Meditations on Israel
by George Jonas
Queen's Quarterly
April 1, 2007
Budapest, 1944. When I was nine I believed Israel was being created for me -- not just for boys like me, but me, personally. This was what my Zionist uncle said. I heard him clearly, yelling at my non-Zionist father in the other room: "Don't say to me 'thanks, but no thanks'... We're not doing it for you. We're doing it for George."
It made sense. Adults were always doing things for me -- "your father works day and night so that you have enough to eat" -- so why not build a country for me as well? All nine-year-olds should have a country, and Israel would be mine.
I knew exactly what father and uncle were talking about. There was no other topic of conversation between them during that summer in Nazi-occupied Budapest. Hitler was as good as gone, my father and uncle agreed on that ("though he will likely kill us all before he goes," my uncle would say, just to help my father keep things in perspective.) But what choice was there for Jews who survived the war? "Live among the murderers, as if nothing happened," uncle would ask, rhetorically, "or build a home for themselves in Israel?"
Father would have none of it. "What happens when you wake up from a nightmare?" he would ask uncle, just as rhetorically. "You make yourself a cup of tea, and get on with it. You certainly don't move house because of a nightmare."
"Hitler's not a nightmare," my uncle would retort. "A nightmare is in your head. Is Hitler in your head? Hitler is in the street. Look out the window."
***
Toronto, 2007. As I look out the window today, 63 years later, I no longer see Hitler or his soldiers. Neither do I see his handiwork, as I did in 1945, outside Budapest's ghetto, as frozen corpses were being stacked on handcarts like cords of wood. But I do see his shadow. I have never stopped seeing it all these years -- first, shrinking after the war until the late 1960s, then beginning to loom again.
2007 begins like an old movie, projecting shades of the 1930s. Boycotts are being organized against Israeli (read Jewish) scholarship and products. Lectures by pro-Israeli scholars or politicians are disrupted or cancelled. There is a vigil in Los Angeles to end "Israeli Apartheid." Former U.S. President Carter calls his new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winning author, is attacked at the Argent hotel in San Francisco. Demonstrators in Poland blame Jews for the resignation of communist collaborator archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus. Anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying rants are delivered at international conferences. CNN carries the story of a 13-year-old Jewish schoolgirl being roughed up by a mob of Asian teens on a London bus. Britain's chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks warns of a "tsunami of anti-Semitism" sweeping across Europe.
I estimate Hitler's shadow to loom about as large in 2007 as it did in 1935, the year I was born, 72 years ago. A friend, more optimistically, says no -- Hitler's shadow looms only as large as it did in 1930, when the Nazis became the second biggest political party with 107 seats in the Reichstag. My friend is probably right, but we live in accelerated times. It took Germany five years to get from 107 Nazi seats in the parliament of what was still the Weimar republic to the Holocaust-auguring Nuremberg laws (promulgated September 15, 1935), and then another five years for the first ovens to become operational (Brandenburg, 1940). But that was in the days of snail mail. Today, within an hour of a ranking Iranian Holocaust-denier saying: "The resolution of the Holocaust issue will end in the destruction of Israel" (as Mohammad Ali Ramin did last year) it would be technologically possible for a million Israelis to be incinerated. Why aren't they? Well, for one thing, Iran's rulers may have the desire, but don't have the bomb or the rocket yet ("habemus penis sed non habemus bus ticket," as we used to sing in school) and for another, as France's Jacques Chirac remarked this year (on February 1, thinking he was speaking off the record): "Where will [Iran] drop it, this bomb? On Israel? It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Teheran would be razed."
Perhaps. But, please, Uncle-in-Heaven: is this your gift to me? Assurance that the Jews have a home from which to raze Tehran a few minutes before Tehran razes the home for the Jews? If so, I could see why my father, who preferred raising things to razing them, would say "thanks, but no thanks."
Sometimes, as the shadow of Hitler keeps growing, it seems to me that my father and my uncle said everything there was to say during that summer in 1944. They covered all bases. They wrote the text; the history of the next 63 years has only been a footnote.
***
Budapest, 1944. We lived in the ghetto, across the street from the apartment of my uncle, Árpád Heller. Hitler's war had about eleven months to go. Uncle, in his 80s by then, had started out as a lawyer and a scholar in Vienna, but in the late 1890's he became active in Theodor Herzl's Zionist movement. Like Herzl, with whom he was acquainted, it was the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France that dramatized for him the necessity of establishing a Jewish homeland. This put him at odds with my father, "Mutzi" Hübsch, whose answer to "the Jewish question", as it was then called, had always been more emancipation, liberalism, and assimilation in Europe, which he considered the only place fit for human habitation.
They banished me to the kitchen during their disputes but their voices filtered through the walls, attracting me to Uncle Árpád's side of the argument. "My dear Mutzi," he said to my father once, "when you and I were young, it may have been possible to dream about the coming of liberalism in Europe. But in 1944, with the man Schicklgruber (Uncle rarely called Hitler by any other name) breaking down your door, wouldn't you finally admit that history has proven us right?"
Father remained undaunted. "Hitler is an aberration," he replied.
"Hitler is Europe," said Uncle.
"Europe, Hitler?" My father sounded astonished. "Hitler is a housepainter from Linz. Europe, for your information, is Goethe, and Schopenhauer, and Mozart. Hitler's charade will be over in a few months, but you and your Zionists will still be pursued by Arabs on camels fifty years from now."
"You and I will never find out," was my uncle's reply, "because a housepainter from Linz will have murdered us before your friends Churchill and Roosevelt could find a cure for Nazism."
"Nazi is short for National-Socialist," my father would reply. "Nationalism is an infectious disease, and Zionists are carriers."
Father would utter the word "nationalism" like a hex. This, in turn, was sure to set off a chemical reaction in Uncle.
"Here we are!" he would exclaim. "For Jews, nationalism is a disease. Why isn't it a disease for Frenchmen to live together in a country called France? And if it's not a disease for them, why is it a disease for Jews to live together in a country called Israel?"
"It's not for me to explain it," my father replied. "You should explain it to the Mufti of Jerusalem. The venerable Haj Amin el-Husseini thinks like you do. He thinks that it isn't a disease for Arabs to live together in a country called -- whatever, Greater Syria maybe. Not Israel, for sure."
"But there is no Greater Syria, for heaven's sake," shouted Uncle Árpád. "There's a strip of desert between a sea and a river, administered as a mandate by the British. Before that it was a province administered by the Turks. And long, long before that, it was a land called Israel. Why shouldn't it be a land called Israel again?"
"Why shouldn't it be a land called Arabia?" my father replied. "The Mufti certainly thinks so."
Other key points in the argument were electricity and irrigation. "Why should the Arabs resent us?" Uncle would demand. "Because we bring them electricity and irrigation? Because we're making the desert bloom? Because we've reduced infant mortality? Education, patience, and time: that's all it takes. When Arabs realize we're introducing them to modern medicine and science, they'll welcome the Zionist state with open arms."
Father would respond to this with a despairing chuckle. "Don't you know anything about human nature?" he'd ask. "The Arabs want their own country, not your electricity. They dream of being masters in their own house, not of being ratepayers to Jewish utilities. How can Zionists not understand this? You're trading symphony orchestras for camel dung to have a flag of your own, and you think you'll bribe Arabs with low infant mortality? Time and education are not on your side. Education will spread more nationalism from Cairo to Damascus. And good Muslims would sooner starve in the House of Islam than feast in the House of Zion.
"If at least you were taking us to Palestine because of God's promise of 'next year in Jerusalem,' that would be one thing. But that isn't your quest. You're a secular Jew, with no mystical yearning for the Promised Land. You're in search of what you call 'a lifeboat' for your people. You're looking for peace and security -- yet you're taking us to Palestine. Why are you doing this to us? Europe is about to wake up from Hitler's nightmare. But Arab resistance to a Jewish national homeland is reality, not a bad dream. You will have to fight Muslims for a piece of desert for the next ten generations."
Uncle remained unmoved. He survived the war in spite of his age, and could still drain a glass of plum brandy to toast the partition vote in the United Nations in November, 1947. He died only about a month before Israel was proclaimed a state. Perhaps it was to have the last word in the argument with my father that he left me his library of Zionist books.
***
Budapest, 1947. After the partition vote, my uncle made one more attempt. "Get in on the ground floor," he said to my father. "You're still young (father was 64) go to Palestine. When you get there, go to bed; next morning you'll wake up in Israel. Imagine! We did it."
"I'm thinking about it," father said, mainly to humour the old man. "Now that Hitler is gone, I can afford the luxury of thinking. The door is open."
It was, until Stalin closed it a few months later. The Iron Curtain descended. The option of Palestine for the remaining Jews of Eastern Europe was no longer available, except in torturous or adventurous ways. My father didn't try.
Jews who did and made it, found their "safe haven" under siege. In October, 1948, Flying magazine featured "Air war in Palestine." The bible of U.S. aviation focused on technicalities, noting the irony that Arabs were attacking with British Spitfires left over from World War II, while Jews were defending themselves with German Me-109 Messerschmitts. When Egypt launched its first air strike, the state of Israel was five hours old. Uncle's "lifeboat" turned out to be a leaking, jury-rigged vessel, surrounded by sharks and high seas.
***
Vienna, 1956. The Jewish Agency is feeding sardine sandwiches to refugees from the failed Hungarian uprising. The scene is almost Biblical: there are long trays of loaves and fishes at the agency's offices on Judenplatz and people can eat as much as they want. I like sardines. Under communism sardines were considered a luxury and rarely available. "Do you have lots of sardines in Israel?" I ask the girl who is replenishing the trays.
"Are you kidding? They jump into your shopping cart," she says.
"Let's go to Israel," I say to my friends, all fellow Hungarian freedom fighters, digging into the sandwiches. "My uncle said it was a country he and his friends created especially for me."
My friends aren't enthusiastic. "I want to go to America," one says.
"Any sardines?"
"They pay you to eat them."
To make a long story short, I go to America with my friends. I'm 21. I'll be 47 before I make it to the country my uncle gave me at nine. By then Israel will have fought the Suez War (1956), the Six Day War (1967), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). I arrive just in time for the Lebanese War in 1982.
***
Tel Aviv, 1982. The Mediterranean sun is beating down; the beach is crowded. Healthy-looking young people are baking, not unlike fish sticks on the rack of an oven. There is something odd, though -- I can't quite put my finger on it for a while, but then I realize what it is. For the number of people using it, too much of the shoreline is unoccupied.
Along the sandy beach as far as the eye can see the sunbathers lie in tight clusters, all but on top of each other like seals in a rookery, but the clusters are separated by wide stretches of no-man's land. These buffer zones of sandy real estate lie fallow, bereft of human habitation, while the beach on either side of them is teeming with people who can barely breathe.
"Landmines, eh?" I ask my Israeli minder who is walking with me.
"Huh?"
"Ah, maybe these people are auditioning for the role of tinned fish in the Israeli-Italian co-production of Tuna!.. That must be it."
"What are you talking about?"
"Why aren't your sun-worshippers spread out a little more? There's plenty of room on the beach."
The Israeli laughs, perhaps a little uncomfortably.
"Ah! Well, don't you see? Look! Ashkenazi, there... then a little space, then Sephardim... a little space and Ashkenazi again... and Sephardim, space, Ashkenazi, and so on..."
As he points from group to group, I do see it. European Jews -- buffer zone -- Oriental Jews -- another buffer zone...
"But why, for heaven's sake? Is there a law?"
"Of course not. It's only... well, that's what people do. It makes them feel more comfortable."
We walk silently for a while, my Israeli escort and I. All right: this is the country my uncle built for me. So what if it isn't exempt form the human condition? You don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
"How do you expect," I ask the Israeli "to get along with Arabs and Muslims in the region, when Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews can't mix on the beach in Tel Aviv without a no-man's land between them?"
"Hey," says the Israeli, "keep your shirt on. I only live here."
***
Ottawa, 1988. On the 20th anniversary of the murder of Israeli airline passenger Leon Shirdan, marking the resurgence of international terrorism, I rise for an after-dinner speech.
Distinguished guests (I say) let's assume that in the Mid-East conflict the Arab side is right. Let's assume that the Jews decided to steal the land that belonged to the Palestinians, and achieved it by employing low cunning combined with brute force. As a result, innocent Palestinians were turned into homeless refugees outside Israel, or oppressed second-class citizens inside their former homeland occupied by the Jews.
If I put the Palestinian side of the argument as high as this (it would be difficult to put it higher) does it justify terrorism?
In this century, as in many preceding centuries, a number of ethnic groups have lost their homelands to their enemies. Some became refugees, and some became second-class citizens. Patriots fighting the conqueror were killed in battle, or exiled or executed. Their children often grew up in refugee camps.
This happened to Latvians, Frenchmen, Estonians, Poles, Norwegians, Lithuanians, Poles, Afghans, Czechs, Hungarians -- to mention only a few groups. Some had later regained their country's independence; some haven't to this day, and perhaps never will. But not one of these groups ever engaged in systematic terrorist acts against enemy civilians -- to say nothing of neutral civilians in other countries.
In our times the Palestinians were the first to regard the loss of their country as a justification to murder or kidnap civilians, including women and children. To begin with, they did so in Israel. Eventually they extended their acts to Israeli (or Jewish) civilians and property in other countries. Finally they extended it to neutral civilians and property in countries all over the world.
They called these acts -- to use the word of Mahmoud Mohammad, a Canadian resident, convicted in Greece of killing an Israeli traveller in an attack on an El Al jet in Athens in 1968 -- a series of "advertisments" for the Palestinian cause.
Incidentally, Mohammed's attack was among the earliest acts of international terrorism in the post-war period. The "watershed year" was 1968. It began with the first Palestinian terrorist act outside Israel: The hijacking of an El Al plane in Rome on July 22. Mohammad's action in Athens, on December 26, came second. The 50-year-old Israeli he killed, Leon Shirdan, was the first recorded victim of our current period of international terror, which has since claimed the lives of thousands of civilians. Mohammad, a resident of Canada, is a historic figure indeed.
No group of French, Norwegian, or Czech partisans ever saw fit to "advertise" the plight of their homelands by shooting German or Russian civilians. Even within their own occupied homelands, the patriotic resistance always concentrated on military targets. The idea of blowing up Swiss airliners -- or attacking German or Russian travellers in neutral Switzerland -- never occurred to them.
It has certainly occurred to some Palestinians. That's what makes them terrorists -- just as a Latvian blowing up a Aeroflot jetliner in Amsterdam would be a terrorist. This, in my opinion, is the dividing line. It has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with somebody's national cause being right or wrong. It has only to do with good and evil.
***
Toronto, 1989. I'm glancing at a Canadian Jewish newspaper. One article outlines how living standards have improved for the Arab population in the occupied or disputed territories since 1967, the year in which the West Bank and Gaza were captured by Israel during the Six Day War. Michael G. Kay's piece in The Jewish Times lists the educational, medical and economic improvements that 22 years of Israeli presence has brought to the Arab population of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and of the Gaza Strip, where the intifada, the Arab uprising, has erupted some 18 months ago.
Life expectancy has risen from an average of 48 years in 1967 to 62 years in 1986. Infant mortality has declined from 90 per 1000 babies to 45 per 1000 during the same period. The Arabs had no university in the region under Jordanian rule; Israel has built five. The percentage of those with nine or more years of education has doubled from 19% to 38%. Before the Israeli presence in Gaza only 18% of homes had electricity and 14% had running water; by the mid-80's these numbers have risen to 88% and 51% respectively. The percentage of homes with household appliances of any kind used to be a mere 5%. Today it's 30% for washing machines, 60% for refrigerators and 80% for stoves.
The figures fill Kay with pained bewilderment. Why, in 22 years Israel has doubled the living standards of people who "wanted little else than the destruction of the Jewish State." And what has Israel received in return? Terrorist attacks, rioters, stone-throwers and a bad press throughout the world.
I hear my uncle's voice from far away. "Trust me: Once the Arabs understand we want for them nothing but health and prosperity, they'll support us." And my father's reply: "Trust me, the Arabs will hate you. They may desire prosperity and health, but only from their own hands, not from yours."
I make a little note for myself. People are motivated by a lot of things (I write) in addition to statistics on running water or infant mortality. Unless a state can reach a political -- indeed, a spiritual -- accord with all its inhabitants, the electrical appliances with which it provides them will only fuel their discontent. As long as Jews rely on having given schools or fridges to Arabs who think of them as having stolen their land, they can expect nothing but stones thrown at them in return.
***
Madrid, 1991. I'm covering the peace conference, to which U.S. President George Bush is dragging the reluctant Arab and Israeli participants by the scruff of the neck. The question everyone has been asking is, will Israel give land for peace? To me, this is a pointless question. The question we should ask is, will the Arab (and Muslim) nations give Israel peace for land?
If the answer is yes, the Madrid conference has a chance. Since all signs indicate that the answer is no, the Madrid conference is likely to be a waste for everyone except the Spanish tourist industry.
The question of "land for peace" wouldn't even arise if the Arabs had ever been willing to live in peace with Israel. The State of Israel would hold no territory with which to make concessions for peace if the Arabs hadn't tried to wage war on it continuously since 1948.
The land Israel is now supposed to give in exchange for peace has been captured after an Arab coalition, led by Egypt's president Abdul Nasser, decided to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. The Arabs prepared for war, massed their divisions along two frontiers, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and ordered the U.N. peacekeeping forces out of the region. This was how the Six Day War began in 1967.
The Golan Heights, the West Bank and even Jerusalem would not be in Israel's possession today if it had not been for that war. This is the land that many suggest Israel should give in exchange for peace -- but when this land was in Arab hands, there was no peace for Israel. Where is the assurance that it would bring peace today? No doubt there are individual Arabs who sincerely desire peace, but they don't amount to a political force. On the contrary, many of the political forces in the Arab and Muslim world are denouncing the peace conference itself. Far from offering peace for land, they say that those Arabs leaders who have agreed to go to Madrid are traitors.
In these circumstances asking whether Israel would give land for peace is ludicrous. Israel amply demonstrated at Camp David that it would give land for peace by returning the Sinai to Egypt -- and the Arab side amply demonstrated what it thought of such deals by assassinating Egypt's late President, Anwar Sadat.
In the unlikely event that Israel decided to trade every square inch -- the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza strip and city of Jerusalem itself -- for peace in Madrid, it would not bring peace to Israel. It would not bring peace anymore than trading the Sinai did more than a decade ago. In the current climate of the Middle East nothing is likely to bring peace to Israel. I'd go further and say that in the current climate nothing is likely to bring peace to the region, with or without Israel. If Israel ceased to exist, or if it had never existed, there would still be no peace in the Middle East.
The region is troubled because its political and social culture is mired somewhere in 1000 A.D. Expecting Israel to trade land for peace in this climate is not just unrealistic, it's probably detrimental to peace.
***
Toronto, 1993. I'm on a television talk show, asked to make predictions about the peace process. To assess a region's chances for peace (I answer) it's necessary to know why the war is being fought. In the Middle East it is the Arab and Muslim world's consistent refusal to accept the existence of the state of Israel. This refusal may or may not be justified -- that's a matter of opinion -- but the refusal itself is simply a fact.
The two sides have entered the peace process with radically different agendas. Israel's goal is acceptance in the region. The Palestinian Liberation Organization's goal is its own survival, along with a hope of achieving a better tactical position from which to squeeze Israel off the map one day.
The PLO has been skirting political as well as financial bankruptcy for some time. It lost the KGB's patronage after the collapse of the Soviet empire. It lost the patronage of the Gulf States when Yasser Arafat decided to embrace Saddam Hussein. It even lost the anti-Israeli initiative to various Muslim militants and to the local leaders of the intifada. The current peace process is a last ditch effort by Arafat and his absentee PLO leadership to recapture their former relevance in the Middle East. Israel's government is going along with them for its own purposes. What is this process likely to accomplish?
1.) The peace plan may work as advertised. It may start a model for Palestinian self-government, an acceptance of the state of Israel and a gradual easing of tensions in the region. This is clearly the happiest of all possibilities. It is also the least probable.
2.) Entrenched in Gaza and Jericho, with their influence once again unchallenged, Arafat & Co. will revert to their old rejectionist stance. In this case there will be no peace, of course. The conflict will continue as it has for much of this century. Israel will have put itself at a slight military disadvantage, though perhaps at a modest advantage from a public relations point of view. This scenario is possible.
3.) The PLO will gain some strength, but not enough to remain unchallenged by Islamic or other militants battling for influence in the Middle East. If so, the shooting will be chiefly between the various Arab or Muslim factions for a period of time. This is a very probable scenario, in my view.
Fast-forward 14 years.
***
Gaza, 2007. According to news reports, on February 1 "... a military force of Fatah, which represents secular Sunni Palestinian Arabs, raided the Islamic University in Gaza, considered a stronghold of the terrorist group Hamas. Hours later, explosions shook nearby Al Quds University, a stronghold for Fatah, and several buildings caught fire. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in months of clashes that followed a Hamas election victory a year ago..."
Re-wind 11 years.
***
Toronto, 1996. I rarely forecast election results because, next to the weather, there's nothing more unpredictable than the voters. Still, I risk a prediction about the Israeli elections. On March 11 I write that with the much-vaunted peace process achieving nothing except suicide bombings in Tel Aviv, Israel ought to "...close ranks, sit tight, and forget the illusion of a phony peace -- which I predict is exactly what Israelis will elect to do."
When, a few weeks later, the Israelis elect to do just that, some political pundits seem surprised. Yet only the opposite results would have been surprising. Benjamin Netanyahu didn't win because a majority of Israelis aren't interested in peace. He won because Israelis haven't been getting any peace. He won because the so-called peace process, dreamed up in Oslo and endorsed by the Clinton White House, hasn't been working.
The process, dubbed "land for peace", envisaged Israel gradually returning certain lands, captured during the Arab-Israeli wars, in exchange for acceptance in the region. Obviously an exchange means giving something and getting something in return. That's what deals are all about. But under the Shimon Peres-Bill Clinton plan Israel was engaged in a giveaway, not a deal. Arafat has been gradually getting his part of the bargain, i.e., land and autonomy for the PLO. He has even managed to place the question of Jerusalem on the agenda. The Israelis, however, haven't been getting their part of the bargain -- peace -- for a single day.
If, after Oslo, no buses had been blown up in Tel Aviv and no rockets had been fired on Israeli settlements, Shimon Peres would almost certainly have won the election. It was the Arab terrorists who campaigned most effectively for Netanyahu (just as the Israeli lunatic who assassinated Yitzak Rabin campaigned most effectively for Peres.) In the end, it was the Arab terrorists who waged the better campaign.
***
Toronto, 2000. I'm interviewing Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of Oslo. As the two young men with him aren't beefy enough to be bodyguards, I dub them thought-guards to the justice minister. Politicians need minders to help them keep their feet out of their mouths, though Beilin seems to need them less than most.
The topic is the right of return -- not as it pertains to Jews in the Diaspora, but Arabs who fled or were displaced in 1948 when Israel came into being. Or their descendants. It is one of the sticking points in the peace negotiations; if it became part of the deal, it would flood the country with a million Arabs or more, many of them militants for whom the very existence of Israel is anathema. According to Beilin, no one in Israel would agree to it.
"Not even a lunatic dove," he says.
It's on my lips to say that this is how many people view him -- a lunatic dove -- but I curb my tongue. "If so, that will be the deal breaker," I say instead. It seems evident to me that the Arab side will insist, absolutely and always, on whatever condition even an insane dove would refuse on the Israeli side.
Beilin understands and shrugs. His weary smile seems to say: if you don't want to give peace a chance, fine. You don't have to. I do.
Suddenly, and just for a moment, I feel ashamed. Enough to jot it down here. Not enough to change my mind.
***
Paris, 2004. Yasser Arafat is dead at 75. Did Israel waste a precious decade suing him for peace? Yes. Utterly. Why? First, because peace has never been Arafat's to give. At most, he controlled the PLO. He never controlled other belligerents in the war against Israel, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, to say nothing of Syria or Iran. People who are being blown up don't care whether the device that blows them up is planted by Arafat or by some other chap Arafat kisses and calls his "cousin." If giving land to Arafat had stopped his kissing cousins from blowing up people, most Israelis would have gone for the deal. Since it didn't, they didn't -- at least not for long.
But negotiating with the PLO leader was a waste for another reason, too: even if he had the title to peace, Arafat never intended to hand the deed to Israel. For a country that has no other war aim but to exist, peace -- genuine, lasting peace -- means victory. Arafat wouldn't have wanted to see Israel win.
***
Toronto, 2005. I'm coming out of a screening room where I saw Munich, a film that had been mounted on the back of a book I wrote in the early 1980s, called Vengeance. I wish it were a bronco and buck off the director, Steven Spielberg. He has saddled my book with his adolescent moral confusion. His movie can't tell cops from robbers because they both carry guns. Things are complex, but not as complex as that.
Groups that kidnap and murder tourists, shoppers, envoys, journalists, athletes, or members of peacekeeping forces aren't engaged in warfare but in acts of terror. Many causes (including Israel's) have been used by terrorists at one time or another, but some causes have allowed themselves to be defined by terrorism. They have permitted terrorists to take them over. This, in my view, has been the tragedy of the Palestinian cause.
I don't think that Israel's response is beyond criticism or debate. Brutalized by decades of terrorism, vastly outnumbered and with their very existence at stake, Israelis have responded in ways that have, at times, been ill-advised, intransigent or counter-productive -- or at least counter-productive in terms of Western public opinion. Without doubt, the Israelis have broken international laws by sending forces across sovereign borders -- sometimes for impeccable reasons, as at Entebbe, but sometimes for reasons many people in Israel itself have questioned. However, nothing the Israelis have done can be discussed in the same breath with terrorism. It's possible to debate questions of excessive force, such as responding to stones with bullets, or whether it's wrong to murder murderers, but there's nothing to debate about the kidnapping or murder of shoppers and wedding guests. There's nothing to debate about using one's own wives and sisters as a shield for military bases, as the terrorists have done. People who purposely attack their enemy's schoolyards (or who purposely set up their armed camps among their own children) inhabit a different moral universe. Trying to "humanize" them is itself a moral error.
***
Toronto, 2006. The vigorous octogenarian sitting down to lunch with five journalists at a Toronto hotel has been there, done that. At 83, Shimon Peres is probably the only Zionist leader from the founding days of the Jewish State still active in Israeli politics. Not yet 25 when Israel became a country in 1948, Peres was already in charge of personnel and arms procurements for the Haganah, the ancestor of the Israeli Defense Forces. In 1994 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the late Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO's Yasser Arafat for his role in devising and promoting the mirage of the Oslo Accords.
Lunch is informal -- rather like a friendly soccer game. My four colleagues are there to chat, not to interview. For my part, I am curious about the "real" Peres -- not that I expect to find out between the soup and the dessert everything about a man who has kept afloat longer than any other in the treacherous and stormy waters of Mideast politics, but I'm hoping to find a hint about something that has intrigued me for some time.
Before Peres became a leading "dove," the poster boy, if not the virtual godfather of the Oslo Accords, he was at times viewed as something of a "hawk." Much like other noted doves of Israeli politics, Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, Peres, too, had been associated with the defense establishment. Barak and Rabin were famous generals; Peres was director and minister of defense, credited with the acquisition of vital equipment during the War of Independence and the Suez crisis of 1956.
It seems that far from being aggressive and war-like, in Israel it's the ex-military and defense types who assume the most pacific stance between hostilities. This may have even been true of arch-hawk Ariel Sharon during his final period as leader. I wonder if Peres might confirm this observation and, if so, provide reasons.
What I get is an experience of déjàvu. Listening to Peres muse at leisure over lunch about the Middle East in general, with each brief question eliciting a lengthy, thoughtful, reflective monologue, I know that I've seen this face, heard this voice, these sentiments before. It's my Zionist uncle's voice, talking to my father, trying to convince him of a bright future for Jews in a Jewish homeland.
My uncle was the same age in 1944 as Peres is now. He spoke, just like Peres, with the serene certitude of the true believer. Uncannily, he used virtually the same arguments. "Why should the Arabs resent us?" he demanded in 1944. "Because we bring them electricity and irrigation? Because we're making the desert bloom?"
"Water," says Peres in 2006. "Economic development," he says. "Hygiene." The only new argument for optimism that faith in rationality and goodwill produced in 60 years is "nanotechnology." My uncle wouldn't have known the word; Peres expects rather a lot from it.
The more things change, say the French...
***
Los Angeles, 2006. More echoes. Dr. Judea Pearl, whose academic field is artificial intelligence, is the father of Daniel Pearl, The Wall Street Journal reporter abducted and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan four years ago. I'm talking with the late foreign correspondent's father on the telephone.
Professor Pearl is suggesting an interesting formula to fight racism on campus. Instead of regarding anti-Zionism as a flimsy cover for anti-Semitism, as we usually do, we should reverse the order and view anti-Zionism itself as racist.
Excuse me, my own father was an anti-Zionist -- well, a non-Zionist, anyway. Whatever he was, a racist he was not.
Yes, but he was an anti-Zionist 63 year ago. He wasn't a racist then for being anti-Zionist, but he would be today, if he were, except he wouldn't be.
Would he?
I don't know.
Like his son, Dr. Pearl believes in dialogue. He runs the Daniel Pearl Foundation with the aim of carrying on his son's legacy, defined as "using music and words to help people better understand one another." This may sound a bit like the credo of a bleeding-heart liberal, but only until one realizes that for Dr. Pearl "dialogue" isn't a code word for displaying the white flag. For the UCLA scholar, "dialogue" mean words of firm purpose, fighting words if necessary, not words as substitute for surrender.
"Anti-Zionism is racism" is more than a neat reversal of the infamous (and eventually rescinded) United Nations formula of "Zionism is racism." To quip that one opposes anti-Semitism because it may lead to anti-Zionism would merely be clever, akin to saying that Baptists oppose sex because it may lead to dancing. But Dr. Pearl is offering a thesis, not a bon mot. As he explains it, "Anti-Zionism earns its racist character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives (e.g. Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination."
Echoes of my Zionist uncle again, yelling at my liberal internationalist father for thinking nationalism was an outmoded form of social organization that would soon be as obsolete as the horse and buggy. Father saw no reason for Jews to start building, through Zionism, a type of edifice that was about to be abandoned by everybody else. As we now know, he turned out to be wrong, or at least premature. Nation-states are thriving in the 21st century -- and they're also considered to be legitimate forms of social organizations for groups to aspire to, attain, or preserve. All groups, that is, except the Jews, according to anti- or post-Zionists. Which is why Dr. Pearl has a point. Anti-Zionism, whatever it may have been 60 years ago, does have a racist tinge today. The current climate considers all national aspirations legitimate, except that of the Jews.
If so, anti-Zionism is. worse than anti-Semitism. First, it's more dire in its potential consequences. "As a form of racism", Pearl writes, "it targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity."
Next, anti-Zionism may have a greater chance of acculturation than anti-Semitism. "[W]hile people of conscience reject anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a mark of academic sophistication and social acceptance in Europe and in some U.S. campuses," Pearl observes. Indeed, people who would feel traumatized if accused of anti-Semitism, might shrug off a charge of anti-Zionism, or even embrace it with pride.
UCLA's professor of artificial intelligence offers his formula as anti-Zionism=racism. It seems to compute.
***
Tel Aviv, 2006. Writing in Haaretz, Eliahu Salpeter raises an uncomfortable question. It's the kind of thing that would make my Zionist uncle turn in his grave.
"The Jewish people's existence is more important than that of the Jewish state," Salpeter writes. "If Israel cannot ensure the Jewish people's survival -- it sometimes seems to even impair that survival -- a giant question mark hovers over the very justification of its existence."
If Israel was created for the safe future of nine-year-olds such as I was in 1944, as my Zionist uncle asserted, where has a Jewish nine-year-old a better chance for a safe future today, in Tel Aviv -- or in Nuremberg?
Is Israel good for the Jews?
Raising such a question is often to answer it. Not in this case. If I thought I had the answer, I wouldn't be writing this piece.
***
Los Angeles, 2007. Demonstrators disrupt the lecture of pro-Israeli Jewish-American scholar Daniel Pipes at the University of California. The leader of the demonstrators speaks to the press afterwards.
"It's just a matter of time before the state of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth," he says. "Our weapon, our jihad, our way of struggling in this country is with our tongues. We speak out ... and this is the best we can do right now. And our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world, they're handling business in their own way. May Allah give them strength."
University authorities speak to the press as well. "The disruption lasted about two minutes," they say. "There were no further interruptions and afterward, the hosts of the event went before the audience and thanked the university's police for its assistance on what the organizers would characterize as a successful event."
Res ipsa loquitur.
***
Toronto, 2006. The Spymaster has two glances in his repertoire. To call one chilly would be an understatement. Even ice-cold doesn't do it justice. It's a glance colder than liquid air. It's a mesmeric look; the look of a cobra about to strike.
In total contrast, the other look is not only benign, but also rather intimate and supportive. It conveys an amiable disposition, coupled perhaps with a touch of mischief. If the first look reminds one of nature films about reptilian predators, the second recalls family albums filled with favorite uncles.
The two faces of Israel? Israel, as seen by friend and foe? The author of Man in the Shadows seems to embody both. Efraim Halevy also seems aware of the range and force of his facial expressions. He toggles between them deliberately, looks for a reaction, and appears amused when it occurs.
Israelis would refer to the Spymaster as the Memuneh, "the one in charge." Their first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, bestowed the designation on Isser Harel, who between 1952 and 1963 headed the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, better known as the Mossad. Harel's successors in the job inherited his title.
Halevy treats me to his Glance No. 1 as we're about to sit down to tea at a Toronto restaurant. After we exchange a sentence or two, to my considerable relief, he switches to Glance No. 2. I'd rather not be at the receiving end of the first look from anyone, let alone a former head of the Mossad, whose watch between 1998 and 2002 coincided with the phrase "targeted assassination" going into the language. Halevy didn't invent the practice, of course; states have periodically assassinated deadly foes throughout history. It wasn't until the late 1990s, though, that governments started scheduling missile strikes targeting individuals as photo opportunities for the evening news.
No regrets from the Memuneh. "The people who were taken out were deeply involved in the command chain of the suicide bomb attacks against Israel," he told The Daily Telegraph's Con Coughlin in an earlier interview. "It was a military strategy and it worked."
Tea is served. Though not an austere man, Halevy finds the suggestion that salmon or caviar be served with it bizarre. Caviar, at three in the afternoon? Tea, that's all. Lets get on with it.
We discuss Man in the Shadows, his book that tells the inside story of what Halevy calls "thirteen integral years, the years 1990-2003, which have changed the face of the world." It's a bravura performance on a tightrope, in which the spymaster tells all without giving away a thing. Time permits only two questions. First, the past. Were some Israeli leaders fooled by the mirage of Oslo? Perhaps Shimon Peres, that's all. What about Ehud Barak? No, he just wanted to see where it would lead. Yitzhak Rabin? No -- well, some say yes, maybe, but Halevy says no.
Then, the future. Halevy has just spoken to an acquaintance who is fixing up his air raid shelter. The future? The Memuneh shrugs. There's always hope.
***
Cairo, 2007. "That cursed Israel is trying to destroy al-Aqsa mosque... Nothing will work with Israel except for a nuclear bomb that wipes it out of existence." That is Mohammed el-Katatny speaking, a member of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party, during a parliamentary debate. Mubarak is the moderate leader of a moderate party in a moderate Arab country. The month is February; the year has barely begun.
***
Toronto, 2007. Conclusion, you say? Ah, my practical reader! Well, here goes. I've been trying to evade Zion for 63 years. It's proving increasingly difficult. My uncle thought Israel was an oasis for the Jewish people; my father though it was a mirage. Halfway through the bout, it looks like my father is ahead on points. At the same time, my father thought Hitler was a bad dream, while my uncle felt that Hitler, in whatever guise, was a recurring reality in Jewish existence. It seems to me uncle isn't just ahead on points: he is close to scoring a knockout. In which case Zion isn't an option, a luxury, a tourist destination for the Diaspora, but a lifeline, a defibrillator, the only game in town.