Operation Shylock: A Confession (21 page)

Multiple selves had been on my mind for months now, beginning with my Halcion breakdown and fomented anew by the appearance of Moishe Pipik, and so perhaps my thinking about George was overly subjective; but what I was determined to understand, however imperfectly, was why whatever George said, even when, like a guy in a bar, he despaired about people as close to him as his wife and his child, didn’t seem to me quite to make sense. I kept hearing a man as out of his depth as he was out of control, convulsed by all his contradictions and destined never to arrive where he belonged, let alone at “being himself.” Maybe what it all came down to was that an academic, scholarly disposition had been overtaken by the mad rage to make history and
that
, his temperamental unfitness, rather than the urgency of a bad conscience, accounted for all this disjointedness I saw, the overexcitability, the maniacal loquacity, the intellectual duplicity, the deficiencies of judgment, the agitprop rhetoric—for the fact that amiable, subtle, endearing George Ziad had been turned completely inside out. Or maybe it just came down to injustice: isn’t a colossal, enduring injustice enough to drive a decent man mad?

Our pilgrimage to the bloodstained wall where Israeli soldiers had dragged the local inhabitants to break their bones and beat them into submission was thwarted by a ring of impassable roadblocks around the central square, and we had, in fact, to detour up through the outlying hills to reach George’s house at the other side of Ramallah. “My father used to weep nostalgically about these hills, too. Even in spring, he’d say, he could smell the almond blossoms. You can’t,” George told me, “not in spring—they bloom in February. I was always kind enough to correct his hyperbole. Why couldn’t he be a man about those trees and stop crying?”

In a tone of self-castigating resignation George wearily compiled an indictment of recollections like these all the way up, around, and down the back roads into the city—so perhaps I’d been right the first time, and it
was
remorse that, if not alone in determining the scale of this harsh transformation, intensified the wretched despair that polluted everything and had made hyperbole standard fare for George, too. For having sniped at a ruined father’s sentimental maunderings with a faultfinding adolescent’s spiteful tongue, Dr. Ziad’s little boy looked now to be paying the full middle-aged price and then some.

Unless, of course, it was all an act.

___

George’s was one of half a dozen stone houses separated by large patches of garden and clustered loosely around a picturesque old olive grove that stretched down to a small ravine—originally, during Anna’s early childhood, this had been a family compound full of brothers and cousins but most of them had emigrated by now. There was a biting chill in the air as it was getting to be dusk, and inside the house, in a tiny fireplace at the end of the narrow living room, a few sticks of wood were burning, a pretty sight but without effect against the chill pervasive dankness that went right to one’s bones. The place was cheerily fixed up, however, with bright textiles splashed about on the chairs and the sofa and several rugs with modernistic geometric designs scattered across the uneven stone floor. To my surprise I didn’t see books anywhere—maybe George felt his books were more secure at his university office—though there were a lot of Arabic magazines and newspapers strewn atop a table beside the sofa. Anna and Michael wore heavy sweaters as we sat close to the fire drinking our hot tea, and I warmed my hands on the cup, thinking, This aboveground cellar, after Boston. The cold smell of a dungeon on top of everything else. There was also the smell of a kerosene heater burning—one that might not have been in the best state of repair—but it seemed to be off in another room. This room opened through multipaned French doors onto the garden, and a four-bladed fan hung by a very long stem from an arched ceiling that must have been fifteen
feet high, and though I could see how the place might have its charm once the weather grew warm, right now this wasn’t a home to inspire a mood of snug relaxation.

Anna was a tiny, almost weightless woman whose anatomy’s whole purpose seemed to be to furnish the housing for her astonishing eyes. There wasn’t much else to her. There were the eyes, intense and globular, eyes to see with in the dark, set like a lemur’s in a triangular face not very much larger than a man’s fist, and then there was the tent of the sweater enshrouding the anorexic rest of her and, peeping out at the bottom, two feet in baby’s running shoes. I would have figured as a mate for the George I’d known a nocturnal creature fuller and furrier than Anna, but perhaps when they’d met and married in Boston some two decades back there’d been more in her of the sprightly gamine than of this preyed-upon animal who lives by night—if you can call it living—and during the day is gone.

Michael was already a head taller than his father, an excruciatingly skinny, delicate brunette with marbleized skin, a prettyish boy whose shyness (or maybe just exasperation) rendered him mute and immobile. His father was explaining that Diasporism was the first original idea that he had heard from a Jew in forty years, the first that promised a solution based on honest historical and moral foundations, the first that acknowledged that the only just way to partition Palestine was by transferring not the population that was indigenous to the region but the population to whom this region had been, from the start, foreign and inimical … and all the while Michael’s eyes remained rigidly fixed on some invisible dot that compelled his entire attention and that was situated in the air about a foot above my knee. Nor did Anna appear to take much hope from the fact that Jewry’s leading Diasporist was visiting her home for tea. Only George, I thought, is so far gone, only he is so crazily desperate … unless it’s all an act.

Of course George understood that such a proposal would be received with nothing but scorn by the Zionists, whose every sacrosanct precept Diasporism exposed as fraudulent; and he went on to explain that even among Palestinians, who should be my ardent advocates,
there would be those, like Kamil, lacking the imagination to grasp its political potential, who would stupidly misconstrue Diasporism as an exercise in Jewish nostalgia—

“So that was his take,” I said, daring to interrupt the unbridled talker who, it occurred to me, perhaps with his voice alone had reduced his wife to little more than those eyes and battered his son into silence. “A nostalgic Jew, dreaming Broadway dreams about a musical-comedy shtetl.”

“Yes. Kamil said to me, ‘One Woody Allen is enough.’”

“Did he? In the courtroom? Why Woody Allen?”

“Woody Allen wrote something in
The New York Times
,” George said. “An op-ed article. Ask Anna. Ask Michael. They read it and couldn’t believe their eyes. It was reprinted here. It ranks as Woody Allen’s best joke yet. Philip, the guy isn’t a shlimazl just in the movies. Woody Allen believes that Jews aren’t capable of violence. Woody Allen doesn’t believe that he is reading the papers correctly—he just can’t believe that Jews break bones. Tell us another one, Woody. The first bone they break in defense—to put it charitably; the second in winning; the third gives them pleasure; and the fourth is already a reflex. Kamil hasn’t patience for this idiot, and he figured you for another. But it doesn’t matter in Tunis what Kamil thinks in Ramallah about Philip Roth. It hardly matters any longer in Ramallah what Kamil thinks about anything.”

“Tunis?”

“I assure you that Arafat can differentiate between Woody Allen and Philip Roth.”

This was surely the strangest sentence I had ever heard spoken in my life. I decided to top it. If this is the way George wants to play it, then this is the way we shall go. I am not writing this thing. They are. I don’t even exist.

“Any meeting with Arafat,” I heard myself telling him, “must be completely secret. For obvious reasons. But I
will
meet with him, any place and any time, Tunis or anywhere, and tomorrow is none too soon. It might be communicated to Arafat that through the good offices of Lech Walesa it’s likely that I’ll be meeting secretly at the
Vatican with the Pope, probably next month. Walesa is already committed to my cause, as you know. He maintains that the Pope will find in Diasporism not only a means of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict but an instrument for the moral rehabilitation and spiritual reawakening of all of Europe. I am myself not as sanguine as he is about the boldness of this pope. It’s all well and good for His Holiness to be pro-Palestinian and to berate the Jews for appropriating property to which they have no legal right. It’s something else again to espouse the corollary of this position and to invite a million-plus Jews to consider themselves at home in the heart of Western Christendom. Yes, it would be something if the Pope were to call upon Europe publicly and openly to invite its Jews to return from their exile in Israel, and for him to mean it; if he were to call on Europe to confess to its complicity in their uprooting and destruction; if he were to call on Europe to purge itself of a thousand years of anti-Semitism and to make room in its midst for a vital Jewish presence to multiply and flourish there and, in anticipation of the third millennium of Christianity, to declare by proclamation in all its parliaments the right of the Jewish uprooted to resettle in their European homeland and to live as Jews there, free, secure, and welcome. That would be simply wonderful. But I have my doubts. Walesa’s Polish pope may even prefer Europe as Hitler passed it on to his European heirs—His Holiness may not really care to undo Hitler’s little miracle. But Arafat is another matter. Arafat—” On I went, usurping the identity of the usurper who had usurped mine, heedless of truth, liberated from all doubt, assured of the indisputable rightness of my cause—seer, savior, very likely the Jews’ Messiah.

So this is how it’s done, I thought. This is how they do it. You just say everything.

No, I didn’t stop for a very long time. On and on and on, obeying an impulse I did nothing to quash, ostentatiously free of uncertainty and without a trace of conscience to rein in my raving. I was telling them about the meeting of the World Diasporist Congress to take place in December, fittingly enough in Basel, the site of the first World Zionist Congress just ninety years ago. At that first Zionist
Congress there had been only a couple of hundred delegates—
my
goal was to have twice that many, Jewish delegations from every European country where the Israeli Ashkenazis would soon resume the European Jewish life that Hitler had all but extinguished. Walesa, I told them, had already agreed to appear as keynote speaker or to send his wife in his behalf if he concluded that he could not safely leave Poland. I was talking about the Armenians, suddenly, about whom I knew nothing. “Did the Armenians suffer because they were in a Diaspora? No, because they were
at home
and the Turks moved in and massacred them
there.”
I heard myself next praising the greatest Diasporist of all, the father of the new Diasporist movement, Irving Berlin. “People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ—down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet!
He turns their religion into schlock
. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it.
Everybody
loves it. The Jews especially. Jews loathe Jesus. People always tell me Jesus is Jewish. I never believe them. It’s like when people used to tell me Cary Grant was Jewish. Bull
shit
. Jews don’t want to
hear
about Jesus. And can you blame them? So—Bing Crosby replaces Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and the Jews, the
Jews
, go around whistling about Easter! And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Do you see my point?” I took more pride, I told them, in “Easter Parade” than in the victory of the Six Day War, found more
security in “White Christmas” than in the Israeli nuclear reactor. I told them that if the Israelis ever reached a point where they believed their survival depended not merely on breaking hands but on dropping a nuclear bomb, that would be the end of Judaism, even if the state of Israel should survive. “Jews as Jews will simply disappear. A generation after Jews use nuclear weapons to save themselves from their enemies, there will no longer be people to identify themselves as Jews. The Israelis will have saved their state by destroying their people. They will never survive morally after that; and if they don’t, why survive as Jews at all? They barely have the wherewithal to survive morally now. To put all these Jews in this tiny place, surrounded on all sides by tremendous hostility—how
can
you survive morally? Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else that the Zionists despise, better to
lose
the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning
Jerusalem
, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988? Jerusalem is by now the
worst
thing that could possibly have happened to us.
Last
year in Jerusalem! Next year in Warsaw! Next year in Bucharest! Next year in Vilna and Cracow! Look, I know people call Diasporism a revolutionary idea, but it’s
not
a revolution that I’m proposing, it’s a
retroversion
, a turning back, the very thing Zionism itself once was. You go back to the crossing point and cross back
the other way
. Zionism went back too far, that’s what went wrong with Zionism. Zionism went back to the crossing point of the dispersion—Diasporism goes back to the crossing point of
Zionism
.”