Peace Kills (6 page)

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture ranging from the bland to the fancifully bland. In Miami the striving, somewhat troublesome immigrant population is the result of Russia's meddling with Cuba. In Tel Aviv the striving, somewhat troublesome immigrant population is the result of Russia's meddling with itself. I found a Russian restaurant where they couldn't have cared less what was made with leaven, where they had scotch, and where, over one scotch too many, I contemplated the absurdity of Israel being an ordinary place.

What if people who had been away for ages, out and on their own, suddenly showed up at their old home and demanded to move back in? My friends with grown-up children tell me this happens all the time. What if the countless ancient tribal groups that are now defeated, dispersed, and stateless contrived to reestablish themselves in their ancestral lands in such a way as to dominate everyone around them? The Mashantucket Pequots are doing so this minute at their Foxwoods casino in southeastern Connecticut. What if a religious group sought a homeland, never minding how multifarious its religion had become or how divergent its adherents were in principles and practices? A homeland for Protestants would have to satisfy the aspirations of born-again literalists holding forth about creationism in their concrete-block tabernacles and also fulfill the hopes and dreams of vaguely churched latitudinarians giving praise to God's creation
by playing golf on Sundays. A Protestant Zion would need to be perfect both for sniping at abortion doctors in North Carolina and for marrying lesbians in Vermont. As an American, I already live in that country.

Maybe there's nothing absurd about Israel. I wandered out into the ordinary nighttime, down Jabotinsky Street, named after the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who wrote in 1923, “A voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable now or in the foreseeable future.” Thus Jabotinsky broke with the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who, in
Altneuland
(1902), had a fictional future Arab character in a fictional future Israel saying, “The Jews have made us prosperous, why should we be angry with them?” And now the Carmel Market was full of goods from Egypt.

From Jabotinsky Street I meandered into Weizmann Street, named for the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who in 1919 met with Emir Faisal, future king of Iraq and a son of the sharif of Mecca, and concluded an agreement that “all necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.” Faisal sent a letter to the American Zionist delegates at the Versailles peace conference wishing Jews “a most hearty welcome home.”

Turning off Weizmann Street, I got lost for a while among signpost monikers I didn't recognize but that probably commemorated people who became at least as embattled as Jabotinsky, Herzl, Weizmann, and Faisal. I emerged on BenGurion Avenue. The first prime minister of Israel was a ferocious battler. He fought the British mandate, the war of liberation, Palestinian guerrillas, and the Sinai campaign. He even won, most of the time, in the Israeli Knesset. And still
he was on the lookout for peace. In the months leading up to the Suez crisis, in 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower had a secret emissary shuttling between Jerusalem and Cairo. Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, told the emissary (in words that Yasir Arafat could use and, for all I know, has), “If the initiative [Nasser] was now taking in these talks was known in public he would be faced not only with a political problem, but—possibly—with a bullet.”

A bullet was what Yitzhak Rabin got, at the end of Ben-Gurion Avenue, from a Jewish extremist, during a peace rally in the square that now bears Rabin's name. A bullet was also what Emir Faisal's brother, King Abdullah of Jordan, got, from a Muslim extremist, for advocating peace with Israel. Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, got a bullet, too.

If bullets were the going price for moderation hereabouts, then I needed another drink. I walked west along Gordon Street—named, I hope, for Judah Leib Gordon, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist who wrote in classical Hebrew, and not for Lord George Gordon, the fanatical anti-Catholic and leader of the 1780 Gordon riots, who converted to Judaism late in life and died in Newgate Prison praising the French Revolution. This brought me to the stretch of nightclubs along the beach promenade. Here, two months later, a suicide bomber would kill twenty-two people outside the Dolphi disco. Most of the victims were teenage Russian girls, no doubt very moderate about everything other than clothes, makeup, and boyfriends.

My tour guide arrived the next morning. His name was a long collection of aspirates, glottal stops, and gutturals with, like
printed Hebrew, no evident vowels. “Americans can never pronounce it,” he said. “Just call me T'zchv.”

I called him Z. I was Z's only customer. He drove a minibus of the kind that in the United States always seems to be filled with a church group. And so was Z's, until recently. “Most of my clients,” he said, “are the fundamentalists. They want to go everywhere in the Bible. But now …” The people who talk incessantly about the Last Days have quit visiting the place where the world will end, due to violence in the region.

Z was seventy-five, a retired colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces, a veteran of every war from liberation to the invasion of Lebanon. “Our worst enemy is CNN,” he said. His parents had come from Russia in 1908 and settled on the first kibbutz in Palestine. Z was full of anger about the fighting in Israel—the fighting with the ultra-Orthodox Jews. “They don't serve in the army. They don't pay taxes. The government gives them money. I call them Pharisees.”

As we walked around, Z would greet people of perfectly secular appearance by name, adding, “You Pharisee, you,” or would introduce me to someone in a T-shirt and jeans who had, maybe, voted for Ariel Sharon in the most recent election by saying, “I want you to meet Moshe, a real Pharisee, this one.”

Z said over and over, “The problem is with the Pharisees.” About Arabs I couldn't get him to say much. Z seemed to regard Arabs as he did weather. Weather is important. Weather is good. We enjoy weather. We respect weather. Nobody likes to be out in weather when it gets dramatic. “My wife won't let me go to the Palestinian areas,” Z said.

“Let's go to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood,” I said.

“You don't want to go there,” he said. “They're dumps. You want to see where Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee.”

“No, I don't.”

“‘And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea' …” For a man at loggerheads with religious orthodoxy, Z recited a lot of scripture, albeit mostly New Testament, where Pharisees come off looking pretty bad. When quoting, Z would shift to the trochaic foot—familiar to him, perhaps, from the preaching of his evangelical tourists; familiar to me from Mom yelling through the screen door, “You get
in
here
right
this
minute!”

As a compromise we went to Jaffa and had Saint Peter's fish from the Sea of Galilee for lunch. Jaffa is the old port city for Jerusalem, a quaint jumble of Arab architecture out of which the Arabs ran or were run (depending on who's writing history) during Israel's war of liberation. Like most quaint jumbles adjacent to quaintness-free cities, Jaffa is full of galleries and studios. Israel is an admirably artsy place. And, as in other artsy places of the contemporary world, admiration had to be aimed principally at the effort. The output indicated that Israelis should have listened when God said, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing.” Some of the abstract stuff was good.

I wanted to look at art. Z wanted me to look at the house of Simon the Tanner, on the Jaffa waterfront. This, according to Acts 10:10-15, is where Saint Peter went into a trance and foresaw a universal Christian church and, also, fitted sheets. Peter had a vision of “a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and
creeping things.” God told Peter to kill them and eat them. Peter thought this didn't look kosher—or probably, in the case of the creeping things, appetizing. And God said that what He had cleansed should not be called unclean.

“Then is when Peter knew Christianity was for everyone, not just the Jews!” said Z with vicarious pride in another religion's generous thought.

A little too generous. To Peter's idea we owe ideology, the notion that the wonderful visions we have involve not only ourselves but the whole world, whether the world wants to be involved or not. Until that moment of Peter's in Jaffa, the killing of heretics and infidels was a local business. Take, for example, the case of John the Baptist: with Herodias, Herod Antipas, and stepdaughter Salome running the store, it was a mom-and-pop operation. But by the middle of the first century theological persecution had gone global in the known world. Eventually the slaughter would outgrow the limited market in religious differences. In the twentieth century millions of people were murdered on purely intellectual grounds.

“Can we go in?” I asked.

“No,” Z said, “the Muslims put a mosque in there, which made the Orthodox angry. They rioted, which kept the Christians out. So the police closed the place.”

For those who dislike ideology, what's interesting about kibbutzim is that they're such a bad idea. Take an Eastern European intelligentsia and make the desert bloom. One would sooner take Mormons and start a rap label. But Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, three quarters of a mile north of the Gaza Strip,
passed the test of ideology. It worked—something no fully elaborated, universally applicable ideology ever does.

I'd never been to a kibbutz. I don't know what I expected—Grossinger's with guns? A bar mitzvah with tractors? Some of my friends went to kibbutzim in the 1960s and came back with tales of sex and socialism. But you could get that at Oberlin, without the circle dancing. I'm sure my polisci-major pals were very little help with the avocado crop. Anyway, what I wasn't expecting was a cluster of JFK-era summer cottages with haphazard flower beds, sagging badminton nets, and Big Wheel tricycles on the grass—Lake Missaukee, Michigan, without Lake Missaukee.

A miniature Michigan of shrubbery and trees covered the low hills of the settlement, but with a network of drip-irrigation lines weaving among the stems and trunks. Here were the fiber-optic connections of a previous and more substantive generation of high-tech visionaries, who meant to treat a troubled world with water (per Al Sharpton) rather than information. Scattered in the greenery were the blank metal-sided workshops and warehouses of present-day agriculture, suggestive more of light industry than of peasanthood. Yad Mordechai has light industry, too, producing housewares and decorative ceramics. Plus it has the largest apiary in Israel, an educational center devoted to honey and bees, a gift shop, a kosher restaurant, and, of all things, thirteen hundred yards from the Gaza Strip, a petting zoo.

Yad Mordechai was founded in 1943 on an untilled, sand-drifted patch of the Negev. The land was bought from the sheik of a neighboring village. And there, in the humble little verb of the preceding sentence, is the moral genius of Zionism. Theodor Herzl, when he set down the design of
Zionism in
The Jewish State
(1896), wrote, “The land … must, of course, be privately acquired.” The Zionists intended to buy a nation rather than conquer one. This had never been tried. Albeit various colonists, such as the American ones, had foisted purchase-and-sale agreements on peoples who had no concept of fee-simple tenure or of geography as anything but a free good. But the Zionists wanted an honest title search.

More than a hundred years ago the Zionists realized what nobody has realized yet—nobody but a few cranky Austrian economists and some very rich people skimming the earth in Gulfstream jets. Nothing is zero-sum, not even statehood. Man can make more of everything, including the very thing he sets his feet on, as the fellow getting to his feet and heading to the bar on the G-V can tell you. “If we wish to found a State to-day,” Herzl wrote, “we shall not do it in the way which would have been the only possible one a thousand years ago.”

Whether the early Zionists realized what they'd realized is another matter. Palestinian Arabs realized, very quickly, that along with the purchased polity came politics. In politics, as opposed to reality, everything is zero-sum.

Considering how things are going politically in Zion these days, the foregoing quotation from Herzl should be continued and completed.

Supposing, for example, we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts, we should not set about the task in the fashion of Europeans of the fifth century. We should not take spear and lance and go out singly in pursuit of bears; we should organize a large and lively hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb into their midst.

On May 19, 1948, Yad Mordechai was attacked by an Egyptian armored column with air and artillery support. The kibbutz was guarded by 130 men and women, some of them teenagers, most without military training. They had fifty-five light weapons, one machine gun, and a two-inch mortar. Yad Mordechai held out for six days—long enough for the Israeli Army to secure the coast road to Tel Aviv. Twenty-six of the defenders were killed, along with about three hundred Egyptians.

A slit trench has been left along the Yad Mordechai hilltop, with the original fifty-five weapons fastened to boards and preserved with tar. Under the viscous coatings a nineteenth-century British rifle was discernible, and the sink-trap plumbing of two primitive Bren guns. The rest of the firearms looked like the birds and cats that were once mummified—by Egyptians, appropriately enough. Below the trench is a negligee lace of barbed wire, all the barbed wire the kibbutz had in 1948, and beyond that are Egyptian tanks, just where they stopped when they could go no farther. Between the tanks dozens of charging Egyptian soldiers are represented by life-size black-painted two-dimensional cutouts—Gumby commandos, lawn ornaments on attack.