The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide

2 Death of a Love Affair

Inside the information pack from the Jewish Agency office in London was a badge and an accompanying letter: ‘Wear this as you walk off the plane to begin your new life as an Israeli citizen,’ the instructions stated. So on 10 October 1999, as I made my way down the flight of steps onto the tarmac of Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion international airport, I had a badge pinned to my chest bearing the slogan: ‘I’ve come home’.

The thought that I and the hundreds of other new immigrants arriving each week on El Al flights from all over the world were reclaiming a right that had lain dormant for two thousand years did not strike me as strange. For the fuel that brought me late in life to Israel as a new immigrant, with only a couple of suitcases of belongings with me, was a dream I had secretly harboured since my childhood. The object of my desire was to make aliya, the Hebrew word for ‘ascent’, an idea that in returning to Israel a Jew is fulfilling a divinely ordained mission.

At the age of fifty I was leaving behind my home in Wimbledon, South London, two grown-up children, Daniel and Tanya, a recently failed marriage and my work as an Aids/HIV counsellor. Other than these attachments, not much stood in my way: Israeli law entitles me and every other Jew in the world to instant citizenship if we choose to live in Israel. There are no visa applications, points systems or lengthy residency procedures. As a Jew I had a right to Israeli citizenship by virtue of my ethnicity alone. The Jewish Agency in London had been able to process my application for Israeli citizenship in just a week, and it made sure the immigration process was as pain-free as possible: my flight ticket was paid for, and accommodation was provided while I found my feet in the Promised Land. The only hesitation on my part was a reluctance, when confronted by an official issuing my Israeli identity card, to adopt a Hebrew name. My friends suggested I become either Shashana or Vered—the names of two flowers—but at the last minute I decided to stick with Susan.

I am not sure I can identify the exact moment I became a committed Zionist, but I do know that a single childhood incident changed the direction of my life, and my understanding of what it was to be a Jew. I was eleven years old and on an outing with some girls from my boarding school to nearby High Wycombe, one of the many commuter towns that ring London. Browsing through the shelves of a small bookshop in one of the backstreets, away from the other girls, I stumbled across the most horrifying picture book. As I leafed through its pages I found photo after photo of emaciated corpses piled high in pits, of men ripping out gold fillings from teeth, of mountains of hair and shoes. At such a young age I was not aware that these were pictures of the Holocaust, an event that was still fearsomely present in the imaginations of Jews around the world fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. But the awfulness of the images transfixed me.

I learned the story behind these photographs from my parents shortly afterwards, so beginning my compulsive interest in the Holocaust and Jewish history. The following year, 1961, after I had moved to a new boarding school in Buckinghamshire, the trial of the Gestapo leader Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. I read the newspapers every day, appalled by the accounts of the Final Solution, Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. I also recall weekends spent poring over copies of the Jewish Chronicle in my parents’ home, reading in the personal columns the notices from individuals and families still searching for relatives in Europe they had been separated from for as much as two decades. These heart-rending messages were an uncomfortable reminder that the legacy of loss and destruction wrought by the concentration camps was continuing. My exposure to the Holocaust—and my new understanding that millions of Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis—launched me on an ever wider quest for knowledge: not only of what had happened to its victims, but also of what had led to such barbarity.

My own family, I was soon aware, had only narrowly escaped—by a quirk of destiny—the tragedy that had consumed so many others. My father’s parents, before they met, were refugees from the pogroms in Lithuania in the 1880s, fleeing separately to Odessa where each hoped they might catch a ship to Hamburg and a new future in Germany. But when they arrived at the port they, and many other refugees, found the ship full and so were forced to travel on the only other vessel, bound for Cape Town in South Africa. As we now know, their fates and their children’s were sealed by that missed boat: instead of finding themselves caught up in the rise of European fascism, they watched the horrific events unfold from the safe distance of Cape Town. My father was, however, in Europe at the outbreak of war. He had left South Africa in the late 1920s, travelling streerage class on a boat bound for Ireland, a penniless but brilliant medical student. He enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was mentored by Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, the chief rabbi of Ireland and the father of Israel’s sixth president, who helped him become a passionate Zionist. By the time Nazism was on the rise in Germany my father was a leading surgeon in London, where he met my mother, a nurse. They spent the war itself tending to the injured in Tilbury docks in Essex, one of the most heavily bombed places in Britain.

If my family had survived the war unscathed, the plight of the many who had not touched me deeply. As with many others, the story of the Exodus—as told by novelist Leon Uris—shaped my perception of the tragedy that had befallen my people. I read of the ship that left Europe in July 1947, its decks choked with Holocaust survivors in search of sanctuary in what was then Palestine; of the refugees who tried to jump ship and reach the shores of the Promised Land; of the decision of the British to send the 4,500 refugees to internment camps in Cyprus because they had agreed to limits on Jewish immigration to avoid further antagonising the local Palestinian population and neighbouring Arab countries; and of the horrifying eventual return of the ship and its Jewish refugees to Germany. I was outraged by the thought that British soldiers—ruling Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations—could have acted with such callousness. My alienation from my country, Britain, began from that point on.

The middle classes exercised a subtle, sophisticated discrimination against Jews in post-war Britain which was apparent enough to make me increasingly aware of my difference. There were the comments about my ‘funny name’—my maiden name is Levy. I heard tales that disturbed me about the clubs that excluded Jews as policy. Among my parents’ friends there were worried conversations about the ‘quotas’ on Jewish children that might prevent their offspring from being admitted to a good school. And my mother, who was born a Protestant but converted to Judaism after marrying my father, would tell of how everyone in her family apart from her own mother disowned her for choosing to marry a Jew.

During my childhood, at the rural boarding schools outside London where most of my time was spent, I felt as if I were wearing a yellow star, as if my Jewishness was a visible stain to the teachers and other pupils. These were demonstratively Christian schools, with chapel services and morning prayers. I was aware of my vulnerability, too: out of hundreds of children, only four others were Jewish in the senior school I attended. I swung between contradictory emotions. On the one hand I feared appearing different, and on the other I wanted to proudly own that difference. Although I did not have the courage to refuse to attend morning prayers, I resolutely kept my mouth closed during the hymns. It was a very isolating experience: I felt outside the consensus, subtly but constantly reminded of my difference. This is, I think, a common experience for Diaspora Jews, but one little appreciated by Israeli Jews who were born and raised in a state where they comprise the majority.

My growing distance from British society was reflected in an ever greater attachment, if only emotionally, to Israel. I was raised on stirring stories of the great and glorious Jewish state. For non-Jews it is perhaps difficult to appreciate what an enormous impact the creation of the state of Israel had on us. It reinvented our self-image, anchoring our pride in a piece of territory that had been our shared homeland two thousand years before. It satisfied our sense of historic justice and showed we could forge our own place among the modern nation states. But more than that, many Jews, myself included, were excited by the triumphs of our army, particularly those of 1948 and 1967, when Israel took on its Arab neighbours and won substantial territory from them. Here we were, a persecuted, isolated people, freeing ourselves from the ghettos of Europe and rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the gas chambers to become warriors. No longer a helpless minority always at risk of persecution, we were a proud people reclaiming our homeland, and willing and able to fight to defend it on the battlefleld. Young Jews need not imagine a future as either merchants or intellectuals, but rather as brave and courageous soldiers. We could call ourselves ‘Sabra’—identifying with the prickly Middle Eastern cactus that flourishes in even the most hostile terrain.

I married my husband, Michael Nathan, a successful lawyer, in 1970 at the age of twenty-one. My early marriage, frowned upon by my parents, brought me into the embrace of a much more religious family than my own. Michael’s mother and father were traditional and Orthodox, in sharp contrast to my own parents’ secular, liberal background, and our differences in upbringing, culture and outlook would eventually push us apart. During the twenty-six years of our marriage, however, Michael and I only ever visited Israel together once, when we went to see his brother in Jerusalem. Michael never shared my attachment to the Jewish state, and on the seven other occasions I visited I was always alone. Our two children forged their own relationships with Israel, touring the country as part of youth groups or working on kibbutzim. But although this was officially my state I always left Israel as a tourist, an outsider, with a feeling that its inner substance had not been fully revealed to me.

So when I arrived to claim Israeli citizenship in 1999, my head was still full of romantic notions of Zionism and the Jewish state. The Jews had reclaimed an empty, barren land—‘a land without people for a people without land’. We had made the desert bloom, we had filled an uninhabited piece of the Middle East with kibbutzim, the collective farms that were the pioneering backbone of the state in its early years. At that stage, the thought that the country was full of strangers, people whom I and my countrymen lived alongside but entirely apart from, did not enter my head. The one million Arabs who share the state with Jews—Palestinians who remained on their land after the 1948 war that founded Israel, and so by accident rather than design became Israeli citizens—were invisible to me, as they are to almost all Israeli Jews. Their culture, their society and their story were a mystery.

The excitement of being in Israel did not quickly dissipate. My first months were filled with thrilling moments of feeling, for the first time in my life, that I belonged to the majority. I did not need to explain my family name, nor did I have to hide my pride in my Jewishness. I could have walked down the street with a Star of David emblazoned on my lapel if I wanted to; no one would have batted an eyelid. There was even a strange sense of liberation in calling a plumber and opening the door to a man wearing a kippa, the small cloth disc worn by religious Jewish men as a head covering. It made me think, I really am in the land of the Jews.

Even the stories that had inspired me as a child now came dramatically to life. Soon after my arrival I was hanging the laundry outside the kitchen window of my Tel Aviv flat when I noticed an old woman waving down to me from a neighbouring apartment block, a dilapidated building erected in the early 1950s. Noticing a new face in the area, she called out that her name was Leah, and asked who I was and where I was from. I told her, then asked whether she had been born in Israel. No, she replied, she had been born in Poland. During the Second World War she had been separated from her parents, who were later killed in a concentration camp. She went into hiding in the woods, staying with several Russian families, before envoys from the Jewish Agency tracked her down and put her on a ship to Palestine. That ship was the Exodus. She recounted the story of the trip in the packed boat that I had read about in my teenage years, and how they were turned back to Germany. She told me of the horrific overcrowding on the ship, of the bodies stuffed together, but also of the excitement as they neared the Promised Land. Here in Leah I had found a living, breathing piece of history, a woman who made flesh all the reasons why I felt attached and committed to Israel.

Most Jews are all too ready to tell you how much Israel means to them as a sanctuary. How safe they feel knowing that there is a country they can flee to should anti-Semitism raise its ugly head again. How reassuring it is to have a country that will protect them, having inherited the legacy of centuries of persecution and the horrors of the Holocaust. What they are much less ready to admit is that Israel is not just a safe haven and a homeland; it also embodies the value of naked Jewish power. What I felt arriving in Israel—as I suspect do many other Jews—was that through my new state I was defying a world that had persecuted my people. Being in the majority, and not needing to explain myself, was a condition I was unfamiliar with after five decades as a British Jew. The sense of being in charge, of putting the boot on the other foot, was more than a little intoxicating.

I did not come to Israel the easy way, though as a middle-class Londoner I could have strolled into any flat in Tel Aviv. I chose instead a path that I believed followed in the footsteps of the pioneering Jewish immigrants to Palestine. I arranged with the Jewish Agency in London to spend my first six months in an immigrant absorption centre in Rana’ana, close to Tel Aviv. I knew what I was letting myself in for: an apartment shared with strangers newly arrived from all over the world, separated by different languages, cultures and traditions. All we would have in common was the knowledge that we were Jews and that we wanted to become Israelis.

These first months were something of a culture shock that tested the resources of many of the inmates. I arrived with my British culture, but the absorption centre was also home to people from many other cultures, including Americans, Dutch, Russians, Swiss, French and South Americans. All of us had to adjust both to these other cultures and to the new Israeli culture. We also struggled with the abruptness of Israelis, which many took for rudeness. The Rana’ana centre has perhaps the most privileged intake of Jewish immigrants anywhere in Israel, with most coming from developed countries. It beats by a considerable margin the caravan transit camps reserved for Ethiopian Jews, the Jewish group most discriminated against inside Israel. Many of the one million Russian Jews who arrived in Israel during the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union also stayed in far less salubrious surroundings.

Nonetheless, the absorption centre was a tough and uncomfortable introduction to Israel, which I remember left several people close to a nervous breakdown and ready to fly back home. I still have a cutting from a local newspaper, Ha Sharon, headlined ‘Immigrants Complain of Poor Conditions’. A letter written by some of the French and American inmates to the absorption centre’s management is quoted: ‘The apartments are old and full of mould and fungus. The kitchens are broken, the showers don’t work properly, the walls are peeling and we have no air-conditioners.’ And it is true that in many ways Rana’ana was as much a prison as a melting pot. Having spent my childhood from the age of seven onwards, however, in the harsh, disciplinarian atmosphere of British boarding schools, coping with these material hardships only slightly marred the wonderful experience of being absorbed into a new country and culture, and meeting so many like-minded Jews.

But in these early months I started to experience darker moments. A big disappointment was that the only family I had in Israel, religious cousins living in the southern city of Ashdod, who originally approved of my decision to make aliya, kept their distance from the moment I arrived. They did not even meet me at the airport. For a while their attitude baffied me, but eventually I came to understand how my migration challenged their sense of their own Israeliness. They belong to the right-wing religious camp, and still hold onto a vision of Israelis as pioneering frontiersmen, settlers implanting themselves in hostile terrain. I think they were convinced that, with my ‘European softness’, I would not be able to stay the course. And when I confounded them by securing almost immediately a well-paid position in Tel Aviv teaching English to business professionals, my easy assimilation served only to antagonise them yet further.

My job involved travelling from one office to the next, which meant that I quickly learned my way around Tel Aviv. I also met and got to know a range of Israelis with different political views and insights into the ‘Israeli experience’. I heard from some of them about their own problems as immigrants being absorbed into Israeli society, about their concerns at their children serving in the army, and about the country’s economy.

Four months after my arrival I suffered a devastating blow when I was diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. I had to begin a crash-course in negotiating my way single-handedly around Israel’s health care system, and eventually found myself in Jerusa-lem’s Hadassah hospital, awaiting an operation on my eye. Hadassah occupies a striking position, set in a pine forest overlooking the old stone houses of Ein Kerem, a Palestinian village that was cleansed of its population in the 1948 war and is now a wealthy suburb of Jerusalem to which many rich Jews aspire to move. It has state-of-the-art medical equipment and is staffed by a mix of Israeli Jews and Arabs, and it was there that I got my first inkling that the country I had so longed to be a citizen of might not be quite what I imagined. I was lying in a ward surrounded by beds filled not just with other Jews but with many of the diverse, and confusing, ethnic and religious components of the Holy Land: Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze. This was before the intifada of September 2000, but still it was surprising to see Israelis and Palestinians sharing the same ward. Even more confusingly, many of the Palestinians were Israeli citizens, members of a group I discovered were commonly referred to as the ‘Israeli Arabs’. The Jewish state was clearly a lot less ethnically pure than I had been led to believe.

It was another experience on the ward that started me questioning what was really going on inside Israel. One day a young Orthodox woman arrived on the ward clutching her month-old baby, who had just undergone surgery on an eye. That evening her husband came to visit. He was wearing a knitted kippa, long sidelocks, and had a pistol on one hip and a rifie slung casually over his shoulder. This is the uniform of the nationalist religious right in Israel—better known abroad as ‘the settlers’. The thought that a heavily armed civilian could wander freely around a hospital where women and children were ill appalled me. I engaged him in conversation as he was leaving. In a strong American accent he told me: ‘I’ve just requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem. I never leave home without a weapon.’ I suggested to him that he would be better off living in the Jewish quarter in the Old City. No, he retorted. ‘All of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.’

His words left a nasty taste in my mouth. Why was he stealing homes from Arabs in the Palestinian part of the city, the section captured by Israel in the 1967 war, when there were vast tracts of the country he could choose to live in? And why did I appear to be the only person on the ward who thought it strange for a visitor to arrive in a hospital wearing a gun?