Losing Israel Read Online Free PDF Page A

was my mother’s heritage and I understood it to be my own heritage, too. The kibbutznik was the ideal – not an effete intellectual, nor a mean usurer, but a noble, enlightened peasant, once again rooted in native soil. According to the kibbutz version of the Zionist story, the return of Jews to this mostly empty land to redeem and restore the waste and desert to their former glory as fertile fields, was heroic in a socialist rather than biblical sense. My grandfather, peasant-kibbutznik, became for me its embodiment: he too had wielded flag and pitchfork and gun; he too had worked with his whole body, his whole being to create a new society, to realise a dream. He was a worker of the land, weathered by harsh sun, idealism and labour.
    At twelve, I learned and embraced this national story, Leon Uris’s Exodus version of it. From that stirring romantic novel, from the places we visited, from family, from newspapers and, later, from film, I absorbed the simple, compelling Zionist account of the past and present, and of my past and present. This was the version, not much more sophisticated, which was reinforced when, at seventeen, I thought I might move to Israel permanently, and came under the formal influence of the Jewish Agency.
    My father had done it before me, along with his twin brother, in 1956: he entered Israel as a new immigrant and joined the army. When he emigrated from England at the age of twenty-one, he had been galvanised by the story of Israeli independence, like so many Jews in the immediate aftermath of statehood, and he too had wanted to help ‘build up the land’. It was a mere eight years since the ‘miraculous’ war of independence, and the Jewish Agency, burdened with the task, after the war, of bringing Jews to Israel, ran language immersion programmes for new immigrants on many of the kibbutzim. These Hebrew ulpans consisted of six months’ intensive immersion in Hebrew, and induction into the Labour Zionist ethos of the kibbutz movement. Six days a week, the new immigrants studied for half the day, and for half the day they worked – in the dairy, the factory, the kitchens, the citrus groves, or the fields.
    My mother was sixteen when my father turned up with his guitar and his handsome laughter, and she was shy. At the beginning the members of the kibbutz viewed him with suspicion as a dangerous Western capitalist influence, because of the guitar. Their romance was a kibbutz drama. Even now, when I meet old kibbutz members for the first time, it is that romance that they remark on when they learn who I am. My father worked in the refet , with the cows. Later, after he’d finished his three-year army service, he and my mother moved to the small frontier kibbutz of Gadot, up near the troubled, dangerous Syrian border.
    That my mother left the kibbutz of her birth at all was a betrayal, an abandonment (she was a bat-kibbutz , a daughter of the kibbutz). That she then left the kibbutz movement for a city life was worse, but that she and my father finally left the country altogether, so that he could continue his studies in England, was, in that coercive society of personal and collective responsibility to the state, the worst form of national treachery. Now people come and go, but at the time the social sanction against leaving made it a taboo; it tore a hole in the fabric of the national myth.
    In contrast to the heady term for immigration, aliyah , with its meanings of ascent, as to a holy place, to emigrate was to ‘go down’ – to descend into the pit of diaspora. My mother was a traitor, and she knew it. It lingered and festered like a curse. She had been afraid to go back. She had been afraid of censure, and it had taken fifteen years before she could face it. And then, when at last we had gone back, she had been embraced – everywhere we went she was embraced, and welcomed. All of us were; all of us were enjoined to return permanently, to be again part of the family.
    When we