Losing Israel Read Online Free PDF

returned to England that second time, my mother was pregnant. I had been the youngest of three, and the news about my imminent displacement made me anxious and then jealous and unhappy. In the autumn my mother spent long weeks in hospital with high blood pressure. I refused to visit her – the hospital was an hour’s drive away, in the small rural hospital in Cuckfield. I told my father that the drive would make me car-sick, but it was because I could not bear to make a fact of my mother’s absence by seeing her elsewhere. I could not bear it that she was pregnant either. I pretended nothing was happening, that nothing was changing, and when it did change, when my mother came home with my new baby sister, Rowena, I told my parents I wanted to leave them, to leave England, to go back to Israel, to the kibbutz, to live. By then, at the age of thirteen, I had completely absorbed my mother’s unreconstructed Labour Zionism, taking in the kibbutz ideology by which she was formed and making it into a romantic idealism. I was attached to it; I defined myself by it and I took refuge in it from this new unhappiness. But though my parents considered it, in the end they would not let me go. Although I accepted and then came to love my new sister, my mother remained inaccessible: at first she was taken up with my sister’s care, and then she fell ill. My adolescence became a dark tunnel, and four years later I dropped out of school and left for Israel after all.
    I was seventeen, impressionable, and ripe for the Jewish Agency’s nationalist story in its most overtly propagandist form. Like most of the people on my kibbutz ulpan, I didn’t know if I was running away from something or towards something. The kibbutz where I was placed wasn’t very old; it had been established after 1948 on the site of a depopulated Arab village by Jewish immigrants from north Africa – but we knew nothing about that. It was 1986, and we knew almost nothing about Palestinians. The kibbutz was very poor, one of the poorest, and it was a highly dysfunctional community, riven by family feuds, and without a clear identity.
    Because I was the daughter of a kibbutznik I was welcomed not as a possible new immigrant, a new recruit to the national body, but as a wayward kibbutz daughter returning to the fold. Through the medium of the ulpan, the Jewish Agency tried to persuade us degenerate, western, Diaspora Jews to return , and I, easy prey, understood that I could repair the breach, could heal the wound created by my mother’s abandonment: I could undo that betrayal by my permanent return. The national story was my own story; the collective was my collective. My roots were deep, deep and ancient, and the path from the Jewish past to the Israeli present was uncluttered and simple and linear.
    We were taught that Jews, dispersed in Roman times, when the Temple was destroyed, had always longed to return to their ancestral home, intoning at every Passover ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ as a matter of course. Some, over the intervening two millennia, made the journey back. Now we could, too; in fact we had a moral duty to do so.
    Leon Uris popularised this simple narrative in his immensely successful propagandist novels Exodus and The Haj , which I had read voraciously as a young teenager, caught up in their melodrama. There were tents in the sand, treachery, the flash of daggers, the gleam of teeth in the darkness, men who could move silently, women who were pure and lovely. Exodus was outrage, glory and Hollywood technicolour in the person of Paul Newman. The Haj was more complicated. Purporting to tell the ‘other story’, it was partly narrated by a village mukhtar’s son whose masculinity was questionable, a cleverly undermining conceit in the muscular, brash, frontier-novel tradition of Wilbur Smith, to whom Uris owed a great debt in style and attitude. I read Wilbur Smith’s novels too – South African adventure stories for white men, in which women