Israel-Summer 1979

Fein, Leonard

rendezvous with destiny—but feel they have forgotten where it was they were to meet. Rush, rush to the rendezvous—but where was it to be, and is it not too late? After thirty-one years, the old...

...We are in the dining room of the kibbutz guest house where the conference is taking place, and the American delegation, of which I am one, has decided that at our table, we will welcome the Shabbat with the kiddush...
...How can we complain...
...The officers, he says, are adrift, men of marvelous technical capacity and nothing else...
...All my friends, those who did not know I was in the country, many whom I have not seen in a dozen years, have been calling...
...If I am her "assignment," she is doing very, very well...
...it is their own right to self-respect...
...It is not, in the first instance, justice for others that these protesters demand...
...Bet Hatfutsot describes what was destroyed...
...But not every right a person has—or a nation—need be exercised...
...And so what if nothing connects them...
...The restaurant is owned by Vietnamese, and the food is awful...
...Only later will I have the chance to read the delegation's statement itself, and understand that it is deftly worded to avoid reference to Eilon Moreh...
...Shall it be the dream of Ariel Sharon, a dream of fortress Israel...
...We do not discuss the protest at all...
...The driver vehemently disagrees...
...see what this bereaved people has built and planted...
...So it may well be that land rather than life is the issue, and—because there are 750,000 Arabs who live in the West Bank, and another 350,000 in the Gaza Strip—Israel's future as a Jewish state...
...There will be six in all, four or five minutes each...
...In some ways, the Israeli experience parallels our own these last twenty years: a surge of attention and investment, and then a withdrawal...
...On Wednesday, there is a raucous Knesset session...
...CI I Inough, I hope, of politics...
...it is a fact to be endured...
...Much later, I walk through the alleys of a movie set called the Old City, through the Armenian Quarter to the Jewish Quarter, all too perfect...
...I hear all this, and think of the essays I have read—and some I have written—on the subject, all those fancy analyses which invariably conclude that there is much that is worth preserving in all cultures, that Israel should be searching for an amalgam, and other such pleasant liberal sentiments...
...Begin would prefer—what politician would not?—that these divisions be ignored...
...We talk of the quality of life, of the dirty streets and traffic, the shouting and the high level of aggression...
...He is an education officer in the army, and he has just returned from a session with a group of young officers...
...Of course one knows...
...And then it was that Jacob said to them, "You have brought trouble upon me and made me odious...
...He takes me to the home of his friend in Ein Karem, where several couples will gather to talk into the night...
...And they provide each other much-needed support: Levinger's zealots are Sharon's shock troops...
...In the 1950's and on into the 1960's, it was assumed that the mass of Near Eastern immigrants (for which "Moroccans" has come to be a kind of shorthand) could best be dealt with through a "Generation of the Desert" strategy...
...The Russian Jews do not come...
...There was a time, not very many years ago, when those who spoke of the dream, of any dream, were ridiculed—perhaps even by these same now-wistful people...
...Go to Bet Hatfutsot and see the imagination, go to a dozen different hospitals and see the kindness, to a hundred different kibbutzim and see the industry, to a thousand and a hundred times that many homes and see, and feel, the love this beleaguered and confused and frenetic people still make manifest...
...Instead, the protesters will go back down the hill, and set up camp...
...And the exhibits are clever...
...Nirmul" is the Hebrew neologism for "normalization," the unfolding process of accommodation with Egypt...
...I am terribly tense...
...The courts may yet stop it, but a couple of thousand assorted Saturday afternoon pickets will not...
...It is amiable...
...The issue goes well beyond such catch-phrases as racism, or bigotry, or discrimination...
...We pass sullen police, soldiers...
...Israel does not suffer by comparison...
...I know little of museums, but it is clear, first of all, that this one works...
...The JTA is the principal source of news for the Jewish press world-wide...
...Then they plundered the city...
...Not wealthy, but quite comfortable...
...I am impatient, talked out, and eager for sleep...
...Begin's response...
...1 can't...
...We do so, quietly, unobtrusively...
...have spent the day Friday being recognized...
...It is front page news...
...Begin is still arguing against the Partition Plan of 1947, and that is a very dangerous thing to be doing in 1979—for if the principle of partition were to be rejected, it is not at all clear that the rejection would be in Israel's favor...
...They explain that it is not for courtesy's sake, but for their children's...
...One of these, the son of a distinguished Jerusalem family, in whose childhood home Arab visitors were commonplace, is described to me as especially interesting...
...Shlomo Nakdimon, Mr...
...I cannot bask, however...
...No, I want to dig beneath a single damaging episode, to try to understand what part of the government's policy is based on domestic political considerations, what part on ideological conviction...
...Much conversation over the next three days will be devoted to this topic, imagining different scenarios to account for the change...
...Wait for the parents to die, invest in the education and acculturation of the children...
...between seven and a quarter past, the crowd swells from three thousand to thirty thousand, perhaps forty...
...nonetheless, they seek to impose their annexationist fantasies on the government, and are not much troubled by the niceties of the law or the accepted norms of democratic behavior...
...I doubt that Sharon will sway the delegation, but they will meet with Begin again before leaving, and he will surely work very hard to win them over...
...The unfortunate resort to the security argument where it does not apply runs the risk of undermining all credibility in Israel's legitimate security arguments in other areas...
...Israel's accepted journalistic traditions virtually guarantee that no Israeli prophet will be honored in his own country...
...Can the pressure of life in Israel be endured if the purpose of life in Israel is obscured...
...The debate over Eilon Moreh or the other settlements is not a debate over rights...
...I am to be the second speaker...
...In a far corner, the organizers are conferring...
...State Department...
...Go to Yad Vashem, and turn from the museum and the monument to look out at the hills of Jerusalem and its environs...
...The infuriating bureaucracy...
...as Begin's guest, it would be rude of him to speak with them first...
...I have a dozen friends in Israel's universities who labor mightily to alter that fact...
...A torch is lit, there is a reading from Brecht, and the speeches start...
...the cause of the split, quite clearly, is a policy which goes beyond the established consensus, and one cannot expect a policy so divisive in Israel to be accepted with absolute calm back in the States...
...I appreciate their courtesy...
...even by the Knesset's own dismal standards, the debate is crude and rowdy...
...They will try to seal the road, to prevent any supplies from reaching the settlers...
...And finally, we come to the stuff of the Israeli dream, the battered dream that was called Zionism, that same Zionism which their parents and teachers and leaders spoke about in Russian and Polish accents, that same Zionism they have long since assumed was done...
...mance happens on Thursday, and therein lies a tale...
...Still, I do not accept the invitation to speak until after the press has had its heyday with the Presidents' Conference statement, has made of that statement a blanket endorsement of West Bank settlement, including Eilon Moreh...
...But the army has blocked the main road, so we are diverted to a patrol path, and for the next hour we bounce rather than drive towards our destination...
...My cab driver takes me the long way around...
...I propose the crazy-quilt economy, the maddening inflation, the insecurities that result...
...The treaty was a mistake...
...the system works, more or less, even when left unattended...
...Jews know too much, remember too well, to respect themselves as rulers of another people...
...And Adi Ophir, the speaker, voice cracking, cries out: "General Sharon: If we are not Zionists"— for that is what Sharon has said of those who disagree with him just two days ago, in the Knesset—"who is it, General Sharon, that you will send to the next war...
...Somewhere in my head I carry that old photograph of Meir Diezengoff and his hardy band standing on top of a Jaffa sand dune with picks and shovels, beginning to build Tel Aviv...
...But this past year, I have remembered that story and told it half a dozen times...
...It is a museum filled with surprises...
...At which point the producer walks on camera, and hands London a note...
...Fink's and My Bar were once the only comfort of insomniac visitors...
...Sharon's office is Levinger's protection...
...This morning, a large call-girl ring has been exposed in Tel Aviv...
...No, there are no candles...
...Go to Afula, and look for the boat people...
...It is so...
...But then whom do you talk to when you're in the army...
...Those who interrupted, he says, will soon be forgotten...
...This is his first active protest, he tells me...
...The Arab mentality" is the last defense of all the zealots, including that not insubstantial number who are part of the Labor Party...
...There are no original works here...
...I need some grapefruit juice...
...Third, that the cause of the split is not lack of concern or flagging energy...
...The police do not intervene...
...But right now, I am talked out...
...Arabs cannot be trusted...
...He asks that I have the Peace Now people call him after he has met with Begin...
...The settlers arrived on June 7; twenty tents, a flag, and a generator, perched on the top of a barren hill less than two miles from Shchem...
...They arrive on Tuesday, and I have been asked by the Peace Now people to arrange for a meeting...
...they have since time began...
...Here and there, a shard of meaning...
...There is a slogan, a motto here tonight: "Hakibbush Mashchit"— "Conquest Corrupts...
...Measured against the present reality, that is no dream...
...Yet I am mildly amused at the curious juxtaposition...
...We have two cars, and every appliance, and trips abroad, and education for our children...
...The State of Israel can survive even without these moneys...
...Hence "to normalize" becomes "l'narmel...
...The difference—one of the differences—between Israel and the U.S...
...I am too conscious of the answers I might have given, but did not...
...earlier in the week three men were indicted for their armed robbery—armed with grenades, an Uzi, revolvers—of a Ramat Aviv bank...
...But in each room, on each table, there are candles...
...There is music playing, pop music...
...For it never was an isolated thread...
...We search for the something, I with questions, they with vague musings...
...We get into the car, and enter the stream of traffic...
...What," he says to me, "will become of us...
...some are close friends...
...But in Jerusalem, last erev Shabbat, when I self-consciously chanted the kiddush, there were no candles...
...his buddies who were rejected will be serving in regular units, and that means mostly with Moroccans, so they won't have anybody to talk to...
...Then he unabashedly, and with full dramatic emphasis, declaims the kiddush...
...T mLm went to Eilon Moreh with the protesters...
...Find a different way...
...She will go on to college, and her friends, the ones who teach her the swear-words her mother does not like, will likely not...
...The Jerusalem Post editorial on Sunday summarizes my views on the matter: "Eilon Moreh, and the international furor it creates, only provides additonal ammunition for the forces ranged against Israel...
...But this is a politicallycharged week...
...do Paul Newman and she know how many of us they continue to disappoint by their absence...
...The ride back is a breeze, and the conversation is familiar: we talk Zionism, for A. and R., his wife, are among the purely classic Zionists I know...
...it has nothing to do with security...
...I am sitting in a new bistro in North Tel Aviv, a few blocks from hotel row, an area that was recently slum...
...The kids come home for the Shabbat, and they are still kids, combat boots and Uzi submachine guns notwithstanding...
...In the small lobby, I bump into an Israeli acquaintance who insists on talking...
...two-thirds of them prefer America...
...Madmen and prophets have competed for attention, and nameless masses have prayed and plowed, have planted and reaped, for the sake of this dream or that...
...Along the way, with cheers, huge boulders are heaved onto Children—there are many—add stones...
...Yet the wist-fulness suggests that there is a complaint...
...I promise to try, and meet with Ted Mann, the Chairman of the Conference...
...He calls the number...
...Loyal we are, but not mindless...
...The streets...
...Why must everything be so weighty, so burdened...
...That night, Begin attacks the "hysterical screams" which have marked the session...
...something is missing...
...stopping to see my cousin at the municipality's tourist office...
...today's Jerusalem is a triumph...
...What I am doing here, once the program begins, is talking about Eilon Moreh...
...Begin has said it clearly: cede the lands, and each of us becomes a target for the terrorists...
...it is a family army...
...And that is why the word for what I hear is not despair...
...It is a relief to be away from Eilon Moreh and the world of politics...
...Accordingly, a government news agency...
...I see that the Jerusalem contingent is small, that there are some thousands of people who have arrived before us, and I begin panting my way up, to the top...
...At the plaza of the Tel Aviv Museum, where the rally is to be held, preparations are under way...
...so long as the question is asked, the thread is not lost...
...T _JL_he words are these: Near the beginning of our time, the Bible tells us, a man named Shchem raped Dinah, daughter of Jacob, our father, and Leah, our mother...
...I want to pick these people up and shout at them, "Hey...
...Tens of thousands of people move freely and pacifically around the country carrying submachine guns...
...He and Rabbi Moses Levinger, leader of Gush Emunim, are the most potent—and most peculiar—team in Israeli politics today...
...She will not be, of course, but she is only 12, and she does not know that yet...
...I suggest the endless war, the anxiety that is bred when you live in a place that others revile...
...But it hasn't happened that way, and it's not at all clear that it's happening...
...These, he argues, will surely cause Egypt to renege on the peace treaty, and that is what he wants...
...Or it needs to become a movement...
...He is three hours off the plane, and still groggy...
...now there are bars and all-night eateries and even some very, very good restaurants...
...Back at the bottom of the hill, the protesters mill about, police cars come and go, the organizers huddle...
...Weizman...
...Friday morning papers feature the Presidents' Conference "endorsement" of Eilon Moreh...
...In the meantime, people will wonder what it was that caused the delegation to change its mind between Wednesday and Thursday...
...They pluck away without facial expression, and Mendelssohn comes out...
...And they have already fought their wars, seen death, and may again...
...Conquest corrupts...
...It is hard for me to accept that they cannot believe the opposition is fully genuine, harder still for me to accept that they are merely seeking to discredit it by their canard...
...it is Arafat and Company who have insisted on arguing from right rather than from reason...
...in Israel, you are either religious (read: Orthodox) or you are secular...
...Yes, they are books...
...The smallish crowd is scruffy, and my first reaction is that they are as much a fringe element as the settlers whose actions they mean to oppose...
...We rehearse, for voice levels and camera angles and such...
...I remember the bitter-sweet taste of success, the confusing realization thaWhis last new appliance has added nothing, has raised the spirits for just an hour, just a day, no more...
...for me, a Chinese restaurant in a Jewish neighborhood is no novelty...
...The television interview meanders along...
...Later, they will argue that the signs and symbols we depend on in America are gratuitous in Israel...
...I do not want Eilon Moreh to occupy my week...
...The traffic jams are real enough, and now the city stays open at night...
...it is a fantasy...
...I have been asked, in the kindest possible way, to speak...
...Here the soldiers block any further advance, and here, therefore, the organizers of the protest reveal their plans...
...A lamp unto the nations...
...It is not the middle of nowhere, not at all...
...My cousin drives me back to the kibbutz guest house where I am to spend the night...
...But the sulking resentments of all those years have taken their toll: Later in the week, still angry, he will denounce Max Fisher's opposition to Eilon Moreh: "Were Jewish leaders accustomed to saying such things in the days of the Labor Government...
...formed into a lamp unto the nations, but that is too weighty a dream, and too distant...
...Up and down from the road, side to side from the pipe-lighting, through a barren moonscape over which nations may yet go to war...
...Dayan...
...Israel is the center, we the periphery...
...It is a forty minute climb, and when it is done, we are a hundred yards from the crude fence which surrounds the settlement...
...My fears are renewed on Sunday when the press reports that Begin is now fuming with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency...
...This cannot be the same Jerusalem where terrorists plant bombs...
...Then quite suddenly, the mass is there...
...We've been there, and it doesn't work...
...Down the hill, then...
...When, after half an hour, he proposes that Israel's only serious recourse is to threaten atomic retaliation for any attack, I decide that there are more interesting ways to spend time...
...At first, I think it just another phrase...
...Instead, as I will later learn, those advisors are insisting that the statement was instigated by the U.S...
...Given the raging debate going on within Israel on these matters, such an interpretation is itself an intervention...
...But this is Israel, and these are Jews...
...Now, in the Lachish area, once Israel's showplace of human reconstruction, it is Arabs who are hired to do the farming, and Jews become effendis...
...He is most comfortable with slogans: Those who oppose Eilon Moreh "follow the evil paths of the enemies of our people...
...It is trapped in the innards of the bureaucracy, in the divide between the two Israels, in the perception of the kibbutz by the 97 percent of Israel's population who don't live there and wouldn't as a nice place to visit, in the laws of parliamentary immunity which are regularly exploited by members of the Knesset to avoid paying parking tickets...
...No one thinks these barriers will slow the bulldozers, but one wants to do something more than marching up a hill and then back down again...
...Sharon is a blustering enigma...
...Freud, a sometime Jew, believed that our dreams are an extension of our reality...
...There is nothing that we lack," her arm in a sweeping motion that embraces the house, its large and lovely yard where we will later sit, the ancient grape arbor it embraces...
...People postpone sabbaticals and extended trips abroad...
...Not far from the dais, I see two of my relative's friends from the night before, and I think it right that this is where they have come in the course of their search for meaning...
...Here signs are being readied, there tables for the sale of T-shirts and bumper stickers are set in place...
...I am frightened as well that Sunday, the day after the protest, by Mr...
...I decline, knowing it is not their way, not wishing to perform...
...He lashes out: "There will be more Eilon Morehs, we shall continue to establish new settlements in Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan...
...I was far more concerned with the proprieties...
...The world community will never accept the priority of Israel's right to the West Bank over the Arabs' right to govern themselves...
...And I try to make excuses for my friends: You expect too much, this place is still too raw, too pressured, too self-conscious...
...I recognize the importance of what he has said...
...I talk a bit about the American dream, and its souring...
...at first hearing, it sounds like a warm endorsement of Eilon Moreh...
...But that will not happen before next week...
...Does he know that one of their leaders has described the settlers' purpose as the sabotage of Begin's "Satanic autonomy plan...
...In light of that interest, I describe what I believe to be the American^ewish reality: profound support for Israel, profound concern for its security, substantial difference of opinion over its current settlement policies...
...The risk, such as it is, was of little concern to me...
...That, of course, is not the issue at stake on Eilon Moreh...
...Last night, on television, the interviewer asked how American Jews prefer to think of Israelis: Do we want them hardy and heroic, or needy and besieged...
...it is an invitation to comment...
...I remember the gropings of those who are sated with things and now search for meanings...
...He's really lucky...
...And, at the same time, not a museum...
...On the one hand, the pushing and shoving in Israeli queues, the dangerous rudeness of Israel's automobile drivers, the venom of its political debate...
...And if there is another war, they will fight in that war, and some will live and some will die, and their women, these women, and their children, these children, will worry and weep...
...The place is this place...
...Now it is West Bank and Gaza Strip Arabs who do the nation's dirty work...
...Accordingly Begin is considering the possibility of setting up a competing news service, or even a substitute...
...But Shchem offered to marry Dinah, because he was much taken with her, and Dinah's brothers, the sons of Jacob and Leah, agreed, requiring only that Shchem and his men be circumcised, and that Shchem's people and Jacob's people, our people, become one...
...My hosts in Jerusalem have arranged a reception for me, inviting not only some of our mutual friends but also some people they think I'd be interested in hearing...
...London asks for my reaction...
...My own impressions, gained from earlier conversations at Kadum, the settlers' base camp, are less favorable...
...is that the Israeli "minority" problem is not a minority problem at all...
...The religious monopoly enjoyed by Israel's Orthodox establishment has left a yawning void...
...So our talk turns to dreams, and what they might be, and where they might come to be discovered...
...At the very least, the Israeli public is now at last aware that American Jews are divided, as are the Israelis themselves...
...I wander the city center, missing the blind beggar in front of Feffer-berg's, the one whose daughter used to come to lead him home each afternoon...
...Detailed reproductions of synagogues—from Vilna, from Cochin, from Amsterdam, from Kai Feng, from Lutzk, and from Toledo (Spain, not Ohio) and from Elkins Park—films on the Jewish communities of Salonika, of Fez, of a "typical" shtetl, a brilliant recapturing of the richness of the Jewish past...
...But tonight, as we leave, I notice some books resting on top of my friend's car...
...And Shchem and his men consented, and every male among them was circumcised, and on the third day, when they were still in pain, Simon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, "took each man his sword, and came upon the city unresisted, and slew all the males therein...
...I heard his question, in one version or another, everywhere I went...
...Julie is the wife of Yuval, one of the original organizers of Shalom Achshav and, a year ago, the subject of an article in moment...
...His heroism during the Yom Kippur War, as a tank commander, is legendary...
...it will take place in Tel Aviv...
...there will be no confrontation this evening...
...And must not the answer lie somewhere in the unexplored territory of Judaic idiom and expression...
...But I am not at all confident that we have learned how to make it work.' " I do not see the point of the story until my cousin continues: "That happened in 1947, and from then until 1978, the story was tucked away among all my childhood memories...
...Or stay, stay here in Jerusalem, the heart of the tapestry, city of threads and of weavers, city of dreams, and listen to your question...
...I am a courteous audience, although I suspect he mistakes my courtesy for agreement...
...But they will be spending the day, it turns out, touring the West Bank, and visiting Eilon Moreh itself in the company of Ariel Sharon...
...All the vulgar and trivial temptations of modernity, all the incessant pressures of hostility, all the complexities of a developing economy have snagged it, but it is not lost...
...I want to say just three things: First, that there are very many of us, back home, for whom Israel is a precious place, and whose natural tendency is to defer to Israeli judgment on issues affecting Israel's security: we take no pleasure in criticism...
...By what right does an American Jew address a public meeting in Israel on matters which affect the life and death of his audience, but not his own...
...What am I doing here...
...But religious or secular, there is still the lingering sense of a people chosen, of expectations of self and of nation that will not go away...
...I see no reason for American Jews to be used as a weapon in the debate, or to feel bound to defend this very controversial departure...
...No one should be required to speak Hebrew after ten o'clock...
...But all are agreed that without significant withdrawal, there can be neither peace nor security nor self-respect...
...My friends in Israel are now of age to have children in the army...
...Some speeches, brief, as dusk falls, and then the crowd dissipates, leaving behind only a scattering of hardy souls who will sleep on the road to insure that it stays blocked...
...It is not the embarrassment of middling fluency that distresses me...
...The confiscation of private lands, the location of this new settlement in the midst of a densely populated Arab region, the irrelevance of the settlement to any legitimate security need—these have combined to bring him here from Haifa...
...Later in the week, Yehuda Hellman, Executive Director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, will visit the settlers and report that their sincerity and conviction brings tears to his eyes...
...in the tension between the two, my friend's haunted and haunting question is born...
...But those assembled here believe that genuine security cannot be achieved so long as Israel rules the West Bank...
...Tomorrow, the papers will duly report the event...
...The assembled are quiet and confident and bright...
...I express agreement with the delegation's assertion that it will be difficult to "sell" Eilon Moreh to American Jews...
...Words like "never" and "always" roll off his tongue, and he leaves Dayan to pick up the pieces of his excess...
...It is not, after all, that something is amiss...
...Ben Gurion, the one time we spoke at length, insisted that the single most important chapter in Zionist history was the chapter known as "The Conquest of Labor"—the demand by the early pioneers that Jews do their own work, with their own hands, and not enter this land as colonizers...
...Most of them, imagined by people who do not know Ted Mann, propose that Begin, through a combination of charm and pressure, has invited the delegation to an ego trip...
...We need the candles and the kiddush to remind us of the Shabbat...
...What a piece of good fortune we and all the generations to come have been granted in Teddy Kollek, its mayor, who has caused parks to happen suddenly and unexpectedly, who has removed the scar where the city was once cut in half, who has polished the streets...
...the timing is near-perfect, and, if Begin's advisors are sensitive to the who's who of American Jewry, they will understand that there are important defections here, that Eilon Moreh does not easily commend itself to the American Jewish community...
...I have for years been hounding my Israeli friends with a question they now know I am incapable of not asking: What will our children have to say to each other, how will they feel and be connected...
...It suggests an all-or-nothing approach which seems to me reckless in the extreme...
...And if the central purpose—to be a home for us all—continues to be rejected, what purpose is left...
...Begin asks, that if we have not the right to Shchem, we have not the right to Jaffa or Ramat Aviv...
...Begin presides over History...
...And Begin, by adopting their frame of reference, has fallen into their trap...
...Any treaty is a mistake...
...Other cars in the caravan, seeing our erratic path, pass us, curious heads turning as they do...
...The table settings change with time and place, the architecture of the rooms changes...
...Even civil defense, provided by volunteers, is a family affair...
...I argue that five and a half million Jews, bursting with Jewish vitality, cannot be classified as peripheral...
...I watch the crowd, the parents and their children, the old folks, the people of the dream and of the disappointment...
...at the least, very many oppose them...
...While we talk, he is getting ready for his first press conference, a suit-and-tie appearance...
...Begin is angry: He is angry with the New York Times, which on Sunday has published a lead editorial called "Begin's Fears, Eban's Hopes" (the Eban reference is to his article in the May moment), he is angry with his critics in the Knesset...
...My cousin, during our drive, had also told that story...
...He is good at his job...
...For him, politics has always been theater, in the grand manner...
...Ariel Sharon's provocative defense of Eilon Moreh ("no fifth column will halt the march of Zionism") is interrupted by catcalls from Knesset members...
...Wherever we have been, whenever, there have been these constants...
...Or come to Boston, to Shreve-port, to Kansas City, to Los Angeles, and attend the devotion, regardless of conviction, that is turned toward this place...
...But he has a story to tell me, and he must be heard...
...Last month, next month, all these brave young men will don their fatigues, and be off to their duty in the reserves...
...My problem, he says, is that I do not understand hamentaliut ha'aravit—the Arab mentality...
...Scopus—we looked down at all of Jerusalem, and he said to me that there would soon rise in this place the Third Jewish Commonwealth...
...Begin's case— Israel's case—must be built on a foundation of legitimate security requirements, not on a foundation of technical legal arguments...
...But no new dream has been pronounced that would replace it, and now, come to successful mid-life, a dream is wanted...
...Was the change real, or was it a result of Begin's pressure, or his charm...
...JL t is Friday evening, erev Shabbat once again...
...I tell the story of the English baron and his guest: The guest asks how so marvelous a lawn has been achieved, and the baron describes the watering, and the cutting, and the raking, and adds, "When you've got all that in place, then what you must do is wait 400 years, and you, too, can have this green a lawn...
...There is, he says, "no motivation...
...Upon his promise to raise the issue once again at the Cabinet level, the protesters broke camp...
...I speak Hebrew, but I do not control it as I control my English...
...more important, it must be made clear to the Israeli public, which will otherwise contemptuously conclude that American Jews are robots, woodenly moving off in whatever bizarre direction they are pointed...
...And is this not Israel, and are these words not in the language of the place...
...Children will come home on leave from the army...
...And there is almost no crime that involves those weapons...
...And, as always, family affairs...
...on the other hand, the sense that this country has been assigned a higher purpose, that everything that happens here matters...
...And I look about, at the crowd that has begun to assemble, and it dawns on me—how could I ever have forgotten, even for a second?—that this is no American-style peace rally...
...TD 1 -/ack in Jerusalem...
...On my first Shabbat, my hosts— who have been my guests in Boston, who know, therefore, of my ritual for welcoming the Sabbath—do me the courtesy of asking that I chant the kiddush...
...But what of our children...
...The delegates are known to me...
...So I work at a text, and then at a translation...
...On stage, which is where he prefers to be, he is destiny's child, the Maker of History whose critics are merely petty partisans devoid of vision...
...Begin's press advisor, has just called the studio with the text of the Presidents' Conference public statement at the conclusion of their visit...
...The leaflet announces the creation, in Northern California, of a moshav...
...But my excuses do not All the empty space where once there was a dream...
...And then, perhaps because I am there, the talk becomes reflective...
...The rally is scheduled for seven, and I am to be there by half-past five...
...he wants enough time to explain his position on Shchem and Eilon Moreh, on Sharon and Peres and such...
...The someone else is Julie Neriya, who is known to me but whom I have not met before...
...Begin, however, appears interested in the views of American Jews, else he would not have invited the Presidents' Conference delegation...
...zig-zagging towards Rechavia and thinking, as I always do in this place, how gracefully Jerusalem carries the weight of its centuries...
...Join us, and explore the possibility of a rich Jewish life lived in a cooperative fashion...
...And so...
...Raising his glass of wine, he says, "L'chaim...
...London reads the statement aloud...
...Our expectation is that Israel matters...
...The dentist shows off his blow-spear...
...I invent a rule: If a melange seeks to defeat a movement, it needs a numerical advantage of better than a hundred to one...
...I have been warned that he can be tough, a kind of Mike Wallace with subtlety...
...The existence of two Israels is no longer a problem to be solved...
...The right laws are on the books, and the right policies are in place, an occasional statistic suggests progress, but the problem seems frozen, intractable...
...The soldiers we pass are dark-skinned, Sephardim...
...We sit in the domed living room of an exquisite house, and the talk is light, diverting...
...even if coffee and tobacco destroy the system, he says, he is not prepared to give them up...
...Even had I no substantive objections to that place, I would by now oppose it on purely personal grounds: enough, already...
...How could it be otherwise...
...And Dinah's brothers were most angry...
...I explain that none of us, whether he opposes that policy or supports it, presumes that he can or ought to be able to "determine" it...
...State Department notwithstanding...
...By late Friday afternoon, however, the radio is broadcasting the news of a critical letter that has been sent to Begin signed by fifty-nine American Jews, a letter condemning Eilon Moreh...
...In one room, there are drawings of Jewish dining rooms from a dozen different places, a dozen different times...
...The Jerusalem I knew 26 years ago was a picturesque but squalid place...
...A pleasant couple and their dog are my companions— everyone in Israel, it seems, keeps dogs these days, and a bright cultural anthropologist could surely do a dissertation on how the classic Jewish phobia for all things canine has so suddenlty been transformed—and we chat amiably during the hour's ride...
...At another table, a very prominent Israeli labor leader rises, raps on his glass for attention, and then says, "I don't have a yar-mulke, but we can still welcome the Shabbat properly...
...Living here, can there ever come a time when the sense of privilege is lost, when the edge of expectation dulls...
...It is manifestly a teaching museum, and what it teaches is how vast our experience has been, and how faithful we have stayed...
...The Cabinet had approved the settlement on June 3 (Yadin, Dayan, and Weizman among those opposing), the first time private land had been expropriated (except for security reasons), the first civilian settlement so close to a major center of Arab population...
...This new museum, on the campus of Tel Aviv University, is a celebration of 2,000 years of Jewish life...
...I have never seen such sober mandolin players...
...The issues at stake here are not going to be played out in distant places with strange-sounding names, and the actors will not be other people's children...
...The organizers are concerned: It is almost seven, the crowd is sparse, Israel's basketball champions are playing against Czechoslovakia tonight in Italy, people may be staying home to hear the game...
...The price is the dream...
...There are two cultures (more, really) and they simply are not merging...
...it draws you in...
...And as the Hebrew fills the pages, I relax: Have not the critics back home, those who believe it is forbidden to American Jews to dissent, most often added that if one has criticism to offer, it should be offered in Israel...
...Bequeathed a dream they once scorned, whose content they do not recall and whose contours they cannot define, these, Israel's successful, are disappointed...
...But they know as well the price Israel pays, and has paid for twelve years now, as the master of the lands and of those who dwell therein...
...the actors are here, before me...
...Ted is uncommonly immune to such temptations...
...The time is always Friday evening, erev Shabbat...
...it is a provocation...
...I am, withal, a guest in this house, and good manners point to restraint...
...The rumors that a large contingent of Gush supporters are on their way from Tel Aviv prove groundless...
...Me'al pisgat Har Hatsofim—from the top of Mt...
...This young man, this veteran of the battle on the Golan Heights, this dreamer, cries out in passion...
...After all those years in hiding, and all those years in impotent opposition, after all those years of suffering Ben Gurion's refusal to pronounce his name ("that man," B.G...
...He stares at me blankly...
...Jerusalem's juxtapositions have always pleased me...
...But if these eight warm and winsome people stand for something, they do not know its name...
...There is no genuine security argument for introducing scores of Gush Emunim zealots into the outskirts of Nablus...
...They know something of the nature of American Jewish communal life, and they had heard of the ugliness that followed on the sending of a cable of support for their effort by 37 American Jews last spring...
...They did not, they said, want me to expose myself to risk...
...He has brought to his work as Minister of Agriculture and Chairman of the Ministerial Settlement Committee the same style which won him renown as a military leader...
...I see, with a few exceptions, a small group of fanatic fundamentalists who thrill to asserting their superiority over the surrounding Arab villagers—a superiority entirely dependent on the Israeli army rather than on their own devices—and whose pseudo-sophisticated geopolitical arguments are as fatuous as they are fervid...
...The Jewish people being what it is, Hebrew lacks a word for "normal...
...There is a phone number for "further information...
...Hearing a New York accent, I turn and see Z., who once taught at Brandeis and has, for some years, been living and teaching in Haifa...
...Trepverter"—the clever phrases that come to you only after a conversation, too late to use...
...Offices and shops close early, and there will be chicken on the table and guests after dinner...
...Don't the protesters realize, Mr...
...Not that, either...
...I wish to emphasize," Nakdimon's statement says, "that the delegation expressed the full support of the majority of American Jewry for the government's policy...
...This nation was built on a dream, and the dream has dried up, has atrophied...
...Where in the world is there more than that, who else in the world insists that there be more...
...My hosts take me to one they like especially, a Chinese restaurant not far from Yad Vashem...
...Later in the week I will have dinner with a former Chief of Staff who perversely favors Begin's policies...
...But for generations, every child in Israel will learn of the heroism and leadership of Ariel Sharon...
...I am to say some things about American Jewry, and I am happy for the chance to rebut the obituaries which are so regularly pronounced over us here in Israel...
...By "kind" I mean that those who asked, after telling how much they felt my appearance might mean, were quick to add that they would understand perfectly well if I thought it best to decline...
...His children are busy dumping stones and rocks in the road...
...I want to know about Judaism in Israel, I want to know whether any new choices have developed, whether there is some stopping point between full-fledged Orthodoxy and absolute secularism...
...How long can you pick at a sand dune before a city happens, and then boutiques and bistros...
...The one a burly outdoors-man, the other a sallow scholar, the one entirely lacking in religious conviction or sentiment, the other a staunch fundamentalist, they share a single-minded ferocity of character and a passionate annexationist conviction...
...Now it is filled with cutesy boutiques and coffee shops, and Tel Avivians on the make...
...I do not doubt that there are important cultural differences among nations and peoples, but I am frightened by the casual racism of those who depend on such sloppy phrases as "the Arab mentality" to support their position...
...The problem was, and is, the Second Israel—the relatively poor, relatively uneducated, relatively left out...
...And when I leave the Jerusalem Theatre after a Habimah performance, I watch the guards who have stood duty during the performance walk away: a mother and her two teen-aged children, rifles dangling from their hands...
...Those who disagree with his policies engage in "incitement...
...If these are life-and-death issues, the Presidents' Conference has already intervened—or been used...
...yesterday, a member of the Knesset resigned his seat after being sentenced to a three and a half year jail term for bribery...
...Never once did I actively remember it, never once did I have occasion to share it with anyone...
...But it no longer takes...
...is is disappointment...
...I reject the question...
...Was there ever a city at once so majestic and so intimate...
...Here is his version: "In 1947, my father took me for a walk on Mt...
...now the driver's attention is on his pipe, which will not stay lit...
...In the meantime, I have found A., another old friend from America, and am to go back to Jerusalem in his car...
...V V'th what words, on my return to America, will I be able to convey the pride and the heartbreak of Adi Ophir, or the hope of this assembled mass...
...Our persistence is a continuing rebuke to classic Zionist theory—and 300,000 Israelis have chosen to make their homes with us...
...Begin has already announced that there will be "many Eilon Morehs...
...A motto for Israeli and American Jews alike: It is better to light two candles than to curse a lapsed Jewish consciousness...
...No confrontation will take place...
...Just a couple of weeks back, some of Meir Kahane's goons broke into several Arab homes in Hebron, breaking up furniture, beating and shoving the occupants around...
...is that not enough...
...I am disappointed, since I believe that Begin will use this alleged endorsement by the American Jewish community in the battle with domestic opposition to his settlement policy...
...I have been invited to appear on Alei Koteret (Behind the Headlines), Israeli TV's most popular talk show...
...This peace movement is not on its way to Canada...
...In an effort to win support for Eilon Moreh, Begin has invited a delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to meet with him...
...As I see it, the Israeli national consensus accepts the importance of an Israeli security presence on the West Bank...
...ther things are on most people's minds this week: Israel is doing well in the European basketball championships, and the annual Book Fair is opening, and "nirmul" goes forward...
...And here and there, during the course of my visit, I heard or saw a piece of the answer—not just the analytic answer, that dissects the past and is satisfied with explanation, but the existential answer, the one that still insists upon tomorrow, the answer that is built on bits of hope...
...They are Israelis who have made it, and they wear their success well...
...We arrive, at last...
...That reaction is strengthened during the endless ride to the settlement site, for I share the back seat of the car to which I have been assigned with a young woman who insists that almonds alone provide an adequate diet, that all machinery is evil, and that all politicians are facists...
...he has, in fact, said exactly that to the Presidents' Conference delegation...
...That must be made clear to Begin...
...There was always a Sephardic aristocracy, and its scions were hardly thought of as "Moroccans...
...When Begin talks security, he means sovereignty, and his hope is to "establish facts" over the course of the next five years that will validate Israel's claim to sovereignty over the West Bank...
...R. and L., an over-age Israeli couple, do a midnight shift twice a week...
...though she enjoyed the work, she missed the Jewish atmosphere of summer camp...
...June in Jerusalem, our unknowing Vietnamese restauranteurs are now playing a medley of Christmas carols...
...It is the same story I have just come from hearing, told briefly and with passion...
...I have dozens more who are hoping their children will be accepted at officers' training schools, so they "can have somebody to talk to...
...Somewhere, something precious has been lost...
...It may enjoy majority support—even that is doubtful—but it will be bitterly opposed by very many Israelis, as well as, obviously, by the international community...
...To me it appears veneer American, imitative...
...The argument ebbs at last...
...This time I am with perhaps two hundred people, delegates to an international conference...
...But London wants to know by what right American Jews think they can determine Israel's foreign policy...
...After thirty-one years, the old questions, the largest ones, still press for answers, more insistently than ever...
...On Thursday morning, the press reports that the delegation has told the Prime Minister that they find it "difficult to explain the government's timing for the settlement in Eilon Moreh...
...if they do not feel a presumption here, why should I? More, word has now leaked out of the Begin meeting with the Presidents' Conference delegation: Begin has flatly stated that Eilon Moreh is the beginning of Israel's effort to assert sovereignty over the West Bank...
...They are pleased to be taking me to dinner...
...It says, instead, that the delegation believes settlements on the West Bank are legal and also essential for Israel's security...
...I know what it is to be without a dream, but I know it in a country so large and so well-established that one can turn inward without guilt...
...Yes, we live well, they say, but something is amiss, something beyond war and politics, beyond terrorism and tensions...
...Is it right that the Israeli public be permitted to believe there is an American Jewish consensus on Eilon Moreh when there is not...
...No, that is not it...
...In so many ways, Israel seems to insist on repeating every American mistake...
...And then he takes from his pocket a leaflet he has brought with him from Los Angeles, where he has just spent a year of study...
...Two weeks later, the Prime Minister will get around to issuing a public apology for this pogrom...
...As one tank and then another was shot out from under him, he found new tanks to command, organizing and improvising new tank companies along the way, until, commanding his fifth tank and crew, he was severely wounded...
...He is, they say, a militant annexationist, but an intelligent one...
...It "brings shame on us all," he will say, and he will offer to pay compensation for the damages done...
...So I go to Bet Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Diaspora, about which I have heard nothing but praise and which may be a piece of the answer I am looking for...
...Yet it is they who have invited me...
...I ask London "my" question: What will connect my child and his...
...But I cannot accept this...
...And I step away from Julie as it dawns on me that this young woman, this lovely person, herself a lieutenant in the army, has been to war...
...A ride has been arranged, and I am collected from the kibbutz at four thirty...
...No, Diezengoff did not imagine that it would come to this...
...To the strains of The First Noel, I dissolve...
...It cannot please him that the audience which watches his performance on the world stage may be aware of the bad notices he gets back home...
...We, those of my generation, can still find a common language...
...It is sponsored by Shalom Achshav...
...Later, I will learn that the Military Governor of Nablus ordered the area closed some hours after we left, and that the several score demonstrators who had stayed on through the night feared they would be bodily removed...
...I do not know Europe...
...Scopus...
...They greet me, pass me over to someone else's care, and resume their conversation...
...T JL...
...in Israel, on Friday afternoon, one knows, the very air reminds...
...Let them stop in Chicago's City Hall...
...the candles are gratuitous...
...Social theory has a devilish way of collapsing at the threshold of the family home...
...An engineer, a senior security official, an economist, two teachers, an agronomist, two housewives, they manage the country, they are beyond the bluster of the still-climbing...
...it is the fear that I will be spending my energy on the words rather than on the ideas...
...Israel's is not just a citizen's army...
...they want to be around while their children are serving...
...I don't...
...But I notice where it is the crowd applauds the most, and each time it is when reference is made to the price that Israel pays for its occupation of the disputed lands...
...But there is no such solidarity, not on these new departures, not on the claim to Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank...
...It was, and is, a part of the tapestry we know as Jewish life...
...I wonder what they mean...
...Herzl, Zionism's father, believed that our reality is an extension of our dream...
...What I suspect Mr...
...But why must I be so judgemental...
...But over the inevitable grapefruit juice, he seems entirely harmless...
...no sign will remain that they ever lived...
...no draft cards will be burned here...
...The list of signers includes several prominent community leaders, although it is top-heavy with academic types...
...It is tangled and twisted, but it is not lost...
...And it contributes over 90 percent of the youthful offenders in Israel's jails...
...Starsky and Hutch" and "Hawaii Five-0" are the most popular television programs here, and they wouldn't believe me...
...He looks at me incredulously, and I see that he wants to change the subject...
...A friend shares his good news with me: "Our son has been accepted to a first-rate officers' training course...
...it is an Israeli who answers...
...he asks...
...Of course Israel has a right to Shchem, the U.S...
...Each time he disagrees, he turns to face my seat-mate...
...A few hasty phone calls later, two Knesset members arrived—in the very early hours of the morning—and they, in turn, convinced Defense Minister Weizman to put in an appearance on Sunday...
...There is time, before the program begins, to chat with my host, Yaron London...
...Is it to be Begin's dream, a dream that in the name of security destroys consensus, that makes no distinction between security and power, that sows hope among Israel's enemies and confusion among its friends...
...I am happy to see him, to see that there are Americans on this side of the issue...
...More, to understand how people I know and respect view the prospect of peace, what they imagine the coming months will bring...
...Clearly, he intends a rapid expansion of Jewish presence precisely in heavily populated Arab areas...
...And those notices— Israel has a free and hypercritical press—have been very bad of late...
...The President is a Sephardic Jew, and there are other Sephardim sprinkled throughout every element of Israel's elite, but that was never the problem...
...It is filled with surprises, with computer consoles that quiz you and with buttons to press and earphones to lift...
...given their busy professional schedules, it's the one time of the day they get to see each other...
...all its wealth they took, and its little ones and its women...
...I am not disappointed...
...Now it occurs to me that I should have said we want them to have the courage of our convictions...
...it stands for something, and by extension—rather than by our own behavior—so, vicariously, do we...
...This jewel glistens more brightly, more richly, each time I enter it...
...I listen carefully to the first...
...Not as clean as London's, but cleaner by far than Boston's...
...Mainline Gush elements rarely engage in such outright hooliganism...
...Does he know that the government has promised these would-be saboteurs fifty million pounds of investment in the next two months, and that new settlements in the Negev and the Galilee go begging...
...In Israel, virtually every Jew is armed...
...A fistful of telephone messages is handed me: the studio switchboard has been lit up since I began...
...I, who have been here five days already, have gone native—open-collar shirt and khakis—and feel entitled to brief him on the mood...
...In the meantime, I am off to the television studio...
...But Begin—so says his advisor for foreign information, Harry Hurwitz, who recently immigrated to Israel from South Africa—thinks that the editors are "too leftist...
...That has been the question between Israel and its neighbors for many years now...
...Tonight, there is to be a mass rally of protest against Eilon Moreh...
...It is supported by its clients, as well as by the organized Jewish community, which appreciates the importance of the service it renders...
...She and these others live well not simply relative to other Israelis, but even when measured by American standards...
...These people know that risk...
...My specific fear is that in the course of his efforts to mobilize Israeli opinion, Begin is planning to use the presumed solidarity of American Jewry as one of his supporting arguments...
...The Second Israel is already larger than the First, and is growing more rapidly...
...And the article begins to come back to me: Yuval is one of eight men in all of Israel's history to have been awarded the Ot Hagvurah, equivalent to the Congressional Medal of Honor or the Victoria Cross...
...They are terribly serious...
...I have visions that we will be passed by them all, that we will be alone in the West Bank, through which we are now driving, that we will be lost...
...There will be some zealots on some hills, and a dream gone awry...
...q K*-/aturday has come now, and my agenda for this day is fixed...
...His words excite the crowd, which stretches back behind the signs that block our view...
...On the contrary: We persist, and find ways of being Jewish...
...The language is familiar, and even the faces, from days of civil rights and Vietnam...
...And I, who have wondered where Judaism can be found in this, the Land of Israel, and where the dream, now know...
...It is Adi Ophir who alludes to this story, reminding us that this is not the first time in our history that the name of Shchem has been linked to our darker instincts, that the deeds we do there bring trouble and odium upon us...
...He is blunt, single-minded, always on the offensive...
...With proper schooling, with army service, the ethnic divide will be bridged, there will be one Israel...
...Most Israelis, I suspect, oppose such settlements...
...it has never embraced the notion of Jewish civilian settlements in densely populated Arab regions...
...What more is there to know, to do...
...it is Shabbat, and but for the protest, they would be on home leave for the day...
...They are to avoid conflict with the authorities, to rely on passive resistance...
...Is not one of the great unstated assumptions of American Jewish life that so long as the Israelis, plow in one hand and gun in the other, live at the center of history, we can continue, checkbook in one hand and tickets to Las Vegas in the other, to half-live at its fringes...
...Can the American Jewish community suspend its own judgment and permit itself to be used as an instrument of a policy it perceives as mistaken, and even dangerous...
...Nor do I believe that the delegation's endorsement of Eilon Moreh accurately represents American Jewish opinion...
...So I am pleased about the letter, proud to be among the signers...
...I huddle in my corner, wishing Nablus to appear...
...This is, of course, Arafat's argument turned upside down...
...see what this restless and rushing people still remembers to do for its parents...
...So I agree to speak, and know that I must choose my words with care...
...What a grand way to let people know you're in town...
...I envy no politician who must suffer the vituperations of the Israeli press...
...Slowly, our conversation moves from the question of quality, from the chronic complaints of modern life, to the question of content...
...In a country with one television station, I have become a bit of a celebrity...
...Later that day, Weizman failed...
...Hurwitz means is that the JTA accurately reports the very deep divisions that now exist within Israel...
...Bet Hatfutsot is not intended as a repository for things that have somehow survived...
...Is it the dream that has been planted a mile from Shchem, in a place called Eilon Moreh, or is it the dream I see in this thronged plaza...
...Some have one plan, others a second, a third, a tenth they believe will preserve, even extend Israeli security after Israel withdraws...
...this morning, the income tax people have revealed that half the nation's shopkeepers under-report their business receipts...
...I try to remember the details of the article as we walk across the plaza, while she introduces me to her friends...
...When, finally, I have the chance to talk to three participants in the meeting, I learn that it was Begin's fury that placed the delegation on the defensive and caused them to frame their statement in a manner that could so easily be interpreted as an endorsement...
...Later, after the Israeli press has joined in my misinterpretation of what the delegation has said, Ted Mann will issue a clarifying statement delicately balanced between endorsement of settlements in general and rejection of Eilon Moreh in particular...
...Many of the Gush Emunim people are Americans, and some of them are among the most extreme elements of the settlement movement...
...The foolishness of Begin-Sharon's settlement policy has been obvious to me for many, many months...
...Will Israel one day become merely a half-way house for Jews in trouble, waiting for a better place to go...
...Second, that there is, in fact, a major rift among American Jews on the matter of Eilon Moreh, and that insistence on Eilon Moreh's importance to Israel's security may well damage Israel's credibility when, down the road a piece, genuine security decisions must be taken...
...I answer my friend the next day, my last, when he asks his haunting question, the thread has not been lost...
...Is it the dream of Gush Emunim, to stand astride another people and offer prayers to God...
...Whereupon I talk for a bit about the notion of mission, a lamp unto the nations, pursuing justice, and all that...
...each time he turns, the car careens to the side of the road...
...T t is late now, very late...
...perhaps this is all very European...
...I am by now exhausted, impatient for the mandolins...
...last week, 17 people were killed in traffic accidents, and 105 more were injured...
...Dreams grow like wildflowers in this land...
...But which dream shall it be...
...The protest has been organized by Shalom Achshav, overwhelmingly an Ashkenazi movement...
...The images jar...
...Those who live in Shchem also have a right to the place, and the question is not which right a court of law may find superior, but how the two rights may be accommodated...
...It is an honor, wholly undeserved, to be standing with them, with these who had worried for me that I might by speaking be exposed to risk...
...And the others do...
...1°** Friday night, I am collected from the kibbutz by a Jerusalem relative...
...There is much talk of that...
...my primary concern, during this visit, lies in a very different direction...
...In the good old days, settlements were erected overnight—a fence and a watchtower— in order to elude the British authorities, and there are those who see in the Gush Emunim settlers this generation's authentic heir to the tradition of pioneering self-sacrifice...
...His job is to provide them the ideological background that will justify their effort...
...An isolated outpost in the midst of a densely populated Arab area is not a contribution to Israeli security...
...And then I remember...
...We go on, at last, to other topics...
...The President of Israel, to whose home the cab finally takes me, tells me that he watched the program...
...He examines them from every side, and very, very gingerly touches them before he picks them up...
...Nothing can be seen of the settlers or their settlement...
...a new poll shows that half of Israel's Arab citizens reject Israel's right to exist, and that nearly two-thirds regard the Zionist movement as racist...
...But the proposal that the government replace the JTA with its own news agency is, of course, a cure far more sinister than the disease, another symptom of government by anger...
...Let others dabble in politics and government, let others fret over Israel's domestic problems...
...they will be targets no less than any other...
...E m Jilon Moreh will not leave me alone...
...That day, or the next, the road will be cleared, and the settlement will go forward...
...She is an uncommonly beautiful woman, a frail, ethereal beauty, and she is also a most gracious hostess...
...used to call him), his time has come...
...I pause at the balcony of the King David Hotel, waiting for Eva Marie Saint to appear, which does not happen...
...he has been doing it for fifteen years...
...A crude road has been bulldozed through a cornfield, and a centipede of people is winding its way up the hill the road traverses...
...The women are costumed, the men v-chested with necklaces...
...Real war...
...It is their right to self-respect that they want back, and security as well...
...V. asks wistfully...
...Does he think that his subsidies and donations entitle him to influence our policies and actions...
...They look more disgusted than menacing...
...This is the kind of hyperbole at which Begin excels...
...The first two failed, and they did not fail because they were conquered, but because we never learned how to live with one another...
...Their fathers are, of course, in the reserves—forty-five days of active duty a year—but it is the children who are learning to use the latest equipment...
...It is a solid rebuttal to the Presidents' Conference statement...
...This Third will also be an experiment,' my father said, 'and I am thrilled beyond words that it will happen...
...see what this preoccupied nation has done to make the Vietnamese feel themselves at home...
...Go to Rishon L'Tzion, and stop at the Malben center for the elderly...
...What is there to say...
...I am to be one of four guests this evening: After our interview, there will be a performance by a mandolin band, then an interview with a pop artist, then back to the mandolins, and then on to an Israeli dentist who has recently returned from two years of treating natives in the Amazon jungle...
...At last—it turns out that we have completed one of the longest interviews Alei Koteret has ever done—we are through, and I stagger into the control room...
...Begin did not allow the matter to be added to the Cabinet agenda...
...My friends' daughter, of thoroughbred Polish ancestry, wants to be a Moroccan...
...This is a radical departure from the existing Israeli consensus...
...The old dream—"We have come to the land to build it and to be rebuilt by it" and all that—no longer compels...
...And America's Jews refute Zionist theory and prediction: We have not been pogrommed to death, we have not assimilated ourselves to death...
...But last summer, my oldest daughter spent six weeks working in a kibbutz...
...Must everyone play chess and listen to Mozart...
...I reach out to remove them, and he rudely shoves my hand away...
...I wonder about these things, and worry about them...
...The end of the Jewish people," I say...
...It is five minutes or less from Nablus...
...As Abba Kovner, whose idea it was, explains, "Yad Vashem describes the destruction...
...we have been having such arguments with each other or with one another's friends, for decades...
...it did not begin in 1882, and it did not end in 1948...
...I am at the parking lot of Binyanei Ha'umah, from which the Jerusalem protesters are to leave, at the appointed hour...
...The record is changed...
...Before those at my table, for whom the assertion of the tradition has become a point of stubborn honor, have had a chance to react, still another corner is heard from: again a prominent Israeli, but this one evidently more sensitive to the peculiar ways of the Diaspora, rises and asks for silence...
...Suddenly, it is accepted as one of the continuing dismal conditions of modern life, like traffic jams and terrorists...

Vol. 4 • July 1979 • No. 7


 
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