Z was seventy-five, a retired colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces, a veteran of every war from liberation to the invasion of Lebanon. “Our worst enemy is CNN,” he said. His parents had come from Russia in 1908 and settled on the first kibbutz in Palestine. Z was full of anger about the fighting in Israel—the fighting with the ultra-Orthodox Jews. “They don’t serve in the army. They don’t pay taxes. The government gives them money. I call them Pharisees.”
As we walked around, Z would greet people of perfectly secular appearance by name, adding, “You Pharisee, you,” or would introduce me to someone in a T-shirt and jeans who had, maybe, voted for Ariel Sharon in the most recent election by saying, “I want you to meet Moshe, a real Pharisee, this one.”
Z said over and over, “The problem is with the Pharisees.” About Arabs I couldn’t get him to say much. Z seemed to regard Arabs as he did weather. Weather is important. Weather is good. We enjoy weather. We respect weather. Nobody likes to be out in weather when it gets dramatic. “My wife won’t let me go to the Palestinian areas,” Z said.
“Let’s go to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood,” I said.
“You don’t want to go there,” he said. “They’re dumps. You want to see where Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee.”
“No, I don’t.”
“‘And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea’ …” For a man at loggerheads with religious orthodoxy, Z recited a lot of scripture, albeit mostly New Testament, where Pharisees come off looking pretty bad. When quoting, Z would shift to the trochaic foot—familiar to him, perhaps, from the preaching of his evangelical tourists; familiar to me from Mom yelling through the screen door, “You get in here right this minute!”
As a compromise we went to Jaffa and had Saint Peter’s fish from the Sea of Galilee for lunch. Jaffa is the old port city for Jerusalem, a quaint jumble of Arab architecture out of which the Arabs ran or were run (depending on who’s writing history) during Israel’s war of liberation. Like most quaint jumbles adjacent to quaintness-free cities, Jaffa is full of galleries and studios. Israel is an admirably artsy place. And, as in other artsy places of the contemporary world, admiration had to be aimed principally at the effort. The output indicated that Israelis should have listened when God said, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing.” Some of the abstract stuff was good.
I wanted to look at art. Z wanted me to look at the house of Simon the Tanner, on the Jaffa waterfront. This, according to Acts 10:10-15, is where Saint Peter went into a trance and foresaw a universal Christian church and, also, fitted sheets. Peter had a vision of “a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things.” God told Peter to kill them and eat them. Peter thought this didn’t look kosher—or probably, in the case of the creeping things, appetizing. And God said that what He had cleansed should not be called unclean.
“Then is when Peter knew Christianity was for everyone, not just the Jews!” said Z with vicarious pride in another religion’s generous thought.
A little too generous. To Peter’s idea we owe ideology, the notion that the wonderful visions we have involve not only ourselves but the whole world, whether the world wants to be involved or not. Until that moment of Peter’s in Jaffa, the killing of heretics and infidels was a local business. Take, for example, the case of John the Baptist: with Herodias, Herod Antipas, and stepdaughter Salome running the store, it was a mom-and-pop operation. But by the middle of the first century theological persecution had gone global in the known world. Eventually the slaughter would outgrow the limited market in religious differences. In the twentieth century millions of people were murdered on purely intellectual grounds.
“Can we go in?” I asked.
“No,” Z said, “the Muslims put a mosque in there, which made the Orthodox angry. They rioted, which kept the Christians out. So the police closed the place.”
For those who dislike ideology, what’s interesting about kibbutzim is that they’re such a bad idea. Take an Eastern European intelligentsia and make the desert bloom. One would sooner take Mormons and start a rap label. But Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, three quarters of a mile north of the Gaza Strip, passed the test of ideology. It worked—something no fully elaborated, universally applicable ideology ever does.
I’d never been to a kibbutz. I don’t know what I expected—Grossinger’s with guns? A bar mitzvah with tractors? Some of my friends went to kibbutzim in the 1960s and came back with tales of sex and socialism. But you could get that at Oberlin, without the circle dancing. I’m sure my polisci-major pals were very little help with the avocado crop. Anyway, what I wasn’t expecting was a cluster of JFK-era summer cottages with haphazard flower beds, sagging badminton nets, and Big Wheel tricycles on the grass—Lake Missaukee, Michigan, without Lake Missaukee.
A miniature Michigan of shrubbery and trees covered the low hills of the settlement, but with a network of drip-irrigation lines weaving among the stems and trunks. Here were the fiber-optic connections of a previous and more substantive generation of high-tech visionaries, who meant to treat a troubled world with water (per Al Sharpton) rather than information. Scattered in the greenery were the blank metal-sided workshops and warehouses of present-day agriculture, suggestive more of light industry than of peasanthood. Yad Mordechai has light industry, too, producing housewares and decorative ceramics. Plus it has the largest apiary in Israel, an educational center devoted to honey and bees, a gift shop, a kosher restaurant, and, of all things, thirteen hundred yards from the Gaza Strip, a petting zoo.
Yad Mordechai was founded in 1943 on an untilled, sand-drifted patch of the Negev. The land was bought from the sheik of a neighboring village. And there, in the humble little verb of the preceding sentence, is the moral genius of Zionism. Theodor Herzl, when he set down the design of Zionism in The Jewish State (1896), wrote, “The land … must, of course, be privately acquired.” The Zionists intended to buy a nation rather than conquer one. This had never been tried. Albeit various colonists, such as the American ones, had foisted purchase-and-sale agreements on peoples who had no concept of fee-simple tenure or of geography as anything but a free good. But the Zionists wanted an honest title search.
More than a hundred years ago the Zionists realized what nobody has realized yet—nobody but a few cranky Austrian economists and some very rich people skimming the earth in Gulfstream jets. Nothing is zero-sum, not even statehood. Man can make more of everything, including the very thing he sets his feet on, as the fellow getting to his feet and heading to the bar on the G-V can tell you. “If we wish to found a State to-day,” Herzl wrote, “we shall not do it in the way which would have been the only possible one a thousand years ago.”
Whether the early Zionists realized what they’d realized is another matter. Palestinian Arabs realized, very quickly, that along with the purchased polity came politics. In politics, as opposed to reality, everything is zero-sum.
Considering how things are going politically in Zion these days, the foregoing quotation from Herzl should be continued and completed.
Supposing, for example, we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts, we should not set about the task in the fashion of Europeans of the fifth century. We should not take spear and lance and go out singly in pursuit of bears; we should organize a large and lively hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb into their midst.
On May 19, 1948, Yad Mordechai was attacked by an Egyptian armored column with air and artillery support. The kibbutz was guarded by 130 men and women, some of them teenagers, most without military training. They had fifty-five light weapons, one machine gun, and a two-inch mortar. Yad Mordechai held out for six days—long enough for the Israeli Army to secure the coast road to Tel Aviv. Twenty-six of the defenders were killed, along with about three hundred
Egyptians.
A slit trench has been left along the Yad Mordechai hilltop, with the original fifty-five weapons fastened to boards and preserved with tar. Under the viscous coatings a nineteenth-century British rifle was discernible, and the sink-trap plumbing of two primitive Bren guns. The rest of the firearms looked like the birds and cats that were once mummified—by Egyptians, appropriately enough. Below the trench is a negligee lace of barbed wire, all the barbed wire the kibbutz had in 1948, and beyond that are Egyptian tanks, just where they stopped when they could go no farther. Between the tanks dozens of charging Egyptian soldiers are represented by life-size black-painted two-dimensional cutouts—Gumby commandos, lawn ornaments on attack.
It was the only war memorial I’ve seen that was both frightening and silly—things all war memorials should be. Most war memorials are sad or awful—things, come to think of it, that war memorials should be also. And this war memorial had a price of admission—which, considering the cost of war, is another good idea.
At the ticket booth was a crabby old guy whom Z greeted with warm complaining, grouch to grouch. Then Z took me to Yad Mordechai’s Holocaust museum, which skips pity and goes immediately to Jewish resistance during World War II and Jewish fighting in Palestine and Israel. Yad Mordechai is named for Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The message of the Yad Mordechai museum is that the Holocaust memorial is in the trench at the other end of the kibbutz.
This is the second wonderful thing about Zionism: it was right. Every other “ism” of the modern world was wrong about the nature of civilized man—Marxism, mesmerism, surrealism, pacifism, existentialism, nudism. But civilized man did want to kill Jews, and was going to do more of it. And Zionism was specific. While other systems of thought blundered around in the universal, looking for general solutions to comprehensive problems, Zionism stuck to its guns, or—in the beginning, anyway—to its hoes, mattocks, and irrigation pipes.
True, Zionism has a utopian socialist aspect that is thoroughly nutty as far as I’m concerned. But it’s not my concern. No one knocks on my door during dinner and asks me to join a kibbutz or calls me on the weekend to persuade me to drop my current long-distance carrier and make all my phone calls by way of Israel. And given my last name, they won’t.
My last name is, coincidently, similar to the maiden name of the Holocaust museum docent, who was Baltimore Irish and had married a young man from the kibbutz and moved there in the 1970s. “I converted,” she said, “which the Orthodox make it hard to do, but I went through with it. There’s a crabby old guy here who sort of took me under his wing. The first Yom Kippur after I converted, he asked me, ‘Did you fast?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Stupid!’ You probably saw him on the way in, behind the ticket counter. He’s a veteran of the fight for Yad Mordechai. There’s a photo of him here, when they liberated the kibbutz, in November ‘forty-eight.” And there was the photo of the young, heroic, crabby old guy. And now he was behind the ticket counter at the war memorial—not making a political career in Jerusalem or writing a book about the young, heroic days, or flogging his story to the History Channel.
“How cool is that?” said the Baltimore Irish woman running the Holocaust museum.
Z and I had lunch at the kibbutz’s self-serve restaurant, where Z took his plate of meat and sat in the middle of the dairy section. In the sky to the south we could see smoke rising from the Gaza Strip—tires burning at an intifada barricade, or just trash being incinerated. Public services weren’t what they might be in the Palestinian Authority at the moment. Or maybe it was one of the Jewish settlements in Gaza being attacked, although we hadn’t heard gunfire.
These settlements aren’t farms but, mostly, apartment clusters. “Are the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza some kind of postagricultural, postindustrial, high-rise Zionism?” I asked Z. “Or are they a government-funded, mondo-condo, live-dangerously parody of nation-building?”
“Pharisees!” said Z and went back to eating.
After lunch we drove to Ben-Gurion’s house in Tel Aviv, a modest, foursquare, utterly unadorned structure. But the inside was cozy with twenty thousand books, in Hebrew, English, French, German, Russian, Latin, Spanish, Turkish, and ancient Greek. No fiction, however: a man who devoted his life to making a profound change in society was uninterested in the encyclopedia of society that fiction provides.
Looking at the thick walls and heavy shutters, I wondered if the house had been built to be defended. Then I twigged to the purpose of the design and gained true respect for the courage of the Zionist pioneers. Ben-Gurion came to the Middle East before air-conditioning was invented—and from Plonsk, at that.
We spent the next day, at my insistence and to Z’s mystification, driving around the most ordinary parts of Israel, which look so ordinary to an American that I’m rendered useless for describing them to other Americans. American highway strip-mall development hasn’t quite reached Israel, however, so there’s even less of the nondescript to not describe.
Z and I stood in a garden-apartment complex in Ashdod, in the garden part, a patch of trampled grass. “Here is the ugliest living in Israel,” said Z. We went to a hill on the Ashdod shore, a tell actually, a mound of ancient ruins, an ash heap of history from which we had a view of … ash heaps, and the power plant that goes with them, which supplies half of Israel’s electricity. Ashdod, incidentally, is a Philistine place-name, not a pun. We could also see the container port, Israel’s principal deep-water harbor. “This is the place where the whale threw Jonah up,” Z said.
We went to the best suburbs of Tel Aviv, which look like the second-best suburbs of San Diego. We spent a lot of time stuck in traffic. Violence in the West Bank had forced traffic into bottlenecks on Routes 2 and 4 along the coast, in a pattern familiar to anyone negotiating Washington, D.C.’s Beltway—living in a place where you’re scared to go to half of it and the other half you can’t get to.
Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware. From the top of Mount Nebo, in the equivalent of Pennsylvania, the Lord showed Moses all of Canaan. New Canaan is in Connecticut—but close enough. And there is a Mount Nebo in Pennsylvania, although it overlooks the Susquehanna rather than the promised land of, say, Paramus. Joshua blew the trumpet, and the malls of Paramus came tumbling down. Israel also has beaches that are at least as attractive as New Jersey’s.
An old friend of mine, Dave Garcia, flew in from Hong Kong to spend Easter in Jerusalem. “I like to go places when the tourists aren’t there,” he said. Dave spent two years in Vietnam when the tourists weren’t there, as a prisoner of the Viet Cong. “Let’s see where the Prince of Peace was born,” he said. “It’s in the middle of the intifada.”
Z drove us from Ben-Gurion Airport to the roadblock between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The highway was strewn with broken bottles, as if in the aftermath not of war but of a bad party. Israeli soldiers and Palestinian Authority policemen stood around warily. Z handed us over to an Arab tour-guide friend of his who drove a twenty-five-year-old Mercedes and looked glum. Israel had lost half its tourism, but hotels in Palestinian areas were reporting occupancy rates of 4 percent.
The Arab guide parked at random in the middle of empty Manger Square, outside the Church of the Nativity. “There is normally a three-and-a-half-hour wait,” he said as we walked straight into the Manger Grotto. The little cave has been rendered a soot hole by millennia of offertory candles. It’s hung with damp-stained tapestries and tarnished lamps and festoons of grimy ornamentation elaborate enough for a Byzantine emperor if the Byzantine emperor lived in the basement. I imagine the Virgin Mary had the place done up more cheerfully, with little homey touches, when it was a barn.
The only other visitors were in a tour group from El Salvador, wearing bright yellow T-shirts and acting cheerfully pious. Dave asked them in Spanish if, after all that El S
alvador had been through with earthquakes and civil war, the fuss about violence and danger around here puzzled them. They shrugged and looked puzzled, but that may have been because no one in the Garcia family has been able to speak Spanish for three generations, including Dave.
All the dead babies from the Massacre of the Innocents are conveniently buried one grotto over, under the same church. Sites of Christian devotion around Jerusalem tend to be convenient. In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher the piece of ground where Christ’s cross was erected, the stone where He was laid out for burial, and the tomb in which He was resurrected—plus where Adam’s skull was buried and, according to early Christian cartographers, the center of the world—are within a few arthritic steps of one another. Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, was over seventy-five when she traveled to the Holy Land, in 326 A.D., looking for sacred locations. Arriving with a full imperial retinue and a deep purse, Saint Helena discovered that her tour guides were able to take her to every place she wanted to go; each turned out to be nearby and, as luck would have it, for sale. The attack of real estate agents in Palestine long predates Zionism.
The Church of the Nativity is a shabby mess, a result of quarreling religious orders. The Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic priests have staked out Nativity turf with the acrimonious precision of teenage brothers sharing a bedroom. A locked steel door prevents direct access from the Roman Catholic chapel to the Manger Grotto, which has to be reached through the Greek Orthodox monastery where there is a particular “Armenian beam” that Greek Orthodox monks stand on to sweep the area above the grotto entrance, making the Armenians so angry that, according to my guidebook, “in 1984 there were violent clashes as Greek and Armenian clergy fought running battles with staves and chains that had been hidden beneath their robes.” What would Christ have thought? He might have thought, “Hand me a stave,” per Mark 11:15: “Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.”