The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide. Susan Nathan
Читать онлайн книгу.
suggested I become either Shashana or Vered—the names of two flowers—but at the last minute I decided to stick with Susan.
I am not sure I can identify the exact moment I became a committed Zionist, but I do know that a single childhood incident changed the direction of my life, and my understanding of what it was to be a Jew. I was eleven years old and on an outing with some girls from my boarding school to nearby High Wycombe, one of the many commuter towns that ring London. Browsing through the shelves of a small bookshop in one of the backstreets, away from the other girls, I stumbled across the most horrifying picture book. As I leafed through its pages I found photo after photo of emaciated corpses piled high in pits, of men ripping out gold fillings from teeth, of mountains of hair and shoes. At such a young age I was not aware that these were pictures of the Holocaust, an event that was still fearsomely present in the imaginations of Jews around the world fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. But the awfulness of the images transfixed me.
I learned the story behind these photographs from my parents shortly afterwards, so beginning my compulsive interest in the Holocaust and Jewish history. The following year, 1961, after I had moved to a new boarding school in Buckinghamshire, the trial of the Gestapo leader Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. I read the newspapers every day, appalled by the accounts of the Final Solution, Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. I also recall weekends spent poring over copies of the Jewish Chronicle in my parents’ home, reading in the personal columns the notices from individuals and families still searching for relatives in Europe they had been separated from for as much as two decades. These heart-rending messages were an uncomfortable reminder that the legacy of loss and destruction wrought by the concentration camps was continuing. My exposure to the Holocaust—and my new understanding that millions of Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis—launched me on an ever wider quest for knowledge: not only of what had happened to its victims, but also of what had led to such barbarity.
My own family, I was soon aware, had only narrowly escaped—by a quirk of destiny—the tragedy that had consumed so many others. My father’s parents, before they met, were refugees from the pogroms in Lithuania in the 1880s, fleeing separately to Odessa where each hoped they might catch a ship to Hamburg and a new future in Germany. But when they arrived at the port they, and many other refugees, found the ship full and so were forced to travel on the only other vessel, bound for Cape Town in South Africa. As we now know, their fates and their children’s were sealed by that missed boat: instead of finding themselves caught up in the rise of European fascism, they watched the horrific events unfold from the safe distance of Cape Town. My father was, however, in Europe at the outbreak of war. He had left South Africa in the late 1920s, travelling streerage class on a boat bound for Ireland, a penniless but brilliant medical student. He enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was mentored by Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, the chief rabbi of Ireland and the father of Israel’s sixth president, who helped him become a passionate Zionist. By the time Nazism was on the rise in Germany my father was a leading surgeon in London, where he met my mother, a nurse. They spent the war itself tending to the injured in Tilbury docks in Essex, one of the most heavily bombed places in Britain.
If my family had survived the war unscathed, the plight of the many who had not touched me deeply. As with many others, the story of the Exodus—as told by novelist Leon Uris—shaped my perception of the tragedy that had befallen my people. I read of the ship that left Europe in July 1947, its decks choked with Holocaust survivors in search of sanctuary in what was then Palestine; of the refugees who tried to jump ship and reach the shores of the Promised Land; of the decision of the British to send the 4,500 refugees to internment camps in Cyprus because they had agreed to limits on Jewish immigration to avoid further antagonising the local Palestinian population and neighbouring Arab countries; and of the horrifying eventual return of the ship and its Jewish refugees to Germany. I was outraged by the thought that British soldiers—ruling Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations—could have acted with such callousness. My alienation from my country, Britain, began from that point on.
The middle classes exercised a subtle, sophisticated discrimination against Jews in post-war Britain which was apparent enough to make me increasingly aware of my difference. There were the comments about my ‘funny name’—my maiden name is Levy. I heard tales that disturbed me about the clubs that excluded Jews as policy. Among my parents’ friends there were worried conversations about the ‘quotas’ on Jewish children that might prevent their offspring from being admitted to a good school. And my mother, who was born a Protestant but converted to Judaism after marrying my father, would tell of how everyone in her family apart from her own mother disowned her for choosing to marry a Jew.
During my childhood, at the rural boarding schools outside London where most of my time was spent, I felt as if I were wearing a yellow star, as if my Jewishness was a visible stain to the teachers and other pupils. These were demonstratively Christian schools, with chapel services and morning prayers. I was aware of my vulnerability, too: out of hundreds of children, only four others were Jewish in the senior school I attended. I swung between contradictory emotions. On the one hand I feared appearing different, and on the other I wanted to proudly own that difference. Although I did not have the courage to refuse to attend morning prayers, I resolutely kept my mouth closed during the hymns. It was a very isolating experience: I felt outside the consensus, subtly but constantly reminded of my difference. This is, I think, a common experience for Diaspora Jews, but one little appreciated by Israeli Jews who were born and raised in a state where they comprise the majority.
My growing distance from British society was reflected in an ever greater attachment, if only emotionally, to Israel. I was raised on stirring stories of the great and glorious Jewish state. For non-Jews it is perhaps difficult to appreciate what an enormous impact the creation of the state of Israel had on us. It reinvented our self-image, anchoring our pride in a piece of territory that had been our shared homeland two thousand years before. It satisfied our sense of historic justice and showed we could forge our own place among the modern nation states. But more than that, many Jews, myself included, were excited by the triumphs of our army, particularly those of 1948 and 1967, when Israel took on its Arab neighbours and won substantial territory from them. Here we were, a persecuted, isolated people, freeing ourselves from the ghettos of Europe and rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the gas chambers to become warriors. No longer a helpless minority always at risk of persecution, we were a proud people reclaiming our homeland, and willing and able to fight to defend it on the battlefleld. Young Jews need not imagine a future as either merchants or intellectuals, but rather as brave and courageous soldiers. We could call ourselves ‘Sabra’—identifying with the prickly Middle Eastern cactus that flourishes in even the most hostile terrain.
I married my husband, Michael Nathan, a successful lawyer, in 1970 at the age of twenty-one. My early marriage, frowned upon by my parents, brought me into the embrace of a much more religious family than my own. Michael’s mother and father were traditional and Orthodox, in sharp contrast to my own parents’ secular, liberal background, and our differences in upbringing, culture and outlook would eventually push us apart. During the twenty-six years of our marriage, however, Michael and I only ever visited Israel together once, when we went to see his brother in Jerusalem. Michael never shared my attachment to the Jewish state, and on the seven other occasions I visited I was always alone. Our two children forged their own relationships with Israel, touring the country as part of youth groups or working on kibbutzim. But although this was officially my state I always left Israel as a tourist, an outsider, with a feeling that its inner substance had not been fully revealed to me.
So when I arrived to claim Israeli citizenship in 1999, my head was still full of romantic notions of Zionism and the Jewish state. The Jews had reclaimed an empty, barren land—‘a land without people for a people without land’. We had made the desert bloom, we had filled an uninhabited piece of the Middle East with kibbutzim, the collective farms that were the pioneering backbone of the state in its early years. At that stage, the thought that the country was full of strangers, people whom I and my countrymen lived alongside but entirely apart from, did not enter my head. The one million Arabs who share the state with Jews—Palestinians who remained on their land after the 1948 war that founded Israel, and so by accident rather than design became Israeli citizens—were invisible to me, as they