A Tale of Love and Darkness (69 page)

Then he added, to my great surprise:

"Basically he's a good man, that Begin. He's a demagogue, it's true, but he's not a fascist or a warmonger. Absolutely not. On the contrary, he's a rather soft man. A thousand times softer than Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion's as hard as granite, but Menachem Begin is made of cardboard. And he's so old-fashioned, Begin. So anachronistic. A sort of lapsed
yeshiva bocher
, who believes that if we Jews start shouting at the top of our voices that we're not the way Jews used to be, we're not sheep for the slaughter, we're not pale weaklings but the opposite, we're dangerous now, we're terrifying wolves now, then all the real beasts of prey will be scared of us and give us everything we want, they'll let us have the whole land, they'll let us take all the holy places, swallow up Trans-Jordan, and be treated with respect and admiration by the whole civilized world as well. They, Begin and his chums, talk from morning to evening about power, but they haven't the first idea what power is, what it's made of, what the weaknesses of power are. After all, power also has an element of terrible danger for those that wield it. Didn't that bastard Stalin once say that religion is the opium of the masses? Vell, just listen to little old me: I tell you, power is the opium of the ruling classes. And not only the ruling classes. Power is the opium of the whole of humanity. Power is the temptation of the Devil, I would say, if I believed in the Devil. As a matter of fact, I do believe in him a bit. Vell, where were we?" (Ephraim and some of his fellow Galicians always pronounced "well" as "vell.") "We were talking about Begin and your big laugh. You laughed at him
for the wrong reason that day, my young friend. You laughed at him because the word 'arm' can be taken in different ways. Vell, so be it. You know what you should really have laughed at? Laughed till the floor collapsed? I'll tell you what. You shouldn't have laughed at the 'arming' but because Menachem Begin truly believes that if he were prime minister, everybody, the whole world, would immediately leave the side of the Arabs and come over to his side. Why? Why would they do that? For what? For his beautiful eyes? For his polished language? In memory of Jabotinsky, perhaps? You should have laughed your head off at him, because that's exactly the politics that all those layabouts in the shtetl used to like. All day long they would sit behind the stove in the house of study and talk that kind of politics. They used to wave their thumbs around like Talmud teachers: 'Foist of all, we send a delegation to Tsar Nikolai, an important delegation, that will speak to him very nicely and promise the Tsar to fix for him what Russia wants most of all, a way out to the Mediterranean. Then, we ask the Tsar that in exchange for this he should put in a kind word for us with his friend Kaiser Wilhelm, so our Tsar should get this Kaiser to tell his good friend the Sultan of Turkey to give the Jews, right away, no arguments, the whole of Palestine from the Euphrates to the Nile. Only after that, when we've sorted out the whole redemption once for all, then we can decide according to how we feel if Ponya (that's what we called Tsar Nikolai) deserves that we should keep our promise and let him have a way out to the Mediterranean or not.' If you've finished there by any chance, vell, let's both go and empty our baskets into the bin and move on to the next tree. On the way we can check with Alec or Alyoshka if they remembered to bring a pitcher of water with them or if we'll have to go and complain to Tsar Nikolai."

A year or two later my class was already sharing night-watch duties in Hulda; we had learned to use a gun in our paramilitary training. These were the nights of the fedayeen and the reprisal raids before the Sinai campaign of 1956. Almost every night the fedayeen attacked a moshav or a kibbutz or a suburb of a town, blowing up houses with people inside them, shooting or throwing hand grenades through people's windows, and laying land mines behind them.

Every ten days it was my turn to keep watch along the perimeter
fence of the kibbutz, which was only some three miles from the Israel-Jordan armistice line at Latrun. Every hour I would sneak into the empty clubhouse, against regulations, to listen to the news on the radio. The self-righteous, heroic rhetoric of a beleaguered society dominated those broadcasts as it dominated our kibbutz education. Nobody used the word "Palestinians" in those days: they were called "terrorists," "fe-dayeen," "the enemy," or "Arab refugees hungry for revenge."

One winter evening I happened to be on night duty with Ephraim Avneri. We were wearing boots, tattered army fatigues, and prickly woolly hats. We were tramping through the mud along the fence behind the storehouses and cowsheds. A stench of fermenting orange peels that were used for making silage mingled with other agricultural smells: compost, rotting straw, warm steam from the sheep sheds, feather dust from the chicken coops. I asked Ephraim if he had ever, in the War of Independence or during the troubles in the 1930s, shot and killed one of those murderers.

I could not see Ephraim's face in the dark, but there was a certain subversive irony, a strange sarcastic sadness in his voice as he replied, after a short pensive silence:

"Murderers? What d'you expect from them? From their point of view, we are aliens from outer space who have landed and trespassed on their land, gradually taken over parts of it, and while we promise them that we've come here to lavish all sorts of goodies on them—cure them of ringworm and trachoma, free them from backwardness, ignorance, and feudal oppression—we've craftily grabbed more and more of their land. Vell, what did you think? That they should thank us? That they should come out to greet us with drums and cymbals? That they should respectfully hand over the keys to the whole land just because our ancestors lived here once? Is it any wonder they've taken up arms against us? And now that we've inflicted a crushing defeat on them and hundreds of thousands of them are living in refugee camps—what, d'you expect them to celebrate with us and wish us luck?"

I was shocked. Even though I had come a long way from the rhetoric of Herut and the Klausner family, I was still a conformist product of a Zionist upbringing. Ephraim's nocturnal words startled and even enraged me. In those days this kind of thinking was seen as treachery. I was so stunned that I asked him sarcastically:

"In that case, what are you doing here with your gun? Why don't you emigrate? Or take your gun and go and fight on their side?"

I could hear his sad smile in the dark:

"Their side? But their side doesn't want me. Nowhere in the world wants me. Nobody in the world wants me. That's the whole point. It seems there are too many of my kind in every country. That's the only reason I'm here. That's the only reason I'm carrying a gun, so they won't kick me out of here the way they kicked me out of everywhere else. But you won't find me using the word 'murderers' about Arabs who've lost their villages. At least, not easily. About Nazis, yes. About Stalin, also. And about whoever steals other people's land."

"Doesn't it follow from what you're saying that we have also stolen other people's land? But didn't we live here two thousand years ago? Weren't we driven out of here by force?"

"It's like this," said Ephraim. "It's really very simple. Where is the Jewish people's land if not here? Under the sea? On the moon? Or is the Jewish people the only people in the world that doesn't deserve to have a little homeland of its own?"

"And what about what we've taken from them?"

"Vell, maybe you happen to have forgotten that in '48 they had a go at killing all of us? Then, in '48, there was a terrible war, and they themselves made it a simple question of either them or us, and we won and took it from them. It's nothing to boast about! But if they'd beaten us in '48, there would have been even less to boast about: they wouldn't have left a single Jew alive. And it's true that there isn't a single Jew living in the whole of their sector today. But that's the whole point: it's because we took what we did from them in '48 that we have what we have now. And because we have something now, we mustn't take anything else from them. That's it. And that's the whole difference between me and your Mr. Begin: if we take even more from them someday, now that we already have something, that will be a very big sin."

"And what if the fedayeen turn up here now?"

"If they do," Ephraim sighed, "vell, we'll just have to lie down in the mud and shoot. And we'll try our damnedest to shoot better and faster than them. But we won't shoot at them because they're a nation of murderers, but for the simple reason that we also have a right to live and for the simple reason that we also have a right to a land of our own. Not just
them. And now thanks to you I'm going on like Ben-Gurion. Now if you'll just excuse me, I'm going into the cowshed to have a quiet smoke, and you keep a good lookout here while I'm gone. Keep a lookout for both of us."

A FEW YEARS
after this nocturnal conversation, eight or nine years after the morning when Menachem Begin and his camp lost me at the Edison Auditorium, I met David Ben-Gurion. In those years he was prime minister and minister of defense but was thought of by many as the "great man of his day," the founder of the state, the great victor in the War of Independence and the Sinai Campaign. His enemies loathed him and ridiculed the cult of personality that surrounded him, while his admirers already saw him as the Father of the Nation, a sort of miraculous blend of King David, Judah Maccabee, George Washington, Garibaldi, a Jewish Churchill, and even the Messiah of God Almighty.

Ben-Gurion saw himself not only as a statesman but also—maybe primarily—as an original thinker and intellectual mentor. He had taught himself classical Greek so as to read Plato in the original, had dipped into Hegel and Marx, had taken an interest in Buddhism and Far Eastern thought, and had studied Spinoza so thoroughly that he considered himself a Spinozist. (The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, a man with a razor-sharp mind, whom Ben-Gurion used to enlist as his companion whenever he raided the great bookshops of Oxford for philosophy books, when he was already prime minister, once said to me: "Ben-Gurion went out of his way to depict himself as an intellectual. This was based on two mistakes. The first, he believed, wrongly, that Chaim Weizmann was an intellectual. The second, he also believed, wrongly, that Jabotinsky was an intellectual" In this way Isaiah Berlin ruthlessly killed three prominent birds with one clever stone.)

Every now and again Prime Minister Ben-Gurion filled the weekend supplement of
Davar
with lengthy theoretical reflections on philosophical questions. Once, in January 1961, he published an essay in which he claimed that equality between human beings was impossible, although they could achieve a measure of fraternity.

Considering myself a defender of kibbutz values, I penned a short response in which I asserted, with due humility and respect, that Comrade Ben-Gurion was mistaken.* When my article appeared, it provoked a great deal of anger in Kibbutz Hulda. The members were furious at my impertinence: "How dare you disagree with Ben-Gurion?"

Only four days later, however, the gates of Heaven opened for me: the Father of the Nation descended from his great heights and deigned to publish a long, courteous reply to my piece; extending over several prominent columns, it defended the views of the "great man of his day" against the criticisms of the lowest of the low.**

The same members of the kibbutz who only a couple of days earlier had wanted to send me away to some reeducation institution because of my impertinence now beamed delightedly and hurried over to shake my hand or pat me on the back: Vell, you've made it! You're immortal! Your name will be in the index of Ben-Gurion's collected writings someday! And the name of Kibbutz Hulda will be there too, thanks to you!"

But the Age of Miracles had only just begun.

A couple of days later came the phone call.

It didn't come to me—we didn't have telephones in our little rooms yet—it came to the kibbutz office. Bella P., a veteran member who happened to be in the office at the time, ran to find me, pale and trembling like a sheet of paper, as shaken as though she had just seen the chariots of the gods wreathed in flames of fire, and told me as though they were her dying words that the Prime-Minister-and-Minister-of-Defense's secretary had summoned me to appear early the next morning, at six-thirty precisely, at the minister of defense's office in Tel Aviv, for a personal meeting with the Prime-Minister-and-Minister-of-Defense, at David Ben-Gurion's personal invitation. She pronounced the words "Prime-Minister-and-Minister-of-Defense" as though she had said "The Holy One Blessed Be He."

Now it was my turn to go pale. Firstly, I was still in uniform, I was
a regular soldier, a staff sergeant in the army, and I was half afraid that I had broken some rule or regulation in embarking on an ideological dispute in the columns of the newspaper with my commander-in-chief. Secondly, I didn't possess a single pair of shoes apart from my heavy, studded army boots. How could I appear before the Prime-Minister-and-Minister-of-Defense? In sandals? Thirdly, there was no way in the world I could get to Tel Aviv by half past six in the morning: the first bus from Kibbutz Hulda didn't leave till seven and it didn't get to the Central Bus Station till half past eight, with luck.

*David Ben-Gurion, "Reflections,"
Davar
, 27 Jan. 1961; Amos Oz, "Fraternity Is No Substitute for Equality,"
Davar
, 20 Feb. 1961.

**David Ben-Gurion, "Further Reflections,"
Davar
, 24 Feb. 1961.

So I spent the whole of the night praying silently for a disaster: a war, an earthquake, a heart attack—his or mine, either would do.

And at four-thirty I polished my studded army boots for the third time, put them on and laced them up tight. I wore well-pressed civilian khaki trousers, a white shirt, a sweater, and a windbreaker. I walked out onto the main road, and by some miracle I managed to get a lift and made it, half fainting, to the minister of defense's office. This was located not in the monstrous Ministry of Defense building, bristling with antennas, but in a courtyard at the back, in a charming, idyllic little Bavarian-style cottage on two floors, with a red-tiled roof, covered with a green vine, which had been built in the nineteenth century by German Templars, who created a tranquil agricultural colony in the sands north of Jaffa and ended up being thrown out of the country by the British at the outbreak of World War II.