My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (42 page)

As the years went by, Dayan’s insight has been dimmed and forgotten. Israelis could no longer bear its cruel wisdom. The Six Day War enabled us to escape its piercing sagacity. The Right nurtured its self-righteous illusions. The Left was mesmerized by its own moralistic illusion. And for two generations, the sin of Ofra obscured the sin of Hulda. But Hulda is here. Hulda is here to stay. And Hulda has no solution. Hulda says peace shall not be.

I descend the hill to the well, the vineyard. It’s so beautiful and calm here. But the soil is hard. The land is cursed. For it is here, in the Valley of Hulda, that history’s door creaked open on April 6, 1948. It is precisely here, at the end of the Herzl forest, that the Jews crossed the threshold between the commune’s olive grove and Jamal Munheir’s
fields and entered the forbidden. After eighteen hundred years of powerless existence, Jewish soldiers employed a large, organized force to take another people’s land and to conquer dozens of villages—of which Hulda was one of the first. Here, by the old well of Hulda, we moved from one phase of our history to another, from one sphere of morality to another. So all that has haunted us ever since is right here. All that will go on haunting us is right here. Generation after generation. War after war.

(
photo credit 11.1
)

A
RYEH
M
ACHLUF
D
ERI WAS TO HAVE BEEN A
P
ARISIAN LAWYER
. H
IS UPBRINGING
in the northern Moroccan city of Meknes was prosperous enough to allow him to dream of a life of success and recognition in France. In the 1960s, King Hassan II extended his patronage to the Jews. There was harmony between Arabs and Jews in the young North African kingdom. Life had order and meaning and a quiet Mediterranean rhythm. The Jewish community was strong. But when Eliahu and Esther Deri realized that their five-year-old son was a mathematical genius, they expected him to spread his wings and fly beyond the happy Moroccan-Jewish community they lived in. And because they always looked to France—its modernity, its enlightenment, the equal rights accorded by France to Jews—the Deris hoped their son would find a future there. They imagined he would be a lawyer or a doctor or a math professor in Paris or Lyon or Marseille.

Eliahu Deri was orphaned at the age of ten. One morning he found his beloved mother lying lifeless in the bed next to him. The following ten years were difficult for him. He was bullied by his older brothers, and he worked for sixteen hours a day as a tailor’s apprentice, sewing and ironing uniforms for the French army. But as he got older and married and became his own man, Eliahu did well. He opened a shop in the
center of Meknes and became a successful tailor. The rapid modernization of North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s doubled and tripled the demand for the high-quality European suits that were his forte, and politicians, businessmen, and officers all called on his shop. Within a short time, the penniless orphan from the crowded Jewish ghetto, the
mlach
, was able to move his young family to the well-to-do Ville Nouvelle, the new city, to a spacious apartment in a smart building with a concierge. They had two maids, a television, gilded furniture, and summer vacations in the best resorts of Tangier. While Esther’s Arab servants cooked and cleaned and tended to the children, she would sneak off to the cinema across the street to watch Humphrey Bogart films. Aryeh grew up like a prince, playing soccer and swimming and devouring Jules Verne novels. On the high holidays, Eliahu Deri would take his two older sons to synagogue dressed in well-cut suits and silk bow ties so that everyone could see just how far the poor orphan had come. The Deris lived a comfortable life of promise typical of the postwar Jewish-Moroccan bourgeoisie.

There was a delicate balance in Meknes. On one hand, the
mlach
preserved the Jewish community and Jewish identity; on the other hand, the Ville Nouvelle offered the riches of France. The Deri family, and many like them, attended synagogue on Sabbath mornings, but their children played soccer and went to the cinema on Saturday afternoons. They maintained a close relationship with the Arab majority, all the while vigilantly safeguarding the uniqueness of their own identity. In the postwar years, postcolonial Meknes managed to keep alive the semi-colonial harmony of the enchanting Levant, where Arabism, Judaism, and French culture were woven together into a modern yet traditional fabric.

The Six Day War tore this fabric apart. Overnight, in the summer of 1967, everything changed. Arab customers stopped calling on Eliahu Deri’s shop. Arab employees started whispering behind his back. One day a passerby spat on Deri’s elegant suit and muttered
“Sale Juif,”
dirty Jew. Deri came home incensed. “We are going to Israel,” he announced. Without letting the neighbors know, they sold all they could sell. They put their furniture into a shipping container, transferred money with the help of the Jewish Agency, hid cash in the double linings that Eliahu sewed into the children’s winter coats, and told friends they were going
on vacation to France. They summoned a taxi late one night and drove to Casablanca. From Casablanca they flew to Marseille, where they boarded a ship to Haifa.

Esther Deri remembers that when they left Meknes she cried. And when they boarded the plane in Casablanca she cried again. Life had been good in Morocco. But though she begged and cajoled her husband to return, he didn’t listen. The Arabs’ sudden change of heart had humiliated him. Only at the transit camp in Marseille did he begin to regret his hasty decision, and only at the port of Haifa did he begin to understand what he had done. When it turned out that their baggage hadn’t arrived, he lost his temper. When he didn’t receive the housing promised to him in Marseille, his wife and five children watched with horror as an enraged Eliahu Deri overturned a table.

Aryeh Machluf Deri remembers that in the transit camp in Marseille there was already tension between his parents. But they hoped for the best and bought everything needed to make life in Israel easier: a refrigerator, a washing machine, a mixer. The ship was actually fun. The kids went wild on deck, and in the evenings the grown-ups danced the tango and the pasodoble. But when they disembarked in Haifa, his father was a different person: loud, tense, lost. He was incapable of understanding the rules of the new world he had chosen so hastily. He would raise his voice, shouting and crying. He lost his dignity.

The family was sent to the coastal town of Rishon LeZion, south of Tel Aviv. Their apartment was tiny and bare: Jewish Agency metal beds, army blankets, and nothing else. When their money didn’t arrive, Eliahu went to the bank every day. When their container didn’t arrive, he went to the Jewish Agency every day. He demanded a better apartment in a better location with better conditions. He became enraged. His blood pressure rose. He shut himself in his room and didn’t come out. He lay in bed all day crying.

Three months later, the family moved from the fifty-square-meter apartment in Rishon LeZion to a hundred-square-meter apartment in Bat Yam. There was a little more room now, but the neighborhood was bad. Many of the immigrant Libyan families in the Eli Cohen housing estate lived on the edge of society. Some neighbors were decent and hardworking, but others were petty criminals. There were drugs, prostitution, street gangs. Because of Eliahu Deri’s debilitating depression,
it was up to Esther Deri to protect her four sons and her daughter. She locked them up at home so they would not learn the ways of the street.

One evening two ultra-Orthodox young men in long black coats knocked on the door. They had heard that the Deri boys were talented and suggested that two of them enroll in a religious boarding school in Netanya. Esther Deri was taken aback. She knew nothing about ultra-Orthodoxy, and the idea of sending her boys away scared her. It seemed inhuman. But her fear of drugs, prostitution, and street gangs was even stronger. After a long, heartbreaking deliberation, Esther deposited her eldest, Yehuda, and her gifted Aryeh in the hands of the two young men. The two brilliant Moroccan boys were sent to the Sanz boarding school in Netanya, where they were totally cut off from their sister and brothers and mother and broken father.

The rabbi at the Sanz Yeshiva was an impressive spiritual figure who immediately captured Aryeh Deri’s heart. But the place itself was dilapidated, dirty, and miserable. Aryeh did not understand why he was being punished, why at the age of nine and a half he had been taken away from his mother. At night he would cry bitterly. During the day, he tried to escape. He collected bottles from trash cans, sold them back to the local grocery store, and with the money bought a bus ticket back to Bat Yam. At home he cried and persuaded his mother to let him stay—until the rabbi arrived and told Esther that her boy was a promising Torah scholar. Looking around the dismal housing estate, she agreed to place her boy in the care of the rabbi once again.

In the meantime, Esther began working shifts in a trade-union-owned textile factory in Bat Yam. Eliahu got out of bed and began cutting raincoats for a trade-union-owned haberdashery. Honor did not return, and neither did plenitude, and there was not much happiness. But after the abrupt transition from Morocco to Israel that had initially crushed the Deris, the family was making a new life for itself—living the gray, depressing routine of the Oriental-Israeli proletariat.

Aryeh, the child prodigy, took another road. He spent his first summer in the State of Israel in the miserable ultra-Orthodox boarding school in Netanya. He escaped, returned, and escaped again. Months later, he managed to get himself transferred to another ultra-Orthodox boarding school, and then to yet another. In Hadera, living conditions
were disgraceful, too, and loneliness was devastating, but the ten-year-old became an observant Jew. The headmaster, Rabbi Shukrun, treated Aryeh like his own son and took a personal interest in his education. When Aryeh went home once a month he watched Arab movies on television on Friday evenings and played soccer on the Sabbath, but in school he wore a yarmulke and studied the Talmud. Three years later, he was transferred to the Sephardic Porat Yosef Yeshiva in Jerusalem, and two years after that, he moved to a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi yeshiva. At the age of sixteen he was accepted to the prestigious Hebron Yeshiva. After seven and a half years in inferior and mediocre Sephardic institutions, Aryeh Machluf Deri had reached the Eton of the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox world.

Hebron was also the school of David Yosef, the son of Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, Ovadia Yosef. The chief Sephardic rabbi’s son, a mediocre student, needed the help and guidance of the brilliant and charismatic Deri, and in return he suggested that Aryeh become tutor to his younger brother. At the age of eighteen, the son of Eliahu and Esther Deri was taken into the Yosef household. Ten years after the ship
Moledet
docked in Haifa with a spoiled secular-traditional boy from Meknes on deck, Aryeh Deri was an up-and-comer in the royal court of Israel’s Sephardic Jewry.

Aryeh’s dream was to establish an elite yeshiva for Sephardic students. But life in the chief rabbi’s household gave him a taste for politics. After Deri married Yaffa, a beautiful orphan, a friend convinced him to devote his life to public service. His self-proclaimed mission was to persuade the Sephardic rabbi Yosef and the Ashkenazi super-rabbi Elazar Shach to co-sponsor a new Sephardic religious party. Thus Shas was born. In 1984, at the age of twenty-five, Aryeh Deri ruled over an Oriental ultra-Orthodox party that garnered four seats in the Knesset in its debut election campaign. He was about to change the face of Israel.

At the age of twenty-six, Deri was a powerful adviser to the minister of the interior. At twenty-seven, he was director general of the Ministry of the Interior, and at twenty-nine, he became minister of the interior. Though he did not possess any experience in public administration or any previous knowledge of Israeli society, Aryeh Deri became a star overnight. He advanced the cause of both ultra-Orthodox Jews and Oriental
Jews. But because he was a dove, the Left took a shine to him. Because he assisted the settlers, the Right appreciated him. And because the agenda he set forth at the Ministry of the Interior benefited many outside his constituencies, he gained the respect of business and media. Deri managed to promote the two minority communities he represented without alienating other communities. At the age of thirty he was the first ultra-Orthodox Oriental Jew to break into Israel’s inner circle of power. He was the most electrifying, promising figure of a new Israel.

In June 1990, Israel’s most powerful daily newspaper,
Yediot Aharonot
, published a series of investigative articles claiming that Deri was corrupt. The state comptroller and then the police opened inquiries. Deri fought back with a vengeance. He attacked
Yediot Aharonot
, the state comptroller, and the police. The people’s hero became the people’s enemy. He was perceived not only as a bribe taker but as one who willfully disregarded the rule of law. Gone was the affection of the Left, gone was the support of the Right, gone was the acceptance by the elite. Aryeh Deri retreated to within the bounds of the one domain that stuck by him: the traditional Oriental community.