Authors: Bruce Feiler
What he is involved in, he tells his father, is trying to change the image of the desert—from a place to be afraid of to a place to be enjoyed.
“People are scared of the desert,” he said. “It’s far away, it’s brown. There’s no place to swim.”
“And where does that come from?”
“It comes from the Bible. ‘The people of Israel suffered in the desert,’ it says. We read it in the first grade and never forget it.”
“But you can’t compete with the Bible,” I said.
“Some friends told me I should rewrite the Bible in language we could all understand.”
“You’d have to rewrite the history of modern Israel, too. The desert was the enemy for Ben-Gurion as much as for Moses.”
“My principal message is: ‘Don’t be afraid. This is the best climate to live in. It’s dry. There are many places to hike. There are many ways to make money.’ ”
“So if the old slogan was ‘Make the desert bloom,’ what should the new slogan be?”
“ ‘Make the desert fun.’ ”
I thought about these conversations on the way back to Jerusalem. It was clear that Ben-Gurion had achieved one central part of his dream: making the desert central to the identity of the Jewish people, particularly to the State of Israel. He did this through his speeches, through his push to settle people in the Negev, and through his personal example of living in Sdeh Boker. But in achieving these goals, Ben-Gurion had lost a central tenet of his Negev dream: turning the desert into a Garden of Eden. Ben-Gurion’s inspirational slogan, “Make the desert bloom,” which I recall hearing as a child, is now recalled as little more than Zionist propaganda. Israel did make the desert habitable; it made portions of it arable; in the future it will make even more of it profitable. But it didn’t make it green, nor should it have. As Ben-Gurion himself said in the
New York Times,
the true appeal of the desert is that it brings one closer to the divine. “Here a person sees primeval nature in all its strength, unchanged and undisturbed by human hand; he does not give up in despair but finds within himself the vigor to meet the challenge and to strengthen his own powers of creation.”
And, as Ben-Gurion anticipated, bringing people closer to the desert also brought them closer to the Bible. Everyone I met, from Yoel De’Malach to David Faiman to Raz, mentioned that spending time in the Negev had strengthened his or her attachment to the text. In the end, this may be Ben-Gurion’s greatest achievement: rebinding the Jewish people to the Bible, saying that even in a world dominated by politics, nuclear weapons, and international alliances, the desert stories of the past still have a role. “Two things have to be fundamental in our education,”
he once said. “Science, as a means for knowing nature and controlling nature, as well as obtaining technical and economic mastery, and the Bible, as master guide for human and Jewish upbringing, shaping our social and ethical choices, relating to man and humanity.”
So how big an accomplishment was this? To answer that question I went to a skyscraper in downtown Tel Aviv to meet Ben-Gurion’s onetime chief aide-de-camp and one of the most recognized Jews in the world. Shimon Peres was not as colorful as his mentor, nor as voluble. He was a technocrat to Ben-Gurion’s pioneer, the coolheaded number cruncher to the impulsive entrepreneur. Peres never developed the personal connection with the public that Ben-Gurion had. Four times he ran for prime minister; four times he failed to win. The two terms he served in the role were under less-than-glorious circumstances. First, in 1984, in a power-sharing arrangement with right-wing leader Yitzhak Shamir;and second, in 1995, following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
What Peres did have was a deep intellect, and a sharply analytical mind. For years he ran the country’s clandestine program to develop nuclear weapons, and in 1993 he spearheaded the secret talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization that led to the Oslo Peace Accords, an accomplishment for which he, Rabin, and Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
I first had the idea of meeting Peres when I learned that he had led a three-week espionage mission to scout out the Negev in 1944 that had remarkable similarities to the spying episode described in Numbers 13–14, in which Moses sends a team of a dozen Israelites to survey the Promised Land. Peres’s expedition involved fourteen men who ventured south on camelback from Beer-sheba toward Eilat with the goal of plotting the land, then under British control, for an eventual takeover by the Jewish state. At the time, Jews were forbidden to travel in the Negev; they were also forbidden to carry arms, which the group had brought along, hidden in large canteens. “A tale of fourteen youngsters who longed to dip their toes in the waters of the Red Sea” is what Peres had said at the outset of the trip.
But they never made it that far. After twenty-two days, and only
twenty kilometers from the gulf, the group was surrounded by British and Arab soldiers, arrested, and carted back to Beer-sheba, where they were thrown into jail. Peres was sentenced to a month behind bars. One day during the expedition, the Polish-born Peres, who at the time was still called Shimon Persky, spotted a large bird’s nest in a tree. Shinnying up to see the nest, he disturbed a large eagle, which took flight. “That’s a
peres,
” the ornithologist in the group declared, using the modern Hebrew name for eagle that had been borrowed from Leviticus 11. “An immediate consensus evolved that as my ‘Diaspora-sounding’ name Persky was close to the name of this bird,” Peres wrote in his memoirs, “I ought to adopt it henceforth as my new, Hebraicized name.” (As it happens, the
peres
actually appears in Leviticus on a list of birds—including vultures, kites, falcons, ravens, ostriches, seagulls, hawks, cormorants, owls, pelicans, buzzards, storks, hoopoes, and herons—that the Bible says are not to be eaten. No reason is given, though interpreters later concluded that these were all birds of prey, and thus unclean.)
When I met Peres in his office, in a meeting arranged through one of Avner’s friends, he was mostly dismissive of the event. “Yes, it was daring,” he admitted. The maps, he said, were later used by the army during the War of Independence. But what Peres most wanted to talk about was Ben-Gurion and how he changed the role of the Bible in contemporary Jewish life.
The foyer to Peres’s office suite was heavily guarded and extensively decorated with mementos from his travels. On the wall was a large photograph of Peres signing the Peace Accords on the grounds of the White House, as well as a bronze dove and a quote from Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Over the copy machine was a photograph of Peres and Ben-Gurion, in which the protégé was a full head taller than his mentor.
Peres’s private office was sunny and lined with books. There was an air of importance in the room, but it was tinged with melancholy, sort of like a musty beachside hotel. Peres, in his late seventies, was dressed in
white trousers and a pink Oxford-cloth shirt with silver cuff links. On his desk was a stack of books in English, including two by Carlos Fuentes and one on Israel and the bomb. His shelves were filled with pictures, including one with him and Hillary Clinton. Next to it was a bulb-headed doll of Ben-Gurion that reminded me of a dashboard icon. I began by asking how much credit he thought Ben-Gurion deserved for making the connection between Israel and the Bible.
“I would give him the lion’s share,” Peres said. His voice was deep, but so soft it was almost impossible to hear. Not a muscle in his face moved when he spoke. Twice I had to move my chair closer to his desk, until, by the end of our talk, I was practically leaning over into his lap. He spoke perfect English, in perfect sentences, with a deep Polish accent despite six decades in the Middle East.
“First, there was a great deal of shame that had developed among Jews in the Diaspora,” he continued. “The exile had introduced some unwelcome insecurities. His goal, intellectually and historically, was to bring back the Bible, instead of concentrating so much on the Talmud,” which had become the dominant text in Judaism by the Middle Ages by compiling commentaries on the Bible and other aspects of Jewish law. “On the other hand,” he continued, “there was a great debate going on about social democracy, communism, and the Soviet Union. He drew a line against that kind of talk and said our social orientation should be from the Bible, not from Marx, not from Lenin, not from Trotsky.”
So what social message did Ben-Gurion draw from the Bible?
“It was a double-edged combination,” he said. “He believed that what was unique about Jewish life was that in addition to the historical side—the kings, priests, and officers—we had the prophets. The prophets represented the moral side of our story. The Bible is history, and the prophets are vision, and it’s combined. So intellectually, you have double the standing.”
“Was this view somehow in the background,” I asked, “or did you practice it every day?”
“First of all, Ben-Gurion never gave a speech without quoting the Bible. Secondly, at his home, he had sessions every Saturday and Sunday
reading the Bible. Thirdly, he organized what he called the Bible Puzzle, an annual national quiz on Independence Day that continues today. Finally, he just talked about it all the time. When he developed a theory about the Exodus, he held a
press conference
!”
“Were there people who resisted?”
“There were two camps who opposed him. One was the religious parties, who were very mad with him for downgrading the Mishnah and the Talmud. The other was the Socialists, who were unhappy that he downgraded socialism.”
We started talking about the Negev, and I asked him if he would describe himself as a desert person like Ben-Gurion.
“Yeah, I spent some time down there,” he said dismissively. “But basically, I would describe myself as future-oriented. I think the desert presents an offer for the future. It’s an opportunity to take the sand from the land, the salt from the water, the wilds from the people.”
“But I thought that view was no longer in favor now. People down there now say, ‘Let’s respect the desert. Let’s keep the desert as a desert.’ ”
“It’s fashion,” he said. “They want to keep the environment, but there are two problems. One is how to keep the air; the other how to keep the land. It’s a contradiction. Because for clean air maybe you need more trees, which destroy the desert. Most of the people in the desert care more about tomatoes than people.”
“So in the future, do you see the desert as green or brown?” I asked.
“Green, green!” he said. “Who wants to live on sand? The desert should be full of trees, leaves, plants.”
In a way it was touching to hear the prodigy defending the dream, but Peres, on this matter, seemed out of touch, and a bit uncomfortable. Sensing my time was coming to a close, I brought the conversation back to the Bible and mentioned that in the country today one didn’t hear politicians quoting the text.
“Today politicians are victims of television, instead of being students of the Bible,” he said, in what was no doubt a reference to his defeat by Benjamin Netanyahu, a master communicator, in the 1996 race for prime minister. “Everybody wants to be a star: his face, his show,
his sound bites. But there is a world behind the televisions. There is a world that lasts forever.”
“Now that Israel is mostly secular, do you think the Bible can survive the onslaught of television?”
“Yes,” he said emphatically, and for the first time all morning he showed some passion. “The Egyptians have the pyramids; we have the Bible. The pyramids are getting old, they’re suffering from neglect. Our monuments are words, not bricks. And words last longer.”
A few days later, I met up with Avner to discuss the conversations I had been having. One view came across loudly: The Bible is alive and well in Israel, the uncredited national anthem. But there seemed to be confusion about what role the desert should play in this vision. Why did some people want to eliminate it, and others want to embrace it? When I asked Avner this question, he popped open his cellular phone, hit one of his speed-dial entries, and whispered a few words to the person on the other end. “I’ll pick you up at seven tomorrow morning,” he said.
We drove southwest from Jerusalem, past Hebron and Beer-sheba, to a mostly unsettled corner of the Negev, not far from the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip, where we met another of Avner’s circle of desert missionaries. Rami Haruvi was taller than Ofer, more kempt than Avner. Dressed in a neatly pressed mustard shirt, he looked like a retired basketball player trying to make a bid for middle-aged modeling. He was also, like his friends, a talker. Early on he told me that after his wife got cancer he went to see a therapist. “The first thing I told him was that when I visit I want to be his last client of the day, because once I start talking, it’s hard for me to stop.”
Rami met us in an abandoned, two-story concrete building on the outskirts of Kibbutz Be-eri. He had spread out a table with an elaborate breakfast, including rolls, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, tea with mint, and coffee with cardamom. “Kibbutzniks know how to eat breakfast,” Avner said. Rami’s father helped start this kibbutz in 1946. “When he came here, there was nothing,
nothing,
” Rami said. “Imagine a convoy
of immigrants from Tel Aviv, with Jews from Venezuela, Africa, Europe. After an hour they came here and had to make a home for themselves.” Within two years they had built a small community. When war broke out and the Egyptian Army came sweeping up from the south, they quickly erected this building for safety.
“I once asked my father, ‘What did you think at this moment?’ ” Rami said. “‘You, alone, with your body, with thirty people here, with a few pistols. Not even one cannon.’ And my father said, ‘We believed.’ ”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“They were blessed,” Rami said. “They defeated the Egyptians. The Negev was included in Israel. And Kibbutz Be-eri went on to become one of the most successful in the country.”