born 1959, journalist, commentator, since 1989 staff writer for the Gazeta Wyborcza, earlier a contributor to numerous samizdat periodicals; author of political essays and critically acclaimed press reports; winner of the Polish-Ukrainian Reconciliation Award in 2003 for his book Pochówek dla rezuna, and the Kurt Schorek Award for his texts on Iraq.
As befits a professional press reporter, Smoleński seeks out places in a state of tension, countries torn by conflict, divided communities, whose problems, rooted in the past, have profound significance for the present and the future. That is why he visits Iraq or Israel. Still, politics, though present in his reports, seems to be of secondary importance for him. The author of the Pochówek dla rezuna is interested above all in individual stories, both of the people making the headlines and of the ordinary mortals, their complex fortunes, tragedies, joys and dreams. Smoleński meticulously collects peoples accounts, confronts them, trying to make sure all sides of the conflict are allowed to speak, showing the interplay of conflicting reasons. In this, he avoids easy generalisations, limits the amount of authors comment, refrains from putting himself in the foreground. He thus invites the reader to join the debate, encouraging them to reflect on the issues presented in his stories for themselves. As a result, the encounter with Smoleńskis writing turns into a demanding, but fascinating, learning adventure.
Selected works:
Pokolenie kryzysu, Instytut Literacki w Paryżu.
Gazeta Wyborcza - lustro demokracji, Warszawa: Noir sur Blanc.
Salon patriotów, Warszawa: Rytm, 1989.
Opowieści amerykańskie, Warszawa: Proszyński i S-ka, 1997
Pochówek dla rezuna, Wołowiec: Czarne, 2003
Irak. Piekło w raju, Warszawa: Świat Książki, 2004
Izrael już nie frunie, Wołowiec: Czarne, 2006
THREE REPORTS by PAWEL SMOLENSKI
ISRAEL WILL NO LONGER BE FLYING HIGH
It was he himself proposed the meeting. He claimed there aren't too many people like him and that perhaps those who are had always been the minority, although minorities or majorities were just arithmetic, lines of figures and it was after all, not a question of numbers here, but about right, total and indivisible. A lone wolf that was how he referred to himself. Wolves bring to mind those who follow their own, independent paths, but also represent strength, courage and resolve.
He invited me to his home, which stood on a quiet back street, a dozen or so kilometres from the cosmopolitan, bustling city centre of Tel Aviv. Nearby lies a cemetery and a district inhabited by religious orthodox Jews, also the location of the Ponowicz Yeshiva University, famous throughout the Hebrew world, where every student has a chance of becoming a renowned rabbi. He promised me an interesting conversation: You will not hear my kind of opinions anywhere else in this politically correct city. He also lured me with the promise of a tasty supper and a bottle of good wine; Shalom Lindenbaum, a retired professor of literature really does cook exceedingly well, especially Arabic delicacies. The kitchen is certainly one domain in which the Arabs have absolutely and ruthlessly triumphed over the Jews.
I took a taxi there. The driver, an Israeli Arab, was condemning the slaughter that had been committed several days earlier in the town of Shafram by a young army deserter. The attacker's name was Eden Natan-Zada, a 19 year-old fascinated by the radical politics of rabbi Meir Kahane, who had been shot in New York by an Arabic terrorist. The rabbi believed that Palestinians should be opposed everywhere, at all times and by all possible means. Being openly racist, the Kah party he established is illegal in Israel.
Eden's mother had begged his commanding officers not to allow the boy access to weapons. He ended up opening fire on fellow travellers in a bus. He killed four people and wounded thirteen others before an angry mob of Arabs lynched him. Even the most radical Israelis, obtuse nationalists and orthodox rabbis, publicly branded this a heinous, unjustified crime.
Shafram's population includes Druze, Arabs so loyal to the Israeli authorities that they even serve in the army, patrol the West Bank and quell Palestinian riots. Jewish human rights activists say that Druze are the most ruthless soldiers in the Israeli army. That is why nobody has even tried to explain why... he chose to attack a bus going to Shafram.
The cab driver kept repeating: I don't get it; I just can't figure it out. That poor young fellow must have been not so much a fanatic as a complete madman.
I told the professor about this. He replied without hesitation: The shooting in Shafram was due to an oversight by the army and security services. It's clear that the boy was unbalanced; all the newspapers say so. Unfortunately, you get madmen in any army.
But I don't see any reason he added to seek some deeper meaning behind this act or give it any special publicity. What happened cannot be undone. Please don't misunderstand me. I do not consider that shooting at Arabs on municipal buses should be the chief business of Israeli army recruits. Nor do I think that the army is the place for the mentally disturbed. But it's too simplistic to say: the boy shot them because he was a madman. If we take that line, then the whole context of the event escapes us.
That context the professor claims is Israel's struggle for survival.
We are alone in this war he continued. We have no allies anywhere. Europe has no wish to see us succeed and doesnt care whether Israel exists or not. The same with the United States; they tip the wink to the Palestinians and suck up to them, so that the world will forget about their policy in Iraq. The situation is what it is: a small Israel in a sea of Arabs. Our situation is not one anybody would envy.
Admit it the professor states the obvious the Arabs hate us. They would gladly drown us all in the Mediterranean. All Arabs, without distinction: Palestinians, Saudis or Egyptians. But like any other nation we have the right to live and maybe even a special right.
Yes, the conversation with Professor Shalom was indeed interesting. Though it was really little more than a monologue. Without exaltation or passionate outbursts, without hysterical oaths or declamations. Only questions, theses and cast iron proof.
I thought to myself maybe it's just as well the professor is a lone wolf.
***
Professor Shalom Lindenbaum is a grey-haired man of average height. He wears glasses and a thin, silver grey beard; if he had slanting eyes, he could pass for a dignified Chinese mandarin. He is of a slim, delicate build; it is hard to believe that just after arriving in Israel as a young man, he had been a stevedore and a butcher's assistant, or that just after the war and the Shoah, far from seeking peace and quiet, he had fought in the Irgun's ranks against the British and Arabs. This, some maintain, was a radically rightist terrorist formation (it was the Irgun that dynamited Jerusalem's King David Hotel), while others hold that it was an underground army fighting for independence and opposed to Prime Minister Ben Gurion's policy of conciliation. Today he looks like a good-natured pensioner, as indeed his name suggests, shalom meaning peace.
In his apartment, I can't find a trace of any great fondness for weaponry or any paintings depicting famous battles. Only a comfortable sofa, a table, long-playing records of classical music in worn covers, newspapers, periodicals and books. Professor Shalom loves poetry, especially in Polish from the land of his childhood, which in his opinion is second only to Hebrew poetry. Mickiewicz and Słowacki hold no secrets for him. He adores them for the beauty of their words and the perfection of the rhythm and rhyme. But above all for their Messianic message, adopted from Jewish culture and Jewish beliefs, but addressed to their legitimate owners so beautifully and with such charm that it is hard to imagine modern Jewish literature or Jewish social and political thinking without the poetry of those great romantics.
But Professor Shalom's true passion is the teacher from Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz; he is the greatest expert on Schulz's works in Israel. Schulz was a frail but impassioned intellectual, a bit of a mystic, a man of letters and a painter. He looked forward to surviving the Second World War, but it wasn't to be. He was I would say the very opposite of Professor Shalom; he never had to carry heavy chests or sides of beef, never took up arms or killed anyone.
But the strange thing is that during our conversation the professor never spoke a word about Schulz.
***
To begin with, he takes a stack of political cartoons from a cardboard file. Some are quite new; others are decades old, cuttings from serious and respected newspapers, but also from the tabloids. He unfolds them, smoothing their creases with the palm of his hand to ensure I won't miss the smallest detail. He wants me to take these drawings with me. He suggests I take a look at them once in a while. Caricatures are abbreviated thoughts, symbols to describe reality. The feelings hidden in caricatures reflect the true temperature of the emotions felt by those who create, publish and look at them. If this were not so, nobody would bother with such a liberal and open-minded newspaper as that serious and respectable British daily "The Independent. Because in "The Independent, some graphic artist has portrayed Ariel Sharon, a general and political hawk, but also the Prime Minister who handed Gaza back to the Palestinians, as nothing more than a wild cannibal devouring Arab children.
And yet this is not the worst caricature by any means. It's nothing compared to the drawings from some Arabic or European newspapers, with their anti-Semitic vitriol, in which Jews always have prominent noses, cunning and perfidy in the eyes and bad but oh such sharp teeth, the personification of meanness and ugliness. The Nazi paper Der Sturmer published just such caricatures. We all know what that led to.
After the drawings come texts. It depends on the journalist's ingenuity whether he uses offensive words and notions directly or hides behind the fraud of politically correct insinuation, masking his main intention with a fog of allusion. True articles wired from Israel the professor believes are as rare as snow tigers. Reliable reporters are an endemic, almost extinct species. The fashion today is to take the Arab side and condemn Israeli mistakes or even just ordinary acts of wickedness, which the professor has no illusions need not be empty invention.
But even then, one should include a "but. "But is the most important word, which permits one to remain objective. Teenagers lost their lives during the suppression of Palestinian riots. That sort of thing should not happen. But what is the age limit between terrorists and urchins throwing rocks at Israeli cars? Does a kalashnikov in the hands of a fourteen-year-old stop being a kalashnikov? And what about that would-be Palestinian shahid, the twenty-year-old Rashid, almost a child and mentally deranged into the bargain? If he had managed to detonate the semtex hidden under his shirt, would his victims have been less innocent, less dead?
Without the "buts, there can be no honest writing on the subject of Israel. But western correspondents have forgotten such a word exists.
- Let's take relations with Shafram says the professor. The fact they concentrate on is that an Israeli soldier shot Arabs. The majority will add that he was madman, will remind us of his mother's futile requests to the boy's commanders: "I beg you, don't give him a gun, it will only end in disaster. Some will go deeper. They will prove that the shooting in the bus was a result of Israel's internal discord, the result of tensions caused by the removal of settlers from the Gaza Strip, a simple consequence of nationalism. They will say, and people will believe: "Jewish extremism breeds madmen. No one will remember that Christian shops were looted during the second Intifada in Shafram. That the same Arabs live there as anywhere else, people who hate us and want to see us annihilated. Nobody will write: "the boy killed innocent people and that is an obvious crime. But isn't Gaza's firing of Kassam rockets at Ashkelon or Ofakim an equally heinous act?
***
The professor's inclusion of "but really does have some justification. In 1976, during the massacre in the small town of Damur, hundreds of Arab Christians died at the hands of Arafat's Fetahu Jazeera fighters. A German journalist wrote about it and like many of the investigators, the professor feels sure was shot for precisely that reason.
An Italian journalist, who reported the lynching of an Arab collaborator in Ramallah, later confessed before the authorities of the Palestinian Autonomous region and begged forgiveness as if he had lied, though he had in fact written the truth.
One of Arafat's relatives publicly announced that the Jewish question in the Near East ought to be solved in the same way as in Nazi Europe.
While writing his doctorate in Moscow, Abu Mazen, President of the Autonomous Region questioned whether the Holocaust actually happened. At the same time, he behaves like a cunning fox. He told a Saudi newspaper: "Don't meddle in the Intifada. It would be better if you place your trust in the »Israeli peace camp« and help the Europeans supporting the Palestinian issue. What perversity and duplicity. Against such a background, how can anyone be surprised by the homage printed in the Arab media: "Thanks, Adolf Hitler for taking revenge on the Jews ahead of time for the suffering of the Palestinian nation.
Why the professor asks are there so many political cartoons in the western press showing Sharon as a cannibal, when Arabs thanking Hitler for the Holocaust are quoted nowhere nearly as often? Why do Western leaders shake hands with Abu Mazen, when they should be condemning him for falsifying history? Why doesn't anybody brood on Jordanian crimes against the Palestinians, while the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila camps are analysed only in the context of Israeli blame? The murderers from the Lebanese Falanga were Arabs. Doesn't this all prove that Israel is seen as a thorn in their side?
***
Professor Shalom next asks me about the essence of these caricatures and the texts based on half-truths. About the sense of the aggressive language used and the meaning of the ambiguous silence on certain subjects.
Before I have time to answer, he claims: For two thousand years the world has been treating us this way. Anti-Semitism, you must admit, was not invented yesterday. In mediaeval Europe, we were ordered to wear pointed caps to make us look ridiculous. We were forced to convert to other religions, forbidden entry to universities and restricted to Jewish ghettos. The Inquisition burnt us at the stake, the Cossacks burnt us in barns and inns and Hitler burnt us in his crematoria. Please listen closely. It is not only Hitler, that primitive, basically insane decorator painter from Austria who is to blame. You are all to blame. The whole world is guilty.
The Professor reminds me that whenever things have begun to go wrong whether politically or economically and whenever it came to war or revolution people have brought up the Jewish question. When Europeans were dying like flies from the plague, it was the Jews who were held responsible. When a Christian child got lost in some back street, maybe kidnapped, perhaps killed by some pervert, it was simpler to accuse Jews of ritual slaughter than to investigate what had really happened. Even in 19th century France, gorged on its hundred varieties of cheese, drunk on its wine, delighting in the paintings of Van Gogh and fired by slogans about freedom, equality and brotherhood, it was found convenient to make a German spy of their Jewish Captain Dreyffus, to put him in the dock, humiliate and sentence him. And what about Czarist Russia? Or Poland, or Germany in the grips of Nazi madness? Even the Dutch, that supposedly tolerant race, handed their Jews over to be sent to concentration camps.
- And what have you the professor demands to say about that? What can you tell me?
His next question was whether I knew why such things happen. He didn't provide a direct answer to his own question, but I took his words to mean the following. The world hates the Jews and persecutes them out of petty meanness and envy, something best explained on the psychoanalyst's couch. Because as everyone knows the Jewish contribution to world culture is incomparably greater than that of all other nations, even the more talented ones. Let's take for example philosophy, medicine, psychology or economics, the exact sciences, literature, biology. Is it only because they were singled out by God (though this is by the way, as Professor Shalom is an atheist) that they have the right to be called the chosen race?
I have to answer, but I don't know how.
Human nature the professor warns me is devilishly perverse. It reserves its greatest hatred for the benefactor and rejects anyone who on his own initiative shares his lavish gifts with his fellow man. It is in the nature of things that every mentor, patron and sponsor is to be as much despised as he is needed. Must I remind you how it was in school: how hard it was to find anyone among one's classmates prepared to give a teacher his due, but how easy to find detractors, scoffers and the simply malicious.
Yes, it's easy to compare relations at school with those between nations. But to what extent and this is the principle difference can a teacher in school oppose his pupils. The lonely nation is condemned to oppression, suffering and humiliation. Nobody will really help it.
But here, against all likelihood, a miracle occurred. The nation condemned to the ghetto and concentration camp secured by force of arms its very own state a state that is like salt in the wound and a stone in the shoe of all other states and nations. Just as for the last two thousand years, people have tried to annihilate the Jews, many today dream about wiping Israel off the map. I feel rather uncomfortable having to listen to this, but the professor repeats: Listen to me! He left Poland long, long ago and so no doubt does not appreciate the bullying tone of his words in our mutual language.
Palestine he says was a notion forged by the Roman invaders in order to remove all traces of the Jews, even in geographical names; why, it was we who fought the Roman Empire. And if I know that, then how can I think of Judea-Samaria, now called the West Bank, as occupied territory? The English have a right to the Falklands and even had that right confirmed in a war that was supported by the rest of the world. The Jews too have a right to their own land. And he'll tell me something else he warns something I will certainly not like. If some European nation were to disappear, something he has no desire to see happen, the loss to world culture would be much less and easier to forget than the disappearance of the Hebrew culture. We he explains are faced with just such an alternative. We are not demanding for ourselves anywhere near as much as world culture has gained from our existence. Either we will survive on the land of Israel, including the West Bank, which without justification is being called occupied territory, or we will disappear. But if we are to disappear, we will not go alone. But I'm not talking here about a curse cast by someone dying. No, the Arabs will swallow us and next they'll be coming for you. After Saturday the Shabbat comes Sunday, the Christian holy day. That is what they are saying, but you don't want to listen. If there is to be no Saturday, Sunday too will disappear. Only the Muslim Friday will remain. Things won't improve until you people finally comprehend this.
Because in the professor's opinion no Israeli settlement has been built on land taken from the Arabs. There is no such thing as a policy of destroying Arab homes. Basically, the issue is simple: if snipers from Palestinian Bethlehem shoot at the Gilo district of Jerusalem and the children from the local kindergartens have to walk in the shadow of a wall made of concrete slabs, there is nothing to be discussed. When Gilo falls, London and Paris will fall too. And after all, nobody wants that, do they?
***
Professor Shalom has no problem describing the Arabs. We have already heard about the cunning of Abu Mazen and the vileness of the Arabic newspapers. Let's therefore start this section with a personal memory.
When in 1948, we Irgun soldiers entered an Arab village he tells me there was no one in the houses; they were all hiding in the cellars. They feared and hated us. They had no water. Someone, if I remember correctly a boy from my squad, was not in the least concerned that they were suffering from thirst. I could not just look on, so I permitted them to go for water. I admit that in that war, as in all the later wars, we Israelis did many bad and unnecessary things. But because of what life has taught me, I cannot stand idly by when someone is suffering. I let those Arabs have their drink. Why shouldn't they have a drink of water? They are drawing up a law in England today that will allow them to close mosques. The world understands this; the bombings in the London underground shook me too. But if the Israeli government closed even one mosque, there would be a general uproar. What's this they're closing mosques, bullying those poor Arabs again? When we entered Jerusalem in 1967, there were those among us who wanted to destroy Arab fanes. Nobody with serious intentions agreed to that; you have as many mosques in Jerusalem today as there were when it was under Jordanian rule. Does that not prove us to be as magnanimous, though maybe less prudent than the English?
I must add, though it will no doubt surprise you, that I couldn't throw a man out of his own house or his own temple. Maybe that's because I belong to a nation of those who have always been thrown out. If my son were to tell me that he had driven some Arab family from its ancestral home, I would be very, very angry with him. I would probably stop talking to him.
But I should again draw your attention to culture. To our cultural achievements, wealth and contribution. You don't need to conduct any elaborate analysis to perceive who occupies which floor in that respect, who is higher and who is lower on the ladder, or why that is.
The professor tells me about Jewish children from Iran. While the Pahlavi family ruled in Teheran, these children had lived there under relative tolerance and attended the same schools as their Persian peers. When they arrived in Israel, independent research showed that their abilities, capabilities and talents had been stifled in Iranian schools. Without any premeditation; this was merely the objective result of the conditions there. By its very nature, Islam simply stunts development, even and maybe first and foremost, among its own followers.
And when people don't develop, they remain entrenched in their convictions. They go down blind alleys, clutching at apparent truths. And that's the way the Arabs are: obstinate, blinded, old-fashioned, conservative. They talk about the right to return to former lands and they seek redress for the fate of the refugees from 1948 and 1967. Fine, that's their privilege. But the world should remember that after World War II, a hundred million homeless roamed Europe and many state boundaries were redrawn, because such are the effects of wars, large or small. It is better to reconcile oneself to these effects. Look at Poland, which now includes Wrocław (formerly Breslau) and Szczecin (formerly Stettin). Do you expect me to imagine Germans talking about their return to these lands and Poles saying "Okay?
Meanwhile, here in the Near East, Arab leaders forbid refugees to leave their camps. They arouse false hopes with their reassurances. The western media acts the same way. The refugees will leave the camps when true peace comes. Professor Shalom professes he would gladly give a quarter of his pension to see peace. Only the peace must be real. It cannot mean the non-existence of Israel.
- Listen, he says our holy city of Jerusalem is not even mentioned in the Koran, because it was never an Arab or Muslim administrative centre. Ramla that's another matter. For the Arabs, that should be the important city. Trade routes intersected there and it was the seat of the province's rulers. Of course they want Ramla. But they don't consider it a priority. Because for them Jerusalem is a symbol of the fact that we were here first and that this is our land.
What's more he says Palestinians already have their own state. Because what else is Jordan, note bene an artificial state, the invention of British cartographers. But in line precisely with Arab intentions nobody wants to see this. Because what for? Why cause oneself problems when things can remain as they are, to the prejudice of Israel?
The professor returns to the subject of the slaughter in Shafram. And now he is going on about a Bedouin, an Arab like the rest of them, who more or less at the time the deranged Jewish boy was grabbing a rifle, was smuggling illegal workers onto Israeli fields and gardens. For no apparent reason, this Bedouin shot two Arabs. And what happened? Nothing. The world never said a word.
True, Israel needs Palestinian workers to survive. Why the devil look for labour in Thailand, China or Nepal? Before the second Intifada flared up, Palestinians regularly came here to work. But that's all over; nobody will engage potential terrorists. And so both sides lose out, but the Arab side's loss is the greater.
- Autonomy says the professor, and maybe he's getting only the details wrong brought them more international money per capita than the Marshall plan. But they have stolen it all, down to the last euro. Israel too is a corrupt country. But such a talent for corruption I am supposed to see this as a sarcastic joke arouses a feeling of envy even in us.
And now the most essential aspect. And this is not a Jewish or Israeli matter. Experience shows that even Christians are on a higher level of development than Muslims. This is worth remembering, because it has a worldwide dimension. Unless they win some new great war, it will take the Muslims a long time to reach the Christians' level of development.
Because Professor Shalom is sure the struggle between Islam and the West is not a result of the discrimination experienced by the Algerians in France or the Turks in Germany. It is not even a function of an anti-American phobia. It's a struggle written in the verses of the Koran: the world should belong to the believers in Allah; any other development of events is a defect of history. Today the war is taking place in Israel; tomorrow it will be fought over the English Channel or in the Norwegian fiords. The Koran teaches its warriors: Now you are tired, rest awhile. When you are rested, attack again.
- Al-Kaida, my dear sir, is not a recent invention he explains. Al-Kaida was conceived at the Munich Olympics, when Palestinian commandos attacked the Israeli athletes. That, by the way, was a message for you too. We have arrived the terrorists were saying and we will never voluntarily go away again. But you of course knew better.
***
The time has come to talk about Israel. About its beginnings, when the professor fought in the ranks of the Irgun, though his father did not approve of such excesses, which meant the young Shalom had to look to his uncle for understanding. And even about those earlier days, when the Jewish state existed only in dreams, but had already been described and organised, designed down to the last detail, virtual but almost real, not only in their thoughts, but also within their grasp. The Zionist Left yes, those were people who knew how to dream and design. But they were nothing compared to Zeew Żabotyński, a great Jew from an Odessa family, a giant of patriotism and national thinking, the father of the Zionist Right and a visionary of Jewish nationalism. Or Menachem Begin, the illustrious soldier of the underground independence movement, a shrewd leader, a politician standing tall above the mediocrity of the Labour Party's leaders, an orator and hero of the war of liberation.
Then suddenly the shock. Following another victorious war, that same Begin, who was always tough and inflexible, signs a peace accord with Egypt, takes the army out of Sinai and orders the destruction of the Jewish settlements. Perhaps he was right politically, but right is not as important as dreams. He gave the Palestinians reason to believe they could count on eventually establishing their own state on Israeli lands. A sign expressed in strong quotation marks, but still one that would prove a source of evil.
The Palestinians claims the professor should have autonomy. But the army, national security and domestic affairs should be in Israeli hands. Which was why Shalom protested by sending Begin all the symbols of the Irgun in his possession, its holiest relics and emblems. A Jewish leader has no right to give up Israeli soil, even if external conditions so dictate.
The years pass and the Israeli Left comes to an arrangement in Oslo without informing the nation. The nation is deceived even if, taken in by the lies about peace, it considers it best to enter into talks with Arafat. Another Munich takes place land is handed over to the enemy in exchange for empty promises. Munich as any schoolboy knows did not hold Hitler back.
That is why Professor Shalom is sure that Oslo will not hold back the Palestinians. He asks and is right again in what way are the Kurds, fighting for an independent fatherland in Iraq, Iran, Turkey or Syria any worse than the Palestinians? Why hasn't anybody, anywhere ever proposed such an arrangement for them? They are no worse, as long as their interests do not interfere with those of Israel and merely upset the Arab status quo. But they will not obtain any assistance, even if they bow before the West and the Americans. But the Palestinians will, even if they send Shahids to Haifa and Tel Aviv with semtex strapped to their chests.
The worst of it all is the confusion. And for that the Israelis and Israeli elite are themselves to blame. People like Amos Oz for example. A writer the professor tells me of great mediocrity, despite being tipped for a Nobel Prize. His articles, reports and essays add up to a confession of sins and abasement before the Arabs, engagement in a movement for peace established by post-Stalinist Jews. It can be put down either to foolishness, political naivety or else insufficient courage to admit: "I was mistaken, there will be no peace with the Arabs.
It's all senseless and devoid of any internal logic, though it does tie in with the meanderings of the writer's biography. Once again, nobody has described the situation using the word "but. Nobody chooses to remember that he came from a family of revisionists, as the Zionist right was once called. Or that fate had Amos Oz end up in a kibbutz, a materialized utopia, the product of leftist imagination brought to life. How was someone with rightist roots going to feel in the truest of communes, where even such issues as who gets to attend college are decided by a collective?
That is why, in response to that writer's next diatribe, Professor Shalom sent him back all the books in his library that the pro-Palestinian had written. Before he did so, he had even thought of perhaps burning them. But he renounced that idea as being too reminiscent of the Nazis burning the books of those authors they despised. He packed the books in a brown paper parcel, stuck on some stamps for a few dozen shekels and took them to the post office. He doesn't consider his protest to have been particularly novel. After World War II he says the Norwegians sent Knut Hamsun back his books, even though he was a Nobel prizewinner and a literary lion. That was how they stigmatised a nazi collaborator. But who is Oz, if not a lackey for the Palestinians.
And finally the present day; the Right, following Begin's example, hands Gaza back to the Palestinians. Ariel Sharon, a hard-headed general with iron fists, cracks before a gang of Arab terrorists, a mostly anti-Semitic Europe and the proud, presumptuous Americans. Can this be the end of history as we know it, though not as foretold by Francis Fukuyama? Or maybe it's the true beginning: must the world first burn before it can rise again from the ashes?
One way or another it's just as well the world still contains some lone wolves and their strange, seemingly twisted, but actually straight and clear paths.
We are hostages of the Left, who imagine that an agreement with the Arabs is possible. Our right has also moved left. If I lived in Poland or America, I'd be an anarchist, left of the Leftists. But this is Israel, the only part of the world where Jews can decide what is good for them and what is not. That is why, in order to save the country and I am sure that at least during the Intifada it was under threat I would put Israeli democracy on hold. Yes, democracy, all that political yapping, exchange of opinions, parliamentary bickering, protests, marches and God knows what else, in a word all of that nonsense is fine, but not while we have the Arab knife at our throat. In other words, not now. I fear we may lose Israel through all this yapping. That's a real prospect, though not one I wish to envision.
***
One blue-black detail immediately attracted my attention. Professor Shalom has a concentration camp number tattooed on his thin and sinewy left forearm; he had been a prisoner in Auschwitz and though only a teenager in the winter 1944, survived the death march out of that camp. This number was like a magnet; I stared at its blue figures, and in my mind asked: why does he think the way he does?
The Professor, with a degree of astonishment and reprimand in his voice, also asked me: Can you believe it? There are people who call me a fascist.
I would never dare make such an accusation.
- What sort of fascist do I make? He retorted. If my son were to come home with an Arab fiancée, do you think I would throw him out of the house? Have I ever discriminated against an Arab student? But I am called a fascist, because unlike many Israelis, I am not asking for the right to live and to exist. I demand that right and am ready to defend it. But on the other hand, I don't want an inch more than that.
I sometimes throw matzo crumbs to the birds outside my window. I like to observe what happens. Always, but always, the same thing happens. One bird grabs a crumb and the rest of them fly at it, chase it off, beat their wings and steal the food from it. Yes, my friend, that's mob psychology, the same way we humans behave. I am not surprised that when the Jews get their crumbs, others try to take them away. That's why we must defend ourselves, hold on to what we have won. Exactly like that grey pigeon.
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The setting is important. David Street in Jerusalem's Old Town, very narrow and shadowy, leading almost directly along the boundary between the Christian and Armenian districts, though this is a fact that today has no meaning whatsoever (the Old Town being almost totally Arab). Two thousand years ago, not far from here, Jesus of Nazareth walked the steep, smoothed steps from the small square just behind Jaffa Gate towards Via Dolorosa, on his way to the crucifixion. Close by is the Wailing Wall and beyond that the holy mosque of al-Axa.
One of the first shops on the left-hand side of this back street has wide-open double doors inviting the passer-by into a deep, quiet interior, covered by a domed vault. The wares on display include silver and gold, necklaces and earrings. There are icons that look centuries old, though I doubt whether they are any older than those still shining from fresh varnish. There are seven-armed candlesticks, the mezuzahs that people attach above their doors, Stars of David and Jerusalem crosses. Christian, Jewish and Arabic prayers and blessings are engraved on dull metal plaques or decorate pale blue ceramics. Around the walls stand copper bowls full of individual, lonely coral beads. There are carpets and rugs, woven mostly in red, heavy kilims and headscarves of some gossamer material. In a word it's a junk shop, one of the many to be found in these dark, narrow back streets filled with the fragrance of roasted meats, mint tea, ginger and cardamom, overripe oranges and the mutton off-cuts from butchers' stalls. No bigger or more sumptuous than any other, in no way special or unusual, just a shop in an Arab souk, in the heart of a capital in a state that is permanently at war with the Arabs.
And its owner is like all the shopkeepers in this city. Noisy, pushy and maybe even insolent. Sure of himself. He says his name is Said.
I was lured there by a silver bracelet on display behind its dusty front window. This silver gem soon turned out to be barely copper, though this in no way diminished its beauty: a thick rope fashioned from hundreds of delicately plaited, hair-thin wires, ending in a massive fastening, bent like a snake's tail. According to Said, such bracelets were worn at the beginning of the last century by the Gypsies of the Near East and Bedouin beauties. In this at least, he is telling the truth.
***
Said is corpulent, chubby, unshaved and very sharp. He knows a lot about the world, has a well-practiced patter and can haggle in several languages. He wears a short-sleeved shirt and threadbare, black trousers. His hip pocket holds a wallet stuffed with banknotes: dollars and euros, Israeli shekels, Norwegian crowns, as well as pounds and francs. He smokes thick cigarettes, squeezing the filter between thumb and forefinger. He drags on them deeply, inhaling the smoke to the bottom of his lungs. He is constantly gesticulating. He enjoys talking to strangers.
He immediately quoted some absurd, sky-high price, promising that in any case he'll be selling it especially cheap as I am not some loaded American, but from Eastern Europe and so probably not too well-off. In response, I told him to get real and find some other sucker. No? Then so be it he looked offended. I was already back out on David Street when he grabbed me by the shoulder: What is your final offer?
We quarrelled and bantered; in the meantime, the salesmen from neighbouring shops served customers that had been on their way to Said's. His adolescent assistant kept bringing us glasses of tea with fresh mint leaves. We took small sips, lit cigarette after cigarette and haggled over every shekel, even though we knew that the amount dividing us was little more than the price of a box of matches. Neither of us thought to bring this performance to a conclusion.
Finally however, that "old Bedouin or maybe Gipsy silver trinket" ended up in my pocket; I still paid too much, though he wasn't asking even half what he had quoted earlier.
- Drop in again, if only for a glass of tea he said by way of parting. We don't have to do any more business.
I became quite fond of him; there was no reason I shouldn't.
***
From that day on, whenever I returned of an evening to the heart of the former Muslim district of the Old Town, I enjoyed taking a roundabout way in order to look in at Said's shop. I would sit on a low stool in the back of the shop, against a wall covered with kilims in hundreds of shades of brown, grey and red. I examined copper bowls full of beads. I drank tea, read the paper and eavesdropped as Said told foreign tourists how business was bad, how customers were few and far between, how he had a family to feed and that a Jerusalem cross was really old and solid silver, or that his pink beads were the truest coral, fished up at least a hundred years ago from the reefs of the Red Sea. I knew he was lying, deceiving and ripping them off, but he did so with such charm, so coquettishly, almost seductively. He had a nose for customers: for any old necklace, he would ask two hundred dollars from Americans or Swedes, fifty from Czechs or Poles.
- A good trader knows he patiently explained when there were no buyers in the shop that you cannot make a good profit on every deal and with every customer. I quite often barely manage to earn a few shekels. But it has never happened may the good Lord continue to be merciful that I had to lose so much as a penny on even the smallest coral bead.
- Tell me Said, how much did you rip me off for? I asked.
- What will such knowledge gain you? He laughed. If I tell you that you bought it cheap, will your bracelet gain in beauty? And if you bought it dear, will it grow ugly in your eyes? You paid exactly as much as you wanted to pay. As much as it was worth to you that day, at that hour. Believe only this, that it was not the best deal I ever did. But it's true he grumbled that business today is not as good as a few years ago. Now the guides take their charges to the large stores outside the Old Town. They would have their tourists believe that they will get large discounts there. In this way we Old Town shopkeepers are left just the scraps. It's no longer worthwhile he lamented running a shop in Jerusalem.
- Then sell it to me I joked when I could no longer listen to his complaining.
Said became serious and looked me straight in the eyes.
- If I ever sell the shop, it would only be to an Arab.
- Is my money any worse than an Arab's?
- It would appear to be the same. But how do I know where you got it? How can I be sure that you will not resell my shop to a Jew? Jews are cunning and tricky. You give them a finger and the next moment you can lose your whole hand. You give them a little room and pretty soon you can't get a foot in. You let your guard down and they push you, trip you up and stab you in the back. I will never sell my shop to a foreigner, because I could never be sure they were not tools in the hands of the Jews. Jerusalem will never be theirs. Never.
- Said, who told you this nonsense?
He did not answer. A group of jovial Norwegians had entered the shop.
***
It is almost night and we are still sitting and talking. At this time of the day, Israelis fear to wander the back streets of the Old Town; for many of them, this is a forbidden district full of fear and robbery, an accursed Arab kasbah. Tourists are thin on the ground here, unlike on the other side of the white stone walls. Street stalls vanish from the arcades; teenage boys with wooden carts haul bags of spices and cardboard boxes full of devotional articles to warehouses and storerooms. Display window shutters slam shut. The Old Town slowly falls asleep.
But not Said. He points out to me the worn paving stones of David Street. These pavements, polished smooth by millions of feet, are proof that in his cursing and swearing at the Jews, not a word has been a lie.
Jews he says are tricky and cunning. Jews he is sure cheat even such swindlers as him. Suddenly, without a word of warning, this friendly, coarse, fat Said begins telling tales that could only I imagine be born in the mind of a madman. And yet I can vouch that he is not a madman.
- Once these streets were of perfectly white marble; such beautiful stone can only come from Jerusalem. We had walked on it for centuries and I swear to you, the day will yet come when we will tread white marble again. One year I remember this perfectly, though I was still only a boy the Jewish officials announced that the municipal services would be installing electricity, water pipes and a sewage system in the Old Town. But for this purpose, the workmen would have to rip up the sidewalks; after all, these pipes would have to run underground. Today, I have running water in my shop and house. What do I care for that, when I can no longer walk on stones that remembered the times of the Prophet and even earlier times, when we were the sole masters of this land! We believed the Jews and, as always, were bitterly disappointed. They took our marble and used it to build their monuments and line their own streets. In return they gave us rubble.
I asked Said whether he wasn't exaggerating. I don't know much on the subject, but the stones on David Street, as on all the other streets of the Old Town, look as old as those in Jerusalem's defensive walls, David's Tower, the Wailing Wall, the Room of the Last Supper and the walls of the al-Axa Mosque.
He looked long at me again and said: Imagine a Palestinian house; forty years ago there was still no other type of house here in the Old Town. The owner's great great grandfather had chiselled verses of the Koran in the stonework above the entrance. Then along comes a thief, takes the house, obliterates the holy letters and chisels in his "shalom. The years pass and only the outcast owner, his children, the neighbours and the thief know the truth. For strangers, visitors like yourself, the house appears to be the thief's property. Strangers have no way of telling what really happened here.
Remember too that the thief is shrewd, tricky and perfidious. But he is not entirely confident; he knows that he stole the house and is living in something that doesn't belong to him. So when the rightful owner comes to him and says: "give it back, the thief complains that they want to take his home. Strangers will stand up in his defence, against the legitimate owners. A hue and cry will go up all around the world.
Then more years pass; by now both the owner and the thief have passed away. Nobody but the owner's descendants knows the truth, but who is going to listen to them. But the thief's grandsons are confident they are living in their own place. The inscription "shalom is already very old; it looks as if it has been there for ever. There are no witnesses, there are no documents and nothing that could prove a theft had been committed. That is just how the Jews stole our land.
And yet this is not the whole perfidy, only a small illustration, a hint or introduction to a full description of the Jewish character. The Jews have convinced the whole world to think as they do: in Jerusalem, in this primeval Palestinian, Muslim city, it is the thieves who are at home.
***
- I understand your sorrow, Said. But what do you think about the return of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians? I asked.
He looked at me as if I had lost my mind: That's a crumb, a scrap, offal, without meaning, an empty gesture. If you knew your history, you'd admit I'm right. What happened was that in 1948, the Jews drove us from our land in Haifa and Jaffa, in Tel Aviv and Nazareth. The world watched this lawlessness and raised no protest. The Jews made the legitimate owners homeless. Since then, we Palestinians have had to wander from Jordan, through Lebanon and Syria, to Europe and America. We have to live with strangers, although we know where we should be living. For over half a century, my nation has not had a roof over its head.
Moreover, in 1967 the Jews stole Jerusalem and the West Bank. I was born in the Old Town. My family comes from here. My father still lived in his own house. I live under foreign occupation.
- You will admit Said, that your father was a subject of the king of Jordan. There was no free Palestine in Jerusalem. You admit that the Jordanian armies bloodily suppressed the Palestinian uprising when you tried to wrest power from King Hussein.
He laughed as if I was to be pitied: And you will admit that Arabs and Muslims, and even Arab Christians, are closest to other Arabs, even if disputes and fights have broken out between us. If someone gave you the choice: live in Sweden, Japan or somewhere in Africa, you would choose Sweden, even though that isn't your country. You are a white Christian and so prefer to live among white Christians. That is simply how people are. Birds of a feather flock together. That is how the Almighty designed the world. Man is incapable of going against God's will.
The Jews handed back Gaza he returns to the subject at hand because they had to give it back. But I am deeply convinced that this is not the end. Eventually they will give us back the West Bank and they will return Jerusalem. I don't know when it will happen, because nobody can predict the future. But I know that it will come to pass. Otherwise there will never be peace; until then, the Jews will never be able to sleep confident of waking safely the next day.
I'll tell you another thing; no way will this be the end. Because one day, in ten years time, maybe in a hundred, the Jews will give us back Haifa and Tel Aviv. The legitimate owners will return to Jaffa and Ber Sheva, which once bore an Arabic name and will again. This land, all this land is ours and always was. For millennia. Nothing here belongs to the Jews and never did.
- Some years back an old Arab said to that Israeli writer that this was God's land I had no wish to argue.
- Adopting your logic, I could say that southern Spain, Sicily, Greece and the Balkans are God's land. Allah was praised in all of those places. Why does it have to be any different today?
***
Said made me mad; I hadn't been aware how easily I had become bogged down in his muddy logic.
- You are probably making a big mistake I said. You claim you know history and yet you forget about the times even before Islam and Jerusalem's mosques, older even than the history of the Arabs. Go out for a walk, my friend, stand before the Wailing Wall, and take a look at the city's true history.
He took a sip of tea, lit a cigarette; he had no doubt had to use these arguments in the past: Tell me one more thing. The Wailing Wall is the remains of the second temple, built over two thousand years ago. And since it was the second, then think logically the first must have been earlier and so even older. Tell me also about the ancient Jewish kingdom of David and Solomon. And now listen to my answer.
Do you think that when David built a Jewish state here, it was nobody's land at that time? Do you think that when Moses as is recorded in Jewish history brought the Jews here, they found a complete wilderness? Nonsense, you know full well that's not true.
Before the first Jews ever came to these lands, our ancestors, called the Canaanites lived here. The Jews' greatest enemies, the Philistines lived in Gaza. Since we are going so far back in history, you must learn the basic facts. Moses and David were conquerors, they settled on someone else's homeland. They came to a populous country; they took over foreign towns and villages. You have probably never read the Jewish history books. I have read them and I am only repeating to you now what is recorded in them.
We, the Arabs and our ancestors, were the first inhabitants of Palestine. Where will you find better proof than in the old books of our worst enemies? The Jews wrote thousands of years ago: Palestine is a subjugated land. It would be hard to find more veracious testimony.
***
The next thing Said tells me makes my skin crawl. Because although he talks such terrible nonsense, there is still some sense to it, a reflection of the past, an echo of what really once happened. Said is wrong, but at the same time is right. His reasoning works like a splinter under a suppurating nail.
- If you are so worried about Jewish property, give them back what they owned in your own country. Hand back their houses, shops and factories. Let them go overseas to Europe, from whence they came. Let them go home at last.
You don't want to give them back? Ah, now I've got you. Your monkey business is quite obvious to all. You gave them Palestine because you didnt want them in your country. You chased them away because they were just a nuisance. It wasn't the Arabs who wrote: "Dogs and Jews barred on café doors. It wasn't we who ordered them to wear pointed caps and sew the Star of David onto their shirts. It wasn't we who prepared them a Holocaust.
You should also know that I do not blame you for this, though I do not approve of spilling blood, violence, derision and insults. Indeed I understand why it had to be so. The Jews are a nation it is impossible to live with under one roof, the greatest filth, the frauds of all frauds and liars of all liars. You wanted rid of them from Spain, Germany, France and Poland. The Jewish nature perfectly justifies your need to do so.
Only tell me, why did you heap them on our heads? Why did you give in to all their demands? Did you feel guilty? If so, you should have paid them from your own coffers. You didn't have to dig into the Palestinians' pockets.
You did the Jews many wrongs. You drove them away, you murdered them because you could not live with them, the right of your existence could not allow you to proceed in any other fashion. But soon after, you became holy and god fearing. Anti-Semitism here, anti-Semitism there; you get indignant, you shout, you protest. Meanwhile the very word "anti-Semitism is false. We Palestinians are Semites too.
Because it's not a question of whether or not someone is "anti. If you left them in peace, they would destroy you, just as they are destroying my nation. You even had to protect your cafés from them. So don't be angry with us. Don't blame us that Palestinian mothers give birth to heroes and martyrs who prefer death and are prepared to detonate a bomb in the centre of a Jewish city. Those Jewish women and children who perish at such times are possibly innocent. But try to explain to a Shahid who was born in a Palestinian camp that suicide bombing is a crime. It is not! I understand these people. In Gaza, Nablus and Jericho, we die every day. Not once, but many times. From fear of military patrols. From the contempt we feel levelled at us at every step and which we experience in all contacts with Jews. From misery and humiliation. From unemployment. From Jewish bullets and rockets. We die constantly, because our life is a form of death.
Anyone from a refugee camp, from the Third World of the Gaza Strip (you must admit that Gaza is Third World, that even in black Africa it would be hard to find such poverty), who has sufficient faith or desperation and who knows he's not to blame for his fate, must take the Shahid path. In the end he has to say: I die several times a day, so merciful God permit me to die once, but with dignity and well. If God forbid some Jew came to take my shop, if he told me to get out of my house, I too would put the Shahid belt on. Even wild animals protect their nests and young.
***
Said terrified me, because he told me all this calmly, dispassionately. He was explaining things he had obviously already thought out, certain and invariable. But I had to ask: Since you dont believe in peace with Israel, tell me what you do believe in, Said.
He scratched his bristly cheek and thought for a moment.
- First I'll tell you what I do not believe in. I dont believe in peace between our two cultures, in agreement and useful cooperation between the East and West. You want proof? Look at Iraq, where the West has got bogged down for years, where it is bleeding, losing day in day out and where in the end it will disappear just as the Jews will disappear from our land. I do not believe in peace, because you have always come to us as conquerors, crusaders, as men who know better, have more, wish to tell others how to live, improve them and force them to fit your order.
And yet, think for a second, it's you who are dependent on us. You need Arab oil. Your civilization cannot exist without it, your cars will stop running, industry will come to a standstill, and the lights will go out in your cities. In a word without the Arabs, you are nobody. Even though you disdain us.
And the time will come when you will finally understand this. Or rather when we will talk some sense into you. You already fear our desperation today; a handful of martyrs can hit you so hard, as in New York or London. You no longer know how to fight, you have no values. You only have the money that is your whole power and the horizon of your thinking.
But you should also know that I do not believe in the Arab nations, or even in one Arab nation. Nationalism is your, European invention. You contaminated us with it and so its fruit had to be rotten. Look: the establishment of Arab states has always been accompanied by anger, aggression and hatred. Jordanians can't stand Palestinians, Lebanese fear Syrians and Arabs murder each other in Algeria and Morocco. No, nationalism has not worked here.
Neither do I believe in democracy, though I have to admit that for the West it may be a good solution. But since not a single democratic state has been established on our land for so many years, since we are ruled by dictators, such as Saddam recently in Iraq or Mubarak today in Egypt, this can mean only one thing democracy is not for us. Tough regimes are not good either, because they only look after their own, will sell out to anyone in order to hang on to their power and privileges. I wouldn't like to live in Jordan or Saudi Arabia, those rotten kingdoms on the American belt.
The one thing I believe in is Islam. Though I confess I am not a good Muslim. I dont pray too often, I don't like giving alms and I sometimes drink alcohol. But every day I see that only Islam works in our lives, only Islam helps us survive and brings hope and strength.
Look at the map of the world and you'll see how great the influence of Islam already is today. My brothers in Allah live in the Far East: in Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. They live in Kazakhstan, Kirgistan and Uzbekistan. Islam reigns over a considerable part of China. In Iran, Afghanistan and even in secular Turkey. Look to the West there we reach to the Atlantic. We are in Africa and even in your Europe. We are everywhere. And every day there are more and more of us; only Islam is winning so many new believers.
Yes, my friend, I believe in one, coherent and durable community of the faithful, an umma community of Islam, as in the times of the Prophet, even though we speak different languages in our everyday lives and read only the Koran in Arabic. I believe that just as one day the Jews will go back to Europe and America, so the Muslims will join up under one enlightened leadership.
I have faith that we will once again be able to build a caliphate. And I don't really care whether its capital is in Cairo, Baghdad, Kuala Lumpur, Kabul or even Karachi. Because where we will rule from has no meaning since we will be one. You say that the experiment of an Islamic state gave us the Taliban in Afghanistan. You fear them, but I don't have your fear. The Taliban were and went away. Islam remained.
And I am certain that we will rule. Add to the strength of all the Muslims in the world the power contained in Arab oil. Then add the courage of the Palestinian Shahids. Don't forget the martyrs who are every day perishing in Iraq. There will be more and more of them and your wounds will become ever more painful, until Muslims regain their due place in the world.
- Do you believe in a war between Islam and the rest of the world, Said?
- It doesn't have to be a war, though our destiny will surely not come to pass without one. It simply cannot be otherwise. And it will not even be fair payment for all we have put up with from you. I know that you are different from me and I understand that you may believe in something else. But such is my faith, that's how I see what has to happen. Belief is not a subject for debate, there's no way to determine who of us believes more strongly or more deeply. If I did not believe, my shop would have been in Jewish hands long ago. But it is not, and for me that is the most conclusive proof that I am right.
***
- Said I did not know how else to end his monologue so sell me this tiny Star of David.
His tone suddenly altered, he stopped ranting and again began to talk like the old Said from the first day of our acquaintance, when he had sold me copper saying that it was the purest silver: This tiny one on a blue shield? Don't you want a larger one, maybe in gold? Buy a little chain too and then you can wear it at once.
I didn't buy it.
I dropped in to Said's shop again the next day. I sat down under the wall hung with carpets, lit a cigarette, and eavesdropped as he haggled with a group of Russian tourists. He did not frown at me, did not look fierce. Again he explained the principles of good trade and his young assistant kept running for fresh tea.
When I told him that this evening was my last, because I was leaving the next day, he got up from his low stool more quickly than his considerable stomach would have liked, plunged his hand into a copper bowl and took out two beads: a brown one with an engraved cross and a blue scarab.
- For good luck he said.
- What do I need luck for, Said? I asked.
- So that you come back as quickly as possible. We will talk again. Maybe then I will convince you.
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* Every night, Israel Segal lies down on his side to sleep. It is not comfortable, but he cannot lie on his back or stomach or his body will be prone to immodest reflexes. That he explains is what the Law demands.
Israel Segal is 10 or maybe 12 years old, and has already experienced his first skirmish with God. It started trivially. His mother asked him to go and buy vegetables and he answered her back rudely, that she could go herself. Or, despite lying on his side, he was prone to immodest thoughts and dreams, in which girls appeared. After all, sin may also be unconscious and independent of one's will.
In a word Israel Segal had begun to sin.
Now he always falls asleep in fear.
In the morning, he opens his eyes, then he remembers he says a prayer of thanks for the new day and that God did not create him a woman.
He ties his shoelaces, always beginning with the right foot, because everything on the left, indeed everything that is left-handed, that has the adjective "left in its definition, is the Law tells us sinful and ungodly.
In the evening, he again lies down to sleep on his side and again his heart flutters with fear.
* We sat down in a bookshop near Yitzhak Rabin Square, in wicker armchairs parked quite close to the busy street. Israel Segal is now 61 years old and his face is recognized by the majority of Israelis. He smokes too much. He writes for the newspapers and hosts a popular television program about Israeli politics. He has written a book about his life. For some, it is a drama and despite the fact that the author is a man of success a diary without a happy end.
For others a work dictated by Satan.
Whoever reads Israel's biography commits a great, indelible sin.
* I believed says Israel that every night God took my soul. He weighed the sins I had committed during the day and even the sins committed only in my dreams. I believed that he could decide not to return me my soul and then I would not awake and so would die. Or maybe worse: I would get up, but it would turn out that I was a goy.
So every evening young Israel Segal traded with God. He swore an oath: Tomorrow I will help mother, I will do the shopping. I will not argue with my father. I will do this and do that. God, that is my offer, my final price. And You in return give me back my soul.
He awoke and the world looked just the same and Israel still had his soul. It seemed to him that God had agreed to this trade with a skinny Jewish boy.
- But what sort of God is this he sometimes thought with whom I can haggle about my soul like I would about a carrot in Cohen's shop?
Or maybe Israel was trading with someone who wasn't listening to him at all?
Maybe though this was inconceivable God wasn't interested in the sins of a Jewish boy with bright watery eyes, whose family had already so long ago returned to Jerusalem, some two hundred years earlier?
Or maybe God simply did not know about him, did not perceive him, even though he was supposedly all-seeing and omniscient?
Such thoughts made Israel angry with God. What sort of a God is it who leaves me all alone? The master of the world and creation knows about every worm and every small cloud, but does not see little Israel?
He tried to avoid such thoughts. But sometimes even the wisest rabbis are unable to control their thoughts, so what chance a young boy.
On several occasions, he sinned so badly that even a trading God, even an indifferent and sometimes very inattentive God should have punished him severely.
However, he did not punish him Israel awoke the same as on every other morning.
He became hysterical, was deadly terrified.
His mother asked: What is it, Israel? But he hadn't the courage to explain.
How to tell her: Mummy, It seems I simply don't like this God.
* I grew convinced he remembers that every thought, every movement and every word spoken by me was being watched. Recorded and evaluated by the Omniscient. I felt the eyes of the prophets burning into my back.
However neither God, nor the prophets he adds praise me, only threaten me with terrible punishments and shout at me. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. There must be some secret in this, since the Hebrew word "to believe is the same as "to fear.
- But on the other hand he adds faith explained why I am on this planet. I had a ready answer for everything, even unimportant or ordinary questions. My every step was scrutinised, my every thought weighed. I was like a plant in a greenhouse, protected from the wind and cold, always in the sun's rays.
Meanwhile, apart from anything else Israel feels that God does not pay as much attention to goys.
* It is Friday evening in 2005, but despite the strict rules concerning the Shabbat, hedonistic Tel Aviv is pulsating with nightlife: boys are in shorts and the girls wear rather too brief, colourful skirts and ingenious tattoos. Israel and I however are in another place and dimension. I imagine how 50 years ago, on a Friday evening he would go down the back streets of Mea Sharim to the synagogue on holy Jerusalem's Batei Varsha Street.
He has a short blond mop of hair and mischievous eyes the colour of watery ultramarine. He wears black knee-length trousers and black stockings. On his head he wears a yarmulke and an old-fashioned black fedora; the white tassels of a tallith hang below his black cloak.
Israel is walking. He's more than just walking! He levitates several centimetres above the uneven sidewalk of Mea Sharim, filled with a feeling of exceptional fulfilment. When he today thinks about that spiritual condition, it reminds him of a permanent high from hashish; it was happiness unbounded.
He has been chosen, like the pious nation of Israel was. Being chosen gives one strength and satisfaction.
On the way he meets men with shaven heads or women in calf-length skirts. But Israel does not notice these odd, immorally dressed people who disregard the strict norms of modesty.
For him they are as transparent as a pane of freshly polished glass. But also uninteresting and probably unimportant. They as the orthodox Jews say today in Mea Sharim are children stolen by the goys.
Israel flies along, sweating from the heat. He plunges into the crowd of bearded men and boys with their side curls, on their way to the synagogue from Rabbi Kuka Street and the neighbourhoods of Admon and Shivtei Israel.
* It is the second half of the 20th century, but these men and boys look like figures from some 18th-century print. Rachitic Hassids in wire spectacles, miraculously transferred from Drohobycz, Lubartów, Góra Kalwaria or Mińsk Mazowiecki.
All in black cloaks, long frock-coats, yarmulkes and fedoras, sometimes in fox caps, though in the stony backstreets of Mea Sharim, where no wind blows, the congealed air is as thick as cotton-wool, full of dust, heat and the heavy scent of goulash coming from the hot stoves cooking the Shabbat supper. Many will tell you that Mea Sharim is the last Jewish shtetl. Today, Israel believes that it is only a stage set and a sham.
The crowd in front of the synagogue becomes denser, garrulous and ecstatically engrossed in prayer, deep in pious concentration. Psalms and clapping can be heard. It is as if the prayer the Diaspora has addressed to the Creator for two thousand years has been answered. They are in Jerusalem!
Israel's family has lived in the holy city for two hundred years. But not only for this reason are the Segals considered the aristocracy of Mea Sharim. They have brought up many of Yeshiva's most illustrious students, many rabbis, mystics and commentators on the Talmud.
Israel, a ten-year-old boy, knows all about his family and is proud of it.
And so when on Friday afternoons he walks, almost flying, to the most important orthodox synagogue of this district of Jerusalem, he has as usual his older brother Dan by his side. They differ only in size, but apart from that they look the same, think the same, believe and feel the same.
For Israel, Dan is a guardian and teacher, a guide and authority.
Israel only has eyes for his brother.
* And yet as Israel well remembers his family had not always been so extremely orthodox. True, they observed the rules concerning all things kosher and attended the synagogue on the Shabbat and holy days. However one day, his mother stopped talking in Yiddish and even taught the younger son beautiful Hebrew. For many of their Mea Sharim neighbours, this was a serious abuse. Hebrew was after all the language of prayers and the Torah. They said that Mrs. Segal must be off her head. But Israel's mother not only wanted to be a Jew, but also a true Israeli.
Moreover she was very brave. Since she worked like the majority of women from very religious families when their men considered studying in yeshivas to be more important she could leave the Mea Sharim district without suspicion. Without letting on to her husband and neighbours, she borrowed books from libraries in Jerusalem's secular districts. She looked at modern Jews. It even got to the point where she occasionally read newspapers.
Next, she began dressing differently, almost like the women promenading on Ben Jehuda Street or drinking coffee in the cafés on Jaffa Street.
Then a beautiful dress became as important to her as Hebrew as a sign of identity.
It was his mother who wanted the boys to study more than just the Talmud. They must, she decided, learn mathematics and philosophy at a secular school; they must know what Shakespeare and Moliere had written. She persisted in this conviction for years. His father accepted the change.
My parents Israel remembers never forsook religion. But, gradually, slowly, by small, careful steps, they became religious Zionists.
His father resolved to serve in the army and even took part in elections. This meant that he recognised the secular state of Israel, created by people who tended to consider religion as being of secondary importance.
- In the Mea Sharim of my childhood Israel remembers one could get beaten up for such sacrilege; why, the state of Israel was to be created by the Messiah, who would come when the time was right. But my father decided that he would not be afraid.
The only trouble was that the Segals found it hard to make ends meet. And from his earliest years their elder son Dan, had by nature been a thinker and mystic. He adored spending long hours in the yeshiva and took no interest in the works of Shakespeare. He eventually became one of the brightest students of the Talmud. He was expected to make a great future for himself and so the commune funded his schooling.
Dan was barely a teenager, when he convinced his father: Let's forget all this Zionist nonsense and return to the Answer, the Source. Then our lives will improve.
And it happened just as he had foreseen. The greater sums of money given the Segals by the commune began to be sufficient for a quite decent standard of living.
* Israel always had his feet more firmly on the ground than his older brother. He preferred mathematical equations, concrete and calculable, to secret spiritual bursts of passion.
Dan took him to the yeshiva every day. He showed him the logic and beauty of the Talmud. Israel read it like a textbook on arithmetic. The Law fascinated him. Every verse of the Talmud provoked new interpretations. In the yeshiva, during debates with his colleagues, he felt like he was in an orchard; one had only to stretch out one's hand and pluck the fruit to learn something new. And Israel wanted to learn more and more.
The yeshiva is total freedom, a splendid anarchy. Different from secular schools, with their stiff division into lessons, bells and breaks. The authority of the teachers also lies in the fact that one may, indeed even should, argue with them.
In the yeshiva, boys learn in pairs and a rabbi watches over their disputes. They read the Talmud whenever they choose. They dispute when they want. They fall asleep when they feel like it. They dream when they feel the need. They can daydream whenever they so desire. They play in accordance with their will and can go home if they feel such a desire.
Israel says that he had not felt such liberty even during his studies at the Hebrew University.
* At the age of sixteen, he begins his studies at the famous Ponowicz Yeshiva outside Tel Aviv, a seat of learning as superb as the Madrasah in the Iranian city of Kum for Muslims, the Vatican University for Catholics, as noble as Oxford or Harvard.
Dan and Israel Segal are at the top of their classes in Ponowicz. And perhaps Israel, with his exact mind, is an even better student than his older brother?
Rabbi Harau Eliezer Shach lectures at Ponowicz. He is one of the most influential men in Israel, a great interpreter of the Law. He tells them how to live, explains what they should think about the world. His power is much greater than that of many a cabinet minister.
But rabbi Shach also encourages discussion and listens attentively to his pupils. He gently points out their errors. He says: Look and think for yourselves and please do not blindly agree with me.
The students adore him.
One day (Israel was then 19) Eliezer Shach assembles all the students on the Ponowicz courtyard. He speaks to them in a calm though loud enough voice to carry, but he is obviously upset.
- I recently heard he says that someone in Europe has written a book describing how men are descended from apes. His name is Freud. I have never before heard such a pyramid of absurdities. Why, as we all know, man appeared in the world as a result of the Creation. The Almighty gives us Jews a soul and life. Despite our sins and faults. So maybe rabbi Shach mocks and Israel and the hundreds of students of the famous Ponowicz Yeshiva laugh along with him it is Freud who is descended from the apes. But Me? You? Never and in no circumstances! Israel, please present us your reasoning why this Freud is so terribly mistaken.
Israel Segal overturns all that ungodly nonsense about man coming from monkeys.
He draws on useful interpretations of the Law and quotations from the Torah. He doesn't leave that fool Freud a leg to stand on and rabbi Shach is highly satisfied with so clear an argument.
* The holidays arrive and Israel is off to Jerusalem. He has no idea why the stupidity formulated by that Freud has stuck so strongly in his head. It is no doubt the result of an analytical mind: he has heard opinions that do not fit into any logic.
But Freud Eliezer Shach told the students had apparently even written a book about it. Dear God, how stupid! And yet how fascinating!
Israel, in stockings and knee-length trousers, a black gabardine, a yarmulke and fedora, is going to the library in a secular district of Jerusalem.
Nobody, even his beloved brother, is aware of this expedition. He is afraid, because he knows that he is committing a great sin. But his curiosity is even greater.
The librarian is a distinguished looking but rather shrivelled elderly lady. She can hardly conceal her laughter when Israel asks for the book by "this Freud" about people descended from apes. But she is friendly and helpful and in no way wishes to offend the young Hassid.
- It seems to me she explains it was written by an English naturalist, Charles Darwin. Sigmund Freud studied other matters. If you want, I can you lend his books.
- What does it matter: Freud or Darwin? Israel asks aggressively. But he is no longer so very confident that rabbi Eliezer Shach knows everything.
The lady librarian smiles all the time.
He sits down in the reading-room and opens the book "On the origin of species. There is a print on the cover sheet depicting a bearded man, serious and religious looking. He looks out at Israel with fiery, wise eyes. No naturalist, dreamer, fabulist, goy or Englishman could look like that.
Charles Darwin looks just like a true Hassidic religious leader.
Israel stares at that print a long time; on that first day he doesn't read a single sentence.
Why, this Darwin he thinks could be rabbi Shach's brother. And he had written such a thick work, thicker than many a Jewish book. You don't write books that thick on your knee and they can't contain only utter nonsense. There must be something to these people and monkeys. One can't just reject it out of hand.
The librarian says that the book "On the origin of species ends with a hymn to God the Creator of us all.
* He virtually moved in to that library's reading-room. The shrivelled librarian continually offers him new titles. Every page of the book is stored away in his brain. What a lot of new and strange matters will need to be discussed with rabbi Shach.
The holidays are coming to an end. There is time for one last book. It is written by a German, Frederick Nietzsche.
Israel sits at the table and reads hurriedly. He has already got to page 28. And there it is written: "God is dead.
He slides off his stool, his fedora rolls off somewhere. The old librarian thinks something has happened to the boy, that he has fainted, passed out or maybe had a cerebral haemorrhage.
Israel comes round with the feeling that he no longer has a soul. Nothing will ever be the same again. He has fallen from such a height that it is hard to even imagine. He doesn't know what he is here for, doesn't know the answer to any question. He has somewhere mislaid the mystic, beautiful logic of the Talmud. His faith has gone, the Mystery has disappeared. Never again will he fly above the sidewalks of Mea Sharim.
In one moment, Israel has ceased to be happy. Darwin and Nietzsche have hacked an enormous hole in his heart, which he tells me to this day nothing and nobody can patch up.
He leaves the library with his head uncovered.
In the yeshiva he tells rabbi Shach: I am leaving.
Eliezer Shach can't believe his ears.
- You told us to raise questions Israel explains. You told me to look for answers, to dig deep and find the essence of the matter, to throw off my shell, raise the cover. Please believe that I have only done what you ordered.
Rabbi Shach asks: Why?
Israel answers: What does God care whether or not we light our lamps on the Shabbat? Maybe thousands of years ago that was considered work, which should not be carried out on a holy day. But today it's only the pressing of a button. And we proceed as if nothing has changed, as if the Creator had really forbidden the use of light on Shabbat evenings.
Tell me, what interest is it of God's whether I tie the laces of my right foot first?
What could God possibly care?
God is an abstract, the heavens, holiness, and perfection, not the slavery of everyday routine.
It's your fault he concludes that I'm leaving. You told me to think, but you didn't say that a wall existed a border to my thinking. And behind that wall is something I have to see.
* If Israel had been more than 19 years old then, he would no doubt have asked rabbi Shach: What does God care whether I sleep on my side? Why rabbi, are the unconscious, uncontrolled reflexes of my body a sin, and not the will of the Creator?
But he wasn't so bold back then and most surely did not know how to raise such an issue.
- Years later I realised that my body was being subjected to a Chinese torture he says. I was taught that just to imagine a woman, listening to a woman singing or even a woman's voice was a sin, because it was said a woman's voice passes through the vagina. I was 15, 16, 17 years old; exactly the time when I was studying those sections of the Talmud that concern women, their physiology, and even sexuality. I had to raise questions and look for answers, I had to discuss women with my colleagues, and yet I was not supposed to imagine them!
I was a normal boy; half the time my thoughts were occupied by girls. And I was alone with the problem; there was no one I could confide in about my desires, fantasies or first fascinations, because they were sins almost as terrible as murder. I was scared to discuss these things, because I was certain that my closest friend, sincerely concerned for my soul, would report me to the rabbi.
Before going to sleep, I would soak my hands in boiling water, I would bind them with straps, and they would still wander under the covers, in defiance of my will. I felt like a criminal, sinful, disgusting. I couldn't help myself, because even if I managed to keep my promise and fell asleep with my hands above the blankets, when I awoke in the morning the bedding would be soiled by wet dreams.
Before going to sleep I would speak to God, just as I had in my childhood, when I haggled with him for my soul in return for good deeds. I would ask: "What's the point of this game, why do I have to experience something like this?" I never got an answer.
I also left Ponowicz because my body was behaving like that of any normal teenage boy.
* He no longer wore a yarmulke and hat, but still wore his stockings and knee-length trousers, a black gabardine and a bright shirt. He couldn't buy any other clothes because he hadn't the money. Passers-by stared at him like a madman: a sort of half-baked Hassid, crazy, a meshugana.
He could not look to his family for understanding, because his beloved brother, soon to be recognized as a rabbi, and under his brother's influence the rest of the family, began treating Israel as if he never existed. He understood many years later that there was pure hatred behind this: sometimes when a Hassid abandoned his religion, the family would carry out a funeral ceremony, go into mourning and thus announce to the world that in their eyes, their son or brother had died. Dan refused him even the right to this symbolic but dignified death. Years later, Israel would publicly declare that his brother had carried out a Shoah on him had exterminated him.
He sleeps in buses, waiting for the morning ride to the bus terminals. He snacks in bars. He wanders the streets aimlessly and without direction. The people in cafés, the shop displays, the crowded beach at Tel Aviv for Israel it's all the purest, inconceivable science-fiction. He himself is like E.T.: naive, amazed by everything, an exotic looking visitor from some distant planet.
In the Ponowicz Yeshiva, he was the best of the best; he amazed everyone with his knowledge, erudition and debating skills. Today that knowledge is of no use to him, no one is interested in verses of the Talmud learnt by heart. Israel is very frightened, because he knows nothing and no one needs him.
- It was as if I had got into a time machine he remembers. In one day I jumped from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. I wanted to get to know all the people in the cafés, shops and streets. I wanted as quickly as possible to stop being a Jew and become an Israeli. But people avoided me. I didn't know why. I no longer had the omniscient Creator watching over me or the prophets watching my back. I couldn't consult the rabbis. I felt completely deserted and alone.
I wanted to talk to someone, but to whom? He eavesdropped on passers-by and had no idea what or who they were talking about. And he even found that he simply couldn't understand their language. For many months he had no one to talk to. His archaic Hebrew, learnt at home from the books his mother brought him, is perhaps a more beautiful language, but completely useless on the street.
When he resolves to join the army, his colleagues on the bus to the barracks suggest: Israel, pray with us.
He thinks they are deceived by his already threadbare black Hassidic gabardine, so he feels some explanation is due: I do not pray, I have lost my faith.
The boys laugh "to pray" is street slang for "playing cards".
And though he was ridiculed throughout his service in the army, it was this institution that gave him an entry ticket to the secular world. Though this secular world was exceptionally cruel to Israel. Years later he sees that he was shunned and despised because for many Israelis he was a cast-off symbol: a dirty, chattering, orthodox Jew, an apprehensive little fellow indelibly branded by the Diaspora and Holocaust, a shy antithesis of the proud, strong Israeli.
* Dan phoned Israel when some 28 years had passed. He was already a respected rabbi, the masterful, influential leader of Mea Sharim, maybe even more famous and respected than Eliezer Shach. He said one word: Return.
Israel replied that he would not return and Dan said: I know that you are going to die within the year. I am giving you a last chance.
But it was Israel's father that died. He was already very tired and sick and spent his last days in a hospital bed. He asked Dan: Bring me my beloved son Israel.
Dan replied: You never had a son named Israel.
On his last evening, old Segal dragged himself from bed, tore the intravenous drips from his veins, ran to the door, pulled at it and shouted: I want to go to Israel.
Dan, as Israel was later told, did not allow his father to leave the room. His father fell to the floor. The end.
* Dan did not let Israel attend his father's funeral. Gossip spread around Mea Sharim and many considered that Dan had this time gone too far.
Our rabbi may choose not to speak to him it was whispered he may curse his own brother. Rabbi Dan's children may not know that they have an uncle (Israel's nephews only learnt of his existence from their peers at school: What, you didn't know that your uncle appears on television and is very famous?). But even one who does not exist has the right to attend a parent's funeral. So when his mother died, Dan did not protest Israel's attendance at the ceremony.
So he went back to Mea Sharim. I felt like in a ghetto he says. A stranger among Hassids, who look at me the very same way as years earlier I had looked at the "children stolen by the goys. They all spoke in Yiddish, the language my mother had rejected. It seemed to me that now she was dead, they were already taking from her that which she had loved so much. If she could, she would have told them: Remember me in Hebrew. That is my language.
Up till then, the decision to lead a secular life had been my own private, intimate business. But then I realised that since for them I had died, I would have to carry out an act of purification on myself. I came home and told my wife: I will write a book.
* Sometimes Israel receives anonymous cards: "I am a Yeshiva student, I read your book.
At such moments he feels like that old, dried up librarian who had smilingly handed him Charles Darwin's book.
Sometimes people will suddenly ask him: Maybe you could hang a mezuzah in your house, Israel? And what could it hurt to start eating kosher meals again?
Israel knows that his brother, one of the greatest religious authorities in Israel, is behind such suggestions.
There are sometimes even attempts at corruption behind these requests: Let at least a drop of traditional Jewishness, a few small Yiddish gestures into your life and you will be rewarded, you will get this or that. At such times he feels an almost physical fear. But not his. He feels Dan's fear. The great religious leader of the Mea Sharim Hassids cannot induce his younger brother to see the error of his ways.
These attempts at corruption enrage him: They can't call me a madman because I haven't been swallowed up by the secular world. They can't say that I am a loser, because I still remember all I learnt in Ponowicz. They know that if I had stayed with them, I would today be a famous rabbi, a very wealthy and influential man.
For forty years they have failed to comprehend my decision. It seems to me they can't bear it.
But this short phone call after 28 years. This request in the form of blackmail: Come back, because if you don't you will die. What did Dan really phone for? Did the great rabbi Segal's soothsaying conceal the dregs of some brotherly love and concern?
* I left says Israel because I can't be a hypocrite. I stopped thinking that I was chosen and thereby obtained my freedom.
The only trouble is that freedom cannot fill the emptiness Israel felt forty years ago: however, he walks the earth instead of flying above it dressed in stockings and a Hassidic gabardine, as if in some narcotic's joyful trance.
But neither the fame of being on television nor the book the whole of Israel is talking about can patch the hole left in his heart. In this sense, it is impossible to completely break with the past. There will forever be something missing. Freedom is not the same as a secret, certainty and happiness.
To the question: Israel, do you feel yourself to be a man of secular Israel? He answers: I don't know. I walk the borderline between two worlds. I don't belong and never will fully belong to either of them.
- Why do you say that Mea Sharim is no shtetl?
- The shtetl slowly progressed but Mea Sharim retreats into the distant past. There were Yeshiva students in the shtetl, but also tailors, shoemakers, hucksters. Non-Jewish neighbours lived alongside us, different, often unfriendly and dangerous. But the intellectual and in some way the social distance was I believe much smaller than between today's Israel and Mea Sharim; and teenage boys, both in the shtetl and outside it, had to go to sleep with their hands above the bedclothes. Both groups lived in real time, had the same limits and restrictions. Israel is the 21st century. Mea Sharim is the fifteenth.
- And do you ever go back to Mea Sharim?
Israel smiles nostalgically, ponders and in a low voice replies: sometimes, when I'm driving, I go the long way round in order to see the place.