It’s Friday and Friday here is the first day of the weekend. You spend the daytime preparing for Shabbat, getting the shopping in, doing the weekend chores that need to be done.
“You know what I miss most about living in England?” Antony says to me. “Sundays. We don’t really have a weekend here. There’s no time to relax and do Sunday stuff, the gardening, hanging around, relaxing, whatever. Friday is all about preparing for Shabbat, then there’s Shabbat and then Sunday we’re back to work”.
“It’s ironic” I say. “Shabbat is supposed to be all about stopping working, switching off the phone and relaxing. Taking some time to think and consider, to breathe. But because of Shabbat, there’s no time to relax”.
We both laugh, and make the joke about Jews not doing irony.
Just outside Efrat in Gush Etzion is a shopping centre. A regular normal recognisable shopping centre like out-of-town shopping centres everywhere. A car park, supermarket, shops, and it’s the same as any shopping centre on a Saturday morning except that to get there we go through the security gate and across the roundabout where you can’t turn right because that’s the way to the Badlands.
There are wire fences all around and what looks like a small watchtower just outside the car park. To me it looks so oppressive, so intimidating but I think I’m the only one who can see it. These things now are so normalised that it’s just there. Stopping at the security gate is just like stopping at a traffic light. Or at the security gates in any gated community.
Take away the fences, the wires, the gates, the guards, the watchtower, the guard with gun at the entrance and it’s just like anywhere else. Inside the supermarket people do supermarket things.
Everything is here in, more or less, the same place as everything in every other supermarket. The fruit and veg at the front, the meat and fish counters at the back, aisles of goods from jars of pesto to nappies to row after row of red and white wine. In the spirits section, there’s a bottle of gluten-free vodka.
Most of the people in the supermarket are from Efrat, and from the accents most seem to be either Brits or Americans. Noticeable – to me – are an Arab couple with their kids.
“They come to shop here like everyone else” says T, “But we can’t go to their villages or even drive down their roads because it’s not safe”.
Why you’d want to go to their villages, I’m not sure. But I get the point.
It’s such a strange place, the mundane normality of the supermarket and the crashing oppression of the fences. We’re in their place and they can come to our place, but we can’t go to their place. On the way back, we turn out of the car park.
As we stop at the give way lines, T pointed to the left.
“Just there, that’s where the three Israeli boys were kidnapped and murdered in 2014”.
“Yes, I know” I replied as Antony turns right to go home.
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Later, I met a group of old schoolfriends who live here, people I haven’t seen for over 40 years. Names from the past, people whose names I remember but that’s all. They all live here, some since 1982, some a little later and it’s a curious thing, but they don’t see each other, they haven’t stayed in touch. We’re all here, all Jews, Jews with history in common but little else. Just like everyone else in this country.
Like I seem to do with everyone I meet these days, I asked them how they found living here, how they justified it, whether they felt vulnerable.
Lovely Ruth – who I’ve spoken to about all this a lot – with her Leftist pleas for justice and equality, talks about the need for a Jewish state but tops it off with a liberal dose of Jewish guilt. The view nearest to mine.
“We’ve got to have a Jewish state but it has to be democratic. We’ve got to be fair to the Palestinians”. Ruth tears herself up with the twists and contradictions of her position, but is also sure that peace is possible, compromise is possible, a way forward is possible, if only there’s the desire. No one I’ve spoken to here, regardless of where they’re from, is a Netanyahu supporter. The Palestinians all hate or distrust Abbas (motherfucker). As ever, we say things like “It’s the politicians that get in the way” and “People just want to get on with their lives”. Ruth and I talk like we’re on the way back from our evening class in “Liberalism For Beginners”.
Someone else is much more the pragmatist. He also comes from the left-ist viewpoint, but then when his daughter moved to a disputed part of Jerusalem that’s over the green line, he moved to be near her. Family comes first. Another one has long gone religious. Seriously religious. There’s no questions here, no uncertainties. It’s Israel. What do you mean how do I justify it?
That view is undoubtedly the clearest, the cleanest and the most straightforward. It’s also the view furthest from mine. It’s unquestioning and absolute.
There is, as ever, a middle ground. Or, if not exactly middle, a nuanced position. As Facebook so smartly figured out way back in 2007, you can be “In a relationship” or “Not in a relationship” – but nothing is quite as interesting as “It’s complicated”.
This land is ours. It always has been and always will be. Far from being colonial invaders, we’re the indigenous people. Our history is here, our heritage is here, our home is here. It’s our land and it was stolen from us and now we’re back. All the chat about 1948, 1967, 19whatever, it doesn’t matter.
So take that and add a degree of real world pragmatism and human understanding. It says “We have to live with the arabs, we have to get along. We can share the land, but we have to accept each other’s existence, each other’s presence.”
It’s a religious view in the sense that it says the Bible is a historical document rather than the Andrew Lloyd-Webber songbook – you know, something a bit more meaningful than Joseph and his technicolour dreamcoat and all that. It’s a more thoughtful view than the ‘seriously religious’ friend because it understands that, while the roots of life are back then, the actuality of life is the here and now.
We talk about Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem and he really cares about Rachel’s tomb. Rachel is part of the story of his life, she’s the reason why he’s here. She’s the reason why he is. If he can’t live in the land of Rachel’s tomb, what left is there? His belief and faith is pure and unassailable.
“That’s the crux” I say to him. “People like you have this belief coursing through your veins. It is the stuff in your veins. People like you can’t see things any other way. And people who don’t see things that way, can’t and won’t ever understand”.
Later, I say to Ruth “You can’t argue with that. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I don’t care about Rachel. She’s dead. She won’t mind. If we want to move forward we have to stop looking back”.
She agrees. We agree. And we order another glass each.
But right here, right now, my liberal attempts at pragmatism don’t make any sense. I wouldn’t dispute for a minute that the Jews need a place to call their own. History has shown time and again – and again and again – that sooner or later the Jewish population of any country is going to get schtupped. They’ll get blamed for something, persecuted, attacked and thrown out. If they’re lucky. It’s simply naïve to think otherwise. It doesn’t matter how secure they feel, how established they are, how integrated and assimilated they are, sooner or later it’s all going to go tits up. It’s never not happened. And what’s going on in the UK with the Labour Party and Corbyn and all that shows how precarious it all is, how it could happen again.
If Corbyn gets in, we’re going to get schtupped. It’ll make 2014, when people got attacked on the street for “looking Jewish”, when kosher sections in supermarkets got destroyed, look like a hiccup. And if Corbyn doesn’t get in, we’ll get blamed like we’re already getting blamed for every story that shows him up to be the antisemite he clearly is.
If you’d said to me five years ago – two years ago – that there’d be a debate in the House of Commons on antisemitism, I’d have said you were mad. If you’d have said that there’s be demonstrations in Parliament Square, if you’d have said that one of the two major political parties in the UK would have spent all summer – all summer – talking about antisemitism, I’d have said you were mad.
So I wouldn’t dispute for a minute that the Jews need a place to call their own. But if I don’t care about Rachel’s tomb, if the Bible doesn’t speak to me, how can I justify that place being here? Why shouldn’t it be somewhere far away from everything like Paraguay? It could be a nice island, Ibiza maybe.
When the conversation about the establishment of Israel first came up, there were – seriously – two other locations suggested: Uganda and (my favourite) the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in USSR in Birobidzhan, deep in the heart of Siberia, near Inthemiddleoffuckingnowherestan . Really. Birobidzhan was, apparently, Stalin’s idea – the ultimate Jewish ghetto. The Nazis apparently suggested a bit of Madagascar…
It’s all nonsense. If the Jews are going to have a homeland, it’s got to be Israel. And, as the by now old cliché has it, the more the Corbyn Left complain about Israel, the more they demonstrate the need for it.
So, about this anyway, the religious guys are right – all shades of them. If there’s going to be an Israel, it has to be here. It’s Rachel who has brought us here. This is our land. Our spiritual land, our physical land, our historical land. And if we accept that, surely we’ve got to be where Rachel’s tomb is. But that’s in Bethlehem. And that’s in the West Bank. And we’ve seen what that’s like. if we accept that, surely we’ve got to be where Abraham is. But that’s also in the West Bank, in Hebron, the most dangerous place in the whole place.
If this is our historic land, all of it is our historic land. As much Gush Etzion as the cosmopolitan cafes and cool beaches of Tel Aviv. If we don’t invoke the Bible, if we don’t care about Rachel’s tomb, why are we here at all? If it’s just land we want, a land for the Jews to feel safe from a world that has historically persecuted them, does it matter where it is as long as it’s safe and secure?
But it is here. And already I can feel myself going round in circles. Just like everyone else.