Staying at Ruth’s was always going to be interesting. When did I last see her? 197something, maybe 1975. That was O level year, and I really can’t remember her past that point. Then again, I can’t remember much past that point. 1975. 1976. Don’t suppose it matters that much. I haven’t seen her for a long time.
She’s been here since 1982 and, part from a brief period in Belgium – no, me neither – she’s been here. It’s her story, not mine, but briefly, she felt the pull of the Jew. In England she felt a bit of an outsider and when she came here she didn’t. Her family, her parents, were / are left wing, active. She’s from Wembley, but this is now her home.
Like her family, Ruth is also left wing. She supports Meretz, a left-wing, social-democratic and green political party that was originally formed in 1992, and buys Ha’aretz, a left wing newspaper. Don’t even ask what she thinks of Netanyahu and the West Bank and all that. She loves Israel but she doesn’t love – or understand – all that. It’s not a contradiction here because living here you understand that you have to live life and deal with life, not write a social media post about it.
Ruth’s been on the Moshav since 2006. Together with her husband, Mike, she bought a plot of land – or rather, leased it from the government because that’s how it works, and built a house, a rather lovely three-storey, four-bedroom house with open plan kitchen and smart lighting and a nice black cat called Keenan. She’s invested time, effort and love. This is where the kids grew up and where their family became a family. Tragedy struck in 2014, when Mike died. Testicular cancer. This is the house Mike built, the house where Mike died.
Ruth’s got three kids. The two younger ones are doing national service in various ways. One is involved in a school project and the other, who’s big on sport, is doing something else. But there are also guns. Of course there are also guns. The oldest is 23 and has just finished all that and has just left for her gap year equivalent in Melbourne. The two that are here come home most weekends, but now mainly it’s just Ruth. Keenan makes his presence felt – the arms of the sofas bear witness to that – but it’s a big house with three storeys and three empty bedrooms and lots of echoes. But it’s home. And the Moshav is home.
The Moshav, we should say, is big. 250 families. It’s like a small town with streets and houses and a school, a shop and a synagogue. It has its own train station. The houses, it’s funny, it’s like Laughton Lodge. The original houses are small, wooden, modest. But then, a few years ago, the Moshav expanded and the new houses are a different demographic altogether. Big, self-builds. Impressive. And the people are obviously different. Not the pioneers of old, but kinda wealthy middle-class people looking for a lifestyle for them and their kids. And, of course, there’s the familiar hierarchy of whose been there longest and all that stuff.
There are a few of these Moshavs knocking around. Ruth’s Moshav backs on another Moshav which, unsurprisingly, isn’t as nice as hers. But you can see it’s a lovely place to live, a good place to bring up a family. It’s 20 minutes from Tel Aviv by train and the trains are good, curiously they come when they say they’re going to come. Not sure that’s ever going to catch on.
We spent most of the morning walking around the Moshav, people getting on with life, dogs running around, a little chat with the bloke in the shop. Just people getting on with life. It was, after all, Tuesday. I might be on holiday, but no one else is. The sound of kids came from the school. We stopped off in the library – oh, air con – and had a chat there, and passed projects in mid-build. To someone who spent a couple of years living on a community, it was sweetly familiar.
Then we saw a small, obviously old, wooden structure that looked like a wooden watchtower. Well, it was a wooden watchtower. It was only about 12 – 15 feet high, but it was what it was. There was a plaque on it talking about how the moshav was established, first as a Kibbutz, in 1938, and there were some grainy black and white pictures of men – men who looked like men. You know that famous picture of the construction workers of the Empire State Building taking their lunch sitting on a girder? They look grainy and grimy, proper men though they’re probably in their early Twenties. These people looked like that.
The first houses went up almost overnight, the watchtower making sure that they did. So, I asked. Apart from time, what’s the difference between what these blokes in the pictures are doing to what’s going on in the West Bank? It’s grim now, but in 80 years time will there be a Ruth showing a Jed around an established town there?
Ruth recommended a book – “My Promised Land” by Ari Shavit, a journalist for Ha’aretz. What I’ve read so far, it’s fascinating. “If need be, I’ll stand by the damned. Because I know that if it wasn’t for them, the state of Israel would not have been born… They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter and my sons to live.” About the West Bank he recognises a harsh reality “If Israel does not retreat from the West Bank, it will be politically and morally doomed, but if it does retreat, it might face an Iranian-backed and Islamic Brotherhood-inspired West Bank regime whose missiles could endanger Israel’s security.”
Finally… “What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge”.
Sitting in a roadside café in Tel Aviv – and more of that later – it doesn’t feel like a life on the edge. It feels like what it is – a lively, modern, cosmopolitan city. Coffee in a thousand guises, freshly squeezed orange and a croissant. In so many ways, it’s a city we’ve been in a thousand times.
But sitting there and thinking of Shavit’s last quote, it’s hard not to recall Orson Welles in The Third Man: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”.