The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide. Susan Nathan

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       2 Death of a Love Affair

      Inside the information pack from the Jewish Agency office in London was a badge and an accompanying letter: ‘Wear this as you walk off the plane to begin your new life as an Israeli citizen,’ the instructions stated. So on 10 October 1999, as I made my way down the flight of steps onto the tarmac of Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion international airport, I had a badge pinned to my chest bearing the slogan: ‘I’ve come home’.

      The thought that I and the hundreds of other new immigrants arriving each week on El Al flights from all over the world were reclaiming a right that had lain dormant for two thousand years did not strike me as strange. For the fuel that brought me late in life to Israel as a new immigrant, with only a couple of suitcases of belongings with me, was a dream I had secretly harboured since my childhood. The object of my desire was to make aliya, the Hebrew word for ‘ascent’, an idea that in returning to Israel a Jew is fulfilling a divinely ordained mission.

      At the age of fifty I was leaving behind my home in Wimbledon, South London, two grown-up children, Daniel and Tanya, a recently failed marriage and my work as an Aids/HIV counsellor. Other than these attachments, not much stood in my way: Israeli law entitles me and every other Jew in the world to instant citizenship if we choose to live in Israel. There are no visa applications, points systems or lengthy residency procedures. As a Jew I had a right to Israeli citizenship by virtue of my ethnicity alone. The Jewish Agency in London had been able to process my application for Israeli citizenship in just a week, and it made sure the immigration process was as pain-free as possible: my flight ticket was paid for, and accommodation was provided while I found my feet in the Promised Land. The only hesitation on my part was a reluctance, when confronted by an official issuing my Israeli identity card, to adopt a Hebrew name. My friends suggested I become either Shashana or Vered—the names of two flowers—but at the last minute I decided to stick with Susan.

      I am not sure I can identify the exact moment I became a committed Zionist, but I do know that a single childhood incident changed the direction of my life, and my understanding of what it was to be a Jew. I was eleven years old and on an outing with some girls from my boarding school to nearby High Wycombe, one of the many commuter towns that ring London. Browsing through the shelves of a small bookshop in one of the backstreets, away from the other girls, I stumbled across the most horrifying picture book. As I leafed through its pages I found photo after photo of emaciated corpses piled high in pits, of men ripping out gold fillings from teeth, of mountains of hair and shoes. At such a young age I was not aware that these were pictures of the Holocaust, an event that was still fearsomely present in the imaginations of Jews around the world fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. But the awfulness of the images transfixed me.

      I learned the story behind these photographs from my parents shortly afterwards, so beginning my compulsive interest in the Holocaust and Jewish history. The following year, 1961, after I had moved to a new boarding school in Buckinghamshire, the trial of the Gestapo leader Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. I read the newspapers every day, appalled by the accounts of the Final Solution, Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. I also recall weekends spent poring over copies of the Jewish Chronicle in my parents’ home, reading in the personal columns the notices from individuals and families still searching for relatives in Europe they had been separated from for as much as two decades. These heart-rending messages were an uncomfortable reminder that the legacy of loss and destruction wrought by the concentration camps was continuing. My exposure to the Holocaust—and my new understanding that millions of Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis—launched me on an ever wider quest for knowledge: not only of what had happened to its victims, but also of what had led to such barbarity.

      My own family, I was soon aware, had only narrowly escaped—by a quirk of destiny—the tragedy that had consumed so many others. My father’s parents, before they met, were refugees from the pogroms in Lithuania in the 1880s, fleeing separately to Odessa where each hoped they might catch a ship to Hamburg and a new future in Germany. But when they arrived at the port they, and many other refugees, found the ship full and so were forced to travel on the only other vessel, bound for Cape Town in South Africa. As we now know, their fates and their children’s were sealed by that missed boat: instead of finding themselves caught up in the rise of European fascism, they watched the horrific events unfold from the safe distance of Cape Town. My father was, however, in Europe at the outbreak of war. He had left South Africa in the late 1920s, travelling streerage class on a boat bound for Ireland, a penniless but brilliant medical student. He enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was mentored by Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, the chief rabbi of Ireland and the father of Israel’s sixth president, who helped him become a passionate Zionist. By the time Nazism was on the rise in Germany my father was a leading surgeon in London, where he met my mother, a nurse. They spent the war itself tending to the injured in Tilbury docks in Essex, one of the most heavily bombed places in Britain.

      If my family had survived the war unscathed, the plight of the many who had not touched me deeply. As with many others, the story of the Exodus—as told by novelist Leon Uris—shaped my perception of the tragedy that had befallen my people. I read of the ship that left Europe in July 1947, its decks choked with Holocaust survivors in search of sanctuary in what was then Palestine; of the refugees who tried to jump ship and reach the shores of the Promised Land; of the decision of the British to send the 4,500 refugees to internment camps in Cyprus because they had agreed to limits on Jewish immigration to avoid further antagonising the local Palestinian population and neighbouring Arab countries; and of the horrifying eventual return of the ship and its Jewish refugees to Germany. I was outraged by the thought that British soldiers—ruling Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations—could have acted with such callousness. My alienation from my country, Britain, began from that point on.

      The middle classes exercised a subtle, sophisticated discrimination against Jews in post-war Britain which was apparent enough to make me increasingly aware of my difference. There were the comments about my ‘funny name’—my maiden name is Levy. I heard tales that disturbed me about the clubs that excluded Jews as policy. Among my parents’ friends there were worried conversations about the ‘quotas’ on Jewish children that might prevent their offspring from being admitted to a good school. And my mother, who was born a Protestant but converted to Judaism after marrying my father, would tell of how everyone in her family apart from her own mother disowned her for choosing to marry a Jew.

      During my childhood, at the rural boarding schools outside London where most of my time was spent, I felt as if I were wearing a yellow star, as if my Jewishness was a visible stain to the teachers and other pupils. These were demonstratively Christian schools, with chapel services and morning prayers. I was aware of my vulnerability, too: out of hundreds of children, only four others were Jewish in the senior school I attended. I swung between contradictory emotions. On the one hand I feared appearing different, and on the other I wanted to proudly own that difference. Although I did not have the courage to refuse to attend morning prayers, I resolutely kept my mouth closed during the hymns. It was a very isolating experience: I felt outside the consensus, subtly but constantly reminded of my difference. This is, I think, a common experience for Diaspora Jews, but one little appreciated by Israeli Jews who were born and raised in a state where they comprise the majority.

      My growing distance from British society was reflected in an ever greater attachment, if only emotionally, to Israel. I was raised on stirring stories of the great and glorious Jewish state. For non-Jews it is perhaps difficult to appreciate what an enormous impact the creation of the state of Israel had on us. It reinvented our self-image, anchoring our pride in a piece СКАЧАТЬ