In the year before Tel Aviv’s centenary, large parts of the city are loud with construction. The first modern Jewish city, Tel Aviv was founded in 1909, but the neighbouring port city, Jaffa, now coerced into uneasy cohabitation, is, by comparison, ancient. Parts of Jaffa too are being redesigned in the lead-up to the centenary celebrations. In the old quarter it is spotless, the mottled pale stone pavings rubbed smooth by centuries of footsteps, the densely packed, small, stone buildings and narrow alleys and archways a network of boutiques, art galleries and jewellery showcases. But all the time in the background rage the saws and shouts and crash of construction.
It is thirty years since I first encountered this place, its noisy chaotic shuk, blind beggars rattling a coin in a tin can, all part of the story that told me where I was from. Now, at the age of forty, I have lost most of this story of the past, and – though I know it’s a cliché – I have come back, as lost Jews often do, to try to figure out who and what I am.
My young cousin Klil has offered me a place to stay, a base without obligation or expectation – he neither feeds me, nor calls me for an account, nor rearranges his life for me, and in turn expects nothing from me. His apartment building in Jaffa has been condemned; outside, the street has been torn up for the new light railway, but he’s not been evicted yet.
Each morning I go out into the heat and traffic of Sderot Yerushalayim where it runs past Old Jaffa, and walk through the market to Abulafia’s for a pastry, and on up to the square for coffee. I pass the enclosed courtyard of an empty house that rustles with an endlessly agitated colony of fruit bats, wondering each time who it belongs to and why it is uninhabited. The tourists don’t arrive until midday, and in the mornings the square is deserted except for one man setting out napkin dispensers and salt shakers on the cafe tables, where I sit with coffee, wondering how I have come to be here again.
I know the risks: reverently touching the ancient stones of Jerusalem’s Old City, or visiting the Western Wall, or seeing the outrage of the Qalandia checkpoint – epiphanies of Messianic fervour are two a penny here, but even so, to return again seems a compulsion, something I can’t resist.
Any crisis can serve as an excuse for a Jew to head off to Israel – the end of a relationship, loneliness, middle-age angst, grown children leaving home, a health scare, a death, or the confrontation with Palestinian trauma. Any one of these alone can act as a trigger, and I have had versions of all of them in quick succession.
My story of the past has been sloughing away for years. Though I resisted for a long time, I am no longer in denial about the ‘other’ story, about the cost of Israeli statehood and what it was based upon. For years I took refuge, first in California, where Jewish identity is uncomplicated and my sense of Israel remained largely unchallenged, and then in PhD research in Wales, where the country’s past use of Israel as a model, its romantic nationalism, and the predicament of its endangered but resilient language all were resonantly familiar and exciting. Moving to Wales and engaging with its troubles was a form of Zionism displaced, a love of Wales-as-Israel. But Israel was changing, had already changed, had never been what I’d thought it was, and therefore that was true also of Wales. The story I was telling myself and telling others about the past, about my place in it, could no longer fit. All that I learned about Israel, and about the Palestinian experience, all that Israel’s behaviour at home and in the world forced me to confront, left me confused and unsure of myself. I amended and adjusted, but nothing fitted together anymore; everything I might say was qualified, defensive. Then I discovered my own family’s culpability in the displacement of Palestinians in 1948, and, profoundly disorientated, my sense of who I was came undone.
Disorientated, we say, meaning unsure where we are in the world, and, without a sense of where the east lies, unable to work out how to get where we wish to go. I have always had a dangerously poor sense of direction: it means I am always getting lost, sometimes with dramatic consequences. When I was nineteen I got lost in Jerusalem, by chance ran into the friend I’d been looking for, but in a different part of the city, and, driven in part by the apparent fatedness of our meeting like that, married him, had children and moved with him to the US. I was just nineteen when that began. I know how dangerously off-kilter Israel can make me; I know it’s a risk to come here at forty, disorientated, at a point of crisis. Long since divorced, my daughters nearly grown, my sense of self in question, without much reason to be in one place or another, I want something momentous to take me over: all of who I am is up for grabs.
It was my grandfather’s wound that changed everything – or, rather, a story about his wound, his scar. I was sitting in the late summer sunlight on the doorstep of my cottage, talking on the phone to my mother in Australia. My older sister had moved to Queensland years before, and after my father retired, my parents followed her, along with my younger sister, in 1999. In the background to my mother’s voice I could hear raucous unidentified bird-life; in the background to my voice she could hear a soporific wood-pigeon, an indignant wren alerting everyone to the presence of a cat. Like this we had sat and talked in horror through the vicious wars of the previous summer – the Gaza war and then the Lebanon war of 2006. A year later I’d taken my younger daughter to Israel for a month, and now back home in Wales I was passing on to my mother messages of love from her sisters and her brother, telling her the family news, and anecdotes about our trip.
I’d visited my grandfather’s grave in the cemetery at Kibbutz Beit Hashita, and my aunt had told me a story about how, when he was attacked and was recovering in the hospital in Afula, Shlomite, my mother’s metapelet, had gone to see him to let him know how my mother was. At the time, everything the kibbutzniks possessed was owned collectively – they neither had their own clothes or shoes or furniture; they did not claim a bed or a room as theirs, but my grandfather kept a few personal items in a tin under whichever bed he slept in, and he asked Shlomite to keep it for him. This was how he and Shlomite got to know each other. Not much later, they married.
This story was new to my mother – that it was she as a very young child who had brought her father and his second wife together. It was a strange moment, sitting in the sun in Wales in the late summer of 2007, talking to my mother in the noise of Queensland’s subtropical rainforest, about her father’s hospitalisation in 1944 which she could not remember. I had never known who had attacked him, or why, and when I asked her, I realised how odd it was that it had never occurred to me to ask before. Uncomfortably, though not fully acknowledged, I knew the reason: it was ‘Arabs’ who had attacked him, and that had explained everything sufficiently. Carefully liberal elsewhere, where Arabs were concerned I was deeply and unconsciously illiberal: ‘Arabs’ in Israel had been to me an undifferentiated mass of hostility and danger, all actual or potential perpetrators of violence. I hadn’t thought about individuals, about individual stories; I had always understood the assault on my grandfather as part of a common and generally expected Arab disposition towards Jews. That realisation was disturbing: it made me squirm with shame.
My mother hesitated before answering. ‘It was Arabs,’ she said, eventually. ‘One of the skirmishes. You know – there were always skirmishes.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘But who? Where were they from? I mean, were they workers? Or from the prison?’ Sometimes the kibbutz had hired Arab day labourers to work in the fields; sometimes inmates from the nearby prison had worked there, too.
‘Well, I suppose people from the villages,’ she said.
There are no villages near the kibbutz. The Ruler Road leads past the fishponds, with their ospreys and kingfishers, past crop fields and citrus groves, and cotton fields. Near the entrance to the kibbutz the shallow sewage treatment ponds spread out, waded by black-winged stilts and avocets. Further down the road there is the prison in its razor wire and watchtowers, and beyond it, on the other side of the road, lie other kibbutzim – Ein Harod and its sister kibbutz, which split off during the Communist schism of the fifties. Beyond them, to the west, towards Afula and north-west towards Nazareth there are some Arab villages and towns, and others further off in Wadi Ara, but I could not think of any Arab villages near the kibbutz.
‘Which villages?’ I asked. ‘Do you mean near Afula, or Wadi Ara?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Yubla, probably, or Al Murassas.’
‘Where are they?’ I asked. I could not recall having seen Yubla or Al Murassas.
‘Well, they’re gone,’ she answered.
‘What do you mean they’re gone?’
‘I mean they’re just rubble. You can’t see anything now. Everyone left.’
‘They left?’ I said. ‘When did they leave?’ But already, creeping in on me, was the certain knowledge of her answer.
‘Oh, you know... In 1947, 1948. It was near the graveyard – beyond the graveyard. We used to go walking there, I remember. But the houses were already ruins. Or at least there were no roofs. Everyone left.’
What I knew about the Nakba I knew in a broad, general sense. Even though I had learned a little bit about this other history, about people fleeing their homes in fear, I knew and didn’t know, just as many Jews, many Israelis, deliberately or otherwise, know and don’t know. The details of who and how and where are passed over or sidelined in the ongoing argument about why people left, about what created the Palestinian refugee ‘problem’. There are exceptions, like the massacre at Deir Yassin, although I had never heard of Deir Yassin as a child or a teenager. In many ways it is the argument over such extreme cases that has allowed the particular stories elsewhere to be lost in the broad generality of the term ‘Nakba’ or the ‘War of Independence’.
There is no sign of those villages on a modern map of Israel. There are no signs naming the ruins and remnants of those villages in the landscape, either. You would have no reason to know they had ever been there. They have been erased from the land, and wiped off the map.
Now, hearing my mother name these two villages, Yubla and Al Murassas, it seemed obvious that there would have been villages near the kibbutz that were depopulated in 1948, and it shocked me that it hadn’t before occurred to me. Nobody I knew or had met had ever referred to them before, yet here was my mother casually identifying two villages not as notional places, but as part of her childhood landscape, her childhood world. And it wasn’t just Yubla and Al Murassas, as I was to find out later. A whole network of interconnected villages that had once spread out through that valley was now gone.
‘Where did they go, then, the people from these villages?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The West Bank, probably. Or Jordan. I don’t know.’
When, earlier, I had learned in a general sense about Palestinian Arabs fleeing the threat of war and then fleeing war, about villages being destroyed to prevent their return, and to erase their memory, I had been outraged, and am still outraged. Nevertheless, there was always something detached about my reaction; it was always an outrage that had happened somewhere else. But here it was close to home, not in the abstract: here it was near Beit Hashita, in the place my mother came from. What had happened there? How had it happened – and how was it that I could not have known? All the many times I’d visited the kibbutz, all the long weeks and months I’d spent there, nobody had ever mentioned the villages. I’d never heard them spoken about, never heard the story told – and hearing nothing, knowing nothing, I’d never had a reason to ask. And now that I’d asked, now that the question had been asked, it could not go unanswered. After that revelation, everything realigned, and I could no longer maintain my last vestiges of denial and self-protection, believing (because I had wanted to believe) that all that was wrong with Israel had somehow happened elsewhere, had been perpetrated by other people. But it hadn’t been. My family, my grandfather – my gentle, idealised, socialist kibbutznik grandfather – was implicated.
In Jaffa, sitting in the morning heat over coffee, the smell of bleach still lingering on the newly wiped tables, I wonder what, precisely, I’m now after. Shortly after the confusion caused by my mother’s revelation about the kibbutz past, and the implications of that revelation, came new shocks and losses: my older sister, suddenly dead of cancer I had known nothing about; my uncle dead soon after; one of my daughters suffering an emergency lockdown at her high school in California, because of a gunman on campus. A mad love affair with an exquisite man ended; another connection with a damaged man left me empty and full of mistrust. I too had a cancer scare, though it turned out to be nothing at all, but it left me mistrustful of my body.
In Australia for my sister’s funeral, I saw the birds I’d heard in the background of phone conversations with her and with my mother and father. The birds’ raucous noise began at four in the morning and it was cacophonous: lorikeets and cockatoos and more garish overgrown things I had not heard or dreamed of. My parents and younger sister took me walking in lush wilderness – down a steep track to the rammed-earth house my older sister and her fiancé had just finished building, surrounded by untouched rainforest. There were fever-carrying ticks, and down at the waterhole we put up a king snake – it came whipping across the water towards us, intent. In the rainforest catbirds mewled like lost children, and wherever we went we could hear the sound of the whipbirds, the tense rising whistle of an imminent strike, and then the crack of the whip, two birds in a call and response of one violent whipcrack.
There were harsh confessional moments that only shock and sharp grief could allow to surface – about family silence, about lies told for good intention or ill, about omissions. The night before I left Australia to go home to Wales, my parents gave me the family photographs – the blue album my father’s mother had put together in 1950; the small black-and-white photographs from the kibbutz; the glossy, square, garishly coloured Kodak prints from our visits to Israel in the seventies. They dug out birth certificates and marriage certificates, and my mother gave me my great-grandmother’s gold brooch, which spelled out her name, Yafa, in Hebrew.
When I got home I pinned my parents’ marriage certificate to the wall. Its paper is off-white, with a blue leaf-pattern border. Below the grand header of the Israeli Ministry of Religion, the Hebrew lettering is rounded, old-fashioned, the figures of the dates and the identity numbers carefully formed. In her black-and-white passport photo, with its scalloped white border, my mother is wearing a sleeveless dotted dress. Smiling, smooth-skinned, her face looks open and naked. She’s not squinting, but without her glasses I know she can only see a blur. My father’s photo is smaller, face-on; there is a hint of a suppressed smile. He’s wearing an open-necked white shirt, and his hair is untidy. The date is 6 October, 1959 and my mother is eighteen years old.
Though my parents never registered my birth with the Israeli embassy in London, my mother’s identification number confers on me Israeli citizenship. Any Jew, and anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, can apply for citizenship, but this number is all I need if I want to get an Israeli passport: I am already a citizen. Or that’s what the embassy told me, when I rang to enquire. They sent me forms, and I have them still. I have never filled them in.
My sister died in late September. After a week in the wildness of raw family shock, and the brash loudness of Queensland, the cool mistiness of rural Wales was disorientating and hauntingly melancholy. It was darkening, and the summer birds had left. Each day I drove along a back road to my job in the nearby town, through flocks of finches rising off the crumbling, ice-damaged tarmac, where they gathered to peck at the fine gravel. The hawthorn was dark with berries the colour of old wounds. The sheep had been taken down off the upland fields for the tupping season, and were kept in for lambing. In their place, the uplands were full of redwings and fieldfares, feeding on the fields and on the hawthorn and bright rowan. A buzzard huddled on a telegraph pole every mile. I always drove the back way, meeting no traffic, crying.
My sister dying, my uncle’s death shortly after, my daughters far from me and vulnerable – the cumulative shocks made me a little crazy and raw. I began to think about giving up my safe civil service job at the Welsh Books Council, of moving on, of leaving altogether. The place I thought I’d made for myself in Wales felt tenuous, temporary – I wondered if there was any more reason to be there than in Sussex where I’d grown up, or California, where I used to live. Everything about my life felt in question. The shock of my sister’s sudden death lasted; six months on it began to turn into a dragging sense that nothing would be worth doing again, that I was alone in a chilly, empty world.
Now that I am back in Israel, I am not sure which shock has driven me here – the search for some new sense of place in the world, or wanting to find out about Al Murassas and Yubla. I wonder if I am complicit in something deeply wrong, whether I have been complicit by loving a country whose government does wrong, whose very existence is based on a wrong. I think I might find out and perhaps try to tell the story of people who lived there in the Jezreel Valley near the kibbutz before they were displaced or driven out by the kibbutzniks. If I succeed in finding out, I hope I might do something good or right – but I know, really, that I am doing something entirely self-interested, perhaps as all good intentions are, because I am lost. Being back in Israel has disorientated me further. Everything I understand about it is in suspense – it does not offer me a sense of place, or a sense of direction, or a way to navigate: instead it shimmers with duality, and falseness, with things not said.
Harus, the map says – destroyed. Again and again, printed over in purple Hebrew – destroyed... destroyed... destroyed... Al Murassas: harus. Yubla: harus. Kafra: harus. Wadi El Bireh: harus. Al Hamidiya: harus. Jabbul: harus. Kawkab al Hawa: harus. It’s a composite map, printed by the Israeli government in 1955, the landscape of that year superimposed on a trilingual British Mandate map from 1945, showing clearly what happened in the seven years following the start of the Arab-Israeli war in 1947. I was given a copy of it by Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that seeks to uncover, publicise and memorialise the full scale of the Palestinian Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948. It’s a palimpsest, a deep map, showing the location of features and resources important to British Mandate control in 1945, overprinted by what is important to the young Israeli government in 1955: the aftermath of depopulation and destruction.
The Jezreel Valley section of the map details the network of spidery unpaved paths and roads that used to connect the villages. It records the oil-pipe, the overhead cables, the railway, water-courses and springs, and the paths along which people rode horses or donkeys, or walked carrying water and grain and children. These paths used to link all the villages in the valley near my mother’s kibbutz, Beit Hashita: Al Murassas, Kafra and Yubla, Wadi El Bireh, Al Hamidiya, Jabbul, and Kawkab al Hawa, and in turn connected them to the towns of Beisan and Haifa, Afula and Nazareth. Now these villages are all gone. Above or below the name of each of them harus is stamped in purple Hebrew letters. The population was expelled or fled, their houses and holy places and schools were knocked down or blown up, and their wells were blocked with rubble, but the signs of the villages are still there on the map, as is the record of their destruction.
Once you know about it the landscape is transformed. Nothing you thought you knew can be trusted; everything is a sign for something that is missing, or a lie, or a story that you can’t quite read.
My reassuring picture of the innocent kibbutz, the safe ground of my family roots, that place of birds and dust – the spruce-shaded cemetery which my grandfather landscaped and where he and his parents lie buried; the painful memory of my mother transformed and strange in the brutalist concrete central dining room with its clatter of trays, its swallows skimming in through its wide open windows, and sparrows hopping along the tables – all of it was some kind of centre for me, a place in the world by which I navigated. Now, learning about what has not been said, about what is not acknowledged, all that I have felt about the place is suddenly suspect. What I thought I knew has been turned inside out. And this place will never look the same again: it will always shimmer, everywhere, disorientating and confusing, with duality, and with the duplicity of its past.
I finish my coffee and wander down to the seafront. Here an earlier redesign that Jaffa underwent is evident in the potted history of its tourist information board. In the Israeli version of events, the town was ‘liberated’ in 1947. At Ben Gurion Airport, a plaque on the wall honours those who died there in the ‘liberation’ of Lod in 1948. I never before noticed the word ‘liberation’, but now the word and its strange jarring new duality seems to be everywhere, though it was always here – East Jerusalem, above all, ‘liberated’ in 1967.
Once you start looking, you can’t not see it – you can’t not look. Once you start asking, it is only by a huge effort of denial, a decision not to pursue it, that you can stop, that you can return to the safe knowledge of your old story, in which you have a place, by which you can make sense of the world and its events: a secure position from which everything may be tested for its bias or sympathy against the certainty of a historical truth.
A friend of mine, Ghaith, who was studying at Cardiff University, once told me how, before the second Intifada, he and his mother and grandfather had sometimes taken the trip from Ramallah to Jaffa to look at their house, which his grandfather had been forced to leave in 1947. One time they knocked at the door, and explained who they were; the Jewish residents reacted coldly. Now I want to ask Ghaith where his grandfather’s house is – but then what would I do? Knock on the door myself, and ask to see inside, so I can feel acutely, personally, this outrage on his behalf? What kind of presumptuousness is this fantasy? It is a despicable misery tourism, a melodramatic over-involvement.
In all the cities, Jewish refugees arriving from European detention camps, and survivors of extermination camps – and later, Jews fleeing from the Arab countries, living in the new Israeli state in tent cities – took over empty apartments left by Arab residents who had fled the conflict in 1947 and 1948. Owning nothing, they sometimes kept everything that had belonged to the former inhabitants – the cutlery and crockery, even the framed family photographs. It is both poignant and suspect, that common story, one tragedy erasing or ameliorating or replacing the other. And yet of course, there were ancient and more recent Jewish communities depopulated and destroyed in that war too – in East Jerusalem, and elsewhere.
Walking the streets of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the evidence is relentless and unavoidable. The duality of the language shimmers, telling one story and erasing another. It lays claim to place in the street names, some of which have imported and imposed European Jewish history and erased the Arab past; it tries to lay claim to what it does not yet own. The naming of the streets in Tel Aviv, this one-hundred-year-old city, everywhere reflects a conscious, deliberate construction: the co-option of the medieval Spanish Hebrew poets, like Ibn Gabirol with his suppurating skin, or the lionisation of Jabotinsky and his expansionist Greater Israel movement – Jabotinsky, whose Jewish Legion formed part of the British army during the First World War, who proposed that an ‘iron wall’ would be needed to separate Arabs and Jews.
In Holon, near my uncle David’s house, there is a cluster of dilapidated buildings on a piece of undeveloped land at the end of Tel Giborim Park, the ‘hill of heroes’ (every high point, it seems, is a hill of heroes). It is known as the ‘Arab village’, but my uncle was always evasive and never gave me a clear explanation about it, and now he’s dead, and I can’t get the story from him at all. I take the bus from Tel Aviv to visit Myriam, his widow, and where the bus stops, at that corner by the ‘Arab village’, a printed banner is draped over the end wall, declaring ‘Na, Nach, Nacham, Nachman me’uman’, the religious mantra of the Bratslavers: some of the fervent chanting followers of Rabbi Nachman must be living here. This sign, too, is a claim to what belongs to someone else. And while street names are officially bilingual or trilingual, I notice for the first time now that this is only true on the main roads and the highways. Arabic disappears at the local level. Arabic, in much of Tel Aviv, is virtually invisible. I have never noticed its absence before; now its absence stands exposed like a kind of scar.
On the route between Holon and Tel Aviv, which I travelled countless times as a teenager, the bus passes a Muslim graveyard, marked by its distinctive two-ended graves. Dry, dusty, bounded by the motorway and a highway, it looks like a leftover, abandoned – but it is still in use. All the times that I followed that bus route I never saw it; now I wonder how I could never have seen it. You see what you expect to see; you impose meaning on what you don’t understand, and get it wrong, because you draw on the wrong information, because you draw on what you’re told you see.
Throughout the city, and throughout the country, someone, or some group, has been spray-painting a blue Star of David on white walls, above the slogan Am Israel Chai – ‘the nation of Israel lives’. I see it everywhere I go. Sometimes others have amended the Hebrew graffiti delicately. An article on Ynetnews.com gathers images of its variations: in one place it reads ‘the nation of Israel lives – by the sword.’ In another it is amended to read ‘the nation of Israel lives – on American money.’ In a third, someone has added an illustration and four letters to the word ‘Chai’ so that it reads ‘the nation of Israel is a snail’.2 Signs, everywhere, have become signs for something else, signposts to what is not said, to what is concealed, to what is visible but goes unseen. It doesn’t require a physical act to render it invisible. A change of language, a change of name, and a continued silence has done a kind of violence to a whole people, and the heroic Hebrew names of Tel Aviv’s familiar streets and wide boulevards whisper to me false, false, in little sibilant voices.
Eating a shwarma at a window-counter overlooking the intersection of Allenby and Melech King George, trickling tehina over my fingers, watching the street jostle with soldiers and teenagers and middle-aged women in wigs and knee-length skirts, a painful, lonely nostalgia ambushes me. I have loved Israel, and I still love the smell of her, the dust, the sense of wild longing. A secret, shameful part of me still wants to lie down and die in her, but now I am afraid I have lost the right or ability to love even the idea of her. The nostalgia is not only for what I have loved, but for the love itself, infatuated and unambiguous. All this vibrant life, all the argument and provocation of the Israeli Jewish psyche, its in-your-face bluster, its militant, angry, belligerent energy – even if I am losing the ability to love it in simple and absolute ways, because of what it now represents, what it elides or denies, I nevertheless know it, I know it in my kishkes: it is part of me. How can I excise that? How can I not long for it, and, at the same time, repudiate it?
Along the coast, travelling north from Tel Aviv, everything trembles with this duality – the parched fields, the flocks of goats, ruined houses, new high-rises shimmering in the heat, religious posters plastered on walls and billboards and buses. Always, everywhere, the place-names and road-signs are a cover-up. Over all of it, over its visible existence, there hovers a kind of glamour of another, secret story: not hidden, not quite visible, but implicit. Hard, physical realities, physical facts, they are not quite lies, but they are omissions and half-truths. It is like talking in two languages at once, meanings approaching and approximating each other, sliding in and out of different forms of feeling, of body language and sense. The landscape is alive with a kind of cognitive violence. Though I cannot quite understand what I am seeing, it is impossible not to feel it as a kind of assault.
It’s dangerous, this reversal of orientation. Without context you can so easily misconstrue what you’re looking at, what you think you might be seeing, and what you’re told. Is there any landscape, marked by humans, that isn’t made into a geographical palimpsest in this way, layered by waves of conflict and language-change, by migration and settlement? Yet in a landscape that is familiar and loved, one that is navigated by memories and associations and a sharp, poignant sense of affiliation, to become aware of the very different meanings and associations that it might have for other people perhaps does not require any other context.
The bus turns inland at the power station near Hadera, round the bulge of the West Bank towards the Jezreel Valley, where the kibbutz pulls me in. Away from the coastal developments, architecture begins to separate the two communities into Arab town, Jewish town; Arab region, Jewish region. In the city, the boundaries between neighbourhoods, ethnicities and nationalities of origin have blurred and shifted, though socially and politically they still exist, starkly; but once out of the city, the landscape, the architecture, cars, signs, shops all shift back into Arab, Jewish, Arab, Jewish. It is not only in the architecture, one with Ottoman references in its minarets, curves, embellishments and colonnades, the other brutalist, modernist, often red-tiled and European; it is also in the way the geography is used. One form of architecture seems built into the land’s contours, the other built onto them, but I am seeing what I now expect to see, a new political awareness undermining what I thought I knew, and for the first time making me look for – and romanticise – the evidence of a long connection in that place.
I think the differences are that obvious, and that unmistakable, but of course it is not so simple. Arab town architecture expresses discriminatory planning constraints, not a more organic relationship to the land. Buildings in Arab areas expand outward and upward, storey built on storey to accommodate new generations of a growing family.
As the bus passes through Wadi Ara, I can see the recent changes in the Arab towns: the skeletons of elaborate, prominent new bright villas and houses showing a distinctive inflection of balconies and rooftops and domes, beginning to form whole new neighbourhoods, many built in defiance of planning laws. They differ utterly from the massive white high-rise Jewish neighbourhoods of Herzliya, the tiled structures of the West Bank settlements, and the new pale neighbourhoods of Afula. Afula is transformed. It is no longer the dusty town I knew as a child and teenager by its bus station, a mere transit point: now it also contains within it another past – as Al Fuleh, an Arab village.
Arriving by bus, I find the station itself as I remember it from adolescence, the last time I came by bus to visit the kibbutz. That was twenty-one years ago, for my grand-father’s funeral. The station is decrepit and choked with diesel fumes, and the metal benches of the bus bays are crowded with lounging or sleeping soldiers. Raddled, deeply tanned men play chess at the cafe table, and at the entrance to the broken toilets sits the same ancient, silent woman attendant who has been sitting there since the toilets were built. She presides, receiving a shekel for five sheets of toilet paper, like the guardian, the door Porter to the medieval Celtic Otherworld – the one who determines who has earned the right to pass.
Toilets take on a meaning that is almost holy when you’re travelling. Your feelings, particularly if you’re a woman, are reverent: you approach the promise of a toilet with something like devotion. The women who preside over them, seated at the entrance on a plastic chair, with a little basket for your tribute, speak an ancient pidgin, an archaic Hebrew that is no longer spoken anywhere else. Toilet attendants are indifferent to your needs. You might be at your lowest: your period might have just started, or you may have bled heavily during a long bus-ride and you might be cramped and overfull; you might be suffering from a reaction to the water, or something you ate, incautiously, unwashed – and they observe you, unmoved, unspeaking, waiting for their shekel when you go in, and their tip when you come back out, relieved but vulnerably exposed. They are the embodiment of disinterest, and they make you cringe and scrabble when you are already at your weakest. They see everything and they see right through you; they know you immediately and completely.
The toilet is the only enclosed public space you can enter, in Israel, without being searched, the only public place without a conveyor belt and X-ray machine at the entrance, or a soldier rifling through your papers and dirty underwear, running an explosives detector up and down your body while the impatient queue waits and watches. You retain a kind of public privacy, but that is because they know, those bathroom attendants: they can read you, desperate and reduced to basic need, in an instant. And what is my basic need, now? To know where I belong? To try to do good at a time when being Jewish, having a connection to Israel, is seen, increasingly, as something dubious, something that has to be accounted for? Or is the universal estrangement that James Joyce saw in the representative Jew a true estrangement – is exile from yourself a kind of essential Jewish belonging? Perhaps my alienation, at forty, at last has made me into this real kind of Jew. I wonder if these are our only choices – to carry our homeland in a book; to carry our homeland in our heart; to carry no homeland at all. But the toilet attendant in the Afula bus station is not the Oracle at Delphi. Impassive, unmoved, she accepts my tribute. She’s seen it all before; she’s seen every species of need and abasement. Impassive, unmoved, she watches me move out again into the noise of the world, lost and confused and full of longing.
My mother’s brother Asaf meets me outside the bus station, and drives me to the kibbutz. He laughs at my eulogy of the toilet attendant, my nostalgia for the Israel of my childhood when nothing worked and everyone was poor, when Jews were good and Arabs were dangerous and I didn’t doubt anything. We turn onto the Ruler Road and drive past the fishponds, now obscured by tall rushes, past a spur-winged plover bobbing at the edge of the dusty tarmac, past the familiar prison, unchanged. Ahead of us the green trilingual road sign points left for Kibbutz Beit Hashita, straight on for the town of Beit She’an, and Asaf begins to slow for the turning. Over the years I have picked up a few Arabic swearwords and exclamations, but it is only recently that I have learned to read the alphabet. Slowly, the meaning of the road sign emerges for the first time: the word in Arabic does not spell Beisan, the Arabic name for the town that lies straight on, near the border with Jordan, but Beit She’an, its Hebrew name. I notice the same thing, later, on the way to Jerusalem: the Arabic on the road sign does not give Al Quds, but the Hebrew name for Jerusalem, Yerushala’im.
Asaf parks near his small house. Outside the cool of the air-conditioned car the dry heat catches at me. Fallen eucalyptus blades crackle under my feet, and their scent rises – and with the scent the place closes its fist over my heart. The memory of every return wakes, every childhood and adolescent and adult return – the memory of riding on the back of my grandfather’s small tractor, and he turning his head to smile at me that warm wordless expression of affection; my mother, vibrant and glowing; walking hand-in-hand with my older sister, and the revelation of the birds, one after another, sunbird, hoopoe, roller, bee-eater, palm dove, bulbul – smaller and brighter than in the field-guide, and though new, known instantly, sharp and exciting...
But my mother is distant and my grandfather is dead. My sister is dead, too, and many of the birds of our shared childhood have disappeared as well, gone long ago: the Egyptian vultures, gone from the edges of the roads, along with the rubbish and carrion, and gone, like the black kites, from the great dump near Tel Aviv, which is now covered over and landscaped, like the coal-tips in south Wales. My innocence is gone, too: that municipal dump, once a bird-haven, and for me a bird excitement, also seals in the invisible remnants of a depopulated and destroyed Arab village called Al-Khayriyya.
Over lunch, Asaf asks what exactly it is I’m after, and so, rather nervously, I tell him how I found out about the villages of Al Murassas and Yubla from my mother, and how I want to know what happened in this place before 1948. I’m not sure how he’ll respond. Perhaps he’ll see it as an unwelcome digging up of what is better left alone, but he doesn’t. ‘Wallah!’ he exclaims with enthusiasm. ‘This is so interesting.’ We can check in the kibbutz archive, he tells me, and he knows where the site of Al Murassas is: he can take me there, though there’s not much to see.
I feel a jiggle of excitement, the beginnings of a kind of hope crystallising in me – of revelation or epiphany, an anticipation of some kind of confrontation with the harsh fact of destruction. I wonder if it will move me, if it will shift me from my ambivalent uncertainties and confusions. My confusion has increased – I am in the grip of nostalgia, and during the night I cannot sleep: all my senses are in full assault, flooded by the sound, the smell, the familiar layout of this place that was my mother’s place, this place where, somehow, I became aware of myself as a separate creature for the first time.
But when my uncle takes me to Al Murassas the next day, it’s a disappointment. We drive along a pale dusty road that meanders through treeless slopes of unfenced crop-fields, and he slows and then stops the car near a small stand of trees, where a barbed-wire fence encloses a rough area of dry cow pasture and sabra. The fawn-coloured cows are slow with the heat, and turn sleepily to look at us.
‘Here you are,’ he says, gesturing at the cows.
‘Where are we?’ I ask.
‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is Al Murassas.’ He points out the wildly growing prickly pear, which shows the presence of a former settlement. Originally it was planted to define boundaries between households; now it is a thicket. He thinks that someone important is buried near the trees, that the trees mark the location of a grave. ‘Yubla has nothing left,’ he says. ‘Even less than Al Murassas. There’s nothing to see, nothing to mark the site, but we can go if you want.’
All I can see is the cattle and the wild thicket of old cactus. Al Murassas is just dust and stones and cows, a few trees, sabra. I know what I was expecting, what I was hoping for – something tragic; an epiphany. Instead I am merely hot, and tired. I look out over ruin with half my attention and feel only a pressure on my bladder, the awkwardness of intruding, suspect, on someone else’s past, and the rapid anticlimax of my unfulfilled desire to be changed utterly. The nagging readjustment turns into irritation. I shake my head, and say there is no need to go and see where Yubla used to be.
In the kibbutz archive, Tomer, the archivist, remembers Al Murassas and Yubla. She doesn’t know when precisely in 1948 they were destroyed, and doesn’t say who actually carried out the destruction. ‘This was political – it came from the government,’ she says. ‘It was not the decision of the kibbutz to destroy the villages.’ Like my mother, she remembers walking in Al Murassas when the buildings were still standing, some months after the inhabitants had left. She thinks the villagers of Al Murassas and Yubla were neither Bedouin nor Arab, but a different ethnic group. She remembers them as being very dark; she thinks perhaps they were African – perhaps descended from some of the African people who were brought to Palestine as slaves and servants in the earlier Ottoman period.
The houses of Al Murassas and Yubla were built of adobe. They only stayed empty and intact for a short while before they were destroyed. When Tomer was a child, nothing was safe. There was a high protective fence around the kibbutz, and people stood guard at night on the roofs of the school and the children’s house. By day things were amicable; at night there were attacks. They had lived daily in a state of threat from their neighbours in all the years leading up to the War of Independence in 1948. Afterwards, it was safer. Afterwards, the land left by the fleeing Arab villagers was shared out for use by the neighbouring kibbutzim.
Tomer, my mother, and others their age: all of them remember the ruins of Yubla, and Al Murassas. What happened to the villages is in the memory of the earlier generation, too – in their yiskor books, memorial pamphlets published for each member after his or her death, and kept there in the archive. Everyone of my mother’s generation remembers a version of Yubla and Al Murassas. They know, but don’t know; they know but they don’t talk about it, or they skate over it. Like my mother, most don’t want to be reminded, don’t want to dwell on the implications of that knowledge, or those memories. It is one thing to oppose the separation wall, to disclaim East Jerusalem, to argue for a full pull-out of the West Bank, but it is quite another to talk about the right of return of those refugees, now in their millions, who fled or were expelled between 1947 and 1949, some of whom were expelled a second time in 1967.
The older generation, and my mother’s generation, remember. They remember the field boundaries and know the location of the destroyed village sites. But members of the younger generation never knew and have not been told, and but for the efforts of individual historians and organisations like Zochrot dedicated to memorialising the Nakba, that knowledge would be gone from national memory too, as the names are gone from the maps.
Maps of this place used to be simple and sparse, like all early maps – but now they’re complex and crowded, dense and layered. Embedded in the Western imagination, the place has been redrawn by explorers and holy men, by missionaries and emissaries of Empire, and by Empire itself, its surface imagined and recreated, or observed and recorded, and its names and meanings mapped onto space sacred to other people, too – the Welsh, for example, and the white colonisers of America. The old Western maps combine the present and the past, juxtaposing what can be observed with what is imagined. On nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century maps, biblical Hebrew place-names in pretty Gothic font lie alongside Arabic names and the modern Hebrew names in Roman font, and there are the modern Hebrew names of the new Jewish towns of Gadera or Tel Aviv. Later, the new Jewish settlements are added: the kibbutzim, and communal farms, and villages. And then in 1955 the map reaches what is perhaps the peak of its complexity, with the triumphant purple overprint of the word harus – destroyed. After that, the Israeli maps revert to a simpler form, and the tourist maps for long years have not even shown what is known in Hebrew as ‘the seam’, the physically erased border with the West Bank. All of it became seamlessly Israel.
Israel’s enemies say it should be wiped off the map, meaning it should be utterly destroyed and its name obliterated. That is what Israel has done to the Palestinian villages. But in wiping the village sites and the record of their destruction off the map, it has obliterated its own past, too: the history of its birth, and the history of the years before its birth.
Beit Hashita is on every map of Israel, but the Arab villages are gone, as their physical features are gone from the landscape. And yet, though they’re gone, their memory is not obliterated in that place, not entirely, not yet. There’s nothing to see of Al Murassas but sabra and stones and sleepy cows, but there are unmarked graves there. Someone’s grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there, as they are in Yubla and Kafra, in Wadi El Bireh, Al Hamidiya, Jabbul and Kawkab al Hawa and all the other destroyed villages and neighbourhoods – as mine are buried, just a few kilometres away. But my ancestors’ graves are marked and maintained, and they have gathered a scatter of small stones, each of which records a visit, a paying of respects.
You consult a map to find out where you are, to see how to get from there to where you wish to be. This is how you orientate yourself, situating yourself, according to the meaning of the word, in relation to the rising sun, but also in relation to Jerusalem, as churches are aligned to point east to their origins. Jerusalem, and the whole land for which it is a synecdoche, forms the linguistic foundation of how, in English, you articulate knowing where you are.
But I don’t know where I am. No map I consult can tell me. I have no idea where I am in relation to my personal orient. The whole landscape, physical and imagined, shimmers with duality, with signs and stories that dis-orientate. Perhaps I will always be disorientated, because there is no longer any absolute east. It depends on where you are. Perhaps, like my mother, I may only carry my homeland in my heart, in a longing that will not be appeased, that cannot really be appeased, because others with grandparents buried in this place also carry their homeland in their hearts this way. But I am permitted to return, to leave a stone as a mark of my visit, to pay my respects and feel, here, my roots – and they are not.