Shortly after Sari and I launched the People’s Voice, former US senator George Mitchell, best known for his role in the Good Friday Agreement ending decades of civil conflict in Northern Ireland, moderated a discussion between Sari and me on the leafy campus of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. To fill the hall, the good people at Macalester oversold our talk as a “Mideast Peace Summit.”
Senator Mitchell kicked off the evening by inviting Sari to the dais to share a few words about himself and his family’s legacy in Jerusalem, an unbroken line of scholars, judges, merchants, and imams stretching back to the days of Omar the Great in the seventh century. Sari shared some sublime facts — for instance, to this day his Muslim family has one of the few sets of keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred site in Christendom — and stories of loss, such as his father losing a leg to sniper fire during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
When Senator Mitchell signaled that it was my turn to stand and speak, I felt myself caught in a dilemma. The Jewish people, of course, have a glorious history. But my parents’ generation of Zionists, in order to build a state, erased the past two thousand years of exile. They chose a state-building narrative that leapt from the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 CE to Herzl, and from the Maccabean battles against the Greeks to the heroes of Tel Hai in 1920. In school Israeli Jews are taught to identify with the prophets and warriors of the Bible as well as with the military heroes, guerrilla fighters, and revolutionaries of antiquity. With ancient history anchored in our minds, we almost never talked about Jewish life in the Diaspora. I was raised believing that European Jews emerged from exile to reclaim our ancient identities, which had been frozen in time, like a woolly mammoth in the Siberian tundra. We saw ourselves as Hebrews, not Jews; we spoke Hebrew, not Yiddish. Arabs who had once lived on our land were ignored, and our bulldozers made sure there wasn’t much to see.
My parents were not from the Holy Land but rather from Transylvania, in central Romania, and they never spoke of their childhoods. At Kibbutz Ma’agan, on the south shore of the Sea of Galilee, the lowest freshwater lake on earth, history’s biggest crime, the Holocaust, was rarely mentioned. I was ten before I learned that Father, or Abba, lost his younger brother, his sister, and her husband in the Holocaust. His parents and older brother survived and were still alive, but I never met them. In the Land of Israel my parents changed their last name from Hirsch to Ayalon and disregarded their family trees. Abba became our kibbutz’s spokesman, business manager, overseer of the banana plantation, and chief ideologue — a man of unbending ideological purity and frenetic energy, always talking about the future we would build with our hands. He buried the past for the sake of the future.
The amiable atmosphere in the room at Macalester College melted away for me as I awkwardly approached the dais. Raising my empty palms, I said to the gathering of people, “I have no past. I suppose I’ve never given it much thought because I’m the product of a rebellion against the past.” To actualize our dreams of redeeming the Land of Israel, we needed plows, workers, cement mixers, and soldiers, not tears and historians of the Diaspora. What’s the point in memorializing what you keenly wish to forget?
Even after I put my painful realization into words, however, its meaning did not sink in. I would not understand its import and take it to heart for another decade, when I read and thought about Professor Gans’s Political Theory of the Jewish People. For the event at Macalester, Sari and I had agreed to avoid discussions of the past and to focus our initiative on building a better future, so for the rest of the evening we emphasized the work of our peace organization, People’s Voice.
When my mother died two years later in 2005, I lost the chance to ask her about her life in Europe. Only at that point did a creeping suspicion begin to grow in my consciousness that we Israelis were haunted by a past we doggedly pretended didn’t matter. Following my mother’s funeral, determined not to lose my father’s stories, too, I gave Abba a thick spiral notebook, the kind kids use in school. I asked him to write his stories, for my sake and for the sake of my children and grandchildren. I wanted to better understand my parents. Abba took the notebook but made no promises.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later when I visited him, still living at Kibbutz Ma’agan, that I learned he’d taken my request seriously. He was waiting for me on the porch of the two-room bungalow he’d shared with my mother for half a century, one of the identical concrete shacks erected by the thousands in the early years of the State of Israel. His woolen blazer and V-neck sweater betrayed his Central European roots, as did his slight Hungarian accent.
The conversation, most remarkable for what we didn’t say, was typical.
“Ma-shlomcha?” I asked. “Is your heart still giving you trouble?”
“They say it might rain this week,” he responded, turning his attention to a few dark clouds to the east, as if willpower alone could conjure up a storm from the Mediterranean.
“So I’ve heard.”
He lit a cigarette — he got hooked on smoking because our kibbutz used to hand out cheap packs — and indicated with a gesture that he’d like to inspect the receding shoreline. We walked past the long-closed communal dining hall and shuttered House of Culture, the kibbutzniks having succumbed to such middle-class luxuries as private TVs. Cranes and pelicans sunned themselves in the warm waters of the blue-green lake.
Upon reaching the shore, I looked north to the stony canyons of the Golan Heights, a patina of green over the otherwise rust-colored cliffs. By this point, I was keenly aware of something that I never knew as a child: Before the War of Independence, the Arab village of al-Samra stretched along the coastal land where our kibbutz’s plantations now grew bananas and mangoes. Abba never told me how our forces drove out the Arabs. We were only taught that they attacked us, and we conquered their territories fair and square with weapons and plows. The millions of our people murdered in the Holocaust, and the bitterness of the battles in the Jordan Valley, left no room to regret what we did during the war or to think about the fate of Arab refugees who now lived in squalid camps across the Jordanian border. Besides, the Land of Israel was our birthright. Everyone knew the villainous Romans drove us out and, after two thousand years, we at long last returned determined never to leave again.
When we returned to his shack that day, I noticed the blue notebook open on his kitchen table, his Hebrew scrawl filling the pages. I said nothing at the time.
After he died in 2008, I discovered the notebook among his few belongings. In it I found stories that I’d never heard him tell, beginning with the European past I assumed he had exorcised from his memory. For the first time, I learned the bare-bone facts of his life. My grandparents, Jacob and Hannah Hirsch, lived in Sovata, a village not far from Cluj. Jacob, a flour mill owner and a man of traditional religious views, reserved a room in his large stone house for the village’s ten Jewish families to gather during the High Holidays.
Though he had no rabbinical training, the members of the community looked up to my grandfather as their leader. The gentiles, evenly divided between Hungarians and Romanians, had a live-and-let-live attitude toward their Jewish neighbors.
My father was born in 1918, a period of geopolitical upheaval; Transylvania, once a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now belonged to Romania. Romanians, like the citizens of other new nation-states in the region, set out to reinvent the past. For instance, in Cluj, a largely ethnically Hungarian city, the Romanians erected a statue across from the cathedral that was an exact replica of the Capitoline Wolf, which depicts a scene from the legendary founding of Rome, with the twins Romulus and Remus suckling the she-wolf. The Romanian government wanted to project the idea that the creation of their state was akin to the Latin-speaking soldiers in the Roman province of Dacia, after two thousand years, rising from the dead to restore an ancient heritage.
Even though anti-Semitism never took root as deeply in Romania as it did in other parts of Central Europe, Jews remained outsiders in the newly formed state. Most Jews didn’t speak Romanian, nor did they identify with ancient Roman soldiers or that other Romanian folk hero, the psychopathic tyrant Vlad the Impaler, the model for Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula.
From the age of three Abba studied at the cheder in the local synagogue, but his passion was sports. An athlete with strong, quick movements, he never had trouble with anti-Semites. If only all the Jews were like you! the gentiles liked to say after a spirited game of soccer. Yet he still longed for a national identity of his own. One day he went with some friends to see a propaganda film featuring the noble socialist farmers of Kibbutz Ein Harod. Abba was hooked, though it would take him a couple of years to muster the courage to tell his father, “I’m becoming a Zionist,” which in those days was tantamount to leaving his religion.
Abba’s brand of Zionism, however, could not have been further from that of the gentlemen in top hats in London. The Romanian youth groups who roamed the countryside building bonfires and crooning patriotic songs were Abba’s inspiration, not religion. He and his young friends were obsessed with “revolutionary constructivism,” the process through which the Zionist sheds the bourgeois, capitalist egotism of his upbringing, the petty concerns and fancies of Exile, and pours his creative efforts into building a utopian society more just, more equal, and most of all rooted in the native Motherland — what Zionists call the Moledet.
Abba eventually left the village and moved to Cluj for high school. Together with his friend Jonah, whom he met in Cluj and was the son of a factory owner, Abba joined the local chapter of the Zionist movement, as well as the Haluz club, which got its name from Moses’s command to the Israelites: “We will pass over armed — haluzim — into the land of Canaan, that the possession of our inheritance on this side of the Jordan may be ours.”
His parents’ remonstrations were futile. In 1937, as Nazi Germany grew more powerful, he dropped out of school. For Abba, this was no time to prepare for a bourgeois way of life. It was a time to liberate the Land of Israel.
Meanwhile Arab nationalists declared war on Jewish immigration and threatened the British authorities, who administered “Mandatory Palestine,” with all-out rebellion if Zionist colonization didn’t stop. Anwar Nusseibeh, the Cambridge-educated judge and father of my future peace partner Sari, partook in the nonviolent part of this uprising. Others, most notably the Islamic revivalist preacher from Syria, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a graduate of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, opted for the jihadist method of laying bombs and ambushing kibbutzim. Hamas’s Qassam Brigades are a tribute to his memory.
In 1939, just as my father and his group were planning to leave Europe for Palestine, the English introduced the White Paper, sharply curtailing immigration and banning new land sales to Jews. David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist leader in Palestine, responded with “the war of (illegal) immigration,” because he believed Zionism would succeed and the Jewish people would win control over their future through demographics and land. As part of this effort, Abba was assigned to one of the first ships bound for Palestine. But before embarking, he returned to his parents’ stone house in the village, where his father shook his hand and his mother, crying, hugged him before pressing into his hand the ring her father had given her on the day of her wedding. It had been in the family for generations, she said, and he should take it with him so he’d always remember her. Father looped the ring on a chain around his neck and was off.
In July 1939, at a port on the Black Sea, Abba boarded the Colorado, a small freighter, which transferred him to the Atarato, a steamer anchored offshore. The passage in the overcrowded Atarato, with its rancid food, stale air, and clogged toilets, was made more unnerving by the fact that from the moment the steamer entered Palestine’s territorial waters, the passengers were outlaws in the eyes of the British.
As the Atarato approached the northern coastal town of Nahariya near the Lebanese border, Abba and the others boarded smaller boats that transported them furtively to land, where they dispersed before British soldiers could round them up. Whereas middle-class Jews from Poland and Germany built hotels and opened shops in Tel Aviv and Haifa, most illegal immigrants like Abba disappeared into the growing network of Jewish settlements. After a few days of work on a kibbutz, Abba got enough of a tan to look local and left for Haifa with counterfeit papers. From there it was by train to the Sea of Galilee and the Hatzer Kinneret, a settlement from the early years of the twentieth century built as an agricultural school for settlers who continued on to kibbutzim. There he was joined by his friend from Cluj, Jonah Rosen. They picked up kibbutzim ideals from books and long arguments into the night. They forswore private property; even the clothes on their backs belonged to the collective. Photos from those days show Abba with his teenage friends bare-chested, smiles stretched across their faces. Women, too, stood with them, their tanned arms strong from working the fields.
In the notebook Abba described visiting Jonah’s house in Cluj shortly before the two of them left for Palestine. It was there that he first set eyes on my mother, Jonah’s thirteen-year-old sister, Varda Magdalena. Mother had told me about this first meeting as well. She said she fell in love with Abba right there and then, but that it took him a few years to come around. In early 1938, Jonah implored his father in Cluj to send Varda to Palestine, as he saw no future for young Jews in their corner of Europe. Their father agreed, on the condition that Jonah follow her. He didn’t want Varda wandering around Palestine alone like a vagabond. Since she came to study, her immigration was legal, and she brought a large wooden crate containing her dowry: a hand-painted bone china tea set, embroidered tablecloths, and silverware. Varda ended up at an agricultural high school on the outskirts of Jerusalem, run by Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi, wife of the future Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.
I recall as a child hearing Mother, or Imma, speak highly of the school and especially of Rahel Ben-Zvi and her hybrid of socialism and nationalism, the way she instilled in her pupils what she described as the “wonderful feeling of being born again in our homeland.” With Varda’s childhood infatuation with Yitzhak as strong as ever, the very day she finished school she happily joined Jonah on the kibbutz, just as her father had instructed. My father eventually reciprocated her love, though his notebooks reveal few juicy details, and the two of them moved into a double tent and got married kibbutz-style: a gathering of friends, some wine, and no rabbi. Their matrimonial home was a cramped room illuminated by kerosene lamps.
Unlike Abba, who relished every day of his life on the kibbutz, Imma never fully adapted to the frontier life of Hatzer Kinneret. At seven hundred feet below sea level, summers were a hellish inferno. This scorched landscape of scorpions and malarial mosquitoes was no Land of Milk and Honey. Nor did she enjoy the endless debates about radical socialism. Father gave up every possession he had, including his mother’s ring, and never looked back — not to Europe, his family, or middle-class comfort. Mother, on the other hand, deposited her dowry box with bourgeois relatives in Haifa for safekeeping, because otherwise Abba would have sold it to buy seeds or pruning shears for the kibbutz.
I inherited my name from a Jewish boy named Ami from a nearby kibbutz, who was shot dead by Arab horse thieves who wanted the pony he was riding. Ami, short for Amichai, literally “my people are alive,” was a popular name after the Holocaust. I was still in Varda Magdalena’s womb when her mother, my grandmother, died of typhus in the Auschwitz barracks on the day before the Red Army liberated the death camp.
Just after my birth, Ben-Gurion dispatched my father on a three-year mission to Hungary to lead a smuggling operation bringing some of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors into Palestine. He replaced Jonah, who was the operation’s original leader but had been caught and taken to a Russian prison on suspicion of being an English spy. This was when Abba changed his name from Hirsch to Ayalon; he was a Hebrew, he spoke Hebrew, he had a Hebrew name.
I began life in the communal nursery where infants slept on plywood planks because, in kibbutz theory, that was how you raised a generation of hardy pioneers. It was only after my cousin Ruthi, Uncle Jonah’s daughter, nearly froze to death that we got mattresses.
Though I was only three and my memory is fuzzy, I remember the day when a smiling man strode into the sunlit children’s dormitory, took me by the hand, and led me to the shore of the Sea of Galilee. “I am your father,” he said, gripping my shoulders. I never knew just how perilous Abba’s return journey had been until I read his notebook. Upon disembarking, he drove from the coastal port through the Jezreel Valley in an armored car because Arab snipers were targeting Jews.
Abba had returned to Palestine immediately after the British left and war broke out. The Syrian army occupied the former British police station at Samakh, an Arab town of three thousand on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and threatened all of our settlements in the Jordan Valley. David Ben-Gurion sent us children to Haifa, where we’d be out of harm’s way. Mother came with me, and for several more months I did not see the father with whom I had just been reunited. When the British left Palestine in April 1948, Abba joined the battles that broke out between our forces and the Jordanian army over the Gesher police station on the Jordan River. Syrian armored units reached nearby Kibbutz Degania, where members of the kibbutz stopped their advance. The story I heard as a child had the Arab townspeople fleeing Samakh when the Syrians lost the battle, but unbiased historians today tell me that Israeli forces expelled anyone who did not leave on their own. The Syrian advance ended with the Battle of Degania, when their forces withdrew to the Golan Heights. When the fighting died down around Samakh, a ghost town for the taking by this point, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the new name for the Haganah, set up camp in the old British base.
After the war, Abba and his comrades left Hatzer Kinneret behind and pushed to establish a kibbutz on newly conquered land. With both the British and much of the Arab population gone, there was ample real estate and several options available. They chose a former British base on the Sea of Galilee, in part for its proximity to a precious resource — water — but primarily to secure the contested border between the new State of Israel and Syria.
My father, Yitzhak, and his best friend, Jonah, could finally realize the dreams they first imagined in their haluz camp in Romania of restoring our ancient patrimony to Jewish control. Building a state for the Jewish people meant armed farmers planting a kibbutz on the front line. None of them would have dreamed of limiting settlement to within a demarcation line they considered arbitrary. They looked for any opportunity to expand the borders of the State of Israel.
They called the kibbutz Ma’agan, or “harbor.” Our dining hall was a former military building, and until the pioneers erected concrete huts, the soldiers’ barracks were our homes. Because of the danger of infiltrators from Syria and Jordan, men occupied the watchtower and patrolled the barbed-wire fence surrounding our new kibbutz around the clock.
Abba’s notebook doesn’t say much about the years following the War of Independence. I had been old enough, though, to remember how each time Abba and his comrades tilled the fields in the no-man’s-land between us and the Syrian positions, the Syrian army fired mortar shells at them.2
We buried our dead and moved the school to a bomb shelter, but we never paused from efforts to “liberate” more land. Sitting in our makeshift underground classroom, I had no idea that the former inhabitants of Samakh lived in tent camps across enemy lines. While our teachers taught us only ancient history—Joshua, the Maccabees, and other Hebrew heroes — children across the border studied a recent event: the Nakba, the Catastrophe, the story of their own exile.