UMM SHAKER DIED A LONG TIME AGO, MOM ISN’T HERE anymore, and the memories are becoming more distant. Other traumas are plaguing the country instead. And I, the first generation after Mom’s snow, trying to be the last generation of feathers from the slaughter, wanted to return one more time to Hebron. To feel what I would feel.
My first meaningful visit to Hebron was during my military service, a few years after the Six-Day War. I was a young paratroop officer and I was stationed there with my comrades in order to keep the peace. The Six-Day War had liberated our ancestral lands and led to the occupation of Palestinian land. We came to the city after police duty in Nablus and Ramallah.
“We’ve transferred you to Hebron, the most difficult city in the West Bank, because of your reputation. Bringing red berets into Hebron is a message, since the days of the British mandate,” we were told in a briefing. Our good reputation also included our capacity for evil. We manned checkpoints and forced work-weary drivers to unload giant trucks loaded with crates of merchandise, ostensibly to make sure that explosives and other weapons weren’t hidden there, but in practice to prove to them and us who was boss, and who wielded power and authority. Such unloading took hours, and meanwhile all city traffic was stopped. What a perfect mess. We zealously chased after rioters. We made our presence known and intimidated frightened residents in the cities where we were posted. This was the good reputation we brought to Hebron.
I don’t recall a feeling of return to my family roots, any sense of closing the circle in Mom’s city. It was just another mission. It was important for me to be a good commander, an exemplary role model, to follow orders to the best of my ability, and to be an outstanding soldier, in the spirit of the paratroopers. One day at dawn I took my soldiers on patrol in one of the prettiest riverbeds in the Hebron hills. A route through an ancient landscape of biblical farming terraces, grapevines and vineyard paths, farming huts made of stones, and mud channels carrying the water running from small mountain springs. I had planned the route the previous evening on a topographical map. On the map there are no people, no human realities, and no encounters. The map is indifferent; it only documents. The narrow donkey path wound along the edges of the farming terraces, trying to take up as little as possible of the precious land in the rocky Hebron hills. We walked in a row, keeping a distance from one another, wearing rubber-soled paratrooper boots, carrying packs full of gear and ammunition, rifles at the ready with the safety catch on. Sometimes we walked on the path, and sometimes we cut straight across the fields, packing down soil that had been turned over, inadvertently changing the course of water streams, breaking carefully tended vine branches, repeatedly disturbing the romantic calm of that hidden valley.
Suddenly the owner of the field reared into view before me, the commander leading the troops. A short, burly, and strong Hebron farmer, an older man. He had an expression of terrible pain on his face, a look of uncontrollable rage. He charged at me and my men hysterically. We were armed with the best modern weapons, and he wielded a pickaxe. One against many. My men loaded their guns, aimed, and opened their safety catches. I yelled at him in my best occupation Hebrew. He didn’t understand a word and shouted back in his village Arabic, and I understood it all. He couldn’t comprehend why anyone had the right to cut through his fields, destroy his work, and damage his ancient vineyard inherited from his forefathers. I understood his outcry, his pain and anger. He continued yelling and going amok, and we had to pin him down. Ten twenty-year-olds against someone who could have been our father or grandfather.
This was a minor incident that probably none of those involved remember, aside from me. Before and after it there were plenty of other occupation stories that were more terrible, brutal, and shameful. But those particular shouts were directed at me personally, and that is why they still ring deafeningly in my ears, from the inside. It wasn’t a political shouting match, but it was the protest of the biblical Navot, the owner of the vineyard, against the indifferent oppression of the soldiers of Ah’av—us—just trying to carry out a routine order in the best way possible. I could hear a version of the biblical prophet’s condemnation, “Have you conquered and also inherited?” and I was so ashamed. From these very vineyards Abu Shaker returned home and saved Mom and Grandfather and the rest of their household in 1929.
Decades later, I consider my military service in the city as a moment of great personal importance. My internal language changed then for many years to come. The minute I got tough with that Hebron farmer, hardening my heart as an oppressor, my Israeli nationalism jumped to a new level and over time nearly choked any other spirit in me. Something in me died then, and did not come back to life during my years of public service. I didn’t know then that I had become an occupier, I just wanted to secure the route, to make sure all was well. And coincidentally I became something else entirely. In those vineyards, I learned the first lessons of Israeli nationalism.
Today I understand my friends, Israeli Jews, who are so fearful of thoughts that are not nationalistic. Because for them, like it was for me in the vineyards of Hebron in the seventies, it’s all related. We only know one definition of our common fate, of shared nationalism and fraternity—a total, exclusive definition—either nationalist or traitor, without any nuances in between. Religion, language, authority, power, sovereignty, the land, and a new culture were all melted down, and they fused in me—in us—to create something unparalleled in my parents’ generation. If you take out one brick, the whole structure will collapse. It’s hard for us as people of this place, children of modern Jewish nationalism, to imagine Judaism without religion or Hebrew, a community without a state or a state without all the biblical territories, patriotism without Greater Israel, survival and existence without a huge preponderance of military might. And in general, few of us are aware of our political history. It is doubtful whether in 10 percent of the thousands of years of Jewish existence we lived in a reality of full sovereignty. All the other Jewish periods were different: a scattered diaspora, communities, autonomy, and more. Every time we tried to get the chariot of sovereignty moving again, self-destructive mechanisms were also triggered, and we were again banished to the diaspora and scattered again, without authority or sovereignty.
Most of our achievements as a people, as a culture, and as individuals are linked to the depths of non-sovereign existence. The era before Zionist nationalism contained many elements that could potentially succeed the current absolute nationalism. Separating the Israeli amalgam into distinct elements—language, culture, religion, heritage, tradition, place, and sovereignty—which don’t necessarily overlap, can provide more channels of identity and identification than the binary option: all or nothing. My Israeli challenge is to do all I can so that the self-destructive mechanism does not go into action again. As opposed to the Israeli in me, the Jew in me must always be prepared for the next state of existence. These two—the Israeli and the Jewish—are constantly moving in me like restless twins in the womb of a suffering pregnant woman, with neither having the upper hand.
WHILE WRITING THIS BOOK I FELT THAT I HAD TO GO TO Hebron again, to clarify a few things for myself. It didn’t happen immediately, nor easily. It began with my son, Dan. During his army service in 2003, he was posted in Hebron. He knows every nook and cranny there, every street, and he’s familiar with nearly every Jewish rioter among the settlers. We talked several times about his service there. For him it was a long and unpleasant experience. An endless confrontation between his personal value system and the world of the Israel Defense Forces.
We, the Israelis, like the adage that “the IDF is the most moral army in the world.” I very much hope that’s true, though it isn’t at all clear to me who has checked, what the criteria were, and who was in the control group. Besides the fact that the army is just a political tool, and a tool is not supposed to have a conscience, especially when the policy and the politicians directing the army are devoid of morality. In any case, what he saw and experienced there hurt him very much, scarred his heart, and was completely immoral. The terrible tension between his value system and what he was compelled to do was too much to bear. He had grown up, like his brothers and sisters, to be a humanist who loves people, all people, but the orders that molded his most significant encounter with the state as a citizen were patently immoral. Like breaking into a house in the dead of night and taking away a father or his son in front of the wife and children; manning checkpoints and letting Jews through while Palestinians are delayed and harassed; guarding illegal, remote Jewish settlements; enforcing racist separation on the streets of Hebron so a handful of Israeli zealots can carry on with their lives normally in the heart of throngs of Palestinians for whom normal life has been denied for years.
He served in a combat unit, sharing heavy responsibility for good and bad, including the injustices committed by the army. An infantry soldier, like I was at his age, a pawn on a board much bigger than us all. Military service was not good for him. With his heightened sensitivity, he couldn’t bridge the gap between military rhetoric and his natural humanistic values. He was discharged from the army with great unease in his heart, a heavy load. He traveled far away, eastward. The simplicity of the Indian subcontinent suited him well, a life very close to its existential foundations. He returned more open, with greater coping skills, and very attuned to his inner truth, though the burden of the previous years and experiences was still evident. His sadness was wrapped in a great silence.
On his own initiative, Dan contacted Breaking the Silence—an organization of army veterans that collects testimonies from soldiers who have served in the territories since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada. Through the testimonies, the group tries to raise consciousness about the daily reality in the territories in order to create a public conversation about the moral price of ruling a civilian population. Many of the soldiers returning to civilian life, like my Dan, are frustrated and pained by the gap between the reality they encountered in the territories and the indifference and silence about it in Israeli society. Together they break the conspiracy of silence and make the voices of the soldiers heard, doing everything they can to get Israeli society to recognize the monstrous reality we have created with our own hands. Their activities include trips to Hebron and other cities in the West Bank.
In 2012, I went back to Hebron with Breaking the Silence and with my son in order to meet his memories. He went back to the places where he served as a soldier, and I returned to the deep and painful sources of my family and where I too had served.
After this first loaded and liberating visit, in which we both faced our private military and historic demons, I visited this tortured city many more times. One such visit, with a friend and partner to values and peace—Gertraud, the secretary general of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna. I wanted to share with her my family’s “killing zone,” which became the launching pad for my aspirations for peace.
We started the visit at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I hadn’t been there in many years. I climbed the stairs slowly, remembering Mom’s excitement when we visited right after the Six-Day War. Until the capture of the city by Israeli forces in 1967, Jews were not allowed into the sacred tomb complex. They were permitted only up to the seventh step, no more. I remember her tense, emotional expression when she put her foot on the eighth step, the ninth, and all the rest. I hadn’t been very excited at the time. What did I know at age twelve about the weight of history? They were just steps, right?
Now, after decades in which I hadn’t been to the place, not since my army service, I went up again to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I wanted to see the place of my boy’s testimony and pain, and I found myself bearing the full weight borne by my mother. Gertraud and I went slowly up the stairs, talking about history and archeology, local politics, and prospects for peace. In front of us an elderly man walked with difficulty, slower than us, supported on two sides by two strapping young men wearing kippahs. We passed him and kept going. I heard a weak call from behind me: “Avraham, Avraham.” Few people call me by that name. Mom and Dad did, and a few family members, that’s it. I didn’t turn around immediately, I didn’t understand that the call was directed at me. And again: “Avraham, Avraham.” This time I turned around. I needed a minute to absorb what I was seeing. The slow and fragile old man whom we had just passed was none other than my cousin Shlomo. The two-year-old saved from the Hebron massacre, the orphaned son of the late Eliezer Dan, the last surviving family member from those distant days. We had lost touch. He’s closer in age to Mom than to us. They grew up together, a fraternity of orphans, in the home of my other aunt, who adopted and raised them like a young mother.
“Shlomo,” I said with excitement, “what are you doing here?”
“And what are you doing here?” he replied with a smile, answering with a question, in Jewish fashion.
I explained to him that I was there with a guest, that I had come to show her the city and its complex history and politics.
“And I’m here,” he replied, no longer smiling, “because today is the memorial day of the massacre. The yahrtzeit. So, I came to pray a bit for their souls, to read Psalms, and say the Kaddish prayer in their memory.”
Because I follow the Gregorian calendar, and I’m not always aware of the traditional Hebrew date, I didn’t know that this particular day was so symbolic. After we parted, we continued our tour of the city. We saw the security apartheid, discriminating racially between Jews and Arabs, approached destroyed Arab shops, and crossed neglected alleys and checkpoints meant to harass the local population. Hebron today is an unpleasant place, a pure distillation of everything that is wrong with the Israeli occupation.
At the end of the day, with the last rays of the setting sun, we climbed up one of the hills in the city, Tel Rumeida, an ancient mound that has become another provocative Jewish neighborhood. Its residents are extremist and violent settlers, and it is entirely surrounded by soldiers, fortified positions, and sophisticated warning systems for protection. At the edge of the neighborhood, among some ancient olive trees that have survived the evil hands of the Jewish zealots, stands Issa’s home. Issa is a young Palestinian activist who believes in nonviolence and civil disobedience. He invited us to eat dinner with him and his friends, an iftar meal, breaking the day-long fast during the holy month of Ramadan.
What a strange moment it was, in the most fortified neighborhood in the Middle East. Soldiers patrolling, security cameras swiveling constantly. Jews who had come to the city for the memorial day peered into Issa’s private yard, as if it were a cage in a zoo. And inside, Issa sat with his friends, Gertraud, Yehuda, the director of Breaking the Silence, and me. An impossible mix. And the conversation flowed, dealing with everything, life and hope, prospects for nonviolent civil disobedience, the occupation’s harassment of masses of Hebron residents trying to maintain their daily routines.
Out of the settling darkness that enveloped us, two more people arrived: Abu Shaker’s grandchildren, whom I had asked Issa to invite and introduce me to for the first time in my life. God, what a day. I had come for the politics, I met my distant surviving cousin, and now here they were with me. We ate local hummus, fresh vegetables, and hot pita bread from the oven in the yard as we talked about our common past. Suddenly everything fell into place. Their stories about those distant days were like a mirror image of our stories. About Shaker, who always suffered from bad lungs, about their grandmother, who nursed little Treyna, Aunt Malka. About the grandfather who was in the vineyards during the massacre, about hiding the rabbi and his children in the house, about our visit in 1967.
On a clear Hebron night, all Mom’s repeated stories became proven facts. But to one of their questions I didn’t have an answer. “Why didn’t you call earlier? Why did you come only now? Where were you all these years?” Why indeed. I was at fault. I’m the occupier, I’m the strong one. I should have looked after them during the many years that I could, and I had failed.