The Levant In Memory

Zionism extracted its first physical and emotional price from me almost 50 years ago. It wrenched away from me, not just extracted but jerked, with such a finality that I still sense that moment when the vanishing happened. There was no forewarning, and even if there had been, it would nevertheless have been incomprehensible to a boarding school lad approaching a decade in life. For it still seems difficult to accept all these years later, despite having travelled to the point where the tale began, to the root of the story, to that great city now called Jerusalem.

During those bleak and lonely early days in boarding school, the funny boys are the easiest to spot for there is always an aura of hap­piness around them. It’s as if they carry their mirth in supercharged particles that spread around the bare dormitory, dour classrooms and the dry playfields of Ajmer. The funniest amongst them was a Mumbai lad who made you laugh with jokes he made with his eyes. And when he opened his mouth that bloke could extract a laugh from even the driest souls, for his Mumbai Hindi was so very funny.

He would probably be translating from his mother tongue Marathi just as I would think in Rajasthani before expressing myself. We were from completely different cities and backgrounds but bonded instantly. His eyes always darting and dancing with mis­chief, lighting up that face with deep dimples. Years later, I would see him whenever my monthly dose of Alfred E Neuman arrived in my hands, sans the freckles and red hair of course. For this bloke was brown-skinned with curly black hair like me. For a Jodhpur lad like me what made him truly exotic was the name, Mikhail Jacob.

He then vanished, just like that. He had never let on about such plans but Mikhail Jacob didn’t come back to school the next term. The Mumbai boys had to undertake a complicated journey in getting to Ajmer, so we waited till the end of the day, the next day too, but still no signs of Mikhail when all the others from that city had arrived. When we asked our house matron about the missing Mikhail, she replied matter of factly, “Oh, he’s migrated.” I had probably never heard the word before, so asked again why, how and what, and every other query possible.

“He’s Jewish, so the family migrated to Israel,” she explained. As an American it was probably routine for her, but for a small-town Indian the idea seemed outrageous to me. The exotic name did of course suggest a different faith, but that was about it, not another nationality certainly. “But he’s Indian, just like me, so how can he belong somewhere else?” I asked and Linda ma’am tried to explain, but it made no sense to me how faith takes precedence over nationality of birth. He was born in India like me, looks and eats like me, yet belongs elsewhere.

It didn’t make sense to me then, and still doesn’t as to how someone’s loyalty to faith can override that sense of belonging that comes from birth and ethnicity. An Indian is Indian no matter of which faith, or even without one. Birth is all it takes, or so I thought then, and still do. Obviously, some don’t and barely four years later one of them taught me a brutal lesson with the butt of his Galil rifle in my stomach on the tarmac of the international airport at Lod, near Tel Aviv. Till June 1948 Lod was Al-Lydd.

I didn’t think of Mikhail at the humiliation of a rifle butt in my stomach but I did four years later in June 1982 when Israel attacked Lebanon. The rifle butt had incited a curiosity which brought about greater understanding on Palestine and Israel. When BBC World Service brought alive the invasion Mikhail loomed large in my thoughts. I had seen the Pakistani bombing of Jodhpur during the 1971 war and we were now aged 18 so he would be undergoing compulsory military service in Israel. Throughout Israel’s Lebanon invasion I wondered about Mikhail, especially during the September Sabra and Shatila massacres.

David Grossman’s To the End of the Land is harrowing in depicting grief, the despairing search for a missing child, hope riddled with doubts, the deepest agony and finality of loss. His son Uri was killed in 2006 when a Hezbollah rocket destroyed his tank. To the End of the Land is the search for a son who is not coming back, and the hopelessness is conveyed with a pain that never leaves the reader. In October 2023, there are many more Davids mourning other Uris, in hundreds. Israeli David is Palestinian Daud, and Uri is not dissimilar to Noor. Arabic and Hebrew words to convey light, brightness, and users of both languages are joined in grief after losing the lights of their lives.

Various Palestinian factions under Hamas launched extraor­dinary attacks across the fence that has caged Gaza for more than a decade. This year marks the 75th anniversary of Pales­tine’s vivisection, the Nakba or catastrophe; it is also 50 years since the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973, and a little more than 40 years since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Yoav Gallant, Is­rael’s defence minister, has vowed a complete blockade of Gaza and “fighting human animals and we’re acting accordingly”.

His predecessor from 1982 had similar sentiments and words, and the only long-term impact of that invasion was the creation of Hezbollah which now plays a significant role in Lebanese politics, and is a permanent source of grief for Israel. Any repeat in Gaza is certain to produce the same result. Israeli airstrikes may well reduce Gaza to rubble, and destroy Hamas, but such ideas tend to metastasise for they are rooted in a permanent state of mind. Gaza is a teeming mass of humanity because the residents were evicted from their historical villages nearby.

Sderot, where the Palestinian attackers drove around for hours was once called Najd, a dusty mudhouse village. In 1948, it was completely cleansed of its Palestinian population which was pushed into Gaza’s refugee camps. It is possible that some of the Palestinian attackers of October 7 were from Najd families ejected in 1948, and likewise for the other places targeted. Their inherited memories keep the Nakba anec­dotes alive, for this is Asia and attachment to ancestral land and villages is permanent. Occidental thinking cannot relate to this attachment, for the bonding and reminiscing over grazing lands hasn’t been inherited.

Palestinians live in Asia while Israelis live in the West, even though they may be separated by a billion-dollar fence and liv­ing barely a few kilometres apart. Gaza looks, smells, sounds, eats, talks and lives in Asia, and when they get an opportunity they even laugh like Asians, while their neighbours live in a sanitised Western environment where they have potable water, regular electricity, clean roads and regularly functioning schools. The only thing they do alike, and now even more so, is shed tears that look identical. And those are flowing in copious quantities on both sides of the fence.

The five red heifers arrived in Israel from Texas in

September 2022, and caused much excitement among the messianic who believe omens were now finally ripe for building the Third Temple (‘Forcing the End’ by Lawrence Wright, pbs. org). So it is prophesied in ancient texts, and one of the five will be ritually slaughtered, but before that there is a rigorous selection to find the perfect specimen, with not a hair unblemished. This will then usher in an era of the messiah. The last temple was destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans. Centuries later the Al-Aqsa mosque came up on the site of the Temple Mount.

In 2023, the heifers’ story would normally have evoked a snide remark, quaint and quirky. Except that two cabinet ministers in the Israeli government, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, carry that belief to unimaginable extents. Hos­tile towards unbelievers, Christians and Muslims alike. Since the heifers arrived, Christian cemeteries have been desecrated and spiting incidents on pilgrims in the West Bank have increased. While a large number of Palestinian families have been thrown out of their homes in Jerusalem and its environs, the real provo­cation are the repeated forays into Al-Aqsa (‘The Temple Mount movement braces for its moment’, 972, March 20, 2023).

So it shouldn’t surprise that the Hamas-led attacks are labelled Toofan Al-Aqsa in Arabic. Messianic meets messianic, with terribly tragic consequences. And it is certainly going to get worse, for both. For this is a squabble where lasting solutions cannot be avoided, however many have been attempted before. The search for alternative solutions through war or otherwise results in greater tragedy, political included. For this is a feud that has assassinated a Nobel laureate, Anwar Sadat, and unseated another, Menachem Begin, following his disastrous Lebanon in­vasion. It also led to the downfall of Golda Meir after the 1973 war.

That surprise war remains etched in Israeli memory as a disaster, but the October 2023 calamity reverberates around the world for the sheer reach enabled by modern technology. Mobile cameras airing the carnage real-time, glee and grief conjoined by the gore. Such visuals will remain in perpetuity, and cannot be reduced to a sepia-toned image circa 1973. Gov­ernments have been quick to condemn the Hamas-led attacks, covering prominent buildings with the blue-and-white Israeli flag while their streets display sympathy with the beleaguered Palestinians. Celtic Park in Glasgow displaying flags and ban­ners during the Saturday afternoon football match.

At the western end of the Arab world, RAJA Casablanca hosted Moghreb Tetouan in the Moroccan football league on Sunday, October 8, and the stands had a larger number of Pal­estinian flags than usual. And the trademark ‘Rajawi Filistini’ was sung with a different tone than before. Such has been the impact of modern communications technology, and it is aston­ishing that groups like Hamas have been quicker off the mark than technology’s established titans like Israel. The visuals are going to get gorier as Gaza is pounded day and night.

There have been repeated cycles of this type of violence, each carrying a more fearsome name than the one before, and they all end after hundreds of lives are lost. There is no times­cale, just the spiral of death. But there is a difference this time, for the sheer nature of the attacks, the scale of intrusions and the unprecedented numbers held hostage in Gaza. There is new ground broken in 2023, and neither side has trod on any­thing like this earlier. So it is unclear how it will play out until fighting fatigue and bruised egos are satiated.

This, however, has not prevented the voluble Israeli media from pointing fingers, within too. Even as fighting raged at multiple intrusion points, Haaretz, the liberal Israeli news­paper, had no hesitation in squarely blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Israeli prisons are overflowing with incarcerated Palestinians. In fact, the number of children in custody is more than the prisoners from Gaza, according to data maintained by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Noa Argamani, abducted from the Supernova music festi­val near Re’im and whisked away on a motorcycle, is the image that epitomises the tragedy and helplessness of the victims. A day later, her father Yaakov spoke to reporters. “Enough with the wars, enough with everything we’re seeing,” he pleaded. Then he detailed the cost to the other side. “They have also lost loved ones in the war. They also have captives. They also have mourning mothers. Let’s engage our emotions. We are two nations from the same father… Let us please make peace. Real peace,” he said, his voice breaking.

Anwar SadatCamp David AccordsGolda MeirHaifaIsrael At WarIsrael-HamasIsrael-Palestine conflictMenachem BeginZionism