As soon as he saw the Arab he said what was on his mind: “Get your records in shape, Jemail, because Cullinane’s got to finish this dig by himself.”
“Why?”
“I’m taking the cabinet job. The prime minister announces it tomorrow. And my first appointment will be you. Director-general.” He extended his hand to the Arab.
Tabari drew back. “You know what you’re doing?” he asked suspiciously.
“I sure do,” Eliav said. He threw his arm about Tabari’s shoulder and led him to the edge of the dig, where they sat on stones that had once served as part of a synagogue-basilica-mosque-church, and there the Jew and the descendant of Ur fought it out, as their ancestors had done ages ago. They were two handsome men in the strong middle years of their lives: the ascetic Jew, tall and serious, with hollow cheeks and cautious manner; the man of Ur, with his five children, heavier, browner, with a quicker wit and a more congenial smile. At the dig they had formed a constructive team, assuming responsibility for decisions and sustaining the creative mood on the tell. Now they were about to grope for a reincarnation of that fruitful if tempestuous partnership which Hebrew and Canaanite had shared four thousand years ago and which Jew and Arab had known for thirteen hundred years following the arrival of Islam.
“It’s about time we Jews and Arabs made some real gestures of conciliation,” Eliav began. “Looks like we’re going to share this part of the world for quite a long time.”
“I have no wish to serve as an experiment.”
“And since in the matters I’ll be handling, you’re the best-informed man I know …”
“If you appoint me there could be all sorts of hell.”
“There will be. But we’ve got to encourage the day when Nasser will appoint a Jew to some job of similar importance. And he will.”
“I don’t want to see you get in trouble, Ilan.”
“Trouble I can take. If they fire me I’ll come back here and live off Paul Zodman.”
“But you’ll be up to your neck in Arab-Jewish relations, and I could hurt you.”
“No. You’ll help. To prove that even in these difficult areas Jews and Arabs can work in harmony.”
“There aren’t six people in Israel prepared to believe that.”
“You’re one of the six, and our job is to increase the number.”
“I was always much impressed,” Tabari said, “when your Jewish God halted human sacrifice. Here you are, restoring it.”
“I’m trying to restore something much older. The brotherhood that used to exist on this land. Want to help?”
Tabari studied the invitation for some moments, then said, “No. I’m an Arab, and the fact that I stayed behind to help rebuild this country doesn’t make me any less an Arab. I’ll become your assistant, Eliav, on the day your government gives one sign that it understands Arabs, wants them to stay here, and is willing to accept them as full partners …”
“Haven’t I proved that this summer? Haven’t you and I been full, respectable partners?”
“You and I? Yes. Your government and we Arabs? No.”
“What do you want?”
“Take out your pencil. We want better schools, hospitals, roads to our villages, nurses, a place in the university for our best young men, a partnership in which our talents are respected. We want you to see that on this land there can be a fruitful association of equals. Your intellectuals have got to stop patronizing us as if we were idiot children. Your businessmen have got to accept us as men who can count and who are as honest as they are. Eliav, we want to feel that as Arabs we have a home in your society.”
“Haven’t I conveyed that promise in everything I’ve done this summer?”
“And there’s one other reason why I can’t accept.”
“Do I know what it is?” Eliav asked.
“I think you can guess. In those long discussions we had with Cullinane on the nature of the moral state, I noticed that there was one topic which he often led up to but always shied away from. Americans are taught to be so sensitive about other people’s feelings. Yet this is the problem which really tests the moral foundations of Judaism.”
“You mean the Arab refugees?”
“I do. Those refugees on the other side of the border were in Cullinane’s mind every time he fell silent in our discussions. They’re in mine, too.”
“What would you have us do?” Eliav asked in frank perplexity. “In 1948, against every plea of the Jews, some six hundred thousand Arabs evacuated this country. They did so at the urging of their political leaders. On the promise that within two weeks they would come back as victors, take over all Jewish property and do what they liked with Jewish women. Now it’s sixteen years later. They tell us the number of refugees has multiplied to a million. Arab governments have not allowed them to find new homes in Arab countries and the time has passed when they can recover their old homes here. What do you want us to do?”
“I’ll join you, Eliav, on the day Israel makes proper restitution for …”
“We’ve agreed to do that! In my first speech I’m to announce that Israel, before the bar of humanity and world opinion, is willing to discuss compensation for every refugee who can prove he left old Palestine, if such a settlement becomes part of a total peace treaty. I’ll go through the world begging Jews in every land to help us pay off that self-imposed obligation. I’ll propose taxes here at home higher than we’ve ever had before. Tabari! Work with me to reach this honorable solution.”
“And what about repatriation?”
Eliav fell silent. Uneasily he moved about the tell and from some distance said, “After we took Zefat I personally went out … in a captured English Land Rover … begging the fleeing Arab refugees to come back to their homes in Zefat. Twice I was shot at, but I kept on, because I knew then that we needed those Arabs and they needed us. But they wouldn’t listen. ‘We’ll come back with an army,’ they boasted. ‘We’ll take everything. Our homes. Your homes. And all the land.’ And they walked over the hills to Syria. A couple of nights later, right where I’m standing, other Arabs killed my wife, yet the next morning, after we had the big fight in Akko … where I met you for the first time …” He looked across the tell at Tabari and asked in a low voice, “What did I do that morning, Jemail?”
The Arab remained silent, and with a sudden leap Eliav was upon him, grabbing his shoulders and shaking them. “What did I do?” he shouted. “Tell me … now!”
In a soft voice, barely audible above the November breeze that was coming down the wadi with the first hints of winter, Tabari said, “You went to the beach, where the boats were filling up with Arab refugees, and you pleaded with every man you could reach: ‘Don’t run away. Stay here and help us build this country.’ ”
“And did any stay?”
“I did.”
Eliav looked at his friend with the kind of quiet passion that history instills in men of perception. He sat down, burdened by the impossible complexity of the refugee problem, and recalled those fateful days when the Arabs had fled the country. “More than twenty thousand left Akko that day,” he said, “and I went from man to man, but of them all I was able to persuade only you.” He bowed to Tabari, then said with increasing bitterness, “And now they want to come back. When the land is fertile and the shops are filled, when the schools are productive and the mosques are open, they want to come back. It may be too late. In Cyprus we’re seeing what happens when you try to force two different peoples to live together in a majority-minority status. Would you have us create a second Cyprus here?”
“I want a state which preaches morality to practice it,” Tabari said. “Bring back at least a token of these refugees to prove …”
“We will!” Eliav cried. “In my speech I’m also to make that offer again. More than a mere token we will bring back. And we’ll absorb them in full brotherhood. But a million? Dedicated to destroy us? When only six hundred thousand left? No, dear friend, you cannot demand that we commit suicid
e.”
“I won’t take the job in Jerusalem,” Tabari said finally. “But I will say this. When we were digging at Crusader levels I remember telling you that just as we Muslims drove out the Europeans after two hundred years, so we would push you into the sea. Now I’m beginning to believe you’ll be here for a long time.”
“I’m sorry you won’t help us,” Eliav said with deep regret.
“I’ll always be an Arab,” Tabari replied.
“On that day in Akko in 1948? Why didn’t you run away too?”
“I belong to this land,” the descendant of Ur said, “this well, these olive trees. My people were here before yours were formed. When it was prudent to be Canaanites, we were Canaanites. For the same lofty reason we were Phoenicians, and when Jews ruled the land we were Jews, or Greeks, or Romans, or Christians, or Arabs, or Mamelukes or Turks. If you allowed us to hold the land we never gave a damn as to which church we worshiped in or what flag we saluted. When my grandfather was governor of Tiberias he spent most of his time looking after his own affairs, and my father, Sir Tewfik, served the British in the same impartial manner, because all we wanted was the land.”
“Why this land, Jemail? What’s so special about this land?”
“Here the pressures of the world are vital. After all, if this land was good enough for God to choose, and Moses and Jesus and Muhammad, it’s good enough for me.”
“You don’t believe in God, do you, Jemail?”
“Indeed I do. There must be a god of the land, who lives in wells like ours, or on hills like that, or in olive groves that replenish themselves forever. He may even live in the religions which grow out of his land. But he cannot exist alien from the land which bore him.”
“We Jews believe in the same partnership of God, and a particular land, and a chosen people. We’re very old brothers, Tabari, and in the future we shall meet many times, for we understand each other.”
Distressed at not having enlisted Tabari for the difficult job ahead, Eliav said good-bye to the dig and made his way eastward along the Damascus road and in time reached Zefat, where he intended spending a few hours with the Vodzher Rebbe reviewing a group of legal cases like Zipporah Zederbaum’s. He had convinced himself that he had a chance of winning the old man over to a more liberal interpretation of Judaism, but he found him a shriveled wraith with a beard even longer and whiter than before and a fierce determination to resist any encroachment on the law. So Eliav retreated and turned the discussion to the heroic days of Ilana, Bar-El and Bagdadi.
“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” the little leader asked in Yiddish.
“Yes, but their ideas won.”
“And you’ve taken another name.”
“Yes, I’m part of Eretz Israel now.”
“And everything has worked out as I predicted, hasn’t it?”
“With modifications.”
“And you’re to be our minister in charge of the very ideas we used to argue about?”
“Yes, and I hope you’ll help me find some sort of compromise.”
The rebbe’s face darkened and with both hands he clutched his beard. “Compromise there can never be,” he said. “Israel has no right to exist except as a religious state.” And when Eliav fought to gain a concession that would allow Zipporah Zederbaum to marry, the rebbe refused to listen. “There is the law,” he said stubbornly, and more he would not say. But he did take Eliav by the hands invitingly: “Come to the synagogue. Stay by my side throughout this night. And you’ll discover what Israel is.” Eliav protested that he must move on to Tiberias, but the rebbe would not allow it. “Your life is at stake,” he said, forcing Eliav to the synagogue, where the services were as moving as ever, except that now more than sixty men attended instead of a mere seventeen. And all roared the Lech a Dodi in some two dozen different styles.
After the evening service the old man returned home but he did not eat, nor would he allow Eliav to do so, but at quarter to midnight the two men said good night to the rebbetzin and walked out into the lovely crooked streets of Zefat to a barren hall where more than a hundred Jews in ceremonial garb were waiting: tall lean men in fur caps, short round businessmen in long robes, and numerous young men in white shawls. They were the Hasidim of Zefat, men violent in their love for God, and now they ranged themselves silently about a U-shaped table as their beloved rebbe made his way to the head position, where he sat alone like a king. Only he had a plate before him at this feast and only he would dine.
At midnight a senior assistant who acted as servant brought him a bowl of soup, and since no spoons or forks were allowed at this ritual the rebbe raised the bowl to his bearded lips, drank a little of the soup, then ceremoniously pushed it away. As soon as he had done so the silent Hasidim leaped from their seats and a hundred struggling hands dived for the bowl. Fingers were dipped into the sacred broth and then conveyed to the mouths until the bowl was dry.
Next came one fish, of which the rebbe ate only a morsel, whereupon the hundred waiting hands tore at the remains till nothing was left on the plate but a few bones, for it was a cherished thing to be able to say in Zefat, “I ate of the rebbe’s fish.” Now the servant brought a bowl of mixed vegetables, the ancient kind that King David had eaten with his bare hands when he traveled from Jerusalem to the Galilee, and again there was the ritual tasting by the rebbe and the mad scramble for a bean or a grain of groats; to Eliav the fight to thrust even one finger into the bowl was disgusting, even though he knew that such feasts were weekly affairs with the Hasidim.
Now came the meat, a large piece of roast lamb cooked precisely as it had been for more than three thousand years by the Jews of this region, but this time there was to be a variation in the eating procedure, for after the rebbe had tasted the lamb he did not push it away. Instead he rose, nodded his wintry head three times and said in a whispering voice, “To my beloved son Ilan Eliav, who has been chosen to help guide Eretz Israel, I give this meat.” And from the bone he tore off a small piece and with his trembling fingers pushed it into Eliav’s mouth. This done, he moved the plate away and his followers struggled for the fragments until the bone lay clean.
The rebbe’s midnight meal was ended and the devout silence which had marked it was broken by one old Jew who started clapping his hands. When he had set the rhythm he was joined by others until the room echoed to the commanding sound. A voice started chanting in Yiddish, and now the hall was filled with those wild songs of religious joy that had originated in Russia and Poland. The ecstasy of God was upon this shouting congregation and for more than an hour the songs reverberated, not stately hymns in the Catholic or Protestant tradition, but cries of violent praise to the God who had shepherded them through another week.
At two in the morning a surprising thing happened: an elderly Jew, whom Eliav had noticed earlier as one of the more decrepit ancients, began to dance and quickly the floor filled with gyrating bodies, fur caps awry and coats standing out from hips. If the Hasidic songs were not hymns, neither were the dances customary religious posturings; they were wild prancings of abandonment which gave the impression that the dancers were drunk. Those steps are much too vigorous, Eliav thought, for the old men who are performing them, but at three o’clock the rebbe himself rose to dance, and for some minutes the others stopped to watch him. Incredible, Eliav said to himself. He must be eighty. For the rebbe was captured by the religious fervor he had learned from his grandfather in Vodzh, and he cavorted like a child, kicking his legs high and whirling about until his fur cap traced a brown blur across Eliav’s eye.
At first Eliav was afraid the old man might hurt himself, but as other dancers formed about the rebbe, Eliav realized that these men were in a kind of catatonic trance and if they were to be struck dead now they would die in maximum joy: they were truly children of God reveling in His goodness.
After the rebbe had continued his violent dance for some fifteen minutes, all the men of Zefat joined hands in a big circle that reached out to the four wa
lls, and slowly this circle began to move counter-clockwise while Eliav remained in the middle, watching. An elderly Jew began singing and soon the hall throbbed with the sound of voices and feet which halted only when the rebbe stopped the dance.
“Tonight my son Eliav will dance with me,” the old man said, “that he may gain an understanding of this land he is to govern.” And the ancient rebbe left the circle, took Eliav by the hand and brought him into the group. With the old man’s hand clutching his, Eliav danced till morning.
As dawn came over the hills of Galilee the fur-hatted Hasidim began straggling out of the hall to wander home in groups of five or six, and as each group moved into the saintly streets of Zefat the rebbe gave them his benediction. When he and Eliav were alone he said quietly, “Eliav, we are depending on you to keep Israel a nation dedicated to God.” He asked the young minister to walk home with him, but Eliav said, “No, I have a mission to carry out,” and perhaps the old man guessed what it was, for he said, “Your true mission to Zefat you have completed. You’ve seen that we religious ones intend to fight for this nation. Not a single paragraph of the law may you change.” Then, as if he realized that he had not much longer to live, he reached up and kissed Eliav on both cheeks. “The dead are dead,” he whispered, “but they rely on us to fulfill their hopes.” And he followed the others through the narrow, arched streets of Zefat.
Then Eliav was alone in the city he had fought for, and he walked by twisting paths and alleys down to the foot of the English stairs to make a pilgrimage which in recent years had come to mean much in his life. Ahead lay twenty-one separate flights to be climbed, and reverently he began his ascent.
One, two, three: to the left stood the stalwart Jewish house pockmarked with bullets and unrepaired since the war; here Vered Yevneski had helped hold off three Arab assaults that would otherwise have taken the house and led to the collapse of the quarter; she had been so young, so brave.
The Source: A Novel Page 131