Because Israel was young and righteous and heroic, I fell in love with it. The country appeared to be everything to which I—at age twelve still incapable of learning the multiplication tables or of running around the bases without tripping over my own pigeon-toed feet—aspired. Even then, I had a keen sense of history, an awareness that I was not just a lone Jew living in late 1960s America, but part of a global Jewish collective stretching back millennia. Already I considered myself lucky to be alive at this juncture, when my existence coincided with that of a sovereign Jewish State. I fell in love with Israel because I was grateful, but also because I was angry.
The only Jewish kid on the block, I rarely made it off the school bus without being ambushed by Jew-baiting bullies. Those fistfights left my knuckles lined with scars. One morning, my family awoke to find our front door smeared with racist slogans; one night our car’s windshield was smashed. Then, when I was a high school freshman, the phone rang with horrendous news: a bomb had blown up our synagogue. I ran to the scene and saw firemen leaping into the flames to rescue the Torah scrolls. The next day, our rabbi stood with Christian clergymen and led us in singing “We Shall Overcome.” But no display of brotherhood could salve the pain.
In the post–World War II, WASP-dominated America in which I grew up, anti-Semitism was a constant. Hardly confined to my blue-collar neighborhood, it festered in the elite universities with their quotas on Jewish admissions, and pervaded the restricted communities and clubs. Superficially, at least, we American Jews ranked among the nation’s most successful minorities. We took pride in the Dodgers’ ace pitcher Sandy Koufax, in folksinger Bob Dylan, and actors Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas. It tickled us that Jewish humor became, in large measure, America’s humor, and the bagel grew as popular as pizza. Jewish artists wrote five of America’s most beloved Christmas songs and practically invented Hollywood. One could hardly imagine a community more integrated, and yet we remained different. Alone among the hyphenated ethnic identities—Italian-American, African-American—ours placed “American” first. And only ours was based on religion. No one ever referred to Buddhist or Methodist Americans. As Jews and as Americans we were sui generis, as difficult for us to define as for others. A graffito on the wall of my bathroom at school asked, “Are Jews white?” A different hand scrawled beneath it, “Yes, but…”
Anti-Semitism completed that sentence. Whether being beaten up for my identity or denied certain opportunities because of it, I often encountered hatred. And after each incident, my father took me down to our basement. There, in a cubbyhole behind the stairwell, he secreted a musty album that his brother, another veteran, had brought home from World War II. Inside were yellowing photographs of concentration camps, piles of incinerated corpses, and snickering Nazis. “This is why we must be strong,” my father reminded me. “This is why we need Israel.”
Those photographs needed no captioning, as the Holocaust haunted our lives. The ovens of Auschwitz, I often felt in high school, still smoldered. Yet American Jews hesitated to talk openly about the murder of six million of their people, as if it were a source of shame. Then, in my sophomore year, survivor and world-acclaimed author Elie Wiesel visited our community. He spoke of his ordeals in Romania’s Sighet ghetto and the Buchenwald concentration camp. In a voice at once frail and unbroken, he challenged us to face the Final Solution publicly, not only in our basements. We did, but confronting the horrors of Jewish helplessness also forced us to face the harrowing truth that America did nothing to save the Jews. Worse, America sent thousands back to be murdered and closed its doors to millions.
That knowledge alone would have sufficed to make me a Zionist. This meant, simply, that I believed in the Jews’ right to independence in our ancient homeland. But there was more. Zionism was not merely a reaction to discrimination, but an affirmation of what I felt from an early age to be my fundamental identity. For deep-rooted reasons, Zionism defined my being.
Though I was not raised religious—I read my Bar Mitzvah in transliteration—the Jewish story of the Exodus from Egypt to the exodus from Europe resounded with meaning. Our story was the vehicle for our values: family, universal morality, social justice, and loyalty to our land. Half of humanity believed in the one God we introduced to the world nearly four thousand years ago and refused to relinquish, even under unspeakable tortures. God owed us an explanation for the Holocaust, I insisted. But Zionism offered a way of saying “we’re finished with you, God” and “thank you, God,” simultaneously. It allowed us to assert our self-sufficiency, even independence from formal religion, but in the one place that our forebears cherished as divinely given. Zionism enabled us to return to history as active authors of our own story. And the story I considered the most riveting of all time was that of the Jewish people.
I belonged to that people and needed to be part of its narrative. Being Jewish in America, while culturally and materially comfortable, felt to me like living in the margins. The major chapter was being written right now, I thought, and not in New Jersey. History, rather, was happening in a state thriving against all odds, thousands of miles away. How could I miss it?
That is why I joined the Zionist youth movement that brought me to Washington in May 1970, when I shook Yitzhak Rabin’s hand. That is why, throughout that year, I mowed lawns and shoveled snow from neighbors’ driveways to raise the airfare. And why I made repeated trips into New York City, alone, to browbeat kibbutz movement representatives into accepting me as a volunteer despite being two years short of the minimum age. The representatives relented and, in the summer of my pivotal fifteenth year, I finally purchased my ticket. I acquired my first U.S. passport and boarded a plane for Israel.
Rising to Israel
Descending the ramp, the Israeli heat hit me, hammering-hot. But even more fazing was my encounter with the country I had only imagined: smelling the citrus-scented air, seeing trees alien to New Jersey and all the signs in Hebrew. This was Israel of 1970, before serious talk of peace or the Palestinian issue, when fighting still raged on the Egyptian and Jordanian fronts. The hourly news, announced with a series of beeps, had passersby running ear-first for the nearest radio.
Behind the tension, though, lay a raffish élan and self-confidence. Toughened old-timers could still recount how they drained the swamps, battled malaria and British occupation troops, and struggled bitterly for independence against invading Arab armies. Along with its valorous past, Israel’s present was scintillating. The streets thrummed with shoppers, beggars, policemen, workers, stunning young women and men in olive army uniforms, almost all of them, inconceivably to me, Jewish.
A few days after my arrival, a wobbly Israeli bus dropped me into the dust of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. Invented by Zionist pioneers at the turn of the twentieth century, the kibbutz—in the Hebrew plural kibbutzim—was an utterly revolutionary concept. Members of these hardworking agricultural communities shared all their worldly possessions, ate every meal in a common dining room, and raised their children in separate “houses” managed by nursemaids. Ideologically utopian, the kibbutzim fulfilled the practical goal of settling the land and absorbing Jewish immigrants. In wartime, the farms served as fortified redoubts. Though representing only a fraction of Israel’s populace, “kibbutzniks” served in the toughest combat units, accounted for as much as half of all officers, and fell in disproportionate numbers. Well after the founding of the state, the kibbutz remained the apex of the Zionist ideal—selfless, grounded, caring, and, throughout successive battles, courageous.
Some of that patina had nevertheless worn off by the summer of 1970. But Gan Shmuel clung to its radical roots. After outgrowing the children’s houses, teenagers moved into the mossad—the institution—and took responsibility for maintaining their own quarters, preparing their food, and reporting for work in the fields. Once assigned to the mossad, I received dark blue work clothes, sturdy boots, and a brim-down sailor’s cap called a kova tembel—“the idiot’s hat,” Israel’s signature headwear. Each sunris
e, a tractor hauled me out to the alfalfa pastures where I lugged irrigation pipes through calf-high muck. And each evening we danced to Israeli folk tunes or huddled around a gas stove eating boiled corn. Back in America, the youth culture convulsed with protests and drugs, but Israel was my rebellion, my stimulant. Israel was cool.
“When I walk around Gan Shmuel at night I’m in such ecstasy, for I know who I am and what I am doing here,” I wrote my parents. I described the rigorous work but also the kibbutz bomb shelter decorated, paradoxically, with a poster of Picasso’s Guernica. Though surrounded by war, I concluded, Israelis never ceased craving peace. “There is God in all of them.”
Did I fail to face the bloodshed out of which Israel had been born and the improbability of a Jewish state serenely integrated into the Middle East? Could I see the conflicting Israeli identities of secular and religious, right and left, Arab and Jew, and the mess that sovereignty entails? In time I would, certainly. The fantasy of Israel would eventually dissipate, but never the dream.
On the contrary, I would cherish the contradictions, for they were ours alone. Throughout most of our history, Jews rarely had the right to wrestle with sovereign problems and, for our statelessness, we paid an unspeakable price. But sovereignty also came at a cost. Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founder, famously said, “If you will it, it is no dream,” to which I always appended a quote from Irish laureate William Butler Yeats, “In dreams begin responsibility.” Zionism, for me, meant Jews taking responsibility for themselves—for their dreams as well as for their mess.
As a teenager, though, my Zionism was still simple, a passion for an Israel that furnished muscular answers to anti-Semitism and a dignified response to the Holocaust. Someday I would live there, I knew. Until then, I would return to America and prepare myself politically and spiritually. Back in New Jersey, I marched in protests demanding freedom for the millions of Jews suffering under Soviet rule and prevented from immigrating to Israel. A Chabad rabbi, Shalom Gordon—cherubic face, copious beard—volunteered to teach me Talmud. Rejoining the Zionist youth movement, I began to learn about Israel’s historic alliance with America.
During the movement’s meetings, I often heard the words of Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court justice, who said, “Every American Jew who supported Zionism was a better American for doing so.” The United States and Israel, I came to value, were both democracies, both freedom-loving, and similarly determined to defend their independence. One could be—in fact, should be—a Zionist as well as a patriotic American, because the two countries stood for identical ideals. Quite naturally, I stood and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and, in the next breath, Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” the Hope.
Meanwhile, I mowed more lawns, shoveled and raked, to save enough to work each summer in Israel for free. At eighteen I was on horseback rounding up cattle on the Golan Heights. The job had risks—cows occasionally set off old Syrian antitank mines—but it further transformed me. Once wan and tender-looking, I became leathery and fit. No longer a stranger in my own land, I blended with my ancestors’ topography and conversed in their language. I longed to become Israeli. The last stanza of America’s national anthem still left me cheering, but the conclusion of Israel’s, “to be a free people in our land, the Land of Zion,” made me yearn.
Yet, still I did not move to Israel, telling myself I could contribute more to it with an undergraduate education. My assumptions were that Israel would remain invincible and largely above reproach, but then these proved wrong. Suddenly attacked by Egypt and Syria on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, 1973, Israel was nearly overwhelmed. Though it eventually drove back and encircled the invaders, in a mere three weeks the Israeli army lost a staggering 2,500 soldiers—the equivalent of 230,000 Americans today.
The Yom Kippur War signaled the beginning of other onslaughts. On the diplomatic front, a holster-packing Yasser Arafat, founder of the militantly anti-Israel Fatah movement and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), received a standing ovation at the United Nations General Assembly. A year later, that same assembly equated Zionism with racism. Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the Israeli towns of Ma’alot and Qiryat Shmona, machine-gunning women and children.
I covered these travesties for Columbia College radio and, in the numbing cold, stood on street corners handing out Zionist leaflets. I felt useless and absurd. While jointly completing BA and master’s degrees in Middle East studies at Columbia, the questions still hounded me: Why was I a student instead of a soldier? Pulling fraternity pranks and not guarding Israel’s frontiers?
My life bifurcated. Outwardly, I was all-American: the recipient of a State Department–affiliated scholarship, the author of novels, plays, and film scripts, one of which won first prize in the PBS Young Filmmakers’ Festival. Such proclivities led me westward, to Hollywood, where I spent a summer nervously holding cue cards for a splenetic Orson Welles. At the same time, I studied Hebrew literature and Arabic, rowed varsity crew, and ran marathons to prepare for the paratroopers. And I worked—as a security guard, bartender, even a football scoreboard operator—to save enough money to move east, to Israel.
But then, after graduation, I again delayed my departure in order to serve as an “advisor”—so my ID defined me—to Israel’s delegation to the United Nations. My responsibilities included explaining Israeli policies to American Jews, many of them senior citizens whose first question was, invariably, “Are you married?” I also observed special UN sessions where Arab diplomats in tailored suits accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian wells and rendering Palestinian women infertile. Saudi ambassador Jamil al-Baroudi wondered aloud whether Jews were in fact human.
In addition to listening to diplomats in three-piece suits spouting anti-Semitism, I had to sit among some of Israel’s fiercest foes. The Jewish State’s name in English begins with the letter I, awkwardly placing its delegates next to those of Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Libya, as well as the Iraqis and Iranians. The only respite came from Ireland, whose jaunty young diplomats comforted me with Guinness. They also arranged a family-hospitality tour of their homeland that left me hooked on Irish music and soul.
Fortunately, my last experience at the UN proved to be the most memorable—Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan came to address the General Assembly. Standing before me with his trademark eye patch was one of the mythic figures of my youth, the storied warrior. He came to the UN not to talk about war, though, but about the groundbreaking peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. I helped him write his speech, aware of his frailty—he died two years later—and the failing sight in his remaining eye. In those pre-computer days, I had to scour all of New York for a printer with letters large enough for Dayan to read.
Dayan’s speech was an inspiring respite from the revolting hatred of Israel I encountered almost daily at the UN. With immense relief, I concluded my service in New York and at last embarked on that life-altering journey. In Zionist parlance, one does not merely immigrate to Israel but rather goes up—makes aliya—and in 1979, finally, I rose.
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The ascent was less than exalted. I arrived alone, in the middle of a drizzly night, with only a backpack. No one greeted me at the airport or offered me a ride to the Jerusalem absorption center, where no one was awake to open the door. Yet the mop, the foam rubber mattress, and mini-refrigerator I received as a newcomer to the state seemed like treasures to me. I stared at the meager contents of that refrigerator, all purchased at an Israeli store, and thought, “Wow, that’s mine. I’m home.”
Under Israel’s Law of Return, any Jew making aliya can almost immediately become a citizen. From then on, I would carry two passports, both of them blue, one American and the other Israeli. I also Hebraicized my name to Oren, meaning pine tree, which recalled my American roots but also my regeneration in our ancestral land. Those two identities finally felt melded in me. I could not have been luckier.
—
The next few months were
spent working for a social service agency, visiting the “other” Israel of poor development towns and remote Arab villages. The poverty often shocked me, as did the sometimes vast cultural gaps between Israel and the United States. Unmindful of the personal space so precious to Americans, for example, Israelis would cut into lines, leer at adjacent drivers at stoplights, and lecture total strangers on the best way to raise their kids. Unlike the Americans, who were swift to hit and slow to shout, Israelis would yell at each other for hours without ever coming to blows, and occasionally end up having coffee. And whereas Americans always wished me “Have a nice day” but did not always mean it, Israelis sometimes said, “Shalom”—peace—and always did.
Still, in spite of the privations I witnessed and the social chasms that needed to be crossed, I felt privileged to be part of Israel. My great-grandparents fleeing pogroms would have been envious of my opportunity to assist the inhabitants of a free Jewish state and to learn their ways, however different. My forebears would have thought themselves blessed to be able to protect that state from harm. I know I did, opening the plain brown envelope inscribed with a sword sheathed in olive leaves. This was the symbol of the Israel Defense Forces—the IDF—and inside the letter were orders summoning me to the Bakum, the central induction base.
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