When Memory Comes

by Saul Friedlander

  How I managed at the time I do not remember clearly; the obvious answer would be: in 1969, I was a mere thirty-seven. I had to deal with all the problems of the new department in Jerusalem and with an entirely different academic setting once I returned to Geneva, in April of each year. In fact, I soon had to advise graduate students and tackle administrative problems at both ends throughout the academic year. Teaching the history of international relations was the same in Geneva and in Jerusalem, but the graduate seminars were entirely different: Nazi anti-Semitism in one place and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the other.

  During my first regular year in Jerusalem, Hagith, pregnant with our daughter, stayed in Geneva with the boys. I joined them in April and again took up my teaching at the institute. In June 1970, Michal was born and a few months later, we all returned to Israel.

  1

  The family was now au complet, if I may say. Hagith and I had never discussed how many children we wished for but, tacitly, we felt that three was the right number. As I mentioned previously, a child represented some sort of revenge for me, and this irrational, instinctive reaction persisted until Michal’s birth. There was an old female pediatrician in Tel Aviv, Dr. Aharonova, who had written the textbook of a former generation; I found it at my in-laws’ home and used to quote it: “Two children like the number of the parents, and one to strengthen the community.” What I quoted ironically, even before Eli was born, became, ironically, our family.

  Was Hagith right to reproach me, in later years, that she never saw me on all fours with one of the kids riding on my back? I didn’t have this kind of playful, natural, easygoing attitude: as a father I was reserved, in the way my father had been with me (much less so, however). I knew that he loved me, although he generally seemed distant, except for the last day of our life together (in the hospital in Montluçon). And I think that the children knew how much I loved them, notwithstanding my relative shyness and my yearly absence for two to three months, in Geneva. They would join me there when school was over and we would spend the summer together and return together to Jerusalem or, quite often in fact, I would return to Jerusalem when my own “school year” was over.

  In Jerusalem we moved from one rented apartment to the next. Eventually, we decided to build a house on a plot in the Talbyeh district that my father-in-law had acquired well before the Six-Day War for a very modest sum. In the euphoria of the postwar months we turned to an Arab contractor from East Jerusalem. He would excavate the ground and build the foundations according to the plans of a Tel Aviv architect, a friend of ours.

  The contractor received a rather hefty down payment, and, indeed, the excavations were soon completed. But that was it: the foundations were never laid. Our contractor had lost the money playing poker and, soon thereafter, he died of cancer. We took a contractor from Jewish Jerusalem and Hagith became the supervisor of daily progress from that moment on until we moved into the house, four years later.

  2

  In Geneva, the question soon arose: What should be done with our apartment while we were in Jerusalem, during the autumn, winter, and early spring, year after year? The monthly rent was due whether we resided there or not. I arranged with the institute the subleasing of the apartment to guest professors, who happened to be mainly Americans. Thus, in the fall of 1972 our first “tenants” arrived: George Kennan and his wife.

  For those who would not remember George Kennan’s name, he was for all intents and purposes the architect of the American policy of containment in confronting the Soviet Union in the cold war. His policy recommendations became the basis of the Truman Doctrine and of the Marshall Plan. As head of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department during the late forties, later ambassador to Moscow and to Yugoslavia, and a lifelong student of the Soviet Union and of international affairs more generally, Kennan was possibly the most important professional and scholarly voice in American foreign policy before the Henry Kissinger era.

  The Kennans were supposed to arrive at the apartment by 3 p.m. on a given day in late September 1972 to leave us enough time for explaining the basics and catching our own plane to Israel. A few minutes before three, no Kennans were in sight. We were getting nervous. Shortly after the hour, a ring at the door: here they were, very tall, blue-eyed, with a severe mien; that’s how I imagined typical WASPs. Their explanation of the slight delay confirmed my intuition: they had not taken a taxi from the airport to our address, less than a mile away. Notwithstanding their multiple suitcases, they had taken a bus to the central bus station in town and, from there, another bus to our house.

  Two months went by and on December 3, the Kennans left for Paris; they had transferred the apartment to the American delegate to a disarmament conference, Paul Nitze, and his wife, and left us a handwritten letter that I have kept. After telling of the arrangements with the maid, Kennan moved to the books:

  I was delighted to find in your library certain books that were of value to me in connection with my own work: namely, Bülow’s memoirs, those of Hohenlohe, the book on the Rothschilds, Chastenet’s history of the III République. I have used them all and I think you will find them in their accustomed places. We have been very happy here and are most grateful to you and Mrs. Friedländer for letting us use the flat.

  Very sincerely,

  George Kennan

  Then, a PS: “Mrs. Friedländer might like to know that the vacuum cleaner, which needed medical attention, was repaired at the nearby shopping center.”

  How nice and civilized!

  Unfortunately, George Kennan was no great friend of Jews, either before or during the world war, as I learned when I read his memoirs.

  3

  The Hebrew University, a full-fledged member of which I had now become, was a proud institution. Established in 1925, it aspired to become the university of the Jewish people. From its original site, Mount Scopus, it overlooked the whole city of Jerusalem on one side and the Judean Hills descending toward the Dead Sea on the other. It would be hard to imagine a more august and inspiring location. After the war of 1948 and the division of Jerusalem, the university buildings on Mount Scopus remained an empty enclave within Jordanian-controlled territory, reached only sporadically and under strict supervision for basic maintenance purposes. In 1967, after the Israeli occupation of the whole of Jerusalem, access to Mount Scopus was free again.

  While Haifa could take pride in its Institute of Technology, and Rehovoth (south of Tel Aviv) in its Research Institute in the Sciences, while Tel Aviv was setting up a still fledgling university, Jerusalem remained, in the early 1970s — and in its own opinion — the guardian of excellence in Israeli higher learning. Truly important from the outset and throughout the first two decades of the state’s history was the Hebrew University’s role as a bastion of liberalism in opposition to the wanton supremacy of state interests preached by Ben-Gurion. Later, it was there that quite a number of voices arose against the extreme nationalism that followed the Six-Day War, particularly in regard to the occupied territories and the fate of the Palestinians more generally.

  “Tell your friend Talmon that we will not suffer such attacks for long without responding.” This was Israel Galili’s ominous message, delivered to me on one of our occasional meetings. Yakov Talmon was back in Jerusalem from a one-year stay in Princeton. For some time since his return in 1969, he was publishing long and eloquent articles in Haaretz against the policy of occupation. As a matter of fact, the government waited passively — and contentedly — for the Arab states to make a first step toward peace, knowing well that they wouldn’t take it. And, if immobility was the rule of the game, why not start setting up some strategically located settlements in the West Bank and, as a bonus, some historically (Biblically) significant ones, according to their location?

  Israel Galili was a strange bird. He was minister without portfolio in Golda Meir’s government and possibly its most influential member. I knew him from Goldmann days and, for some reason, he chose me to convey to Talmon and
others the “official” reaction to my wayward colleagues’ publications criticizing the occupation policy. I stopped meeting him after he presented me with a riddle: “Do you know,” he asked me, “what the definition of our conflict with the Palestinians is?” As I silently conveyed my ignorance, he proceeded: “It is the agrarian question.” And after another puzzled look on my part: “That is: who will be first in pushing the other’s head into the ground!” Only much later did I hear that this was how the Bolsheviks defined their struggle against the Mensheviks.

  Eshkol, in comparison, had been a Menshevik of sorts. He could have accepted some compromise agreement with the Arab states, but he died in early 1969 and was replaced by Golda Meir, a very different kind of leader, a stone-hard “Bolshevik.”

  It would be a mistake to perceive Israeli settlement policies in the occupied territories as one single swoop from its beginning to the present. In the fall of 1967, Eshkol accepted the settling of Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem, on the site of the former Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, destroyed by the Jordanian army during the 1948 war; more precisely put, Eshkol did not oppose the national religious initiative, given that the location of the new settlement (camouflaged at first as a military outpost) was included in the outline of new defensible borders, later known as the Allon Plan (named after the vice prime minister Yigal Allon, who had authored it), a sine qua non condition for any peace agreement.

  I am telling all of this in order to describe common thinking during the first two or three years following the war, a thinking that I accepted. The pre-1967 borders were indeed indefensible, and if Israel hadn’t struck preemptively and destroyed the Egyptian air force, the course of the war would have been lengthier and more painful. During these early postwar years what I and others started questioning was not the principle of defensible borders but, under Golda Meir’s watch, the refusal to respond to any positive initiative coming from the other side.

  In 1970, an “attrition war” started along the Suez Canal: the Egyptians shelled Israeli positions and exacted a toll in Israeli lives, while Israel retaliated by bombing Egyptian cities along the waterway: Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez.

  I mentioned previously how unsettling it was to move from dormant Geneva to the nationalist excitement of post–Six-Day War Israel. During the war of attrition along the canal, traveling in the opposite direction, from Israel to Geneva, was even more unsettling. The Israeli press published the names of the soldiers killed almost daily along the canal on front pages, at first also publishing their photos. I had just looked at the names and pictures of soldiers killed the previous day on the plane to Geneva, in the spring of 1970. After landing I bought the Tribune de Genève. The front page carried a banner headline: “Neuf filouteries d’auberge” (Nine restaurant swindles).

  That same year, Nasser succumbed to a heart attack. He was replaced by a fellow “Free Officer,” Anwar Sadat, little known by the masses of Egyptians and even less so outside of his country. On the face of it, nothing much had changed.

  4

  In early 1971, Sadat proposed a first step toward a truce along the canal by reciprocal demilitarization of a mutually agreed-upon zone on both sides. Meir said no. A group of colleagues under the aegis of Dan Patinkin, a celebrated professor of economics, met in the apartment we rented on Magnes Square, and we sent a cable of protest to the prime minister (it became known as the Patinkin cable). We were excoriated by all possible right-wingers and also, to my astonishment, by Haim Herzog, Yakov Herzog’s brother. Haim’s outburst reminded me of the saying attributed to his mother, the wife of the chief rabbi of Palestine, who once told my in-laws, their neighbors in Jerusalem before 1948: “I have two sons. One, Yakov, has a brilliant mind; the other, Haim, is very good-looking.” Yakov died in the 1970s and, in due time, Haim Herzog became president of Israel.

  I started participating regularly in public meetings against the occupation and often expressed myself rather bluntly. Here and there my words found an echo. On January 26, 1972, I received the following letter:

  Professor Friedlander, as an Arab student may I extol your brief speech which you delivered last week in Weiss auditorium. Your insight in the future is right. May all your efforts for spreading out the ideas of justice be blest. Thanking you and with best regards, I remain yours sincerely,

  Selim I. Khoury

  Two years after the Patinkin cable, in early 1973, I had my own confrontation with Golda Meir. It demands some background details.

  In the 1950s, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell met in Pugwash, a small town in Nova Scotia, and initiated a series of periodic encounters between American and Soviet nuclear scientists, a sort of informal communication channel, to ease tensions between the two nuclear superpowers locked in the cold war. The Pugwash conferences were born. Over time, the organization became internationally all-inclusive, and countries involved in conflicts used the venue to exchange ideas with their opponents; moreover, the delegations came to comprise academics of various backgrounds who represented their governments but were allowed some leeway to explore various possibilities.

  Shalheveth Freier, whose job, it may be remembered, I inherited at the Defense Ministry, headed the Israeli Pugwash group. Shalheveth had remained brilliant and eccentric; in 1970 he offered to appoint me to the Israeli delegation: I gladly accepted, as I liked and respected him and the four or five other members of the group. Our contacts with the Egyptian delegation were reasonably good and even the relations with the Soviet delegation, headed at that time by Yevgeni Primakov, were cordial (the Soviet Union had broken off its diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six-Day War). Naturally, we were on friendly terms with the U.S. delegation, one of whose main members was Bill Polk, the director of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs in Chicago.

  Sometime in early 1973, Polk called me at home in Jerusalem and told me that he had succeeded in organizing a meeting, under the auspices of Pugwash, among an Egyptian, a Russian, himself as chair, and — this was the breakthrough — a Palestinian (a Palestinian professor living in the States, but a Palestinian nonetheless), who agreed to meet with an Israeli. He asked me to be the Israeli representative at that very confidential gathering. I agreed immediately, as our lack of initiative regarding the Palestinian issue — even at Pugwash — increasingly bothered me; but, I told Polk, I had to ask for an official authorization and would call him back.

  I reached Mordechai Gazit, director general of the prime minister’s office, and asked him to get me the authorization. Within half an hour or so, Gazit returned my call: “Shaul,” he said, “the prime minister wants to see you.” “When?” “Now.”

  Golda Meir was our “Iron Lady.” The Ukrainian-born, Milwaukee-raised, chain-smoking, first-generation leader of the new state was a formidable presence, “the only man in the cabinet,” as the quip went. She had the basic, immutable belief of those early Zionist political figures in the Jews’ exclusive historic rights to a state in Palestine, and she was ready to fight for those rights with a fierce determination that she hammered in with a heavy American accent. We met and she launched into a diatribe about the nonexistence of a Palestinian people and told me in no uncertain terms that I was not permitted to attend the Chicago meeting if a so-called Palestinian was present. There was clearly no point in trying to argue with her. I informed Polk and that put an end to this initiative.

  5

  Hubris characterized the Israeli attitude toward the Arab world (Palestinians included), a foolish sense of superiority and hyper-confidence. This was often acknowledged later on, after the deluge, but I am not sure that it has changed in the long run. In the early seventies, it was particularly visible among some politicians, and even more so in the army. The victory in the Six-Day War had convinced the population and the army that stemmed from it (Israel, from its beginnings, had introduced compulsory military service for both men and women, with some exceptions) that Zahal (the Hebrew acronym for the Israel Defense Forces) could crush any Arab
army or coalition, if they ever dared to attack. Even my friend Teveth contributed to this dangerous complacency with a book that inordinately praised the leaders and feats of the armored division during the six days: The Tanks of Tammuz.

  I remember sayings current before that time and used even more frequently after the six days. One was attributed to a well-known military figure that showed contempt both for the Arabs and for the “Oriental” Jews who were mostly relegated to the lowest positions in the army (kitchen, drivers, foot soldiers, etc.): “When I want to know what the Arabs plan to do (in a given battlefield situation), I ask my driver [of course an Oriental Jew] what he would do.”

  While a general sense of superiority in regard to the Arabs became widely shared after 1967, it was not only, in my opinion, the cumulative effect of the victories of 1948, 1956, and 1967 but mainly the deeper reaction of a people that had suffered from a long history of humiliations, weakness, and — just a few years earlier — an attempt at total extermination. This specific Israeli pathology stemmed at first from Diaspora history and from the Zionist reaction to it: “You, the Diaspora Jews, went like sheep to slaughter; we, the proud youth of Eretz Israel, will show you what self-defense and strength mean.” Now, the stereotype of the European Diaspora Jew had yielded, as symbol of inferiority, to that of the Oriental Jew, often identified with the indistinct mass of “Arabs.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Expiation

  On Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), October 6, 1973, Jerusalem, like all of the country, was silent, a silence somehow rendered even deeper by the luminous and mellow weather of a crisp autumn day. Our daughter Michal was three and a half years old by then; the five of us lived in a rented apartment, as the house we were building was still “almost” ready. This time, we camped on Metudela Street amidst ever more furniture, desperately eager to move to our permanent home. Within two weeks the academic year would start again. I could only hope that the students of the forthcoming graduate seminar would be as good as those of the previous one, on European fascism, which I’d taught from October 1972 to February 1973.