In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Avraham Burg

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  First Edition: January 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Burg, Avraham, author.

  Title: In days to come : a new hope for Israel / Avraham Burg.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Nation Books, [2017] | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017020692| ISBN 9781568589787 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781568587974 (e- book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Burg, Avraham. | Political activists—Israel—Biography. | Authors, Israeli—Biography.

  Classification: LCC DS126.6.B87 A3 2017 | DDC 956.9405—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020692

  ISBNs: 978-1-56858-978-7 (hardcover), 978-1-56858-797-4 (ebook)

  E3-20171208-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  PART I: LIVING Chapter One

  MENORAH OF BULLETS

  (1955–1968)

  Chapter Two

  A RAY OF LIGHT IN THE DARK

  (1969–1977)

  Chapter Three

  SOLDIER IN WAR, ACTIVIST IN PEACE

  (1973–1982)

  Chapter Four

  THE PUBLIC LIFE

  (1982–2001)

  Chapter Five

  AN ALIEN IN THE KNESSET

  (1988–1992)

  Chapter Six

  DECLINE AND REDEMPTION

  (2001–2004)

  PART II: LEARNING Chapter Seven

  RUNNING AND WRITING WITH A KIPPAH

  Chapter Eight

  OF ISAAC AND ABRAHAM

  Chapter Nine

  A TALE OF TWO HEBRONS

  Chapter Ten

  THE NEW MEANING OF HEBRON

  Chapter Eleven

  FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL IDENTITY

  Chapter Twelve

  OF TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER

  Chapter Fourteen

  A TALE OF TWO MEETINGS

  Chapter Fifteen

  BETWIXT AND BETWEEN

  Epilogue

  THE DAWN AFTER THE LONG NIGHT

  About the Author

  Index

  To my mother and teacher, Rivka Slonim, and my father and teacher, Shlomo Yosef Burg, of blessed memory.

  For the loves of my life: Yael, Itay, Noa, Yuval, and Gal. Roni, Ariel, Zev, and Ayal. Natan, Tamara Yang, and Lemoni. Dan, Avital, Jonathan and Malachi, Noam and Noam.

  And to Andrea, Anna, Azar, Bashir, Frans, Ghaida, Hanes, Husam, Ivan, Lars, Leila, Martin, Mazen, Michael, Ram, Sam, Shawki, and Yvette.

  And to Gertraud, my Europe, who opened all the doors for me and invited me in.

  Birds born in a cage are convinced that flying is a disease.

  ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY

  If there is no foreigner in my identity, I don’t know myself. I can be defined only through the dialectical relationship between me and the other. If I am alone, with no one else, what do I understand? I am full of myself, all of my truth, without dualism.… I need heterogeneity, it enriches me.

  MAHMOUD DARWISH

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER A QUESTION HAS accompanied me: what would your father say? Rarely is it the curious question of someone who really wants to know; mostly it is a taunt from someone who wants to win an argument without having a conversation. Many times, I ignore the question and the questioners, if only because they have no interest whatsoever in what my mother would say. Her comments were no less sharp and incisive than his. Our togetherness, she and he and a bit of me, brought into the world the baggage that I offer my children to adopt.

  Between my parents, who have passed on, and my children, I am a link that awoke one morning a few years ago with great anger. It was during the bloody days of the second Palestinian uprising. A great silence and greater bewilderment enveloped the country. Death took its toll on both peoples, and we were its emissaries and victims. All the atrocities, killing, and bereavement had no meaning or purpose. Day after day. Terrorist attacks and retaliation, revenge and counter-revenge. That morning everything burst inside me. When I asked myself why, I realized that of all the people I was angry at, I was angry at my beloved and missed father most of all. He had been dead for a few years and the Palestinian uprising and Israel’s responses were no longer his responsibility, and still all my arrows were aimed at him.

  For weeks I continued the examination—why? Why the anger, and why toward him specifically? I reached the conclusion that I was angry with him because he, who was so important to me as a father and teacher, did not leave me anything written, no guide to the perplexed or a spiritual will about his conception of the roots of Israeli reality or its future directions. In our imagined conversations, I asked him again and again what he would have thought had he been with us. But from the book he did not write for me there were no answers.

  In those days, I wanted to leave something for my children, wherever life may take them, and I began to write. I don’t know what challenges they will have to face, and I have no idea what decisions they will make in the moments of truth in their lives. But wherever their winds take them, I want to leave them materials from which they can always stitch sails of thought and content that will fit their size. I have no property to leave them, just some insights as provisions for the journey of life, raw materials for shaping their lives. So that they will at least have an answer to the question: what would your father say? Despite the confusion of the times, do your utmost not to err like many do in distinguishing good from bad. And despite the nationalistic wave, which presents itself as the calling card of contemporary Israel, never forget the values of our home, the all-embracing humanism that is our safe haven. Never despair about the political and social reality. Fight it and change it. And never flee your inner truth, even if it means periods of loneliness and living as a minority. Because truth will out, and ultimately many of the truths of the minority became the majority’s strategy for salvation. These are important and defining lessons that my parents drummed into me. But alas, they are not being passed on to the next generation, to Israel’s grandchildren, who need them more than ever.

  These days of the early twenty-first century appear to me as days of profound change against the background of global, local, and personal upheaval. That is why this book ultimately is a personal document, written at a stormy time as I perceive it, as an individual Israeli. Arou
nd the time of this book’s publication, Israel, the region, and the international community will mark fifty years since the Six-Day War. That is a very long period in a person’s life, but very short in the annals of history. There are few chapters of the past like this one, in which we as individuals and as a collective achieved so much, while making so many mistakes. Years in which greatness and folly were intertwined. This duality requires a great deal of soul-searching, of which this book is a part. I had the privilege of living and acting in this chapter of the history of my people, the Jewish people, and I have a few thoughts, insights, and reflections on the time, as well as about myself and others.

  I’ve already written a few books. Each one has moved me a bit closer to the next, and given me another measure of courage to reveal myself to myself, and become almost entirely revealed to my readers. “Why on earth are you summing up your life? You’re only halfway there,” many people told me while this book was being written. They were right. I really did not try to write an autobiography. With all due respect to my public career, I’m not important enough to thread an entire period of history through the eye of my needle as a writer. All I wanted to do was to find and share the lost Israeli places between current affairs and history. Therefore, this is just a reflection and expression of what my eyes have seen. My personal experiences are just a means to help me decipher some of the riddles of Israeli existence. In this book I open parts of my personal life to the public in order to add another dimension of meaning to what is happening to us. Mine is an Israeli voice that tries to be different from the formal, shrill voices blaring from official Israeli loudspeakers. I’m trying to add another sound to the few heard from my generation, the generation that followed the establishment of the state and has not found enough expression, and the generation of religious Zionism that reshuffled the whole deck here and also is rather mute and very deaf.

  I have anger and consolation, but I am not a prophet and do not come from a family of prophets. I just see history and current affairs as prisms through which I can prepare for the future. The following pages are therefore reflections of this sort, about current affairs that became history, and events happening right now, and those still to come. Brexit and Trump, the populist movements and the contemporary setback of liberal democracies are details, important but fragmentary. So here is my modest attempt to comprehend the larger frame, the “gestalt of the zeitgeist,” the way it is perceived through Israeli, Jewish, and liberal lenses.

  In Days to Come is the fruit of profound gratitude. First and foremost to Noa Manheim, a friend and study partner, my Hebrew editor and critic, and to Alessandra Bastagli, editorial director at Nation Books. Many great thanks to the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna and to Gertraud Auer Borea d’Olmo, who gave me a home and a fellowship, a social network and circles of warmth and wisdom that few have the privilege of having in their lives. To the wise Ivan Krastev and Anna Ganeva, who involved me in the activities of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria. Their invitation to the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna enabled me to broaden my horizons and gave me time to write. To the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, in whose quiet and enveloping library the book took shape, and to the people of “Molad” for the lessons they have taught me.

  And above all, my relatives who are around me and in me. To Yael, my incomparable companion. To my wonderful children, their families, and Hillel and Talila, who are always with us. To Lucian and Janine, my parents-in-law. To my sister, brother-in-law, and my nephews and nieces, who took the trouble to read, weed, and plant. They turned the feelings into words and a melody. When I think about you, my parents gather in me and sing along with us the song of our life.

  LIVING

  CHAPTER ONE

  MENORAH OF BULLETS (1955–1968)

  THE FIRST CHILDHOOD MEMORY I HAVE OF MY FATHER IS linked to the destruction of empires—the collapse of a world order that had once seemed eternal. Dad, whose life spanned nearly 90 percent of the twentieth century, was born before World War I. He spent his childhood in the seemingly stable but actually decaying reality of nineteenth-century Europe. From the window of his childhood home in Dresden, Germany, at Zerre Straße Nummer Zwei, he, the Jewish boy born in 1909, saw the revolutionaries calling for the overthrow of the king of Saxony. With his particular smile reserved for especially vulgar words, he quoted the Saxon king, with a heavy Saxon accent, lashing out at the rebels, “Mach deinen Scheiss allein” (Go deal with your own shit). A continent away, Mom’s childhood was also shaped by terrible upheaval and destruction, wrought by the massacre of Hebron’s Jews in 1929.

  My parents’ first and momentous memories are imprinted on me, while my own first memories are small and very personal, much like any child of my generation. The slats of my crib were already loose. My crib was old. My parents bought it used, and then it served my sisters before it became my first bed. The three of us shared a room, and the furniture, like our clothing, schoolbags, and pencil cases, was all hand-me-downs. That crib is my very first memory, in which—like in many moments to follow—I was entirely alone. It was 1957, and I was a year-and-a-half, maybe two years old.

  I squeezed out of the crib and walked around the house, beyond the permitted boundaries. I went from my room to my parents’ room, which was a sacred space and not always accessible. In the middle was the tall kerosene stove, warding off the “draft” for Dad. A piece of beautiful cast iron, whose wick only Mom knew how to change and light without creating soot. A large pot with boiling water stood on the stove, to humidify the air and to prepare tea. And I, the fugitive from the crib, bumped into it with full infantile force. The boiling water spilled and scalded my tender back, the first burns of my life.

  In those days, I probably attached little meaning to the crib slats and the escape, the fire and the water, the pain and the scar, the deposed kaisers and slaughtered Jews that launched me into the world. My childhood was mundane, not particularly heroic. I lived through twelve of the nineteen first—and last—sane years of Israel’s existence, and although in those distant days of my childhood some vestiges of the excitement of 1948 still lingered, I didn’t know we were making history.

  In the sixties, from time to time, new children would join my class, from Morocco, France, or Poland. Children, not waves of immigration. I knew how to mock their foreign accents, but I failed to understand that I was being insulting and not welcoming. Aunt Bertl sent us packages from America full of used clothing that Tziona the seamstress altered for us on Mom’s oversized sewing machine. For me, as I grew up, the Jewish Agency and the United Jewish Appeal were embodied in those packages my family received. Nobody even noticed that there were kids in class who did not have uncles and aunts in America, or uncles and aunts at all, and no one imagined that my worn and fitted striped American pants were actually the start of the social inequality gap. All these small childhood events flowed like tiny tributaries until they became, during the war that changed our universe, a big waterfall that has not stopped cascading since.

  During the Six-Day War (June 5–10, 1967), I was neither a brave fighter nor an involved civilian—at twelve, I was barely a concerned citizen. I was just a little Jerusalem boy in transition from childhood to adolescence. Still without whiskers, but with some underarm sweat like the adults. I had a pair of Ata factory jeans and “a real cowboy’s” holster belt and toy gun that Aunt Bertl had sent me in a package for Purim. In June 1967, I had long used up all the caps for my gun, but I still sat for hours on a punctured water tank left in the yard, riding bravely on the tin horse, galloping toward the enemies and driving them off. In that fashion, over many days, I saved Mom and Dad and my two older sisters, Tzvia and Ada, time and again. All by myself, like the cowboys and Indians who were both my father’s childhood superheroes and mine. Our daily routine, Mom’s and the kids’, continued as usual, but nothing was really in order.

  Slowly, patiently, the tension grew and became stifling. Fathers went to the army, and
vehicles we had never seen before—command cars, light armored vehicles, and other bulky trucks—were on the streets. Private cars were commandeered and covered with mud as camouflage. Occasionally a plane was seen overhead—despite the ban on flying over the city—and that caused a sensation. We, the Jerusalem kids, hardly ever saw planes before and never up in “our skies.” Every day after school we took to the streets to fill bags from the piles of sand left by government and city trucks on every street corner. We painted car headlights blue for a blackout “like in London,” adults said, recalling the blitzkrieg days of World War II. In Mr. Heller’s grocery store Mom bought a little extra toilet paper and some canned food. But she said, “I’m not stocking up, because if they see me stocking up on food then everyone will think they need to prepare.”

  I was a sixth-grader in Mrs. Blumenthal’s English class when, on a Monday morning, war came. It began just as they had explained it would: a siren, the lesson came to a halt, and we huddled next to the walls, under windows that looked like woven fabric, crisscrossed with the brown masking tape we had pasted on them with our saliva and little hands. Hundreds of children and a few dozen teachers—female teachers, to be precise, because almost all the male teachers had been called up to the army—waited tensely. Explosions reverberated through the city, Jordanian legionnaires fired sniper shots, there were explosions of shells and mortars from both sides, and the thunder of jets repeatedly broke the sound barrier as they headed beyond enemy lines. It was the first time that I had heard such sounds. The automatic machine-gun fire rang in my ears like a giant metronome. Then there was silence for a few minutes, as if the conductor of an orchestra had ordered all the musicians to stop playing and listen for a moment.

  In one of those moments I drummed my fingers on the school’s old wooden table. We all practiced different games to train our fingers to be nimbler. Who knows if it was just a game or an effort to release tension. Nothing I heard until that moment was as frightening as the shouts that followed. That petite and stern-looking teacher, Mrs. Blumenthal, took out her stress on me, venting the terrible anxiety I was protected from as a child, caused by the days of waiting in which we labored to fortify our homes and classroom and endured the absence of the men, including her partner. Poor woman, all her favorite disciplinary measures were denied her. She couldn’t eject me from the classroom and endured because there was shooting outside. She couldn’t send me to the principal because he too was sitting with us in the makeshift shelter. So she made do with a heartfelt groan: “How dare you? Don’t you understand anything?” And the truth is that indeed I did not understand, though not necessarily the things she had in mind.