In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

“Mom, I want to leave my children a better country than the one you left us,” I told her, and her reply surprised me very much: “This country is not the country we founded.” They really lived in the classical Jewish world of two Jerusalems, heavenly and terrestrial. They loved the utopian, idyllic, and perfect Israel of their imagination, and lived in it within their protected and insulated environment. They hardly knew the reality outside. They knew of its existence, but they never got near it or rubbed shoulders with it. I, for my part, repeatedly hurled terrestrial Israel at them, which they refused to see or get to know. Our disagreement was a familial microcosm of the Zionist rebellion against mother Judaism. Between those two entities, theirs and mine, one the object of dreams, the other embattled, is where the Israeli struggle is playing out to this very day and will continue for many days to come.

  I was very careful to maintain respect for Dad just as I was making every effort to damage the standing of his government. The forty-eight-hour war we were promised had been going on for three months. On Rosh Hashanah of that year, 1982, the year of Sharon and Lebanon, a terrible massacre occurred in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. On the morning of our holy day, when Dad and I were standing beside each other in our small synagogue, the Christian Phalangist fighters, Sharon’s allies, completed two days of slaughter and bloodshed in the helpless and defenseless Palestinian refugee camps. The Phalangist fighters left the camps, and that’s when the horrific news began to arrive.

  When my friends came into the synagogue to tell me about the massacre, I whispered to Dad, “I can’t go on, I’m going home,” and in my heart, I literally shouted for a response to the day’s prayer to “remove the wicked government from the earth.” Yael was sitting in the synagogue’s women’s section with our little Roni; our firstborn, Itay, was with me. We met outside the synagogue and went home. In the square between the synagogue and my parents’ home, the police were already trying to disperse demonstrators with tear gas, and we all breathed some of it. Those were really Days of Awe. At home, we didn’t talk much about politics, and in public we didn’t talk at all—my father and I—about one another or with each other. We never planned our joint moves, or more precisely our non-moves. But our deep and intimate knowledge of one another produced, seemingly spontaneously, a deliberate decision never to be on the same public stage, not on radio or television, not in the press or in any political encounters.

  In those days someone, probably one of my friends, spray-painted a huge graffiti message on the wall of my parents’ home: “Burg, learn from your son.” Time and again the municipality asked my parents if they wanted the writing erased. “No!” Dad said. The large inscription stayed there, gradually fading, until a few years after his death, when it disappeared entirely. Until his last day, Dad was very attentive. Not always understanding, not necessarily agreeing, but wanting to be updated and very curious. His personal example, his open-mindedness and readiness to learn from anyone, which he always accompanied with the old Jewish saying, “A person is jealous of everyone except his son,” was a motto that enabled me to be a partner, pupil, and friend of all my children.

  During those months after the Rosh Hashanah of Sabra and Shatila, the pattern of relations between me and my family, as well as between me and the Israeli public, was set. Until the massacre in the refugee camps, the Israeli political system treated us—the protest leaders—with expedient hypocrisy. Everyone benefited from our public work, and few were willing to really pitch in and help. There were a few thousand soldiers who had been in actual combat in Lebanon, and who came back home and said, “No more,” and “The emperor is a liar.” The right needed us in order to sic its mob against someone. And who better than the “well poisoners,” “traitors,” and “backstabbers of the nation,” who are all satanic leftists? Begin and his followers had a long tradition of double-talk. Lofty declarations about the unity of the people and despicable acts of goading and incitement. And the opposition to Begin, the Alignment Party, didn’t exactly know what it wanted. Some of them refused to meet us, others met us and then issued denials. And the rest simply didn’t care, because they were going about their business. We were killing and being killed, protesting and struggling, and they were in the Histadrut labor federation, in the party or party branch or municipality. Only the massacre in the refugee camps managed to unsettle them and force the entire political system to take a stand. Completely against their will, even the smooth and evasive operators among them were compelled to become retroactively courageous.

  On Saturday night, September 25, 1982, retroactive activists like them streamed to Malchei Yisrael Square with hundreds of thousands of people. People shocked by the massacre and opponents of the war, veteran peaceniks along with the begrudging presence of opposition members. Leaders were swept along, led by the masses who were much more honest and ethical than they were. The square was packed with people. It was hard to believe that sight, unbelievable that a few young men in Jerusalem—honest, yet simple soldiers coming back from the battlefield—had generated this tremendous human movement, or more accurately, were active partners in extracting the cork from the bottle in which the spirit of all these people was trapped. For the first time in my life I was on the stage, any stage. All the bigwigs spoke, Rabin and Peres and many more. I was the eleventh speaker. I stood off to one side. I didn’t know any of them. They appealed to the crowd with rousing, impassioned calls that set off waves of applause, trying to compete with their rhetoric against the hypnotizing oratory of PM Menachem Begin, the king of city squares.

  I went up to the stage, hobbling with my cane. I had the feeling that utter silence had descended on the world. Before me were notebook pages on which I had written the first speech of my life. Hiding under the stage, where the traditional theater prompter would be, was Haim Bar-Lev, the general secretary of the Alignment. In his slow cadence, he whispered, “Two minutes and fifty seconds left, two and a half minutes…” How in heaven did we get to a situation in which the acclaimed former army chief of staff, who had avoided any affiliation with us and our argument, became a hidden whisperer in this defining demonstration? And what the heck was I doing up there, in the three minutes allotted to me? I said what I said, ending with the words, “We believe in a Judaism whose ways are pleasant and all of whose paths are peaceful.” I think there was applause. I’m not sure. My stomach was knotted with excitement and I couldn’t stand up straight because of the momentousness of the event. I didn’t know that this was history, but my body apparently understood that something was changing at that moment in our existence. The demonstration dispersed, and I walked, bent over, leaning on the shoulders of my dear father-in-law Lucien, who never wavered in his opinions, and with whom I attended many more demonstrations, gatherings, and memorial days.

  When I got home I called my parents, as I always did until their last day. I hadn’t told them that I was going to that demonstration, but they likely already knew. We talked about how the Sabbath had gone, how the children were doing, who had visited whom. As if it were weekend business as usual. At the end, a minute before we hung up, at that moment, in his first and only reference to my political activity, Dad paid me the highest compliment, correcting the pronunciation of the biblical quotation I used in my speech. I’m not entirely sure that I mispronounced it, but if there was such a mistake, in a verse that I had chanted and sung so many times since childhood, then it was the best mistake I had ever made. So much was folded into that sentence of his. All the mannerisms of the German immigrant, all the politics, all the appreciation, and all my upbringing at home. He basically told me without spelling it out: I know you were at the demonstration, I know you took care not to use the stage to harm me. I know that your words were well received and different than the words of others. I’m glad you used Jewish tradition as a basis for your political argument. But you have more to learn, because it’s important to be as precise as possible in citations and quotes, and not to fall into the abyss of ignorance thre
atening many pundits in Israel. So meticulous was this comment, so European in its understatement, and so him. Only time taught me the meaning of his pithiness. In his conciseness, he was saying to me: I know how to recognize your inner truth among your layers of verbiage and rhetoric. He knew, because he was like that too.

  It took me many years to understand the secret of his conciseness. On the day of my marriage to Yael he called me into the kitchen. “Sit down,” he said. I sat down with great embarrassment. He chattered in a roundabout way and finally told me, “Look, according to Jewish tradition, I have to prepare you now for the wedding and marriage. But I fear that regarding some of the subjects, about which our Jewish forefathers would talk with their sons at this moment, you know more than me. I’ll make do with one word: Gently.” It’s hard to describe the degree of my astonishment, my sense of insult, the feeling of emptiness. Finally, for the first and perhaps last time in our lives that we’re sitting down to talk, this is all he has to say to me? Today I’m leaving his house and establishing my home, and that’s it? For a long time, I carried this searing pain in my heart; so little, almost miserly.

  Over the years that anger gave way to a wonderful insight. And when my children were married, this is how I blessed them: “Between today and tomorrow, with the rays of the sunset, we will send you off on your way, as is customary in our home, with the blessing of Grandpa, of blessed memory: ‘Delicately.’ Continue your enchanted beginnings delicately, set the pace delicately, take flight to the sky delicately, and with the same delicacy go deep into hearts. With the delicacy that typifies only you continue the legend so that it will never stop.”

  Because that lesson of gentleness was the essence of my parents’ lives and the basis of all the relationships between me and all my loved ones, the members of my household. Sometimes one word is etched in memory more than an entire speech. That’s how it was when I was sent on my way in life on the day of my wedding, which was his day of happiness, and that was his summary of my first experience on the public stage, the correction of the verse which in “his language” was an absolute recognition. I cherish and fondly remember all these words of his with longing and in a renewed search for meaning. Lucky, in fact, that he didn’t say more, because then I would have enjoyed it at the time without retaining anything for all the moments in the future that await me.

  THAT MASS DEMONSTRATION, WHICH WAS KNOWN LATER as the four-hundred-thousand-people protest, was a defining moment for me. It cemented my place in the public consciousness and reorganized, for the better, the whole fabric of relations between me and my parents. Our political differences improved and our relationship deepened. On the one hand, we understood each other much better. Contrary to the past, we now started to talk in the very same language. We loved and appreciated the same people, and the list of people we didn’t particularly respect was almost the same. I thought that one was a liar, and my father sarcastically commented, “Not at all. He lies only to stay in shape.” About another he claimed that “he lies even when he’s silent.” And about one of our common adversaries he had this to say with feigned affection, “He’s a man of principle. Principle number one: opportunism.” On the other hand, the deep differences between us on issues of religion and state, policy and political alliances were so significant that we didn’t have to confront each other about them. It was obvious what our positions were, and we saved ourselves a great deal of time.

  Still, my point of entry to the political atmosphere was not easy for him at all. Two weeks after that demonstration I received an invitation from Shimon Peres’s office. He was then the leader of the opposition, who had already lost a few elections to Menachem Begin. We met in the ornate lobby of a hotel in Jerusalem. “I heard you speak at Malchei Yisrael Square two weeks ago and I was very impressed,” he said. “I would like to offer you to join the Labor Party.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” I asked, surprised.

  “Just join the party, and I’ll see to it that you will become a member of the central committee.”

  I didn’t know precisely what the central committee was, but this institution still radiated great power at the time, the source of energy of the historic Labor Party.

  “And what will I do there?” I wondered.

  “What would you like to do in public life?”

  “I want peace, and I want the separation of religion and state,” I said, reciting the two pillars of the doctrine of my teacher and guide, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

  “Excellent. So you will be the chairman of the platform committee for issues of religion and state,” he said, concluding his offer.

  Despite my surprise, I responded, “Thank you. I accept, but I ask that you give me a few days before making it public, so I have a chance to discuss it with my parents and tell them. So they won’t hear it elsewhere first.”

  “Of course, of course. Give my regards to your parents, especially to your special mother.”

  “Thank you. I will call you after the Sabbath, after I speak with them.”

  The next day, very early in the morning, even before the hour that people from Germany thought was the polite time to call, the phone rang. On the line was my dad, literally crying, sobbing and swallowing his words. It turned out that immediately after the meeting with me, Peres went to the Labor Party branch in Jerusalem and publicly announced that I was joining the party. His announcement was reported in one of the back pages of the mythic labor movement Davar newspaper. It is doubtful if anyone saw it aside from my father, who was very hurt, not by the political decision but by the way he had found out about it. And he was right.

  A few months later, the committee I was promised to chair convened. I arrived in the room, twenty years younger than the youngest member there. I had gotten ready for this meeting over many days. I had prepared my remarks and the committee agenda. I had intended to propose a process for adopting new and fundamental decisions on an issue that had not been dealt with much until then. I wanted to sit in the chairman’s seat, “mine,” and discovered it was already taken. Shimon Peres had already promised it to someone else, older, more aggressive, and far more experienced. He had arrived a half hour earlier and had taken the seat. That’s how you create facts in the Labor Party. Needless to say, Peres was not there to resolve the complication created by his empty promises. The committee room was filled with people who had received promises from Peres that he had forgotten to keep.

  Within the space of a few months I had met personally with two of the most significant figures in Israel, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. Begin was an honest but weak man, surrounded by a coterie of admirers who protected him in every way possible, and who were not averse to deceiving the public for that purpose for many years, up until he resigned, worn out and feeble, in September 1983 with the painfully truthful statement of an honest man: “I can’t go on.” Peres was neither one nor the other, neither weak nor honest. There was only one thing they had in common: the need, the unquenchable thirst for popularity. Begin flirted endlessly with his audiences, and Peres, who was rejected as different, an “other,” and was unloved for most of his career, bore his cross through all the stations of the Via Dolorosa until his popular redemption in the presidential residence in the twilight of his life. I still preferred Peres and his path over Begin—because of his path. At the time, I still believed that Peres was indeed a man of peace, and the rest was less important to me.

  In the mass demonstration I described previously, a process began that culminated in the establishment of the state commission of inquiry into the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The committee submitted its conclusions in the winter of 1983, the grimmest of winters. The government of Israel was very hesitant: to accept or not accept the report? To adopt or not adopt its conclusions? The report recommended dismissing Ariel Sharon from the post of defense minister, undoubtedly a great achievement for our unequivocal public demand. But Sharon, in true Sharon fashion, refused to resig
n.

  In February 1983, masses of protestors took to the streets again. This time we asked to receive the report and its recommendations. A demonstration left from Zion Square in Jerusalem to the government complex. It passed for a few kilometers downtown, in my childhood neighborhood, all the places I knew and loved in the city when it still had some remnants of intimacy: Atara Café; the Hatik leather store; the Maoz HMO; Badihi’s Falafel King stand, where I asked Yael to be my girlfriend and was rejected; Benny’s Fish restaurant. This time the walk had no romance. It was one long, violent scene. Incited supporters of the government, rightist street thugs, repeatedly broke through the thin line of police that was supposed to protect us. In the moments of truth, during the event, I had the constant impression that the police were part of the rioters, and not a defense deployment against them. Spitting, tearing of clothes, shouts, curses, pushing, and actual blows. In the end, we arrived at a place across from the prime minister’s office.

  Upstairs, the government was meeting to discuss the commission report. They were up and we were down below, they in power and we in the street. We raised our voices, hoping to penetrate the sealed windows and deaf ears. I thought then that Begin, who for so many years had been in the opposition, would understand the meaning of the street protest more than his colleagues in the cabinet. We raised placards, speeches were given, and we sang the national anthem. There’s always a very special pause between the end of such an activity and the return to private routine. A minute of transition from the adrenaline high to everyday ordinariness. A moment when everything stops. This is the time of calm between all kinds of storms. Into this special moment, right at the end of the last strains of the hoarse “Hatikva” that crackled from the makeshift loudspeakers, burst an unmistakable sound—the explosion of the detonator cap of a hand grenade. My soldiering instinct, still imprinted in me, counted off in my head by itself: “Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Boom.” Grenade! Somewhere on my left a deadly hand grenade had been thrown out of the darkness, and like all my colleagues who were there we became participatory witnesses to the first political assassination of our lives, in which Emil Grunzweig, a friend and a devoted peace activist, was murdered by Yona Avrushmi, a right-wing zealot.