In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  The large crowd began running in all directions. Someone fell next to me. And another. I bent down and began giving first aid. I don’t remember any thoughts going through my head as I hunched over the wounded person at my feet, just lots of legs, shoes, socks, and cuffed jeans in the style of that time. Nothing aside from the silent vacuum that always prevails in pressure situations. Thoughts disappear, leaving only the operating system in automatic mode. Tourniquet, calming down, tearing a shirt, and dressing the wound. A large vehicle, a Volkswagen van, arrived out of nowhere. I carried someone in my hands, and then another person, and we hurried together to the nearest hospital, Shaare Zedek. When it was all over, someone said, “Avrum, you have a hole in your coat and blood on your back.” I took the coat off, and I discovered that I had been hit by a fragment from the grenade and hadn’t even felt it.

  In seconds, everything took on an entirely new dimension. From being a responder I became a casualty. I was laid down on a bed in the emergency room. They stripped me, then cleaned and dressed the wound. And all around there was a big commotion of doctors, police officers, photographers, peace activists, noisy rightist thugs, and ordinary busybodies who always gather in emergency rooms. I felt a great weariness. The entire load of the recent months and the changes in my situation landed on me at once. Unable to sleep, I asked to call Yael, who was at home with the kids. A short time later I sensed movement on the other side of the curtain that separated patients from the large space of the emergency room. The curtain was pulled aside, and my father stood there. He had left the fateful cabinet meeting, gone through a transformation, and was again my father.

  Something between horrible worry and liberating relief was etched on his face. I was so happy to see him. I loved him so much at that moment. The whole world went quiet around us. Searching for the picture that would frame the event, a quote, a gesture, or an expressive face. And we felt as if it were just the two of us in the world. I drowned myself in his kind eyes. And he too leaped through my eyes directly into the depths of my soul, and I immediately knew that all the bad years between the two of us were behind us. But I didn’t know that all the bad years for Israel still lay ahead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AN ALIEN IN THE KNESSET (1988–1992)

  I WAS ELECTED TO PARLIAMENT, THE KNESSET, IN 1988. I was thirty-three years old, quite young to be a member of the Knesset, maybe too young. Were I elected today, knowing what I know now, I would be a better member of parliament, serving my constituents much better. In my first years, I wasn’t sharp and precise enough. I don’t want to unpack my long career from the limited perspective of that youth who saw through the old and foolish emperor’s new clothes, nor as an active and involved player whose nakedness was also exposed, but as a somewhat distant observer with considerable experience. At a certain moment, I realized that I was part of the empire, the government, and the kingdom. That’s life. Youth is lost, and the empire is almost always naked even when you are part of it. And when there is nakedness, your private parts are also exposed.

  Reuven Rivlin, a close personal friend and now the state president, told me, “My father used to say that the higher the donkey goes up on the ladder, the more his backside is visible.” It took me a very long time to understand the essence of the Knesset: where the ladders are, and who sees what of whom. When I understood, I didn’t always have partners for conversation and action on the basis of this understanding, and I wasn’t always an appropriate partner for others.

  It began badly. In the past, parliamentary correspondents would summarize in the press the first plenary session of the new parliament members, an attempt of sorts to predict who is a flash in the pan and who is made of long-term parliamentary stuff. At first I didn’t know to which category I belonged. No wonder, therefore, that my activity was summed up this way by one of the more malicious reporters: “Avrum Burg is wandering the corridors of the Knesset like an alien connected to his beeper and waiting for a message from another planet.” This is a quote whose accuracy I didn’t bother to check in the archives. It was engraved in me verbatim, like a searing brand that will never be forgotten. It’s difficult to describe my shock when I read those words, the insult and fear of the terrible failure I faced. And worst of all—he was right. I watched haplessly as my colleagues were making their mark in the media and being appreciated, legislating, joining debates in the plenum and committees, and expressing opinions in faction meetings, while I remained mute at best, inarticulate at worst. I invested my energy in gimmicks and blunt statements in order to get some media attention, but as someone told me in an off-the-cuff comment at the time, “You won’t get anywhere because you’re not hungry for anything.” He too was right, and my spirits were very low. I needed fame, but I wasn’t hungry for it—because I was already a bit famous. I didn’t pursue unimportant legislation just to get into the Knesset statistics books, and I didn’t try to rack up as many speeches and parliamentary questions as I could on patently marginal issues.

  I wanted to deal with the pure issues for which I had entered the public meat grinder. I wanted to deal with history and substance. But to my chagrin, I discovered that I had come to the wrong address. In the main public arena, the Israeli Knesset, there is virtually no activity dealing with the central issues of Israeli society. It is a junction where all interests meet and collide, like a very busy street market. A real arena, with struggles, violence, and all the rest. A lot of tactical realities, but surprisingly little strategic substance. Religious people of various shades don’t meet in synagogue but in the Knesset, where they fight and quarrel with the full force of their beliefs. Jews and Arabs don’t encounter each other anymore on city streets or in places of work because ethnic separation is very effective here. The same goes for new immigrants and longtime residents, the city center and the suburbs, the bourgeoisie and socialists, religious and secular people, and so on. For all these groups, all that remains is the Knesset plenum, and therefore the friction there is sometimes violent to the point of physical altercation. The Knesset deals with many day-to-day matters, and usually it suffers from a huge and unnecessary load of minor current affairs and pettiness. Knesset members live in their own tree and don’t always see the Israeli forest, with the demons and wild animals prowling it.

  At that time, I had two sails propelling my political boat forward. The sail of separation of religion and state, and the sail of peace, both powered by the wind of one person—my teacher and guide, the late professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz. From my childhood to the day of his death, his figure was like light and shadow, part of my life. Today’s Jerusalem is almost empty of its original children and packed with immigrants from the West—especially from the United States and France—with their luxury apartments. In the early days of the Israeli enterprise when I was young, the city was much smaller, but its people loomed large. Martin Buber and S. Y. Agnon, David Flusser and Marcel Dubois, Miriam Yellin-Steklis and Zelda, Israel Eldad and Yeshayahu Leibowitz walked the streets like ordinary people. You could approach them on a street corner. You could often see people buttonholing one of these celebrities and launching into long-winded debate or a discussion of current events. Leibowitz was always there—a long-legged intellectual with a crooked back, gangly with a spring in his step, carrying a battered leather case and wearing a thin-brimmed hat, his expression half enigmatic and half curious, watching the world and criticizing it.

  Over the years, I had the privilege of getting closer to Leibowitz, studying with him and learning from him, so I considered myself the representative of his values and path in the Knesset. Then I still lived an Orthodox life and I ignored the structural contradiction at the root of his worldview, the contrast between his wonderful openness and the rigidity of Jewish law to which he was committed. From time to time, I found issues in the Knesset that I took up, but most times I returned home sad, depressed, and with a sense of missed opportunity. The amendment to the “pork law”—whether it could be permitted to import pork to the Jew
ish state, something that was “unheard of and un-thought of” according to the common coalition hypocrisy—was a sad example of how matters proceeded. In my view the original law, like the proposed amendment, was pure religious coercion. A prostitution of religious values for the sake of rabbinic interests, the work of kippah-wearing religious thugs. The law was characteristic of the religious establishment’s cynical use of its political power. It stood in stark contrast to my view of the desired relationship between religion and state.

  In my vote, I wanted to apply what I had imbibed in Leibowitz’s home on Ussishkin Street in Jerusalem when I was young—complete separation of religion and state. But the Labor faction imposed factional discipline, because, as always, the fate of the coalition depended on this vote. “If we don’t stand together as one, the religious parties will withdraw,” “the ultra-Orthodox politicians will be angry,” and “Rabin and Peres may go back to quarrelling with one another” or, God forbid, fall from power. And any rookie Knesset member knows this: power is not the main thing—it’s the only thing. I abstained from the vote and felt like a spineless, gutless rag. And there were many more such votes.

  In my first term, 1988–1992, the media published several stories about mistakes by ritual circumcisers or medical complications caused by neglect during circumcisions. As was customary in parliament, I immediately submitted a bill to regulate the entire circumcision realm. It kicked around the corridors, got reasonable media coverage, and in the end, did not receive a shred of support in the ministerial committee for legislation. I still wanted to raise the issue for a Knesset vote, and suddenly the pressure was on. Ministers and directors-general, the prime minister himself and his lackeys became overnight experts on the cutting-edge subject for Jewish newborns. It turned out that, again, the resilience of the always-fragile Israeli coalition was hanging by a thread. And, again, as usual, the ultra-Orthodox parties threatened. And, again, as usual, the leaders of the country were scared and scrambling. Meetings were arranged for me with current and former chief rabbis, with representatives of the ritual circumcisers and of the Israeli Medical Association. They all made pilgrimages to me, made promises and broke them, deceived me, threatened me with fifty shades of threats, and in the end, as expected, the coalition easily survived. The bill was defeated in deafening silence.

  A large majority was mobilized against my vote and the votes of a few assertive members of the opposition who happened to be in the plenum. The ritual circumcisers continued to work without medical training and supervision, and all the promises I was given were ignored. And on the other hand, at the same time I managed to pass an amendment to the law requiring the leashing of dogs. The lesson couldn’t have been more bluntly clear: I can legislate regarding dogs, because they have no rabbinate and party hacks, they have no power in the coalition nor the ability to make threats or break promises. But God forbid I should touch the tip of a newborn baby’s penis, because on him rests the future of the entire Jewish people, or at least that of a few politicians who claim to represent it. From that point on I virtually stopped making the effort to pass bills and legislate just for the sake of statistics and unimportant laws.

  These disappointments and many others compelled me to look inward, deeper, into the essence of being a parliamentarian. There are two possible models. The first is the vanishing breed, the public servant, who in addition to his personal urges is motivated by a real sense of mission. The second, proliferating like weeds, is nothing but a public scarecrow or political technician. When I recognized this crossroads, I knew what I did not want to be. I didn’t want to grow old in the temple of democracy and become a tired priest, like that venerable member who told me at one faction meeting, “I was always against the war in Lebanon.” And I, who remembered every one of them and their evasive excuses, didn’t quite recall his resolute stance. At the height of that war of lies I had requested a meeting with him, when I was still a young activist, and I had a different recollection of his position.

  “Really?” I interjected. “I don’t remember.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I even wrote an anonymous poem in the Maariv newspaper against the war.” I didn’t want to be a poet like him.

  Parliamentary life is very intense, especially when you’re finding your way like me and running around all day in search of yourself. It doesn’t leave any time for reflection and thought. Long days at the Knesset and other days, just as long, of politics, voters, party branches and institutions, recruiting support, and endless conversations with constituents. In order to preserve the family and sanity, and to recharge, we strictly observed certain guidelines at home. Friday and Saturday were always devoted to the children, and the annual vacation was greatly anticipated and a source of strength and renewal. At the time, we liked to travel down to the Sinai Peninsula, not only because of the soothing wide-open spaces, but also because of the message to the children—you can travel abroad by car. We wanted them to know that the Israeli reality is not only a siege wall on all sides; it also has breaches of peace, like the southern border crossings. Precisely there, as far as possible from the commotion in Jerusalem, from the tension, from the brutal competition and scathing criticism, I gained an understanding of the new reality I was living in.

  We were on a hike in the high mountains of Sinai, along with friends, Bedouin escorts, a few camels, and the expanses of creation. For many hours, I walked behind a camel and thought. An irrepressible mental association ran an old Talmudic saying through my head again and again: “One who sees a camel in a dream—death was decreed against him from heaven and he was saved from it.” I thought about the gap between the negative Jewish image of the camel and the great love, dependence, and appreciation felt by the Bedouin for their camels. There are those who think that the camel is an expression of what is bad in the world and others think that it is the source of vitality in the world. And the camel? He’s the same camel, what does he care. So why do I care so much about what certain people or others think of me? I’m a camel walking in the desert. Sometimes I drink, sometimes I’m thirsty. All I lack is the camel’s patience. To walk slowly and go far. That was one of the two times in which I altered the pace of my life. I returned changed from that vacation in Sinai. I was done with ingratiating myself, and I let go of much of the drivel associated with exclusively media-directed behavior. I had searched for and found part of myself.

  IN THOSE DAYS IN THE EARLY 1990S, THE LABOR PARTY was mired in another one of its deep crises. The years-long partnership with the conservative Likud Party in coalition governments had effectively eliminated the existence of an opposition as a vital supplier of alternatives in Israeli politics. My party had simply given up its role as a genuine alternative, surrendered, and committed hara-kiri. We were treated as a venerable old lady, sometimes respected because of her past, and sometimes a barely tolerated nuisance. We occasionally provoked anger because of our inability to let the Likud govern without helicopter parenting. Fatigue had spread throughout the system, and another election defeat seemed closer than ever. And this in the wake of a searing and painful failure in trying to unseat Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir by means of a not particularly successful political maneuver. “The stinking maneuver,” Rabin called it in his dry, colorful language. Gloom settled over us. Together and as individuals, we had reached a low point. And we didn’t know then that there were even lower ones ahead.

  On the eve of Yom Kippur in 1991, I left a meeting of the Knesset Finance Committee with Haim Ramon, a veteran Labor lawmaker and the architect of “the stinking maneuver.” Ramon’s face reflected reality—pale and desperate. “Avrum, we’re lost,” he told me. I was, at the time, a political novice, without much understanding of loss and success. I sensed that I had an opportunity to connect with politics with the tools that I knew. Like that camel, walk slowly but go far. “Haim, I have an idea,” I told him. “Let’s draw up a position paper with all ‘our’ issues and go for broke. Against the old folks, against the establishment,
against all the disgusting people, come what may. At worst, we’ll die standing tall and not like dishrags.” This collegial discussion led to a document of principles that was original and novel in the political landscape of the time. We recruited our immediate friends and a few pillars of the party and presented the party convention with “the Document of Ten,” a statement of principles on behalf of ten parliament members and central party figures that offered a good alternative to the moldy ideology of the Labor Party. We intended to employ all our political energy to promote these principles at the coming party convention.

  The statement of principles endorsed the immediate reform of the Labor Party’s corrupt linkage with Israel’s organization of trade unions as well as with the unions’ health service organizations. Our statement sowed the first seeds of the Oslo agreements, and it was the beginning of the change from socialist hypocrisy (“Bolshevik,” we called it among ourselves) to a much more contemporary social-democratic worldview. That party convention was eventually convened and was cast in advance as a generational struggle. Our young political group against the old, worn “rest of the world.” I’m not convinced that anyone in the future will ever consider those days historic. But there was something like it then.

  Haim Ramon gave a wonderful speech at the convention, where he described the fading labor movement as a whale committing suicide. He portrayed the Labor Party as a whale swimming to shore to die there, and how he, Haim Ramon, with his “meager resources” was trying to save it from its suicidal fate. I was in the audience and was very moved. It’s not often that you have the privilege of being present at a public birth, the birth of a leader. Then Yossi Beilin took the stage and presented our political thesis. It was worth living through the previous decade, from the Lebanon War up to the decision by the convention, to feel with all my soul that we were moving the wagon that was stuck. We were agents of change, and we had influence.