In Days to Come

by Avraham Burg

  I saw Rob, whose parents are from Jamaica and today is from London; Zia the Englishman, from a Muslim Bangladeshi family, and today his identity is much more augmented; Sayida the German judge whose parents are from Turkey; Andre the Jew from Morocco; Julia from Poland; Ivan the Bulgarian; Gertraud, from the Bruno Kreisky Forum; and the German-born Lars, now living in Amsterdam.

  “You understand,” he said, referring me to a quote from his latest book, “this is Europe! Abundant variety is the most precious treasure that Europe has succeeded in saving from the great conflagrations of the past, and offers it to the world today.” Then he expanded on the subject in a lecture, quoting the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: “To live with the other, to live as the other’s other, that is the basic human task—on both the lowest and loftiest levels. That is perhaps the unique advantage of Europe, which was able and must learn the art of living with others.”*

  This could be so fitting for our varied society in Israel, and we can be part of this mosaic. But Israel, unfortunately, has only an American strategy. We have no European strategy, though we need it more than ever. And we don’t leave openings for European influences. We’re attentive to the best of American junk—from food and music to politics and arms, never to the Constitution and civil rights. With Europe, it is even worse; we have nothing to do with the social, cultural, and moral processes at work there. It would be appropriate for us if only because Europe is an accessible tourist destination for the average Israeli, and for Israeli statesmen of recent generations a generous source of guilt feelings, credit on which they can draw for any negative action, injustice, or mistake by Israel, and have European officials sign off on it. Otherwise, from the Israeli political perspective, Europe is a nuisance that Israel would do best to ignore. I have no doubt that Europe has the rare ability for renewal and reinvention. It has done it so many times in the past, and its renewal mechanisms are working now again with full force.

  Who would have believed me if I had said during the Spanish Inquisition that one day all of Europe would be a secular continent? I would have likely ended my life on the torture rack somewhere in the dungeons of Madrid. And if I had whispered to Martin Luther that one day there would be on his land a secular sect far bigger than the Catholic sect or its Protestant offspring—one that is completely indifferent to religious differences—I have no doubt what his reaction would have been. And when the Turks were at the gates of Vienna, it is doubtful if anyone imagined that one day there would be a discussion about including Turkey in the European Union, not to mention the millions of Muslim migrants that are changing its social fabric beyond recognition. Who believed 150 years ago that Europe would be the world’s continent of peace? Nobody! Germany and France leading together? Impossible! A small, neutral, peaceable Austria? An Italy that was not militaristic? Peace-loving Nordic peoples? Naïve nonsense. And still, the facts speak for themselves. It’s not easy; new encounters produce discord and dangers. And still, it is happening.

  And indeed, something almost biblical is happening to the old continent. European history is replete with all manner of horrors, bloodshed, persecution, and hatred. And now, as if magically transformed, Europe is a continent of peace. Only a few people, such as Stefan Zweig and his colleagues, thought seventy years ago that it was possible and desirable, and that Europe’s politics would look like this. Open borders, a genuine effort to include the other, with all the difficulties and problems, a real commitment to end wars, expand democracy and the discourse on rights, combine a growing economy with social justice, and make peace wherever possible. For Europeans, these are often pressing challenges. But to me and others looking from the outside, it looks like the realization of the ancient prophecy of turning swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.

  In 1989, I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, like the rest of the world, on television. It was strange to see history in your bedroom, like a passive voyeur, like Dad eighty years ago from the window of his room in Dresden. I didn’t think at the time that this wall would open many private boxes that were hidden somewhere inside me without my knowing they were there. I was born in a divided city with a wall running through it, Jerusalem. I came of age when it was divided without a wall, and it remains that way, painfully for me. A wall, I learned in Jerusalem, is not only a structure of concrete and cement. It is first and foremost a state of mind. A wall between people whose foundations are a separation between souls and consciousness. This is the polarized message that keeps coming from “the united city,” from the “eternal capital” of Israeli transience. It seems that the tangible Berlin Wall fell only after the walls in the consciousness of the adversaries collapsed. With an elegant European delay of forty-five years, World War II ended. The time of disconnection ended, and the time of connection began.

  European individuals toppled barriers well before their political leaders. Gertraud, my friend and colleague, who makes possible most of the European projects I’m involved in, was born in Austria. At a very young age she abandoned the good old but oppressive Austrian world order and moved to Paris. Later she married the Italian Gian Battista and raised his children. He lived in Monaco, she in Vienna again, and the two of them together in Sardinia. She speaks German, Italian, French, and English fluently, and when I met her, she was busy studying Hebrew. She moves easily between eastern and western Europe, between the north and south, between the Middle East and Europe, and especially between the Austrian and Jewish past. She is the most wall-free person I know.

  I got to know my friend Ivan through her. He was born in Sofia, but every time I look for him he is in another city somewhere in the world. He is a fascinating partner to many discussions and thoughts, and very wise in the ways of political history and political science. He has a penetrating worldview and a rare ability to connect deep historical currents with the latest headlines, and to explain almost everything that is incomprehensible in our contemporary life. He is a Bulgarian whose children study in Vienna and who is a member of some very prestigious American research institutes. “How do systems collapse, how do empires end, how does a culture vanish? I know. I was born there,” he says of himself and the European environments in which he lives.

  Martin is the president of the European Parliament, born in Germany, a socialist. He is fluent in English, German, and French. He is proficient not only in the political register of those languages, but in the cultural, literary, and spiritual depth of every one of them. He understands the Middle East better than many, knows the inner recesses of Turkey, and is familiar with every nuance of European politics. He is attentive to everyone, but also expressive. He may become the leader of all of Europe one day.

  Danny Cohn-Bendit is Jewish. His parents escaped from Germany to France during World War II and returned when it was over. Danny grew up in Germany, and in the mid-sixties arrived in France to study. He was the leader most identified with the student unrest in Paris in 1968. He later returned to Germany, always active and involved. An intellectual and an activist. In Germany, he became the deputy mayor of Frankfurt. At the end of the nineties, he returned to European politics, this time from the French side, as the candidate of the French Green Party to the European Parliament.

  These are all my friends. Unlike me, whose identity is only Israeli, their identities are complex from birth, layered and sophisticated. They broke down the walls of Europe long before masses of Berliners took hammers and pickaxes in hand and smashed the concrete wall. All these were what my father was and could have been were it not for that cursed war and this country, afflicted by the war’s malignant metastases. Maybe I’m wrong, and he would not have managed to break down his own walls. Maybe his great spiritual affinity with Jewish Eastern Europe and its shtetl romanticism would have bested him. But we—his children and grandchildren—could have been… actually, I can’t bear the thought. It’s too difficult and frightening.

  And still, “Europe is a body of ideas.” It gave birth to movements of religious ref
ormation, psychology, and the sciences, unique aesthetics, ideologies and philosophies, churches and beliefs, Zionism and Jewish Orthodoxy, and ultra-Orthodoxy. Not necessarily religious, not essentially nationalist. But generating ideas and trends. Part of it expelled Dad and me before I was born, and part of it made room even for people like me. It was a place of paradoxes, from which humanity’s worst ideas emerged, along with some of the worst ideas of contemporary Judaism. But the seeds of equality were also sown in it, the sanctity of the different, human liberties, and everything that is sacred to me. And in the midst of all these, the Jews of central and western Europe were like the fermenting yeast causing the dough to rise. In recent times Europe has also been the most fascinating laboratory I know for searching for the place of the “other.” Again, at the forefront of Western and global innovation.

  After many years, actually most of my life, in which I was just a total Israeli, I find myself more similar to my parents. Today I have a dual identity. I’m a European Israeli. My partner immigrated to Israel from France as a child. Her parents live in Jerusalem and physically live the existential duality. All their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are Israeli. All their hopes and frustrations are channeled to this place. Their home is the most Israeli place possible, and at the same time an island of European French refinement with all its manners and culture in the heart of a hidden Jerusalem garden. They have a dual identity and culture. French Israelis, simultaneously Jewish and European. Traditional people in their personal life, committed to a public sphere that sanctifies the secularism of the state, the famous French laïcité. I learned from them the essence of the French conception of secularism, freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Religion has no foothold in the institutions of the state, and the state is not involved in what goes on in the religious sphere. At the time of writing, this concept has no Hebrew entry in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and I wonder if it is a coincidence that there is one in Turkish and even in Esperanto, but not in Hebrew.

  When I left the Knesset in 2004, I knew that I wanted to embark on a journey to my roots, in the internal direction of Europe. I could have gotten a German passport as my father’s son, maintaining his citizenship that had been cut off by the sundering violence of the previous century, and I could have requested French citizenship by virtue of my marriage to a French citizen. I devoted much thought to the subject. Doubling my identity, and the point of entry to that status, preoccupied me. In the end, I realized that there were no gates more symbolic than the French and German ones. I come from Israel, one of the most emphatic nation-states in the world. The old Germany presented the world with a concept of a nation based on a shared blood bond. France, which had its own set of problems, presented the model of a nation based on shared culture and civic values. On the one hand, I’m fascinated by and very much like what is happening today in the new Germany. In every World Cup, I root for the German soccer team. It’s enough for me to see Germany’s national team, composed of so many players of different origins cooperating under the same flag—Poles, Turks, North Africans, all of them German—to remind me that people, collectively and privately, are always open to change. I am a big believer in partnerships of ideas, alliances of values, and I have no commitment to genetic tribalism, not even to the Israeli blood-bonded nation emerging around me. The new Germany today is very far from those blood-based concepts. On the other hand, the symbolism of the past stopped me. From that point, the decision was simple.

  I applied for French citizenship in addition to my Israeli citizenship. Like my partner and children. Like many of my friends. Considerable public fury, scathing criticism, and bitter cynicism have been directed at me since. As if people were doubting my patriotic allegiance. Because I’m no longer a public figure, I don’t really care about the criticism, which is superficial and hollow anyway. Few people really take the trouble to listen to the reasons. Most prefer to hurl “your French passport” at me in order to avoid dealing with my Israeli criticism. I don’t really need another passport. I returned my diplomatic passport, for which I have lifetime eligibility as a former Knesset speaker, to the authorities, and I never asked to have it renewed. Both because I was never elected to be a “former” and because I want to have freedom of opinion and expression, including harsh criticism of the country, its behavior, and its leaders. For that reason, I can’t travel the world with a representative passport without representing Israel. I have paid my public dues to society and I don’t want to continue being a representative stuffed animal, as some would like me to be. From the start, I wanted a European passport to get to places I can’t reach with my Israeli passport. I’ve already been to Yemen to help the small Jewish community that remains there, I’ve explored whether I could get to Syria, and Tehran is also a goal on my map. I’ve been in all sorts of places, and I want to reach others, to speak with the local people and build human bridges to places where political ties and the Israeli passport still cannot reach. Along with the storm of controversy, I discovered more layers I hadn’t thought of originally regarding the places I aspire to reach. They are not only physical and political places, but mainly ideological spaces found beyond today’s Israeli conceptual world.

  AS ISRAELI JEWS, WE HAVE AN AGGRESSIVE AND INSENSITIVE basic assumption that all Jews in the world are committed to dual allegiance: to their countries of citizenship—the United States, Britain, France, and the rest of the world—and to another country, Israel. At times, we exploit this duality with brutal cynicism, as was the case with Jonathan Pollard and with Ben Zygier, “Prisoner X.” Zygier was an Australian Israeli citizen, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, and allegedly also a Mossad agent. He died in custody in 2010, apparently by hanging himself in a suicide-proof maximum-security cell. While he was imprisoned, he was referred to as Prisoner X, Mr. X, or Mister X.

  I have nothing but contempt for this cynicism. I adamantly oppose this emotional manipulation and don’t want to be part of it. Pollard is the best-known but definitely not the only person whom various Israeli agencies have used against his or her countries, regardless of the high prices for them personally or even of endangering the well-being of their entire Jewish communities. I want to offer an alternative. For me, being part of the “nation of the world” is to have dual responsibility, which is the complete opposite of the conventional divided and dual allegiance. The meaning of dual responsibility is simple: I do my best on behalf of members of my Israeli community, and at the same time I am committed to a better world according to my values. That is why anywhere and in any way that I can fight those who ruin the world, I am committed to this dual responsibility.

  Europe is not just a geographic place; it is also a value system that I am trying to expand so that it envelops our lives and the lives of the Palestinians. I watch with great sadness the pessimism that drives the wheels of our region. Even the greatest believers in peace between us and the Palestinians find it hard to form images of a sustainable future for the State of Israel and the State of Palestine together. It seems that psychologically the terrestrial space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is too small to contain such giant and hurt egos like those of the Israeli and Palestinian collectives. Peoples like ours need wide open spaces after the end of the wars and traumas. And still, I truly believe that our iconic conflict, between Israelis and Palestinians, can become an iconic solution, one that will be an inspiration to peoples in conflict and areas still driven by hatred and distrust.

  I know that the reality I’m dreaming about is no more than a utopia at this stage in our history. For every one of us bearing the burden of being Israeli—earning a livelihood, wars, fears, and pressures—it is no more than a vision. “Maybe,” I tell people in the heat of debate, “but it is my north star. It can’t always be reached, but you can always navigate toward it. What’s your star?”

  Sometimes I tell them about the once-in-a-lifetime event in which science met the faith of my childhood. On every first
Saturday night of the new Hebrew month we would go out to the synagogue courtyard right after services, crane our necks, and try to see the thin crescent of the new moon. We would say the prayer of the new moon as we faced it, dancing a bit and reciting, “Just as I dance before you and cannot touch you, so will my enemies be unable to touch me.” Like other prayers, this was another protective layer of the constantly fearful Jew. When I was fourteen, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and my father went through a minor theological crisis. “I don’t know,” he wondered aloud at the Sabbath table, “whether now that man has touched the moon, the prayer for the new moon should be changed, or whether our enemies will now be able to harm us.”

  That landing on the moon, which seemed impossible, which changed the world and caused my father to ponder a taboo—a tiny religious reform—is for me a source of inspiration. In almost every matter I deal with, I begin with the basic question, who is “the man on the moon” of this issue? What is the most far-fetched vision I can think of, and what are the paths leading to it? I have no doubt that I will live to see the day in which Israeli-Palestinian peace, based on principles of freedom, human dignity, equality, justice, and democracy, will be possible and self-evident. We will touch the moon, and the persecution will stop. I’m convinced that between the Jordan River and the sea every person must have the same rights. Such full equality between Israelis and Palestinians will be a source of peace that will radiate positively across the Mediterranean region, to southern Europe and to Muslim North African lands.

  IN MANY RESPECTS, ISRAEL IS A MICROCOSM OF THE WEST. What takes place here frenetically occurs in the West at a more measured pace. War, terrorism, a weakening of liberal values, strange political leaders, xeno- and Islamophobias, and setbacks to democracy as well as hesitant peace, and the dynamics of history. Our world is shrinking into social network ghettos, and a media-driven politics focused on presidential tweets is undermining idea-based discourse. The roots of our contemporary reality, however, are much deeper and older. One of the most significant starting points of our time is World War I; that conflict, a century ago, gave birth to the world order that we now are leaving. The demise of the Ottoman Empire happened then, the new Soviet empire was born, and in the West, the stars and stripes of the United States began to light up the sky as it joined—and increasingly shaped—the new world order. The process was completed by the end of World War II, with the defeated nations, Germany, Italy, and Japan, enthusiastically embracing capitalism.