entered the land that God himself had bestowed upon them. And it is safe to assume that my baptism into the realities of occupation did not occur at the site where St. John converted the first “true children of Israel,” which Christian tradition locates south of Jericho. In any event, I could never understand why that elderly man had been tortured, as Palestinian terrorism had not yet even emerged and no one had dared put up any resistance. Perhaps it was for the money. Or perhaps the torture and banal murder had simply been the product of boredom on a night offering no alternative forms of entertainment.
Only later did I come to view my “baptism” in Jericho as a water-shed in my life. I had not tried to prevent the torture because I had been too frightened. Nor do I know if I could have stopped it. However, not having tried to do so troubled me for years. Indeed, the fact that I am writing about it here means I still carry the murder around inside me. Above all, the inexcusable incident taught me that absolute power not only corrupts absolutely, as attested to by Lord Acton, but brings with it an intolerable sense of possession over other people and, ultimately, over place. I have no doubt that my ancestors, who lived a powerless life in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe, could have never dreamed of the actions their progeny would perpetrate in the Holy Land.
For my next tour of reserve duty, I was again stationed in the Jordan Valley, this time during the celebrated establishment of the first Nahal3 settlements there. At dawn on my second day in the valley, I took part in an inspection conducted by Rehavam Ze’evi, better known as “Gandhi,” who had only recently been appointed head of central command. This was before his friend Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had given him a lioness as a gift, which would become a symbol of the Israeli army’s presence in the West Bank. The Israeli-born general stood before us, striking a pose worthy of General Patton himself,4 and delivered a brief speech. I cannot remember exactly what he said, as I was somewhat drowsy at the time. However, I will never forget the moment he waved his hand toward the mountains of Jordan behind us and enthusiastically instructed us to remember that those mountains, too, were part of the Land of Israel and that our forefathers had lived there, in Gilad and Bashan.
A few of the soldiers nodded their heads in agreement, others laughed, most were focused on getting back to their tents as soon as possible to catch up on sleep. One joked that our general must have been a direct descendant of those ancestors who had lived east of the river three millennia ago, and proposed we immediately set out to liberate the occupied territory from the backward gentiles in his honor. I didn’t find the remark funny. Instead, the general’s brief address served as an important catalyst for the development of my skepticism toward the collective memory with which I had been infused as a pupil. I knew even then that, according to his biblical (and at least somewhat skewed) logic, Ze’evi was not mistaken. The former Palmach hero and future Israeli government minister was always honest and consistent in his passionate views on the home-land. His moral blindness toward those who had previously been living in “the land of our forefathers”—his indifference to their reality—soon came to be shared by many.
As I have already noted, I felt a powerful sense of connection with the small land where I grew up and first fell in love, and with the urban landscape that had shaped my character. Although never truly a Zionist, I was taught to see the country as a refuge in time of need for displaced and persecuted Jews who had nowhere else to go. Like historian Isaac Deutscher, I understood the historical process that led up to 1948 as the story of a man leaping from a burning building in desperation and injuring a passer-by as he landed.5 At the time, however, I was unable to foresee the monumental changes that would come to reshape Israel as a result of its military victory and territorial expansion—changes that were wholly unrelated to Jewish suffering from persecution and that past suffering could certainly not justify. The long-term outcome of this victory reinforced the pessimistic view of history as an arena for continual role reversal between victim and executioner, as the persecuted and displaced often emerge subsequently as rulers and persecutors.
The transformation of Israel’s conception of national space almost certainly played a meaningful role in the formation of Israeli national culture after 1967, although it may not have been truly decisive. After 1948, Israeli consciousness suffered from discontent with limited territory and “narrow hips.” This unease openly erupted after Israel’s military victory in the 1956 war, when Prime Minister David BenGurion seriously considered annexing the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.
Despite this significant but fleeting episode, the mythos of the ancestral homeland declined significantly after the establishment of the state of Israel and did not return forcefully to the public arena until the Six-Day War almost two decades later. For many Judeo-Israelis, it seemed that any criticism of Israel’s conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem and the cities of Hebron and Bethlehem would undermine the legitimacy of its previous conquest of Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, and other places of comparatively less importance to the Zionist mosaic of connection with the mythological past. Indeed, if we accept the Jews’ “historical right of return to their homeland,” it is difficult to deny its applicability to the very heartland of the “ancient homeland” itself. Weren’t my comrades-in-arms justified in feeling we had not crossed any borders? Wasn’t this why we had studied the Bible as a distinct pedagogical historical subject in our secular high school? Back then, I never imagined that the green armistice line—the so-called Green Line—would disappear so quickly from the maps produced by the Israeli Ministry of Education, and that future generations of Israelis would hold conceptions of the homeland’s borders that would differ so greatly from my own. I simply was unaware that, following its establishment, my country had no borders except the fluid, modular frontier regions that perpetually promised the option of expansion.
One example of my humanistic political naïveté was the fact that I never dreamed Israel would dare legally annex East Jerusalem, characterize the measure by invoking “a city that is bound firmly together” (Psalms 122:3), and at the same time refrain from granting equal civil rights to one-third of the residents of its “united” capital city, as is still the case today. I never imagined I would bear witness to the assassination of an Israeli prime minister because the lethal patriot who pulled the trigger believed he was about to withdraw from “Judea and Samaria.” I also never imagined I would be living in a moonstruck country whose foreign minister, having immigrated there at the age of twenty, would reside outside of Israel’s sovereign borders for the entire duration of his term in office.
At the time, I had no way of knowing that Israel would succeed in controlling such a large Palestinian population for decades, bereft of sovereignty. I also could not foresee that, for the most part, the country’s intellectual elite would accept the process and that its senior historians—my future colleagues—would continue to refer to this population quite readily as “Arabs of the Land of Israel.”6 It never dawned on me that Israel’s control of the local “other” would not be exercised through mechanisms of discriminatory citizenship such as military government and the Zionist-socialist appropriation and Judaization of land, as had been the case within the borders of “good old” pre-1967 Israel, but rather through the sweeping negation of their freedoms and the exploitation of natural resources for the sake of the pioneering settlers of the “Jewish people.” Furthermore, I never even considered the possibility that Israel would succeed in settling more than a half million people in the newly occupied territories and keeping them fenced off in complex ways from the local population, who would in turn be denied basic human rights, highlighting the colonizing, ethnocentric, and segregationist character of the entire national enterprise from the outset. In short, I was wholly unaware I would spend most of my life living next door to a sophisticated and unique regime of military apartheid with which the “enlightened” world, due in part to its guilty conscience, would be forced to compromise and, in the absence of any other option, to support.
In my younger years, I
