Yitzhak Laor - The Myths of Liberal Zionism

I once visited the United States shortly after an incident in which a college student had opened fire and killed several of his fellow students on the campus of Virginia Tech. The taxi driver who took me from JFK Airport to Washington Square in New York heard I was from Israel, and therefore excitedly told me about the Israeli professor who protected his students and was shot to death. He survived the Nazi concentration camps to die here as a hero, the driver told me. I was truly impressed by this historicization, and when I spoke to my wife on the phone later that day I told her about it. She said she had heard the same description on CNN, and, indeed, I later heard the same story from President Bush, or his speech writers, on TV.

I think I know how to write about our present time and place to people who live alongside me, who use the same language, even though I belong to a political minority. I am more skeptical about my ability to talk about this time and place to outsiders. Not just because our history long ago turned into a collection of soundbites, or because it is very easy for a Hebrew writer to tell his parents life story as a kind of illustration of the dramatic history of his people in the first half of the twentieth century, or to tell my own life story as an illustration of the dramatic history of the country I have lived in over the second half of the twentieth century. I am skeptical of my ability because I find it extremely hard to try to sharpen my questions, mainly questions about the nature of the current historical moment in Israel, the place where I was born and will probably die. Twenty years ago I wrote a poem in which I tried to explain Israeli aggressiveness thus:

We didnt grow up where our fathers grew up.

They didnt grow up where

Their fathers did. We learnt not to

Feel nostalgic (we can feel nostalgic for any tombstone

Decided upon), we dont belong any

Where (we shall belong easily to anything

When demanded), we move across

Countries, we sleep in fancy

Hotels, we sleep in cold

Barns, we love only in order to be

Loved, we rape only

To be remembered, we enjoy

Only so as to register ownership, destroying

Mainly villages, declaring ownership

And leaving, hating peasants, mainly

Peasants (if necessary, well also cultivate

The land).

I didnt content myself with writing poetry, because I thought that through it I could not capture all this history which so occupies me: We didnt grow up where our fathers grew up. They didnt grow up where their fathers did.

What in this eternal foreignness to the landscape that ones father loved in his childhood, or that ones fathers father loved in his childhood, what in this foreignness is relevant to our patriotism (always abstract) and what is not? I am not sure that I have good answers. And yet I am trying to ask questions about the ability to write beyond images, beyond the simple images that the TV news chatters about.

There is something about our Israeli lives, about how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others perception of us, that is entirely connected to the European origins of our concept of nationality, democracy and political structure.

Even though our Israeli lives are very dependent on the United States of America, the fact is that when we, in the heart of the Middle East, talk to our metropolis, yearn for its love, ask for its moral support and recognition of our cultural values, we are not really talking to the United States, maybe because we take its love for grantedhence we do not make any real efforts to desire its desirebut maybe we simply do not really understand or know it. And though understanding the US is almost a profession in Israeli journalism, and though we are very up to date with most US TV drama series, soap operas and sitcoms, even we understand that the United States is not just what we see on TV, or in Hollywood movies, or via the politicians who visit us on their way to the White House.

Perhaps the United States does not really understand us either, if it is even possible to talk of the United States in the singular, as a single entity that can or cannot understand something. It is clear that the easiest story to tell is the kitsch one, like the description of the cab driver who took me from JFK to Washington Square, but I started by explaining how difficult I find it to write for Americans in order to suggest that we should begin from those places where we can see eye to eye, and peer into a new dimension.