Notes from 1948

NOVANEWS

Now I know why American tourists love the Israeli resort city of Eilat: it allows people to fly into the geographical heart of the Orient and pretend that they are in Florida. Palm trees, neon-lit hotels, everything overdone and garish. I was there briefly after entering Israel through the Taba Crossing from the Egyptian Sinai, and the flesh-and-blood figures of Israelis started to fill in the scholarly blueprint I had drawn of their society and its links with the world and the West.

Manning the border were 18-year-old Mizrahi (Jews from Arab or Muslim countries) conscripts, fresh out of high school, with their odd racist hyper-vigilance: young American backpackers scrutinized intensely, anyone speaking a whit of Hebrew to them waved through with barely a glance. Outside the crossing, on the Israeli side, was a family of ’48 Palestinians. They had been held up for hours at the checkpoint, they told me. So not just anyone speaking Hebrew glides in on the lubrication of Israeli racism – Israeli Palestinians speak it fine – but just Jews speaking Hebrew. On the bus from the border to the central station was a passel of Spanish teenagers on a Zionist tour group: the grassroots effort of building up global ideological support for Israel amongst Jewish communities in action. At the shabby bus terminal in Eilat were soldiers walking around with M-16s slung over their backs, younger cub trainees in desert fatigues: in Israel the militarist inculcation starts early and never really ends.

And with chilling friendliness a Canadian man sitting next to me in the terminal started recommending that I spend as little time in Eilat as possible. He lived there full-time and had been there for five months. He was there as part of an industry training program, working at one of the seaside city’s resorts. Israel loves such links with the Euro-Atlantic world of which its leaders and founders so deludedly consider the country a part – oriented always north and west, to the Mediterranean of Barcelona and Athens, not the one of Alexandria and Beirut.

Even in the northern Mediterranean port cities, the truth seeps through the porous borders protecting the lie. The entire Mediterranean littoral can’t be militarized. Here, the lie is everywhere, since the raw materials with which it was cobbled together speak the truth through the simple fact of their being: the palm trees stolen from Palestinian orchards lining the city’s roadways and promenades, the Arabic lettering beneath the Hebrew on nearly every sign, the Sudanese refugees speaking to one another on the buses. In furious defiance of the future, the Israeli government will soon start building a new wall on its frontier with Jordan. They contemplate doing the same on the armistice line with Lebanon. In such acts, the rulers of the state tacitly confess their knowledge that their lie will not last. There is no wall that can be built tall enough to keep out the future.

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