Old Archive

Two Sides of Israel

By Leonard Fein

Israel's dramatic (and sometimes ironic) contrasts are often remarked - the old butting up against the new, the ethnic and religious variety, and so forth. The other night, one such contrast hit me especially hard.

I was a guest at my favorite kibbutz, Geva (one of the dwindling number of kibbutzim that is holding its economic own) in the Jezreel Valley, one of the very many scenically breathtaking areas crammed into this tiny country. Late in the evening, my friend and host Yoel drove me to a place called Malkishua, located on the highest point of the Gilboa Mountains (there where Jonathan fell and David memorably lamented his death). Malkishua is a drug rehab village with some 90 residents, for the most part criminals sent there instead of to prison by judges who perceived in them the possibility of rehabilitation. The judges, as it turns out, are wrong more often than not, since Malkishua boasts a success rate of only 35 percent or so, and even that fades with time. But in the drug rehab world, 35 percent, I'm told, is considered enviable.

The drive up to Malkishua at night, along an interminably winding road, brings new revelations with each turn - the lights of the Jordan Valley and, off in the not-so-far distance, of Jordan, and then, winding in the opposite direction, the lights of Afula and of Nazareth and of the Arab villages and the kibbutzim that mark this area. But whatever magical sensations and mystical ideas these evoke along the ride are immediately and quite rudely interrupted upon arrival at Malkishua, where a year-long regimen of heavy discipline is the essential therapeutic approach, and where the population (95 percent Sephardic, a handful of Russians and Ethiopians) heart-breakingly includes a number of teen-age prostitutes. In the end, it is no surprise that Israel has a drug problem or that its drug problem is especially prevalent (though hardly unique to) its lower classes. Yet each time one bumps into new evidence of Israel's "normalcy," there's at least a touch of sadness that things haven't worked out quite the way the early dreamers (and their disciples) had hoped.

Malkishua is actually a detour. Our target for the evening is Ma'aleh Gilboa, a kibbutz of Hapoel Hamizrachi, the once-proud and long-since marginalized kibbutz movement of the Mizrachi (Zionist Orthodox) bloc. There's a yeshiva at Ma'aleh Gilboa, a yeshiva affiliated with Meimad, Israel's tiny movement of Orthodox doves, and I have been invited to speak. Ten o'clock at night is not my favorite time to try to engage an audience, especially an audience of young men who've been praying and studying since six in the morning. But these 40 or so are, apparently, used to long hours; they show no sign at all of wilting. I talk with them about America's Jews; their questions focus almost exclusively on religious questions: What's the distinction between Conservative and Reform? Why do we take so seriously Israel's behavior regarding religion? Long before they have conceded to the late hour, I do.

And on the way down, Yoel needs to make a quick stop at the tail end of an outdoor wedding. We arrive in time for the disco dancing, the likes of which I have never before seen, not in movies, not in real life. How shall I put it in this, a family newspaper? Try this: If the dancing had been in a city-owned space in New York, Mayor Guiliani would surely have sought to have it banned. Or this: There are activities usually performed horizontally that were here symbolically engaged in vertically. Or this: Little, very little, was left to the imagination.

Drug addicts, yeshiva bochers, disco dancers - a small sample of this nation's staggering heterogeneity. Another excursion might as easily have turned up volatile Russian separatists, teen-age computer nerds, steely-eyed security people, and Tel Aviv beach bums.

And out of all this, a nation is meant to be built. Such a nation requires rough agreement on a common narrative, what we used to call "an organizing myth." Washington and the cherry tree, Jefferson as liberal polymath, the Statue of Liberty. But Israel is these days hustling to debunk its fledgling myths. It began last year with the 22-part Tekumah series on television, chronicling the origins of statehood on the occasion of the 50th anniversary in painstakingly and painfully unvarnished revisionist detail. It has continued this year with the publication of a new 9th-grade history text that purports to "tell it like it was." (Yes, Israel did expel Arabs during its War of Independence. And more.)

Who can oppose the effort to get at history's truths? In America, it is time and then more than some for us to teach our children and ourselves just how brutally native Americans were treated during the years of our expansion. And we can afford to do that; our consensual symbols are solidly in place. They can withstand the truth(s) about Jefferson, Nixon, our wars, the whole truth if need be. But Israel is not yet there. The Judaism that is ostensibly the grout that holds the mosaic together (and already, we've left out the 20 percent of Israel's people who are not Jews) is these days dried out, crumbly. The wars that have manifestly served to compress the differences may now be over. Even Lebanon in 1982 was no longer an occasion for national consensus.