1948

Twenty-three

I had a friend, part of whose shoulder had been shot off. We’d walk down the street, and when we saw people coming he’d stop and look at his missing shoulder. The people would look on astonished, he was tall and good-looking, and he’d raise his arm and whirl it behind his head, which in the absence of a shoulder he could do, and they’d all scream and he’d smile at me and we’d go on our way.

At Café Nussbaum there was talk about work at sea. I wanted to get to the fighting in the Negev. Miri, who was in charge of the Palmach wounded, told me I wouldn’t be going back because physically I wasn’t up to it. She suggested that I sign on to bring refugees by sea. She put me in touch with Zimmermann from the Shoham Maritime Company, who was responsible for the ships, and who came from Kfar Tavor, or Meskha as it once was known. He used his influence and I signed on aboard the Pan York. On each trip we brought around three thousand people.

When I first saw them, shinnying up the hawsers to board, I hated them. I wrote an article for Shlonsky entitled, “I Hate the Jewish People.” Afterward I fell in love with them. I realized that they, not us, were the true heroes, and that to survive what they’d gone through you needed more than a few rifles and Stens. I would talk to them.

I roamed the streets of Marseilles and Naples. After that I worked for the luxury tax office. I tried dating girls but they dropped me because all I talked about was death. I studied in Jerusalem. I finally found love, a woman I loved a lot, but I killed that love too, and the years went by.

After ten years in New York I came back to Israel, or immigrated to Israel, depending on who’s talking, and “went up” to Jerusalem, as my mother used to say. I went onto the roof of the Talitha Kumi Monastery, where Jesus had told Talitha to stand up, and she did. I’d once lived on that roof, in the belfry, and on its door was a faded inscription: “Yoram has gone to Paris.”

I looked down and saw the officer who ran away at Nabi Samwil passing below on the far side of the stone wall. I remember seeing a girl not far from me licking an ice cream, and I shivered. I wanted someone to say something about that officer, and how — suddenly — girls are eating ice cream in Jerusalem. We were all in the battles.

The Palmach is a house. Actually, it’s two houses that cost millions. The Palmach House and the Yitzhak Rabin Heritage House, and the man has yet to be born who can explain exactly what that heritage is, and everything there today is one huge retrospective. The people who were commanders or close to headquarters and knew the top men, and vice versa, helped each other to create a virtual Palmach, a children’s story for grown-ups.

Two thousand Jews who swam to Palestine on decrepit boats even before the second wave of immigration, most them aboard Betar* vessels, have been forgotten. Nobody counts them as heroes of the War of Independence. A German submariner who saw the Mafkura, a small vessel, just before it sank after being hit, said, “The Jews are swimming to Palestine.” They are not Palmach nor Haganah nor Etzel, they are nothing. Just like the unknown soldiers who got just about six pounds after the war.

There are engagé books. Engagé films. Scholarly articles on battles in which I took part and didn’t know a thing about what the scholars have written. The past is painted so that’s what will be remembered. The fighters who lived through it, who are no longer the Palmach, are trying to heal their wounds to this day, to escape the nightmares they’ve carried with them since the war. We are a stinking drop in the sea of memories of the Palmach heroes.

I did not know the Palmach in its halcyon days of the early 1940s, when its members worked in kibbutzim, and stole chickens from the coops, and sang around the campfire and pissed on it to put it out. The Palmach I knew in the war was not the same Palmach. It was battalions of fighters. It wasn’t nice.

In the summer of 1955, I came back to Israel for a visit. I traveled the country, met up with friends. In Bab el-Wad, on the wall of the lower pumping house, somebody had written in big letters: “Baruch Jamili.” It pleased me that someone unknown, who’d fought in the war, already knew what would be concealed later, with the Palmach generation commemorating the noncombatant headquarters people, and so he wrote his name in big letters to be seen by people going up to Jerusalem. A few years ago his name was erased. I don’t know who did it, but for me it was as if the Wailing Wall had been erased and used as the desert is being used: to build the walls of a luxury hotel for the very rich. His name should have been put up in lights.

And one evening, in a small bar in Malkei Yisrael Square, I met a man whom I recognized from the Harel Brigade. He was a few years older than me, a tough guy, I remember that he was an excellent fighter, and we began drinking together. We drank Scotch, which in Israel is called whiskey. At the time I didn’t want to remember. The more I managed to forget, the better I felt. The man said that the war hadn’t ended, as many people thought. The vast majority went back home after the war, hung it up on a hook, and carried on.

The man said that wars of independence persist for many years, and that even now, in 1955, we’re still fighting to establish the state. Countries aren’t founded in a single year. The war that began in 1920 in Jerusalem is still going on and will do so for years to come. It will continue for at least a hundred years. There are security agreements and calm, but we still don’t have peace or a state or a future or quiet. There is no “And the land had rest for forty years.” Forty years is just a prologue.

At the time I thought that the war was over. I thought that in the end the Arabs would resign themselves to us and we to them, and we’d live in our state at the side of a Jordanian or some other state for many years. He alleged that I was deluding myself. He said that in the Bible the Hebrew word begida, betrayal, comes from the word beged, garment, and in the Talmud the word me’ila, treachery, comes from me’il, coat, so it’s all one and the same. I thought about how the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart had said, “My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.”

Many years later, quite recently in fact, when I am old and have had a serious illness, I was asked to speak to young students about the war. They were young and lovely and listened in relative quiet, and had bracelets and earrings and tattoos. Before I left, I stood for a moment at the school gate and in my mind said to them, sadly, In thy blood, live!