For me Israel is very much a dreamed-of elsewhere. I went there, many years ago now, after the Six-Day War. But of that I shall not speak, or not much. That period is over and done with, and serves only as a basis for my present reveries, as a way of dating a feeling experienced at that time. Why did I feel myself there to be in a foreign country? Foreign and familiar at once. Familiar in the kibbutzim, where a European nature had been reconstituted, and where people still knew and spoke yiddish among themselves. Foreign among the sabras and their roughness, their brutality—perhaps one will call it the rusticity of their ways—and the calm manner of being on the land that characterized them. (On closer inspection, was this calm not a little contrived, in the face of the threats weighing on the country?) This contradiction toward Israel persists, and colors my reveries. I shall not speak of politics here. Every day, alas, it is spoken of; every day the conflict reminds us of itself. Not counting books, films, and reportage. I, like all of us, would like to be a prisoner no longer of this accursed conflict, but between the desire and the reality lies the whole space of a peace endlessly missed, even if glimmers sometimes appear! Is Israel the East, is it the West? Is it a far-flung piece of the USA, with its technology, its way of life, or is it on its way to becoming Orientalized, with its bazaars, its artisans, its populations from North Africa, Yemen, Ethiopia, and so on? And then too this Eastern land, green, ochre, black, brown, gray. The deserts, even irrigated, the olive trees, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, the sunrises and sunsets. Can one be entirely a piece of the West on that land? It is perhaps because everything and the opposite of everything coexist that reverie can be born.
It happens that, unlike many Jews, I have no family in Israel and never have had any. And yet my father must have been more or less a Zionist, though not a militant one, because at home before the war there was a collection box for the “Keren Kayemet le Israël” [Jewish National Fund] in which one put money meant to help Jews settle in what was still Palestine under the British Mandate. This box fascinated me because I wondered how much candy I could buy myself with that money. So I have no family in Israel, but I know people there. Two friends from secondary school; we were in the same class in Paris from the fourth form to the philosophy year; they made, as the saying goes, their aliyah. One, who had been a dentist in Paris, identified with liberal religious Judaism. Under the influence of her children, who became hyper-religious in adolescence, she left France and dentistry to become, in Jerusalem, what one would call a “fundamentalist.” She spends her life, her husband too, in the study of the Talmud; she has twelve or thirteen grandchildren. She sent me a few exalted letters in which she explains her happiness and her peace to me. “Her peace”! I did not reply. What can a convinced atheist say? I am only astonished and saddened. But after all, the Talmud is perhaps a form of psychotherapy. The other was a cheerful, lively, gay, talkative woman; she is perhaps still all of that, but in the Israeli police, where she has worked for thirty years. She is probably retired now. To tell the truth, a luminous figure happily comes to counterbalance the strange turn that Irène’s and Anna’s lives have taken. It is that of Shira, a gentle young woman of twenty-two, a student of philosophy and anthropology, the daughter of a cousin of a Parisian friend of mine. A militant for Palestinian rights, she goes to the wall that Sharon is erecting and uses her body to obstruct its construction. She is generally present in every action against the policy of the Israeli government. This does not prevent her from loving her country, she says, from feeling deeply Israeli, and from being unable to imagine living elsewhere. When I meet her in Paris two or three times a year, I feel like thanking her for her quiet courage and her lucidity. That Israel, I admire and I love. She reminds me of another “just one,” Simha Flapan. Thus, tossed between positive and negative feelings, my reverie cannot conclude. And by the way, what nourishes these contrasting flashes? The films: above all Amos Gitaï, but also Finkiel: remember the old lady arriving from Russia and searching desperately through the streets of Tel Aviv for someone to give her directions in Yiddish, without finding one: “so there are no Jews in this country,” she says. I could have, not said it, for though I understand Yiddish I do not speak it; but I could make her astonishment my own. The books: above all an Israeli detective novel by Alexandra Schwarzbrand entitled Balagan, in which I learned more than in many a learned book. And, my word, television, inevitably. This little article has neither rhyme nor reason. Nor do reveries, to tell the truth. The complexity of Israel does not let itself be enclosed, even in the imagination. But in fact, why does this reverie, this motionless journey, sometimes come to me before the rest of the night? No doubt because something obsesses me, and this time it is a matter of the real. This strong and fragile State, unbearable and endearing, these people who try so hard that they end up behaving like a real State, unjust like all the others, stupid like all the others, a cold monster like all the others, this obsession with the land (our land, that of our ancestors and so on and so forth), this democracy reduced to its borders, the denial of the Palestinians’ rights, and many other not very likeable things, which are the proper traits of States—of these I am no part. But when I think of the Israelis of flesh and blood, I feel myself “inside outside,” concerned in spite of myself. Devastated by the blind attacks, devastated by the conduct of the Israeli military in the West Bank and in Gaza, by the stupidity of so short-sighted a policy. Will this nightmare one day end? How, and to whose benefit? I set out from reverie and I arrive at nightmare. So goes the Middle East.