Had I come to Israel in 1968, instead of 1969, I would have killed three birds with one stone: I would have celebrated Israel’s 70th birthday, my own, and 50 years in the country. Almost three of a kind. Often when people ask my age, I answer “the same as the country, and I don’t know which of the two of us is in better shape.” It’s a draw: Israel and I have had our ups and downs, our problems and crises, but we can be proud of having overcome them and of being able to celebrate seven decades.

I was born in Paris three weeks after the creation of the State of Israel, on the rue Barbette in the heart of the “pletzl” and its many schmatologists, since transformed into a hyper-trendy “Marais.” My mother was born on a 15 May. Would these two dates explain the importance that Israel took on very early in my life? My parents gave me a first name more-old-fashioned-than-me-you-die, in memory of Golda, my paternal grandmother murdered at Majdanek in 1943. I was lucky that they chose the French version: Golda, in the Israel of the seventies, would have been heavy to bear. My brother is named Marcel. Much later, when someone asked me how my mother (why my mother? and my father?) had chosen our first names, I answered “because of Proust,” taking care not to add that she probably didn’t even know who that was.

Israel entered my life in adolescence. My father had the good fortune to be able to go there by boat with his Deux-Chevaux and an eight-millimeter camera, aboard the “Theodor Herzl.” When I saw the films — rather bad, by the way, with interminable panoramas — the urge took me to go and see for myself up close. At the age of 16, I boarded an El Al plane alone to spend the summer holidays there. At last the sea and the sun, not the dreary climate of the usual Le Touquet. Everyone explained to me that the country needed young people, that I should come and live there, and I thought “me, a Parisienne, in this desert.”

And yet, on returning, I began to take Hebrew lessons. The Six-Day War marked a turning point, followed by May 1968 and the leftist anti-Israeli outbursts. Impossible to stay any longer in France; my decision was made. After my degree in English, I would leave. France seemed to me gray, conservative, blocked in its prejudices, stagnating in an outdated world where each woman lived her life without concern for others. Here, free Jewish women, we would build a new society, egalitarian and upright.

In the summer of 1969, I crossed the Mediterranean on the Dan, a small Zim boat that vanished from maritime circulation long ago. I did not make aliyah; the word frightened me, evoked too sharp a rupture. Being a temporary resident suited me perfectly, offered the same privileges, and would allow me to take part in the building of the country, an incomparable life project. Precisely, in this country, small and still little developed, threatened with destruction by its neighbors, I felt both more Jewish, rid of that feeling of belonging to a minority even while not at all observant, and at the same time I forgot that I was Jewish, because it had become self-evident. No more need to be on my guard, nor to try to guess or to seek out who was Jewish upon new encounters, that reflex which accompanied our life in France.

It was Tel Aviv that had attracted me, an entirely Jewish city endowed with beautiful beaches where I had every firm intention of spending all my free time. The kibbutz? Out of the question. I hate the countryside, and it offered only a limited future, for the women then worked in the kitchen or with the children, fields hardly attractive in my eyes.

In seventy years, I don’t know who has changed the most, Israel or I. We can both rejoice at having overcome the wars, the intifadas, the attacks, the missiles, the political and economic crises, the assassination of a Prime Minister. We have also celebrated jubilant events, like the return of the hostages from the plane hijacked to Entebbe and the coming of Anwar Sadat, and others more trivial, like the victory of the Maccabi Tel Aviv team in the European basketball cup, or first place at Eurovision. We deserve to celebrate our birthday with the honors due to us.

I learned to love this country, despite the harshness of life and the rather low standard of living almost five decades ago. The consumer society had not yet reached our borders, but I thought only of consuming. In the frugal atmosphere, I missed everything: French cheeses, the baguette, the chestnut cream, toiletries, fashionable clothes. My parents kindly remedied this sense of scarcity by passing along stocks of good things through people who came this way. Today, in this temple of consumption and economic neoliberalism, ranked second behind the United States for inequality among developed countries, people go abroad as in the old days one went to spend a few days in a “beit havra’ha,” a rest home that did duty as a hotel. It must be said that a travel tax, sometimes higher than the price of the plane ticket, remained in force until 1993. The current overconsumption disgusts me. This culture of “canyons,” as these big shopping centers are called in Hebrew, has dragged me into another extreme. I refuse to be part of it; it isn’t easy. I am delighted to be able to eat a good baguette made right here at home with quality local cheese, to find clothes without falling into the excesses of fashion or of international brands.

Today the low-cost airlines share a good part of the cake, and it is possible to go to Poland for a few dozen euros. Some Israeli women rush there, to shop or to tour. To tour? In Poland? In that cemetery? Yes, you read that right. While a flourishing industry takes schoolgirls to visit Auschwitz, tour operators even offer tourist circuits without visits to any extermination camp, for one must of course spare the sensitive souls. During my first trips to Israel before coming to settle here, in the sixties, I was, like many, shocked to see the great number of Volkswagens and Mercedes. In my family there was no question of buying German. Unlike Poland, which is veering to the right and where antisemitism has brought out its venom again, Germany has recognized its responsibility and paid the price for it. But I shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself. Antisemitic acts are on the rise there, and the presence of Nazis in the Bundestag since the last elections sticks in my throat.

In the sixties and seventies, the Israelis formed a society where cohesion reigned. Apart from the fanatics of Mea Shearim, everyone lived more or less in harmony, disturbed at times by social movements like the Black Panthers. All the men, with rare exceptions, did their military service. In the film “Atalia,” directed by Akiva Tevet in 1984, Michal Bat Adam plays a young widowed kibbutznik who begins an affair with an 18-year-old boy exempted from military service. Both represent “outsiders” in the society of the kibbutz, where conformism reigns absolutely. Since then, the population has fragmented, and the analyses of society describe “sectors”: the Ashkenazim, the Mizrahim (Sephardim), the Arabs, the Druze, the Russians, the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), the Ethiopians, the new immigrants. Is this the inevitable destiny of a gathering of Jews come from the four corners of the world and of minorities settled here for generations?

Israel is a country of extremes and contrasts. In this “start-up nation,” an empire of high technology, one can still see in the streets of Tel Aviv a cart hitched to a horse, loaded with disparate old junk that the driver tries to sell to cries of “alte sakhen!,” and shop fronts that have not changed in fifty years, even in the prosperous neighborhoods of the old North.

But on the whole, Tel Aviv has metamorphosed. The population itself has changed, and after skipping a generation, mine, the young are now in the majority, and numerous are the fathers strolling their small children in a pram. Often I rail against these changes: the omnipresent dogs (twenty-six thousand!), and their walkers who drag six or eight of them at a time behind their bikes — those same bikes, often electric, that brush past us at full speed and clutter our sidewalks, accompanied by electric scooters and other Segways, public dangers for the peaceful pedestrian women. Then I calm down and acknowledge that I would have a hard time finding a city offering such easy access to a warm sea, where the cheap transport network allows one to get around easily, in an air-conditioned bus (sometimes too much so) or in a taxi at an affordable price, on foot, and even on the Shabbat in a sherout (shared taxi). At the same time I feel nostalgia for the era when people spoke to one another in the street without knowing one another. I would sometimes be approached kindly: “you’re wearing a beautiful dress, where’s it from?”, or be bothered by neighbors knocking at my door to bring me a freshly cooked dish. They have been replaced by yuppies, sometimes pejoratively nicknamed “tzfonbonim,” young women of the rich north of the city, self-absorbed.

Itzhak Shamir, the Prime Minister, used to say that “nothing has changed… the Arabs are the same Arabs, the sea is the same sea.” He was wrong. The sea has changed; now the jellyfish invade us at the start of summer for a few weeks, accompanied by a new kind of voracious fish that painfully stings the legs of motionless bathers (to escape it, one must swim or move). More and more young Arabs do civil service, and the number of Christian women in uniform is also on the rise. Women to’aniot rabbaniot (legal advocates) today sit in the rabbinical courts.

Since the effigy of Golda Meir in the eighties on the ten-shekel notes, women had been conspicuous by their absence on the banknotes. This gap has been corrected. Rachel the poetess, as she is called in Hebrew (Rachel Bluwstein), is now worth twenty shekels. I take the opportunity to recommend a visit to her grave at the Kinneret cemetery, in a dreamlike bucolic setting. As for Leah Goldberg, that genius of literature, she has the honor of figuring on the new hundred-shekel note. In other domains, no change: the inequality of wages between men and women, gone from thirty to thirty-two percent despite the increased presence of women in finance and in the Knesset, or the number of women killed by their partner each year, which even seems to be slightly up.

What is certain is that the polarization is intensifying. One can now find “hametz” during Pessah in Jerusalem; in Tel Aviv the cinemas and theaters operate on the Shabbat (except the Habimah, the national theater), which was not the case even a few decades ago. In parallel, certain religious groups and “haredim” (ultra-Orthodox) have become obsessed with the segregation of the sexes in civil life and in the army. Since they do not succeed in dissuading all observant young girls from not doing their military service, their rabbis try at least to erase the image of their presence and to impose a total segregation where it did not exist. In the last elections in 2015, the ultra-Orthodox parties (no disagreement between Ashkenazim and Sephardim on this subject) refused to include women candidates on their lists, even as — a new development — ultra-Orthodox women insistently demanded it. There is talk today of introducing courses for haredim, thus men and women separated, in the universities, which would entail a decrease in the number of women professors, not to mention the social consequences. In parallel, in the day nurseries and the kindergarten and primary classes of Tel Aviv, the children go to the school of diversity and come from families of all kinds: single-parent, same-sex-parent, and of course traditional nuclear.

A small country, still young and one that could add a few records to those of the Guinness book, if it were possible to photograph them. I cite them pell-mell:

For Tel Aviv:

Israel breaks another record, one we would gladly do without: there exists no other country whose slightest deeds and gestures are examined under the microscope and the mere mention of whose name provokes such ravings and such a hysteria of hostility, on the right as much as on the left. But the Israeli women themselves do not seem unduly worried, since the country is ranked eleventh in the happiness index of 2017! At times I wonder whether we are not living like happy fools, at a moment when certain commentators wonder whether the greatest danger we face might not come from within: fragmentation, sometimes violent, comparable to the destruction wrought by needless hatred (sinat hinam) during the revolt against the Romans.

As for Israeli cinema, literature, and music, no need to sing their praises: festival prizes awarded to numerous films, television series adapted abroad, women writers among the authors of international best-sellers, and women jazz musicians of international renown — one has the choice. I heard Yaël Dayan assert to a group from the Conseil Général of Saône-et-Loire (super-friendly Burgundians) that since the massive arrival of the Russian immigrants, the number of women musicians would suffice to found a philharmonic orchestra in every locality. Recently Abdullah Al Hadlaq, a Kuwaiti writer, declared in a televised interview that Israel was a legitimate independent state, that the Israelis had a right to their country in their land. According to him, no Arab country would have done what Israel did for the liberation of Gilad Shalit. He got himself called an idiot and a Zionist agent on social media, but was not threatened with death. Progress. Let us also not forget that famous Israeli cuisine, which no one really knows how to define, but which reportedly attracts more and more discerning gourmets.

Israel remains, all the same, the only place in the world where I can live, the only one that has made me thrill. I thrill still when I travel across it, whether by train along the coastal plain, by car at the edge of the Dead Sea, through the breathtaking desert landscapes of the Negev, or on foot reliving history in Jerusalem and in Saint-Jean-d’Acre. The walks in Galilee evoke for me the women pioneers who, despite the grueling conditions, held firm and made it so green. It was better, all the same, than the pogroms. At the end of a colloquium organized by Yad Vashem in memory of Simone Veil and of the Hungarian deportees in October 2017, everyone rose and sang the national anthem, Hatikvah. As every time, singing it in chorus turned my “kishkès” over and brought tears to my eyes. It is perhaps through certain emotions that one defines one’s identity.

Note: the feminine in the text encompasses the masculine.

Biographical note

Has lived in Israel since 1969. Holds a master’s in English from the University of Paris VII. A feminist activist, she took part, among other things, in the group that founded the first rape crisis center in March 1978. Was part of women’s groups for peace. Has published articles on women and the women’s liberation movement in Israel in French-language reviews, and the chapter on Israel in a book on women’s movements around the world, published by the German review Das Argument. A board member of the Adva center, an NGO specializing in research on inequalities within Israeli society. Now retired, after a long career in tourism.

“This text was published in the review of French-language Israeli writers Continuum 14 – 2018, devoted to the 70 years of the State of Israel.”

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