The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics Read Free

we set out for Ansar, a notorious Israeli internment camp in South Lebanon. This experience was to change my life completely.
    At the end of a dusty dirt track, on a boiling hot day in early July, we arrived at hell on earth. The huge detention centre was enclosed with barbed wire. As we drove to the camp headquarters, we had a view of thousands of inmates in the open air being scorched by the sun.
    As difficult as it might be to believe, military bands are always treated as VIPs, and once we landed at the officers’ barracks we were taken on a guided tour of the camp. We walked along the endless barbed wire and guard towers. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
    ‘Who are these people?’ I asked the officer.
    ‘Palestinians,’ he said. ‘On the left are PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation], and on the right are Ahmed Jibril’s boys [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command] – they are far more dangerous, so we keep them isolated.’
    I studied the detainees. They looked very different to the Palestinians in Jerusalem. The ones I saw in Ansar were angry. They were not defeated, they were freedom fighters and they were numerous. As we continued past the barbed wire I continued gazing at the inmates, and arrived at an unbearable truth: I was walking on the other side, in Israeli military uniform. The place was a concentration camp. The inmates were the ‘Jews’, and I was nothing but a ‘Nazi’. It took me years to admit to myself that even the binary opposition Jew/Nazi was in itself a result of my Judeo-centric indoctrination.
    While I contemplated the resonance of my uniform, trying to deal with the great sense of shame growing in me, we came to a large, flat ground at the centre of the camp. The officer guiding us offered more platitudes about the current war to defend our Jewish haven. While he was boring us to death with these irrelevant Hasbara (propaganda) lies, I noticed that we were surrounded by two dozen concrete blocks each around 1m 2 in area and 1.3m high, with small metal doors as entrances. I was horrified at the thought that my army was locking guard dogs into these boxes for the night. Putting my Israeli chutzpah into action, I confronted the officer about these horrible concrete dog cubes. He was quick to reply: ‘These are our solitary confinement blocks; after two days in one of these, you become a devoted Zionist!’
    This was enough for me. I realised that my affair with the Israeli state and with Zionism was over. Yet I still knew very little about Palestine, about the Nakba or even about Judaism and Jewish-ness, for that matter. I only saw then that, as far as I was concerned, Israel was bad news, and I didn’t want to have anything further to do with it. Two weeks later I returned my uniform, grabbed my alto sax, took the bus to Ben-Gurion Airport and left for Europe for a few months, to busk in the street. At the age of twenty-one, I was free for the first time. However, December proved too cold for me, and I returned home – but with the clear intention to make it back to Europe. I somehow already yearned to become a Goy or at least to be surrounded by Goyim .
    ***
    It took another ten years before I could leave Israel for good. During that time, however, I began to learn about the Israel–Palestine conflict, and to accept that I was actually living on someone else’s land. I took in the devastating fact that in 1948 the Palestinians hadn’t abandoned their homes willingly – as we were told in school – but had been brutally ethnically cleansed by my grandfather and his ilk. I began to realise that ethnic cleansing has never stopped in Israel, but has instead just taken on different forms, and to acknowledge the fact that the Israeli legal system was not impartial but racially-orientated (for example, the ‘Law of Return’ welcomes Jews ‘home’ from any country supposedly after 2,000 years, but prevents Palestinians from returning to their villages