Last update - 00:00 29/02/2008
The comfortable occupation
By Neri Livneh
In the SMS that my acclaimed writer friend sent me minutes before she was due to board a plane for Mumbai, she informed me that she was under tremendous stress and was considering not getting on the flight at all. I immediately responded that there was no place like India, that I would switch places with her in a heartbeat, and that ever since I returned from there all I've wanted is to go back.
When she returned two weeks later, she, too, sounded completely captivated by India's charms. Admittedly, her trip - which featured five-star hotels, domestic flights and air-conditioned vehicles - was quite different from mine. While I spent much of my time in the company of young backpackers, she was hobnobbing with India's intellectual elite and attending the New Delhi World Book Fair. But India still worked its magic on her, and she wondered aloud about just what it was that had so enchanted her.
I offered that, apart from the obvious - the smells, the colors, the different experience of time - one of the most relaxing things about a visit to India, unlike, say, a tour of classical Europe, is that the question, "And what were they doing during the Holocaust?" is completely irrelevant. You can't do a "roots trip" in India. And, as we know, we are very sensitive about the injustices that were done to us. And, on rare occasions, about those we've inflicted upon others.
When I lived in Jerusalem, in Baka, in an Arab house (but one that had been built for British officers, as we always pointed out to our guests, who were often Peace Now supporters), I would sometimes get an unpleasant reminder of the fact that in the past, before the War of Independence, Arabs had lived in the neighborhood.
One day, before the first intifada, a maid from Bethlehem named Mercedes came to our house. "Look at this old house that once belonged to Arabs - why did they flee?" she said the first time she entered the house. She would repeat this question every half hour, it seemed, invariably prompting me to foist upon her a scarf, or a bracelet, or some clothes for her kid, shoes for the husband, a coat for her mother or any other item in which she happened to express an interest.
The much more serious pangs of conscience, deriving from the occupation of 1967, I didn't try to smooth over with items of jewelry and clothing. To the Palestinian handyman from the Old City who came a few years later to my home in the center of town (in a building that had unquestionably never been home to any Arabs), I offered to give back all of East Jerusalem and the new neighborhoods (especially Gilo) and the settlements, but he turned out to be quite the Zionist and an enthusiastic supporter of the National Insurance Institute.
But in Jerusalem there is no need for a personal encounter to feel that with every move you are stepping not only on history, but also on the rights of the previous inhabitants. This feeling is particularly acute if you live in Mamila, or when you go to the Income Tax Authority office located where the village of Deir Yassin once stood, and in the eastern part of the city, in all those Arab neighborhoods that were occupied in 1967 and you notice the inferior infrastructure and glaring neglect, which remain practically hidden from the Jews who live in very close proximity.
For that reason, even when I still lived in Jerusalem, every visit to Tel Aviv gave me a sense of freedom that was grounded in the liberation from the need to continually encounter reminders of the burning political questions and the historical events that engendered them. Tel Aviv was the magical city that my parents took me to every year or two, usually to see a musical or the Shalom Tower "skyscraper," to eat in the Bulgarian restaurant on Dizengoff Square, to sit among the "bohemians" at Cafe Cassit or to buy shoes on Neve Sha'anan Street.
The anticipation alone was sufficient to impart an actual physical sensation of wondrous freedom. And since most of my familiarity with the city came from books and magazines, in my mind it was the city from the illustrated books of Nahum Gutman, the new, joyful white city where the popular children lived, like the Hasamba gang and the young soccer players; where the cafes and parties were filled with "glamour girls" and people from "good families" about whom I secretly read in the gossip columns of Ha'olam Hazeh and Olam Hakolnoa.
And that's how it stayed in my mind - a city where the only time is the present perfect continuous, devoid of the oppressiveness of the past but also of roots, a somewhat synthetic place. That is, until I read Alon Hilu's new and extraordinary "Ahuzat Dajani" ("The House of Dajani"). This historical novel, based on authentic documents, spectacularly recreates what life was like for the Jews of Jaffa in the late 19th century, as well as life in the estate of the sheikh that gives the book its title.
A tale of rape and conquest in more than one sense, it is a Mediterranean paraphrase of Hamlet depicting the relationship between the historical figure of Chaim Kalvarisky, a Zionist official who bought land from Arabs and was part of the First Aliyah; and Salah, a brilliant and sickly Arab youth who lives in the Dajani house with his beautiful mother, on whom Kalvarisky would like to get his hands (along with her lands).
As soon as I finished reading, after eight utterly gripping hours in which I couldn't even bear to budge to get myself a glass of water, I immediately decided to make a Shabbat tour, with my son, to the places where the book's plot unfolds. We walked on the boardwalk toward the place which, as I noted self-righteously to my Jerusalemite son, was once a Muslim cemetery, just like the one that is visible from the window of our home in central Jerusalem. The congestion at the port prevented us from getting right up to the Al-Awja estuary and we made or way home on foot via Manshiya, the old train station and the German Colony.
With every step I tried to preserve and to cultivate the sense of injustice aroused in me by the book, but it was such a gorgeous, sunny day, and the coffee in Neveh Tzedek was excellent, and out in the sea the windsurfers' bright sails flashed amid the rippling white waves, and the despair in Tel Aviv on this winter Saturday was definitely way too comfortable.