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| ISBN-13: | 9781466892088 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/08/2018 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 841,508 |
| File size: | 59 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
Kibbutz Roots
I am an Israeli. But I was born in British-ruled Palestine, on a fledgling kibbutz: a cluster of wood-and-tar-paper huts amid a few orange groves and vegetable fields and chicken coops. It was just across the road from an Arab village named Wadi Khawaret, whose residents fled in the weeks before the establishment of the State of Israel, when I was six years old.
As prime minister half a century later, during my stubborn yet ultimately fruitless drive to secure a final peace treaty with Yasir Arafat, there were media suggestions that my childhood years gave me a personal understanding of the pasts of both our peoples, Jews and Arabs, in the land that each saw as its own. But that is in some ways misleading. Yes, I did know firsthand that we were not alone in our ancestral homeland. At no point in my childhood was I ever taught to hate the Arabs. I never did hate them, even when, in my years defending the security of Israel, I had to fight, and defeat, them. But my conviction that they, too, needed the opportunity to establish a state came only later, after my many years in uniform — especially when, as deputy chief of staff under Yitzhak Rabin, Israel faced a violent uprising in the West Bank and Gaza that became the first intifada. And while my determination as prime minister to find a negotiated resolution to our conflict was in part based on a recognition of the Palestinian Arabs' national aspirations, the main impulse was my belief that such a compromise was profoundly in the interest of Israel, whose existence I had spent decades defending on the battlefield and which I was ultimately elected to lead.
Zionism, the political platform for the establishment of a Jewish state, emerged in the late 1800s in response to a brutal reality. That, too, was a part of my own family's story. Most of the world's Jews, who lived in the Russian empire and Poland, were trapped in a vise of poverty, powerlessness, and anti-Semitic violence. Even in the democracies of Western Europe, Jews were not necessarily secure. Theodor Herzl, a largely assimilated Jew in Vienna, published the foundational text of Zionism in 1896. It was called Der Judenstaat. "Jews have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers," he wrote. "In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes super-loyal. In vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens ... In our native lands where we have lived for centuries, we are still decried as aliens." Zionism's answer was the establishment of a state of our own, in which we could achieve the self-determination and security denied to us elsewhere.
During the 1890s and the early years of the new century, more than a million Jews fled Eastern Europe, but mostly for America. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s that significant numbers arrived in Palestine. Then, within a few years, Hitler rose to power in Germany. The Jews of Europe faced not just discrimination and pogroms. They were systematically, industrially murdered. From 1939 until early 1942, when I was born, nearly 2 million Jews were killed. Six million would die by the end of the war. Almost the whole world, including the United States, rejected pleas to provide a haven for those who might have been saved. Even after Hitler was defeated, the British shut the doors of Palestine to those who had somehow survived.
* * *
I was three when the Holocaust ended. Three years later Israel was established, in May 1948, and neighboring Arab states sent in their armies to try to snuff the state out in its infancy. It would be some years before I fully realized that this first Arab-Israeli war was the start of an essential tension in my country's life, and my own: between the Jewish ethical ideals at the core of Zionism and the reality of our having to fight, and sometimes even kill, in order to secure, establish, and safeguard our state. Yet even as a small child, I was keenly aware of the historic events swirling around me.
Mishmar Hasharon, the hamlet north of Tel Aviv where I spent the first seventeen years of my life, was one of the early kibbutzim. These collective farming settlements had their roots in Herzl's view that an avant-garde of "pioneers" would need to settle a homeland that was still economically undeveloped, and where even farming was difficult. Members of Jewish youth groups from Eastern Europe, among them my mother, provided most of the pioneers, drawing inspiration not just from Zionism but from the still untainted collectivist ideals represented by the triumph of Communism over the czars in Russia.
It is hard for people who didn't live through that time to understand the mind-set of the kibbutzniks. They had higher aspirations than simply planting the seeds of a future state. They wanted to be part of transforming what it meant to be a Jew. The act of first taming, and then farming, the soil of Palestine was not just an economic imperative. It was seen as deeply symbolic of Jews finally taking control of their own destiny. It was a message that took on an even greater power and poignancy after the mass murder of the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.
Even for many Israelis nowadays, the physical challenges and the all-consuming collectivism of life on an early kibbutz are hard to imagine. Among the few dozen families in Mishmar Hasharon when I was born, there was no private property. Everything was communally owned and allocated. Every penny — or Israeli pound — earned from what we produced went into a communal kitty, from which each one of the seventy-or-so families got a small weekly allowance. By "small," I mean tiny. For my parents and others, even the idea of an ice cream cone for their children was a matter of keen financial planning. More often, they would save each weekly pittance with the aim of pooling them at birthday time, when they might stretch to the price of a picture book, or a small toy.
Decisions on any issue of importance were taken at the aseifa, the weekly meeting of kibbutz members held on Saturday nights in our dining hall. The agenda would be tacked up on the wall the day before, and the session usually focused on one issue, ranging from major items like the kibbutz's finances to whether, for instance, our small platoon of delivery drivers should be given pocket money to buy a sandwich or a coffee on their days outside the kibbutz or be limited to wrapping up bits of the modest fare on offer at breakfast time. That debate ended in a classic compromise: a little money, very little, so as to avoid violating the egalitarian ethos of the kibbutz.
But perhaps the aspect of life on the kibbutz most difficult for outsiders to understand, especially nowadays, is that we children were raised collectively. We lived in dormitories, organized by age group and overseen by a caregiver: in Hebrew, a metapelet, usually a woman in her twenties or thirties. For a few hours each afternoon and on the Jewish Sabbath, we were with our parents. Otherwise, we lived and learned in a world consisting almost entirely of other children.
Everything around us was geared toward making us feel like a band of brothers and sisters, as part of the wider collective. Until our teenage years, we weren't even graded in school. And though we didn't actually study how to till the land, some of my fondest early memories are of our "children's farm" — the vegetables we grew, the goats we milked, the hens and chickens that gave us our first experience of how life was created. And the aroma always wafting from the stone ovens in the bakery at the heart of the kibbutz, where we could see the bare-chested young men producing loaf after loaf of bread, not just for Mishmar Hasharon but small towns and villages for miles around.
Until our teenage years, we lived in narrow, oblong homes, four of us to a room, unfurnished except for our beds, under which we placed our pair of shoes or sandals. At one end of the corridor was a set of shelves where we collected a clean set of underwear, pants, and socks each week. At the other end were the toilets — at that point, the only indoor toilets on the kibbutz, with real toilet seats rather than just holes in the ground. All of us showered together until the age of twelve. I can't think of a single one of us who went on to marry someone from our own age group in the kibbutz — it would have seemed almost incestuous.
Mishmar Hasharon and other kibbutzim have long since abandoned the practice of collective child rearing. Some in my generation look back on the way we were raised not only with regret, but pain: a sense of parental absence, abandonment, or neglect. My own memories are more positive. The irony is that we probably spent more waking time with our parents than town or city children whose mothers and fathers worked nine-to-five jobs. The difference came at bedtime, or during the night. If you woke up unsettled, or ill, the only immediate prospect of comfort was from the metapelet or another of the kibbutz grown-ups who might be on overnight duty. Still, my childhood memories are overwhelmingly of feeling happy, safe, protected. I do remember waking up once, late on a stormy winter night when I was nine, in the grips of a terrible fever. I'd begun to hallucinate. I got to my feet and, without the thought of looking anywhere else for help, made my wobbly way through the rain to my parents' room and fell into their bed. They hugged me. They dabbed my forehead with water. The next morning, my father wrapped me in a blanket and took me back to the children's home.
To the extent that I was aware my childhood was different, I was given to understand it was special, that we were the beating heart of a Jewish state about to be born. I once asked my mother why other children got to live in their own apartments in places like Tel Aviv. "They are ironim," she said. City-dwellers. Her tone made it clear they were to be viewed as a slightly lesser species.
* * *
Though both my parents were part of the pioneer generation, my mother, unlike my father, actually arrived as a pioneer, part of a Jewish youth group from Poland that came directly to the kibbutz. In addition to being more naturally outgoing than my father, she came to see Mishmar Hasharon as her extended family.
Esther Godin grew up in Warsaw. Born in 1913, she was the oldest of the six children of Samuel and Rachel Godin. Poland at the time was home to the largest Jewish community in the world, more than 3 million by the time of the Holocaust. While the Jews of Poland had a long history, the Godins did not. Before the First World War, my mother's parents made their way from Smolensk in Russia to Warsaw, which was also under czarist rule. When the war was over, the Bolshevik Revolution had toppled the czars. Poland became independent under the nationalist general Józef Pilsudski. The Godins had a decision to make: either return to now-Communist Russia or stay in the new Polish state, though without citizenship because they had not been born there. No doubt finding comfort, community, and a sense of safety amid the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Polish capital, they chose Pilsudski over Lenin. They lived in what would become the Warsaw Ghetto, on Nalewski Street, where Samuel Godin eked out a living as a bookbinder.
My mother came to Zionism as a teenager, and it was easy to understand why she, like so many of the other young Jews around her, was drawn to it. She saw how hard her parents struggled economically, on the refugee fringes of a Jewish community itself precariously placed in a newly assertive Poland. She saw no future there. Though she attended a normal state-run high school, she and her closest friends joined a Zionist youth group called Gordonia, which had been founded in Poland barely a decade earlier. She started studying Hebrew. Each summer, from the age of fourteen, she and her Gordonia friends would retreat deep into the Carpathian Mountains, where they worked for local Polish landowners and learned the rudiments of farming and the rigors of physical labor. Late into the evening, they would learn not just about agriculture but Jewish history, the land of Palestine, and how they hoped to put both their newfound skills and Zionist ideals into practice.
She had just turned twenty-two when she set off for Mishmar Hasharon with sixty other Gordonia pioneers in the summer of 1935. It took them nearly a week to get there. They traveled by train south through Poland, passing not far from the little town of Oswiecim, which would later become infamous as the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Then, on through Hungary and across Romania to the grand old Black Sea port of Constan?a; by ship through the Bosphorus, past Istanbul; and on to Haifa on the Palestinian coast, from where they were taken by truck to their bunk-bed rooms in one of a dozen prefab structures on the recently established kibbutz. Though the water came from a well and the kibbutz lacked even the basic creature comforts of the cramped Godin apartment in Warsaw, to my mother, it was just part of the challenge and the dream she'd embraced, which had come to define her. It was, she confided to me many years later, as if only then was her life truly beginning.
That feeling never left her. Yet it was always clouded by the memory of the family she left behind. When the Second World War began in September 1939, the Germans, and then the Soviets, invaded, overran, and divided Poland. Two of my mother's three sisters fled to Moscow. Her teenage brother Avraham went underground, joining the anti-Nazi partisans. All three survived the war. But in the autumn of 1940, the rest of her family found themselves inside the Warsaw Ghetto with the city's other 400,000 Jews. My mother's parents died there, along with her thirteen-year-old brother Itzik and her little sister Henya, who was only eleven.
When my mother arrived at the kibbutz, her Gordonia friends assumed she would marry a young man named Ya'akov Margalit, the leader of their group back in Warsaw. But the budding romance fell victim to the Zionist cause. As she embarked on her new life, Margalit was frequently back in Poland training and arranging papers for further groups of pioneers. He continued to write her long, heartfelt letters. But the letters had to be brought from the central post office in Tel Aviv, and the kibbutznik who fetched the mail was a quiet, diminutive twenty-five-year-old named Yisrael Mendel Brog — my father. Known as Srulik, his Yiddish nickname, he had come to Palestine five years earlier. He was an ordinary kibbutz worker. He drove a tractor.
My father's initial impulse in coming to Palestine was more personal than political. He was born in 1910 in the Jewish shtetl of Pushelat in Lithuania, near the mostly Jewish town of Ponovezh, a major seat of rabbinic learning and teaching. His own father, the only member of the Pushelat community with rabbinical training, made his living as the village pharmacist. Many of the Jews who lived there had left for America in the great exodus from Russian and Polish lands in the early 1900s. By the time my father was born, the community had shrunk to only about 1,000.
When he was two years old, a fire destroyed dozens of homes, as well as the shtetl's only synagogue. Donations soon arrived from the United States, and my paternal grandfather was put in charge of holding the money until rebuilding plans were worked out. The problem was that word spread quickly about the rebuilding fund. On the night of September 16, 1912, two burglars burst into my grandfather's home and stole the money. They beat him and my grandmother to death with an axle wrenched loose from a nearby carriage. Their four-year-old son Meir — my father's older brother — suffered a deep wound where the attackers drove the metal shaft into his head. He carried a golf-ball-sized indentation in his forehead for the rest of his life. My father had burrowed into a corner, and the attackers didn't see him.
The two orphaned boys were raised by their paternal grandmother, Itzila. Any return to normalcy they may have experienced was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War, forcing her to flee with them by train ahead of the advancing German army. They ended up some 1,500 miles south, in the Crimean city of Simferopol. Initially under czarist rule, then the Bolsheviks, and from late 1917 until the end of the war under the Germans, they had to deal with cold, damp, and a chronic shortage of food. Uncle Meir quickly learned how to survive. He later told me that he would run after German supply carriages and collect the odd potato that fell off the back. Realizing that the German soldiers had been wrenched from their own families by the war, he began taking my father with him on weekends to the neighborhood near their barracks, where the soldiers would sometimes give them cookies, or even a loaf of bread. But they were deprived of the basic ingredients of a healthy childhood: nutritious food and a warm, dry room in which to sleep. By the time Itzila brought them back to settle in Ponovezh at the end of the war, my father was diagnosed with rickets, a bone-development disease caused by the lack of vitamin D in their diet.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "My Country, My Life"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ehud Barak.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Map ix
Preface: Night Flight xi
1 Kibbutz Roots 1
2 Picking Locks, Stealing Guns, Growing Up 16
3 Accidental Commando 38
4 Turn Off the Radio 53
5 Out of the Fog 61
6 Six Days in June 72
7 Back in Uniform 88
8 Uzis and Eye Shadow 102
9 Wake-Up Call 138
10 Entebbe 160
11 The Earth Moves 177
12 Israel's Vietnam 189
13 Chain of Command 210
14 Intifada 227
15 Chief of Staff 243
16 Prospects and Perils of Peace 257
17 Hate versus Hope 274
18 Labor Pains 292
19 One Israel 311
20 Struggle for Peace 326
21 Beyond Oslo 347
22 Camp David 357
23 Arafat's Answer 382
24 Voice for the Defense 403
25 Final Act 419
Epilogue: Crossroads 440
Acknowledgments 455
Photo Credits 460
Index 461