Occupied Minds: A Journey Through the Israeli Psyche

Introduction

In 1970, Golda Meir addressed the Knesset in a debate over the ethnic nature of Israel’s nationality laws. ‘More than anything else in the world, I value one thing,’ she said, ‘the existence of the Jewish people. This is more important to me than the existence of the state of Israel or of Zionism, for without the existence of the Jewish people, the others are neither necessary nor can they exist.’¹

There was a sense then that Israel depended on Diaspora Jewry for its life blood. In the cheder I went to as a child, teachers who had made aliyah would come back enthusing about the wonderful advances Israel was making for us all. Sometimes, they would speak about Israel’s creation as a kind of cosmic payback for the Holocaust or a miraculous resurrection of the Jewish people. But when talking of Judaism and Zionism, even they understood the difference between cart and horse.

By 2005, the tables had turned to the extent that Tony Bayfield, the leader of Britain’s Movement for Reform Judaism, could write that, ‘If the state of Israel were to cease to exist… Judaism would, I believe also cease to exist, except perhaps for a tiny remnant of Jews.’² For Jews like Bayfield, the unrelated phenomena of diaspora assimilation and rising Palestinian birth rates meant that Zionism was no longer protecting the religion and culture of the Diaspora. It had become the religion and culture of the Diaspora and so much for two thousand years of history.

I grew up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, with parents who held to the traditions of the Bund, a secular and anti-Zionist Jewish socialist party that once was the mainstream of East European Jewish life. In those days, it was still possible to find a space in the Jewish community for such a perspective. Today, Israel has come to dominate Diaspora existence and anyone defining themselves as Jewish has to do so in relation to it. I wanted to write about Israeli Jewish identity to analyse the construct that was coming to define the Diaspora. The subject fascinated me, not just because I felt that Israel’s actions in the occupied territories were tearing the Diaspora apart but because I wanted to turn the spotlight back on those who were creating the context within which I, my family, my history and culture were being understood.

Shortly after the Second Intifada began, I went to a picket of a shop that was illegally stocking goods made by settlers in the occupied territories. A passing Israeli woman harangued the demonstrators. She was angry with the other picketers, but when I told her that I was Jewish she became incandescent and shouted that she wished my forebears had been killed in the Holocaust. I’d previously only heard such comments from neo-Nazis and wanted to fathom how another Jew could say such a thing. What I found in Israel was that a self-righteous tornado had been unleashed, within which, such comments only constituted a tail-end. The storm rages across the occupied territories, deep inside the 1949 armistice line and within Israelis themselves. But its full force is felt by Palestinians.

During my first visit in March 2003, Tel Aviv was gripped by war fever. Gas masks were flying off the shelves, and a travel agent near my hotel had put mock adverts in his window advertising tickets to Baghdad on the back of a US F1–16 fighter plane for $5. ‘Next year, Tehran $3! 2005, Gaza $1!’ his sign read. The clamour for war was everywhere, even if the fear of suicide bombings on busses was driving well-heeled Israelis to use Arab-driven sherut taxis. On one sherut I took to Jerusalem on the eve of war, an Israeli radio station was playing songs tailored to the mood of the moment. One, a version of Chumbawamba’s ‘Tub Thumping’ had a rewritten chorus that went something like, ‘Just knock him down, shoot him in the head, there’s another dead Iraqi boy.’ The Israeli Jews on board laughed out loud and then sang along with the next number, a version of the Beach Boys’ ‘Barbara Ann’ with the new chorus: ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Iraq.’ I left Israel the next day.

When I was seeking accommodation in Tel Aviv before I returned in June 2004, a prospective agent sent a stormy email regarding a client’s property. ‘Please do not feel offended if I ask you what type of author you are,’ she began. ‘Both she and I are very, very loyal Israelis and we wouldn’t even want to consider anyone writing anything bad about Israel or consorting with Arabs. I am sure you will understand this. In the meantime we have only your name but Arabs, especially Palestinians, take on Jewish-sounding names and try to pass themselves [off] as Jews and even as Israeli Jews, especially to get accommodation in main centres.’

The journalist Graham Usher once told me: ‘Whatever you think you know about Israel, when you go there, you’ll find the truth is more complicated.’ Yet I always seemed to find the situation to be even more black and white, albeit with profoundly upsetting implications. Journalists can’t help but anticipate the stories they will write, and on the plane to Tel Aviv, I was expecting the people I interviewed to confirm a monochromatically racist and nihilistic picture. But Graham was right insomuch as I found a more complex and sad picture emerging.

The Zionist ‘counter-identity’ is something I still find ugly, but Israelis themselves are rarely monsters – and never two-dimensional. As human beings, they are frail and contradictory, however they try to mask the fact, and there are many sincere Israeli humanists, operating in a context more fraught and dangerous than that facing those who would instinctively condemn them for their nationality. I hope it will not sound manipulative to admit that I anticipated a story of how Israel betrayed the Jewish people. I also found unexpected cause for long-term optimism.

Occupation is not just a state of forced control. It is also a state of mind, a way of keeping busy and of passing the time. Individuals in societies that see themselves as permanently at war often view each other through military field glasses; as combatants, infiltrators, morale boosters and traitors. Zionism, the belief in an ethnically centred Jewish state, still commands overwhelming support among world Jewry. Israel is revered as a safe haven in extremis. Yet since its creation in 1948, it has existed in a state of national emergency for every year bar one, 1966. This book is an exploration of the world through the Israeli mind’s eye.

Palestinians often accuse Israeli Jews of living behind mental and actual fortress walls. They may not know that the ancestors of today’s Israeli Ashkenazim (ethnically European Jews) typically lived on the other side of them. In Israel, Ashkenazim today hold the most important centres of political and economic power, but for centuries their forebears led a precarious, often nomadic existence in which persecutions of the most barbarous kind were all too common. Isolated in scattered communities (often little more than ghettoes), they were frequently banned from professions, forced into rent collection by landlords and used as lightning rods during peasant uprisings.

By contrast, Mizrahi (‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ Jews) were traditionally well-integrated into the Middle Eastern societies where they lived and the majority tended to see themselves as Arab Jews. In Iraq, for example, Jewish social and religious institutions flourished and Jews were entrenched at every level of the country’s civil society. Jews served as government ministers, as Communist party leaders and they practically invented the country’s financial and monetary system in 1932.

But political Zionism was a European invention, and its treatment of Mizrahim who migrated to Israel in desperate circumstances is still a cause of bitterness today. Upon arrival in the Promised Land, the same Baghdad Jews who had led Iraq’s cultural renaissance were sprayed with DDT and sent to tin shack transit camps. The attitude of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, towards the Mizrahim was not considered illiberal in the 1940s:

Even the immigrant of North Africa, who looks like a savage, who has never read a book in his life, not even a religious one, and doesn’t even know how to say his prayers, either wittingly or unwittingly has behind him a spiritual heritage of thousands of years.³

The Ashkenazi halutzim wanted to build a modern, secular European-style Jewish national identity in opposition to those that existed in the Mizrahi – and Ashkenazi – Diasporas. As an ‘Arabised’ people in a land at war with its indigenous Arab population, Mizrahim posed a particular problem for the early Zionists. But so did the attitudes of Eastern European Ashkenazi immigrants, a traditionally mercantile community, who had lacked a territorial base from which to organise self-defence, when attacked by anti-Semites. Their dominant communal strategies for dealing with conflict involved camouflage, pleas to rulers, negotiation and compromise.

Violence was seen as a dangerous tactic both for those carrying it out and for the Jewish Diaspora as a whole. During the Chmielnitzki pogroms of 1648, which claimed an estimated quarter of a million Jewish lives in Eastern Europe, there was little effective self-defence. The Jews of Tulczyn in Poland even refrained from attacking the Polish nobles who betrayed them to the Cossacks after their leaders told them: ‘We are in exile among the nations. If you lay hands upon the nobles, then all kings of Christianity will hear of it and take revenge on all our brethren in the exile.’⁴ Such attitudes were and are anathema to Israelis.

As socialist ideas spread through the shtetls of Russia and Poland, communities belatedly began to organise to protect themselves. During World War II, however, Jewish partisans were haunted by the same dilemma that faced their co-religionists almost 300 years before. Still, from Baghdad to Braslav, living ‘perpetually in enemy territory’, as Herzl put it, also helped bequeath diverse and vibrant cultures with their own foods, dress, humour, music, languages, schooling, behaviour and politics. The Zionist pioneers aimed to transcend them with a new identity, that of the robust ‘new Jew’, who was stereotypically blond-haired, blue-eyed and muscular.⁵ Ironically, Ashkenazi Jews who fitted such a Teutonic bill, probably only did so owing to the prevalence of rape against Jewish women in medieval Europe and the inability of male Jews to defend ‘their’ women.⁶

Supplanting the weak ghetto Jew stereotype, Zionist pioneers constructed a national identity based on a connection to the land, the ‘pure’ Hebrew language, shared privileges over the indigenous population, a collective experience of military service and, ultimately, a blurry commitment to Judaism. The essence of their appeal to a traumatised Diaspora in the years after the Holocaust was the sine qua non of security. Some Israeli writers, like the activist Michel Warschawski, argue that the price was a virtual ideological pogrom against Jewish identity as it had previously been known:

From its inception, Zionism always carried within it a rejection not only of Judaism but even of the Jew himself, or at least of a certain way of being Jewish. That Jew was crudely characterised by the ideologues of Zionism [as] primitive, reactionary, unproductive, parasitic, passive, effeminate – in a word degenerate… Being an Israeli means deliberately breaking all continuity with the history of one’s grandparents, their cultures and the values they embraced, reducing the links to the past to some mythic relationship to a 2,000-year history.⁷

Certainly, Zionist grandees such as Nordau, Pinsker and Zangwill were assimilationists who saw a nation state as the precondition for acceptance by gentiles. The father of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, on one occasion proposed a mass conversion to Catholicism. On another he wrote:

We might perhaps be able to dissolve ourselves without a trace in the surrounding races if we were left in peace for only two generations on end. But we shall not be left in peace… It is only pressure that forces us back into the parent stem, only the hatred encompassing us that turns us into strangers once more.⁸

To Herzl, becoming ‘a nation like other nations’ involved the dissolution of traditional Jewish identities in a nationalist cauldron. However, dispensing with any connection to Judaism would also have meant dispensing with any claim to statehood. Jews are a people defined by religion and Jewish identity is only ethno-religious insofar as it is a religion inherited matrilineally. As cases such as Father Daniel Rufeisen’s⁹ demonstrated to secular Zionists in the mid-1950s, religion is at the root of Jewish identity. From the word go, Israel didn’t just need religious support for international legitimacy – it needed it for communal credibility and new immigrants.

In 1948, Zionism was still a heresy to the majority of the world’s religious Jews because it rejected holy scriptures, which prophesied the state’s founding only after the Messiah’s arrival. In the end, the religious were won round by a ‘status quo’ agreement that institutionalised religion at the heart of the state. But tensions remained until 1967 when religious Jews embraced Zionism en masse, interpreting Israel’s military success as a sign that the Messiah had returned. But the religious believed that Israel’s destiny was to become ‘a light unto the nations’ rather than a nation like any other. They could at least point to a contiguous Israeli Jewish identity or a ‘continuation of the ancient past’, as Ben Gurion put it,¹⁰ albeit it was one that had not existed for two millennia. Yet this was not an insurmountable problem for the religious, as their attachment to Israel was based on faith, rather than a desire for security.

In the European Diaspora, Hebrew was rarely spoken as a day-to-day conversational language. Even in mandate Palestine, the religious orthodoxy opposed the introduction of Hebrew as a daily language until the 1920s. According to tradition, Hebrew was a holy language that would be corrupted and deformed by mundane use. Instead, Sephardic Jews in southern Europe spoke Ladino – a mix of Latin, Arabic, Greek and Hebrew – while Mizrahi communities in the Middle East often mixed classical Hebrew with Arabic dialects. The East European diaspora spoke the fully fledged language of Yiddish, a mix of Germanic, Slavic, Aramaic, Romance languages and Hebrew. In Yiddish, a word that defined Jewish identity for millions was ‘b’tochen’, which meant ‘faith’. In modern Hebrew, the word is now pronounced ‘bitachon’ and means ‘security’. Unsurprisingly, many Diaspora Jews view the transformation of the word as a deliberate attempt to debase Jewish identity itself.

The Zionist pioneers actually rejected Yiddish as a corrupt and archaic language. Yiddish posed a challenge to Zionism when Israel was founded in 1948. It was the first language of the Ashkenazi masses and heavily associated with the socialist Bund, which until the Holocaust was the most popular European Jewish political organisation. Viktor Alter, a member of the group’s executive committee in Poland, explained how Bundist objectives diverged from Zionist ones:

We Bundists cannot accept, even for a moment, the trappings of a capitalist society. [The Zionists], on the other hand, wish to remain within these trappings. Because they adapt themselves to the existing capitalist society, they cannot understand the urgency of our struggle in Poland. We wish to shatter the existing economic frameworks and show the Jewish masses how a new society can be built not by escape but by struggle. We link the essence of the Jewish masses’ life to that of humankind.¹¹

Armed with a universalist Jewish philosophy that saw solidarity with non-Jews as key to Jewish and human emancipation, the Bund had won fierce battles with East European Zionists for the hearts and minds of the Jewish multitudes. But particularist Jewish traditions that stress Jewish separateness and uniqueness have always been equally well founded in Judaism. Israel’s biblically based Law of Return, for instance, allows any person of Jewish descent anywhere in the world to claim Israeli citizenship. The corollary is that Palestinians may not.

Ethical debates about the particularist–universalist continuum still rage across the pages of the Israeli press but their fruits are affected by the climate. Tony Bayfield, for instance, inaccurately described the debate between particularists and universalists as being about ‘a people in a [Jewish] land and a people in Diaspora’.¹² In fact the universalist position on Israel first articulated by the Israeli cultural Zionist Martin Buber (in opposition to David Ben Gurion) was that the new Israeli state should meet the needs of all its citizens, not just its Jewish ones:

No contradiction could be greater… than for us to build a true communal life within our community while, at the same time, excluding the other inhabitants of the country from participation… Closed-minded attitudes inform the dominant type of nationalism, which has gained so many adherents among us – the most worthless assimilation – which teaches… that one must evaluate one’s own nation on the basis of its greatest era and all other nations on the basis of their lowest points… The open minded attitude of humanitarian nationalism… demands that we judge other nations as we wish to be judged ourselves…¹³

Buber argued that Palestinians and Jews shared a ‘common fate’ and that mutual security could come only through equality and joint endeavour. But in 1948, Ben Gurion signed the declaration of independence, pronouncing only ‘the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations’. Israeli advocates of Judaic particularism frequently take God’s covenant to Abraham as a starting point and proceed to a literal reading of the ‘God’s chosen people’ story. It had formerly been popularised as a defensive riposte to European anti-Semitism and Christian supercessionism.¹⁴

Zionism grew out of the Haskala, a secular Jewish reformation inspired by the Enlightenment that lasted from the 1770s to the 1880s. But it was formed in the constellation of European anti-Semitism and, according to Golda Meir, needed a moderate dose of it to continue attracting new migrants.¹⁵ Indeed, pessimists argue that without Israel’s war-related gravity and the background radiation of anti-Semitism, the centrifugal forces of Zionism might become dangerously weak. The animosities between secular Israel and religious Jewry constantly threaten to implode.

Faith and security may hold together the 80 per cent of Israel that is Jewish, but it also tears them apart. Secular Zionists who were once patrons of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) project to repopulate Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank and Gaza), now see holding on to all of the occupied territories as a threat to Israel’s security. Religious Zionists interpret any withdrawal from the perceived borders of biblical Israel, with its implication that 1967 might not have been a herald of the Messianic age – or worse, that the secular Zionists might be obstructing its development – as a threat to their faith.

In Ha’aretz in June 2005, Zvi Bar’el complained that the settlers were ‘trying to settle in our hearts’. The truth is that a particularist identity-type has settled in the Israeli mind. In 1891, the visionary cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am (a pen-name meaning ‘One of the People’) issued the following warning:

The secret enabling our people to survive is… that already in antiquity its prophets taught it to respect only spiritual power and never to admire physical power. Therefore, it has not succumbed, like all ancient people, to a loss of identity when faced with stronger adversaries… However, a political idea alien to the national culture can turn the people’s heart away from spiritual power and produce a tendency to achieve its ‘honour’ by achieving physical power and political independence, thus severing the thread linking it with its past and losing the base which sustained it throughout history.¹⁶

Ha’am went on to argue that whether the Zionist enterprise succeeded or failed it would imperil Judaism because of the colonial and assimilationist ideas of its figureheads:

[All our leaders] even if loyal to the state and wishing it success will necessarily seek this success in terms of the alien culture which they have absorbed. They will implant this influence through moral influence and even by force… Such a state of the Jews will be mortal poison to our people and will grind its spirit in the dust… This small state… will survive only by diplomatic intrigues and by constant servility to the powers that happen to be dominant… It will really be, much more than now, ‘a small miserable people’, a spiritual slave to whoever happens to be dominant looking enviously and greedily at the fists of its mighty neighbours, and all its existence as a ‘state owner’ will not add an honourable chapter in its history. Isn’t it preferable for ‘an ancient people which has been a light unto nations’ to disappear from history rather than reach such a final goal?¹⁷

I hope that a small and optimistic part of the answer to Ha’am’s existential question might be found in the words (and silences) of some of the people interviewed in this book. The project was conceived as a platform for an unrepresentative but enlightening cross-section of voices to tell their own stories in their own way. It was written in the months leading up to Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan.

1

Into the Kur Hitukh

In 1948, the founders of Israel began the process of state-building with what they called a Kur Hitukh. The term literally meant a ‘melting reactor’ for newly arrived Diaspora Jews, but came to denote the more US-friendly ‘melting pot’, a place where old Jewish identities would be dissolved and fused into a nation rising from the ashes of the Holocaust. With the birth of Israel, Adele Grubart explained, ‘A new Jew was born, a Jew no longer forced to grovel as he had been for over two millennia, one who valiantly defended his homeland, his family and his people [and] though the cost was incalculable, was to walk with dignity, and build a country that would re-emerge as a light unto the nations.’¹ From the beginning, the project aimed at transcending rather than augmenting existing Jewish identities.

The qualifications for citizenship were straightforward. A person with a Jewish grandparent had only to make aliyah to the Holy Land to be offered generous financial, language and housing aid packages. The Law of Return, which governs the process, is enshrined as an inherent right of any Jew dating back to antiquity and is thus not governed by the state. ‘Equal opportunities’, in the western sense of the phrase, are arbitrarily applied to non-Jews, whatever their familial, legal or historic ties to the land. To remain a ‘Jewish state’, given the region’s ‘demographic’ trends,² Israel needs more Jewish immigrants – or fewer non-Jewish Israelis.

Since 1948, there have been successive waves of Jewish immigration; from Europe after World War II; the Middle East in the late 1940s and early 1950s; South America in the 1950s; North America after 1967; Ethiopia since the 1980s and most significantly, the former Soviet bloc in the early 1990s.³ All of these groups have faced absorption difficulties related to issues as various as language, climate, housing and jobs. But inter-generational problems have largely been the reserve of Mizrahi Jews, who make up around half of Israel’s population and suffer structural and systemic discrimination. Unlike other immigrant groups, third-generation Mizrahim still look like locals.

Visitors to Israel often note an ersatz and improvised feel to the society or complain of an inauthentic cultural Americanism. Outside East Jerusalem, much of pre-1948 Palestine has been gentrified or concreted over. Beneath the beaches lie the cobbled stones. Naturally, the bulk of the funding and support for Israel’s development has come from a United States sensitive to Israel’s strategic benefits, but the two nations anyway share deep similarities. Israel also came into being by a force of will rather than organic development. It too was built on a promise to welcome immigrants in flight, and it has waged war on an armed indigenous people who were determined to defend their land from incursions by new émigrés. But America fought its war against the Indians centuries ago and was never as outnumbered or dependent on outside help as Israel.

Notwithstanding the Holocaust and other particular characteristics of Jewish history, a permanent atmosphere of ‘precarity’ permeates Israeli society. Like émigrés anywhere, Israel’s olim hadashim find themselves constantly reinventing their life narratives but on shifting and crisis-ridden desert sands. Many have suffered anti-Semitism, others are refugees. Some have sought a better life, or even a sense of being Jewish. All are experiencing degrees of loss, uncertainty and disquiet in a Kur Hitukh unable to examine that which it melts.

EZRA LEVY

No particular place to go

Before the creation of the state of Israel, more than 80,000 Jews lived in Iraq. Hailed by some as the original Mesopotamians because of an unbroken lineage in the area stretching back to Babylonian times, they were one of the most successful Diaspora communities. Yet by the time of the second Gulf War, fewer than 100 Iraqi Jews remained. ‘Ezra’ Levy was the rabbi of Baghdad’s last synagogue, the Mer Taweig, and one of the community’s most influential figures. In 2003, he turned down an offer to sit on the American-led coalition’s Iraqi Governing Council. Instead, he made aliyah to Israel and now lives in an old people’s home in Ramat Efal.

Ezra Levy. Photo by Arthur Neslen

I was born in central Baghdad in November 1922, the son of a Hebrew teacher. I had four brothers and two sisters. All of them came to Israel in 1951.⁴ Only one brother and two sisters are still alive.

In Iraq we spoke Arabic because we couldn’t speak Hebrew. We are Jews of the world and wherever we are, we speak the language of the people we live with. If we spoke another language, trouble. If we spoke Arabic, we were the same as them.

As a young boy, I went to an Arab school and people there knew I was Jewish but I never had any problems. Arabs were always my friends. In 1941, I was working as chief engineer in the railways office on the day [that Rashid Ali began a revolt].⁵

The night before, a Muslim friend in the police had warned me to stay at home that day. But I’d gone to my office anyway until the trouble started. Then, like everyone, I hid in my house. From this place, you can’t imagine how it was then. The sun does not always rise.

I was an Iraqi Jew, not a Jewish Iraqi. I lived quite separately from other Jews. I ate and slept in my family’s house but that was it. I saw other Jews only in synagogue. I went every Saturday but there was never a minion.⁶ We didn’t have ten people. Sometimes we didn’t have three. For the last five years I was the rabbi at the Mer Taweig synagogue, we could pray but every time without a minion, what could we do?

The Muslims were more than a family to me. I don’t know why I left them to come here. It’s better to have good friends than Jewish friends. I like Jews, but there is a difference between the mind of a Jew and a non-Jew. We prefer to stay amongst our own.

When Israel was created, people became concerned solely for themselves. They thought that coming to Israel would be a pleasure. But I heard the news from Israel all the time. People told me that my friends who had made aliyah were living in the rain, in broken tents. When my family left for Israel, the only words I said to them were ‘bye bye’.

My life was with the Muslims. Sometimes I’d go to Hilla or Samarrah for three or four days, sometimes I’d ride a horse from the Palace of King Faisal. I could go anywhere because I was free. Saddam Hussein was not always friendly to the Jews. At the beginning, they hung some people in Iraq.⁷ We were small people. We didn’t even have electric lights. But I was happy in Baghdad, until my wife died.

When she died on 1 April 1991, the day after our 30th wedding anniversary, I died with her. It was after the war and her blood sugar level had become too high. There were no doctors, no hospitals, nothing, and so she had had to have her legs cut off. I don’t know what happened to the world in 1991. I only hoped that my life would soon end. It’s true that the Americans offered me a job on the Iraqi governing council in 2003 but I told them I couldn’t do it. My life is passing quickly to the end now.

After the war, reporters came knocking on my door. One day, a big man came from Israel with an American captain and two soldiers protecting him. I told them ‘Welcome!’ but they just sat in the hall. The Israeli asked me, ‘Why you don’t come to Israel?’ I said ‘Please, this is a question only for me.’

A friend in a shop in Marat said, ‘Why don’t you go? Your son is in Amsterdam. Why stay here? Go! Wali! Go!’ He wanted a better life for me but now that I am here, life is very hard. Nobody comes to see me. I don’t know any place to go if people won’t take me. I have many friends in Israel who came in ’71 and ’75 but I don’t know where they live. My son asked me if I would like him to buy me a car. I said no because I don’t have any place to go to. Mostly, I just sit and watch television.⁸

When I arrived, many people came to speak with me, even the Israeli president, Moshe Katsav. He asked he me if I was happy being here and I replied, ‘Why not?’ But after that, nobody came. No telephone calls even. I feel sad now, living in this castle. The people here make like they like me. They say ‘hello, Adon Levy!’ because they saw me on the television. I don’t know them. They are good people but only to say ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’ to.

In Iraq, they would have thought I was a Muslim. My name there was Ezat. People would always shout ‘Hello Ezat!’ But in the hotel when I came to Israel, they were going, ‘Ezra! Ezra!’ I asked my sister, ‘Who’s Ezra?’ She said, ‘Brother they are calling you!’ I didn’t know. I still think of myself as Ezat not Ezra.

Now, my son who stayed in Iraq is the rabbi there. I don’t know if he will come to Israel. In the synagogue here, they are all Ashkenazi and we are Sephardit. If I read the Hagada (prayer book) with an ‘aiyin’,⁹ they ask ‘What are you reading?’ I know only my God. I must go to other people’s synagogues to pray.

How do you feel about the conflict with the Palestinians?

I don’t like it. It is not for me. There are many people who this land belongs to. But what can I do? If I say something, what will happen? Nothing, because who am I? I am a Jewish man who dreamt all his life of coming to Israel, and now I am here. I am here but I am alone.

RAFAEL KATZ

A greater sense of security

Argentina is home to the biggest concentration of Jews in Latin America but it is not necessarily a place that most of them would call home.¹⁰ Long before a bomb in a Buenos Aries cultural centre killed upwards of 85 people in 1994, Argentina’s Jews identified themselves in national terms, partly because of the militaristic and uncertain climate in which