The Killing of Gaza, the Killing of Israel

19. 11. 2024 / Muriel Blaive

I  returned to Israel countless times after that—twenty, thirty, perhaps more. I lost track as I found myself boarding a plane every few weeks. It was impossible not to feel at home in Israel or more precisely, in Tel Aviv. The city seemed to weave together the disparate threads of my life into a harmonious whole. First, there was the Central Europe I love, a culture I inhabit daily through my history books but encounter only as a shadow in the real world—a ghost, repurposed by nationalisms that obscure its origins. What is celebrated as national identity today is more often than not the Jewish culture of those who vanished. I was awestruck when, at a Sabbath gathering in Jaffa, I was treated to the familiar strains of the folk music of my Hungarian friends in Slovakia to which I danced all my youth. I was amused to discover that challah was, in essence, my everyday Austrian brioche. I was overjoyed to see that the small, quaint shops and workshops that were still strewn over the streets of Tel Aviv seemed to come straight out of communist Czechoslovakia or Romania – ah yes, because Israel was not only Central European, it was also socialist: double whammy as far as nostalgia is concerned, and glory be to the Monument to the Hebrew Worker behind the port of Tel Aviv.

I wandered from one functionalist house to another and felt as though I had been transported to Holešovice on the western bank of the Vltava. Israeli friends eagerly prepared me for a rare privilege, unveiling with great ceremony a “Bauhaus light switch.” I couldn’t but fondly smile—it was the kind of old rotary switch found in every Czech home not so long ago, still lingering in forgotten basements or the unrenovated cottages seized from the Sudeten Germans after their expulsion in 1945. In Israel, this humble relic, worth maybe ten crowns in the Czech Republic, commanded a price of 300 shekels—a small absurdity of nostalgia commodified.

I cherished the daily symphony of familiar languages in Tel Aviv—a rare confluence I can experience fully only there. Few places, apart from ethnic borderlands like southern Slovakia or Transylvania, stir my heart in quite the same way. In Tel Aviv, the air hums with not only Hebrew, but Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Russian, German, French, and, of course, English. There is nothing I love more but to lie on the beach, close my eyes, and just lazily abandon myself to this polyphonous soundscape.

The second treasure I hold dear in Tel Aviv is the Mediterranean Sea itself. I’m from Nice. I grew up surrounded by southern blue skies and blue water. For over thirty years in Central Europe, I have felt its absence acutely—it’s the one and only thing I cannot get used to. In Tel Aviv, I have it all again. Well, almost. The fish culture, alas, is a different story. Israelis, heirs to Central European traditions of bone-riddled carps unglued from muddy ponds (thanks, but no thanks) lack any real fish tradition. Still, I can forgive this shortfall. Tel Aviv is also home to the Arabic and Mizrahi Jewish flavors that are reminiscent of the world I grew up in. I can make do at the little sabich joint on Tchernichovsky.

And so, I roamed the streets of Tel Aviv with the same fervor as I had once roamed the streets of Prague. I made friends at Tel Aviv University and arranged a research stay at the Wiener Library, though focusing on archives proved a losing battle with the stunning campus outside the window. After a few days of noble effort, I surrendered, spending the rest of the week sprawled beneath a palm tree on the lush campus lawn, vaguely twitching at my laptop while listening to birdsong until the hour came when I could decently trade academia for a leisurely bike ride along the sea. Still, I heard Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelkind talk about their mortal battle with the Kaczyński regime – Central Europe is never far from Tel Aviv.

When my institute in Vienna was closed by the Boltzmann Foundation, leaving me unemployed for a few months, I convinced the Austrian unemployment office that learning Hebrew was essential to my career prospects. They generously funded a three-month intensive course, and by the end, I could follow conversations, read, write, and speak a little Hebrew—though the Covid years likely swept most of it away. One phrase, however, remains immortalized in family lore: Yesh hatihot behof hayam? Don’t ask.

I had the privilege of co-organizing a conference with TAU, exploring the parallels between German/Central European and Israeli/Palestinian issues, living the dream. I made the heartwarming discovery that one of my favorite authors, Gil Eyal (Columbia University), who wrote the best book on the Velvet Revolution in 1989 Prague, also wrote the most incisive analysis of how the Mizrahi knowledge of the Arab world—the lived expertise of Oriental Jews—was systematically displaced in Israel by Ashkenazi “experts” who wielded more power but knew far less: surprise! I visited the American Colony hotel and the Cinematheque in Jerusalem with my friend S. while she told me about her kibbutz experience in 1967 alongside Tony Judt and how they discovered Jerusalem together in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.

I took my children to the magnificent Austrian Hospice in East Jerusalem, where they delighted in speaking German and eating schnitzels and Sachertorte in the heart of the Arab Quarter. I met Michel in Tel Aviv, and our bond was cemented when his parents appeared at the door – a reincarnation of my grand-parents twenty years after their passing. I met the formidable Madame Assouline, Michel’s neighbor who made Aliyah from Algeria in 1956 and fed him when Hamas rained missiles over Tel Aviv and everyone in the house took cover together in the staircase.

I made a memorable tour of Jaffa with activist Sami Abu Shahade and Michel. Sami, even then, had had to abandon his PhD thesis at Tel Aviv University on the expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa after 1948, as the topic was stymied by political sensitivities. He was also criticized by some Palestinian peers as a traitor for serving on the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipal council and supporting the Jewish mayor, a stance he took to ensure a voice on issues affecting Jaffa—particularly the influx of hipster Jews transforming the city and erasing its Arabic heritage. The same Sami and his father appeared in the powerful documentary Jaffa: The Orange’s Clockwork (Eyal Sivan, 2009) I recently mentioned in Britské listy, a film which eloquently explores the systematic erasure of Palestinian presence in the Promised Land as it was supplanted by the constructed narrative of Jewish settlement in Palestine.

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I visited Ramallah and a Palestinian family, and saw Yasser Arafat’s grave with a Christian Palestinian friend of Sami’s. He was an ideal companion for navigating the checkpoints, as he seamlessly blended in—Israeli to the Israelis, Palestinian to the Palestinians. His fluidity reminded me of my friends in Slovakia and Hungary. Porous identities are always a historian’s delight.

Michel and I had the privilege of visiting Moussia on several unforgettable occasions. At 99 years old, she was a treasured friend of his, born in Ukraine. Her family fled the Soviet Union in the 1920s and sought refuge in France. In 1940, she managed to escape Paris, while her entire family was deported and perished in Auschwitz. She met her Viennese husband, Harry, in a refugee camp in Switzerland, and after the war they fled the antisemitism that was still plaguing France and settled in Jerusalem. The last time we saw Moussia together, in 2019, her gentle and endlessly positive spirit was shaken. She had recently come to understand the extent of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and struggled to reconcile this reality with the Israel she loved. Michel and I couldn’t bring ourselves to comment. Later, we attended a Meretz party electoral meeting in Tel Aviv. A young man was trying to rally votes to challenge Netanyahu. He was bright and determined, but there were barely 15 of us in the room. The left had completely sunk. The Israel we held dear was slipping away.

In other words, I rediscovered in Israel the multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual society I was still clinging to, just barely, in Central Europe, but which was fast fading. From my research and personal experience, I had witnessed the systematic stripping away of Czech culture: first, the Germans forcibly removed its Jewish component; then, the Czechs expelled the Germans, divorced the Slovaks, and somehow erased the Roma. Nationalism is doing better than ever in Central Europe, thank you very much.

Since the horror of 7 October 2023, I fear that the last remnants of this culture in Israel have vanished, and with it, Central European culture is dying its final death. After spending over thirty years clinging to ghosts in Prague, I now feel those same ghosts are taken from me again, this time at the core. The Yiddishland is being erased from collective memory for the final time. To paraphrase Ben Gurion, perhaps Israel can be a real country only after its army behaves like the other armies of the world and it defends itself by killing others and killing its own dream. I just read the haunting The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe by Gideon Levy—yes, that Gideon Levy, the much-maligned conscience of the Israeli left. He reminds me of anti-communist dissidents: heroic in their struggle, yet perhaps unbearable in everyday life once the regime has fallen.

The book is almost unendurable. It’s not that I am unacquainted with competitive victimhood—I have written extensively about it. Nor am I unfamiliar with inhumanity, at least as much as one can become “accustomed” to hearing or reading such harrowing accounts. And it’s not as though I haven’t been a contemporary witness to genocide—I was horrified by Bosnia, devastated by Rwanda, and, like everyone else, utterly powerless. For years, I have been critical of the instrumentalization of the past in Israeli society. I was quite proud of my presentation at my own conference in 2013, “Would you have sex with an Arab?”, after the eponymous film of Yolande Zauberman. We laughed, and I was pleased that several people in the room claimed they would. At the time I even taught a comparative course on the externalization of the “other” in Central Europe and Israel/Palestine. “It’s not what I heard in Jerusalem!”, objected a shocked American student. I bet it’s not; I wouldn’t dare to teach this course today. “Who is the enemy? You create your enemy”, they say in the Zauberman film. “Fuck identities! What is this?”, they also say.

What feels new to me now is the realization that the experiences I described above will, in all likelihood, no longer be possible in Israel. That world has sunk with the ship of the security state. I cannot say for certain if what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide. Omer Bartov believes it does, and as both a scholar of genocide and an Israeli, he has the authority to make that claim. But this is not the central issue for me here. The point is that even if it isn’t genocide now, it could well become genocide tomorrow and I already fear that Israeli society, more likely than not, would fail to prevent it and perhaps even to be shocked by it. Nor, to be honest, would most of us in the West. This is how genocide happens, right next door. In the best case, we would feel a vague sense of sorrow, but we convince yourself we are not fully aware of what is unfolding. It’s the issue that has haunted me as a historian for decades when writing about Central Europe during the Nazi occupation. It feels as though my history books are coming alive to confront me, jumping off the page and demanding an answer. And yet, all the while, more books will be written on a renewed outburst of antisemitism in Central Europe and elsewhere – the one trait that never seems to die.

I am afraid to return to Israel. Afraid of rediscovering a society who I now know is capable of endorsing this inhumanity and thereby of destroying its own heritage, memory, and identity. I trust my friends. But how about the rest of society? Do I want to know? I do, and I don’t – I am torn.