Paweł Smoleński

Israel will no longer be flying high

About the book

It was he himself who proposed the meeting. He claimed there weren't too many people like him and that perhaps those who were had always been the minority, although minorities or majorities were just arithmetic, rows of figures and it was after all not a question of numbers here, but about rightness, total and indivisible. A lone wolf – that was how he referred to himself. Wolves bring to mind those who follow their own, independent paths, but also represent strength, courage and resolve.

He invited me to his home, which stood on a quiet back street, a dozen or so kilometres from the cosmopolitan, bustling city centre of Tel Aviv. Nearby lies a cemetery and a district inhabited by orthodox Jews; also the site of the Ponowicz Yeshiva University, famous throughout the Jewish world, where every student has a chance of becoming a renowned rabbi. He promised me an interesting conversation: – You will not hear my kind of views anywhere else in this politically correct town. He also lured me with the promise of a tasty supper and a bottle of good wine. Shalom Lindenbaum, a retired professor of literature, really does cook exceedingly well, Arabic delicacies in particular. The kitchen is certainly one domain in which the Arabs have absolutely and ruthlessly triumphed over the Jews.
I took a taxi there. The driver, an Israeli Arab, was condemning the slaughter that had been carried out several days earlier in the town of Shafram, by a young army deserter. The attacker's name was Eden Natan-Zada, a 19 year-old fascinated by the radical politics of rabbi Meir Kahane, shot in New York by an Arabic terrorist. Rabbi Kahane believed Palestinians should be opposed everywhere, at all times and by all possible means. Openly racist, the Kah party he established is illegal in Israel.
Eden's mother had begged his commanding officers not to allow the boy access to weapons. He ended up opening fire on fellow travellers in a bus. He killed four people and wounded thirteen others before an angry mob of Arabs lynched him. Even the most radical Israelis, obtuse nationalists and orthodox rabbis, publicly branded this a heinous, unjustified crime.
Shafram's population includes the Druze, Arabs so loyal to the Israeli authorities that they even serve in the army, patrol the West Bank and quell Palestinian riots. Jewish human rights activists say that the Druze are the most ruthless soldiers in the Israeli army. That is why nobody has even tried to explain why... he chose to attack a bus going to Shafram.
The cab driver kept repeating: I don't get it; I just can't figure it out. That poor young fellow must have been not so much a fanatic as a complete madman.
I told the professor about this. He replied without hesitation: – The shooting in Shafram was due to an oversight by the army and security services. It's clear that the boy was unbalanced; all the newspapers say so. Unfortunately, you get madmen in any army.
But I don't see any reason – he added – to seek some deeper meaning behind this act or give it any special publicity. What happened cannot be undone. Please don't misunderstand me. I do not consider that shooting at Arabs on municipal buses should be the chief business of Israeli army recruits. Nor do I think that the army is the place for the mentally disturbed. But it's too simplistic to say: the boy shot them because he was a madman. If we take that line, then the whole context of the event escapes us.
That context – the professor claims – is Israel's struggle for survival.
We are alone in this war – he continued. We have no allies anywhere. Europe has no wish to see us succeed and doesn’t care whether Israel exists or not. The same with the United States; they tip the wink to the Palestinians and suck up to them, so that the world will forget about their policy in Iraq. The situation is what it is: a small Israel in a sea of Arabs. Our situation is not one anybody would envy.
Admit it – the professor states the obvious – the Arabs hate us. They would gladly drown us all in the Mediterranean. All Arabs, without distinction: Palestinians, Saudis or Egyptians. But like any other nation we have the right to live and maybe even a special right.
Yes, the conversation with Professor Shalom was interesting. Though it was really little more than a monologue. Without exaltation or passionate outbursts, without hysterical oaths or declamations. Only questions, theses and cast iron proofs.
I thought to myself: maybe it's just as well the professor is a lone wolf.

***

Professor Shalom Lindenbaum is a grey-haired man of average height. He wears glasses and a thin, silver-grey beard; if he had slanting eyes, he could pass for a Chinese mandarin.  He is of slim, delicate build; it is hard to believe that just after arriving in Israel as a young man, he had been a stevedore and a butcher's assistant, or that just after the war and the Shoah, far from seeking peace and quiet, he had fought in the Irgun's ranks against the British and Arabs. This, some maintain, was a radically rightist terrorist formation (it was the Irgun that dynamited Jerusalem's King David Hotel), while others hold that it was an underground army fighting for independence and opposed to Prime Minister Ben Gurion's policy of conciliation. Today he looks like a good-natured pensioner, as indeed his name suggests, shalom meaning peace.
In his apartment, I can't find a trace of any great fondness for weaponry or any paintings depicting famous battles. Only a comfortable sofa, a table, long-playing records of classical music in worn covers, newspapers, periodicals and books. Professor Shalom loves poetry, especially Polish poetry – Poland is the land of his childhood – which in his opinion is second only to Hebrew poetry. Mickiewicz and Słowacki hold no secrets for him. He adores them for the beauty of their words and the perfection of rhythm and rhyme. But above all for their Messianic message, adopted from Jewish culture and Jewish beliefs, but addressed to their legitimate owners so beautifully and with such grace that it is hard to imagine modern Jewish literature or Jewish social and political thinking without the poetry of those great romantics.
But Professor Shalom's true passion is the teacher from Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz; he is the greatest expert on Schulz's works in Israel. Schulz was a frail but impassioned intellectual, a bit of a mystic, a man of letters and a painter. He looked forward to surviving the Second World War, but it wasn't to be. He was – I would say – the very opposite of Professor Shalom; he never had to carry heavy chests or sides of beef, never took up arms or killed anyone.
But the strange thing is that during our conversation the professor never spoke a word about Schulz.

Translated by Richard Biały