Greed

In 1886 Tolstoy published a story about a peasant named Pahom, who had land enough to feed his family and still felt he was short of land. He bought more, quarreled with his neighbors over fences, moved to a distant village where each family was given more ground to plow, and there heard of the Bashkirs, a people of the steppes who sold land at a price no one took seriously. For a thousand rubles, Pahom could have all the land he managed to walk around between daybreak and the end of the afternoon, on condition that he return to his starting point before the sun touched the horizon. He set out before dawn and walked, and every time he thought of turning he caught sight of a fertile valley a little farther on, a stretch of pasture it would be foolish to leave out, and kept going straight. When the sun began to sink he was too far away, and he ran, and he reached the hill where the Bashkir chief was waiting for him, and he fell on his face with the sun still in the sky, and he did not get up. The servant who had come with him dug a grave the exact length of his master, from heel to head, and that was all the land a man needed. James Joyce, in a 1935 letter to his daughter, wrote that it was the greatest story the literature of the world knew, and the word that explains Pahom is the one in my title.

No one can say we were not warned, because the prime minister who won the war of June 1967 was the first to warn us. Levi Eshkol summed up what we had gained in a line he would repeat many times, that the dowry was lovely but nobody knew what to do with the bride. Golda Meir was franker and said that her soul yearned for the dowry and that someone else could have the bride. They knew, then, and we knew along with them, and still we kept walking straight ahead, because each additional hill cost little next to the distance we had already covered.

Many of us will object that Pahom was running after what he did not need, while we run only to stay alive. The objection has merit, because none of us invented the neighbors who want us gone, and yet it stumbles over the bride, since every acre we have fenced in since 1967 comes with people inside it. We know by heart the truth we refuse to admit, a truth no fence can alter, that between the Jordan River and the sea there now live some seven million Jews and as many Arabs. Whoever wants the whole land will have to choose, without admitting the choice, between ceasing to be a majority and ceasing to be a democracy, and either choice would end the country that the Declaration of Independence brought into being in May 1948.

The funny thing, if the word fits, is that the proof that the numbers can work was elected to the Knesset on October twenty-seventh. There are nineteen of them, lawmakers from the Arab parties, the most seats those parties have ever won, chosen by citizens who pay taxes, work in the same hospitals where we are treated, and bury their dead in the same earth where we bury ours. A fifth of the country’s population is Arab and Israeli at once, and that coexistence, imperfect and testy and full of grievances on both sides, has worked for seventy-eight years without Israel ceasing to be Jewish or ceasing to be democratic. Whoever swears that we cannot trust these nineteen, and by extension the two million who vote for them, is not defending Israel, and is claiming instead that the numbers that already work within our borders cannot work beyond them.

Pahom’s only warning was a bad dream the night before, and he paid it no mind. We have the whole tale, we have Eshkol and Golda, and we have the nineteen names on the roll of the newly elected, and if with all that we still cannot see that we are repeating the same story, we must be very stupid. Yet the tale holds a hope that hardly anyone notices, that Pahom could have turned at any hill and made it back in time, master of more land than he had ever held.