Turned Off

The other day I was listening to a podcast by a Brazilian writer I admire. (He is a very good writer, and his name does not matter here.) At some point he put all Israelis in one pot and called us Zionists, in the tone a man saves for an insult. I switched him off. Then I unfollowed him. I felt no anger, which surprised me. Anger would have kept me listening.

At home I get a different question. Israelis who find out that I moved here from Brazil ten years ago ask me why on earth I left, since life is better there. They are right. It is better there. The Brazilian thinks I had no right to come, and the Israeli thinks I had no reason to. I owe them both the same answer, and it begins with two ships.

In 1903, in Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, a mob spent two days killing Jews. It is the pogrom that Bialik wrote his poem about. My family was from Bessarabia. The rescue on offer was not a Jewish state. It was the charity of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Jewish banker who paid to move the Jews of the Russian Empire to farms in South America, to any country whose government would take them. When my family reached the port, there were two ships. One was going to Brazil and the other to Argentina. Some of us boarded the first and some the second. Nobody chose a country. They chose a ship. For more than seventy years, neither side knew that the other existed.

We found each other at my bar mitzvah. I was thirteen, and the room filled with people from another country who had my father’s face. They had my uncles’ faces. I remember how strange it was to recognize strangers. Looking back, I think that was the day I first felt I would have to return, though I could not have said where.

I lived in Brazil until I was fifty-three. I love the food, the land, and the people. I was a foreigner there for every one of those years. I came home, and home does not have to be the better place.

That leaves the word. Here, a Zionist is, more or less, someone who is for Israel. By that definition, all my relatives in Brazil are Zionists. They love their lives there and cannot imagine living here, and they are for Israel no matter what. I do not doubt their love. But no matter what is easy to say from far away. It asks nothing of the people who say it. It does not even ask them to look.

My Zionism is built on a different phrase. I am for Israel in spite of. In spite of its government, and of the men who govern me. In spite of what my country did in Gaza, where more than seventy thousand people are dead, and where we did terrible things that I do not excuse. In spite of living here, which is harder than loving the place from another continent. In spite of the people I share it with and cannot stand. I cannot stand Jewish extremists. I cannot stand Arab extremists, or extremists of any kind. I cannot stand the Haredim who manage to work and prosper in New York, in Porto Alegre, in Mumbai, anywhere in the world, and who feel entitled, here and only here, to have the rest of us pay their bills, as if the state owed more to them than to the people who serve in its Army. I cannot stand anyone who uses hatred to hold a crowd together. To be for Israel in spite of all that, you have to know exactly what all that is. You have to look at it every day, and stay.

A man who is angry about Gaza is angry about something real, and I know it better than he does. But a man who is angry about Gaza names the government, or the Army, or the people who gave the orders. The writer said Israelis, all of us, and he said Zionists. I am a man of the left, and it is the left, my own side, that uses the word this way. People say Zionist because Jew would be too obvious. The writer is one of those people, and it costs me something to write that.

I know what it is to look at a room full of strangers and see one face. I was thirteen, and the face was my father’s. The writer looked at a whole country and saw one face, too, and it belongs to no one I know. Two weeks ago we voted, and the governing parties lost their majority. An anger that cannot tell a government from a country, a country from its citizens, or its citizens from me was never only about Gaza.

A people with our history of massacres has an obligation to be the adult in the room. I believe that. The adult in the room hears the accusation out, separates what is just from what is hatred, and answers for what is just. That day I did not hear it out.

There is a short book by Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-born writer who lives in Germany, called The Burnout Society. I read it years ago, and I think it has aged well. Han says that people today are exhausted because each of us is his own master and his own slave, and has no one to blame. The world, it seems, does not have that problem. When it needs someone to blame, it usually finds us. If the butler didn’t do it, the Jews did. Our tiredness is the opposite of the tiredness in that book. Han’s man has no one to blame, and we are the ones who get blamed. We are tired of the war and of the men who ran it, and we are tired of being the answer to everyone else’s question.

Tiredness is not an argument, and the adult in the room does not get to switch off for good.