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By Root 1252 0

or any of those gloomy refugee scholars of whom Jewish Jerusalem was full. After a while I signed up for the scout movement, whose members in those days intended to enlist in the Nahal, the military formation that specialized in creating new kibbutzim along the border, when they had finished at school, and to go on to "labor, defense, and the kibbutz." My father was not pleased, but because he yearned to be a true liberal, he contented himself with remarking sadly: "The scout movement. Very well. So be it. Why not. But the kibbutz? The kibbutz is for simple, strong people, and you are neither. You are a talented child. An individualist. Surely it would be better for you to grow up to serve our beloved state with your talents, not with your muscles. Which are not all that developed."

My mother was far away by then. She had turned her back on us.

And I agreed with my father. That is why I forced myself to eat twice as much and to strengthen my feeble muscles with running and exercises.

Three or four years later, after my mother's death and my father's remarriage, in Kibbutz Hulda, at half past four one Saturday morning, I told Ephraim Avneri about Begin and the arms. We had gotten up early because we had been detailed for apple picking. I was fifteen or sixteen. Ephraim Avneri, like the other founder-members of Hulda, was in his mid-forties, but he and his friends were called—by us and even among themselves—the oldies.

Ephraim listened to the story and smiled, but for a minute it seemed he had trouble understanding what the point of it was, because he too belonged to the generation for whom "arming" was a matter of tanks and guns. After a moment he said: "Ah yes, I see, Begin was talking about 'arming' with weapons and you took it in the slang sense. It does come out rather funny. But listen here my young friend," (we were standing on ladders on opposite sides of the same tree, talking while we picked, but the foliage was in the way so we could not see each other) "it seems to me you missed the main point. The thing that's so funny about them, Begin and all his noisy crew, is not their use of the word 'arm' but their use of words in general. They divide everything up into 'obsequious Diaspora-Jewish' on the one hand and 'manly Hebrew' on the other. They don't notice how Diaspora-Jewish the division itself is. Their whole childish obsession with military parades and hollow machismo and weapons comes straight from the ghetto."

Then he added, to my great surprise:

"Basically he's a good man, that Begin. He's a demagogue, it's true, but he's not a fascist or a warmonger. Absolutely not. On the contrary, he's a rather soft man. A thousand times softer than Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion's as hard as granite, but Menachem Begin is made of cardboard. And he's so old-fashioned, Begin. So anachronistic. A sort of lapsed yeshiva bocher, who believes that if we Jews start shouting at the top of our voices that we're not the way Jews used to be, we're not sheep for the slaughter, we're not pale weaklings but the opposite, we're dangerous now, we're terrifying wolves now, then all the real beasts of prey will be scared of us and give us everything we want, they'll let us have the whole land, they'll let us take all the holy places, swallow up Trans-Jordan, and be treated with respect and admiration by the whole civilized world as well. They, Begin and his chums, talk from morning to evening about power, but they haven't the first idea what power is, what it's made of, what the weaknesses of power are. After all, power also has an element of terrible danger for those that wield it. Didn't that bastard Stalin once say that religion is the opium of the masses? Vell, just listen to little old me: I tell you, power is the opium of the ruling classes. And not only the ruling classes. Power is the opium of the whole of humanity. Power is the temptation of the Devil, I would say, if I believed in the Devil. As a matter of fact, I do believe in him a bit. Vell, where were we?" (Ephraim and some of his fellow Galicians always pronounced "well"