A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [252]
I was shocked. Even though I had come a long way from the rhetoric of Herut and the Klausner family, I was still a conformist product of a Zionist upbringing. Ephraim's nocturnal words startled and even enraged me. In those days this kind of thinking was seen as treachery. I was so stunned that I asked him sarcastically:
"In that case, what are you doing here with your gun? Why don't you emigrate? Or take your gun and go and fight on their side?"
I could hear his sad smile in the dark:
"Their side? But their side doesn't want me. Nowhere in the world wants me. Nobody in the world wants me. That's the whole point. It seems there are too many of my kind in every country. That's the only reason I'm here. That's the only reason I'm carrying a gun, so they won't kick me out of here the way they kicked me out of everywhere else. But you won't find me using the word 'murderers' about Arabs who've lost their villages. At least, not easily. About Nazis, yes. About Stalin, also. And about whoever steals other people's land."
"Doesn't it follow from what you're saying that we have also stolen other people's land? But didn't we live here two thousand years ago? Weren't we driven out of here by force?"
"It's like this," said Ephraim. "It's really very simple. Where is the Jewish people's land if not here? Under the sea? On the moon? Or is the Jewish people the only people in the world that doesn't deserve to have a little homeland of its own?"
"And what about what we've taken from them?"
"Vell, maybe you happen to have forgotten that in '48 they had a go at killing all of us? Then, in '48, there was a terrible war, and they themselves made it a simple question of either them or us, and we won and took it from them. It's nothing to boast about! But if they'd beaten us in '48, there would have been even less to boast about: they wouldn't have left a single Jew alive. And it's true that there isn't a single Jew living in the whole of their sector today. But that's the whole point: it's because we took what we did from them in '48 that we have what we have now. And because we have something now, we mustn't take anything else from them. That's it. And that's the whole difference between me and your Mr. Begin: if we take even more from them someday, now that we already have something, that will be a very big sin."
"And what if the fedayeen turn up here now?"
"If they do," Ephraim sighed, "vell, we'll just have to lie down in the mud and shoot. And we'll try our damnedest to shoot better and faster than them. But we won't shoot at them because they're a nation of murderers, but for the simple reason that we also have a right to live and for the simple reason that we also have a right to a land of our own. Not just them. And now thanks to you I'm going on like Ben-Gurion. Now if you'll just excuse me, I'm going into the cowshed to have a quiet smoke, and you keep a good lookout here while I'm gone. Keep a lookout for both of us."
52
A FEW YEARS after this nocturnal conversation, eight or nine years after the morning when Menachem Begin and his camp lost me at the Edison Auditorium, I met David Ben-Gurion. In those years he was prime minister and minister of defense but was thought of by many as the "great man of his day," the founder of the state, the great victor in the War of Independence and the Sinai Campaign. His enemies loathed him and ridiculed the cult of personality that surrounded him, while his admirers already saw him as the Father of the Nation, a sort of miraculous blend of King David, Judah