Crossing Borders

Twenty-four hours on deck, under a scorching sun through the day and a warm starry sky at night. Waving goodbye to Marseille and anticipating an unknown land across the Mediterranean. Cheeks burned by the sun and the strong wind off the sea. Hard deck, lack of sleep, picking a way gingerly in the dark through mute heaps of sleeping people. Going below deck to find an overflowing toilet, an ordeal that had to be endured. Morning broken, the sun returned, the first signs of human habitation coming into view. The ancient ruins of Carthage stretched up the bank on one side of the ship as it nosed its way down a long narrow waterway towards the dock at La Goulette, the port of Tunis.

Fifty-five years ago, I was a student, little travelled, finding my way with a clutch of fellow students, across France and the sea beyond to Africa, heading for Tunisia to attend an Arabic language course at the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes. In port, we disembarked, part of a heaving crowd glad to be liberated from the smell, the crush and the flies. Dragging bags down the ramps and stumbling as we went, we made our way along the quayside, through dilapidated marine warehouses, towards a line of customs officials standing behind a rough assemblage of trestle tables ready to receive and inspect our baggage.

One signalled me to place my suitcase in front of him. He opened it and then closed it perfunctorily. With a few words in French, he pulled it off the table and ordered me to go with him. I followed meekly, looking round for my companions at the same time. But amidst the jostling crowd they were nowhere to be seen. The customs officer took my arm and led me away, right out of the docks, going through a big gate in the middle of an impregnable fence of iron railings. He hailed a taxi. Fear began to take hold and in halting French I asked him to let me go back. He shook his head, with a peremptory “Non, venez avec moi ”. Holding insistently onto my elbow, he pressed me into the tiny cab. We drove off.

Eventually the driver stopped outside a modern block of flats. I followed my captor out of the car. He took my case. I thought, this is the moment I disappear from public view for ever. We went into the building and took a lift to a flat on the third floor. He opened a door and took me in. A young woman, casual in European clothes, greeted my captor in Arabic. They offered me sweet mint tea. Later we left the flat, taking another taxi across the city. Finally, the taxi stopped and we alighted, going into another building, older and more traditional. Marble floors, cooling the air and masking the heat of the day. They knocked on a door, a woman in a long, flowing dress, her hair bundled up in a scarf, greeted us and ushered us in. Another young woman peered round an open door nearby, smiling and inviting. It must be, I feared, a brothel.

Again I was offered sweet mint tea, accompanied by a small plate of dates. Several other women and now young children appeared. Smiles, stares and tentative pats from them all. Food later that evening, then a mat on the floor by shuttered windows, sleeping alongside the females of the house in a long, airy withdrawing room. Next day, the customs officer left for work and, later, two other males of the family proudly showed me Tunis. And the day after that, they took me to the hostel where my fellow students greeted me with relief. Six weeks later I gained my certificate in Arabic – no problem. But I never knew the reason why all this had happened.

Gillian Dalley, Autumn 2018

Out with the Old and in with the New?

Gillian Dalley, Summer 2018

We’re told that it’s good to move on, don’t live in the past and keep up with the times and I’ve been trying to observe that maxim. To that end, I started on the cupboard in my study this morning – planning to clear shedloads of files dating back some 20 years and more. But it turned out to be less a salutary and invigorating exercise and more a bittersweet angst-laden encounter between past and present. It made me sit down and think hard.

I’d forgotten how experienced – and even competent – I had been in my earlier life. The realisation came as a surprise. Although I’ve written my CV many times, rehearsing the catalogue of posts I’ve held, the lists of articles, reports and books I’ve written, and organisations I’ve worked for, I’ve never really dwelt on their significance as a record of a ‘career’. But coming across the written record of those times now made me see things rather differently. The hard evidence – the research papers and other publications, the minutes of countless meetings chaired or attended, all types of other work-related ephemera – sat there in sealed boxes waiting to be shredded. While I had remembered much of it in the abstract, the detail surprised me. Reading some of it now, 20 years on, I confess I was impressed. What – me? I asked.

But that led to greater reflection. I realised it’s been a part of me that I’d consigned to the back of my memory – perhaps associated with the growing public invisibility that most women in their seventies experience (and writing those words now alerts me to this absence of a presence). Those younger than us are unaware of our past, our experience, our views, our value. We are started on the slope to oblivion, unable or unwilling to knock sharply on the table and say – hang on! stop! listen to us – our lives may have something to tell you and our knowledge and insight may be useful! Scientific progress may be built by standing on the shoulders of giants according to Newton – but, who knows, at a less exalted level, even on the bent backs of old women.

Identity and its Discontents

The recent furore over anti-semitism in political circles in the UK pushes me back again into that circle of identity: Jew. When asked why he called himself a Jew, though he didn't adhere to any practices or beliefs, the open-hearted thinker Isiah Berlin responded 'because they won't let me forget.' 'They' is anyone who singles out the Jew as Other, projecting onto that screen ugly traits deserving of annihilation. It's wearying, and I wish not to engage. But present tensions compel me to once again examine the knots of my own Jewishness , striving to make peace with its contradictions.

On one hand, the tentacles of Jewishness form immense bonds of warmth and clarity. When my mother died, Jewish mourning rituals--covering household mirrors, sitting on a low stool, tearing a piece of clothing--were immensely comforting as was the support of the community. On the other, the communal grip can strangle, squeezing out those not deemed acceptable to the tribe. When I chose a non-Jewish mate, my then rabbi refused to take part in our ceremony.

Perhaps Jewish particularity and insistence on maintaining non-adulterated ties at any cost comes from the small number of Jews in the world. Hard as it is to believe, Jews are only 0.15% of the world population and about 0.5% in the UK[i]. Current demographics indicate that right-wing religious Jews will soon be the majority UK Jewish culture. For a secular Jew like me, this shift towards a rigorous, 19th century Judaism as touchstone of legitimacy is troubling, pushing me further into seeing myself primarily as a rootless London cosmopolite, grateful to live in this city-state's diverse cacophony.

Israel has only made things worse regarding the vexed issue of Jewish identity. Irony of ironies, the existence of the so-called Jewish state both feeds anti-semites and starves those of good will who see Israel as a nation-state accountable to norms governing any country. Israel and many of its supporters want it both ways: Jewish and a nation; a democracy yet one permitting its priestly class, the rabbinate, to decide matters of public policy; an occupier of other's lands and a defender of the rights of a beleaguered people --so long as those people are Jews.

Rage against Israeli policies is one of the hardest challenges for a Jew like me who wishes to loosen long outworn ties whilst not adding to the chorus of Jew hatred. The line between opposing Zionist policies (using Zionist as a descriptor of those who define Israel as the legitimate homeland of only the Jews) and being anti-semitic is a thin one.[ii] Boundaries keep getting crossed. Anger at Israel often gets conflated with dirty words used to insult and threaten Jews. Jews who are critical of Israel are often accused of being self-hating. Jewish self-righteousness rears its head, insisting that the age-old slaughter of Jews can only be avoided if Israel is implacably unyielding and if Jews everywhere give Israel unquestioned support.

It's a mess, and the noisy and ugly non-conversation is exhausting. I struggle to be clear. I want institutional anti-semitism rooted out. I want Israel held responsible for its inhumane and immoral human rights violations. I want my fellow Jews to insist that Israel is a nation-state and not allow it to move further into a theocracy answerable to a god but unaccountable to international law. I want Israel to take its chances as an open culture, federated with neighbours Jordan and Palestine. I want to shut out the voices in my head that tell me I'm betraying the Jews by thinking this way.

As the ancient Hebrew priests invoked, 'ken yehi ratzon': Let it be so.

[i] www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-population-of-the-world

[ii] See the London Review of Books, Vol. 40 No.01-4, January 2018; page 18: The 'New Anti-Semitism' by Neve Gordon, an excellent discussion disentangling the threads of so-called anti-semitism from criticism of Israeli policies.

-Rose Levinson