On the evening of October 6th, I boarded a plane at Ben Gurion airport. After 30 years of living in Israel, I was going home. I “made aliya” in the heady days of Oslo, following my Israeli husband, rather than any Zionist zeal. In the interim a third split in my identity had formed – South African, Australian and Israeli. Now – no longer married – I was tearfully bidding goodbye to three grown up children, friends and a lifetime. Most of all I was farewelling hope. Hope that Israel would fulfill the Declaration of Independence. Hope that Israel would not forever be held by the sword. My kids did not share my sense of urgency, although they did have plans of their own. One bound for Berlin, one to pursue a PhD in Sydney, one to stay put.
Nearly a year before, in the lead up to the November 2022 elections when Netanyahu formalized a coalition with the likes of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, something in me broke. I announced to my family that if he got in, I would seriously consider returning to Australia. I was done. “You’ll see, the tail will wag the dog. Netanyahu has made a pact with the devil. Things are going to unravel fast.” Yeah, yeah they joked as one, you’ve been predicting that Third World War forever! I noticed their shared mirth was not as heady as it had been over the years. It had waned as they grew older, and Israel had fallen further into the abyss.
Netanyahu got in. In January of the new year, just weeks into the government, I listened in disbelief to the new Justice Minister’s[1] insidious judicial overhaul announcement. I listened from Australia. I had not been in Israel for that fateful election. Even now, I can conjure the chills that ran up and down my spine. They have become a regular visitor since, even prior to October 7th. By the time I returned to Israel in March, the demonstrations were in full swing. I returned to the streets, where we’d been for almost three years already. Balfour to Kaplan. Now every fibre of my being was impelling me to pack up and leave, yet I struggled to actualize my decision, losing weight and sleep in the process. How could I leave my kids? Why couldn’t I just continue spending half a year in each country? How could I, a constitutional lawyer in my bones, abandon the fight in Israel now? Long buried memories of my teenager self preparing to flee Apartheid South Africa flood my dreams. I gaze at my father through adult eyes, filled with wonder at his courage to defy everyone and spirit us off to a new beginning. I envy his authority over all of us. In the African sky of my dreams a fiddler shrouds me in his haunting melody, while I march my three kids over the horizon like ducklings, to quieter shores. Those same shores my father chose, and I abandoned, lured by love and hope. I awake to lingering klezmer vibrations and the familiar echo of the Holocaust coursing through my veins. I simply can’t shake off this sense of foreboding.
I’m creating a bridgehead is a phrase that follows me out of my dreams into my waking hours. I check the precise meaning of the term bridgehead and find the following definitions: “a position held or to be gained on the enemy side of a river or obstacle, to cover the crossing of friendly troops; any position gained that can be used as a foothold for further advancement.” (italics mine) The presence of the word enemy in the definition stuck me. Australia the enemy? Seriously? No way. The bridgehead of my dreams must be the latter. I am establishing it in friendly territory, as a refuge.
My flight on October 6th is to Athens. The plan is to spend a week with my dear friend Sagit, return to Israel for a wedding, and fly to Melbourne on Oct 18th. Ever the early riser, Sagit wakes me at 6.45 am. “Something is happening in Israel” she shrugs, and with a wan smile, “something is always happening in Israel”. Over coffee we surf the internet. By 8.30 both our What’s Apps are exploding. Rockets even on central Israel. We desperately call our kids. They are already in bomb shelters. Frantic messages flood in from friends living in communities in the Gaza Envelope, from friends with kids at the Nova party. Crazy, unbelievable stories slowly start bubbling up like sewerage from a blocked drain. Still, we were nowhere near comprehending. We have to decide. To go on or to go back? Sagit makes the call: “If we are to stop what we are doing and run back every time something happens in Israel, we’d never live our lives. Israel will go on and so should we.” That evening, ensconced in an idyllic seaside cottage on the western Peloponnese five hours drive from Athens and a world away from Israel, we were no longer so sure. An existential fear we had never known was winding its way around our hearts, turning even the magestic sunset black.
I did not go back to Israel. My son arranged for a suitcase of winter clothes and my Aussie passport to be brought to me in Athens. All my kids insisted I go on to Australia. Equally they all insisted they were not going anywhere. This was their generation, their friends, their fight. I swallowed hard. They were not drafted thank God. They volunteered with the rest of civic society, bereft of a functioning government. I admit, rather shamefacedly, I begged them to leave. I also harangued my ex-husband to send them, as if he could. Biding time till my flight, I roamed Athens holding desperate negotiations with the wheel of fate. Fear of the future had morphed in one fell swoop, into burning existential terror. Only a week after the massacre and Pro-Palestinian demonstrations had already begun. In disbelief, I watched the footage of the chanting on the Sydney Opera House steps. Doubt began to creep in. I awoke each morning with a jolt, grabbing my phone to assuage the angst that rose with me. This is still my new waking routine. A year later and there continue to be plenty of reasons to fuel the panic.
I arrived in Melbourne on the 22nd of October, dazed and uprooted. The quiet leafy streets were surreal. I felt so far away, isolated even though I’d returned to my family. Compelled to act, I frequented the Hawthorn Rd warehouse to volunteer. I joined demonstrations in Caulfield Park and the city. I was added to the infamous Jewish Creatives WhatsApp group and later doxed. I devoured Israeli, international and independent media. I quickly extricated myself from the frenzy on social media. It felt untethered. Everything I did felt useless. Everyone I met wanted to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Just for me it wasn’t an issue. It was deeply personal. I found myself tossed between polarized narratives, neither nuanced, both usually brimming with nescience. My worst encounter was when I was earnestly told “I understand why the Palestinians attacked those settlers after all they have done.” The justification of the October 7th massacre was sickening, the ignorance galling. I also knew the same justification wouldn’t hold when Palestinians started dying in the ensuing war. For the most part, non-Jewish Australians I encountered pleaded ignorance upfront and proceeded with curiosity and openness. This did not reflect the cacophony of incendiary slogans blasted daily on the streets, in the universities and online. Initially I relegated them to the fringes, to the pure ideology of youth. The irony of their binary approach to this issue was exasperating. There was much to criticize Israel about, especially its current government, however it was slowly dawning on me that their demands envisaged a world without Israel. They appeared to have been co-opted by a sleek, cleverly constructed campaign to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. I began reading up on wokeism, identity politics and cancel culture. Catapulted from the periphery of my vision into focus, I was struck by my own ignorance.
Sometime in the ensuing weeks I realized that I could no longer be unequivocally certain that as Jews we would be safer in Australia than Israel. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I had never experienced antisemitism in Australia. Now, it was no longer about that. It had morphed into something existential, not only for Israel, but for all Jews around the world. The lines of right and wrong, black and white, left and right, were becoming blurred and my certainty about everything was fading fast. I shared this with my kids, and in the main refrained from any further suggestion they leave. There were many tough nights, when I awoke with a jolt and reached for the phone, trembling.
I fell off the wagon in April and again in late July when we all waited with bated breath for the Iranian-Hezbollah fury to be unleashed. I regressed to pleading with them to get out and assailed my ex-husband in my terror. In the interim I had returned to Israel to pack up my flat and bid a real goodbye. Filled with sadness and trepidation, I had finally made my choice. Being back was also surreal. Once again, I found myself caught between conflicting narratives and suspended in a lacuna of knowledge. The collective trauma was palpable. Yehudit Ravitz’s melodic refrain, what you see from there, you don’t see from here[2], got lodged in my brain on an endless loop. Saturday evening demonstrations were now fragmented between Democracy Square and Hostages Square. The divisions in Israeli society felt even more stark and implacable, unheard of in war time. The world felt like a whirlpool. The general sense of doom I’d left with was replaced with foreboding, lodged permanently in my throat. Most of all a sense of helplessness in the face of fate, fueled ancient human fears, that for me bore the shape of the Holocaust. Tales of those that left and those that stayed, gripped me in their erratic and unpredictable dance of fate. In the dead of sleepless nights, I recalled that in Hebrew I am named after our only relative from Lithuania who stayed, rather than flee to South Africa. She was murdered together with her family. Ironically it means life. Chaya. L’chaim. To life.
Where will fate settle? Do I have a hand in it, or in a terrible twist of fate, might my desperate attempts blow up in my face? These are the questions that keep me up at night, in quiet, leafy Elwood. Who knows where we will be safe. Will my daughter, named after her great grandmother who fled Berlin for Palestine in the 1930’s, be safe in Berlin of the 21st Century? Will my son be safe at Sydney Uni? Will my eldest have a future in Israel? Which bridgehead will Australia prove to be? There is no certainty, no guarantee. One thing is for sure. The days of the wandering Jew have returned.
[1] Yariv Levin
[2] From the song You took my Hand in Yours. The phrase also appears in the reverse: what you see from here, you don’t see from there.
