Aliyah

WAITING
In 1972 my father sent my then much younger older sisters to Israel for a few months to live and work on a kibbutz. I don't recall why I didn't go along. Perhaps it was because I was still in high school. More likely, I didn't go for the simple reason that my father wanted me to go. In any event, they went, and I didn't.

Now, nearly forty years later, I am in Budapest's Liszt Ferenc airport waiting to board Hungarian Airlines flight 210 to Tel Aviv.


Four months ago when I alighted in Hungary and passed through this airport for the first time to begin my Fulbright I had no thought of traveling to Israel. Now, four months later, having been to Budapest, Berlin, Krakow; having visited the synagogues emptied by the Nazis and Arrow Cross; having read the travails of the Hungarian Jewish survivors George Konrad and Imre Kertesz; deeply regretting the loss of the superb Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb, who was beaten to death in a concentration camp at age 43, a career ended at three titles; I have an interest in Israel I never had before and never would have anticipated.

For the record: I have not kept a close watch on Israeli politics during my lifetime. For the record: That which I have paid attention to has distressed me.

From my perspective way across the Atlantic, Israel has too often been governed by muscle-bound hawks, Zionist zealots who have engaged in oppression and babarity unconscionable for a people who have suffered oppression and barbarity so intensely themselves. I read with shame about General Ariel Sharon's Lebanese concentration camps in the 80s, no less despicable in their way than were Hitler's in the 40s and Stalin's in the 50s. He should have been tried rather than elected Prime Minister. 


First with Sharon, then with Netanyahu, and now again with Netanyahu, if Israel had a moral compass, it has lost it; if Israel had moral authority, it has ceded it. I hope in time Israel can find them again. Being Jewish, acting on behalf of, or in defense of, the Jewish state excuses nothing. If anything it should carry greater responsibility.

What's more, Israeli politics regarding its Arab neighbor states is suicidal. For how long can Israel keep the Palestinians under "control"? For how long can it continue to support the vast military apparatus it (and the U.S.) has built in the name of defense, when, in the end, such defense will only lead to increased tension and inevitable war? 

***

I am naive. And I am self-righteous. I have not been to Israel. I have never lived there, never seen it from the inside looking out. I don't know if a week's time there will give me a better perspective, but I hope so. 
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SEAT 5A
I am now cruising at 41,000 feet, somewhere above the clouds and Bulgaria. An inflight video boosting Hungary just showed some of the country's inventors and inventions: Leo Szilard; soft-contact lenses; light-emitting concrete; color TV; Excel; phonograph recording; something to do with virtual reality; and more. Pretty impressive, actually.

It's hard not to think about what, perhaps, will not be invented, or invented later rather than sooner, owing to the holocaust. Some of it we probably wouldn't have wanted. But who knows what future goods were undone when the children were marched to the gas chambers? What might Antal Szerb have lived to write had he even reached my age?

Such questions can be asked of all deaths, everywhere and for all times. Still, the genocide of Europe's Jews is different, a half-million of whom were Hungarian. Whole generations of a people never to be born.

But I follow the nose of this plane; I look ahead to Israel. Imperfect as it is, I will try to understand it, try to love it. Born of so much hate, I must try to love it.