Joel Schalit :
“Two Land Rovers is nothing. Six, and you know there’s a problem.” Headed out of the Israeli Arab village of Umm-Al-Fahm, in the direction of Megiddo Prison, their presence on the busy highway crossing Wadi Ara, was disconcerting. Unlike civilian vehicles, they’d move a little more slowly, compounding the already dense rush hour traffic.
“I would have preferred we didn’t buy these things,” said my father, as he idled his car at a light. “The jeeps we make, at a factory in Nazareth, are perfectly suitable for the purpose. But the army just had to buy British.” Having imported his own fair share of army vehicles himself, on behalf of the IDF’s nascent transport command during the War of Independence, the remains of his efforts still litter the highway in the hills approaching Jerusalem, monuments to the 1948 Arab siege.
“Weren’t those British vehicles?” I asked Elie, recalling that he wasn’t exactly innocent when it came to requisitioning military gear from the Crown. “Yes,” he said, giving me a sharp look. “Some of them were surplus vehicles from North Africa. But we didn’t have any choice during those days. We used what we could find. If you’ll remember, the air force flew Messerschmidts at first, and I hate to say it, but they were better than the British Spitfires we got later.”
It wasn’t the first conversation of the kind we had. But it was typical of the sort of ambivalence my father routinely expressed about the British, as the colonial authority he grew up under, in Mandate Palestine (1917-1948). So ingrained was his dislike for them, it wasn’t all that surprising that he preferred German over British fighters. But it was an especially interesting exception to have made, given the Messerschmidts were flown under Hitler. It was though he felt the British were worse.
Jewish resentment of the British, in the Palestine of my father’s youth, was the monopoly of the extreme right, particularly terrorist groups like the Irgun, who routinely targeted British forces. Working for the Haganah, the underground military wing of the governing Jewish authorities under the British, Elie was more of a soldier for the establishment. He hated the British, and broke their laws as often as he could. But, he always observed the pretence of being allied with them.
The amount of confusion and anxiety this instilled in him was immense. On the one hand, he identified with the British. They represented authority, and culture, in a region of the world wracked by anarchy and violence. On the other hand, they were an obstacle, in the way of independence and freedom from two thousand years of homelessness.It was an especially loaded, albeit typical set of grievances informing the desire for decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century.
But it would be a long way towards coming to grips with the legacy the British left for Israelis like him. Growing up in the shadow of the Mandate, the crisis of managing this, in persons of my father’s generation, was obvious, starting with the Palestinians. “These Land Rovers were probably coming back from a demolition,” my father said, referring to the IDF’s practice of levelling the homes of families of guerrillas or terrorists. “The British pioneered that,” he often said.
The repetition of the criticism was always significant, as though the identification of the national background of the innovator was explanation in and of itself of the moral transgression. The British are just like that, was the logic. They are colonialists at heart. The longer we behave like them, the longer we imitate them, the lower our chances of ever being welcomed here, meaning Israel, was the implication. That was the idea. Clearly, he had other alternatives in mind.
As the date of the Brexit referendum drew closer, I could not help but think about my father’s British anxiety, as though it were some sort of unconscious way of saying it wouldn’t be so bad if they left. For a country with as complicated a colonial past as the United Kingdom, to express resentment against the EU, as a superstate intent on taking away its sovereignty, feels especially disingenuous from a post-colonial point of view. Even one as complicated as that of Israel.
It is especially difficult to stomach given the aristocratic quarters from which much of the Brexit leadership hails. Witness the privilege of the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, or the ironically German-accented Gisela Stuart. One would be hard pressed to associate them with Yasir Arafat or Frantz Fanon. Not just for ethnic reasons, either. The privilege they radiate makes it hard to take their anti-colonial ”Independence Day’ rhetoric seriously. These are precisely the sort of British leaders my father’s colleagues in the Irgun would have considered killing in the 1940s.
In spite of all of this, I was raised in the United Kingdom, as well as in Israel, and also lived there as an adult. There’s a lot I value about my time in the country, in terms of both my education and the neighbourhoods I lived in, like Brixton. But what I miss is London. The city of Sadiq Kahn to be precise, and its wondrous mix of persons from Britain’s former territories, conjuring up a truly post-nation state context, detached from both the UK and its ex-colonial holdings, like Israel.
All of that, I fear, is what is being rebelled against by England’s elites, in the Brexit crisis. That’s what Europe represents to them and why they focus so heavily on immigration. This is why I find myself increasingly ambivalent about the United Kingdom, in ways not too dissimilar to my father, and persons of the post-colonial era like him. While I will never be forced to take up arms like he did, I understand the anger that motivated many Palestinian Jews of his generation to do so. It’s a rage that events like Brexit make it hard to disconnect from.
“Two Land Rovers is nothing. Six, and you know there’s a problem.” Headed out of the Israeli Arab village of Umm-Al-Fahm, in the direction of Megiddo Prison, their presence on the busy highway crossing Wadi Ara, was disconcerting. Unlike civilian vehicles, they’d move a little more slowly, compounding the already dense rush hour traffic.
“I would have preferred we didn’t buy these things,” said my father, as he idled his car at a light. “The jeeps we make, at a factory in Nazareth, are perfectly suitable for the purpose. But the army just had to buy British.” Having imported his own fair share of army vehicles himself, on behalf of the IDF’s nascent transport command during the War of Independence, the remains of his efforts still litter the highway in the hills approaching Jerusalem, monuments to the 1948 Arab siege.
“Weren’t those British vehicles?” I asked Elie, recalling that he wasn’t exactly innocent when it came to requisitioning military gear from the Crown. “Yes,” he said, giving me a sharp look. “Some of them were surplus vehicles from North Africa. But we didn’t have any choice during those days. We used what we could find. If you’ll remember, the air force flew Messerschmidts at first, and I hate to say it, but they were better than the British Spitfires we got later.”
It wasn’t the first conversation of the kind we had. But it was typical of the sort of ambivalence my father routinely expressed about the British, as the colonial authority he grew up under, in Mandate Palestine (1917-1948). So ingrained was his dislike for them, it wasn’t all that surprising that he preferred German over British fighters. But it was an especially interesting exception to have made, given the Messerschmidts were flown under Hitler. It was though he felt the British were worse.
Jewish resentment of the British, in the Palestine of my father’s youth, was the monopoly of the extreme right, particularly terrorist groups like the Irgun, who routinely targeted British forces. Working for the Haganah, the underground military wing of the governing Jewish authorities under the British, Elie was more of a soldier for the establishment. He hated the British, and broke their laws as often as he could. But, he always observed the pretence of being allied with them.
The amount of confusion and anxiety this instilled in him was immense. On the one hand, he identified with the British. They represented authority, and culture, in a region of the world wracked by anarchy and violence. On the other hand, they were an obstacle, in the way of independence and freedom from two thousand years of homelessness.It was an especially loaded, albeit typical set of grievances informing the desire for decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century.
But it would be a long way towards coming to grips with the legacy the British left for Israelis like him. Growing up in the shadow of the Mandate, the crisis of managing this, in persons of my father’s generation, was obvious, starting with the Palestinians. “These Land Rovers were probably coming back from a demolition,” my father said, referring to the IDF’s practice of levelling the homes of families of guerrillas or terrorists. “The British pioneered that,” he often said.
The repetition of the criticism was always significant, as though the identification of the national background of the innovator was explanation in and of itself of the moral transgression. The British are just like that, was the logic. They are colonialists at heart. The longer we behave like them, the longer we imitate them, the lower our chances of ever being welcomed here, meaning Israel, was the implication. That was the idea. Clearly, he had other alternatives in mind.
As the date of the Brexit referendum drew closer, I could not help but think about my father’s British anxiety, as though it were some sort of unconscious way of saying it wouldn’t be so bad if they left. For a country with as complicated a colonial past as the United Kingdom, to express resentment against the EU, as a superstate intent on taking away its sovereignty, feels especially disingenuous from a post-colonial point of view. Even one as complicated as that of Israel.
It is especially difficult to stomach given the aristocratic quarters from which much of the Brexit leadership hails. Witness the privilege of the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, or the ironically German-accented Gisela Stuart. One would be hard pressed to associate them with Yasir Arafat or Frantz Fanon. Not just for ethnic reasons, either. The privilege they radiate makes it hard to take their anti-colonial ”Independence Day’ rhetoric seriously. These are precisely the sort of British leaders my father’s colleagues in the Irgun would have considered killing in the 1940s.
In spite of all of this, I was raised in the United Kingdom, as well as in Israel, and also lived there as an adult. There’s a lot I value about my time in the country, in terms of both my education and the neighbourhoods I lived in, like Brixton. But what I miss is London. The city of Sadiq Kahn to be precise, and its wondrous mix of persons from Britain’s former territories, conjuring up a truly post-nation state context, detached from both the UK and its ex-colonial holdings, like Israel.
All of that, I fear, is what is being rebelled against by England’s elites, in the Brexit crisis. That’s what Europe represents to them and why they focus so heavily on immigration. This is why I find myself increasingly ambivalent about the United Kingdom, in ways not too dissimilar to my father, and persons of the post-colonial era like him. While I will never be forced to take up arms like he did, I understand the anger that motivated many Palestinian Jews of his generation to do so. It’s a rage that events like Brexit make it hard to disconnect from.
(Joel Schalit is News Editor of EurActiv.com. This article is excerpted from his forthcoming collection, Everywhere But There: Essays on Europe’s Diversity Crisis. His most recent book is Israel vs. Utopia).
