Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Page 53

Special Report

An Israeli’s Passover Reflections on His Country’s 50th Anniversary

By Neve Gordon

A story has it that at a Labor Party meeting in the early 1970s, Israeli novelist Amos Oz addressed Prime Minister Golda Meir: “When you came to Israel in the early 1920s you dreamed of establishing a Jewish State based on justice and equality, you dreamed of living peacefully with our Arab neighbors, and you dreamed of renewing our relationship to the Jewish heritage.

“So what do you dream of now?” Oz asked.

“The incessant ringing of the phone at night leaves me no time for dreams,” Golda responded.

Though he is in many ways her inferior, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s leadership is similar to Golda Meir’s in the sense that it also suffers from myopia. For what it’s worth I would like to offer my dream for Israel as it enters its 50th year, a dream which is informed by the theme and symbols of Passover, recently celebrated by Jews all over the world.

During Passover, family and friends gather in order to read from the Haggadah, a text which recounts how the people of Israel were liberated from the oppression of the Egyptian slavemasters, and how they began the long march toward freedom. The Haggadah states that “every person, in every generation, must regard him or herself as having been personally freed from bondage.”

Accordingly, Jews are not simply asked to summarize an historical experience, but to engage and grapple with the significance of the exodus story, and to ponder in what way it is relevant today. Rabbi Akiva (50-135 ce), for example, responded to this call and used the Passover gathering to plan a revolutionary struggle against the Roman oppressors, thus reaffirming the vision of freedom central to the Passover celebration.

Food that symbolizes the suffering of slavery is arranged on the Passover plate and placed in the middle of the table. Bitter herbs represent the harshness of subjugation and exploitation; charoset—a mixture of apples, nuts, and wine—looks like mortar and brings to mind the bricks our foreparents were forced to make, bricks with which they built Egyptian cities. A cup of salt water is a reminder of the tears that come with enslavement.

Because Jews were repeatedly subject to brutal repression, violence and systematic murder, they continued to identify with these symbols for over two millennia. To day, however, we are no longer victims and can savor the charoset’s sweetness, which signifies the freedom our ancestors longed for.

Realizing Freedom

My dream for Israel consists, therefore, of overcoming oppression and realizing freedom. The historical plight of the Jews was not the only issue on my mind this Passover, but also the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip which has now lasted for 31 years, making it perhaps the longest military occupation in the 20th century.

It is like the bitter herb we eat during the Passover meal: the torture, house demolitions, curfews, administrative detention, roadblocks, humiliation and not least the extreme poverty. In 1996, for instance, per capita GNP was $1,700 in the occupied territories, while just across the Green Line it was $17,800.

Bricks and salt water are not mere metaphors for Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. For substandard wages bricklayers from Gaza built the apartment in Beer-Sheva where I lived as a child, as they did thousands of other buildings throughout Israel.

The taste of salt is not uncommon in many villages in the southern part of the Strip. As director of the Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights, I met with villagers after they had filed a complaint concerning the drinking water, which flows only a few hours each day, tastes like brine, and seemed to be the cause of widespread diarrheic infection.

The tyrannical occupation is antithetical to the central principles of freedom and equality underlying the Passover story. Once victims, we Israeli Jews have assumed the role of oppressors. In my dream, I see Israel washing itself of this occupation and sharing with the Palestinians the sweetness of freedom which it has enjoyed for the past 50 years. I see a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

My dream is neither original nor unique, and does not greatly differ from the aspirations articulated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. After all, the Declaration states that the country “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Israel has not lived up to this Declaration. Golda Meir, who was one of its signatories, was to ignore it just a few years later, while the current prime minister, Netanyahu, not only abandoned its objectives but seems to disdain them. Fifty years have passed since it was written, it’s time to set things straight.