Israel's Own Psyche

Uri Avnery

On the morrow of the Six-day War, Amos Kenan came to my editorial office. He was in a state of shock. As a reserve soldier, he had just witnessed the emptying of three villages in the Latrun area. Men and women, old people and children, had been driven out in the burning June sun on a foot march in the direction of Ramallah, dozens of kilometers away. It reminded him of sights from the
 Holocaust.

I told him to sit down there and then and write an eyewitness account. I rushed to the Knesset (of which I was then a member) and delivered the report to the Prime Minister, Levy Eshkol, and to several ministers, including Menachem Begin and Victor Shem-Tov. But it was too late – the villages had already been razed to the ground. In their place, the Canada Park was created later on with the help of that country, to its lasting shame.

Kenan's report is a human and literary document. It says much about its author, who died this week. Amos Kenan was a moral person.

The country was the center of his mental universe. It was the focus of his worldview, his life work and his actions. I don't hesitate to say: he was the lover of this country. In his youth, he belonged for a time to the "Canaanite" group and adopted some of their ideas. But he drew from them the opposite conclusions from those of their founder, the poet Yonatan Ratosh, who denied the very notion of Arab nationhood, as well as the existence of the Palestinian Arab people. Kenan, like me, was convinced that the future of Israel was bound up with the future of Palestine, because the common land commands a partnership of the two peoples. I first met him during the 1948 war, on one of my short leaves. At a friend's place, I bumped into the young soldier who was also 
on leave.

He was born in the country and had been a member of the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair ("The Youth Guard") movement, whose idealistic-moral ideology certainly helped to shape his character. Like many leftist youngsters at the time, he joined the Lehi (Stern Group) underground, which then had a pro-Soviet orientation. With the founding of the state, all Lehi members were drafted into the new Israeli army.

We discovered that we had similar ideas about the future of the newly founded state. We both believed that we had created not only a new state, but also a new nation – the Hebrew nation, which is not just another part of the Jewish Diaspora, but a new entity altogether, with a new culture and a new character. Since this nation was born in the country, it does not belong to Europe or America, but to the region of which it is a part, and all the peoples of this region are our natural allies.

On this basis we objected to the 1956 war, in which Israel put itself at the service of two tainted colonialist regimes, the French and the British. While the war was still going on, a group came together and decided to outline another path for the state. We called ourselves "Semitic Action", and apart from Kenan and myself, our number included the former Lehi leader Nathan Yellin-Mor, Boaz Evron and other good people.

Immediately after the 1967 Six-Day War, the same group set up an organisation called "Federation Israel-Palestine", in which Kenan also played a role. We advocated the immediate founding of the State of Palestine in all the Palestinian territories that we had just conquered, and the setting up of a federation of Israel and Palestine. Many who opposed this then, now recognize that it was the right idea at the right moment. In 1974, when I was the first "Zionist" Israeli to establish secret contacts with the PLO leadership, I tried, in accord with them, to set up a public body in Israel to continue the contacts openly. Several meetings were held, a lot of discussion took place, and nothing came of it. So we decided to take the bull by the horns: we published a call for the creation of an organisation for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

The political aspect, important as it was, was only one of Kenan's many parts. He was a satirist, writer, poet, painter, sculptor, gardener, chef and who knows what else, a real renaissance person. But all these parts had one common denominator: the country.

Kenan was a man of quarrel and strife, who was quick to lose his temper and become aggressive. He had a tendency to hurt those who loved him. "There is only one way not to quarrel with you," I once told him, "and that is to cut off all relations and not to speak with you."

The last time we quarreled was when Gush Shalom called for a boycott on the products of the settlements. Kenan refused to join, ostensibly because we included the Golan settlements. "I don't want to give up the Golan wine," he said half in jest. But he hated the settlements, not only because they were built to obstruct peace with the Palestinians, but also because they symbolised in his eyes the general uglification of the country. He told me once that when looking out of the window of an aircraft he had suddenly realized that "the State of Israel has destroyed the Land of Israel."

In her semi-biographical book about her husband, which appeared not long ago in Hebrew, Nurit Gertz talks about his difficult childhood, when his father was in a mental institution. I suspect that throughout his life, he suffered from a hidden fear that he might inherit the disease. That may explain his bouts of alcoholism. Fortunately for him, he had an extraordinary mother, Mrs Levin, a short, vigorous and resolute woman who raised Amos and his two younger brothers practically on her own.

The only times I saw his face soften was when he was looking at Nurit or their two daughters, Shlomtzion and Rona. I could forgive him all the offensive and abusive attacks, because his creative talent was so much more important. He already disappeared from the landscape some years ago, when he fell victim to Alzheimer's disease. Actually, he faded away together with the culture he had helped to create.

The Hebrew culture, which was born in the early 40s died in the 60s. The heavy losses of our generation in the 1948 war and the mass immigration that flooded the state in its first few years meant the death of this unique culture and its replacement by the banal Israeli culture as it is now.

Amos Kenan's death marks the exit of one of that Hebrew culture's last remaining exponents. At Kenan's funeral, not a single representative of official Israel was present.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist. He served three terms in the Israeli parliament (Knesset), and is the founder of Gush Shalom peace
movement.