Between Nakba and Shoah

'Israel has become its own ghetto, where Jews are less safe than Diaspora Jews,' says Kai Bird in his thought-provoking new memoir that leaves readers with much to think about

Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978

Author: Kai Bird

Publisher:   Simon & Schuster

Pages: 423

Price: Rs 1,299

In 1956, eight years after the violent creation of the state of Israel, five-year-old Kai Bird overheard an American heiress in East Jerusalem proclaiming that she would give a million dollars to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Excited, he told his father, America’s vice-consul in the then Jordanian-controlled part of the city, “Daddy, we have to win this prize.”

Almost seven decades later Kai Bird isn’t closer to that jackpot. Neither, of course, is anyone else, whether politician or terrorist. Yet, in a post-October 7, 2023 introduction to  Crossing Mandelbaum Gate , his reissued 2010 memoir, he revels in memories of his childhood naivete, believing that the Israelis and Palestinians will find peace someday.

Mr Bird is the co-author with the late Martin J Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus,  the biography of Robert Oppenheimer that formed the basis for the Oscar-sweeping movie Oppenheimer. In that book, Mr Bird was very much the historian. In this one,  he is an unwitting actor in a consequential period of history from the Suez crisis to the 1967 war and the Black September attacks of 1970. His memoir isn’t a comprehensive history of the Arab-Israeli conflict nor even a potted one. His “subversive intention” in writing this memoir is to posit the conundrum of identity, an issue that resonates around the world today as much as it did then. He asks, “How does one define national identity? By ethnicity or religious grounds?... And can there be a modern, secular definition of citizenship in the Middle East mosaic?”

Between his West Asian childhood and youth, when his girlfriend was a hostage on an airliner hijacked by Palestinian terrorists, and his research into the lives of his Jewish parents-in-law, Holocaust survivors, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate  does not answer these questions fully either. Mandelbaum Gate refers to a heavily guarded crossing dividing East and West Jerusalem that Kai passed through to go to school. It was emblematic of the conflict. Once part of a mansion owned by a Jewish merchant family that settled in Palestine in the late 19th century that later became the headquarters of the Haganah Jewish militia, and the scene of rioting between Arabs and Jews in the late 1920s. It was later demolished.

His parents came from Eugene, Oregon, as small-town America as you can get. Among other things, his father reported on the activities of the Jordanian Hashemite monarchy . East Jerusalem was close to the armistice line of 1949 and echoed with the ancient sounds of donkeys braying, church bells, the Muslim call to prayer; machine gun and sniper fire were the modern echoes. Speaking Arabic, Kai grew up in the multicultural milieu of pre-Israel Palestine, among Lebanese, Egyptians, Americans, Armenians, Arabs, Jews, Christians and Muslims.

In less than a year of arriving, his parents found it difficult to sympathise with the Zionist cause. Evacuating his home during the Suez crisis and then the 1967 war they understood the experience of displacement. As his mother wrote to a friend, “When I came out, my bias was undetermined, or if anything slightly leaning towards the Israeli side, now I find it difficult to understand the refusal of the Israelis to regard themselves as the aggressor.” She added, “If you lived in tents … since 1948, seeing your home occupied by outsiders you might be better able to understand that sporadic isolated attempts to strike back are inevitable”.

Later, tracing his parents-in-law’s struggles in Nazi Germany, Mr Bird’s views were somewhat leavened. “The Palestinians did not understand that Israel is a society deeply traumatised by the Shoah [catastrophe]. …When Palestinians maim and kill in the name of resistance to the occupation, Israeli society resurrects Hitler,” he writes. Yet he recognised that the Israeli state was deeply flawed in conception: “Instead of creating a state … where its citizens can live a normal life like the citizens of… any other nation-state, Israel has become its own ghetto where Jews are in fact less safe than Diaspora Jews.”

This evocative coming-of-age memoir may provoke disagreement but it leaves readers with plenty to think about. As the First and Second Intifadas broke out, Mr Bird wonders why neither side produced a leader like Gandhi who understood the power of non-violence as a weapon of resistance. But Gandhi is a unique figure in history. In 2024, with the “symbiotic relationship” between the Israeli right wing and Hamas weakening peace prospects, his book reminds us of at least two missed opportunities that, he thinks, could have ended the cycle of violence that benefits neither Israelis nor Palestinians, who refer to the events of 1948 as “Nakba” (catastrophe). In 1972, King Hussein of Jordan proposed the creation of a “United Arab Kingdom” comprising a Palestinian state/region in the West Bank and a Hashemite state/region on the East Bank each autonomous within a federated structure with regional parliaments, an elected governor and with the capital in East Jerusalem. This was rejected by Israel as “fanciful” (to the relief of Yasser Arafat, unwilling to share power with Hussein) because it entailed giving up some captured territory.

Another solution in a one-page “citizens’ charter” worked out by his childhood neighbour Sari Nusseibeh, architect of the First Intifada, and Ami Ayalon, a former Israeli intelligence chief. It proposed a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with Arabs and Israelis enjoying the right of return only within those territories, Jerusalem as a joint capital, a joint fund for rehabilitating displaced Palestinians and both sides renouncing all claims to each other’s territories. The proposal garnered a quarter-million signatures from Israelis and slightly less from Palestinians. Unsurprisingly, it gained no traction beyond that.