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Aharon Megged: 'I did not see the villages.'
Eyal Megged: 'They were already trained not to see it.'
Photo: Eli Elgarat

One land, two nations

Aharon and Eyal Megged experienced the Six Day War differently: the father was excited by the great miracle and the son encountered Palestinians for the first time. A conversation with two generations on the war that changed the face of the country

For Aharon and Eyal Megged the Six Day War was a conscious turning point. They were both socialist Zionists who turned rightward, but in different ways that stemmed from different life experiences: the father who felt that the choking borders of the land were ventilated in a great miracle, and the son, born in ’48, who was excited by the new territories spread out in front of him, until he encountered the Palestinian nation.

 

Aharon: “My life is divided into twenty-year chapters: from ’48 until ’67, from ’67 until ’86 when the first intifada broke out, and from ’86 until today. Paradoxically, in the first twenty years under the Mandate, I felt my connection to the land and the land’s connection to me greater than in any other period. This was despite the fact that Arabs were the majority and that we were living under British rule. It was because we wandered around the entire country by foot. I was part of the immigrant camps and we would go out on walking tours that began in Ra'anana through Kfar Saba, Kalkilya, Tulkarem, Nablus, and Jenin until Emek Yizrael. A guide or two would lead us. I had a gun in my canteen that no one saw. Children would throw stones at us in Kalkilya, but we slept in a sheikh’s house in Jenin and never felt that our lives were in danger. We walked among the streams, fig and olive trees, and rocks and read in the Bible about Hebron and Jericho and thought: ‘This is our land’. Right after the Six Day War there was a feeling that we had returned. An excitement. Unlike Eyal, I did not see the villages.

 

Eyal: “They were already trained not to see it. During the war I was 19 and served in Army Radio. Two days before the war broke out I ran out of socks and underwear, so I went home and the war caught me at home. I sat in the Army Radio station in Jaffa burning with anger that the forces had left and I was not accompanying them. I was looking for some action and there was no logistical way to get any. So I personally enlisted my father and his car. He conditioned it on the condition that he would drive. He was only drafted later on to the History division to write the history of the war. So with the help of my uniform and army reporter badge we were able to arrive at the tail end of a battle in Latrun.

 

“I immediately took out my microphone and I remember that I interviewed the soldiers that were resting in the monastery. My soul was entwined with this area, and after a few days I returned. That is when I had the first shock of the war, in that they razed the three pretty villages that I had seen previously. I saw the refugees fleeing and that was my first encounter with Palestinians in the way my father was familiar with it. For my generation, this was the first time that we had encountered this nation, as a nation, and not as Arabs under military rule. Here the conscious issue was formed; it took many years to mature into recognition of our existence opposite the Palestinians. This was the largest and longest-lasting effect, for me it began in Latrun. In those three villages, in the small enclave that they decided to raze. The effect was that they joined the ruins of ’48 in a very short time. From there began a conscious odyssey, very significant in my opinion that has constant repercussions.

 

Aharon: “I remember that trip, but I do not remember Latrun.”

 


Father and son (Photo: Eli Egert)

 

Eyal: “I will tell you why, because for you those territories did not make as big an impression as they did for me, because I think that you knew them from not too long ago. From today’s perspective, 19 years is not a lot. It is less time than between the first Lebanon war and today. For us it was as if we had landed on the moon. I thought that I would travel all over the world; but across the Green Line, a skip and a jump from Jerusalem - I never thought I would get there. There was no way to imagine a situation where there would be non-military contact between us and the Arabs.”

 

Aharon: “But there were also Arabs here.”

 

Eyal: “But they were undefined Arabs. They were Arabs that I cannot recall ever being called Palestinians. They were Arabs under Israeli military rule, or waiters in Yunus or Abu Kristo in Akko. Even though I met Arabs when I was a student in the new high school, which was a very ideological school and educated towards bi-nationalism. After the excitement died down, the conscious issue began to germinate: who is that nation that is living there. Even though there was a perception from what was written during that period that they were empty places with no one living there. It was romantic. In the beginning there was a feeling of messianism and of a mutual embrace. There was not yet the effect of occupation. Slowly the romantic place had problems. My generation is the generation that deliberated between all these directions. It was also entranced by the idea that suddenly breached the borders, more than previous generations that should have guarded the memory of these places. My father was also in Syria with the youth movement. They lived in this entire Mandatory area, so it was not as great a sensation for them as it was for us, who were trapped in the smallest Israel of any generation.”

 

Aharon: “The Six Day War was six days. That is very short. I was 47 then so I was not drafted for the reserves. I was attached to the Northern command; I was deputy education lieutenant in those circumstances, to report on what happened. I followed the forces; I followed the entire journey to Jenin, to Nablus, southward.”

 

Eyal: “To the Golan Heights.”

 

Aharon: “I traveled to the Golan Heights and went to Tel Facher. That was one of the most difficult battles. When I arrived there, when I got to the entire Golan, there were no villages. I did not see any villages. There were just a few ruins here and there.”

 

Eyal: “There was Kuneitra.”

 

Aharon: “Ah yes, Kuneitra. When we arrived at Kuneitra it was a destroyed city. But in Tel Facher itself or around it, all I saw were dead bodies. The Arabs that were killed. They lay in the ditches and there were already flies on them and there was a stench of corpses. But the victory itself, it was as we said then “we were as dreamers”. It was an unbelievable mythological event, like the siege of Assyria on Jerusalem that is mentioned in the Bible, that there was a plague and suddenly the siege was lifted and suddenly they were living anew. The Six Day War was a similar biblical miracle. When I went back to these places it was like returning, since I had lived there during the Mandate for twenty years. As Alterman said then: “The State of Israel returned to the Land of Israel and now we have to complete the third side of this triangle; to bring in the nation of Israel.”

 

What did the writers do

 

In their works, they touch on the war in a roundabout way. Eyal’s task is more direct and Aharon’s, most of whose books take place in a far away world from the bloody battlefields, is more hinted at.

 

Aharon: “Of my 32 books, not one describes the Six Day War, but it is indirectly mentioned in “Iniquity”. The hero of this story is an anonymous poet named Yaakov Levinstein, who under the fabricated name, Assaf Hagoel, wrote two poems, the first after the War of Independence, and the second after the Six Day War. The first received fame and recognition and the second was sent to newspapers and no one wanted to publish it, despite the fact that it was not any worse than the first. Not only that, but one of the journalists who received it was also a literary editor who stole it and changed it around: where Hagoel wrote, “By the flame of the light they clung to the longing of the destroyed earth”. The editor changed it to “By the flame of the fire they scorched the longing of the raped earth’ and thus the poem was published.

 

“In 1967 my works were in a collection entitled “Not by the Sword Alone”, there were pieces written before the war, during the war and a short while after. An atmosphere rested on the writers then of enthusiastic patriotism, with no connection to Right or Left.”

 

Eyal: “Even Uri Avneri was in it.”

 

Did the war not crack the almost conscripted Zionist writing that characterized the 1948 generation?

 

Together: “No.”

 

Eyal: There was always discontent here.”

 

Aharon: “There were not yes men. The fact is that we were mostly Zionists, because that is how we were raised not because they told us to or that we wanted to appease the leaders. Until today I am a Zionist and I have deep roots in this land.”

 

But something happened. Clear camps were drawn. Some explicitly said: “We are going to the other side.”

 

Eyal: “I think they died quickly. Alterman and Agnon did not participate in any of the spiritual, cultural or political disturbances that were around.”

 

Do you remember the prophecy of Yeshayahu Leibowitz?

 

Eyal: “Yes. The day after the war I identified more with Leibowitz than with the Greater Israel supporters.”

 

Aharon: "Really? I did know not what kind of enemy I had in the house.”

 

Eyal: “I remember that I told you, but you can not remember all my nuances. On Army Radio we had a comic diary called “The Withdrawal Diary”. Each one of the five journalists reported on the army’s retreat from the areas that we had captured. It was surrealistic because just like we never thought we would enter these places, we thought that we would never leave them. It was a surrealistic diary according to what Leibowitz said: “Get out of there quickly, without any compensation for it will corrupt you”. When he spoke about a “Disco Kotel” he expressed what I thought. You can not take the prophetic sense from him.”

 

Aharon: “The satiric.”

 

Eyal: “Yes, we have great prophets who were satirists.”

 

Eyal: “I could not identify with the Greater Israel Movement’s famous petition that was signed by the best writers and philosophers, despite the fact that their intention was that the land should not be divided again and most of them were humanists who wanted to bestow citizenship on the Arabs. My father did not sign it. What did they call it Dad, a proclamation?”

 

Aharon: “It was not a proclamation it was a tantrum.”

 

Why did you not sign it?

 

Aharon: “Because even then I thought that there should be two states.”

 

Eyal: “His refusal to sign perfectly expresses the problem. The omitting of the two paragraphs. This is the central problem of the Six Day War; this is the major lesson for which I do not know if there is a solution. The war was a success and the management of things after the war was the worst in the world. This is all a result of this lameness. If you look at a dramatic piece it could be expected. If you do not have confidence in what you are doing you will always have a catastrophe coming from it, because you did not walk with any true compass following this war. Either you ignore it, or you hide it like we have done since the beginning of Zionism and the catastrophe gets worse as you encounter more chapters and more battles.

 

“Our main failure was the mistake which arose from the Six Day War, according to which we could pay with the coin of ’67 for the sin of ’48. To repay the debt that began in a fighter’s discussion that took place immediately after the war, there they beat this sin, which was inconsequential compared to the sin of ’48. The entire path that they marked was wrong, and the Left are the ones who reinforced this erroneous conception, they are the ones who decided on the equation that if we give back the territories it will be the end to the conflict. It will not be solved until we deal with the truth that returning the territories will not solve the problem. The problem began in another place.”

 

What did we gain from this war?

 

Eyal: “The Palestinians, who interest me more than any other nation, because we love the same place. In my book “Woman Country”, I compared the situation to the tragic situation of two men who love the same woman. There is closeness between them because they love the same body. In my opinion the war should have caused us to understand that it is not a tragedy that they are here, that it added a dimension that is not only a dimension of confrontation. But we need a change of heart. I as an intellectual can say this. Who will say it if not writers?”

 


פרסום ראשון: 06.04.07, 18:20
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