Israel, Why We Care

As a 7 year-old girl in Paris, I went to Sunday school and learned all about Cain and his brother, Abraham and his son, Esau's lentils, Jacob's ladder, Moses' tables, Joseph's well, David's lute and all the rest. Palestine was home. Jews were relatives who'd found God and had been found by him back way back. From then on, I accepted them as fellow travellers along the path of my life. They have accompanied me to this very day.

As a 9 year-old, my father started telling me and my brothers about the war. He'd been in Berlin in '42-'44, a passionate anti-Nazi, and had done his private bit in opposing Hitler's thugs, saving a Jewish couple from the claws of the Gestapo and preventing the arrest of an American secret service agent. This got him thrown out of Germany, which was lucky, since these guys were more used to murdering than banishing. Still, they had their own rules and stopped short of assassinating a Swiss diplomat. I have always wondered about the two Jews: did they survive?

As an 11 year-old I fell in love with a beautiful young Egyptian boy who told me about camels, minarets and 1001 nights, teaching me how to write my name in Arabic. On the 5th of June 1967, he disappeared. Our school mistress told us a war had broken out in the desert, and that my friend had had to leave. He'd come back when all was over and done with. At home my parents were glued to the news. A few days later, they triumphantly announced Israel's victory and took us kids to the Drugstore on the Champs-Elysées. I had a banana split.

François Kamel didn't come back. Instead, a new boy arrived in our class. He was pale, thin and his black eyes were shining. His name was Gil and he told us he was a Sabra as well as a Kibbutznik, which left a deep impression. I promptly fell in love, since my previous flame had abandoned me. Gil told me about the Shrine of the Book and the hill of Armageddon, and about sharing property and having no money. Then he taught me how to write my name in Hebrew.

In 1970, 14 years-old, I read the memoirs of Golda Meir, "O Jerusalem" from Lapierre/Collins, and Leon Uris' "Exodus". To a girl brought up with the stories of the French resistance instead of Andersen's fairy tales, the Israelis became the quintessential resilient underdog, the freedom fighter summa cum laude, forever repeating little David's slaying of the big bad Goliath. I loved them and totally identified with these wonderful cousins who'd suffered beyond imagination but never given up the ghost, and who were now about to transform a piece of dump into the modern Garden of Eden. Had I been allowed to, I would have gone straight to a kibbutz.

1974-1978 I read all the books of Primo Levi and started to believe in hell, which was on earth, and in the Devil, humanity itself. God was dead, obviously, and for a while, there had not been enough light for most people to see what was perpetrated before their very eyes. Light needed to be reinvented, this was the purpose of life.

In 1998 I went to Israel with 25 German youth actors. We performed "Goodbye Butterfly", my play about the Theresienstadt ghetto, to sold-out audiences in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Hasorea. On the last night of our trip, we had a bonfire party with about 20 young Israelis on the Sheraton Beach in Tel Aviv. Just before midnight, Ruth Elias, a survivor from Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, came to meet us. She looked frail and hard at the same time. Her silvery crew-cut shone in the moonlight. A dozen German kids came to sit in the sand around her, to talk things over. She wanted to know what it was like to have a Nazi grandfather. They told her. It was a starry night and the waves were loud. I let them deal with this alone; it was their story. At the end, everyone hugged Ruth. 50 years ago, when she'd given birth to a child in Auschwitz, Mengele had her breasts hermetically bandaged, wanting to find out how long the baby would survive without food or drink. As it started to dry out, Ruth poisoned it.

From then on, my life was full of Israel and Israeli friends. I travelled to the country several times. There were terror attacks, army operations, 2002 the end of Oslo; checkpoints sprang like mushrooms all over the territories and the settlements spread. My friends talked heatedly around the Shabbat table and said: "look at what is happening to us. We must stop this nonsense. Let them have their state and deal with their own internal mess. One day it will be too late and we will not wake up from this nightmare anymore". They told me to write about this and I did.

This is my story, and the story of many Europeans from my generation. We care. We listen to our Israeli friends, share their concern and join in their silent, o much too silent chorus: "No to occupation. Two states for two peoples. Share Jerusalem. Now". There is no security except in peace, justice and human dignity.