Preface:
During our walk and talk in London, I told Haitham that I was disturbed by the way some people threw around the term Zionist as if it were an insult - or worse. What do you think a Zionist is, I asked him. In response, he threw the question back at me. Since I promised to keep the details of our conversation private, I told Haitham that instead of writing about it directly, I would write a story - and dedicate it to him. So this story is dedicated to Haitham.

One October morning, shortly after Israel withdrew from Gaza, I met my friend Ilan for coffee. We try to get together every couple of weeks, usually on a weekday morning before he goes to work, but last summer I was busy in Gaza and he was unusually busy at work, so we didn’t see each other for a couple of months. There was a lot to catch up on and we talked for a long time.

I’ve been trying to think of a way to describe Ilan, but it’s not easy. I guess the best I can come up with is “an extraordinary ordinary man.” On the one hand he’s a middle class father of two who lives in a 2-bedroom Tel Aviv apartment, works in high tech, struggles to pay the mortgage, is actively involved in the parents’ committees at his children’s schools and is pretty much a homebody who likes to cook or read in his spare time. That’s the ordinary part.

On the other hand he’s pretty much a genius. He earned a PhD in pure mathematics in less than a year, developed technology that led to the creation of two start-ups, can quote reams of Hebrew poetry, speaks flawless English (‘though he has always spoken to me in Hebrew, even when I had only a tiny vocabulary) and has an enviable memory for factoids about an astonishing range of subjects. He’s also a wonderful friend – the kind of guy who takes half a morning off work to reconfigure my computer, or listen sympathetically as I moan about a recently ended romance.

Ilan was born and raised in Jaffa. His father was a Polish Holocaust survivor and his mother immigrated to Israel as a child, shortly after King Faisal expelled the Jewish community from her native Iraq. His parents were active members of the Israeli Communist Party, but Ilan’s disenchantment with communism began at the age of 14, when he spent a summer in the former USSR with a group of international communist youth. He figured that if everyone he saw looked depressed and miserable, probably communism wasn’t as great as he’d been told.

In Israel, gifted high school students are sometimes allowed to complete their undergraduate degrees before starting their mandatory army service. Then they are slotted into prestigious jobs in intelligence units, which is what Ilan thought would happen to him. But when he showed up at the induction centre with his degree in mathematics and computer programming, he discovered that, because of his parents’ political affiliations, the army considered him a security risk.

So while all his friends were whisked away to the glamorous jobs, Ilan was sent to work as an “assistant copy machine technician” at an obscure army office in the middle of nowhere. He nearly went out of his mind with boredom-induced depression. After a few months he managed to get himself transferred: he spent the rest of his mandatory service teaching remedial mathematics at an army school for soldiers who wanted to improve their matriculation results. In his spare time, he completed his Master’s degree in mathematics.

After his discharge, Ilan was never called up for reserve army duty.

Ilan is mostly a leftist, but he is not dogmatic. He has an endearing quality of thinking through each issue individually, and he often surprises me. Once, for example, after I told him about a disturbing incident I’d witnessed at an army checkpoint in the West Bank, I worried aloud that the ill-will created by such incidents would make it increasingly difficult for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate a peace agreement.

Actually, he responded, I don’t worry about that at all. Israel and West Germany were already discussing diplomatic relations five years after the Holocaust. I’m much more worried about whether there will be clean water for my daughters to drink, and clean air for them to breathe, when they are adults.

He is an avowed atheist, but he makes sure his daughters don’t make noise that will disturb his religious neighbours on the Sabbath. And he has a strong aversion to secular Israelis who spout negative generalizations about religious people. For Ilan, it is the individual who counts.

Once I asked Ilan why he had never taken advantage of the opportunities he’d been offered to work in the United States, where he could earn far more than he did in Israel.

“Because I would feel like a stranger,” he answered. “Israel is my heritage, Hebrew is my language and Tel Aviv is my city. I wouldn’t feel comfortable anywhere else.”

Over coffee that October morning, I told Ilan about something I’d seen in Netzarim on the day it was evacuated.

I hadn’t visited Netzarim prior to the disengagement. I’d met and spoken with residents of many other settlements and I knew they were a mixed bunch. Some claimed a God-given right to the land, but many were secular Israelis who told me they’d chosen to live in Gush Katif for the quality of life – the cheap housing, the small communities and the good schools. I even met some modern Orthodox people who insisted that they were not ideologues, that they’d just seen an opportunity to establish a profitable agricultural business or a textile factory and they’d taken it – with government encouragement. Their major objection to being relocated was what they saw as inadequate financial compensation from the government. They did not express any particular antipathy toward Palestinians; actually, many said that they had good relations with their neighbours.

But Netzarim was homogeneous – and extreme. It was a tiny settlement of 62 religious, ideological families, deep in the middle of Gaza and surrounded by Palestinian residential areas. I told my sister that Netzarim was like a spoonful of sour cream in the middle of a big bowl of borscht, with the borscht representing Palestinian territory. Three hundred and fifty Israeli soldiers protected those 62 families. There was nothing on the settlement except houses, a kindergarten and a synagogue; a trip to the supermarket required armoured vehicles and an army escort.

The settlement was frequently shot at from the Palestinian areas, which were just a few minutes’ walk away.

About a week after Netzarim was evacuated, I visited one of those Palestinian residential neighbourhoods and watched from an apartment roof as Israeli bulldozers destroyed the empty houses of the former Jewish settlement. Surrounding us was the rubble of several Palestinian homes that had also been crushed by Israeli bulldozers, because they had been used by gunmen who shot at Netzarim. (photo here).

A few television crews for various Arab television stations were filming Netzarim from the roof of the apartment building; after he’d made us coffee on the portable kerosene stove, one of the cameramen pointed at the piles of rubble below and said cynically that he didn’t understand why it was taking so long to destroy Netzarim, since it had only taken a few minutes to blow up the Palestinian houses directly below us.

Early on the morning of the evacuation, I walked around Netzarim and talked to a few of the residents. Few had begun to pack, even though the army was scheduled to arrive in just a couple of hours to take them away; and even though the residents had negotiated an agreement that would allow them to be resettled as a group, as long as they left without resistance.

At one point I stopped in front of a house that had a large balcony on the roof; according to the sign in front, the family’s name was Karkover. The parents and their children were assembled on the balcony as the father sang psalms; he didn’t stop singing when the soldiers arrived to deliver their evacuation order, but one of the sons shouted down “How can you do this? Aren’t you ashamed? Jews don’t expel Jews! We’re not Arabs!”

After a few more journalists, including two Israeli television crews, had joined me, Mr. Karkover stopped singing. He spread his arms wide, like a biblical prophet on a mountain, and began to speak.

“Secular Zionism,” he said, “Has no soul. Once it created something, but no more. It has lost its way. We are the future of Israel. Religious Zionism is what has made this country great. Our children are the best of the best. They don’t need psychologists. Send your psychologists to the children in the discotheques and clubs of Tel Aviv. Our children are just fine.”

He continued on in that vein for a few more minutes. I stood in the hot sun, brushing drops of perspiration off my nose and scribbling notes. One Israeli reporter muttered, “He makes me wanna barf. How dare he think he’s better than me?”

I thought a lot about secular Zionism that morning. I thought about my secular Zionist friend who volunteers to teach chess at a community center for Arab and Jewish children; about the secular Zionist kibbutz members who volunteered to help farmers from Gush Katif transport their greenhouses to their new homes inside Israel; about the secular Zionist physicians who volunteer at the free medical clinic for illegal foreign workers in South Tel Aviv. About the secular Zionists who do volunteer community work in Israel’s disadvantaged areas.

Over coffee, I told Ilan that I’d been disturbed by Mr. Karkover’s divisive tone, by its elitism and by the way he dismissed anyone who didn’t think and live as he did.

Ilan listened to me intently, without interrupting. Then he said slowly, “Well, the difference between religious Zionists like him and me is that I don’t think I’m better than them. I believe that they deserve the same rights as I do, and that we should all respect each other.”

Then he said, “It’s true that secular Zionism has lost its way. It has to decide what it is, and it can’t just have a negative message of what it’s against – against the settlements, against the occupation, against the religious. I don’t hate the ultra-Orthodox or the national religious people. I’m against secular parties like Shinui that preach a religion of anti-religion. Hatred is not constructive.”

“So what do you believe in?” I asked Ilan

In response, he pointed to the street sign outside that said “Ahad Ha’am”, and said, “I believe in Ahad Ha’am’s vision: a secular, humanist nation that is a nation like all others, with solidarity, equality and positive accomplishments. A place of tolerance.”

Then he looked at his watch and said he had to get to work. I stood up to hug him goodbye, and as I embraced him I whispered jokingly in his ear, “Ilan, you’re my Zionist hero.”