A New Consignment of History

On the third and last day of our northern Israel excursion, we parted ways with Mark Twain to visit some sites he skipped. We left Kibbutz Menara in the morning, drove west along the Lebanese border to an ancient synagogue in Kfar Baram, continued to Rosh HaNikra in the northwestern corner of Israel, and then turned south and drove down along the Mediterranean coast back to Tel Aviv.

The Baram synagogue, about three kilometers from Israel’s present-day border with Lebanon, was built during the Talmudic period (in the third century C.E.) by the Jewish community that survived in the Galilee after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and Judea. The synagogue has been partly restored by the Israel Department of Antiquities. A., ever the astute sociological observer, noticed right away that the three doorways of its front entrance symbolically face Jerusalem.


A Maronite Christian Arab village was built in the nineteenth century on the ruins of the Jewish village of Baram, but the Arab residents deserted it during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Most of them relocated to the nearby village of Jish (in present-day Israel), but their church is still standing, not far from the ruins of the synagogue.


I’m struck by how often we have seen this in Israel: successive settlements, all built in a jumble on top of one another, each on the ruins of the one before it. “From time to time a new consignment of history arrives,” as the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote, “and the houses and towers themselves are its packaging which is then thrown away and piled in heaps.” It brings to mind the “urban ecology” view developed by the Chicago School of sociologists in the early twentieth century, according to which urban neighborhoods are continually transformed by the invasion and succession of different groups. Here one sees urban ecology writ large – regional ecology, perhaps. And when you see enough of this, you realize how inadequate the notions of “colonialism” and “settler society” are for understanding the creation of the State of Israel. According to this view, axiomatic in certain left-wing academic circles, the Jews are European colonizers who displaced the indigenous Arab population. This view is only possible, of course, on the basis of a kind of historical amnesia that filters out what Max Weber called “inconvenient facts,” that forgets the long history of Jewish settlement in Palestine, the conquest and dispersion of the area’s Jewish population by the Roman Empire, and the Arab conquest of Palestine in the seventh century C.E. (not to mention the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population is not “European” at all but refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab countries). I am not suggesting that the colonial paradigm should be inverted, that we should recast the Arabs in the role of the bad colonizers and see the Jews as the virtuous indigenous population. My point, rather, is the absurdity of this distinction in the context of a long history of succession in which, if you scratch deep enough, today’s indigenous population turns out to be yesterday’s invaders, and yesterday’s invaders only remain so until the next invasion. Baram is a case in point. At first glance, it seems to be Exhibit A for the notion that Israel is a European colonial outpost built on the displacement of Arabs, but dig a little deeper (literally) and the story turns out to be more complicated. But then, historical truth is always more complicated than the Manichean parables crafted by those with an ideological axe to grind.

From Baram, we traveled to the stunning white cliffs of Rosh HaNikra, from which one can see Haifa Bay, the Galilee, and the Mediterranean. This cape has been a gateway in and out of Palestine for centuries,


and here too, even more so than in Baram, the continual transformation of this region by the invasion and succession of different groups is well evidenced. The ancient Ladder of Tyre, a steep road that connected the territory of Akko (Acre) with that of Tyre, once passed here; the Talmud mentions it as the northern limit of the Holy Land. Alexander the Great entered the Land of Israel through Rosh HaNikra, and he is said to have led his army through a tunnel his troops dug in the cliffs. Later, the Muslim conquerors renamed the area A-Nawakir (the grottoes), from which the present Hebrew name (Rosh HaNikra) is derived. In the twentieth century, the British army invaded Lebanon from Rosh HaNikra and dug a railroad tunnel here. When the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, the Palmach blew up the railway bridges to prevent the Lebanese army from invading Israel. Three decades later, the movement of troops flowed in the other direction as Israeli forces invaded Lebanon from Rosh HaNikra. Most recently, just a few days before our arrival, Hezbollah returned the bodies of two Israeli reservists here – the same ones whose kidnapping started the Second Lebanon War two years ago – in exchange for five Lebanese prisoners, including the notorious child-killer Samir Kuntar, convicted thirty years ago of smashing the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl after murdering her father, and the bodies of 199 Lebanese combatants and infiltrators.

But it is not just the continual invasion and succession of human beings that has transformed and reshaped Rosh HaNikra; it is also the unending war of attrition waged by the sea. As its name suggests, the main attraction of this cape is the natural grottos, accessible only by cable car, formed by the sea in the white seaside cliffs over thousands of years. No less than the social ecology of this region, natural ecology has also made it what it is today.