From Judas

The neighbors called him an Arab-lover. They called him Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti. And some people called him a traitor, because he justified, to some extent, the Arab opposition to Zionism and because he fraternized with Arabs. And yet he always insisted on calling himself a Zionist and even claimed he belonged to the small handful of true Zionists who were not intoxicated with nationalism. He described himself as the last disciple of that Zionist visionary Ahad Ha’am. He had known Arabic since his childhood, and he loved to sit surrounded by Arabs in the coffeehouses of the Old City and talk for hours on end. He had close friends among the Muslim and the Christian Arabs. He pointed to a different way. He had a different idea altogether. I argued with him. I stuck to my view that this war was sacred, a war of which it is written, ‘Let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber,’ et cetera. My child, Micha, my only son, Micha, might perhaps not have gone to this war had it not been for his father’s talk of a sacred war: I had brought him up from an early age on tales of the heroic defenders of Tel Hai and Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads and the brave guards of the Jewish villages and the need for the courageous ancient Hebrew warriors to come back to life. I programmed him. Not just me. All of us.