You Can Become Israeli

Clive Pinder’s argument that immigrants can become English, that belonging is something a nation can hand over and something a newcomer can earn, landed on my kitchen table with unusual force. I write from Efrat, Israel, and my country has spent two years running the same argument under the hardest possible conditions. Families from Britain and America kept arriving through the war, stepping off planes into a country under fire, and their absorption became a live test of everything Pinder’s essay proposes: what a country under siege asks of those who want in, and what it owes them back. The results say something about belonging that the calm, peaceful version of the debate never has to confront.

Arriving into the fire

Nobody immigrates to a missile map by accident. The olim who came in these two years knew exactly what they were walking into, and that knowledge changed the character of the arrival itself. In ordinary years, immigration is a bet on a better life; in these years it was a statement, made with a one-way ticket, that the belonging was worth the risk. The planes kept coming, and the country kept receiving them, sometimes with ceremony on airstairs and sometimes quietly, a family with eight suitcases landing at two in the morning and taking the shuttle to a rental in a town whose name they could not yet pronounce. The world kept arriving through all of it, visitors and settlers both, and the newest citizens arrived with their eyes open in a way no integration minister could have engineered.

What the country asked back

Pinder writes that Britain should demand assimilation and reward it with belonging. Wartime Israel demanded something rawer. Newcomers learned the country not through civics classes but through its emergency grammar: the shelter drill in a language they were still learning, the reserve-duty neighbours who disappeared and returned changed, the funeral attendance that became part of the weekly rhythm. The demand was total in a way no peacetime integration scheme is, and the reward was equally total, an intimacy with the country’s grief and stubbornness that takes decades in calm seasons. The woman from London who stood at the Hostages Square vigil every Saturday, the American family whose son drafted a year after landing, they were not asked to merge into a culture. They were asked to carry a corner of it, and carrying proved a faster road to belonging than any ceremony.

Belonging, earned and given

The debate Pinder enters asks whether a nation is an ethnicity or a contract. The wartime answer is that it is neither, or both, or something older: a table that can be extended. Englishness, he argues, can be ethnic, cultural, or both; Israeliness under fire showed the purest version of the cultural door, held open even when opening it was dangerous. The lesson travels, and it is not a soft one. A country that knows what it is can afford to let others in on the terms Pinder describes, demand and reward, effort and welcome. A country unsure of itself closes the door or opens it and apologises. The olim of the war years walked through a door held open by a country certain of itself, and their arrival, under those skies, is the strongest argument for his thesis that anyone could have staged on purpose.

Mark Ginsberg writes about politics and daily life in wartime Israel from Efrat, Israel, for the Times of Israel.