Onder Zeeniveau

Meeting Amit 1977.

With Amit in my life an amazing adventure began. Amit didn’t seem afraid of anything.

She was a real Sabra. I was born nine years after the end of the Second World War and I realize more how the shadow of that war still hung over the Netherlands. The Second World War was a daily topic of conversation in my family and school. Everyone I knew had fought against the ‘Germans’, on a small scale and on a large scale, and everyone had suffered under the occupation.

What had happened to the Jews was incomprehensible and was a great sin. Israel was the land of God, and the Jews were the children of God. They had lived in exile for years, had been led to The Promised Land by Moses, had made the Ten Commandments that everyone could keep, and after being led to the gas chambers in Hitler’s Germany and murdered in cold blood, of course, they were entitled to their land. For me, that was as obvious as a cheese sandwich. At the time of the Six-Day War, the radio was on everywhere and we listened to the news in the geography lesson while the teacher explained to us on the map how the troops moved. In Israel, girls went into military service and everyone loved the handsome Israeli girls who participated in the Four Days Marches of Nijmegen. How beautiful those girls were and how cool it looked, those girls in those uniforms.

A lot tougher than our Milvas, the Dutch women’s army. I stood with Israel and loved the land unconditionally. And now I met an Israeli! In the Women’s House of Amsterdam. She opened the door when I had walked through the night from the Staatsliedenbuurt to the Women’s House. My bike had been stolen the night before. She came to sit next to me at the bar, introduced herself, and told me she was from Israel. My mouth fell open. Thoughts were running through my head, I wanted to know and said that. “Just ask,” Amit said.

“Can I ask you stupid questions?” I asked.

“Of course,” Amit said. 

Are you Jewish I asked Yes. Do you mind if I call you a Jew? No, I don’t. That’s what I am, a Jew. Have you done military service? Yes. Were you born in a kibbutz? Yes. What do you think of Israel’s politics? That’s why I’m gone. Are you a Sabra? Yes, tough on the outside, soft on the inside.

Amit loved to talk and was amused by all my questions, she gave me extensive answers as she spun joints on the bar, and we drank bottles of coke. She was twenty and was in the Netherlands to experience the winter. She had never experienced a winter before and always wanted to go to Amsterdam. She had traveled through Europe in a Volkswagen van with two friends who were at the Art Academy in Jerusalem. Two days ago, she had waved goodbye to her friends at Schiphol, she had a job as a driver in the port and a bed in a student flat on the Prinsengracht next to the Anne Frank House. And now she was here. Alone. In for an adventure, in for the winter. We were escorted out of the Women’s House, and she asked if she could give me a lift. She was driving a white Volkswagen. The car was parked a short distance away from the Nieuwe Herengracht. Amsterdam was a ragged city in the seventies. There were many clearings in the city and there were more houses held up by beams.

It was a chilly night in the fall of 1977. I studied at a teacher training college, but I was already very conflicted with my education after I found feminism. The female teachers in the program were far outnumbered, and feminists were mostly seen as ugly man-haters. Also, by women. My objections to the student’s use of language as ‘he’ or the general view that only men wrote literature were mocked and dismissed as whining. Men were right. And women should listen.