The belly of the whale

It is a metaphor created about 40 years ago by a Muslim sheikh, who suggested that much like Yunus (Jonah) in the Quran, Arab Israelis were swallowed by a whale. And they needed to find a way out.

Today that allegory likely applies to all Israelis, stuck in a cycle of violence, hatred, and political turmoil that is slowly destroying the very fabric of its society.

It is why Israeli journalist Ruth Margalit used the phrase to title her new book, “In the Belly of the Whale: Portraits From a Fractured Israel.” It is a collection of 10 profiles published mostly over the last seven years in the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker.

Her stories are about politicians — Arab Israeli legislator Mansour Abbas and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, for example — archaeologists, survivors of October 7, the creators of “Shtisel.” They are lucid, intelligent, and rigorously honest. Ms. Margalit is there as an observer; she lets her subjects speak for themselves.

That’s not to say she doesn’t have opinions — as I found out during a recent Zoom conversation with her. These are opinions she likely will share in New York October 4 when she will appear at the 92nd Street Y in discussion with New Yorker editor David Remnick.

Ms. Margalit, 33, was born in Jerusalem. Her family was secular; her parents were philosophy professors at Hebrew University with roots in pre-Holocaust Europe.

“When I was growing up, they had sabbaticals abroad,” she told me. “We went to England for a couple of years, and we lived in Princeton for a year. That’s how I picked up English and fell in love with reading in English and started writing in English, even though my mother tongue is Hebrew.”

She was always writing when she was a kid, producing both fiction and nonfiction. While she was in college — she graduated from Tel Aviv University — she got a part-time job at Haaretz, the generally liberal Israeli Hebrew-language daily that also has an English language edition.

She worked on the English news desk, “where you would get stories from news agencies and aggregate them and kind of rewrite them to suit the audience,” she said. The experience cemented her desire to abandon fiction in favor of a career in journalism, “integrating my curiosity about people and politics, current events and my natural inclination to write.”

Her way of looking at the world and her career were shaped by the conversations around her family’s dinner table, she said. “I grew up in a very politically aware household. We were always talking about what was happening. It was a politically engaged household. So I was always curious about what was happening.”

After she graduated from college, she moved to New York to pursue a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University. When she got there, she found work at the New Yorker. She began as a fact checker but worked her way up the editorial ladder to become a writer, first for the magazine’s website and then the publication itself.

She also met her husband, Anthony Axelrod, who is an American-Israeli — his parents made aliyah and he grew up in both countries.

She lived in the United States for nine years, but in 2019 she decided to return to Israel, “because the pull of home was too great,” she wrote. That pull was fueled in part by what the writer Amos Elon called Israel’s myth of mission, “the creation of a new and just society.”

But, as she notes in the book, “we have by now strayed so far from that mission that we can no longer see it when we look back over our shoulder.”

In conversation, she tells me the Israel she returned to “is not today’s Israel. But I’m still here, and the reason I’m still here is because I’m curious about the place. I want to write about it. I want my children to be raised with Hebrew and close to their relatives.

“You know, despite all the hardships, despite everything that’s happened these past few years, it’s my home. It’s a home I kind of mourn, because it’s changed so much. But it’s not as if I feel differently about it.”

When I ask what changed, her answer is not surprising. Netanyahu’s rule in the last decade and a half “made things kosher that weren’t kosher,” Ms. Margalit said.

She refers specifically to the Kach party founded by the activist Rabbi Meir Kahane, who preached a philosophy so right wing — it proposed expelling Arabs from the country and creating a theocratic state — that for many years candidates were banned from running for office under its banner.

Netanyahu made deals with those followers of Rabbi Kahane — who was assassinated in Manhattan in 1990 — that “brought them into the mainstream and gave them more power than they ever had before,” Ms. Margalit said. “The fact that Smotrich essentially runs the West Bank and is in charge of the settlements — that’s a new phenomenon.”

Bezalel Smotrich, who heads the far-right Religious Zionist Party, recently called for the destruction of 40 Palestinian memorials in the West Bank. This came right after a party member took a sledge hammer to one.

Settlers storming into Palestinian West Bank villages, killing livestock, destroying crops, burning homes. These are Jews committing pogroms, Ms. Margalit said. And they’re doing it “in the name of the Jewish faith. That is 100 percent what is happening. I can’t wrap my head around it. As you say, it’s really hard to grapple with, but we absolutely have to.

“But for many sectors of the Israeli society this is hard to do. It’s very hard to look this in the eye. It’s very easy to blame it all on the hilltop youths. But it’s not. At this point, it’s a state-operated machine. Unless things change, unless the election changes things, the trajectory is extremely, extremely dangerous.”

If the radical settlers succeed, “this will no longer be a Jewish state,” she said. “It will be very different, a kind of settler ethno-state where everyone else” — that is, non-Jews — “has no place and doesn’t really feel they belong.”

She says that there always has been an unspoken accord that outside the country you say only good things about Israel. But that, she said, “would only be possible if “Israel pursued policies that could be defensible. This isn’t defensible at this point. This is really out of control. And I think many inside the government know it’s out of control.”

America, she feels, has at its disposal one simple solution to this problem. “We know the names of the people rioting on the West Bank, who are torching villages, setting fire to orchards. The army and the police may want to look away, but if these people are sanctioned, if their finances are frozen, I believe it will have a huge impact in Israel.

“I think sometimes when it comes to Israel, people say Israel is doing this or Israel is doing that. I would love it if people could distinguish between what the Israeli government is pursuing and what Israelis as individuals are doing. The fact is that there is a huge resistance to the government here. There are protests every week.”

Mr. Remnick, it should be noted, just spent time in Israel and wrote a lengthy and comprehensive piece about the country’s policies and politics, so his conversation with Ms. Margalit will be interesting and wide-ranging.

Ruth Margalit and David Remnick will discuss “Belly of the Whale” at 92nd Street Y on October 4 at 7:30. Tickets (both in person and streaming) can be ordered at 92ny.org/event/ruth-margalit-with-david-remnick