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have loved it: a "Zionist with seasickness ." He thinks of his life , of
how his major interests lay elsewhere . He supposes much of his life
will always seem locked in place, addressing the Petrograd Soviet,
leading the attack across the ice . As he lies flat on his back, pale as a
white sheet, the blue waters of the Mediterranean stretch out beyond
his cabin windows , and he sails towards the land he had ignored and
the movement about which he knew so little.
He has come to accept the existence, for a long time to come, of
that which was once a heresy: a "Jewish nation." He has even made
peace with the notion that "the nation cannot formally exist without
a territory." He had not foreseen the so-rapid collapse of the British
Empire . Still , the Arabs . . . .
So Trotsky, barely recovered, arrives in Haifa, a new im–
migrant to the Jewish state . Idelson is there to meet him alongside
the woman who wrote the invitation , also journalists and photo–
graphers to catch this curious sight and immortalize it in their ar–
chives : the leader of the 1905 revolution, the creator of the Red Ar–
my, a refugee arriving home in Israel , an old man, bespectacled,
disembarking in another foreign port. There is an interview soon in
the Labor paper,
Davar,
and the liberal
Ha'aretz. The Palestine Post
runs a front-page story.
Recovering from the voyage and still suffering from what he
calls "historical vertigo ," Trotsky begins to explore his new environ–
ment. He cannot read Hebrew, but he is able to exploit the collective
wisdom of the small circle of admirers, "tourists" and sycophants
which gathers around him almost nightly.
Even with their eager help and perhaps because of it, Trotsky
cannot make sense of the hothouse of Israeli political life . He rec–
ognizes the human types, but the context is so utterly original. The
flora is misleadingly familiar to the eye, but the scent throws him ofT,
and the unceasing noise of this small country, the pitch , and the
tone, are utterly foreign .
Trotsky surveys the landscape . The left-he finds it difficult to
reward nationalist factions with the coveted role of a vanguard par–
ty- is divided. But together the parties of the left completely
dominate the Knesset and the labor federation. Israel's version of
"dual power." Bourgeois, clerical, and fascist parties are isolated,
although Ben-Gurion, in a complex , tactical shift, will co-opt the
center-right to his first government , leaving the Marxist Mapam in
the opposition. Ben-Gurion's social-democratic Mapai is already
displaying worrying signs of retreat from even their own diluted ver-
