It’s left to the Muslims to keep the peace at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, just as it’s left to the Jews to keep a similar peace at the likewise divided Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Who will be a Muslim and a Jew to the Muslims and the Jews? Hindus, maybe. That is more or less the idea behind putting UN peacekeeping troops in Israel. This may or may not work. The Bhagavad Gita opens with the hero Arjuna trying to be a pacifist: “Woe!” Arjuna says. “We have resolved to commit a great crime as we stand ready to kill family out of greed for kingship and pleasures!” But the Lord Krishna tells Arjuna to quit whining and fight. “Either you are killed and will then attain to heaven,” Krishna says, “or you triumph and will enjoy the earth.”
Our guide took us to several large gift shops with no other customers, aisles stacked with unsold souvenirs of Jesus’ birth. Part of the Israeli strategy in the intifada has been to put economic pressure on the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza. Fear of death hasn’t stopped the Arabs. Maybe fear of Chapter 11 will do the trick. The hopes and fears of all the years reside with badly carved olive-wood crèche sets. Dave and I bought several.
Then our guide took us up a hill to the Christian Arab village of Beit Jala, which the Israelis had been shelling. Large chunks were gone from the tall, previously comfortable-looking limestone villas. Shuttered housefronts were full of what looked like bullet holes, but large enough to put a Popsicle in. “Ooh, fifty-caliber,” said Dave with professional appreciation.
“These people,” our guide said, “have no part in the violence.” Dave and I made noises of condolence and agreement in that shift of sympathy to the nearest immediate victim that is the hallmark of twenty-first-century morality.
“Here a man was sleeping in his bed,” said our guide, showing us a three-story pile of rubble. “And they couldn’t find him for days later. The Israelis shell here for no reason.”
“Um” said Dave, “why for no reason?” And our guide, speaking in diplomatic circumlocution, allowed as how every now and then, all the time, Palestinian gunmen would occasionally, very often, use the Beit Jala hilltop to shoot with rifles at Israeli tanks guarding a highway tunnel in the valley. They did it the next night.
“It’s kind of a rule of military tactics,” said Dave to me, sotto voce, as we walked back to the car, “not to shoot a rifle at a tank when the tank knows where you are.” Unless, of course, scanty olive-wood-crèche-set sales are spoiling your enjoyment of earth and you’ve decided to attain to heaven.
The owner of an upscale antiquities store back in Bethlehem did not look as if he meant to attain any sooner than necessary, even though his store’s air-conditioning unit had been knocked out by Israelis firing on nearby rioters. He arrived in a new Mercedes with three assistants to open his business especially for Dave, his first customer in a month.
The antiquities dealer was another friend of Z’s. Z told us that this was the man whose grandfather was the Palestinian cobbler to whom the Dead Sea Scrolls were offered as scrap leather by the Bedouin shepherd who found them—a story too good to subject to the discourtesies of investigative journalism.
The emporium was new, built in the soon-dashed hopes of millennium traffic. The antiquities were displayed with the stark, track-lit modern exhibition drama necessary to make them look like something other than the pots and pans and jars and bottles from people who had, one way or another, given up on this place long ago.
Dave collects antiques, but by profession he’s an iron and steel commodities trader. He has also lived in Asia for years. I sat on a pile of rugs and drank little cups of coffee while Levantine bargaining met Oriental dickering and the cold-eyed brokerage of the market floor. The three great world traditions of haggle flowered into confrontation for two and a half hours. Folks from the Oslo talks and the Camp David meetings should have been there for benefit of instruction. Everyone ended up happy. No fatal zero-sum thinking was displayed as banknotes and ceramics changed hands at last. Dave could make more money. And the Arabs could make more antiquities.
Why can’t everybody just get along? No reasonably detached person goes to Israel without being reduced in philosophical discourse to the level of Rodney King—or, for that matter, to the level of George Santayana. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Santayana said in one of those moments of fatuousness that come to even the most detached of philosophers. In Israel and Palestine, as in Serbia and Kosovo, this goes double for those who can’t remember anything else. And everybody does get along, after a fashion. Muslims and Christians and Jews have lived together in the Holy Land for centuries—hating one another’s guts, cutting one another’s throats, and touching off wars of various magnitudes.
The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in the plots of imaginary melodramas. I was thinking this as I was looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls in the solemn underground Shrine of the Book, inside the vast precincts of the Israel Museum. Maybe, I thought, all the world’s hoary old tracts ought to wind up as loafer soles or be auctioned at Sotheby’s to a greedy high-tech billionaire for display in his otherwise bookless four-thousand-square-foot cyber-den. Then I noticed that Z was reading the scrolls, muttering aloud at speed, perusing an ancient text with more ease than I can read Henry James. What’s past is past, perhaps, but when it passed, this was where it went.
Z dropped us at the King David Hotel, the headquarters of the Palestinian mandate administration when the British were trying to keep the peace. In 1946 the hotel was blown up by the radical wing of the Jewish Resistance Movement, the Irgun. Some of every group were killed—forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight British, seventeen Jews, and five reasonably detached persons of miscellaneous designation. The Irgun was led by the future prime minister Menachem Begin, who would make peace with Egypt in the 1970s but, then again, war with Lebanon in the 1980s.
On the way to the hotel Z explained why there will always be war in the region. “Israel is strategic,” he said in his most New Testamental tone. “It is the strategic land bridge between Africa and Asia. For five thousand years there has been fighting in Israel. It is the strategic land bridge.” And the fighting continues, a sort of geopolitical muscle memory, as though airplanes and supertankers hadn’t been invented. The English and the French might as well be fighting over the beaver-pelt trade in Quebec today, and from what I understand of Canadian politics, they are.
We were meeting Israeli friends of Dave’s at the hotel, a married couple. He voted for Sharon; she voted for Ehud Barak. Dave and I marked our lintels and doorposts with the blood of the lamb, metaphorically speaking, and drank Israeli vodka and orange juice.
“There will always be war,” the husband said, “because with war Arafat is a hero and without war he’s just an unimportant guy in charge of an unimportant place with a lot of political and economic problems.”
“There will always be war,” the wife said, “because with war Sharon is a hero and without war he’s just an unimportant guy in charge of an unimportant place with …”
Also, war is fun—from a distance. Late the next night Dave and I were walking back to our hotel in Arab East Jerusalem. Dave was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and I was in a blazer and chinos. We couldn’t have looked less Israeli if we’d been dressed like Lawrence of Arabia (who, incidentally, was a third party to the cordial meeting between Chaim Weizmann and the emir Faisal). Fifty yards down a side street a couple of Palestinian teenagers jumped out of the shadows. Using the girlie overhand throw of nations that mostly play soccer, one kid threw a bottle at us. It landed forty yards away.
On Good Friday, Dave and Z and I walked from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Lions Gate, where Israeli paratroopers fought their way into the Old City during the Six-Day War. We traveled the Via Dolorosa in an uncrowded quiet that Jesus Christ and those paratroopers were not able to enjoy. We owed our peace in Jerusalem to an enormous police presence. This did Jesus no good. Nor did the Jordanian police
give Israeli soldiers helpful directions to the Ecce Homo Arch. And our Savior and the heroes of 1967 didn’t have a chance to stop along the way and bargain with Arab rug merchants.
Z and the rug merchants exchanged pessimisms, Z grousing about Sharon and the Arabs complaining about Arafat. “The Israeli army tells Arafat where the strikes will come,” one shopkeeper said. “They tell him, ‘Don’t be here. Don’t be there.’ No one tells me.”
I visited the fourteen Stations of the Cross and said my prayers, for peace, of course, although, as a Zionist friend of mine puts it, “Victory would be okay, too.” Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” He didn’t say not to have any. In fact, He said, “I came not to send peace but a sword.” Or, anyway, staves and chains.
Then we went to the Wailing Wall, the remnant of the Second Temple, built by the same Herod the Great who killed all the babies buried by the manger in Bethlehem. Atop the Wailing Wall stands the Haram al Sharif, with the Dome of the Rock enclosing Mount Moriah, where Abraham was ready to kill Isaac and where, at that moment, Muslims gathered for Friday prayers were surrounded by Israeli soldiers, some of both no doubt also ready to kill. (The Dome of the Rock marks the center of the world for those who don’t believe that the center of the world is down the street, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.)
In the plaza in front of the Wailing Wall religious volunteers were lending yarmulkes to Jews who had arrived bareheaded. “Well,” Dave said, “my mother was Jewish, so I guess that makes me Jewish. I’d better get a rent-a-beanie and go over to the Wailing Wall and … wail, or something.”
The yarmulkes being handed out were, unaccountably, made of silver reflective fabric. “I look like an outer-space Jew,” Dave said.
“I always thought you were Catholic,” I said.
“Because of Garcia,” Dave said, “like O’Rourke.”
I said, “But I’m not Catholic, either. My mother was Presbyterian, and I’m Methodist. I came home from Methodist confirmation class in a big huff and told my mother there were huge differences between Presbyterians and Methodists. And my mother said, ‘We sent you to the Methodist church because all the nice people in the neighborhood go there.’”
“They could use that church here,” Dave said.
Dave swayed in front of the wall like the Orthodox surrounding him, although, frankly, in a manner more aging-pop-fan than Hassidic.
What could cause more hatred and bloodshed than religion? This is the Israel question. Except it isn’t rhetorical; it has an answer. We went to Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust Memorial, and saw what the godless get up to.
There are worse things than war, if the intifada is indeed a war. As of May 2001, 513 Palestinians and 124 Israelis had been killed in what is called the second intifada. About 40,000 perished in the 1992-1996 civil war in Tajikistan that nobody’s heard of. From 1.5 to 2 million are dead in Sudan. There are parts of the world where the situation Dave and I were in is too ordinary to have a name.
Late Saturday night the particular place where we were in that situation was the American Colony Hotel, in East Jerusalem, sometimes called the “PLO Hotel” for the supposed connections the staff has. It is the preferred residence of intifada-covering journalists, especially those who are indignant about Israeli behavior. The American Colony Hotel was once the mansion of an Ottoman pasha. Dave and I sat among palms in the peristyle courtyard, surrounded by arabesques carved in Jerusalem’s golden limestone. The bedroom-temperature air was scented with Easter lilies and in the distance, now and then, gunfire could be heard.
“This country is hopeless,” Dave said, pouring a Palestinian Taybeh beer to complement a number of Israeli Maccabee beers we’d had earlier in West Jerusalem. “And as hopeless places go, it’s not bad.” We discussed another Israel question. Why are Israeli girls so fetching in their army uniforms? It may have something to do with their carrying guns. But Freud was a lukewarm Zionist and let’s not think about it.
After the first Zionist Congress, in 1897, the rabbis of Vienna sent a delegation to Palestine on a fact-finding mission. The delegation cabled Vienna, saying, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” However, the twentieth century, with all its Freudianism, was about to dawn, and we know what having the beautiful bride married to another man means in today’s melodramas. No fair using amnesia as a device for tidy plot resolution.
“Do we have to choose sides?” Dave said. But it’s like dating sisters. Better make a decision or head for the Global Village limits. And speaking of sisters, I opened The Jerusalem Post on Easter morning and discovered that my sister’s neighborhood in Cincinnati was under curfew, overrun with race riots.
4
9/11 DIARY
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
When the Pentagon was hit, Debbie Lehan, the manager of my apartment building in Washington, D.C., and Damon Boone, the building engineer, moved their cars out of the underground garage and parked them to block both ends of the building’s horseshoe drive. Of course that was absurd—as if the terrorists had thought, “World Trade Center, Pentagon, and … the place on Connecticut Avenue where Naomi Wolf used to live.” But by noon all the building’s children had been gathered home from school or day care. The children played in the empty half-oval. Career daddies and career mommies hovered. The barricaded driveway was absurd, if you could keep your eyes from misting.
“Better to do something,” Debbie said.
Damon unlocked the door to the building’s roof. We could see the Pentagon on fire across the Potomac. “It makes me angry, scared, sad all at once,” said Damon. According to the theory of terrorism, it was supposed to make him paralyzed with terror.
The traffic on Connecticut Avenue was coming from downtown as if in the evening rush hour. But there was none of the accustomed honking at the District’s unsequenced and haphazardly placed stoplights.
Downtown the cars were gone and the stores were closed. Police officers stood in ones and twos. On the corner of F and Fourteenth streets two businessmen, two messengers, and a panhandler were listening to the panhandler’s portable radio. A tape of President Bush’s first response to the terrorist attack was being broadcast. One of the messengers said, in the voice people use when they’re saying something important, “After today things will never be the same.” Then he seemed to have one of those moments that came to everyone on September 11, with jumbled thoughts alike in size but wildly mismatched in weight—pity, rage, and how to get the shirts back from the dry cleaner. “Transportation in the air won’t be as fast,” he said, in a smaller voice.
At the corner of Fourteenth and Constitution a policeman set out flares to block the street. The policeman took the plastic caps off the flares and tossed the caps aside with the decisive gesture of a man suspending minor public mores in a crisis. A young man on a bicycle stopped at the curb and said to me, “At least the grocery stores are open. But the trucks can’t get to the stores. If it’s going to be a big international war, I’ll just fast.”
The young man had a theory that the terrorism had to do with America’s pulling out of the UN conference on racism in South Africa, but he was interrupted by a woman indignant that the portable toilets at the Washington Monument were still in use. “They don’t know what I could be doing in there,” she said.
The grass expanse in the middle of the Mall was deserted except for the homeless, suddenly homeless alone. Like everyone else, they seemed subdued, although they didn’t stay subdued. The next day, at Eighteenth and L, I would see a ragged man in the middle of the street shouting, “I’ll kill all of you people! I don’t like any of you!” No one, including the soldiers who were by then everywhere in Washington, paid attention.
Michele Lieber, a lobbyist who lives in my building, had come downtown with me. Alongside the Mall, snack and souvenir trucks were dutifully open. Michele asked a snack-truck proprietor if business was good. “Yes, of course,” he dutifully said.
That day, for the first time in thirteen yea
rs in Washington, I saw no protesters. And hardly any were around on Wednesday. A reopened Lafayette Park would feature only an old woman with a sign saying WHITE HOUSE ANTI-NUCLEAR PEACE VIGIL SINCE 1981 and a middle-aged hippie on a similar anti-nuclear sleep-out SINCE 1984. The old woman was talking mostly to herself. “They provoked what happened,” she said. The hippie was talking to two adolescent girls with piercings, discussing his pet squirrel.
On Tuesday afternoon even TV crews were mostly absent from the White House vicinity. On Constitution at the Ellipse, ABC White House correspondent Terry Moran was on a lone stand-up, not saying much to the camera. A few people gathered around. “We just got here from Slovakia and everything happened,” a tourist said.
Michele and I had walked to the reflecting pool behind the Capitol before we saw any more tourists. A family in sport clothes was standing there looking baffled. I introduced myself to the father, and his first words were (one is grateful for not having a conspiratorial turn of mind), “We’re from Slovakia.”
“We are a bit concerned,” the father said, “but the weather is okay. We had only one day to be here. Tomorrow we are supposed to go to New York.”
Michele, on her cell phone, was trying to call friends in New York. She kept getting a recorded message, “Due to the tornado your call cannot go through.”
At Bullfeathers, a restaurant on First Street, Representative Don Sherwood, Republican from the Tenth District in Pennsylvania, was having lunch with his daughter. He wanted a session of Congress to be convened at the Capitol that night. “We should be as visible and in-business as possible,” he said.
Four or five televisions were on inside the restaurant, their volume turned up. Another congressman and his female aide were in the men’s room, the only place quiet enough for the congressman to do a phone interview. The congressman was saying, “We will make the people who did this pay. It is awfully hard to defend yourself from people who have no respect for human life.” He seemed to be pulling in two directions—as did the soldiers on the streets the next day, camouflaged for invisibility and wearing blaze-orange traffic control vests.