It’s almost midnight. When I write a story, I try to go to sleep with one unfinished idea, an idea I haven’t gotten to the bottom of. The hope is that at night, in my dreams, it will ripen. It is so exhilarating and rejuvenating to have a story help extricate me from the dispassion that life in this disaster zone dooms me to. It’s so good to feel alive again.
Monday
I keep reading hostile remarks about Israel in the European press, even accusations that Israel is responsible for the world’s current plight. It infuriates me to see how eagerly some people use Israel as a scapegoat. As if Israel is the one, simple, almost exclusive reason that justifies the terrorism and hate now targeted against the West. It’s also astounding that Israel was not invited to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition, while Syria and Iran (Syria and Iran!) were.
I feel that these and other events (the Durban conference and its treatment of Israel; anti-Israeli Islamic incitement and racism) are causing a profound realignment in Israelis’ perceptions of themselves. Most Israelis believed that they’d somehow broken free of the tragedy of Jewish fate. Now they feel that that tragedy is once again encompassing them. They’re suddenly aware of how far they still are from the promised land, how widespread stereotypical attitudes about “the Jew” still are, and how common antisemitism is, hiding all too often behind a screen of (supposedly legitimate) extremist anti-Israel sentiments.
I’m highly critical of Israel’s behavior, but in recent weeks I’ve felt that the media’s hostility to it has not been fed solely by the actions of the Sharon government. A person feels such things deeply, under the skin. I feel them with a kind of shiver that runs back to my most primeval memories, to the times when the Jew was not perceived as a human being of flesh and blood but was rather always a symbol of the Other. A parable, or a chilling metaphor. Last night I heard the host of a BBC program end his interview with an Arab spokesman with the following remark (I’m quoting from memory): “So you say that Israel is the cause of all the troubles that are poisoning the world today. Thank you, and I’d like to wish our audience good night.”
Tuesday
For two weeks already there has been a decline of sorts in the level of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. The heart, so accustomed to disappointments, still refuses to be tempted into optimism, but the calm allows me to get absorbed in writing without pangs of conscience. The woman in my story is becoming more of a presence. I haven’t the slightest idea where she is leading me. There’s something bitter and unbounded about her that frightens and attracts me. There’s always that great expectation at the beginning of every story—that the story will surprise me. More than that, I want it to actually betray me. To drag me by the hair, absolutely against my will, into the places that are most dangerous and most frightening for me. I want it to destabilize and dissolve all the comfortable defenses of my life. It must deconstruct me, my relations with my children, my wife, and my parents; with my country, with the society I live in, with my language.
It’s no wonder that it is so hard to get into a new story. My soul is on guard. Like every living thing, it seeks to continue in its movement, in its routine. Why should it take part in this process of self-destruction? What’s wrong with the way it is? Maybe that’s why it takes me a long time to write a novel. As if in the first months I have to remove layer after layer of cataract from my recalcitrant soul.
Wednesday
“The only one smiling is the one who hasn’t heard the latest news.” So wrote Bertolt Brecht. At 7:30 in the morning the radio reports the assassination of Israeli Minister of Tourism Rechavam Ze’evi. Ze’evi was an extremist who advocated transferring the Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I never agreed with his beliefs, but such an act of terrorism is horrible and unjustified. That is also my opinion when Israel murders a Palestinian political figure.
Like every other country, Israel has the right to defend itself when a terrorist bearing a “ticking bomb” is on his way to attack. Rechavam Ze’evi, despite his views, was not a terrorist.
The heart fills with apprehension. Who knows how the situation will deteriorate now. Over the last two days there was relative calm, and we were almost bold enough to resume breathing with both lungs. Now, all at once, it’s as if the trap has closed in on us once again. I am reminded of how easily we can be overcome by the unbearable lightness of death (as I write, I have the feeling that I am documenting the last days before a great catastrophe).
Still, last night I had a small, private moment of comfort. As on every Tuesday, I studied with my hevruta. It’s two friends, a man and a woman, with whom I study Talmud, Bible, and also Kafka and Agnon. The hevruta is an ancient Jewish institution. It’s a way of studying together and sharpening the intellect through debate and disputation. During our years of study together, we have developed a kind of private language of associations and memories. I’m the nonreligious one of the three, but I’ve already had ten years of vibrant, exciting, and stormy dialogue with these soulmates. When we study, I become intimately connected to the millennia-long chain of Jewish thinkers and creators. I reach down into the foundations of the Hebrew language and Jewish thought. I suddenly understand the code hidden in the deep structure of Israel’s social and political behavior today. In the midst of confusion and the loss that surrounds me, I unexpectedly feel I belong.
Thursday
Things fall apart. Israeli forces are entering the Palestinian city of Ramallah. A day of combat. Six Palestinians are killed, a ten-year-old girl among them. Another of the victims was a senior official of Fatah, the majority Palestinian faction, who was responsible for the murder of several Israelis. An Israeli citizen was killed by Palestinian gunfire coming from the village of another, previously killed, Fatah operative. The fragile cease-fire is no more, and who knows how long it will take to rehabilitate it. I call one of the people I can share my gloom with at such a moment. Ahmed Harb, a Palestinian writer from Ramallah, a friend. He tells me about the shooting he hears. He also tells of the optimism that prevailed among the Palestinians until the day before yesterday, before Ze’evi’s murder. “Look how the extremists on both sides are working hand in hand,” he says. “And look how successful they are …” Only two days ago Israel lifted its siege of Ramallah for the first time in weeks. After Ze’evi’s assassination the roadblocks returned. I ask him if there’s something I can do to help him, and he laughs. “We just want to move. To be in motion. To leave the city and come back …”
Between the news bulletins, amid the ambulance sirens and the helicopters that relentlessly circle above, I try to isolate myself. I battle to write my story. Not as a way of turning my back on reality—reality is here, in any case, like acid that eats away any protective coating—but rather out of a sense that, in the current situation, the very act of writing becomes an act of protest. An act of self-definition within a situation that literally threatens to obliterate me. When I write, or imagine, or create even one new phrase, it is as if I have succeeded in overcoming, for a brief time, the arbitrariness and tyranny of circumstance. For a moment, I am not a victim.
Friday
The week is coming to an end. Its events were so acute that I did not have time to write about many important things dear to me: about my son, who is writing a surrealist play for his high school drama club; about the soccer game we watched together on television, Manchester United vs. Deportivo la Coruña (with Barthez’s outrageous blunders); about my daughter, who is conducting a scientific study of her parakeet; about my eldest son, who is serving in the army and about whom I am anxious each and every moment. Also, about our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary this week, celebrated this time with much concern: Will we succeed in preserving this vulnerable family structure in the years to come?
So many cherished things and private moments are lost to fear and violence. So much creative power, so much imagination and thought, are directed today at destruction and death (or at guarding against destruction and de
ath). Sometimes there is a sense that most of our energy is invested in defending the boundaries of our existence. And too little energy is left for living life itself.
Deadly Routine
December 2001
On November 29, 2001, four Israelis died in a suicide attack on a bus near Hadera, north of Tel Aviv. On December 1, twelve people were killed and 180 wounded in a downtown Jerusalem attack carried out by two suicide bombers and a car bomb that exploded twenty minutes later, timed to strike the oncoming rescue teams. On December 2, a suicide bomber blew up a crowded bus in Haifa, killing fifteen and wounding over forty more. Another bus was destroyed in the attack. On December 5, a suicide bomber blew himself up near a bus stop in the center of Jerusalem. Eleven people were wounded. On December 9, Israeli policemen at a busy junction north of Haifa shot a suspicious-looking terrorist. The explosives in his belt detonated, wounding thirty-one people.
One p.m. These are the moments of fear after the terrorist attack in Haifa. The radio speaks of as many as fourteen dead and about fifty wounded from the explosion of a suicide bomber in a bus. They’re all civilians.
Each ring of the telephone might be announcing terrible news from relatives and friends who live there. One young cousin isn’t answering her cellphone. We know that she had been planning a ride on bus number 16, the route on which the attack occurred.
My finger desperately punches the numbers of the hospitals to which the victims were evacuated. Has she been admitted? The operator at the emergency center looks down the list. Seconds that last forever. We think about her. Of what it will be like without her.
The radio broadcasts recordings of cheers from Hamas’s radio station in Nablus. “We will avenge your death, O Abu Hanud,” they promise the Hamas official murdered by Israel last week, after he had murdered dozens of Israelis. The operator gets back to me: No, sir, the name you gave me is not on our list. We can breathe again.
But we really can’t breathe. Incidents run into one another. Another shooting here, another alert about a possible suicide bomber there. Between the reports, the announcements of the funeral times for the ten young people killed the previous night as they sat at a café in Jerusalem. It is terrifying how one event blacks out the previous one. It was only yesterday, after midnight, that we anxiously telephoned all our friends and the parents of our children’s friends who were out at that hour at the place where the attacks occurred. “Lucky that there’s a big history exam today,” my son explains to me lucidly. “That’s why most of my friends stayed home to study last night.”
The giddy madness. The Hamas terrorist’s mother ululates joyously—her son will now enter paradise. She’s only sorry that he died this way—that is, “because he was killed without taking twenty Israelis with him.” After the shooting attack in Afula last week, someone, perhaps unintentionally, covered the body of an Israeli woman who’d been murdered there with an old election poster proclaiming ONLY SHARON WILL KEEP US SECURE. And, in fact, this same Sharon declared three days ago, “We have found the way to deal with the security problem.”
We have already seen the first Israeli retaliation—attacks on Arafat’s headquarters and helicopters. But I’m sure that what we have witnessed is only the beginning of Israel’s response. When Sharon spoke today, there were war drums in his voice. He promised an escalation in Israeli retaliation operations. But who remembers that each escalation by Israel brings about an escalation of terror in turn?
From the way Sharon is talking, it’s clear that the unthinkable is now quite thinkable—toppling the Palestinian Authority, expelling Arafat; all now seems possible. Only one alternative isn’t being considered at all: immediately commencing intensive negotiations without preconditions.
On the other side, Arafat. This is the Arafat who, when notified by Israel that there is a sophisticated explosives factory in Nablus, confiscates the explosives and immediately releases the terrorists. Arafat, who speaks ceaselessly about his opposition to terror but who refuses, out of cowardice and shortsightedness, to finally instigate a courageous battle against the terrorist elements in the Palestinian Authority. He doesn’t understand that it is they who will bring an end to his great dream, and perhaps to himself, too.
How can we bring to a halt this madness in which we are becoming blind, becoming filled with anxiety and despair, forgetting that on the other side there are, at this moment, people like us, anxious and despairing. In other words, how can we make Arafat talk less and do more, and how can we bring Israel to do less and talk more?
In the days to come, Israel will apparendy launch a massive military offensive. The Palestinians will respond with even more terrorist attacks. It’s amazing how the Israelis and Palestinians never turn off this path, the path of violence. The bungled Oslo Accords are, for most Israelis and Palestinians resounding proof that they can never again walk the path of peace.
It is now 3 p.m. I note the hour because there’s no way of knowing what will happen after I send this article off. I have already written so many articles at moments like these, after attacks, before attacks. I’ve tried so many times to understand, to explain, and to find the logic behind the actions of both sides. What I feel like doing now is not writing an article. I actually feel like taking a can of black spray paint and covering every wall in Jerusalem, Gaza, and Ramallah with graffiti: LUNATICS, STOP KILLING AND START TALKING!
Turning a Blind Eye
December 2001
The U.S. Middle East envoy, General Anthony Zinni, left the region on December 16, 2001, after failed attempts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians. During Zinni’s three weeks in Israel, over a hundred Israelis and Palestinians were killed in a resurgence of hostilities. An earlier shooting attack by Palestinian terrorists on an Israeli bus in the West Bank settlement of Emmanuel, which killed ten and wounded dozens, provoked Israeli air strikes in retaliation. Sharon announced that the Israeli government was breaking off all ties with Tasir Arafat, who was at the time under personal siege by the Israeli Army in his headquarters in Ramallah.
Six months ago the journal Nature published a study about a dangerous mechanism in the human visual system. The study sought to explain why the brain sometimes refuses to see what the eyes take in and convey to it. The scientists, from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, suggested that the explanation for this phenomenon is that the brain is flooded with a multitude of interpretations of every reality it faces and that it must, in the end, decide in favor of one of them and act accordingly. The fascinating part of this explanation is the hypothesis that, from the moment the brain decides in favor of a given interpretation of the images it is receiving from the eyes, all stimuli that support any other interpretation simply disappear. The brain, as it were, refuses to incorporate them.
In the impossible relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, both sides have for years suffered from almost complete blindness to the complexity of the situation. Each is certain that the other side is ceaselessly deceiving it; that the other side does not want peace at all; that any compromising move by the other side is camouflage for an intrigue designed to bring that side victory and the elimination of its opponent.
Despite all that, early this week, at an army roadblock near Ramallah, several dozen of us, peace activists from both sides, gathered. In the middle of the chaos of hundreds of backed-up and churning vehicles, of people trying uselessly to leave or enter their city, in the face of the shouting and cursing of Palestinians who oppose this desperate initiative to bring people together, Yossi Beilin, one of the fathers of the Oslo agreement, and Yasir Abd Rabbo, the Palestinian Minister of Information and Culture and a close associate of Yasir Arafat, called for a swift resumption of dialogue. Or at least acceptance of American envoy Anthony Zinni’s proposal for a forty-eight-hour cease-fire.
The rest is well known. Neither side honored the cease-fire. Many Israelis and Palestinians did not survive even these mere forty-eight hours. Wednesday night, after an espec
ially bloody attack by Hamas, the Israeli government issued an odd and equivocal statement: Arafat was irrelevant; he was blotted out of the picture. This meant, actually, that the Palestinian people had also been blotted out, along with their justified desires and aspirations. And so any tiny chance for talks, for an agreement, for a more tolerable future, was also blotted out.
A person stands before this reality and his heart breaks, in seeing how the fears and suspicions and worldviews of naysayers succeed, in the end, in proving themselves in the most destructive way possible. How endless malicious, mistaken, suspicious acts by each side have connected one link to the next in an ostensibly logical continuum—logical in the distorted terms of the conflict—until, all at once, it becomes clear how we have ourselves, with our bare hands, garroted our own necks with a bloody chain of violence.
And it could have been otherwise. One can sketch a picture of more merciful circumstances. One’s thoughts skip quickly back. Had Jordan’s King Hussein responded to Moshe Dayan’s invitation to call him, immediately after the 1967 War, to discuss peace between the two countries; had Israel initiated, in talks it held with the Palestinians in the 1970s and 1980s, a bold settlement that would have linked Israel, Jordan, and Palestine in a federation; had Sharon, when he was minister of defense in 1982, not tried to evict Arafat from Lebanon to Tunis but rather allowed him to return to the occupied territories as a leader; had Israel addressed the first Intifada, in 1987, as a Palestinian cry of distress, and tried to respond accordingly rather than simply to repress it; had Yitzhak Rabin not been assassinated; had Hamas suicide bombers not killed hundreds of Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in 1995 and 1996, thus helping Benjamin Netanyahu win the prime ministership; had Ehud Barak negotiated at Camp David with greater wisdom and sensitivity; had Arafat had the good judgment to realize the magnitude of the Israeli concessions on offer and not turned so quickly onto the path of violence in September 2000; had Sharon not gone to the Temple Mount; had Arafat truly fought terrorism and not tried to fool the whole world; had …