Last Night There Was an Inferno Here
The West Bank was a storm during the entire month before the attack at Alfei Menashe. There were daily demonstrations and arrests, stone throwings and tire burnings. Three thousand security prisoners were in the midst of a hunger strike in the military jails. The entire population was restive over the strike. Disaster was in the air, inescapable; whoever traveled the West Bank roads at that time felt it. One Friday, as I exited the village of Dura, an explosive device went off there; a week later, as I returned from Kfar Adumim, stones were thrown at my car. On our way to Nablus, the Israeli cabdriver took a large, black-and-white checked kaffiyeh, the traditional Arab headdress, out of his glove compartment and spread it conspicuously over his dashboard. To fool the enemy, he said, so that they stop to think before they start throwing stones.
The disaster occurred on the Saturday night before Passover. The Moses family was traveling in its car from the settlement Alfei Menashe to neighboring Kfar Saba. As they left the settlement, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the car, apparently from an orange grove along the road. The car burst into flames. The father, his clothes on fire, succeeded in getting his children out of the car. The mother, Ofra, thirty-five years old, five months pregnant, was trapped and perished. The survivors are still suffering from serious burns: the father, sons Adi and Nir, and the son of friends, Yosef Hillel. Five-year-old Tal died in July.
The morning after the attack, three military cars are parked alongside the road to the settlement. Senior officers survey the area through dark sunglasses. They converse in post-disaster low voices. On the road, an ugly black stain, composed of the remains of a burnt tire and a timid wreath of three flowers in the middle of the spot.
The businesslike presence of serious-faced security men fills the area. Roadblocks, searches, the crackle of walkie-talkies, a patrol plane flying above. A curfew has been declared in the nearby Arab city of Qalqilia, and in the surrounding villages. Two gray army bulldozers knock down the first rows of trees in the orange groves on both sides of the road. In one of them, apparently, the thrower of the Molotov cocktail lay in wait. As of this writing, he has yet to be caught.
It is possible, on the basis of past experience, to sketch his portrait. It is possible to re-create the words those who sent him poured into his heart in order to seal it, so that it might serve as a deadly, blind instrument. In his friends’ eyes, he will from this point on be a hero. A freedom fighter. The situation is a mint casting human coins with opposite legends imprinted on their two sides. But the contradicting legends do not change the fact that between them—freedom fighter or terrorist; ours or theirs—can be found the dark, hidden raw material: a murderer.
This morning the air is perfumed by the flowering orange groves, and the land’s breath awakens the abundance of springtime and the exorbitant profusion of nature. The pale roots of the orange trees break through the wounded ground, and green oranges still roll earthward, coming to rest on a carpet of wildflowers.
Four hundred and fifty families live in Alfei Menashe. Three and a half years ago they came to the bald, boulder-crowned mountain. Rows of houses are stuck in a semicircle on the side of the hill, and from far off, in the glare of the sun, they look like the sparkling hooks of a net thrown over the neck of a huge gray whale.
Close up, one sees that the whale has surrendered: roads and public parks, playgrounds, houses surrounded by green, a shopping center for morning chats and cultural evenings, and in the schoolyard boys play soccer.
The settlement Alfei Menashe is located very close to Kfar Saba and looks much like one of the neighborhoods of private houses which surround, for instance, Jerusalem. “We are, after all, included in the Alon Plan,” say the residents, surprised, referring to the compromise borders proposed by then Foreign Minister Yigael Alon in 1976, under which Israel would absorb parts of the West Bank. “We aren’t settlers at all!” As if they don’t understand how the terrorists could mistake them for such—how did they not understand that they are included within the consensus?
The residents of Alfei Menashe do reside, as they say, within the area about which there is general agreement. They are like tens of thousands of other Israelis who now live over the Green Line for reasons of convenience and quality of life, rather than as a matter of ideology. Another practical nibble at the moral problem, another step toward surrounding the immoral with the amoral. In ten more years, if the present situation continues, it will become clear that the motherly, broad down blanket of the consensus is actually made of rubber, and there will always be those who will not stop stretching it more and more, from five minutes from Kfar Saba to a stone’s throw from Sidon.
At night there was an inferno here. After the attack the residents of Alfei Menashe and of other settlements gathered to take revenge. First they cut down two trees in the nearby orange grove, “to symbolize the cutting down of an Israeli family,” and afterwards, while the smoking car still lay on the road, they entered the nearby Arab city of Qalqilia. In their words, they “burned four piles of weeds.” The press reported burning fields and broken windows in hundreds of cars and homes, and the frightening of the inhabitants of Qalqilia and a nearby village, Hablah.
Shaul Hai from Alfei Menashe took part in those actions. “What happened? What’s the big deal? Did we kill anyone? Did we take an eye for an eye? Did we even slap an Arab in the face? If you were to go to Qalqilia today, you would see the truth. I’m a moderate type, I swear, but when I see something like that—a whole family…” He fell silent, biting his lip. “I ask the bleeding hearts, those who are now shouting that we took the law into our own hands, what have they done to prevent this situation? What have you done, what?”
And what happened in Qalqilia? And what did you do in Hablah?
“Settlers from Karnei Shomron and Kdumim went there. The army—which always fights us instead of the terrorists—stopped their cars, so they got out and went on by foot, over the fields. They only went into the city and into Hablah and burned piles of weeds, and afterwards I read in the newspaper about burning fields in Qalqilia! What would they do to those Arabs in a case like that in Russia? Bang bang bang bang bang! To the wall, no questions asked! No one would open his mouth! I’m telling you—good for those guys who gave it to the Arabs—they really know how to put things straight. You can’t put out a fire with polite talk!” He leaves me, boiling with anger, and I don’t know which fire he was talking about: The car? The desire for revenge? The large barrel of gunpowder?
I try to imagine those moments last night, in Kdumim: the telephone in the settlement’s office rings. “There has been an attack. One or more dead. Not clear how many. Have to notify. Have to do something.” The whisper turns into a rumble. People run quickly, grimly, from house to house. The air thickens as everyone becomes part of a taut web of nerves. The news passes silently from person to person. From settlement to settlement. The men get in their cars (which immediately become “transports”). At the gate, someone ducks his head into the car and says in a hushed voice that he just now talked with a leading figure in Gush Emunim and he will be there, too. That grants an unspoken official seal of approval. I imagine that they did not talk much in the car about what was about to happen. The people already know that there will be an investigation, because that’s how the authorities work, that no one here will actually give the order. So that no one person will be culpable. In this way a sort of collective, agreed-upon distance from the decision is created. They allow the violence to pulsate in its raw form, shapeless, in the fear and the hope that it will work itself, direct the hands and blind the eyes and hearts, and force them to act in one predetermined way.
Do I not already know all the heroes of this tragedy? The murderous terrorist, whose brothers in hatred I have met so many times in Nablus, in Hebron, in Deheisha; and those who set out for revenge, to correct a crime with an injustice, the determined, history-conscious people from Ofra, from Kfar Adumim; and the poor family itself, the children, the parents, and the innocent inhabitants of Qalqilia, taking cover in their houses in fright, listening to the approaching footsteps?
I knew them all, and I could speak with all of them, as well as find similarities and sympathy between us. But now every eye is bloodshot, they are all possessed, the slaves of a single power, tyrannical and cruel, leading them, blinded, one into the other.
* * *
I enter Qalqilia. It is my first time in a city under curfew. It is strange to pace through complete stillness, when every step sounds as if it breaks the surface of a frozen puddle. Everything is locked up—the stores and the houses. Human footsteps no longer sound in the street. And spring bursts into this emptiness with all its might, flowing like a drunken crowd through the empty streets and alleys, its butterflies, the colors and perfumes of its flowers, and for a moment it is possible to err and wonder whether the city has only been drugged by the abundant, sensuous perfume, addicted to it, dizzy and loose-limbed like Jericho.
A pretty city, Qalqilia, fair to the eye. Well kept. Roses flower in enclosures along the main boulevard. There are no signs of violence. I do not see broken windows or the remains of a fire, even though the settlers themselves said they came here as a great and angry group.
Suddenly a boy leaps from the doorway of a house in a narrow alley and runs to the road. Hey, boy, don’t you know there’s a curfew? Yes, yes, I know, but I slept at night at my aunt’s house, and I want to go home, and not only that, I’m not a boy, I’m a girl!
You’re a girl?
“Yes!”
She is truly insulted.
Fine, fine. Excuse me that I didn’t notice. But your hair is very short.
“Yes, but I’m wearing earrings!”
And she presents the tiny earrings, sparkling in her earlobes, for my inspection. No doubt about it—a girl.
I apologize once more. Her name is Samah, and she is nine years old. She is not afraid to run, because the army isn’t in this side street, and not only that, they won’t do anything to her, because she is little.
Do you know what happened here at night?
Her fresh, mischievous face locks. Don’t know. Didn’t hear anything.
Were you afraid?
Yes, but only because her aunt cried all night. Now she has to run.
I follow her with my eyes as she crosses the street. She looks both ways, and afterwards, speedily, like a trained fighter, like a hare crossing an open field, she rushes, slightly bowed, and disappears. What life teaches.
Now I begin making out heads peeking from roofs, from the balcony railings, from the half-closed blinds. The alley next to the Shalom Café is closed at present, and I exchange a few words with a family hiding behind a slightly open iron gate. They did not hear anything; at night there were cries and shots and they smelled smoke. The Jews’ cars sped past, honking. Then the army came, and the inhabitants calmed down, because the army is less dangerous than the mustawtanin, the settlers; soldiers passed and announced over loudspeakers that there would be a curfew. Until when? Don’t know. Maybe one day, maybe two. Until further notice. They did not sleep all night out of fear. There is also a problem—Grandmother is in bed upstairs and she has pains in her chest, maybe it’s her heart, she is crying from the pain, and they cannot bring a doctor.
I ask if they know what happened yesterday on the road by Alfei Menashe. No. They don’t know. They only heard that the Jews tore things apart. “Someone burned a family with small children on the road. They killed a woman,” I say. Once again I find myself facing an expression emptying itself of all emotion, like a door slammed in my face. “We don’t know anything. We haven’t heard anything.”
On the main street, I am surprised to see televisions, refrigerators, and ovens on the sidewalk, outside a closed store. Across the street, furniture: armchairs, beds, and mattresses. Two soldiers call me over and ask who I am. In those places where the storekeepers did not manage to get their merchandise into the store before having to lock up, the army has stationed guards to prevent plundering. This mixture of violence and consideration, of brutality and basic humanity is what makes everything hard to deal with and hard to understand. It is even harder for those who do the work themselves. Is this an army of occupation, or a police force protecting citizens from their own fellow nationals? What does a young soldier (maybe a farmer’s son) feel when he has to cut down young trees? What does an Arab feel as he labors on the construction site of a new settlement on the hill overlooking his village? What kind of occupying army can it be whose soldiers did not rape a single woman from among its surrendering enemies? What does the student reservist, who studies together with Arabs at the Hebrew University, feel when he suddenly has to shoot into a crown of demonstrators at An-Najah University in Nablus?
Another question: Into what reality are children to be educated? How fuzzy can the lesson I give to my sons be? Maybe I do them an injustice when I bring them up with certain values and do not prepare them for the brutal life we live here?
And a last question: Is the feeling that the situation cannot possibly continue forever really a reasonable guarantee that it will eventually change?
* * *
The secretariat of Gush Emunim and the heads of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip meet in the gymnasium of the school in Alfei Menashe. They are all here, those whose names you see in the newspapers, and many of their friends. They damn the army, the Chief of Staff, the Minister of Defense, and the entire government with fire and brimstone. They sit around tables in the gym, between ladders and vaulting horses, their faces red with fury, fingering their pistols. They know that at such moments it is easy for an unsure government, overwhelmed with guilt, to give in to their demands, and they strike the iron while it’s hot. You can understand their motives, but they are repellent. Most of the residents of Alfei Menashe that I spoke to wanted nothing to do with this political convention, exploiting their sorrow for its own purposes—most of them boycotted it.
Hooliganism echoes in everything the leaders of Gush Emunim say. A smooth, sharp hooliganism, but hooliganism nonetheless. With television cameras in the gymnasium, every speaker makes sure to give lip service to “the need to work within the law,” but they pronounce the words like someone spitting a rotten piece of apple from his mouth.
Rav Levinger, leader of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, his beard stiff and wiry, his face red, calls the Minister of Defense a murderer. His hands spilled this blood. Levinger hints that another Jewish underground will arise. It will arise because of the government’s failures. “They decided that there would not be another underground, and I accepted the decision,” he declares and hints. He accepted but did not agree. “But today we once again face a situation in which the Ministry of Defense has made us fair game, and the Ministry of Defense bears, after all, the major share of the guilt for the last underground.” Those were his words. Maybe one of the young people of Gush Emunim understood the hint the Rav dangled before them, and afterwards the people of Gush Emunim will be shocked and say that their entire system of education opposes violence.
“If we allow ourselves to get used to stone throwing,” Levinger seethed, “we will get used to funerals. One funeral and another and another. Blood and more blood and more blood!” His finger jabs the air as if he were debating a passage of Talmud. His head bobs constantly, as if drawing something out of the depths of his being, as if he has drilled through his soul to its primal layer, even deeper and wilder, where lies all the sediment of Jewish suffering and an incomparably dark thirst for revenge. And now he straightens his neck and sputters death. We need a death penalty! Death penalty! Why are you afraid of the death penalty? In the United States they execute lots of people!”
Beside the preacher of death, Daniella Weiss, Secretary-General of Gush Emunim, nods and her eyes sparkle, two rings of red raised on her cheeks, but it seems to me it is not the spring that is bringing out this bloom. She repeats his words, her eyes hanging on his lips, her lips moving, as if she is the only one who knows how to read his words, death penalty! It is a short distance from seeing these two move opposite each other in the stylized movements of a sacrificial revenge ceremony.
Elyakim Ha-etzni, a Kiryat Arba leader, stands and froths before the assembly, but his voice is so high that the echoes bouncing off the walls of the gymnasium crash into each other and it is very hard to hear what he is saying. It is almost certainly fascinating—it seems that he has prepared a list of steps the authorities must take against PLO activists in the territories, and maybe against anyone who has ambitions which clash with Ha-etzni’s. I make out the words “expulsion,” “closure,” “imprisonment,” “death penalty,” “destruction,” and for a short, mad moment I see Ha-etzni prancing happily through a West Bank completely emptied of people.
Someone else rises to speak. A resident of Alfei Menashe, a lieutenant colonel in the standing army, large-bodied and with a sympathetic face, the face of a golden boy of the land of Israel, and as his speech takes off, his face becomes more serious and harsh, and he concludes by promising that he himself, and all residents of the settlement, will deal with the Arab villages in the area “with all the means at our disposal.” “We will go in there like commandos!” he roars, his finger waving in the air. The journalists take it all down.
* * *
Then the funeral. Alfei Menashe still does not have a cemetery, so Ofra was buried in Segula. Two soldiers who fell in the Lebanese War are also buried there. Somber and bitter. The crowd treads silently. The husband and the children are still fighting for their lives in the hospital. Meir Kahane arrives. He frequents burials. He strides, surrounded by a few strange, tense young men, both drawing and repelling everyone’s glances, like an embarrassing subconscious failing.
We pace along the cemetery paths, and Haim Korfu, Minister of Transportation and the government’s flesh-and-blood representative, drives among us in his Volvo. To my left I hear Ha-etzni explaining to someone how Israeli peace initiatives of the past and present have only caused more Jewish deaths: “When I heard Peres’s idea of an international peace conference, I immediately knew there would be more victims.” I peer at him, and try to figure out where he plugs in the device that allows him to make such logical contortions—and wonder whether the misfunction is mine.
The government’s representative speaks by the grave: “Just as the two soldiers who fell yesterday died in defense of the safety of the Galilee, you, Ofra, fell in defense of the safety of Jerusalem.”
I find it hard to believe my ears: “You, Ofra, are our soldier … We established settlements in order to make Judea and Samaria safer…” These words seem so foreign to the pain, and to the facts. “The settlements are a guarantee against the Palestinian state of those who hate us!” Korfu declares, and someone shouts at him: “You are Peres’s whores, all of you!” He is silenced by those who stand around him. Relatives sob. They almost certainly do not take in Korfu’s words. Like standard words of greeting and curses. I hope they do not hear it. What can they feel when their dead loved one turns into the instrument of a cynical political game? Why does there have to be a government representative at such a tragic event? Is death also the government’s domain? Do the living also partake in this same hollow protocol? Why do politicians not know how to make themselves scarce, and shamefacedly withdraw from the place of the pain and sorrow which they, in their impotence, have a part in causing?
I listen to the government representative and begin to understand. There is no guarantee that what has to be done here to prevent more and more suffering will actually be done. Most of the tragedies which have befallen nations happened because of the mistakes those peoples made. There is a no-man’s-land, a dead place, dividing personal pain, a man and his feelings, from the place in which things are decided and the agreements and party manifestos and official eulogies are drafted. “The PLO wants to cut us off at the roots, but we will do the same to them!” Korfu concludes the official prayer of the government representative at the cemetery.
The funeral has ended, it was announced. Then there was total stillness. The crowd waited as if for some sign, for an event that would carry off all its emotions in a storm. Violence waited above like a torch sputtering in the wind. The air was filled for a moment with the flatulent whisper “Kahane.” Then the tension subsided. The crowd began to disperse. Korfu sailed off in his car, and the television crew folded up its equipment.
The sun was covered by a slight cloud, shimmering through it, as if covered by a handkerchief. Ofra Moses’s close friends and relatives quietly approached the grave. Now they were alone, without politicians and functionaries and merchants of tragedy. The close friends gathered into a tight group, embracing and solid in their pain around the small, long mound of earth, and tightened their circle more and more, gazing inconsolable and unbelieving at the new scar on the ground.