Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you’re handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood, and smiting firstborn, give me a pass, and tell me when it’s over.
And the Lord did well by me at Passover—brilliant sunshine on the beaches of Tel Aviv, pellucid waters, no flies in my room at the Hilton, and certainly no lice. I am a firstborn myself but was not the least smitten, not even by the cute waitress at the Hilton’s kosher sushi restaurant. I am a happily married man. And by the way, Leviticus 11:10 says, “Of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you,” an apt description of sushi as far as I’m concerned. But gentiles aren’t expected to understand the intricacies of dietary law, although extra complications thereof lead to Passover’s main drawback: food and—more important to gentiles—drink.
“I’ll have a Scotch,” I said to the Hilton’s bartender.
“Scotch isn’t kosher for Passover,” he said. “It’s made with leaven.”
“Gin and tonic,” I said.
“Gin isn’t kosher.”
“What can I have?”
“You can have a screwdriver—Israeli vodka and orange juice.”
“What’s Israeli vodka like?” I asked.
“The orange juice is very good.”
There was no plague of tourists in Israel. It should have been a period of hectic visitation, with Passover beginning April 7 and the Eastern Orthodox and Western Easters coinciding a week later. But Israel’s income from tourism dropped 58 percent in the last quarter of 2000, and to judge by the lineless queues at Ben-Gurion Airport and the empty-seated aisles of El Al, the drop had continued. The marble lobby of the Hilton echoed, when at all, with the chatter of idle desk clerks and bellhops. The din of strife had rendered Israel quiet.
Quiet without portentous hush—traffic hum, AC buzz, and cell phone beepings indicated ordinary life in an ordinary place. Tourism wasn’t the only thing there was no sign of in Israel. Demonstrations didn’t block intersections, public address systems failed to crackle with imperatives, exigent posters weren’t stuck to walls, except to advertise raves. There was no sign of crisis—international or bilateral or domestic political—although all news reports agreed that a crisis raged here, and an economic crisis as well. A 12 percent quarterly decline in gross domestic product was unevident in boarded-up shops and empty cafés, which didn’t exist, or in beggars and homeless, who weren’t on the streets.
There was no sign of terrorism, not that there hadn’t been some. But what doesn’t inspire terror, by definition, isn’t terrorism. The Carmel Market was crowded, either with people wholly unafraid or with people indifferent to whether they were blown up singly or in bunches. If security was pervasive, it was invisible. Israel, I’ve heard, is hated fanatically by millions of Muslims around the world, whereas the U.S. Congress is loathed by only a small number of well-informed people who follow politics closely. But a walk around anything in Israel is less impeded by barriers and armed guards than a walk around the Capitol Building in Washington.
There was no sign of war. Plenty of soldiers were to be seen, carrying their weapons, but this is no shock to the frequent traveler. For all that the world looks askance at America’s lack of gun control, foreigners love to wave guns around. Nothing about the Israeli Defense Forces is as odd as Italian carabinieri brandishing their machine pistols while grimly patrolling that flashpoint, Venice.
There was, in fact, no sign of anything in Tel Aviv. In particular there was no sign of Israel’s vital importance to world peace—except, of course, those signs of vital importance to world peace that one sees everywhere, the lettering here in Hebrew but the trademark logos recognizable enough.
Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture ranging from the bland to the fancifully bland. In Miami the striving, somewhat troublesome immigrant population is the result of Russia’s meddling with Cuba. In Tel Aviv the striving, somewhat troublesome immigrant population is the result of Russia’s meddling with itself. I found a Russian restaurant where they couldn’t have cared less what was made with leaven, where they had Scotch, and where, over one Scotch too many, I contemplated the absurdity of Israel being an ordinary place.
What if people who had been away for ages, out and on their own, suddenly showed up at their old home and demanded to move back in? My friends with grown-up children tell me this happens all the time. What if the countless ancient tribal groups that are now defeated, dispersed, and stateless contrived to reestablish themselves in their ancestral lands in such a way as to dominate everyone around them? The Mashantucket Pequots are doing so this minute at their Foxwoods casino in southeastern Connecticut. What if a religious group sought a homeland, never minding how multifarious its religion had become or how divergent its adherents were in principles and practices? A homeland for Protestants would have to satisfy the aspirations of born-again literalists holding forth about creationism in their concrete-block tabernacles and also fulfill the hopes and dreams of vaguely churched latitudinarians giving praise to God’s creation by playing golf on Sundays. A Protestant Zion would need to be perfect both for sniping at abortion doctors in North Carolina and for marrying lesbians in Vermont. As an American, I already live in that country.
Maybe there’s nothing absurd about Israel. I wandered out into the ordinary nighttime, down Jabotinsky Street, named after the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who wrote in 1923, “A voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable now or in the foreseeable future.” Thus Jabotinsky broke with the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who, in Altneuland (1902), had a fictional future Arab character in a fictional future Israel saying, “The Jews have made us prosperous, why should we be angry with them?” And now the Carmel Market was full of goods from Egypt.
From Jabotinsky Street I meandered into Weizmann Street, named for the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who in 1919 met with Emir Faisal, future king of Iraq and a son of the sharif of Mecca, and concluded an agreement that “all necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.” Faisal sent a letter to the American Zionist delegates at the Versailles peace conference wishing Jews “a most hearty welcome home.”
Turning off Weizmann Street, I got lost for a while among signpost monikers I didn’t recognize but that probably commemorated people who became at least as embattled as Jabotinsky, Herzl, Weizmann, and Faisal. I emerged on Ben-Gurion Avenue. The first prime minister of Israel was a ferocious battler. He fought the British mandate, the war of liberation, Palestinian guerrillas, and the Sinai campaign. He even won, most of the time, in the Israeli Knesset. And still he was on the lookout for peace. In the months leading up to the Suez crisis, in 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower had a secret emissary shuttling between Jerusalem and Cairo. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, told the emissary (in words that Yasir Arafat could use and, for all I know, has), “If the initiative [Nasser] was now taking in these talks was known in public he would be faced not only with a political problem, but—possibly—with a bullet.”
A bullet was what Yitzhak Rabin got, at the end of Ben-Gurion Avenue, from a Jewish extremist, during a peace rally in the square that now bears Rabin’s name. A bullet was also what Emir Faisal’s brother, King Abdullah of Jordan, got, from a Muslim extremist, for advocating peace with Israel. Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, got a bullet, too.
If bullets were the going price for moderation hereabouts, then I needed another drink. I walked west along Gordon Street—named, I hope, for Judah Leib Gordon, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist who wrote in classical Hebrew, and not for Lord George Gordon, the fanatical anti-Catholic and leader of the 1780 Gordon riots, who converted to Judaism late in life and died in Newgate Prison praising the French Revolution. This brought me to the stretch of nightclubs along the beach promenade. Here, two months later, a suicide bomber would kill twenty-two people outside the Dolphi disco. Most of the victims were teenage Russian girls, no doubt very moderate about everything other than clothes, makeup, and boyfriends.
My tour guide arrived the next morning. His name was a long collection of aspirates, glottal stops, and gutturals with, like printed Hebrew, no evident vowels. “Americans can never pronounce it,” he said. “Just call me T’zchv.”
I called him Z. I was Z’s only customer. He drove a minibus of the kind that in the United States always seems to be filled with a church group. And so was Z’s, until recently. “Most of my clients,” he said, “are the fundamentalists. They want to go everywhere in the Bible. But now …” The people who talk incessantly about the Last Days have quit visiting the place where the world will end, due to violence in the region.
Z was seventy-five, a retired colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces, a veteran of every war from liberation to the invasion of Lebanon. “Our worst enemy is CNN,” he said. His parents had come from Russia in 1908 and settled on the first kibbutz in Palestine. Z was full of anger about the fighting in Israel—the fighting with the ultra-Orthodox Jews. “They don’t serve in the army. They don’t pay taxes. The government gives them money. I call them Pharisees.”
As we walked around, Z would greet people of perfectly secular appearance by name, adding, “You Pharisee, you,” or would introduce me to someone in a T-shirt and jeans who had, maybe, voted for Ariel Sharon in the most recent election by saying, “I want you to meet Moshe, a real Pharisee, this one.”
Z said over and over, “The problem is with the Pharisees.” About Arabs I couldn’t get him to say much. Z seemed to regard Arabs as he did weather. Weather is important. Weather is good. We enjoy weather. We respect weather. Nobody likes to be out in weather when it gets dramatic.
“My wife won’t let me go to the Palestinian areas,” Z said.
“Let’s go to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood,” I said.
“You don’t want to go there,” he said. “They’re dumps. You want to see where Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee.”
“No, I don’t.”
“‘And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea’ …” For a man at loggerheads with religious orthodoxy, Z recited a lot of scripture, albeit mostly New Testament, where Pharisees come off looking pretty bad. When quoting, Z would shift to the trochaic foot—familiar to him, perhaps, from the preaching of his evangelical tourists; familiar to me from Mom yelling through the screen door, “You get in here right this minute!”
As a compromise we went to Jaffa and had Saint Peter’s fish from the Sea of Galilee for lunch. Jaffa is the old port city for Jerusalem, a quaint jumble of Arab architecture out of which the Arabs ran or were run (depending on who’s writing history) during Israel’s war of liberation. Like most quaint jumbles adjacent to quaintness-free cities, Jaffa is full of galleries and studios. Israel is an admirably artsy place. And, as in other artsy places of the contemporary world, admiration had to be aimed principally at the effort. The output indicated that Israelis should have listened when God said, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing.” Some of the abstract stuff was good.
I wanted to look at art. Z wanted me to look at the house of Simon the Tanner, on the Jaffa waterfront. This, according to Acts 10:10–15, is where Saint Peter went into a trance and foresaw a universal Christian church and, also, fitted sheets. Peter had a vision of “a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things.” God told Peter to kill them and eat them. Peter thought this didn’t look kosher—or probably, in the case of the creeping things, appetizing. And God said that what He had cleansed should not be called unclean.
“Then is when Peter knew Christianity was for everyone, not just the Jews!” said Z with vicarious pride in another religion’s generous thought.
A little too generous. To Peter’s idea we owe ideology, the notion that the wonderful visions we have involve not only ourselves but the whole world, whether the world wants to be involved or not. Until that moment of Peter’s in Jaffa, the killing of heretics and infidels was a local business. Take, for example, the case of John the Baptist: with Herodias, Herod Antipas, and stepdaughter Salome running the store, it was a mom-and-pop operation. But by the middle of the first century theological persecution had gone global in the known world. Eventually the slaughter would outgrow the limited market in religious differences. In the twentieth century millions of people were murdered on purely intellectual grounds.
“Can we go in?” I asked.
“No,” Z said, “the Muslims put a mosque in there, which made the Orthodox angry. They rioted, which kept the Christians out. So the police closed the place.”
For those who dislike ideology, what’s interesting about kibbutzim is that they’re such a bad idea. Take an Eastern European intelligentsia and make the desert bloom. One would sooner take Mormons and start a rap label. But Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, three quarters of a mile north of the Gaza Strip, passed the test of ideology. It worked—something no fully elaborated, universally applicable ideology ever does.
I’d never been to a kibbutz. I don’t know what I expected—Grossinger’s with guns? A bar mitzvah with tractors? Some of my friends went to kibbutzim in the 1960s and came back with tales of sex and socialism. But you could get that at Oberlin, without the circle dancing. I’m sure my poli-sci major pals were very little help with the avocado crop. Anyway, what I wasn’t expecting was a cluster of JFK-era summer cottages with haphazard flower beds, sagging badminton nets, and Big Wheel tricycles on the grass—Lake Missaukee, Michigan, without Lake Missaukee.
A miniature Michigan of shrubbery and trees covered the low hills of the settlement, but with a network of drip-irrigation lines weaving among the stems and trunks. Here were the fiber-optic connections of a previous and more substantive generation of high-tech visionaries, who meant to treat a troubled world with water (per Al Sharpton) rather than information. Scattered in the greenery were the blank metal-sided workshops and warehouses of present-day agriculture, suggestive more of light industry than of peasanthood. Yad Mordechai has light industry, too, producing housewares and decorative ceramics. Plus it has the largest apiary in Israel, an educational center devoted to honey and bees, a gift shop, a kosher restaurant, and, of all things, thirteen hundred yards from the Gaza Strip, a petting zoo.
Yad Mordechai was founded in 1943 on an untilled, sand-drifted patch of the Negev. The land was bought from the sheikh of a neighboring village. And there, in the humble little verb of the preceding sentence, is the moral genius of Zionism. Theodor Herzl, when he set down the design of Zionism in The Jewish State (1896), wrote, “The land … must, of course, be privately acquired.” The Zionists intended to buy a nation rather than conquer one. This had never been tried. Albeit various colonists, such as the American ones, had foisted purchase-and-sale agreements on peoples who had no concept of fee-simple tenure or of geography as anything but a free good. But the Zionists wanted an honest title search.
More than a hundred years ago the Zionists realized what nobody has realized yet—nobody but a few cranky Austrian economists and some very rich people skimming the earth in Gulfstream jets. Nothing is zero sum, not even statehood. Man can make more of everything, including the very thing he sets his feet on, as the fellow getting to his feet and heading to the bar on the G-5 can tell you. “If we wish to found a State to-day,” Herzl wrote, “we shall not do it in the way which would have been the only possible one a thousand years ago.”
Whether the early Zionists realized what they’d realized is another matter. Palestinian Arabs realized, very quickly, that along with the purchased polity came politics. In politics, as opposed to reality, everything is zero sum.
Considering how things are going politically in Zion these days, the following quotation from Herzl should be continued and completed.
Supposing, for example, we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts, we should not set about the task in the fashion of Europeans of the fifth century. We should not take spear and lance and go out singly in pursuit of bears; we should organize a large and lively hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb into their midst.
On May 19, 1948, Yad Mordechai was attacked by an Egyptian armored column with air and artillery support. The kibbutz was guarded by 130 men and women, some of them teenagers, most without military training. They had fifty-five light weapons, one machine gun, and a two-inch mortar. Yad Mordechai held out for six days—long enough for the Israeli army to secure the coast road to Tel Aviv. Twenty-six of the defenders were killed, along with about three hundred Egyptians.
A slit trench has been left along the Yad Mordechai hilltop, with the original fifty-five weapons fastened to boards and preserved with tar. Under the viscous coatings a nineteenth-century British rifle was discernible, and the sink-trap plumbing of two primitive Bren guns. The rest of the firearms looked like the birds and cats that were once mummified—by Egyptians, appropriately enough. Below the trench is a negligee lace of barbed wire, all the barbed wire the kibbutz had in 1948, and beyond that are Egyptian tanks, just where they stopped when they could go no farther. Between the tanks dozens of charging Egyptian soldiers are represented by life-size black-painted two-dimensional cutouts—lawn ornaments on attack.
It was the only war memorial I’ve seen that was both frightening and silly—things all war memorials should be. Most war memorials are sad or awful—things, come to think of it, that war memorials should also be. And this war memorial had a price of admission—which, considering the cost of war, is another good idea.
At the ticket booth was a crabby old guy whom Z greeted with warm complaining, grouch to grouch. Then Z took me to Yad Mordechai’s Holocaust museum, which skips pity and goes immediately to Jewish resistance during World War II and Jewish fighting in Palestine and Israel. Yad Mordechai is named for Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The message of the Yad Mordechai Holocaust museum is that the Holocaust memorial is the trench at the other end of the kibbutz.
This is the second wonderful thing about Zionism: it was right. Every other “ism” of the modern world was wrong about the nature of civilized man—Marxism, mesmerism, surrealism, pacifism, existentialism, nudism. But civilized man did want to kill Jews, and was going to do more of it. And Zionism was specific. While other systems of thought blundered around in the universal, looking for general solutions to comprehensive problems, Zionism stuck to its guns, or—in the beginning, anyway—to its hoes, mattocks, and irrigation pipes.
True, Zionism has a utopian socialist aspect that is thoroughly nutty as far as I’m concerned. But it’s not my concern. No one knocks on my door during dinner and asks me to join a kibbutz or calls me on the weekend to persuade me to drop my current long-distance carrier and make all my phone calls by way of Israel. And given my last name, they won’t.
My last name is, coincidentally, similar to the maiden name of the Holocaust museum docent, who was Baltimore Irish and had married a young man from the kibbutz and moved there in the 1970s. “I converted,” she said, “which the Orthodox make it hard to do, but I went through with it. There’s a crabby old guy here who sort of took me under his wing. The first Yom Kippur after I converted, he asked me, ‘Did you fast?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Stupid!’ You probably saw him on the way in, behind the ticket counter. He’s a veteran of the fight for Yad Mordechai. There’s a photo of him here, when they liberated the kibbutz, in November ‘forty-eight.” And there was the photo of the young, heroic, crabby old guy. And now he was behind the ticket counter at the war memorial—not making a political career in Jerusalem or writing a book about the young, heroic days, or flogging his story to the History Channel.
“How cool is that?” said the Baltimore Irish woman running the Holocaust museum.
Z and I had lunch at the kibbutz’s self-serve restaurant, where Z took his plate of meat and sat in the middle of the dairy section. In the sky to the south we could see smoke rising from the Gaza Strip—tires burning at an intifada barricade, or just trash being incinerated. Public services weren’t what they might be in the Palestinian Authority at the moment. Or maybe it was one of the Jewish settlements in Gaza being attacked, although we hadn’t heard gunfire.
These settlements aren’t farms but, mostly, apartment clusters. “Are the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza some kind of post-agricultural, post-industrial, high-rise Zionism?” I asked Z. “Or are they a government-funded, mondo-condo, live-dangerously parody of nation building?”
“Pharisees!” said Z and went back to eating.
After lunch we drove to Ben-Gurion’s house in Tel Aviv, a modest, foursquare, utterly unadorned structure. But the inside was cozy with twenty thousand books, in Hebrew, English, French, German, Russian, Latin, Spanish, Turkish, and ancient Greek. No fiction, however: a man who devoted his life to making a profound change in society was uninterested in the encyclopedia of society that fiction provides.
Looking at the thick walls and heavy shutters, I wondered if the house had been built to be defended. Then I twigged to the purpose of the design and gained true respect for the courage of the Zionist pioneers. Ben-Gurion came to the Middle East before air-conditioning was invented—and from Plonsk, at that.
We spent the next day, at my insistence and to Z’s mystification, driving around the most ordinary parts of Israel, which look so ordinary to an American that I’m rendered useless for describing them to other Americans. American highway strip-mall development hasn’t quite reached Israel, however, so there’s even less of the nondescript to not describe.
Z and I stood in a garden-apartment complex in Ashdod, in the garden part, a patch of trampled grass. “Here is the ugliest living in Israel,” said Z. We went to a hill on the Ashdod shore, a tell actually, a mound of ancient ruins, an ash heap of history from which we had a view of … ash heaps, and the power plant that goes with them, which supplies half of Israel’s electricity. Ashdod, incidentally, is a Philistine place-name, not a pun. We could also see the container port, Israel’s principal deep-water harbor. “This is the place where the whale threw Jonah up,” Z said.
We went to the best suburbs of Tel Aviv, which look like the second-best suburbs of San Diego. We spent a lot of time stuck in traffic. Violence in the West Bank had forced traffic into bottlenecks on Routes 2 and 4 along the coast, in a pattern familiar to anyone negotiating Washington, D.C.’s Beltway—living in a place where you’re scared to go to half of it and the other half you can’t get to.
Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware. From the top of Mount Nebo, in the equivalent of Pennsylvania, the Lord showed Moses all of Canaan. New Canaan is in Connecticut—but close enough. And there is a Mount Nebo in Pennsylvania, although it overlooks the Susquehanna rather than the promised land of, say, Paramus. Joshua blew the trumpet, and the malls of Paramus came tumbling down. Israel also has beaches that are at least as attractive as New Jersey’s.
An old friend of mine, Dave Garcia, flew in from Hong Kong to spend Easter in Jerusalem. “I like to go places when the tourists aren’t there,” he said. Dave spent two years in Vietnam when the tourists weren’t there, as a prisoner of the Viet Cong. “Let’s see where the Prince of Peace was born,” he said. “It’s in the middle of the intifada.”
Z drove us from Ben-Gurion Airport to the roadblock between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The highway was strewn with broken bottles, as if in the aftermath not of war but of a bad party. Israeli soldiers and Palestinian Authority policemen stood around warily. Z handed us over to an Arab tour-guide friend of his who drove a twenty-five-year-old Mercedes and looked glum. Israel had lost half its tourism, but hotels in Palestinian areas were reporting occupancy rates of 4 percent.
The Arab guide parked at random in the middle of empty Manger Square, outside the Church of the Nativity. “There is normally a three-and-a-half-hour wait,” he said as we walked straight into the Manger Grotto. The little cave has been rendered a soot hole by millennia of offertory candles. It’s hung with damp-stained tapestries and tarnished lamps and festoons of grimy ornamentation elaborate enough for a Byzantine emperor if the Byzantine emperor lived in the basement. I imagine the Virgin Mary had the place done up more cheerfully, with little homey touches, when it was a barn.
The only other visitors were in a tour group from El Salvador, wearing bright yellow T-shirts and acting cheerfully pious. Dave asked them in Spanish if, after all that El Salvador had been through with earthquakes and civil war, the fuss about violence and danger around here puzzled them. They shrugged and looked puzzled, but that may have been because no one in the Garcia family has been able to speak Spanish for three generations, including Dave.
All the dead babies from the Massacre of the Innocents are conveniently buried one grotto over, under the same church. Sites of Christian devotion around Jerusalem tend to be convenient. In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher the piece of ground where Christ’s cross was erected, the stone where He was laid out for burial, and the tomb in which He was resurrected—plus where Adam’s skull was buried and, according to early Christian cartographers, the center of the world—are within a few arthritic steps of one another. Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, was over seventy-five when she traveled to the Holy Land, in AD 326, looking for sacred locations. Arriving with a full imperial retinue and a deep purse, Saint Helena discovered that her tour guides were able to take her to every place she wanted to go; each turned out to be nearby and, as luck would have it, for sale. The attack of real estate agents in Palestine long predates Zionism.
The Church of the Nativity is a shabby mess, a result of quarreling religious orders. The Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic priests have staked out Nativity turf with the acrimonious precision of teenage brothers sharing a bedroom. A locked steel door prevents direct access from the Roman Catholic chapel to the Manger Grotto, which has to be reached through the Greek Orthodox monastery where there is a particular “Armenian beam” that Greek Orthodox monks stand on to sweep the area above the grotto entrance, making the Armenians so angry that, according to my guidebook, “in 1984 there were violent clashes as Greek and Armenian clergy fought running battles with staves and chains that had been hidden beneath their robes.” What would Christ have thought? He might have thought, “Hand me a stave,” per Mark 11:15: “Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.”
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 house fronts 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 I had prayed to Mecca a dozen years before, 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 forty thousand 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.