The night my mother left there was a savage act by a Palestinian: a baby girl was killed by a sniper in Hebron, shot dead as she lay in her father’s arms. Her name was Shalhevet Pass.
Since Sharon’s accession, town after Palestinian town had been invaded by the IDF, terrifying the inhabitants; Palestinians had attacked Israelis, terrifying them in their turn. By the end of March 2001, 68 Israelis and 409 Palestinians had died in the new Intifada. Since the killing of eight Israelis by a Palestinian bus driver on February 14, one Israeli had been killed and nine injured by a bomb in a taxi in Wadi Ara, and three days later three people were killed and at least 60 injured in the Israeli town of Netanya—the first Israelis killed in a suicide bombing since the start of the Intifada. Two car bombs were defused, including one in Mea Sharim near the boys’ school. Now, nearly two months after Sharon’s victory, evacuation hung over us again. And yet at home in the Forest of Peace we felt safe; the bells around the necks of the goats rang out against the quietness of the valley, and there were meowing kittens and fat puppies. One of these, the furriest, was going to be ours, promised to the children by Maha’s niece, Rasha. The foal was growing well. Flowers abounded, crimson poppies, yellow mustard, blue rosemary, and countless tiny flowers I couldn’t identify, almond blossom painting the trees palest white-pink.
On March 27, 2001, there were two bombs in Jerusalem: the first, in the morning, was a car bomb in Talpiot injuring seven people. Andrew called me on my cell phone to say be careful, and also that this might trigger the beginning of a widely predicted Israeli onslaught.1 The second, that afternoon, was a suicide bomb aimed at a bus in French Hill. Twenty-eight people were injured, two seriously. Traffic all over central Jerusalem was knotted up, and I was forced to go deeper into Mea Sharim where we were held stationary. I was not happy about being made to drive through this area: my control over risk was taken away from me. The streets were narrow and contorted, and jammed up very quickly, leaving you pinioned in a dangerous place, unable to escape. People walking by became threats, backpacks became explosives, costumes disguises.
The next day there was a bomb in Qalqilya, a Palestinian town, and another was defused in Netanya. The IDF shelled again: Gaza, Ramallah, and Hebron. Sharon’s efforts to convince President Bush that using military force would bring peace had been successful, and there was little hope, moderates on both sides complained, of the intervention they needed from the US.
Samia hadn’t turned up on a number of mornings, and it was difficult to know whether it was because of the soldiers at the checkpoint or her efforts to emigrate. When she did come, she was as jumpy as ever. One morning she found a giant centipede three inches long writhing in the sink, and screamed.
“If they bite you, you die,” she cried. I was at home trying to write a report; I dealt with the “forty-four,” as the insects were called, and tried to calm Samia. There were fresh almonds on the table, picked from the trees, with their strange greenness and sharp taste; we had no idea what they were until the evening, when Maha came around to tell us she was having a baby. After three girls, she was hoping for a boy. She showed us how to eat the almonds, and we watched the foal canter awkwardly up and down the little drive. The foal had been left alone while Basil took its mother out for a ride; later Basil came back for his little brother, Hamoud, and led him quietly along the dusty road by the house. The mare sensed that her new rider was a beginner, so she was gentle, not the spirited ride she had been with Basil, who had raced by, tassels flying. Rasha came to the house to tell us that we could take the new puppy. The children ran about chattering and we settled the fluffy fat thing into her new basket, but the puppy was mournful and howled for her brothers and sisters all night.
The ten-month-old murdered Israeli baby, Shalhevet Pass, was finally laid to rest in April. (Her Hebron settler family had initially refused to bury her until the IDF took over Abu Sneim, from where the shots that killed her were fired.) The talk since her death had been about the mentality of a gunman who could fix his sights on, and kill, a child. Now Hebron, where there was always incipient trouble even at the best of times, was boiling.
Even those who had become inured to the daily tests of the occupation had trouble believing the reality of Hebron. Four hundred Jewish settlers and 140,000 Palestinians live in the city of the Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are believed to be buried there with their wives. Forty thousand of these Palestinians live under Israeli rule and, for much of the six months since the start of the Intifada, had been kept under complete 24-hour curfew. This allowed the 400 settlers to move about freely.*
Even when there was no curfew, it was sobering to visit Hebron and see its slow strangulation. You drive in through Palestinian bustle, streets crammed with life, the sharp new buildings against the softer stone of the old. Suddenly the wide main road becomes a market—instantly, from street into souk without taking a breath. The market had to be here now: the original souk was closed up. Gargantuan cabbages on every side, wooden trolleys speeding through impossible gaps, boys running, old men slow in white djellabahs and dark keffiyehs, mounds of purple garlic, broad beans in wide piles, towers of flat-smoothed vine leaves, pyramids of spice, cages of pigeon, duck, and geese, and noise.
The noise dulls steadily into quiet as you make your way through the concrete cubes blocking the narrowing streets, walking along the double-storied buildings, shops below, homes above, the shutters green metal and mournful. The closer you get to the Jewish settlement, the heavier the quiet. The dead center, the site of the old market with its now boarded shop fronts, often marked black with fire and violence, is sepulchral. There may be a few settlers standing at the checkpoints—they wear their weapons and their religion with equal ease. Green army vehicles patrol, eyeing us, checking us out. A white TIPH car, its two unarmed occupants looking uncomfortable, edges by in silence.
There are ancient stone houses in the center of the city, many of them abandoned: “encouraging” the Palestinian inhabitants to leave has been going on for years. Inside, the houses are filled with absences: vaulted ceilings; ovens for baking; stairs now winding up into nothing; delicate colors lingering on the peeling plaster; vines and weeds taking over. The views from the rooftops over the city toward the great Herodian edifice—the Tomb of the Patriarchs—are punctured by watch-posts, whose camouflaged eyes are all-seeing.
An American journalist, Joe, the father of one of Archie’s school friends, came back from Hebron aghast at the violence and virulence he had encountered. Knowing he was going to be late, he had asked me to pick up his daughter from school. He came to collect her and accepted a drink before they left. He sat, stunned, under the tree overlooking the valley, and talked.
The night before, he said, the settlers had set off a bomb in a row of Hebron shops, injuring their own soldiers. Joe had watched them marauding, flaunting their freedom to the shuttered doors and the Palestinians locked in behind them, unable to move, or work, or go to school, day after day. It was the settlers who attacked Joe, who happens to be Jewish, and were verbally aggressive when he tried to interview them, then physically aggressive when he admitted that he had interviewed Palestinians as well. “Get out of my face!” they spat at him as they beat him away. “God gave us this land!—God gave us this land!” they said repeatedly and with a loathing he said he had never seen in all his time as a journalist, and hoped never to see again.
“I never said a word about their right to be there. I hardly got anything out at all—they didn’t give me a chance.”
“This is not living,” one Palestinian had told Joe as he hurried past to find food for his family when the curfew was lifted for an hour, as happened every few days. “This is not life.”
Curfews were not new to Palestinian Hebronites; nor was conflict. The original Jewish community in Hebron had been massacred by Palestinians in the riots of 1929. Since 1968, when Moshe Levinger installed the first Israeli colony, settlers and Palestinians had lived alongside each other angrily, with frequent violence. The Palestinians attacked the settlers and the settlers attacked the Palestinians. The law, however, was weighted against the Palestinians: Israeli government commissions and human rights organizations repeatedly found their forces failed to protect Palestinians from settler attacks, sometimes even joining in.2 Under the protective might of the IDF, settlers had virtual immunity to bully, beat, and mob Palestinians who could only watch as their market and livelihoods were bulldozed.* Many had given in to the terror and left.
One Norwegian observer stationed in Hebron told me of the frustration of working there, of the number of times they were themselves attacked by settlers, and of the ironies. He once witnessed a fight between two American Israelis. They were standing on a road in Hebron built with American government money. One was a peace activist; the other was a settler. One said to the other, “You have no right to be here. Go back to America,” to which the other replied: “No, you have no right to be here, you go back to America.”
More visitors came to stay with us in Jerusalem, ignoring warnings from people in London and New York. During my parents-in-law’s visit the IDF bombed Beit Jala again. I left my mother-in-law at home while I took the boys to play soccer, but when we returned she was distressed. Sitting in the garden among the unpruned roses, listening to the rumbling explosions of the IDF barrage on Beit Jala, she could not know how close the bombing might edge.
“I’m not really enjoying this,” she said. Realizing how immune I had become to the noise of the IDF, I assured her that our village had never been bombed. I had to leave her again to go with my father-in-law to visit one of his old friends, Israel Shahak. Amid the chaos of books and papers in his tiny apartment in Rehavia, the sadness was bleak and heavy. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and of Bergen-Belsen, after a lifetime of standing up for justice and common sense in Israel, even Professor Shahak had been pushed too far by Palestinian attacks.
“How things have changed since we last met, Ian.”
My father-in-law murmured, “Indeed, Israel, and not for the better.”
He meant not only the terrible violence, but also anti-Semitism. “As an Israeli Jew,” said Shahak, “I’ve been shocked by the levels of hatred in Arab countries.” He mentioned a vitriolic song—“I hate Israel, I love Amr Moussa”*—playing to huge approval in Egypt. “And President Assad’s vicious comments to the Pope when he visited Syria...”3
Ian agreed. They talked about anti-Semitism and the danger that the Intifada would lead to more. Neither man, both long-time observers of the politics of the Middle East, held out much hope, especially with the US not taking on the role of impartial arbiter.
“But the State Department has at least protested that more than a billion shekels are to be used for settlements,” said Ian.
Shahak brushed this off—Sharon had apologized to the US, saying the money was for security, not expansion, and would be spread over several years.
“What nonsense,” he said, “Sharon does not change.”
Ian mentioned the possibility of Shimon Peres using his cabinet post to restrain Sharon. Again Shahak was dismissive. “Oh, Peres and Sharon,” he said, despairing. “They’re just like each other.”
“In what way?”
“The two of them are the biggest liars in Israeli history.”
For Ian, the saddest moment was when his friend, who for years had stood up for dialogue, coexistence, and genuine peace declared his new position: “Separation is the only option.” Shahak explained: “We cannot talk peace with them, only a ceasefire behind an iron wall.” This was the majority Israeli view, he said, and now, sadly, it was his view too. Others, pointing to the fence around Gaza, insisted that separation was not a solution: Condemning hundreds of thousands of people to a life of dependency inside a big prison does not bring genuine peace. And therefore it would not bring security either. But Palestinian bombings were pushing Israelis, even long-standing and vocal peace advocates like Israel Shahak, into a position they had thought they would never hold.
“The Palestinians have lost all sympathy,” he explained. “Arafat united all Israelis by first demanding the Palestinian right of return.” There was a peace camp joke, he said: “We thought we were struggling for two states for two nations, now we see the Palestinians want two states for one nation.” The implication being that the Palestinians would have not only their own state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but would also, by returning hundreds of thousands of refugees, secure a demographic majority in Israel as well. (This, many held, was Arafat’s chosen method to destroy Israel.)
Shahak’s second reason was Palestinians’ insistence on attacking Israelis inside Israel, instead of attacking only settlements inside the Occupied Territories. “Attacks against settlements in the territories shock few Israelis,” he said. “I don’t call those terrorist acts—except in a few cases. Most are acts of legitimate resistance to the occupation, but not all. The killing of two young boys in the cave, and the two men in the Tulkarem restaurant when they spared the Israeli Arab—these are different—and not legitimate resistance by any definition.” The murder (May 8, 2001) of the two fourteen-year-old boys had been horrifying: Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran had been beaten to death by Palestinians in a cave near their settlement, Tekoa.
“Where is the situation heading?” I asked him. “People are talking about ‘transfer.’”
The professor looked pained, and shook his head slowly. “The transfer idea was alive until the 1980s,” he said. “But it was killed by Oslo and the first Intifada.” He talked about Zionism’s aims, the plan to conquer the land, leaving as few Arabs on it as possible, and how this had been pursued in various ways: forceful expulsions, the destruction of villages, churches, mosques, historical sites, homes, and businesses, the expropriation of land by a number of legalistic ploys, the expropriation of water, and other measures including massacre and rape. And with varying success: 1948 saw the territory of the new state of Israel cleared of 75 percent of its Palestinian inhabitants. Yet in that respect the war of 1967 failed: the population of the newly occupied territories fell by only a fraction; the majority of Palestinians, having learned the lesson of ‘48, stayed. “And now,” he said, “transfer is dead.”
“But the problem of the settlements,” he continued quietly. “The two worst are Itzar and Tapuach. These,” he added, “are even worse than Hebron.” His thoughts ran on. “Likud shouts, Labor builds: it’s always been this way...” he said, explaining that while Likud made a big drama about building settlements, Labor quietly went ahead and built them. “The Sharon government will last as long as the war,” he said finally. I was unsure which he meant was driving which. We left and never saw him again. Professor Shahak died a few weeks later. A great man, he was widely mourned.
If Israel Shahak, a long-standing pillar of the left, had been pushed too far by Palestinian violence, it was not surprising that many Israeli moderates had moved into the fear camp. It, the fear—and the situation—kept nagging at our daily routines. Andrew rang from Gaza one morning while I was in a meeting with colleagues at work. He wanted me to know that despite the IDF destroying a building 100 meters from the UN compound, he was fine. But he didn’t much like the whistling in and then boom of the missiles, he said.
There were Palestinian attacks and reprisals, Israeli attacks and reprisals. Shalhevet Pass was no longer the youngest victim of the Intifada; another baby girl, Iman Hijjo, was killed by Israeli tank-fire in a Gaza refugee camp. She was four months old. The IDF shelled in retaliation for a Palestinian mortar attack on an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip. The mortar attack caused no injuries. Ten Palestinian children in a primary school were among those injured in the retaliation.4 All the while there was the constant backdrop to most of our days: the steady thud, thud of IDF actions in the territories, too continuous to be news.
May 15, 2001 was newsworthy. The anniversary of the Nakba, the Palestinians’ catastrophe and Israelis’ triumph at the founding of the state of Israel, it stood in direct contradiction to the refrain of Israelis as victims. There was widespread Israeli anger about Palestinians marking the event by street protests and riots. Continuing Palestinian incitement against Israel was one of the main Israeli complaints against the PA.
During the day we heard that a friend had been shot. At first we had no idea how bad his injuries were, but the shooting had been caught on film by one of the many international film crews, so we found out soon enough as it was widely broadcast. One of France’s main TV journalists in the Middle East, Bertrand had been covering the Nakba Day demonstrations at the Ayosh junction in Ramallah, when, as the video recording showed, an Israeli border patrolman got out of his jeep and made his preparations. The soldier, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, lifted his M-16 rifle, which was fitted with a telescopic sight, took aim at the journalist, who was standing amid a group of reporters and their cameras, and fired a single shot. If it hadn’t been for his flak jacket, Israelis read in their paper, he “might have been mortally wounded.”5 As it was, the force of the shot left Bertrand lying injured on the ground, the shreds of metal bullet embedded in his flak jacket.
I saw him a few days later when our families were swimming at a friend’s house. The bruise on his chest was over his sternum, just to the left over the fifth intercostal space.
“He was a good shot,” I said. “One inch more and he’d have been right over your heart.”
“No, he was a very good shot,” came the reply. “I was at a slight angle to him,” said Bertrand, indicating that the shot had come in from the left and would, without his flak jacket, have penetrated his heart. “But let’s not talk about it,” he said, making a quieting sign with his finger to his lips. “The boys,” who were in the pool with mine, “don’t know what happened, and we don’t want them to.”
His wife, Charlotte, a designer, blonde, English, and very attractive, talked about an encounter with an Israeli she had come to know. She told him, when he asked how she was and how things were in his friendly way, what had happened.
“No, it couldn’t have been,” he said. “I was in the army. Our security forces don’t do that kind of thing.”
“But I’m telling you,” said Charlotte, “it was filmed, recorded, it’s right there on the screen.”
He would not be moved: “It didn’t happen,” he said.
Three days after Bertrand was shot, a Hamas suicide bomber detonated himself outside a shopping mall in Netanya. Five Israelis were killed and over a hundred were wounded. This attack, like each one before it, ruined hundreds of lives. Israel retaliated immediately, this time sending in war planes—F-16s—to bomb Gaza and the West Bank for the first time since 1967, killing sixteen Palestinians and causing widespread damage.
I managed to take Catriona to preschool. “Managed” because new checkpoints had sprung up one immediately after another in crazed fashion. The traffic in Beit Hanina was gridlocked, and those parents who had been forced to move in order to avoid the checkpoints were maddened: “What do we do, move again so we can get the children to school?” Andrew called to say that perhaps our boys shouldn’t swim that day, as tensions were running very high in Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jerusalem. Just after we hung up there were two loud blasts over the city, different from the normal construction blasts, but I heard nothing on the news. I was anticipating bombs.
We were beginning to see signs of the strain even in our little village. One morning, while I turned the car around, the boys went ahead down the hill as usual to put the rubbish in the dumpster. I could hear voices and a tone I didn’t like. When I reached the boys they jumped into the car and said, “Let’s get out of here,” so I drove away. “What happened?”
They told me that a gang of boys from the lower village had bristled up to them, saying “What’s your name” in the loud and uncomprehending way that happened from time to time. I should have been more alert. The bigger boys, three of them, about twelve years old, had slapped my two (now aged seven and four) on the cheek, kicked Archie in the back, and surrounded Xan and pushed him around. My boys said they hadn’t liked it but they didn’t want me to go back and sort it out, nor would they run up the hill to find me if it happened again, because they said they would look scared. So much for absorbing local lessons: they had learned that not losing face was more important than finding a solution. I called our landlord to find out the telephone number of the mukhtar (village elder) so that I could speak to him about it. All the landlord could offer was to ask why I hadn’t called his father, saying he was the mukhtar. I said I would sort it out myself.
The landlord passed the word to his father regardless. To Abu Anis I was a woman who needed protecting when Andrew was in Gaza or traveling abroad and probably an irritatingly disrespectful one at that. Besides, he felt that administering local justice was his territory. He appeared at my door that evening saying he was going to get Basil to bring the boys to us, and if we identified them as the right boys Basil would hit them.
“No—no hitting,” I said.
So Abu Anis told me the culprits were afraid of his boys, who would show them the dogs and tell them that they would feed them to the dogs if they did wrong. I glanced at Basil, standing beside his grandfather looking uncomfortable. I knew him as an Androcles, always looking after and finding food for his menagerie, shy with me but very kind to the children. He was here out of duty.
“No hitting,” I repeated. Abu Anis insisted; I blocked again. This went on with no ground given on either side, until he decided it was a translation problem, and gave up.
I should have been more grateful for his concern. I had appeared disdainful to him and his system of justice, but I was feeling belligerent, especially when he said “I am your father.” In other words: you can’t look after yourself. The language and culture of victimhood was everywhere, debilitating. “Don’t you see how like each other they are?” asked one of the more jaded commentators that night at the journalists’ favorite haunt, the American Colony bar. “Both sides convinced they’re the victims, both adamant that the other must give way, both obsessively determined not to look beaten even if it means continuing the bloodshed instead.”
That day I had been dependent enough to ask for Amer’s help in fixing our phones. I didn’t know that his 90-year-old father had had a stroke and was being taken to the hospital. Amer helped me and then rushed off to see to the Israeli ambulance that had arrived. I watched it leave, under armed escort, a police jeep with machine-gun-wielding soldiers inside.
Ambulances, and their sirens in particular, had become a warning system. They were sometimes the first indication of a bomb; two would raise the alert, three would make journalists sit up and stop talking, more than four had them heading for the door. One night we woke to the ominous sound of ambulances speeding down the Hebron Road in the direction of Talpiot. Those journalists who were not in bed were on their way. The sleeping ones caught up later. The ambulances were arriving in droves. What they found when they reached the scene was, for once, not a bomb. Everyone had assumed a suicide bomber. The victims were Israelis, but this time the villains were not Palestinian terrorists but corner-cutting Israeli businessmen, who had skimped on building materials and constructed a death trap of a banqueting hall. The TV news played a sequence shot by a guest at the wedding being celebrated: the bride and groom dancing among their happy guests and then, calamity. The floor of the hall gave way, collapsing under the feet of the dancers, dropping them through space and crushing them under masonry and falling columns.
It was a further tragedy for Israelis to swallow. Another followed shortly, when Palestinian gunmen murdered three settlers. Former US Senator George Mitchell called for an immediate ceasefire to allow confidence-building measures and a renewal of peace negotiations, and a freeze on expansion of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. Sharon rejected the freeze, saying the settlements were a vital national enterprise. It was a stalemate, budged by acts of aggression from each side. Correspondents were struggling to keep their coverage acceptable to their editors back home—so many of the day-to-day Occupied Territories stories were “the same,” they’d heard it all before. “How many times can you report that a few Palestinians were killed during an IDF incursion?” asked one, morosely.
Catriona was thriving at preschool; I was frustrated at work. I had little enough time there as it was and could not be very productive. Besides, there was always talk. One morning my colleagues decided to take me to the best patisserie in Ramallah so that I could try the famous sweet cheese confection, knafeh, that they had often talked about. They drove me through the streets to show me their town. Ramallah had been under attack and repaired so often that it almost seemed to be enjoying a construction boom—if you ignored the reason for the piles of rubble and scales of scaffolding.
While we sat at fake-marble formica tables in the bakery—the confection was indeed very sweet, layers of soft white cheese and melting sugar—one colleague, a Harvard-educated PhD, her head tightly veiled and face beautiful in her sadness, described being an alien everywhere she went and the pain of never finding a home. She had been born and brought up in Kuwait, where her parents had worked. They returned to Palestine in 1990 when Kuwait expelled its Palestinian community—400,000 people—because of Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein. “Being dispossessed,” she said, “is only the beginning of the misery.” She had not been accepted in Kuwait because she was Palestinian, and then she was not accepted in Palestine because she was from Kuwait. And it had not been easy to assimilate as a student in the US.
Back at work later that morning we were discussing research issues and efforts to build up the school of public health when a stranger hurried in and announced that Faisal Husseini had died. Everyone was quiet. “This is a great loss for us,” my colleagues explained: Faisal Husseini had been a voice of authority and common sense. The head of one of Palestine’s leading political families, Husseini had been a key player in negotiations with Israel since the first Intifada and was a notable moderate.
Diplomats and politicians drove to Ramallah to pay their respects at the PLO headquarters, standing about in the hot sun observing Palestinian grief at Husseini’s death. Andrew stood in line with the newly arrived British Consul General who had been at the same school as him. It was a school where boys could choose, if they wished, to be drilled in military formation. “Bit like the corps, this,” the diplomat quipped.
The dignitaries and representatives reassembled later at Orient House to join the funeral procession. Orient House had been the Husseini family home, built in the 19th century when Jerusalem expanded beyond the Old City, and the scene of famously lavish parties. Under Faisal Husseini, Orient House became an intellectual and political focus in East Jerusalem. Diplomats and dignitaries were received there, though this irritated Israeli authorities who resented displays of Palestinian officialdom in East Jerusalem. Now, for Husseini’s burial, they were to await the arrival of the funeral procession, before joining it on its way to the al-Aqsa Mosque, next to which he would be buried. Settler groups, incensed that he should be buried on Temple Mount like generations of his ancestors, threatened to cause trouble.
For Palestinians the day was a short-lived liberation of East Jerusalem, or at least a taste of it. The Israeli police stayed out of the eastern side of the city completely, allowing the tens of thousands of mourners to drape Palestinian flags over the Damascus Gate and the city walls, as they peacefully marked out their sorrow along the twisting route through the Old City to al-Haram al-Sharif, where they buried him unconfronted by settler groups.
And then the following night the phone rang at 1AM. We were lying in bed unable to sleep; it was hot, there was no breeze. What was up this time? A senior IDF general had a tendency to call between midnight and 1AM on Saturday nights to update Andrew on Hizbollah movements on the border with Lebanon, and to berate him for the UN’s inaction.
But this was different. Andrew was saying, “I can’t hear you—what? It’s a terrible line—what’s happened?”
And then, “Oh God.”
A suicide bomber had detonated himself at a Tel Aviv nightclub, the Dolphinarium, killing sixteen young Israelis, and injuring scores of others. So now, Sharon had said, the gloves were off, and a security cabinet meeting at 8AM would determine Israel’s response. There was immediate talk of UN evacuation: the UN’s Gaza staff were told to take three days’ rations and assemble at the meeting point. The death toll rose over the hours, and in the end was twenty-one. Twenty-one young people murdered.
Our friends Ofer and Halley in Jaffa, on the verge of leaving Israel for ever, lived a nightmare that night. Their son Elamar had gone out for the evening. They had often deliberated the choice between tying him down or taking the risk that there might be a bomber out there. And that night he had gone out—they knew only approximately where—and they heard the blast. They lived the hell of their imaginations, driving through the emptying streets until at last they found him, safe.
Diplomats and UN officials, Andrew included, rushed off to Ramallah again to see if they couldn’t talk sense into Arafat, who had condemned the bombing, but not forcefully enough. As ever, diplomacy was only a background hum to events, with no one able to break through the block on negotiations. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, happened to be in Tel Aviv at the moment of the bombing and had already visited the site. We had learned the pattern: attack, retaliation, revenge, with no starting point; it was circular. And we kept asking: would Arafat do whatever it took to prevent more F-16s or whatever the “gloves-off” policy was to be? European and American diplomats had long complained about Arafat’s promises and assurances, and many had lost patience with his inability to effect a ceasefire. And now, even if he did pull off a ceasefire, would that stop the momentum?
The waiting was grim. Palestinians who had nothing to do with suicide bombers, martyrs, or political activity of any kind waited, knowing that they were sitting ducks for whatever actions in revenge the Israeli cabinet decided to take. And the cabinet had to do something, not least to satisfy public opinion. Knowing retaliation would come, Andrew’s father called to make sure Andrew was not in Gaza. He was not happy to hear that he was in Ramallah instead.
Arafat was persuaded to declare an unconditional ceasefire. Precarious as it was, it held off the immediate attack that everyone was expecting. Rumors continued to circulate that the government was planning a major offensive.
“I’m sorry to say it, but I have to,” said my friend Scott, when I met him that afternoon, “Arabs are animals, they’re not human.” In his view, Palestinian bombings—in the two months before this latest bombing there had been three suicide bombs and five car bombs, killing eight Israelis*—had proved the government right. He didn’t want to be reasonable any more—what was the point?
At dinner Andrew said, “This tragedy, this single bombing, the killing of those Israeli teenagers, will efface all the killings and tragedies the Palestinians have suffered, every one of them, and silence even more of the Israeli moderates.” The occupation would no longer be visible to the outside world. “Both peoples are in for far, far worse now.”
I sought out an Israeli friend, Shoshana Halper, wanting to hear her say the situation wasn’t so bad after all. I drove to her home in the Yemeni quarter of Jerusalem, walked up to the house and rang the doorbell. As the door opened a dog rushed through.
“Hey, look what the dog brought in,” said Jeff, her husband, welcoming me. “Hello, I’m just off to get the paper.” Shoshana made coffee, gave me marbled cake, and from time to time tended the washing on the line.
Shoshana talked about her fear as a child in the fifties living near the border with Jordan, afraid of Palestinians who would come and steal their cattle. Her parents—Orthodox, right-wing—felt that the Arabs were trying to destroy them, just as the Nazis had. Her parents came from a large village in the Carpathian Mountains, and when Hungary handed over its Jewish population to the Nazis in 1944, her mother and aunts were sent to Auschwitz. They endured the ordeal of Mengele’s selection. “My grandparents were sent off to one line.” Her mother and three sisters were sent to another, bound for Bergen-Belsen.
In Bergen-Belsen Shoshana’s mother and aunts were forced to work at a range of different tasks, including some for the German manufacturer Krups. “I avoid their products.” She sat tucked into a large armchair as she told this story, a smile of kindness and understanding on her face. Understanding, that is, of my discomfort at her family’s ordeal, of the unspoken.
“There was an epidemic of typhoid in Bergen-Belsen. One of my aunts died 48 hours before the British liberated the camp. I’m named after her—Reizel means ‘rose’—and I was renamed Shoshana by my kindergarten teacher in Israel. She thought we should all have Israeli names. Actually,” she added, “Shoshana is more a lily than a rose.
“Anyway, when the war ended, my parents married almost immediately. There was a strong urge to create families quickly, and my brother was born the year they were married, 1946. They lived in a big German house with a piano, in the Sudetenland. The Germans had been evicted.”
In 1949, after the communists had come to power, “my parents decided to move to Israel. They had considered it before, of course, but the communists gave them the impetus they needed. In Israel they were given a great big Arab house, in Tira, an Arab village near where Ben Gurion airport is now. This was survival struggle; they didn’t think about who had lived there before, or what had happened to them.” Soon, in the drive to erase signs of the Palestinian past, the rest of the old Arab village was razed but their house was left for another four years because it was on the edge of the village. Eventually they moved to an Israeli house in the new village.
Shoshana grew up in a community with no grandparents and few children born before 1948. Her parents would not talk about the Holocaust, but everyone of Shoshana’s generation “knew their parents had a big hump on their back, a taboo.” Her first real exposure to that evil was the Eichmann trial in 1961. “Everything stopped in school, we all stopped, listened to the radio. It was a huge thing in Israel, it was, to face the issue of the Holocaust.”
At that moment the door opened and Jeff came in carrying the papers and a bag of groceries. He wore a long-suffering grin that belied an incident: an angry fellow Israeli had accosted him at the mini-market.
“Some woman jumped on me yelling, ‘Arab lover! My kids are in the army and you love the Arabs!’ She attacked me.”
“What did you do?”
“Yelled right back.” Jeff, a well-known campaigner and peace activist, was used to being attacked, verbally and physically, by Israeli individuals as well as by Israeli forces, especially in his role as head of the Israeli Campaign against House Demolition (ICAHD). From time to time we would see him with cuts and bruises, and ask what had happened. He would explain that the security forces hadn’t liked his campaign, which usually meant that he had been sitting in protest in front of Israeli bulldozers and had been arrested, often beaten up in the process. But he would always laugh it off and carry on.
Shoshana too was a campaigner—as part of the women’s protest movement “Women in Black,” but yelling was not her style. “I tell Jeff it’s futile arguing, that talking is the only way: find some common ground, then try to persuade.”
Both personally and professionally—she is a professor of medieval and Jewish history—Shoshana feels how important it is not to minimize the legacy of Jewish history, “which the left often tends to do. After everything the Jews have been through? No, no one should try to minimize that. But it doesn’t excuse what we’re doing now.
“Now,” she said, “where we’ve got to, I’m feeling despair for the first time. Once things were very clear: two states, end the occupation. But now, with so much brutality and division? Now I fear for Israel.”
I joined a demonstration and saw Shoshana in action. “Women in Black” was in its second decade of campaigning for withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. The message was short: “End the occupation”; the image was stark: dress in black. The rhythm was simple too: every Friday, in Zion Square, at 1PM for one hour. this time, the week after the dolphinarium bombing, it was a big international event, with black-clad women from all over the world and an international line-up of speakers, all of them against the occupation and all against the violence. While the women’s voices called for negotiations and an end to brutality, extremist settlers hurled abuse. The settlers, shouting furiously in Hebrew, clashed against the calm dignity of the Women in Black. In some cases the calm came from not knowing what the settlers were saying as they spat at us because we didn’t speak Hebrew.
An Israeli woman in front of me did speak Hebrew. She was responding, occasionally and quietly, to the lashings of abuse from the mouth of a settler woman in front of her. The settler’s long clothes were, for once, colorful against the black of all our clothes. Her enraged voice, hoarse by now, was suddenly silenced when her adversary gently pulled her out of the path of the oncoming traffic, some of it honking in protest, all of it speeding. The settler woman had been so transported by her hate that she had stepped out into the road; she had found herself saved by someone she despised.
Shoshana was standing on a wall next to a potter whose work I’d seen displayed in the Yemeni quarter. The young settler men yelling at her were on her eye-level. As they yelled, she stayed calm. The louder they screamed, the calmer she appeared. This incensed them. They screamed louder. She smiled, not superciliously, and began to counter their shrieks with a few softly spoken words. Quietly and clearly she answered their accusations, and after a while, one or two of them began to listen. I didn’t know what the words meant, but I could see her soothing their fury and bringing them to reason again.
“It won’t do much good,” she said later. “They’ll fill up with hate again back in the outposts.”
Shoshana and other moderates were waiting for Israelis to see sense while the extremist settlers and their supporters were urging on Israeli opinion with their zeal, their unshakable belief, and their determination to hold on to the land, whatever the cost. And Palestinian suicide bombers and their crimes were telling Israeli moderates that they were crazy to think the Palestinian people would ever live in peace alongside Israel. On the one hand, Shoshana and many like her were trying to counter the rigidity and inhumanity that can come from fear and fundamentalism. On the other, diverse strains of fanaticism and fundamentalism—Christian, Islamic, Jewish—were feeding off each other, intensifying each other everywhere.
Early one morning as I made the children’s packed lunches for school, I heard the Voice of Israel news declare that it was “essential for the Palestinians to stop the killing and bring an end to the violence.” There was a pause. Then the presenter went on briskly: “A Palestinian was killed last night”—by an Israeli settler organization. The press said it was possibly a Palestinian killing—a case of mistaken identity—even though the settler group (called “Shalhevet Pass”) had claimed responsibility. And, the announcer added, three Bedouin women had been killed by Israeli tank-fire while they sat in their tent near Netzarim in Gaza.
George Tenet, head of the CIA, arrived in Israel to pressure both sides into a more robust ceasefire.* The suicide bombings had presented Palestinians as barbarians, giving credence to those who insisted the only way to deal with them was to put down their rebellion with military force. As I took Maha to her parents’ home in Silwan by the walls of the Old City, she said, “Palestinian blood is cheap. And the IDF know how much they can get away with.”
There was no withdrawal from Palestinian cities and no easing of the siege. The IDF would not pull back from the reinvaded Palestinian areas unless there was a complete cessation of violence. “So as usual,” said Maha, “Hamas and Islamic Jihad will be thanking the Israeli government for the invitation to ruin the ceasefire. And then Sharon will be thanking them when they do.” Though the ceasefire was holding, just, the underlying situation, and the fears, were worse than ever.
Meanwhile, I discovered that I was pregnant, proving that malaise can be attributed to elements other than the political situation, and that modern contraception is as fallible as the books admit.
* After Baruch Goldstein gunned down 29 Muslims praying in the mosque at Hebron in February 1994, the Israeli government nearly withdrew the settlement, but Rabin hesitated. Israel accepted the presence of unarmed international monitors in the town. Known as the “Temporary International Presence in Hebron” (TIPH), the group was restricted to the role of making notes on attacks they were powerless to stop.
* In January 2001 there had been outrage among Israeli moderates when a settler found guilty of clubbing a Palestinian child to death with a rifle butt was sentenced to six months’ community service.
* Egypt’s then Foreign Minister.
* March 28, April 22, 23, and 29, and May 18, 25, 27, and 30, 2001. In this period 23 Israelis and 97 Palestinians were killed.6
* Under the terms of this ceasefire, Yasser Arafat was to clamp down on militants, and Israel was to withdraw from territory seized during the Intifada.