Unlike many Israelis and virtually all Palestinians, we were able to take a break during the summer, flying away from sirens and bombings to a place where the news was not filled with daily killings. In a wet green valley in southwest Scotland we submerged ourselves in plans for our new home, working out the roots we wanted to set into the earth, laying down our own place, and retrieving a semblance of control.
Control felt good. While the children explored their new and forever home, Andrew and I walked through our small towerhouse, which sits in the crook of a tumbling burn looking out across the fields to an ancient wood. We were with Nick, the architect, and his Icelandic wife, Limma. Nick wielded a large crowbar and, for good measure, a sledgehammer.
“Let’s see what’s hiding behind these layers of plasterboard,” he said, slugging the sledgehammer into the wall. Plaster and dust spun away from his blows, and he stopped to shake down and examine the damage. “Look, here’s the old fireplace—I think it’s almost intact.” Attacking the ceiling, bringing down debris on himself, he shouted, “Not much to be said for these oak beams, I’m afraid. You’ll need new ones.” And later, covered in centuries of dust, surfacing with a satisfied smile: “You’ve got a spiral staircase behind this wall.”
After all the destruction we sat down to work out how we wanted everything laid out. “Kitchen? How about here—we could make a new window there, cantilever a new floor here...”
“Oh, and Limma,” added Andrew. “You know we said we needed three children’s beds... Can you make that four?”
Four children: we were both taken aback. Three had seemed manageable. Then again, said Andrew, Catriona will have a playmate. She may be two now but the boys pair off together and leave her out of their war games—all their games. I was seeing laundry and diapers and the long months and scent of breastfeeding, not to mention labor. “Another child is going to be wonderful,” he smiled, “you’ll see. They’ll fill this house and it will be perfect.”
We returned from Scotland restored, but almost immediately the bombing began again and the noises and the fears swept in, closer than ever.
On the last day of July we heard that an IDF missile strike had assassinated Sheikh Jamal Mansour, a senior Hamas political leader. With that, Hamas’s nearly two-month-old ceasefire on attacks against Israeli civilians came to an end. The next day angry Israeli commentators warned readers that since Israel had violated the ceasefire they should expect Hamas to retaliate.1 On August 9, Hamas duly dispatched a suicide bomber who detonated himself on the corner of Jaffa Road and St George Street, 200 yards from the boys’ school. When there’s a bomb, one of the things you take to doing in an attempt to deal with the horror is to monitor the casualty count. It kept rising through the day: by 6PM we heard that nineteen people were dead, with constant news footage on all the networks. Then the toll came down. It was finally given as fifteen dead. Seven of the dead were children.
The bomber had picked out a pizza parlor, Sbarro, as his target. We had been there a few weeks earlier, pizza being a staple of normal life. I had walked past it the day before. That very pavement was now covered with blood and death. We knew we would have to drive past it twice a day on the school run once the autumn term began. On the day and time the bomber chose, lunchtime, Sbarro was full of people and their children going about their daily business, living—or so it seemed—normal lives.
A Palestinian neighbor, who had asked me for a lift to Damascus Gate that morning, sat sullen in the evening, insisting that Israel deserved it. She had been changed as much as anyone by nearly a year of being ground down and sniped at, her and her family’s lives besieged, made unlivable. There still seemed no hope of any progress, the leaders incapable and unwilling. The IDF had tightened the repression again and again and ratcheted up the number of “extrajudicial killings,” including an attempt to kill Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian leader one notch down from Arafat. Even so, it was alarming to hear how far her reason had stiffened into inhumanity, and to know that there were many Palestinians who felt the same.
Israelis’ security concerns were growing. Suicide bombs were claiming many victims. Horrifyingly many. Peace Now, the Israeli campaign organization, had an encampment on the pavement near the Prime Minister’s residence; one of their placards monitored the death toll. In September 2001 this was 168 Israelis and 693 Palestinians. We passed it every day on the way back from school, watching the number rise as we turned the corner. Yet the death toll measured only a fraction of the suffering and grief, only a small part of the fear and freezing of normal life. Perhaps those maimed in the Intifada were the ultimate among the silenced; their lives ruined, turned dependent, in a second. It was not until I visited a clinic for the disabled victims of the war that it really sank in: finding myself looking at a bank of shelves filled with rows of different-sized prosthetic legs, their stiff feet unbending toward the sky.
That evening I sat at home thinking about the clinic. The staff had been professional and positive about their work; rehabilitation was their job. They had talked about helping victims of attacks come to terms with living with a disability, and how it was possible not to be filled with hate for the people who were responsible. One rehab nurse admitted that it was sometimes difficult to wake up in the morning and go about your life as an able-bodied person, working with people who had once been like you, able-bodied and independent, until, at the command of some distant shadowy figure, their life was blown apart.
Andrew came back from Gaza with his own grim story of a New York Times reporter witnessing snipers shooting children “for sport.”2 Andrew told me the story quietly, then sat down and reread favorite stories to our three children before we headed for the Old City, to a dinner given by a Palestinian philanthropist and businessman called Zahi. His house was perhaps the most beautiful in the Old City, with its winding limestone staircases leading through cool atria dressed in simple elegance up to the roof. The broad views of the Old City and al-Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount laid out around and below us were lit by points of yellow light and bars of fluorescent green on the mosques. As we sat at the stone table on the roof the conversation was of Zahi’s patient campaign to persuade the Israeli authorities to release his phone company’s new equipment from the port where it had docked months before. None of the officials or ministers Zahi approached could explain why the equipment, which would have delivered a state-of-the-art phone service to Palestinians, was denied clearance. “This is not unusual,” Zahi said. “It seems that commercially and economically, the Israelis don’t want us to succeed independently.”
Palestinians continued to bomb and kill Israelis inside Israel. A British friend emailed from London to see if we had survived the latest bombings, and I emailed back our domestic news: a baby on the way. He wanted full details, and I hid from the reality of each day by replying at length about childbirth choices rather than about the risks of ending up as collateral damage.
Andrew had gone to Ramallah for a meeting with Marwan Barghouti. Part of Andrew’s job was to monitor the political pulse on all sides, to see influential actors and assess their readiness (or not) to negotiate or compromise. On his way to the meeting he called to say he would be back in time for dinner. He did consider, but didn’t mention, that we both knew the IDF might make another attempt to execute Barghouti by missile. I put away imagining the technicalities of how—whether by missile or bomb in his office or at home, and the probabilities of when—perhaps while Andrew was with him. What I didn’t know was that earlier in the day over lunch in Tel Aviv with his friend Moshe Kochanovsky, deputy director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Defense, Andrew had let it be known that he would be seeing Barghouti later.
Andrew called at 8PM to say he would be back in an hour. An hour or more later, he called again, saying they were in a line at the Qalandia checkpoint that was worse than ever, even so late at night. I could hear the murmur of engines, the angry honking, and raised voices of other trapped drivers. The wait was five hours: he called me intermittently with updates, irritation, resignation, disbelief, and more irritation.
I lay in bed that night, as on many nights, unable to sleep, glad when Andrew finally returned from checkpoint dementia. The following morning brought back control, for a while, then unnerved me again. Maha had wanted me to take her to Bethlehem. I rang to say “Let’s go,” but she replied that she wasn’t going any more, and to take a look at the news. The IDF had bombed—with F-16s again—a number of Palestinian towns. They were targeting Palestinian security forces in retaliation for a militant attack on an IDF post in Gaza in which three IDF soldiers had been killed on August 24. Family in Britain saw the bombing on the news and called me because both Andrew’s phones were out. They would watch the news, see an attack or a bombing, try to get hold of him and think the worst when he was out of reach.
Assured that Andrew was safe, they wanted to know if I had made a decision about where to have the baby. I said not yet, but probably in Jerusalem or Bethlehem. “Is that a good idea?” they asked.
I had to admit that London looked safer: London was not, then, vulnerable to suicide bombings, or to broken ceasefires, repetitive military “lessons,” and patterns of revenge and retaliation. My case for staying in Jerusalem and keeping the family together soon hit another problem. On the first day of the autumn term at the lycée, Andrew headed for the office in Gaza, dropping the boys at school on his way. A few seconds after he left the house I heard the door open: he came back saying that he hadn’t said goodbye properly. Twenty minutes later there was a massive boom across the valley and a choir of sirens struck up. A bomb? I looked at the kitchen clock: ten to eight, the time when Andrew and the boys would be driving along Ha’Nevim Street. I called his mobile—they were fine—it had not been a bomb after all, not this time. The following morning, September 4, 2001, Andrew was still in Gaza so the school run was mine. We woke early because the dog, who was normally too scared to bark even at the tomcats stealing her food, had joined the birds’ dawn chorus. Thanks to her barking, we were in good time, and our mood was unusually upbeat for the beginning of a school day. But then the boys’ dressing slowed up and stalled: favorite items were missing, socks needed help, shoes wouldn’t tie, and we ended up being late.
We drove along to the Khaled tape that had become the boys’ obsession. The music was hammering and sinuous; the children were squabbling in the back of the car. Catriona, strapped into an itchy carseat, pulled at the parts of her brothers within reach. Vexed by the kids and frustrated by the traffic, I cursed into the wind. Suddenly, on the last stretch before school, our road was blocked. A frantic policewoman was redirecting traffic, gesticulating wildly, herding us in the opposite direction from the one we wanted. I dithered for a moment, knowing that it must be a bomb, but I didn’t want it to be true.
She yelled at me: “No English, no Hebrew—GO!” and I broke off, a rabbit in the headlights.
I turned into a small street. We stopped, parked, to think and take a call. Steve, a Canadian journalist and fellow parent, confirmed that it was a bomb, and very close to the school. His children were distraught, school was closed, talk later. We headed home in a daze, and a round of phone calls began. Mine to Andrew: “There’s been a bomb, we’re okay, we’re all okay.” He was calm: we were talking to him so we were alive. Then other calls, to me—were we all right? Everyone with a story, an escape: how bizarre it was that this morning the alarm clock had failed to go off, that their mother had called from home with a crisis, that the cat was sick. All to make each family late. And miss the bomb. I still didn’t get it, how close we had been.
When we drove into the yard at home, Amer was waiting for us. Maha appeared immediately.
“Thanks God,” they both said. “You are safe.”
Amer had heard on Palestinian radio that a bomb had gone off at Yad Sarah—not just near the school but right outside the gate—right there, on the two-foot-wide pavement we should have been treading had we not been those few minutes late. Amer knew what I still hadn’t understood: we could have been dead.
Piecing together the news through the day, we learned that the suicide bomber had disguised himself as an Orthodox Jew, but with a backpack—not characteristic of Orthodox Jews—and he had been challenged by two border policemen before he could penetrate further into West Jerusalem. There and then he had reached into his bag and detonated himself, the explosion sending his severed head flying over the wall and into the schoolyard, dropping with a thud in the dust at the feet of the Palestinian nursery teacher. Other bits followed; an eye on someone’s shoe. The new headmaster, one week in, laid a cloth over the head and shreds of body to shield the children from the sight and horror.
No one could believe that, despite the location and timing, only one pupil had been injured, and not too badly. One of the two policemen was critically injured, twenty other people mildly wounded. The when and the where should have left many children injured or killed. Still, the damage to the children was enormous. And to the staff: the doorman’s wife was hysterical because when she saw the rolling head she thought it was her husband’s. He was always stationed right there, by the gate. Quickly the headmaster summoned parents and counselors, all rallied round, children were shepherded home, and the clearing up began. Someone scraped the blood and flesh off the wall, which would be bleached white in a tell-tale arc my mother never noticed when she came back to stay a few weeks later and visited the school.
“Where was the bomb?”
“Oh, some way down there.”
The children talked of course, pondering every detail. Archie, at seven, felt it important to tell me a few days later that it had not been the bomber’s body that flew over the wall, “just his head.” Xan’s Palestinian teacher was distressed: as the severed head rolled to a halt “it touched my leg,” she whispered. The other teachers and parents tried to comfort her, but it wasn’t easy: in the past year her home had been shelled by IDF tanks, her sister’s house had been demolished by IDF bulldozers, and her family had twice been fired on by settlers as they drove home.
Andrew hurried back, without the guest who had been coming for dinner. I was unprepared in any case and the fridge was empty. What with bombings and the children home all day I hadn’t made it to the shops. Shops—maybe a bomber there too. Andrew ran into the house and found me and held me. We stood, silent, breathing each other. The children coursed in, broke us up, claiming their own hugs. All safe, together. We slowed down and read stories but the stories and Catriona’s quiet questions at bath-time only brought home the nearness and the risk, so we put the children to bed and sat down to a meager supper and drank and laughed with relief.
Turning our backs on Jerusalem as soon as possible, we spent the weekend in Tel Aviv. Among the sun-happy crowd on the beach we put reality aside, as Israelis were doing. Bikinis, buckets, and beach restaurants transported us instantly. But the sea was big that day, and I found myself standing knee-deep in the breaking waves, arms akimbo, telling the children to come in from the surf—it looked too dangerous, and minutes after that three ambulances pitched up on the beach to deal with the drownings. The waves, despite the breakwater, swelled and surged and the swimmers tried to kick their way back but it was hard, fighting the current, and by the time Andrew, who was swimming further out, made it back to the beach the first ambulance parked on the sand was busy. Two bodies were pulled in, unconscious. One swimmer was beyond saving, drowned, and the children saw the body bag lying white on the sand with a watching crowd surrounding, and wanted more explanations.
Back in Jerusalem, back at school, walking past the arc of bleached wall, seeing the dent in the metal gates and the patches of lingering sand for mopping up. Now there were more police and soldiers on the street and a new checkpoint for glancing at documents, in an Israeli part of town for once. But everything carried on. Four-year-old Xan said he wanted to learn to read, but he hated school now because his teacher kept twisting his arm. Andrew had to go to Cairo; I was hating him being away. On September 9, 2001 two suicide bombers exploded, one of them a Palestinian Israeli—a first. The bomber waited until the Tel Aviv train had arrived and people were leaving the station before detonating himself, killing three and injuring scores. Then a drive-by shooting, killing two settlers, and Israeli reprisal helicopter attacks in Ramallah. And so it went on, endlessly. We went out for a walk in the evening light through the winding paths of the Forest of Peace, and as the children played they picked up interesting bits of burned pipe and syringes, things they couldn’t explain— “Mummy, what are these?” Drug paraphernalia.
September 10, and Catriona was starting at a new school in the German Colony, West Jerusalem. There were too many checkpoints between our home and Beit Hanina, and since I had now admitted defeat in the struggle to get to work I couldn’t hack checkpoint frustration any longer just to get a two-year-old to nursery school. Standing in line with dozens of people who knew that this was not about security. Even the IDF said checkpoints didn’t work.3
Checkpoints did not stop suicide bombings but they did close down lives: waiting, each car, long enough to be searched and then not searched, just made to wait, to gnaw with frustration day after day, twice a day. And I was now more than six months pregnant, discovering what it was like to be forced to wait for minutes and hours when you hurt for want of a pee with the baby pressing down inside you. So I’d given in and stopped work and changed Catriona’s school in order not to have to wait at checkpoints or worry about being caught in crossfire. Then again, the new school was in an area where bombs were likely: Palestinians chose to target Israeli civilians, so they might choose this place. These were the choices: for Palestinians it was either put up with checkpoints and curfew and occupation or quit Palestine, if they could; for Israelis it was put up with suicide bombs and gunmen or quit Israel. Rather than face the locals’ choices, and confronting their own and their children’s nightmares, more expat parents were leaving, some for a few weeks, some for good. All unnerved by that bomb, a mere six days ago.
Amer came by to talk, badly timed—I was trying to feed Catriona. He talked and talked, about the bombs, the daily IDF actions, about what had gone on in Durban where the UN had held a conference on racism. Israel was being accused of racism. “What good does that do?” he asked. “The situation has rotted something inside all of us,” he said, “our friends included.” He had taken his kids for a walk on the promenade and saw a policeman: an Israeli policeman, of course. He said to his son, “Don’t be afraid, go up to him and say hello.” “Why did you tell him that?” asked his Palestinian neighbor. “You should teach him to piss on them.”
That afternoon on the way to school I fell down at the corner of the street opposite the hospital, Bikur Cholim, where Amer’s daughter was being treated. Fell in a heap of pregnancy and toddler, Catriona in my arms, my ankle twisted. “Please don’t cry, Mummy,” she said. No one stopped to help or asked if I was okay. I got up, dusted down my clothes, picked up my child, and limped off to school.
The day was 9/11. Sitting lame in the warm sun after school by the Crowne Plaza pool with three other parents, I was watching the children have their first swimming lesson of the season. Yitzhak, the teacher, was another friend about to quit Israel for good. Then Steve, perched on the edge of the sun-chair next to me, took a call from his wife. She was the correspondent for ABC: two airplanes had flown into the World Trade Center. Another call to another parent: ITN’s correspondent telling his wife Libby the same news. Another call from ABC: the Pentagon hit. Thousands, she said, were dead in New York and Washington.
In the car on the way home the radio began to reveal the scale: the television took over once we were inside the house. Andrew finally reached me by phone. He was in Beirut, sitting with Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, watching aghast the collapse of the Twin Towers on the guard’s television. The enormity and mortality were only just beginning to dawn, and the immediate reactions, some competent, others not, added to the obvious, the only certainty: nothing would be the same again. Governments were on high alert. Israeli embassies all over the world were evacuated, as was the White House, UN headquarters, most of the US federal government. The children full of questions; they saw the Twin Towers they remembered so well, and watched them go down. How could I explain anything? Waking during the night, seeing over and over the Twin Towers disintegrating with all those people inside and underneath. Family called twice, or was it three times, to say they were really worried about us and didn’t I think it was time to come “home”?
Interviewed the following day, one-time Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was asked how the attack would affect relations between Israel and the US. “It’s very good,” he replied. “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy... and strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades.”4
The IDF had invaded Jenin and Jericho, killing more than seven Palestinians, including a little girl, in Jenin; the deaths were not mentioned on Israel’s morning news. I talked to friends in New York, our old home. Firefighters from our street, West 19th—generous, patient men who had always made a fuss of the children as we walked by, and hooted when they drove past us in their fire engine—had been killed. Friends all said the same thing: we get up, we go to school, we go to work, we don’t know what will happen next, but we get on with life. CNN and the BBC were saying that New York was in chaos, no one sleeps, ordinary life over. Both simultaneously true.
Andrew came back from Beirut via Egypt, wondering at the lack of security at Tel Aviv airport, and exasperated by senior Arab officials trying to claim the attack was not the work of Arabs but of Japanese terrorists. Much of the world behind the US, mourning.
Days went by with dozens of emails from New York friends. My stepbrother turned up there, not dead amidst the rubble. My sister-in-law rang again: why the hell weren’t we coming back immediately? Suddenly everyone was feeling daily risk and bystander’s impotence and telling us to do something about it, perhaps because they couldn’t. For them, on their behalf: come over here, be with us, join our risk. People were full of panic; some were asking what I thought about full-length chemical warfare suits for the entire family—in New York? And why ask me? Because of where we lived.
Israelis were not panicking. Now perhaps they would be understood, whereas Palestinians, said Edward Said, were sure to lose either way, as always. There was chaos abroad, yet calm in Jerusalem. The smallest details set the big picture: acceptance, understanding, camaraderie. I bought ice creams for the children after school and the man behind the counter was blithe and friendly: “Tell me how you do it, make such happy children?” The newspaper vendor saved me a copy of the International Herald Tribune the day after the NYC/Washington attacks. The pet-shop man refused to let me carry any of the sacks of dog food that I had just bought. A woman stopped me in the street, wanting to say hello to my little girl, talking gently and kindly, saying “Stay well, my dear” as we parted. The violin-maker, deep-voiced and slowly smiling, was happy to laugh with me at something daft the children said.
The routine of daily life returned. ABC journalist and writer Charlie Glass, finishing a book, was coming to stay. Trips to the beach—as long as there were no drownings—helped us to feel normal, just by leaving Jerusalem for a few hours. But there were always reminders.
I gave an Israeli friend, Sara, a lift home one afternoon. Normally she took three buses to get home, so she knew, she said, that her day would come. She also said she’d heard that I’d joined the peace group, Women in Black. I hadn’t. “Funny,” she said, “I heard you were a signed-up, paid-up, full-on member.” I was going to say that I had only been to some demonstrations when she told me that she had been a member from 1990 to 1993. After Oslo she felt she could retire.
“Now,” she said, “I can’t go back to them even though I’m still as opposed as ever to the occupation. It’s simply that my people, my family, are hurting too much, and you can’t kick a man when he’s down.” She described how isolated she felt as a religious Jew, with religious friends all of whom seemed to be very right-wing, she said. During Rosh Hashanah she had dinner with some of them. One turned out to have been involved in a plot to blow up al-Aqsa Mosque.
Another had questioned her about the Anglican school, where she taught, next door to the lycée: “Don’t a lot of UN kids go there?”
She was cautious, non-committal.
“Yeah, well, we should bomb the hell out of them,” he had said.
“I’m 100 percent sure,” she told me, “that this particular guy would not actually bomb a school full of children.” But she was worried that he “might have that conversation with someone who might.”
“I lied my head off about the level of security, the number of CIA agents there, the armored cars, the impossibility of getting in without special permits, passes, status, etc., etc.”
On Yom Kippur I arranged to meet our new guest and give him a ride home. Tolerance is inconsistent: I drove. No Israeli is supposed to drive on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Earlier, on the phone, I had pointed out to Charlie that it was Yom Kippur but he said, in his suave way, “Oh, that won’t be a problem,” so out I went into the evening. The roads were abandoned. Even the traffic lights were switched off. It was the smoothest, darkest of drives, sweeping effortlessly through the middle of the city.
There was Charlie sitting at a table in the leafy courtyard of the American Colony Hotel, by the fountain that reflected lights in the dark evening. As I arrived, he looked up at me, smiled hello, surprised. “You know, someone said you wouldn’t be coming.”
“Really, why?”
“Because it’s Yom Kippur and your car will get stoned.”
“Who was it?”
“A Palestinian woman. She seemed afraid.”
We had dinner and I drove Charlie back to our place. Where East and West Jerusalem meet on the broad lanes of the Nablus Road, Israeli “Route 1,” we saw a small crowd of people on the far side of the road.
Charlie was suddenly worried: “Hey, what are we doing? It’s Yom Kippur!”
“Yes, Charlie.”
“Well, hey—you see those big stones over there, lying on the road? Those are rocks. And you see those guys in Orthodox kit standing by them?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah? Well, those guys’re going to pick up those rocks and then they’re going to throw them at us. Let’s get out of here!” The rocks flew as we swung by, but their aim was off.
“Charlie, you said it would be okay.”
“Well, even ABC gets it wrong every now and then.”
The following day was September 28, 2001, the anniversary of the beginning of the Intifada: exactly a year since Sharon’s visit to al-Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. During the day, six Palestinians were killed, including a ten-year-old child. Charlie received a call from the nervous Palestinian who told him there was no way he could get to where he wanted to go—the IDF had added another layer of checkpoint at Qalandia: a pedestrian one, which would take at least an hour to pass and, if you didn’t live in Ramallah, you could not, she assured him, pass through.
He shrugged off her caution, saying only, “So now there are three open-air prisons: Northern West Bank, Southern West Bank, and Gaza. Welcome to the only democracy in the Middle East,” and headed out.