I took Andrew to the airport. We made up nonsense about seeing each other again in a few days’ time, and said goodbye as if that were true. We knew it would be at Christmas, six weeks away. Then we said goodbye again.
The children and I spent the rest of the day away from the house. I felt a sense of relief that almost outdid my sense of loss. Now that Andrew had gone, we could start to look forward to him coming home again. Was that it? He had been so loath to leave us; we had been so uncontrolled. The children said very little, as though questions and their answers might make his absence harder to bear. We hid our missing him at the house of an Israeli friend. Nothing could have been more peaceful than spending a couple of hours with Alison in the playground near her home, talking about the origins of an ancient Jewish festival, and wrapping ourselves against the descending cold. In the dusk we went back to her house, where her son pulled out a box of toys for my children, who played on the carpet. We drank minted tea, and threw ourselves into their normality.
In the village that evening, there was a gathering around nargila (hookah) and coffee. There had been another Palestinian attack, this time on armed settlers in Hebron. “Settlers,” Alison had said to me, “but still, how stupid can the Palestinians be?” At Maha’s house, the spools of nargila smoke hovering over the stiff chairs, the mood was angry: “The onus is always on us Palestinians.”
I caught hold of our dog, who had appeared from nowhere, bouncing between the men and the bulbous waterpipe. Amer, with his pathological fear of dogs, joked as usual: “Dog, I’m going to cook you one day.” I used rescuing her from Amer as my excuse to leave, and went down the few steps to Rasha’s house to find the children drawing pictures with her and her sisters. We went down more steps to our house, read stories, and talked about Christmas.
There was a late party that night; a French journalist, François, was turning forty. I had planned to stay away and be lonely, but then thought, what the hell: bury it. I arrived at a big vaulted room full of François’ Palestinian, Israeli, and expat friends, and then dithered. Turning around to leave, I was swept up by a Palestinian friend, Shireen, elegant in black leather. Knowing that Andrew had just left and what I must be thinking she pulled me into a dance: “You’re not leaving. Come on, stay and enjoy yourself.”
Paul, a Palestinian-American friend, joined us. All three of us were hiding in different ways, and we buoyed each other. Shireen was being pursued by an American who found it hard to understand the constraints she lived under: divorced, living with her extended family. At the same time she had decided to send her children to boarding school in Switzerland, away from the situation. Paul was bemoaning the Palestinian leadership’s reluctance to confront the meaning of “the facts on the ground.”
“Why not put it to the Israeli people—head-on, no messing about—that Sharon’s road leads only to a one-state, binational solution?” He was using code, political, not medical this time. As opposed to the two-state solution, the one-state binational solution meant creating one state, comprising Israel and the Occupied Territories, with the two nations, Israeli and Palestinian, living as one. “If Israelis could grasp that they are being pushed into the end of the two-state solution, and that they’ll end up with us as the majority and with citizenship, wouldn’t they change their minds?”
Another Palestinian sat down on a bench with Paul and me, watching the women drift in and out of the dancing. He added his frustration to Paul’s: “The PA won’t talk about the one-state solution because that means giving up on independence. The Israelis won’t talk about it because it means the end of the Jewish state, and they say that this is what we have planned all along, using it as a cunning way to obliterate Israel. But, Christ, what choice is there now? Thanks to the settlers and their infrastructure, we’re locked so tight into the State of Israel we’re like a bug in concrete.”
Somehow I wasn’t escaping at all; Shireen saw this and laughed at the men. “Okay, okay,” they said, “let’s dance,” and we went back into the dark colors of the vaulted Pasha Room of the American Colony where François was smiling, dancing in a circle of women.
I went home very late, creeping in and hearing the baby cry as I closed the front door, feeling more grateful than ever to Julita for providing such consistent care and love for my children. I had heard Israelis and Palestinians debate a single state before. I had listened to people say that the one-state solution had always been the only equitable answer. To others who said they would not care what the country was called as long as they could return to their village and lands and their culture unfettered, and that they would defend these against anyone. I had heard Israelis and Palestinians reach bravely beyond the hate, beyond the challenges of nationalism, into a place where both would be permitted to join their neighbors and form an economic union or regional confederation.
Michael, an economist, wrote to me in an email: “What is it that is being silenced? The two-state solution (Israel and Palestine) was never a real proposition, it has just suited everybody to pretend that it was. Israel has never pursued policies that could help a ‘viable’ Palestinian state come about. And without Israel’s help, how can any of us imagine the Palestinians can establish a proper state? The more thoughtful of the donor nations know this, yet this ‘two-state solution’ remains the main reason for providing billions of dollars in assistance. It has suited everybody—including the PA, who understandably wanted the money to keep flowing, even if they too have serious doubts that they will ever be allowed an independent, viable state—to maintain this fiction. Now,” Michael ended, “we face the prospect of a unique experiment in human misery—Gaza—being replicated on the West Bank: huddles of human misery, kept alive. Hardly an independent, functioning state.”
Within a few days of Andrew leaving for Senegal there was more killing and more impunity. Another suicide bomb exploded, this time on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Hamas dispatched a bomber to choose a bus bringing people into town during the morning rush hour. Obediently the suicide bomber timed his explosion with accuracy.
“Do you think he even saw that the bus was full of kids?” asked one parent at the lycée. “What kind of mind is it, taking out those innocents on purpose?” said another. The bus was full of people traveling to work and children coming to school. Eleven people were killed. One of the lycée children was among the fifty injured. He had recently arrived from France with his mother, new immigrants to Israel, and the explosion injured him horribly.
The teachers were angry and grieving: the boy was so badly wounded that he was not expected to live. The conflict had come deep inside the school again and set off waves of hate among the children, and then other ripples. One girl triggered a political row between two boys, one Israeli and one Palestinian, by telling one that the other had said, “This is what your people do.” The teacher who sorted out the fracas let out a slip of bitterness, saying that the girl was “teasing” both of them (she was thirteen and a half). “She’s a salope, like her mother,” said the teacher.
The new French consul general’s wife mobilized help and comfort for the wounded boy, and for his mother who was attempting to cope alone. The school switched its attention from trying to organize transportation for Palestinian pupils imprisoned behind barriers by the Israeli army, to coping with an Israeli child gravely injured by a Palestinian terrorist. And all the while keeping a lid on the roil of loathing in the schoolyard. Xan and his friend Freya, aged six, galloped up and down the school courtyard oblivious to the sorrow. Their older siblings were subdued, caught in the middle of something they didn’t want to understand just yet.
The killing on both sides was close again. Later that day we heard that a senior UN official had been shot by an IDF sniper in Jenin. The news that an expat had been killed spun around in the wake of the news of the boy injured in the bombing. The dead and wounded Israelis were, rightly, big news, splashed all over the world. The death of Iain Hook, a former British army officer, was barely covered by the US media: it made page34 of the Washington Post.
Iain Hook was in Jenin trying to rebuild Palestinian homes razed during Operation Defensive Shield. IDF tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters had attacked the refugee camp once again, and Palestinians had fired back. The IDF continued to fire into and around the local UNRWA compound even after the fighting stopped. An Irishwoman living in Jenin saw Mr. Hook after he tried to evacuate women and children from the compound. He had left the compound waving a blue UN flag. The IDF had shouted via megaphone: “We don’t care if you are the United Nations or who you are. Fuck off and go home.” The Irish witness then heard that a small boy she knew had been shot dead and others wounded by tank fire. She tried to field other Palestinian children away from the line of fire—they were throwing stones—while pleading with the army not to fire live ammunition at unarmed children. She was shot in the thigh. Some of the children dragged her out of the continuing Israeli fire.
Israel Radio reported that a soldier shot Mr. Hook as he came out of an alley from which Palestinians had been firing earlier because he mistook the object at Mr. Hook’s ear, his mobile phone, for a hand grenade. Then the army said that two soldiers fired at him while he was inside the UN compound because they thought he was holding a gun. And that the gun battle had not ended at the time he was shot. In fact Mr. Hook was inside his office when he was shot. There were stories, rumors, about the red laser point of the sniper’s sights homing in, but no one wanted to think too much, especially those who worked in the Occupied Territories. The UN reported that the IDF had delayed the ambulance for nearly an hour. The IDF denied this: they said they sent an ambulance immediately, and that he was already dead by the time it arrived. The Irish witness saw Mr. Hook brought into the hospital alive. He died a few minutes later.1
The IDF’s invasions continued and Bethlehem’s turn came round again. That same night a fundraiser was held for the town’s Peace Center. I went dutifully to the Seven Arches Hotel in Jerusalem for the “Bethlehem Ball.” There was a minute’s silence for all the victims of the conflict. The room was full of people dressed in satin and lycra talking about death: the Israelis killed in the bombing, the schoolboy, the Palestinians killed in the retaliations, and the 50-year-old Briton. On top of the sadness hovered the usual questions about the inconsistencies of the IDF’s stories, and why—why—a sniper would shoot a UN worker.
The dancing appeared frenzied, as though frenzy would erode the futility: fundraising for Bethlehem children on the day the tanks went in again. I sat between two British diplomats, both professional and both brilliant, neither immune to the despair. Not dispassionate or buttoned up: professionalism only sits so deep. People from Tel Aviv were appreciating the change just as we in Jerusalem liked to escape to Tel Aviv. “How nice not to see any of those fish we eat for breakfast,” said one. I was missing Andrew, hearing his voice in my ear, feeling his thoughts in my head; friends asked if I was all right and to call if I needed anything, anything at all. Of course I was all right; I was fine. The whole point of everything was bleeding away. Our friend Michael saw all of this and led me away, on to the dance floor. Father Jerome Murphy O’Connor, leading Pauline scholar, known to everyone as Father Jerry, led me into a stiff ballroom posture, confronting me with his ample form and the question, how do you dance with a monk? My conversation slipping into carelessness, like everything else.
And then in the morning I switched for a moment to positive again, running up to Government House to hand in our passports for new Israeli visas and seeing the Dome of the Rock pour a gleam into the morning light, its Hebrew University backdrop in shadow. I let myself linger along the promenade, but was then downed again at the words of an early crop of American tourists. They were looking out across the valley, a valley full of hundreds of Palestinian houses, home to thousands, and then came the guide: “All this is Jewish land, as far as you can see. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. They’ll try, but it is not true.” Silencing in motion. I had heard it so many times before.
That morning the children felt unjustly treated because of my down—how children despise unfairness. They were low. Every day each one asked: where is Daddy, when am I going to see him, when’s he coming back? Catriona, three years old and pining, was the worst. I emerged from my room one morning to the sound of her quietly crying to herself, “Daddy, Daddy, I want my Daddy.” It wasn’t because I was listening—she didn’t know I was there. Julita found her in the kitchen one day with the phone in her hand. Catriona explained: “I am phoning Daddy, because I want to see him. I’m going to be a good girl; I’m going to say hello to him all the time and hug him.” She was blaming herself for his being sent away.
We went to the Old City thinking it could be diverting to hunt down white teeshirts for the school play and Turkish Delight dusted with confectioner’s sugar, and to run in the narrow alleys and around the archaeological gardens. Instead we were coiled up in the crowds and had to push our way through, so we gave up on souk life and Byzantine ruins.
Hell, I thought, let’s risk a movie. The boys and a schoolmate we picked up along the way were thrilled: Harry Potter at the cinema inside the Jerusalem Mall. The child’s mother later ribbed me for costing her a ton of money, she said, by taking her son to the mall. Like me, she had a “no mall” rule because of the threat of bombs. As a result of my giving in, she had to let the boy’s older sister go there too, but for shopping, not Potter. Many shekels later she and her daughter had left the mall, lugging bags of new clothes and shoes, and, like me, guilt at having taken the risk for no good reason.
I had dinner a few nights later with Alison and her family. Being Friday night, it was special for them, but not from a religious point of view. It was a gathering, a rhythm that they maintained each week, to sit down together and talk. Her husband Avi was more relaxed even than his normal relaxed self and played the fool, pretending he had done the cooking. We talked about risk, and the rules we laid down for ourselves to deal with the risk, and then breaking the rules of Israeli life, “You have to take risks, sometimes,” he said. “We’d all go mad if we ruled out everything. For the kids, I agree, it’s different.”
And we changed the subject gently. Israelis were coming to terms with two terrorist attacks in Kenya and another at a Likud voting station. But, as Avi had said, when something happens you check that no one you know is involved, and then you carry on. Their oldest son talked about his day; he had attended the wedding of a friend, “religious people,” he said. “It was full of joy and the usual wedding feelings, except that over all the wedding finery there were M-16s. That was odd.”
It was not so odd. Not now. Israeli normality had been filled with guns for some time, even at weddings. We had been surprised from the beginning by the number of guns in everyday Israeli life, and not just handguns for policemen but machine guns in the hands of civilians. At every shop, bar, restaurant, cinema, theater, or club we opened our bags by reflex as we went in. The bag-check normality had become part of saying hello. “Shalom, here’s my bag, how are you?” Security guards were a growing business, stationed outside any place a bomber might pick. Perched on stools outside the doors hour after hour, the guards had a lonely, dull life, except that it was sometimes deadly frightening.
As the days passed, the French-Israeli schoolboy injured by the suicide bomber held on to life. Parents followed his progress each day, hearing that he was breathing on his own, had setbacks, infections, then turned a corner again, enduring operations and more infections and pulling through it all against the odds. It took weeks, but he made it back to school: a triumph of courage and good medical care.
I had seen bomb injuries in Afghanistan, working with a team of mine engineers and medics in Baghlan province. The Afghan surgeon had been highly skilled, debriding the wounds the mines inflicted, usually to the feet and legs, which were frequently blown off. If he managed to get the patient stabilized, the most difficult and painstaking part of his work was cleaning out the particles of dirt and shrapnel forced up into the wound by the blast. Often the nursing staff were little help, and I would find him dressing wounds on the wards by himself, saying the nurses were “useless.” Worst of all, he had little anesthesia and had to use products like ketamine, which was popular with vets in Britain.
On Bagram airbase I learned a little about mines and wondered about the minds that designed them, intending not to kill, but to injure. The calculus was simple. Injured men, I was told by ex-Royal Engineers who were training Afghans to clear mines safely, have to be picked up, transported, treated and cared for. Dead ones cost the enemy less time and effort.
In Israel there were no supply problems, and nurses were skilled. In this conflict both sides’ operating surgeons dealt with particles of dirt and metal blown into their patients’ bodies. And neither side stopped at mere destruction. Both had methods to maximize injuries: Israel’s army sometimes used fragmentation, anti-personnel tank shells and flechettes (internationally banned in case of civilian injury)—once in Gaza they were fired at a group of boys playing soccer: nine were hit. And Palestinian suicide bombers and their handlers packed their bombs with screws, bolts, and metal objects to inflict as many injuries as possible. There were burns as well as blast injuries, and rehabilitation, years of fighting to achieve some normality again.
After the Bethlehem Ball I visited hospitals in Bethlehem and talked to more surgeons. Samir, my helper, had organized a list of doctors and my aim was to gather information about their current hospital policy and protocols. But they were not so concerned with obstetric or other protocols. Instead they were worried about caring for their patients under the continuing siege. “We haven’t been able to give them fresh vegetables or fruit for days, and we haven’t enough milk.”
Samir and I dropped by the Church of the Holy Nativity and sat for a while in the ancient silence. A Greek Orthodox priest approached. I thought his concern was spiritual but I was wrong: he had come to check that I was not malingering. Very tall, very beautiful, with long flowing black hair and robes, he explained that he had had his fill of siege and refuge-seekers since the Nativity Church standoff during Operation Defensive Shield. At that time Palestinian fighters had taken refuge in Christ’s birthplace, itself under siege, with civilians and activists who sneaked in under the eyes of the IDF and caused havoc. When a family had recently sought refuge in the church he refused: “Not again,” he told them.
As he told the story—“They said they wanted to die here”—he stood up, he was a towering Hercules of a man, saying: “I asked them, ‘Are you ready to die?’ ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘we will die here.’” Taking off his black cap and robes in front of me, he said, “I told them, ‘Right then, I kill you now!’ and I went like this...” lunging toward me, hands outstretched, aiming at my neck.
“They ran,” he said. “They ran away, right out of the church and they have never come back.” I was not surprised.
Samir took me away from the towering priest and the church and through the town to meet his cousin, a businessman in Beit Jala. The idea was to have a break from our day; instead it was a confrontation with yet more reality. In the store were dozens of chocolate items, all red and gold and Christmasy. I must get some, I thought, I’ll never find them in Jerusalem. There were bells, stars, Father Christmases, and angels. Ranks of them. “That’s nothing,” said Samir’s cousin. “Come up here and see the warehouse.” We followed him up the wooden stairs, unhindered by banister or balustrade. At the top we stared: row upon row, pile upon pile, of chocolate figures. There were Santas by the candied dozen, angels in dark, milk, or light chocolate by the host, squadrons of red-robed melting elves and bell upon unchiming bell.
“Oh Hassan, what did you go and do?” said Samir, knocking over a mountain of chocolate money and starting an avalanche.
“Don’t worry about that,” said Hassan, steadying those elves that were still upright. “I ordered all this months and months ago. One of those American envoys was in Israel and I thought the Israelis would have to listen to the Americans and lift the siege and freeze the settlements. I thought there’d be negotiations again. I never thought the Israelis would be allowed to carry on and on and on like this. Believe me, I thought long and hard. I invested a fortune in this fucking chocolate. All of it. Then when I realized the Americans would give Israel the green light for anything—Operation Defensive Shield, remember—I tried to cancel the shipment, but they wouldn’t let me. Italians. It arrived a few weeks ago, the shipment. Now I have to sell all this before it gets warm again—I can’t afford to chill this much stock—and no one has any money. They can’t even buy flour and rice.”
Back in Jerusalem a week later everyone dropped their normal routine and assembled at UNRWA’s depot in Jerusalem. There was to be a memorial service. People came from all quarters and organizations: diplomats, journalists, aid workers, religious leaders, politicians and water specialists, agronomists and doctors, nurses and teachers. Car after car drove in through the security gate, parking in the forecourt abutting the huge warehouses from which tons of aid were distributed to the holed-up Palestinian refugees. We stood in a semicircle in the open air in front of the warehouses.
The service was in memory of UNRWA workers killed in the conflict. Father Jerry and a Palestinian prelate led the prayers. Richard Cook, UNRWA’s West Bank director, gave a short address.
“We planned this memorial for Iain Hook and two others, little realizing that by the time the memorial took place, three more UN workers would have been killed.” He said how much it had meant to UNRWA and to the families of those killed that so many people had sent condolences. I felt guilty that the one time I had had a chance to give my condolences to the Hook family I had allowed myself to be talked out of it.
One American aid worker said he wished the UN secretary-general “would just come here and give a speech to both sides saying you cannot kill my people, you cannot do these things, or something, anything... There was such outrage at the killing of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, but where is the outcry now,” he asked, “when the IDF kills a Briton who’s trying to help refugees?” His anger grew, “Those dumbfucks in Congress who think UNRWA sponsors terrorism—my God, their ignorance is outdone only by the damage their statements cause. Damage to Israel, if they only stopped to think.”
The mood was bitter. Everyone felt the pointlessness and the injustice, the impotence. “But,” said Richard Cook, “we will go on feeding the needy and helping them as much as we can. We will go on doing our job.” All that the humanitarian workers were asking, he said, was that the IDF allow them to carry out their aid work in safety, without risk of being killed or injured. It was a short, very poignant service.
On my way home I stopped in a peaceful, untouched suburb of Jerusalem to do some errands. There was a cake shop run by an English émigré: her cakes were worth several journeys. I parked my car, which carried license plates marked UN“P,” for personal vehicle, in a side street. As I got out a woman saw me, ran up, and started shouting in furious Hebrew. She appeared to be Orthodox, with her cloche hat and long, covering clothes. I didn’t understand what she was saying and must have looked blank. This incensed her even more.
Then she launched into perfect American English, spitting: “You bitch! You dirty bitch. You UN bitch—get out of here!” Her rage was spraying all over me. In my head I was still at the UN memorial, thinking about the British family getting ready for Christmas, without the dead father.
I said nothing and tried to disengage without engaging. I walked up the hill toward the main street. She followed me, cursing as she went.
“You BITCH! You whore! Dirty dirty bitch!” she went on, keeping up alongside me. I hurried; she went faster. By the main road she was trotting, breathlessly spitting out her insults. On the main street more people were about, and some began to stare, others walking on by, embarrassed. She didn’t stop, but kept shouting that I was a bitch and that I should get the hell out. My heart was thudding, but the outer me was calm: her anger was so out of control that calm was the only thing to be, especially after the sadness of the memorial.
The cursing went on and on, building to the climax: “You kill our soldiers.” She looked relieved to have spoken the words. But it was a surprise to me: unarmed UN personnel bumping off IDF soldiers? And I’d just been to a memorial for five UN humanitarian workers killed by the IDF. What was she thinking? I gently tried, but couldn’t get an answer to how it was that she thought the UN killed IDF troops. All I heard was more accusations of whoredom and harlotry in my ear. She followed me all the way along the road, shouting more obscenities as she went. Those people who caught my eye looked sympathetic.
And then she said, “You UN are for the Palestinians. You love the Palestinians. You are for the Palestinians and against Israelis.”
“No,” I said, speaking for the UN for once. “The UN is for the Israelis and the Palestinians.” I wondered whether to try to start... how to explain, perhaps, that one of the UN’s mandates was to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate the Palestinians made destitute by Israeli military activity over the years, and continuing now. To lay out that there was a difference between UN workers—agronomists, doctors, water specialists, political scientists—and UN member states. That people who work for the UN don’t represent or even share the views of the member states, and that even though a number of those member states took an anti-Israeli line, it was nothing to do with the individuals who worked for the UN.
But she had stopped, suddenly silent, quieted. Her shoulders dropped as her vitriol ebbed. She turned about and left me alone. Her anger had run its course, and she looked weary as she walked away. I listened to my own breathing and swallowed the gorge of frustration and emotion.
An Israeli who had heard the shouting came up to see if I was all right. “Perhaps she was related to one of the three IDF soldiers captured on the Lebanese border,” he said.
“Maybe that was it,” I said, glad of a reason. But the conflict again: how to explain that you can want to see justice for an oppressed people and still be pro-Israeli?
There was bitterness toward the UN dating from the original Partition Plan of 1947, though not from those whom the results had deprived of a state. It was Israelis who were angry with the UN, and it came out from time to time, as it had done to me just then.
“One reason many Israelis dislike the UN is because the UN’s job is to protect the Palestinians dispossessed by the war of 1948–9.” The speaker was one of the many young Palestinian lawyers recruited to help the PA prepare for statehood. “The UN is a constant reminder of Israel’s violent birth,” she explained. Some people, “perhaps forgetting the strength of a refugee’s longing,” she said with care, “argue that the refugee ‘problem’ would just fade away without ‘the interference’ of the UN and the Arab world.” Lebanon, for example, could let the refugees integrate instead of denying them all rights and making them subsist in a pitiful state. “Israelis would like the issue of the Right of Return to just ‘go away.’ They say the world is full of refugees—history is littered with them—and eventually they blend in. But not here, and they say it’s the UN’s fault.” UN resolutions uphold Palestinians’ right to return to the homes they fled or were driven from and, according to this viewpoint, the UN perpetuates not only the refugees’ misery but also violent anti-Israeli feeling.
Before we left New York we were introduced to a Russian-American couple who had lived in Jerusalem. “You will love the Israelis,” they said. “Israelis like nothing better than a rip-roaring debate with criticism flying in all directions. Then at the end you all make up and go home friends again.” They were right, even though I started with a disadvantage—I was UN by marriage, and many people saw the UN as an anti-Israeli institution. By the UN’s very composition there is an automatic majority—the Arab states, Islamic countries—that uses it as a battleground to attack Israel. The result has been more resolutions passed against Israel than against any other nation—the 1975 resolution stating Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination, repealed in 1991, was only the most painful example.
“We can accept criticism,” said one Israeli. “We welcome it. And given the Intifada we expect it. But we would like to see every other country subjected to the same degree of criticism. Do we really deserve more censure than Syria, than China?”
She went on: “When we see Europeans taking the same line as anti-Semitic countries—when we see Syria a member of the Security Council—when we ask ourselves where are the resolutions condemning suicide bombing, we see a problem with the UN. Don’t you?” I did. She continued: “How can an organization with such an institutional bias against Israel play an honest role in promoting peace between Israel and its neighbors?”*
Apart from being the target of a steady trickle of harmless gestures, like printed posters held up by drivers at traffic-lights— “UN unwanted bodies—GO Home” was a typical one—UN personnel faced other aggression. Being picked on in airports, subjected to body searches, being held up unnecessarily at checkpoints especially if the UN worker concerned had an Arabic name, being pulled forcibly out of vehicles, despite Israel’s according the UN diplomatic status, being searched and threatened, tires slashed and physical abuse—these were among the many things UN workers and their families put up with. One Italian living on her own in a smart area of Jerusalem was subjected to a long campaign of abuse and intimidation, including having bricks thrown through her car window and messages plastered to the glass accusing her of being a Nazi (“UNazi”), warning her to leave or face the consequences.
Most UN workers took these to be a result of the anger of a small minority of Israelis. The majority was friendly and helpful, especially if treated that way in the first place. I had just as many encounters with Israelis helpfully pointing out that I had a flat tire or had left a brush on the car’s running board as with Israelis telling me to sod off or that I was unwanted because the car carried UN plates.
War and separation were testing, but the days’ duties, errands, work, and routine were grounding. More nighttime parties that morphed into daytime stupors, or into daytime parties, that dealt with the evenings and momentarily blanked out the panic—war panic, separation panic, daily-danger panic. Julita was our strength and calmly refused to be panicked. Sholto, all of one year old, was found stirring the toilet with my cell phone; we presumed that was the end of that. Yes, said the agent at Orange in Talpiot, having tried his best to dry it out, I did need a new phone. Mr. Strinkovksy, the violin-maker, loaned us a violin after Xan tried simultaneous fiddling and roller-blading in an enclosed space. He spun on his wheels, flailed for a second, fell back, sat on his violin and snapped its neck. There were bikes at the shop and boys to pick up from soccer. Impressive match, the other parents said—except that Xan was being rough and had tackled a girl, switching to rugby instead of soccer, and then had carried on tackling when she was on the ground. The coach, Kim, was kind. She said it was because he was bored.
The pizza ritual had broken. It had become—or I finally accepted that it had always been—too big a risk to sit there, much as we liked to. Instead, I picked up takeout pizza in flat boxes from the pizza store—kosher—and talked to the boss. Shaven-headed and hardworking, he was affable, relaxed, and always welcoming. His wife had been pregnant at the same time as me, and we laughed that I had only just won the race to give birth. He understood when I guiltily explained why we weren’t going to stay to eat our pizzas. He shrugged his shoulders and said he hoped we were wrong.
I met Julita and the children at Liberty Bell Park, where we ate the pizza and ran relays to the replica of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, symbol of independence and freedom from foreign interference. There were spaces for biking and roller-blading, courts for basketball and volleyball and a wooden ship to climb on, but tensions surfaced even in the playground. A bunch of older boys shouted at Archie in a language he didn’t understand and he answered, “I don’t speak Arabic.” They, wearing kippas and clearly Israeli, though not to him, were furious as if he’d known what he’d said, and pushed him around, yelling, “Don’t fuck with us, kid.”
He took refuge beside me. We went home via the bike shop to collect the newly repaired bike and buy some oil to maintain it.
I couldn’t get to work in Ramallah again. Curfew. I needed work.
Father Christmas came early. He carried six medium-sized cardboard boxes and one large plastic one. Each was marked with our name. The big one was for the baby. “What are they?” the children shrieked.
“Gas masks.”
“Gas masks for Christmas?” said Xan. “Wow!’
He was too young to understand. Gas masks were being issued because of the coming attack on Iraq and the possibility of retaliation against Israel. There were so many out-of-the-ordinary things to explain to the children. It was as impossible as ever to prevent the children hearing stories. After more than two years of Intifada, they now asked why children and women were killed by soldiers as well as by the air force. They liked to have things clear in their minds; they liked lists, categories, and answers. And they were wising up to weaponry, becoming increasingly sophisticated. What weapons do the Israelis have now? Do they have more planes? Warplanes? F-16s? Tanks? What kind of tanks? Merkavas, Abrams? What weapons do the Palestinians have? Do they have planes now? Warplanes? F-16s? Tanks? Merkavas, Abrams? Why not? How many on each side have been killed? How many boys? How many girls?
They knew all about the suicide bombings, and they hated them. “Why do the Palestinians do this?” they asked. They knew that one of their schoolmates had been injured in the attack of mid-November and was critically ill. And they often talked about the bomber who set himself off right outside the school, his head landing in the schoolyard. “Not his whole body, Mum, just his head,” they repeated. They knew about “martyrs”: the Palestinians in their class often talked about martyrs. For them, martyrs were still superheroes.
I spilled one cup of coffee too many over my computer keyboard. After a piano lesson Archie and I headed to Rosh Ha’ayin near the Green Line to get a new one. The Apple dealer in Jerusalem had closed down: “It’s the economy,” the agent said, “there’s not enough business these days.” I had been told the store we were looking for shut at five o’clock, and it was a long way to go for a keyboard, but with no computer, no email, I was cut off. We reached the town and drew up alongside a pedestrian to ask for directions. She took pains to explain exactly how to get to the industrial zone we were aiming for.
The directions were good, but I didn’t follow them properly. We swept down a slip road and found ourselves on the settler road heading for Ariel, well inside the West Bank. We were on the wrong road but there was nothing I could do about it—there was no exit: mile after mile without a side road or turning. We had been waved through a checkpoint just after the slip road and that was when I remembered that for once I hadn’t brought my passport so maybe they wouldn’t let me back through the checkpoint.
And this was a settler road for settler traffic, and settlers were a target for Palestinian gunmen. I had never been frightened in the West Bank, but now I felt afraid of being shot at, and I was sweating. Archie was lying across the back seat—that was something. He was reading, asking from time to time why we weren’t there yet. The road went on and on with no way off or out, like a tunnel blanking out the land, taking us deeper into the West Bank, until we were almost in the settlement of Ariel. At last, there was a turning point. I turned around and headed back.
When we did finally arrive, the computer store was closed but there were three men left in the building. They took pity on me when they heard I’d driven all the way from Jerusalem. They tried to fix my keyboard (all their stores were locked so a purchase was impossible) and when they diagnosed that it was only the mouse that ailed they gave me one of theirs. And then when I’d left and was trying to buy Archie something to eat from a stall outside the store, they stopped their car beside us to make sure I was all set to get home.
* Palestinians would also talk about bias, laughing in their resigned way about US impartiality. At a rundown exhibition of paintings by young Palestinians, with every canvas and installation a shout against closures and the director sitting in fear of another raid by the Israeli authorities trying to close down the gallery and commandeer the records, one artist had painted a US flag in among the debris. A small group looked at the work, talking about the role of the US. Most of the comments were bitter unsubstantiated jibes, but one was armed with fact. She made one point: that throughout the administrations of George Bush senior and Bill Clinton—twelve years in all—Middle East policy was effectively run by Dennis Ross. That he subsequently became head of the main pro-Israeli think tank in Washington, linked to its lobbying organization, AIPAC, was, she felt, as good an indicator as any of Ross’s impartiality.