The first I heard of the plan to move our young family from New York to Jerusalem was on an October night’s drive along the Sawmill Parkway to Connecticut.
“How’d you like to live in Jerusalem for a couple of years?”
Andrew and I had been married for eight years. Soon after our wedding in Britain I’d joined him in Pakistan where I worked as a junior surgeon in a Pakistan hospital, and we moved to New York in 1992.
Now it was late October, 1999. Andrew was at the wheel of a rented car. We’d stood in line for burgers and milkshakes at the Red Rooster in Brewster and the smell of French fries hung stale in the car air.
“Might be good.” I needed more information. “What’s up?”
“The main UN office for the Middle East peace process is setting up a unit for regional politics out there, helping with the negotiations that are looking encouraging. The lead guy has asked if I’d be interested in heading it.”
“When?”
“Starting in a couple of months. We’d see in the new millennium in New York, and be out there some time after that.”
The new millennium. Newspapers, websites, and conversations obsessed with Y2K and the impending end of electronic interaction. Seven years in New York had been light and young. We’d built ourselves a home in a Chelsea loft and filled it with three children. They were now five, two, and six months old. Archie could handle moving schools without too much trouble; Xan and Catriona would take it in stride. And I had swapped clinical medicine for research and public health. There’d be plenty of work to do out there.
“Great. Let’s go for it.”
The weekend was bright with the colors of a New England fall, so much more vibrant than a veiled old England autumn. The children buried themselves in leaves and tried to redirect a small stream ambling down the hillside. Andrew and I played visions of a Holy Land life in each other’s heads, and drove back to the city halfway out of it already.
The reality of relocation was not so streamlined. The UN machine moved slowly, and Andrew didn’t start his new post until April 2000. We waved goodbye to him and stayed on in New York to see out the school year, finish my work projects, and pack up our loft.
Friends were full of advice about where to live, which schools to choose, and how to cope with the natives (definitions varied). I heard about our new location directly from Andrew when he reached it. His reports about our new rental accommodation in a tiny village in Jerusalem caused problems for me when I relayed them in conversations back in New York. Apparently he’d found a house for us that couldn’t exist, in an area we shouldn’t contemplate, and he’d chosen a school—the Lycée Francais—from a different culture that would only confuse our children. At a party on Gracie Square Peter Jennings questioned me about the location of the Palestinian village in central Jerusalem. Edward Said explained to him that it was in “No Man’s Land,” that is, the area in Jerusalem lying between two threads of the Green Line, the 1949 Armistice Line (I made a mental note to find out about these complications, and their history). At a book party I was told that I must find an apartment in Ramallah, as that was where all the fun was to be found, not in stodgy Jerusalem. No, no, no, others insisted: Tel Aviv was the only place to live, with way too much religion in Jerusalem. On a bench in Union Square a friend told me that to live in a Palestinian area was to ask for trouble; why not choose one of the nice areas of West Jerusalem, like Rehavia or near Emek Rephaim, or even one of the up and coming areas like Bakaa? None of the names meant anything to me yet. As for the French school system, why burden children with the francophone way of thinking? There was a perfectly good American school in the center of town, wasn’t there?
New York’s confidence was as solid as its concern, but not always shored up by the reality 6,000 miles away. My confusion at the contradictions was to morph into an automatic resignation; I would stop the retort that rose automatically and bite it back until I’d seen for myself what was happening on the ground. I was to find that contradiction became a pattern and the general way of things.
The house that Andrew found, through a French-Israeli friend—Ofer—who lived in Jaffa, was in a village in Jerusalem after all. We did live in a Palestinian area, but found it no trouble. I grew accustomed to the names of places, and to love them. The French school served us well and was a good choice, though there was a suicide bombing at its gate one morning. And we added to the family: a baby boy, born in Bethlehem, four days before Christmas.
Six years later we were back in New York. Six years; a large slice of a family’s life, but a brief moment in the story of the Mideast. A moment in which there had been an intifada, an attack on the US homeland, and the inauguration of two wars. New York’s assuredness had shifted and realigned. A moment of profound change, and opportunity, of failure, and pain. For us it was a moment of watching people’s futures sawn off by extremism and violence, observing diplomacy fail and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia grow, witnessing hope cemented into despair. It was our moment of riding the roller coaster euphemistically known as “the situation.”
“The situation”: that’s what those on the ground call it. On the face of it, the situation is straightforward. It’s a conflict between two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, over land: the Holy Land. In reality, it’s a maelstrom, a tragedy of our times, a shameful failure of the modern world. And it looks so different from over there, on the ground, that the view from New York verges dangerously on fantasy.
We walked into the situation in August 2000, a month before it blew up; the calm before the continuing storm. We quit on the first night of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, the bombs falling on Baghdad as I sat waiting with my four children in a large airplane on the tarmac of Tel Aviv airport, hoping we would not end up as collateral damage of the onslaught a few hundred miles away.
A few hundred miles. That’s a big distance in Israel. Many of Israel’s enemies are much closer, and the gap between protection and defenselessness painfully narrow. There’s no Atlantic barrier, no island safety for Israelis, who inhabit a sliver of land with undefined, changing borders. I heard the fears all too painfully in a conversation with an IDF general, Amos Gilad, military strategist in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. He had described to a friend of mine, Peter, his straightforward vision of the future: to turn the seven major Palestinian cities into isolated “microcosms.” That would contain the problem. This was to be the strategy, he had said, “this year and for all years.”
Peter told me about their conversation over coffee one morning in the Jerusalem winter of 2002, after we had dropped our respective children at the school next door to the café. An Australian ex-soldier turned UN political officer, Peter wondered aloud at the idea of “microcosms” and their effects on people’s lives. Roni, the café owner, switched channels to find the news. There had been another terror attack, and Roni translated for us.
“We’ll never be free,” he said. “This country is shit, we’ll never be free from terror.”
“This is my point,” said Peter. “How do we, they—Israelis and Palestinians, but it affects the rest of us too—get out of here? Everyone is trapped, in different ways, but trapped all the same by the situation.” The question stuck, as it always did, in the freeze of frustrated silence. The two of us left Roni’s coffee shop in that same silence, heading out into the damp Jerusalem chill to start work.
Later, when I went to see General Gilad myself, I asked him about “the situation” and, remembering Peter’s troubling question, how we might get out of it. Major General Amos Gilad, by now head of the Israeli government’s military-political unit, held court in Tel Aviv at the Kyria, the left ventricle of the Israeli defense ministry. I had driven down from Jerusalem with a slow leak in a tire through sluggish traffic on Route 1, and an Israeli in the lane next to me had pointed out my flattening tire with a look of sympathy. I was going to be late if I stopped so I didn’t.
Tel Aviv was bright in the Mediterranean sun, as bright as it had been buzzing when I had seen it the night before, the clubs pounding music and the people filling the streets, gathering in the balmy night air. Now, out of the morning rush hour, I drove cautiously through the security procedures into the Kyria, an awesome complex in the center of the city. I wished I had stayed the night in Tel Aviv instead of heading back to Jerusalem, but the two cities are less than forty miles apart and the pull of Jerusalem is strong. I had submitted all my details to the ministry and been given clearance for my visit. That same week an Israeli-Arab* journalist had also been given clearance to visit the Kyria to interview an official; the soldiers on guard were jumpy and when he reached into his pocket for his ID they thought he was a terrorist and beat him up, breaking his legs. I was glad General Gilad had sent one of his uniformed assistants to escort me through the complex to his office.
I had first met the general at a party in Tel Aviv. Guarded by security men, all shaven-headed with coiled listening pieces in one ear, he was talking to Norway’s ambassador, Mona Juul, who introduced me. He was genial, relaxed, telling me about female pilots in the Israeli air force and the military’s worries in case they were shot down and captured by Arabs. “You don’t want to know what they do to women if they capture them. And I’m not going to tell you,” he said slowly, looking straight at me. “But these girls insist on being pilots, and we are,” he laughed, “a democracy. Sometimes too democratic, I think.”
Now, in the Kyria, a girl in khaki fatigues was leading me through the complex of buildings and corridors. She handed me over to the general in his office; he smiled and shook my hand firmly. He was charming: “You know, I was in New York, but I came back because I wanted to see you.” We both laughed at his flattery. “Why don’t you sit here?” the palm of his hand offering the corner in an elbow of sofas. “Coffee?” He glanced at one of the uniformed girls in the outer office.
His office was small, unpretentious. Israelis are not particular about putting on a show; they are informal and unstuffy. Nor did the general need any trappings to give the impression of power. He sat at the protected heart of a vast army, equipped with the latest, most invincible land, sea, and air weaponry, conventional and nuclear. Ursine, solid, and gray-haired, he radiated power: it hung off his civilian clothes. His unraised voice was frank as he laid out Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians.
“You have to understand the deep motives in this situation.” He leaned back. “It was Rabin who sent me to Arafat,” the general said, “and eventually I reached a deep insight of the Palestinian leader. We developed a chemistry. But we got him wrong, in a way that doesn’t contribute to the image of Jews as geniuses. One of our most critical mistakes.”
A young woman came in with cups of coffee. She set them down on the low table between us.
General Gilad thanked her and carried on. “One of our most critical mistakes was dealing with this guy. My assessments irritated some politicians.” He chuckled, but went on more seriously, explaining that, tragically, the Palestinians don’t recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. He looked down at my notepad, pausing while I wrote, and then explained that Arafat believed demographic trends dictated that Israel was temporary, and accepted Israel on that basis only. The general added his resentment at Palestinians’ making “no attempt to understand Israelis, how we feel, what our concerns are.”
His words conjured up the image of Arafat, the short man in his military gear, keffiyeh placed painstakingly on his strange head. I tried to picture the two men together, working out each other’s deep motives.
The general was telling me how Palestinians wanted all Jews out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that their ideas were not based on mutual recognition; they want an independent Palestinian state without Jews. “Unlike Israel, of course, which is one fifth Palestinian.” And they want us “to take back the refugees as well.” He broke off, mildly angry.
I had questions, but he was explaining in his own way.
“The Hashemite Kingdom is, of course, two thirds Palestinian,” he was saying about Jordan. “Amman is almost entirely Palestinian.” And then: “As for women, you know that to them women are less than donkeys and dogs. An Arab of 75 came to me asking for fertility treatment—he had a 25-year-old wife! You can buy women in their society.”
I thought of men buying women, that it’s not impossible to buy anyone, anywhere.
“You remember the suicide bombing by the woman at Erez?”
I nodded.
“She was having an affair with her husband’s boss, a Hamas man. Her family left her no choice. Either she died ‘with honor’—as a suicide bomber—or she got killed.”
“How did we get here, though? Into this terrible situation?”
“In 2000, Arafat decided to use terror to break us. He was confident he would break us with their terror. This was the correct assessment I presented before Camp David.
“Israel suffers far more from terror than any previous people. Israelis are remarkable people—they show unbelievable resistance. People don’t understand what it’s like. We were briefing a delegation and I was explaining to them that I was never sure whether I would see my wife alive each night. At that very moment my daughter called me to say that there had been a suicide bomb in Herzliya. My mother, my wife, and my daughter had left the scene one minute before it went off. The Hungarian delegate said to the Russian, ‘Now I understand, and I’m leaving.’”
I thought back to my own narrow escape from a suicide bombing, and the cold horror of knowing how close the three children and I (pregnant with our fourth) had been.
“They failed,” the General was saying, “the Palestinians, because we don’t do revenge, we don’t do atrocities, we don’t do rape—the Russians in April and May 1945 ordered their soldiers to rape German women. Even torture—I don’t think there is any here because it’s against the law. As for assassinations, the British are so hypocritical...” He tutted. “But it is intolerable to have so many casualties.”
I wondered for a moment whose casualties he meant. Then I realized he was talking about the spring of 2002, when 129 Israelis were killed in suicide bombings and other attacks.
“Let me tell you, in March 2002 we opened a new chapter.”
“Operation Defensive Shield?” Israel’s April 2002 invasion of Palestinian cities, most famously Jenin.
“Yes. We are weak in propaganda, I’m not sure why. Saeb Erekat said 700 were killed, but in fact only 53 died—I’ve got the names. And we saved the hospital in Jenin—I financed generators for them: 1 million shekels. And we arranged the hospitalization of the wounded. The director of the hospital lied when he said the hospital was hit.”
I let these facts roll out: by now I’d lived in Jerusalem for some time. I asked him where he thought the situation was going.
“You have to understand this, we are dealing with an entity that will never accept us.”
He let this sink in, and then added: “The Holocaust was so cruel” and that Palestinian attitudes reminded so many Israelis of this. “I’m not sure if I have the answer as to where we are going. You don’t understand the hatred. Do you know how many Palestinian workers turn on their Israeli bosses and kill them?” I didn’t. He continued. “And this hatred comes from incitement. The incitement is terrible, unbelievable. In 2000 Arafat could have had all the settlements removed, but he wants only the final solution.”
I looked at him. He had not used the phrase thoughtlessly.
The incitement, he was saying, “is educating the Palestinian population that all Israel is Palestine and to hate all Israelis. They remind us of our worst enemies. What hate they have against us. Why? Because people need an enemy to excuse their own problems, the problems they have at home. We are weak. No one paid the price for extermination. You know, Air Marshal Harris said it was ‘not in our priorities to bomb the crematoria’ and yet he managed to bomb installations four kilometers away.”
He didn’t want me to comment, only to know. He went back to the Palestinians. “We’re dealing with sponsored state terror. But we are not committing atrocities. In fact we have many teams dealing with the humanitarian side.”
“On the humanitarian side, General, what about Closure?”* I wanted to hear his views on the realities of life in the Occupied Territories, described increasingly often as jails by those who worked and lived there. “What about these big prisons?”
“Ah yes. The fence.” He gave me a short tutorial on tactical, strategic, and operational considerations. “The fence is the tactical and operational solution to the Palestinian problem.”
“And the checkpoints?”
“I don’t like them. I was flooded with complaints from the EU and all the others.” His arms swept round an imaginary roomful of unhappy diplomats. “We have a special team improving the humanitarian situation, as I said, and we’ve removed half of the roadblocks. We’ll need even fewer roadblocks with the fence. The fence will decrease the need for internal closure. There’ll be less of a siege on their cities.”
“But the cities will be stuck inside the fence. What will happen when the prisoners can’t stand being captive any longer?”
He paused. “I’m not sure I have the answer to that,” the general said. “But, what I can say is that with this barrier we are saving lives, Palestinian and Israeli. When Palestinians kill Israelis, we have to take measures in retaliation: they get killed. So we save their lives this way.”1
At that moment, I found out later, a retaliatory measure was about to start in Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. But our talk had come to an end, and we stood up. I put out my hand to shake his, and he grasped me, pulling me toward him for a kiss.
As I left I felt mildly like a bought woman, walking through the outer office with the eyes of the uniformed girls on my back. I had wondered if we would meet again, as he had said he hoped. And then he’d grabbed me. His smile as he pulled me, that hunter-smile, the same everywhere: no harm in trying, the smile said.
I drove away, forgetting the slow leak in the tire, thinking again about Peter’s questions. Where was it that we had gotten to? How had we gotten here? Amos Gilad had given his answer, in part, but he had not offered much hope for getting out of “the situation.” Here was a general in one of the world’s most powerful, well-equipped armies, and even he was fearful. Thinking about his wife and daughter missing a suicide bombing by minutes. Just as we had—the memory kept resurfacing—missing a suicide bombing by minutes. Me and my children.
We had arrived in Israel, eventually, just before the second Intifada began. When the bombing of civilians started in Israel one month after that, we began to feel the fear. How many times since then had we been in the wrong place but not at the wrong time and therefore still alive and whole?—Café Moment, Ha’Nevim, the narrow streets of Mea Sharim where the Orthodox live, Pizza Sbarro, Ben Yehuda Street a dozen times over. My favorite café on Emek Rephaim, where the casualty surgeon died when he had broken his unbreakable rule not to go to cafés and restaurants—but his daughter was getting married the following day so why not? He and she had both been killed. No bride, no wedding. The staff in casualty knew he must be dead because he was always first there after a bomb and this time he wasn’t.
The fear the general had talked about was a shackle for every Israeli, hanging round their future. It put a block on life. Life continued, but with the drag of anxiety. And then there’d be a heart-stopping boom across the valleys and the fear flooded back and took over as you tallied where everyone was. Family first: kids, husband. Then friends. Colleagues. After that you give yourself the all-clear and push back the fear and out into the normal again. You feel bad being callous, but you have to carry on, as normal. Everyone does.
How different everything had been when we’d arrived in Israel: the hope, the landscape, and the future. I had been changed by living here, stuck between the two communities, Israeli and Palestinian, moving from one to the other, hearing from each side about fear and hate and rage, facing the same things but as an outsider, and finding myself torn between the two.
The day before seeing General Gilad I was in the Occupied Territories.* Perhaps that was where the tire had acquired its puncture, not as I drove eastward on the new broad settler roads on the long detour around the new Security Barrier, but on the rough roads for Palestinian traffic as I looped back again to reach al-Quds University in Abu Dis, a suburb on the edge of Jerusalem. I was there to meet a German friend, Daniel, and wait for him to finish giving his lecture on graphic design before we headed off to Hebron. To the east of al-Quds lies the Judean desert, to the north and west the city of Jerusalem. Not far south, along the line of hills, is Bethlehem, with the city of Hebron beyond.
One of Daniel’s Palestinian university friends, also waiting to see him, came up and said hello. Ghassan and I sat on a low stone wall in the spring sun under the olive trees of the campus grounds. Beyond us, on the sports fields, construction workers and cranes were slotting together towering slabs of concrete to form another wall, the wall. The rest of Abu Dis, and Jerusalem, lay on the other side.
We looked across the valley at the winding wall, and at the new Israeli settlements going up amid the remaining Palestinian areas, and at the roads linking the settlements that are not for use by Palestinians. “We must go the long way round,” said Ghassan, “if we are allowed to move at all.”
Ghassan was born in Jerusalem, not far from where we were sitting, at the hospital where I had worked, but the Israeli authorities classify him as a Palestinian from the territories, a “West Banker,” and therefore a Palestinian not entitled to live in Jerusalem. His wife, who is also Palestinian, and who, like Ghassan, works at al-Quds University, is defined as a Jerusalem resident. “The Israeli law does not allow us to live together,” Ghassan explained.* They used to live as a couple, breaking Israel’s rules, in their home in the Jerusalem suburb of Ras al-Amud, but now there is the Wall physically dividing them. Ghassan has to live with relatives on the West Bank side of the Wall, in Abu Dis.
“It’s the control that’s the worst. Israel controls every aspect of my life: where I can and cannot go, when, whether or not I can get to work, what roads I can use, even whether or not I can leave my house. They will not let me build on the land that remains to me—the settlers have taken the rest. With their wall and their permits they want to cut me off from my family, my friends, and my city. And my wife.”
“Can you go to Jerusalem to visit her?”
He frowned at the question but said very slowly: “They won’t let any Palestinians into the Holy City without a permit.” Ghassan was formal, somber. Part of his voice had anger in it, but he held it in a dark place and what I heard was sorrow. “And you can only have a permit, in theory, if you are over 29 and are married and have children.”
“And you’re not?” He didn’t look very old. His black hair was cut short and square, his clothes were pressed and neat, his shoes polished, with a tidemark of today’s dust about the toes.
“Yes, I’m 33. And we have a child, a baby boy. But my son is not listed on my ID and even when I take his birth certificate they won’t allow me a permit.”
“But surely...”
“In any case, even if I had a permit it wouldn’t make any difference. For weeks the Israelis have not let anyone through at all, even with a permit.”
Ghassan was telling me this quietly and calmly. “All I want,” he said, “is to be with my wife and child, to be able to live together as a family. I now see my wife for five minutes every now and then at work if we’re lucky. My son is one year and three months old. He will forget me. My wife sometimes manages to get here to see me on the weekend, but it is a risk and she has to go on a long, long detour because of the Wall, even though our homes are only two minutes apart.”
“And if she moves in with you in Abu Dis?”
“Then she loses her right to live in Jerusalem forever.”
“And Jerusalem...”
“Jerusalem is Palestine,” he said. “I used to go to the Old City of Jerusalem every day—look how close it is, we’re much closer to the Old City than the majority of West Jerusalem areas are. I would buy groceries, visit the dentist, pray at the mosque, whatever. It is, Jerusalem is—how can I put it?—the center of our lives.
“My brother is in the same position. But his wife has decided to let go of her birthright to Jerusalem. She will never be allowed to return. They are miserable about this, but they are together.” He slows down, thinking.
“And the injustice... people are ‘returning’ from all over the world to claim the right to live in Jerusalem, a place they may never have seen, but it’s their ‘right’—because they’re Jewish, while we’re being forced out.” He pointed to the snake of concrete wall along the ridge, stamping its course between houses, through people’s gardens and over their land.
“I can’t understand the Israelis. They took the last part of Palestine in the war of ‘67. They want to control our land, our water, our history, our freedom. They want to drive us away, perhaps, but why do they want to break apart our families? To keep children from their parents, to keep me from my son and have him grow up in anger—what good does that do?”
He was asking me questions he didn’t expect me to answer.
“My father is a retired teacher. He is so affected by the situation that he just sits at home not saying anything. Me, I see nothing beyond tomorrow.
“And my wife, my poor wife. It’s very hard for her, not just raising our son without me but being harassed by the insurance.”
The “insurance,” he explained, is a department of the Israeli Ministry of the Interior. “They come to your house to check up on your residency status, and if you’re not there or your clothes are too few they say you’re not a resident and you lose your status. They raid our house in Ras al-Amud to make sure my wife’s not ‘lying.’ Everything you do, they begin with the position that you’re lying. They come at any time, usually very early in the morning, hoping to catch you out. They go into the kitchen, open the fridge, ask you why you have a dishwasher like this, or food like that. They go in the bedroom, they are very rude, very offensive, and open all your drawers and look at your most personal things and make comments.”
Ghassan was a computer engineer. “I used to supply computers to the settlement of Ma’ale Edumim.* I had many friends there, among the settlers. They are very sympathetic but they can do nothing. They’re not like the settlers in Hebron or some other places: they’re civilized. Some of the soldiers, too. My brother speaks Russian and sometimes, if the soldiers are Russian, they sympathize and let us in so we can see our friends in Ma’ale Edumim.
“You know, the Israelis, they even make us apply for a permit to move from one place to another in the West Bank. I cannot go anywhere, not even Bethlehem, without one. It’s there, Bethlehem, just over the hill, you can almost see it. There is nothing we can do. What is the point of anything, even demonstrating? It does no good at all.”
Daniel walked over to the wall where we were sitting. “How are things?” he asked, and we talked for a while about the students’ problems getting to class. Daniel and I climbed into the car and drove away, toward the road to Hebron that Ghassan cannot travel because he is Palestinian.
To get to Hebron we had to pass through Bethlehem, and Daniel knew a back way eastward across the dry country. We wound through narrow streets, passing children and donkeys and little green tractors pulling miniature trailers. A path led off to the right down a wadi. I could see the valley below, patches of rebellious green against the sand, but I couldn’t see where the path went or why there were so many Palestinians, old, young, suited, robed, making their way down the hillside.
Daniel and I kept going. There was a checkpoint ahead. A burly soldier told us that the checkpoint, separating two Palestinian areas just as Ghassan had described, was closed and no exceptions: “Security.” Daniel knew the checkpoint had been open that morning and asked politely if the soldier was sure. Yes, he was sure, and now he was angry. He thought we were trouble, and started to shout, but then another man in uniform appeared. Slight, polite, and apologetic, he spoke in Hebrew to the burly man and told us: “Wait here.” We waited. It didn’t matter, waiting, we were used to it. Then the slight soldier motioned us to go through. The burly one had disappeared.
We passed through and curved down the hill on a hairpin bend. Now I could see where the footpath led: it was the checkpoint bypass. The Palestinians knew they would not be allowed through the checkpoint so they were walking around it to one of the yellow taxis waiting on the other side. The old, bent and leaning on sticks, found the rocky steepness difficult. The young helped them.
We drove on, through the biblical landscape toward Bethlehem, into the village of Beit Sahour, now a suburb with squares of olive orchard and blocks of concrete houses, past the Shepherds’ Field and Manger Square, doubling back where the roads were blocked by earth-mounds or trenches dug by the army. But there was no traffic, the place was still. We drove across the middle of Bethlehem, past the hospital where I had given birth, and out again through another suburb-village, Beit Jala, up the hill and past the church and the well and out to coils of barbed wire: another checkpoint. Again, it was a checkpoint between two Palestinian areas, well inside the West Bank.
“You can’t pass. And all of Bethlehem is under curfew.” This explained the midday quiet of the town. The soldier was very young indeed. He had his orders not to let anyone through his checkpoint. But he checked to make sure, at a concrete pillbox just behind, with more soldiers away to the left watching from under the drapes of camouflage.
“You cannot pass,” he came back to say. “You have to go back.”
“You’re sending us back during curfew? People get shot for breaking the curfew.”
“No, we never shoot people for breaking the curfew. The army doesn’t do that.” We said nothing. It is always better to say nothing. Anyway, it wasn’t his fault.
We doubled back. Now that we knew about the curfew the quietness was frightening. Rather than go back into the curfew we tried the road by the monastery of Cremisan. After the dry earth west of Bethlehem, Cremisan was green, damp, and fertile. Vines and terraces fell away below us and rose upward from the narrow road. Round the curve between stone walls the monastery facade appeared amid pointing cypress trees. The presence of water seeped through the green. But this road was blocked as well, three monks from Europe told us.
We had no choice but to go back through the curfew, through Bethlehem and out through yet another checkpoint.
Living in Jerusalem and working in the Occupied Territories means that you see a great many soldiers. One afternoon the young officer son of some Israeli friends sat down on the leather sofa in his parents’ house and talked to me about working in the territories. He was intelligent and thoughtful, sensitive and expressive, speaking slowly with long pauses while he searched his mind. Every word he said was weighed, not because he was afraid of saying the wrong thing to me—an outsider, a goy—but because he was working out what it meant to him. He was working out how it was that he had ended up doing the things he didn’t want to tell me about.
He was not the sort of soldier who would swing open the door of his jeep and rake bullets into a house under curfew, killing a woman on her porch in the process (the mother of one of our friends died in this way). But he had had to do things that he found unacceptable and had ended up asking for a transfer. Perhaps he was seeking control over his actions; perhaps he just wanted to escape. It wasn’t his fault that he’d had to do terrible things to defend his country. But that was the nub of what he was trying to sort out in his head.
He talked of the need to sustain military order— “if that goes, then you’re really in trouble”—and his understanding of “what the reality means,” the reality of why they were there in the first place.
“All that the Palestinians wanted was to get to their fields or to the house to see Grandma, but we were trained to think of them as the enemy. That everyone is a potential saboteur.” Some of the officers were more aggressive and let the troops have their head. “Oh, they all emphasize the need to be polite,” he said. “But many of them are looking for a fight. It’s boring. They’re soldiers. The same Palestinians come back again and again, saying they want to get to their fields—or to Grandma’s house—and you’ve sent them back an hour ago, and yesterday, twice, and you have to send them back again—but our orders are to keep them away from the settlers. That’s our job, you see.”
Soldiers contend with villagers sitting in front of army bulldozers, begging them not to demolish their houses or their orchards; with Palestinian farmers who want to harvest the olives from their trees; and with Jewish settlers who tell the soldiers this land was given to them by God 3,000 years ago and who are you to stand in our way when we drive off the Palestinians and take the olives? They are our olives: God gave them to us. And the Palestinians are pleading—our grandfathers planted these trees, please, protect us from the settlers. Then the Israeli peace activists try to intervene and say that the law we follow is man’s law and if we follow God’s law we’ll be stoning each other for our transgressions, for God’s sake. And the children come back from school and are trying to get to the village to do their homework and the settlers attack them with dogs and chains because this is our land, God gave it to us, and the Israeli peace activists say again, what kind of Israel do you want? And there they are, the soldiers, stuck in the middle, trapped.
And they know that anyone approaching them might be strapped with explosives and ready to die.
Some deal with their fears by thinking they no longer care about anything, wearing apathy like a shield. In Hebron a soldier shot the legs off two kids but, he said, nothing bad happened to him, it didn’t affect him. Another said shooting was the “IDF soldier’s way of meditating. It’s like shooting is your way of letting go of all your anger when you’re in the army.” There’s also “punitive shooting”—opening fire on whatever you like: on windows with washing hanging up to dry, knowing there were people who would be hit.2 But the shield confuses the soldiers when they get home because the violence must not follow them; they must leave it somewhere, and that isn’t always easy. There’s no room in Israeli life for firing on children, for example: that couldn’t be real, could it? Surely that doesn’t happen. Israelis talk about the bubble—the place where what goes on in the Occupied Territories can’t touch them. It is a place to hide.
Driving back to Jerusalem, I wondered about Ghassan. About him seeing the concrete wall towering between him and the short distance to his wife and toddling son, about him applying for a permit to be allowed to see the two of them, about his ordeal of waiting and humiliation. General Gilad had been in earnest when he said that half the checkpoints had been removed and that the Barrier would make life better for Palestinians inside it because there would be fewer checkpoints. Inside. And did he know the number of internal checkpoints had not decreased, nor leveled off, but had actually increased?
The bubble again, hiding from hearing the prejudices: people saying the word “Palestinian” and meaning terrorist, the word “Jew” and being full of hate. People who hadn’t seen, or didn’t want to know, or if they had been here, seeing out of one eye. And in a way I envied them their one-eyed view; simple, straightforward, knowing where you stand, stark in black and white, all sorted out, not torn. But one-eyed views didn’t fix: I had stood at a party abroad holding a glass of wine and listened to foreign male certainty brush aside the things I’d seen, imposing their distant diagnoses, and I had hurried back to Jerusalem to listen to old hands who had watched for years, decades, and who admitted they had no answers and were still able to see the humanity of both sides.
I thought of trenches I had seen dug and closures tightened even as the IDF announced that closures were being eased; of conversations with foreign military observers who said time and again that the upper tiers of the army didn’t know what the unit commanders and ranks were doing; of Israeli friends’ shock at the finding that, even in the first few days of the Intifada, unit commanders made decisions without asking senior officers who would have said no, and then there were riots, and people—their own citizens, Palestinian Israelis—were killed.
I remembered the face of an Israeli friend, drained into anguish waiting for her soldier son to come home, then silently putting him to sleep in his boyhood bed—only he still is a boy, just eighteen—and she’s wondering if she should look in his pockets to try to understand what it is that he’s been doing on duty and won’t talk about, just clams up. And the teacher, a settler, at my boys’ school who wept in class for her baby niece shot dead by a Palestinian gunman; and the other teachers telling her class of mostly Palestinian children that she was weeping because she had a headache.
I thought of the children shot dead by army snipers as they played soccer or sat at their desks in school, their friends splattered with their blood. Of the maze of lies, and the voices pushing from abroad, the one dictating the “reality,” the other interpreting it for their own use. And the voices on the ground, from both sides, crying out for reason and moderation and understanding, and for dialogue. The gags on those voices, the extremism, the blind convictions and the willful misunderstanding. And of the many Israeli peace activists, explaining to us whenever we saw them: “People don’t know ‘the situation,’ because they are sold a version and because of the ‘bubble.’”
I thought of the black-haired firebrand journalist, beating the table at the smart East Jerusalem restaurant with her fists, her bracelets crashing, saying, “The army and the settlers hit us again and again and again and here and here and here and take our land and break our trees and kill our kids day after day after day and then ‘BOOM’ and everyone is surprised?”
I thought of the hundreds of dead whose lives are cut short, and the maimed whose lives are ruined, and all Israelis and Palestinians living in fear, even the general at the top. Everyone trapped, wondering how to get out of the situation. The reality for so many: that, as the journalist said, ‘it’s easier to reach heaven than the end of the street.”
And the why? The layers of complication and interpretation, and the flow of hate and love in this land, and a vengeful God sitting somewhere in the middle, and Peter’s question, how to get out, unanswered, and the block on doing anything to sort it out because—well, just because.
But it doesn’t help to get angry.
* Those Palestinians who took Israeli citizenship after the creation of Israel in 1948 refer to themselves as Palestinian Israelis or ‘48 Arabs. Jewish Israelis and most foreigners refer to them as Israeli Arabs
* Closure is the Israeli policy of controlling Palestinian movement within and at the limits of the Occupied Territories by physical (e.g., checkpoints, earth-mounds, barriers, ditches, gates) and administrative (e.g., permits) means.
* Occupied Territories: commonly used term for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the “Occupied Palestinian Territory” under international law. Most Israelis call them the “territories.” Some call the West Bank “Judea and Samaria.”
* The nullification of family reunification by the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law of July 2003.
* Settlements refer to Jewish-only communities built in the Occupied Territories, the 22 percent of Palestine that was not controlled by Israel until its capture in 1967. See Glossary.