Is This Your First War? (21 page)

A rocket launched weeks earlier was not. It dropped into Or Adam's yard, tore off the tops of his rush bushes, hit the wall of his house, and exploded into his living room. Adam's wife and three daughters were home at the time. He was talking to his wife on the phone when the siren sounded. She quickly hung up to gather their children. They didn't make it into the safe room, but everyone survived.

When Adam greeted me outside his home, he showed me his rose bushes. “They were black, but they've come back,” he said. “For us, it's a symbol that life can go on.” Adam is a bit of an oddity in Sderot. He's a lawyer whose parents emigrated from Poland in the 1920s and could likely be successful anywhere in Israel, but he's chosen to live in Sderot as part of an urban kibbutz in which all members pool their incomes for the good of the collective. He wrote a poem about the rosebushes.

“I'm not a pacifist, but I believe in peace,” he said. “It's a long process of trying to understand each other's suffering. If seven-year-olds today grow up seeing the other side as human beings, maybe in thirty years we'll have a settlement. They might do a better job than us.”

Adam's own daughter had a difficult time dealing with the attack. She was seven, and for a long time she wouldn't run or jump. She always wanted to hold her mother's hand. She started to see a child psychologist. “She's doing a lot of paintings and stories about the Qassams,” said Adam, referring to the rockets by name. “It helps. She's very strong.”

Many children in Sderot suffer from traumatic stress syndrome, Nitai Shreiber, the executive director of a social welfare agency in the city, told me. To call it
post
-traumatic stress disorder is not accurate, he noted, because the stress is ongoing.

“My daughters are always asking me why we don't leave,” Shreiber said. “They say, ‘You came here for ideology, but it's hurting us.' They spend most of their time in Ashkelon, a city a short drive away that's rarely hit. We're a family that loves each other, but we can't live in the same place. One of my girls asked me, ‘If I get wounded, can we leave Sderot?' I said yes. ‘So,' she asked me, ‘Why are you waiting?'”

Maclean's
often publishes loud and attention-grabbing covers to draw the eyes of anyone browsing a newsstand. One that ran for an article I wrote describing the challenges Israel faces because of a growing population of Palestinians who don't enjoy citizenship rights was headlined, “Why Israel Can't Survive.” I was in Toronto the morning the magazine came out, and after a late night plodded into a convenience store next to my hotel on Yonge Street to buy it. When I tossed the magazine on the checkout counter, the woman working there looked at the cover and swooned. “Oh, what wonderful news,” she said.

And that's the other thing it helps to remember when thinking about Israel: for millions and millions of people around the world, the problem with Israel isn't a specific action or policy direction; it is its very existence as a state. For them, no peace deal will be enough, because the sin that must be rectified isn't anything that's happened since 1948, but the creation of Israel in the first place.

Most Israeli Jews consider 1948 a triumph, the birth of a homeland after the Holocaust's destruction. But even beyond the anti-Zionist fringes of ultra-orthodox Judaism, there are a few Israeli Jews who look back on their country's establishment with a sense of ambivalence.

Sami Michael is one of Israel's best fiction writers. He was born in a mixed Baghdad neighbourhood of Jews, Muslims, and Christians more than eighty years ago and immigrated to Israel in 1949. As an Arab Jew, he joined a minority community of immigrants who initially had little in common with the Ashkenazi European Jews who were the driving force behind political Zionism and the majority in the new Israeli state.

Historian Avi Shlaim, another Iraqi-born Jew whose family immigrated to Israel shortly after its creation, once described in a lecture I attended at Saint Antony's College how out of place he felt in Israel as an Arabic-speaking boy whose cultural roots were in Iraq. This changed for Shlaim during his service in the Israel Defence Forces, specifically the culmination of basic training, when new recruits climb the ancient fortress of Masada at night and swear, as dawn breaks, that it will never fall again. For Shlaim, who as a historian later wrote critically about Israel's relations with Palestinians and surrounding Arab states, the experience underlined the difficulty Israel faces in forging unity from citizens of such diverse backgrounds, and the role the army plays in achieving this.

Sami Michael, the author, was never as conflicted about his multiple identities as an Iraqi and an Israeli, an Arab and a Jew. “I'm like baklava,” he said when he welcomed me into his Haifa apartment. “My layers enrich the final taste.”

Michael's eyes were dark brown and seemed sad, but he smiled a lot. He had a passing resemblance to Pablo Picasso. Prints of paintings by Salvador Dali, however, were what hung on his walls. A bookshelf supported a small photograph of his mother, who died aged 103. His upper-floor apartment looked over the city — a gas station and, beyond that, the sea. Scattered on his living room table were letters. He had been corresponding with Walid Daka, an Israeli Arab jailed for the abduction and murder of the Israeli soldier Moshe Taman, and visited him once a month. Michael came across as dignified and without pretense. He wore cords and a blue shirt and served his guests thick Arabic coffee that clung to the sides of the ceramic cups he poured it into.

“When we started hearing about the Zionist plan, we had to make a decision,” he said, explaining his youth in Iraq. “We decided that the Zionist idea was a dangerous one — bad ideologically and impractical. We knew the Middle East as a place of conflict, especially for minorities. To come and create a Jewish state on a European mentality was too dangerous an adventure.”

Michael didn't want to emigrate, but ultimately he didn't have much choice. He was a Communist, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in Iraq. He fled first to Iran, hoping to return later to Baghdad. When this wasn't possible, he made his way to Israel. He was a young man and would grow up with the new Jewish state. Now Michael described himself as an Israeli patriot. “I am part of this country. It is the homeland of my children, and I am dedicated to it,” he said. “But I know its future is a nightmare, and no one is listening to me.”

Michael had what he called a “mad dream” in which Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and a Palestinian state are united in a federation. He didn't think it was likely, but then, he said, few would have believed sixty-five years ago that today it would be possible for English, French, and Germans to join together in the European Union.

“Are you proud of Israel?” I asked him.

“I'm not proud of anything. I'm not proud of some cloth that's called a flag. But I love things and I hate things. It is enough that I love this country and I love the people. And because I love them, I can see the danger. I can see the dangers of war, of not negotiating. But since we have a strong army, it is easier to use power than negotiate.”

For all his criticism, Michael did not believe that Israel's establishment was a mistake. “But we're not in the right place,” he said. “Zionism for me is like a bird that insisted on building its nest on the back of a crocodile. We are living from war to war. I served in the army in 1956 and fought wars until 1967. My son is a commando and took part in many dangerous missions. And now my grandchildren will do the same thing. Sometimes I don't sleep at night.”

Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages are already so enmeshed throughout the West Bank that keeping the two peoples apart is virtually impossible. There are roads for settlers and roads for Palestinians — easily distinguishable by their quality — but often the highways are shared. Different-coloured licence plates allow soldiers manning checkpoints to tell who is who. In the fields surrounding some Arab villages, hundreds of olive tree stumps stick out of the ground. The groves have been cut down by Israeli settlers — part of the strategy described by Danny Halamish of pressuring Palestinians to leave.

There are areas, though, that feel like a separate country. Ramallah is one of them. It's the closest thing the Palestinians have to a capital city and reflects the consequential wealth that government bureaucracy and foreign diplomats bring. It's also one of the more liberal Palestinian towns. About twenty-five percent of the people who live there are Christians, and few women cover their faces. I arranged to meet my fixer, Mohammad, there. Young, ambitious, and well connected, Mohammad had been trained as a journalist by Western NGOs and now made a pretty good living translating for foreign reporters. We sat in a trendy café and drank pints of Carlsberg.

“Moves to boycott Danish stuff after that newspaper published cartoons of Mohammad never really went anywhere here,” he said when I pointed out the beer's patrimony, referring to the controversy — and deadly rioting — that erupted all over the world after Denmark's
Jyllands-Posten
newspaper printed the satirical drawings of the Muslim prophet. “A lot of television crews from Jerusalem came over here hoping to film protests and flag burnings and all that, but it was pretty calm here. Most people didn't care.”

In the morning we drove to Hebron, probably the most politically charged city in the region. Here, in the middle of 150,000 Palestinians, some 700 Jewish settlers live in a neighbourhood focused around the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and several members of his family are said to be buried. The site is holy to Jews and Muslims, and both faiths worship there — although they must use different entrances to the complex that has been erected over the tomb, and the building is divided inside. The Jews of Hebron have suffered numerous terrorist attacks over the years. It is also where, in 1994, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein murdered twenty-nine Muslims praying at the tomb. Goldstein was beaten to death by survivors of the massacre and is buried nearby, beneath a grave with an inscription that says he “gave his soul for the people of Israel, its Scriptures and its land. Honest and pure of heart.” Militant settlers erected a shrine beside the grave. Israel's Supreme Court ordered the shrine destroyed in 1999, concluding it violated an Israeli law banning monuments to “perpetrators of terrorism.”

Several days earlier, I had visited the Cave of the Patriarchs in an Israeli car. The drive through the narrow and winding streets in the city's Muslim neighbourhoods to get to the Jewish one was tense. My Israeli fixer was visibly nervous and cursed herself for not posting some sort of sign on the car indicating that she was a journalist rather than a settler. But it was also a straightforward affair. We descended into a sort of basin in the centre of the city where the settler enclave is located and parked outside the tomb, watched over by Israeli soldiers. Inside, we wandered at will. Several American tourists were there as well. One looked like a college student. She wore a long flowing skirt and a bandana holding brown curls back from her forehead. She nodded and smiled as a rabbi inside explained the tomb's Jewish history. “This place is part of who we are,” he said.

Getting to the Cave of the Patriarchs with Mohammad was more difficult. We approached on foot and were turned away at an Israeli army checkpoint. We tried from a different direction and were stopped again. The soldiers here were Bedouin Arabs. Mohammad cajoled and joked with them but was rebuffed. We circled around the enclave, getting hotter and sweatier all the time, and tried to reach the tomb through a covered market in Hebron's old city. Most of the shops were shuttered and locked. All the checkpoints meant it wasn't worth the hassle required of vendors and potential customers to simply get to the stalls, so they went elsewhere. An historic and once thriving section of the city was eerily quiet.

There was a barrier of revolving gates at the far end of the market, closest to the tomb. We were permitted to cross. The street on the other side of the barrier was reserved exclusively for settlers, and three or four Palestinian shop owners with special permits. Because Hebron is such a flashpoint, pro-Palestinian activists occasionally visit and patronize the few Palestinian shops in the Jewish quarter. But merchant Manas Kefishey, whose shop was full of glassware and painted ceramics, said he hadn't sold anything in five days.

I asked him whether he thought a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine was possible. He wasn't interested. “I want all of Palestine to be an Islamic state,” he said. “The two-state solution is a dream. It will never happen.” Kefishey said Jews living in Palestine would be
dhimmi
. The word literally means protected subjects, but in historical practice has required religious minorities to acknowledge Muslim supremacy.

“It will be like the Jewish state today, but in reverse. Jews have never had an independent state in history. Why should they have one now?

“You want to know why I think this?” Kefishey continued. “I sit on my chair right there at the front of the shop, my neighbour beside me. Every day the settlers walk up in front of me and draw their fingers across their throats. Every day. We try to explain this to the soldiers, and they shrug. If they can't do anything for me, what can they do for Abu Mazen [the Palestinian president, also known as Mahmoud Abbas]?”

Much of Hebron's downtown core has already been emptied of Palestinians. Some have lost their homes to security buffer zones. Others are forced out by settler attacks. Kefishey lived two kilometres from his shop. Sometimes negotiating the various checkpoints to get home or get back to work in the morning took him hours. He said he was tired of settler children throwing rocks at him and was thinking about closing the place for good.

Mohammad and I left Hebron's old and contested city and had lunch in the Arab section of town. Mohammad knew a place that served a typical Hebron dish of lamb's neck stuffed with rice and raisins. The restaurant had white paper tablecloths and a fountain in the middle of the dining area. A photograph of the recently executed Saddam Hussein hung on the wall. I asked Mohammad about it. He looked embarrassed.