Vicious Circle (3 page)

Along with my reputation for deadpan detachment, I brought to the job the hard-nosed heresy that the way out was to raise
the stakes. Even before the European leaders drove the point home with their Delphic chant, the political climate was ripe
for heresy. The rash of terrorist attacks on Israeli cities and Israel’s tit-for-tat retaliatory raids on the Palestinian
territories were still fresh in everyone’s memory. When another terrorist attack struck the continental United States a month
after the new President was sworn in—I’m talking about that crop-dusting plane that attempted to spray Indianapolis with anthrax
spores; deaths would have been in the thousands instead of the dozens if the winds hadn’t carried off most of the anthrax—anti-Israel
sentiment, never far beneath the surface, turned up in the public discourse. We all heard it—on the TV talk shows, at cocktail
parties, in elevators. The sentence usually began with some variant of the phrase, “If it weren’t for the Jews …” Taking advantage
of the fact that the general public was fed up with America getting blamed for the Israeli problem, Congress passed and the
President signed into law—despite intense opposition from the Jewish lobby and its allies on the evangelical Christian right—a
measure doing away with tax deductions for contributions to organizations that distributed money to foreign governments or
entities. Overnight donations to the United Jewish Appeal dried up. When the Israelis orchestrated a not-very-subtle campaign
against the sitting President, the other shoe dropped: acting on my advice, the United States suspended the delivery of arms
to the two leading recipients of foreign aid, Israel and Egypt
.

You remember what happened as well as I do. The move, which would have been unthinkable only a few months before, caused a
Richter-scale quake in Middle East politics. The Israeli Air Force flies American jets. Without spare parts, they would have
to begin cannibalizing planes in order to keep others in the air. The Israeli government spumed for several days and then
imploded, elections were held and a coalition of the more moderate secular and religious parties cobbled together a slim majority
in the Knesset. Which is when I began shuttling
between Jerusalem and Cairo and Riyadh and what was left of the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah after repeated
Israeli air strikes. Brandishing the usual carrots and sticks, I persuaded the two sides to grudgingly agree to cease fire.
The Palestinian Authority, under intense pressure from the Egyptians and the Saudis, who were under intense pressure from
European capitals, finally got serious about jailing Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Fatah and Al Aksa activists and shutting
down the suicide bombings; Israel, fearful of losing American support for the first time since the creation of the Jewish
state, pulled its Army out of the Palestinian cities on the West Bank it had occupied, ordered its soldiers to stop shooting
rubber bullets at children throwing stones and gradually opened the borders to Palestinians who held permits to work in Israel;
within weeks twenty thousand Palestinians were crossing into Israel daily, and returning home at night with pay envelopes
in their pockets. When the cease fire held, the belligerents were dragged—kicking and screaming, according to the
Washington Post
—to the negotiating table at the Mt. Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, the scene of the Bretton Woods Conference after World
War II
.

Which pretty much brings us to where we're at this morning. If the cease fire holds long enough for us to get this damned
treaty signed, the hope is that the silent majorities on both sides will come out of the woodwork—

Hold on a sec, CNN’s put a map of Israel on the screen. Can you turn up the volume? Thanks
.

“… we'll go live to our correspondent in Jerusalem. Joel?”

“When the two sides initialed the Mt. Washington peace treaty, forty-one days ago, everyone in Israel took a deep breath and
held it. Now, with nine days to go until the actual signing, the silence is deafening. People tend to jump when a car backfires
or a door slams or an ambulance siren wails in some distant part of this ancient city. As a senior American diplomat put it
to one of my colleagues in Washington: ‘If a shot is fired, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s going be heard ’round the
world.’ Joel Plummer, reporting from an eerily quiet Jerusalem.”

Okay, you can turn it down
.

For the record, the senior American diplomat is none other than yours truly, Zachary Taylor Sawyer
.

T
HE
khamsin
,
A BLISTERING WIND FROM THE FURNACE OF HELL,
swept up from the endless reaches of the Sahara. It was the earliest
khamsin
in memory and the most brutal in years, and was taken by some as a portent of plagues to come. Like a tidal wave, the bone-dry
gusts seemed to pick up speed and mass as they spilled across the Suez rut into the Sinai and the tangled
wadis
of the Israeli Negev beyond, scalding the desert, stirring the sand into storms that disfigured the face of the late afternoon
sun. Its force spent, the
khamsin
curled westward to break against the wedge of land on the shore of the Mediterranean that the Israelis call
Aza
, the Palestinians call
Ghazeh
and the world knows as Gaza.

Their windows closed and caked with sand, two civilian automobiles—a dirty yellow 1950s Chevrolet with tail fins and a baby-blue
Nissan station wagon—barreled down the buckling asphalt road from Yad Mordechai, an Israeli kibbutz founded just outside Gaza
after World War Two by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In the distance an Army jeep, its needle-like machine gun
sweeping the orange groves inside Gaza, could be seen patrolling the dirt track that ran along the Israeli side of the chain
link fence separating Israel from the Gaza Strip. “To live by the Torah isn’t enough,” the Rabbi was telling the journalist
in the back seat of the station wagon. His voice was hoarse from giving interviews and saying the same thing over and over—though
each time he managed to come at the material with an ardent freshness, which left his audience with the impression that the
Rabbi was inventing himself as he went along. “Stop me if I’m talking
too fast for you to take notes. We must follow God’s commandment to the Jewish people and settle every square inch of the
land of the Torah. Without the lava of the land burning through the soles of our shoes, we are spiritual cripples. The land
is a means to an end; the end is redemption of the Jewish people and the coming of the Messiah.”

The journalist, a lanky American in his late thirties named Max Sweeney, sat hunched over the coffee-stained pages of a child’s
copy book, scratching notes as the Fiddler on the Roof (as he had nicknamed the Rabbi the moment he spotted his bulging eyes
and dancing side curls) rambled on. “You were one of the founders of the Jewish settlement Beit Avram, in the hills above
Hebron—”

The Rabbi cut him off. “Hebron is where it all began,” he said. He removed his perfectly round steel-rimmed eyeglasses, dragged
an enormous handkerchief from the breast pocket of his double-breasted jacket and started to clean the thick lenses. “Read
the twenty-third chapter of Genesis,” he plunged on, his cataract-scarred eyes agleam with maniacal energy. “It’s where Abraham
purchased the first dunams of holy land; where David, commanding Israel’s hosts, set up his capital before moving his act
to Jerusalem; where our patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are buried.” The Rabbi carefully hooked the eyeglasses over
one oversized ear and then the other and watched the point of Sweeney’s pen scratching across the page; even with eyeglasses,
the Rabbi’s vision was so poor that the handwriting looked like the hills and valleys made by a stylus on a polygraph. It
occurred to him that he hadn’t verified Sweeney’s credentials; for all he knew, the American journalist could be working for
the CIA. Not that it mattered; he’d take whatever press coverage he could get. “Anyone who thinks we should abandon Hebron,”
the Rabbi continued, his voice a strained rasp, “is defying God. That’s the bulletin I came to deliver to the Jews meeting
in Yad Mordechai today.”

“If the Israelis and the Palestinians wind up signing this Mt. Washington peace treaty that the Americans rammed down their
throats,” Sweeney ventured, “you’ll be obliged to leave Hebron, along with a hundred other settlements in the West Bank.”

“There’s still nine days to go before the ceremony,” the Rabbi noted. “Anything could happen between now and then.”

“The cease fire has held up for three months.”

The Rabbi snickered. “Arafat’s successor turns out to have more brain matter between his ears than Arafat. He’ll keep his
people in line and get as much as he can through negotiations, then he’ll take a deep breath and come back for more, count
on it.”

“It’s no secret that you’re dead set against the peace process,” Sweeney persisted. “How far would you be willing to go to
derail it?”

The Rabbi coughed up a ruthless laugh that struck Sweeney as being just shy of maniacal. “I’d convert to Islam if I thought
it would put an end to this asinine government policy of trading holy land for profane peace.”

The driver, a Russian-Jewish Zionist with a loaded Uzi submachine gun resting across his thighs, snorted in satisfaction.
“Hell will freeze over before our Rabbi converts to Islam!”

In the front of the station wagon, Efrayim Blumenfeld, the young rabbinical student who served as the Rabbi’s secretary, twisted
around in his seat. “We’re almost at the Ashqelon interchange,” he announced.

The convoy sped past a corpulent Israeli Arab in a long gray robe riding an emaciated donkey and flailing away at the animal’s
flank with an olive branch. From the minaret of a dilapidated mosque in an Arab village set back from the road, the high-pitched
voice of a
muezzin
calling the faithful to prayer boomed out from a loudspeaker. “
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar
.” The Rabbi, who had taught himself Arabic on the theory you were better armed if you spoke the language of your enemies,
translated for the journalist. “He is saying that God is most great. He is saying, ‘I witness that there is no god but Allah;
I witness that Muhammad is His messenger.’” Gazing through the sand-stained window, the Rabbi didn’t bother to mask his contempt.
“Some messenger! Some message! But then what can you expect from the incoherent ranting of an illiterate camel driver?”

The journalist glanced at the Fiddler, who was kneading a purplish bruise on the pale skin of his forehead. “I’ve been meaning
to ask you all day,” Sweeney said, “how you hurt your head?”

“Praying at the Wailing Wall.”

“You’re making a joke.”

“He beats his head against the Wall when he talks to God,” the secretary explained over his shoulder. “It’s the only time
our Rabbi has ever come face to face with someone as stubborn as he is. In a manner of speaking, it drives him up the Wall.”

The journalist, who was gathering material for a profile on West Bank Jewish militants in general and the Fiddler on the Roof
in particular, waited for the laughter. When none came he understood the answer was serious and jotted it down. “It’s a matter
of record that the Jewish fundamentalist who assassinated Prime Minister Rabin in 1995 had been an early student of yours
at Beit Avram,” he said. “He was said to have been reading your book
One Torah, One Land
the night before he committed the crime.”

“Hundreds of students have studied Torah at Beit Avram. Tens of thousands have read my book, which is about the unbreakable
bond between
ha-aretz
, the land of Israel, and the Torah. What my students and readers do with this information is their business. It’s not my
fault if one of them decided to excarnate the Prime Minister.”

“Excarnate?”

Efrayim turned in his seat belt. “Our Rabbi takes the Torah’s injunction ‘
Thou shalt not kill
’ to its logical conclusion—he won’t even let the word
kill
pass his lips.”

“Okay. Let’s come at the question from another direction. There are rumors that your settlement, Beit Avram, is the home of
the Jewish underground movement Keshet Yonatan, the Bow of Jonathan; that you are the spiritual leader of the movement and
the guru to its mysterious leader who signs himself by the name of Ya’ir.”

“‘
From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back
.’” The Rabbi, an amateur poker fanatic famous for playing his cards close to his vest, managed to produce a smile that transmitted
no information; he could have been betting a straight flush or a pair of threes. “Two Samuel, chapter one, verse twenty-two.
I would have thought a serious reporter for a serious newspaper had better things to do than check out cockamamie rumors.”

The journalist absently brought his middle finger up to the small plastic device in his left ear; his drum had been ruptured
when a mortar shell exploded next to his car in Beirut several wars back. His right ear had not been affected but his colleagues
understood that he could only distinguish sound in his left ear with the help of the small plastic aid. “Are you denying there’s
a Jewish underground?” he asked. “Or are you denying you are its spiritual leader?”

The Rabbi, whose name was Isaac Apfulbaum, shrugged his gaunt shoulders. “Either. Or.”

Up front the driver worked the windshield wipers and the sprinkler to clear sand from the window. The Ashqelon interchange
with its transparent bus shelters on both sides and a swarm of hitchhiking soldiers loomed ahead. The driver pulled the station
wagon onto the dirt shoulder and cut the motor. The Rabbi climbed out of the car and, with the American journalist trailing
after him, walked over to a group of soldiers to shake the hand of each of them; to Sweeney’s eye, the Rabbi looked like an
American politician wading into a crowd of constituents to spread the gospel of his reelection. When the Rabbi offered his
hand to a young Israeli officer, the soldier thrust his fists deep into his pockets. “I know who you are,” he declared in
Hebrew. He noticed someone he took for a journalist behind the Rabbi scribbling furiously in a copy book and switched to English.
“You stand for everything I despise.”