Vicious Circle (4 page)

The Rabbi took the insult in stride; in the years since he had immigrated to Israel from the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn
and, along with fourteen families from his Brooklyn congregation, founded Beit Avram, he had developed a thick skin. “I stand
for the people of Israel on the land of Israel,” he remarked tiredly. “I stand for God.”

He turned away to accompany the journalist to his car, which he had parked across the road when they met that morning. “I
am told you have a chip on your shoulder against the Jewish state,” the Rabbi said. He angled his head, causing his thick
eyeglasses to catch the light and turn opaque. He shifted his weight from one scuffed black shoe to the other. “I am told
you write stories that are invariably anti-Israeli.”

“If you think I slant my articles, why did you let me tag along with you today?”

The Rabbi studied Sweeney in the fading twilight. “As long as you spell my name correctly—it’s I for Isaac Ap
ful
baum, with an f after the p—and quote me accurately, my arguments will resist your efforts to distort them. In a nutshell,
I’m a religious Zionist. I have bad teeth because I’m too busy studying Torah to go to a dentist. I wear a hand-knitted
kippah
on the back of my head and would carry a gun if I could see well enough to shoot my enemies and not my friends. I am absolutely
convinced that the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was a religious event. I believe our victory in 1967, which reunited
what you call the West Bank and we call the biblical provinces of Judea and Samaria with the rest of Israel, was the handiwork
of God. For me, Genesis 17:8—where God gives Abraham and his seed
all
of the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession—is the heart of the heart of the Torah. For too long Jews were a people
without a land, and Palestine was a land without a people. Now the people and the land have come together and nobody—not our
crazy Israeli politicians, not the conscience-stricken Diaspora Jews, not the lunatic Islamic fundamentalists, not even a
goy
journalist with a chip on his shoulder—is going to separate them again.”

The word
goy
struck Sweeney like a slap in the face. He snapped shut the copy book and slipped it into a pocket of his worn safari jacket.
“There are good-thinking people, Jews as well as
goys
, who would argue that Palestine was never a land without a people. When the British counted noses in 1918, they found 700,000
Arabs and 56,000 Jews—”

“In the history of the world there has never been a Palestinian people,” the Rabbi said flatly. “Jews have lived on this land
for the last three thousand years, long before Islam’s hooligans swept down from the Arabian desert to plunder Palestine.”
Squinting, he studied the bloated sun, which appeared to be snared in the barbed wire atop the chain link fence ringing an
electricity station. “We could continue this discussion for hours, but I have to get back to Beit Avram for a meeting.”

Neither man offered to shake hands. “Another time, perhaps,” Sweeney said.

“Fax your article to my office. Then we’ll see about a second interview.”

The Rabbi turned on his heel and, splashing through an oil slick, crossed the road to the station wagon. The three young religious
Jews serving as body guards flicked away their cigarettes, checked their weapons and climbed back into the Chevrolet. The
driver, a reserve lieutenant in a reconnaissance unit when he wasn’t studying Torah at Beit Avram, rolled down his window
and called to the Russian-Jewish Zionist behind the wheel of the Rabbi’s Nissan, “Stay close. Whatever happens, don’t stop.”
Then, with the Chevrolet in the lead, the two cars sped off toward Beit Avram, a Jewish settlement of three hundred souls
planted like a
yarmulke
atop a windswept Judean hill in the spine of mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea.

Both cars switched on their headlights as the twilight thickened into night. The Rabbi, worn out from the long day on the
road, tried to cat nap in the station wagon’s back seat but the headlights of oncoming cars kept him awake. “How long?” he
called to the driver.

“Three quarters of an hour, an hour if we run into traffic.”

Efrayim said, “It’s not sure we’ll get there in time for the meeting.”

“My getting there,” the Rabbi observed dryly, “will be the signal for the meeting to begin.”

After a while Efrayim looked over his shoulder and whispered into the shadows of the back seat, “Rabbi, are you sleeping?”

“If I were sleeping I wouldn’t have heard you ask if I were sleeping.”

“Excuse me, Rabbi, but what did you mean this morning when you said prayer was a waste of time?”

“To pray is not the worst thing you can do with your time, but it’s a waste of time in the sense that there are better things
you can do.”

“For instance?” Efrayim persisted.

A sixteen-wheel trailer truck roared past in the opposite direction.
Apfulbaum waited until the noise subsided, and said, “My Rabbi in Brooklyn used to teach us that if the Torah didn’t instruct
Jews to pray, he wouldn’t pray—he’d study Torah.”

“So studying Torah is the best thing a Jew can do with his time?”

“Studying Torah and obeying God’s commandment to settle all the land of the Torah, these are the best things a Jew can do.”

“What if someone is already occupying the land of the Torah?”

“Do you remember what happened to the Amalek nation when it rose up against the Israelites fleeing Egypt?”

Efrayim, who had been studying Torah since he was a child, smiled brightly. “God instructed Moses to blot out their memory.”

“And who has heard of an Amalek Liberation Organization today?” the Rabbi asked. He laughed under his breath at his own little
joke.

Efrayim thought about this. “Rabbi?”

“What is it now?”

“If our demented Prime Minister goes ahead and signs that peace treaty in Washington, we’ll have to give an awful lot of the
land of the Torah back to the Palestinians. If we give back the land, how will we be able to obey God’s commandment to settle
all of the land of the Torah?”

“God will surely stay the Prime Minister’s hand at the last moment.”

“The way he stayed Abraham’s hand when he was about to sacrifice his son Isaac?”

“Something along those lines.”

Rounding a curve near the Zohar Reservoir, the headlights of the lead car swept over a white Volkswagen camping car parked
up ahead at the side of the road. A tall religious Jew with side curls, wearing a black ankle-length coat and a black fedora,
waved his arms over his head to flag them down. A young woman, also a religious Jew judging from her shawl and pill box hat
and the long skirt that plunged to her ankles, stood nearby with her eyes downcast.

“
Haredim
,” muttered the driver in the point car, using the Hebrew word for the ultra Orthodox Jews.

“Keep going,” the young man sitting next to him ordered, but
the driver of the Rabbi’s station wagon was already honking his horn and slowing down, so they pulled up, too. The three young
bodyguards, their side curls and the ritual fringes of the
tallith katan
flying in the dry gusts coming off the desert, cocked their Uzis as they stepped out of the Chevrolet.

The Rabbi’s station wagon had come to a stop next to the camping car. The Rabbi’s Russian driver, his finger curled around
the trigger of the Uzi concealed along the seam of his trousers, opened his door and stepped out onto the road. The Rabbi
rolled down his window. “What’s the trouble?” he called in Yiddish to the religious Jew standing next to the parked Volkswagen.

“We ran out of benzene,” the young woman, her face disfigured by smallpox scars, replied in Hebrew.

The tall young man in the ankle-length coat approached the Rabbi’s car. “We are on our way back to Ashqelon,” he explained,
speaking Hebrew with an accent Apfulbaum couldn’t immediately place. “Do you have a jerry can you could lend us? We will reimburse
you for the benzene.”

The driver of the Chevrolet came running back along the road. “Something’s not right,” he shouted. “They’re speaking Hebrew
instead of Yiddish—”

The warning—
Haredim
only spoke Hebrew when studying Torah or talking to God—came too late.

From the folds of her shawl the young woman whipped out an automatic pistol and, gripping it in both her hands, sent a hail
of bullets plunging into the driver’s chest. Gun shots erupted from the darkness at the side of the road, cutting down the
two body guards standing next to the Chevrolet before they could squeeze off a round. The driver of the Rabbi’s Nissan dove
onto the asphalt and fired his Uzi in short bursts at the flashes at the side of the road until the clip ran out. He was trying
to jam in a second clip taped back to back to the first when a grenade rolled across the road and exploded near his feet.

In the darkness and the confusion, one of the bodyguards from the Chevrolet, wounded in the head and stomach, managed to drag
himself across the road into a tangle of underbrush at the shoulder.
Wiping the blood from his eyes with a forearm, he looked through the bushes. Two Mercedes-Benzes materialized out of the dunes
at the side of the highway and screeched to a stop near the Volkswagen bus. In the glare of their headlights, figures in jeans
and black turtleneck sweaters, their faces masked by black-and-white
kiffiyehs
, could be seen wrenching open the doors of the Rabbi’s station wagon. Several Arabs dragged the Rabbi and his secretary from
the Nissan and prodded them into the back seat of the first Mercedes. A heavy-set man, on the short side with short-cropped
hair, came around in front of the Rabbi’s station wagon. He was wearing a double-breasted suit jacket over a flowing white
robe. The Nissan’s headlights spilled his shadow down the road and onto the rear of the Chevrolet. The Arab dropped to one
knee next to the body of the Russian driver, who was twitching in agony from the grenade explosion. When the twitching suddenly
stopped, the Arab felt for the driver’s pulse and, bending over, put his ear against the wounded man’s mouth. He must have
decided that the driver was still alive, because he seemed to probe with the tips of his fingers behind the Jew’s ear as he
drew a small pistol from the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. He pressed the barrel of the pistol to a spot on the
driver’s skull. The hollow
phffffft
of a small-caliber weapon reached the ears of the wounded bodyguard hiding in the thicket. Close by, voices called out in
Arabic. The beams of powerful flashlights danced on the road. One of the attackers opened a large pocket knife; the wounded
bodyguard watching from the thicket could see light glinting off the blade as the Arab leaned over the body sprawled next
to the Chevrolet. The other attackers started searching for the missing bodyguard. One of them came across a trail of blood
on the asphalt and trained his flashlight on the thicket across the road. As he started toward the thicket, the headlights
of a vehicle topped a rise a kilometer away.

The heavy-set Arab in the robe and suit jacket shouted orders. Two of the men in turtleneck sweaters lifted a wounded Arab
into the back seat of the second Mercedes. Doors slammed. Low beamed yellow headlights flicked on as the two Mercedes careened
off in the direction of Gaza.

T
HE TWO MERCEDES SPED ALONG A DIRT ROAD, FORDED A
shallow stream at a spot marked by two logs driven into the bank and pulled up in an apple orchard. The lights strung along
the top of a security fence around a kibbutz flickered in the distance; from the orchard, with a little imagination, it was
easy to take the kibbutz for a cruise ship and the sea of impenetrable blackness around it for the Mediterranean. In the back
seat of the first Mercedes, the Rabbi and his secretary, their wrists bound in front of them, their heads covered with leather
hoods, waited in the darkness. Both men stiffened when they heard footsteps approaching. The heavy-set Arab with short cropped
hair came up behind the car and nodded at one of the young men in turtleneck sweaters. “Cut open their sleeves,” he ordered
in Arabic.

The young man, whose name was Yussuf Abu Saleh, pulled out his pocket knife for the second time that night and, leaning into
the back of the car, slit open the jacket and shirt sleeve on the left arm of each prisoner. The Rabbi’s secretary, Efrayim,
gasped. When his turn came, the Rabbi filled his lungs with air but said nothing.

From a small metal container, the Arab with the short-cropped hair, whom the others knew as “the Doctor,” removed the two
syringes he had prepared that afternoon. The Rabbi gritted his teeth and breathed heavily through his nostrils when he felt
the needle prick his skin. As he slumped against his secretary, Efrayim cried out through his hood, “Oh God, you have executed
him.” When he felt the Doctor’s fingers searching for a vein in his forearm, he started to
tremble uncontrollably. As the needle pierced his skin he began to intone the Shema from the book of Deuteronomy: “
Shema yisra’el, adonai eloheynu … adonai—”
Then his head slumped forward onto his chest.

Four members of the raiding party carried the drugged prisoners over to the small delivery van parked next to a beat-up silver
Suzuki with Israeli license plates. The van bore the logo “Fine Bedouin Robes and Carpets” printed in English on its sides.
Each prisoner was crammed into a large straw hamper and covered with layers of robes and carpets. Then the hampers were loaded
into the van and other hampers packed with robes and carpets were piled on top of them. Yussuf locked the back door of the
van and handed the keys through the window to the driver, a pock-marked Bedouin smoking a foul-smelling hand-rolled cigarette
and listening to a cassette of a popular Egyptian singer on the car’s tape deck. The young woman who had passed for a
Haredi
when the Rabbi’s car was being flagged down sat next to him. Her name was Khloud but everyone knew her by the nickname Petra,
after the ruined Nabataean city in the Moab Mountains where she was born. For the ride back to Jerusalem she had changed into
the long dress and the off-white head scarf of a religious Muslim. “Drive slowly,” Yussuf instructed them. “Use the dirt tracks
into the West Bank to avoid Israeli checkpoints, come at Jerusalem from the Jericho side, when you arrive in the Old City
pull into the alleyway next to your shop and flash your lights twice. Our people will take care of the rest.”