Now, after the acute despair of last night, it is clearer than ever that the peace process must go on, because if it stops for even a moment, despair and extremists will take control. The process will continue on its agonizing, bumpy way, requiring all of us to ask the most difficult questions of ourselves, about our identity, our faith, and our courage or cowardice. I hope that this is not just my own dream: I believe that there will be flexibility on the question of Jerusalem, on both sides. When the moment comes — may we not need another round of bloodshed before it does — both sides will realize that not only Jerusalem is holy; the lives of the people who live there are no less holy.
Boy Killed in Gaza
October 2000
The tragic killing of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy on September 31, 2000, was televised and broadcast live around the world. Muhammad al-Durrah, who died in his wounded father’s arms, became an instant international symbol of the Palestinian uprising. To this day, neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Israeli Army has accepted responsibility for the death of the child in the crossfire between them.
Everyone who lives in this disaster area — the Middle East — has seen many horrific sights. But these pictures, the pictures of Muhammad’s death, are among the most harrowing ever seen here. They signify that even if we eventually have peace in the end, it may arrive too late.
Because war and violence have blinded our eyes, and have turned some of us into killers, and many others of us into tacit collaborators with murderers.
Of course, there is still no way of knowing who shot him, Israelis or Palestinians. In the madness that rages here, anything is possible. But there can be no absolution for such an act — for the execution of a twelve-year-old boy. When I hear Israeli army officers explaining that the father shouldn’t have taken his son to a riot zone, I feel nauseous.
For more than one hundred years we, Israelis and Palestinians, have been giving birth to children in battlefields, bullets shrieking past us. Yet another generation and another generation are thrown into the fire immediately at birth. Our parents did this to us, and we are doing it to our children. Fathers cannot defend their sons, but it also seems that they do not have the strength to rise above this fate for their families, to change this verdict. As if all of us here, Palestinians and Israelis, are doomed to be either murderers or victims.
As if we no longer have any other way.
In the meantime, for the last year and a half, Barak and Arafat have not stopped talking about the need to make peace, for the sake of the children. But they are apparently speaking of some abstract peace, of figurative children.
A twelve-year-old boy now lies between them, a boy with a name and a face, a face contorted with fear. A very tangible dead boy.
Were Barak and Arafat braver, really brave, this boy might still be alive. Now, even if they reach an agreement in the end, we will carry Muhammad al-Durrah’s face in our minds like a curse.
Who knows how many more innocent people will die in the days to come, until the two sides understand that the look that was in the eyes of that boy before he died will be the look we all have, if we continue to sit passively, easy prey for violence.
Letter to a Palestinian Friend
October 2000
The second Intifada broke out after the failure of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David. It was instigated by a visit of opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount (al-Haram al-Sharif) in the old city of Jerusalem, on September 28, 2000. Palestinians regarded the visit to the site, sacred to both Muslims and Jews, as a provocation, and the riots that erupted the next day resulted in many deaths. The wave of violence that spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza was met with overwhelming force by Israeli security forces.
On October 12, 2000, two Israeli reservists lost their way near Ramallah and were stopped by the Palestinian police. An angry Palestinian mob invaded the police station and brutally stabbed the Israelis to death, then mutilated their bodies. Shocking film footage of the murders convinced many Israelis that there was no hope of achieving a negotiated peace with the Palestinians.
Dear B.,
First, I hope you are well, and that no one in your family has been hurt in the events of these last weeks.
I was thinking how strange — and sad — it is that we have not spoken on the phone since the disturbances began. Up until then, after any event that took place during the peace process, joyous or violent, we always spoke, or even met (though the meetings were rarer). And now — absolute silence. Perhaps because we are both in shock, shock that paralyzes our ability to respond and our strength to continue to believe. Being in shock, we might both be thinking at this moment that we may have erred. Maybe we only imagined that we saw the incipience of hope in both our peoples. Maybe the whole concept of peace was the naive illusion of a few bleeding hearts that were weary of war and oblivious to the volcano of primal instincts and hatred churning under their feet.
Or perhaps we don’t dare call each other because somewhere, in your heart also, I’m sure, nestles the fear that the friend, the Other, has already despaired completely of conciliation. Maybe even he, moderate and judicious, has finally been inundated by the wave of hatred that has broken over all of us now.
But no. I don’t believe that this is what happened to you. We’ve known each other for eight years, talked about literature and politics, about life, about our children. It feels strange to me to address you in this way, publicly, and even now, at the opening of this letter, I feel a slight change in my normal manner of speaking to you. Over the years we have freed ourselves from the natural tendency of every Israeli and Palestinian who engage in dialogue to turn themselves into representatives of their people. But at this time, the new situation threatens to relegate us to that position, whether we like it or not.
You know, when I watch the television broadcasts, I always try to watch them through your eyes. I see a Palestinian throng storming an Israeli Army position and I try to single out an individual face, which might be the face of one of your children. I know that you don’t approve of this kind of demonstration, that it is foreign to your character, as one who opposes all forms of violence. But perhaps, under these new circumstances, it is hard to control a teenage boy who was but a toddler at the time of the first Intifada. Perhaps he has grown up on the proud, heroic stories of the teenage boys of that time and now longs to take part in his people’s resolute, violent struggle for independence. I gaze at the photographs, seeing how the hands are raised, holding stones; how the faces are contorted with hatred. I see the Israeli soldiers taking aim and shooting, and think of my own son, who will soon enlist in the army. Will his face and body also quickly adjust to those attitudes of war and hatred? I look, and suddenly all of them, our children and your children, have the same faces and the same gestures, and it is so clear the extent to which the long conflict has succeeded in claiming them for itself, all of them. All look to me like toy soldiers, lacking individual volition, marionettes manipulated by politicians and army commanders on both sides.
And I try to think of what you are experiencing, you with your sober, accommodating views, within a society that from the outside looks to me as if it is ablaze with a fire for revenge. You are within a nation that is now roaring at me, at least on the television screen, with a single voice, without nuances. But perhaps I am mistaken. Maybe you, and other common friends of ours, are making their voices heard. Maybe it’s the media — ours and yours and the world’s — that chooses to show only the harshest, most extreme scenes and stir up our feelings against each other. But even if the media is guilty, as we always claim in Israel, how is it possible that I have not heard a single note of true Palestinian condemnation of the horrible lynching of the two soldiers in Ramallah — and I mean an explicit condemnation, with no buts and with no “you must understand Palestinian anger.”