Still, last night I had a small, private moment of comfort. As on every Tuesday, I studied with my hevruta. It’s two friends, a man and a woman, with whom I study Talmud, Bible, and also Kafka and Agnon. The hevruta is an ancient Jewish institution. It’s a way of studying together and sharpening the intellect through debate and disputation. During our years of study together, we have developed a kind of private language of associations and memories. I’m the nonreligious one of the three, but I’ve already had ten years of vibrant, exciting, and stormy dialogue with these soulmates. When we study, I become intimately connected to the millennia-long chain of Jewish thinkers and creators. I reach down into the foundations of the Hebrew language and Jewish thought. I suddenly understand the code hidden in the deep structure of Israel’s social and political behavior today. In the midst of confusion and the loss that surrounds me, I unexpectedly feel I belong.
Thursday
Things fall apart. Israeli forces are entering the Palestinian city of Ramallah. A day of combat. Six Palestinians are killed, a ten-year-old girl among them. Another of the victims was a senior official of Fatah, the majority Palestinian faction, who was responsible for the murder of several Israelis. An Israeli citizen was killed by Palestinian gunfire coming from the village of another, previously killed, Fatah operative. The fragile cease-fire is no more, and who knows how long it will take to rehabilitate it. I call one of the people I can share my gloom with at such a moment. Ahmed Harb, a Palestinian writer from Ramallah, a friend. He tells me about the shooting he hears. He also tells of the optimism that prevailed among the Palestinians until the day before yesterday, before Ze’evi’s murder. “Look how the extremists on both sides are working hand in hand,” he says. “And look how successful they are …” Only two days ago Israel lifted its siege of Ramallah for the first time in weeks. After Ze’evi’s assassination the roadblocks returned. I ask him if there’s something I can do to help him, and he laughs. “We just want to move. To be in motion. To leave the city and come back …”
Between the news bulletins, amid the ambulance sirens and the helicopters that relentlessly circle above, I try to isolate myself. I battle to write my story. Not as a way of turning my back on reality — reality is here, in any case, like acid that eats away any protective coating — but rather out of a sense that, in the current situation, the very act of writing becomes an act of protest. An act of self-definition within a situation that literally threatens to obliterate me. When I write, or imagine, or create even one new phrase, it is as if I have succeeded in overcoming, for a brief time, the arbitrariness and tyranny of circumstance. For a moment, I am not a victim.
Friday
The week is coming to an end. Its events were so acute that I did not have time to write about many important things dear to me: about my son, who is writing a surrealist play for his high school drama club; about the soccer game we watched together on television, Manchester United vs. Deportivo la Coruña (with Barthez’s outrageous blunders); about my daughter, who is conducting a scientific study of her parakeet; about my eldest son, who is serving in the army and about whom I am anxious each and every moment. Also, about our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary this week, celebrated this time with much concern: Will we succeed in preserving this vulnerable family structure in the years to come?
So many cherished things and private moments are lost to fear and violence. So much creative power, so much imagination and thought, are directed today at destruction and death (or at guarding against destruction and death). Sometimes there is a sense that most of our energy is invested in defending the boundaries of our existence. And too little energy is left for living life itself.
Deadly Routine
December 2001
On November 29, 2001, four Israelis died in a suicide attack on a bus near Hadera, north of Tel Aviv. On December 1, twelve people were killed and 180 wounded in a downtown Jerusalem attack carried out by two suicide bombers and a car bomb that exploded twenty minutes later, timed to strike the oncoming rescue teams. On December 2, a suicide bomber blew up a crowded bus in Haifa, killing fifteen and wounding over forty more. Another bus was destroyed in the attack. On December 5, a suicide bomber blew himself up near a bus stop in the center of Jerusalem. Eleven people were wounded. On December 9, Israeli policemen at a busy junction north of Haifa shot a suspicious-looking terrorist. The explosives in his belt detonated, wounding thirty-one people.
One p.m. These are the moments of fear after the terrorist attack in Haifa. The radio speaks of as many as fourteen dead and about fifty wounded from the explosion of a suicide bomber in a bus. They’re all civilians.
Each ring of the telephone might be announcing terrible news from relatives and friends who live there. One young cousin isn’t answering her cellphone. We know that she had been planning a ride on bus number 16, the route on which the attack occurred.
My finger desperately punches the numbers of the hospitals to which the victims were evacuated. Has she been admitted? The operator at the emergency center looks down the list. Seconds that last forever. We think about her. Of what it will be like without her.
The radio broadcasts recordings of cheers from Hamas’s radio station in Nablus. “We will avenge your death, O Abu Hanud,” they promise the Hamas official murdered by Israel last week, after he had murdered dozens of Israelis. The operator gets back to me: No, sir, the name you gave me is not on our list. We can breathe again.
But we really can’t breathe. Incidents run into one another. Another shooting here, another alert about a possible suicide bomber there. Between the reports, the announcements of the funeral times for the ten young people killed the previous night as they sat at a café in Jerusalem. It is terrifying how one event blacks out the previous one. It was only yesterday, after midnight, that we anxiously telephoned all our friends and the parents of our children’s friends who were out at that hour at the place where the attacks occurred. “Lucky that there’s a big history exam today,” my son explains to me lucidly. “That’s why most of my friends stayed home to study last night.”
The giddy madness. The Hamas terrorist’s mother ululates joyously — her son will now enter paradise. She’s only sorry that he died this way — that is, “because he was killed without taking twenty Israelis with him.” After the shooting attack in Afula last week, someone, perhaps unintentionally, covered the body of an Israeli woman who’d been murdered there with an old election poster proclaiming ONLY SHARON WILL KEEP US SECURE. And, in fact, this same Sharon declared three days ago, “We have found the way to deal with the security problem.”
We have already seen the first Israeli retaliation — attacks on Arafat’s headquarters and helicopters. But I’m sure that what we have witnessed is only the beginning of Israel’s response. When Sharon spoke today, there were war drums in his voice. He promised an escalation in Israeli retaliation operations. But who remembers that each escalation by Israel brings about an escalation of terror in turn?
From the way Sharon is talking, it’s clear that the unthinkable is now quite thinkable — toppling the Palestinian Authority, expelling Arafat; all now seems possible. Only one alternative isn’t being considered at alclass="underline" immediately commencing intensive negotiations without preconditions.