[I am reprising this essay about my 1995 tour of Israeli/Palestinian politics in light of "Operation Al-Aqsa Storm," the Hamas attack against an Israeli music festival on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, because it describes attitudes and emotions in the background of that awful act.]
In early January, 1995, my father, a member of Peace Now, an American
left-leaning pro-Israel organization, was invited on a tour of Israel sponsored
by the Israeli Meretz party, but he could not go. He asked me if I would
like to take his place. He explained that
Meretz is a left of center party which, after years out in the cold during right-wing
Likud governments, had progressed to become a minority member of a Labor
coalition. I had never been to Israel and was interested, so I
agreed to take my dad's place on the tour.
On January 12th, my parents' friend, Yitzhak, a tour guide by profession, picked me up at Ben-Gurion airport and took me directly to the Western (or Wailing) Wall, a relic of the Second Temple of ancient Israel and thus a symbol of historic Jewish presence.
At the Wall an Israeli Defense Force
(IDF) ceremony was under way. Hundreds of 18 year olds stood at
attention, each carrying an automatic weapon. In fact
throughout the Old City of Jerusalem, and throughout Israel, IDF teenagers
carry automatic weapons. It occurred to me that this is perhaps an
enlightened system. In Los Angeles we have many thousands of armed teenagers, completely
unregulated and uncontrolled. In Israel, all boys and girls join the IDF at 18, and every boy (at least from what I saw) is issued an automatic weapon, with the proviso that he shoot it only in
self-defense, or defense of others, or when ordered, so at least there is adult supervision. Nevertheless the guns made me nervous, and I asked Yitzhak if they had good
safety mechanisms. He said the M-16's were safe, but that the Uzi's were
subject to accidents.
I had arrived several days before the Meretz tour in order to accompany
two couples on a side trip to Petra, in Jordan, that had been prearranged with my father.
The morning after my arrival, Friday the 13th, I met my fellow travelers
in a hotel lobby in Tel Aviv and we took the two hour taxi ride to the Allenby
bridge, a major crossing point to Jordan. I noticed that our driver, when
stopped in traffic for a red light ahead, would beep his horn as soon as the
light turned orange. Many drivers around us did the same thing, so that
there were never ending waves of horns honking, to no purpose. Out on the
highways, where speed is considered an absolute good above all others, our taxi
driver defied the laws of physics by getting us to the Allenby Bridge alive.
After a two hour bureaucratic ordeal at the bridge, we entered
Jordan and met our young Jordanian guide, Abdullah. We drove non-stop to the
ancient ruins of Petra, arriving at near sundown as the last tourists were
leaving. Hurrying to catch the light, our party fairly bolted from the
car and into the vertiginous Siq, a narrow winding path with sheer rock walls
that shoot straight up hundreds of feet, said by locals to have been created from a tap of
Moses' staff. The Siq helped the builders of Petra, a people called the
Nabataeans, conceal their stunning city from those who might have envied it to death.
I lost track of my companions and found myself alone in the Siq,
disturbed only by the occasional returning rent-a-camel. After about twenty minutes- suddenly and without any signs- I
turned the last corner and beheld the "Treasury," a fantastic palace-like crypt
carved directly into the sandstone mountain. I had seen engaging photos
of the Treasury, but the reality, at twilight, without another person in sight,
was powerful. This structure was built to engender hallucinations of what
human existence might be, with the right gods on your side. The Nabataean
civilization was one of the last gasps of polytheism before the
Judeo-Christain-Moslem dominion, and the power of its monuments is unnerving.
It was all I could do not to have visions as I wandered into the
increasingly dark and ambiguous inner chambers of the Treasury. I even
had an impulse to commune with the Nabataean mountain god Dushara, but for this
I was punished with two days severe need for Lomotil.
We stayed one night in Amman, at the Grand Hyatt, whose lobby was
bombed in 2005. That evening we walked around the city, under the care of
Abdullah, and saw some Roman ruins. The men we passed had dark
mustaches and serious facial expressions. Amman is
one of the few Middle Eastern capitals where a group of Jews can walk around without (much)
fear. I wanted to know what protective force was here, but that secret was not revealed by
the serious faces. We met more serious, and armed
Jordanian men at a series of checkpoints on our way back to Israel, where we waited through lengthy periods of silence as uniformed men slowly inspected our
papers, turning to study our faces in between pages. Each time we were
approved for passage, I wondered again what force within Jordanian culture
produced this acceptance, or at least tolerance.
Abdullah took us past
the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. It stretched for miles in the desert outside Amman,
rows of tents and small buildings. The inhabitants were clearly not
incorporated into Jordanian society, quite the reverse. I wondered why
there was relative peace around this arrangement, compared to the strife in
Israel.
On Sunday evening we entered Israel at the Sheik Hussein crossing. During the two hour taxi ride through the West Bank, one of my
companions, Judy, explained that Meretz was actually a coalition of three
parties: Ratz, a civil-rights party, Shinoui, a capitalist party, and Mapam, a
formerly Marxist party. I commented that these were strange bedfellows,
and Judy said this was characteristic of Israeli coalitions. She added that Americans demonize our
adversaries to the extent that crucial coalitions are impossible.
It turned out that all the members of my tour were Ratz
supporters. Above the entrance to our hotel in Jerusalem was a banner
reading, "Welcome, friends of Ratz!"
We were in time for the opening dinner, and Member of the Knesset
(MK) Naomi Chazan's remarks about the settlements in the territories, which she
said needed to be "totally dismantled and dispossessed." The
other members of my tour were in alignment with this, as was my dad, but I was
new to the subject and not sure.
That evening I read the texts of recent
agreements, the "Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government
Arrangements," and the "Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers
and Responsibilities," signed in 1994, the year before my trip, pursuant
to the 1993 Oslo Accords between the Palestinian Authority (PA), which then
governed the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israeli Government. To my
puzzlement I found no references in the documents to the settlements and their
future.
The next day we went to the American Colony Hotel in East
Jerusalem to meet with Hanan Ashrawi, a familiar spokesperson for Palestinians. She is the one media-survivor of the people I met, identified by the Los Angeles Times (1/12/18,"PLO reconsiders recognition of Israel") as "a prominent attorney on the PLO's executive committee, opposed to President Trump's Jerusalem policy," which was "official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem."
[Update, more recently- March, 2024 - Ashrawi referred to Israeli claims of Hamas atrocities on October 7 as "nonsense."]
I asked Ashrawi if she believed the settlements would
have to be totally dismantled in the course of a final phase of the agreements.
She replied that the settlements were built on "stolen, confiscated
property." I mentioned the lack of reference in the 1994 documents
and she said the settlements would be dealt with in 1996 [that of course did not happen].
From the American Colony
we went to the Palestinian Center for the Study of Non-Violence. A
Swedish man named Anton talked to us about non-violent principles of
Palestinian resistance to Israel. A British woman extolled the Intifada,
telling us that "Intifada" means a "shaking out," as of a
carpet, and that rock throwing was the least of it. A Palestinian named
Jibril told a moving story about difficulties encountered in trying to get his
ill father across Israeli checkpoints to the nearest hospital. Afterward
I asked Jibril if his non-violent principles prevented him from supporting the
rock throwing of the Intifada. He said he supported the rock throwing.
That evening we met at the hotel with settlement spokesman Yisrael
Harel. He told us that Jews had a biblical and archaeological claim to
all of Israel, that Jews were, in fact, there first. I asked Harel if he
thought the entire United States should dismantle itself and leave the North American
continent because the native Americans were there first. I meant this as a serious
question, but Harel laughed and I got no answer.
Later we dined with MK Benny Temkin. I asked him the question I had asked Ashwari
about the settlements. He answered, as Ashwari had, that settlements will
be decided in '96.
Tuesday, January 17, my birthday, we toured the Gaza Strip.
A few miles from the entrance, we stopped at a busy restaurant for lunch. I used the restroom, which was filled with IDF soldiers. I was the
only person at the urinals without an automatic weapon.
In the parking
lot I encountered Sylvia, from the tour of Jordan, who had been very kind
to me during my post-Petra intestinal distress. Sylvia was in a thoughtful
mood. She told me that she had been a lifetime supporter of the State of
Israel, but that if things didn't change she would have to reassess her
position. She said she had visited Gaza two years earlier, and that I was
going to see unspeakable conditions in the Gazan camps.
We left the restaurant and entered Gaza City. This is a
bustling town, with signs of construction everywhere. The people on the
street walked purposefully, and were dressed fairly well, sometimes in designer
clothes. At the south end of Gaza City we saw a large lot with hundreds
of parked cars, and hundreds of people walking around. Our guide told us
it was a car auction.
We went first to the headquarters of Fatah, a faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which then governed Gaza (in 2007, the more fundamentalist Hamas wrested control of Gaza from Fatah). The PLO's
leader, Yasser Arafat, was in Morocco, so we were greeted by Freih abu Medein,
Minister of Justice for the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Medein
went through a long list of grievances against the Israeli government, from the
settlements to Palestinian prisoners. He did not have anything particular
to say about Gaza.
We traveled next to the Red Crescent Society where we met Haider
Abdel Shafi, who had been in the news earlier that week after calling for a
hard line alternative to Arafat. Members of our group asked Shafi if it
was true that as an original member of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid
peace talks he had resisted removing the call for destruction of Israel from
the PLO charter. He said he had, and that he continued to support this provision
as an important card against Israel. My group was split on this (Sylvia
was incensed).
We moved on to Fatah police headquarters, formerly Israeli
headquarters. A man named Ahmed Oreia showed us a large map of Gaza.
He particularly wanted us to see sections of beach which at that time
were still controlled by Israel. He found this to be an outrage. He
said that leaving and entering Gaza was more difficult now than before Oslo [Gaza
became legally autonomous in 2005, when Israeli forces and settlements were
removed]. When asked about concerns in Israel about dangerous Gazans,
he said that when Israelis walk around inside of Gaza, they do not feel
threatened. He talked about unemployment in Gaza, and complained that, unlike
the Egyptians after their stay, the Israelis had left the infrastructure of
Gaza destroyed, even taking out the phones from the PNA building.
Back on the bus, we were told not to eat the food we had picked up at the restaurant because we were going to the best fish restaurant in Gaza.
After a few minutes ride, we arrived at a pleasant building on the beach.
Walking around for a minute, I was struck by the beauty of the ocean and
the long sandy beach. The fish was excellent. If ever there was a
resort town waiting to happen, Gaza is it.
After eating we were told to get on the bus for the trip back to
Israel. Sylvia and others expressed concern that we had only heard
political statements and had not seen any of Gaza's notorious camps. After some
negotiations, it was agreed that we would drive through the Jubalya camp, with
50,000 residents, the largest in Gaza. A Palestinian named Samid would
accompany us. Sylvia said I was going to see the true misery of Gaza.
As our bus entered the outskirts of Jubalya, our guide pointed out an intersection
where the Intifada had begun over an incident with Israeli police.
Jubalya is a criss-cross of unpaved streets and alleyways. The
homes are makeshift one story shelters of corrugated steel, plywood and
whatever material is at hand. The first thing that struck me was the huge
numbers of young children. They ran around in groups of twenty to thirty
everywhere we went, and children were visible as far as we could see down
the alleys. My impression was of driving across a crowded elementary
school playground (I taught elementary school at the time). The children
seemed occupied with their games. They were adequately dressed. I
saw no signs of malnutrition. I was puzzled by the absence of teenagers.
I asked Samid about this. He said the teenagers were "at
jobs."
Sylvia had told me of raw sewage in the streets. There was
water running in narrow ditches, but it seemed clear and there was no stench. Sylvia said the camp had improved considerably since her visit two years
earlier.
As we left Gaza, buses of Palestinian workers were unloading.
The men seemed upbeat, many smiling, happy to be back from work.
They streamed through a hole in a chain link fence to a large parking
lot. Apparently many owned cars.
The next morning we headed for an infamous hill near the
settlement of Efrat, which had been in the international media recently after
Efrat settlers had tried to grade a section for expansion and faced resistance
from the nearby town of El Khader. In Bethlehem, we picked up Anton from
the non-violent group. Ten minutes south of Bethlehem we entered El
Khader, where we picked up a man named Hassan. Anton acted as Hassan's
interpreter. Hassan directed our bus south, up the windswept, rocky hill
in contention. Near the top we parked and got out, in a freezing wind. Hassan told us
that his great grandfather had given his grandfather this land. He said
that it was holy land, where 7,000 martyrs had fallen, and that no one was
supposed to wear shoes here (Hassan wore shoes). Next to where we parked
were some olive trees, which Hassan said were cultivated to prove ownership of
the area by El Khader. South of the trees was an extensive garbage dump, mostly cars,
including an entire stripped bus. I asked Hassan why the dump was there.
He said "entrepreneurs" put it there. When pressed to
explain, he said car thieves used the area.
On top of the hill was a bulldozer which the settlers had left.
One IDF soldier stood guard. Hassan pointed south to the next hill,
about a mile away, where we could see the settlement of Efrat. It seemed
pretty clear that the bulldozing was a provocative act. A typical
extension would have been closer to the settlement.
We boarded the bus and headed down the hill, into a small valley
filled with plots cultivated by villagers from El Khader. Moving up the
next hill, we paused at the entrance to Efrat. There was some discussion
about the safety of driving through the settlement of 12,000. There were
no guards; no one seemed to be paying attention to our bus, so we entered.
The first thing I saw was an elementary school. A couple of hundred
children ran around the playground. The school and all the buildings were
white Jerusalem stone. The settlement was attractive. It could have been a
community of upscale townhouses in Chatsworth. There were some modest
lawns, reinforcing our group's contention that the settlements appropriate too much water, but at least no swimming pools. We left Efrat without getting
off the bus and talking to anyone. I found it ironic that the only group
we shied from was of our own tribe.
Passing out of the southern entrance of Efrat, we went down the
hill into the next village of Wadi-Nis. Samid knew people here. We parked
next to a large handsome mosque, in the village center, and got out. The
villagers crowded around us. The children stared at us without smiles.
Soon we were greeted by the Mukhta, the head of the largest family.
He welcomed us to the village and asked if we would like tea. Everyone said yes, as we were quite cold. Charles
from our group, a conservative rabbi from New York, asked the Mukhta what kind
of relations Wadi-Nis had with Rabbi Riskin, spiritual leader and spokesman for
Efrat. The Mukhta said Rabbi Riskin was an honorable man who was a
moderating influence on Efrat. At this Hassan burst into a rage at the
Mukhta, shouting in Arabic and gesticulating until the Mukhta offered him a cigarette. The next moment we found ourselves boarding the bus, the tea forgotten.
Smiles and handshakes all around.
Back at El Khader, Hassan pointed out Highway 16, then under
construction, which Israel was building to connect the settlements. Hassan said this highway proved that Israel will not remove the
settlements. The highway went along the city wall of El Khader, but
there would be no off-ramps for the village.
After dropping off Hassan, we headed for the Israeli legislature,
the Knesset, in Jerusalem. Anton stayed with us for part of the way. He told us of a big demonstration coming up at a checkpoint outside
Jerusalem. He warned "there might be violence." I asked
Anton what his specialty was. He said, "conflict resolution." It turned out there was no demonstration.
Visitors to the Knesset are intensely screened.
Young men with automatic weapons scrutinized each of us, asked if we were
armed, took our cameras, and let us in. We spent a few minutes in the
gallery watching the proceedings. By a coincidence, the whole of the
Israeli government was in attendance. Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir
chuckled together, seeming relaxed and happy to be in the opposition. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who was assassinated ten months later) and
cabinet member Shimon Peres looked harassed and defensive.
We were led to a small conference room near the cafeteria and were
endlessly fed while a succession of Meretz MK's visited us. The first was
the Minister of Environment, Yossi Sarik. Several of our group, inflamed after
our visit to Efrat, demanded to know if the government was going to halt
settlement expansion. Sarik, like many Israeli politicians, is a master
of the irritated shrug. He said, "We are trying; we will see what
happens," as one might say, "Excuse me for living!"
Next we met Haim Ramon, Secretary-General of the trade union
organization, the Histadrut. Ramon had been in the news for opposing
Labor entrenchment and corruption in the Histadrut. When asked if he had
made progress weakening corruption, he shrugged: "It's gone."
We met with the mayor of the settlement of Ariel, Ron Nachman
(Nachman is also a Likud MK, a legal double duty in Israel). Nachman told
us that Ariel has excellent relations with the surrounding Arab communities,
and that they have no problems sharing water. He also said the
settlements are important in ensuring that there will never be a Palestinian state.
That evening at the hotel, we hosted Minister of Science,
Technology and Arts, Shulamit Aloni. She was introduced to us as Mrs.
Ratz, because she had formed the Ratz party in 1973 [Ratz merged with Meretz
in 1997]. Aloni invited each of us to speak of one concern. When it was my turn, I said that I had been troubled by the lack of
understanding between the parties over the settlements, and that my
reading of the situation was that the settlements would not be dismantled, at
least not entirely, and that it was perhaps time to talk of compromise. I
half expected the whole room to start yelling at me, but no one seemed
troubled. Aloni said my suggestion was a good one, and I remained on good
terms with the friends of Ratz.
Thursday morning we traveled to Tel Aviv. The headline of
the Jerusalem Post that morning read, "Government Bends to Meretz
Pressure- Promises Settlement Freeze." The article quoted a furious Shaas (religious party) MK saying
that Meretz members were "spies and traitors" who brought
"sympathizers from America to sneak into settlements and spread lies
abroad." It was diverting to be part of a perceived conspiracy, and to
note the irony of my total lack of influence on the politics around me.
We went to a bank in Tel Aviv where we had lunch with IDF Colonel
Shalom Harari, in charge of Army Intelligence for Arab Affairs. Harari's
presentation depicted Palestinians as bunglers and/or crooks. He said the
reason that international money is not forthcoming for the Palestinians is that
they are notorious for diverting money into the wrong pockets and will not
account for the funds they receive. He said the PNA in Gaza had made
monopoly agreements with companies that supply Gaza in return for a 15% cut.
As an example he cited an agreement with an Israeli cement company. Gazans must purchase cement from this company even though they
could get it cheaper from Jordan. When our group pressed him about the
destroyed infrastructure of Gaza, he said that some phones were taken, against
orders, from the PNA building, but that three months of supplies were left in
Gaza's main hospital, including three months worth of vaccinations. The
Israelis did this, the Colonel said, because "we knew what they were like,
what they would say." Concerning the difficult checkpoints, he said
Israelis are afraid of the hostile Gazans, and are going to foreign workers,
like Romanians, to replace Gazan labor.
After lunch, we drove to the Maccabee Center for a meeting with
the Minister of Education, Amnon Rubinstein. I told Rubinstein that I had
read an article in the Los Angeles Times about his "peace
curriculum," which is supposed to acquaint Israeli children with "the
concept of living peacefully with Arabs under the new agreements." I
asked him how this program was going. He said it was going very well, and that even
when he had visited "famous Efrat" he had seen the curriculum
presented, with flags of Arab nations adorning the classroom (presumably
this was the elementary school I had seen). It's fair to say that all of our party assumed the "peace curriculum" agreement applied to the Palestinian side as well, so that they would teach their children positive things about Israel and Jews. We were not told if that happened.
Friday morning we headed towards Jericho, one of the world's oldest
cities. On the way we passed the huge settlement of Ma'ale Adumin, with
20,000 residents one of the hot spots in the debate over "greater
Jerusalem." Inclusion of Ma'ale Adumin in a greater Jerusalem would
remove it from the territory of a Palestinian state. Critics charge that
Ma'ale Adumin is illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention's article 49, which
prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory
to occupied territory. The Israeli counter argument is that such
conventions relating to occupied land do not apply to the West Bank because the
region was not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state at the time of the
occupation.
Anyone who chooses one set of arguments over the other is
vilified by the other side. In hindsight, I feel I made the right
decision in 1995 to never use legal arguments in discussing the
settlements. I might as well try to prove that my house in Los Angeles should not revert to Chumash ownership. Arguments of this nature are
designed to defy resolution and last forever.
Moving down into the Jordan Valley we entered Jericho, a sleepy
Arab town, no sign of trumpets blaring and walls falling, chosen by the
government for autonomy, we were told, because of its apolitical, resort
atmosphere. A Mr. Erakat, Minister of Local Affairs, was with his ill
father, so for twenty minutes we listened to a spokesman excoriate Israel.
I asked if he could speak about Jericho itself, and he said the economy
was in bad shape because of Israel. I asked if tourism was important to
Jericho, and he said tourism was down since autonomy, because of Israel.
Saturday morning we toured the citadel in the old City of
Jerusalem. Our guide gave us a rather limited tour then left us on our own, with warnings to stay in the Jewish quarter. I left our party to wander in the shuk, a maze of hundreds of retail stalls. The guide had told us not to
turn left or right (lest I be stabbed, Sylvia warned), but mesmerized by the seeming infinite corridors and bright colors, I did turn left and found myself in the Muslim quarter. The butcher stalls
showed a lurid red. In front of one stall blood had splashed all over the
paving stones and I had to step through it. I found myself walking
behind a man in civilian clothes, sweater and jeans, carrying an automatic
weapon. I was told later that when people from the settlements come to
the Old City they take private security guards with them, and that these guards
are subsidized by the government.
I walked on, finally climbing a hill called Temple Mount and arriving at
a great wall with one door, the entrance to the Dome of the Rock, a
church, synagogue or mosque (called "Al-Aqsa") depending on your point of view, built by the Ottomans to encompass holy sites in the region. There was a plaque outside the Dome explaining that within was the site where God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, and where King David built the Ark of the Covenant to house the Ten Commandments. An adjacent plaque commemorates the same spot as the site from which Mohammed ascended to heaven. Other plaques nearby identify the Stations of the Cross that Jesus walked to his crucifixion. Unfortunately the combined plaques do not represent a unified spiritual vision for humankind, but rather the opposite, a spiritual turf-war, if that isn't a contradiction in terms. I had to wonder if this situation was God's idea, or was it dreamed up by contentious humans? [Update, Oct. 7, 2023: Today's brutal "Operation Al-Aqsa Storm"- waged by the Palestinian group Hamas among others against Israel-is named for the religious conflict over the Jerusalem site, though it's hard to see a spiritual element to it.]
An Arab guard sat in a folding chair by the door of the Dome of
the Rock. I asked him if I could go in. He said no, that visiting
hours, which were not posted, were over [Back in Israel years later for
my son's bar mitzvah, I returned to the Dome and was again told
visiting hours, still not posted, were over].
Saturday evening we met
with Meretz MK Ran Cohen. The group questioned him about the settlement
freeze, about Efrat, about greater Jerusalem and Ma'ale Adumin. Cohen
sighed, then said that things looked difficult. Mirroring my thoughts, he
said that the time had come to consider a compromise on the settlements.
He speculated that such a suggestion could create controversy within
Meretz, but no one in our group expressed a problem with the idea.
Concerning an upcoming vote of no confidence in the Knesset, Cohen
made a comment that turned out to be prophetic: "I pray to God there will
be no terrorist attack in the next two days."
After Cohen left we went to a restaurant for a farewell party with
many Knesset MK's and aides. Toasts were made, and we each received a gift from
Meretz of candle holders in the shape of doves.
Sunday morning I took a taxi to Jerusalem's Central Bus Station to take a bus to Tel Aviv to stay two days with my wife's aunt.
The bus station was crowded with soldiers returning from the weekend
furlough. I waited behind a crowd of soldiers shoving their backpacks
into the hold of the bus. As they bent over, their weapons often pointed
at me, sometimes poking into my body. I wondered which were M-16's and
which were Uzis. On the bus I was the only civilian. Automatic
weapons bristled the length of the aisle. I was not sure whether to feel
protected or threatened.
Arriving at her flat, I found my aunt engrossed in the TV
news. She explained that two bombs had gone off that afternoon at a bus
stop near Netanya. The bus had been crowded with IDF soldiers. Sixteen
had died. I thought of the bus I had been on, and of Ran Cohen's words.
The next morning's news showed a jubilant rally in Gaza in
support of the suicide bus bombers. What if this rally had taken place on the
day we toured Gaza? What questions might we have asked, and what answers
received?
The news featured a woman at the bomb scene who said that the
aftermath of the bombing was like a "meat market," with "our boys thrown
around like fresh meat." This woman's statement was shown repeatedly
on all the news shows.
My aunt took me to the shuk in south Tel Aviv. While she
bought fruit I wandered into an area of butcher stalls. I saw a plastic
tub filled with chicken heads. Behind one stall there was a
flayed cow's head on a table. A woman shopper eyed a barrel of slow
moving fish. She pointed to one and the shopkeeper grabbed it by the tail
and shoved it into a plastic bag, head first. Still holding the tail, he
grabbed a short wooden club and whacked the fish hard on the head twice.
The bag was still. The lady nodded in approval. I mention
these things only because I had never seen them before. Such
foundational elements of carnivorism are hidden from urban America.
That afternoon I took a train to Haifa to visit more of my wife's
family. The train was full of young soldiers. They looked tired and
apprehensive, no doubt thinking of the recent bombings. The relatives took me to a mall north of Haifa, art deco
style though it was built in the 80's. They showed me an area that had
been destroyed during the Persian Gulf War by an Iraqi Scud missile that had
been intended for a nearby refinery. No sign of damage remained, but framed
photos showed cracked columns and the ruptured ceiling of the original rotunda.
The rebuilt rotunda enshrined the Scud rocket itself, retrieved from the
rubble.
At home we watched a press conference by Rabin about the bus
bombing. My fourteen year old niece translated for me, emphasizing the
part where Rabin said, of the bombers, "We will keep fighting you! We will chase you down! No border will stop us. We will
liquidate you, and emerge victorious!"
The next morning, on the train back to Tel Aviv, I read the
Jerusalem Post: "Prime Minister: Goal of Peace is to separate Israelis,
Palestinians." There were various attacks on Meretz. Benjamin
Netanyahu, then leader of Likud (and later prime minister) charged
that the government had become a "greater Meretz."
I arrived that evening at Ben Gurion Airport for the long flight
home. The girl at one security check asked me why I had been to Jordan.
I said I had gone to see Petra. She asked what I had done in
Israel. I said I had been part of a tour.
What kind of tour?
A tour sponsored by the Meretz party.
Whom did you speak to on the tour?
MK's and Palestinian spokespeople.
Did you become friendly with any Palestinians? Were you invited to any
of their homes?
No.
Did you receive any gifts or packages from anyone?
Just my present from the tour organizers.
Show me the present.
She took the candlesticks, my passport and my plane tickets and
left for about fifteen minutes. She returned, handed me my stuff and
wished me a pleasant journey. I felt that the international praise of
Israeli airport security was well deserved.
At home, the Los Angeles Times was overwhelmed with O.J. Simpson stories. On
a back page I read that Israel's Labor government had approved a Greater
Jerusalem, and that Palestinian leaders say the peace process is doomed.
The Middle East is a history factory. We like to paraphrase historian George Santayana: Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. It's an optimistic
sentiment. We may be condemned to repeat history whether we remember it or not. Or perversely, maybe the more history we remember, the more
prone we are to repeat it.
Anyway, I had a great trip, and I'm grateful to the many friendly and well-meaning people I met, of whatever background. In addition, I can look at Los Angeles in a new
way: We may have earthquakes, floods, fires and riots, but at least we don't
have a peace process.
