Lee added, “As you know, we were not to have children with the local people—if nothing else, lest we will also acquire the genetic vulnerability introduced into the Earth people as a safeguard.” Her voice faltered as he moved closer. Her eyes traveled over his chest before returning to the chiseled face.
They gazed into each other’s eyes.
She cleared her throat. “I should warn you I am into old people.”
“Am I old enough?” he demanded.
“Oh, plenty.”
“Alas, I don’t do underage girls.”
“I am forty-three!”
“I rest my case,” replied Aratta. “Hell, the first century of life doesn’t even count.”
She grabbed him by the nape of his neck. Standing on tiptoes, she kissed him for a long time, her breasts crushing against the firmness of his chest.
“My, you are very mature for your age,” he said when she finally pulled back a little. “I think I will make an exception in your case.”
“When you were shirtless, fighting at the path…” Lee murmured, staring into the deep pools of his eyes. “You were so hot.”
“Well then,” he said in a low, husky voice—she felt his warm breath on her—“I’ll just have to fight more often.” His mouth moved passionately on hers, tongue insistent and searching.
He hoisted her up in his arms and carried her upstairs.
Part Three 2015
Chapter 20
The Foothills of Organ Mountains, New Mexico
It was a warm, cloudless day. The wind stirred the creosote bushes and cottonwood trees scattered about the large estate. As far as the arriving guests were concerned, this was a picture-perfect day.
None of them had any reason to suspect this was the last day of life as they had known it.
Lee had invited dozens of people to a costume party that was to be held later that evening at her villa. Three of them came early in the day. Brandon was off that weekend and had nothing else to do. Susan and Mr. Galecki were both retired and local. Lee wanted them to meet two people who were to come shortly, one of whom would not stay around for the party.
A hammock within a wooden arc stand rested in one of the corners of the spacious drawing room. Her three visitors were taken aback by the sight of a man lying in it. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he was snoring softly. “This is Puddeck,” clarified Lee in a solemn voice. “I just need to give the hammock a little push now and again.”
“You just need to give a push now and again,” repeated Brandon, staring at the stocky figure in a violet robe.
“He likes it,” explained Lee, eyes bright with humor.
Brandon turned to Galecki and stage-whispered, “Did you hear? ‘He likes it.’” For a moment, he looked downright comical with his rounded eyes and irrepressible curls. The 3-day stubble beard did not alter his boyish appearance. Brandon could have passed for a high school senior. He was in fact twenty-three-years old.
Lee nodded gravely in response.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” commented Mr. Galecki dryly, regarding the snoozing figure. He took off his glasses and wiped them with the edge of his Hawaiian shirt. As an analyst for an international think tank, he had spent the previous thirty years wearing a suit and a tie and was now determined to make up for it in his retirement years.
Lee walked over and rocked the hammock. “There,” she said. “Good for the next few minutes.” She looked at her three guests. “Won’t you have a seat? They will be here any minute,” she assured them. “I think you will find Professor Peled interesting.”
“Peled? Is he an Israeli?” asked Galecki.
“Uh-huh. In fact, he only just arrived from Israel this morning. Aratta is taking him elsewhere. He agreed to stop by for a few hours.”
Brandon availed himself to an apple. “Do the Israelis still bomb Gaza?”
“No. This happened last summer,” murmured Galecki, glancing at the clock. He smoothed the remaining wisps of his gray hair, trying in vain to keep them from curling up.
Susan sighed. With her cream pantsuit and coiffed hair, she was every inch the retired director of a large charitable foundation that in fact she was. “What a mess down there,” she said. “The Israelis withdrew from the Strip ten years ago. The people of Gaza could have made it into the Singapore of the Middle East. Instead, th—”
“I am afraid they couldn’t have,” said a new voice in heavily accented English from the doorway. “This is bubbe-meise—old wives’ tales.”
There they were. Aratta, in an ivory-colored linen suit and a pale teal dress-shirt, and next to him a thin, old man pulling a carry-on wheeled suitcase.
Lee came over, kissed Aratta, and hugged the Professor. “Everyone,” she announced, “you’ve met Aratta before, and this”—she wrapped an arm around the small old man—“is Professor David Peled.”
Susan, Brandon, and Mr. Galecki got up, introduced themselves and shook hands.
“Can I get you breakfast?” asked Lee of the old man as she wheeled the suitcase to the corner of the room.
“No, thank you. I just had something before I came.” His eyes crinkled with a smile. He glanced sideways at his companion and grinned. “You could say that the flight was terribly short.” In fact, Aratta had teleported him from Israel but a moment earlier, but he was not supposed to say anything about it.
Perfunctory smiles greeted his odd statement.
Lee insisted, and David took a seat in the wingback chair. Aratta sat next to her on the small couch, putting his arm around her.
“Please, tell us, Professor,” said Susan, “why couldn’t Gaza have turned into the Singapore of the Middle East on the heels of the Israeli withdrawal from the territory?”
“Before the disengagement, movements of goods and people were curtailed. The disengagement changed nothing in that regard.” The old man got up, poured himself water, then sat back down. “The ticket for tiny Gaza has been an export economy. This means having a roll-on/roll-off container port. This means having bus convoy service between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, facilitating an unfettered flow of people and goods. This means having a predictable border crossing regime with the capacity for hundreds of trucks departing daily.”
Galecki smiled grimly. “With rockets and terror attacks not letting up in the months and weeks leading to the Israeli pullout and with weapons smuggled during the weeks and months following it, I reckon the Palestinians in Gaza gave Israel no reasons to take chances. Even if tight security did sabotage the prospect of an export economy.”
“What if I were to tell you there was a way to increase the flow of goods by an order of magnitude out of Gaza while augmenting the security measures at the same time?” countered David.
Galecki gave the professor an appraising look. “Kindly explain how such a thing is possible.”
“Cargo entering Israel has been unceremoniously dumped on the ground,” David told them, “then loaded into another trailer on the Israeli side. As a result, goods have been damaged, transportation costs climbed, and the number of trucks crossing each day, small.
“But there was no need to take anything out of the semi-trailers or switch trailers. Imaging systems, composed of gamma and X-ray devices, could have discerned what was inside the containers. Bomb-sniffing technology could have detected vapors emitted from potential explosives. Fluorescent fibers randomly embedded into the container seals would have alerted border agents of any tampering during transit. And in the case of a terror threat coming out of Gaza, Israel could have introduced a redundancy principle, where if one crossing is closed, an alternative one was to be made available.”
Mr. Galecki mulled it all over, looking doubtful.
“The World Bank outlined all of this to the Israeli authorities before the disengagement,” the old professor said. “In response, Israel made some noncommittal
noises and, in the end, did precious little.” David helped himself to an apple. “Less than three months after the Israelis departed, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip tried their hands at export all the same. They have utilized the large array of greenhouses left by the Jewish settlers and planted a fall crop.
“Come mid-December 2005, the first export shipment of strawberries, cherry tomatoes, sweet peppers, herbs, and spices was ready. A first, it seemed things might work out. However, on January 21, the crossing was shut down for about a month. The Palestinians had to dump the vast majority of produce by the wayside. For a shekel, one could have bought a bag of strawberries in Gaza. Eventually, the whole greenhouse operation went belly up. It was all downhill from there.”
“So, the Gaza Strip is an open-air prison, huh?” said Brandon coolly.
David’s eyes drooped at the hyperbole. “With wardens patrolling the streets and evening curfews? No. It is more like a small country under a partial blockade.”
“How about removing the sanctions and blockade, Professor?”
“I am with you on this, except for munition, of course. The people there vow to eliminate us in case you forgot.”
Brandon pressed on, “I understand the need to defend yourself from rockets fired indiscriminately out of Gaza, but with Iron Dome deployed, you didn’t need to resort to bombing the Strip.”
The old man’s expression hardened. “We were asked to stay away from windows in the event they may explode from shock waves; our children were routinely herded in the middle of the night to bomb shelters; thousands of us evacuated the border areas. And you argue we should not have taken offensive measures?”
“I didn’t say that,” protested the young man.
David crossed his arms. “All right, what would you have us do, exactly?”
Brandon rubbed his nose. “I am not sure.”
“Then maybe you should stay quiet on this,” said David, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. He had come across too many people like that young man. They never offered any real solutions. Were never willing to make the tough calls, but more than willing to be sanctimonious about hard choices taken by others.
Brandon reddened. “All I know is if there are such things as rules of war, then here is the big one: you don’t fire at noncombatants.”
“Sure you do,” said Mr. Galecki harshly. “This always ends up happening in military engagements in urban areas.”
“I don’t get it,” said Susan. She stood up and walked over to the console table, her gleaming burgundy pumps clicking on the wooden floor. She helped herself to some grapes. “Hamas surely knows that their rocket barrages are militarily pointless.”
But Galecki made a dismissive gesture. “They are fighting a narrative war,” he told her. “Death of their noncombatants by the retaliatory strikes of the Israelis makes up a critical part of it. It serves to demonize Israel and sway public opinion abroad in favor of the besieged Gazans.”
“How many civilians in Gaza need to get killed before you conclude the price is too high?” demanded Brandon.
“You really should be posing that to the government in Gaza,” said David. He shook his head in disbelief. “As we speak, Houthi-Saleh forces have indiscriminately fired artillery into Yemeni cities and dropped cluster bombs. From their end, the opposing Saudi Coalition forces have bombed hospitals, schools, civilian vessels, and funeral gatherings. And they didn’t precisely drop warning leaflets ahead of time, much as we did. Thousands of civilians have died. Over a million cholera cases and eight million Yemenis are on the brink of famine under a blockade. Where are the howls of outrage, demanding mass intervention? Gornisht mit gornisht. Nothing. The bleeding hearts of the world couldn’t be bothered.”
David went on, “Countless people have been butchered in the Middle East and beyond, but it is those thousands of dead Palestinians in the hands of the Jews that have arrested the attention of the media and governments throughout.” He looked flustered. “I have noticed it time and again. Where were the divestment campaigns against Indonesia when it slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Papuans seeking independence? Where were the mass protests when independence-seeking Chechens got brutalized by the Russians, or when the Sri Lanka military killed twenty thousand Tamils in their bid for independence?”
“It is odd,” murmured Lee in Aratta’s ear as David went on. "Is it not?”
“It is.” Aratta contemplated this. “Fancy that dementia gas bubbles underneath the surface of the political realm on Earth,” he replied in a low voice. “Israel is a hub, where it is most dense. Upon entering the underworld at that spot, you find everything warped beyond recognition: from the Red Cross, which manufactures stories casting the Jews of Israel in a bad light, to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s obsession with that country. In a sense, this tiny conflict is one of the doorways to the cultural underworld of Earth.”
It is this taint that concerns us, and which sets this world on a collision course with reality, he transmitted.
Meanwhile, David finished what he was saying. Brandon looked at him bewildered. Finally, he frowned with irritation. “You are deflecting criticism of Israel by pointing that some other countries have also acted with brutality.”
“What I am saying is that if you single out one state and apply to it a different set of expectations, you demonize it,” David replied.
The young man mulled it over. He decided on another tack. “Look, you have had only a few people killed on your side. Would you say killing over a thousand civilians was a proportionate response?”
“The proportionality in warfare is not how many civilians are killed on each side—this is not a tournament—but what is a reasonable and prudent measure to neutralize, in this case, the barrage of rockets into our cities,” the old man replied with forced calm. “In a real sense, Hamas determines what the needed dose is, we simply keep cranking up the pressure slowly until it cries uncle.”
“Obviously what you are doing is not working, as Hamas has not succumbed.”
David shrugged like he’d heard it many times before.
“Our government can resolve it once and for all by carpet bombing them over one long weekend,” he observed. “We are unwilling to do so, though. It seems that long periods of lull punctuated by occasional skirmishes is the best we can hope for.”
“What about sitting around the table and working out a permanent arrangement?” Brandon asked with a touch of impatience.
“Working out what?” David asked sharply. “The schedule of dismantling Israel? The host countries that will accept Israelis as refugees? Because these are the only things Hamas would be willing to negotiate beyond additional funding or a truce to allow them to take a breather and re-arm themselves.”
Brandon shot him a disgusted glance. “They live in a giant enclosure you’ve set up. What do you expect?”
“They hate us for forcing upon them those conditions, yes. However, they want to take over the land that makes up Israel proper for ideological reasons that transcend their circumstances.”
“Naturally,” someone said from behind them. “After all, for the Palestinians, there is no Israel.”
The people in the room turned to the hammock and the now-seated figure in violet. “For the Palestinians,” Puddeck announced brightly, “the country in existence is Palestine—a never-never land of olive trees and stone houses and pastoral villages, which has been under occupation of dhimmis.” He smacked his lips, clearly enjoying himself. “As far as they’re concerned, this occupation must be ended, the colonial enterprise dismantled, and the foreign settlers are to be driven off the land—back whence they came: Ukraine, Poland, and Ethiopia. They regard the Israeli Jews not as members of a nation but adherents of a religion, despised and disparate people from the four corners of the world who injected themselves into the heartland of Dar al-Islam and defiled the land. They r
egard Israel as a white settler-society, where a fearful privileged few hold onto power in a creeping, ever-expanding colonial enterprise of South Africa meets the Nazi-occupied France scenarios.”
“How do the Palestinians see themselves,” asked Susan, eyeing somewhat warily the bald man in robes.
Puddeck shrugged. “Why, the Palestinians are the French Résistance who fight to liberate the land, aiming to reenact the expulsion of the Pieds-Noirs from Algeria. It is all quite straightforward, really. And in the Islamic Center in Philadelphia, the children sing: ‘Our Palestine must return to us….We will chop off their heads…and we will subject them to eternal torture.’”
Silence. Even Brandon was taken aback by this.
Aratta said, “I am afraid this is indeed the case. The narrative the Palestinians have created for themselves is not a prelude for an eventual peaceful coexistence but preparation for Arab hegemony over the entire area.
“Accordingly, a map at the office of the Palestinian Water Authority portrays Palestine as encompassing the territory that currently makes up Israel. A youth magazine described Lebanon as bordering in the south not with Israel but with ‘Occupied Palestine.’ In their media, the territory of Israel is routinely referred to as ‘the interior’ or ‘the 1948 areas.’ It is the same with their school textbooks. The State of Israel is commonly termed ‘the Zionist Occupation.’ The textbooks contain a poem discussing youths who commit themselves to conquer Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem—namely, Israel proper, and a poem, for second-graders, with the lines: ‘I vow I shall sacrifice my blood…and will eliminate the usurper from my country, and will annihilate the remnants of the foreigners.’ In a geography textbook, a map features Palestine spanning the territory that at present is Israel, and Jewish cities like Tel Aviv are absent from it. Students learn that Jerusalem is an ‘Arab city’ holy to Muslims and Christians; the historical and religious connection of the Jews to the city is omitted, and the Jewish presence in Jerusalem prior to 1967 is purged. Palestinian children grow up in a world where the state of Israel does not exist.” Aratta fell silent.
The Earth Hearing Page 19