by Paul Theroux
I mentioned to Mr. Levescu that it seemed there would be more violence.
“You didn’t hear the news?” Then he told me.
Three Palestinians had just been killed that morning at a checkpoint in Hebron.
That night watching television in Tel Aviv I saw another killing, and it had taken place either that day or some few days earlier. A videotape taken by a freelance journalist showed an Israeli soldier giving the coup de grace to an injured and unarmed Palestinian. The tape showed the soldier sighting down his rifle and firing a bullet at the struggling man’s head and blasting the skull to pieces. It was explained that the man, Nidal Tamiari, had had a fistfight with the soldier. The military denied that the soldier had shot the man in cold blood. The spokesman said, “He was verifying the kill.”
It was too late to ask Mr. Levescu what he thought, but in any case I had a feeling I knew what he would say. This is war! He had said it often enough in our conversation at the cafe by the sea in Tel Aviv. His sentiments were predictable, and his story was fairly typical.
“We left Romania in 1946,” he said. “Father, mother, brother and me, and sister.”
They crossed the border into Hungary, made their way by train to Budapest, where they hid. They were smuggled to Vienna, then into Germany. They stayed awhile, they received some help, they headed south to France, moving slowly, and once on the coast traveled east, entered Italy and got a train to Bari. A ferry took them to Cyprus. They were among many Jews there, awaiting transfer to Israel. At last they arrived in Haifa. The trip from Romania had taken a year.
“My father joined the Haganah [“Defense,” the Jewish guerrilla army prior to independence] and we were given a house,” he said. “The house is still there in Haifa. Arabs were our neighbors. We visited them. They came to our house. We liked their food better than they liked ours. We ate with Arabs!”
That reminiscence, like the Pilgrim Fathers befriending the Red Indians, and being helped by them, was a frequent detail in stories of Israeli pioneers in Palestine.
“Weren’t you fighting the Arabs?” I asked.
“Other Arabs,” he said. “And British.”
“Which other Jews were here when you arrived in 1947?”
“The first wave had been Russians. Then Poles. Then Bulgarians and Romanians,” he said. “In the 1950s we got Moroccans and North African Jews—Algeria, Tunisia. And others.”
“Americans?”
“Not many from America,” he said. He laughed—not mirth: it was a nervous expression of the Israeli ambivalence towards America. “Americans come here. They look. They smile. They know they have something better.”
“What do you think of America?”
“America is the grandfather of Israel,” he said. Or it might have been “godfather.”
The following day, in Gaza, at the Palestinian settlement of Khan Yunis, a Palestinian journalist, Hani Abed, was blown up by a sophisticated bomb that had detonated under his car when he turned the ignition key. Such a bomb could only have been placed there by the Israeli secret service members, Mossad. It seemed as though what Rabin had said just the other day about fighting to the death was being proven.
This was not denied; on the contrary, it was heavily hinted that this was so by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz (The Land): “Hani Abed … got the punishment coming to him, ‘for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind,’ ” including Hamas in the denunciation.
Wiping someone out and then quoting a bit of blood-spattered scripture (this text from Hosea 8:7 was an old standby) seemed fairly routine. But of course that was not the end of it, for several days later a boy on a bike pedaled past an Israeli checkpoint into Gaza City and blew himself up, along with two soldiers, and he was instantly proclaimed a martyr for the Palestinian cause.
That was an about average week. I happened to be there, writing it down. It went some way towards explaining why the Israeli soldiers were anxious and fatigued, why strangers never chatted in trains or buses, and why the atmosphere was so sullen.
There had been no public expression of bereavement in Tel Aviv over the bus bombing. No flags at half-mast, no wreaths, no ribbons. There were angry letters to the Jerusalem Post in this regard: “What is wrong with us that we cannot express our own grief.”
That did not mean that no one grieved; there had to be great sorrow. But the silence meant there also had to be tremendous resentment, anger and frustration. Out of this bitterness came feelings of revenge, and support for any politician who vowed it (as most did, ad nauseam) to the death. This and the unforgiving attitude seemed an Israeli rather than a Jewish reaction.
There was not much public expression of joy either—not much laughter, no talking on buses and trains, no sense of animation; more a sort of sick-of-it-all, seen-it-all attitude that was laced with suspicion. After dark the Tel Aviv streets emptied, and the same was true of Haifa—almost no nighttime pedestrians. That was a clear sign of high anxiety.
Even Tel Aviv, in spite of its long beach and leafy suburbs, had the look of a fortress, for its militarism gave it the same colonial garrison look that Haifa had. It looked out of place, built on sand, artificial and incongruous. It was both too big and not big enough, and only its traffic and loud music and air conditioners gave it a Miami sound.
I went to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, about a twenty-minute walk from my hotel. It contained a number of works which I had seen elsewhere—rusty shovels (“Untitled #34”), flashing lights (“Neon Fragment”), rags on hooks (“Work in Progress”), and the last resort of the artist barren of imagination, broken crockery glued to plywood (“Spatial Relationships”)—perhaps the splinters and shards of the very plates the artist’s spouse had flung in frustration, crying, “Why don’t you get a job!”
This frivolity did not speak of Israel, but obviously someone—a wealthy person in Tel Aviv—had put up the money for this. One exhibit showed photographs of small naked girls, six- and eight-year-olds, smiling, with trusting faces, sitting with their legs apart. The expression “kiddie porn” did not describe such pathetic trust and violation.
We have all been in such art museums and said, “It makes me mad.” And been told by the ludicrous supporters of such junk, “That’s good. It’s supposed to make you mad.”
But the museum was not a total waste. There was also a one-person show by an Israeli artist named Pamela Levy—photographic paintings, all of them arresting, many of them upsetting. Some were scenes of battlefields, showing dead and dismembered soldiers, and the horror of war. Many were depictions of biblical characters, or Old Testament re-creations of Israeli life, hairy men and chubby women in classic poses. Many of the naked men were shown hooded. “Lot and His Daughters” had a sinister carnality—naked girls and a supine old man, and the painting entitled “Rape” was disturbing most of all because it looked like a form of fooling that was about to turn violent.
The artist Pamela Levy had been born in Iowa in 1949 and had come to Israel in 1976. She was as much of an Israeli as anyone else here, but I felt that her painting said a great deal about the state of mind here: the repression, the aggression, the fantasies, the nakedness, the sexual ambiguity, the terror. Those paintings seemed to offer an insight to the turmoil in the country, and so her art was true.
Later, I had lunch with the Cohens from London. I bumped into them in a restaurant and we talked. They were an elderly middle-class couple, very polite to each other and pleased to be in Israel. It was their annual holiday.
“Every year we come, just about this time,” Mrs. Cohen said. “We’ve seen so many changes.”
“Has Tel Aviv grown very much?”
“I can remember when none of this was here,” Mr. Cohen said. “Are you from London?”
“I used to live in south London,” I said. “Clapham—Wandsworth way.”
“Are there many Jews there?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
And as I was muttering to myself, “How should I
know how many Jews there are in Clapham?” it occurred to me that perhaps I had been privy to a secret exchange. When Jews met in safe places each asked where the other was from and said, Are there many there?
“I think there’s a synagogue in Putney,” I said.
“Hammersmith,” old Mr. Cohen said.
Changing the subject, I mentioned that it was my first time in Israel and that I liked the food.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Cohen said. She mentioned several restaurants for me to try. “They’re not very nice but at least they’re kosher.”
The streets were empty at nine o’clock, and Tel Aviv, which advertises itself as “The City That Never Takes a Break,” is not much after dark. It was just a wall of unforgiving concrete; not pretty, not even very interesting, but like the rest of Israel in being clean and orderly and full of public buses. No graffiti, no apparent disorder, and so naive people who were unaware of what was going on were reassured by this appalling ordinariness.
The beach at Tel Aviv continued south to Jaffa where, within a few feet, it turned into an Arab town. But it was not a popular destination. Most people stayed right here at the center of town, and it made me think that this was perhaps more an Eastern European dream of the seaside than an American one, illustrating the Shakespearean solecism, the stage direction in The Winter’s Tale: “the coast of Bohemia.”
I woke early, and called Emile Habiby. He was still out of the country, so I checked out of my hotel and got a ten-shekel bus ticket to Jerusalem. In this week of revenge killings I expected the bus to be filled with soldiers, and it was; but they were asleep, hugging their rifles, and when they woke up they looked cranky. The rest of the bus passengers were the assorted citizens of Israel—Moroccans in track suits, Hasidim in black hats, followers of the Lubavitcher sect whose messiah, recently deceased, was the Rebbe Schneerson. (An exact duplicate of the messiah’s Brooklyn brownstone, down to the iron rails and the aged brickwork, had been built in Jerusalem, so that he would feel at home in the event that he should visit Israel.) There was a woman with a violin and another with a viola, students with textbooks, people with groceries, and pilgrims—but a pilgrim is just another sort of tourist.
Down the highway, into the semidesert and Route One through the rocky hills. But it was all more familiar than it should have been. The guardrails were American-style, and so were the signs and barriers and arrows and signal lights, and all this hardware gave a distinct sense of being in the United States.
The four-lane road passed ravines and steep slopes, some wooded summits. Old-fashioned armored cars and rusty trucks had been left by the roadside as memorials to the men who had died in what the Israelis call the War of Liberation. The vehicles, so old, so clumsy, roused pity. It was rough country, and even with the stands of slender cypresses it looked bereft, as the buildings did by the side of the road, plain, unornamented, with that same garrison look, the flat military facade which was Israeli architecture. Most buildings in Israel seemed as though they had been designed to withstand an attack.
Jerusalem is a city in the hills. The outskirts were steep and suburban, and the higher the bus climbed the denser the buildings. The bus station was like any old bus station, crowded, chaotic, with an added element of anxiety, for violence was an outdoor activity in Israel. Because Jerusalem’s terrain is irregular the streets are twisty and steep. This makes it hard for someone on foot to get a good clear sight of the city—or rather the two cities. The Old City is the Jerusalem of postcards. But West Jerusalem is the city of politics and commerce; it is still being built and settled as the Israeli capital, as though a deliberate challenge to anyone who harbors the idea of internationalizing it.
Asking the way to the Old City, I met an Ethiopian Jew, Negu. The colloquial term for such people was Falasha (“stranger” in Amharic), but it was rejected by them, as obviously contemptuous. He said he would show me the way. He had little else to do. He was not working.
“You could join the army, couldn’t you?”
“I am too old for the army.”
But he was hardly thirty, and as Israel was a country where, of necessity, soldiers were all ages and sizes, I could not understand why this was so.
“Would you be a soldier if they let you?”
Negu shrugged. He did not want to pursue this. He was thin and tall and quite black, with piercing eyes and an odd sloping walk, with a twitch of alertness in it, always seeming to be aware of what was happening around him.
“When did you come here?” I asked.
“Six years ago.”
“From Addis Ababa?”
“My village is eight hundred kilometers from Addis Ababa.”
“This must be quite a change from that.” Eight hundred kilometers had to be the remote bush, the very edge of the country, on one of the scrubby borders—of the Sudan, or Kenya, or Somalia.
We were walking through the busy precincts of West Jerusalem, where there were offices and agencies and shopping districts and hotels. Ahead I could see the domes of the Old City, an ancient skyline, but here it was all bustle—people, traffic, the same hectic anxiety that I had felt in the bus station, an air of apprehension; each person walked just a beat faster, and voices were more insistent and a few octaves shriller.
“In some ways, Israel is better.”
But he was doubtful.
“Better than your village in Ethiopia?”
“In some ways only. In other ways, no. Ethiopia is good.”
“You’re a Jew, though?”
“Yes. I am a Jew. We do not use these things on our head,” he said. He pointed to a passerby wearing a yarmulke.
“You have a family?”
“Yes. Wife. Children,” he said. “We are Jews.”
“Will you stay here?” I asked. “Do you like it?”
He shrugged, the same shrug, irked by my curiosity, wondering who I was and why I was asking.
“That is the gate you are searching for,” he said, and left me.
It was the Jaffa Gate, which took me through the Armenian Quarter to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I went inside, jostled by hurrying visitors, and then walked to the real treasure of the city, Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock and, a little farther on, the Al Aqsa Mosque. There I met Fikret, from the Akdeniz, who had lost the others.
“I was at the Crying Wall,” he said. “I cried!”
“Where is Bible Man?” That was our nickname for Onan.
“He is looking for Hebrew books,” Fikret said. “He has already bought one for sixty dollars.”
We walked together through the Lion’s Gate, to the edge of the Mount of Olives. Fikret reminded me that this was a city that was sacred to Muslims, which all believers tried to visit.
Jerusalem was a little jewel in the hills, a lovely city, certainly one of the most beautiful I had seen on my trip. But as a place of pilgrimage, inspiring a sort of breathless pilgrim, eager to possess it, with that special intensity, Jerusalem merely glittered for me. I found myself resisting its power to cast enchantment. Praying there seemed like theater, requiring a suspension of disbelief or a self-conscious fakery. And the city was a symbol. In Israel symbols were always useful shorthand, and so they were chosen as targets—they were exaggerated, or destroyed; either way, they lost their reality.
Fikret stayed, saying he was going to look at the mosque again. I decided to return to Haifa. Back at the bus station I tried to buy a ticket to Gaza.
“No, no, no,” the ticket seller said, and waved me away.
I asked a policeman. He shook his head. He said that, because of the recent shootings and bombings, the territories were closed. I would not be able to get through a checkpoint at the border.
“That’s too bad.”
“That is not bad,” he said. “You are lucky you can’t go to Gaza. It is dangerous.”
At the bus station, asking directions, a man heard me speaking English and took me aside. He was thinking of emigrating to the United States. Did I know anythi
ng about Orlando? He wanted to become a driver there—not necessarily a taxi driver, but something a little more colorful, perhaps a limo driver.
“I think I could be a success there, with my English accent,” he said.
It was true, he had the ghost of an accent, but though his reasoning seemed preposterous, I said, “Sure, they’re bound to think you’re David Niven, but how is Israel going to manage without you?”
“There’s no money here,” he murmured, and slipped away.
To reassure myself that the Akdeniz would not leave Israel without me I talked to the purser. No, the day after tomorrow, he said; and so I was free to go to a concert, the Haifa Symphony Orchestra: Elgar’s “Introduction and Allegro for Strings,” Tippett’s “A Midsummer Marriage,” Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini,” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony in C.”
Afterwards I saw six decorous prostitutes crouched at the corner of Sederot Ha’atzma’ut and little Lifshitz Street, and they were laughing and making kissing noises at me. I attempted to talk to them—they were bound to be fluent in English—but realizing that I was not interested in anything else they turned away. Besides, they saw some potential customers hurrying along, two young Hasidic Jews with big black hats and black frock coats, velvet yarmulkes, side-curls and black pants tucked into black socks. They walked in a flapping flat-footed way, and quickened their pace when they saw the prostitutes, who just laughed.
I followed the Hasidic boys for a while, just to see where they were going—up to Mount Carmel or over to the crumbling buildings of Wadi Salib. Seeing them in the bus or the train, in the desert heat, these black-suited and bearded Hasidim always made me perspire. Dressed for chilly nineteenth-century Poland, they made no allowance for being in the desert of the Middle East. They also seemed out of place because Israel was so secular—Christian or Orthodox churches were more numerous in Haifa than synagogues. People were polite but pieties were rare, courtesy scarce. It was not rudeness; it was more a sort of truce. Everything was practical and measured. What was the fear? Was it that generosity, which is also goodwill, exposed you to strangers and thereby put you at risk?