“There were people there,” he said, making a circular motion in front of his ears to mimic the sideburn locks many Orthodox Jewish men wear.
“They saw us coming, and they were afraid. I said, ‘Don’t worry. We’re Israeli citizens. We’re not from the West Bank. My father was born here. I just want to take a photo for my dad.’”
The Jewish inhabitants of his old house showed Furani around. He took a photograph in front of the house with his elderly father. They had a picnic nearby.
When I met Furani, he was living in Haifa, the city in northern Israel that bore the brunt of Hezbollah’s rocket attacks in 2006. “This is my country. I don’t want to leave it,” he said. “I want to live with the Jews based on respect. I don’t hate Jews. I have Jewish friends who want peace for both of us. We want to live together. They don’t want to throw us to the sea, and we don’t want to throw them to the sea.”
The number of settlers in the West Bank has grown over the last two decades, despite various peace initiatives proposing a freeze. In addition to government-approved settlement blocks, there are dozens of illegal “outposts” that are typically established on hilltops deep in the West Bank by particularly devoted settlers with trailers, portable electricity generators, and water tanks. Where possible, they tap into the water and electricity supply of a nearby settlement. Soldiers are sent to protect them; more settlers arrive; and the outpost becomes a “fact on the ground.” Soon, another outpost is established, pushing Israel’s reach deeper into Palestinian territory. Few have ever been dismantled.
Back in Efrat, Nadia Matar offered to take me to one such outpost, called Ma’ale Rehav’am. It is located in the Judean Mountains, on a hilltop far beyond the security barrier that Israel has been building since 2002. The road to it winds over rolling hills of reddish rock and scrub, past other settlements. There are few trees. It felt lonely. “Can you see any Arab village or city? Any nomads?” Matar asked. “Nothing. But they say these settlements are encroaching on Arab land. How is this place bothering George Bush or Condoleezza Rice? I have no answer but anti-Semitism.”
Ma’ale Rehav’am, in 2008, was a cluster of seven or eight trailers and a large water tank. An Israeli flag flew over everything. A few soldiers guarded the approach. One of the settlement’s residents, Danny Halamish, thirty-seven, greeted us when we arrived. He was one of the settlement’s original founders, arriving one night back in 2001 with one other person. Others came within a week and haven’t left since. A black dog scampered at Halamish’s feet. He had named it Jihad.
“I was living in England. That was 2001, when the war started, and I realized my place was here. In a war, this is the front line,” he said. “This is my land — not my land, our land. The Arabs want to take it, but they have no right to it, and we will not allow it.”
Halamish said he is not particularly religious but believes in God and cleaves to his Jewish identity. There are two kinds of Jews in Israel, he said: those who want to hold on to their identity, and those who want to shed it. “Tel Aviv represents the second group. It is built on sand with no roots. It might as well be Los Angeles.” Ma’ale Rehav’am, said Halamish, is not built on sand but on history, and they are making more of it every day they live there. He described Ma’ale Rehav’am as Israel’s frontier. “In so many ways we are beyond the law and can do what we want. I don’t think anywhere else in Israel has this freedom.”
Palestinians on the frontier must leave, he said. “The exact method is not important. It could be fast and violent, as in a war. It can be a very slow and gradual process that’s led by mostly economic pressure and other means. The important thing is that we do it. Had the Arabs accepted our ownership of the land, they could have stayed here. But because they do not accept our ownership of the land, they are our enemies and cannot.”
Driving back to Matar’s home in Efrat, we passed the wadi where, in 2001, two Israeli teenagers, Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran, were bludgeoned to death after they skipped school to go hiking. At times it seems difficult to travel far in Israel or the West Bank without stumbling on places stained with similar history.
Advocates and opponents of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank have something of a test case in the Gaza Strip. Israeli pulled out in 2005, abandoning settlements where some 9,000 Jews lived. The move, described as a unilateral disengagement, was controversial and was vigorously opposed in Gaza and by pro-settler organizations elsewhere. Some compared the Israel Defence Forces soldiers who evicted them to Nazis. Scenes of Israeli soldiers dragging Jews away from their homes were painful for many Israelis to watch — though one former army officer told me he wished he could have been among the soldiers who cleared the settlers out.
Palestinians in Gaza responded to the Israeli pullout with unprecedented numbers of rocket attacks against nearby Israeli towns. “We left them beautiful hothouses,” said Rubinger, the photographer. “They tore them to pieces and started throwing rockets at us. So today, when I have an argument with a right-wing Israeli, he says, ‘All right, so you want to pull out from the West Bank too. We pulled out from Gaza, and look what we get.’ What do I tell him? I have no reply.”
“Welcome to our refugee camp,” Rachel Saperstein said as she opened the door to her bright and pleasantly decorated four-bedroom caravilla in the Israeli settlement of Nitzan. “This is my job — to take a slum and make it a palace.”
Saperstein and her husband were among the settlers forcibly evacuated from Gaza in 2005. “Soldiers, like robots, pulled me from my house,” she said. “Our Zionist dream came crashing down on us. We had a great deal of love for our army. Now we see it being used to beat up Jews.”
Saperstein was born in New York and immigrated to Israel in 1968 “because we’re Jews, and being Jews we wanted to come to our homeland.” Her husband fought in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, in which he lost an arm and part of his face. They moved to Gaza in 1997. A Palestinian gunman there ambushed her husband as he drove in his car and shot off two of the fingers on his remaining hand. She rejected the idea that the land was once home to Arabs, too. She said they arrived when the Jews did because they wanted to make money. “They came from Yemen. They came from Iraq. And now all of a sudden they’re Palestinians. They are simply Arabs who came from all over. There is a state for them. It’s called Jordan. If they want to live with their Arab brothers, they can go there.”
Saperstein longed to return to Gaza. God blessed the Jews there, she said, and so did the very ground on which they lived. “The Earth will not produce for the Arabs,” she said. “It will produce for us.” Agriculture was only one of many miracles Saperstein witnessed in Gaza. She said it was as if God Himself swatted away the missiles Palestinian terrorists shot at them. “People laughed at us when we said it, but even the Arabs saw it. It bothers them to this day that in Sderot they try to kill so many and kill so few.”
Saperstein was referring to the Israeli city closest to the Gaza Strip that has borne the brunt of Palestinian rocket attacks. Sderot is a working-class town. The residents are primarily descendants of Moroccan, Kurdish Jewish, and Soviet immigrants. The attacks were ongoing when I visited. Whenever a rocket was spotted arching out of Gaza, a siren sounded and residents had thirty seconds to seek cover in a reinforced room of their house or in one of the many bomb shelters located every block or so in Sderot. As we approached the city, my driver turned off the radio and opened the car windows to better hear the alert. When the rocket came, the alert was too late or too quiet. We heard no warning, only the muffled crunching explosion of a missile hitting nearby. This one was harmless, landing in an empty parking lot.
A rocket launched weeks earlier was not. It dropped into Or Adam’s yard, tore off the tops of his rush bushes, hit the wall of his house, and exploded into his living room. Adam’s wife and three daughters were home at the time. He was talking to his wife on the phone when the siren sounded. She quickly hung up to gather their children. They didn’t make it into the safe room, but eve
ryone survived.
When Adam greeted me outside his home, he showed me his rose bushes. “They were black, but they’ve come back,” he said. “For us, it’s a symbol that life can go on.” Adam is a bit of an oddity in Sderot. He’s a lawyer whose parents emigrated from Poland in the 1920s and could likely be successful anywhere in Israel, but he’s chosen to live in Sderot as part of an urban kibbutz in which all members pool their incomes for the good of the collective. He wrote a poem about the rosebushes.
“I’m not a pacifist, but I believe in peace,” he said. “It’s a long process of trying to understand each other’s suffering. If seven-year-olds today grow up seeing the other side as human beings, maybe in thirty years we’ll have a settlement. They might do a better job than us.”
Adam’s own daughter had a difficult time dealing with the attack. She was seven, and for a long time she wouldn’t run or jump. She always wanted to hold her mother’s hand. She started to see a child psychologist. “She’s doing a lot of paintings and stories about the Qassams,” said Adam, referring to the rockets by name. “It helps. She’s very strong.”
Many children in Sderot suffer from traumatic stress syndrome, Nitai Shreiber, the executive director of a social welfare agency in the city, told me. To call it post-traumatic stress disorder is not accurate, he noted, because the stress is ongoing.
“My daughters are always asking me why we don’t leave,” Shreiber said. “They say, ‘You came here for ideology, but it’s hurting us.’ They spend most of their time in Ashkelon, a city a short drive away that’s rarely hit. We’re a family that loves each other, but we can’t live in the same place. One of my girls asked me, ‘If I get wounded, can we leave Sderot?’ I said yes. ‘So,’ she asked me, ‘Why are you waiting?’”
Maclean’s often publishes loud and attention-grabbing covers to draw the eyes of anyone browsing a newsstand. One that ran for an article I wrote describing the challenges Israel faces because of a growing population of Palestinians who don’t enjoy citizenship rights was headlined, “Why Israel Can’t Survive.” I was in Toronto the morning the magazine came out, and after a late night plodded into a convenience store next to my hotel on Yonge Street to buy it. When I tossed the magazine on the checkout counter, the woman working there looked at the cover and swooned. “Oh, what wonderful news,” she said.
And that’s the other thing it helps to remember when thinking about Israel: for millions and millions of people around the world, the problem with Israel isn’t a specific action or policy direction; it is its very existence as a state. For them, no peace deal will be enough, because the sin that must be rectified isn’t anything that’s happened since 1948, but the creation of Israel in the first place.
Most Israeli Jews consider 1948 a triumph, the birth of a homeland after the Holocaust’s destruction. But even beyond the anti-Zionist fringes of ultra-orthodox Judaism, there are a few Israeli Jews who look back on their country’s establishment with a sense of ambivalence.
Sami Michael is one of Israel’s best fiction writers. He was born in a mixed Baghdad neighbourhood of Jews, Muslims, and Christians more than eighty years ago and immigrated to Israel in 1949. As an Arab Jew, he joined a minority community of immigrants who initially had little in common with the Ashkenazi European Jews who were the driving force behind political Zionism and the majority in the new Israeli state.
Historian Avi Shlaim, another Iraqi-born Jew whose family immigrated to Israel shortly after its creation, once described in a lecture I attended at Saint Antony’s College how out of place he felt in Israel as an Arabic-speaking boy whose cultural roots were in Iraq. This changed for Shlaim during his service in the Israel Defence Forces, specifically the culmination of basic training, when new recruits climb the ancient fortress of Masada at night and swear, as dawn breaks, that it will never fall again. For Shlaim, who as a historian later wrote critically about Israel’s relations with Palestinians and surrounding Arab states, the experience underlined the difficulty Israel faces in forging unity from citizens of such diverse backgrounds, and the role the army plays in achieving this.
Sami Michael, the author, was never as conflicted about his multiple identities as an Iraqi and an Israeli, an Arab and a Jew. “I’m like baklava,” he said when he welcomed me into his Haifa apartment. “My layers enrich the final taste.”
Michael’s eyes were dark brown and seemed sad, but he smiled a lot. He had a passing resemblance to Pablo Picasso. Prints of paintings by Salvador Dali, however, were what hung on his walls. A bookshelf supported a small photograph of his mother, who died aged 103. His upper-floor apartment looked over the city — a gas station and, beyond that, the sea. Scattered on his living room table were letters. He had been corresponding with Walid Daka, an Israeli Arab jailed for the abduction and murder of the Israeli soldier Moshe Taman, and visited him once a month. Michael came across as dignified and without pretense. He wore cords and a blue shirt and served his guests thick Arabic coffee that clung to the sides of the ceramic cups he poured it into.
“When we started hearing about the Zionist plan, we had to make a decision,” he said, explaining his youth in Iraq. “We decided that the Zionist idea was a dangerous one — bad ideologically and impractical. We knew the Middle East as a place of conflict, especially for minorities. To come and create a Jewish state on a European mentality was too dangerous an adventure.”
Michael didn’t want to emigrate, but ultimately he didn’t have much choice. He was a Communist, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in Iraq. He fled first to Iran, hoping to return later to Baghdad. When this wasn’t possible, he made his way to Israel. He was a young man and would grow up with the new Jewish state. Now Michael described himself as an Israeli patriot. “I am part of this country. It is the homeland of my children, and I am dedicated to it,” he said. “But I know its future is a nightmare, and no one is listening to me.”
Michael had what he called a “mad dream” in which Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and a Palestinian state are united in a federation. He didn’t think it was likely, but then, he said, few would have believed sixty-five years ago that today it would be possible for English, French, and Germans to join together in the European Union.
“Are you proud of Israel?” I asked him.
“I’m not proud of anything. I’m not proud of some cloth that’s called a flag. But I love things and I hate things. It is enough that I love this country and I love the people. And because I love them, I can see the danger. I can see the dangers of war, of not negotiating. But since we have a strong army, it is easier to use power than negotiate.”
For all his criticism, Michael did not believe that Israel’s establishment was a mistake. “But we’re not in the right place,” he said. “Zionism for me is like a bird that insisted on building its nest on the back of a crocodile. We are living from war to war. I served in the army in 1956 and fought wars until 1967. My son is a commando and took part in many dangerous missions. And now my grandchildren will do the same thing. Sometimes I don’t sleep at night.”
Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages are already so enmeshed throughout the West Bank that keeping the two peoples apart is virtually impossible. There are roads for settlers and roads for Palestinians — easily distinguishable by their quality — but often the highways are shared. Different-coloured licence plates allow soldiers manning checkpoints to tell who is who. In the fields surrounding some Arab villages, hundreds of olive tree stumps stick out of the ground. The groves have been cut down by Israeli settlers — part of the strategy described by Danny Halamish of pressuring Palestinians to leave.
There are areas, though, that feel like a separate country. Ramallah is one of them. It’s the closest thing the Palestinians have to a capital city and reflects the consequential wealth that government bureaucracy and foreign diplomats bring. It’s also one of the more liberal Palestinian towns. About twenty-five percent of the people who live there are Christians, and few women cover their faces. I
arranged to meet my fixer, Mohammad, there. Young, ambitious, and well connected, Mohammad had been trained as a journalist by Western NGOs and now made a pretty good living translating for foreign reporters. We sat in a trendy café and drank pints of Carlsberg.
“Moves to boycott Danish stuff after that newspaper published cartoons of Mohammad never really went anywhere here,” he said when I pointed out the beer’s patrimony, referring to the controversy — and deadly rioting — that erupted all over the world after Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper printed the satirical drawings of the Muslim prophet. “A lot of television crews from Jerusalem came over here hoping to film protests and flag burnings and all that, but it was pretty calm here. Most people didn’t care.”
In the morning we drove to Hebron, probably the most politically charged city in the region. Here, in the middle of 150,000 Palestinians, some 700 Jewish settlers live in a neighbourhood focused around the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and several members of his family are said to be buried. The site is holy to Jews and Muslims, and both faiths worship there — although they must use different entrances to the complex that has been erected over the tomb, and the building is divided inside. The Jews of Hebron have suffered numerous terrorist attacks over the years. It is also where, in 1994, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein murdered twenty-nine Muslims praying at the tomb. Goldstein was beaten to death by survivors of the massacre and is buried nearby, beneath a grave with an inscription that says he “gave his soul for the people of Israel, its Scriptures and its land. Honest and pure of heart.” Militant settlers erected a shrine beside the grave. Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the shrine destroyed in 1999, concluding it violated an Israeli law banning monuments to “perpetrators of terrorism.”
Is This Your First War? Page 18