Exile: a novel

by Richard North Patterson

  David smiled. “Sibling rivalry.”

  “Only this one’s three thousand years old. In essence, it’s a contest between Muslims and Jews over which is the favored people of God, each claiming that He granted them the land to which both have sought to return.” Ernheit spoke with resignation. “In Hana Arif ’s view, she lives in the Occupied Territories, surrounded by Jewish oppressors. But to many Jews, she lives in the biblical land of Judea and Samaria, now occupied by Arab terrorists and anti-Semites—the descendants of those who slaughtered Jewish settlers in the 1920s and ’30s, and call our Day of Independence their Day of Tragedy.”

  “And for you?” David asked. “Where does history start—and end?”

  Ernheit pondered this, then pointed at the distant skyline of Jerusalem. “For me, sitting in this place, it starts three thousand years ago.” He turned, looking hard at David. “This is where the Jewish people were born—not Argentina, or Uganda, or any of the other throwaway places the world suggested we settle after the Holocaust was done and six million of us had died for the lack of a place to go. South America is nothing to us. Africa is nothing to us. Our heritage and roots are here. Jews were a majority in Jerusalem in the early nineteenth century, and a thriving presence in this land ever since the Zionists came here in the 1880s, fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe. So this is where our history begins, and this is where it will end.”

  Dead or alive, David thought—there was no mistaking the determination in Ernheit’s words. “I need you to understand something,” David said at length. “About this trip, and about me. I may be a lousy Jew to some, but that’s their problem, not mine. I have no use for suicide bombers, terrorists, or anyone who wants to eradicate this country. If I thought Hana was one of them, I wouldn’t be here. There’s nothing in this case for me but heartache and ambivalence. And, perhaps, the need to know whatever truth there is to know, like it or not.”

  Ernheit studied him. “Like it or not,” he repeated. “An important qualification. I’ve read some of your statements about Arif—that she’s a mother, that she would never risk her child’s future. And I knew at once that you presume to understand too much.

  “So let me tell you a story. Two years ago a Palestinian woman, dressed in a long black shroud but obviously pregnant, set off a metal detector at a checkpoint near East Jerusalem.” Ernheit’s tone was clipped, factual. “The day was blazing hot. Teary-eyed, she explained to the young Israeli soldier who stopped her that, as a child, she had broken her leg so badly that the surgeon had pieced it together with screws and a metal plate. Because she was Muslim, the woman said, she could not show him the scars on her leg. But he must understand that she was harmless—no mother, Jew or Arab, would sacrifice her child to harm others.

  “As I said, the soldier was young. He explained later that she looked close to giving birth. And so, reluctantly, he let her pass. Perhaps thirty yards beyond him was a cluster of Israeli soldiers. He saw the woman approach them, asking for water. As one drew out his canteen, she blew herself and four soldiers to pieces.”

  “She wasn’t pregnant.”

  “Yes, she was,” Ernheit demurred with a sardonic smile. “Eight months pregnant, in fact. But her husband, a Hamas activist, had been in an Israeli prison for twice that time. And so her brother-in-law, also Hamas, gave her a choice: to die at his hands in an honor killing or redeem herself by taking

  some Israelis with her and her bastard child. She chose the latter course.”

  David tried to imagine this. “And the lesson?”

  Ernheit’s smile vanished. “Is simple. Don’t ever think you understand this place. And never believe you comprehend your client, or what may have impelled her to murder our prime minister. Because you don’t.”

  2

  On the winding road to Jerusalem, David and Ernheit passed Jewish and Arab villages; a British cemetery, the remnant of colonialism; and the modern buildings of Hebrew University, whose founders, Ernheit explained, had reinvented a three-thousand-year-old language in a determined act of cultural resurrection. They stopped again at Mount Scopus, overlooking Jerusalem.

  David leaned against the railing of the viewing area. On the sloping hillside beneath them was a Jewish cemetery; the custom, Ernheit explained, was to bury the dead east of Jerusalem, where the prevailing wind blew from the city. Now, carried by that same wind, the haunting sound of a muezzin’s call to prayer issued from the Old City of Jerusalem, whose sandstone walls, built by Roman conquerors, surrounded the sacred sites of three civilizations.

  The panorama of the city was that of the Middle East, ancient and, David thought, compelling in its sense of spiritual beauty, its mosques, spires, and minarets rising above the wall amid palms and pine trees. Framed against the modern neighborhoods and buildings that surrounded it, the Old City seemed ethereal; even at this distance, David could understand man’s desire to possess it. Ernheit pointed out the golden Dome of the Rock, the Muslim holy site; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the supposed place of Christ’s crucifixion; and the black dome of the Al Aqsa Mosque. “For Muslims,” Ernheit said, “the Al Aqsa Mosque was the ‘end of the journey,’ a holy place to come if Mecca was too far away. More recently, it supplied the name of the terrorist group that, his assassin claims, planned the murder of Amos Ben-Aron.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  Ernheit leaned against the railing, his keen expression focused on the city. “Why do you think I’m helping you? If Hana Arif is guilty, as seems likely enough, let the Americans kill her. But she couldn’t have put this plan together on her own. And those who helped her are not Al Aqsa.”

  Ernheit said this last with such conviction that David turned to stare at him. After a time, Ernheit pointed to the rolling landscape beneath the city. “Do you see that line of trees below the wall?”

  Gazing out, David saw that the line, even and densely wooded, ran along the length of the horizon. “It’s like a border,” he said.

  “Effectively it is a border—the ‘Green Line,’ we call it, the edge of Zionist planting. After 1948 it became a de facto border, and remained so until the war of 1967. As you see, it does not include the Old City of Jerusalem. And it is very difficult to defend.” Turning to the left, Ernheit raised his arm to indicate a green wall, twenty feet high, snaking along the hillside, its construction incomplete. “And that is our new de facto border, at least for the time being—the security barrier, meant to protect us from Al Aqsa, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and whoever else on the West Bank may send the next Iyad Hassan to murder us in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Haifa.

  “Between these two borders is a no-man’s-land of fear. Some opponents of Ben-Aron, including the religious, believed that he would give Faras and the Palestinians the sacred ground of the Old City; others believed he would abandon our settlements in the West Bank. All you require to become afraid is to look out at the Green Line, history’s illustration of how precarious our existence was and is. And then, perhaps, you could begin to think Ben-Aron a traitor. Leaders have died for less.”

  “So you believe that Jews helped kill him?”

  “I believe that it cannot be ruled out. But the answer to who killed him may also be found in the manifest failures of another leader, Yasser Arafat. And in the murder of still another, Yitzhak Rabin.”

  David considered this. “Dead leaders,” he said. “And missed opportunities.”

  “Arafat never missed an opportunity to miss one. But sometimes he had outside help.” Ernheit wiped his sunglasses, carefully placing them in the pocket of his shirt. “After Arafat returned to the West Bank from his exile in Tunis, Rabin decided that the Occupied Territories were a quagmire for Jews—that he had to find some pragmatic way, through Arafat, to give the Palestinians their own country in exchange for a lasting peace. Which earned Rabin a bullet at the hands of a right-wing Jew.

  “You would think his murder might lead to a reaction against the Israeli right, a political uprising for peace. But Hamas, wh
ich did not want peace, chose this precise moment to launch a wave of suicide bombers against Israel. The result of that was the election of Arafat’s most adamant enemy, Benjamin Netanyahu—the candidate of the Israeli right and, some would argue, Hamas. A synergy of extremists on both sides killed the chance of peace.”

  Behind them, the sunlight of late afternoon cast its failing light across the Old City, causing the tint of the golden dome to deepen. “Whatever our own failings,” Ernheit continued with quiet bitterness, “this current mess is, in great measure, Arafat’s legacy to us all. Netanyahu was succeeded as prime minister by Ehud Barak, who was prepared to negotiate a lasting peace, with President Clinton as the intermediary. But Arafat lacked the courage, and certainly the desire, to give up the right of return so cherished by radicals like your client’s husband. To snarl matters still further, Barak’s leading opponent, Ariel Sharon, chose this crucial juncture to visit the Al Aqsa Mosque—supposedly to assert Israeli sovereignty over Muslim holy cities.” Ernheit smiled grimly. “If so, the messenger could hardly have been worse: Palestinians view Sharon as the architect of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. His visit became the supposed flashpoint for more suicide bombings by Hamas, Al Aqsa, and others in what became the Second Intifada.”

  David noted the qualifier. “Is that what you think?” he asked.

  “Not quite. My own belief is that Arafat used Sharon’s visit as his pretext—he thought that countenancing terror might give him more leverage with Barak in peace negotiations. In this, as in so many other things, Arafat was a fool. What he got instead was nine hundred dead Jews, three thousand dead Palestinians, and the defeat of Barak by Sharon, Arafat’s archenemy, who became prime minister of Israel.

  “The upshot is essential to understanding who might have planned the murder of Ben-Aron. After sixty suicide bombings in seventeen months, Sharon surrounded Arafat’s compound in Ramallah and pretty much obliterated everything around him, leaving Arafat to rail against ‘the Zionists’ on his cell phone as the battery died, the media yawned, and his entourage ran out of food.” Ernheit shrugged, as if to say that this was only justice. “For the last three years of his life, Arafat was a pariah, humiliated by his virtual incarceration, scorned by America and Israel, forced to look on helplessly as Sharon built a security barrier and unleashed a twelve-day attack on the refugee camp at Jenin, a nexus for terrorists and the home of Ibrahim Jefar, killing fifty-six Palestinians, whom Arafat could only add to his list of ‘martyrs.’ The man was dead before he died. And he left his people nothing but occupation, violence, an economy in ruins, a string of Israeli settlements on the West Bank—some of them illegal—with a road system reserved for Israelis that connects them like a spiderweb, and, of course, this barrier. As fertile ground for extremism as you’d like. Hence, the rise of Hamas.”

  “And the death of peace?” David asked.

  “I think so. To me, the last hope of peace was a collaboration between Faras and Ben-Aron. Now Ben-Aron has been assassinated, like Rabin; like Arafat, Faras has lost all credibility; much like Netanyahu, our new prime minister has launched fresh attacks on terrorists. And Ben-Aron’s dream of peace is as dead as the man himself. So what remains on the West Bank,” Ernheit concluded in a tone of quiet fatalism, “aside from Israeli soldiers, presently engaged in wiping out Al Aqsa, is the vacuum that Arafat left behind: a struggle for power between Faras and Fatah—perhaps fatally weakened by the assassination and Israel’s response to it—and the extremists of Hamas. The question is who gains from such a vacuum, and from the death of Amos Ben-Aron.”

  “Easy. Anyone who doesn’t want peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”

  “A very long and contradictory list,” Ernheit concurred. “Unfortunately, when it comes to who plotted to murder Ben-Aron, that’s your list of suspects.”

  “No doubt your government is working overtime to sort them out.”

  “The Shin Bet in particular. It collects intelligence on Palestinian and other terrorist groups, as well as Iranian espionage activities in Israel and the West Bank. Also right-wing extremists such as the Masada movement.”

  “I saw their leader on television,” David said. “Barak Lev. He’s insane.”

  “Perhaps. But one man’s psychopath is another man’s savior, committed to religious truth. Perhaps that’s why the Shin Bet has had the devil’s own time cracking the Masada movement. Those men don’t talk—except to one another, and to God.”

  “And God talks only to Samuel,” David answered. “And Moses and Aaron.”

  Ernheit laughed briefly. “You’ll make a Jew yet. But if you give God orders, as Lev did, perhaps God answers in His own way. Lev’s last request, you may recall, was that God strike Ben-Aron as dead as Adolf Hitler.”

  “Is there any chance,” David asked without much hope, “that the Shin Bet would tell me at least some of what they know?”

  “No chance. But there are others, as I said, who may wish—very quietly, and indirectly—to put you on the proverbial long and winding road.” Ernheit glanced at his watch. “In fact, we’re meeting one of them at the King David, for drinks and a little conversation.

  “His name’s Moshe Howard. Nominally, he’s your legal adviser in Israel, retained to assist you regarding your request for information. Inasmuch as it’s hopeless, that would be a foolish waste of money—assuming he ever sent you a bill. Which, given his profound distaste for your client, he would never do.”

  “So why are we meeting?”

  “In four months we elect a prime minister—unless something dramatic happens, it will be the one who just took power, Isaac Benjamin, who is supported by the settlers and the religious, deplored by the followers of Ben-Aron.” Ernheit paused to consider his words. “Moshe has an interest in changing the electoral dynamic, and you may serve that interest. For now, let’s leave it at that, and hope he decides to trust you.”

  3

  The King David Hotel was majestic, the former headquarters of the British military, a six-story sandstone structure built in the imperial manner. Its palm-shrouded patio, patrolled by waiters in white jackets, looked out on the Old City, a ghostly outline in the dusk. Freshly showered and wearing a newly pressed sport coat and slacks, David sipped red wine with Ernheit and Moshe Howard.

  Howard was David’s age, slender and fine featured, with short brown hair and inquisitive blue eyes. “The occasion for your visit is uncomfortable,” he told David after a few moments’ conversation. “But it is necessary that you see the geography we share. This is not Middle America.”

  David nodded. “One look at the Green Line, and it’s easy enough to see why people might feel threatened.”

  Howard smiled faintly. “My father,” he said, “was a Jewish officer in the British army when they helped liberate Bergen-Belsen. It changed him. After he came here, he would often speak of the ‘Holocaust syndrome’— a deep trauma in the psyche of Israelis, so that any danger, internal or external, echoes with the threat of extermination.

  “Of course, the slaughter of Jews did not begin with the Holocaust—it took place in Europe long before, and in places like Hebron on the West Bank, where Palestinians murdered Jews. So it is inevitable that we fear the Palestinians, who now send their young to kill themselves and us—who would not fear people with such disdain for the value of human life? But often we fear each other: Israeli Jews versus the Israeli Arabs, who, many believe, are potential agents of outside enemies like Iran; the secular— including advocates of peace like Ben-Aron—versus the settlers and religious, who fear ‘betrayal’ at the hands of their fellow Jews.”

  Listening, Ernheit inclined his head toward David. “We spoke a little of the right of return,” he told Howard, “the abiding passion his client’s husband, and others like him, rail about incessantly.”

  “Show me the Palestinian leader who will say to his people there will be no return,” Howard responded, “and I will show you a leader with no future. And if the four hundred thousand desce
ndants of refugees in Lebanon, and the half million more on the West Bank, did return to Israel, we would have no future.”

  David looked from Howard to Ernheit. “Isn’t the reverse also true?” he asked. “There are three million or so Palestinians in the West Bank. You can’t make them part of Israel, nor can you occupy their land forever. Ben-Aron was looking for a way out.”

  “In 1967,” Howard answered in an arid tone, “when our army chased the Jordanians out of the West Bank, it was like Eve biting the apple. Even at the time, most of our leaders understood this. But many religious Jews were enraptured—at last we had reclaimed the land given us by God. And the Jordanians, it transpired, were happy to be rid of real estate filled with Palestinians who, under Arafat, had disrupted the regime of King Hussein. In short, we couldn’t give these people away.

  “And so, over time, we built settlements on the land we had acquired as a bulwark against invasion, much as the kibbutzim near Jerusalem had slowed the Arab invasion in 1948. It would have been better to put soldiers there; soldiers can be removed to make a peace. But kick out a quarter million Jews who have made their lives there? Not so easy.”

  “I’ll take you to the settlements,” Ernheit said to David. “You’ll see homes, synagogues, cemeteries, the work of three generations. And you’ll understand what has bred a handful of dangerous extremists like Barak Lev.”

  For a few moments, the three men sipped wine in silence, the patio dimly illuminated, the Old City spectral in the moonlight, the white-jacketed waiters gliding among the tables filled with patrons. “Peaceful,” David said at length.

  Howard nodded. “And beautiful, too. But Jerusalem is surrounded by cemeteries, and the dead sometimes seem more powerful than the living—King David and Emperor Saladin, still pursuing their own vision of this land. And yet this is still the only place in the Middle East where Christians, Jews, and Muslims have a chance to live together in peace, to create a vision of the future. For one people to own it would be tragic—”