I think of my little cats. They would love to be here. They would appreciate the fresh goat milk. Super kosher.
On the way out of Moses’ property, the news comes in: a number of Arab men entered a settlement and approached a couple. They killed the husband with axes; his wife survived. This is the fourth murder of a Jew by an Arab in the last three weeks alone. B’Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights, Yesh Din, and the various European NGOs have not issued statements condemning these losses of life.
***
I travel in God’s mountains and hills, the biblical Judea and Samaria, until I reach Yitzhar, a settlement the residents of which fight both the Arabs and the IDF. “A Jewish soldier helps Jews,” posters hanging on poles inside the Yitzhar settlement say. Whatever the meaning of this is, it seems clear that the Jews here and the IDF are not the best of friends.
To get a better understanding of what Yitzhar is made up of, I go to their yeshiva, their religious academy. Surprisingly, there is only one student in attendance. I try talking with him, but he behaves as though he is both deaf and mute.
I check the books on the shelves. This is not the kind of yeshiva I attended back then. This is a totally different animal. On the shelves here you can find books written by modern-day extremist rabbis who, in their spare time, discuss complex, brainy issues such as the permissibility of killing enemy children (Arabs) during war.
This is Yitzhar, arguably the most extreme settlement in the world, the residents of which are the biggest hotheads of the Right. I meet one of them, Benjamin, a man with a long beard, long sidelocks, and a big skullcap.
He says to me: “I’m not going to try to be ‘nice’ about it. I’m not interested in being PC or in giving you such an impression. I’m going to be straight with you. You see the olive field at the foot of the hill, down there? We set it on fire. Yes, we do such things. Not all of us, but some of us. Why? Because these are the laws of war. We are in a war with the Arabs for control of this land.
“This land is a war zone. If we don’t show them that we are the lords, we will become their slaves. In other settlements, the Arabs plant olive trees right next to the border of Jewish settlements because they want to prevent the settlements from growing. With us, they know it’s not going to work. We are the lords of this land.”
Had I closed my eyes and exchanged “Arab” and “Jew,” I would easily confuse this settler, Benjamin, for a Muhammad.
But he is Benjamin, not Muhammad.
I have met farmers before in my life, non-Jewish farmers in America and in Europe, and they talk more or less similarly and they will protect their lands the same way. But it is very strange, very uncommon, to listen to a Jew talking like this, like a normal “Goy.” These Jews – like Moses, his goats, and his Mormon loveliness – are not the normal Jews.
Personally, I hardly get to meet conviction-driven Jews, say-what-I-think Jews, farming Jews, if-you-slap-me-on-one-cheek-I’ll-slap-youon-both-your-cheeks Jews. The Jews I know are neurotic Jews, weak Jews, self-hating Jews, hate-filled-narcissist Jews, accept-every-blame Jews, bowing to all non-Jews Jews, ever guilt-ridden Jews, ugly-looking Jews, big-nosed and hunch-backed Jews, cold Jews, brainy Jews, yapping Jews, and here-are-both-my-cheeks-and-you-can-slap-them-both Jews.
To me, the biggest proof that Jesus was Jewish is this: Who else, but a Jew, could come up with this statement: “If someone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other one as well”?
I go back to Jerusalem, to my little herd of stray cats.
It is the end of the day on Friday, and the opening session of the Knesset is to take place on Monday. Should I go and mingle with the power brokers of Israel? What do you say, my cats?
Gate Forty-Two
An inaugural session of the Knesset.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU AND SHIMON PERES SPEAK, AND IT IS BORING. OH, IS this boring! I would like to mingle with some MKs, one by one, but I can’t see many of them in the main hall. Did they sneak out to have some tuna? I go to the MKs’ dining room, and there I see a number of them. I order Coke Zero and join the legendary centrist MK Fuad Ben Eliezer at his table.
If you ask a rightist “What is Israel?” you are likely to hear the word “God” or the word “Treblinka” somewhere midway in his response. If you ask a leftist, you’re likely to hear the word “occupation” at precisely the same spot. What will happen if you ask a centrist the same question? I try it on MK Ben Eliezer, and he replies.
“A homeland. For every Jew. This is the place where we can do anything we want. It’s quite terrible to have eight million Jews living together, it’s not that easy, but I think we’re doing quite well.”
I love this image of eight million Jewish zekel beiners in one sack.
Fuad goes on: “All of our history, all our traditions, started here; don’t forget. I’m too old to forget what happened to us sixty, seventy years ago. We have to learn our lesson and understand that we can only depend on ourselves. With all respect to the nations, European and other, the one nation responsible for ourselves, is us. We have to be.”
Fuad, also known as Benjamin, tells me that he was the first Israeli official “who went to Arafat in Tunis, in 1993. Rabin sent me there to check one thing: Were they [the Palestinians] ready to take off the terrorist suit and put on a statesman’s suit? I stayed forty-eight hours with Arafat, day and night, and I studied him. I came back and I gave Rabin a clear answer.”
What did you tell him?
“I think that they are ready to switch suits.”
This I never knew. What made Yitzhak Rabin change his outlook on the Palestinians was not a personal experience of the other side, but the result of Fuad’s experience and recommendation.
Just in case, I ask MK Ben Eliezer if he knows my newest spiritual father, Jibril Rajoub.
“I got to know him in 1978, when he was in jail. He was busy translating [former Israeli prime minister] Menachem Begin’s book The Revolt into Arabic. Later on I met him many times. He was my liaison for my 1993 trip to Tunis. He is a courageous man, he is a strong man, he is a good man; I respect him.”
For my part, and since I have not heard from Jibril for some time, I shoot an e-mail to Jibril’s office and tell him what Fuad thinks of him. He would like it.
I chat a bit more with Fuad and then I notice MK David Rotem, chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, across the room and he is looking pretty bored. I go to him. It is my fate today, I think, that I fellowship with bored MKs.
“You ask me what you want, I will answer what I want!” he says to me.
What is Israel?
“Israel is the only country given to the Jewish nation. An empire of information (high tech), of science, of culture, and it is the only country from the countries around it that has succeeded in being democratic.”
What does it mean a “country given to the Jewish people”? This doesn’t mean much.
“If it doesn’t mean much, this is very bad. In 1922 the League of Nations, which was later replaced by the UN, decided on a British Mandate for Palestine for the purpose of establishing a Jewish state. According to paragraph 80 of the UN’s own mandate, all decisions made by the League of Nations have a legal validity and will stay legally binding to the UN. Europeans don’t know history and don’t know international law. They say that Israel occupies lands, but they don’t know that according to international law this is not occupation.”
So you don’t believe in giving territories to the Palestinians?
“Of course not! Before the 1967 War, when Jordan and Egypt were holding the lands the Palestinians are now claiming, the Palestinians didn’t want those lands. Why didn’t they? They don’t want to have a state!”
What, then, do the Palestinians want?
“If you ask me, I’ll tell you: They want a war.”
War forever?
“Forever. They feel good when they incite hatred against us, when they commit terror acts against us. The Palestinians’ real nigh
tmare is that one day a suicidal Israeli prime minister will tell them: Here, I’m willing to grant you a state!”
The Europeans, he tells me, support the Palestinians because the Europeans are anti-Semites, but this will not go on forever. One day “the Europeans will have enough of their anti-Semitism” and change. When? “I’m not an expert on anti-Semitism, but one day they’ll understand that this hatred cannot go on.”
MK David Rotem’s party, the rightist Israel Beyteinu, is a coalition partner of Netanyahu, but if Netanyahu gives up territories, “we will leave the coalition.”
Did you tell this to Netanyahu?
“Yes.”
MK Yehiel Hilik Bar, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Secretary General of the Labor Party, is a centrist. He is the next bored MK that I save today. We chat a bit and he tells me that Israel is the only place for Jews, people who have been evicted from wherever they used to live.
What’s special about Israel?
“We sell today, all over Europe and China, high tech and medicine. This is not normal for a country as small as Israel.”
What about the political situation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? He’s not worried. “By next decade,” he tells me, there will be peace between the Arabs and the Jews.
Good to know.
***
I leave Jerusalem and go to Tel Aviv. I need a break. Sun and beach, coffee and beer can be good friends. But, sadly, I was not born to be a Tel Aviv guy. I get bored pretty quickly when doing nothing. I don’t have my cats in Tel Aviv to pal around with, so I go to see Aluf Benn, editor in chief of Haaretz (“The Land”), a man I was supposed to meet just before Rabbi Ovadia Yosef passed away.
Haaretz, like most papers of the West that I’m familiar with, is more propaganda than news. It is in Haaretz that you’ll read all the bad things that the Jews are doing, or even just thinking of doing, and very little of the bad stuff the Arabs are doing, not to mention what the Arabs are thinking of doing. It is also in Haaretz that you’ll find all the doom and gloom that will happen to the Jews if they don’t give the Arabs everything they ask for.
I ask Aluf to define “Israel” for me, and he does: “Israel is home.”
Aluf has a home, and a home you can divide: half for your enemy, half for you. I wish I knew where my home was. My life started here, but I left long ago and have ever since lived in different places.
Aluf and I have one thing in common: media. And that’s why we meet.
I ask Aluf a question that has been bothering me for a long time: Why are there so many foreign correspondents in Israel?
“Ask them,” he says.
I love his short answers!
Haaretz is the one Israeli paper that serves as a “Bible” to herds of foreign journalists who keep quoting from it the way a Sephardi Jew would quote “Maran.” I ask Aluf what’s the newspaper’s circulation. The answer is 70,000 copies. How many readers online? First he says 110,000, but then says he’d have to check it. Whatever the exact figure is, I now realize that almost nobody in this land reads The Land. This reminds me: Gideon Levy is still hiding from me.
The sad fate of Haaretz doesn’t seem to bother Aluf. “I’m not a big dreamer,” he tells me.
***
It is time now, after having asked people what Israel is, to meet people who are putting their lives on the line to protect Israel. I hope that my personal herd, the sweet stray cats, are doing well in Jerusalem, for I’m going to Haifa.
Gate Forty-Three
Experiencing war: inside an Israeli navy battleship in mid-sea.
ARMY: IDF. ARM: ISRAEL NAVY. UNIT: SAYERET PERES (RECONNAISSANCE PERES). Number of ships in Unit: Four.
I am to join the battleship marked 816-TFD (“The Flying Dutchman”).
Yes. Finally the IDF has woken up, recognizing the existence of a Master Agent in their midst, and are willing to cater to my honor. They have asked me where, within their various bases, I’d like to see my zekel beiner, and the navy sounded appealing to me. I don’t know how to swim and if anything happens I will fly to Paradise, sit with Maran in Heaven, and share a laugh about those who mourn our passing away.
The IDF has agreed and I am here, at the gate of the Haifa base. I pass the gate and I encounter a problem. The commander of the unit that I’m scheduled to join is quite upset. “This is not what we’ve agreed,” he says to my accompanying twenty-something-year-old female soldier. I don’t know what he’s talking about, except that he wants me out. The soldier doesn’t know what to say and she gets lost, which means that I have to take command. In the Israeli navy, as you might imagine, both Tobi the German and Abu Ali mean zilch. I need another hat. Which hat should I put on my head? Well, how about the Tough, Pissed Jew hat. I face the commander and tell him in perfect Pissing Hebrew: I’m not leaving!
The commander looks at me, Tough, Pissed Jew, and he knows that he has no choice but to succumb to His Toughness. Me.
I’m cleared to board the ship. A battleship. Yes, a battleship, but at first you don’t notice that it’s a battleship, for it’s a really small baby ship.
I board the baby. It takes me less than a minute to realize that this is a little animal. Underneath the deck is a little house: a living room, a kitchen, a toilet, bedrooms, shells and bullets for decoration and an information room. People and explosives live here side by side, in total harmony, which makes for a really nice household for tough, pissed off people like me.
This ship has a name: Dvorah (bee). Cars have names, and ships too. There is a Mercedes and there’s a Bee. Why bee? You figure this out on your own.
***
Engine on, we get ready to move. But the second the baby starts moving I register that this bee is really not a Mercedes. Nope. Mercedes is for humans, this bee is for anything but. For whatever reason, the Dvorah hates the words “shock absorbent” and it loves to shake your body mightily. As if this were not enough, the Dvorah also likes speed. Do you know what happens to your body when it is being shaken right and left, up and down, and that very very fast?
The waters are rough today, the waves are high, and this bee jolts accordingly plus more. Much more. If you don’t hold tight either to a heavy machine gun welded to the body of this baby, or to some other equally impressive immovable part of the ship, you’ll find yourself in Toronto in less than one second.
A soldier explains to me the secret of this ship. “It’s called ‘bee,’ for a reason. It’s small enough – twenty-one meters long – that it doesn’t ‘threaten’ the enemy. It is fast, and it stings.”
This is the kind of a baby you wouldn’t want to mess with.
Today we are starting “dry,” no live ammunition, and will end up with real fire. Duration: six to seven hours. Oh, Lordy Lord!
The soldiers on board ask me who I am and I tell them that I’m a European journalist. “What do they say about us?” a soldier asks me, speaking of the Europeans.
That you are a ruthless killer, that you are an animal, that you are a bitch.
“Is this what they really think?”
Sorry, but yes. Why are you serving in this army?
“This is my country, I was born here. This is where I live.”
Second soldier, hearing this, remarks: “If serving in the army was not mandatory, I would be in the university now.”
First soldier: “Don’t listen to him, he’s a half Romanian and a half Kurd.”
What does this mean?
“He steals but he doesn’t know what.”
Would you serve in the IDF had it been a volunteer army?
“I would serve no matter what. None of us on this battleship have been forced to serve on it. You come to this Sayeret only if you choose to be here, and if you are found fit to be here.”
You love this ship, ah?
“I live here, we live here, day and night. We sleep in this ship, we train on it, we fix it, we maintain it. This is home, our home.”
Have you developed a personal relationship
with this ship?
“Oh, yes!”
Today they’re exercising one grirah (haul) after the other, each from a different angle and each to fit a certain circumstance. These exercises are physically demanding, since the cables alone weigh a ton or two. When they finish each grirah they form a circle and loudly yell: “816-TFD Hey!” As we know, 816-TFD is the number of this particular bee, which is also known as The Flying Dutchman. Hence 816-TFD. “Hey” just standing for “Hey.”
From time to time, an alarm sounds. Tsemakh, their commander, turns the siren on and these soldiers must run up and down, hauling and carrying heavy objects. At one point, for example, a smaller ship comes by and a “wounded soldier” is being transferred to the bee.
Fun.
***
Occasionally there is a “cigarette and water” break. “A friend of mine,” one of the smoking animals tells me, “is doing his service close to Palestinian cities. He tells me that he and the Palestinians drink coffee together, that they eat together, and that the Palestinians have very nice houses. Have you been to Palestinian cities?”
Yes.
“Is it true what my friend tells me?”
Yes, your friend is right. At least this is what I’ve seen.
“We never read this in the media. What are you going to write?”
I’ll write what I see.
“Would you mind sending me what you have written once it’s published?”
These ruthless animals are little babies who are scared of European journalists. I take a moment to look at these kids – yes, they’re just kids. Yet the world refuses to see them for what they are, kids, preferring instead to view them as the epitome of evil.
An additional officer is with us today. He is the highest-ranking on board, doing his reserve duty, and his job is to check that the commander of this bee is performing well.
Catch The Jew! Page 34