Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  This is where he feels most comfortable, where everything was going so well, near his children, the mountain at his back, the ocean spread out in front of him. He comes here almost every night.

  Early spring, early morning, and there are already a half dozen surfers in the water. The waves are six to eight feet and seem to run perpendicular to the shore because of the shape of the cove. The water crosses itself, with one set of waves rolling toward the harsh rock outcropping as another set moves in a broad arc toward the beach. The land below the highway in this part of Ventura County curves at nearly ninety degrees, creating a perfect break, provided you don’t stray too far from the cove and get washed across the rocks. Just beyond the pier is the beach attached to La Conchita, the small path beneath the highway its only access point.

  A blanket of dark clouds is gathering. The rain may be coming back. A young girl, no older than ten, her hair loose and free, catches wave after wave in the cove. She cuts through the other surfers, riding the water’s sharp edges away from the shore, toward the islands in the distance. She disappears in a tunnel of bright water, then appears again, the ocean bubbly white beneath her. Finally, the wave curls into itself, and the child is flicked from her board like an ant from a lunch table. No match for nature, she spreads her arms wide, a long, thin band attached to her ankle. The board tilts up, dives into the surf. The girl disappears, then emerges moments later.

  —Ventura, California, 2005

  The New New Middle East

  We’re seeing the birth pangs of a new Middle East.

  —Condoleezza Rice

  We should go to the Arabs with sticks in hand and we should beat them on the heads; we should beat them and beat them and beat them until they stop hating us.

  —Israeli taxi driver, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land by David K. Shipler

  1

  Moments ago they closed a street in Jerusalem. The police came and unspooled red tape and wire as cars backed up Jaffa Road. They wore heavy vests and carried big guns, but they were laughing. Two storekeepers plugged their ears. There was a small explosion. Someone had left a bag sitting in Ben Yehuda Plaza. This is one part of Jerusalem.

  At Mike’s Place in West Jerusalem, the tables are outside and a breeze cuts through the courtyard. I play pool with my friend Maimon, who lives here now with his wife and child. We met at a ski resort eight years ago. I was hitchhiking under a full moon and the white glow of the mountaintops when Maimon stopped to give me a ride. I got a job bartending at the top of the gondola lift, and Maimon taught snowboarding. When we weren’t working, we zipped down the mountains. Those were endless days, when the only thing that mattered was the depth of the snow.

  But that was Colorado, and this is where Jesus died and Mohammed rose to heaven and the Jewish Temple stood for a thousand years, leaving nothing but a retaining wall, where the Hasidim knock the brims of their hats and kiss the bricks and leave notes and prayers for their god. The capital of a nation at war.

  Maimon tells me a story about his time in the Israeli military, before we met.

  “I was in the infantry,” he says. “We were in Gaza, and they were launching mortars at us. We saw where they were setting up. They were in an orphanage. I fired at them, but it was night. I shot with an M60, which is a nineteen-pound machine gun that fires five hundred and fifty rounds per minute. Do you understand what I’m saying? I had coordinates, but I couldn’t see anything, and I was firing on an orphanage.”

  From the bar we head to the Western Wall, where I leave a note on behalf of a friend and kiss the wall. I should perhaps make my own wish for the war to end, but I’m not a believer. We are close to the Via Dolorosa, where Jesus fell carrying the cross he would be nailed to, and we can see the gold dome of the al-Aqsa Mosque. The old city, with its ancient walls and cobbled roads and armies of devout singing and muttering in the dark, is perhaps the most beautiful place on earth. I will go to Gaza soon, twenty-eight miles long and surrounded by an electric fence. All I need is a press card.

  When I go to get that card, they don’t want to give it to me. The press woman says, “What is the Believer? I have never heard of your magazine.”

  “The Believer is a big magazine in America,” I say. She stares blankly at me. “Maybe not that big. It’s a prestige publication.” I ask if she would like a copy, and she looks through me with hatred. Finally I prevail upon her.

  When I leave I say, “Have a nice day.” I kind of want to ask her on a date. I don’t know anybody in Israel except Maimon. She says, “I will not have a nice day. Fourteen Israelis have just been killed in Lebanon.”

  A Hezbollah spokesman says the soldiers were “burned alive in their tanks on our land.”

  2

  It’s quiet in the town of Kiryat Shmona, or it’s very loud. This is the largest town in northern Israel, and when the rockets land, the ground shakes. Then nothing. Everything is very tense. Sometimes the rockets are incoming, but usually Israel fires west to the border. The town is practically empty. The stores are closed except for one, and I stop there and have a beer with a clerk who is watching Keanu Reeves in Speed.

  Many of the residents here have moved to a camp on the beach fifteen miles north of Gaza. The Israeli army is taking more casualties than they expected. The Lebanese are faring much worse. In 2000, the Israeli army pulled out of Lebanon unilaterally after eighteen years of occupation. In 2005, they also pulled out of Gaza. They’re building a wall to block out the West Bank and stealing some land in the process while creating new “facts on the ground” as the settlements grow. The leaders of Israel say they don’t negotiate with terrorists, but it looks like you have to negotiate with your enemies. A nation can’t negotiate with itself.

  I walk at night, watching for the flash of tank muzzles. I see a woman smoking a cigarette, her dog nearby. She doesn’t pay any attention to the missiles falling. A handful of lights is on in the windows. A couple of cars parked, the rest of the spaces empty. I stay in the military hotel near the bus station, and a soldier steals my computer while I sleep.

  The next day I ride in an armored car with Uwe, a large, bald, ruthlessly ambitious press photographer from United Press International. We drive past a field where a missile has struck, leaving a crater and a small fire. There are tanks, troop carriers, D9 demolition vehicles. The D9s are horrific machines with giant steel shovels on the front and thick, round bars surrounding their torso in a cage. All of it built upon the frame of a tank.

  We come upon a military installation, but the officers won’t let us inside. The entire north, they say, is a closed military zone.

  “The north’s not closed,” says Uwe. “They’re just not letting us in. They don’t know what they are doing. They don’t give a shit about us. The other night the army publicists showed us the bodies of Hezbollah fighters. They were wrapped in plastic bags, and they had their guns next to them. They were like hunting rifles. I said, ‘Hey, these guys are giving you trouble? C’mon.”’

  We cross another gate, into the border town of Avivim. There is a Lebanese village half a mile away, but it is empty. I want to cross the border. “No way, man. Everything is booby-trapped.” I ask Uwe for his jacket and helmet, but he just laughs, spins the car around. We can see the minaret of the mosque in the rear window. I feel like we could go over there. Talk to people.

  “I’m too young to die,” Uwe says. “And I love my life.”

  We continue through the rocky countryside. It’s beautiful here, but also very hard. Past artillery and the occasional ambulance. This is the land of kibbutzim, Israeli idealism, communal farms. We wind up the hills along the border.

  We pass another missile smoldering in the earth. We hear explosions, then pass the bushes just set to burn. We can’t get back inside Avivim, so we take a dirt road through the back. There are giant tank guns pointing at us when we exit the woods, but the gunners just smile and wave. Some of the soldiers rest on the ground, heads leaning against their knees. Soon,
though, we are turned around, and it takes an hour to get back because all the roads are closed. Then there is small-arms fire coming from the Lebanese side. Then machine-gun fire from the bluff above us. We stop, surrounded. The cannon bursts are continuous now. There is another village across the valley floor, and there’s fire and smoke there. The sky is blue and purple.

  We are the only car in the road. It’s nearly dusk. I ask myself what I am doing, but I know what I am doing. I’m heading into danger, hoping to understand conflict and war and the price of land. Maimon said I was crazy to come here, but he’s already served two tours in the Israeli military.

  Finally we pull out carefully, back the way we came. There is a great cloud of smoke from behind a Lebanese hill. Massive gun-fire, shelling. We drive to a plateau and park and get out. There’s a TV crew there. Soon there are more photographers watching the smoke and the movements.

  “They’re bombing a new village,” Uwe says.

  Two helicopters hover in the sky above us. The choppers drop flares like flaming shit from pigeons, hoping to distract the Lebanese missiles by drawing them to the heat. Then we see a plane in the distance and realize that is what the helicopters are protecting.

  The plane, everyone thinks, is carrying the new bunker-buster bombs delivered express by the Americans. Now all the cameras point to the sky.

  In the distance two more villages are burning. Or maybe they are the same ones. “You see all the helicopters and missiles,” Uwe says. “I think they are really flattening those places.”

  The hills are filled with whir! bang! and boom! But here in the Upper Galilee, way up high in the strategic position, it is hard to tell the human story contained in that smoke: the families huddling in shelters, trapped children burning to death, others crushed by beams, cut to ribbons by exploding windows, entire families incinerated. Four hundred Lebanese have been killed so far, sixteen hundred wounded.

  This part of Israel, the rocky sliver of land between Syria and Lebanon, has always known fighting. This is where the Syrian army crossed in 1973 and where the PLO attacked from its fiefdom in southern Lebanon prior to the Israeli invasion in 1982. In 1970, a school bus in Avivim was attacked. Nine children and three adults were killed, and nineteen children were permanently crippled. In 1974, three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine snuck into Kiryat Shmona with directions to take hostages. Instead they entered a housing complex and killed eighteen residents inside.

  We leave the plateau, again through woods. Up higher we come upon a tank unit. Two soldiers load the gun, another soldier rests on the hood. “You have to serve in the military here, so you appreciate your country,” the soldier tells me. “We’re doing a good thing, and we’re going to change everything.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I hope so. We lost five soldiers out of our group. My friend lost both of his legs, and we got him out in the tank. There are only fifty soldiers in my unit, so to lose five is a lot. The guys that are dead, I want to visit their families because I know them. But I can’t because we are at war right now.”

  “A soldier stole my computer this morning,” I tell him. “I was staying in the military hotel. It was plugged in, sitting on top of the refrigerator. Somebody came in and stole it while I was sleeping.”

  “A soldier is like anyone,” he tells me. “A soldier also steals.”

  Two days later Uwe and I get stuck in an apple orchard on the Lebanese border while waiting for Israeli troops to return. I decide to leave and walk out onto an empty road, closed by a checkpoint nearly three miles away. I realize I am walking alone on the border and I could be shot and there would be no return fire. It’s my first taste of the fear.

  On the day when at least twenty-eight are killed in an Israeli shelling of an apartment building in Qana, Lebanon, a hundred missiles rain on Kiryat Shmona. Four missiles fall near our hotel, and a reporter from Haaretz is taken to the hospital with shrapnel wounds. He had been interviewing someone whose house had been bombed when another bomb fell on the building next door. The firefighters around Kiryat Shmona are out spraying the fields. There are six injuries in Kiryat Shmona, and property is destroyed, but nobody dies, because the town is nearly empty and those who stayed kept to the shelters.

  The Lebanese who died were in shelters as well. They thought they were safe. But Israeli bombs are stronger and Lebanese buildings are weaker, and the building collapsed and everybody perished and the pictures are all of dead babies covered in dirt and rock.

  As the Israelis push deeper into Lebanon, the Lebanese missile fire focuses on the Upper Galilee, the northernmost point of the country. Shaba Farms is here, just a few kilometers from the city. According to the United Nations, Shaba Farms belongs to Syria, and Israel keeps it, waiting for a treaty. But the Lebanese say it belongs to them, and Hezbollah says it will fight until every inch of Lebanon is liberated. So when Israel withdrew unilaterally in 2000, Israel kept Shaba Farms, which it had taken from Syria in 1967. There are people who joke that the war with Lebanon is over three acres and a goat. There are others who say that if Israel had pulled out of Lebanon when the PLO left for Tunis in 1982, there would be no Hezbollah. But nobody knows.

  At a kibbutz near the border, there is a pond and a small field filled with deer. Soldiers back from Lebanon lie around the water, clips removed, rifles slung loosely over their shoulders. There are signs warning people to beware of the animals. A deer was born two weeks ago. They named him Katyusha, after the rocket.

  When the first rockets fell near the hotel this morning, it felt like the walls were going to break. We ran to the porch, saw the blackened field, the smoke rising, fire on the hills, and also smoke coming from where we couldn’t see to the west.

  Safed is a holy city, supposedly founded by a son of Noah and certainly dating back to the Romans. It’s the center of Jewish kabbalism. Madonna was here recently, swimming in the purifying waters. Like the Upper Galilee, Safed is mostly empty. There is still a guard at the coffee factory, but the coffee isn’t being processed. He shows me where the missile came through the roof into the third floor. “I would have been standing right there, but I was on my break. I was playing sudoku.”

  From the roof of the factory, we can see the scorched hillside near the hospital. The hospital’s windows are broken, and tops of buildings are smashed in places. I meet a man who has just returned from southern Israel, where the rockets can’t reach. He talks to me about the fear. “You’re playing Russian roulette,” he says, “walking in the streets.” He says they have a safe room in their house. “You shouldn’t be here. If you hear a whistle, find a wall and stand behind it. If you feel something, be careful.”

  I meet Jonas, an American Jew who has decided against leaving. His child brings me a twisted piece of rocket that landed nearby. Jonas wants to know what my angle is.

  “I’m anti-victim,” I tell him. He invites me into his house, and we talk about fear. He says the rockets started falling on the same day the walls of Jerusalem were breached in ancient times. He says today is the anniversary of the death of a famous scholar and that normally there would be ten thousand people here.

  “We were fasting, and when we broke the fast, we set up a table outside, and a rocket came and exploded when it touched the top of a tree only twenty feet away. The tree saved my life. You don’t know,” he says. “You don’t know if it will land here or in the valley or in Haifa. We seem safe sitting here, but we’re not safe.

  “Listen,” he says. “There was a woman who was six months pregnant, but she went into labor early. She goes to the hospital. When she comes home, her house has been destroyed. You see. It was a miracle.”

  Jonas invites me to stay, but I don’t. Jonas says, “They want to push us into the sea. They will wait, and wait …”

  There is danger everywhere, but it is nothing compared with the images broadcast from Lebanon, entire cities reduced to piles of rock. Some argue that what matters is who started it. Others say
it is a disproportionate response. Everybody wants to feel safe, but that isn’t what people are fighting for. Jonas thought the Arabs and the Jews would always be at war. I mentioned Jordan and Egypt, but he didn’t think that counted for much.

  Back to Tel Aviv. The beach in the evening is warm and peaceful. People here don’t really feel what is happening closer to the border. This is the secular heart of the country, where people drink and dance and swim in the ocean and nearly everyone speaks English. There are sex shops and parties, and nothing seems to have slowed down. I sit at Mike’s Place. Maimon meets me when he gets off work. And we are too late when the tow truck comes and snatches Maimon’s car. It takes only seconds for the truck’s bars to slide beneath the chassis and hoist the car in the air. Maimon screams at the police officer, pulling on his own hair.

  “You have another job for me?” the officer asks. “I’ll do something else.”

  3

  The day before I’m supposed to go to Gaza, I ask an Orthodox Jew at a bus stop where I can find a synagogue. He introduces himself as Michael, and he invites me to go with him to the Western Wall; it happens to be the anniversary of the destruction of the temple. Michael hasn’t shaved in three weeks. Jews are supposed to suffer to help them remember. Some people put dirt in their shoes.

  On the way we stop at a demonstration protesting the forced removal of the settlers from the Gaza Strip. They wave orange flags, and some have orange strips tied to the ends of rifles.

  Michael tells me I’m not half-Jewish. “That’s like being half-pregnant. If your mother’s not Jewish, then you’re not Jewish.” I feel rejected. “C’mon,” Michael says. “I didn’t invent these laws. Do you think I don’t want to eat pork?”