Death as a Way of Life Read online

  This morning, when I woke up my eleven-year-old son, he asked, “Has today’s terrorist attack already happened?” My son is scared, as are most of Israel’s citizens—during the last two weeks there have been five suicide bombings, in which more than fifty Israelis were killed and hundreds wounded. We have seen horrifying scenes of civilian slaughter of a kind we did not see in our worst wars. People have been crying out: How long will this go on? What kind of peace is this? Even Israelis who have supported the peace process so far have begun losing confidence in it, and the public opinion polls show a sharp rise in support for the political parties of the right, PERES, PERES, taunted the signs at a right-wing demonstration after the attacks, is THIS WHAT YOUR NEW MIDDLE EAST LOOKS LIKE?

  True, the vision and idea seem impotent when faced with the stench of scorched flesh and the spilt blood. Fear overwhelms all other thoughts—when you walk down the street, you examine everyone you see seven times over. Any one of them might be your murderer (and, surprisingly, you discover that almost every single person—even familiar ones—appears sinister in some way). Every decision is liable to be a fateful one. Should I stop for a drink at this stand, or wait to get to the next one? Should I send my two children to school on the same bus? (And then there’s the decision over which child to send on the 7:10 and which child on the following bus.) I find myself walking down the main street where I have walked since childhood, the bustling, raucous, somewhat provincial main street of Jerusalem, with my mind ceaselessly smashing this beloved scene into little bits. I keep bidding the familiar farewell. Its impermanence elicits my compassion. Everything is so fragile—the body, routine, family, the fabric of life.

  We Israelis are accustomed to living in the vicinity of death. I’ll never forget how a young couple once told me about their plans for the future: they’d get married and have three children. Not two, but three. Because if one dies, there will still be two left. This heart-wrenching way of thinking is not foreign to me. It’s the product of the unbearable lightness of death that prevails here, a way of seeing things that, in my opinion, is also characteristic of the long-suffering Palestinians. It’s precisely the disease that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat sought to cure by turning onto the road of peace. Hamas’s suicide bombers want to keep the disease alive, and volunteer to spread it. Once, years ago, they hijacked airplanes; today they wish to hijack our future.

  It is depressing to think that we are conducting a dialogue of peace with people who have among them spiritual-religious shepherds who enthusiastically send young people to their deaths in order to kill Jews. I cannot comprehend exactly what kind of God these people worship. What God can be proud that His people slaughter little children on their way to a holiday party?

  It’s also depressing to see that, until now, we hear almost no Palestinian voices condemning these acts of mass murder. Where are you, Palestinian intellectuals who should be denouncing this? Where are the writers, where are the humanists? Don’t you understand that this is no longer just Israel’s war? After all, Hamas will want to impose its fanatic worldview on you moderate, secular people as well.

  Tempers are high in Israel. People are demanding revenge and the annulment of the entire peace process. But even in this difficult hour, we must remember that this is the one way open to us if we want to live. We’ve already tried the alternative route, the one opposed to peace, for decades, and we still bear its physical and spiritual scars. The peace process will be long and painful, and apparently not all of us will survive it, but there are no quick solutions to such a complex and lengthy conflict. Israel and the moderate Palestinians help each other all along the way, because peace is the only state that can ensure that at least our grandchildren—I no longer believe that it will apply to our children—will be able to live a life of security, of normalcy, of blessed routine. A life in which young couples will want to have three children, maybe more, simply because it is a joy to raise them.

  Open Letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

  October 1996

  Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud Party, won the general elections of May 29, 1996 by a razor-thin margin of 51 percent to Shimon Peres of Labor’s 49 percent. The election results clearly reflected Israel’s deep division on the issue of national security. After initially declaring that he would not convene with Arafat, Netanyahu met the Palestinian leader at the Erez roadblock in the Gaza Strip on October 6, 1996.

  Mr Prime Minister, the moment of truth has arrived, like it or not. The talks that will commence in a few hours will ostensibly address only specific points of disagreement. But in the new state of affairs that you have created, these talks might well be the last opportunity to get the peace process back on track, without forcing us all, Israelis and Palestinians, to endure another lengthy bloodbath.

  Reality lies before you—read it. Israel cannot long maintain a situation in which the Palestinians live in frustration and rage. Any solution that does not give the Palestinians hope for a state of their own, within a reasonable period of time, will intensify their frustration and rage. Do you perceive some new way to resolve this dilemma?

  There is no other way but the way begun by the late Yitzhak Rabin and by Shimon Peres. We have no alternative reality, and there is no half-solution. Most of the world’s countries have recognized this, as has most of Palestinian society. Even most of the Israeli nation has already begun to adjust, if without great enthusiasm, to the idea of sharing the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Five or ten years in the future, after hundreds or thousands have lost their lives, there will be two countries here. They will not have great mutual trust, but they will fear the alternative. They won’t relinquish their dreams, but they will understand the clear advantages of accepting each other’s existence.

  Is there really no other way? There is, of course. It’s the way of hostility and humiliation and occupation. But we’ve already tried that, and we’ve seen where it led us. If we go down that path again, we will find it to be more violent and horrible than ever before. We’ve already come to realize that the more time Israel tries to buy, the higher the price it has to pay in concessions, in blood, and in internal disintegration. For those who choose life, there is currently only one way—that of the great and painful concession, of the calculated risk.

  Rarely does the world present us with such a drastic and clear choice. Any step that does not lead directly and uncompromisingly to this one road leads to the other. Convoluted words and phrases can no longer create a new condition. The writing is already on the wall, and it is written, as the poet Yehuda Amichai said (in another context), in three languages—Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

  Three days ago you issued a heartfelt and, in your words, sincere appeal to the Palestinians, and spoke of your desire for real peace. But in all honesty, Mr Prime Minister, if you were this morning a Palestinian who desired peace, would the offers that Israel has been making over the last three months seem like “real peace”?

  I pose to you another question, which is the core of the matter, in my opinion. Does the vision that you are offering us Israelis today, really include our great and only chance of recovering, finally, from the historical error that has drawn our blood and all the good we could have within us? What is the point of aspiring to lead Israel at this time, in this situation, if you are not able to promise Israeli citizens the opportunity to end its occupation of another nation?

  Mr Prime Minister, the late Yitzhak Rabin entered the Oslo process knowing that he also represented the half of the nation that feared this peace. The Oslo Accords actually reflect the anxieties of this half of the Israeli people. This morning, and in the days to come, when you brief your representatives, when you go to meet Yasir Arafat again, and when you face difficult decisions, please do not forget that you also represent those of the other half of the nation who, despite their trepidation, are not prepared to continue this way. For these people, the very desire to live is being taken from them because
they have spent the last thirty years in circumstances that they view as deformed, immoral, unjust, and, especially, not safe. It’s this half of the nation that will have difficulty understanding why it is being called to fight, very soon, when the secure peace you have promised becomes a slaughtered peace.

  You represent those millions of Israelis as well. You must give them voice; their hopes must be realized in your actions; their courage must beat within you.

  If the peace that you intend to lay before the Palestinians and Israelis today is not substantially different from what you have proposed so far, there is no reason to even send your delegates to the Erez roadblock for negotiations. Better that you, too, remain in your office, to prepare the nation and the army for what lies ahead. But if you want true peace—not a peace of virtual, imaginary reality, not a compromise that answers only to your own needs—you must begin, at last, to work for it today.

  The answer to all the questions I have raised here will be given in the next few days. It will be an unambiguous, definite answer, and we eagerly await it with anticipation and hope. We’ll know how to identify and decipher the answer no matter how you spin it. You have boasted that you have won thirty debating competitions in the American school you attended, but to answer the questions that the country’s majority puts to you this morning, you do not need convoluted rebuttals, neither for Israelis nor for Palestinians. You need only one word. Are you or are you not ushering in change, toward real peace? Is it or is it not a peace that will have a partner? Can you say, in all sincerity, that as the leader of this nation, you have this week chosen life?

  No Peace, No Security

  July 1997

  Two coordinated suicide bombings on July 30, 1997, in the Jerusalem Mahaneh Yehuda market, left sixteen people dead and 180 wounded. Five weeks later, central Jerusalem was hit again with another major terrorist attack carried out by three Hamas suicide bombers. On October 1, 1997, Israel acceded to pressure from Jordan and released the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

  Two explosions that slayed so many Israelis and wounded nearly two hundred have also punctured the strange bubble in which Israelis have been floating this past year.

  Despair and paralysis pervaded the bubble, as did, in particular, a desire not to know what is really happening. In the period since Benjamin Netanyahu came to power, it seemed as if no one in Israel truly understood the reality that the prime minister was creating with his sleights of hand, and the consequences of that reality. The situation has repeatedly reached the brink of explosion, yet each time, at the last minute, the peace process has been rescued. Not in order to surge forward toward realization, but rather again to tread water.

  The explosions in Jerusalem’s central open-air market woke all of us up from the absurd illusion that things could stay as they are indefinitely. The explosions also proved the irrelevance of Netanyahu’s campaign slogan “Making a secure peace,” and showed that without peace there is also no security.

  True, under the Rabin and Peres governments there were also mass murders of innocent Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers, but then, at least, it was clear that a genuine peace would gradually reduce the number and power of those who support such acts. Today it is hard to speak of the Palestinians having any hope. The majority of Israelis do not realize the depth of Palestinian despair and humiliation caused by Israeli government policies. Under these circumstances, it is now clear, Israeli lives will be as intolerable as Palestinian lives.

  The two peoples have not learned anything. Israel condemns the use of force and terror, but itself exerts the full force of its political, economic, and military might to suffocate the Palestinians in the occupied territories and to extinguish any glimmer of hope they may have. Arafat, in his distress, but also as a result of his own cynical calculations, is not prepared to withdraw his own cards of force and violence. He has taken great care not to make any serious effort to fight terrorism and Hamas’s supporters (only two weeks ago, senior Palestinian officers and policemen from the Palestinian Authority were caught on their way to committing a terrorist attack in Israel). Each time he speaks publicly, he takes care to leave the option of war open.

  On the face of it, one might have thought that in such a savage region, only the language of violence could ensure political gain. But that, too, is an illusion that we should have long ago abandoned. Violence justifies more violence and makes pursuers of peace despair all the more.

  Today is especially bitter and depressing, because only four years ago we could envision how despicable acts such as this explosion might be gradually relegated to the past. We almost realized a dream, but it has evaporated. Again we are caught up in the spiral of violence we were born into. We want peace, but it seems that many, among both peoples, are still not ripe for it. The pessimists in Israel like to say that only another round of violence will make the two sides come to their senses, but now even that seems optimistic fantasy. Another war will only make the positions of each side more extreme, and will drag more people into the cycle of hatred and revenge.

  The dead lie before us, innocent dead, pawns in the hands of incompetent and cynical leaders. It seems that this last explosion requires us to look at reality as it is. Israelis and Palestinians cannot on their own reach an agreement that will ensure true peace. They are hostages of their history and psychology, and have lost their ability to save themselves. If there are still other countries that care about what is happening in this corner of the world, they should take action to force the leaders on both sides to begin talking seriously. The American tactic of “letting the sides stew in their own juices” is not effective. Neither is European caution called for. We now need determined pressure on both sides, especially on Israel, which holds most of the cards. Pressure that will take account of the justified fears of the two peoples and of their actual needs. Pressure that may just save the Israelis and the Palestinians from themselves.

  Whose Life Is It, Anyway?

  September 1998

  This article was written on the eve of the coming Jewish New Year.

  This week, with the Jewish year drawing to a close, is a time for making personal and communal assessments. A seemingly strange question came to me in this context: Are there any Israelis today who feel that they are living the life they would like to live?

  Also, how has it happened that the Israeli reality is, more than anything else, a depressing sequence of compromises and anxieties and apathy and fatalism?

  And the government, the one elected by the majority—who, actually, does it represent today?

  In other words, would Israelis today, even a handful, on the left or on the right, give their votes to any leader whose platform promised voters the current state of affairs?

  “We’ve got a wonderful country,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thunders at every opportunity. He’s right—we really do have a wonderful country, but why does it seem like a dream that is steadily fading? And why does almost every large sector of the population—the religious, the secular, the settlers, the members of Peace Now, the Russians, the Ethiopians, the ultraorthodox, the unemployed, the Israeli Arabs—see itself as a persecuted minority, living under a hostile regime? And why do so many Israelis feel that an ever-expanding abyss of alienation stretches between them and their own country?

  Apparently, there’s something mesmerizing about that abyss. It’s a fact: nearly 6 million people are being sucked into it without protesting much, without frequent, huge demonstrations, without vigils at every street corner. There are no individual hunger strikes, or any other legitimate act of civil disobedience. There’s not even a single television satire worthy of the name.

  But the sense that something has passed us by doesn’t let go, the feeling that something precious and rare is slipping through our fingers, irrevocably. Perhaps, for that reason, Israelis are becoming more bitter and resentful by the year, displaying a specific kind of hostility toward one another, like that of prisoners sharing a
cell, like partners in a failing business.

  How little sympathy and understanding we have, even for other Israelis who don’t belong to our own group. With what rage, or derision, we relate to the real, authentic pain of Israelis who are not “us.” As if our automatic and long-standing refusal to recognize at least some of the Palestinian claims, lest any of the justice of our own cause be appropriated from us, has seeped into our most inner selves and set entirely awry our common sense and natural family instincts. At times it seems as if what Jews do to other Jews in this country would be defined in any other country as nothing less than antisemitism.

  Those who return to Israel after a long absence are generally amazed by the tremendous development of the cities, the roads, and the malls, but are taken aback by the people themselves—the brutality, the vulgarity, and the insensitivity. Those who live here have long since ceased being surprised by this. Within an astoundingly short time our young, friendly, bold country has undergone mental processes of accelerated aging. With a peculiar enthusiasm, Israel has taken on a manner that is rigid, suspicious, dejected, and, more than anything else, lacking confidence in its ability to change, to be re-created into a better tomorrow.

  As in an old science fiction story, an entire nation has been caught in a time warp, where it spins round and round, doomed to relive all the worst evils of its tragic history. Maybe, for that reason, when Israel is at the height of its military power, Israelis themselves lose their ability to act. They become nonpersons, victims in fact; only, this time they are their own victims.

  Six million people have allowed their mind, their will, and their judgment to degenerate into infuriating criminal passivity. They have lost their ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Most of all, they have lost the healthy instinct that should rouse and shake them, that will remind them what their goals and needs are, their most profound ones as a people and as a society.