The Pillars of Hercules

So what was it? Tel Aviv had no Mediterranean look, nor anything of the Levant in its design; it was Israeli in the sense that Israeli architecture and city planning is an American derivative. Somewhere on the east coast of Florida there must be a city that Tel Aviv resembles, a medium-sized seaside settlement of ugly high-rise buildings and hotels, a shopping district, a promenade by the sea, not many trees; a white population watching gray flopping waves under a blue sky.

Did the appearance of it mean anything? I spoke to some people in Tel Aviv. I began to think that what was visible in Israel was less important than what was felt.

“You know about the bombing?” a man named Levescu said to me, utterly dismissing a question I had asked him about the look and the texture of Tel Aviv. He waved away what I had said with an irritable gesture. “Twenty-five people! On a bus! An Arab!”

“Yes, I read about it,” I said. “Terrible.”

“Terrible!”

This tragedy had put Tel Aviv in the news for having had one of the worst massacres in recent Israeli history: twenty-five dead, forty-eight people wounded. That had happened only a week before.

“It was revenge, wasn’t it?”

“Revenge—for what? It was murder!”

Some months before, in Hebron, a man named Baruch Goldstein had entered the Shrine of the Patriarchs (a mosque, but also a synagogue, where Abraham, Rebecca, Leah, Isaac and Jacob are entombed) during prayers, perhaps with the connivance of Israeli soldiers—after all, Goldstein was heavily armed—and howled, “No Arab should live in the biblical land of Israel!” He machine-gunned twenty-nine men to death, severely wounded over a hundred men, and was himself beaten to death.

The members of the Palestinian group Hamas (an Arabic acronym but also meaning enthusiasm or ardor or zeal) had vowed revenge. The Tel Aviv suicide bomb was their reply.

“There will be no dialogue with Hamas,” Prime Minister Rabin had said on Israeli television. “We will fight to the death!”

I mentioned to Mr. Levescu that it seemed there would be more violence.

“You didn’t hear the news?” Then he told me.

Three Palestinians had just been killed that morning at a checkpoint in Hebron.

That night watching television in Tel Aviv I saw another killing, and it had taken place either that day or some few days earlier. A videotape taken by a freelance journalist showed an Israeli soldier giving the coup de grace to an injured and unarmed Palestinian. The tape showed the soldier sighting down his rifle and firing a bullet at the struggling man’s head and blasting the skull to pieces. It was explained that the man, Nidal Tamiari, had had a fistfight with the soldier. The military denied that the soldier had shot the man in cold blood. The spokesman said, “He was verifying the kill.”

It was too late to ask Mr. Levescu what he thought, but in any case I had a feeling I knew what he would say. This is war! He had said it often enough in our conversation at the cafe by the sea in Tel Aviv. His sentiments were predictable, and his story was fairly typical.

“We left Romania in 1946,” he said. “Father, mother, brother and me, and sister.”

They crossed the border into Hungary, made their way by train to Budapest, where they hid. They were smuggled to Vienna, then into Germany. They stayed awhile, they received some help, they headed south to France, moving slowly, and once on the coast traveled east, entered Italy and got a train to Bari. A ferry took them to Cyprus. They were among many Jews there, awaiting transfer to Israel. At last they arrived in Haifa. The trip from Romania had taken a year.

“My father joined the Haganah [“Defense,” the Jewish guerrilla army prior to independence] and we were given a house,” he said. “The house is still there in Haifa. Arabs were our neighbors. We visited them. They came to our house. We liked their food better than they liked ours. We ate with Arabs!”

That reminiscence, like the Pilgrim Fathers befriending the Red Indians, and being helped by them, was a frequent detail in stories of Israeli pioneers in Palestine.

“Weren’t you fighting the Arabs?” I asked.

“Other Arabs,” he said. “And British.”

“Which other Jews were here when you arrived in 1947?”

“The first wave had been Russians. Then Poles. Then Bulgarians and Romanians,” he said. “In the 1950s we got Moroccans and North African Jews—Algeria, Tunisia. And others.”

“Americans?”

“Not many from America,” he said. He laughed—not mirth: it was a nervous expression of the Israeli ambivalence towards America. “Americans come here. They look. They smile. They know they have something better.”

“What do you think of America?”

“America is the grandfather of Israel,” he said. Or it might have been “godfather.”