The Pillars of Hercules

The following day, in Gaza, at the Palestinian settlement of Khan Yunis, a Palestinian journalist, Hani Abed, was blown up by a sophisticated bomb that had detonated under his car when he turned the ignition key. Such a bomb could only have been placed there by the Israeli secret service members, Mossad. It seemed as though what Rabin had said just the other day about fighting to the death was being proven.

This was not denied; on the contrary, it was heavily hinted that this was so by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz (The Land): “Hani Abed … got the punishment coming to him, ‘for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind,’ ” including Hamas in the denunciation.

Wiping someone out and then quoting a bit of blood-spattered scripture (this text from Hosea 8:7 was an old standby) seemed fairly routine. But of course that was not the end of it, for several days later a boy on a bike pedaled past an Israeli checkpoint into Gaza City and blew himself up, along with two soldiers, and he was instantly proclaimed a martyr for the Palestinian cause.

That was an about average week. I happened to be there, writing it down. It went some way towards explaining why the Israeli soldiers were anxious and fatigued, why strangers never chatted in trains or buses, and why the atmosphere was so sullen.

There had been no public expression of bereavement in Tel Aviv over the bus bombing. No flags at half-mast, no wreaths, no ribbons. There were angry letters to the Jerusalem Post in this regard: “What is wrong with us that we cannot express our own grief.”

That did not mean that no one grieved; there had to be great sorrow. But the silence meant there also had to be tremendous resentment, anger and frustration. Out of this bitterness came feelings of revenge, and support for any politician who vowed it (as most did, ad nauseam) to the death. This and the unforgiving attitude seemed an Israeli rather than a Jewish reaction.

There was not much public expression of joy either—not much laughter, no talking on buses and trains, no sense of animation; more a sort of sick-of-it-all, seen-it-all attitude that was laced with suspicion. After dark the Tel Aviv streets emptied, and the same was true of Haifa—almost no nighttime pedestrians. That was a clear sign of high anxiety.

Even Tel Aviv, in spite of its long beach and leafy suburbs, had the look of a fortress, for its militarism gave it the same colonial garrison look that Haifa had. It looked out of place, built on sand, artificial and incongruous. It was both too big and not big enough, and only its traffic and loud music and air conditioners gave it a Miami sound.

I went to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, about a twenty-minute walk from my hotel. It contained a number of works which I had seen elsewhere—rusty shovels (“Untitled #34”), flashing lights (“Neon Fragment”), rags on hooks (“Work in Progress”), and the last resort of the artist barren of imagination, broken crockery glued to plywood (“Spatial Relationships”)—perhaps the splinters and shards of the very plates the artist’s spouse had flung in frustration, crying, “Why don’t you get a job!”

This frivolity did not speak of Israel, but obviously someone—a wealthy person in Tel Aviv—had put up the money for this. One exhibit showed photographs of small naked girls, six- and eight-year-olds, smiling, with trusting faces, sitting with their legs apart. The expression “kiddie porn” did not describe such pathetic trust and violation.

We have all been in such art museums and said, “It makes me mad.” And been told by the ludicrous supporters of such junk, “That’s good. It’s supposed to make you mad.”

But the museum was not a total waste. There was also a one-person show by an Israeli artist named Pamela Levy—photographic paintings, all of them arresting, many of them upsetting. Some were scenes of battlefields, showing dead and dismembered soldiers, and the horror of war. Many were depictions of biblical characters, or Old Testament re-creations of Israeli life, hairy men and chubby women in classic poses. Many of the naked men were shown hooded. “Lot and His Daughters” had a sinister carnality—naked girls and a supine old man, and the painting entitled “Rape” was disturbing most of all because it looked like a form of fooling that was about to turn violent.

The artist Pamela Levy had been born in Iowa in 1949 and had come to Israel in 1976. She was as much of an Israeli as anyone else here, but I felt that her painting said a great deal about the state of mind here: the repression, the aggression, the fantasies, the nakedness, the sexual ambiguity, the terror. Those paintings seemed to offer an insight to the turmoil in the country, and so her art was true.

Later, I had lunch with the Cohens from London. I bumped into them in a restaurant and we talked. They were an elderly middle-class couple, very polite to each other and pleased to be in Israel. It was their annual holiday.