The Pillars of Hercules

Politicians tended to simplify the sides into Jews and Arabs, but such designations were totally misleading. A Jew might be a Moroccan, fluent in Arabic and Hebrew and French, raised in Marrakech and educated in Tel Aviv; or a Russian from Odessa now living in a settler village in Gaza, or a monoglot girl in pigtails from south Florida. An Arab might be as complex and interesting as the man I met over coffee in east Jerusalem—a Christian named Michel, born in Jaffa in 1933, his father Palestinian, his mother Italian. “Many Italians used to come and stay here, because it was a holy land for them, too.” He said that since 1948 there had been nothing but trouble. The influx of militant Jews had made it impossible for him to go on living in Jaffa, so he had had to come here to Jerusalem, where there was safety in numbers. He had been married in the Church of St. Anne in the Old City and believed (as I did) that Jerusalem should be an open city, internationalized, and not an Israeli stronghold. The Israelis had knocked down walls and put up offices and rearranged and rebuilt Jerusalem to suit their political ends.

His twenty-year-old son was in Iraq, studying engineering.

“Because I have no money,” he said. “And Saddam Hussein gives scholarships to Palestinians.”

There were some Palestinians at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and there was a Palestinian university at Beir Zeit in Nablus. But in general Israel took no responsibility for educating the underclass of Palestinians any more than they saw the Palestinians as having a right to their own portion of the country. Not much was being asked—at most about twenty percent of what was rightfully theirs. Without partition there will be no peace, but in the present atmosphere peace was a long way off.

It was an atmosphere of conflict, a joyless unrestful place in which from the simplest transactions like being ripped off for a taxi fare, to the highest levels of government, there was no finesse. It was all sour looks, the suspicion, the sharp elbows, the silences, the soldiers, and fundamentalists of all descriptions. Both sides were fearful, racialistic, intolerant and paranoid. Israelis ignored the fact that they snatched and settled land that was not theirs. Their usual reply to any complaints was: You hate Jews.

The worst turn of events was the recent rash of suicide bombers. Ironically, it was an Israeli, Baruch Goldstein, who initiated this new form of warfare, when he killed twenty-nine Muslims at prayer at a mosque in Hebron. He knew when he opened fire that he would never leave the mosque alive; he was beaten to death. Soon after him there were three Palestinian suicide bombers, in separate incidents, who managed to bring Israelis down with them, and this has become the principal tactic, and the most violent so far, in the war between the extreme Palestinian groups (Hamas and Hezbollah) and the Israelis. There are few defenses against the person who is willing to sacrifice his life to kill others.

There was always a violent reply. The Israelis, obsessively retributive, had an absolutely unforgiving rule of retaliation, and always with greater force. It assured a continuing hopelessness and an impasse.

A new development was that their dislike and fear of Palestinians had reached such a pitch that their answer now to Palestinian demands was the hiring of immigrant laborers and field hands from Thailand, the Philippines, and Poland—desperate so-called guest workers—to bring in the harvest. In the absence of Jews willing to perform the menial tasks that had been assigned to Palestinians, there were now seventy thousand such immigrants, a new element in the society, and a new underclass of non-Jews.

In a crowded almost silent bus, jammed with passengers, I rode to Haifa. Only one person spoke, an old Ethiopian Jew—a patriarch, traveling with his large family. He carried a fly whisk and called out loudly in Amharic when he saw anything unusual. It was very easy to translate his exclamations. We passed the airport. Look at the planes! he cried. We passed the railway line. Look at the train! We were stuck in traffic. Look at all the cars! and nearer Haifa, traveling along the coast, the old man was delighted. The sea! The sea!

The blue water lapped at the low shore of tumbled dunes.

Intending to be early, in order to catch the Sea Harmony, I went directly from the station to the pier. In the event, I very nearly missed it.

“Come with me,” an Israeli security officer said to me as he leafed through my passport.