Exile: a novel (41 page)

Leaving the plane, he followed the signs to the baggage claim area, his meeting place with Bryce Martel’s friend Zev Ernheit.

Ernheit was a broad-shouldered man in his early forties with a graying crew cut, prominent features, and perceptive brown eyes that seemed to take in David with skepticism and a trace of grim amusement, as if to say, What have I got here? It was the expected response, David supposed, of a former Mossad operative to the Jewish lawyer for the accused Palestinian assassin of Amos Ben-Aron.

Ernheit’s handshake was firm, his manner direct. “If you’re not too tired,” he said, “we’ll stop for a history lesson on the way to Jerusalem. Martel assures me that anything I tell you will be new.”

Even as he spoke, David noticed Ernheit’s air of tensile alertness, the way his glance swiftly took in those around them. The loose short-sleeved shirt he wore, David realized, concealed a gun. “Anything,” David answered with a smile. “And everything. Including who really murdered Amos Ben-Aron.”

Ernheit merely shrugged, his look of amusement gone.

The newly paved roadway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem ran through a landscape of rocky hills that had once been desert but now was dotted with pines. The early Zionists, Carole had told him, had determined to create an arable land by planting trees—in Hebrew school, Carole and her friends had raised money to support the planting of yet more trees. What David was seeing now, Ernheit told him, was a hundred years of planting, more than two hundred million trees, creating Israel’s own small miracle, the only man-made climatic change in human history that was for the better.

“All these trees,” Ernheit observed, “are a metaphor. The State of Israel is not only rooted in our history but in the sweat of a million Jews. The land that Palestinians claim as theirs is not the land they left.”

The modern houses of Israeli Jews, David saw, tended to be white stucco structures with red roofs, which seemingly had sprung from nothing. Clustered together, they reminded David of the exurbia that typified southern California, with its sense of suddenness, vitality, man’s irresistible enterprise. On a nearby hill, David spotted a cluster of sprawling homes above which the dome of a mosque was outlined against blue sky. “An Arab village,” Ernheit observed.

David nodded. “The architecture’s different.”

Ernheit kept his eyes on the road. “The cultures are different,” he
answered laconically. “Jewish children leave home, Arab sons bring their wives home to live with their families. So the homes themselves just keep on growing.”

Quiet, David thought of Hana and her parents. “About Ben-Aron,” Ernheit said abruptly, “our important conversations will take place out-of-doors. You’re an intruder here, an unwelcome guest. Take it as a given that your telephone calls will be monitored, your hotel room bugged. You’re also likely to be followed.”

“For what reason?”

Squinting in the midday light, Ernheit put on sunglasses. “Let us suppose,” he said, “that our government believes what you do—that a conspiracy to murder our prime minister included Jews. Assume further that they do not yet know who was involved in the conspiracy, or its dimensions. In which case they are as anxious to know as you are. Perhaps more.”

“Why waste time on me?”

“Why not? You may actually stumble across something they want to know. There are some in Israel who, for reasons of their own, may wish to help you.”

And whose side are you on,
David wondered. He could not be entirely sure, he thought to his discomfort, that Ernheit was not himself a human wiretap. “I’ll remember that,” David answered.

They stopped on a hill with a distant view of the city of Jerusalem. At its crest, partially shaded by leafy green trees, was an ancient stone building that, but for the Islamic inscription above its entrance, could have been a church. As they approached it on foot, David asked, “What place is this?”

“A good place to start,” Ernheit answered. “The church that became a mosque. The burial place of Samuel, perhaps the greatest prophet of the Jews. One of only three—the others being Aaron and Moses—ever to converse with God.”

“Who built the original structure?”

“Crusaders, the scum of Europe. They came to extract holy relics and instead struck Islam at its heart, setting off its ceaseless conflict with the West.” Pausing, Ernheit pointed to the inscription. “That’s the work of Saladin, the great emperor who reconquered Jerusalem and restored honor to the Muslim world. So this became a holy place for three religions.”

David followed Ernheit through the entrance. Inside, the stone building was divided into sections—a mosque where Muslims could pray, a portion of the old church preserved for Christians, and, at its center, two sets
of steps, one for men and one for women. Following Ernheit down the stone steps, David saw the tomb of Samuel covered in cloth, beside which three Hasidim sat, their heads bowed, reciting prayers as their bodies rocked slowly back and forth.

Emerging, Ernheit and David sat on the hillside facing Jerusalem. Pointing to an adjacent hill, Ernheit said, “That’s where Saul, the first king of Israel, built his palace. But the structure you see is the unfinished palace of Hussein, the Bedouin king of Jordan, abandoned when we conquered it in the war of 1967. You begin to understand, I imagine, what I’m telling you.”

David sorted through his sense of shifting boundaries, religious sites built on top of one another, the intertwined histories of contending peoples. “That everything here is complicated,” he ventured.

Ernheit laughed softly. “Even truth. In the Middle East, there are at least four versions. For believers there is theology—the written word of God, infallibly true. But for Jews and Muslims, God’s truth is different and conflicting.” Ernheit hooked a thumb at the structure behind them. “Here, as you have seen, is archaeological truth, the record of men’s footprints, to which theological truth does not always conform. Then there is historic truth, combining fact and myth, a narrative of the past as a people wishes it to be.

“Finally, there is political truth—history’s first draft, a story of the current day in which religion, archaeology, and history are shaped to the need of the teller. Which is why Arafat insisted, contrary to the Jewish truth, that the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine, is not built on the site where Abraham came to sacrifice his favorite son, Isaac—who, in the Islamic telling, was Ishmael, the precursor of Muslims.”

David smiled. “Sibling rivalry.”

“Only this one’s three thousand years old. In essence, it’s a contest between Muslims and Jews over which is the favored people of God, each claiming that He granted them the land to which both have sought to return.” Ernheit spoke with resignation. “In Hana Arif ’s view, she lives in the Occupied Territories, surrounded by Jewish oppressors. But to many Jews, she lives in the biblical land of Judea and Samaria, now occupied by Arab terrorists and anti-Semites—the descendants of those who slaughtered Jewish settlers in the 1920s and ’30s, and call our Day of Independence their Day of Tragedy.”

“And for you?” David asked. “Where does history start—and end?”

Ernheit pondered this, then pointed at the distant skyline of Jerusalem. “For me, sitting in this place, it starts three thousand years ago.” He turned, looking hard at David. “
This
is where the Jewish people were born—not Argentina, or Uganda, or any of the other throwaway places the world suggested we settle after the Holocaust was done and six million of us had died for the lack of a place to go. South America is nothing to us. Africa is nothing to us. Our heritage and roots are here. Jews were a majority in Jerusalem in the early nineteenth century, and a thriving presence in this land ever since the Zionists came here in the 1880s, fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe. So this is where our history begins, and this is where it will end.”

Dead or alive, David thought—there was no mistaking the determination in Ernheit’s words. “I need you to understand something,” David said at length. “About this trip, and about me. I may be a lousy Jew to some, but that’s their problem, not mine. I have no use for suicide bombers, terrorists, or anyone who wants to eradicate this country. If I thought Hana was one of them, I wouldn’t be here. There’s nothing in this case for me but heartache and ambivalence. And, perhaps, the need to know whatever truth there is to know, like it or not.”

Ernheit studied him. “Like it or not,” he repeated. “An important qualification. I’ve read some of your statements about Arif—that she’s a mother, that she would never risk her child’s future. And I knew at once that you presume to understand too much.

“So let me tell you a story. Two years ago a Palestinian woman, dressed in a long black shroud but obviously pregnant, set off a metal detector at a checkpoint near East Jerusalem.” Ernheit’s tone was clipped, factual. “The day was blazing hot. Teary-eyed, she explained to the young Israeli soldier who stopped her that, as a child, she had broken her leg so badly that the surgeon had pieced it together with screws and a metal plate. Because she was Muslim, the woman said, she could not show him the scars on her leg. But he must understand that she was harmless—no mother, Jew or Arab, would sacrifice her child to harm others.

“As I said, the soldier was young. He explained later that she looked close to giving birth. And so, reluctantly, he let her pass. Perhaps thirty yards beyond him was a cluster of Israeli soldiers. He saw the woman approach them, asking for water. As one drew out his canteen, she blew herself and four soldiers to pieces.”

“She wasn’t pregnant.”

“Yes, she was,” Ernheit demurred with a sardonic smile. “Eight months pregnant, in fact. But her husband, a Hamas activist, had been in an Israeli prison for twice that time. And so her brother-in-law, also Hamas, gave her
a choice: to die at his hands in an honor killing or redeem herself by taking

some Israelis with her and her bastard child. She chose the latter course.”

David tried to imagine this. “And the lesson?”

Ernheit’s smile vanished. “Is simple. Don’t ever think you understand this place. And never believe you comprehend your client, or what may have impelled her to murder our prime minister. Because you don’t.”

David leaned against the railing of the viewing area. On the sloping hillside beneath them was a Jewish cemetery; the custom, Ernheit explained, was to bury the dead east of Jerusalem, where the prevailing wind blew from the city. Now, carried by that same wind, the haunting sound of a muezzin’s call to prayer issued from the Old City of Jerusalem, whose sandstone walls, built by Roman conquerors, surrounded the sacred sites of three civilizations.

The panorama of the city was that of the Middle East, ancient and, David thought, compelling in its sense of spiritual beauty, its mosques, spires, and minarets rising above the wall amid palms and pine trees. Framed against the modern neighborhoods and buildings that surrounded it, the Old City seemed ethereal; even at this distance, David could understand man’s desire to possess it. Ernheit pointed out the golden Dome of the Rock, the Muslim holy site; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the supposed place of Christ’s crucifixion; and the black dome of the Al Aqsa Mosque. “For Muslims,” Ernheit said, “the Al Aqsa Mosque was the ‘end of the journey,’ a holy place to come if Mecca was too far away. More recently, it supplied the name of the terrorist group that, his assassin claims, planned the murder of Amos Ben-Aron.”

“Do you believe that?”

Ernheit leaned against the railing, his keen expression focused on the city. “Why do you think I’m helping you? If Hana Arif is guilty, as seems likely enough, let the Americans kill her. But she couldn’t have put this plan together on her own. And those who helped her are not Al Aqsa.”

Ernheit said this last with such conviction that David turned to stare at him. After a time, Ernheit pointed to the rolling landscape beneath the city. “Do you see that line of trees below the wall?”

Gazing out, David saw that the line, even and densely wooded, ran along the length of the horizon. “It’s like a border,” he said.

“Effectively it
is
a border—the ‘Green Line,’ we call it, the edge of Zionist planting. After 1948 it became a de facto border, and remained so until the war of 1967. As you see, it does not include the Old City of Jerusalem. And it is very difficult to defend.” Turning to the left, Ernheit raised his arm to indicate a green wall, twenty feet high, snaking along the hillside, its construction incomplete. “And that is our new de facto border, at least for the time being—the security barrier, meant to protect us from Al Aqsa, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and whoever else on the West Bank may send the next Iyad Hassan to murder us in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Haifa.

“Between these two borders is a no-man’s-land of fear. Some opponents of Ben-Aron, including the religious, believed that he would give Faras and the Palestinians the sacred ground of the Old City; others believed he would abandon our settlements in the West Bank. All you require to become afraid is to look out at the Green Line, history’s illustration of how precarious our existence was and is. And then, perhaps, you could begin to think Ben-Aron a traitor. Leaders have died for less.”

“So you believe that Jews helped kill him?”

“I believe that it cannot be ruled out. But the answer to who killed him may also be found in the manifest failures of another leader, Yasser Arafat. And in the murder of still another, Yitzhak Rabin.”

David considered this. “Dead leaders,” he said. “And missed opportunities.”

“Arafat never missed an opportunity to miss one. But sometimes he had outside help.” Ernheit wiped his sunglasses, carefully placing them in the pocket of his shirt. “After Arafat returned to the West Bank from his exile in Tunis, Rabin decided that the Occupied Territories were a quagmire for Jews—that he had to find some pragmatic way, through Arafat, to give the Palestinians their own country in exchange for a lasting peace. Which earned Rabin a bullet at the hands of a right-wing Jew.