NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (58 page)

Just as I was surprised by the offhandedness and the truculence, I was pleased by many other aspects in Haifa that I had not expected. The food, for example. It was the cleanest, the freshest, the most delicious I had found since Italy—but it was less meaty than Italian food, and lighter. It was salads and fish and fresh bread, hummus and ripe fruit, just-squeezed juice and pure olive oil. It was not expensive. Everyone ate well.

The public transport was another pleasant surprise. There was a train to Tel Aviv. There were buses. From the bus terminal in Haifa you could go anywhere, every half hour, and because this was Israel there was not a town or village in Israel that was not reachable in a few hours. Jerusalem was an hour and three quarters. The Dead Sea was two hours. Nazareth was an hour. Tel Aviv about an hour. A bus to Cairo took half a day,
which was nothing. President Clinton had just visited the previous week to be present at the signing of the Israel-Jordan Peace Accord. So there were buses to Amman, too.

The intellectual life of Israel was visible in terms of public lectures and bookstores—I had not seen such well-stocked bookstores since leaving Italy. Croatia’s were pathetic, Greece’s stocked school textbooks and women’s magazines, Turkey’s were no use to me, nor were Egypt’s. Israelis sold every sort of book and magazine, in all the languages that Jews spoke, which was almost all the languages of the world. There were museums with rich collections, classical music on the radio and symphony concerts. I like going to concerts, listening to live music; I went to two good ones in Israel. I could have gone to many more if I had stayed longer. Israelis complained of the high cost of living, and the high inflation, but nothing in Israel struck me as being very expensive.

And there was a suburban atmosphere which also made it seem peaceable if not downright homely and dreary. This first impression was borne out by my travels to other towns and cities, for so much of Israel had the texture and pace of a retirement community, and—alone among Mediterranean countries I saw—the whole land was noisy with the persistent whine of air conditioners.

Strangest of all, I felt a sense of safety. Perhaps it arose from the colonial look of the city, and the orderliness of the stores and streets. I never felt at risk—or rather I felt that I was among millions of people who were taking the same risk.

But of course you only feel very safe in Israel if you are ignorant. I did not know it then—I learned it by degrees—but Israel was in a terrible period, one of its worst cycles of murder and retribution. What I took to be somnolence was suspense.

Another thing I learned about Israel: never question a date, because everyone took liberties. A person might allude in one sentence to something that happened last week, and in the next breath he would be in the Bronze Age, quoting the Torah and mentioning Egyptians at the time of Moses, making it all seem like it was yesterday. It was poetic license, but it was
often the basis of Israeli political or military decisions. Egyptians claimed that on the walls of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was written “Greater Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile!” It was not merely a misquotation, but a misrepresentation of Genesis 15:18 in which God promises Abram and descendants all land, from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt, which is not the Nile but the Sea of Reeds. On the other hand, “God gave it to us” is not usually the equivalent of a Purchase and Sale Agreement.

The same doubtful history and wobbly logic made it normal for Israeli immigrant citizens from Morocco and New York City and Kiev to think of themselves as Israelites, and Israeli life today as a rehash of the Torah, in which the chosen people were taunted and held captive and laid siege to by idol-worshiping pagans. They never used the word “Palestinians”—always saying “Arab” instead, because it depicted an upstart horde and served to make Israelis seem the underdogs (there were so many more Arabs in the Middle East than there were Palestinians). Egyptians avoided the word Arab too. They were part of the same theater of self-dramatization. This was the land of the Pharaohs, they said; they were pharaonic. “We built the pyramids!”

So the Israelis were not alone in taking liberties, but it made life rather confusing for a traveler when Mediterranean peoples were so busy misrepresenting themselves. Most inhabitants of its shores took the most fanciful liberties with their ancestry. In fact, though no one ever said so, the Mediterranean was almost devoid of aborigines.

Anyway, I took the train down the coast from Haifa to Tel Aviv. Israeli Railways was celebrating its centenary. A hundred years ago Israeli Railways did not exist, of course; but who had built this line? Probably the British.

Something that bothered me greatly were the numerous people traveling armed with rifles, usually large and very lethal-looking ones, and pistols. Most of those people were soldiers and one of the characteristics of Israeli soldiers on trains and buses was their fatigue. They always looked sleepy, overworked, and no sooner were they on a seat than they were asleep, and I often found that their weapons bobbled in their arms were pointed directly at me.

This happened on my very first ride, as a soldier in the seat opposite
made himself comfortable to sleep, put his feet up and propped his Uzi automatic rifle, so that it was horizontal in his lap, and it slipped as he dozed, and was soon pointing into my face.

I said, “Excuse me,” because I was afraid to tap his arm and risk startling him and the weapon discharging.

He did not wake, but after a while I raised my voice, and asked him to take his rifle out of my face.

Grumbling, without apology, he shifted in his seat and moved his rifle so that it was pointing at the woman across the aisle, who was so engrossed in reading a medical textbook,
The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease
, that she did not notice the man’s weapon.

“Now it’s pointing at her,” I said.

He slapped and pushed the rifle, and though it was still not upright as it should have been, he grunted and went back to sleep.

Walking up and down the crowded coach, I counted the weapons: two in the next row, a frenzied man in a white shirt with a nickel-plated revolver, a soldier two rows back with a pistol and a rifle, ditto the soldier next to him, a woman in uniform lying across two seats with her big khaki buttocks in the air and a pistol on her belt, seven more armed passengers farther down. My feeling is that all weapons are magnetic—they exert a distinct and polarizing power, and nearly all attract violence. The gun carrier’s creed is: Never display a weapon unless you plan to use it; never use it unless you shoot to kill.

For the first time on my trip I suspected I was traveling in a danger zone. I had never seen so many weapons. And yet, as I said, I did not feel that I was personally threatened. That was one of the many paradoxes of Israel: it was a war zone and yet it was one of the most monotonous places imaginable.

We passed Carmel Beach, some condos going up, and a sign, “The Riviera of Israel.” It was rubble and rocks and, farther on, dunes. The coast had the look of a shoreline that had been leveled so that it could be defended. There were no obstructions, it was all visible, nowhere for a landing party to hide. In military jargon such a landing was called “an insertion”—a rapid on-shore penetration by stealth under the cover of darkness, men leaping out of small boats and hitting the beach. Many had been attempted, but few had succeeded. The very idea, though, that such military
actions were contemplated here made this section of coast south of Haifa unlike its Riviera namesake.

At Binyamina and beyond was the reality of the country—that it was really very empty and underpopulated, that the garrison mentality is strong (people living in places they can defend) and that it was agricultural, intensively cultivated in many places, banana groves set out with precision and order, grape and vegetable fields beneath the green and rocky hills of Har Horshan.

The orchards and citrus groves I had expected to see in Israel were there on the coast near Netanya, with rows of eucalyptus, the gum trees that were used everywhere as giant quick-growing fences and windbreaks. Plenty of fruit trees, and canals, and craters and scrubby ditches; but where were the people? This coast was one of its most populous regions and yet it was thinly settled.

The settlement of Hertzliyya was celebrating fifty years of prosperity, and agriculture flourished there, too. But with such subsidies, so it should have. It seemed to me much more extraordinary that Mediterranean countries that did not receive three billion dollars a year in foreign aid were growing fruit and running schools and defending themselves.

Approaching Tel Aviv, I saw for the first (and last) time on the shore of the Mediterranean a drive-in theater. It was beside the tracks, and also beside the sea. It was advertising a double feature in Hebrew on the marquee.

That was appropriate enough, for no city in the entire Mediterranean looks more like an American concoction than Tel Aviv. It was wrong to compare it (as many people did) to Miami and its tangle of suburbs. Tel Aviv was both more sterile and less interesting, and it was strangely introverted; its streets were lifeless, its different cultures, and its tensions, masked.

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.”

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.