One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (31 page)

Over the seven days of mourning for the murdered baby, Kook Immanuel, stunned citizens from all across Israel, many with their children in tow, set aside their fears of venturing into the wild West Bank and flowed into Hebron to offer comfort to the bereaved parents—and, in the process, to demonstrate with their bodies their outrage that such atrocities were possible in their own land that was their God-given birthright. From common folk to dignitaries at the highest spheres of government and the religious establishment, they made their way defiantly through the treacherous streets of the Jewish people's second holiest city up to the military base on the hilltop, almost every tree and wall along their route plastered with heartbreaking black-and-white posters of the baby's shockingly innocent face overlaid with streaks of bright red blood gushing down like tears along his chubby cheeks from the black hole in his forehead like a third eye, and the stark words electrified in lettering evoking
death camp barbed wire, S
LAUGHTERED BY
T
ERRORISTS
, shrieking the savage tale.

So great was the number of mourners who kept streaming in that the shiva was moved from the family quarters to the synagogue, the largest tent on the compound. Temima sat on the floor in her stocking feet in the women's section to receive the female comforters, an army blanket thrown over her head that she did not raise for the entire period of the seven days of mourning, her lips moving as she rocked back and forth, reciting Psalms from memory but no sound emerging from her mouth, voiceless like the barren Hannah praying for a child in the Tabernacle so that the high priest Eli concluded she was a drunk.

In the far more capacious men's section of the synagogue tent, her husband, Haim Ba'al Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, his arm still in a sling, his head still bandaged in gauze, sat on the floor facing a throng of men packed tightly together undulating like a giant beast stirring in hibernation whenever one or another of them sought to push his way through to make his presence known to the chief mourner and offer the requisite words of consolation. Only when the prime minister of the State of Israel himself, surrounded by his bodyguards with faces as if carved from granite, arrived in a black bulletproof limousine did the crowd part like the Reed Sea to create a passage for his eminence as the first lady who had accompanied him set a silk scarf loosely over her helmet constructed of hair and made her way alone to the women's section. Howie was so overcome by the honor of the appearance of so prestigious a comforter that in violation of religious protocols he rose from his place of mourning to greet him, flushing crimson with gratification at being singled out for such public recognition, to his everlasting shame and regret failing to seize the moment to cry out for all to hear demanding justice and to extract before all these witnesses the promise of retribution. For months afterward he would replay the scene in his head, with the crucial variation that in his internal drama he spoke out and said what he should have said so that as time passed he had massaged the history, recounting the story crowned with his bold outcry, and no one denied him.

From the ranks of religious leaders, Howie was also honored by shiva calls from the two chief rabbis of Israel, the Ashkenazi rabbi in his three-piece suit with the cutaway coat and black fedora smelling of calf-foot
jelly
ptcha
, the Sephardi in his brilliant robes and turban and tinted shades smelling of musky patchouli, each arriving separately in an armored limo accompanied by his retinue.

No less keen an honor, which at first served in some measure to render tolerable his grief, was the constant presence of the Toiter, Rabbi Elisha Pardes, who appeared at the shiva directly from the cemetery and remained for the entire seven-day period of mourning. Declaring that since it had been he who had performed the circumcision on the child, which strictly speaking is the duty of the father, he felt himself to be like a father to the boy and therefore it was incumbent upon him to go into mourning too. With a rip like a scream, he tore his white garments and donned sackcloth that one of his disciples handed to him and, bending down, he picked up a fistful of dirt and poured it over his head. For seven days he sat on the floor in a corner of the tent, and in the night he slept there guarded by a few of the Hasidim from his inner circle. Swaying jerkily, refusing almost all nourishment, growing increasingly gaunt and frail, his white hair and beard wild and ragged, his eyes hollow, he looked like a madman who had wandered in from the street, and though he strove to practically erase himself and achieve a level close to invisibility in his corner, several of the comforters who took notice of him approached to drop some coins into the cup half-filled with cold tea on the floor beside him thinking he was a beggar even as Howie pointed out that this personage was no less than the holy Toiter himself, leader of the Dead Hasidim, possibly one of the hidden thirty-six righteous of the generation upon whose merit our world continues to exist.

At the close of the seven days, as they all got up from shiva, the Toiter addressed Howie for only the second time since his arrival when he had expounded on his reason for including himself among the mourners. “You have given the child to the Molekh by exposing him to such danger in the streets of Hevron,” the Toiter said in an even voice like a judge passing sentence at the end of a long trial, revealing no trace of anger or emotion. “It is an abomination, idol worship—child sacrifice explicitly forbidden in the Torah, a profaning of God's name for which the punishment is death by stoning. The stone that struck the boy was meant for you and will one day find you.”

It seemed to Howie as if those words of the Toiter were like a curse spewn out by an uninvited guest in a fairy tale, like a preview of the
stones themselves pelting him, yet to his eternal satisfaction he did not lose his presence of mind on this occasion as he had during the visit from the prime minister, but replied in kind with a reference to the Torah, passages of which he knew by heart primarily from his work as a scribe, in particular from the days when he had painstakingly instructed his wife, letter by letter, in the writing of her pathetic little mother scroll.

“Excuse me, Rebbe,” Howie said, “but this time it's not my fault. It's the sin of our leaders and founders who had misguided pity for the inhabitants of the land and didn't kick them out once and for all like the Torah commands us to do, every last one of them, when we returned home to Zion—I'm telling you, Rebbe, it was like we were dreaming. So now they've become ‘stings in our eyes and thorns in our sides,' exactly like the Torah says they would, and they hassle and kill us right in our own backyards. Believe me, Rebbe, I know from bitter personal experience what I'm talking about. What? You think I'm some kind of idiosyncrasy?”

This idea—the mandate to ruthlessly rid the land entirely of the Arab infestation, to strike them down like Amalek, man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey, to blot out their memory forever from the face of the earth—this charge had gripped and taken hold of Howie even before the blameless infant Kook Immanuel had been so barbarically cut down during the rightful exercise by citizens of peaceful assembly and nonviolent protest. What was this Toiter talking about anyways? Was it really possible that he seriously believed there was even one centimeter of our God-given soil that we Jews did not have the right to tread on?

With nearly breathless interest, Howie had been following in the press the emergence of the Jewish Defense League in America under its fiery leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Had Howie still been living in the States, there was no question in his mind that he would have been one of the first to sign up to serve as a faithful foot soldier in the JDL ranks to fight the anti-Semites anywhere in the world they reared their ugly heads. There were some, even (especially!) among Jews, who called the rabbi a hothead, an outlaw, a terrorist, for God's sakes. So what else is news? What else would you expect from Diaspora Jews with their
shtetl
mentality, always sucking up, always making nice, always pishing in their pants from fright
lest they offend, God forbid. Enough with playing the victim, enough with going like sheep to the slaughter—been there, done that. With the conviction of inspiration, Howie knew in his heart that Kahane had it right. A Jew had to stand up for his own, there was no one to depend on to protect you and look out for your interests but yourself, a Jew had to show the world he had balls. To be called a vigilante was not an insult, it was not a dirty word, far from it, it was the highest compliment. To turn the other cheek—nonviolence—that was the deluded idea of a Jewish boy two thousand years ago who had gone bad—very bad. Oh yeah, for sure, Howie would turn the other cheek, only it would not be the cheek of his face. To carry a weapon in a holster at your waist to defend yourself and yours was a holy obligation, a commandment, like wearing a kippah on your head and a fringed garment on your body. Only the underclasses and the subjugated were denied the right to bear arms, that was a historical fact. Already Howie was never without a gun, even during the shiva. Jewish pride. Jewish power. Never again.

How this translated in Israel was obvious to Howie. The land had to be cleansed of the sons of Ishmael. They were like wild asses, their hands mixing it up with everyone, and everyone's hands therefore lifted against them in self-defense. Whatever they touched they befouled and destroyed. They were liars and thieves and murderers, they were barely human, they lived in filth like monkeys, they ate their own excrement. They only understood one language—the language of force. If they don't pack up and go quietly wherever, maybe to that ridiculous kingdom of the little Hashemite gigolo on the other side of the Jordan River where they are already the majority, then a little friendly or maybe not so friendly persuasion on our part will have to be used to transfer them. Yes, let's face it boys, we're talking expulsion here, forced deportations. Nobody lifted a finger when they did it to us, so where is it written that we can't do it to them too? It was all so clear to Howie, he could barely understand how anyone didn't get it; only a numbskull wouldn't
khop
. Just look at the statistics. They were breeding wildly like rabbits, those Arabs, like a cancer in our body politic, it was only a matter of time before they would outnumber us, before this malignancy would eat us up alive. Surgery was required to remove every last trace and cell of them—it was our only hope for survival—a radical Muslimectomy. As far as they were concerned, time was on their side; they would just sit there playing with their beads
and smoking their bubblies and scratching their balls and screwing away like nobody's business and wait us out—the democratic end of Zionism, voted out of existence by its own citizens, the end of the Jewish State. It was plain demographics, pure and simple. Howie recognized that it drove those liberal, mush-headed Jews crazy to hear this simple fact on the ground because—why? Because they knew it was the truth. Don't talk to me about majority rules, forget about democracy, Howie thought to himself. Is democracy in Israel good for the Jews? That was the bottom line. That was the question every Jew had to ask himself at all times, that was the gold standard he had to live by—what's good for the Jews. What does democracy have to do with us Jews anyways? It is a goyische concept. For a Jew in his own homeland there is only one rule—the rule of the Torah. Torah is our constitution, our law of the land.

Howie took for himself the nom de guerre Go'el-HaDam, Blood Avenger, and with two comrades who called themselves Shimon and Levi, they carried out the first of their acts of civil disturbance on the
shloshim
, the thirtieth day after the death of the innocent baby, Kook Immanuel. On Al-Shuhada Street, on the very spot where Kook Immanuel was cut down, they erected in the middle of the night a monument to memorialize him. Its base was composed of a pile of stones to which was affixed a sign announcing that on this place, in the year 5729 from the creation of the world, the baby boy, ten months old, Kook Immanuel, may his memory be a blessing, son of Haim Ba'al-Teshuva of Hebron, was murdered by Arab degenerates, may their names and memories be blotted out. On top of the stone pedestal a baby carriage was affixed inside of which a wooden facsimile of an Uzi submachine gun was placed with the words K
OOK
H
AI
! scrawled across it on one side in blood red, and on the other side, N
EKAMA
! Revenge!

And Kook did indeed continue to live on, at least in that monument, because for every time it was demolished by vandals and hooligans, or defaced with graffiti such as J
EWS
R
AUS
! or Z
IONISM
=R
ACISM
! or smeared with disgusting body matter, solid and liquid, human and animal, the small cell of zealots led by the mysterious bandit Go'el-HaDam would restore it in the night until it merged with the landscape and no one paid attention to it any longer, circumnavigating it automatically like any other familiar obstacle absorbed by the street. Dogs lifted a leg and relieved themselves against the stone foundation, men threw their cigarette butts
into the baby carriage and emptied their pockets of condom wrappers and sunflower seed shells, young boys stuck their chewing gum and smeared their snot on the Uzi and young girls drew hearts on it with initials plus initials that only they could decode.