Pumpkinflowers (15 page)

Part Four

46

A
ROUND THE TIME
the last soldiers crossed back into Israel before dawn on May 24, 2000, I unlocked my bike outside my parents' house in their town near the Lebanon border. I rode along the Mediterranean in the weak light and then turned inland through an Arab village where only the roosters were awake, and then through sunflower fields and avocado orchards to the greenhouse where I had a job growing roses for export.

By then I had been a civilian for a few months. The military's absence from my life still felt like the first disconcerting steps off a moving airport sidewalk, the withdrawal of an unseen force propelling me forward. I became accustomed only gradually to being unarmed and responsible solely for myself. University would begin in the fall, and there would be travel, a job, a family, the same ideas we all had, more or less, though none of us thought everything was going to happen so fast. When we get together now we look at each other and at our wives and children, and it hardly seems possible. In the years that elapsed since that morning and the recording of these experiences, between our early twenties and mid-thirties, our sense of what fate might hold for us opened so wide it seemed to encompass the whole world and then began to narrow again, which turns out to be the way it works.

Each morning at the greenhouse I found my shears and apron and got to work cutting the roses that were about to bloom in red, yellow, white, and pink. The flowers were always budding, spreading leaves and petals. Every morning there were thousands more.

The sun wasn't up and no one was quite awake. It was a good way to start a day, breathing humid, perfumed air, listening to the murmuring of the volunteers from Germany and Holland, a few Arab kids, some Ethiopian immigrants from an Absorption Ministry trailer camp down the road. There was a mild man from one of the Israeli Druze towns in western Galilee, a sculptor in his spare time, who had spent part of his army service in Lebanon with the infantry. We understood each other. We worked for a while in parallel rows. He nodded through the glass panes toward the border with Lebanon.

They just pulled out, he said. I stopped clipping.

In the daze after my discharge I hadn't been following things closely. It was behind me, and what was before me seemed more interesting.

They left Lebanon, he said, that's it. He heard it on the radio driving over.

At that moment the border crossings in the Finger of Galilee were clogged with armored vehicles coming south out of the security zone, and there were long lines of Lebanese militiamen and their families trying to escape to Israel. Every news crew in the country was there filming the soldiers coming out grinning and waving flags. Bruria and Orna were also present—they heard the news in the middle of the night, drove up to the border together, and were watching it all happen in disbelief. I knew my old company was in there somewhere but didn't have a way to reach anyone. All I knew was what the other worker had said: that the security zone, that whole world that had existed the evening before, was gone, and with it the Pumpkin.

I don't think we said more. It made sense to me at that moment.Things were changing in my life and in the life of the country, old things were being destroyed and new things were coming that were better. The fulcrum of Israel's recent history can be found in those months in the spring, summer, and early fall of that year.

Had you told me then that I would still be thinking about the hill years later, that I would try to return to it in person and then again in writing, I would have been surprised. I was twenty-two and wasn't sure anything was indelible. So I got back to work, holding the stem of each flower with the gloved fingers of my left hand and snipping it with my right, and the sky outside the glass grew light as always. There was a new century ahead of us.

47

A
FTER I ARRIVED
at the university campus in Jerusalem not long afterward, enrolled in the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, students with familiar faces sometimes approached me in the halls. It would be someone from a tank crew, or one of the lookouts, now with longer hair and jeans. You're from the Pumpkin, one of us would say, and we'd shake hands and grin but wouldn't have that much else to add. We shared something we knew was significant, being from the Pumpkin. But even then, not six months after the pullout, it was becoming clear that the significance was apparent only to us.

The sites of Israel's famous battles have tended to remain afterward within our borders: Ammunition Hill, the Kastel hill above the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road, Tel Faher in the foothills of the Golan. There are signs and guided tours. Survivors can visit with their children and stand there in safety. But when the Pumpkin was abandoned with its sister outposts in the spring of 2000 it became inaccessible, controlled by our enemies on the other side of a hostile frontier. Lebanon might have been the moon. Our society hardly paid a thought to the security zone war once it ended. Israelis were soon preoccupied with other events. They were also afraid that if they looked too closely they might reach, and then speak out loud, the conclusion that it had all been an error. And it is easier to forget drawn-out affairs like ours than brief incidents of high drama, like a war lasting six days, just as a heart attack would stand out in the memory more than a decade of chronic pain, though the chronic pain might be more important in shaping who you are.

And of course everyone would rather remember victories. Whatever this was, it wasn't that. “Except for the bereaved families and the fighters who served here, who carry in their heart experiences they can share with no one, this war will be forgotten in a few years,” wrote the most insightful commander of the Lebanon era, Chico Tamir, after the withdrawal. “The discomfort the army felt about the results of the war, I thought, and the deep wounds it left in Israeli society, sped up the rapid repression of memory that was already under way.” Army operations less significant or costly than the years of the security zone have been given official names and military ribbons, but this period was granted neither. The only memorial to the Lebanon dead is an unauthorized one, built by Orna on her kibbutz with no help from the government.

Only a fraction of Israeli men serve in combat units, and not all combat units were engaged in Lebanon. The traditional pipeline of information from the military to Israel's populace is the reserve army, civilians called up for short periods of service in units that tend to be democratic and unruly. Reservists often feel moved to complain, write a letter to someone in parliament, or publish something. But in the nineties the army didn't use reservists in Lebanon, perhaps for this reason, and kept the zone mostly off-limits to reporters. The fighting was thus left to the unformed minds of regular soldiers just out of high school who barely understood what they were seeing.

Back in civilian life the soldiers of the security zone saw no reflection of our experience, no indication that anything important had happened. One of our characteristics was a kind of feigned indifference, a ban on admitting that anything that happened to us mattered, and this pose turned out to be hard to discard even afterward. It added to the general forgetfulness. So did the fact that most soldiers, even at the most dangerous outposts, never experienced anything worthy of calling a “battle,” let alone a “war,” so it hardly seemed right to claim any accomplishment amid the greater feats of our fathers and grandfathers. After a while even the physical existence of a place like the Pumpkin started to seem unlikely. It was just one of those inexplicable things that happen to you when you're young. Or maybe none of it had happened at all.

48

W
HEN THE SUICIDE
bombings began in our cities that fall we realized there was no “new Middle East” after all. That phrase would never be used again without sarcasm. The Middle East was gutted buses and cafes, and young killers in black masks.

It turned out the Palestinians were watching closely that last night in the security zone, earlier the same year. That night was “a light at the end of the Palestinian tunnel, a hope that liberation might be achieved by treading the path of resistance and martyrdom,” wrote Hezbollah's deputy secretary-general. “What happened in Lebanon can be repeated in Palestine.” Israelis had elected a government that would end the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and make peace, but now the peace talks collapsed. For the Palestinians there would be no more humiliation or compromise, just as Hezbollah had brooked none. Watching Palestinian television, I saw yellow Hezbollah flags appear at rallies. Propaganda videos showed riots in Gaza with clips of Israeli vehicles leaving the security zone.

The humanities faculty of Hebrew University is in a concrete fort of a campus set atop Mount Scopus. In the university's walls in those days I studied Islam as an idea that touched a nerve in Arabia long ago and showered countries with spires and domes, poetry and prophecy in flowing letters, empires coming together like drops of mercury and splitting apart like amoebas. I spent an hour in my course “The Modern Middle East,” which appeared in our textbooks to be a safe distance away, and then packed my books and exited into the modern Middle East, where a woman named Andalib, who was a few years younger than me, could walk into the open-air market in Jerusalem a few minutes after I walked out, press a button sending an electric charge to her explosives, and kill herself and six people who happened to be standing nearby. A youth with a knapsack sometimes had the effect on me of that old whisper in the sky over the Pumpkin. Sometimes you heard a deep thump, then silence, then sirens, and everyone knew what it meant.

After our withdrawal the south of Lebanon came under the control not of the Lebanese government but of Hezbollah. Guerrillas crossed the border into Israel that fall, unhindered by any security zone, killed three soldiers and took their bodies. Later, two guerrillas infiltrated into western Galilee and waited along a road. When a truck arrived they killed the driver, and then a woman in her car, then a mother and her daughter who happened by after that. They saw a farmer tending his sheep nearby and killed him; he was my future wife's cousin. In a different incident guerrillas shot two army technicians off a frontier antenna. Nearly everyone agreed that pulling the soldiers out of the outposts in Lebanon was the right decision. It was, because this gave our enemies fewer targets and made it harder for them to attack. But our move turned out to have no bearing on their intentions. Their war against us was still on after all.

I answered a reserve call-up in 2001 and spent a few weeks patrolling near the Lebanon border. I saw Hezbollah men in the open for the first time, manning guard towers by the fence. We weren't allowed to shoot them, and they seemed to be under similar orders. Once, on a patrol, one of their guards smiled at us as our jeep passed and used his hands to mime an explosion. I took this to mean he hoped we blew up, which was fair enough, but then our cell phones began to ring. A suicide bomber had just detonated himself in a pizza restaurant in Jerusalem, erasing a few families. The Hezbollah man knew before we did.

For a while the word
Lebanon
started showing up in newspapers again. When Palestinian gunmen ambushed a bus in the West Bank, crippling the vehicle with a bomb and machine-gunning the passengers as they fled, the headline the next day was “Just Like Lebanon.” Soldiers in Gaza and the West Bank began to move in convoys, and roads were swept for bombs. Hezbollah men and their Iranian patrons appeared among the Palestinians with money, weapons, and advice, and the Palestinians increasingly expressed their opposition to us in the language of holy war.

The military reserve called me up again in the spring of 2002, at the peak of the violence, and I left the university and found myself back in a hilltop outpost with my friends. This time we overlooked the West Bank city of Nablus, which the army had placed under siege. Passover was coming, and the unit's cooks spent days preparing food for the seder. Mixed with the usual army smells of gun grease and sweat were those of spicy Moroccan fish and chicken soup. But the meal never took place. As we sat down to eat at long tables in the mess someone started shooting at the outpost. We all scrambled up into the trench and shot back, not that we could see the assailant, who was in one of the nearby homes. While this was going on news passed along the line of men. A suicide bomber had struck a seder at a hotel in the city of Netanya. There were thirty dead.

Within days the army had called up thousands of men, and mobile command posts appeared at the outpost. I saw a line of infantry descend at night toward the buildings of Nablus, where they moved from house to house by blowing holes through the walls and fought in neighborhoods defended by armed guerrillas and full of innocent and terrified people, many of whom were killed beside their fighters. That week a squad from our brigade, temporary soldiers like us, walked into an ambush in the city of Jenin and thirteen of them died.

I stood in the middle of the night at one of the checkpoints ringing Nablus when a bus pulled up. Out came a few dozen Palestinian men, who began crossing through the island of harsh light into the darkness of their city. “Rejects,” an officer said, dismissing them with his hand. He meant they were detainees from one of the army's sweeps, seized, cuffed, questioned, and released after being deemed worthless to our intelligence people. I saw one man my father's age, with a graying mustache and unshaven cheeks, shuffle by a few paces away in leather dress shoes but without socks. He didn't look at me.

From a third-floor office in downtown Jerusalem I heard a suicide bomber detonate himself one rainy morning and saw a trail of white smoke curl upward from the scene. A bomber struck a line outside a club in Tel Aviv popular with Russian kids—Maria, Ylena, Irena, Sergei, Alexei, twenty-one dead in all. Eventually the modern Middle East penetrated the university itself and killed nine people with a bomb in one of the cafeterias. I wasn't on campus when it happened, but my sister was—she was in a different cafeteria and saw them bring the bodies by. You might remember Jonah, my childhood friend, who recited Poe to himself one night in his tank at the Pumpkin. His younger brother Daniel, a playmate of mine from Toronto backyards, who by this time was a junior officer in the Fighting Pioneer Youth, a pianist and student of the Irish pipes, was leading a squad trying to arrest or kill a gunman in Nablus when he was shot in the side. The round slipped between the plates of his bulletproof vest and there was nothing anyone could do.

The Israel that believed in compromise, a country rooted in the old left of the kibbutz movement, was shattered. The left went from ascendant to defunct in a matter of months. The triumph of the Four Mothers was, in retrospect, the last charge of the kibbutzniks, the final instance in which those Israelis would lead anything of national importance. By the end of the pivotal year, 2000, they receded into the margins, where they remain.

Amid these events came the suicide attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the Americans were soon in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Then came the same roadside bombs, the same videotaped explosions shown on TV again and again with a sound track of martial music, televised farewells from martyrs, clerics leading militias with black uniforms and headbands, the idea that war is not a means but a way of life and that death is victory—all the elements of the Hezbollah technique, perfected against us in the years of the Pumpkin, broadcast via satellite TV to the Arab world and beyond throughout the nineties, crowned by the victory of 2000, and applied by the children of the nineties against the new invaders. Sometimes it wasn't just the same tactics but the very same people. Hezbollah, one American intelligence man said after a few of the group's operatives were picked up in Iraq, was the “A-team”—al-Qaeda was just the “B-team.”

Of course the Americans did what we did, which was armor their convoys and become heavier and slower the more men they lost, and dig in and build hilltop outposts to control hostile territory, all of them very important until they were not and were abandoned. It felt as if by squeezing the trigger on that last night in the spring of 2000, my friends had freed a wrathful millennial spirit trapped inside the hill and released it into the world.