For two decades I lived in Jerusalem. Whenever mobilized I’d get into khaki and as a very low-ranking Israel Defence Forces soldier go to Lebanon, the Egyptian border, or the West Bank aka Judea and Samaria. Also, in civvies, as a reporter, I spent days and nights with Arabs and Jews in and around Beirut, Ramallah, and Gaza, not to mention UN Relief and Works Agency camps, not to mention Israel proper. I especially returned over and over to Ramallah.
Back then no wall snaked up and down the hills like a Christo installation. The few and ephemeral checkpoints allowed Jews and Arabs to come and go back and forth over the Green Line as they pleased——the Green Line being the 1949 ceasefire line, so called because the ink on the UN map was green. Driving me were fascination, curiosity, and for a time hope. So long ago was it that I’ve forgotten which Palestinian woman in Ramallah explained to me over aromatic coffee why there’ll never be a mutually-happy-making solution between my people and hers.
Did I know the Judgment of Solomon? Well, yes, I did, but that didn’t stop her retelling the Biblical legend.
Two women come into the presence of the king and with them two babies, one living, one dead. Both claim to be the mother of the living. He says: All right, since DNA testing hasn’t been invented we’ll take a sword and divide the kid. OK, fine, says one woman. No, no, says the other——don’t kill it, don’t kill the boy, I give up my claim, just don’t kill him. Whereupon the extra-wise monarch understands.
I can’t remember which Palestinian woman offered this analogy——it was so long ago, in the ‘70s or ‘80s, and I didn’t report it.
When she offered it, we Jews had already twice consented to splitting the flyspeck of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and the Palestinians, or the so-called Palestinians, had twice refused and gone to war.
So-called Palestinians? Yes, in spite of Jund Filastin, a military subdistrict of the Damascus-based Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, there was I knew never a Palestinian people far less a Palestinian nation until the Zionist Jews arrived with our bare-legged women. Palestine, the Palestinians, and Palestinian nationalism are all byproducts of Zionism and would never have come about but for Theodor Herzl’s little pamphlet. Filastin isn’t even originally an Arabic word. It’s a transliteration of the Roman, the Latin, there being no “P” in Arabic. So what? Never when in the company of Palestinians did I, a bareheaded, Sabbath-violating, pig-eating Jew, even hint at such dusty facts——my job was to listen.
I listened over that coffee. Neither she nor I mentioned that 40 or so years before, in 1937, the Peel Commission headed by Lord Peel had recommended splitting the baby.
Well, not splitting exactly in two but giving the Jews a Gaza Strip-sized piece along the coast from Tel Aviv to Haifa plus the Galilee. That was four years after Hitler became chancellor of Germany and 15 years after the League of Nations awarded Great Britain a mandate over Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River, East Bank, and West Bank, on the understanding the whole thing was to be a national home for the Jews. All right, the Zionists said. No way, said the Palestinians-to-be, and went to war, in which the Brits quashed them. Haj Amin el-Husseini, a Moslem cleric and the Palestinian top man, fled to Berlin, where he spent World War II urging Himmler to get serious about exterminating the Jews.
The second refusal was in 1947 following the Extermination——the Brits under Winston Churchill the philo-Semite and pro-Zionist who as Colonial Secretary had lopped the East Bank off the mandate, inventing the kingdom of Transjordan, had shut Palestine to Jews fleeing the gas chambers. So in 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to divide the notch on the rim of Asia fifty-fifty. We, the remaining Jews, the Zionists, had said OK, the Palestinians and the Arabs had said never and gone to war, losing now to us. It was during this war that the IDF partially ethnically cleansed the areas it won and the Arabs totally cleansed the areas they won.
Ancient history? Yes and no. Either way, I knew that William Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi had written that the past is never dead, it’s not even past, but I also believed it’s not a journalist’s role to dredge it up.
So for a long time, I haunted the occupied/liberated areas of the Land of Israel/Palestine looking, listening, and drinking endless cups of coffee and glasses of tea. Many, many Palestinian children. In refugee camps and in villages and towns I learned what every child learned——the Jewish state whatever its size and shape was an imposter and kidnapper. Provided every boy and girl child, provided he or she and his or her own children and grandchildren remained steadfast the fake mother would eventually be done away with and the real mother possess the whole living baby.
“From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free.”
I also drank coffee and tea with Jews——not such good coffee, not such good tea, but still. Among them were settlers of various kinds. While everybody in some settlements in the areas overrun in the Six Day War believed God had promised the whole country, the whole baby, to the Jews, and it would be sinful to give anything up for any reason, in others I found many who’d moved for the quality of life. Ofra was in the first category.
All the males there wore knitted skullcaps, all honoured the Sabbath, none ate pig, while all the females honoured the Sabbath, none ate pig, and those past menarche covered their hair with scarves if not wigs. Many, many children. Not in Ophra’s synagogue but in the communal dining hall I beheld a giant aerial photo-mural. It was of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock, from which Mohammed flew to heaven, and the Aqsa mosque, which readers of the New York Times will know is the third holiest Islamic site in the world, erased, in their place a model of the Third Temple. Some readers of the Times even know that the first and second actual temples were built by Solomon and refurbished by Herod and demolished by Nebuchadnezzar and Titus.
Given the mural, I wasn’t surprised when three Ofra-ites, all wearing knitted skullcaps, were arrested in the mid-‘80s. They were members of a so-called Jewish Underground which had booby-trapped the mayor of Ramallah’s car, blowing off his foot, blown off the legs of the mayor of another West Bank town, Nablus, known as Shechem in the Bible, murdered some young Quran students in reply to Palestinians murdering a young Talmud student and were about to blow up the Dome of the Rock and Aqsa. Four years after conviction they were pardoned and returned home to be lionized.
By then I’d ended the West Bank/Judea and Samaria/Gaza/Lebanon chapter of my life and shed my fantasies of peace.
I’d also met that British woman and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The first was by chance in the garden restaurant of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem where Susan Sontag and John Le Carré liked to stay. As the fountain gurgled this lady journalist or human rights person, I forget which, displaying the nicest teeth I’d ever seen on a Brit, smilingly compared Israel to the Crusader kingdoms. They’d appeared invincible yet eventually left only some picturesque ruins. It had taken a few centuries, but what’s that in the sight of history? This was a parallel a number of Arabs had drawn for me before, although none so charmingly, or so memorably.
Not long afterwards I happened to be put in contact with a bareheaded, Sabbath-violating, pig-eating young businessman looking for somebody to translate, for money, which I could use, a book from Hebrew to English.
He was Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, then running a furniture store in Jerusalem after having been in the IDF’s most difficult-to-get-accepted-into commando unit and gotten a BA in architecture and an MA in business management at MIT. His bareheaded, Sabbath-violating, pig-eating older brother, Jonathan, known as Yoni, had led the same unit and been killed in the nearly-unbelievable Entebbe hostage rescue mission. A posthumous collection of Yoni’s letters to his parents, brothers, and girlfriend had topped the Israeli bestseller list for months. Bibi was happy with the job I did——so happy that he asked me to be his spokesman in the political career he was about to embark on.
Edward Grossman teaches Chinese youngsters English. He has reported for the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Atlantic, Maariv (Tel Aviv) and Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo).
