October 4, 2000

Meir, our firstborn, is sixteen, an adolescent in every sense of the term: outlandish dress, behavior to go with it. Still, he did spend half his summer vacation earning money, and for the last two weeks he has been campaigning to buy himself a cell phone with his earnings. For it must be said: 98.4 percent of all Israelis between the ages of three and a hundred-and-three own their own cell phone. Until yesterday, when Meir got his, the Lozowick family had been among the remaining 1.6 percent.

This morning he took it with him to school, which, I somehow had forgotten, borders on Arab Jerusalem. Literally borders: some day, this will mark the international boundary, and the building adjacent to his school will be in Palestine.

An hour after traipsing off with his new toy, Meir began bombarding his mother with reports.

Imma [Mom], the neighbors are being more aggressive today.”

Imma, they’re throwing firebombs, and we’re not allowed out of the building.”

Imma, they’re shooting with live ammunition, from both sides.”

Imma, the police have closed the main road, I don’t see how I’m going to get home.”

At this stage his mother called me. Meir was panicking: should she drive over and fetch him? I told her to stay put and called him myself. As we talked I could hear staccato gunshots in the background, but Meir, who was in the gym, assured me it was just the rap of basketballs on the court. We agreed on the route he would take if there was still fighting going on at the end of the day. I called his mother to urge her not to worry.

Late in the afternoon, on my way home, I again heard gunshots, real ones, but they lasted only a minute or two. This evening an elderly man walking his dog in the neighborhood of Gilo was shot at from the nearby Arab town of Beit Jalla, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA). He fell on his face; the windows of the apartments behind him were all smashed.

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October 31, 2000

It has taken a while for the significance of events to penetrate my mind.

In mid-summer, Ehud Barak flew to Camp David for secluded talks with Yasir Arafat and Bill Clinton. The last time a trio of American, Arab, and Israeli leaders cloistered themselves at Camp David was in 1978; the result was a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that has withstood some pretty severe tests.

Those were heady days. Upon his return, Prime Minister Menachem Begin was greeted at the airport by thousands of cheering demonstrators. A representative of the Peace Now movement, only recently established, announced on television: “We didn’t vote for Begin, but since he has risen to the historic moment, we’ll marshal all our forces to support him.”

The image is set in black and white—color TV came to Israel only a few years later—but the physical sensation was unforgettable. Like other members of the “peace camp,” like Israelis in general, I was overcome with emotion at the prospect of life in a country not at war—“a normal country,” as we liked to say.

Our tears of joy turned out to be premature—but now, a generation later, Barak seemed poised to repeat Begin’s feat, and on the night of his departure thousands of us converged in front of his residence to demonstrate our support. The first speaker, Tzali Reshef, prominent in Peace Now from the beginning, reminded the crowd of the long road they had traveled. Often, he recalled, the movement had operated in a climate of public hostility. But now, after all these years, a prime minister elected with a mandate to withdraw from the occupied territories was off to reach an agreement with Yasir Arafat. “This is the moment,” he thundered.

But it wasn’t. A few weeks later Barak was home again, and there were no crowds at the airport. Israel has been dismantling its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the Oslo accords of 1993; at Camp David, Barak had effectively offered a complete withdrawal, recognition of an independent Palestinian state, and even compromises over Jerusalem, all in return for a Palestinian declaration that the conflict was over. Arafat turned him down.

On September 27, an Israeli soldier, nineteen-year-old David Biri of Jerusalem, was killed by a bomb at Netzarim, an island of Israeli-controlled territory in the Gaza Strip. Netzarim, along with the other Israeli settlements still in Gaza, was to be evacuated and turned over to the Palestinians according to the terms offered by Barak at Camp David. Should we have pricked up our ears at the death of David Biri, recognized the beginning of something new? At the time, it did not seem particularly unusual.

The next day, Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount on a visit that had been cleared in advance with the Palestinian authorities. Jibril Rajoub, one of the PA’s top security officials, had assured his Israeli counterparts that as long as Sharon stayed away from the Muslim mosques on the Mount, there would be no problem. The visit was uneventful. On Friday, the following day, Arab rioters on the Temple Mount dumped rocks on Jews praying at the Western Wall below.

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A picture on my desk as I write shows a four-year-old girl, crying with terror as her mother pulls her away from the Wall; in the background, other women race off as a policeman screams at them to get away. Up on the Mount itself, five of the rioters would be killed in the ensuing clash with the Israeli police. The same day, an Israeli policeman was also killed; he was on a joint patrol near the town of Qalkilya when one of his Palestinian colleagues simply walked over and shot him.

For the next two days, I heard no news. It was Rosh HaShanah, and we spent long hours in the synagogue. To me the climactic moment of the service has long been the passage in the prayer book that was composed by Amnon of Magenza at the end of the 11th century. Magenza was the Jewish name for the German town of Mainz, and I could picture Rabbi Amnon sitting in the dust and rubble of his destroyed community, pouring out his heart.

Limbering up for the task of liberating the holy land, Crusaders en route to Jerusalem had been massacring Jews along their path through Europe, a tidal wave of thugs moving south. In their wake, a devastated Amnon sat and wrote about the awesome dread of the one day each year when God decides who among us will live, and who will die. Fittingly, the possibility of another’s year life is noted only briefly in Amnon’s prayer, while the modes of death he lists are multiple: “who by water, who by fire, who by the sword, who by the beast, who by hunger, who by thirst. . . . Man is as a broken shard, as straw on the wind, as a wilted flower, as a passing shadow, as a fleeting dream.”

As a child, and later as a young adult, these words went right by me. The older I become, the more deeply they resonate: another year has passed, and I have been blessed with life, and Rabbi Amnon is back to remind me not to take any of it for granted. And he sends me another, subliminal message, too, in the mere fact that the words he penned in the midst of calamity nine centuries ago should still have the power to stir the soul to reflection and, improbably, hope. A tradition that calls forth such poetry from the dust is surely worth living for.

On Sunday night, prayer and meditation behind me, I got on the Internet and visited the New York Times. There, the horrifying picture of twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, huddling next to his father in terror moments before being killed in crossfire, struck me like a fist in the face: me, a lover of peace, me, the father of a twelve-year-old son.

Muhammad’s picture, too, is on my desk as I write. I have spent many hours studying it, etching it into my soul; it is incredibly powerful, and I have no wish to hide from it. But weeks would pass before I began to understand the truth of it. That the incident happened at Netzarim, the same lonely outpost in Gaza where David Biri had been shot and killed. That Muhammad’s father had been screaming to his compatriots for a brief cessation in their firing at Israeli sentries. That a French cameraman had been situated only a few yards away, but rather than joining his own pleas to the pleas of the anguished father had kept his camera trained on the picture of his career. That the Palestinian “freedom fighters” all around were so intent on redeeming by bloodshed what they had refused to accept by negotiation that it never crossed their minds to stop shooting. That, given the terrain and the range, it was highly improbable that the Israeli soldiers, hunkered down, shot at from three sides, could have had any idea that there was a child there. Only a fool—or worse—would claim that they calmly surveyed their surroundings and maliciously shot down a child.

But that is precisely what my friend Arthur claimed. He is an English gentleman, a non-Jew who teaches in a university and who each year takes his students to visit the sites of the Nazi death camps in Poland. His reading of the big picture, or so he told me, was that Ariel Sharon was a war criminal—a Milosevic—and in a normal country he would be tried for his crimes. To my demurral—what was happening was too serious to be glibly blamed on Sharon, and if one were looking for a leader with the blood of innocents on his hands, Arafat would easily qualify—his response was to sever relations with me. A decade of friendship, gone in the puff of an e-mail. Maybe we had never been as friendly as I thought.

Or maybe I was just expecting too much of him. People, after all, are creatures of their times, and of their societies, and the British media have been quite clear as to who is to blame for what is going on. The Economist, one of the most influential news magazines in the world, has summed up the events thus:

[Israel] has to abate its greed for other people’s land. . . . Most Palestinians, who once lived in the land that is now Israel, have through their leaders accepted the two-state solution. It is now up to the Israelis, if they want a decent, civilized life for themselves, to allow the Palestinians a reasonably-sized little state with its proper capital in East Jerusalem.

Isn’t this precisely what Barak just offered?

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December 5, 2000

At the beginning of November I had occasion to go to Germany on business. At a mostly deserted Ben Gurion airport I chatted with one of the building staff. Not only was tourism dead, which everybody knew, but Israelis themselves had stopped traveling. “No one feels like taking a vacation with this mess at home,” he said. I, too, had had my qualms.

In Germany, our little war seemed far away; over the course of ten days of meetings the only people who inquired about it were friends I met after work. On my return home, the first thing I heard on the news was that Gilo was being shot at. I was thunderstruck: six weeks of firing at a residential neighborhood, and we hadn’t found a way to put a stop to it?

I ran into an acquaintance, a mid-echelon officer in the military.

“So how are things?”

“Average.”

“Average?”

“Yup. Worse than before, better than what’s to come.”

The large-scale violence was indeed dying down, having reached a precipice of sorts in, of all places, the Galilee, where in late October Israeli Arabs—citizens, every one of them—had joined the rioting. For about ten days, twenty-fours a day, the news reports listed roads that had to be closed to traffic; they included the country’s main arteries. Two weeks later, a friend drove down to Jerusalem from his home up north and told of mile after mile of devastated highway: steel lampposts razed, traffic lights smashed, a gas station torched, stone barricades everywhere. Thirteen rioters had been killed by the police. In an ensuing counter-explosion by Jews in the northern part of the country, the only casualty was himself a Jew, hit by a rock while driving on the main road from Haifa to Tel Aviv.

As the violence inside Israel subsided, Palestinian arms turned instead on the settlers in the occupied territories. No one gets as bad a press as these settlers: men, women, and children who are regularly portrayed as the evil, brutal edge of Israeli society, their avarice for Palestinian land having provided the spark that lit the entire conflict. My own relationship with them has long been ambivalent: objecting to their goals, I have liked many of them personally. Almost all the people I went to school with grew up to join the settlers’ movement.

In mid-October I had had lunch with three or four of them. They were complimenting themselves on their prescience. They had known all along that the Palestinians were not going to make peace, and by standing their ground they had managed to provoke the Arabs into showing their hand. “Stop kidding yourselves,” I responded. “This has nothing to do with you. If the Palestinians had been willing to make peace with me and my kind, you couldn’t have stopped us. The truth is that the peace effort blew up over Jerusalem, not the settlements.”

By November, though, the settlers were being shot down on the roads. Colleagues who live in Efrat or Ofra took to leaving work early in order to get home before nightfall; a member of my staff missed work altogether one day to attend the funeral of a neighbor, murdered in his car the evening before.

Practically every household in these settlements keeps one or more firearms, and many of the men are also armed with automatic weapons lent on a permanent basis by their reserve units; they also have military training and experience that far exceeds anything the Palestinians can offer. And yet, contrary to their image abroad, the settlers were restraining themselves. It made one pause and think, or should have.

One of the murdered was Dr. Shmuel Gillis, a forty-two-year-old hematologist at Hadassah hospital and the father of five. At the funeral service his colleagues told of Gillis’s outstanding professionalism and his contributions to an international research effort, while his patients lauded his warm bedside manner. Mourning openly along with the rest, his Palestinian patients shared their grief with the media. The cortege set out from Hadassah accompanied by thousands; additional thousands, standing in silence, lined the road south of Jerusalem on which Gillis had been shot. It was all rather different from the Palestinian funerals to which we have become accustomed, hate-filled affairs that often serve as launching points for more violence.

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February 15, 2001

By now, terror murders or attempted murders in Jerusalem, Hadera, Holon, Netanya, and elsewhere have blurred the distinction between the settlers and the general Israeli populace. It is not the occupied territories that agitate Palestinian passions, it seems; it is the very existence of the state of Israel. Ehud Barak’s desperate attempts to reach an agreement in the last hours before his downfall served to bring that into starker relief.

Barak had not been backed by a majority of the Knesset when he went to Camp David, but neither had he been toppled on his return. The process of toppling began in January, when new elections were set for early this month and all the polls concurred that Barak was going to be severely thrashed. The only thing that would save him, or so he appeared to think, was a peace treaty that would radically change the picture on the ground.

Bill Clinton, even then packing his own bags, proposed to bridge the gap between the two sides by having Israel give in to the division of Jerusalem and the Palestinians renounce the “right of return.” This was the agenda for talks at Taba on the Red Sea. Whether Barak had a mandate to agree to such a deal was moot but also irrelevant; in the event, the Palestinians flatly rejected it.

The attitudes of the two sides were clearly on display at a live press conference at Taba on the final evening of the talks. Shlomo Ben-Ami, our foreign minister, spoke Hebrew; Abu Alah, his Palestinian opposite number, spoke Arabic, with simultaneous translation into Hebrew. Each addressed his own constituency (though Abu Alah faced no elections), so we could compare.

Ben Ami was full of sweetness. Mutual trust has been re-established, he proclaimed, presumably in my name and that of my fellow citizens. We are almost there. Vote for Barak next week, he all but added, and peace will come shortly thereafter. Abu Alah was rather less sanguine. Yes, progress had been made toward putting an end to Israeli aggression. But the Israelis, he told his people, were not yet ready to accept our inalienable right of return. Until they do, we Palestinians have assorted methods at our disposal: diplomatic, political, and otherwise. Vote for Sharon next week, Abu Alah more or less told us, since peace is not going to happen, and Sharon is the candidate who knows it.

Last week, when the election was held, Abu Alah’s argument won the day.

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March 21, 2001

Some Israelis with long memories have the feeling they are back in the 1940’s, in the dangerous years leading up to the establishment of the Jewish state. Whether or not things are as bad as that, undoubtedly there are similarities. It is unsafe today, as it is was unsafe then, to travel the roads. It is unsafe to run errands downtown. An experiment in resolving our conflict with the Arabs, an experiment that many of us thought we had to undertake and were strong enough to undertake, has failed dismally, as others of us said it would. The price of the failure is being paid in blood.

Yesterday, ten-month-old Shalhevet Pas of Hebron was murdered by a sniper. In the evening a bomb was defused in the center of Petach Tikva. Today there have been two bombs in Jerusalem, one of them on the bus that my two sons and I take every day. The terrorist, who was killed, will now be added to the roster of Palestinians murdered by the Israeli aggressor. Indeed, just as the bomb was going off, Yasir Arafat was giving a speech at the Arab summit in Amman saying that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land was the greatest act of terrorism imaginable, the foreign minister of Denmark was identifying the Israeli occupation as the cause of the conflict, and the head of Amnesty International was unconditionally backing a Palestinian right of return.

I have been told that our situation would have stumped Kafka, but that seems unfair. On the contrary, I think one of his sentences was tailored specifically for us: die Luege wird zur Weltordnung gemacht, the Lie rules the world.

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