Homeward Bound
Richler, Mordecai
Mordecai Richler Homeward Bound Israel, viewed from Canada, and vice versa. M y wife and I arrived in Israel on October 11, 1992, and we were driven directly to Mishkenot Sha'ananim, the official...
...However, it did occur to me that had Bee been a cartoonist for The Catholic Herald, and had he drawn a mixed-marriage couple clasping hands before a Star of David, and equated it with genocide, the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League would have been on his case in a jiffy, accusing him of racism...
...I was weary of the West Bank's loopy, God-crazed settlers toting M-16 assault rifles on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv...
...And then the man's Ph.D...
...My two other sons, who were both in prison then, saw my picture in an Israeli newspaper, and read how the reporter wrote that I had been beaten with sticks when the soldiers came to search our house...
...Obviously Halkin was a stranger to self-doubt, but could he really believe that I lived in Canada only because I was a slacker and a sybarite and not because it was my home and, therefore, a country I cared about more deeply than Israel, for that matter...
...It was with the most disarming of smiles, albeit tainted by condescension, that he said to me, "Jews have a choice...
...Instead, I said, "If possible, I'd like to talk to people who haven't already been interviewed again and again...
...Then," he said, "there will be civil war...
...But did she not hope, I asked, that one day there would be a peace settlement...
...Sure many Palestinians were evicted from their villages...
...My husband worked in construction in Saudi Arabia...
...Many of our children have lost their fathers...
...Whom do you wish to talk to in Dheisheh...
...In 1950, I dropped out of college, sailing for Paris rather than Tel Aviv...
...In Dheisheh, I said, I had heard complaints about torture...
...As we drove through the Jerusalem quarter of Talpiot, Miss Barham pointed out a sizable detached stone house...
...Or Kristallnacht...
...Morally, they are in the right...
...Later," she said, "we regretted it...
...Marina, responding to my skeptical look, said, "It is a very true suspicion...
...On the other hand, since the Gulf War, the PLO has been cut off by Saudi Arabia and others, and Palestinian workers have been deported from Kuwait, another loss of income...
...r The American Spectator, P.O...
...The plaster of Paris model of the Dome on the Rock that sat on a side table was inscribed, "If you support God, God will support you...
...He was tall, big-featured, lanky, with a shock of gray hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and huge protruding ears: a man who clearly had no time for idle chitchat or an exchange of civilities...
...Halkin's assumption that it was impossible to lead a full Jewish life in America, or the U.K., was unnerving...
...One of the stone-throwers...
...Arab workers out of Gaza congregate here, waiting to be picked up by Israeli contractors who will provide a day's work on one building site or another...
...Founded in 1979, Tehiya is fiercely dedicated to saving Judea and Samaria from those "treacherous" doves who would swap land for peace, the "dastardly" Yitzhak Rabin in particular, who might yet enter history, Ha'etzni once wrote, "as a second Rehoboam who had helped fatally divide his people and his land," and might even add his Jewish name "to those of Nebuchadnezzer and Titus, who exiled the Jews from Bethlehem, Shilo, Beit El and Hebron...
...At least, I thought, we no longer poisoned wells or required the blood of Christian babes for our Passover matzohs, but I said nothing...
...You're going to think this is terrible of me, but the truth is they smell so bad...
...The difference between our two mentalities is the difference between someone who lives at home and someone who lives in a rented room...
...36 The American Spectator September 1994 Miss Barham did not have an Israeli or Jordanian passport, but only a laissez-passer issued by the Israeli government...
...My cousin Sam Orbaum, a Jerusalem Post reporter, told me that the loaf is called a beigele by both Arab and Jew...
...Jerusalem is sacred to all Muslims...
...Ha'etzni, a.former representative in the Knesset is a member of the Tehiya Party...
...An aged robed Arab sat on a stool outside a poky shop displaying boxes of fruits and vegetables, and a couple of shelves of canned goods...
...At UNRWA, we were directed to the office of Public Information Officer, where we were confronted by an insufferably elegant Sandro Tucci...
...I yearned for some Canadian homebrew farce rather than the daily death toll of Arab and Jew: October 25...
...However, the first person to ring our doorbell, in response to my mother's ad, was an emaciated, timorous, impeccably dressed, middle-aged man...
...Descending a slope to our car, which we had left outside Dheisheh's fence, we were careful to avoid patches made slippery by rotting garbage...
...I was grateful that for once in our history, we were the ones with the guns and they were the ones with the stones...
...I can offer you a young man who had part of his jaw shot off, a recent widow, a boy who came out of prison crippled...
...38 The American Spectator September 1994 in a gas station in the Jewish settlement of Zar Hadas...
...I resented the need to stiffen every time an Arab, wearing a keffiyah came striding toward me...
...People are beginning to look for apartments elsewhere," she said, "because the schwartsers have begun to move in...
...He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital and I would not allow an autopsy because the Jews use the body parts...
...The family you rent from may be the kindest and nicest you could wish for, but you still have to behave yourself and stay in its good graces if you don't want to be out of a room...
...Land was appropriated...
...0 ne morning, accompanied by Paul Workman, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Middle Eastern correspondent, and Azur Mizrachi, his cameraman, I set, out for Dheisheh, a Palestinian refugee camp...
...Ironically, the American-bred immigrants among them, playing latterday gunslingers, actually owed more to their TV heritage of "Maverick" and "Rawhide" than they did to Hillel or Rabbi Akiba...
...I lower my eyes...
...The most conspicuous was crudely colored and had a purple paper valentine pasted on it...
...He told me not to tell my parents that I was seeing him...
...Putterschnit explained, "Listen here, you're not a real waiter, but by the owner a son, and this isn't even a restaurant...
...My husband was only joking," said Florence...
...He was shot through the head by a soldier...
...Three buses were partially burned...
...I don't have to show how good I am...
...That snake you see coming out of my TV is not there by accident...
...I also didn't want to encounter any more appealing Israeli boys and girls in uniform, both at risk, out for a stroll, lugging submachine guns rather than briefcases stuffed with textbooks...
...So are James Ring Adams's two reports on the Whitewater scandal, John Corry's "The MIA Cover-Up," Michael Fumento's report on Magic Johnson & AIDS...
...Sullivan, who had lost his only son in the battle of the Falaise Gap, in 1944, took an interest in me...
...R eturning to our apartment, I paused by the Arab bread vendor's cart, opposite the Yemin Moshe windmill, to buy a horseshoe-shaped loaf that is sold with a pinch of za'atar (hyssop) wrapped in a twist of newspaper...
...Essence of Dizengoff cooking oil...
...Attacks by Palestinian gunmen with grenades in Jenin, another attack by knife-and axe-wielders in Gaza wounded two Israelis...
...I was tempted to ask if he took Amex...
...En route, we geared down to creep necessarily slow through the teeming market square opposite the Damascus Gate that was a hodgepodge of rickety wagons laden with vegetables or junk, ancient trucks with panting engines, bicycles, and donkey-carts and lined with hole-in-the-wall cafés, bakeries, and butcher shops, the signs in Arabic...
...Then I take out the car on Saturday morning and there they are, with their ten children, shaking their fists at me and shouting shabbes...
...A zur and I had a 2 p.m...
...Even with the Golan, every one of our kibbutzim is fenced in...
...Will the Americans give back New Mexico...
...The Arabs were here for a thousand years," he said, "more, and we moved many of them out...
...After traveling through the Rockies, Rupert Brooke had complained that he missed "the voices of the dead...
...I asked for compensation...
...He also complained that "today, owing to American pressure, Arabs are allowed to build freely whenever they wish, while Jews [on the West Bank] cannot build even privately financed homes...
...It was reported to the driver, everybody was disembarked, and the bus was driven to a secludMordecai Richler is the author of Oh Canada...
...There was a clash with the soldiers and seventy people were injured...
...Eventually Hoppenheim, Putterschnit, and Stein became regulars at our table...
...E n route to Elyakim Ha'etzni's house, we stopped for a beer at a street-corner canteen in Kiryat Arba...
...Ibrahim was only 38 years old when he was murdered," she said...
...T here were two Israeli Defense Force (IDF) bases opposite Dheisheh, four observation posts mounted on roofs within the camp, and the narrow hilly streets were regularly monitored by three patrols, made up of six to eight soldiers each...
...At the time, we were all pledged to make aliyah (the ascent to Israel), but none of us ever made it...
...Another guest at the dinner party, an archaeologist, told us about an associate who had forgotten his briefcase on a bus...
...We have already given up three-quarters of Palestine, which they call Jordan, and where the so-called Palestinians make up seventy per cent of the population...
...I can offer you a young man who had part of his jaw shot off, a recent widow, a boy who came out of prison crippled...
...Within minutes a police van will heave to, police with bullhorns will clear the area, and then a ramp will be lowered from the rear of the van, and a robot will be sent out to open what could be a bag of groceries or dirty laundry or, just possibly, a bomb...
...So now I don't know...
...This seemed agreeable to Mr...
...We heard two shots, very close to the house, and then a girl came running...
...A nother day Florence and I went to lunch with Bubbi Zerwanitzer, a documentary film maker in his sixties...
...I asked Ha'etzni if he was in favor of returning the Golan Heights to Syria...
...he asked...
...Why should I give it up...
...I asked...
...They searched my house every night, but Mohammed was staying with his grandmother and only came home for a bath...
...nhappily the driver who was to take us to U Masada turned out to be a direct spiritual descendant of the tiresome Mr...
...My husband also heard the shots and he went to the window to see what was happening...
...My God, here was a writer who in one sentence managed to impugn the honor of nearly seven million Jews who feel at home in North America, never mind the others at ease in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and elsewhere...
...A decent sofa and armchairs...
...I did not wake up Florence, my Protestant bride of thirty-three years, mother of our five children, to show it to her...
...Zionist zealots and anti-Semites, those most unlikely of bedfellows, share an undeniably racist article of faith, the odious notion that Jews born and bred in North America, or other Western countries, can never be bona fide citizens of their homelands...
...Shalom," said one, and the other smiled and said, "Chaq somaich...
...Money...
...just to see if he would acknowledge the chant by raising his arms aloft...
...Nihad joined us: poured the coffee, and sat down to tell her tale...
...Urbain Street, we might have had the courage to be among the stone-throwers...
...Eighty were arrested...
...Look outside," he said, indicating a large picture window, "and you will see the Judaean hills...
...David Brock's investigation of Anita Hill and his "Living With the Clintons...
...Will this new American definition of 'civil rights' and 'nondiscrimination,' this new racism directed against Jews, prevail during the five years of 'Autonomy...
...However, I have no quarrel with those who have chosen assimilation...
...A melancholy Jew, Bubbi's heart was laden with guilt, some of it his, still more harvested...
...The same month, in a Post op-ed piece that anticipated the forthcoming meeting between Prime Minister Rabin and then President Bush, Ha'etzni warned against granting the Palestinians even limited autonomy, a license, hewrote, for an Arab police force made up of former "masked, hatchet-bearing murderers...
...At last it has its 'Jews,' its scapegoats, the ever-guilty, the chosen-and-rejected, those who always make news...
...Would you mind passing the bread, sir," Hoppenheim might say...
...Soon, soon...
...You're sailing for the wrong port, chaver...
...The military told me that only close relatives could come to Ibrahim's funeral," said Nihad...
...Another old Arab, intent on his Koran, squatted before opened cartons of Marlboros and packages of razor blades...
...Finally, after a three month wait, I got my laissez-passer...
...What do you want here...
...Maybe a neighbor shot your husband,' he said...
...They probably told you in Dheisheh about the policy of home demolition where arms were found or terrorists were hidden...
...That's Ibrahim's blood...
...Shame on you...
...The living room's centerpiece was an idealized, but crudely drawn portrait of Mohammed, underneath which was written: YOUR HEART IS BEATING, INTIFADA IS VERY STRONG...
...Other Jews came out of Yemen, Libya, and Egypt with nothing but what they could carry...
...Yes, I tip him...
...We have a strong army and we should bombard the terrorists with at least 100 shells for every one of their Katyusha rockets...
...You know, one day, at the rate they're going, they will outnumber all of us, and what then...
...Why should I be exiled to live in the Diaspora, in Tel Aviv, on the Philistine plains...
...Mohammed's mother, Aba Nidal Abu 'Aker, wore a scarf with PLO colors...
...Ha'etzni spoke effortless English with a pronounced German accent...
...Five IDF soldiers were killed, and three seriously wounded, in a Hizbullah roadside bomb attack against an IDF convoy inside the eastern sector of the security zone in south Lebanon...
...Where do you start here and where do you stop...
...He was only 19 years old when he died two years ago today...
...I didn't correct her, but I did venture that Jerusalem was also sacred to Jews...
...It was, I could see at once, considerably more prosperous, if only on the Dheisheh scale...
...Urbain Street boyhood, but which some Israeli youngsters take to be Arabic...
...I served the meals and Mr...
...But he had the disconcerting, and intimidating, habit of shouting at two people in a living room, his voice often flirting with hysteria, as if, in his mind's eye, he was poised on a balcony, hectoring the multitudes milling below...
...I was grateful that for once in our history, we were the ones with the guns and they were the ones with the stones...
...How far back can we go in making amends...
...A Sony ghetto blaster...
...Suckers that we are, we are sick in our minds...
...Born in Kiel, in Schleswig-Holstein, in 1926, Ha'etzni had come to Israel in 1938...
...Imagine that, Mr...
...Labor didn't win a majority of the Jewish votes...
...I've been here for forty years and I expect nothing...
...Montreal, 1944...
...Twenty to forty people at the most was all they would allow...
...A state is a machinery for oppression, even a Jewish state...
...A Gazan in Khan Yunis, and another in Gaza City, were both shot dead by other Palestinians, apparently for cooperating with the authorities...
...And we don't serve liquor here...
...They hate the Jew and like the Arab who, although he shoots at them, toadies to them and takes care to flatter their sense of importance...
...Send for your copies today...
...Two, they will kill anybody, not necessarily the perpetrator...
...Even as I luxuriated in guilt, I had to acknowledge a deeper feeling, one that I hadn't plucked out of my liberal convenience store...
...They only discovered that they were Palestinians after the Zionists built a state here...
...Daniel Wattenberg's profiles of the real Hillary Clinton, Love and Hate in Arkansas, or his report on David Koresh...
...He knew everything about me...
...A contributor, since 1940, to the Palestine Post, as it then was, and other Israeli newspapers, Birzowski signed his name Noah Bee...
...Spanish Jews, I remembered, expelled by the edict of the Catholic monarchs in 1492, also held on to their front door keys, sometimes passed down through the generations...
...Outside, a muezzin called the faithful to prayer...
...Then she swept a pillow from a tattered sofa...
...Tell me," I asked, "have you guys ever thought of bottling Israeli piss and marketing it abroad as perfume...
...If only I would agree to inform on Palestinians abroad...
...Many of our children have lost their fathers...
...She invited us to sit down in her living room, andthen went off to prepare Turkish coffee...
...A diplomatic passport...
...Three, they are terrorists who favor indiscriminate killings of innocent civilians...
...CD The American Spectator September 1994 43...
...F eigning sleep, I brooded over Nihad 'Odeh's heartfelt declaration, torn from the rock of her misery: The Jews haven't suffered as we have...
...One, they have no regard for human life...
...I was raised to proffer apologies because my ostensibly boring country was so short of history, but after five footloose weeks in a land choking on the clinging vines of its own incomparably rich past, a victim of contrary mythologies, I considered the watery soup of my Canadian provenance a blessing...
...Mohammed's ancient, shriveled grandmother, his grieving parents, his twofor him another time...
...A mensch who hadn't shucked what too many smart-ass Israelis disdain as "ghetto hang-ups," and what others, myself included, cherish as neshuma, soul...
...Sabra cologne...
...I complained to a human rights organizahouses constructed in 1954...
...From 1825 to 1855, during the reign of Nicholas I, Jewish children in the Pale of Settlement, from the ages of 12 to 18, were taken from their parents and press-ganged into the army for periods of up to twenty-five years...
...In 1899, following a pogrom in Jassy, Romania, the fussgeyer movement was born...
...In 1948, during the Israeli War of Independence, his widow flew over a battle in progress at Deganiah and dropped her husband's Bible on the field...
...Marina explained that following the death of a martyr the PLO provides the widow with a pension of $100 a month, but she must go to Jordan to collect it...
...There are Russians," he said, "who are only off the plane for an hour and they want to know what are so many Arabs doing in our land...
...It is putting a bullet to our heads...
...Two months after I applied for a passport," she said, "I was invited to meet with an Israeli intelligence officer in a room in the King Solomon Hotel...
...Was he, I now wondered, sitting out there pondering the fate of those Richlers left behind in Rawa-Ruska, a Galician shtetl...
...Our historical land, our political entitlement coming from the Bible...
...From the moment he picked us up at Mishkenot, through the two-hour drive to Masada, our visit to that astonishing site, and the trip back, he never stopped nattering, overwhelming us with statistics, pointing out every Israeli miracle on either side of the road, watching closely for our reactions in his rear-view mirror...
...That was our family house until '67," she said, "and every time we pass, I see it...
...One night the soldiers came when he was here, but he escaped, the soldiers running after him...
...This is largely due to the fact that we seem to send only the worst type of British official to Palestine...
...It was a kosher canteen run by a good-natured young man with corkscrew sidecurls, a follower of the Lubavitcher Rebbe...
...Hoppenheim and Putterschnit were bachelors and Stein was a widower...
...Paul drove back to the UNWRA camp with Marina and then Azur and I proceeded to Kiryat Arba, where we were scheduled to meet with the West Bank settlers' most eloquent advocate, the ferocious Elyakim Ha'etzni...
...Terry Eastland's dissection of Rush Limbaugh's Revolution...
...In Israel, the ultra-orthodox are variously known as schwartsers, blacks, or black coats...
...Mohammed lived for two years after he was shot on life-sustaining machines...
...When Mohammed was only 15 years old, she said, he was already active in the intifada...
...Dheisheh lies on the main road out of Jerusalem, through Bethlehem, to Hebron, with its overhanging settlers' suburb of Kiryat Arba...
...Photographs of Nihad's late husband were everywhere...
...Scent of the black-coats...
...Do I tip him...
...It was a pleasure, he said, to talk to such a well-educated young woman...
...Mohammed was taken to the hospital, where the doctors were surprised that he was still alive...
...In another op-ed piece, published in the Post, Ha'etzni noted that by freezing funds for the settlers, "The State of Israel has achieved normalcy...
...Urbain Street and cooked for a refugee who had escaped from Austria immediately before the Anschluss...
...You see, I'm an active Zionist and could Mr...
...Will the Arabs have free access to state-owned land, while the Jews remain cooped up in their chicken-pens waiting for slaughter...
...Me, I was grateful at last for their absence...
...The Jews haven't suffered as we have...
...Miss Barham, an intelligent, young Palestinian Christian, who spoke fluent English, was to serve as my guide and translator...
...Mohammed's been shot,' she said...
...Arab children are severely beaten for anything," he 40 The American Spectator September 1994 said...
...Then, his manner that of a bored maitre d' of human suffering, he began to recite specialities that were not listed on the menu...
...He was shot with a dum-dum bullet, which exploded in his abdomen...
...The furnishings were wretched...
...Unavailingly, as it turned out...
...Mr...
...in Canada you will earn a living.] Running through this heritage of outrages and endurance in my head, not forgetting the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, when the murder of a mere forty-nine Jews qualified as a "massacre...
...The real goal of the Arabs is to drive the Jews into the sea," he said...
...We will never give up Jerusalem...
...On May 9, 1988, he was on vacation at a time when I was six months pregnant...
...Sullivan, who worked at the neighborhood branch of the City and District Savings Bank, frequented our table on Tuesdays and Thursdays...
...The American Spectator September 1994 35 be called up to serve in our army in Palestine any time after my eighteenth birthday...
...Grabbing was also out...
...Privileges...
...From 1944 through 1948, I was a member of Habonim, a Zionist youth group rooted in socialist doctrine...
...was unnervingly reminiscent of the St...
...Big-bellied, black-eyed Aba Nidal Abu 'Aker, endlessly rocking, keening, but also relishing the importance injustice had bestowed on her, rendering The American Spectator September 1994 39 her mother of a martyr...
...Nihad was the mother of four sons and four daughters...
...The soldiers were here...
...So I needn't excel any more...
...Kiryat Arba was established on a rock-strewn slope in 1969 by Rabbi Moshe Levinger and forty haredi families, and was officially recognized as a settlement by the government a year later...
...Before we left the house, we were each handed an envelope with an invitation to that afternoon's memorial service for Mohammed...
...Sullivan unfailingly tucked a dime or fifteen cents, depending on whether it was a meat or fish night, under his tea saucer for me...
...A plump, excitable matriarch of substance, black eyes smouldering, she was the one chosen to recite the family's tale, and such was her puissance no sooner did she start than the living room was transformed into a theater...
...Neither do I," said Azur...
...in kanade vet it ferdinen gelt...
...He spoke fluent Arabic...
...M y wife and I arrived in Israel on October 11, 1992, and we were driven directly to Mishkenot Sha'ananim, the official municipal guest house for visiting artists and intellectuals...
...Bubbi was a cultivated man...
...Sullivan, but my mother still blocked his path...
...At a dinner party that night I learned that school children in Jerusalem are trained to summon the police immediately they discover an unattended parcel or carton anywhere on the street...
...She's doing an honest job," he said, "but widows get more than $100 a month from the PLO and they don't have to go to Jordan to collect it...
...He brought me City and District Savings Bank blotters, a calendar, and once two baseball tickets that a customer had given him...
...His blood...
...Please accept our apologies.' And then he pointed at my swollen belly and said, 'I hope you have a boy and you call him Ibrahim.'" Ibrahim and Nihad's families had both fled their village in 1948, fearful of the approaching Israeli army...
...Enough...
...He hadn't been out for very long when the soldiers came W e moved on through an alley strewn with rubble to the house of Mohammed Abu 'Aker and Aba Nidal Abu 'Aker...
...Box 549, Arlington, VA 22216-0549 Yes, please send me: copies of James Ring Adams's "Beyond Whitewater" $ copies of James Ring Adams's "The Whitewater Obstructionists" copies of John Cony's "The MIA Cover-Up" copies of Michael Fumento's "This Magic Moment" copies of Daniel Wattenberg's "Gunning for Koresh" copies of Daniel Wattenberg's "Lady Macbeth of Little Rock" copies of Daniel Wattenberg's "Love and Hate in Arkansas" copies of Terry Eastland's "Rush Limbaugh: Talking Back" copies of "The Incredible Shrinking AIDS Epidemic" copies of Lisa Schiffren's "The Unauthorized Clinton Financial Audit" copies of David Brock's "Living With the Clintons" copies of David Brock's "The Real Anita Hill" copies of David Brock's "The Travelgate Cover-Up" Sub-Total VA residents add 4.5% sales tax Total Enclosed $ Name: Address: LCity: State: Zip Code: RP9409 Fifteen Arabs were injured and a day-long commercial strike was declared in Gaza...
...Sullivan indicated the folded copy of the Star in his hand, my mother's ad circled with a pencil...
...When our eldest daughter, Emma, was a mere 10-year-old, she informed her brothers, "You guys are Jewish, but the girls aren't...
...It was noted that he ate with his fork upside down, he wore spats, and on evenings when my mother joined the men for dessert, he would rise from his chair until she was seated...
...Or the conference at Wansee that led to the Final Solution...
...Then we passed the home of my obdurate grandfather, Shmariyahu Richler, who sat on the balcony, catching the evening breeze, the local Yiddish daily newspaper, Die Keneder Adler, on his lap...
...Framed verses from the Koran hung on one wall...
...Her flat, part of a cinderblock row, was made up of a tiny kitchen with a tiled floor, two bedrooms, and two sitting rooms...
...Happy holiday...
...Waiting for the presumptuous author of such a self-serving pensee to appear, I anticipated a fierce quarrel...
...Mohammed Abu 'Aker, responding to a nod from his wife, said he suffered from a debilitating heart condition and worked stones...
...But, taking it a step further, I also found myself wishing that if Jerry, Hershey, Myer and I had been born and bred in the squalor of Dheisheh rather than the warmth of St...
...There were clashes in the camp...
...Then, his manner that of a bored maitre d' of human suffering, he began to recite specialities that were not listed on the menu...
...But he was in hiding...
...There are three boys and two girls...
...Yes...
...Given to messianic fantasies, Wingate dreamed of being a latter-day Moses, leading the Jews in a military campaign to re-establish them in their historic homeland, but he died in an airplane crash in Burma in 1944...
...Texas...
...These bullets are against the law...
...What they didn't tell you is that, immediately a home is demolished, they get money from the PLO to build another one...
...The second frame was a drawing of a couple being married in church, standing before a crucifix, with the footnote "Intermarriage...
...Ha'etzni...
...A goy...
...There are fences around all the Jewish settlements, because we are the object of attacks...
...He was released by the courts after three months, but when he was 16 he was imprisoned again, this time for a month...
...Or the Black Hundreds...
...Is it the Rebbe...
...Sullivan doffed his pearl gray fedora and asked, "May I come in, madam...
...This is the advice I got from the Arabs themselves," he said, watchful, his eyes taunting...
...A certain amount of physical pressure is permitted in dealing with terrorists...
...We went to a human rights organization and Mohammed was allowed to fly to the United States for treatment...
...A family group awaited us...
...We must have something like 10,000 musicians here now, most of them second-class, and now reduced to playing their violins or singing on street corners, because how many teaching jobs are available in such a small country...
...The Arabs are different from us for three reasons...
...L ate one afternoon I sat in the bar of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv waiting for Hillel Halkin, an American-born writer and translator who had made aliyah in 1970...
...It is also commonplace, he said, for Arab junk collectors, passing through Jewish neighborhoods on their donkey-drawn wagons, to call out "Alte zachen (old things)," a Yiddish cry familiar to me from my St...
...No harm in it...
...Established as a tent city in 1949, Dheisheh had its first Now its residents, making a political statement, would not allow any renovations, and neither would they agree to be moved, unless it was back to the villages they had fled or been evicted from in 1948...
...In the event, Halkin turned out to be a gentle, soft-spoken man...
...In With Friends Like You: What Israelis Really Think About American Jews, Matti Golan argued for "the importance of Israel not as a Jewishunfortunately, he is right about one thing...
...H a' etzni pointed out that he often acted for the Arabs in Hebron, defending them in court...
...Today, although ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers, it is a pretty, prosperous town, home to some 5,000 settlers surrounded by hostile Arabs, no settler more visible than the lawyer Elyakim Ha'etzni...
...But he accepted five shekels...
...How much is that...
...His displeasure obvious, he grudgingly showed us into his living room, and then excused himself to retrieve his shirt...
...Suffering from a surfeit of Israel's seemingly insoluble dilemmas, I longed for the familiar nursery school name-calling between English and French—our two founding races, so to speak—not the progeny of Sarah and Hagar, but of dispossessed Highland sheep farmers and peasants out of Brittany and Normandy...
...They're ideal for distribution to your friends, colleagues, teachers, and political representatives...
...But what if Rabin did trade land for peace, I asked, and the West Bank settlements had to be abandoned...
...California...
...Mr...
...Israeli kids, for their part, frequently borrow from the Arabic, saying "mapsut" for "satisfied" and "ya'ani" for "let's go" or "come on...
...Climbing the hilly dirt road to Nihad 'Odeh's flat, we passed fly-ridden mounds of decaying refuse, cannibalized hulks of rusting cars, abandoned mattresses bleeding stuffing, and piles of rubble...
...I had been unable to find a copy of his out-of-print book, Letters to an American Jewish The American Spectator September 1994 41 Friend: A Zionist Polemic, published in the seventies, but I was familiar with the argument at its core: it was, as put by Halkin himself, "that for any Jew in this day and age who cares about being Jewish, the only honest place to live is Israel...
...He was confined in a cell where there wasn't enough room for him to lie down or stand properly...
...A neighbor, Leah Yaffin, also a new immigrant from Russia, told a Jerusalem Post reporter, "I never thought that in a Jewish State we would need to hide like mice...
...But, wrote in a Jerusalem Report column, "Jews are no different from other people in putting their comfort first—they are only different in feeling so embarrassed about it that they will resort to almost any myth or rationalization before admitting their true motives...
...The biblical land of Israel is the West Bank...
...They are not trash...
...Wingate was a first cousin of T.E...
...In both cases, soup and dessert come with...
...Turning to his assistant, Marina Barham, he said, "Take him to the homes of Nihad 'Odeh and Mohammed Abu 'Aker...
...And look, the blood...
...Our rambling, three-story meeting house was on Jeanne Mance Street, in the heart of Montreal's old working-class Jewish quarter...
...Lawrence...
...Those clothes...
...The right arm of one of the brothers was freshly bandaged right up to the elbow...
...Sullivan, who worked at the neighborhood branch of the City and District Savings Bank, frequented our table on Tuesdays and Thursdays...
...This essay is adapted with permission from his latest book, This Year in Jerusalem, to be published in September by Knopf ed area...
...Dheisheh, its official population 8,048, was surrounded by a six-meter-high fence, entry and exit possible through a narrow turnstile...
...I told him about my meeting with Ha'etzni...
...Oh Quebec...
...To begin with, I pocketed the money with exaggerated ceremony for the benefit of Hoppenheim, Putterschnit, and Stein...
...All at once, I was fed up with tensions that have long been Israel's daily bread...
...I am so ashamed for him...
...A disturbance...
...In fact, at one point I was tempted to shout back, "Ha'etzni...
...One of the cartoons reproduced for the tribute was in two frames with the headline "Final Solutions...
...Twoyears later, she placed a small ad in the Montreal Star offering "delicious, strictly kosher meals at a reasonable price in a warm, family atmosphere...
...Then there was an investigation and six days later he was here again...
...my mother demanded...
...We had come on a day of mourning, the second anniversary of the death of Abu 'Aker's 19-year-old son Mohammed...
...Before he even sat down, he pointed at the sculpture of an unwinding black snake on the top of his TV set, glared at me, and said, "The media belongs to the left...
...We are not for transfer...
...But this is a Jewish home," said my mother, "and we only serve Jewish food here...
...Urbain Street grandmothers of my boyhood, spinning their sorrowful tales of the Old Country...
...But my family had to leave millions behind when they fled Syria...
...Arabs have a saying that a hungry cat is a tiger...
...They made him suffer electric shocks...
...Nothing but...
...They placed a black sack over his head...
...They have guns...
...My husband accompanied him to a hospital in Boston...
...We fight with stones...
...We stopped at another place where, once the money was available, waste water from Israeli toilets would be chemically treated to heat a city yet to be built...
...There was a curfew—soldiers—four hundred people came...
...And, in the same sentence, he also managed to dismiss as uncaring about their Jewish heritage, and necessarily dishonest, a far from uninteresting bunch, say, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Alfred Kazin, Susan Sontag, Joseph Heller, Woody Allen, Anita Brookner, Daniel Bell, Bernice Reubens, Leonard Michaels, Alan Ginsberg, Dan Jacobson, Frederic Raphael, Harold Pinter, John Gross, and the late Irving Howe, Bernard Malamud, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others...
...Look," she said, indicating the hole in a windowpane that had never been replaced, "the bullet hole...
...We are very sorry,' he said...
...They shouldn't be humiliated, having to wait by the roadside to be picked up for construction jobs...
...We fight withbrothers and a sister...
...Sending buckets down the well of my Jewish provenance, I still had to allow that Nihad 'Odeh and Aba Nidal Abu 'Aker were not culpable...
...Either/or...
...We havefilled the graveyards with our children, and they must pay...
...A telephone...
...So now you have it...
...But if there was a conference somewhere, I would just have to say who was there, and where were they staying...
...From time to time they would waken him out of a deep sleep and serve him soup in a dirty bowl...
...What can I say...
...thesis, the work of several years, was blown to bits...
...The Incredible Shrinking AIDS Epidemic report...
...Once, my grandfather had raised the shutters of his rolltop desk and showed me the revolver that had been his when he had served in the army of the Emperor Franz-Josef...
...Or that several hundred of Rawa-Ruska's Jews had been herded into a barn that was surrounded by machine gunners and then set on fire, those fleeing the inferno being gunned down for sport...
...Worse news...
...We come from a village near Jerusalem," he said, "where I used to own eight thousand dumas of land...
...Slouching toward Habonim meetings with my chaverim (comrades), Jerry, Hershey, and Myer, the four of us puffing on Sweet Caps, became a Friday night ritual that continued unbroken through four years of high school...
...Ruminating over why so many American Jews had failed to make aliyah, Halkinhome, but as a home, period...
...He slowed down to show us where there would be a pipeline one day, pumping desalinated sea water into the desert, making it bloom...
...Israelis, tooling past the camp, usually accelerate, lest they be stoned, their cars readily identifiable by their license plates, which are a different color from those of Palestinians from the occupied territories: the former are yellow, the latter blue...
...They can't help it...
...Outside, I trailed behind Paul and Marina with Azur, a Jew whose family had been obliged to flee Syrian oppression...
...So," said Azur, teasing, his manner affectionate, "when is the moshiach [messiah] coming...
...It was noted that he ate with his fork upside down, he wore spats, and on evenings when my mother joined the men for dessert, he would rise from his chair until she was seated...
...But I can't look him in the eye...
...Requiem for a Divided Country (Alfred A. Knopf) and many novels, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then and Now, and Solomon Gursky Was Here...
...Every three or four days they call for a 24-hour curfew...
...Mr...
...And once again, in my mind's eye, I was cutting through the lane to the Habonim meeting house on Jeanne Mance Street, horsing around with Jerry, Hershey, and Myer...
...Our first stop was to be the field offices of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), at Sheikh Jarrah, in Jerusalem...
...Back in our apartment, unable to sleep, I read the Jerusalem Post in bed...
...A Katyusha rocket, fired into Kiryat Shmona, killed fourteen-year-old Vadim Shuchman, whose family had immigrated from Russia two years earlier...
...Electric fans...
...Sifting through my notebooks in the bar of the Dan Hotel that evening, I was suddenly overcome by homesickness for my nearly empty, unspeakably rich, sinfully misgoverned country...
...But, yes, there is police brutality in Tel Aviv...
...Or Vichy's Pierre Laval rounding up 13,000 Parisian Jews on July 16, 1942, 3,000 children among them, and locking them up in the Winter Velodrome, until they could be retrieved by the Gestapo...
...They don't realize it's just around the corner...
...Bands of able-bodied young Jewish men, marching in double-file, knapsacks on their backs, tramped hundreds of miles to the port of Hamburg, and from there sailing steerage to America...
...Is Marina translating everything correctly," I asked, "or is she doing a number on me...
...For Americans," he replied, his manner jovial, "only a hundred bucks...
...Instead of drunken Cossacks wielding swords, IDF delinquents with dum-dum bullets...
...Even as I luxuriated in guilt, I had to acknowledge a deeper feeling, one that I hadn't plucked out of my liberal convenience store...
...And now they knew he came home to bathe in the evening, and they hid, waiting for him...
...The others at the table were too intimidated to banter in Yiddish in his presence, and felt obliged, in deference to his manner, to eat without loosening their ties or removing their jackets...
...We were rewarded for that with Auschwitz...
...I asked...
...Do you think Abu 'Aker really owned all that much land and had it taken from him...
...Tell me," he said, his voice rising, "why a Jewish war should be different from others, and why we should return our territorial gains...
...And Arab workers, waiting to enter Israel from Gaza at the Erez checkpoint, rioted, heaving rocks...
...He was the camp's first martyr of the intifada...
...Wingate, who went on to become a Second World War hero in Burma, leader of the irregular Chindits, a mixed force of British and Gurkha troops, had a Hebrew code name in Palestine in the thirties: hayedid, the friend...
...But he is nobody's fool...
...Go, little Jews, in the wide world...
...Let's see if our children will come to kill me...
...Staring into the molten, heaving seas late at night on the deck of the Franconia, I feared that any moment I might be confronted by Ezra Lifshitz, my former Habonim group leader who had made aliyah...
...He offered me immunity...
...Visa...
...Glickstein, the member of the Zionist Executive in Arthur Koestler's Thieves in the Night, who is seldom without his "propaganda smile...
...It's eighty cents if it's fish, but a dollar five when I'm serving meat...
...42 The American Spectator September 1994 American Spectator Reprints Available David Brock's hot new exposé of Travelgate is available to TAS readers as a special report...
...This heat...
...Why must we prove to be better...
...I am in favor of equal pay for equal work...
...appointment to meet Ha'etzni at his house in Kiryat Arba...
...Yes, but I had purchased some of those sickly pink tomatoes in Montreal and they had tasted of nothing more than water and pulp...
...Witnesses said they saw two Arabs fleeing the area...
...The settlers are the Jewish State's Jews...
...They have guns...
...Gaza Strip after shave...
...After ten such cases there would be no more stone-throwing...
...According to family legend, a great-uncle on my mother's side of the family had shattered one of his testicles on a blacksmith's anvil to avoid being conscripted into the army of the Czar...
...Actually, our half-breed children solved the problem of their dual religious provenance years ago...
...It is our second holiest site...
...Human life is cheap for them...
...The first frame showed Jews in striped concentration camp uni34 The American Spectator September 1994 forms lining up to be consumed in a crematorium, smoke billowing out of its tall chimney...
...It paid tribute to cartoonist Noah Mordechai Birzowski, who had just turned 75...
...October 27...
...You won't care for what he has to say...
...After my parents divorced, my mother, obliged to earn money, rented out the back bedroom of our cold-water flat on St...
...I tip him...
...They can either make aliyah or assimilate...
...It begins across the street...
...Look here, what a Jewish state is all about is to enable us to be the same as everybody else...
...He was arrested and held in prison, where he was tortured...
...Don't worry, he said, I wouldn't have to inform on my friends...
...If the Rebbe is not the moshiach," he said, "then surely he is the one who will proclaim him...
...My grandfather still keeps a key to the front door...
...One of our problems is that most foreigners, and even some Jews who have never been here, think you have to hike for a mile or cross a river or climb over a mountain to reach the West Bank...
...The insensitivity of some of the recent Russian immigrants troubled him, but so did their plight...
...Nihad 'Odeh, a pretty, 34-year-old widow, attired in an embroidered green kaftan, had been warned in advance of our visit...
...My husband was shot for no reason...
...I asked...
...In August 1992 Ha'etzni filed a complaint against the Israeli Broadcasting Authority for allowing the Palestinian spokesman, Faisel Husseini, to present his case on the Moked interview program...
...At the time he could not have known that the sick, concealed in holes, had been rounded up in an SS Aktion...
...His weight dropped from sixty-five kilos to thirty kilos," she said...
...How can he afford that house," I asked Marina, "the TV set, the radio, on a gasoline station worker's salary...
...Sifting through my notebooks in the bar of the Dan Hotel that evening, I was suddenly overcome by homesickness for my nearly empty, unspeakably rich, sinfully misgoverned country...
...That depends...
...They have, in a word, just enough idealism to lie to themselves systematically, which is why preaching Zionism to them is a waste of time...
...The government is going to have a very hard time," he said, "legitimizing the presentation of the PLO's chief leader inside this country...
...It's right here...
...The next day he was to be here at eight in the evening and there was to be a demonstration at ten...
...On December 31, 1937, he wrote to his cousin Sir Reginald Wingate: "The administration of Palestine and Transjordan is, to a man, anti-Jew and pro-Arab...
...They could not be blamed...
...We had to ring the doorbell several times before a sleepy-eyed Ha'etzni greeted us in his undershirt...
...Descending the stone steps to Mishkenot, I met two robed, middle-aged Arab sweepers leaning on their brooms...
...The man who delivers my groceries was a doctor in Leningrad...
...There are crazies on both sides," he said...
...On the road, they sang the "Song of the Fusgeyer": Geyt, yideleh, in der vayter vett...
...The military governor came to see me...
...To give back the Golan is suicide...
...My cousin Sam Orbaum had provided me with the Jerusalem Post file on the truculent Ha'etzni...
...In '67 the Arabs said let the sword judge between us...
...The American Spectator September 1994 37 tion...
...I had gone to the kitchen to prepare some food when I heard shots...
...He is probably helped by relatives who work in the oil fields or maybe even America...
...We tooled past greenhouses, where resourceful farmers, exposing their plants to 24-hours of artificial light, grew tomatoes from seed to fruition in six weeks...
...One night he asked, "Will you be attending university here...
...Aba Nidal Abu 'Aker nodded, and her husband passed me photographs of their wasting son lying on a hospital bed...
...I mentioned that we had spent the morning at Dheisheh...
...In June 1991, UNRWA estimated that there were 430,083 registered refugees rooted on the West Bank, of which 114,763 lived in twenty different camps...
...Unfortunately, as things stand, there is a very big difference between Jewish hospitals and Arab hospitals...
...Some of the new conscripts in the army suffer from sadism...
...I failed to respond immediately...
...They beat him...
...He attempted to recruit me three times, but each time I said no...
...Little things like that...
...There was a large new TV set in evidence...
...We should have raised dramatically the health standards of the Arabs...
...Eight months later, back in our cottage on Lake Memphremagog in Quebec's Eastern Townships, where the worst menace is deer chewing on our cedars, I would read in the Montreal Gazette that on July 16, 1993, Bathsheva Hillel, a 57-year-old woman, had been stabbed five times in the back, apparently by a terrorist, in the neighborhood of Yemin Moshe near Mishkenot...
...Afterward I would wake up in the morning and I would find food on my doorstep...
...We arrived right on time, but he had either forgotten about us, or his after lunch snooze had lasted longer than he intended...
...But we should take the families of those children who throw stones and send them into exile...
...Helicopters flew overhead...
...One: $5 Twenty-five: $75 Five: $20 Fifty: $130 Ten: $35 One hundred: $250 (Quantity discounts apply only to orders for the same report...
...More than enough...
...Our hostess lived in a nondescript concrete apartment block in Jerusalem's Ramat Eshkol district...
...Or, with just a hint of menace, "Would you care for the last slice of potato kugel, sir...
...and Lisa Schiffren's exposé of the Clintons' Tax Returns...
...Finally I drifted off to sleep conjuring up an image of Major General Orde Wingate in Palestine in the thirties, lying naked in his tent, combing out his pubic hairs with a toothbrush, as was his habit, and instructing eager Jewish youngsters, Moshe Dayan among them, in guerrilla night tactics...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
