Prickly pears and peace talks
White, Patrick
are emphatically not "all part of the same organism." That view takes us entirely too far down the road to where killing becomes a form of toenail clipping. This urge to prune and trim, to...
...I had been struggling for days to find a way of writing about the opening of the peace conference in Madrid...
...But against this backdrop of violence, the intifada may be taking on a new dimension...
...stood in the large auditorium fascinated...
...Shamir's intransigent address, I found such hopeful passages as: "We must live without war, without bloodshed...
...But, according to the American researcher Michael Palumbo, even the revisionists have not yet explored all available sources: BBC and CIA monitoring of Middle East broadcasts, United Nations archives housing reports of observers in the field, archives in the Vatican...
...Troops were just twenty yards away on the roof of the neighboring school for the blind, pointing their automatic weapons toward the courtyards and gardens where some students sat talking...
...In particular, though I could hardly be surprised by his interpretation of the crucial events surrounding the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, his perspective excluded what I had seen for myself during our walks...
...The title is grimly apt for the story...
...and goats and to some extent kept intruders at bay...
...I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different...
...Bowden takes legal steps but without effect because the ex-con cleverly uses the legal system for his own ends...
...Canada Park, just off the main highway to Jerusalem, is the area where four Palestinian villages were bulldozed and their inhabitants driven out in 1967...
...Prickly pears and peace talks, that's what I'U call this chapter," I said suddenly to my companions...
...I looked again at the opening speeches at the Madrid peace conference and, rereading Mr...
...Their delegates returned from Madrid amidst euphoria, but for many in the territories this joy did not reflect the reality of the situation...
...Perhaps, I thought, this process might spread throughout the occupied territories...
...And Haidar Abdul Shaft, chief of the Palestinian delegation, in his poetic speech: "Let us light the candle of peace and let the olive branch blossom...
...They will tell you how their relatives were driven out after the '48 war and their houses destroyed...
...Husseini talked about political pragmatism as the key to participation in the peace talks...
...These cactuses were imported into the country from the arid areas of America in the last part of the nineteenth century, and the Palestinians planted them all over what is now Israel, not just in the Shephelahs," the foothills where we were hiking...
...Thus, Cape Fear is an obscene movie...
...By calling themselves prickly pears, Israelis mean that they are prickly on the outside, soft on the inside...
...On our return we discovered in the undergrowth signs of streets and houses of another Palestinian village on the crest of the hillside...
...n Sunday, November 3--two days after the beginning of the Middle East peace talks in Madrid--three of us set out to walk the hills and wadis in the Shephelahs near Bet Shemesh...
...I want to love my neighbor not because he is I, but precisely because he is not...
...When Sam looks down at the criminal's body and realizes that "he had turned this elemental and merciless force into clay and dissolution," the reader shares his relief and even his exultation...
...As our car climbed the hill we could see children swarming across the main street...
...Here we were standing on ruins...
...Tom Sergev, Benny Morris, and Simha Flapan have conducted research into sources ignored or overlooked by Zionist writers...
...We were concerned at first because they blocked the road at a point where Israeli settlers' cars are sometimes stoned--and they were stopping the passing cars, both those with yellow Israeli plates and those with Palestinian blue plates...
...Looking across the valley of Nahal Refaim we could see the scattered houses of the present village of Walaje on the West Bank side of the green line, where the Walaje villagers fled and were fortunate enough to find land to rebuild their lives within a mile of their destroyed homes...
...Prickly pears became something of an obsession as we hiked or traveled by car across Israel...
...in Battir, on the West Bank side of the green line, there was a living, thriving Palestinian village...
...Prickly pears made excellent barriers around the villages...
...But, apart from the initial flurry of poster-pasting, the two-hour meeting was orderly and calm...
...Certainly, one way or the other, all things in our home will be made very new indeed...
...PRICKLY PEARS & PEACE TALKS THE VIEW FROM BETHLEHEM PATRICK WHITE ook, prickly pears...
...And that fact, quite literally, is a continuing revelation to me...
...The old French railway line, built in 1892, follows the valley floor...
...When they must report to the military governor for new cards, they are required to pay a fine of more than $60...
...While Faisal Husseini spoke--hunched over the microphone, trying to hold the attention of the university audience-hooded PFLP activists plastered the walls with pictures of their leader, George Habash...
...To live with children and not recognize them as wholly individual souls wrestling with their own demons and graces is a kind of blasphemy, I think...
...The novel works in a very simple, straightforward way because, through his superb craftsmanship, the author makes you share his admiration and pity for the resourceful victims, and his loathing for, and fascination with, the ingenious psychotic...
...It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces," Chesterton reminds us...
...It is, in fact, dubious indeed that a complete and distinterested account acceptable to all will ever be achieved---or that any such achievement would make a difference...
...This too is the instinct of Christianity, which so sentimentally unites the everyday miracle of a newborn baby with "the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars...
...At the same time they tucked olive branches under the windshield wipers and offered branches to us through the windows, Elsewhere on the West Bank, we learned, astonished soldiers had responded positively to the Palestinians' gestures for peace...
...For the Israelis, Tom said, the term prickly pear has another sense as well...
...So here we all sit, some more pear-shaped and ponderous than others, waiting for Christmas with more than the customary sense that all things will be made new again...
...The ubiquitous prickly pears were there in abundance, along with the remnants of olive groves and terraced fields...
...Tom continued...
...Israeli military law under occupation forbids meetings or gatherings of more than ten persons...
...It's likely that few of the more than 1,000 students on hand had ever experienced this kind of debate before, with their leaders actually addressing them...
...746: Commonweal On learning this history, some Canadians protested that their financial help had gone to the project...
...And yet, there had been a change, though no one can say how long it will last...
...Leon Kass has speculated that in the mysteries of gender and sexuality and procreative love we may find "the beginning of the sanctification of life--yes, even in modem times...
...Martin Scorsese's film is a remake of the Gregory Peck-Robert Mitchum thriller of the early sixties, but both movies derive from the John D. MacDonald novel, The Executioners...
...So they are," I observed...
...The history of that time is still a battlefield, but no longer a one-sided one...
...An English colleague drove us up through the Palestinian town of Beit Jala...
...If souls are separate love is possible...
...Outside the campus Israeli soldiers had surrounded the university...
...Then someone recalled that the week before we had walked through a village called Battir...
...Our hike illuminated their stories...
...On the campus in Bethlehem, many students expressed misgivings...
...There was, however, another reality...
...Rows of them contained the flocks of sheep PATRICK WHITE is a Christian Brother teaching at Bethlehem University...
...My two children gather around their mother this very afternoon, their hands seeking her hard belly or slyly reaching for her remembered breasts, their heads pressed against the surface of that biologically matter-of-fact yet still unimaginable world from which they have been--is the word "delivered...
...The lawyer then takes more sordid measures such as having his tormentor tailed and then assaulted by thugs, but these don't work either because Cady is cunning and tough...
...That is why Mean Streets, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and 748: Commonweal...
...Martin Scorsese is interested only in obsessives...
...True, the army still maintains a threatening presence, and Molotov cocktails are still sometimes tossed at the Bethlehem police station...
...Roadblocks had cut off the university from the outside world...
...Claims of distortions in the Israeli accounts were lodged by early scholars, such as Erskine Childers and Walid Khalidi...
...To ask an Israeli whether he or she is a "Sabra" (prickly pear) is to inquire whether the person was born in Israel...
...When I see clusters of prickly pears on the hillsides of the Shephela in the future, the images that come to mind will not be only those of thorns, barbed wire, and bulldozers...
...Its habitat, the text confirmed, is dry and rocky, and its stems carry bristling groups of sharp spines...
...But to value obsessives over others just because of the fascination they exude is obscene...
...A series of photos showed one village as it had been before the destruction, then a scene depicting the destruction, and finally the scenic parkland and forest covering the area...
...It was also a true novelty...
...Their presence here told us we were standing on the site ofa Palestinian village that had been destroyed by the Israelis in 1948...
...But it does have bright yellow flowers and edible brick-red fruit, "the size of a hen's egg...
...The scene was a vivid enactment of the inevitable conflicts existing on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as Palestinians attempt to break with their recent past and move to a different future...
...This site had just gained attention through an article in a British newspaper, the Independent...
...two trains a day still run down this scenic route from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, In this valley, called the Nahal Refaim, we scrambled over the ruins of Walaje...
...present-day Israeli revisionists continue the argument now...
...Yes, it is...
...Were these only rhetorical flourishes, or did these men really mean what they said...
...I will hope to see blossoms yielding a harvest of fruits yellow and purple...
...Student friends at Bethlehem University had explained that their families once lived in Walaje...
...One of our Sunday walks took us along the valley between Battir and Jerusalem...
...Enclosed within these protecting walls, Palestinians were free to debate with their leaders and one another...
...And they do so...
...Palestinians and Israelis, all men and women created in God's image, "standing tall among the community of nations...
...Instead there was amicable debate...
...Or so thought Chesterton, old Father Christmas himself...
...In my mind I could see and hear Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir on television as he delivered his opening speech at the conference...
...In Madrid, the head of the Palestinian delegation, Haidar Abdul Shaft, tried to shift the argument away from history in his address to the peace conference when he said: "We seek neither an admission of guilt after the fact, nor vengeance for past iniquities, but rather an act of will that would make a just peace a reality...
...Among Palestinians, debate raged over whether that was the proper stance to take in the peace talks...
...Let us celebrate the rituals of justice and rejoice in the hymns of truth, for the awe of the moment is a promise of the future, which we must redeem...
...Recently, well-known Israeli writers and scholars have reexamined the long-held Israeli claims that it was the Arabs alone who started the 1948 war, that the Palestinians fled on orders of their own leaders, and that it was never the intent of the Zionists to expel Palestinians from their homeland...
...more radical groups either rejected the negotiations altogether or were sharply critical of the tactics adopted by their official spokespersons...
...atherhood, a role I long associated with the abuse of power, has given me things I could never have achieved myself, stiffened my spine for responsibilities I once thought mere drudgery, and cast my passions and interests beyond my own limiting ambition...
...An Israeli reporter from the Jerusalem Post noted: "Here there had been no demonstrations, no clashes, and no confrontations...
...The fact of this forum is exceptional...
...He is the author of Let Us Be Free: A Narrative Before and During the Intifada (Kingston Press), and a frequent contributor to The Tablet (London...
...Riyad Malki, a supporter of the hardline Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was severely critical of the delegation's 20 December 1991:747 stance...
...Tom exclaimed...
...Many of these locations were now partially covered, turned into coniferous forests or scenic parks...
...Sam Bowden, a lawyer so humane and scrupulous that his senior partners have shunted him away from their more ruthless dealings, is approached by a man from his past: Max Cady, a rapist whom Sam both apprehended and helped to convict fourteen years previously...
...That Sunday evening, back at the university, I found a text on botany with a passage describing Opuntiaficu-indica, the prickly pear...
...Faisal Husseini came to speak on behalf of the leadership at Madrid...
...Our walk that day took us down a wadi through attractive Mediterranean forest growth from an Israeli settlement called Bar Giora to the disused railway station in the ravine below...
...Many students and staffwere incensed at the way some soldiers had tom up students' identification cards as they came to the campus...
...We saw the now familiar prickly pears, stunted olive trees, and the foundations of solid stone buildings, partially hidden under vegetation...
...All told, 369 Palestinian villages were destroyed in Israel in 1948 and 1967, and we could spot some of the sites by the presence of prickly pears...
...Finally, after the ex-con nearly kills one of Bowden's sons, the lawyer tells his wife that they must murder Cady themselves...
...Our car had yellow plates but displayed bold Red Cross emblems...
...But now, standing on the site of another destroyed Palestinian village, I could not help wondering how different people could hold such divergent views of historical events...
...This urge to prune and trim, to eliminate human irregularity and accident, is an almost irresistible temptation and a great evil...
...Judaism has given the world not only the belief in one God, but the idea that all men and women are created in God's image...
...SCREEN OBSESSION OVERREACHES SCORSESE'S 'CAPE FEAR' bsessives are more immediately fascinating than "normal" people because they enact their psyches...
...If souls are united love is obviously impossible...
...The youngsters gathered round the car shouting, in both Arabic and English, "Peace, peace...
...The students listened intently, and many took part in the question period following the two main speeches...
...Had Palestinian political leaders attempted to come to Bethlehem University in such an open way on previous occasions, the Israeli army might well have closed the campus...
...It was similarly situated, but otherwise the difference was all too apparent...
...We stood surveying the scene in silence...
...What was the point...
...an avid student of recent Israeli and Palestinian history, he was always a mine of information on these walks...
...I believe that, and think that to secure human dignity in other spheres /g the unconditional love of children must be encouraged, not hedged in on every side with captious qualifications...
...Without ID cards, Palestinians cease to exist...
...Now the released Cady threatens to rape Bowden's wife and barely pubescent daughter and to kill his two little sons...
...Clusters of the cactus were growing amidst piles of rubble and large stones on a hillside covered with scrub, grasses, and scattered young coniferous trees...
...They ultimately become much less interesting for the very same reason...
...I know this baby, whatever its temperament or fate, will be as sure a manifest mystery and as much a spur to my better nature as my first two children have been...
...Have you heard the story...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 22
