Death as a Way of Life

Letter to a Palestinian Friend

October 2000

The second Intifada broke out after the failure of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David. It was instigated by a visit of opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount (al-Haram al-Sharif) in the old city of Jerusalem, on September 28, 2000. Palestinians regarded the visit to the site, sacred to both Muslims and Jews, as a provocation, and the riots that erupted the next day resulted in many deaths. The wave of violence that spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza was met with overwhelming force by Israeli security forces.

On October 12, 2000, two Israeli reservists lost their way near Ramallah and were stopped by the Palestinian police. An angry Palestinian mob invaded the police station and brutally stabbed the Israelis to death, then mutilated their bodies. Shocking film footage of the murders convinced many Israelis that there was no hope of achieving a negotiated peace with the Palestinians.

Dear B.,

First, I hope you are well, and that no one in your family has been hurt in the events of these last weeks.

I was thinking how strange — and sad — it is that we have not spoken on the phone since the disturbances began. Up until then, after any event that took place during the peace process, joyous or violent, we always spoke, or even met (though the meetings were rarer). And now — absolute silence. Perhaps because we are both in shock, shock that paralyzes our ability to respond and our strength to continue to believe. Being in shock, we might both be thinking at this moment that we may have erred. Maybe we only imagined that we saw the incipience of hope in both our peoples. Maybe the whole concept of peace was the naive illusion of a few bleeding hearts that were weary of war and oblivious to the volcano of primal instincts and hatred churning under their feet.

Or perhaps we don’t dare call each other because somewhere, in your heart also, I’m sure, nestles the fear that the friend, the Other, has already despaired completely of conciliation. Maybe even he, moderate and judicious, has finally been inundated by the wave of hatred that has broken over all of us now.

But no. I don’t believe that this is what happened to you. We’ve known each other for eight years, talked about literature and politics, about life, about our children. It feels strange to me to address you in this way, publicly, and even now, at the opening of this letter, I feel a slight change in my normal manner of speaking to you. Over the years we have freed ourselves from the natural tendency of every Israeli and Palestinian who engage in dialogue to turn themselves into representatives of their people. But at this time, the new situation threatens to relegate us to that position, whether we like it or not.

You know, when I watch the television broadcasts, I always try to watch them through your eyes. I see a Palestinian throng storming an Israeli Army position and I try to single out an individual face, which might be the face of one of your children. I know that you don’t approve of this kind of demonstration, that it is foreign to your character, as one who opposes all forms of violence. But perhaps, under these new circumstances, it is hard to control a teenage boy who was but a toddler at the time of the first Intifada. Perhaps he has grown up on the proud, heroic stories of the teenage boys of that time and now longs to take part in his people’s resolute, violent struggle for independence. I gaze at the photographs, seeing how the hands are raised, holding stones; how the faces are contorted with hatred. I see the Israeli soldiers taking aim and shooting, and think of my own son, who will soon enlist in the army. Will his face and body also quickly adjust to those attitudes of war and hatred? I look, and suddenly all of them, our children and your children, have the same faces and the same gestures, and it is so clear the extent to which the long conflict has succeeded in claiming them for itself, all of them. All look to me like toy soldiers, lacking individual volition, marionettes manipulated by politicians and army commanders on both sides.

And I try to think of what you are experiencing, you with your sober, accommodating views, within a society that from the outside looks to me as if it is ablaze with a fire for revenge. You are within a nation that is now roaring at me, at least on the television screen, with a single voice, without nuances. But perhaps I am mistaken. Maybe you, and other common friends of ours, are making their voices heard. Maybe it’s the media — ours and yours and the world’s — that chooses to show only the harshest, most extreme scenes and stir up our feelings against each other. But even if the media is guilty, as we always claim in Israel, how is it possible that I have not heard a single note of true Palestinian condemnation of the horrible lynching of the two soldiers in Ramallah — and I mean an explicit condemnation, with no buts and with no “you must understand Palestinian anger.”

And are you over there, beyond the present wall of alienation, aware that among us you can still hear, even after all that has happened, voices that insist on questioning whether Israel indeed did every thing for peace, and what is the real nature of the peace that we imposed on the Palestinians, and whether we did not again fail by viewing reality through our spectacles of bottomless fear, our permanent blind spot? (But, after all, it is an eminently justifiable fear, a voice shouts within me, because in the face of all that we have seen, it is all so rational to fear!) I know that it is impossible to compare the limitations that you are subject to, to the freedom of expression that I have here, in Israel. The worst thing that can happen to me if I express an opinion that is far off the consensus is that someone will write a venomous article against me. But you might be physically harmed. But I so much want to hear, at this hour, in a private conversation, what you are thinking now.

If it’s at all possible to think now as the riots rage outside, and inside. All day — arguments. I drive my car and argue with myself. Friends testify that even in bed, with their spouses, they talk almost solely about politics. The human spirit cringes. I also realize that for every argument I make, I have an incontrovertible counterargument. The situation is so complex and unavoidable that suddenly even opinions I always opposed suddenly bear an ominous attraction. People accost me angrily in the street. Everything you believed in was just a dream, they say. You can’t make peace with the Palestinians. How can you believe Arafat, who has already signed four agreements in which he committed himself to refrain from the use of violence? How can you believe beasts like those who lynched the soldiers? What a horrible, criminal blunder it was to give the Palestinians weapons, with which they are now shooting and killing us.

I don’t know how it is with you, but here close friends, and even relatives, who always believed in peace, and hoped that most of the Palestinians were undergoing a similar process, now feel truly brokenhearted and betrayed. What was the point of offering Arafat so much, of compromising even on Jerusalem, when he encourages such violence, when there is no certainty that he can control his people, and when the schools and mosques of the Palestinian Authority continue to teach and preach the destruction of Israel?

And beyond that, Israelis say today — you can hear it everywhere — even if we give the Palestinians everything, all the territories, and evacuate the settlements and even hand over all of East Jerusalem — the following day they’ll want the rest of Jerusalem and Haifa and Jaffa. They’ll always find a new pretext for violence, for nurturing their hatred and their yearning to throw us into the sea. I have my own answers to those questions, nowadays somewhat more hesitant. I still believe there’s truth in these answers, but I feel how weak this reasoning is, in light of the fire and the fury of hatred.

*

Suddenly, in an impulse of despair, out of isolation, and in protest of the situation that prevents me from doing something so simple and natural, I call you.

You recognize my voice at once, and I hear your relief. We speak for a long time. Your family is unharmed, but the little boy next door was killed. I tell you that bullets were fired tonight on the Jerusalem neighborhood where my brother lives. We both still observe a kind of symmetry, a balance in our reporting, which of course balances nothing, nor does it comfort; despite it all, we are still representatives. You sound agitated and beyond hope — I have never heard you sound this way. It is a nightmare, you say, never has the situation been as awful, and there is no way of knowing how it will end. You blame Israel. The way it dragged out the negotiations for years, far beyond what was agreed on at Oslo. You speak of the impossibility of reaching peace without evacuating the settlements. About how Israel humiliated the Palestinians in the negotiations, and then went so far as to demand that they consider intra-Israeli political problems, while completely ignoring Arafat’s shaky position. Israel tried to impose peace on him under conditions that no Palestinian, even the most moderate, would accept.

I agree with you that the way Israel conducted the peace process was faulty, aggressive, hostage to profound Israeli fears, and unable to empathize with the Palestinian point of view. For years I’ve thought that the peace agreement itself, as it was engineered in Oslo, was the product of brusque Israeli dictation, and that the reality it was meant to create was not going to ensure neighborly relations. Despite that, I say, look at the change that has taken place in Israel with regard to peace since the Oslo process began, especially in the past year, under Barak’s administration. Can you deny the man’s courage, his willingness — which astounded and incensed many Israelis — to hand over most of the occupied territories to you, and to give up parts of Jerusalem, the innermost heart of the Jewish people? Don’t you know, as I do, that a generation’s worth of years will pass before there is another Israeli leader who is both so courageous and able to retain the confidence of the Israeli people in his defense policy? And if you miss this opportunity, you’ll find yourselves facing Sharon (and we, too, I think to myself, we too will find ourselves in that dangerous position).

You are familiar with my arguments and respond to them with your arguments, which are familiar to me. It is as if both of us have to quote them repeatedly, are trapped within them, and feel that our positions never completely comprehend the whole dilemma. There’s always that humiliating sensation that we — the Israeli and the Palestinian — are nothing but a pair of actors sentenced to acting on stage, generation after generation, a grotesque and bloody tragedy whose denouement no one can write, a scene that would offer a hope of relief, of the lifting of the curse.

What frightens me, you say, is that the debate now is not only between governments, or between our armies and police, but between the peoples, the civilians. And the worst is that after Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, it has once more become a feral, tribal, and religious battle.

It seems to me that the situation deteriorated not with Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, which was, in and of itself, provocative and malicious, but rather when Arafat announced three months ago at Camp David that he could not sign a compromise agreement on Jerusalem. He represents, he said then, not only 5 million Palestinians but also the world’s billion Muslims. At that moment, to my mind, the possibility of a solution eluded us, and it turned into a religious conflict. You and I know that religious fanaticism, whether Jewish or Muslim, is your and my real enemy. Neither you nor I can live our lives as we desire under an extremist religious regime. In the end, the relevant borders for most Israelis and Palestinians are not only those between the two peoples, for all their importance, but those between the moderates and extremists on both sides. That should be one of our major motives for reaching a compromise, at almost any price, in order to weaken the religious forces that are growing so strong now.

But we cannot accept the solutions you are offering us, you say — there can be no peace with the settlements, there can be no peace when what we finally get, after such a long struggle, is a tiny state without control of our water sources and most of our territory, a state crosscut by hundreds of Israeli roads and roadblocks. There can be no peace when every time I open my blinds in the morning I see the settlement on the mountaintop that looms over me. Do you know that the settlers call me every night and demand that I leave my city? They, who only twenty years ago settled here by force.

It won’t be a just peace, I admit, but I hope that as a first step it will be a good-enough peace. We can’t hope for more than that in the meantime, but maybe afterward, many years from now, when animosity has diminished, when a normal fabric of life has been established, perhaps even trust renewed …

I want you to know, you say out of context, how sad and shocked I was by the lynching of the Israeli soldiers. It is horrifying. I blame the Palestinian police, because no matter how the Israelis got there, from the minute unarmed people are under your protection, you must safeguard them. No, such an atrocity simply must not be allowed to happen. Even in such a brutal struggle we must retain our humanity.

I ask if there are others who think as you do, and you say that the great majority of Palestinians were appalled by the incident. I have trouble believing you. The sight of the faces of the murderers and their cries of carnage are still so vivid in my memory. The hands proudly raised aloft, soaked in the blood of the murdered men. I then recall a conversation we had not long ago in a Jerusalem café, before the world turned over on all of us. There we concurred that the Oslo agreement had been possible because the two leaders, Rabin and Arafat, had finally realized, after years of holding to a militant, aggressive worldview, that the conflict was seeping into the innermost tissues of their peoples, infecting them with violence and brutality, and decomposing them from within.

And you remind me that we said one more thing on that day. We had no illusions about this — we knew that this peace process would be a very bitter one. That it would be full of successive acts of enmity and violence, on both sides, acts that time after time would move Israelis and Palestinians to cry out in rage, each in turn, Look how impossible it is to believe them! Look what a mistake we made when we made sacrifices to them! We’ll never, never live in peace side by side!

And so it was.

But never to this extent.

You interrupt the conversation for a moment, telling your wife that you forgot a dish in the oven. I hear your children laughing in the background. Your home. Things television doesn’t show.

Afterward you say, Look, you and I, we represent two overly emotional peoples. For that reason, so much depends on how our leaders lead us. For example, you say, I think that we Palestinians have to change the way we fight. I don’t believe it’s good to send children to throw stones, nor adults either. We need to find a nonviolent mode of struggle, a peaceful struggle, because the loss of life is terrible. But also because our behavior threatens you, and you respond overaggressively, not willing to listen to us. We need to turn to peaceful demonstrations, you say — maybe that way we can get across to you what we feel. But you, too, must change. You shouldn’t exaggerate the situation as if it is a threat to your existence.

You’re certainly right about that, I reply. I see that this brief conflict has revealed just how deep our existential fear is. That, perhaps, is the Palestinian tragedy, that you are facing a tough and complicated partner (one convinced it is the meekest, most malleable, most merciful partner there is). You have a partner with a history so difficult that nothing in the universe can give it a real sense of security and strength.

If you were more confident, you say, you wouldn’t use such heavy fire against demonstrators. Just think of what massive power you use against us.

“The peace of the brave,” I say, quoting Arafat.

Ah, you suddenly sigh. Politicians are ruthless.

Are you managing to get anything done these days? I ask.

How can I? Who can concentrate?

You could at least state publicly the things you tell me.

No, and certainly not as I once could. But I’m sure that most of the Palestinian public thinks as I do. Listen, people here understand that peace is a necessity. Not everyone here is pleased with all that’s happening. We have lost more people than you have, but I know that the Israeli sense of loss is just as great. We feel surrounded, under siege, but so do you. We must break free of this despair and this immobility, because, at the end of the day, we are going to have to live here together, and we can’t kill each other indefinitely. We’ll live here together, I say, and in the end we’ll also make peace, but it will be such a frail peace, always on the verge of being shattered. And underneath there will always be that volcano, and it will erupt again and again. Hundreds of years may pass before we have, if ever, a peace similar to the one between England and France, or between France and Germany. But what am I doing planning the centuries to come, when the question is what to do now, today?

Today we will do nothing, you say. Today both your and our blood is boiling. We have to wait a few days and hope that things will calm down a bit. Afterward we’ll decide what we can do.

And so, agreeing that we will speak more frequently, we bid each other farewell.