Death as a Way of Life

Death as a Way of Life

May 2001

The horrible thing that’s happening to Israelis is that they’re getting used to it. They’re used to waking up in the morning and hearing about the terrorist attack that happened at dawn. They’re used to the sight of their injured and dead. Used to the stock phrases about the situation, to the formulaic photographs and news. They’ve gotten so used to it that their emotions sometimes also seem like clichés. Like something that could be put into a compact, blaring newspaper headline in one of the tabloids: ANGUISH AND ANGER! or FEAR AND LOATHING!

There seems to be no way out, to the point that a person doesn’t dare, sometimes, to feel anything more than what the headlines proclaim. He dreads that introspection might reveal emotions even more disconcerting and menacing. He dreads that they will kindle disquieting questions about the justice of his actions, or his chances of living, even for a single day, a life of serenity, a life in which he will cause injustice to no one and will fear no other.

Most Israelis now believe that the peace process has dissolved and become part of history. Even worse, most of them now believe that it was a mirage from the very beginning. They even have trouble understanding how they allowed themselves to be led on by the left and by the Barak government, which deluded them into believing that Israel really had a negotiating partner and that the Palestinians had really given up their dream of destroying Israel.

Israel has plunged into a kind of apathy. Seemingly, life goes on as usual. Everyday affairs are conducted with the characteristic Israeli mixture of vigor and edginess. But as anyone who has lived here all his life knows, everything has a strange and disheartening kind of impassivity. Life in slow motion. Israel is now slipping back into the psychological stance that is most dangerous for itself — the stance of the victim, of the persecuted Jew. Almost every threat to it — even from the Palestinians, who can never defeat Israel on the battlefield — is perceived as an absolute peril justifying the harshest response.

Unlike at other, similar difficult periods in the past, it appears as if Israelis no longer have any hope. Only hope can impel them to try to extricate themselves from this fatal ossification. The prophecy is liable to fulfill itself. “You can’t make peace with the Arabs” is a statement I hear very often, every time I foolishly get into a debate on the street, in a taxi, or on a radio program. With one small difference, it is the same statement one hears in debates with Palestinians: “You can’t make peace with the Israelis.”

The war is taking place almost everywhere in Israel (at this very moment, as I write, I can hear the rumble of the Israeli incursion into Palestinian Beit Jala, ten kilometers due south of my home in a Jerusalem suburb). Despite this, the average Israeli seems to be able to repress what is happening around him and, in a strange way, is almost able to ignore it. It’s hardly surprising — decades of wars and anxiety have trained him to do this very efficiently. When an Israeli citizen opens his eyes in the morning, he can assume, with a high degree of certainty, that during the course of the day at least one Israeli will be hurt in an attack of some sort. He knows that his life could change in the bitterest possible way. He won’t think about it. Nor will he think about what the Palestinians are feeling (it’s all their fault anyway, the average Israeli believes — we offered them everything and they responded with lynches and terrorism). He won’t go to crowded places. He’ll refrain from hiking his favorite trails, avoid taking roads previously attacked. He contracts himself a little, but no more. He notes that downtowns look empty and bleak. That there are almost no tourists in the streets, and sometimes more policemen and soldiers than civilians. He gets used to that, too. In the evening, in front of the TV news, after the segment on the day’s funerals in Tel Aviv and Gaza, a little voice in his head whispers, “Fortunately, it wasn’t me today.”

Gradually, Israelis and Palestinians are moving further away from peace. Just three months ago, in February 2001, at the talks in Taba, an agreement was imminent. Today that looks like a remission, brief and delusional, in the course of an incurable disease. Now almost no one uses the word “peace.” The Palestinians say they won’t end their violence “until the occupation is completely over.” Israel declares that it will not even enter negotiations “until violence comes to a complete halt.” Each side knows that its ultimatum — even if morally correct — is unrealistic. Furthermore, both know that if they adhere to these demands they will be caught in continuous violence and that finally they will bring destruction on themselves. The occupation will go on, and the violence will not end (quite the opposite!). In any case, with a kind of numbing of the senses, they do nothing to save themselves from this nightmare.

Since there is no hope, Israelis and Palestinians go back to doing what they do — shedding the blood of each other. Each day more people join the ranks of the dead and wounded, of the haters and the despondent. Each day the appetite for revenge grows. The Palestinians say, before camera and microphone, that they no longer care if there is never an agreement. “The main thing is for the Israelis to suffer as we have suffered.” Israelis demand that Prime Minister Sharon “rub out a few Palestinian villages” and believe, so it seems, that this will make the Palestinians surrender and agree to an Israeli compromise.

Senior Palestinian officials, who in private conversations with Israelis severely criticize Arafat and the blind slaughter committed by suicide bombers, close ranks with the most extreme elements in their society when they speak in public. The voice of Israel’s left wing has gone almost completely mute — many have given up and have decamped to the right, while others realize that their views just don’t resonate with the public at large. Indeed, what influence can ideas and words have in the face of the brutal, all-pervasive reality that eats away at hope like acid?

Instead of pursuing what Arafat likes to call “the peace of the brave,” both sides are busy keeping a bloody, you-killed-me-I’ll-kill-you balance sheet. The principal objective is to avenge yesterday’s murder while minimizing the enemy’s retaliation tomorrow. Without noticing it, Palestinians and Israelis are reverting to the pattern of an ancient tribal vendetta, eye for eye and tooth for tooth.

It makes one suspect that the two peoples prefer to preoccupy themselves with this cruel ritual rather than really solve the problem at its roots. On second thought, it’s easy to understand (especially for anyone who lives here). “They give birth astride of a grave,” Samuel Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot, and in the Middle East this description is terribly concrete: all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, were born into this conflict, and our identity is formulated, to no small extent, in terms of hostility and fear, survival and death. Sometimes it seems as if Israelis and Palestinians have no clear identities without the conflict, without the “enemy,” whose existence is necessary, perhaps critical, to their sense of self and community.

You become queasy these days listening to that unique form of self-directed Schadenfreude that fills Israeli and Palestinian leaders when their angry prophecies come true, in particular as a result of their own failings. They especially like to watch hope collapsing before their eyes. No less shocking is the enthusiasm with which so many Israelis and Palestinians adopt these despairing visions. When it comes down to it, so it seems, people get used to the injustices history has inflicted upon them, to the point that they forget what they are allowed to yearn for.

Sharon and Arafat are both cynical leaders. Their consciousnesses were shaped in war and violence, and their actions mirror each other like a carefully choreographed ceremonial dance. In order to achieve a compromise, both will have to renounce most of the fundamental concepts that have molded their worldviews and that have given them their standing among their peoples. Their actions in recent months make one suspect that they are deliberately making negotiations conditional on demands that have no chance of being met today. They direct government and society, including the media (which in the Palestinian Authority is mobilized to achieve the regime’s goals, and is also significantly mobilized in Israel as well), in order to divert the citizenry’s attention from the main issues and to create hostility toward the people of the other side.

As things look now, only a miracle or catastrophe will change the situation. If you don’t believe in the first and fear the latter, you realize that the only practical hope for saving Israel and the Palestinians from mutual slaughter is heavy international pressure on both of them. I still believe that Israel has the obligation to make the larger concessions in negotiations, because it is stronger, and because it is the occupier. But both sides must immediately end their uncompromising rhetoric and reduce their violent actions to the bare minimum, in order to resume negotiations. Another, more minute hope is for the willingness of individuals, Israelis and Palestinians, to renew open dialogue among them. This is not easy to do, but if such contacts take place, they will be of huge and not merely symbolic importance. They will remind both nations of what they must long for. They will create the only alternative to hatred and despair.