Death as a Way of Life

Time to Part Company

August 2001

A mother, a father, and three of their children were among the fifteen killed in the suicide bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown West Jerusalem. Another 130 people were injured, including many more children on their summer vacation. The terrorist responsible for planning this attack appeared on a most-wanted list of terrorists previously submitted to the Palestinian Authority by Israel. Arafat condemned the attack, but failed to take concrete steps to prevent further killings.

Jerusalem’s main street was built more than a century ago, and it’s engaging in its simplicity and shabbiness. It’s lined with two rows of antiquated, outdated stone construction plastered with huge billboards. The X-shaped crosswalk painted in the middle of the central intersection is the city’s heart. There is no child in Jerusalem who does not know it, and for many it is one of the quotidian symbols of civilian Jerusalem — if you’ve crossed the street there, if you’ve gotten intermingled, as everyone does, in the flow of people coming at you, you’ve felt as local as a native.

A Palestinian terrorist picked that X as a target. He chose a vacation day, one on which many of the families sightseeing in Jerusalem stop in at one of the inexpensive downtown restaurants. As I write this, there are already fifteen dead, among them entire families and many children. There are also more than a hundred wounded. When I saw the footage of the crosswalk on television after the attack, my first thought was: This is hell, and I’m living in it.

I turn on the television and hear Palestinian spokesmen explaining with great fluency why the terrorist did what he did. Yasir Arafat will, apparently, issue an official condemnation of the attack. But who will that condemnation help so long as Arafat refuses to arrest those whose intentions to commit such attacks are known to all? At this hour the Israeli cabinet is convening to discuss how to respond. Tonight or tomorrow it will come, the retaliation. But will it really change anything? Will it be of any use to the dead? It won’t even be of any use to the living.

For more than ten months now, the two sides have been in a mad, dizzy spiral of violence. They don’t know how to stop. In the lunatic logic of this conflict it is possible, of course, to justify every murder by citing the murder that preceded it. The cruel code of the Middle East states that if you have not responded with full force to the blow you suffered, the other side will interpret it as weakness and will strike at you again even more painfully. The result is that each side is condemned to strike out at its antagonist, and then cringe in anticipation of the counterblow. The rhythm of life, the rhythm of consciousness, even contacts between one person and another, everything is conducted entirely according to the tick of this deadly metronome. In such an atmosphere, who even remembers that the real goal that we must aspire to is not the next attack on the enemy, or effective protection against him, but to attempt to bring this cycle of death to an end? We suffer so much from the outer, violent symptoms of the situation, and we are so focused in our treatment of them — of them alone. So much so that we have entirely forgotten that only if we are cured of the disease itself, at the source, will we cease, perhaps, to suffer from its symptoms.

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The Palestinian Authority is shattered and disintegrating. Palestinians are hungry and hopeless. When the doors are closed and the windows shut, they are vociferously critical of the way Arafat is conducting their affairs. They are also quickly awakening from the illusion that the world — and the United States in particular — will rush to their aid. Israelis are no less desperate. They cannot understand the reality in which they have been living for the last ten months. They are afraid to leave their homes, and especially, they despair at the thought that they will have to live this way for many years to come.

Israel has vast military power — but it cannot use it out of fear that it will lead to international intervention and the imposition of a solution not to its liking. The Palestinians are weak, and yet they are able to cause Israel great distress. Is there a third way? Of course there is: the painful separation of the two peoples, forming two separate sovereign states, Israel and Palestine. To this end, intensive and determined negotiations must be commenced at once. And don’t wait, not for a halt to terror, or for mitigation of the siege of the Palestinian population (neither of these will happen, regrettably, in the near future).

Are the Israelis and Palestinians capable of this? The answer, I’m afraid, can be found in Thomas Mann’s story “Mario and the Magician”: “Between not willing a certain thing and not willing at all … there may lie too small a space for the idea of freedom to squeeze into.” And, indeed, after more than a century of saying no to each other — in every way possible — it seems as if Israel and the Palestinians are not capable today of wanting anything at all. Not even the right thing for themselves, the thing that will promise them life. As for freedom of some sort, freedom of choice, of desire, of hope — it is almost impossible to talk about that anymore.