Peace Kills (7 page)

It was the only war memorial I've seen that was both frightening and silly—things all war memorials should be. Most war memorials are sad or awful—things, come to think of it, that war memorials should be also. And this war memorial had a price of admission—which, considering the cost of war, is another good idea.

At the ticket booth was a crabby old guy whom Z greeted with warm complaining, grouch to grouch. Then Z took me to Yad Mordechai's Holocaust museum, which skips pity and goes immediately to Jewish resistance during World War II
and Jewish fighting in Palestine and Israel. Yad Mordechai is named for Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The message of the Yad Mordechai museum is that the Holocaust memorial is in the trench at the other end of the kibbutz.

This is the second wonderful thing about Zionism: it was right. Every other “ism” of the modern world was wrong about the nature of civilized man—Marxism, mesmerism, surrealism, pacifism, existentialism, nudism. But civilized man did want to kill Jews, and was going to do more of it. And Zionism was specific. While other systems of thought blundered around in the universal, looking for general solutions to comprehensive problems, Zionism stuck to its guns, or—in the beginning, anyway—to its hoes, mattocks, and irrigation pipes.

True, Zionism has a utopian socialist aspect that is thoroughly nutty as far as I'm concerned. But it's not my concern. No one knocks on my door during dinner and asks me to join a kibbutz or calls me on the weekend to persuade me to drop my current long-distance carrier and make all my phone calls by way of Israel. And given my last name, they won't.

My last name is, coincidently, similar to the maiden name of the Holocaust museum docent, who was Baltimore Irish and had married a young man from the kibbutz and moved there in the 1970s. “I converted,” she said, “which the Orthodox make it hard to do, but I went through with it. There's a crabby old guy here who sort of took me under his wing. The first Yom Kippur after I converted, he asked me, ‘Did you fast?' I said yes. He said, ‘Stupid!' You probably saw him on the way in, behind the ticket counter. He's a veteran of the fight for Yad Mordechai. There's a photo of him here,
when they liberated the kibbutz, in November ‘forty-eight.” And there was the photo of the young, heroic, crabby old guy. And now he was behind the ticket counter at the war memorial—not making a political career in Jerusalem or writing a book about the young, heroic days, or flogging his story to the History Channel.

“How cool is that?” said the Baltimore Irish woman running the Holocaust museum.

Z and I had lunch at the kibbutz's self-serve restaurant, where Z took his plate of meat and sat in the middle of the dairy section. In the sky to the south we could see smoke rising from the Gaza Strip—tires burning at an intifada barricade, or just trash being incinerated. Public services weren't what they might be in the Palestinian Authority at the moment. Or maybe it was one of the Jewish settlements in Gaza being attacked, although we hadn't heard gunfire.

These settlements aren't farms but, mostly, apartment clusters. “Are the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza some kind of postagricultural, postindustrial, high-rise Zionism?” I asked Z. “Or are they a government-funded, mondo-condo, live-dangerously parody of nation-building?”

“Pharisees!” said Z and went back to eating.

After lunch we drove to Ben-Gurion's house in Tel Aviv, a modest, foursquare, utterly unadorned structure. But the inside was cozy with twenty thousand books, in Hebrew, English, French, German, Russian, Latin, Spanish, Turkish, and ancient Greek. No fiction, however: a man who devoted his life to making a profound change in society was uninterested in the encyclopedia of society that fiction provides.

Looking at the thick walls and heavy shutters, I wondered if the house had been built to be defended. Then I twigged to the purpose of the design and gained true respect for the courage of the Zionist pioneers. Ben-Gurion came to the Middle East before air-conditioning was invented—and from Plonsk, at that.

We spent the next day, at my insistence and to Z's mystification, driving around the most ordinary parts of Israel, which look so ordinary to an American that I'm rendered useless for describing them to other Americans. American highway strip-mall development hasn't quite reached Israel, however, so there's even less of the nondescript to not describe.

Z and I stood in a garden-apartment complex in Ashdod, in the garden part, a patch of trampled grass. “Here is the ugliest living in Israel,” said Z. We went to a hill on the Ashdod shore, a tell actually, a mound of ancient ruins, an ash heap of history from which we had a view of … ash heaps, and the power plant that goes with them, which supplies half of Israel's electricity. Ashdod, incidentally, is a Philistine place-name, not a pun. We could also see the container port, Israel's principal deep-water harbor. “This is the place where the whale threw Jonah up,” Z said.

We went to the best suburbs of Tel Aviv, which look like the second-best suburbs of San Diego. We spent a lot of time stuck in traffic. Violence in the West Bank had forced traffic into bottlenecks on Routes 2 and 4 along the coast, in a pattern familiar to anyone negotiating Washington, D.C.'s Beltway—living in a place where you're scared to go to half of it and the other half you can't get to.

Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware. From the top of Mount Nebo, in the equivalent of Pennsylvania, the Lord showed Moses all of Canaan. New Canaan is in Connecticut—but close enough. And there is a Mount Nebo in Pennsylvania, although it overlooks the Susquehanna rather than the promised land of, say, Paramus. Joshua blew the trumpet, and the malls of Paramus came tumbling down. Israel also has beaches that are at least as attractive as New Jersey's.

An old friend of mine, Dave Garcia, flew in from Hong Kong to spend Easter in Jerusalem. “I like to go places when the tourists aren't there,” he said. Dave spent two years in Vietnam when the tourists weren't there, as a prisoner of the Viet Cong. “Let's see where the Prince of Peace was born,” he said. “It's in the middle of the intifada.”

Z drove us from Ben-Gurion Airport to the roadblock between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The highway was strewn with broken bottles, as if in the aftermath not of war but of a bad party. Israeli soldiers and Palestinian Authority policemen stood around warily. Z handed us over to an Arab tour-guide friend of his who drove a twenty-five-year-old Mercedes and looked glum. Israel had lost half its tourism, but hotels in Palestinian areas were reporting occupancy rates of 4 percent.

The Arab guide parked at random in the middle of empty Manger Square, outside the Church of the Nativity. “There is normally a three-and-a-half-hour wait,” he said as we walked straight into the Manger Grotto. The little cave has been rendered a soot hole by millennia of offertory candles. It's hung
with damp-stained tapestries and tarnished lamps and festoons of grimy ornamentation elaborate enough for a Byzantine emperor if the Byzantine emperor lived in the basement. I imagine the Virgin Mary had the place done up more cheerfully, with little homey touches, when it was a barn.

The only other visitors were in a tour group from El Salvador, wearing bright yellow T-shirts and acting cheerfully pious. Dave asked them in Spanish if, after all that El Salvador had been through with earthquakes and civil war, the fuss about violence and danger around here puzzled them. They shrugged and looked puzzled, but that may have been because no one in the Garcia family has been able to speak Spanish for three generations, including Dave.

All the dead babies from the Massacre of the Innocents are conveniently buried one grotto over, under the same church. Sites of Christian devotion around Jerusalem tend to be convenient. In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher the piece of ground where Christ's cross was erected, the stone where He was laid out for burial, and the tomb in which He was resurrected—plus where Adam's skull was buried and, according to early Christian cartographers, the center of the world—are within a few arthritic steps of one another. Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, was over seventy-five when she traveled to the Holy Land, in 326
A.D.,
looking for sacred locations. Arriving with a full imperial retinue and a deep purse, Saint Helena discovered that her tour guides were able to take her to every place she wanted to go; each turned out to be nearby and, as luck would have it, for sale. The attack of real estate agents in Palestine long predates Zionism.

The Church of the Nativity is a shabby mess, a result of quarreling religious orders. The Greek Orthodox, Armenian
Orthodox, and Roman Catholic priests have staked out Nativity turf with the acrimonious precision of teenage brothers sharing a bedroom. A locked steel door prevents direct access from the Roman Catholic chapel to the Manger Grotto, which has to be reached through the Greek Orthodox monastery where there is a particular “Armenian beam” that Greek Orthodox monks stand on to sweep the area above the grotto entrance, making the Armenians so angry that, according to my guidebook, “in 1984 there were violent clashes as Greek and Armenian clergy fought running battles with staves and chains that had been hidden beneath their robes.” What would Christ have thought? He might have thought, “Hand me a stave,” per Mark 11:15: “Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.”

It's left to the Muslims to keep the peace at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, just as it's left to the Jews to keep a similar peace at the likewise divided Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Who will be a Muslim and a Jew to the Muslims and the Jews? Hindus, maybe. That is more or less the idea behind putting UN peacekeeping troops in Israel. This may or may not work. The
Bhagavad Gita
opens with the hero Arjuna trying to be a pacifist: “Woe!” Arjuna says. “We have resolved to commit a great crime as we stand ready to kill family out of greed for kingship and pleasures!” But the Lord Krishna tells Arjuna to quit whining and fight. “Either you are killed and will then attain to heaven,” Krishna says, “or you triumph and will enjoy the earth.”

Our guide took us to several large gift shops with no other customers, aisles stacked with unsold souvenirs of Jesus' birth. Part of the Israeli strategy in the intifada has been to put economic pressure on the Arabs of the West Bank and
Gaza. Fear of death hasn't stopped the Arabs. Maybe fear of Chapter 11 will do the trick. The hopes and fears of all the years reside with badly carved olive-wood crèche sets. Dave and I bought several.

Then our guide took us up a hill to the Christian Arab village of Beit Jala, which the Israelis had been shelling. Large chunks were gone from the tall, previously comfortable-looking limestone villas. Shuttered housefronts were full of what looked like bullet holes, but large enough to put a Popsicle in. “Ooh, fifty-caliber,” said Dave with professional appreciation.

“These people,” our guide said, “have no part in the violence.” Dave and I made noises of condolence and agreement in that shift of sympathy to the nearest immediate victim that is the hallmark of twenty-first-century morality.

“Here a man was sleeping in his bed,” said our guide, showing us a three-story pile of rubble. “And they couldn't find him for days later. The Israelis shell here for no reason.”

“Um” said Dave,
“why
for no reason?” And our guide, speaking in diplomatic circumlocution, allowed as how every now and then, all the time, Palestinian gunmen would occasionally, very often, use the Beit Jala hilltop to shoot with rifles at Israeli tanks guarding a highway tunnel in the valley. They did it the next night.

“It's kind of a rule of military tactics,” said Dave to me, sotto voce, as we walked back to the car, “not to shoot a rifle at a tank when the tank knows where you are.” Unless, of course, scanty olive-wood-crèche-set sales are spoiling your enjoyment of earth and you've decided to attain to heaven.

The owner of an upscale antiquities store back in Bethlehem did not look as if he meant to attain any sooner than necessary, even though his store's air-conditioning unit
had been knocked out by Israelis firing on nearby rioters. He arrived in a new Mercedes with three assistants to open his business especially for Dave, his first customer in a month.

The antiquities dealer was another friend of Z's. Z told us that this was the man whose grandfather was the Palestinian cobbler to whom the Dead Sea Scrolls were offered as scrap leather by the Bedouin shepherd who found them—a story too good to subject to the discourtesies of investigative journalism.

The emporium was new, built in the soon-dashed hopes of millennium traffic. The antiquities were displayed with the stark, track-lit modern exhibition drama necessary to make them look like something other than the pots and pans and jars and bottles from people who had, one way or another, given up on this place long ago.

Dave collects antiques, but by profession he's an iron and steel commodities trader. He has also lived in Asia for years. I sat on a pile of rugs and drank little cups of coffee while Levantine bargaining met Oriental dickering and the cold-eyed brokerage of the market floor. The three great world traditions of haggle flowered into confrontation for two and a half hours. Folks from the Oslo talks and the Camp David meetings should have been there for benefit of instruction. Everyone ended up happy. No fatal zero-sum thinking was displayed as banknotes and ceramics changed hands at last. Dave could make more money. And the Arabs could make more antiquities.

Why can't everybody just get along? No reasonably detached person goes to Israel without being reduced in philosophical discourse to the level of Rodney King—or, for that matter,
to the level of George Santayana. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Santayana said in one of those moments of fatuousness that come to even the most detached of philosophers. In Israel and Palestine, as in Serbia and Kosovo, this goes double for those who can't remember anything else. And everybody
does
get along, after a fashion. Muslims and Christians and Jews have lived together in the Holy Land for centuries—hating one another's guts, cutting one another's throats, and touching off wars of various magnitudes.