Having returned last week from visiting family ba’aretz, I would report the same. Peace is so over. Even the guys in the falafel stands get it. So do the cabbies, the clerks in the stores, the kids, the waiters — and they all look at Barack and Hillary dumbfounded.
It’s not because returning Gaza was such a big mistake. It’s not because Fatah can’t speak for the hate-intoxicated Hamas or because of the settlements. It’s simply experiential.
'We’re living on a time bomb — and we know it,' my cousin Molly says. And since they don’t know exactly when it’s going to go off, only that it will, they are driven to live every day as if it’s their last. Perhaps it is because their daily life is so unstable that Israelis are reported to be among the happiest of people — surprisingly, they rank sixth in the world happiness index.
And this American Jew, living in the cushiest diaspora our people have ever known, is upset. Vexed. Irritated. Angry. The murder of Jews by Arabs has a shelf life of about two minutes in the American press. People here barely remember that the day before Benjamin Netanyahu met Mahmoud Abbas in Washington for the first time, four Jews were murdered in their car on a road in Kiryat Arba. And I can’t stop thinking about it — not for all the Prozac and Xanax in the cupboard.
Just two weeks ago, Steve and I were on that very road, also traveling in a car with Israeli license plates. We were going to Hebron to visit the graves of the mamas and the papas at the cave of the Machpelah, the land Abraham purchased to bury his wife, Sarah. Though I have traveled everywhere in Eretz Yisrael, I had never been to Hebron because it was considered too dangerous. But this was the very place that commenced our ancient romance with the land of Israel — and I have longed to see it. And for the crime of being Jews daring to be present in this place, we could just as easily have been gunned down.
So when the parents of seven children were murdered by gunmen on a road I had just traveled, the event shook me up. News coverage blended it into the skirmishes surrounding the peace process. Some articles implicitly blamed the victims, who were 'settlers,' those Jews who dare to live in the West Bank beyond the Green Line. But, Barack and Hillary, on what planet is it right to shoot people because they are Jews?
Oh, yes. This planet. Where Jews continue to wear targets on their backs, 60 years after the Shoah. Islamic terror has made all travel difficult, but if you travel to Israel, you are among the choicest of targets. You must arrive at the airport earlier, have your luggage scrutinized more assiduously, and submit to more intense interrogations. I’m grateful for the security, but insulted by the implication.
Forty million people want me dead — and that’s a low estimate.
Taking a flight to Israel from Zurich, I wondered aloud why our plane was the only one with a tank and soldiers with automatic weapons trained on it. 'It’s for your protection, Madame.' Because visiting Eretz Yisrael puts me on the endangered species list.
Remember the daily bombings that occurred until Israel erected a security wall? In my family, the debate at that time was whether to rent an explosion-proof or bulletproof bus as transportation to a wedding.
When my cousin’s son attended a yeshiva in Hebron, he wore a flak jacket and helmet to class. Returning home from a family Chanukah party, his sister and her three children escaped harm when the windows of their car were shot out by terrorists. 'Don’t worry,' Tzippy told me, 'we have terrorism insurance.'
Oh, and you know how my cousin David teaches his kids to drive? He throws tennis balls at the car to prepare them for the stoning or shooting that will likely be a part of their future travel.
Israelis get it. America is still clueless.
Do we really think that settlements in the West Bank are at the heart of the failed peace process? Israelis moved to the West Bank to defend the vulnerable boundaries from which Israel had been attacked in three different wars by all her Arab neighbors. For peace, they would abandon their homes in a heartbeat and move back across the Green Line. But as for appeasement — the belief that if only Israel did this or that, the Arabs would tolerate a Jewish state in their midst — 'We’re Israelis, but we’re not stupid,' says my cousin Tzvi.
I won’t argue the politics. I am not a settler, not a provocateur, not a militant. I am simply a Jew who wished to worship at the graves of her ancestors and who escaped murder by sheer chance. That’s the way we all survived the Shoah, the bombings, the pogroms — all of the lethal anti-Semitic uprisings that continue to take their toll on our people — we escape by sheer chance or through our temporary shelter in a good hiding place.
On Aug. 31, four Jews were killed in Kiryat Arba — and one of the first responders found his own wife among the slaughtered. Three thousand West Bank Arabs gathered to celebrate the murders and cheer the murderers, and the media reported it as a small bump in the peace process. But it was more.
'The conflict is religious — not territorial,' writes Islamic scholar Hagai Mazuz, quoting several Islamic books including the Koran. Most Israelis are apathetic about the peace process because they understand the conflict as older and more noxious: It is about what the Nazis called 'Judenrein,' the purification of a country or continent by the removal of its Jews.
The Israelis get it in a way that we don’t. They’re on the ground; they pay the price. The daily search of their bags and person every time they enter a store or public place tells them. And the frequent funerals of fellow Jews martyred for residing in a Jewish state have driven home a unique understanding among our Israeli cousins. Their hair turns gray sooner; they become accustomed to risk and vulnerability. They live faster and with more intensity. This is not the first time Jews have lived on a time bomb.
Perpetual mourning is not a lifestyle anyone would choose, but it has conferred a certain wisdom on our Israeli cousins. Let the diplomats do the dance, count their approval points and pose for photo ops. Israelis have a life to live. And that’s how the falafel guy comes to understand what our most brilliant diplomats fail to compute.
I call my cousins in Israel ranting about the Kiryat Arba shootings. 'That could have been us!' I tell them. 'We were right there! My kids could have been the orphans. It makes me sooo angry!'
'You guys in America, you have time for all these feelings. You’re angry. You’re hurt. Somebody doesn’t like you and you feel bad.' Thus explains my hard-boiled cousin Tzvi. 'Us in Israel? We’ve got no time for shtuyot [idiocy]. We’ve got a life to live and a state to defend.'
'Hey, give my regards to Obama.'
Ellen Golub is a research associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and author of the Jewish short-story collection 'The Shabbes Dog.'" (source)
