Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  Elihu looked over his shoulder. All of Nablus seemed to be lit up. From the minaret of a mosque on the edge of the city a hand-cranked siren began to wail. A swirl of dust, rising like a sandstorm toward the waning sliver of moon, trailed behind the taxi as it raced between the two Army jeeps stationed along the route of the exfiltration. They were almost home free. The taxi bounced up an embankment and turned onto a paved road. Only when they had driven past the two tanks, with sergeants saluting them from the open turrets, did Elihu order the driver to slow down. He switched on the two-way radio to check in with the base as the men, mentally exhausted, slumped in their seats. From the radio came the low growl of the Mossad operations commander. “Congratulations on the successful conclusion of your last combat mission,” he said after Elihu had sent the coded signal indicating the target had been killed and the raiders had escaped unhurt.

  “Looks like you broke the jinx, Elihu,” Dror, the second in command, called nervously from the back of the car.

  But Elihu, watching the lights of Jerusalem glimmer in the darkness ahead, was lost in thought. “We must never forget,” he said softly. He was barely aware of talking aloud.

  The men in the back seat exchanged looks. “What must we never forget?” Dror asked quietly.

  Elihu could have been speaking to himself. “That we live in a corner of the planet where absolutely no one, least of all the hundred million Arabs around us, respects weakness. Which is why, when the last verse of the Pentateuch is read, we chant: Hazak, hazak, ve-nit’-hazak—Be strong, be strong, and we shall be strengthened.”

  SOMETIME IN THE NEAR FUTURE

  An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

  Testing, three, two, one. If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. (This particular travel tip is from Lewis Carroll.) The voice level work for you? Okay, here goes nothing. My name—

  Excuse me a moment. Who? Have him get back to me. I'm going to be tied up until lunchtime. With the exception of the President, don't put anyone through until I'm finished here.

  Sorry. Where was I?

  My name is Zachary Taylor Sawyer, Zack to my friends, Old Rough and Ready to the people who associate me with my illustrious ancestor, the twelfth President of the United States, Zachary Taylor, and think that, like him, I ride rough-shod over anyone who gets in my way. I'm pushing fifty-five from the right side; will be for a few more months. I taught history and political science at Harvard until eleven months ago, which is when I was invited to come to Washington as the Special Assistant to the President for Middle Eastern Affairs. For the record, this morning I'm participating in Harvard's “Running History” Project, under which senior government officials agree to record history as it's being made on the condition that these tapes will not be released to the public for twenty-five years. The object of the project, as I understand it, is to give future historians access to the raw material behind the decision making process—the endless battles over turf, the position papers that take no position, the brain storming sessions where original ideas are shot down by time servers who have no alternatives to offer, the furious disagreements that are shoved under the carpet to give the impression that the highest level of government speaks with one voice.

  You really think I'm being cynical? I thought I was being accurate. Speaking as a historian, I suspect that history tells us more about ourselves than the past—it tells us how we distorted what we chose to remember. But that's another story.

  Where to begin? I s'pose the best thing would be to describe where we're at, and then tell you how we got there. Where we're at is nine days from the signing of the peace treaty between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the creation of a viable Palestinian state within mutually agreed frontiers. The person who was on his way out when you came in was the White House protocol chief, Manny Krisher. We were ironing out the last wrinkles in the signing ceremony. Manny was generous enough to say that he didn't know how I'd convinced the Israelis and Palestinians to sit down around the same table, much less sign a treaty of peace.

  I told Manny what I usually tell people who ask me how I did it. It was a matter of timing. I came on the scene long enough after 11 September for the world to become weary of Bush’s endless war on terror and the so-called clash of civilizations—the materialistic and secular West crusading against a spiritual and fundamentalist Islam—that was alienating Muslims around the globe. I came on the scene when Wahabi fundamentalists posed a credible threat to the Saudi monarchy and the price of oil out of Arabia hit one hundred dollars a barrel, driving up inflation and driving down economic growth in every industrialized country. I came on the scene when European leaders—as his Excellency, the British Prime Minister, bluntly told Bush’s successor in my presence—were ready to reassess their historic ties to America if Washington didn’t rein in the Israelis and get them to agree to the existence of a viable Palestinian state, which, in the British view, would pull the rug out from under the Wahabis and stabilize Saudi Arabia and bring down the price of oil.

  No, that part of the meeting didn’t make it onto the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post, and for good reason—it would have scared the bejesus out of voters across Europe. The British PM, the German Chancellor, the French President, all over here for that U.N. summit, sounded like Delphic oracles who had coordinated their message, which essentially was that, unlike the U.S.A., their countries had enormous Muslim populations that might erupt like Mount Vesuvius if the Palestinians didn’t get their homeland, and soon.

  Good question. Were they exaggerating? You know, even exaggerated perceptions have a way of shaping reality, which was the case here. In essence the European leaders had swallowed the jihadist’s bait; without admitting it in so many words, they were blaming Israel for the existence of Islamic fundamentalism in the world. The fact of the matter is that the Islamic fundamentalists were around before the sovereign state of Israel was created in 1948 and they’ll be around after the sovereign state of Palestine comes into existence. The fact of the matter is that the impoverishment of the Arab masses and their lack of hope that things will get better before they get worse—which is the stuff off of which Islamic fundamentalism feeds—will still be around when the struggle over this sliver of Holy Land winds down.

  Yes, yes, I have to agree: they will certainly come up with another festering issue to rally their troops if we manage to solve the hundred-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But here’s the beauty of it all—here’s what I convinced the President of: Just because the European analysis was driven by an imperfect grasp of Islam and the historical forces at work in the world doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take them at their word, or look as if we are. In pressuring the Israelis, Washington would be seen to be responding to Europe’s legitimate concerns. And solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—even if it’s not the antidote to Islamic fundamentalism’s drive to restore the seventh century caliphate and what the Koran calls Hakimiyyat Allah or God’s rule—could only serve America’s long-term interests in the sense that it will become more difficult, if not impossible, to blame us for Palestinian tribulations.

  I’m laughing because you’re right. As the President was kind enough to point out at her most recent press conference, a good deal more than luck was involved in getting the two sides to the negotiating table. Let’s start at the start. It's no state secret that I was summoned to Washington by a President who'd been intrigued by my book Breaking Vicious Circles. She seemed as much impressed by the tone of the book as its contents. As she told me the first time we met, she didn't come across many Middle East mavens, her husband included, who were as detached as I was.

  Along with my reputation for deadpan detachment, I brought to the job the hard-nosed heresy that the way out was to raise the stakes. Even before the European leaders drove the point home with their Delphic chant, the political climate was ripe for heresy. The rash of terrorist attacks on Israeli cities and Israel’s tit-for-tat retal
iatory raids on the Palestinian territories were still fresh in everyone’s memory. When another terrorist attack struck the continental United States a month after the new President was sworn in—I’m talking about that crop-dusting plane that attempted to spray Indianapolis with anthrax spores; deaths would have been in the thousands instead of the dozens if the winds hadn’t carried off most of the anthrax—anti-Israel sentiment, never far beneath the surface, turned up in the public discourse. We all heard it—on the TV talk shows, at cocktail parties, in elevators. The sentence usually began with some variant of the phrase, “If it weren’t for the Jews …” Taking advantage of the fact that the general public was fed up with America getting blamed for the Israeli problem, Congress passed and the President signed into law—despite intense opposition from the Jewish lobby and its allies on the evangelical Christian right—a measure doing away with tax deductions for contributions to organizations that distributed money to foreign governments or entities. Overnight donations to the United Jewish Appeal dried up. When the Israelis orchestrated a not-very-subtle campaign against the sitting President, the other shoe dropped: acting on my advice, the United States suspended the delivery of arms to the two leading recipients of foreign aid, Israel and Egypt.

  You remember what happened as well as I do. The move, which would have been unthinkable only a few months before, caused a Richter-scale quake in Middle East politics. The Israeli Air Force flies American jets. Without spare parts, they would have to begin cannibalizing planes in order to keep others in the air. The Israeli government spumed for several days and then imploded, elections were held and a coalition of the more moderate secular and religious parties cobbled together a slim majority in the Knesset. Which is when I began shuttling between Jerusalem and Cairo and Riyadh and what was left of the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah after repeated Israeli air strikes. Brandishing the usual carrots and sticks, I persuaded the two sides to grudgingly agree to cease fire. The Palestinian Authority, under intense pressure from the Egyptians and the Saudis, who were under intense pressure from European capitals, finally got serious about jailing Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Fatah and Al Aksa activists and shutting down the suicide bombings; Israel, fearful of losing American support for the first time since the creation of the Jewish state, pulled its Army out of the Palestinian cities on the West Bank it had occupied, ordered its soldiers to stop shooting rubber bullets at children throwing stones and gradually opened the borders to Palestinians who held permits to work in Israel; within weeks twenty thousand Palestinians were crossing into Israel daily, and returning home at night with pay envelopes in their pockets. When the cease fire held, the belligerents were dragged—kicking and screaming, according to the Washington Post—to the negotiating table at the Mt. Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, the scene of the Bretton Woods Conference after World War II.

  Which pretty much brings us to where we're at this morning. If the cease fire holds long enough for us to get this damned treaty signed, the hope is that the silent majorities on both sides will come out of the woodwork—

  Hold on a sec, CNN’s put a map of Israel on the screen. Can you turn up the volume? Thanks.

  “… we'll go live to our correspondent in Jerusalem. Joel?”

  “When the two sides initialed the Mt. Washington peace treaty, forty-one days ago, everyone in Israel took a deep breath and held it. Now, with nine days to go until the actual signing, the silence is deafening. People tend to jump when a car backfires or a door slams or an ambulance siren wails in some distant part of this ancient city. As a senior American diplomat put it to one of my colleagues in Washington: ‘If a shot is fired, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s going be heard ’round the world.’ Joel Plummer, reporting from an eerily quiet Jerusalem.”

  Okay, you can turn it down.

  For the record, the senior American diplomat is none other than yours truly, Zachary Taylor Sawyer.

  ONE

  THE khamsin, A BLISTERING WIND FROM THE FURNACE OF HELL, swept up from the endless reaches of the Sahara. It was the earliest khamsin in memory and the most brutal in years, and was taken by some as a portent of plagues to come. Like a tidal wave, the bone-dry gusts seemed to pick up speed and mass as they spilled across the Suez rut into the Sinai and the tangled wadis of the Israeli Negev beyond, scalding the desert, stirring the sand into storms that disfigured the face of the late afternoon sun. Its force spent, the khamsin curled westward to break against the wedge of land on the shore of the Mediterranean that the Israelis call Aza, the Palestinians call Ghazeh and the world knows as Gaza.

  Their windows closed and caked with sand, two civilian automobiles—a dirty yellow 1950s Chevrolet with tail fins and a baby-blue Nissan station wagon—barreled down the buckling asphalt road from Yad Mordechai, an Israeli kibbutz founded just outside Gaza after World War Two by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In the distance an Army jeep, its needle-like machine gun sweeping the orange groves inside Gaza, could be seen patrolling the dirt track that ran along the Israeli side of the chain link fence separating Israel from the Gaza Strip. “To live by the Torah isn’t enough,” the Rabbi was telling the journalist in the back seat of the station wagon. His voice was hoarse from giving interviews and saying the same thing over and over—though each time he managed to come at the material with an ardent freshness, which left his audience with the impression that the Rabbi was inventing himself as he went along. “Stop me if I’m talking too fast for you to take notes. We must follow God’s commandment to the Jewish people and settle every square inch of the land of the Torah. Without the lava of the land burning through the soles of our shoes, we are spiritual cripples. The land is a means to an end; the end is redemption of the Jewish people and the coming of the Messiah.”

  The journalist, a lanky American in his late thirties named Max Sweeney, sat hunched over the coffee-stained pages of a child’s copy book, scratching notes as the Fiddler on the Roof (as he had nicknamed the Rabbi the moment he spotted his bulging eyes and dancing side curls) rambled on. “You were one of the founders of the Jewish settlement Beit Avram, in the hills above Hebron—”

  The Rabbi cut him off. “Hebron is where it all began,” he said. He removed his perfectly round steel-rimmed eyeglasses, dragged an enormous handkerchief from the breast pocket of his double-breasted jacket and started to clean the thick lenses. “Read the twenty-third chapter of Genesis,” he plunged on, his cataract-scarred eyes agleam with maniacal energy. “It’s where Abraham purchased the first dunams of holy land; where David, commanding Israel’s hosts, set up his capital before moving his act to Jerusalem; where our patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are buried.” The Rabbi carefully hooked the eyeglasses over one oversized ear and then the other and watched the point of Sweeney’s pen scratching across the page; even with eyeglasses, the Rabbi’s vision was so poor that the handwriting looked like the hills and valleys made by a stylus on a polygraph. It occurred to him that he hadn’t verified Sweeney’s credentials; for all he knew, the American journalist could be working for the CIA. Not that it mattered; he’d take whatever press coverage he could get. “Anyone who thinks we should abandon Hebron,” the Rabbi continued, his voice a strained rasp, “is defying God. That’s the bulletin I came to deliver to the Jews meeting in Yad Mordechai today.”

  “If the Israelis and the Palestinians wind up signing this Mt. Washington peace treaty that the Americans rammed down their throats,” Sweeney ventured, “you’ll be obliged to leave Hebron, along with a hundred other settlements in the West Bank.”

  “There’s still nine days to go before the ceremony,” the Rabbi noted. “Anything could happen between now and then.”

  “The cease fire has held up for three months.”

  The Rabbi snickered. “Arafat’s successor turns out to have more brain matter between his ears than Arafat. He’ll keep his people in line and get as much as he can through negotiations, then he’ll take a deep breath and come back for more, count on
it.”

  “It’s no secret that you’re dead set against the peace process,” Sweeney persisted. “How far would you be willing to go to derail it?”

  The Rabbi coughed up a ruthless laugh that struck Sweeney as being just shy of maniacal. “I’d convert to Islam if I thought it would put an end to this asinine government policy of trading holy land for profane peace.”

  The driver, a Russian-Jewish Zionist with a loaded Uzi submachine gun resting across his thighs, snorted in satisfaction. “Hell will freeze over before our Rabbi converts to Islam!”

  In the front of the station wagon, Efrayim Blumenfeld, the young rabbinical student who served as the Rabbi’s secretary, twisted around in his seat. “We’re almost at the Ashqelon interchange,” he announced.

  The convoy sped past a corpulent Israeli Arab in a long gray robe riding an emaciated donkey and flailing away at the animal’s flank with an olive branch. From the minaret of a dilapidated mosque in an Arab village set back from the road, the high-pitched voice of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer boomed out from a loudspeaker. “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.” The Rabbi, who had taught himself Arabic on the theory you were better armed if you spoke the language of your enemies, translated for the journalist. “He is saying that God is most great. He is saying, ‘I witness that there is no god but Allah; I witness that Muhammad is His messenger.’” Gazing through the sand-stained window, the Rabbi didn’t bother to mask his contempt. “Some messenger! Some message! But then what can you expect from the incoherent ranting of an illiterate camel driver?”