by Alan Gold
Fuad’s warning to the village that Yael was under his protection had spread from house to house. But that didn’t stop dozens of people from lining the streets on the outskirts of the village as she drove slowly away. They were just looking at her and her car. She tried to focus and concentrate on her driving, but whenever she looked at the people’s faces, she thought she saw both anger and envy. They had been warned off from harassing her, but Fuad had said nothing to them about intimidation, and that’s precisely what she felt.
The menacing stares grew fewer and fewer as she drove out of the village, but she could still feel them. Having been brought up in Jewish cities and suburbs all her life, and with few Palestinians whom she could call friends, her only contact with them was through her patients. She didn’t want to think of herself as a racist or a person who instinctively disliked or distrusted Palestinians, as did a number of her friends, but her experience in Bayt al Gizah deepened her concerns that Jews and Palestinians were destined never to live together, and all the high hopes and naïve optimism might never change the relationships between the two peoples. Abba Eban’s words came to her mind:
“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
Yael was afraid, and she was angry that she should feel afraid. So close to her home, in the place she was born, she was suddenly fearful of those all around her; of the Palestinian eyes she felt boring into her. Realizing that she was driving faster than normal as her anxiety increased, she slowed down as she approached the outskirts of Jerusalem and its familiar lights reflected on ancient stones.
At school she had learned her history and the complexity of the diaspora and exile of the Jewish people. Land and culture were ancient, but nations were built and made and manufactured. Israel had been built upon the bones of an ancient culture with a narrative of determined survival in the unwelcoming places Jews had been forced to live. It was a narrative well suited to a people who had nowhere else to go.
And the Palestinians, whose envious eyes Yael could feel watching her as she drove away, had an identity and a narrative manufactured for them by external political forces. A nation dispossessed and a victim of colonization. Both were simple narratives obscured by infinitely more complex truths. The Jews had been exiled and yet they had never truly left, with family lines remaining in villages, towns, and cities. Palestinians longed for a nation of their own, yet history had never known a people called Palestinians. Their narrative had been written for them, and they had become a people with nowhere else to go. The story was flawed and complex, and too much blood had been spilled trying to simplify it.
But all this was very far from Yael’s mind as her eyes glanced nervously in the rearview mirror and the mix of fear and anger welled inside her. Why should she feel afraid? Behind her car, lights flashed and she caught her breath. Was she being followed? Or was she jumping at shadows? She had gone to a village so close yet so far removed in time and place from her home. She had spoken to a reasonable man, a loving father, yet she was at the mercy of his protection from his neighbors, who saw her as an enemy. She was furious that she should need protection.
Yael flexed her hand and shook out the tension, placing her palms back on the wheel with a deliberately lighter grip. The lights behind turned off into a side street and she was alone on the road again. She thought of the blood she had washed off those hands through countless surgeries. Jewish blood and Arab blood all looked the same as it cascaded off her latex gloves and flowed down the sink. But fear and delusion were much harder to scrub away. The realization of her own bloodline’s complexity filled her with anxiety, as her own heritage was shown not to be as simple as she had once thought.
She had to control her anger before arriving at the hospital, but the thoughts kept invading her mind. And she couldn’t stop her mind from being angry when she remembered her father telling her that, even before the Six-Day War in 1967, those Arabs living on the West Bank and in the north called themselves Jordanians and Syrians. She knew from further education, talking to friends, and listening to lectures that before the First World War the area now encompassed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority was little more than an outpost of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. And before that, their land was occupied by half a dozen different warring Arab dynasties; even before the rise of Islam, the Romans; before them, the Greeks. No research she’d done, no book she’d ever read, had identified a Palestinian capital or a separate Palestinian culture, language, religion, dress, art, cuisine. The people who now proudly said that they’d been Palestinian for seven thousand years were actually an amalgam of migrants, nomads, Bedouin, and residents of sporadic villages.
Yael pulled into the hospital’s parking lot and had to sit for five minutes to get her emotions under control. She was a surgeon, so self-control and the ability to handle any sudden and life-threatening emergency were the hallmarks of her profession. The last thing she wanted was to walk into the hospital in her current angry state.
Eventually, calming herself with deep breathing and listening to a Mozart piano concerto on her iPod, she left her car and walked into the hospital. Up two flights of stairs to the doctors’ rooms, she entered and immediately found a note telling her to come to the men’s surgical ward. It was signed by her boss, the head of surgery, and he had noted the time: the note had been written only ten minutes earlier.
Rushing up the flights of stairs to find out what was wrong, she was confronted by the sight of three tall and officious-looking men standing outside Bilal’s room, arguing in restrained but clearly angry voices. She walked quickly to where they were standing with her boss, Pinkus Harber. “What’s happening?”
Pinkus looked at her in relief. “These gentlemen are demanding that Bilal be taken to prison today. Now. Immediately. You told them that he would be able to be released today but, according to the nurse, you’ve given instructions not to release him until Friday. They’re insisting . . .”
Her state of distress from her experiences in Bayt al Gizah suddenly returned and she said defensively, “His wounds aren’t recovering as quickly as I wanted. He’ll stay here until he’s safe to be released into your custody.”
The oldest of the three men looked menacingly at her, a technique he used with uppity young women. “We’re government officials. We’re here to take our prisoner into our custody. We don’t need your approval.”
“What government department? Where’s your identity card?” she demanded.
The man looked at Pinkus.
“Yael,” said her boss, “I’ve seen these men’s identification. They’re from Shin Bet. They have the right to remove the patient, provided you give permission as his treating doctor.”
“Doctor,” said a younger man, trying to mollify her, “we have excellent medical facilities at the prison. We’re taking him now, and he’ll go into the prison hospital.”
“He’s my patient. You’re not taking him now. He’s staying here under my care until I’m sure that he’s well enough to be released.”
The third man, shorter than the others, chimed in: “Are you forgetting that this bastard slit the throat of an Israeli citizen and tried to murder dozens of others? The man he killed was Yemeni; he came to this country with his wife and four children, and he’d become a respected citizen. Yet this little bastard slit his throat like a piece of meat. This hospital isn’t a health farm for the likes of him. We have orders to take him, and take him we will!”
Now it was Pinkus’s turn to be angry. “Dr. Cohen is one of our finest surgeons, and until she says so, he stays in her care. Now, if you gentlemen would kindly leave and return on Friday, we’ll get on with our work of curing the sick.”
The most senior Shin Bet operative stared at Pinkus, then Yael. “And if I get a court order to remove him?”
Pinkus said menacingly, “The hospital’s lawyers will oppose the granting of any court order. It’ll take till Friday to resolve the issue anyway. So i
t’s your choice.”
The oldest man slowly nodded to his colleagues. They all knew that the next step simply wasn’t worth it. Without a word, they turned on their heels. Yael watched them disappear down the corridor. To her surprise, Pinkus said, “After they arrived, I took a quick look at Bilal’s wounds. They’re healing fine. You know he’s ready to be released. So why the hell are you keeping him here? Fattening up the goose before the slaughter?”
She thought quickly for an excuse, but none came to her. So she told him half of the truth. “He’s going to prison forever. I know he’s a murderer, but he’s also a misguided kid. Pinkus, when he goes to prison, he won’t see much of his parents for the rest of their lives, and whatever visits he gets will be through glass walls, talking to them with a telephone, or whatever they do to terrorists. I’ve arranged for his mother and father to visit him tomorrow. At least in here they’ll be able to touch him, kiss him, hold him. I’m sorry that you were involved.”
Pinkus nodded. “Okay, fine. But don’t compromise this hospital any further. Friday is Friday—it’s when he’s wheeled out to prison. No ifs or buts or maybes. He goes. Understood?”
She nodded, thanked him, and was about to go into Bilal’s room when her phone beeped with a text message.
I’m in a taxi nearby. I could be with you in half an hour for a cup of coffee, if you’re free. Text me. I’d like to continue our conversation, especially now you’re a media star . . . Yaniv Grossman.
Again Yael found herself annoyed by the American’s bravado and slick confidence. And yet, she knew some personal time with him would calm the tension she’d suffered since going to the Palestinian village. She texted him back.
I’m free—so to speak.
* * *
PUTTING DOWN THE TELEPHONE, Eliahu Spitzer ached to reach for a cigarette to calm his fragile nerves. He hadn’t smoked in three years at the insistence of his doctors as well as his wife, who hated the stench of tobacco in his hair and on his clothes, yet the urge to smoke in times of tension had never left him.
Instead, he opened another packet of gum and slowly chewed the little white bullet as he pondered what to do next. This damned, bloody, interfering bitch of a doctor wouldn’t give up her patient.
He breathed deeply and realized that his hands were sweating despite the air-conditioning. But why? What did the little Arab shit know, other than the imam had sent him to blow up a wall and, right on schedule, he’d been taken down by the Israeli security forces. Sure, it had made headlines as far away as New York and Moscow, but the reaction, both in Israel and in the rest of the world, had been muted, to say the least. Eliahu had assured his rabbi that it would be the first in a series of planned Palestinian atrocities against Jewish monuments that he would orchestrate to build and build until the momentum of the atrocities against ancient Judaism would anger world Jewry, who’d rise up in outrage, swamping the voices of the appeasing left-wingers.
The rabbi had concurred that violence committed to bring about the downfall of the secular government was justifiable. And as an expert in counterterrorism, it was just a small step across the line for Eliahu to go from protector to destroyer. But, unlike most destroyers, his plan was to rebuild a Messianic Israel after the destruction, the foundations of which would be the Torah, and this would lead to the return of his beloved daughter.
In the eyes of Neturei Karta, Israel was an illicit, amoral collection of Jews who should have stayed in the diaspora created by the Romans until the Messiah arrived. Then He would gather up His people and return them to God’s land. A small number of blessed Jews had lived in Roman Judea, in Islamic Palestine, in the Crusader kingdom of Christendom, and under the rule of the Ottomans as caretakers, and this was God’s will until the arrival of the Messiah and the return of all the Jews from around the world. But then political Zionism had begun the artificial building of the Jewish nation and secular lawmakers had introduced things that weren’t in the Jewish law of the Torah, and so the Messiah would not come.
Eliahu reached for another piece of chewing gum as he remembered his many conversations with Reb Telushkin in the two years after his heart operation. But the first steps in their plan had gone slightly awry. In the ordinary scheme of things, it wouldn’t have mattered. The Palestinian kid had failed to be killed, and he could have been seen to in prison or anywhere. But this doctor was getting involved, and that was adding an unnecessary layer of complication. If there was one thing Eliahu hated, it was external complications to a neat and clever plan.
This damnable woman doctor was frustrating him again. What had Bilal told her? What had he said to others? Had he named the imam? For if he had, Eliahu was concerned that if the pressure on the imam was too great, the bastard would tell the cops about him. It was unlikely, and he’d covered his tracks, but he didn’t want any cop or colleague in Shin Bet examining what he was doing. Two had already become suspicious and he’d had to deal with them.
But this doctor—she was a problem that needed to be removed! He continued chewing, realizing that he was chewing faster than normal. To calm himself, he began to sing the Neturei Karta anthem under his breath.
God is our King, Him do we serve, the Torah is our Law and in it we believe.
We do not recognize the heretical Zionist regime, its laws do not apply to us.
We will go in the ways of the Torah in fire and water.
We walk in the ways of the Torah, to sanctify the Name of Heaven.
He sighed and felt calmer as he remembered the brilliant white light and the path he’d followed ever since.
* * *
933 BCE
AHIMAAZ SAT ALONE in the silence of his office—a silence that was not only in the room but also in his mind. Yahweh’s silence was the most profound indication that Ahimaaz was abandoned. The duties of the day were nearly upon him but he could not empty the silence from his mind.
There was a knock on the door and he didn’t have time to say “Enter” before it opened and Gamaliel the tax collector walked in. The man was so rude, so arrogant, that Ahimaaz nearly ordered him to leave. Since they’d been working together, administering the temple, they’d barely spoken a civil word to each other.
Gamaliel sat himself down and drew out an assortment of papers and accounts relating to money and expenses in the maintenance and construction of the temple. Small talk of small financial matters filled the room in short, sharp statements, yet Ahimaaz saw that there was something in Gamaliel’s face. Today he was a different man, his arrogance dissipated.
Finally the small talk between them was broken when Gamaliel abruptly said, “You and me, priest, we are not so unalike.”
Ahimaaz raised an eyebrow. Gamaliel lowered his voice, the first time he’d done so since Ahimaaz had known him. Normally he didn’t care who heard him or what he said.
“We find ourselves elevated to high office, with much further to fall,” said Gamaliel.
In past times Ahimaaz would have been defiant in his denial, but today he was silent.
“We were both raised up and now those who raised us have no need of us. We are expendable and we teeter at the top of a precipice. You and me . . .”
Ahimaaz remained silent.
“I, too, was offered advancement and protection beyond my station. The first wife herself, Tashere, came to me, just as Naamah came to you.”
Ahimaaz flinched. Gamaliel smiled and said, “You can’t hide anything from Solomon—or me.” He pushed himself back slightly from the table and eyed the priest coldly. “Naamah gave you power when your invisible Yahweh did not. Tashere gave me protection when I could not protect myself. But what price did we pay, my dear priest?” Gamaliel didn’t wait for an answer and Ahimaaz had none to offer.
The tax collector continued. “Tashere came to my house and asked me to divert money to her so that she could raise a militia to overthrow Naamah. She wanted to expel the third queen from the city, along with her son, Rehoboam. She wanted her son, Abia, to be brought ba
ck from exile and be Solomon’s heir.”
Ahimaaz finally found words. “And what did you do for her?”
“I gave her money. Money from the temple taxes.”
Ahimaaz stood up suddenly, his chair falling backward. “How dare you!”
But Gamaliel stood to match Ahimaaz and cut him off. “Protection from Naamah was the price I charged Queen Tashere. What was your price when Naamah bought you? Which of your fellow priests did you cast out? How many opponents did you have removed?”
“Enough!” yelled Ahimaaz, his mind aching with pain. “Enough!”
But Gamaliel persisted in softer and more resolute tones. “And what of your brother? Is this another story of Cain and Abel? How did you convince Solomon to get rid of him?”
The words sucked the air from Ahimaaz’s lungs and he sat back in his chair, his face ashen.
“Do not fear. I am no judge. Your god has the monopoly on that. But now is not the time for giving in . . .” Gamaliel sat back down and leaned across the desk to be close to Ahimaaz’s face. “Now is the time to protect ourselves.”
“What do you mean?”
“Naamah has no need of you any longer. And as Tashere circles her with soldiers my money has just bought, Tashere will soon have no need of me. You and I must make ourselves needed, valued, by someone higher than a queen.”
“Solomon? How?” asked Ahimaaz, his hands trembling. “When he finds out, he will have us killed.”
“The truth. The truth about the plotting of his queens. Such truth will set us free,” replied Gamaliel with a smile.
“It will be a half-truth,” said Ahimaaz, shaking his head.
“Better than no truth at all.”
“Is it?”
