Ted Conover
Page 25
“But I’m with a friend,” I responded, and gestured at Khaldoon. “A family friend.” I thought that might sound a bit more persuasive. But the soldier only looked puzzled. He called up Khaldoon. “Okay, family friend,” he said finally. He returned our documents. We were clear.
It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Omer invited me to the holiday dinner at the family home of his longtime girlfriend, Orit. Orit was a student of veterinary medicine, and her parents lived in a townhouse in Netanya, about twenty minutes north of Tel Aviv and maybe two hours from the paratrooper base north of Ramallah. Work in the West Bank, Omer had told me, was “a war you can commute to.”
I’d never been to Netanya, but I knew its recent notoriety: in the spring of 2002, a suicide bomber had blown himself up at a seder in the city’s Park Hotel, killing 29 people and injuring 140. The event, which has come to be known as the Park Hotel Massacre or the Netanya Passover Massacre, was the climax of a bloody month that saw 130 Israelis killed in suicide and other attacks. Days later, the IDF responded with a major offensive called Operation Defensive Shield, invading most of the Palestinian cities of the West Bank and focusing particular wrath on Jenin, site of a refugee camp from which they believed many of the attacks originated. Palestinian casualties at the camp—fifty-two, according to the IDF—have led Palestinians to refer to it as a massacre. Suicide bombings inside Israel have dwindled since then (in 2007 there was only one, and the same in 2008), due largely to the construction of the “security fence” and the ongoing efforts of army units like Omer’s.
I’d had some trouble reading the highway signs at night, and so was the last to arrive at dinner. In addition to Omer and Orit and her parents, her two older brothers were there with their wives; one couple had an infant daughter, the other a toddler son. Both brothers (and one of the wives), as it turned out, had spent four years in the army but clearly felt that was enough: they had moved on to careers in other fields. Omer, I now saw, was seen as something of an oddity, a smart young person with many other options who remained in the military because, well, he liked it.
As the group passed around the brisket, the capon, and the kugel and asked about my work, it became clear how interested they were in letting Omer know it was time to get out. Omer had already told me about the trouble his soldiers often had with their West Bank service: their families didn’t want to hear about it. Even if families approved of their country’s conduct in “the territories,” also known in Israel as Judea and Samaria, they didn’t necessarily want to know the details, because much of it was frankly unpleasant. But somehow I had imagined that Omer, the wise and senior leader who observed all this, was somehow immune to such pressure.
Not at all. Orit’s family appeared to be left-leaning, and therefore that much more disapproving. Her father said, more than once, that work in the territories was morally insupportable. “To work a week there—impossible,” he said. “To work a month—impossible. To work a year there—impossible!”
Most Israelis, a sister-in-law added, were “against the West Bank policy.” I hadn’t known that and asked her why, in that case, had they elected a prime minister like Ariel Sharon? She told me she wasn’t sure, that it was complicated.
“Will you finish soon?” ventured Orit’s mom.
“Yes, I’m applying for programs in graduate school,” Omer confirmed. He had already told me this, but had added that he would probably return to the military once he was finished.
Omer and Orit and I took the parents’ boxer for a walk when the main meal was finished but before dessert. Orit, Omer had already told me, was firmly against his working in the territories, on political grounds. Though they had lived together nine years and planned to get married, she had never once visited his posts in the West Bank. “Did he tell you about the time he was attacked in Nablus?” Orit asked me as we walked.
I said he had—the kid who’d come around the ambulance with the Molotov cocktails whom Omer had shot. I knew it had been horrific for him, killing a boy, but hadn’t known it was also a crisis for Orit. “It made me hate the Arabs,” she disclosed. “That they make a boy do that.”
Omer returned to something he had told me earlier, the example of a nighttime home invasion. I knew these bothered him, but I also knew he had to do it all the time, and the searches often bore fruit: to the army, finding a weapon justified the horror. And yet a horror it was: “When soldiers invade a family’s home and terrify the boy sitting on the bed in order to find a weapon, I think we’ve probably just created another terrorist,” he said, echoing an earlier comment. (A few days later, al-Jazeera posted a manifesto purportedly from Osama bin Laden lambasting the United States with these words: “Your allies in Palestine … terrorize the women and children, and kill and capture the men as they lie sleeping with their families on the mattresses, [and] you may recall that for every action, there is a reaction.”) And yet, from Omer’s point of view, it was crucial work that had to be done.
Whatever his shortcomings as a potential son-in-law, I thought that Orit’s family would have a hard time finding a better soldier.
Omer kept referring to “the old 60” and “the new 60,” and one day I asked what he meant. The old 60, he explained, had connected all the major Palestinian cities of the West Bank. But with the growth of Israeli settlements in the territory, and with Israeli settlers encountering trouble when they traveled through Palestinian cities, bypass roads had been created. The peak of this construction was in the late 1990s. Bypasses now constitute the main 60 Road, which skirts not only the cities but many of the villages as well.
One morning, intelligence reports indicated that bombers out of Nablus would be heading to points south, and Omer decided to set up a flying checkpoint on the new 60 Road where it intersected the old 60, just below the company’s base. After all, a smart bomber might decide to avoid the main routes, with their permanent checkpoints, in favor of a longer journey on back roads.
Four soldiers went out at midmorning with a Humvee driver to set up the flying checkpoint, and I went along to observe. In charge of the operation was one of Omer’s most trusted platoon leaders, a twenty-one-year-old named Ori, who unloaded from the Humvee two ammo boxes containing the pakal machsom, the checkpoint kit, which included reflectors, a warning sign on a tripod, and two lengths of “dragon’s teeth”—collapsible spikes that extend about six feet across the road, to make sure cars stop where they are supposed to.
I had talked to Ori at length the evening before, at a picnic table on the base. Short, handsome, and conscientious, he had served two years in the army after an eight-month stint in the navy. Like many of his buddies, he was still trying to make the adjustment from his active life as a soldier patrolling Nablus to a relatively more passive one manning checkpoints. “In Nablus you feel like a warrior,” he told me. “You arrest people, you bring them to justice, and all of that. But here you don’t see the fruit of the work. The challenge is the people and their problems and all the pressure they put on you, and your soldiers looking at you and trying to see how you do it. And you need to deal with the threats, which at a checkpoint are very large. The threat could be in a lady’s bag, or in the engine behind an air cleaner, or behind the nearest hill, or a grenade could be thrown at you from fifty meters.” As Ori spoke, I thought of his platoon’s symbol: a clown juggling grenades.
The low points of his military service, Ori told me, had been the three months he spent working the Hawara checkpoint, and a recent dangerous assignment in Gaza. He had been sent to Gaza the day after a rocket-propelled grenade killed five Israeli soldiers traveling in armored personnel carriers. Ori’s challenge, in the middle of taking fire from snipers, was to try to retrieve small body parts of the slain soldiers, so that their relatives would have something to bury.
But today he was back at a checkpoint, battling the heat and the boredom of examining each and every document handed to him from a slow-moving line of cars. As the line began to stretch back over a h
ill and out of sight, much like the scene in Hebron as I had waited with Khaldoon, Ori, exposed on the blacktop, summoned one vehicle at a time to move ahead of the rest, and then spoke to the driver in the Arabic phrases he had learned during his boot-camp training. The first, of course, which every soldier knew, was Stop!, or Wakkif! But Ori knew many more.
Wain raieh? (Where are you going?)
Jai min wain? (Coming from where?)
Lahalak fi al-saiara? (Alone in the car?)
Laish raieh? Shu al-shughul? (Why are you going? On what business?)
Itfee al-saiara! (Turn off the car!) This order is often ignored at first.
Itla min al-saiara! (Get out of the car!)
Iftah al-sanduq! (Open the trunk!)
Irfa qameesak! (Lift up your shirt!)
All morning long I watched Ori and his colleagues do their work. I watched them stop an ambulance and make everyone get out, including an old man in back who was apparently on his way to a hospital and looked pretty close to death. Later, in their defense, Ori and other soldiers pointed out that ambulances had been used on more than one occasion to carry explosives.
I watched them allow cars with yellow-and-black Israeli license plates, as opposed to white-and-green Palestinian ones, to skip the queue and pass through the checkpoint by using the oncoming-traffic lane. Most made eye contact with Ori before proceeding, but some just zoomed by.
I watched them make a pregnant woman wait more than twenty minutes in the broiling sun while a soldier ran her ID through a computer back at the base.
I watched them order several Palestinians to pile out of a service taxi, leaving inside an incapacitated man whose foot was wrapped with gauze through which blood had oozed. Wary of a trap, Ori then made the man, despite his evident pain, get out of the taxi and hop over to him with his documents. After getting the all clear the man was carried back to the taxi by the other passengers.
I watched an old woman climb out of the car she was riding in and hobble up the road, saying that her husband could pick her up once he got through the checkpoint, but she was not going to wait a minute more. “Go ahead and shoot me!” she told Ori as she walked by.
Standing there in the sun (I’d been issued a helmet and a bulletproof vest as well), I recalled Khaldoon’s remark that he “hated” traveling on roads. And then I thought of my son’s soccer team back in the USA. There were many players from other countries, including a wonderful Israeli kid, Eden, whose father was a general posted to the U.S. for purposes of military fund-raising. Soon after the American invasion of Iraq, when the inadequate armor of our vehicles was becoming clear, he had told me that Israel had quietly loaned the U.S. “many” armored vehicles as a stopgap, the IDF being well seasoned in the challenges of occupation. Iraq, of course, with its bloody internecine power struggles and the profusion of IEDs that took such a high toll of coalition soldiers, was a much more dangerous place to be than the Palestinian territories. But the war-without-end of an occupation, and the centrality of roads to the effort, were two things they had very much in common.
After about three hours Omer arrived and decided that although no bomber or contraband had been interdicted, the checkpoint had served its purpose. Back at the base Ori and the other soldiers seemed glad to take off their heavy combat gear and eat lunch. Ori told me that he would have liked to be a soldier in the time of the Haganah—the Israel Defense Forces’ precursor—or of an early elite strike force like the Palmach. Such fighters, he said, recruited themselves, lived in a group, and worked together for one purpose. “Now it seems so complicated—you don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong, and if we’ve done the right thing every time.”
Surely this sentiment is shared by thousands of soldiers—Israeli, Russian, American—at the dawn of the twenty-first century, when it appears that the hardest thing is not taking control of a territory (the West Bank, Chechnya, Iraq) but attempting to run it once you are there. The battlefield is no longer a highly militarized beachhead, plain, or jungle but a road, a checkpoint; and the challenge is picking out the enemy—a teenager in a long coat; a woman with a baby carriage—from the large mass of civilians who are noncombatants, without creating additional enemies in the process. The great risk, as you contend against the unseen, is that you may come to demonize even those who are not part of the resistance. That’s what the job does. No wonder Ori felt nostalgic for the old days.
And no wonder Omer, in command of a base surrounded by historical enemies, didn’t seem at all fearful of traditional defeat. His side clearly enjoyed overwhelming military superiority. But Omer did worry a lot about his men’s state of mind. I knew this in part because, for a few days, I shared his bunk room in the radio trailer on the paratrooper base. The room was small—three cots—and messy: uniforms and underclothes were piled here and there, bullets were scattered around the floor. Omer didn’t spend much time in there; his days started early and usually ended late. He wanted to be near the radio in case there was urgent news. More than once I woke up in the morning to find him asleep in his uniform, even his boots still on. One night, after I’d been asleep about four hours, he and his lieutenant, Eyal, arrived back after a particularly difficult arrest in a Palestinian village. I’d gone along on other nights but this time, at the last minute (around one a.m.), the Shin Bet radioed I couldn’t go. Too sensitive, Omer guessed. And so I’d missed it, but from the other operations I had an idea of what had transpired: the village, dark and silent, the soldiers quietly taking up positions all around the house in question, and finally Omer and his top guys bursting inside to look for the person or the weapon. It was scary, but when it was over it was sad.
By the time Omer returned it was almost dawn. Eyal flopped down on the third bunk and fell asleep almost instantly. In the low light beginning to show through the window, Omer sat on his bed and unlaced his boots. Yes, he told me, they had got the bad guy. “But it was hard.” He didn’t need to mention a girl’s shaking, a mother’s sobbing, a father’s veiled fury. I knew his concern was always for his soldiers, and they loved him for it. “The real daily fight,” he had told me more than once, worried about the toll on his soldiers, “is fighting for a soul.”
SPEED UP!
A BLOCKED ROAD is a thwarted intention.
A good road—smooth, straight, free of roadblocks—allows us to go fast. Speed, in fact, is not only the advantage of a good road but one of its great pleasures.
In the pre-Hispanic Americas, speed was a fast runner. Spaniards introduced the horse, which, according to early chroniclers, the Aztec saw as an intelligent being, even a god. Larger and faster than any other creature they knew, a horse with a soldier on its back formed a huge, intimidating fighting machine.
With time, Native Americans came to understand, breed, and ride horses with a skill commensurate with that of the cowboys and soldiers they battled. Around the world, in Mongolia and Scandinavia, in Australia and Argentina, pastoral people used horses for transportation and, yes, for the pleasures of racing.
Earlier, though, other civilizations had taken it to the next level. Four-wheeled chariots appeared in Mesopotamia between 3000 and 2500 B.C., pulled by oxen or donkeys. As their use spread to India, China, and Europe, they became more nimble with the use of spoked wheels, and by 2000 B.C., they were pulled by horses, two, three, or four of them—a potent innovation for battle. They could go faster than a single horse ridden by a soldier in full armor, and they allowed soldiers better access to weaponry. As we know from sources including the movies, Greeks and Romans put them to use in races and other pageantry.
The Greeks, in addition, found a place for chariots in their mythology. Phaeton, challenged by his friends to prove that Helios, the sun god, was his real father, asked to drive his chariot (the sun) for a day. Helios tried to talk him out of it, but to no avail. Phaeton, reins in hand, quickly lost control: the chariot came too close to earth, setting rivers and oceans to boil; “whole cities burn,/ And peopled kingdoms into ashes turn.”
Libya became a desert and the Moors’ skin blackened.
Finally Zeus, god of the sky, intervened, striking the runaway chariot with a bolt of lightning. Phaeton, perhaps history’s first teenage driver, plunged to earth with his hair on fire and perished.*
Horses pulled carts and wagons of various kinds for centuries, but not until the eighteenth century did a combination of better roads and better cart technology result in vehicles that brought wheeled speed to large numbers of people. The French were leaders in this development, with the horse-drawn cabriolet, a lightweight, two-wheeled, open-air cart for two; sturdier coupés; and the turgotine, a narrow stagecoach. The convenience, excitement, and utility of these innovations resulted in a boom: the number of vehicles in Paris went from 320 in 1658 to 20,000 by 1765. “Everyone has become a driver,” wrote the Chevalier d’H. in 1819. “It’s the fashion of the day.”
England, too, was transformed. Over seventy-five years the number of carriages shot up from 18,000 in 1775 to 106,000 in 1840. Roughly corresponding to the French conveyances were the English curricle (two wheels, one axle), phaeton (four large wheels, minimal body), and mail coach. Like the French vehicles, and like the fallen god, and indeed like the modern sports car, all were known as fast and dangerous, thrilling to drive but a peril to pedestrians. With vehicles “came efforts to widen and straighten out streets, regulate traffic, differentiate sidewalks from roadways … efforts that had the effect also of encouraging a further acceleration of motion.”
A significant enabler of speed, of course, was McAdam’s better pavement. In combination, smooth pavement and horses pulling lightweight carriages brought the pleasures of speed to a larger number of people than ever before. As angry as pedestrians were with the newfound perils of the street, drivers and passengers became ecstatic with motion. The hero of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) exulted in his travels from town to town in a britzka drawn by three horses: