by Hesh Kestin
“Mother, Erika. In this hospital there is a Bedouin boy who was injured in the same . . . incident. He is being treated with the same care. I am told he is on the floor below. Would you like to see him, see his family? There are many problems here between Jew and Arab, but free access to equal medical care is not one of them, and you know it. Not everything may be turned into propaganda. I beg you. We need to test your blood.”
“My blood?” Erika laughs. “Foolish girl. My blood is my own.”
“Nevertheless, we must know if it is suitable.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Mother,” she says, knowing that she is pleading and not caring, “Ari is badly hurt. He needs your help. Only you can offer a chance to save him.”
“No.”
“Please, mother.”
“You want something I cannot give.”
“Mother, we have only minutes. Please let these nurses take a sample of your blood. If it is not suitable—”
“You are wasting your time.”
“There are no other relatives. You are our only chance. Please, mother.”
Erika begins laughing, quietly at first, then more violently until she seems hysterical, her head thrown back. “You don’t want my blood. My blood isn’t good enough. It never was.”
“Mother, for the last time, let us put aside the past.”
“The past may never be put aside. It is with us forever. My blood is worthless to you.”
“Mother, your own grandson. This is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of precious time.”
Erika turns to Zeinab, who has risen, her hand covering her mouth as if to stifle a scream. “My blood she wants. Mine!”
Dahlia has had enough. “Constables, I am giving you direct orders. One of you hold her down. The other restrain her arm. Nurse!”
As the two policemen grab Erika and the pretty African nurse steps forward, Zeinab places her hand on Dahlia’s arm. She says nothing at first, but only shakes her head.
“Auntie, it must be done.”
“My dear child, release her.”
“Auntie, I can’t let my son die. Her own grandson!”
Zeinab tightens her hand on Dahlia’s arm. “Erika cannot help,” she says gently. It is little more than a whisper.
The room grows silent, as though there are only the two of them.
“Auntie, please.”
She leans to whisper into Dahlia’s ear. “My child, he is not her grandson.”
The blood drains from Dahlia’s face. She stares into Zeinab’s eyes.
Both women are weeping.
Zeinab slowly rolls up her sleeve.
86
Three days later, the funeral of Dep. Comm. IDF Col. (Res.) Kobi Shem-Tov concludes in the military cemetery at Mount Herzl with a detail of three soldiers firing three volleys into the air. As the gunsmoke rises and dissipates in the light breeze, Dahlia walks back to their car on Dudik’s arm, Uri trailing behind on the narrow path. Just ahead of them, Sheikh Adnan Ibn-Aziz, his IDF medals pinned to the blue suit jacket he wears over white robes, leads his five grown sons, all in uniform. His youngest, Salim, will sit in near silence in a military rest home for two months until one morning he dresses and, without bothering to check himself out, finds his way back to the desert. In time he will be declared unfit for duty and granted a military pension. He will spend his days grooming the mare, and riding alone.
As is customary, Kobi’s family remains behind at the grave. He was, Dahlia has learned, divorced. His wife, remarried, lives abroad. No children, only two wizened parents and a troupe of brothers and sisters, some religious, some not, and their offspring.
Zeltzer leaves next, trailing a contingent from the Israel Police that includes Chief Supt. Zaid Jumblatt and a dozen senior officers.
Some two hundred uniformed IDF personnel—the entire rescue party along with comrades in arms from earlier campaigns—drift off individually, united in dress, separate in sorrow.
It is a delayed funeral. Normally a Jewish burial takes place on the day following death, even the same day, but the prime minister’s office has intervened with the rabbinate to put off the interment to make sure the ceremony receives adequate coverage from the foreign press. The raid on Beirut is meant to underscore Israel’s determination not to give in to terrorism in any form, and to remind the enemies of the state that the price for holding even one Israeli hostage, whether soldier or civilian, Jew or Arab, will be retribution in kind. In his eulogy, the prime minister hits hard on this.
In one form or another, the Prime Minister’s words will make their way onto the front pages of newspapers around the world. However, in the cause of objectivity and fairness and because the international press is convinced that terrorism can be justified so long as it does not occur in their own countries, Israel’s side of the story will be balanced by another view. That view will become its own story, one that quickly eclipses the necessity for the raid with a vociferous inquiry into its cost in human life.
87
Only a mile away, in a room in the post-operative unit at Hadassah Medical Center, IDF Lt. Ari Barr, hooked up to an array of tubes and monitors, is barely able to keep his eyes open. Between the painkillers and the fatigue, his attention wanders as he attempts to concentrate on the television screen across from his bed. The woman whose kidney saved his life recuperates on the floor above.
On the screen is a handsome correspondent for CNN whose deep voice displays only a shade of the discreet Southern accent that gives his reporting the ring of amiable truth. “In the aftermath of Israel’s lightning raid to free two prisoners of war captured by Hezbollah,” he says, “questions are being asked about the severity of the action. Indeed, questions are being asked about its very necessity.”
The screen goes to a one-armed man with a scarred face and glasses, one of whose lenses is black. “Why do they need to do these criminal acts?” he asks.
The correspondent’s earnest face returns. “I’m here in a secret location in Cyprus with Dr. Fawaz Awad, spokesman for Lebanon’s Hezbollah Party. I can’t reveal the precise spot. Fearing further Israeli reprisals, Dr. Awad has agreed to this interview on condition CNN not disclose our precise location.”
“They come in the night, murdering innocent civilians. Sixty-three people, innocent people, their lives are taken from them. Even children. Five children, my God. And why? Because the Jewish government refuses to negotiate in the same way they refuse always to negotiate. For this reason, sixty-three innocent people are dead.”
“Dr. Awad, Jerusalem claims that all the dead were armed Hezbollah fighters.”
“Floyd, let me promise you. They say this each time they kill innocent civilians. It is not the first instance. For what? We asked for the release of the Canadian professor Edward Al-Masri, the father of a small child. This fine man was kidnapped by the Mossad, and no one has seen him since that time. This is not human rights. This is evil.”
88
The next day Israel’s Ministry of Justice announces that Mohammed Al-Masri, known in the West as Edward Al-Masri, is in police custody on charges of currency smuggling that could bring a sentence of five years.
At his trial thirty days later, Al-Masri makes no mention of the cigarette burns on his chest. His defense counsel claims the funds in question were intended to build a house for Al-Masri’s widowed mother in Baka al-Gharbiya, and that the Israeli government is merely using the smuggling charge in order to silence a well-regarded Arab critic of what he terms its “racist policies.” He calls for the court to throw out the charges. “Just as the Jewish State has suppressed the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” he tells the panel of three judges and the international press in attendance, “so, too, does it seek to suppress the right of my client to free speech, a right enshrined in Israeli law.”
What he does not say is that a deal has already been agreed upon between the prosecution and his client: Al-Masri will not mention the cigarette burns in r
eturn for a sentence of six months, which he will serve not in a prison for common criminals but in a special security wing for Palestinian terrorists.
The deal works for both parties. The prime minister’s office need not defend Israel on charges of torture, at least not now, during a period of intense negotiation with the United States over weapons purchases; Al-Masri will be permitted to wear the cloak of martyrdom by serving his time with other heroes of the Palestinian cause. And there is this: Among Arabs Al-Masri need not fear violence from Jewish criminals who, he knows, would eat him alive.
But midway into his sentence, a cell-block court of Al-Masri’s fellow martyrs, convened in the library of the special security section at Beit Lid Prison, near the coastal city of Netanya, sentences him on a charge of collaborating with the Zionist enemy in giving up details that led to the raid on Beirut and the rescue of two valuable Israeli hostages.
The next morning he is found dead in his cell.
An autopsy concludes the cause of death to be asphyxiation, but that immediately before he was killed he was tortured. Dozens of fresh cigarette burns pock his upper body like bullet holes.
Epilogue
Nearly forty-five years earlier, in the maternity ward of Hillel Yaffe Hospital in the central Israeli city of Hadera, a Jewish mother manages to overcome her pain and rise from her bed. She brings her newborn son to the arms of an Arab mother in the bed adjacent.
Zeinab Al-Masri kisses her own newborn, a daughter, and hands the child to the Jewish woman. The Arab woman brings the infant boy to her breast, where immediately he begins to suckle. “Allah bless you for this, Erika. After seven daughters, my husband would divorce me for bringing another. That is the way with us. Trust me. I will care for your son as my own.”
“What’s the difference?” the Jewish woman says, holding the infant girl. “A child is a child.”
© LEIGH KESTIN
HESH KESTIN was for two decades a foreign correspondent, reporting from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa on war, international security, terrorism, arms dealing, espionage, and often equally shadowy global business. Formerly a London-based European correspondent for Forbes, he is an eighteen-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. His articles have appeared in Newsday, The Jerusalem Post, Ma’ariv, and Playboy. The father of five, Kestin lives close to New York City in a very quiet village, and likes it that way.
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ALSO BY HESH KESTIN
Based on a True Story: Three Novellas
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Epigraph
Author's note
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Epilogue
About Hesh Kestin
