by Max Brooks
In your opinion, what do you believe was the cause of that war?
I think there were many causes. I know the repatriation of Palestinians was unpopular, so was the general pullout from the West Bank. I’m sure the Strategic Hamlet Resettlement Program must have inflamed more than its share of hearts. A lot of Israelis had to watch their houses bulldozed in order to make way for those fortified, self-sufficient residential compounds. Al Quds, I believe … that was the final straw. The Coalition Government decided that it was the one major weak point, too large to control and a hole that led right into the heart of Israel. They not only evacuated the city, but the entire Nablus to Hebron corridor as well. They believed that rebuilding a shorter wall along the 1967 demarcation line was the only way to ensure physical security, no matter what backlash might occur from their own religious right. I learned all this much later, you understand, as well as the fact that the only reason the IDF eventually triumphed was because the majority of the rebels came from the ranks of the Ultra-Orthodox and therefore most had never served in the armed forces. Did you know that? I didn’t. I realized I practically didn’t know anything about these people I’d hated my entire life. Everything I thought was true went up in smoke that day, supplanted by the face of our real enemy.
I was running with my family into the back of an Israeli tank,5 when one of those unmarked vans came around the corner. A handheld rocket slammed right into its engine. The van catapulted into the air, crashed upside down, and exploded into a brilliant orange fireball. I still had a few steps to go before reaching the doors of the tank, just enough time to see the whole event unfold. Figures were climbing out of the burning wreckage, slow-moving torches whose clothes and skin were covered in burning petrol. The soldiers around us began firing at the figures. I could see little pops in their chests where the bullets were passing harmlessly through. The squad leader next to me shouted “B’rosh! Yoreh B’rosh!” and the soldiers adjusted their aim. The figures’… the creatures’ heads exploded. The petrol was just burning out as they hit the ground, these charred black, headless corpses. Suddenly I understood what my father had been trying to warn me about, what the Israelis had been trying to warn the rest of the world about! What I couldn’t understand was why the rest of the world wasn’t listening.
1. From “Quotations from Chairman Maozedong,” originally from “The Situation and Our Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan,” August 13, 1945.
2. A prewar automobile manufactured in the People’s Republic.
3. The Institute of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases of the First Affiliated Hospital, Chongqing Medical University.
4. Guokia Anquan Bu: The prewar Ministry of State Security.
1. Shetou: A “snake head,” the smuggler of “renshe” or “human snake” of refugees.
2. Liudong renkou: China’s “floating population” of homeless labor.
3. Bao: The debt many refugees incurred during their exodus.
1. Bad Brown: A nickname for the type of opium grown in the Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan.
2. PTSD: Post-traumatic stress disorder.
1. It has been alleged that, before the war, the sexual organs of Sudanese men convicted of adultery were severed and sold on the world black market.
1. Children of Yassin: A youth-based terrorist organization named for the late Sheikh Yassin. Under strict recruitment codes, all martyrs could be no older than eighteen.
2. “Sure the vilest of beasts in Allah’s sight are those who disbelieve, then they would not believe.” From the Holy Koran, part 8, Section 55.
3. By this point, the Israeli government had completed operation “Moses II,” which transported the last of the Ethiopian “Falasha” into Israel.
4. At the time, it was unsure whether the virus could survive in solid waste outside of the human body.
5. Unlike most country’s main battle tanks, the Israeli “Merkava” contains rear hatches for troop deployment.
