Before you get somewhere, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that it will change you.
It’s the oldest story going: you head off to make a mark on the world, but in the end the world marks you, instead. It happened to me, and it happened to the people I knew, and I believe it happened to the country, too.
It doesn’t take long. Once you go a little bit into the business of being a witness, once you have been cut by what you’ve seen, it takes a lot of strength to stop. It doesn’t matter anymore why you went at first; now you are bound to stay. The importance of it gets inside of you, and then nothing else feels important at all, you are pale and flaccid in your days. You sense that you have already lost something in the war, so you stick around waiting for the missing parts to come back, to restore themselves, or at least to lose enough so you don’t notice the gap anymore.
By accident I wound up nowhere, neither here nor there. Listless in Houston. Jagged in New Orleans. Confused in Austin. When the editors asked me to go for a temporary stint in Jerusalem, I told them I’d stay as long as they needed. Then I begged and pleaded and cajoled until they let me move there for good. I would have to go farther, go so far there was no other place to go except home again. I left Texas and moved to Jerusalem, trying to get back home, taking the long way around.
FOUR
TERRORISM AND OTHER STORIES
Armageddon is a place in Israel. I drove there on a golden morning in apricot season. In Hebrew, the name for Armageddon is Megiddo, and Megiddo is an ancient crossroads watered by centuries of blood. The warriors and zealots who prowl the Holy Land have paused for centuries there to decide which direction to take. The roads stretch west to Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea; east to the Galilee; north toward Lebanon; or south toward what is now known as the West Bank. At Megiddo Junction stand a military prison, an old kibbutz, and a bus stop.
The number 830 commuter bus was hit on the dawn run from Tel Aviv to Tiberias, crowded with dozing, daydreaming soldiers, men and women in their late teens and early twenties, on their way to military bases that pepper the mostly Arab-populated Israeli farmlands. A seventeen-year-old boy from Jenin had stolen a car and packed it full of homemade explosives, pulled up alongside the bus’s gas tank, and blown himself up. The boy, Hamza Samudi, had been sent by Islamic Jihad. The Palestinian prisoners in their cells heard the explosion and cheered.
On that June morning, clean breezes and honeyed light fell on the watermelon fields of Armageddon. Sunlight sprayed the yellow grasses and fresh pine trees shaded the road. Pieces of people had gotten blasted onto the roadsides. Sheets of bus siding lay tangled in barbed wire at the prison’s edge. Men in long beards and rubber gloves, Orthodox Jewish volunteers, combed quietly through the grassy slopes, hunting for pieces of human flesh, gathering every last bit of dead body for proper burial. Later that day I found the bus driver in a hospital cot, and he talked about the soldiers in their smart khakis. He knew their faces and their schedules, where they climbed aboard and where they hopped down. They reminded him of his sons, of his own younger days fighting in the 1967 Middle East War. “They were wonderful,” he said.
That was the first suicide bombing I covered, and it sticks there in my memory, the brightness and the death of it. A morning in June; a morning in apricot season. Night had dragged itself out of morning’s way, but no freshness broke through a swelter that warped the windows and stuck to the skin, even at dawn.
Israeli news wires are trails of gasoline; the bombs are matches. News races, burns, and gallops. Seventeen people died at Megiddo, most of them burned alive. Eighteen, if you count the teenaged bomber, and I think we should. Islamic Jihad bragged that it had carried out the bombing on the “Zionist bus.” The group’s leader, Sheikh Abdullah Shami, said the attack marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Middle East War, when Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem, wresting the land from Arabs. “We say to the enemy, we will continue to destroy the protective shield Sharon talks about,” the sheikh said. “They will never enjoy security as long as occupation exists in our land.”
In that spring of 2002, the second Palestinian intifada was nearing two years old. Suicide bombers came by day, and at night Israeli tanks seized Palestinian turf in the West Bank. Things had gotten out of control. Violence fed violence. Blood washed blood. The Israelis launched Operation Defensive Shield, which later morphed into Operation Determined Path. Behind the names, it meant that Israel was reoccupying the West Bank. It meant that the Oslo Accords, the exhaustively argued framework for peace and a Palestinian state, were lost.
It was late afternoon when I drove back into Jerusalem from Megiddo. By then everybody had seen the pictures of the burned bus and the dead soldiers. Israeli tanks had already groaned into Jenin, the bomber’s hometown. I sat in the car, waiting for a light to change at the edge of East Jerusalem. The heat hummed and buzzed. Hasidic boys in their brimmed hats tripped along toward the walls of the Old City, carrying bottles of soda pop, sweating into long-sleeved oxfords. An older Palestinian man crossed their path and they surrounded him, jeering and taunting. They crunched their features in disgust and threw their shoulders back, unscrewed a bottle of Sprite and splashed the older man’s face and shirt. These are our streets and our city, their stances said. They were poking the Arab and spitting on him. A taxi squealed to the curb; the Arab driver pushed up his sleeves as he ran, shoes slapping clumsily over the pavement. Another Arab man leapt out of another car. They pulled the old worker away with pats on the back, threw glowers and threats over their shoulders. The Orthodox boys shuffled off. Jerusalem rearranged itself. The light changed and I drove away. It was over, except that it was never over.
After midnight, tanks and bulldozers arrived at Palestinian Authority president Yasir Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters, the Palestinian government center just over the line from Jerusalem. By first light, the compound had been demolished and Arafat, the crooked president of a country that still doesn’t exist, waddled through the remaining rooms. The walls were blasted off the soldiers’ sleeping quarters, the floors toppled like a fallen layer cake, clothes and wires dripping from the squashed rooms. A skinny soldier shimmied like a child on a jungle gym, sweating and grunting in sock feet, to rummage in the wreckage. Finally he tugged his shoes free of the rubble and held them aloft like trophies; his comrades cheered from the ground below. The summer light came thick and naked, laying it all bare, and Palestinian families walked aghast through the wreckage, silent and stunned, entire clans come together as if on picnic to inspect the broken structure of their national dreams.
Twenty-four hours in Jerusalem spread like a road map to misery.
I knew a Palestinian woman who lived in Jerusalem. She was pretty and slim from living on cigarettes and Nescafé, but her eyes were old and sad. Sometimes she drank iced vodka until she was drunk, leaning over with curses falling out of her mouth, stabbing the night with a cigarette, roaring in broken laughter.
She was still a teenager when Israeli soldiers arrested her for membership in an underground Palestinian political movement. That was back in the bad old days of the first intifada. Break their bones. That’s what Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Israeli soldiers, or so the story goes. Some Israelis insist this was a command to be soft with the Palestinians. Break their bones but don’t kill them, beat them but don’t shoot them. But an American reporter who covered that intifada told me he saw Israeli soldiers systematically break the arms of little boys, one by one, working their way through a village, so they couldn’t throw rocks. Israel is merciful; Israel is brutal. The two deathless story lines of the Jewish state, crowding the streets and minds of Jerusalem. Most people believe one or the other, and believe it fervently. It is hard to find anybody who acknowledges that both might be true, and then some.
The Palestinian woman told me her own story one night. We were both drinking and I didn’t take notes, but I never forgot it: When they arrested her and brought her to jail she made th
e soldiers angry because she yelled at them, Fucking Jews, I wish I were Hitler. She was embarrassed about yelling those things. I was so crazy, she said. I was just crazy. She told me that she was tortured for days, beaten, abused, threatened with rape. One day a particularly brutal Israeli interrogator wounded her breast with a nail, left it bleeding. She pulled her blouse aside and showed me the scar, deep and permanent. Then she told me about the young Israeli guard. This stranger, this anonymous Israeli man, sat with her hour after dark hour, fanning her raw wound with a magazine. And all the while, he cried.
I saw her scar, I listened to her words. I don’t know if the story is true, in that I don’t know if it actually occurred. It may have been apocryphal. These are my memories of her memories. And this is Jerusalem, world capital of dubious stories, centuries of stories half forgotten and passed on, stories of saints and prophets and torturers, everybody fighting for the best story, the one that gives you a religion, a claim, a right. But I never doubted the emotional truth behind this one story, and I have kept it because it encapsulated the things I could sense but not say: that after their awful history, locked in a death match for survival, Israelis and Palestinians had become what they never wished to be—one people after all, each one half of a whole, locked together in a union you could not touch or understand from the outside, torturing one another, tarnishing their own souls with each other’s blood, speaking hidden words in voices pitched so only the other could listen, maybe even loving one another in some secret and sublimated way. Each capable of a cruelty that is deeper because it understands exactly what it does, because it is not blind. It is a story not only about pain inflicted, a strong torturer and a helpless victim. It is that story, yes, but it’s also a story of a weeping teenager confronting the underbelly of his own country, fighting his conscience with nothing but a magazine to flap in the dark. It’s about the pain that turns back to gnaw on the tormenter, about the damage we do to others because we want to protect ourselves, and how that damage echoes back into our own souls. This is not, perhaps, a productive way to think about foreign affairs, least of all in the Middle East, where power is currency and weakness must be hidden at all costs. In this part of the world, statesmen survive because of what they smash, not because of what they say. And yet there was truth and humanity in this story, and so I kept it. Maybe I needed the story, and need it still, to organize my thinking. Maybe I clung to it because it helps, when people are killing their neighbors, to believe they cry over it in the dark. Years later, I do not track down the woman who told me the story. I don’t want to double-check. Maybe I am afraid she will take it away again. I have lived with it too long to give it back now; it has become mine, and that is how the stories of Jerusalem have worked for centuries.
I meditated on the story when I jogged along the clean rock walkways of the Sherover Promenade, through the clumps of sweet lavender and sage, past the strolling settlers who gave me silent approbatory looks and the skinny Arab boys who scrambled after me, bawling yahud, yahud—Jew, Jew. The path scooped around the hillside, over the ancient Old City walls, and the church bells and the call to prayer quavered from below. The last rays of light glinted off the gold Dome of the Rock and the sweet smell of herbs came up as the dirt grew cold at the roots. Palestinians trailed through the hills, prodding their goats. I ran through the olive trees and up, ancient rocks beneath me, the wonder of the Old City of Jerusalem. The physical beauty of Jerusalem, the transcendent power of a place packed with prayer and reverence, is not a myth. I felt it every day I lived there; it was the consolation for the politics and oppression and misery, and that wonder never faded. Everybody wanted that city for themselves, but in the quiet hours of twilight they just walked and looked down at it, Arabs passing Jews, war suspended for no reason but that it cannot always, every minute, exist. Everybody has a Sabbath in Jerusalem and sometimes the war does, too, although it doesn’t come regular or announced.
I thought about the story, too, when I walked the glistening aisles of the Israeli shopping malls and supermarkets, among bent Holocaust survivors and olive-clad soldiers and settlers with small arsenals strapped to their backs. One of these anonymous men once sat in secret and wept with a Palestinian girl because she had been tortured. All Israelis had served in the army. What had they done, and who had they been, and what did they bring back home with them?
There was a problem with the corpses of the suicide bombers. They were piling up in the steel refrigerators of Israel’s morgue, and nobody could figure out what to do. The force of the blast eviscerates the middle part of the bomber’s body, sending the head and feet sailing off into the air. Now all those salvaged heads and feet were jamming up the morgue, crowding out the dead Israelis. Palestinians couldn’t get into Israel to pick up their dead; they wouldn’t dare come, anyway, as the widow or mother of a bomber. Under both Muslim and Jewish law, the bodies should have gone into the ground by first sundown after death, but many Jews were squeamish about burying a suicide bomber in the dirt of Israel. It came up on the floor of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and the attorney general’s office struggled to invent a policy. But they came to no resolution, and the pile of heads and feet kept growing. I visited the morgue, met the director, and wrote a feature. Nothing long or fancy, just a surreal little glimpse of war warping the most ordinary corners of the country.
The story ran. And then the hate mail began.
They called me stupid. They called me an anti-Semite. They lashed me with language so bilious I felt uncomfortable reading the letters, as if a stranger had suddenly pulled down his pants to show me something private and deranged. One of them went on at ranting length about how the Palestinians were pigs who deserved to have their bodies soaked in pigs’ blood and burned. Hundreds and hundreds of e-mail messages clogged my inbox. A right-wing, pro-Israel website called “Boycott the Los Angeles Times” posted: “Megan Stack, another PLO propagandist, takes anti-Semitism to a level reminiscent of the 1930s.”
Everybody knows about the Jerusalem hate mail. All the reporters get it. You think you are ready to read mail like that. You’re not. Not at first. The smears are too personal. Suddenly friends from home were saying, “My mom saw this stuff about you on the Internet …” It’s meant to be like that: personal and awkward. Until you’re so badgered that you catch yourself reading through the stories—not for truth or good writing, but weighing phrases, wondering how much hateful e-mail they’re going to incur.
I hadn’t expected it, not for a story so innocuous, even marginal. Just a policy debate in Israel over a pile of old body parts. None of the Israeli staff in our bureau had been fazed or offended or even particularly interested. None of the facts were wrong. What was the big deal?
“You humanized them,” a reporter friend said. “You’re writing about suicide bombers as people who have corpses and families. They can’t stand to see them written about like that.”
“It’s not like I said suicide bombers were noble or good,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. You humanized them.”
By 2003 I’d settled in Jerusalem, and everybody was talking about a war in Iraq. By then I was used to accepting vitriol and character attacks as another part of the war, and they had oxidized me. This was an old battle of narratives, all the stories fighting to be the most true, and as a writer of stories you couldn’t help getting dragged into it. I printed one of the e-mails and tacked it to my office wall:
“You and the LA Times should go FUCK yourselves.”
It was part of the crusting you develop in Jerusalem. When the phone rang at four in the morning, I fumbled for instant coffee in a dark kitchen and hacked out a story about some fresh assault on Gaza, knowing even half asleep that nobody would read it—that many Americans don’t fully understand what Gaza is or how it was created, or what the presence of Israeli tanks there denotes, and that the people most likely to slog through twenty column inches of wire-style reportage are the ones scanning for a hint of bias, a misplace
d adjective, a mistaken fact. But I got up and wrote through the dawn all the same, because it was the job I had pined after and now it was mine, in all its dubious glory. Work was becoming work.
Arab children could be trained to think better. Miri really thought so. She was an Israeli photographer with a rusty scrape of a voice and big dark eyes under torrents of wild curls. Miri was liberal. She believed in peace past the point when most Israelis had thrown up their hands and decided to build a wall. She maintained what I imagined to be careful, fraught friendships with Israeli Arabs, as the Palestinians who live inside Israel proper are called. (On my first trip, I annoyed the Jerusalem bureau chief by asking, “But aren’t there also Jewish Arabs? Like Israelis from Morocco and Yemen?” “Yes,” she snapped, “but you don’t call them that!”)
I was sitting around a Tel Aviv television studio with Miri. Midnight was coming and we were eating sushi and talking about animals. Miri had been teaching Arab kids about animal rights.
“It’s terrible what you see,” she said. “They tie a cat or a dog to a stick and torture it. But you can explain to them. They don’t know any better.”
I was skeptical. “I would think that either kids have compassion, or not,” I said, soaking a tuna roll in soy sauce. “How can you put compassion where it wasn’t before?”
“Oh, you can,” Miri said. “They don’t know. So you say, ‘I have a cat at home and he’s very smart, he does this and that, his name is Frank.’ So they start to think of the cat like a person with feelings.”
“Do they respond?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “They are very interested.”
Israeli news was running; it was late in the newscast, in the features. There was a talent show in an Israeli prison. The prison looked jolly and clean. An inmate chatted with a voice coach. The two men joked back and forth, chuckling and nodding their heads.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 5
