The Siege of Tel Aviv

by Hesh Kestin

  She touches his thigh. It is cool, too cool. “Tell me Cobi is alive. That he’s a prisoner somewhere. That he’ll return. And we’ll start again, somewhere, anywhere, from the beginning. Tell me that, my love.”

  “Cobi is alive,” he says, almost whispering as though it is a secret that must be kept between them. “Cobi is alive and we will start again, our little family.”

  “We’ll start again. With Cobi.”

  “With Cobi,” he says, this time not whispering, almost too loudly for the distance between them. “We will start again.”

  “We’ll go to the States. Miami. You have an American wife, remember. I’m the most valuable asset that exists in Tel Aviv, an American passport.”

  “I have a wonderful American wife,” he says, drawing her close. “And we will build a new life.” His voice drops an octave. “But not in Miami.”

  “Darling, there’s nothing here.”

  “Not at the moment,” he says.

  48

  IN A SHALLOW CAVE in a west-facing slope in the Judean hills, Cobi lies on his back half asleep. The cave is little more than an indentation in the rocks. Clearly Bedouin shepherds used it recently; there is enough dry sheep dung for a fire. This hardly matters. Even had he anything to cook, his father had not brought up an idiot. On the narrow roadway below, Syrian mounted infantry patrol like clockwork day and night, poor military practice because it is predictable, but less predictably helicopters of the Royal Jordanian Air Force—he still has his binoculars, though one lens is shattered—circle overhead from time to time, looking for just such a sign of Israeli stragglers.

  Cobi considers there must be small groups of young conscripts like himself who were effectively passed by in the initial onslaught, or farmers, or settlers. One evening, from the mouth of the cave, he sees jeeps enter the settlement on the hill opposite, then hears gunfire: Kalashnikovs, the Russian-manufactured semi-automatic rifles that are coin of the realm in the Arab world. This is not, he knows, the gunfire of battle. There is no returned fire. He sees little, a grove of olive trees covering part of the view, the settlers pre-fab houses and trailers blocking the rest, but he knows what he cannot see. This was the sound of firing squads, a dozen rifles going off at once. The Syrians depart soon after, their vehicles loaded with household goods, pillows, televisions and microwaves, while behind and above them the settlement burns, the smoke of many fires rising in the still air like white pillars stretching to a moon so full it might be not be real. What, he asks himself, is?

  He is thinking of that, half-thinking, half-dreaming, and then he hears something move close by, too close. He grabs his rifle and instantly is on one knee, the rifle at his shoulder: At the entrance to the cave, a silhouette.

  “Cobi,” the silhouette says in the dulcet Hebrew of a rural Arab. “By all that is holy, kindly endeavor not to kill your friend. It is bad manners. And it causes discomfort in my bladder.”

  “Fuck, man. Bang two rocks together four times. How hard is that to remember?”

  “You were sleeping.”

  “I haven’t slept for a long time.”

  The Bedouin enters the cave so that now Cobi can see his face, dark, unshaven, smiling. He drops a plastic-string bag on the cave floor.

  “But you eat well.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  Abed watches the young man tear into the food, homemade pita, white sheep’s milk cheese, onion, tomatoes, and olives. Wrapped in grape leaves, a sticky clump of ripe dates. Those in the palms above them are still green.

  From the time the Bedouin found him, unconscious in the grove of palms that had been planted by the settlers from the hill opposite, Abed showed up every day with food and two full plastic liter bottles of water. He brought aspirin, and alcohol to clean Cobi’s wounds. The wounds are superficial, but under present conditions might easily become infected.

  When he first came to, the young soldier thought the Bedouin intended to kill him—for his gun, or his boots, or his watch—or turn him over to the enemy for bounty.

  The Bedu chuckled at this. “You are my guest,” he said. “And thus your life is my responsibility. I am obligated to protect you.” Very quickly Abed revealed more. For twenty years he was a tracker in the IDF, officially still is, but he burned his sergeant’s uniform and buried his military ID when he saw how the wind was blowing. Should they discover he was not merely another Bedouin shepherd, the Syrians who held this area would rape his wife and kill his children before his own eyes, and then torture him to death with not even so much as a pause to think about it. Syrian hatred for the Bedouins was never a secret, and for those who joined forces with the Zionist enemy there could be no mercy. If Abed is glad of anything it is that his father is no longer among the living. The old man preceded him as an IDF scout, and the entire modus operandi of his life was to find a way to die gloriously. He fought in three wars, the old man, with the decorations to prove it, was wounded twice, almost willfully seeking a glorious death. His father alive would have got them all killed.

  Abed considers himself a modern man. He can wait to die. His job is to stay alive in order to protect his family and small clan.

  “My father, may he enjoy the fruits of paradise, was pure Bedu,” Abed told his guest in the cave in the first days. “But I am compromised. I have responsibilities.”

  “Then you’re foolish to risk your life for a stranger.”

  “You are not a stranger. You were, then not.”

  That was ten days ago. Sometimes Abed did not show up for extended periods, waiting until it was safe, difficult hours for Cobi as he recuperated from blood loss, shock, fear, and the gnawing perception that it is criminal for a soldier not to be in battle, though where that battle is he does not know. Maybe something happened to Abed, or his protector changed his mind. He knows that as a people the Bedouin are, as a reflection of necessity, not the most consistent of personalities. Perhaps a greater responsibility had presented itself, and Abed chose to protect his family and clan by turning him in. Cobi could understand that. Abed has six children. He loves his wife so much he has not taken another. If it comes to a choice, Cobi will understand. But always Abed returns, twice during the day with a herd of sheep as cover, though mostly by night.

  Cobi finishes the bread, vegetables, and cheese and turns to the dates. “Abed,” he says as he chews the sweet fruit he learned in school was the original honey of this land, his land, flowing with the milk of sheep and goats and the honey of dates. “I can’t stay here forever. It’s dangerous for both of us. And I have to get back to my unit.” He pauses. “Any unit.”

  “A poor Bedu you’d make. Do you not know patience is a principal virtue of the Bedu?” He grins. “Maybe the only one.”

  “What’s it like out there?”

  “What is it like? Fucking Syrians steal everything. Last night a patrol took four lambs. Inshallah, to be again in uniform. Some believe we Bedu enlist for money. Cobi, no one can buy the Bedu. For the first time since the prophet, my tribe is not spat upon by Arabs. Why? Because we wear the uniform of the IDF. Why do we do this, work with the Jews? In twenty years no Jew, officer or enlisted, looked down upon me. It is disgusting what has happened.”

  “What has happened? Does anyone really know?”

  “We will see soon enough. I must get you to Tel Aviv. That is your only chance.”

  “And how will you accomplish that? How do we do that if it’s as you say—that the enemy is all over the land. Under every rock. In the shade of every tree. Your words.”

  “Fuck words,” Abed says. He pulls from beneath his robes a worn, dusty suit of Bedouin garb, replete with headgear and a pair of battered sandals.

  “Fuck words is right,” Cobi says, examining among the robes spread before him a kaffiyeh and the agal, the loop of woolen rope that keeps it on one’s head. “Abed, my Arabic consists of surrender, hands up, bread, and your mother’s cunt. I wouldn’t want to have to engage in an extended conversation on Sharia law.”
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br />   “Dress then in these and keep your mouth tightly shut,” the Bedouin says. “It will make for a pleasant change.”

  49

  THOUGH TEL AVIV IS spared mass destruction, IDF headquarters in the Kirya in the very center of the city is a leveled field, bombed intensely on the first day of the attack, and though the war rooms in hardened levels deep underground remain intact, there is no longer any communications infrastructure to connect the military leadership with units in the field. In point of fact, there are no units in the field.

  The air force is wiped out. IAF pilots and navigators are now relegated to sitting around the lobby of a hotel on the beach that has neither electricity nor running water. These mission-oriented men and women of action find themselves with no mission and no action. A good many busy themselves playing poker and gin rummy, the most adept amassing thousands of shekels in play money that can buy nothing. Few have sufficient energy for beach volleyball or swimming, or even enough to argue politics, once the national pastime of a people who had not been permitted to govern themselves for over two thousand years. But of politics, like food and water, there is now none.

  In the fishing port of Jaffa to the south of Tel Aviv, which had almost immediately been abandoned by its largely Arab population on strenuous warnings from the Islamic Liberation Force, whose aircraft snowed leaflets over the town, a division of infantry was cobbled together. But with little weaponry, less ammunition, and entirely no transport, its fighting men spend their time fishing. It is a useless pastime: Because every third resident of Tel Aviv tries his hand at angling for some sort of aquatic protein, the waters close to shore are quickly fished out. Many soldiers play chess or dominos or shesh-besh, a variety of backgammon. One enterprising platoon, having discovered the epicurean delights of seaweed, manages to harvest sufficient for a handful for almost every man and woman in the division. After several days, there is no more.

  The navy is gone, sunk in port or destroyed by Egyptian gunships after running out of fuel at sea. A few fortunate sailors swim to shore, the shark-ravaged bodies of the rest eventually joining them, skeletal remains wrapped in shredded tan cloth.

  Only an expanded brigade of some 160 tanks remains capable of action, but these and their support vehicles are strung out in a Maginot Line of dubious efficacy on the eastern edge of the city. With low reserves of fuel, this armor, once the mailed fist of an IDF capable of lightning offensive strength and tremendous maneuverability, now function as a static, if not simply symbolic, line of defense. Fixed in place like artillery, their commanders’ only hope is to discourage the approach of the first enemy tank. Once the next vehicles break through, there is nothing to stop them from entering the city. It will be over.

  With little to command and no communications with which to do it, the chief of staff is reduced to traveling by jeep from group to group in a vain attempt to instill hope and a sense of military structure. An early attempt to restart training fails for lack of fuel, not merely for the armored corps but for its personnel. With next to nothing to eat, no one has the energy. Even basic morning calisthenics are abandoned, just as their chief of staff has abandoned all hope on his daily visits to the Hilton, where former low-level government functionaries go through the motions of pretending to administer a city-state of the damned. They have nothing to offer him in the way of resources, and he has nothing to offer them in the way of defense.

  He is at the Hilton now, barely a mile away, when a column of civilian cars led by a red BMW pulls up to what is now IDF head-quarters, a collection of camouflaged tents that fills the once-pleasant park lining the south side of the Yarkon River from Ibn-Givrol to Dizengoff Street, in the recent past Israel’s thoroughfare of the young, the hip, the cool. Its bars and restaurants, broken into, now offer shelter from the sun to thousands of refugees. Pinky makes his visit to the Hilton every day at the same hour. It is no accident that the driver of the red BMW leading the column of civilian cars chose the same hour to visit what passes for military HQ.

  Assembling his personnel, a collection of gangsters, miscreants, and triggermen from all over the country, Misha steps away from Yigal to speak his marching orders in terms that are as brief as they are chilling.

  “Whatever happens,” he says, “we don’t kill our own.”

  A Druze drug dealer in the front rank, whose people in the northern village of Daliyat-al-Carmel were wiped out by the invaders, man, woman, and child, for collaboration with the Jews, utters a quiet, “God forbid.” The Druze, an offshoot of Islam, have fought in the IDF for decades.

  “Unless,” Misha says, “absolutely necessary.”

  50

  THE HEADS OF SIX Jewish organizations are seated like diplomats with the president and Flo Spier in the Oval Office, having first been treated to a group tour of the White House and then each photographed with the president, a print of which will no doubt take its place on an office wall full of similar souvenirs. All have been here before, guests of earlier presidents. Like earlier presidential advisors, Flo Spier counts them as necessary to electoral victory as the caciques of the Cuban exile community in Florida, the light-complexioned leaders of a dozen black organizations, the delegations of Hollywood stars lobbying for intervention in Africa, to say nothing of federal protection for the blue whale, support for the Dalai Lama, encouragement of wind power, and constitutional recognition of gay marriage. The president is already on good terms with almost every Pentecostal group; like the Jews, these too must be stroked. As must every other puzzle piece in America’s fractious demographic jigsaw: Mexican-American leaders pushing for immigration reform, delegations from Wall Street and Silicon Valley looking for tax breaks, politically powerful Roman Catholic bishops in states where many people still insist on eating fish on Friday. Though today’s delegation of grandees is aware that the Jewish vote is no longer concentrated in the northeast, Jewish money will be a factor in American politics for a long time. Fortunately, that money is now evenly divided in support for both parties. This offers leverage.

  The president is not unaware. His guests have twenty minutes to make their case, or to feel they are making it. Egos are involved.

  “Mr. President, Israel is an ally of the United States, a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.” This from the doyen of American rabbis, a tennis-playing Reform cleric, hatless, beardless and—according to his more traditional colleagues—shameless.

  “Well, Rabbi Joe,” the president says. “I could be cynical here and say Israel is now not much of an ally of anyone. It’s the incredible shrinking country. Of course, under our treaty we will come to her defense should Israel be subject to nuclear attack.”

  The representative of B’nai Brith, secular and centrist, has seen this coming. “But Mr. President, that’s not the problem. The problem is Iran so far has not had to use nuclear—”

  “Warren, below nuclear my hands are tied. My predecessors tried to get involved with improving the situation in other places in the Middle East, which I’m sure you know, and it cost this country a fortune in the lives of our brave young soldiers, to say nothing of vast reserves of treasure that have left the US economy in a state from which it has yet to fully recover. Y’all are not looking at a man who believes America should entangle itself in the affairs of every nation around the globe, noble and sympathetic as that nation may be. As for democracy, the Israelian parliament—what they call it, Flo?”

  “The Knesset, Mr. President.”

  “The Key-Ness-Et. Been dissolved.”

  “Mr. President,” the B’nai B’rith chairman blurts out. “By assassination!”

  The leader of the free world checks his watch. “Gentlemen, let me be frank.” One of the visitors will later suggest to his wife that this is pretty much an admission that otherwise the president has been less than that. “I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the Jewish people. My Harvard roomie was half-Hebrew, Benny Berman—everybody used to call him Berman the Vermin. All in fun, of course. I do admire yo
u folks, no question, always have, always will. But there’s more at stake here than what I call matters of the heart. My heart is with you, one hundred percent. But the national temper, that’s a whole ’nother ballgame. Poll after poll, including our own unpublicized research, shows pretty damn clearly—excuse me, gentlemen, for my language, but I’m leveling with y’all—shows conclusively that if our Jewish citizens try to distort the national agenda to get us involved in another Middle East war to support Israel, what’s left of it, then mark my words the American people will react on the parallel matter of immigration, a prospect I deplore, but won’t be able to do much to prevent. We got us millions of refugees with no place to go but the bottom of the sea. That’s the A-one, double-distilled, gold-plated problem before us, and it requires the acquiescence of the American people. Flo, what’s that phrase these folks use?”

  “Shalom bayit, sir. Peace at home.”

  “Exactly. Peace at home, my friends. We need things to work out here at home before we can go ahead and take care of your co-religionists over there in Tel Aviv. I don’t have to tell you the first step in that process. It’s solving the worst energy crisis this country has every faced. We got to get people filling their tanks with gas at prices they can live with. End of the day, those are the kind of tanks that are going to save your people, not the kind with guns attached. Shalom bayeet. I love the sound of that. It means with goodwill and a flexible foreign policy we can get the job done. Now let me thank each and every one of you folks for visiting with us. I’m advised you can pick up your autographed photographic records of this historic visit on your way out. I’ve always maintained an open door policy for the American Jewish community, and as Christ is my witness this President of the United States of America ain’t going to let that change. Thank you for y’all’s support.”