The Siege of Tel Aviv

by Hesh Kestin

  “His excellency passed several Syrian bases, then. There is gas available there, or did the colonel not know? Excellency is a colonel?”

  “I must have missed the bases. Colonel, yes.”

  “Colonel, I am Abu-Yunis. Please hold still—my blade is sharp. You travel to Tel Aviv?”

  “To the front. That is correct.”

  Abu-Yunis pauses, the razor poised at Alex’s throat. “To Tel Aviv?”

  “For the final attack, yes.”

  Suddenly the barber is no longer speaking Arabic. “Why would an Egyptian officer in need of gas pass such military bases?”

  “Is that Hebrew?” Alex returns in Arabic. “Regretfully, I do not speak it.”

  Nevertheless Abu-Yunis continues the same way. “If the colonel is an Egyptian, then Abu-Yunis is just a barber.” He moves the razor slowly over Alex’s throat.

  Alex has no choice. “You’re not just a barber?” he replies in Hebrew.

  “Until one month ago, Abu-Yunis was a proud citizen of Israel. He voted. He had freedom of speech and movement. His children studied in good schools. He could not be arrested without just cause. Neither as an Arab nor a Christian did harm come to him.”

  “And?”

  The barber shrugs. “From time to time Abu-Yunis assisted his government.” He has finished the shave. With the still-warm towel, he carefully wipes the rest of the lather from Alex’s face.

  “What do I owe you, Abu-Yunis? Aside from my life?”

  “To get to Tel-Aviv as quickly as possible. To tell your people that when the time comes the Christian citizens of this area will cut the invaders’ throats as I have not cut yours.” He laughs. “Also, next time to send a spy whose Egyptian accent is more...practiced.”

  “My mother grew up in Alexandria. She taught me.”

  “Just so. This is why we call it mother tongue. In speech the child emulates her who gave him life.”

  Alex cannot suppress the smile. “Sometimes not only in speech.” The barber smiles as well. “I can spare five gallons.”

  63

  ON THE SCREEN BEHIND Damian Smith, Muslims and Jews clash at UN Plaza, a wedge of mounted New York police forcing them apart as the newscaster reads from his teleprompter. “Earlier today, a march down New York’s Fifth Avenue to the UN by pro-Israel demonstrators culminated in violence with a counter-demonstration by Muslims and their sympathizers. Police reported seven injured before order was restored.”

  The screen goes to Connie Blunt aboard CV Star of Bethlehem with a tall sixty-year-old in a khaki officer’s hat, black t-shirt, and jeans. He is smoking a cigar.

  “Meanwhile, some five thousand miles away, Connie Blunt joins us aboard the Christian Vessel Star of Bethlehem, en route to Tel Aviv and possible interception by the Egyptian Navy. Connie, tell us what morale is like aboard the flotilla.”

  The sound of “Amazing Grace” rises and then is reduced by the control room so that Blunt can be heard.

  “Damian, moments ago spontaneous hymn singing broke out here aboard the CV Star of Bethlehem, and I’m told it’s spread to the other ships. It’s hard to believe the Egyptian Navy will make good on its threats, but there’s no knowing. The crew has been doing lifeboat drills since we left Marseilles.”

  “Connie, how long before you enter Israeli waters—or Islamic waters, as they’re now called?”

  “Damian, that’s a very good question. Here with me on the Star of Bethlehem is its captain, retired US Navy Commander Franklin D. Levine, known aboard as Captain Frank. Captain Frank, are we sailing into danger?”

  “Well, Connie,” the captain says in a voice heavy with command gravel. “Your people probably know more than we do about that. All I do know is that we’ve been told the Egyptian Navy has warned they’ll fire on us if we enter Israeli waters.”

  “I believe they’re calling it Islamic waters now.”

  “They can call it dog (bleep) for all I care,” the captain says. “We’re on course for Israel, not some other place.”

  “Are you questioning the outcome of the war, captain? It seems to be well accepted, at least among the diplomatic commu—”

  “You know the story of Abe Lincoln and the farmer?”

  “Abe Lincoln?”

  “Yeah, used to be president, and a better one than we got now. Abe asks the farmer, ‘How many legs has a cow?’ The farmer says, ‘Why, four.’ Abe says, ‘Well, if we call her tail a leg, then how many?’ The farmer says, ‘Five.’ ‘No, sir,’ Ol’ Abe says. ‘Just calling the tail a leg don’t make it one.’ This ship and the five in our wake are bound for Tel Aviv, Israel. Far as I can see, the Arabs can shove any other name for the Jewish State up their (bleep).”

  “Be that as it may, captain, the Egyptian Navy seems to disagree. Will they fire on us, do you think?”

  Captain Frank is not doing a very good job of concealing his impatience. His tanned face creases unpleasantly. “That’s not known at this time.”

  “Captain, when will we know?”

  The creases deepen. “When will we know if the Egyptian Navy is going to fire on us?”

  “Yes, when?”

  Captain Frank looks up to the cloudless sky, as if seeking divine aid in dealing with this idiot. “About a second after they do.”

  Blunt is oblivious. “And when do you suppose we’ll be crossing from international waters into formerly Israeli, now Islamic, waters?”

  “Miss, you see that green stuff?”

  Blunt shades her eyes to follow his finger.

  “The wet stuff,” Captain Frank says.

  “The ocean?”

  “Yeah, the Mediterranean Sea. Do you happen to see any lines out there, with markers and flags? Any buoys?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because there aren’t any.”

  “Captain, I’m not sure I understand.”

  “When the shooting starts—that’s when we crossed the line. That’s when we know.”

  “Yes, but can you—”

  “From our position and from what I’m informed of theirs, and assuming they’re making twenty knots, two hours.”

  “Thank you, Captain Franklin D. Levine, commander of the six vessels that make up this aid flotilla on course for Tel Aviv. This is Connie Blunt, aboard the Christian Vessel Star of Bethlehem, somewhere in the Mediterranean.”

  “Thank you, Connie. And this is as good a time as any to tell our viewers CNN offered to evacuate Connie, producer Terry Santiago, and cameraman Buddy Walsh by helicopter. Each refused. Stay safe, gang!”

  64

  IN THE READY ROOM of US Marine Aviation Forward Attack Squadron Wildcat, the three pilots turn to each other as Jimbo, who as ranking pilot has charge of the remote, clicks off the TV. They are all in regulation flight suits that allow pilots of supersonic planes to withstand up to nine G’s without passing out. The tight-fitting trousers prevent blood from pooling in the lower body, thus preventing it from draining from the brain. Unless they are about to fly, no pilot will wear them. The discomfort is considerable. Each suit weighs fourteen pounds.

  Chris has an aeronautical map in front of him. “Two hours.”

  “Guys,” Stan says. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Shee-it, everybody knows you Jews got no sense of direction. You people done wandered in the desert forty years. We wouldn’t want you to get lost out there all on your own, would we now?” Chris folds the map.

  “Hell, no,” Jimbo says. “We sure as hell wouldn’t want that.”

  65

  ON A MOUNTAIN PATH west of Jerusalem, the two donkeys descend steadily. The shortcut takes their riders, both dressed in soiled Bedouin robes, from the secondary road where they were passed twice by an olive-green Cadillac flying the pennant of Egyptian headquarters staff to this narrow trail enfiladed by thick-trunked olive trees that bore fruit before the time of Jesus.

  “Abed,” Cobi says, “my tuchis is about to fall off.”

  “Why not let the donkey ride you?” />
  “Is this your idea of transportation, man? It’s the twenty-first century.”

  “As it happens,” Abed says, “I possess a Ford pickup, four-wheel drive, AC. Beautiful machine. Despite Hollywood movies, the Bedouin is no enemy of the internal combustion engine.”

  “So why in hell do we have to—”

  “Because that vehicle is too big to negotiate this pathway. On better roads, we would be stopped, and questioned, and perhaps the Ford would be requisitioned. The Syrian sons of whores at the bottom, hidden in the foliage, they won’t bother stealing two donkeys.”

  Cobi shades his eyes. “I don’t see any Syrians.”

  Abed points to the rocky trail before them. “We’ve been following their tracks for two kilometers. Army officer, eh? Don’t they teach you anything?”

  66

  GHETTO TEL AVIV COVERS fourteen square miles. Far larger than the municipal boundaries of Tel Aviv proper, this takes in Bat Yam to the south, parts of Herzlia to the north, and to the east is bounded by the Geha Road, whose six empty lanes prove as much a natural barrier as any river. To the west is the Mediterranean Sea. The area contains six hundred schools, three universities, and so many eating places—from falafel stands to sidewalk cafés to elegant restaurants—that even the municipal licensing authorities, when they functioned, were unsure of the precise number. At any given time, eight hundred buses ran on its streets, not including several hundred sheroot jitneys that followed bus routes and were authorized to stop anywhere along the way to pick up and discharge passengers.

  Tel Aviv’s luxury hotels lined the beach, each with hundreds of rooms, most of them booked year-round. Almost every commercial street corner held a kiosk selling everything from the nation’s two dozen newspapers to snacks and, in some neighborhoods, tiny bags of locally grown marijuana and more costly Lebanese hash, a world standard since the time of Abraham. Banks and post offices punctuated every avenue, along with supermarkets and tiny owner-run groceries in the side streets. Most service businesses operated from early morning to late in the evening, perhaps a hundred never closing, remaining open 364 days a year—Yom Kippur being the exception—and for the privilege paying a municipal fine every week for keeping open on the Sabbath, just a cost of doing business.

  Once a buzzing maze of heavily trafficked streets, boulevards, and highways, Tel Aviv was a walker’s city, its ambiance a meld of New York, Paris, Nice, and Warsaw, with just enough of every other city in the world to make living there at once fascinating, complicatedly pleasant, and maddening. Half planned, half chaotic, it was a city of Bauhaus architecture, shortcuts, secret destinations, tiny parks, and favorite cafés. All it lacked was public toilets, but with so many cafés, no one complained.

  Now Tel Aviv is one big public toilet. The cafés are closed, the offices empty but for squatters, and the only traffic on the streets is pedestrian, filling the roadways in search of food, drinking water, and news. Rumors fly the ghetto’s twelve-mile length in less than an hour, all propelled by fear, hope, and desperation.

  In the six days since Yigal Lev took over as prime minister, much of this changed. There are still no commercial establishments in operation, though every street corner is an ad hoc market where jewelry and watches are bartered for tiny plastic bags of moldy flour. No buses or jitneys run, and bicycle traffic is light, largely because Tel Avivians never really took up bicycles as a mode of transportation—most apartments are too small to store them. But in those first few days, a change came across the face of the ghetto: the ratio of fear to hope was altered. There is now just a bit more of the latter than the former. Not much more, but enough to make a difference.

  Yigal’s people managed to open the schools (which of course are flooded with the entire country’s students, so that classes normally overcrowded with forty pupils now hold a hundred, each school running at least two shifts—why not, all the nation’s teachers are available). The new government has re-established rudimentary policing, with former cops and former gangsters working together. That neither group has uniforms—the regular police early on got rid of theirs to avoid arrest, or worse, by the conquering armies—is not much of an obstacle: armbands with the large Hebrew letter mem, for mishtara (police), suffice. Most cops had kept their side arms; the hoodlums had their own. Public latrines are dug in parks, the stinking piles of human waste buried. Each block is compelled to establish its own voluntary workforce under the authority of street captains designated by the new government, most of these newly appointed officials functioning well enough, especially when they are female. It appears Jewish men are historically accustomed to being bossed around by females; even the most surly remains disinclined to sock a woman.

  Almost immediately a sense of civic responsibility takes hold, aided in good part by the knowledge that there is no one else to do the work, that the next street already looks like humans live there, and that there is precious little else to do.

  Yigal’s choice of Misha Shulman as chief of police (or chief enforcer, as he likes to think of himself) goes a long way to make this happen. Just as the Arab invaders borrowed the blueprints of the Nazis, so too does Yigal take a page from lessons learned in the Warsaw Ghetto: this time, among the Jews, there would be no factions, no competing ideologies, no separate armed groups.

  To accomplish that with a normally fractious Israeli population, already viscerally subscribed to political parties with different aims and desires, calls for the application of indiscriminate force. Misha’s gangsters and a select group of former cops—a good many are former members of the Border Police, head-busters who were known to strike first and ask questions later—take on this mission with an enthusiasm that the population both welcomes and fears.

  In the first twenty-four hours on the job, Misha’s specially designated Motivation Squad motivates forty-seven civilians on the spot—no trial, no appeal, no compunction. Whether the ignored prohibition is as small as pissing in the street or as large as displacing a family by force in order to take their corner of some miserably overcrowded apartment, the punishment is the same: a severe beating in full public view.

  Mistakes are made, perhaps personal scores settled, and when the area is gray, even the most motivated of the Motivation Squad find themselves wishing to pause. But any pause, any deviation from orders, anything other than drumhead justice administered quickly and on the spot, would have sunk the ghetto into pathetic and fatal dissolution.

  Yigal’s greatest challenge in re-establishing civil order in Tel Aviv and creating hope among its forlorn residents is logistical. Without printing presses, without radio, without loudspeakers, there is no effective way to bring word of what is to be expected from the population to the population. His cabinet has no idea. The army’s best minds come up with nothing. Professors of communication from Israel’s top universities never faced such a problem.

  At the end of the day, and it was indeed at the end of the day, in bed, like every Jew from Abraham forward, Yigal asks his wife.

  “Town criers,” Judy says.

  “There’s already enough crying,” he tells her, confused by the term.

  “Silly,” she tells him. “Get a lot of guys out there hollering out whatever message you want.”

  He considers. “The ghetto is too big. Too much territory to cover.”

  “Pony Express.”

  “Horses? There’s not one in the city that hasn’t been eaten.”

  “No, no. It’s a chain. One messenger brings the message to—I don’t know—five others, then they spread out and contact five more, and so on until—”

  “On foot? Baby, I don’t have enough people strong enough to walk the city, much less run.”

  “Kids on bicycles,” she whispers, then turns over and falls asleep.

  In the three days that follow, Tel Aviv does not become paradise, but it is no longer hell. Its population continues to starve, but with dignity.

  67

  A SYRIAN LIEUTENANT WATCHES as his men frisk two Be
douin for arms. He is in charge of a reconnaissance patrol belonging to the Syrian Army’s Security Corps—an especially feared group built on the lines of the Nazi SS, even down to its uniform. They wear the same double lightning bolt shoulder patches.

  “What is your name, filth?” the lieutenant asks almost conversationally.

  “Abed Abu-Kassem of the Ghawarna, your lordship.”

  “And you, piece of shit?”

  Cobi offers only a weak smile.

  “My mother’s brother’s son’s cousin, sire. He speaks not.”

  “Shy?”

  “Your lordship,” Abed says. “He is unable.”

  “And neither of you with papers?”

  “No, my lord. As I explained, we were robbed of them. We journey to Ramle, there to sell the dates in our bags. That we may purchase papers. That we may have them, because we were robbed of them. Thus we journey to Ramle, to sell dates.”

  The Syrian officer comes so close Cobi can smell the stink of his uniform. “And why is this unable to speak? Does it not hear?” The lieutenant moves behind Cobi and cocks his pistol just behind his head. “It hears. It heard that.”

  “Sire, he hears certainly. But something is wrong in his brain. He hears, but understands little, like a child. By Allah, I have taken him under my protection.”

  The lieutenant now stands before Abed. “Have you money, filth?”

  “No, lordship. Only dates.”

  “How then do you live?”

  “Upon dates, sire.”

  “Tell me, then, camel shit. What should I do if my men open your bags and among the dates is found money, or gold, or weaponry?”

  “You should kill me, excellency. My lord, you should kill us both.” The Syrian lieutenant spits. “Go. When you sell your dates, return by this route and pay a toll in gratitude that I have spared your miserable lives.”

  Abed falls to the ground and kisses the lieutenant’s boots. “So we shall, nobility. Thank you. Thank you eternally in the name of Allah. In the name of the prophet may your—”