No Symmetry:
Notes From Israel & "Palestine"

For a subject people, independent statehood is a vital necessity and an advance; but once such a people has reached the stage of independence nothing can be more retrograde for it than to fix its mind on that stage and to refuse to look beyond it. The nationalism of a sovereign people cannot claim for itself the justification claimed by the nationalism of an oppressed people.

-- Isaac Deutscher, 19581

THIS ESSAY IS LARGELY THE RESULT of a trip I took in March 2002 to Israel and -- and where? The occupied territories? But not, capitalized, "Occupied Territories," which then becomes a "proper" noun. Or I could just say "the West Bank," or I could be more precise: "Areas A and B, as defined by the Oslo Accords, under varying combinations of administration by Israel and the Palestinian National Authority. . . ." In some contexts, to make a political point, I would say "Palestine." My point, of course, is that Palestine does not exist. The idea, yes; the state, no. This is not to say that I endorse the idea of the state as some higher good, or even that I have an absolute position on a one-state or two-state solution (I lean toward the latter).

My point is rather a more personal one. I would hazard to guess that most of us have opinions and positions which depend on concepts that we have not defined: What is a state? What is sovereignty? What is a right? Even I am fairly certain that I am alive, though scientists admit there is no clear definition between living and non-living matter. I am a Jew, though I cannot tell you what a Jew is; that's how life is. I do know that I am not interested in any notion of allegiance based on a label such as "Jewish" or "American." More important, I am uneasy with using my Jewish identity as a kind of credential to make a political point. I cringed when I went to enter my name on a website to offer support to Israeli military refuseniks and was faced with a box that said "Yes, I am Jewish." But I have had to re-examine that discomfort this spring as the e-mails started coming in, asking me to sign various petitions from American Jews speaking out about the current situation -- one of these from a Pakistani Muslim friend. Another arrived via someone connected with the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee who, a couple of years before September 11 and the war in Afghanistan, accused me of anti-Arab racism for forwarding a petition in support of women persecuted by the Taliban; the subject line of her message passing along a petition from Jews declaring that Sharon is not their spokesman said: "Please distribute immed to every Jew you know."

In private, I am a Jew for reasons I need not define. In public, unarticulated definitions and undefined borders begin to appear. One afternoon in Miami I paused when a supermarket cashier, assuming I was not Jewish, started making anti-Semitic remarks to me about the cheap Jews who usually shop at her store. At first, I just listened. It seemed like a rare opportunity to eavesdrop. Then I told her I was Jewish. She paused briefly, seemingly realized in an instant that this information did not change her feeling or opinion, and continued her rant as if I had said nothing. For her, I could not be Jewish in that moment; perhaps she could have explained to me how anti-Semitism continued to flourish in Poland even after the Jews there had been exterminated.

I had hoped to write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without getting bogged down in these questions. That seems impossible at the moment. I will not resolve the cluster of experiences described here into easy categorization. They are a version of the complexity in Jerusalem, and by extension, the wider region, as Meron Benvenisti describes it:

The Jerusalem situation involves more than the sum of its parts that are amenable to rational analysis. Indeed, despite the existence of real and measurable conflicts of political, economic, and other interests, the problem is irrational at its core. When it is presented in rational and objective terms (in order to fit it to a rational solution), one can categorically state that it is insoluble. It might also be said that the preoccupation with theoretical solutions is aimed not at facilitating real political progress, but rather at nurturing the hope that a solution is indeed attainable and that salvation lies right around the corner.

The conflict over and within Jerusalem is not so much a problem as it is a condition. This is the typical case with intercommunal conflict, which arises from the daily friction between two ethnic groups living in intimate proximity and competing for urban spaces, public resources, and the preservation of their respective ways of life. To this local-municipal aspect of the conflict are added national frictions over the fulfillment of competing aspirations for self-determination, independence, and sovereignty. This conflict is not purely political but pervades every level of private and collective life; it is organic in essence, endemic, and resistant to political "solutions."2

I have opened with personal reflections which might turn out to be political. But politically, I really have only one point to make. In the current conflict, only one side is under occupation. During my trip, I met a number of thoughtful and generous people who convey a living balance between, on the one hand, recognizing the irrational complexities articulated by Benvenisti and, on the other, taking a clear stand. To put it another way, I found some reason for hope in my meetings with activists willing to respect borders and imaginatively or literally cross them at the same time.

I DECIDED TO GO TO GIL BEDIHI'S FUNERAL because, even though I did not know him, I felt tenuously but unmistakably connected to him in the fabric of everyday life's little realities. I was visiting my brother, sister-in-law, and their young daughters in the Israeli community of Nataf, just west of Jerusalem (inside the Green Line). One morning, I videotaped my niece's fourth birthday party at her nursery school nearby. Of all the children who paraded across the camera lens, for some reason I was struck by the face of one little boy as he played a plastic trumpet in a classroom parade. Less than a week later, my sister-in-law told me that the trumpet player's older brother had just been killed. The two families didn't know each other, but they lived within shouting distance.

My sister-in-law was furious at me when I told her that I had attended Gil Bedihi's funeral. This was in early March, when tensions in the region were at a breaking point for all. My sister-in-law -- she is also my friend -- and I had already had many difficult conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tending to get stuck on our differing versions of Jewish identity and national/ethnic sovereignty. But now her anger was not about such abstractions. She felt, I would say, that I had trespassed on her community and its grief. She reminded me that when she told me about the young man's death, my first reaction had been to ask: Was he a soldier? It is true that I had a political filter in front of my grief so that a civilian death would not register the same way that a soldier's death would. To join my sister-in-law in her sadness about the Israeli man's death without knowing the circumstances would have been an ideological risk.

Gil Bedihi was a soldier, and he was killed when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rolled into the West Bank town of Ramallah in March. (The IDF would withdraw a few days later, and then enter again near the end of the month.) At his funeral procession, neighbors joined with military formations in the slow walk to the graveyard in the hills. Even my minimal Hebrew was sufficient to recognize the fusion of personal grief and nationalist sentiment. This was a soldier's funeral, after all, no matter the country. A column in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz went so far as to connect the family's grief with the Zionist enterprise and Arab riots:

When the soldiers who had returned from Ramallah wept at the grave of their friend Gil Bedihi in Nataf, the sound of singing was suddenly heard amid the grief and the pain. In a trembling but confident voice, the bereaved mother, Yael, sang on the fresh grave of her son. The song she sang was written by David Shimoni and sung after the Arab riots in Palestine in 1929. "And nevertheless, and in spite of everything, Eretz Yisrael. And as long as [the Jewish prayer of faith in God] 'Shema Yisrael' is heard in the world, and as long as the heart of Israel beats in the world, Shema Yisrael, Shema Yisrael, you are Eretz Yisrael.'" . . . The war being waged for our home here is a war both for survival and for justice. If we weren't in the right, there would be no point to fighting and gritting our teeth. And security, which we certainly cannot do without, is the instrument by means of which we are fulfilling our destiny here, a destiny that the bereaved mother, Yael Bedihi from Nataf, described so well in her grief.3

I wrote to columnist Nadav Shragai, asking him to explain to me the connection between Gil Bedihi's death in Ramallah and Israeli security; he did not reply.

Several days before the IDF got Gil Bedihi killed in Ramallah, I was there looking at the posters all over town memorializing what in English are called Palestinian "martyrs." I put the word in quotation marks not only because it is translated from a language I do not know, but also because it is not a term in my vocabulary. It is a term with obvious nationalistic, sometimes religious connotations. It is a version of the word "hero," I suppose. But I also put the word in quotation marks because, to my understanding, it combines two distinct groups of people. One group is those Palestinians killed by Israelis in the latter's enforcement of its occupation. (I leave aside whether those killed are armed or not.) The second group of "martyrs" -- the ones we hear more about these days -- are the suicide bombers who usually target Israeli civilians.

A recent article in the monthly Between the Lines summarizes the previous month's successes of the Palestinian resistance. Toufic Haddad rightly criticizes the media cliché about "cycles of violence" which implies that there are no victims and no aggressors, that both sides equally play both roles, that being "fair" means finding symmetry. Then Haddad proceeds to mirror the other side's tally of successful killings. His list is careful to include casualties only of Israeli soldiers and settlers. This crude calculus is offensive, too. Does my reaction contradict my earlier impulse to ask my sister-in-law that very question: soldier or civilian? Yes and no. Haddad's care in his listing is tainted by this sentence later in the article when the mask of the distinction seems to slip:

The Palestinian retaliatory attack for Sharon's heavy fist in the camps [of Jenin and Balata in late February 2002] witnessed in the 2 March attack upon a synagogue in West Jerusalem killing ten people, as well as the 3 March attack upon a military checkpoint near Ofra settlement killing 10 settlers and soldiers at the hands of a lone Palestinian sniper, intended to send the unequivocal message that Palestinian resistance would not tolerate brazen slaughter within their camps without Israeli military and civilians paying a price as well.4

Fair enough, when viewed as analysis, but Haddad's careful language is too careful. When we are talking about targeting civilians, "the unequivocal message" is that "brazen slaughter" will be answered with "brazen slaughter." Haddad criticizes Sharon for using a tactic with no "military objective" per se but intended rather "to send a message of terror to the civilian population." But if the tactic is wrong in and of itself, then it is wrong no matter who uses it. For Haddad, "brazen slaughter" on one side brings "paying the price" on the other. Word- tinkering aside, this is the cycle of violence again. It doesn't mater who is "right": that's the whole basis of the clichéd cycle. In previous issues of Between the Lines, Haddad rightly condemns Israeli killings of civilians, seeming to make a distinction between the killing of combatants and civilians; but when it comes to Palestinian operations, the distinction is blurred, almost to the point of erasure, and Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians are viewed solely through a tactical lens.

At this point, I think we need to be explicit about this. We must support Palestinian resistance without celebrating individual combatant deaths, and while unequivocally condemning the targeting of civilians. Period. There is too much sense of a "yes, but" in some of the left's condemnation of suicide bombers. This includes the common assertion following a condemnation, that suicide bombings only strengthen Sharon's hand. That is not good enough. Here, instead, is Hanan Ashrawi:

Why and when did we allow a few from our midst to interpret Israeli military attacks on innocent Palestinian lives as license to do the same to their civilians? Where are those voices and forces that should have stood up for the sanctity of innocent lives (ours and theirs), instead of allowing the horror of our own suffering to silence us?5

Israel Shahak once told me that as much as he grieved for the innocent victims of these bombings, they do not constitute a threat to the state of Israel. That was in 1995, and perhaps there wasn't much more that had to be said. But precisely because now the killing of Israeli civilians is openly discussed among Palestinians as a tactical question, and not as an aberration, criticism of it must be clear. That does not mean succumbing to the mainstream stereotypes which have equated all Palestinian resistance with terrorism; on the contrary. Consider this from Israeli journalist Amira Hass:

In order to succeed in a military and political campaign, one has to know the enemy: his weaknesses and his strength, his defects and his capabilities, his pain and his happiness. Instead, the enemy is presented only as a one-dimensional mass, ignorant and lacking feelings and thoughts. Perhaps the lies being disseminated about the Palestinians during these days of war actually express the contempt of the Israeli authorities toward the Israeli public, and an implicit assumption that it will continue to swallow them. That it will always make do with intelligence analyses, and will avoid sociological, historical and political ones, and therefore will not ask why so many Palestinians want to blow themselves up and take others with them, and how hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are holding out in intolerable conditions of shelling and continuing curfew, without water, electricity and food?6

A longtime Fatah activist I know watched with dismay as the TV showed the aftermath of a bus bombing in northern Israel. We were sitting in his living room in Ramallah. He told me that after the suicide bombing of the Moment Café, near the Prime Minister's residence in West Jerusalem, he was afraid to listen to the news. Why? He feared hearing confirmation of rumors that among the victims were Israelis who had just returned from a rally against the occupation. In this view, there are no civilians. This man believes that it is a legitimate tactic of resistance to frighten -- and kill -- Israelis by bringing into their homes and communities the fear and terror which Palestinians have experienced for so long in theirs. Unless his dismay at the carnage on television was an act for my benefit -- a possibility -- his emotional reaction and his political beliefs are at odds. When he was out of the room, his wife quietly told me that she doesn't like to talk politics with him, but wanted me to know she disagrees with him about suicide bombers. She is against them.

Here we can find symmetry. An Israeli soldier told Israeli women peace activists with the group Machsom Watch monitoring checkpoints that he wished they had been killed by Palestinian terrorists.7 Maya Rosenfeld of this group, while unambiguously opposing the occupation, told me she doesn't even like the term "intifada" for the current situation. On the Israeli side, she said, there is "state terror," and on the Palestinian side there is "another [form of] terror" with "elements of national resistance." Yes, there is terror on both sides. Rosenfeld can say this without compromising another truth: there is not symmetry here. Only one side is occupying the other. In the PBS Frontline documentary "Battle for the Holy Land," a grieving mother tells the camera that if she had known her son was on his way to blow himself up in Israel, she would have turned him in to the Israeli authorities. She says, in effect, "mothers are all mothers," and she holds in front of her a framed photo of her dead son with his raised weapon. Contradictory? Yes. Another soldier's funeral. At Gil Bedihi's funeral, it occurred to me that as long as neither "side" can mourn the deaths of the other, then there will never be peace. That does not require symmetry so much as imagination.

THE MILITARY CHECKPOINT SCENARIOS have all the complexity of any international border crossing: control, accommodation, arbitrary power, improvisation. At Kalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah to the north, Palestinians (workers, schoolgirls, men in ties, women with bundles on their heads) wind their way around the checkpoint on a rocky, sandy path, in full view of the Israeli Defense Forces observation posts. Food vendors and drink stands are set up. A boy selling cigarettes displays his merchandise on a pile of flat stones, an improvised store counter. A Palestinian contact in Ramallah had explained that I would be able to get a taxi here to return to Jerusalem. But the rules had changed, and no taxis were being allowed through the new border. As I negotiated my own passage with the soldiers, a taxi driver losing a day's work shouted at me in broken English: You're not Jewish, you're not Christian, you're American. Just show the soldier your American passport, he continued, seething with resentment, then reminded me that Bush is giving Israelis the money to do what they are doing. I managed to hitch a ride with an Israeli Arab, who had to talk his way through the checkpoints as a citizen of Israel, and defend himself as an Arab to the taxi driver who was now shouting at him. At yet another new checkpoint down the road, the Israeli Arab, who was on his way to work at a factory in northern Jerusalem, would have been turned back if it wasn't for my press credential and, yes, American passport. Even then, after a quick search of my backpack and the car, there was one final question for me from the soldier: "Are you Jewish?" I said yes. I didn't ask him what he meant by "Jew."

The checkpoints between Jerusalem and nearby West Bank Palestinian areas have been seams where fear and mutual ignorance crackle at the surface. In early March, almost a dozen Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint north of Ramallah were killed by sniper fire. An IDF spokesperson impatiently suggested that I refrain from judging soldiers at the Kalandia checkpoint, and he has a point. The young men with automatic weapons are obviously afraid. There is terror from both sides every day. But only one side is occupying the other. Why is the idea of "buffer zones" almost always discussed as if only the Israelis need protection from Palestinians crossing the border -- and not vice versa? Where's a little symmetry when you need it? Language tells the story: even when speaking Arabic, Palestinians use the Hebrew word "Machsom" for checkpoint. In a place that should be bilingual but is psychologically divided against itself, a few groups make it their business to cross over the invisible lines. Machsom Watch is an organization of Israeli women formed since the outbreak of the second intifada who take turns gathering twice every day at the Kalandia checkpoint north of Jerusalem, and at the calmer checkpoint south of the city on the way to Bethlehem (and less regularly at several others). It's no accident that when you phone the principal author of Machsom Watch's recent report, you will hear a bilingual outgoing message. These women are re-drawing what Benvenisti calls the "geography of fear," delineated in the "tribal maps" which Jerusalemites of all ethnicities carry in their heads.8

When we talk about checkpoints, we are not talking about the inconvenience of a traffic jam on your way to work. A man in the Deheisha refugee camp near Bethlehem, after a long discussion about the differences between Israeli, Zionist, and Jew once tried to tell me what it is like, psychologically, to live under military occupation. When you bite into a sandwich, he said, you even taste the occupation there. It's almost impossible to convey what something tastes like. Presumably one of George W. Bush's handlers learned that these inconveniences are something much deeper, because Bush referred explicitly to checkpoint humiliations in his April 5th comments to reporters. Maybe he had seen Charles Glass's moving report:

Palestinians cannot go more than five miles in any direction within the Occupied Territories before coming up against an Israeli checkpoint, beyond which most of them cannot travel. Some checkpoints are worse than others, but all of them have the authority to prevent Palestinians from going to their places of work, to the houses of their extended families, to schools, hospitals, farms, or anywhere outside their own villages and towns. The most public humiliation of Palestinians occurs at these checkpoints. I have seen soldiers beat and teargas civilians and I have read in Israeli newspapers of groups of soldiers forcing young men to undress and cross a checkpoint in the Gaza Strip wearing only their underpants, or dividing Palestinian women into two queues -- those they judged to be pretty on one side, ugly on the other -- before allowing them to pass.9

The hypothetical, sympathetic handler should also read Machsom Watch's recent report,10 documenting a year of checkpoint observations and "interventions." Though it is in some ways already an historical document, as one of the Machsom activists remarked, it also provides essential background. Even before Israel's recent invasion, the checkpoints were not simple border crossings. A thorough history of the checkpoint becomes a history of the occupation itself, and as such is beyond my ability. But the report observes that the checkpoints have always constituted "part of a deliberate siege of the Palestinian population." One goal of Machsom Watch's activities, says the report, has been to challenge "the prevailing militarism so entrenched in Israeli society," and to demand that the military itself "not take refuge behind a smokescreen of security issues." Israel has real security issues, but the repression enacted at checkpoints does not serve them. After September 2000, according to Machsom Watch, the closure and control of civilian movement and livelihoods were tightened even though this is "contrary to international law, is inhumane, immoral and ineffective in preventing terror attacks." The "noose" is for preventing sick people from getting to doctors, teachers and students from getting to schools, and families from getting together. When Machsom Watch activists challenged soldiers about keeping Palestinian workers detained for so long after their identities had been checked, they were told that "'if we give them back the documents earlier, the workers will infiltrate again.' . . . In other words the job of the soldiers was to ensure that the labourers would lose a day's work, and they knew it." The report covers the situation up until January, providing essential context for the more recent, extreme humiliations and violations that have been reported.

MAYA ROSENFELD IS THE PRINCIPAL AUTHOR of the report. The topography of the occupation has changed dramatically since the recent events, so I asked Rosenfeld, who is also the author of the forthcoming Facing the Occupation (Stanford), for some clarifications. First I asked her for an overview of the often-discussed checkpoints11:

I do not know how many permanent or semi-permanent checkpoints were 'operating' before the last invasion, but I assume the number is somewhere between 150 and 250. These can be divided into two main types: First, checkpoints located at the crossing between the West Bank and Israel proper -- that is, either along the 'green line' or at the various entrances to the municipal territory of Jerusalem (we are talking of 'greater Jerusalem,' including all the Arab neighborhoods and villages which were annexed to the municipality and the lands expropriated). Second, checkpoints that were erected inside the West Bank by the IDF and/or border police during the period between September 29, 2000, (after the outbreak of the second so-called intifada) and today. These are scattered everywhere, mainly on the major and minor roads between villages, towns, cities, and refugee camps, and also at the entrances to or outskirts of many villages.

The 'logic' is as follows. As you know, the majority of West Bank territory remained under Israeli military control, either as Zone B or Zone C (Zone A encompasses approximately 28 percent of the territory, maybe even less). So the checkpoints were erected on the 'junctions' or crossings where Zone A meets with Zone B or C, or else, inside Zone B and Zone C. This way the West Bank was not only divided into cantons but actually was split into hundreds of isolated or semi-isolated Palestinian settlements. So Palestinians became prisoners in their own villages or towns. At times no vehicles whatsoever were allowed to move through checkpoints, and all passengers had to either cross by foot (after a security check), through the fields, dirt, and heaps of obstacles that the military piled there, or they were forced to stay home.

We at Machsom Watch focused almost only on those checkpoints that initially served as border crossings between the Palestinian Territories and Israel (even these were not final but awaiting further negotiations). It is at those checkpoints that Palestinians' entrance was conditioned upon holding work permits or travel permits that were issued in the past by the Civil Administration and [military commander].

That description is now background. Since the invasion, checkpoint functioning "changed completely," writes Rosenfeld. The checkpoints at Kalandia and Bethlehem became military bases. "Today the entire Territory [sic] is under complete siege. The Palestinians are now in need of a rescue operation. The Israelis, on the other hand, are at the peak of their destruction mission. These ends do not converge."

Recent news reports have mentioned various ideas resurfacing of "fortifications," "buffer zones" etc. What do such possibilities mean concretely for Israelis and Palestinians?

This requires an essay, not a brief response. I can only say that the buffer zones etc. are full of shit. The idea is Israeli-made of course, and it is based on seizing (stealing) more Palestinian land. As you well know, they don't think for one minute of creating a zone to the west of the green line, only to the east -- that is, at the expense of the West Bank. One may think that this no longer matters, now that they have bulldozed the entire Palestinian space, but this is not so. What this boils down to is that Israel may go ahead and create this zone by force, in the same way it does everything. But this will distance it even more from any beginning of a solution.

Unlike many human rights groups, Machsom Watch, in its activities as well as its report, is very much concerned with linking personal consciousness with political action: "It is our hope that this report will be added to the testimonies that will help them [i.e. Israelis] to cross the threshold between knowing, [and] acting on that knowledge by raising their voices in protest." I asked Rosenfeld about the group's efforts to cross borders geographically as well as psychically so that Israelis can recognize in a more deeply-felt way that their country is occupying Palestinian lives.

I can only say that I crossed this border many, many years ago. In fact, I have spent most of my adult life, including the major part of my academic life, trespassing or transcending (or whatever you want to call it) national, state-made borders and boundaries. But to be a little more specific: The issue you raise here is that of denial, this extraordinary ability of human beings to be untouched by (or distance themselves from) the suffering and pain of others, even when this pain and suffering are the consequence of their direct or less direct doing, i.e. the policy of their government or action of their army, which includes their sons, husbands, brothers and so on. Of course, one can expand forever regarding this unique human capacity, its psychological dimensions, etc., but I think that things here demand an even more complicated explanation.

Most Israelis do not suffer from lack of knowledge and information, and there is not a single person who does not know what happens when hundreds of missiles are fired at a refugee neighborhood, and the majority know exactly where Jenin and Ramallah are located (as well as knowing people from Ramallah and Jenin). I also think that if you would have told an average Israeli three years ago that Israel will bombard the West Bank, he would have never believed you. The point is that once the impossible has become a fact on the ground, most people tend to defend it ('it' being the IDF's actions) probably because they fear that otherwise their entire world will be completely destabilized. The threshold that has to be crossed by most people is quite huge, considering their high level of 'integration' in the society/nation/state and the fear of losing the sense of belonging. . . .

Mind Monitors & Border Crossers

"SO MANY ISRAELIS CANNOT THINK LOGICALLY about this situation because there's so much hatred," Nava Elyashar tells me, her scarf whipping in the chilly, early morning wind. Elyashar is another member of Machsom Watch; we met when I accompanied a group of watchers to the Jerusalem-Bethlehem checkpoint, before the invasion. Born in Haifa to German and Austrian parents, Nava Elyashar is married to the son of Iraqi Jews, a man held as a prisoner of war by Egypt in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Many of their friends now consider them traitors, he tells me, for their opinions in the midst of horrific, almost daily attacks by suicide bombers on Israeli civilians. But Nava, a computer systems analyst, overcomes the artificial divides by monitoring more than checkpoints. "I'm able to monitor my mind as if I'm somebody else . . . as if I was the other side." Back home in Gilo, after we share a breakfast, which her husband learned to cook in the army, she finishes addressing invitations to her youngest son's bar mitzvah.

On that calm March morning just north of Bethlehem, Nava Elyashar watched as a soldier turned away a Palestinian woman who said she had a doctor's appointment in Jerusalem. The soldier told her to have the doctor come to the checkpoint to sign something. "Obviously," Nava says matter-of-factly, "it will not happen." A lot of the checkpoint traffic here is the result of Jerusalem and ethnic demographics. That is, Nava explains, after 1967, many Arab families from East Jerusalem were refused building permits by the Israeli authorities to accommodate their growing families. Reasons good enough for "us, the Jewish people," to build were not applied equally; "the same logic doesn't work for the Palestinians." When more equitable building laws were passed, implementation of them remained spotty at best. So when the house got too small, some family members would move to nearby villages. One result is their separation from the city by Israeli checkpoints. All because, Nava, says, "they had to live with dignity." Later in the morning, Nava offers her cell phone to an elderly woman trying to get to the American Consulate in Jerusalem. The young soldier, wearing a knit cap -- he probably wasn't twenty -- looked for a few moments at the papers the woman handed him, protected in a plastic page-cover. The woman was trying to get her visa for a trip to Mission Viejo, California. From there she hoped to go visit her son in Arizona. For the moment, she was turned back toward the village of Beit Sahour, where she lives.

Nava and her husband Shlomo have three sons. The older two are in the army. One was recently stationed at a Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus. "He's watching . . . that the settlers have their easy life. It's very dangerous, it's very, very dangerous. They are very nervous. They are afraid, yes." I ask her if she speaks with her son about serving in the occupied areas. "He knows that I would be very happy if he will leave the army and refuses to go to the territories. But he is twenty-one. I cannot tell him what to do. My husband and me, we gave him our way of life. But from his friends, he has some other ideas getting into his head. And he must go and choose his way alone. I cannot tell him what to do. . ." It would be redundant of me to analyze the way Nava speaks about her family, about the difficulty of being a parent who believes in freedom, all in the same context in which she reaches out to strangers whose humanity and dignity she recognizes across the border. She can speak for herself. Her clarity sometimes seems hopeful, sometimes dark; either way, her courage is inspiring:

Most of the Israelis close their eyes and don't see what's really happen[ing]. Many of the soldiers come here hating Arabs, or distrusting Arabs, or not knowing what really is going on. Some of them will have other thoughts after being here. Some of them will be much more aggressive toward the Arabs, and will say, "we were at the checkpoints and we know how bad the Arabs are, how ugly they are, how they behave, how they are trying to go to kill us." But some of them will get [that] the whole situation is bad and the Arabs are human beings like the others. And it happens all the time. Most of the officers who wrote the refusal letter, they served here. They were here at first at the checkpoints, in the streets of Gaza, in the streets of Beit Lechem, in the streets of Hebron, and after seeing what really happens, they change their minds.

The refusal letter she mentions is Seruv's "Courage to Refuse."12 There are more than 1000 Israeli "refuseniks" -- reserve officers and soldiers who, since September, have refused to serve in the occupied territories. Over 400 of these belong to Seruv ("Refuse"), a group whose open letter declares that, while they will "continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel's defense," they will not "continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people." In March, Ha'aretz columnist Israel Harel dismissed "the tiny refusal-to-serve movement, which the media inflates beyond any reasonable proportion to its true significance"--a sure sign of the group's growing influence. Knesset member Yossi Sarid of the leftist Meretz party recently decided that it would be political suicide to give official support to Seruv, but some Meretz members have publicly expressed their sympathy with the movement, according to Ha'aretz. Meanwhile, the IDF is taking a harder line: As of April 13, Seruv reports that 39 officers and soldiers were in Israeli prisons for their refusal, more than the number jailed at the height of the Lebanon war, when the refusal movement began with the group Yesh Gvul.

OFER BEIT HALACHMI IS ONE of those who signed Seruv's open letter. I was late for my meeting with him because I suddenly found myself at the remains of Jerusalem's Moment Café where a suicide bomber had attacked days before. This is the attack in which the Fatah activist worried that Israeli peace activists might have died alongside Israeli civilians whose deaths were tactically desirable. As workers cleared the rubble, Peace Now held a vigil across the street in front of the Prime Minister's residence, keeping a tally of combined casualties -- Israeli and Palestinian. A month later, as his troops were reportedly opening fire at close range against Palestinian civilians (according to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization), Sharon's horror of mixing Jewish blood and Arab blood would seep through his rhetoric; speaking about the suicide bombing at an Arab-owned restaurant inside Israel, he told the Knesset: "Victims of coexistence, those whose worlds fell apart while eating at an Arab restaurant in Haifa, their blood mixing with the blood of Israeli Arabs who were sitting beside them."13 The Peace Now banner at Sharon's residence read (in Hebrew): "Get Out of the Territories: Return to Ourselves." My first reaction was to be cynical about the simplistic slogan. But speaking with Ofer was a reminder that "separation" can be on the racist, blood terms of a Sharon -- and imposed by the powerful, as Rosenfeld noted above -- or on the terms of those bordering each other in mutual recognition and dignity.

Ofer is a rabbinical student at Jerusalem's Hebrew Union College, where we met. He is a third-generation Israeli, born two years before the Six Day War. His grandparents were Polish, and his parents taught him about his "right to the land," and about their wish for Jews to come to Israel. "This was the vision," Ofer explains quietly in a lounge at the college. Growing up there, Ofer would take walks, and though there was now a post-1967 "Green Line," he "didn't feel there was a border . . .[it] was not mentioned and was not visible." Then came the Lebanon war and what Ofer calls the "first crack." He entered the army in 1984, going into Lebanon as part of the occupying Israeli army after the principal fighting was done. He was stationed near the Syrian border. Two things happened that winter, both of which have resonance almost twenty years later. First, he realized that nothing he was doing in Lebanon was related to defending Israel. "I was across the border without any real meaning," he says. Then the first known suicide bomber struck -- against a bus of Israeli soldiers. After that, "I found myself defending myself and not defending my country." Such a distinction threatened to break open the vision his parents had instilled, the one in which individual, military, and state are all one; Israel itself was supposed to be a family. (Simplistic notions of family and nation are hardly unique to Israel.)

In 1984 Israel announced its withdrawal from Lebanon. "We decided -- 'we'" -- here Ofer shrugs at his own usage, then he revises it -- "The government decided" to withdraw, but of course to remain in the so-called security zone created in southern Lebanon. The withdrawal "was simply a lie," as Ofer sees it. Even as he recognized this, Ofer entered his fourth year of army service to begin officer training. In 1985, he was sent to Ramallah and Nablus (he calls the latter by its Hebrew name, Shechem). Two years later, he went to Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. "I found myself without any visible threat, walking through the streets" of these towns, "stop[ping] what I saw as innocent people" to check their papers. He would "interrupt their everyday simple life," and he would wonder why he was doing it. He remembers standing on a rooftop in Hebron with his weapon, watching people -- Palestinian people -- in the market. "I felt that I'm doing something wrong," he tells me. Why, he wondered, was he aiming a weapon at people who were only trying to live their lives? "It put a split in my soul." Should he simply obey orders and assume that his superiors knew what they were doing, or should he act on his own sense that what he was doing was immoral? The dialogue Ofer describes was internal, so I asked if he ever spoke to friends or fellow soldiers about his dilemma. "There was an unwritten rule," he responds. "If you are talking like that, you are joining the enemy . . . to put a knife in the back of your friends." And the first intifada was still two years away.

He tells me that the refuseniks have a variety of political views but that they share that "same split inside themselves" -- and share an understanding that the split is unnecessary. That is, his refusal to serve in the occupied territories is "not an act against my state and my people." On the contrary, he is strengthening his right to shoot when necessary. "If I have borders, then I have the moral right to defend our borders." Ha'aretz columnist Akiva Eldar recently assessed the cost of borderlessness in these pragmatic terms:

On Israel's 54th birthday, the most prominent characteristic of the state is the moral, political and economic price being paid for being a state without borders. In exchange, its citizens don't even get hope for improvement in their personal safety. And that's not all. By rejecting the proposal to turn the Green Line into the international border, which for the first time this year was formally recognized by the Arab League, Israel could be losing a strategic asset of invaluable proportions: The Sharon government is daily eroding the credibility of the U.S. In simple terms, Israel is shooting at its own deterrent capability.14

When Ofer and I spoke, Seruv was only six weeks old, and the large- scale invasion of the West Bank was still two weeks away. He wanted to emphasize to me that "We are not a political movement. We don't have the answer for everything." He has his own opinions of course, but Seruv does not have a position about Arafat or settlements or negotiations. "We all know" -- including the political right -- that there is no future in "the idea that we can with force make the Arabs" do what we might want them to do. At the same time, the left has been saying to negotiate, but "We all know we have no one to talk with."

"Israel must negotiate with itself," Ofer says, perhaps returning us by a more nuanced path to that Peace Now slogan. "When you don't have a [geographical] border, you don't have a moral border." Then he adds: "We took on the right for ourselves" to rule the territories, but "instead of helping" the people in them, we have made their lives worse, making sure that the Palestinians cannot "build a living country." Ofer -- who lives in Katzir, the town that would become newsworthy in 2000 when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of an Israeli Arab family challenging the Land Authority's policy against selling land to non-Jews -- believes the Israeli repression of Palestinian nation-building in the West Bank is no accident, for "I was raised to be blind to human rights of non-Jews." He writes in an open letter posted on the Seruv website: "The deterioration of the current situation is not a new development but rather it is the logical continuation of a long process . . . the beginning of which is an immoral and unjust rule of another people." And before running off to class, he ventures even further into this dialectical minefield: "Actually, what I feel is, we created our enemies."

IT'S POSSIBLE OFER ONCE STOOD GUARD as GZ's family shopped at the Hebron market. GZ is a Palestinian journalist in Hebron who also tries hard to undo the secular and religious tangles of this whole situation, though the very words he must use betray the confusion at the heart of defining identity. "When I talk about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I don't talk about a religious conflict. This is the mistake of the Israelis, or the Jews. They believe the conflict is between Judaism and Islam. It is not so. We got absolutely no problem with Judaism or Christianity." GZ says "we" because he is Muslim, though he himself is not religious. He continues: "The conflict is a political conflict. There is an occupation. . . . done in 1948 and 1967. They bring Russians because this Russian is a Jewish guy, and he can easily come and live in Haifa and in Hebron, while the original citizens who used to live here thousands of years are driven out and they cannot come back. And this is the idea of Zionism, this racism. . . . The conflict is not a religious conflict. . . . I respect his religion, but his religion should not be on my account." He believes that stereotypes of Arabs as peasants who ride donkeys and live in tents make it possible for the media and politicians to talk about "giving back" places that are under military occupation, terminology which offends him. (In October, Senator John McCain appeared on the David Letterman show, joking that after the Afghan war the locals could go back to selling camels. He got laughs and applause.) The mention of donkeys seems to remind GZ of Orwell's Animal Farm, to which he refers several times. The Palestinian Authority sacrifices those whom it exploits, he says, referring to Arafat's political exploitation of those who die for the Palestinian cause.

To get to Hebron, I take a taxi van south from East Jerusalem. The dozen passengers, all men, are smoking cigarettes. After a while, almost as an afterthought, someone cracks a window. Curtains are pulled over the windows, though the passenger next to me opens ours a little because he understands that I want to see what's outside. He gazes out the window, looks back to me and says "Ein Mazel." No luck. In general, he means, for the Palestinians. He is from Jordan and lives in Hebron. "This fucking," he says. Ungrammatical and without subtlety, but in the lingua franca his bottom line is clear enough. The taxi stops at a little town north of Hebron. Some of the passengers continue on foot, others change taxis. At the "junction," a group of men prunes a knotty tree. There are food kiosks. A man with a briefcase and a tie. A young guy holding an orange pamphlet called "Compiled Material for English." Kids with multi-colored backpacks; it's a school day. I share a smaller taxi with a half dozen passengers, and this one drops me in the Palestinian-controlled part of Hebron, which is not under curfew. But the friend I am going to meet lives in an area that is under curfew. I dial his number and he tells me to hand my cell phone to one of the drivers nearby looking for a fare. They arrange the last leg, and this driver takes me through the quiet streets.

When I called information from inside Israel to get a phone number in Hebron, the operator told me the city doesn't "belong to us anymore." Actually, Post-Oslo Hebron is divided into areas known as H1 and H2. Some 80,000 Palestinians live in H1, which is under Palestinian control. Some 40,000 Palestinians and 400 Jewish settlers live in H2, which includes Old Hebron, the disputed holy sites, and the Palestinian marketplace. Another estimated 5600 Jewish settlers live in and around Hebron; perhaps the best-known settlement there is Kiryat Arba. H2 is the area subject to the curfews ordered by the local Israeli military commanders. That is, the curfew affects the mixed Israeli-Palestinian areas of the city -- and applies only to the Palestinians in those areas.

GZ is 30 years old, but like many Palestinians I meet, he looks older than he is. His grandfather is from West Jerusalem. He himself was born here in Hebron. "I am a human being. . . . I cannot accept somebody to impose his will on me." That, he explains, is what an occupation is all about. In a rare rhetorical flourish, GZ does say that "the Israelis even control the oxygen." He is chain-smoking Marlboros, boycotting Israeli cigarettes, a tactic he acknowledges is indirect. After all, "Americans support Israel. There is no difference between American and Israeli policy, but I prefer to have American cigarettes and not Israeli cigarettes." Then the click of his lighter is audible on the tape.

"The feeling of oppression makes you crazy," he says, with some impatience. This curfew will last about a week. Palestinians are forbidden to leave their homes, open shops, attend school. Some defy the restrictions, of course, but this is risky even when there is no overt military activity. They risk getting shot, in other words. "Forget the money [i.e. economic losses] and the casualties," GZ says. "Imagine yourself in New York stuck for eight days, you cannot go out of your home, somebody is controlling your freedom. You would really need a psychologist. In the meantime, this curfew is imposed only on the Palestinians, although in this part of the town, which is under curfew, you have Jews and Arabs. Jews can freely move. . . . So it is a sort of punishment for civilians. Certain results are predictable. "It doesn't really help the Israelis. It makes people more angry. When you impose your will on me, when you decide to imprison me for a week -- it's a prison in fact, it's a prison -- what do you expect from me? You create more hostility. . . . So when the curfew is lifted . . . [there will be] resistance."

Did GZ always consider himself political? During the first intifada, what he calls the "popular intifada," he was a teenager. "I was just a boy. I knew nothing about politics. I just knew one thing: this soldier is my enemy. Because he has a gun. And this man who has a gun comes and beat up my father, beat up my friend, he makes curfew. Even a boy can understand that this guy holding a machine gun is the one who is my enemy. . . . If I want to go somewhere, he gives me permission. And he controls water, he cuts [off] water in the camp15 -- he controls my life, you know. So I took part, like so many Palestinians." He joined other young people throwing stones at Israeli patrols. He joined others in acts of civil disobedience. The "popular revolution" involved painting slogans on walls, demonstrating, boycotting. He was jailed three times by the Israelis

"Revolution is good," he continues, "but [only] if you have a clean leadership." Rich and poor took part in the first uprising. The rich may not have given their lives, but they financed popular activities; even paint costs money. But "basically only poor people go to fight. It's like Animal Farm." Now GZ sees himself as a journalist, a talker, and an analyst. The first time we met he told me that he was a Palestinian who was suffering and became a journalist to write about that suffering. Now he says: "I will never ever take part again in any intifada because of the first intifada -- because I felt that I was just used, like so many people." He explains: "When you are fighting as a boy, even when you throw stones, you could get shot. You could get killed . . . We were sacrificing, and the leadership comes and gives concessions. The leadership comes and talks about political solution. We are not against political solution. [But] we also feel that we were neglected. . . . The first intifada was spontaneously done and many people took part. But this intifada is a programmed one. The aim beyond this intifada is not to achieve our national goals. It is to help Arafat. Arafat makes use of people to improve the conditions of negotiations. And then eventually he comes as the hero. But in fact Arafat is not the one who is suffering. He is not the one who is fighting on the ground."

GZ articulates the dilemma shared by other Palestinians with whom I spoke. "I mean, nevertheless, I am not against the intifada. I have my criticism. Because I don't want people to be used as cats' paws, as victims, for a political game played by Arafat and his group. Why doesn't Arafat send his daughter or his son? The Palestinian leaders and ministers: why do their sons not go and take part in the fight? Why only poor people should die?" The "leadership" must have sensed the not-so-rhetorical question in the air, because just a couple of weeks later, Arafat's wife would announce that she would gladly send her son to die -- though she has only a daughter. GZ, by the way, does not support suicide bombings. Nor does he feel that the siege of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah changes anything. In May, he told me by phone, "Arafat is trying to make himself a hero," but the deal he made to end the standoff at Bethlehem means he has given his stamp of approval to a policy of deportation. Not only is Arafat not a hero, he says, but "Sharon is still in need of Arafat."

Back in 1995, GZ was already critical of Arafat for negotiating autonomy without securing an end to the occupation. "They give you autonomy and they keep on confiscating." Land, that is. A day after the Hamas faction had won student elections at Hebron University, GZ was saying: We had the Turkish occupation, then the British, then the Jordanian, then the Israeli, "now we have the Palestinian Authority." Seven years later, I ask if he would say the same thing today. "We have a problem, you see. On one hand, we want to get rid of the occupation. On the other hand, we want to achieve a democratic state. I don't want to get rid of the occupation and then live in a state which is controlled by a dictator, or controlled by five or ten people who possess the economy and possess the fate of the millions. But despite our criticism of the PA, we think that all efforts should be focused on fighting the occupation. . . . I cannot really change all these things now. . . . We have a split between the people and Arafat, Arafat's policies, I mean, but it's not the right time to fight [that], because what the Israelis want is to have civil war among the Palestinian community and we don't want that." What does he think will happen after Arafat dies? "Arafat is just a person. Nothing will happen. When I tell you 'Arafat,' I don't mean Arafat as a person. I don't give a fuck about Arafat as a person. I am talking about Arafat's policies, the political direction of Arafat."

"We are not against negotiations in principle. . . . [But] he failed, Arafat and his men. He wants to revive the streets, revive actions and revolution so as to use it as something that could be [an] influence in the negotiation, you see? So he is using his own people, which is not acceptable. If you use your people to liberate, if you have a political program -- liberation -- no problem. I will be the first one to go. But if you want to use me as a victim, and then get [nothing but] redeployment here or there . . . I will not accept that. If Arafat stands up now and says, 'Oslo is over, we want to fight so as to achieve a state in the West Bank and Gaza, according to [the UN resolutions], and we will not give any more concessions,' everybody will fight. Everybody will be for the intifada, and everybody will sacrifice. But now Arafat is still sticking to Oslo." And why is Oslo not an acceptable framework? "Because the essence of the conflict is land, land occupied by a foreign force, by the Israelis. Oslo talks [as if] there is problem or a dispute between Palestinians and Israelis. No. There is a land occupied. . . . Oslo talks about transition periods, [for example] redeployment from Hebron. No. We don't want the Israelis to get out [only] from the center of Hebron. We want the Israelis to completely put an end to their occupation from the whole West Bank cities. In the city center [of Hebron], you are liberated in some way, or you have autonomy. But outside, like my house, which is five minutes from the center, it's occupied. . . . Oslo is a partial solution. . . . It will take one thousand years to finish Oslo."

In 1995, when I asked how I should identify him, he replied, "Say, 'the boy who wants to go to America.'" Since then, he has tried unsuccessfully to get to the U.S. As we said good-bye, he talked about how much he envies Israeli culture. Like Americans, he told me, they know how to enjoy life. They are always having picnics and birthday parties for their kids, he said. Back in H1, while I'm having a falafel sandwich on the street, a forty-two-year-old Palestinian sports instructor wearing a black and yellow sweat suit walks up to me and asks if I am American. Yes. "The plane Apache is from America," he says (referring to the helicopter), "and it kill the Palestinian people every day." After passing through a no-man's land and an Israeli checkpoint into H2, I waited at a bus stop to return via Kiryat Arba to Jerusalem. A young Israeli Jew in civilian clothes with an automatic weapon stopped to ask me who I was. Then he told me he lived in Hebron to attend the yeshiva here. Yes, there are good yeshivas in Jerusalem, he said, but it takes a special kind of Jew to live here. Special in what way, I asked. "Sh'lo yesh ko'ach": he has strength. The armed settler was not subject to the curfew, but I think his mind is not as free as my imprisoned friend's.

"They always ask us to understand them," GZ says. "I am not the one who oppressed you. Go to Germany and ask for compensation. When you ask me to understand you, you also have to understand me." The day before we met, a Palestinian had been killed at a Hebron checkpoint under disputed circumstances.16 "The victims [on both sides] are the civilians," GZ says repeatedly. This does not mean there is no right and wrong. Al Jazeera is reporting on a gunfight here in Hebron the previous night; in response to the checkpoint incident, armed Palestinians had attacked IDF positions in the city. We wrapped up our interview, because, despite the curfew, GZ was planning to attend the funeral of the young man killed at the checkpoint. I asked if I might join him. He said it was not a good idea. He knew I was Jewish, and the funeral was likely to be a religious one.

MY VISIT TO RAMALLAH was delayed when the IDF shot out my Palestinian driver's tire, then delayed again when my driver insisted that we go to his home for a glass of hot tea. I said I preferred a whiskey but he told me that because he was Muslim he did not drink. Then I met my friend in Ramallah. Here's another signal of asymmetry: no Israelis asked me to hide their names. "JT," who disagrees with his wife about suicide bombings, sees the asymmetry like this: one side wants liberation, the other side wants to stop them. When I first met him, JT was a Fatah activist in the first intifida. In the mid 90s, the second time I met him, he had a job through the Palestinian Authority with an "international organization." Today, in his mid-40s, the father of three, his daily routine has changed -- he has to pick up his kids from school, for example, which leaves less time to walk the streets of West Bank towns, introducing a visiting American Jew to fellow fighters, or taking the visitor to see the wounded at an East Jerusalem hospital. But his anger still snaps, and his anger seems to give him a certain pleasure. He sees the future getting bloodier before it gets better, but there is no turning back because "behind [us] is a wreck."

JT still calls Arafat "the Chairman," a kind of respect which he maintains even when he criticizes him. He blames the corruption of the PA not on Arafat himself but on those around him. As he sees it, the Chairman holds all the strings but cannot afford to stop suicide bombers and other violent resistance unless he wants to end his own political life. JT's anger remains. He supports suicide bombers as a political principle, but he also insists that day-to-day life must be improved for Palestinians if anything is to change. He is a fighter, but he speaks as a father now, too: "If the economic situation is upgraded, who will send his son to throw a stone?" He recalls that his own grandfather, a Jerusalemite, used to say that he would give up his life for his Jewish neighbors. But that mentality is lost now. JT himself is just a few years older than the occupation. He was raised under the Israeli occupation. He has been tortured in Israeli jails, and he doesn't want his own young sons to know that experience. A generation needs to be trained for peace, he says, if there is going to be peace.

The "suicide bombers" must be seen in this context, he tells me. "These are the ones you prevented from living a normal life. . . . Who should I hate? The Palestinians who did not make peace, or the Israelis who did not need peace?" Since Oslo and the creation of Palestinian security forces, young stone-throwers of the first intifada, trying to survive in a strangled economy, can receive a salary for taking a gun. We are in JT's living room. He, too, is chain-smoking Marlboros; when I first met him years ago I offered him an Israeli cigarette, and he told me about boycotting Israeli goods. A small symbolic act, considering how the Palestinian economy has depended on Israel. The television is on, CNN reporting another attack inside Israel, this one a bus bombing near Tel Aviv. The sound is muted, so JT provides commentary. "[Israel is] driving not only the neutral but even the peaceful [Palestinians] into resistance," he says. What about the general media impression that suicide bombers are guided by religious fanaticism? "Bullshit," he says. The mosques are filled with worshippers old enough to die but who are not going out detonating themselves. We are not the Taliban, he says; "half the city sells alcohol, the other half drinks it." JT is perceptive and cocky. He is opinionated but sometimes contradicts himself. He is worth listening to because he has been around, he is thoughtful and honest -- and he'll surprise you sometimes. He is a person, balancing ideology with daily life. So I give this picture of him without trying to make it coherent or palatable.

How do the Palestinians fight both PA's corruption and the Israeli occupation? "We know they are thieves. We know even the names of the thieves. . . . [but] someone is shooting at both of us," so we fight against our common enemy. "After we finish with them, I'll turn at you and I'll fuck you day and night," he says, referring to his Palestinian enemies. What about the thieves whose names you know? He quotes "the Chairman": "These are the shoes that we are going through the mud with. You cannot wear your best shoes to go through the mud. This is a transition period." No one can predict what will happen next, he says, just as no one predicted the current crisis. As for Sharon's invasion of Ramallah and the West Bank: "It's hard to tell you this, [but] it serves us in the long run." How? "The last general of the old generation" believes he "can bring [the Israelis] peace by force." JT is a darkly optimistic dialectician. This will cost the Palestinians, he explains, but it will also serve them by showing the Israelis that Sharon's is an unattainable goal.

Like other Palestinians I have met, JT knows more about Israeli society than most Israelis I have met seem to know of Palestinian society. This is "natural" since, one group usually crosses the border to work for the other, and the other, when it crosses, usually does so to dominate, repress, or confiscate. JT also led Israeli-Palestinian youth dialogue groups in the 90s, inside the Green Line. "I spoke to them as an old fighter." He learned something as well. "The Israelis," he tells me, not "the Arab countries," "taught me that the human being is the most precious thing." This doesn't mean he accepts the Israeli version of its army's beneficence. In the occupied territories, he continues, the Israelis don't need to kill us. (This was before the re- occupation.) But do not doubt, he continued, that Israel would kill without hesitation if the threat was inside the Green Line. (A few weeks later, the New York Times ran a front-page photo of Israeli police beating Israeli peace activists.) I asked JT his thoughts on my sense of the schizophrenia inside the Green Line -- that most Israelis have no real sense of what goes on in the occupied territories. He replied that I had just explained the suicide bombings without realizing it. "To make the Israelis inside to know what's happening here." It is no longer enough, he said, to sit in a café "being neutral" and wanting to know nothing about what's happening in Ramallah. That's when he tells me about the rumors that circulated after a suicide bomber hit the Moment Café in Jerusalem. I didn't ask him if he would send his children to do such killing.

But I did ask about being middle-aged and watching the younger generation taking over the fight. "These are the kids who used to watch us in the old intifida," he says, then pauses a long time. They see that "this stone cannot achieve much." It's not complicated to see why this is a "more bloody intifada," he says, just as his kids walk in the door from nursery and elementary school. He asks me how I would have felt a few hours before when the IDF solider shot at me, if I had had a gun in my hand instead of a camera. He tells me his kids used to be afraid of the sound of gunfire. The youngest has just handed me a chocolate, though JT explains this was a ruse so that he could eat one himself before dinner. But now they go to the window to watch, and they run to see the Israeli tanks. Just fifteen days ago his nine-year-old daughter (she's wearing a light blue Gap sweatshirt) would still "piss on herself" when she heard shots. She would wet her bed and wake up when there was shelling nearby. Now she sleeps through the night while Apache helicopters above the neighborhood fire missiles. "What are they planting, and what do they intend to harvest?" JT asks me. By "they" he means all of them -- I think. Or maybe all of us.

Many of the hospitable Palestinian men I met during my short visit kept their wives hidden.17 JT's family doesn't work that way. We ate together (KFC with all the fixin's and Ramallah's version of Chinese food.) Then his wife -- the one who quietly opposes suicide bombings -- refuses to let me leave without having a piece of blueberry cheesecake, the first she's ever made. We're forced to eat too quickly, because the sun is setting and I am nervous about getting "back." Outside on the driveway, a half dozen neighborhood kids are playing with toy guns while an older boy skips rope. They often play checkpoint inspection, JT tells me, then drives me to the real checkpoint. I cross on foot, showing my American passport, and ask a dark-skinned Israeli soldier, perhaps an Ethiopian immigrant, where he's from; "Israel," he says with a wry smile, and allows me to snap a quick photo. Then I watch another solider fire a few shots toward a nearby car. Most of the Palestinians queued up don't even flinch. For the twenty-minute trip back to Jerusalem I will take three different taxis. In one taxi van, an English-speaking doctor who was recently forced by checkpoint soldiers to dump out his medicine on the ground tells me that his mother was shot by rubber-coated bullets the previous night. The driver is watching us in the rear-view mirror and says something in Arabic. The doctor translates: the driver is saying they shot at his car near the checkpoint last night. "Everyone has to expect to be shot now," the doctor explains.

All of that was just before things got really bad this spring. Indeed JT did not predict what would happen next: Sharon's sustained effort to make the Palestinian idea of a state into an unattainable goal. "The wanton destruction on the West Bank of basic infrastructure, of civilian ministries, of equipment and documents, including school records, that have no security value -- these are acts of revenge having little to do with security and everything to do with humiliating and seeking to break the will of the Palestinians for self- governance."18

There are wrongs on both "sides," but there is no symmetry because only one side is occupying the other. And the way out of our false belief in symmetry is not to give up seeing right and wrong, but to overcome our conditioned notions of us and them. One of those petitions I received opposing the occupation also expressed concern for Israel's long-term security. Political language can be so coded and loaded that I actually had to pause and turn those words over in my mind. Within seconds the words dissolved and instead I saw my two young Israeli nieces.

This is Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:

And they searched his chest
But could only find his heart
And they searched his heart
But could only find his people
And they searched his voice
But could only find his grief
And they searched his grief
But could only find his prison
And they searched his prison
But could only see themselves in chains.19

notes

1. "Israel's Tenth Birthday," in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford, 1968), pp. 124-25. Deutscher continues: "This is no matter of abstract principle only. The future of Israel may well depend on whether the Israelis are on guard against nationalist conceit and are able to find a common language with the peoples around them. Will they find it in the second decade of their statehood? There is nothing that a friend of the people of Israel can wish them more ardently." return

2. Benvenisti, City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem, trans. Maxine Kaufman Nunn, (Univ. of California, 1996), pp. 222-23. return

3. Nadav Shragai, "Our Justice," Ha'aretz (English edition), March 26, 2002. return

4. Haddad, "When Push Comes To Shove: Achieving the Dialectic of Resistance," Between the Lines, March 2002, p. 6. return

5. Ashrawi, "Where We Went Wrong," The Progressive, February 2002, p. 22. return

6. Hass, "Profound Contempt," Ha'aretz (English edition), April 15, 2002. return

7. Machsom Watch, First Annual Report (August 2001 -- January 2002), Part I: The Bethlehem Checkpoint, pp. 8, 17. Available from y_k1@netvision.net.il return

8. Benvenisti, City of Stone, pp. 224, 226. return

9. Glass, "Diary," London Review of Books, Feb. 21, 2002, p. 36 return

10. See note 7. return

11. What follows is an edited version of an interview conducted by email in April 2002. return

12. http://www.seruv.org.il/ return

13. "In Sharon's Words: Arafat Is Terror's 'Dispatcher,'" New York Times, April 9, 2002, p. A10. return

14. Eldar, "And if we strip the emperor naked," April 15, 2002. return

15. See for example, B'Tselem's "Not Even a Drop: The Water Crisis in Palestinian Villages Without a Water Network," (July 2001) for accounts of Israeli military destruction of Palestinian reservoirs and drinking sources. return

16. "Mohammed Da'ana, 26, was killed Saturday in the West Bank city of Hebron. Da'ana's family claimed that the soldiers shot him at a checkpoint, whereas the IDF said he was killed while driving his car in an Israeli-controlled section of the city while it was under curfew." Amos Harel and Mazal Mualem, "IDF troops shoot dead 4 Palestinians, arrest Jihad activist," Ha'aretz (English edition) March 16, 2002. return

17. Meanwhile, as I'm writing, a woman in Jordan has divorced her husband -- a first in that country. Until a January court ruling, only men had the right to divorce there, according to the Associated Press ("Jordan: A Milestone for Women," New York Times, May 15, 2002, A6). return

18. Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, "A Reply to Ehud Barak," New York Review of Books, June 13, 2002, p. 49. return

19. "Earth Poem," in Modern Poetry of the Arab World, trans. and ed., Abdullah al-Udhari (Penguin, 1986). The poem was first published in Beirut, 1972. return

Contents of No. 33

Go back to New Politics home page