Barely had I felt so safe as on a recent trip to Israel, but rarely had I felt so threatened as on the last day of the same visit.
"They have a mission, and they're going to carry it out," our trip organizer reassured us as we rode to our last dinner in Israel--less than an hour after Palestinian suicide bombers destroyed two public buses and 23 other lives. "This is the reality here, and maybe it's a good thing that you were here when it happened because it makes it more real."
We were in Jerusalem, with the bombings 45 minutes away in Tel Aviv, but the attacks might as well have been next door to our hotel. We watched as Israelis, like any proud people in crisis, reached out to one another, consoled each other and searched for details of the attack and answers to the violence. Israel's small size, its recent shared experiences and Jews' long, often difficult history only add to the closeness of its people.
But Israelis do not hide, at least not any more. After the attacks, professionals in the hotel lobby continued working on their laptops, waiters still served drinks and a desk clerk laughed out loud at a joke. I had heard the stories throughout my trip, how changing your life only lets the terrorists win, how maintaining a daily routine helps you cope.
Yet, Israelis' ability to live relatively normally amid the violence--and my own failure to do the same--only seemed real when we passed other, supposedly safe public buses on our way to dinner. The Israelis packed inside surely knew the recent fate of some of their fellow commuters, but they went on riding their buses as they would any day. My initial reaction that they were surely insane quickly turned to fear, as I could not help but wonder whether their bus, not five feet away, was the next target.
It was not, and I realized--in many ways thankfully--how much innocence post-Sept. 11 Americans still have left.
Palestinians, too, lack Israelis' ability to put aside the conflict and continue with their lives, but their reasons are very different from Americans'. At the moment, Islamic fundamentalist violence and Israeli retaliations and restrictions prevent Palestinians from doing much of anything, including having a normal economy or visiting a neighboring city.
Security concerns prevented me and the other college journalists I was with from visiting the occupied territories during our stay, sponsored through the American Jewish Committee. But it is not difficult even in Israel proper to see where Arabs fall on the socioeconomic scale. Many work in fields such as academia, the law and journalism, but a disproportionate number have not made it that far. Quite often, they run the bazaars, make up the hotel beds, serve the food and perform all the other low-end service jobs that fall to society's disadvantaged.
Their lives are relatively normal, however, compared with residents of the West Bank. After withdrawing from selected Palestinian areas in the mid-1990s peace process, the Israeli Defense Forces reoccupied most of the West Bank within months of the current Palestinian uprising that began in December 2000. Since then, the IDF has erected countless roadblocks and checkpoints that have largely succeeded in deterring suicide bombers but have also crippled Palestinian society. "The sense of having any sort of control over their lives is gone," Rema Hammami, an anthropology professor from Birzeit University, the largest Palestinian university, told us.
Hammami is probably less affected than most Palestinians--instead of losing her job, she simply needs to pass several roadblocks to get there--but her sense of powerlessness exists all the same. For most Israelis the answer is simple: Stop the suicide bombers, ensure the security of the Jewish state, and the occupation's severity will end. But for moderate Palestinians like Hammami, with little or no sway in the planning of Hamas and other terrorist organizations, that answer is beyond their reach. "When you have a situation of no exit, no hope, people being battered all the time, there are no words I can say that will change that," she said.
Many Middle East observers await the rise of a moderate, powerful Palestinian majority as essential to any lasting peace. Nearly all Israelis and some Arabs would much rather see a Palestinian leader more open to compromise, and more sincere about support for Israel's existence, than Yasir Arafat. The current Palestinian Authority president and longtime chair of the Palestinian Liberation Organization has survived leadership challenges by appeasing various constituencies and outmaneuvering rivals. At times, he has been caught speaking in Arabic about betraying Israel and conquering Jerusalem.
The belief that Israel has no partner for peace has driven many Israelis--in search of a coping mechanism, a logical solution to the crisis, or both--to assume extreme positions themselves.
"The biggest reserve of empty space in the world is possessed by Arabs, as is the case with oil," explained Israel Harel, a leader of the Jewish settler movement in the West Bank and a columnist with Ha'aretz, one of Israel's major English-language dailies. Eighty percent of land held by Arabs is unpopulated, he said, so why should Palestinians live in overcrowded cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Why should they not live among their Arab "brothers" in Egypt or Jordan, where they can be with people more like themselves? "The Arab states should make room," Harel said.
Of course, Egypt and Jordan could make all the room they like--what Harel needs for his plan to work is either the Palestinians' acceptance or, to put it lightly, more extreme measures. If Palestinians declined to leave their homes, would Harel and the rest of Israel's far right favor a forced uprooting and expulsion of Arabs before the size of their population surpasses Israeli Jews, as is expected in 2010? "Something radical has to be done," Harel said, "or you're never going to have peace in the Middle East."
West Bank settlers are not alone. Most Israelis want something radical, and they have shown it in a number of ways. The IDF has stepped up "targeted killings" of high-ranking terrorist leaders, accepting that sometimes civilians are caught in the crossfire. Soldiers, after serving in units in the West Bank city of Ramallah, think of duty in the tense Golan Heights, on the Syrian border, as a vacation. And of this writing, corruption scandals are the only thing keeping Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a hard-right leader with a violent military background, from a landslide victory in Israel's Jan. 28 elections.
Moderate Israelis are looking for a partner for peace, but when moderate Palestinians look right back, they often find more extremism than what they are really searching for.
The twin Tel Aviv bus explosions on the last day of our trip occurred not far from a spot we had visited just days before. The lives claimed in the attacks largely belonged to recent, non-Jewish immigrants, who came to work jobs that West Bank Palestinians could no longer fill. Ironically, the spot we visited was the headquarters of Selah-Israel Crisis Management Center, an organization that supports new immigrants who are victims of terror. Selah is an acronym, but it is also Hebrew for "rock." There, the most personal form of coping takes place.
Ruth Bar-On, Selah's executive director, works personally with immigrants, many of whom lack the support system of family, close neighbors and co-workers that native Israelis would have. When an attack occurs, Bar-On and her network of volunteers are at the hospitals, offering whatever resources are needed.
"It wasn't until 9/11 when we realized how far we had come," Bar-On said of her organization, founded in 1993, and its experience with terror. "We work day to day, trial-by-error, and we learned as we went. We were at 'Stage 6', and with 9/11 we saw what 'Stage 1' was."
Among the people Bar-On worked with was "Ana", a recent Russian immigrant whose daughter was killed in the June 2001 bombing of the Dolphinarium dance club in Tel Aviv, across the street from our own hotel. She described the emotions caused by her daughter's death; chief among them was simply an enormous sense of loss. A doctor by training, Ana became so despondent that the Israeli government declined to approve her application--pending at the time of the bombing--to practice medicine. With support groups and other programming, Selah helped return a sense of normalcy to her life, she said. Her son, too young to remember or understand his sister's death, was able to live a regular life.
Selah's mission will continue as the son grows older. "The needs are there for the long term. They're not going away," Bar-On said. "We need to know, will there be someone there for the next graduation or the next Christmas?"
Every Israeli has some personal connection to the violence--a son or daughter was killed, a co-worker's spouse was injured, a friend watched helplessly as the attack occurred. Living through the emotions becomes a fixture of Israeli life.
One would expect that the greatest Israeli optimism about ending the violence would come from the youth. In a country where childhood innocence does not last long and nearly everyone serves time in the army, the youth are as hardened to reality as the veterans of Israel's oldest wars, but that is not to say they have lost their optimism.
One evening at a crowded Jerusalem shopping mall, we watched a group of Israeli soldiers take time from their usual duties to go bowling. While we waited for a lane to open up, they bowled, drank and laughed the same as any Americans would in a bowling alley in the United States. But they had a piece of equipment not found in the American version of the sport: their guns. Israeli soldiers carry their weapons, often M-16s, wherever they go; some even left their guns strapped onto their backs as they bowled.
The same resolve to live normally, not in bunkers, was visible among the Israeli youths I saw celebrating New Year's Eve, and the students I met at Israel's first private university, the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. Israelis generally do not begin college until their mid-20s, because of the requirement of military service after high school, and the students had already served in the military. Many of them were studying with the express purpose of one day contributing to a peaceful resolution of the conflict, and they were cautiously optimistic that it would eventually come. They have to be--they are Israel's future, and they recognize its military and economic strength. Israel cannot help but make peace, they said, because if it does not, much of the dream of the state will have died.
As much as anyone else in Israel, the youth have learned that how they cope with violence will eventually decide whether it continues. They worry about when and where the next attack will come, they insist on security for the state of Israel, and they hate the attacks that threaten their day-to-day existence. They also understand that to lose sight of an eventual peace, even if it means more time, more sacrifice, is to lose sight of having a future at all.
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