She went to talk to the grocer to ask him to watch her car, and on her way to me (I'd moved over to the wall), snapped a picture of me. It gives you a sense of the size of the thing.. Posted on 08/05/2004 8:37:56 PM PDT by Salem
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Wall Sight Journal
Jerusalem occupies space in the international headlines that is wholly incommensurate with its size. Big news, but a tiny city. We live on the southern side of the city, almost at the edge (Bethlehem would be a ten minute drive if we could get there at all), but can get to the northern edge of the city, if traffic isn't too bad, in just over fifteen minutes. As one heads north, to the Hebrew University campus for example, you pass the Old City, then a relatively upscale Arab neighborhood called Sheik Jarakh, and then take a right and an immediate left to the University. If you were to take the right, but not the immediate left, you would end up, in just a couple of minutes, in Wadi Joz, and then Abu Dis. Not, shall we say, very Jewish neighborhoods. And not, shall we say, neighborhoods where many Jews willingly go anymore.
Fortunately, in all the trips I've made to the University, I've never missed that immediate left. Last Monday, though, a friend and I purposely missed the left, and kept heading straight, first into Wadi Joz, and then into Abu Dis. She's Palestinian, and for a long time, she's been asking me to spend a day with her in Abu Dis, to see the "wall" up close. Seeing it, she was assured, would make me a vociferous opponent of the entire project. I had no idea how I would react, but it seemed to me that if I lived only fifteen minutes away from parts of it, the least I could do would be to spend a day taking a look.
She agreed to pick me up in her car (if any of the neighborhood's residents stopped us, she told me, we'd be much better off if she did the talking), and told me to wear a baseball cap instead of a kippah. I was struck by her suggestion. Arabs, including Palestinians of all sorts, regularly walk the streets of west Jerusalem. I share the sidewalk with them. And the elevator in our office building, which also houses the city's water department. And they ride our buses. And they never seem to think that they have to hide who they are in order to make it out safely.
But being an obedient sort, I dressed accordingly, jeans and an American t-shirt, baseball cap and a camera, to look a little tourist-like. She picked me up as promised, and within fifteen minutes we were in Wadi Joz. She showed me Al Kuds University, which I'd often heard of but had never seen, and then, after a bit of winding around neighborhoods I'd never have found my way out of, Mukassed Hospital, the east Jerusalem hospital where Arab victims of the violence are typically taken by the Arab ambulances. It didn't look like much. She didn't need to point out that Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, a cutting edge place by any standard, is about three minutes -- and two centuries -- away.
Her point having been made, we set out for her to show me the piece-de-resistance, no pun intended. We took the main drag through Abu Dis, and there it was, looming right in front of us. Can't exactly miss it. She parked in front of a grocery store, and told me not to speak Hebrew. English only. She went to talk to the grocer to ask him to watch her car, and on her way to me (I'd moved over to the wall), snapped a picture of me. It gives you a sense of the size of the thing..
I looked at the graffiti on the wall. Much of it read "From Warsaw Ghetto to Abu Dis Ghetto," or "No to the Busharon Wall." The second was at least clever. The first, I thought, was a bit sick. The Warsaw Ghetto was part of a project very, very different from what's going on here, no matter how much one may be opposed to the wall. There were also a few spray painted slogans like "Kol Ha-Kavod le-Magav" -- "Thank You, Border Patrol" (you can see that one right above my head in the photograph), presumably not written by Palestinians. A few biblical verses about freedom, a Star of David made out of dollar signs (presumably not painted by a Jew). And a biblical verse, in Hebrew: "Have we not all one Father? Did not one God create us? Why do we break faith with one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?" (It's from Malahi 2:10, though the wall didn't have a footnote.) That one, presumably, was written by neither the Palestinians nor the Border Patrol.
Some graffiti, I thought, was missing. Where was the slogan that said "Stop the bombings, so they take this thing down…"? Nowhere. Not a single indication that the wall was a reaction to something. Not an auspicious beginning to the tour.
She wanted to show me a school that she knew about that was on the other side of the wall, so we started climbing the long, dusty road at its foot. Several hundred meters up, we came across five young women, all in long dresses and full Moslem headdress, carrying schoolbooks. My friend asked them how to get to the school. It's on the other size of the wall, they told her in an Arabic that I could barely follow. How do we get across? They pointed to a place where the wall hadn't been completed, and said you climb up there, and jump down. How far down is the jump, my friend wanted to know. They said something, and laughed, and I didn't follow it. I asked her what they'd said, and she, too, laughed. "They said it's a big jump, but if you get killed, you're considered a 'shahid' [martyr]." Somehow, I suspected that if I died making the jump, they probably wouldn't announce my new 'shahid' status in my shul, so we bagged the school.
We got to the top of the hill, where some Israeli security guys were loading equipment into a building that had formerly been a hotel, but that now, because it stood at the top of the village, was being used as a lookout post. They eyed us suspiciously, and then asked me a few questions, but didn't really bother us. We hiked around. I took some pictures, she explained the layout of the village to me, and then suggested that we go to her sister's house on the other side of the wall. No problem, since the wall ended there. So we walked a bit further, around the edge of the wall, cut through a field, and (after she'd called her sister on her cell phone to tell her we were on our way) went to visit her sister.
Her sister also speaks a perfect Hebrew. She brought out soft drinks and water, and then sat down to tell us about life in the village, the hardships of the fence. How she used to drive her son five minutes to his school bus (he goes to school at the Arab-Jewish public school in West Jerusalem) but now has to go all the way around Ma'aleh Adumim, and how it takes forty minutes on a good day. It wasn't clear to me why they didn't just park on the other side of the fence as we had done, and hike to the car, but I didn't ask.
The story, to be sure, wasn't a pretty one. The wall is enormous, it's ugly, and at least here, it cuts right through the middle of the village. True. And it makes life very, very inconvenient for a lot of people. No question. I asked them if the part of the wall we'd just seen had been the part that the Israeli Supreme Court recently said had to be moved. They didn't quite answer that one. They (sort of) said they didn't know, and I (sort of) knew that wasn't the entire truth. I sat and listened, drank enough soft drinks to be polite, but couldn't help thinking about one missing fact -- why the wall had been built in the first place. That, neither my friend, nor her sister, nor, for that matter, anyone else we met during the rest of the day, seemed inclined to mention.
It was, as my friend expected, an unsettling day for me. But not for the reasons that she'd thought. No one can deny the massiveness of the wall. No one can deny that it's ugly as sin. Or that it poses real hardships. Or that it may not have been built in all the right places. But no one can deny, either, that the reason that we, like many other Israeli parents, worry much less about whether our children will make it home is because of that wall. And that the reason that Jerusalem, and much of the rest of the country, has been exceedingly quiet recently, for almost five previously unimaginable months, is also because of the wall. And that before the wall, this was a different country. A country terrorized. By people who came from places like Abu Dis. Who, for the most part, can no longer get in.
It was their absolute unwillingness to even mention Israel's need for the fence that, contrary to her expectations and her hopes, slowly but inexorably eradicated most of the misgivings I'd had about the fence, at least in principle (there are without question some spots that have to be moved). My friend and her sister are Israeli citizens, in addition to being Palestinian (a long story). They live on opposite sides of the fence. (Another long story.) But both speak Hebrew, both work in West Jerusalem, and both understand Israeli culture as well as anyone else. And neither, in an hour of talking about the fence and a day of touring the area, ever mentioned any reason why Israel might do such a thing. That silence, much more than the fence, is what I found disconcerting. And surprising.
More surprising, of course, than the ruling at the International Court of Justice. Everyone knows that the wall is a problem. Israel's Supreme Court said the same thing. Which is why the Court ruled, just days before the ICJ ruling, that significant stretches of the fence had to be moved. "Eliminate the hardship," the Supreme Court effectively said, "as much as you can." While the ICJ essentially said, with admitted hyperbole on my part, "Eliminate Israel, as soon as you can." How else to explain a ruling that the fence must be taken down, and the Palestinians compensated for their losses, without any serious reference to Israel's security concerns?
Though Israel's right wing was outraged by our Supreme Court's ruling, many of us were proud. I certainly was. Not many countries can boast of a Supreme Court that's ruled in favor of those trying to destroy it, even in times of war, I suspect. (In fact, though I'm certainly no expert, I'm hard pressed to think of a single other example.) That's the ultimate difference between our Court and the ICJ, of course. Our Court said "Survive, but do it with decency." Whereas the ICJ said, essentially, "We don't care if you survive or not."
There's no question we didn't build this fence the smart way. We built it too slowly. And we should have plotted the course of parts of it differently. And our soldiers guarding it are not sufficiently trained, which is why it was announced today that the patrolling of the fence will shortly be assigned to a private firm, presumably with better trained people. All of those problems are real.
But so were the problems that the fence was meant to address, and about that, no one seems to have anything to say. Not the ICJ, not the Palestinian and Israeli protesters who want it brought down, and not my friend who so desperately wanted me to see it. It was that silence, that complete blindness to what had been happening in this society for four years, which left me feeling less concerned about the fence, and more overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness, a sense that what we have now is the best we're going to see.
At the end of the day, I was left saddened, not outraged. Saddened not by the wall, but by the fact that the simple but instinctive desire to stay alive has killed something else in us, something that no one should live without. Empathy. Simple human caring. Maybe even a sense of promise for the future.
Saddened, almost beyond words. Because I left convinced that though we may one day get to non-belligerence, we're not going to see peace. The hatred is too deep, the distrust too embedded. They see us as a massive military power, while we can't remember one instance when their leadership said (in Arabic, which is all that matters) that we have a right to exist. They accuse us of not caring about their standard of living, and we see them as unwilling to acknowledge what we've lived through for the last four years. Where they see a massive invasion and disruption of their village, we see protection for our kids. They read the ICJ ruling with approval, and we see Europe, unrepentant, repeating its wholesale willingness to see the Jews vulnerable. One wonders how, or if, we'll ever get beyond that. One wonders how many people really want to. On either side.
When we made our way back to the grocery store to get my friend's car, we saw some kids huddled around the ice cream freezer just outside the store, chatting about what kind of ice cream cones they wanted to buy. I realized, suddenly, that they were speaking English, a perfect American English, without a trace of an accent.
I went over to them and asked them where they were from. San Francisco, they told me, delighted to meet another American. What were they doing here, I asked. Their whole family lives in Abu Dis, they told me, and they come for the whole summer, every summer. We chatted for a minute, and then they asked me what I was doing here.
"I live here," I told them.
"In Abu Dis?" they asked, with surprise.
"No, there," I said, and pointed to West Jerusalem, clearly visible one hill over.
At which point, the eldest, probably about fourteen years old, looked alarmed. Her body language shifted. She shepherded her siblings and cousins away from the freezer, without buying any ice cream, and as politely as she could, ushered them away. Had we met at a Ben and Jerry's store in the Bay Area, it all would have been very pleasant. But because we met over an ice cream freezer in Abu Dis, thousands of miles away, I was suddenly the enemy. Because of the wall? Or because I exist?
My friend and I were quiet as she drove me back to West Jerusalem. "What did you think?" she asked. But she didn't want to know. What I thought was that though I genuinely like her very much, and admire a lot about her, and though Elisheva and I enjoy having her and her husband over for dinner, the wall didn't create the gulf between our worlds. It just formalizes it. What did I think? What I couldn't tell her was that I was thinking of Abram, and Lot, and the verse that says "the land could not support them staying together" (Gen. 13:6). And wondering if it was no less true today than it was thousands of years ago.
And wondering, if that is still true, where that leaves us. Nowhere good, that's for sure. Without much hope. With just a deep sadness, the kind that gnaws at you, and won't go away. With the sense that, with apologies to Robert Frost, huge fences make tolerable neighbors. With the fear that this may, for the foreseeable future, be the best we can hope for.
And with the hope, however faint, that someone will show us otherwise.
These Dispatches are © Daniel Gordis, and may be reprinted or posted on a web site
only with the express written permission of the author.
© "Daniel Gordis (www.danielgordis.org) is Director of the Mandel Jerusalem Fellows, and the author,
most recently, of If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State (Crown)."
Very sad -- the CONSEQUENCES of their murderous actions. There are other choices available. Very good, the wall. It is a great, perfect solution. And look -- it even works.
Nice looking wall. One just like it extending from Tijuana to the Gulf would do very nicely.
That really is the fundamental question, isn't it? ... for both Americans and Israeli's. The enemies of Man want to erase our existence. The Sheep of Europe are content to sit this one out, or even take the side of the Barbarians, for the promise to be eaten last.
But, Honorius is long passed (albeit reincarnated in the form of John Kerry), and the pearl of Western Civilization is no longer Rome. We do not pay homage nor ransom to butchers, nor do we slaughter them with legionnaire's perfection. Instead, we ask only that they let us be. It is We that know that the Earth belongs to the living. Yet, we share it compassionately with worshippers of death. Do let's be clear, however, that the walls of concrete and sea may seem to protect Man from the Beast; in reality the barriers separate the beasts from Man's realization that We the Living can exist without them...
... but they cannot exist without us. God help them, the day those barriers no longer protect them from our moral clarity.
Rome never knew a revelation so brutally complete.
Atos
Looks like a nice, sensible wall. Prefabbed partitions that can be lifted in place with a crane. Would cut down on illegal border crossings and ease minds that terrorists were coming in from mexico. And it would make the money we spend on BP agents go further.
But that makes entirely too much sense.
Thanks for the ping .Excellent post.
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