Afternoon break time. Cooks’ room.
Fewer people now. Most have gone home for Sabbath. Even four of the eight prisoners got leave for the weekend. That’s like two days off your sentence: Friday afternoon, Sabbath, Sunday morning.
One named Dubi told me that I should not expect Sabbath leave. “In our case it’s an act of mercy. But you—if you need mercy so much, you didn’t need to come here. And you’re famous. Your name’s been in the papers and on TV. They won’t want your neighbors to see you while your unit’s in the field.”
Here is the story of how I wound up here.
First comes the draft notice, upon which is written “Area of Judea and Samaria.”
I go to see my commander.
“I refuse to support what we are doing in the Territories.”
Dark and burly, he bends to the side, glancing past three dark and burly officers toward his secretary at the end of the table, and it seems to me that there is between them a silent rollicking laughter. Finally he recovers, straightens, settles.
“Stephen!” he reads my name from the draft notice. It is, of course, a foreign one here. I wanted to change it to Shai, meaning “gift,” but my mother told me not to. There was a time in America when lots of Jewish couples gave their children Christian names like Stephen and Richard. The Israelis have fun with it. The only Stephen they know is Steve Austin, the six-million-dollar man, and lots of them call me Steve Austin. It gives them a chance to practice their English. But this commander takes particular relish in my name, I think, because it signifies that I am a spoiled American, and cannot therefore have the slightest idea of the mentality in this part of the world. My refusal belongs elsewhere. A little reality—and it will dissolve. Americans have a reputation for being soft. “American soap,” the Israelis call us. There are three billion dollars in American aid to prove it.
He shakes his head. He does not look at me but at the piece of paper. “The notice stands,” he says. “The place remains the place. You are to report on schedule. If you still want to refuse then, the army has procedures.” And now he bends back away from me again. “However! If on that day it appears that I have filled my requirements in the Territories, I will arrange something for you in Jerusalem.”
“I hope you will remember me,” I say.
“I will remember you,” he says.
Comes the day, two months after that. I arrive seven minutes late. The taxi driver insisted on picking up an old lady at her house. Having inquired and heard my position, he told me that I would be going to jail. “It’s a possibility,” I said, Bogart style. “And then you’ll get another notice in your hand to the same place.” “It’s a possibility.” When I pulled my huge duffel bag out over her knees, the old lady spoke for the first time, with a push in her voice—she had mustered her courage: “May God be with you.” I was surprised. She looked at me. I would not have expected support from a stranger in this oddball thing I was about to do. “Thank you,” I said. I did not exactly believe in that God. There had been too many innocent people with whom He had not been. But I believed in the old lady, who believed in that God.
Seven minutes late. It bothers me. I know from experience that people will still be arriving two hours from now. But I want everything to be by the book, so that my disobedience will be clear and clean.
Schneller, the base is called. A German Protestant missionary of that name founded an orphanage here in the mid-nineteenth century. The Turks had been ruling for more than three hundred years, and to them the land was Lower Syria. The arriving soldier-to-be, therefore, is confronted by a building that looks like an illustration from a tattered copy of Brothers Grimm, with the faint traces of an inscription reading Syrisches Waisenhaus, and nearby another: Jesu, lieber Meister, erbarme dich unser. (“Jesus, dear master, have mercy on us”). The extremists among our Orthodox might take exception to being greeted thus, but I don’t think they ever enter Schneller, since they have student deferments until a hoary age.
There are bell towers and Old Testament quotes too chiseled over the doors in Gothic script, and upon each building the name of the German city whose Protestants financed it: Köln, Stuttgart, Petersburg, Halle. The modern asphalt goes up to these old buildings, as if it would invade and undermine them and clip them off. Along the stretches of asphalt appear wooden signs, couplets in black stenciled Hebrew, the elegance and pithy wisdom of which are scarcely to be rendered: Soldier! Health is the gain/ When you keep yourself clean! A thought for tomorrow/ Saves an ocean of sorrow. When equipment goes to waste/ It’s your unit you’ve disgraced! This was the language of the Psalms.
Given the buildings and the Hebrew signs, one has the odd impression of a quaint German city which has been emptied of its burghers and occupied by an army of Jews, as in a nightmare of Josef Goebbels.
The buildings are crumbling. Stone sits upon stone, but occasional bulges portend collapse. The drainpipes are askew. Some of the tile roofs are three-quarters gone, bare innards exposed to the heavens. Occasionally, near the entrance, the asphalt stops short and there are the remains of a pitiful attempt at a garden, long since given up. But on the left as you go in there is a duck pond about two yards square, with an actual mother duck and her babies flipping water from their tails, and a bit of green grass around it, and a bench. These are the only cheerful beings in sight. The duck pond must be the brainchild of the base commander, an attempt to change the atmosphere, but so patent a ploy that it serves rather to acknowledge how depressing the place is. A few droopy soldiers guard the entrance, open the gate for authorized vehicles, check your identity papers, wait for their time to pass. On the insides—although I do not at first go inside, but I know from experience— there is the smell of damp, decaying plaster, the latest flakes still on the floor. The fresh-faced soldiers, girls and boys—boys some of whom have been assigned to the offices here, rather than to fighting units, because their fathers or brothers were killed in our wars—tack up pictures of movie stars or singers, and the plaster crumbles under the tacks as the generations of soldiers, stars, and singers age and pass.
A guard directs me where I am to go. I am full of energy for the ordeal. The huge bag weighs nothing on my shoulder. I fight the depressing effect of Schneller by reminding myself that it is, after all, a place which has war as its central concern. It would be a kind of obscene euphemism if it looked like an Ivy League campus.
I round a curve and there they are, only a few of course at this appointed hour, behind metal barricades which have been set up to enclose the yard between the reserves building and some warehouses. An opening is left in the barricades, and on the inside stand a few officers. Shalom! they say to me. Warmly. As if they knew me. Each makes a point of saying it. Eye contact. Shalom, I answer. Surprised. Awed. How nice of them. A welcoming committee. It seems I have entered a gate from which there is no going out.
You’re in the army now,
You’re not behind a plow.
You’ll never get rich
By digging a ditch.
You’re in the army now.
Go to your left, right, left.
Go to your left, right, left.
I go to my left and sign up at the table. Now begins the long wait.
Others come in. They all seem to know each other. I know no one. Apparently a mistake has been made. My file got shuffled into the wrong group. These are all long time Israelis, veterans of former wars. And each of them has a little bag, the size of an airline bag, which you can shove under the seat in front of you.
Yet no one laughs at my bag. No one seems to notice it or me.
Three hours later I am standing there in uniform with two huge bags, the new one full of equipment, and an Uzi submachine gun. The dark and burly commander did not remember me. When I reminded him of my position he did not have a fit of laughter. He said I should get equipment. So here I am. Buses have pulled up, and there must have been an order to board, because someone said, “Come on, gang!” and there was a surge toward the first bus. As soon as it was full it moved forward a few yards and stopped, and the second has moved up and is filling. I have resisted so far the natural pull to get on. It seems the simplest thing in the world, to get on a bus. And thus it might happen. I might so innocently get on. No one has said where they are going. I haven’t even heard an explicit order to get on. It is as simple and natural, therefore, as every previous step: handing in my draft notice, filling out, for the umpteenth time, the form for my address and phone number, changing into uniform, signing for the Uzi—and now getting on the bus. The simplest thing in the world, and I could find myself, an hour or two from now, exactly where I do not intend to go. By default. Just as, by default, I came into this life, so by default I could wind up in the West Bank.
Officers are running to and fro, shouting at people: “Why aren’t you in uniform?” “Why aren’t you on the bus?” But no one shouts at me. I am invisible. The yard is still populated. A few are even still arriving. There is a big crowd in the entrance to the reserves building; it is the line for the doctor. An old woman comes, someone’s mother, and makes a fuss, and is refused, and starts crying. The officers are embarrassed but hard. Yosi—that is my commander’s name—is about to walk by me, and I ask, “Do I get on the bus?”
“If someone tells you to get on the bus, you get on the bus. If no one tells you to get on the bus, you don’t get on the bus.”
“No one has told me anything,” I say.
He keeps on walking.
I look at the buses. They have almost filled the second one now. The yard is beginning to empty.
Finally there is someone I know. Danny, the father of a friend of my daughter’s. I know he is in my unit. So there has been no mistake.
“Come on, Steve, let’s get on.” He wants company.
“I don’t get on till someone tells me specifically to get on.”
He nods, smiles. Goes to the second bus.
It seems so contrary and untoward a thing, what I am doing, or rather not doing. Freakish even. The orderly succession that begins with the “Shalom” of the officers and would end by landing me in the Territories is rather like a wave, a great wave that carries everybody to shore, and there they are on shore, looking at me from the bus windows, two and a half busfuls now. What is this strange figure there, flailing against the wave? There is a saying: “You spit on the army, the army drowns you.” Perhaps they are thinking that. Or: Who is this misfit, this miscreant? Doesn’t belong to our unit. Never seen him before. Nor will Danny say he knows me. All kinds of strange types in the world, even here, this oddball. Those waiting for the doctor they understand. But someone who defiantly stands there, showing no limp, seems selfishly assertive, exalting himself, for whatever principles, like a raised fist toward the State of Israel.
There is no seam in this process, no identifiable place of which one can say, “Here is the line.” And so I draw the line. That is the hardest part. To assert oneself that much, to say, “Here, quite arbitrarily, I stop and draw it.” I decide, for my purposes, that the buses are going to the West Bank, and I will not get on.
The third bus is filling. Those in the first bus have sat there for at least an hour.
The truth is, I don’t feel the push of that wave. I am rather like a sieve. I feel that it is there, but it goes right through me. If I were younger, then I would feel it, and to resist would be an act of courage. I would think: Surely all those guys can’t be wrong. They must know what they are doing. Why should I trust my half-informed opinion against the weight of all the experienced, heavy-jowled wisdom sitting unquestioning on the buses? No doubt there are aspects I haven’t thought of. I have lived in this country only ten years, after all. I have fought in none of its wars. I should go this once, and see what it’s like, and there I’ll have time to think about it.
I have a tendency to credit any roughly normal-looking stranger with wisdom, until it is proved otherwise. But I have lived long enough—and it has been proved otherwise often enough—that I have learned to correct for this tendency as for an optical illusion.
I stand, therefore, amused. It is an ancient scene. One alone against a multitude. If I were to look with inner vision, I know I would find myself in good company, on the shoulders of giants. But it is amusing that I, little Stevie Langfur from Cedarhurst, Long Island, who did in the privacy of his home, and sometimes secretly in public places, things of which any decent human being would be rightly ashamed, should nonetheless be granted the honor of playing this part here.
Yet these men are also old enough, have suffered enough in life, from a woman, or a friend, or a child, that to resist the army and pay the price for conscience’ sake is comparatively no great matter. Have been riddled through enough, that to be a sieve against the wave is no great matter. And surely among these hundred and fifty or so—I know it from the surveys—there must be fifty who believe that what we are doing in the West Bank is unnecessary and therefore immoral. And among these fifty, there must be twenty or ten or five or three or two—two more than I!—who feel as strongly about it as I do. So why does no one else think to draw the line here? Why am I standing alone?
Yet I can understand why—or partly. Two considerations, financial and moral, work together. These are old-time Israelis. They don’t have the security of well-stocked families abroad. Both husband and wife work, and if they are careful they manage to make it through the month. During reserve service the National Insurance pays the husband’s salary, but not if he’s in prison. (The movement called Yesh Gvul—”There is a limit/border”—helps the families of soldiers who take the course that I am taking, but few are aware of that.) Another thing: one doesn’t know how long the screw will turn, and when they finally stop sending you back to prison and give you an assignment you can accept, there’s that time too. What employer will put up with so indeterminate an absence, especially if he is against refusal, as practically everyone is? Or if you have your own business, your clients will need to go elsewhere.
And then, as the clincher, comes the moral consideration: I should go to the West Bank in order to restrain the violent ones among our soldiers, the trigger-happy, the beaters, the bone breakers. I should go there to save Arab lives.
There is truth in this. The Palestinians are thankful for the kind ones.
And if these two considerations are not enough, there are others: We are a democracy after all. As a citizen one can vote. One can demonstrate. But as a soldier, one must obey the orders of a government which represents the will of the majority.
So one may be totally against the occupation, and even in favor of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, but one gets on the bus.
In my case the financial pressure is not there. I work for a Palestinian tour agency. I guide Christians through the Holy Land.
On the other hand, people do refuse, so why not these? In the two years of intifada ninety Israelis have stood as I do now. Most were under financial pressure. Despite this and despite the moral argument and the point about democracy, they chose jail. There have probably been others for whom the army (which is sensibly wary) changed the assignment. And there must be thousands like those who are waiting for the doctor. The number of refusers is small, but we are a small country.
It is well to remember too that until a few years ago our army was something holy for most of us. It had become a symbol, perhaps the principal symbol, of our resurgence as a people after the Holocaust. In moments of great anxiety it brought such swift deliverance that it took on a biblical aura. Through it we tasted again—or thought we did—the ancient miracles, the parting of the waters, the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, the tumbling of the walls. There is no healing, no consolation ever, when a soldier falls in battle. But there was a time, even without consolation, when one could say that he had fallen for something meaningful. To his family one could say that the abysmal and surely endless pain they were feeling was the strength of their bond to him, and that this bond was part of the bond which bound our whole people, the bond for the sake of which he had fought and risked and fallen, and that the whole people would always be with them in their loss. And it was so. I discovered this in 1972, when I was here as a student, on the day after our athletes were slaughtered at the Munich Olympics. The mourning was not only in the media. It was in every face, in every back, in every word. That’s when I discovered that there was a community here, a wholeness, a being-with-one-another which could face those deaths and in its sorrow be more powerful than death, be, in very sadness, an affirmation of life over death. With that kind of connection, who would refuse the army? It was practically unheard of.
And now look at us. In Lebanon the army lost any glimmer of holiness. It was—after its first few days—a different kind of war for us. It was not a war to defend our very life. It was rather politics by another means, an attempt to fulfill an ex-general’s vision of a new order in the Middle East. And now another unnecessary war: this futile attempt to suppress the intifada. The distance between the men on the buses and me is the rift that has opened up within our people. Our brokenness shows in many places, but nowhere so strongly as in the fact that ninety of us so far, in the two years of the intifada, have refused, and gone to jail—a thing unheard of! unheard of!— and that I too stand here, not picking up my bags, not moving toward the third bus.
There are in fact a few others standing about, but not for my reason apparently. A group of officers, including Yosi, has been going around visiting them one by one. Each becomes the focus of a conference. Then the soldier picks up his army bag and his airline bag and his Uzi and moves either to the line for the doctor or to the third bus, and the conference changes venue. Mopping up.
“What about you?” Gruffly. A lone officer from the buses behind me.
“I do not go to the Territories.”
He is tall, kindly looking, with a wrinkled face. He has put on gruffness for the occasion.
“You can go to Bethlehem. With my bus.”
“Bethlehem is in the Territories.” I have to muster my courage and make it clearer. “I refuse to go to the Territories. On grounds of conscience.” This is a slogan, a category. It will register.
“There’s no such thing as refusing to go to the Territories. You are refusing an order.”
“So I’m refusing an order.”
Then suddenly he melts:
“I respect your opinion.”
And he goes away. I am left to ponder this.
The conference moves toward me. They are talking about me. The kindly one joins them.
“I respect your opinion,” he repeats in their hearing.
Yosi: “I understand the issue of conscience.” He looks down at me through his sunglasses. A large man with an intelligent air, a certain personal force. These sayings—”respect your opinion,” “issue of conscience”—unexpected from the mouths of officers—are also mere slogans. It is not the living man who talks in them. When surprised by something basic, we are reduced to slogans.
“As I told you in our interview two months ago, I am ready to serve anywhere in the State of Israel and in all of Jerusalem.” Prepared text.
“Where do you live?”
“In the German Colony.”
“Where’s that?” he asks the others. “I’m weak in Jerusalem.”
“South,” I say. “Near the railroad station.”
Perhaps he wants to arrange a night watch for me on my block.
“You can be in Bethlehem!”
All approve. He has solved it.
“Bethlehem is not part of the State of Israel, and it is not part of Jerusalem.”
He was thinking that I might just want to be near home. Conscience and all.
“Give him Har Gilo,” he says to the kindly one.
“Now wait! I can’t promise him Har Gilo.”
The kindly one does not understand, I am sure, but this is a trick. The idea is to persuade him to give me Har Gilo, and I am supposed to accept with relief. Only during the bus ride, after we have passed the Jerusalem neighborhood called “Gilo,” will I, ignorant American soap, begin to learn the difference between it and Har Gilo. Har means mountain. Har Gilo is a Jewish settlement in the West Bank; it looks down on the Jerusalem neighborhood. (This neighborhood is also in the West Bank, but after the Six-Day War the government declared it to be part of Jerusalem, in which—all of which—I have stated my willingness to serve.) Once I am sitting in the guardhouse of Har Gilo, I’ll be ashamed to say what a fool I was. How could I claim to know enough to refuse the army, if I don’t know the difference between Gilo and Har Gilo? Guarding the settlement gate, chatting with the women, sipping coffee and munching homemade cake, I’ll see how pleasant and harmless and interesting it all is.
“Har Gilo,” I say, “is in the Territories. Look,” with a gesture of helplessness now, “whether it’s Bethlehem or Har Gilo or Hebron or Maon, a border is a border. There is a border.” In Hebrew, Yesh Gvul.
He removes the sunglasses.
“You know, this means jail.”
“I know.”
“You’re ready?”
“I hope so.”
He calls someone over. Decision taken.
“Make out a”—and he says a number—”for this man.”
Man? Already a man?
The fellow, short, thin, and bald, shakes his head and says mournfully to me, “You need this?”
The conference has moved away. I give my name and the bald fellow moves away. I look down at the two bags. So there will be no alternative arrangement in Jerusalem. It is done.
I am going to jail.
I sit down on my own bag. Noon. I have been on my feet without noticing it for five hours. Should I pull out Faulkner? Should I finally read? I do not.
The first two buses drive away.
A group of officers. One is glaring at me. It is the first look of hatred I have encountered. A large man with short cropped red hair. But the eyebrows are thick and wild. Bright flames. From beside him another, dark and deeply lined—we are middle-aged men here—calls me. I rise and walk toward him, avoiding the redhead’s eyes.
“Prepare your soul,” says the wrinkled one, “for a trial.”
“I think my soul is prepared.”
That is all. Apparently this is something he is required to say.
“Now?”
“No. We’ll call you. A few minutes.”
I go back and sit down. “Prepare your soul.” In Hebrew it sounds quite natural. “Prepare yourself soulwise” would be a literal rendering. So what am I supposed to do? Think grave thoughts? Go over my arguments? I have lived with the grave thoughts and the arguments for years.
The third bus is half full. It is waiting for those whom the doctor does not discharge. And it is waiting, theoretically, for me.
The wrinkled one comes. It is time.
“After me,” he says.
He disappears into the crowd that has filled up the hallway in front of the doctor’s room. How am I to do this?
Perhaps he expects me to leave the bags down here. Well, I won’t. I stand, thrice widened, the Uzi slung from my neck, before the solid wall of the supposedly sick.
“Excuse me!”
Not even a glance. Invisible. There is nowhere for them to move anyhow. This is a curious kind of waiting. Normally people try to sneak ahead in line. But here the hope is that the third bus will pull away before one’s turn comes. Thus there is a kind of curious restraint, a pale, sweating lethargy. These men are careful each of his place in order not to go in prematurely. They will not part for me. That would shuffle whatever complex order they are keeping track of. I put down my bags.
Suddenly a vibration, a quiver in that mound. It is my wrinkled officer, cursing as he shoves and squeezes. He is spewed out.
“Where the hell are you?”
I bend and lift the bags.
“Leave them here.”
“I will not leave them here.” There is such definiteness in my voice that he doesn’t argue. He takes the army bag and hoists it above his head—I take my duffel bag and do the same—and he simply throws himself against the wall until it parts (Nachshon, think I: there is a legend that the Red Sea would not part until one man leaped in in the faith that it would, and that was Nachshon). And one after the other, he shouting, I excusing myself, a groundhog and a snake, we wend a way through the rooted bodies, past the dull unsurprised faces, my co-refusers, gray refusers (when the mobilization is for service in Jerusalem, not only is there no line for the doctor—there is no doctor), then up through and over those on the stairs, up to the first landing, and it is free.
They do not want to be visible from the offices.
Nachshon tells me to put the bags down outside the door.
I don’t want to. If mine is stolen, I’ll be stuck in the Atlit prison without long underwear. It’ll be all right, he insists. I picture myself raising a fuss, being carted off without my underwear. What is his “all right” worth once it’s gone? Can I wrap myself in his “all right”? Will it keep me warm?
“Give me your weapon.”
This I am glad to get rid of. I haven’t the faintest idea how to use it. I last had an Uzi in my hands six years ago for maybe four hours of my life.
“When you go in you will salute. To every question you will answer ‘Yes, commander’ or ‘No, commander.’ If you are acquitted, you will salute and leave with me. If you are found guilty, you are not to salute. Do you have a hat?”
“Yes.”
“Put it on.”
I dig it out of my pocket and put it on. My heart is pounding. All this formality. Should have prepared my soul.
“What about my bag?”
“I told you it’ll be all right.”
“Will you watch it?”
“No one will touch it.”
It is dark brown. It is lying under the army bag. But it is so heavy. Anyone stealing it would have to take it down through the crowd at the doctor’s office.
I am led to an inner door.
“Not yet,” he says.
It opens. I peek through. There is a small hall, and another open doorway, and there at the desk of Yosi’s secretary, at the far end, sits the redhead from the yard. He is writing.
“I forget when I am supposed to salute.”
“You salute when you go in, and again if you are freed.”
“Like in the movies?”
He looks puzzled. I am serious. In my three-weeks of training no one ever taught me. So now, by way of rehearsal, I make an imitation of American war movies.
“Like that?”
He nods and blushes and glances around.
A smart-alecky-looking kid comes out. He has just been tried.
“Wait here and I’ll call you.”
My escort goes in, exchanges a word with the judge, then steps back, turns sideways, pulls himself to attention, and commands:
“The soldier will enter!”
A last glance at my brown bag in the hallway and I enter. Stop. Snap my heels together and salute. I shouldn’t have snapped my heels together. I have combined the American and the Nazi sides out of World War II movies.
“Name?”
“Stephen Langfur, commander.”
“Number?”
I give my number.
“Do you want to be tried by me?”
And here he looks up for the first time. Boring through. Hating. I don’t quite understand the question. Do I have a choice of judges? Perhaps if I say yes he’ll be nice.
“Yes, commander.”
He writes.
“When did you last do reserve duty?”
“In September last year, commander.”
He writes.
“Where were you stationed?”
“In Jerusalem, commander.”
“And before that?”
“Before that nothing, commander.”
“Nothing?”
He looks at me in disbelief. He asks:
“How long have you been in this country?”
“Ten years.”
“And in ten…”
“Commander.”
“…years you have done reserve duty only once?”
“I did training after three years, commander. Then they called me to a course and canceled it. The next year they called me to a course and disqualified me because of my glasses. Then for two years they didn’t call me. Commander. Then they called me and said they didn’t need me. Then my father was sick in the States and they postponed it and then never called me. I always reported when I was called. Commander. I never tried to get out of it, commander.”
“You are charged with refusing an order. What order?”
“To go to the Territories, commander.”
He writes something. It goes on and on. It is perhaps the decision. Finally he puts down the pen, leans forward over the form, looks up at me, and says softly, “Why?”
This I have not expected. After all, what difference can it make, why? Am I really supposed to persuade him? And now I feel at a disadvantage—because I have to do this in Hebrew, and because I am standing while he is sitting, and because of the tension of ceremony.
“It is immoral for one people to govern another, without the consent of the governed. Commander.”
I should leave it at that. But of course it seems so unreasonable. We can’t just pull out. I don’t want to be a goddamned lily-white do-gooder bleeding-heart idealist. I say:
“There was a time when we had no other choice, because there was no one to talk to.” Slogans. The old phrases. No one persuades anyone. No one can hear anymore, because the minute you push the button of a slogan, everyone knows in advance that you have nothing new to say. My voice doesn’t feel like it’s coming from my own body. It comes from a radio installed in my mouth. “But for years there’ve been people to talk to, and we’ve done nothing. That changes the whole picture.” I can’t help it. “The moment we can do something to end the occupation, and we don’t do it, it becomes immoral. Excuse me that my Hebrew is so bad. Commander.”
“I have no problem with your Hebrew. Do you know what we’re asking you to do?”
“I heard a rumor, to guard Jewish settlements near Hebron.”
“To guard Jews!” he bawls up at me. “Not settlements! Jews!”
Well what the hell are they doing there? I want to ask, but I do not, for I do not, after all, want to antagonize him more. He is glaring at me. Such eyebrows. Crusader. As when I grew a mustache once, and it was red, and my Aunt Gertrude said, “That’s a Crusader coming out above your upper lip.” There was no one then to guard Jews.
“We are not asking you to kill Arabs. You don’t have to dirty your hands. You go to a settlement. You get a gate. It’s your responsibility for a few hours a day. If you come up against Arabs, it’ll be Arabs who are trying to get in through your gate and throw grenades or take hostages. Or do you think terrorists ought to be protected?”
He awaits an answer.
“No, commander.”
“No, so then you should go and sit in the gate and protect Jews. We’ll forget all about this.”
He has lifted his pen. He is poised to release me. I am confused. Defend Jews! Images come to mind, in black and white. Of course Jews should be defended! I have no position left. I forget what my position was. I am grasping for a wisp.
“If you will allow me so much time, commander, the truth is, I am not so much in favor of the policy of the settlements either.”
“Do you think we should just leave those Jews undefended?”
“If we were doing all we could, and the Palestinians were the ones saying No, then I’d be willing to go.”
He leans back, shakes his head, looks at me quizzically. For the first time without that hatred.
“But there are negotiations going on. All the time. Under the table. We’ve made a peace initiative. Are you putting yourself and the army to all this trouble because you’re not satisfied with the pace of the negotiations?”
I feel really stupid. After the first few slogans, it seems, I have nothing to say.
“Yeah, sure I’m not satisfied. Commander. We’re acting as if it’s a card game and we have to hold the cards close to our chest. If Labor had won the last elections…” Now this is really stupid, but having started, I have to continue. I am falling into a vortex. “…then maybe we would have gone ahead as we should, and if we were trying all we could, then I could in good conscience go. But unfortunately for me Labor didn’t win.”
Not exactly the trial of Socrates.
He reddens. He bawls:
“I am a leftist! And I say you are wrong!”
Hard to believe. He is the image of a right-winger.
“I am about to send you to jail for twenty-one days because you are not satisfied with the pace of the negotiations and because you don’t want to defend Jews. If we were sending you to run after Arabs, maybe I could understand—not agree, but understand. But to defend your own people, women and children, against some terrorist—”
He goes on. I miss part of it, because I am thinking:
Twenty-one days! Is that all!
He is saying that while negotiations go on, we have to defend Jews. Then something new:
“What happens if I don’t send you to jail? You’re not in jail, and you’re not doing your reserve duty. So where are you? A man has to be somewhere. That’s anarchy!”
He glares up at me and waits. I say nothing. I am not inclined to defend anarchy.
“You’ll sit in the gate of a settlement. You can argue with the settlers. Maybe you can persuade them.”
He waits. We are both fixed firm. Even if my arguments were stronger, and my Hebrew fluent, would it make any difference? If he were persuaded, he would have to come and stand where I am and say to someone else, “Yes, commander,” “No, commander.” And I will not give up (though I feel that my position has been shattered in the burning focus of his eyes) for the simple reason that I would lose the respect of my friends. I locked myself in during the last few months, half deliberately I think, boasting to them, “The army hasn’t a snowball’s chance to send me into the West Bank.”
“Maybe you want to think about it for five or ten minutes.”
Why not? I studied philosophy.
“Yeah sure. Thinking is always good.”
“Five minutes to think,” he says to Nachshon.
Do I salute?
Nachshon comes and takes me by the arm, so I do not.
Another smart-alecky kid is waiting. Out in the hall my bag is still there under the army bag. I lean against the wall next to it. From the side comes an officer, another deeply lined face, but he has many fancy insignia upon him.
“May I have a word with you?” he asks. Friendly.
“I’ve been given five minutes to think.”
“Well after you’re finished thinking, call me. I’ll be in here.”
He goes into a room on the right.
Why not, after all? I know there are reasons why not, but I could not remember them within that narrow frame: “Defend Jews!” Now, outside, I can push against the frame. The settlements. The Drobles Committee. That was 1979. This committee made a recommendation which became the official policy of the Israeli government. The Jewish settlements are placed where they are with the express intent of surrounding the Arab villages and cutting them off from one another, so that the eighty thousand Jews in the West Bank and Gaza today can help us to dominate the one and a half million Palestinians. And these are the Jews he wants me to protect! They are the heart of a plan to perpetuate the immorality. They will turn out to be the main obstacle to a peace settlement. He wants me to guard the gate of the main obstacle. Worried about their security? So instead of sending me out to guard them in their injustice, let’s pull them back into justice. I’ll gladly participate in that. Send me to the West Bank to do that!
I am champing at the bit to get back in there. But I remember the officer. I catch his eye. He comes out and stands before me, brightly bedecked.
“Don’t be fooled by what you see here.” He points to the signs of rank. I never learned ranks.
“I am a leftist,” he says. “I’m Peace Now.” He lowers his voice, “I think someday the nations of the world are going to make us a Nuremberg Trial for what we are doing to the Arabs.”
My God. I would never say that. I know something about what we’re doing to the Arabs, and you may well call it crime, but to say that!
(Writing this now, I realize what I should have said: “You need a refresher course in the Holocaust.” But I was stunned. I had heard, of course, the invidious comparison before—from my German youth groups—but here?! Among my own people! At such a level!)
“And in spite of that,” he says, “I go to the Territories. It’s exactly the ones like us who are needed to keep our own soldiers under control. Understand?”
I nod.
“I always tell them, ‘I’m the only one to shoot.’ And I shoot in the air. And no one gets hurt. I have saved Arab lives. So you decide, and let me know afterward what you’ve decided.”
“The low gear,” I say, “can slow the car, but it cannot change its direction.”
He looks puzzled.
“The good,” I say, “is sometimes the enemy of the best.”
“Let me know what you decide.”
He goes off. My escort comes. Again the ceremony. I stand before my judge.
“Nu?”
“The settlements are part of a policy—”
“What—Not that. In one word now, do you accept or refuse.”
“I refuse.”
He writes. He gets up and starts to leave, not waiting for me not to salute. “You’re in for twenty-one days.”
Irritated.
(Only twenty-one days!)
“Where? Commander.”
“I don’t know.” He stalks out.
Nachshon looks upset.
“Are you healthy?” he asks.
“I hope so. Basically.”
“Maybe the doctor can find something wrong, and you won’t have to go to jail.”