JERUSALEM 2000

BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...1

2010-02-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

BAGHDADI PROPOSAL DRAFT MANUSCRIPT
BY LURENE GISEE
OCTOBER 2000 – JUNE 2007 WORK PERIOD

That October Day Of 2000

I decided I had put off seeing him for too long. Ten years. Now was the time to go. Right now, which is the only thing a clock can say.

There is no other time.

That’s right, no other time. Not for you and me. Did you ever see a clock, Dear Reader, which told you it is literally 2 p.m. yesterday? No. There is no such clock in the universe. It was right now that October day in San Francisco, the same “now” it is now as you begin this story about the day I was…

Landing In Jerusalem

…quite literally, out of the fog and into the English day’s last light on a British Airways flight heading from London to Tel Aviv. It was still October 6, 2000. By coincidence, the anniversary date of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. “It’s a national holiday in Egypt,” an Egyptian man remarked to me before I left home. “It was a victory for us.”

Victory? I looked at the entertainment screen in front of me, which tracked the plane’s path over Europe. We were just now flying over Yugoslavia, its maddened people streaming to and from the tear-gassed streets of Belgrade to evict their monster, Slobodan Milosevic. Somewhere among them as well, the country’s ghostly multitude from bloody massacres and rapes.

How does it happen? I felt strange knowing I was over the sites these crimes had occurred. How do modern men turn against their neighbors to commit such atrocities, time and time again?

I looked down at the open book on my lap. Still René Descartes. I lay my head on the seat cushion and drew a deep breath. Always René Descartes. I turned my eyes to the clouds now below us.

I was going to Jerusalem. Jerusalem will always be Jerusalem, a city as known for murder across ethnic and ideological lines as it is for King David, Jesus, and the call for Allah. The city of religion. The city of religiosity.

Today, there was a chilled mood on this plane. On September 30, Ariel Sharon of the conservative Israeli Likud party decided to take a walk around the al Aqsa Mosque with armed escort, and Palestinian riots subsequently erupted, and continued. It was not a spontaneous demonstration, but quite planned. Yasser Arafat knew fully of Sharon’s plans to tour the area that day. Israeli leader Ehud Barak was issuing ultimatums. American Secretary of State Madeline Albright and French President Jacques Chirac were vainly trying to quell the riots through diplomacy. It was too late. The new Intifadah had begun.

The Kurdish Cabdriver

“Perhaps you can call on your cellular phone? The man’s name is Shabi Gamlieli,” I said to the cab driver. I was now on the streets of Jerusalem with several other occupants of the cab.

“Oh! That’s a Kurdish name!” he said, navigating his way through the narrow, dark streets of Jerusalem with several other occupants of the cab. “You should have said so earlier. I’m a Kurd,” he said, smiling at me in the rear view mirror.

Intermittent flashes of light played on his face. A domestic worker with whom I shared the rear seat, a Pilipino woman, was bitterly complaining about not being dropped off first. The cab driver continued to address me as she complained, like she wasn’t there.

“I wouldn’t have thought of it. Yes, Shabi is from a large, Kurdish family, originally out of Iraq,” I said, still rummaging through my purse for lip balm.

“How in the world are you in Jerusalem visiting a Kurdish family?” he asked, looking at me in laughing astonishment. “And now, of all times! Don’t you know what’s been going on here the last couple of days? Where are you from? You’re not a Kurd…”

“San Francisco. Last time I was here was 1990.”

“Ten years. What were you doing then?”

“Studying at the Hebrew University on Har Azafim. Rothberg School. You know the campus. It’s across from Hadassah Hospital near…”

“I know, I know.”

“I always lived in Jerusalem. I took some road trips, though. Northern Israel, Eilat, Cairo.”

“Oh, you made it to Cairo.”

“Sure, but it was dicey. All my Israeli school friends pulled out at the last minute. There was a terrorist attack on an Israeli bus just prior to the trip.”

I looked at his face in the rear view mirror and saw his eyes shift down and to the left. He gazed at me intensely for five seconds, a newsreel seeming to run behind his eyes.

We were on a dimly lit section of a street for a few seconds. I could barely see his face, but made out the slight smile on his lips. Seconds later, we were driving past the walls of the Old City. My eyes were drawn to the part of Damascus Gate I could see from my perspective. We by now had dropped off the last passenger, and I was the only rider left.

“Do you speak Hebrew, Kurdish?”

“I remember a little Hebrew. The letters, how to spell my name, sound things out. It’s never spoken in San Francisco that I overhear; I mean, it’s not commonly overheard like Spanish. On the rare occasions I whip out a Hebrew book for old times’ sake while sitting in a Fillmore Street café, people either ignore me, have no interest at all, or give me brief, but strange glances. It’s not like Italian or French where people step up and tell stories about their travels. Never could understand why it seems to stand so alone among languages, either. Really alone….but maybe I just don’t know….Oh, and no Kurdish. I heard it from the old guy at the dinner table sometimes at Amminidav, though.”

“So, they come from Iraq.”

“Iraq. In the wedding picture, Shabi’s dad was fully armed with primitive guns. Had to be the 1920s, I guess,” I said, leaning slightly forward. “I must have looked at that picture a hundred times and I still can’t imagine what life must have been. Shabi’s mom was young and little and skinny, standing next to his dad. He was formally dressed in a kind of tribal attire, ready to say the vows, fully loaded with weaponry. They’re still together.”

“Of course they were armed,” he said, turning onto the road to Amminidav. “In Iraq? It was enough to be a Jew. But a Kurdish Jew?” he raised his right hand in a mock stop signal. I was sitting so far forward that a distant observer would have thought we were telling secrets.

I reclined back in my seat, digging in my purse for cab fare. I had no currency. What kind of idiot goes to a rioting Jerusalem with no currency in hand, I thought to myself momentarily. I’m such an idiot. SUCH an idiot.

I looked up again toward the front. “Well, history says the Jewish groups in Iraq would get along alright with the surrounding populations for a while, but things would eventually swell up in some new rage. Then, they would calm down again. Life became intolerable, though, after the talk of Zionism. Same all over the Arab world; God only knows how many Jews were strung up by the neck in Damascus, Baghdad…”

“I know. The same, the same,” he said, slowing the taxi down as we approached a security gate.

Just as we slowed near the gate, the idea flashed through my mind that Arab governments and a high proportion of the residents of those countries seemed not to understand the difference between ethnicity and political culture; Arabs might be an ethnicity spread across the Mideast, but the difference between an Arab in Kuwait and one in Syria are quite notable because of the different political details within the two nations.

In fact, it was an idea that also ran through much of Jewish history – the vast cultural and lifestyle differences, for instance, between a Yemeni Jew and an American Jew -- but I kept the thought to myself because we were approaching my destination. I felt I knew more than many Americans did because of my time at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but most of that was learning about how much I did not know.

What is Jewish history for me? Jewish history is a belief in effort, even in the darkest and filthiest of human rooms.

I snapped out of my thoughts to focus on the thick assortment of trees and bushes near the gates of Amminidav. They did not have a security gate ten years ago, I privately noted.

The Arrival; Shabi in Amminidav

I was standing with one foot on the dirt of Amminidav and my other leg on the second stair leading to Shabi Gamlieli’s house. I was surrounded by leaves too large to grow on the land of most American homes on the beautiful pacific coast. I remembered in a flash the image of Shabi’s Iraqi hands watering just these plants when they were little, the look he’d get on his face when the garden tools were in his hand, tending flowers and shrubs. Shabi and Tova probably never had the same attitude about those plants. Funny how these things come to you in the wake of a divorce.

The plants had grown up since I’d left Jerusalem. How powerful a little plant can be with human memory! You don’t think it’s in your mind filling space until a time arises and makes its demand that you remember. Maybe you pass the flower bed of a strange front yard one day and find yourself thinking your grandmother used to space her plants using just that number of inches, and at that, some memory of her fragrant, fresh bread seems to fill your mind.

A dim light was pouring out the kitchen window onto those leaves now, and onto Shabi’s gesturing hands as he complained about the price of the cab fare with the driver. His face was ostensibly focused on the driver, but underneath his expression I was feeling some kind of tension. He didn’t like having to dig up the fare, for one thing.

When we got into the brightly lit kitchen, all the smaller memories in my head of living in this house came back. There was the full swimming pool in the back, the olive tree, the artist’s studios, the in-law apartments, the stone back deck.

The endless sun. This handsome, agricultural Israeli right near me.

Shabi Gamlieli loved earth, plants, dirt, olives, water, sun, wind, and desert. Every Baghdadi I’ve met – even the few I’ve known who were ridiculously wealthy from work in or on one of the world’s major cities – had some corner of his mind on the garden shovel, no matter what was otherwise taking his attention.

Shabi and I spoke at eye level, so he was about 5’8. He had silky dark brown hair, and large Iraqi eyes that you could not ignore during conversation. It would have been hard for me to lie to Mr. Gamlieli, or to hide anything for long. To have that kind of tie with another person remains to me a sophisticated achievement in life. By that standard, I have few.

I have to remain on this point for a moment. Here was Shabi’s face again. A face dances.

His eyes could be looking at yours like they were Las Vegas billboards promising big, big money – ‘I never knew until today how fascinating I truly was!” you’re thinking. If you’ve ever sat on the patio with Shabi on a sun-filled Shabbat, you know this is true.

You also know Shabi’s eyes could be avoiding your entire face, as if, deep down, he felt sorry for you, and you didn’t warrant attention.

That’s not all. His eyes could assume complete vacancy, like a bored, Montana traffic cop who’s hearing again the echo of his fault-finding ex-wife’s mom in court. (He lost miserably, by the way.) At times like this, you realize you’re not good looking, and that you might as well get off your useless ass and act now. Maybe you’ll make something of yourself.

When I was a visiting student, Shabi often had guests on Shabbat. They would be sitting on the stone patio in the bright sun drinking juice and laughing. The Baghdadi would speak for minutes at a time without stumbling on his words or being interrupted by his captivated friends. People loved telling him their most dramatic life stories. Especially women, because he would listen, and women’s lives in every country are often inadvertently or deliberately overlooked.

Whether a parent needed an ear or not, they could count on Shabi and Tova’s swimming pool being crystal-clear, and the house and yard being clean; The kids could have fun in safety as Mom or Dad sat nearby. That’s the way it was.

I am not sure how Tova felt about this all, though. We had good relations, but I never felt like I knew her well. I only watched her talking to her kids, picking up the house.

On that note, the Gamlieli family – all of them – seemed to believe that their homes were meant to serve their friends and visitors. This was the second half of 1989. This was just before the fall of the communist world. I might be saying hello to an Israeli settler, a prominent local physician, an international businessman from Tel Aviv, or a Baghdadi housewife from a nearby moshav with four kids -- all in the pool behind us. After the fall of the wall, however, and my return to America, things changed greatly for Israeli society. It became a new population. Russia opened, the Soviets were no more.

When I discuss my Hebrew University days, I am talking 1989-1990. The Berlin Wall fell a day I was on campus in Jerusalem. I am becoming my grandmother’s voice when I write about these things. I have to talk about not just Israel, but changing national ties, rules, borders and understandings within Europe just like she did.

Once in a while, the air over Shabi’s yard would be quiet for a stretch. I would hear him somewhere in the back yard fussing over a plant, his Hebrew/English lettered cigarette pack would be abandoned on the patio table. I wonder why such five-second memories remain in my mind when so many other things have not.

Shabi had a core perplexity in the sense that he kept some things to himself and you were not sure why he chose what he did for nondisclosure.

You might ask a simple question. He would give you what seemed a rehearsed, distant smile when he was in this mood.

It looked to me like he was using such isolated periods to think, and to read. He seemed to prefer history books and memoirs by political statesmen he admired, many of whom were Israeli. He especially admired Yitzhak Rabin.

I remember Shabi and myself talking about American diplomacy once or twice – it wasn’t often – and I would have an intuitive feeling his mind just stepped back to check the landscape before making the statement he just did. Or maybe it was some color that arose in my mind….I’m not sure; It’s an ineffable thing and hard to recall accurately. The sure thing was he seemed to want to be careful how he sounded to a visiting American student, which is who I was back then.

He was a devastatingly handsome negotiator. He could have been a con artist if it was the only choice available to him in Iraq. If he’d been living the impossible life of his father, navigating his way skillfully over the invisible tribal lines of that country, he might well have been one; Learn to con, hide and lie, or learn to die. Suit yourself. Nobody’s going to stop you from having a personal intention in life.

Mr. Gamlieli, however, was not a con man that had to trick border guards to get to the other side alive. Shabi had a country, and it was a country that wanted him and everything for which he stood. There was no other country – or idea -- that he would have wanted to inhabit.

I have to say “idea” because as we enter the 21st Century the very notion of the nation-state is twisting itself to something we can’t see; Haiti and Cuba are both island nations, but they’re not even close to the same government structures, the same ideas.

I mean, let’s face it: Today’s aspiring nation barely needs a coherent idea underneath it to function militarily. But we need a coherent idea. We need another method of organizing and defining space altogether. It’s going to have to be outside the structure of a nation-state, territory, refugee camp, reservation, or what have you.

I don’t know what that new definition of space will be. Nobody does that I’ve read or heard. All we know is that it’s time to reform the space we occupy into something that works for a greater percentage of the world’s population, millions of whom are destitute as dirt, poorly educated and under the boots of dictators. But if a new concept of human organization involves the same old remittances of big chunks of cash or military power by the United States, Western Europe and the economically powerful areas of Asia, then it won’t work for long. It never has.

I often came back to thinking of the countries surrounding Israel, however. I still do, because the Arab world needs a completely new view of itself. Not the European view of 1637, the Russian of 1920, or the American of 1776 or even 1965.

It needs a clear and unique view of itself. This ongoing obsession with the Jewish state is a red herring. Deep down, we all know that. The Arab world must begin to reorganize itself on solid, philosophical principles when it comes to daily life, international relations and economic management, not Islam. Islam is a religion, not a school of accounting.

Still, it was not politics that had me in Jerusalem that night. It was Shabi. I had an overflowing bin of good and pulling memories about him and his family. This was what got me on the plane. He’d been asking me to visit, but more insistently when Tova walked out. I had been telling myself I loved him, and that it was time to fly to Jerusalem, to sit down and to listen.

At first glance, there was the same house. I was in the same living room.

This room was still your average Israeli family of 1989. It was still Tova holding Hagar in her arms watching an American or European movie with Hebrew subtitles. It was soda and popcorn from goofy monster Hebrew paper sacks. But the calm began to dawn on me.

The real change that hit me was in the kitchen. There were no spoons sitting on the counter with steaming food on them, no Israeli treats half eaten, still sitting on chocolate smeared napkins. No coffee ready to be made in two minutes for guests, with a few grounds spilled on the counter by an old silver spoon. The feeling of something not being there was less a large set of letters on a blackboard in front of my face as it was a harmless summer bug swirling near my head. Hardly noticeable, but it was there.

Looking into and around his face, I saw the friendly ghost of his ex-wife, Tova. She was still piddling around with supplies in the cabinets.

“I wish you had made it to Jerusalem before,” Shabi said, looking straight to my face.
He put his hand on the American cigarette box and moved them closer to himself. We were at the kitchen table talking.

“When Tova left, I was hoping you would be in Israel soon. It was a terrible time. I tried hard to find out what her problem was. I didn’t understand what she wanted, or what was wrong. The kids were good, the house was good. We had enough money. The sex was good. I tried and tried to talk to her.”

He set his hands in a questioning position and shrugged his shoulders upward.

It may as well have been me shrugging my shoulders, too. I knew nothing. Was that part of the reason Shabi wanted me to return to Jerusalem?

“I finally accepted Tova’s decision,” said Shabi. “I saw I was not going to change her mind. I said, ‘Okay,’” he lightly slapped his hand down on the surface of the table. “’If you want to go, go.’”

He had the floor. I sat looking at him like I was watching a rehearsal and would give my review at the end of the set. I didn’t mention anything about how I’d impulsively made the trip to Jerusalem, finally, or how some people were calling me crazy for making the trip when I did. Why would I? To inspire gratitude?

Looking at the man in front of me at the table, holding his pack of American cigarettes half-consciously, I felt that any talk with imagery of San Francisco would have been off. Too soon.

I do not think he realized how noticeable was his frequent grabbing of the pack to bring it either within his grasp, or to a different spot on the table. He didn’t have that nervous tic before. Why did he smoke American cigs now, anyway? What happened to the Israeli pack of Time?

I could not believe this was the same man I knew ten years ago. He kept talking.

“I gave her the money I had to give her,” he continued, leaning forward slightly. “I had to give it to her. There was no use arguing about it.”

He raised his hands to the air weakly.

“Now, some time has gone by. I am okay. No – I’m glad! My life is better alone, but…”

He paused to consider his next words about his youngest daughter. His eyes bore into my own for some seconds.

“Hagar is angry with her mother. She will not speak to her now. I told her, ‘Hagar, my dear, you cannot…’”

He let his eyes move downward for a moment to recall the moments of talking with his daughter. “…’Make separation…with your mother. You can’t do it. You have to make things alright with your mother.’”

I was looking at a home without Tova and seeing one too vague. I can’t remember a color or sound to it.

I can’t say Shabi uttered those few sentences about Hagar’s distancing from her beloved mom with satisfaction, but I could see it was nonetheless his one-inch of consolation. Why? Because for now. Hagar was sympathetic, sticking by dad. Those kinds of anger don’t last, but for a few days, they make the bruises hurt less.

But it was an artificial consolation to Shabi. I could tell that by his face as he talked. It didn’t fool me, and it didn’t even fool him, deep down. Even now, I wasn’t seeing an expression of distaste toward Tova or a disrespect of their years together. I thought I was seeing, rather, his satisfaction that some things were not winnable or touchable in a divorce. Hagar was it.When I was going to school in Jerusalem and staying with them all, adored Hagar was nine years old.

Shabi admitted that he had been tough with his kids as a policy. The chores had to be done carefully, and done on time. He felt it would be better preparation for life in Israel, which by that time had been in war with the Arabs after war backed by communists after war perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists. Wars and fights without end.

But Hagar was comparatively spoiled by both Shabi and Tova. She had her little schedule of household chores, tasks for the upkeep of the yard. But Hagar’s childhood was filled with play with her parents and siblings, and by games with her friends on the Moshav. I remember Shabi used to take Hagar with him on nearly every errand he had. She looked just like him, and she was always at his side. The olive, Iraqi skin. The thin build. The classic, almond-shaped, brown eyes. so typical of Baghdad. Daddy’s girl.

Tova would keep her tucked close, too. They would watch American and European movies dubbed in Hebrew many evenings with Hagar snuggled up with her on the couch. I remember the silly snack containers that would be lying on the coffee table. You didn’t have to read Hebrew to picture the buying scene at the grocery isle with Hagar and mom. All kids are the same this way, aren’t they? Their little hands up in the air, pointing toward some bright, cartoonized box. Penguins, dogs, elephants -- all depicted as wanting whatever it is inside the box.

“Where is Hagar, speaking of her?” I asked.

“She’s in India with Tamar. The traditional trip after leaving the military. Do you know?” he said.

“I do.”

“She will be home in some weeks. She’s having a good time.”

I suddenly threw my head back in laughter. “Wait. The same Tamar she used to play with all the time when she was little?”

“Yes.”

“Hagar and Tamar. Tamar and Hagar,” I chanted.

I was glad we were laughing, but I’d already noticed a dim pattern since I’d been sitting with Shabi. He would begin with a statement of despair. I don’t remember the particular statements, but his shoulders would be slumped, his hands might be gesturing surrender, as someone who’s run out of good arguments. He would stay like this for five or six minutes.

Then, something would strike him as cheerful and he would snap into that mentality for a time. After all, there were four or five things nobody was noticing about this issue that were clear and colorful….Then, he’d drift into a state of distraction, mumbling something to himself in Hebrew, getting up, searching a kitchen drawer….Then, as if a light had clicked on, he’d proclaim something philosophical he forgot to mention about the passing of time, how some fact of life surfaced then submerged again like a submarine; how his children had become adults, the weird days after Tova moved.

We hear so much fluff about the victorious Israeli, but that’s all it is; a dinner table conversation at 3 a.m. that’s irrelevant to the day ahead in this floating country. Maybe a little of the Israeli is puffed up, but it never seems to last long if things aren’t right in the home. Everyone is the same this way.

Okay, I told myself, Shabi was alone now. Typical post-tragedy stuff, but I was no expert. I’d never been married. I knew it ruined some people, set others free as they’d never before been. Shabi was not yet 50.

We’d been talking for hours. We were yawning.

The Israeli took his sweater off the chair and put it on. After all this talk, he was cold. We talked more. We continued talking until four in the morning. Finally, he looked at the clock.

He hoisted my large suitcase from the living room through the door of Hagar’s room.

“I don’t know why you come to visit now after all this time. Yom Kippur is beginning tomorrow. We can’t go anywhere.”

He placed the suitcase near the wall. He straightened himself and looked at me.

“I remember Kippur. No, I didn’t think of the holidays when I got my ticket, and the travel agent didn’t mention it. They’d sooner mention Carnival then Kippur. But it’s alright. I can use the peace and quiet. I love being back in Jerusalem. I’m sorry about the outbreak of hostilities just now, though.”

“Bad for the economy, too. Do you know that I had my hotel rooms booked for these next two weeks and every single guest cancelled? I ordered some curtains from a man in The West Bank. I already paid for them. But now, he cannot deliver them. Everything is stopped. We all lose money. And more people will die,” he said, his voice trailing off as he lumbered into his bedroom.

I fiddled with my belongings. It was dinnertime for me in San Francisco, and I didn’t know how I would sleep.

There was a large photo of Hagar hanging on the wall. She was leaning forward on her right leg; hand on her hip, looking dynamic and chic. Her personality emerged from that picture, and, knowing Shabi and Tova, and the way the family was in ’89, it would be exactly the kind of photo of Hagar they would both want to show around the Moshav.

I fell into some sort of slumber, but it was the weird, otherworldly kind of sleep you get after a long, international flight.

Kippur Night

I remember seeing people with shawls walking down the little streets. Shabi and I were driving to his parents’ home around the corner. We had gone there many times to eat a decade ago, always on Fridays.

We walked in and the first, most obvious differences were how attractive the children had grown up to be, and how old Shabi’s father now appeared to be.

He had memory, mobility and sight problems. He was 93 now. One eye had been clouded over since he was a young man because of an eye infection he’d had as a child in Iraq. Someone in the old Kurdish village used a folk remedy for an eye infection. It ended up clouding his eye over for life. The old Jewish Kurd was sitting at the head of the table in his Keepah and shawl nibbling at some bread.

As various family members straggled in, they hurriedly kissed him and his wife, who was puttering around in the kitchen. Just the sight of it brought memories of other Jerusalem families to my mind hurriedly. Memories of families where one member was a survivor of the European Holocaust, would sit silently at the table, and the rest of the kids learned to live normally around the living evidence of it for the rest of time.

That was not quite the story with this living room, though.

When I saw Shabi’s mother scramble into the dining room, I looked at her and smiled.

“Shalom,” I said. It was one of the few things I said to her, now or ten years before.

“Shalom,” she answered with a large smile. She motioned me to the table.

The Kurdish matriarch still wore a great deal of gold around her wrists and neck. She’d always had a kind of Kurdish look of wealth and status about her. Being old had not changed her look. Even with the variety of immigrants we have in the United States, I have yet to see an 86-year-old woman dressed like this in the streets of an American city. I doubt I ever will; the Kurds we do have here are probably quite modern in their habits. The old, tribal looks of Iraq are a lost, lost world for Jews. Not in books, perhaps, but in reality, it’s gone.

A tall, dark haired man with a cast on his right leg entered the room.

Even if he’d been in a full-body cast entering an auditorium full of men his age, he’d easily be the most noticed man by the women. It was Herzl, one of Shabi’s brothers.

When I was a student at The Hebrew University, my Israeli roommate in the dorm room, Rachel, nearly fainted when she saw statuesque Herzl. Thick, rich, curly hair. One of those chiseled faces that one sees so often in fashion magazines on male models that it doesn’t seem real.

I couldn’t help noticing my face reddening slightly. I never knew what to say to Herzl. Whatever the tint of my face, though, Herzl did not seem to notice anything except I hadn’t been at the table for ten years.

“Lurene! Shalom! It’s been a long time since you’ve been around. Welcome back to Israel.”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling meekly.

I liked the small amount of Herzl’s architecture I saw in his houses. Why? Elegant.

Israeli architecture, according to the careful words I read of those who practiced it, gave me the feeling that Israel had arrived in the world, and that it was a state with something fresh and positive to say for itself.

Interestingly, Herzl had built his own family’s home with a large window facing the nearby Arab village. I had the idea that he wanted his kids to grow up being aware of the inhabitants of Israel – all the inhabitants of Israel.

Various third-generation members trailed in. One young man, Herzl’s son, gave all in the room a kiss. He stopped at me. His hair was tied back in a ponytail, and he had every bit of Herzl’s six-foot-something height. I couldn’t remember what he looked like when he was a boy.

“Do you want a kiss, too?” he smiled.

“Yeah,” I said. He gave me a fast kiss on the cheek. Herzl’s daughter was there, too. She was helping her father with his crutch. She only quickly smiled. She had no memory of me.

Shabi’s mother set a piece of pita in front of her husband who was sitting, weak and frail, at the head of the table. The Indian assistant, a woman who might have been in her early 30s, had assisted him in sitting down. Dimly witnessing the family festivities, he broke a portion of the bread and passed the rest of Shabi. Shabi took a portion and passed some to me.

“Bread. Bread. There is always bread we share, for all the history,” Shabi said in a low, matter-of-fact tone as he chewed.

This would be the food as I remembered it. A bowl of steaming red Kubeh soup was set on the table. Kubeh is a beat soup with leafy vegetables and semolina-coated meatballs. There was also a large dish of white rice glimmering with olive oil. I sat looking at the filling, delicately spiced Iraqi favorite.

A Kurdish Jew in Iraq

On the living room wall, there was that old photo of Shabi’s parents the day they married in Iraq, maybe in the late 30s. I’ve forgotten. Whenever it was, I knew life for a Kurdish Jew in Iraq had been a tightrope. When this couple brought themselves into a new Israel about 1951 or 1953, they would know for the first time relative political and economic security even though it was no American suburb in those days.

Iraqi Jews were significant both in the Mideast and in the complex mix of Jewish history. According to an article by the Wall Street Journal June 30, 2003, a high Mesopotamian priest in Babylon once “ruled as the supreme leader of Eastern Jewry.”

“Known as the Exilarch, he settled all disputes brought before him by Jews living as far away as India and Spain.”

The article reports the descendants of Iraq’s Jews today are in various areas of the globe.

“They include such influential business leaders as the Saatchis of London, the Kadorie family of Hong Kong, and the Jordache and Sassoon clothing clans of the U.S.”

Most of the Gamlielis were educated and carried inside themselves a sense of history and self-worth. There is more to the story of Iraqi Jewry, but to what extent Shabi’s family played a direct role in it, if any, I did not know. I did know that most if not all of those Jews who vividly remember Jewish life in Iraq are either dead or, like Shabi’s father, extremely old. There may be a small Jewish community still in Iraq, but I am not clear on this today.

I’m no historian of Jewish affairs, but if Iraqi society loosens up the chains of dictatorship, I think we will hear more about this significant population of Jews, scattered as they are today around the world. There are pockets in areas like Los Angeles and London, but an outsider like me needs to dig hard to find the stories. The fact that I can tell these stories about a few personal relationships with Baghdadis, like this one, put me at both an advantage, and a disadvantage, I’ve often thought. Disadvantage because people will expect me now to know things I don’t know. I have no prayers or poems from 1896 to tell.

Why should anyone care? I am not sure, but I did care. It wasn’t a waste of my time. They were from the land that had the Garden of Eden, or so the bible says. That’s at least a good starting point for an American.

“Go ahead, dear, eat while it’s hot. We don’t wait for a full table these days. We’ve become less formal,” Shabi said, bringing my mind back to the plate.

I noticed again the young, Southeast Asian woman helping Shabi’s father at the table. So much had changed since the Berlin Wall came down. Israelis now had Asian labor everywhere, though that did not exactly connect to events of a decade ago. The new workers were often from the Philippines, China or other areas of Asia.

Economically, it had consequences for Palestinians. The old “Arab work,” as many Israelis used to dismissively call it, was now done by these guest workers.

This economic shift was due to the policies of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian terror machine as far as I could see, as well as the smiling readiness of third-world labor to work in Israel without engineering violent political tantrums.

So, having gone through of all that, I was one of the few Americans in Jerusalem that night, or so people kept telling me.

I’ll never quite forget being at that table. It had a “now” feeling about it, and it gives that sensation when I recount it. New-age healers often advise their clients to focus on “now” when meditating. Is it not an inescapable fact that “now” is a distinct memory sometimes?

It might have been just that kind of now during those days in Jerusalem. I know because of the feeling I have when writing these words.

Shabi and I finished eating, and left the house. We found ourselves going to the home across the street from Shabi’s home, where his brother used to live with his wife before their divorce. Now, the lot had two homes, the new one built and owned by Herzl.
Shabi knocked at the door of Herzl’s former wife, Michal, who still lived in the older home. [Pronounced, Mik HALL] She greeted us at the door. She had white, shoulder length hair and was dressed in a combination of styles; her clothing was loose and inspired by a mix of 1990s India and 1960s Berkeley. Her jewelry was unique and handmade by her. It stood out for its unique shapes curling around her neck and dripping from her ears.

“Michal, you’re beautiful,” I said, giving her a hug while still at the entrance area of the home. I looked down at the multi-colored, hand-made rug on the floor. In fact, the rich colors of a rainforest at twilight were everywhere.

“That’s a lovely rug.”

“I bargained three days for it in Turkey,” she said softly, leading us into the living room.

She said this softly not because she was adopting a special tone to refer to the rug, but because this was her essence. Even though Michal had gained about fifty pounds since the days I saw her ten years ago, her music somehow remained. Now I understood why.

It was her way of moving, and the way her voice sounded like a low-toned renaissance harp. She may not have worked in radio, but she could have easily.

We all sat down in a sunroom at one end of the house. Michal brought us some local, red wine and set out a bowl of pistachios. We began to discuss politics as we looked out on small Arab village two or three hills over. What a window!

“Barak set a 48-hour ultimatum for an end to the violence,” said Michal.

“I heard,” I said, sipping my wine. “I think he issued that ultimatum, October 6, yesterday, while at the same time three soldiers were kidnapped by the Hezbollah on Mount Dov. I heard they were taken into Lebanon. Is that right?”

“I heard that, too. Then yesterday, the Palestinians attacked Joseph’s Tomb in Nabulus.”

I raised my eyebrows a bit. I hadn’t expected things to intensify quite this quickly, but I knew the least.

“It will die down,” Shabi said, leaning back in his seat. He waved his hand dismissively.

I was quiet for a few moments and then said, “Ultimatums. It could feed the fire, couldn’t it?” I popped a nut into my mouth.

What’s with the 48 hour thing, anyway? I have seldom heard of demonstrations that were quelled by statements like this, I thought privately. I was surprised Barak made that move.

I leaned back in the chair and looked at Michal. I wondered what happened between her and Herzl, but would never consider asking her about it.

“I normally would not be here for Yom Kippur and Succoth,” she said in her velvety voice. “I always traveled during the holidays. We were planning to go to the Sinai this year.”

She lit a cigarette. When the small flame arose from her lighter, I saw her large, mysterious eyes had not changed over eleven years.

I tried to turn the talk to American tabloids, to lighten the atmosphere. Maybe we were sick of politics. It was a special day, anyway, Yom Kippur.

Waving one hand like the airy Californian I was, and holding my wine with the other, I joked about American culture, quipping that Hollywood glamour girls who had breast augmentation were vain. I don’t remember how I’d skated over to that subject, but I thought it would lighten the air of the room.

“I don’t know. The surgeons worked wonders on me after my breast cancer operations,” she said calmly.

I hushed, and fast. I was afraid to show any shocked or morose expression, or to even continue joking. When I think back to this conversation now, I think I should have done it differently, asked her for a few details later about the cancer she evidently survived.

“So, you were talking about a trip to the Sinai? That’s exciting, Michal! Why aren’t you going?”

“Oh, no. I can’t go now. It’s too dangerous for an Israeli to go to Egypt right now,” she said, turning her face to Shabi. “I am so disappointed. The Sinai is incomparable. The Bedouins are wonderful people. All the plans had to be cancelled.”

“When the Palestinians make a demonstration, everything stops. It is bad for all the economies in the Middle East,” Shabi said.

“I wish we were complaining about the religious again,” Michal said smiling.

She was talking from the perspective of those in Israel who lived in a secular world. They casually complained about devoutly religious Jews. “Now, we’re hearing people say “Kill Arabs” again.”

Michal said she often heard the Moslem call to prayers from her home because the nearest Arab village was visible from some spots in the Moshav.

We continued talking for another ten minutes, but Michal showed me some of her hand-made work in jewelry. I would’ve have bought two or three pieces in a hot minute if I’d had the money on me.

Shabi and I left Michal’s home a few minutes later. She had no notion of how seriously the little chat had wedged itself in my mind. I made a big effort to hide my feelings about what I was seeing. It was a woman who’d already lost a portion of her chest smoking cigarettes. Why was she hastening her demise?

It was one of the mysteries of the trip, like so many, that I’d never answer.

It got to be eleven.
How did life get leaden?
Just minutes past,
I heard my music.
I couldn’t face the
Only goal my life
Recognized ever
Was death;
The goal of fire
Burning wild,
Looking at the tree.

The Shapeless Nature of Free Will

Shabi and I, alone in the house, settled down to sleep through the holiday. He was in his room. I was in Hagar’s room.

I had my radio with me, and quietly explored around the bands out of curiosity. I was getting Arabic broadcasts, one or two in English. Nothing in Hebrew. Not on Kippur. All Israeli border crossings were closed, including Ben Gurion airport and the ports in Haifa and Ashdod. Public transportation wasn’t running.

Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day of Atonement, and they fast. They spend the day quietly in bed, putting aside all business and social activities. I am not Jewish, but I at least know people don’t “celebrate” Kippur like they do Succoth.

When I think of the two times I have observed this day, I see it as time working a bit more visually, like the space on your kitchen table. That is, in your mind, you move the chunky items around a bit and you see what you didn’t before. “Ah, that’s what I was looking for!”

Days, months, jobs with their endings and beginnings may or may not have the same shape you saw for them before. For me, that’s the power of a day without food and media.

I’d always heard that if you’re visiting a Jewish home on this day, regardless of your religious beliefs, you’re not to be excluded or shut out of the house you’re visiting.

I think in practical terms, though, this probably applies to Israelis visiting other Israelis, or friendly foreigners visiting Jews.

I wanted to sleep now, but my cycle hadn’t left San Francisco. What a long, quiet night and day it was. I thought about everything surrounding me. The moon, the quiet. The night sounds around me, which is to say no sound at all. Jerusalem could get so quiet at night, and I could feel the complete solitude of the place, not what people imagined when back in the United States.

So much time to think. More time uninterrupted than I could get at home. In the United States, one is somehow always surrounded by a cartoon-like certainty of the future, always on its way toward you. You in particular, too. In America, there is this feeling we re given from childhood that a beam of light is around the next corner as the sun is rising. The culture is about “what could happen when…”

But here I was now in Israel, which symbolized more than just history; Israel was developmental centuries ahead of its poverty-mired, substantially undereducated Arab neighbors.

This was not the Jerusalem of prime-time news. It was much closer to the Jerusalem described in areas of the Old Testament, a city of contemplation about the thin air in front of you. What could my life be? What do I want it to be, and who is opposing my ideas of what it could be? One could imagine sitting here that right and wrong were concepts eternally undefined. Life waits patiently for substance from events, and human decisions.

In spite of the guidance provided by different standards of law, right and wrong are empty patches of air waiting for our ideas to fill them with yeses, nos and half-blind choices made in the quiet of the ancient city’s night. It is either the root of criminality or the clean air of freedom. The world never thinks of Jerusalem as containing the raw elements of freedom, but it always did and it does.

Freedom is not the thing we think we are trying to uphold every day to maintain in the United States by a material standard. Our material abundance is part of what we fill our freedom with. There is nothing wrong or immoral about material goods. No. But it’s not freedom itself.

How few ideas of our own creation we are born with! I don’t think it ever occurs to us because we are hit with so many purposive templates from the cradle on. Beneath those templates are the great, undiscovered vacuums every human being holds within. All these years, all these words, and only now did I have something concrete in mind about the true invisibility, danger, and shapeless nature of what we call free will.

I tried to fall off to sleep, but I couldn’t hope for much since my consciousness was adjusting to the time zone. I got into a state of pre-sleep, though. Because a good, healthy sleep never followed it and I instead sat up again, I wrote what I was seeing in my mind during that otherworldly holiday night.

It was a fuzzy, snow-like static when I closed my eyes, though there had been no bright light I was looking at before closing them. This snow-like image seemed to be surrounding me, or so I imagined….white, waved, broadcast-like veins seemed spaced evenly. When I closed my eyes, my entire field of black vision was taken, as if my eyes were open and these white static things were filling the room from ceiling to floor. Transparent, non-material, like light behaves sometimes.

In fact, perhaps this is what it was. A more substantial light. A heavy light. Why was it there? How did it happen? What interpretation, if any, ought I to have given it? How can I recall it? Thin, horizontal, waving columns, like sheep’s wool, or maybe thick clouds. Powdery but unreal….No, the more I thought about it, this imaginary substance behaved like a heavy light, staying in a rational configuration......

I don’t remember if I truly slept, but I found those notes in my suitcase and saved them. These were my thoughts, foolish as they may sound today, on Yom Kippur night in October of 2000.

Jerusalem, like other famous cities in the world, can be quite uneventful in day-to-day life. Let’s be plain: Jerusalem, just like Paris, Athens and San Francisco, has its mundane corners, too boring to merit attention.
October 8, 2000 could have been that kind of day. Shabi and I were walking around the popular Ben Yehuda area. We initially stopped by the small Arab village of Abu Ghosh, but everything had closed. Striding by, we nodded to an Arab storeowner of 50 years or so sweeping his front steps. His head remained cast down revealing his thick, ash-colored hair. His eyes met ours, but for only seconds. His sweeping seemed to lack purpose. It was like watching a dejected, but frightened man walking along, shuffling his feet.
I guessed he was ordered to close shop that day. He would certainly be losing money on this traditionally profitable day. I suspected he and other merchants were under threat of the Arab organizations directing this new Intifadah, like Hamas, and the PLO. But who knew?
We drove into town. Here in downtown Jerusalem, there were few tourists and only a few Israelis compared to the usual post-holiday crowds. It was nice for me because there were few long lines. Even the cafes had plenty of space if we would have wanted to enter one.
Shabi and I kept walking along. A man stopped and looked at us. He was young and had dark, silky hair. He was just the kind of handsome man in his early 30s who always caught my eye. He was laughing with his friends.

I heard some Russian. Looking at some merchandise, I turned my head and smiled. Wow! Was he ever handsome! Guys like that run into me at home in my dreams! I don’t know what I could possibly say to him, and I was thinking of what to say in Hebrew, or if I could remember anything more than the alphabet from my one Russian class so many years ago. (I took the class not so much because I was fascinated with speaking the language of the other side of the iron curtain, but because I was attracted to the bizarre-looking alphabet.)
Shabi then approached me from two storefronts back. The man’s eyes widened, then narrowed. His warm expressions disappeared. He looked terrified, but aggressive, too. His tone now reminded me of a young father trying to protect his 13-year girl.
“He’ll kill you. He’ll kill you!” the man said loudly. With his friends surrounding him, he mimed a knife moving aggressively across his throat. “Come with us. Please. Please don’t stay with him.”
He stretched his arm and hand out to me. A nervous, tight arm and hand. I stood in the middle of the street, immobilized. My mouth was open.
He reached out his hand toward me. “Come with us now. Please! This man will kill you. I am telling you!”

Shabi was a handsome man by any standard. He had the classic features seen on the streets of Baghdad. Rich, olive-toned skin. Prominent nose, thin build, silky dark hair with a slight sweep of gray. He was naturally affectionate, and demonstrative, like most Iraqi Kurds in Israel I’ve ever met. Now, I had to watch him being abused on a Jerusalem street, treated like a criminal. Shabi? I was watching this man who virtually took care of me when I was a student ten years ago?
How could the Russian-speaking man do it, and even more, how was I watching this now without comment? How?
Some gesture Shabi had made on the street had set this seemingly charming man off, had turned this handsome, raven-haired bachelor from the picture of a spring-like day to something like a gathering tornado sky in the American Midwest. I was too stunned to do anything whatsoever about it. It tackled me now, this new world. I hadn’t arrived ready to see this. What I was supposed to do?
This man, who assumed Shabi was Palestinian, was trying to shield me. He thought I was a tourist about to make a grave mistake just days after the outbreak of new riots.

Shabi said nothing. He just stood there in the street, smiling. He reached his arm out modestly, motioning me to snap out of my shock and disbelief and come along with him. Pay no mind to this man, he was saying with his outstretched arm.
The young Israeli, still surrounded by his Russian-speaking friends, who now were helping him, finally let his arms drop in resignation.
“I tried to help you,” he said half to me, half to his friends. I walked on with Shabi, stunned and quiet.

I think back to that scene today and I think of two startlingly different worlds that were not truly there except in our minds and our memories. In our vast panic, they were all too there. The sheltered world free from terror that the young Russian thought he was offering, and the world that man probably once lived within and was trapped within, quite opposite me in the old Soviet Union.
After all, I have another innocent face that comes to my mind when I recall that day in Jerusalem, but this one on photo paper. Politically innocent as he was then, at least.
The picture was taken by San Francisco photographer Lloyd Francis of Anatoly Sharansky, as he was known around the world then. He was standing with a group of protestors in front of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco in 1984. People were holding signs reading, “Let Our People Go.” It was a reference to Soviet Jews being held from crossing borders to emigrate. It’s odd to think back today that there ever was such a thing as a Soviet Jew, and that they were captives of Soviet power until communism faded. Natan Sharansky was a famous Soviet dissident in that era.
By 2000 when I was revisiting Israel, I think Sharansky had a seat in the Israeli Knesset.

What was unbelievable to my ears was to have gotten used to thinking of him as a prisoner of international circumstances, as a lifelong victim of dictatorship, and then to see him arguing in the Knesset with lawmakers who did not agree with his views, and to see him having to be elected to maintain his history as a hero – in a way. But this is the flash, cartoon way I was seeing it in late 2000.

The natural process that takes place with political change. Mr. Sharansky, like all people, became a twig in a rampaging river in the wake of the post-1989 changes. He arrived in Israel a symbol of freedom, and is today a debater with others legitimately opposing him. It’s almost funny.

Men like Sharansky may steer their own course to some extent, but clearly, it’s not possible to determine the entire course. Things get more challenging after the attainment of freedom. One’s flaws are recognized. I remember this young man on the 2000 Jerusalem street the way I remember Sharansky, in some way. As an American, I can’t stop the association.

I also can’t suppress another memory when I try to write about that day in Jerusalem.
In that same period of the Cold War when I was a student journalist in the Bay area, I interviewed a Soviet diplomat at the Soviet Embassy in that San Francisco building with another area photographer, Howard Ford. We were thrilled to have the permission to visit the Soviet diplomat, Gennady German, at the consulate. It was to run in The Chabot College Spectator. The interview went okay, but yielded no real news. The news was that we got the interview at all. The man we spoke with, of course, was not from a democratic system and was not free to say anything he wished to say. We knew that.
It’s more than safe to say that, like Sharansky, that man pictured in my collection may exist, but not as the man we photographed in the Cold War 1980s.

Now, I especially wondered who that man who thought he was “saving” me from murder by a terrorist was in those years, and who he was that day with Shabi nearby. I didn’t doubt the fact that he’d honestly been trying to help me, but did he not realize that Jews come from multiple continents, including Arab countries? Clearly, he did not. The new Intifadah had begun just days – virtually hours -- ago.
I turned my head to Shabi as we walked away and started to say something, but his face was set. He was now pretending nothing had ever happened.
Shabi never commented on that scene. Worst of all, I had to live with the idea that day of how open and attracted I had been for the first minute or so to this handsome Israeli from Russia. Forget Shabi!

The Russian man was from a time and place an American couldn’t see for a good deal of the 20th Century – the Soviet world. The fantastic face he had, the mannerisms, there was that “something extra” pulling me I still don’t want to admit, and it’s from a great deal of my own American history. He was the man, in the abstract, I was never allowed to know, and never will know. It’s no longer possible.
What was I thinking? I had to picture myself on the plane again, walking from San Francisco’s Financial District, all because I wanted to see this Baghdadi and nothing else was good enough at that moment. I hadn’t cared about anything else when I got onto that plane to fly over the rioting streets of Belgrade and land in the rioting land of Israel. Nothing else mattered.

I still can’t bring myself to tell this story in conversation. I wonder who I think I am sometimes. It may take two and three and four decades before a scene like that on the streets of Jerusalem becomes impossible, though.

We like to think our personal lives are a separate thing from international affairs. But that’s never true. Never, never, never!
Iraqi Jews, as Shabi is, are a community within Israel with one of the most clearly recorded, significant histories in Judaism, but even in Israel, new immigrants arrived, Jewish or not, from places like the old Soviet Union almost completely uneducated about Jewish history, or any other. Or maybe they are simply unaccustomed to an unthreatening life. I can’t help noticing they’re lost sometimes.
This chunk of the consequences of the end of the great Cold War was playing itself out clearly within all parts of the world, I now saw – and in the midst of the new Intifadah, of all venues!!!
I wanted to know that new Russian-Israeli! I still wonder what his life had been. Were his thoughts anything like mine once were about Russia? Dismal and set? Convinced things would always be as they were?
But this abrupt event also demonstrated more clearly than anything what life Shabi lived as an Iraqi Kurd in Israel, and how endless conflict with Arabs manifested itself on the streets of Jerusalem between its residents. It’s right in your face if you’re on the streets of Jerusalem.
Maybe our brains are too feeble to demonstrate complete non-prejudice in the midst of violence, when we suspect there may be just seconds. I’ve noticed that over the years about all societies, and absolutely about all battlefields, be they virtual or literal.

I awoke the next morning and saw Shabi taking on the phone in the kitchen. I wandered around the back yard looking at the pool, the olive tree, flowers. Shabi had always been meticulous in the way he maintained his property. It was as if he was always expecting his guests to traipse strait from his door to the doors of the local media to give quotes and pictures away about his home. More on that later….
I think this frantic cleanliness was mostly habit, the way he was raised, the way he was used to seeing things at home when growing up. I never asked Shabi or his siblings the details of their childhoods, though. Not much, at least.

I do not today recall how I spent that morning as it turned into an early afternoon, but I remember growing sleepy. I lay down on Hagar’s bed sometime around 2 or 3, but wasn’t genuinely sleeping.
I heard the door swing open. I snapped my head up and saw an armed young man in Israeli army fatigues staring at me, slightly confused. He stood like that for about ten full seconds staring at me. Then, he quickly shut Hagar’s door and disappeared.

It was Yeriv, Shabi’s silent son.
I walked into the kitchen. Yeriv’s weapon was on the table because he had thrown it down to the table as soon as he was in the kitchen. This is one thing I grew accustomed to in the old days, doing a lot of normal things, like chewing nuts, in the presence of a long military weapon sitting on a table or a couch. It’s hard to imagine a house in, say, Lansing, Illinois being this casual in the presence of military weapons. You began to ignore it.
No matter what’s sitting on the kitchen table, though, the most important thing in any family’s house is the relationships it contains. That old idea came right to my head when I saw now the respectful way Shabi stood in the presence of his son, and the way Yeriv’s posture seemed posed to truthfully explain his day to dad.
“Hi Yeriv! I guess it took you a few seconds to recognize me. It took me five or six seconds, too,” I said with a smile.
“It’s been a long time since you’re in Israel, Lurene,” he said.
That was all he said to me, too.

Strange, but anyone who really knows Yeriv would know it’s the only thing he’d have been likely to say. If I were to write here a long and interesting series of quotes between myself and Yeriv, Israelis who know him would know right off I was lying.

I never knew Yeriv Gamlieli, never really spoke to him, even in 1989. Yeriv was the least verbal son in Shabi’s family, as far as I knew. He didn’t discuss how he felt about things, or give an impression of like or dislike when in conversation. He seemed, at least to my glance, wholly dedicated in his service to the Israeli military. He was one of those rare-in-any-country one-woman men, too. The girlfriend he had in ’89 was the girl he married. Her name was Yaffat.
What Yeriv thought about the start of the new Intifadah, his parents’ divorce, his life in the military, the price of tea in Tel Aviv, I’ll never know. It’s the way Yeriv was. Well-mannered, civilized, and silent.
Men like that remain men like that to the day they lose consciousness for good, no matter what language they speak. If I think of him these days at all, I remember him as a recognizable Israeli type; the clever Baghdadi survivor who’s smarter than you think he is and hides it. What business is it of yours, anyway?
Not all Israelis are that way, but I’ve met a number of them who are hidden by nature and, for that reason, I’ll never quite know them. Neither will you, exactly.

Being Christian and American, as I am, is like a life-long festival when set against other ways of living in the world, but there are other festivals. I always thought Americans, especially if secular-living, should take the trouble to attend them now and then.

Why? It broadens your brief awareness on earth. You will not compromise your secular lifestyle. In fact, you may even appreciate your own days more fully, whatever they may mean. Holidays are windows of understanding.

The holiday I’m discussing in this case is Succoth. This is the week Jews construct and eat in outdoor booths called Sukkas. It’s a harvest holiday that reminds me vaguely of the American Thanksgiving because it is an agricultural festival. It is focused on food. Modern Jewish society is sooner recognized for financial and academic professions, but ancient Jewish societies are another story.
The holiday’s booth has at least three walls made of whatever material the celebrants choose, plastic usually in this modern era, and the roof is constructed with cut vegetation. In the Moshav, this meant leaves and branches picked up from the surrounding grounds. Succoth is considered a social week, and it is usual for the Israeli family to host visitors one evening, and to be guests for another family the next night.
I remember small crowds eating under the Sukka, political debates and jokes being fired back and forth from animated diners. If it is not raining, kids sometimes like to camp under the Sukka with their little friends during the 7-day festival.
Sukkoth is an opportunity to meet people; at least it was for me as a visitor. Shabi’s mother, with assistance from other women in the family, prepared the large meal as she always had. We all sat to eat more Koober and share bread.

Israelis can’t escape politics. The meal was buzzing with talk of separation from the Palestinians by way of a wall. I remember that because of the animation and gestures of the debaters as their food steamed in front of their faces. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. My Hebrew was never good enough to make sense of an impassioned political discussion. I remember hearing the name Golda Meir, though, and seeing hands gesturing a separation. I do not want to speculate on the conversations that Sukkoth night.
It got me thinking in predictable circles, though. Seeing his hand gesture, I couldn’t help thinking of the Berlin Wall that fell while I was a student in Jerusalem from 1989 to 1991. I’ll never forget the day. I ran out to the streets expecting to see crowds of some sort. There was no crowd, though. In reality, you can’t compare such events.
The Arab world is eager to step into another historical light, though, so we are going to continue to hear phrases like “Apartheid wall” or “Jerusalem’s Berlin Wall.” Not to imply one can’t have legitimate debates about such a wall, because it is, no matter what you want to call it, a serious diplomatic development. I am only saying here that it is not bearing the boots of South Africa’s Apartheid, dictatorial Russia, wartime Korea, European fascism or 1932 Selma. Bogus comparisons cloud thought. False analogies, spurious allegations, and foolish insults set the Palestinians back.
Yasser Arafat was sure no Nelson Mandela.

Some of Shabi’s brothers were under the Sukka branches. Over a table with rice glistening with local olive oil, freshly sliced onions and steaming Koober, I saw Avner, Shabi’s brother, vigorously making a case to his brother Herzl on the other side of the table. Was that his name? Or was he Avraham? Whoever he was, he was speaking amplified Hebrew. His eyes changed expression with every half-sentence, or so it appeared to me from not quite three yards off.

Judaism is the religion of words and images conveyed over centuries of history -- the image of Jewish tribes crossing the Red Sea from Pharaoh’s Egypt, the image of stone tablets with the Ten Commandments, and so on. In this sense, I’ll never erase the image of the wild gestures being made over the Succoth table regarding the wall. During all of this, there were the traditional rituals and prayers being said at the head of the table where Shabi’s father was sitting. His wife was to his right. Another of Shabi’s brothers, the oldest one, Nahum, was to his right in a white Keepah.
I watched Nahum bending down to kiss his father’s hand. To me, it looked ancient and mysterious. He was about five feet six and had whitish hair cut close to his scalp. I never noticed him laughing. He was usually either quiet, or enunciating a direct point in especially precise wording. He was articulate; I did not have to perfect my Hebrew to understand that.

That’s why I was confused when, before the final portion of the meal was served inside the house, Shabi approached me, stretched his hand toward this same man, and said in a loud voice, “Lurene, sit here. This is Nahum. Nahum is a very important man to know.”

I looked at Shabi for a moment, then turned my head to his brother and said hello. He invited me to sit by him, as Shabi just had, so I did.
We proceeded not to talk to one another while sitting together for the next 20 minutes or so. Nahum talked to one of his brothers on his right, and I watched the news in front of me on television, which was broadcasting pictures of the Intifadah as it continued to unfold. I did not know why Shabi introduced his brother as “important” and I did not know why I should care. When we were ready to go, I began to follow Shabi to the car.
“Lurene, say goodbye to Nahum,” he said.
With a pastry in my hand, I turned around and looked at Nahum. He was in conversation and didn’t seem even to realize I was leaving.
“Oh, bye Nahum,” I said, swallowing some food.
I did not step forward to shake his hand and barely looked at him any further. I came to Jerusalem to see Shabi. Not his brother.
I didn’t realize, however, that I had been seated next to Nahum because Nahum had requested it from Shabi. This brief meeting with Nahum would turn out to be one of the most important – and disastrous – for me, personally, in this fateful trip to Jerusalem.

Shabi dropped me off in downtown Jerusalem one day shortly following Succoth. Now that I reflect on the issue, every trip to a foreign land I’ve ever taken includes a memory of aimlessly wandering world famous streets, seeing a lot of people who seem to have nothing pressing to do. They are just out wandering to see what happens.
In such hours, which I never seem to record, new sights and sounds present themselves to my mind of their own accord, using as they do their own means of transport.
One thing that always gets the attention of the traveling American is the sight of foreign families and the vastly different way they relate to one another as compared to American families. I found myself looking at the way Ultra Orthodox Jewish men talked with each other on the streets of Jerusalem; I am not an expert on Israeli religious affairs, of course, but sometimes the men I would watch would argue passionately for minutes at a time, strenuously. If I were to study them a little more, I would be interested in learning more about how Ultra Orthodox men resolve problems between one another. Everything from small financial debts to major weddings involving somewhat incompatible families.
Once or twice when wandering the streets there I would ponder for just a few moments the idea that millions of these arguments, pointless or not, were wiped out in Europe and I wonder what some of them were. I also wonder if they float invisibly somewhere among us. During the editing of this memoir, my nephew, Drasil Helzer, reminded me that another idea remains: Can one truly kill a human argument before it is resolved? Does it not always raise itself again?

“Don’t go to Damascus Gate today, please,” Shabi said as I got out of the car, looking me straight in the eye.
“I know. I know. They’re burning American flags in Damascus,” I said, setting off with a wave of my hand. I was dismissing his advice. I wanted to see more arguments in the streets I couldn’t understand.
When I think back to this gesture now, I think of how stupidly self-confident I was. “I know, I know” always turns to, “I wish I’d known.”
I walked and wandered in Jerusalem. I think I took a photo of a Nigerian man in a stunning, white suit as he sat reading a newspaper. I spoke with random young men, who always seemed to approach me if I paused at a window front, as I passed by an outdoor café, as I strolled on a nearly deserted Ben Yehuda street. The weather was clear and mildly warm.

Yet, it was not so crowded. This is one of Jerusalem’s most traveled streets by pedestrians on temperate days like this. I can’t adequately describe the oddity of seeing it virtually deserted near high noon. I thought of seeing New York’s Times’ Square with two billboards, its dressed mannequins in store windows looking at you, but few real eyes.
I entered one store, but had to allow the security man at the door to search my purse and coat. One naturally doesn’t want to go through this more than a few times unless on a serious shopping spree, so I didn’t enter many buildings.
The most pleasant sight that afternoon was in a park. Two people on horses rode leisurely past me. I liked the sight of it, and liked thinking about people walking past me enjoying the scene, too. Jerusalem frequently offers such scenes.
By and by, I first found myself standing about 150 yards in front of the Western Wall. I looked at it from that distance for about 15 minutes. That is what people come here to see, to do. They want to think about whatever they need to contemplate in front of the Western Wall. Their lives, their choices, their consequences. I could not help contemplating, too, but on that day, I could not keep on the subject. It was like hearing two drunken men argue about the California tax code inside my head. I don’t even remember what I was thinking outside that; I do not want to lie and claim I had great thoughts about the world because I was at Jerusalem’s sacred site. I tried, and nothing came. So here I was at the Western Wall, my eyes temporarily resting on the Ultra-Orthodox men in black hats leaning forward and back. Eventually, I snapped out of my trance and left the sunny area. I began wandering through the old city. My eyes were so attracted by the sights in souvenir-stuffed stalls that I was not watching my direction.

Then, the music started to change. The cheesy attractions in the stalls changed, too. The street became a dark, narrow alley. Very dark. It was two in the afternoon on a sunny day ten minutes ago….
Arab men started shouting at me as I walked past. Some nearly pulled me into their small closet stores by the collar, making comments about my features, my desirability, making it seem my only choice was to enter their store. There were hands grabbing at my clothing every three seconds.

It’s a strange feeling to be American in East Jerusalem, lost in this chaotic part of the city. These are not streets in the American sense of the term, even though this is what they’re called. This was the so-called “Arab Street.”
To me, the expression “Arab Street” was another way of intimating there was no such thing as accountability in the Arab world. No such thing as political independence. Have you ever walked on an undemocratic street? Some of us never quite have. Some Europeans know something about this, though.
I wonder what it’s like for them to visit a place like East Jerusalem. To be forced, if only for a few minutes, to revisit some aspects of the culture of Eastern Europe in the 20th Century.
But I guess that’s another issue because there I was that day. The Cold War was over and this was some of what was left of the shrinking, old world. The protests of Palestinians against Israelis are not only the closest thing the Arab world can claim to free political expression, but are the shrinking slave world, still open for exploration.
I was now among the enslaved, for lack of better terms. I need to emphasize that inarticulate concept strongly because it could be that someone in my family four generations out will be reading this, will wonder what it was like to walk in such a world.
As I write this portion in 2005, I have to remind tomorrow’s reader that Arabs were making their opinions public for the first time ever as I walked in Jerusalem that day, when and if they could properly vote, that is. The Arab world was trained for total obedience, not independence. Thus, when I hear, Arab Street, I hear the fact being confirmed that free expression was far, far down the horizon for the average, or even the educated Arab man.
Arab women? Oh, forget most women! If free expression was a far horizon in those years, gender equality was their unrealized space age.

Yes, the Arab Street, and here I was, lost. Lost!!
“Shit,” I said to myself silently as I looked around myself. Why do I always do this?

Last I checked I was strolling along Ha Shalshelet in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s old city. What was I daydreaming about? My cat? What I was going to eat next week? The price of coffee in today’s Fillmore?
Whatever it was this idiot was not thinking, I’d wandered rightward without looking. Now, I was on Suq El Khawajat, maybe 125 feet into the Muslim Quarter, close to the boundaries of the Jewish, Christian and Armenian quarters.
Unless I turned around, I was going to have to walk through a good portion of the Arab Suq to reach the Christian Quarter, which I could have reached by turning left on Aqabat Es Saraya. The portion of Christian history I would be facing would be just as foreign to me as this, though. I would be near Greek Orthodox houses of worship, an Ethiopian Coptic Monastery and a Lutheran Church, all of which I knew the same amount of nothing about. Christians like me don’t know Christian history.
It doesn’t matter, though. I wouldn’t have made it right then to the Christian or Armenian Quarter, anyway. I couldn’t turn around; I was surrounded with the consequences of my own idiocy.

Suq El Khawajat is dark and paved in stone as streets were in past centuries. The market stalls were just feet wide. One man, old and hunched over, tried to lure me into his closet-like shop with a piece of bread as if I was a passing bird. This was a way Arab shopkeepers tried to lure customers. I remembered just then, in that hall-like street in which I was now trapped, that American flags were burning just this moment in Damascus.

I thought about how one can recognize Americans on a foreign street by their jaunty walk; I could not hide now. My heart quickened, my breaths grew shallow. I darted into one of the stalls just as I felt a hand desperately grab my shoulder.
A man lunged at me, pulling my body close to him in a bear hug. He started kissing my face.
“Quit! Stop!” I said, trying to remove myself from his arms.
“I am so happy you are here! Give me your hand,” said the stout, Arab man, looking to be about 55. He was in tattered sandals and clean-shaven.
He grasped my hand then pulled me into another suffocating bear-hug attack.
“Please, step back! Get away!” I screamed, backing up.
“I love you. You come to my store! I love you!”
“If you love me you’ll show me a seat and give me some tea so I can stay a while and look at your merchandise. We’ll talk,” I blurted out.
I looked around the small store like a foreigner with souvenir money to burn. It was the only strategy I could think of at the moment. I had to protect myself. It’s hard to believe I was doing this again, but I had just 120 Israeli shekels, or about $30. I couldn’t buy a night in a hotel room, a gun, a tank of gasoline, or even life insurance. Now, for the first time in my life, I understood the true value of negotiation skill. Deal or die. That is life sometimes. No wonder the Jews are still known for finance; they negotiate and survive. It’s about bargaining, not money. This is the way I view it today.
But, again, this was October of 2000, Jerusalem’s oldest Arab streets and merchants. The pot-bellied man fumbled with a small aluminum saucepan of water and his haphazard supply of tea. He was scared and excited that I was here.
I quickly devised a strategy. I knew asking for tea would convince him he could calm down. I was intending to stay for a while, he would tell himself, to do business the old Arab way. The way it was done before these current hostilities, at least.
Just then, a tin canister flew from the poor man’s hands and to the dirty floor. An assortment of hard candies flew out in different directions. He threw his worn hands up. His face wore nothing but fear.
“Oh. I’m so sorry. I was going to offer you some candy with your tea. I’m so sorry, sorry so much,” the man whispered, nearly in tears. He was picking up candies from the ground.
“Please, don’t worry about it. I wasn’t going to accept any candy, anyway. I don’t care for it right now. Can I sit on this stool while I look around at your lovely merchandise?” I said.
The man stood up straight and looked at me square. “Sami Sharabati,” he said, smiling widely.
“Okay, Sami. I’ll be kind of slow in making up my mind. Hope you don’t mind. Don’t burn yourself on my account.”
Sami stood with the jar of tea in his plump, brown hands. His clothes were too worn and his sandals looked at least five years old. His large brown eyes looked at me mournfully, though he didn’t seem aware of having that mournful look. This made it all the more intense, somehow. I was probably the only American he’d seen wandering the dark passages of Souk el Khawajat since the start of these new riots. But here I was, sitting in his shop, on his tattered stool, even saying I wanted to look at his merchandise! I might buy something!

Sami set down a fresh, steamy cup of tea on the counter near me. I was well covered by my clothing. Now I was thankful for that, even though I was looking at the clean, white fabric of my coat touching the filthy floor. The truth was, I had worn clothing more modest than usual not because I’d planned to wander along Khawajat, but because I thought I might be wandering among religious Jews. The ultra orthodox were sensitive to everything around them, as tourist guides were quick to point out. I was still thinking of steps for negotiation.
“I’m not bothering you too much, Sami? I know you must be busy these days.” It was the old game of making a statement the opposite of what the truth is, and forcing the other person to admit the obvious.
Sami looked at me with slight surprise.
“Business is terrible. We’re almost starving when tourists don’t come.”
I paused for a moment to think about what best to say.
“Oh, I wouldn’t have known. See any change coming?”
Sami turned his head to his shelves, moving small items around. “I don’t know,” he said in a small voice.

I let fifty seconds pass while my eyes roamed the shelves. With each passing five seconds, I began to feel more secure. We were talking about merchandise now.
“I sure like the robe up there. Hey, what about those rugs? No. No. Not those ones. The little, colorful ones there. I’ve got to send these abroad, you know.”
We discussed all sorts of items. I didn’t have nearly enough money, but as long as I talked about it for a while, then purchased something, he wouldn’t feel like he was wasting his time, and I could delay walking back out to the old street.
I also wanted the surrounding shopkeepers to see me talking business in their commercial neighborhood.
After 45 minutes or so, I finished my tea and purchased a wall tapestry, small and inexpensive. He gave me his card before I left at 4 p.m. – high time to get going with things being what they are. I don’t want to get caught in the old city as night fell.

But the merchant wasn’t ready to say goodbye just yet. As I stood with my right hand on my hip and my handbag over my shoulder, Sami painstakingly showed me every postcard he’d ever received from a Western tourist. There were all kinds of cards. Old tourists from England, France, Australia, the U.S.
“Please send postcard when you get back. Please. I want to put it up here with the other postcards,” he said, his hands out in demonstrative gestures toward the collection. “Here is my business card. Here, take it and put it away. Don’t lose or forget,” he said.
“I won’t, Sami,” I promised, walking out.

My strategy of trying to establish myself as a woman who had clear business with this particular shop might have worked, because I was able to slip out of old Jerusalem’s Arab quarter completely undisturbed. Some merchants raised their eyes at me as I left, but that was all they did.

When I think of Islam these days, I think of two categories of Moslems. The first image is of the working man like Sami. Assuming he is what he appears to be, I can bargain with Sami. I can understand Sami, and he can understand me.
The second image is the man full of hate, a real citizen of no country, Arab or otherwise. One can try doing business with him, but I wouldn’t advise it. He’s in the process of destroying everything many of his countrymen have tried earnestly to achieve since the 1920s.
What this second Moslem’s passport says has no ideological meaning for him, so it shouldn’t for us. He’s a citizen of the borderless, non-geographical nation of militant Islam. It may even become an increasing presence in the 21st Century – holding office, determining the course of elections. One day, it may even have a seat at the United Nations, if the organization still exists on that day.
It’s a wild, seemingly paranoid idea, but it’s not outrageous to think it when an organization like Al-Qaeda has so much sympathy in the Mideast and North Africa and even within some political movements in the United States and Europe.
Al-Qaeda is only part of the story. Who would have predicted in January of 1979 that Iran would be a revolutionary Islamic state by 1980?
We need to take Islam seriously and not make the mistakes we made with the rise of Communism. By 1950, that gutter ideology and that unintelligible book by Karl Marx took over half of Europe.
We in the West have a problem in late 2000. It’s not unwise to view an organization like Al- Qaeda taking their seat through blackmail one day at the United Nations, to see our diplomats having to shake their blood-soaked hands. Nor is it unwise to project the coming rise of some new kind of anarchy. Yes, anarchy. An extra-governmental movement that revivifies an unenlightened world. Let’s at least be clear on what that means.

It’s not that 7th Century laws don’t work. In the sense that campfires will cook hot dogs as completely as microwaves, these systems of government actually do work.
They’re inadequate for the demands of the modern Arab, though. Put Western civilization aside for a moment: Why are these dictators perpetually providing horses for their own freeways? Is this an exaggeration? Maybe, but only “maybe.”
I like what the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said in 1930 in his work Revolt of the Masses. He said reality “hesitates, walks up and down, and is uncertain whether to decide for one or another of various possibilities.” Gasset was reminding readers then that anything could happen. It’s still true. It’s never too late for the Arab world.

It’s the idea of Israel being a cancer in Islam’s heart that is a red herring. Oh, it will be the Arab world’s incessant excuse, but they can’t survive philosophically as is. It's always the same story: Some terrorist group makes a threat or kills crowds of people. This has happened multiple times by October of 2000 and the Arabs get the same amount of nowhere through this road. Something explodes, and we react. That reaction is a false direction for today’s Arab. That's what we need to recognize. Not to imply one victim is more worthy than another, but most victims of terror in those years were other Arabs.

What those newly freed dictatorial regime residents want is someone who can look at the virtual abstract painting that is their new future and define it for them. To explain the green canvas with a black square painted in the middle at the European art museum, that big space looking back at them. It terrifies some.
Today is a fill-in with the contents of your mind world. It’s a world that allows viewers to come to mutual agreement on the existence of phantoms, things and concepts that were never really there in the classic sense. It’s a new world of staged truth. The burden is on the audience to suspend disbelief in the right areas, and create it in others. This is the modern world we die in, the air we’re not able to leave. The pressure is terrible.
Where do the mobs in the streets of Baghdad think they’re getting when they rip off their own art?

Arab leaders fear nothing as much as they do the idea of Israel moving to Madagascar and Moslems the world over waking up and realizing they’re dirt poor, uneducated, and inhabiting some of the world’s worst slums.
Terror organizations, or governments like that of Iran, would rather hide from their own brothers than talk.
All the other components of a successful civilization – an economic system, diplomatic talent, an assortment of strong, reliable allies, a sense of humor -- are not things they can do with their present structures. They deserve more from themselves.

Leaving the old city, I hurried to the place where the bus going to Amminidav was picking up. When it arrived, I dug in my purse and found that I only had four shekels. It wasn’t enough for bus fare.
I looked at the driver, a thin man in his 30s who seemed eager to get on with things.
“I’m sorry, but it seems I’m a little short of fare. Can I just deposit an extra amount the next time I ride the bus? I need to get back to Amminidav.”
“Too bad! If you don’t pay fare, you don’t ride,” he snapped, closing the door quickly. He sped off down Jaffa Road like a New York cab driver on New Year’s Eve.
I stood for a few moments with my eyes wide and my jaw hanging open. Now what?
I had enough for a phone call, so I went to a pay phone near Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station and called Shabi. Thank Universal Circumstance again and again and again that he was near the phone.
“Shabi! I’m stuck downtown. I ran out of money and can’t get on the bus. The guy wouldn’t let me on.”
Shabi sighed. “Alright. Take a cab here. I’ll wait.” #

BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...2

2010-02-16T12:51:00.001-08:00

When I got back to Shabi’s home he was irritated with me. Had I explained the reason I let myself get so low on shekels, he might have thought about the fact I was calling him at all. But I never explained, or so my notes indicated.

The reason I didn’t want to tell him is because he’d specifically warned me not to go to Damascus Gate. I didn’t want “to be told I’d been told.” After all, I then reasoned, I did not go through Damascus Gate. I mistakenly entered the Arab quarter through another route. I’d been careless. I wasn’t watching my direction.

Had I mentioned this to Shabi, he would have had to spend the next hour lecturing me on how I could have been killed and don’t you know what’s happening in this country and what did you think you were doing and who did you think was supposed to help you….? I don’t know what else. He would have been right, though. The old city is not nearly as dangerous as Gaza or the West Bank, but it still wasn’t a place to wander in October of 2000.

To be fair, though, I don’t think anyone would have been indifferent to the news of what I’d done that day. If it had been my mother, she would have called me “dumb as grass.” If Shabi had known, I might have learned some novel Hebrew words that night.

A great number of the world’s Moslems are not interested in becoming enmeshed with terrorism, and do not share the ongoing hatred by the Arab world of Israel and Jews.

With journalism being what it is, however, and news consumption abbreviated, relatively reformist Arabs will continue to be lumped in with radical Islam by most of the world’s population.

How could it be different? They’re today a hopelessly weak force, unseen in documents and unheard on mainstream news reports. Even in the West. In the disputed zones, seeing a charred body hanging from a commonly-used commuting bridge is all you need to know on a Tuesday morning.

But one can be optimistic. We can assume there is a judicious segment of Arab society that exists, and hear their non-substantiality like we hear the silence between two notes in a tragic opera. We can presume intent to the deliberately unplayed sound.

This is what they have to continue and surpass. I honestly believe enlightenment is possible for the Mideast. Possible. Moslems are capable and reasoning as other people the world over.

Riad Adame was a taxi driver when I met him in downtown Jerusalem in 1989. We started talking and became friends. He was at the time unmarried and not particularly involved in the Intifadah that was going on.

Not that he discussed his beliefs with me. He simply was not very involved in politics as far as I could tell. He was a Moslem, perhaps only religious in the sense that so many Americans are active in Christianity. They celebrate Christmas with trees and presents, Easter with colored eggs, but go to church only when a wedding invitation comes along.

I took the trouble to see him while visiting Jerusalem because these are probably the kinds of Arab men who are worth the trouble. I was not in such agreement with Mr. Adame, mind you, but believed he was worth the risk I took that day to have lunch with him in Jerusalem. To me, Riad is the hope of the Arab world. Why?

Riad lived on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. We would get together for lunch sometimes back in my days as a student at The Hebrew University, and that’s about all I remembered in October of 2000. There was no intimate relationship between us, and neither of us pursed the possibility.

We met in downtown Jerusalem somewhere intending to head to Mt. Scopus, where the Hebrew University is located. It was where we always used to hang out when we occasionally got together for coffee and snacks ten years ago, since I had lived on that campus part of the time I was a student there.

Riad and I tumbled into a cab. Our eager cabdriver, Sami, talkative guy, began wandering around East Jerusalem as we were on our way.

“Do you know this is only the third fare I’ve had today?” Sami said.

It was about 2 in the afternoon. He said it had never happened to him before in Jerusalem. We explained as we sat behind a tractor that was blocking the street. The operator had Arabic music blaring from the speakers. Nobody spoke for a few seconds as we waited for the tractor to complete its move.

Sami lit a cigarette. I thought of how, in the Bay area, not only would this tractor in the road be vigorously resented by other cars, but would have by now been reported by a traffic reporter on “All-News-All-the-Time: KCBS.” I couldn’t help inserting it.

Once the tractor moved, we had to get past a checkpoint for security, since we were dining in East Jerusalem. That was new. I once lived on Mt. Scopus. Though it was during the first Intifadah, I never had to go through a checkpoint to get to East Jerusalem until now. Maybe I just did not know they existed before. Maybe he occasionally used the checkpoints for his own purposes. I’ll never know, though. I could go on all week like this.

We got past the soldier questioning us easily. Of course, numerous incidents of terror had yet to occur. Things were tense, but had we been going to lunch some weeks later, it would have been a different afternoon altogether.

We sat in a restaurant with a large, outdoor eating area. The waiter, dressed in freshly laundered white cotton, was running about the large area swatting a white tablecloth at a stray white cat. The cat was tattered, skinny and desperate. The waiter roamed around the unoccupied tables looking for the morsels of dropped food to make the ground less inviting to strays. Even then, the fact was your nose straight up plain: there were no clumsy customers sitting there. The cats begged in vain.

Suddenly, I laughed, but not boisterously.

Riad raised his face toward mine.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because that cat is starving and no one’s going to notice that here today. No way.”

He shrugged while taking a quick look around himself.

We sat eating local favorites now, drinking Arak from Ramallah. I told Riad about my adventures in the old city a day or so back, and how I had been kicked off the bus because I had spent my fare with the merchant in East Jerusalem’s old city.

“I’ll remember that story,” Riad laughed.

War makes new things funny. We kept eating.

Riad pulled an envelope out of his pocket and slid it toward me on the table.

“I’ve been saving these for you for ten years. I knew you’d come back to Jerusalem one day,” he said, his eyes meeting mine.

The photos he took of me leaving Jerusalem! It nearly shocked me, seeing myself the day I left Israel to return to the United States in June of 1990.

“Speaking of that,” Riad said, “Why are you here? Nobody else is. Look around yourself. We’re the only ones in this restaurant today.”

“The new riots started just before I got on the plane, Riad. It was too late to change my ticket even if I had wanted to, and I didn’t. I thought it was going to be like the first Intifadah, if that even. Sort of a long, day-to-day demonstration. But this time, it seems a lot different.”

“I don’t get involved with politics," said Riad, “but there are problems with life here. I can’t get a passport. Not without a lot of waiting and other problems. I cannot get housing, even if I have the money. We’re second-class citizens.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at his face. I had the glass in my right hand. He continued quietly.

“It couldn’t go on much longer without…” he paused and leaned forward, “something like this happening. I’m not part of it, exactly. I’m telling you now that you’re here, Lurene, that this explosion could not have been avoided.”

“Is it all civil rights?”

“Not all, no. And, you know, America isn’t helping. The American Congress is biased toward Israel, toward Jewish problems. Never Arab problems,” he said.

As an American, I knew there was more to the story than that, but I wasn't going to argue with him here and now. I didn’t see the point.

"What if some in Congress stood up and brought these issues up in some different way, more prominently this time?” I said.

He looked at me plainly and humorlessly, as if I’d just asked what a slight change in the price of olive oil would do.

“It doesn’t matter what the American Congress does now,” he said dully, his eyes unblinking as he pointed them toward mine. “It’s too late now. It’s too late.”

I kept my eyes to my plate for a few minutes. I sipped more Arak.

“Well, that’s enough politics. No more politics. You don’t seem as well, Lurene. You’re drinking Arak,” he said.

“Oh, I’m okay. Not sleeping well, that’s all.”

“You never married.”

“Never got around to it,” I quipped.

“You aren’t missing much. Marriage is okay sometimes, but it’s not as great as you think it’s going to be. I don’t know. I have kids now.”

“Five, you mentioned.”

“Five.”

He paid for our lunch. We left the beautiful, deserted restaurant. The drive back to Jerusalem’s center was easier than the drive into East Jerusalem. We hugged goodbye sincerely. I still have the photos.

I understood what Riad was trying to tell me, but what was he saying that I really needed to hear?

Riad was repeating the Arab quest for freedom. But there’s a difference between non-captivity and pure freedom. The two are not the same. Non-captivity is the less complex condition, the most self-righteous, and the less demanding. It's being in the state of Hosni Mubarak or Saddam Hussein and being, well, let alone. Nothing more. You're not going to discover oxygen or write a symphony. Your kids will swim at the same depths as you and your grandparents did.

Freedom, on the other hand, is harder to understand and harder to achieve. Most of the world’s population is content to live alongside it…somewhere. The Palestinians are in this kind of pit.

Riad asked me to write a brief email to the American President’s office, so I did so on November 15, 2000. While most of his brothers in the Arab world were known for violence and thuggish means of protest, Riad reached out another way.

It didn't matter whether I agreed with his opinion or not. I agreed greatly with his means of trying to express it, and found it easy to help. I wrote a simple message for the White House, likely ignored, but marked down with others that day as coming from East Jerusalem. I received a simple, correspondence acknowledgement from Washington. This is what my November 15, 2000 note read:

Dear Sir,

While in Jerusalem October 6 through October 20, 2000, I was able to speak with some Arab residents of Jerusalem. They asked me to relay the following:

1. They do not feel the United States has been a fair broker on their behalf. They feel that the United States favors agreements biased toward the Israeli government;

2. They feel the problem is largely one of civil rights for Arab residents of both Israel, and the so-called occupied territories;

3. They do not feel the American administration has been helpful in tempering Israeli military actions against Arab residents.

I hope this letter is helpful to you.

With highest regards,

Lurene K. Helzer
San Francisco

So that Riad would know his request that I write the note was not ignored, I sent him a copy of the short letter and a copy of the form acknowledgement from the White House, which was dated November 15, 2000.

Riad,

I wanted to quickly write this letter to you while I have a few minutes free at work. I wanted to let you know that I appreciated your comments as we had dinner October 19 in Jerusalem, and have told some people here what I learned from you, and from others who share your position regarding civil rights in Israel.

I am presently working on an essay regarding my experiences. I also intend to write a brief letter to the White House.

Of course, in that case, it will be read by White House staff only. Every letter helps, though.

I will write you a bit later about more mundane matters!

Your friend,
Lurene

I had no expectation of a special or unique response from the Bill Clinton administration, of course. The American White House gets probably hundreds of letters like this every day.

When I reflect on it now, though, I think of how it’s not common for the average person of any ethnicity to attain freedom, be aware of the state they’ve achieved, and then use it wisely. In this case, I am discussing a man barely acquainted with the ideas of freedom who was using it quite confidently.

It doesn't matter if I agree with him or not. I don't care if he wanted me to write a letter to the American president arguing something I do not agree with.

I care that an Arab from East Jerusalem, instead of bombing a bus that day, or pretending to agree with someone who was going to bomb a bus, was asking an American to write a letter to a democratically elected president. Any democratically elected president.

I want the people of Iraq and Syria and Egypt, furthermore, to read about Riad's request that day, and know that he was heard even as he requested it from the bloody streets of Jerusalem.

These are the private ideas I had while listening to Riad, but I left them off the table. I wonder now if that was what I should have said, anyway.

The Palestinians, it seemed to me, have become known around the world for committing acts of violence to achieve the non-captivity they think they’ll achieve in an all-Palestinian land.

But I have always thought that if the Palestinians get the country without Jews they say they want and leave actions similar to Riad's out of the mix, they’ll face a society oppressed by centuries of tradition, Arab dogma, old sayings, family duty, religion and totalitarianism. They'll be in the same gutter. Read about Riad. Riad saw the path and he was walking it by himself. He didn't need my approval.

This is the memory of my 2000 lunch with Riad Adame in an East Jerusalem of more bloody conflict. I still think it stands up to other lunches of my life for its unleavened meaning.

-- END EPISODE FOUR --

BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...3

2010-02-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

We were on the way to Northern Israel the next day. Shabi was driving. I wanted to quit with the politics, practice some Hebrew again. I did not realize how bad I really was.

We were doing okay as long as we were doing the easy words. Car. Dog. Time. Head. Arm. Eyes. Hands. I don’t know how the talk got so twisted during the scenic drive.

“Is this why I came to Jerusalem? Like, ‘Oh, sure! Better know how to call Moshe a penis if he takes cuts in…..”

Shabi raised his hand in mock exasperation. “What, Lurene? You asked me what the word is for the penis and I’m telling you….”

“That’s not what I meant. Why do I need this word? These are the friends I need in Jerusalem?” I was laughing, could hardly speak English now, let alone Hebrew.

We laughed about my red face and useless speech in Hebrew on the fragrant roads of Northern Israel. We were going to a kibbutz to visit Adah, Shabi’s girlfriend. Having lived in California most of my life, driving to northern Israel felt to me like driving to the Oregon border.

First of all, the Israeli road through its northern section had just as much traffic as California’s freeway. Fewer old cars in Israel, though, and more fatal accidents. Israelis did not all learn to drive in the same culture.

“Traffic accidents claim more Israeli lives than terrorism does,” you’re often told. I include it because most Israelis at one time or another will tell you that in routine conversation if that kind of thing interests you.

Most notable of all, though, is the varying climates in Israel. Pick your favorite according to your interests; Israel is like a color wheel in nature that never stops spinning. The massive Negev, the temperate and subtropical zones of Israel’s Mediterranean climate, its 511 species of birds and other forms of animal life are some of Israel’s attractions for a person like me who grew up visiting U.S. National Parks. Countrywide, Israel has 200 million trees -- forests of pine, tamarisk, carob and eucalyptus. Wildflowers and medicinal plants grow in profusion, according to sources on the internet and elsewhere.

I don’t know why these images came to my mind, though, when I remember our drive that day toward the Israeli/Lebanese border region, because the Israeli border with Lebanon is nothing like the border between two U.S. states. Particularly this border. Lebanon was the site of yet another Israeli war from 1982 to 2000. I guess a border is a drab, man-made idea. Nature is nature and remains nature.

Shabi and I were joking like this while stuck in the traffic near Haifa. He was testing me on the Hebrew I learned ten years before. I remember some guy in a Keepah looking at us at a stop like we were in purple fish suits or something.

The kibbutz where Shabi’s girlfriend Adah lived was just like Northern California in some ways. The small houses were clean and well tended. As we approached Adah’s little house, I noticed an old typewriter gathering moss on a credenza underneath a tree. It must have been there since the 1950s or early 1960s. Whatever the year of its placement under that generous and merciful tree, you never see such machines in use these days. Not in American offices, that is. I guess someone just left it there, initially because they had no more use for it, and finally because it was charming and attracted small birds. It was a potted plant now. It had its own goals now whether it was tended or not.

Any number of weird birds is passing over yards just like this while migrating over the area on routes from Europe and Asia to Africa. Israel’s bird lovers monitor them. Probably a lot of bird watchers here, I thought.

When we walked in, I looked into Adah’s large eyes before casually introducing myself. We shook hands. She looked to be in her mid-40s and wore loose, comfortable clothing in thin, flowered print fabric. Slightly more tasteful clothes than many women her age would wear while wandering the isles of a typical American shopping mall. She was nevertheless casual in her appearance and tone.

I could already sense a chill from her, though. I was coming through her front door with her boyfriend. Her smile was strained.

Maybe she wasn’t sure why I was with her boyfriend, or why he’d dragged me in with him on this day. Didn’t he tell her I was coming? She didn’t stand in front of me in a pose of greeting for long, as some people do when you’ve come from such a long distance. I know that look on a woman’s face. I’d seen it before.

I want to say she looked at me warily for a moment, then went into her small kitchen, but that’s not quite what she did. She avoided looking at me for a moment while pointing her eyes toward the space I occupied, and then walked into her small kitchen.

There was nothing rude about her, but I think it was the lack of curiosity she displayed toward my…it’s hard to adequately express the guarded quality one woman can adopt in the face of an unknown other at times like these. Picture it for a moment: I walked into her house with her man.

Shabi plopped down on the couch. The television news was playing in the living room. I sat with my right leg crossed over my left in a stuffed chair facing the television. Shabi lit a cigarette and pulled the ashtray on the table closer to himself. Adah did not smoke, but accommodated Shabi’s smoking. Maybe she offered that hospitality to all smokers. Americans either smoke and allow smoking, or don’t smoke and their smoking friends are booted outside with a stern smile.

“So, Lurene, how long are you in Israel?” said Adah, while preparing lunch at the counter.

“I fly back to San Francisco October 17. Another week?”

I looked and smiled at her modestly, averting my eyes from the television.

She walked a few steps into the living room with a cut onion in one hand and a knife in the other. She looked at the screen. It was a live broadcast showing helicopter gun ships firing on Palestinian neighborhoods.

The residents who lived on those streets were growing more violent every day I had been there, and would become more militant as the days passed toward my departing flight. While looking at the picture, I privately thought of how I’d run out of pity for Palestinian leadership over the years. I had pity, however, for the powerless Palestinian family looking to the likes of Arafat for a permanent diplomatic solution. Arafat was supposed to take responsibility for the society’s illegitimate and unprofitable ideas and lead the residents and their kids to something more beneficial. He’d done nothing but the opposite, and I felt the Palestinians had been played like dice.

With the vote for Arafat that had taken place in the mid 1990s, the Palestinians had done little more than harden the corruption they already had. Even the far left seemed to hope Arafat was going to be some sort of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley if things went okay. Daley is now remembered as corrupt and quite tolerant of racism, but nevertheless on some kind of constructive road that could benefit generations far into the future. I have to admit that my thoughts frequently were in that box, too.

As I sat watching the news with Adah and Shabi during these few seconds, it flashed in my mind that the Palestinians might be better off building a functional capitalist state before even trying a democratic one, if such a thing is possible. In capitalism, they’d have something to protect from house to house, rather than faction to faction. It’s hard to get far in simple capitalism without acknowledging Elm Street and Main Street have different interests. You can be as liberal as you please, but capitalism’s the capillary network underneath most human endeavors.

Yet, other people who are closer to the daily issues in the territories have considered those financial ideas unworkable. It’s based on a hopeless negativity about human potential. They say Palestinians must have democracy before anything, no matter how rocky the road to its completion.

Adah pointed her kitchen knife at the television, but it was a resigned, hopeless hand gesture, like the wave someone uses to point to garbage that keeps piling up in a vacant lot across the street.

“Look at this, Shabi. This is war. We are at war now,” Adah said, stepping a few feet into her living room to be closer to the images playing on the screen. Her voice was laced with mild depression. I’d heard that tone often since landing. She turned her face toward me for a moment to show her mood. She seemed down.

Shabi never seemed optimistic about current events, either, but I saw him slip in and out of denial. I never saw him do that during the first Intifadah, when I was a student at The Hebrew University. Now, he seemed a different man.

“The Arabs will settle down. I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. He looked toward Adah, away from the television. “I’m hungry.”

She went back to slicing her onion. Shabi always liked fresh onion slices near his plate. I had a memory flash of Tova setting fresh onions near Shabi’s lunch plate as the sun poured into his kitchen, hearing little Hagar laughing outside.

“I don’t know if this will die out.” Adah said. She looked up at me from her cutting board. “It wasn’t this way a few weeks ago. It’s too bad you’re here now, just as this all happens.”

I looked at her for a moment then let out a contrived laugh. “Oh, it won’t last. We’ll all be in Eilat by next week! I wish I had a shekel for every time someone apologized to me for this…” I had to think a few seconds, “…situation…since I’ve landed in Tel Aviv.”

Nobody laughed. I shut up. Adah got polite but distant. She would have preferred other company. Any other company! Maybe she did not enjoy having to be hospitable to some American woman her boyfriend dragged in. Couldn’t I stay somewhere else?

It’s interesting in retrospect how Adah carried herself. Here she was talking about these new hostilities nobody wanted. Yet, when I looked at her face, she seemed more afraid of me being in Jerusalem than she was of the Arab combatants who were trying to rip and bleed Israel into nothingness. What’s really weird is that Shabi’s face showed that he wasn’t getting that like I was.

Adah’s fear of rising war, gripping as it was for her, was probably not in the same area of her heart where her fear of a life without Shabi lived. Both filled her with dread. Fear is a fascinating thing to watch. So is anger. What a wide variety of stories war concocts!

Maybe I could sympathize with her, though. Adah was a single mother of two boys, one of whom was showing some behavior issues. I figured it stemmed from the earlier break-up of her marriage, but it was a weak guess. I didn’t know what the boy’s life had been, but I knew part of what it was going to be: The IDF.

I think Adah looked at me not simply as a threat to her romantic life, but as a clear threat to her material future. A single mother with a feisty boy could look hard and long for a stable, relatively affluent Israeli boyfriend and never find him. I understood at least that about her.

Kibbutzim rarely have large savings accounts, or at least that’s what I’d always heard. They work the land and the Kibbutz in return houses them, feeds them, offers recreational opportunities, some safety and may send a promising student to the university – I don’t know the details of the arrangements in Israel’s various organizations. These are not wealthy communities, but they uphold what Americans would consider a healthy middle-class housing standard and a safe, friendly neighborhood for families.

But there’s a catch: A Kibbutznik is not free to do as he or she wishes, to make any decision he or she wishes, to take off on a three-month vacation without acquiring the cooperation of fellow Kibbutzim. No police state mentality, of course, but it’s a cooperative living scheme that requires cooperation. It’s essentially socialist. It’s no place for a Donald Trump.

It’s really not an American thing. Like forms of socialism everywhere, it’s hard to sustain in the long term. Some countries seem to do it fairly well, but they have serious weak points.

We wolfed down Adah’s tasty food, which included fresh salad and warm bread. We piled into Shabi’s van shortly after for the ride back to Jerusalem. If I had any doubts about seating arrangements, Adah made things clear immediately.

I didn’t mind, but I was in the habit of seeing a gesture, at least. Something like, “I’ll sit in the front, okay?”

No, Adah was not going to be a close friend. That much was sure. But women are not in general friendly to each other in situations looking anything like this one. Also, I was in a foreign country. I had to expect a changed tone, anyway.

As we were in the car again and moving fast toward Jerusalem, Adah did not turn to talk to me. There was no like or dislike about it, but I was threatening the quality of her life. That’s it.

Life can get to throat-cutting between women. I guess it’s worth mentioning Israel is one of the most competitive societies I’ve ever known when it comes to romance. I’ve noticed it’s their habit to watch their mates closely, without showing what they’re doing. I have never noticed Israelis showing outright jealousy in public, though. Maybe I haven’t been around enough, though. I’m guessing in this, at best.

Call it American practicality, if you want, but I always try to see my dates and friends for who they are at first glance – especially the dates.

When I’m with a man who is seeking amusement with other women while I’m in his life, I hear my grandfather’s voice inside my head. “You’ll be sorry, baby.”

BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...4

2010-02-16T12:46:00.000-08:00

In Napoleon’s day, there was a mathematician named Jean-victor Poncelet. He discovered in his studies that the lengths and angles of a figure bear no relation to the lengths and angles of its shadow. Therein lays the inaccuracy we all carry within us regarding the past. One nearly needs to be a born mathematician to avoid distortions of reflection.

That’s an important point, because sometimes, in the dead of night, laying alone or not alone in total darkness, I ask myself what happened during that horrifying and violent October in 2000 Jerusalem. When I visualize myself standing somewhere inside that ancient city, I have to see events not only as I tell myself they happened, but as they were seen around the world, as they were seen around Jerusalem, and in the distorted and emotionally strained way my proud Kurdish friend must have seen them unfolding. It’s the only truthful way to view those anarchic, ungovernable days, and even then one might throw the whole fractious record into the fire, suspecting it’s all a feeble-minded lie.

I can’t prevent such dismal thoughts sometimes; the next event was our visit to Yitzhak Rabin’s grave.

The former Israeli prime minister rested on a ridge in West Jerusalem. Mount Herzl (Har Herzl in Hebrew) is the name of the site because Israel’s historical figures are buried there, like principal Zionist founder Theodore Herzl, whose remains did not arrive in Israel for burial until 1949, though he died in 1904.

I read his 1896 essay while at The Hebrew University. The essay is recognized as the founding document of Zionism. The essay remains relevant today because it says so much about the Europe that appeared some thirty years after his death with the advent of World War II:

“Only an ignorant man would mistake modern anti-Semitism for an exact repetition of the Jew-baiting of the past. The two may have a few points of resemblance, but the main current of the movement has now changed. In the principal countries where anti-Semitism prevails, it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews.”

As Shabi and I were preparing to go to the Rabin site that morning, he became particular about the way I would dress. When we got to the memorial park and he looked down and saw I was in fur-lined sandals with heels.

“I told you to wear shoes for rough ground,” he barked, his eyebrows turned down. He continued walking. I hopped along to keep up.

Seeming to adopt a military tone in the emerging presence of Rabin, Shabi’s pace quickened in stridency the closer we got to the grave.

I should have worn different shoes. Shabi was correct. Here I was, hobbling along in heels, trying to catch up to this Jewish Kurd’s determined, angry stride on dry gravel.

When we got to the grave, I stood in the open sky looking at the Hebrew characters spelling Rabin and the grey and black stones marking it. The isolation of the space was something I was breathing.

Some locations in the world have a distinct feeling and scent. I remember once traveling through a dark and wooded highway in California toward San Juan Capistrano. I opened the car’s window. It was the fragrance of the Southern California coast. That smell clings to most of the California coast, or maybe I just want to think it does because I love that part of the world.

In such moments, I’m a plain dog panting on the shore, paws lodged in the warm Western sands, my face toward the blue and milky sky.

This area of Jerusalem was distinct in a different way. Words, phrases and disparate ideas came to my head that day. Why these thoughts of a deserted factory floor, a quarry pit, a perfume with its flowers and herbs asphyxiated? It was a feeling of the unhuman space between lifeless planets.

Did they place him this way to underscore the enduring feeling of desolation Rabin’s assassination gave the state? Whether all inhabitants in Israel feel the way this place looks I’ll never know, but Shabi sure did.

He was standing, looking at the headstone of Rabin. He took a Marlboro out of the box and looked at me with distance. He wasn’t angry about my shoes anymore.

“I come here sometimes to think about the advice he might have given me. Rabin was a straight, direct man. Do you know?”

“Yes. I remember. You used to call him your prime minister.”

Our tones were quiet, but a deep-toned counterpoint in the immense calm framing us.

“I come here to think, be alone, smoke one cigarette, solve problems,” he said.

When Shabi speaks in that way, he seems to reveal a humility he didn’t have often. I only remember him using that tone on one other occasion. That was when he was forced to recall Egypt as a soldier during the 1967 war. He cited it once to me, in just this way – the low tone, the feeling there was another face aside from my own he was addressing, the manner which shows the very opposite of the kind of man portrayed in a Greek Statue. That time was in 1990 when I was preparing to visit Egypt. I’d asked him if he wanted to go, too.

“No, my dear. I saw enough of Egypt in 1967. Here,” he said putting $300 in my hand unexpectedly, “You’re not going to Egypt without money.”

The memory was clear to me. If I’d been a bird that day, however, I would’ve had to face what was surrounding us that very moment.

Arab citizens of Israel were rising up with rage throughout the country. Several main roads were blocked; Israeli Jews in the Galilee were being attacked by mobs with flaming Molotovs, being hit with ball bearings hurled from slingshots. Stores, post offices and all categories of public buildings were being ransacked. Forests blazed. Few cities were calm as we stood near Mr. Rabin’s resting place.

This was one of the few places of peace that day. Nazareth, Jaffa, Haifa all were sites of violence as we paced.

We were the only tourists there in those minutes, and maybe in that entire day. This account of our visit to Har Herzl is bombast if I display it without its encompassing reality.

For that reason, and because of the mood Shabi was in as we stood there, I am glad he wasn’t that bird in the skies of Israel, having to see the landscape as it really was that day. Sometimes it’s better to be an ant than an eagle, if only for a few minutes.

I paced and looked toward the buildings of Jerusalem. I did not talk about all of my thoughts with Shabi that day, but as we walked in half-circles near the grave, I thought about how I did not remember seeing Rabin in formal attire in news pictures on television or in newspapers, either in Jerusalem or back home in San Francisco. The leader wanted to be known for ideas, for the strategies he devised that he thought might work for Israel in the far future.

Maybe Rabin was wrong about some things. Did he think sufficiently of his enemies? Too little of his enemies? Did he not foresee their capabilities?

He misidentified the enemy in this case, since his assassin was another Israeli, Yigal Amir. I’ve never seen a quote from Mr. Amir expressing regret.

I wondered back then if peace was even remotely possible, and still do. We’ve seen on both sides people who do not want deals. They are willing, like Yigal Amir, to sit in jail the rest of their lives to demonstrate it, to be known for the concept of non-negotiation on key issues.

On the Arab side, assailants don’t consider jail at all; they just settle the whole question by blowing themselves up, along with all contemplation about the wisdom of the act. Unfortunately, contemplation would mean that any Palestinian leader who proposes a deal with the Israelis would have to imply that all those suicidal “martyrs” did not have to die at all.

What Palestinian leader could survive after implying that those suicide bombers died for something less than complete Arab victory, for a compromise? I think he might meet the same fate as not only Yitzhak Rabin, but also Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981. These days, the fact still floats around my head that both Sadat and Rabin were recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...5

2010-02-16T12:43:00.001-08:00

After a day or so, Adah returned home. It got to be evening in Jerusalem and Shabi and I were in his kitchen drinking Arak again.

“It’s such a beautiful night. Let’s go sit outside. I made a nice spot for sitting outside. Let me show you. Take the glasses.”

We walked across dewy lawn. There was a full moon out, or so I imagine. The water in the pool was as still and blind as a dead body. We went to the leafy rear, in front of the artist’s studios and behind the pool. He had a couch there with a wooden table. It looked like a set-up for an Annie Leibovitz photo, especially after we settled there.

He poured himself a few teaspoons of Arak then leaned back on the arm of the west end of the couch. He put his legs up. I had my back against the eastern arm of the couch.

“You know, when Tova first left me I was broken. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong in the marriage. I couldn’t understand what she was doing -- oh! Be comfortable, my dear. Put your feet up -- so, I did not know what I was going to do in the beginning. She told me there was no point in discussing it anymore.”

He took a sip of his Arak and quietly set the glass down. The question ran through my head: What was going on with Tova? I didn’t let that one out, though.

“I was very, very sad. Now, I am glad it’s all over. I see now I am able to do things that I did not even imagine before,” Shabi said. He ran his hand over the top arch of my foot. I pulled my knees to my chest.

His eyes moved toward mine. “Don’t worry, my dear.”

I lay my legs back out. He put his hand back on the top of my foot. He sighed and continued with his talk.

“I like Adah very much. She is…” he paused. “a very nice…” he paused again, “friend. But her sons are giving her some trouble, and I do not know if this will be good for my life and my family.”

He said those words like he was patting someone on the head comfortingly; It was the tone an art teacher uses when breaking the news to Mom that little Jane isn’t exactly the cueball of class.

I looked into his face. It was lit by a soft light through leaves. He was reminding me with his words of men I’d met in past years and slowly learned to avoid. Men who called the woman at his side “girlfriend” until another attractive female comes into his space. Now, the girlfriend is called “a friend of mine.” I usually know what’s going on when a guy introduces with that phrase.

I saw the game now. Shabi wasn’t committing to an identifying term for Adah so long as I was sitting here with him in Jerusalem. Her ears weren’t near.

“Do you see everything that has changed since you were here? I turned this building from a chicken house into some artist’s studios. I get rent for these now. I am making an income every month from the hotel. There are two other apartments I rent out on the property, too. I take in a steady income every month now. I do not have to work as hard as I once did. I have time to live my life, today, my dear.”

When I think back to what he told me that clear October night, I think about how plain it was. He had the guts to lay his cards on the table now. I felt emotionally dizzy; good, bad and unsure. The Baghdadi proposal. I’ve never had the guts to say such a thing. I was a coward compared to him.

He was giving me the overview of his finances, his plans for the future. I could see this was no light talk for him, or some thoughtless plan. He was discussing the way he intended to spend his emotions, his attentions and his time during the second half of his life. He was saying it as his country was again in conflict. Mine was not. Why should I take him seriously? Why did he make such hopeless efforts?

It is rare for a woman to hear this kind of heartfelt speech from a man. I can never get truth like that from the men I see anymore. I miss what I never see. I still think about what Shabi said. He could have said a lot of other things, but chose to say what he said on that night.

All I had to do was look around and compare what I had waiting for me at home, even if I was going to endure complete poverty the rest of my life. At home, I knew the language, the culture, and it was reasonably safe on the American street. But in Jerusalem, I would always need to watch where I was aimlessly walking.

One reason why I am glad I was born a woman is that I am not expected to make these all-or-nothing statements, especially to someone who has traveled across the globe for a two-week look. If I were an Israeli, surrounded by enemies, war and hate, asking a woman who was preparing in one week to return to one of the most materially and intellectually fortunate countries on earth today, I would be afraid to say what Shabi said that night. In all my life, I do not know if I will ever take a chance like the one Shabi took that night.

Mirav and Lurene visit Tova. Lurene meets Avi and Omer.
One day, Shabi’s daughter, Mirav, stopped by the house. In conversation, I’d mentioned that I would have liked to see her mother, Tova, while visiting….any chance?

She answered she was just intending to drive over to see her mom the next day.

When the time came, I was sitting on the front steps of the small house in Amminidav that Mirav shared with her husband, Avi.

Avi was a doctor at a nearby facility, which was probably ten minutes in driving from Amminidav, if that even. Their boy was playing nearby. He was a funny-looking, happy kid. Happy and three or four years old, maybe. He had silky, thin brunette hair and tremendous eyes, more similar in face with his father. Isn't it strange how children are like that? In a family of three or four children, it seems some of the children will take right after mom, and some after dad, and some, I swear, you don't know what the great one was doing when the design was drawn. Such children have faces that seem completely their own property. As if mom and dad didn't have much say in the matter.

Avi sat next to me on the front porch for a few minutes as Mirav readied the boy for lunch. She intended to feed him, then leave him with his father while we took a drive to visit her mom. My heart was beating a little quickly because I was so excited to see Tova after ten years. Better concentrate on the people around you right now, I reminded myself. I could hardly think, though.

I wanted to chat with Avi about something less traumatic than his work. I’d been reading Descartes on the plane, so I wondered if that might be a topic that could pass as conversation. A lot of people don't like philosophy, I knew.

But I was by now well into Descartes' work, and I wanted to make a nice impression on Mirav and her husband after this long absence. I wasn't sure what nice topic to pick in the midst of these new days of blood. Plus, doctors see nothing but blood. How about some math? Wait for him and Mirav to say something?.....Oh! How could I forget! Philosophy!

Mirav was a young mom, and I knew her from years back. Still had the long, thick hair and approachable manner. I could follow her lead in conversations. I could see how she would have married carefully, but easily.

But what about Avi? I figured there was a chance that an educated guy in Israel would know about Descartes. Descartes delved into the mechanics of “existence” in the 17th Century. Since Israelis tolerate so many nasty questions from today’s world about why they exist, “existence” without the lousy attitude seemed a fun topic. (“Oh, sure!” I hear someone in audience now yelling.)

I couldn’t go wrong with Descartes. In Israel, maybe it would even be like chatting about Leonard Bernstein for a few minutes.

To my delight, and relief, Avi liked the topic. He seemed prepared to chat about philosophers for a few minutes as I waited for Mirav while relaxing on his front porch. We heard the sounds of his boy’s laugh in the background. If my recollections are accurate, Avi not only knew the basics of Rene Descartes, but ran through descriptions of five or six other famous philosophers – Sartre, Nietzsche, Plato, and more. He sat on the steps and crossed his arms on his chest. He smiled while hearing me start with three or four words.

"Yeah, I looked at some philosophy. I could understand Socrates, but I never got Immanuel Kant," he said.

"I never read him," I said. "What's he like?"

"Thick. Complicated. Like trying to understand algebra in a lot of areas. I didn't enjoy reading it as much as some of the others," he said.

A few years later, when I had time to read some of the Critique of Pure Reason, which came out in 1781, Avi's comments made perfect sense.

If one genuinely reads Kant, I thought (while taking my second aspirin with the pages open before my eyes that day), one would have to at least admit it’s hard to grasp with a light reading; one doesn’t pop open a beer and put one’s feet to the old stool and read Kant. His notions about time, space and transcendental logic alone are enough to make the reader scream. Almost each paragraph is highly complex when it hits the mind. To understand Kant, you have to spend the better part of an American workweek on the page. It’s probably worth the effort, but whether one has the time to understand such things is the real question! It kept us away from thinking about the grenades of Gaza, that's for sure. So, Kant worked that day.

It’s not so important what Avi’s ideas about philosophy were, though. What came to my head was that Shabi’s daughter, Mirav, found a smart, sensitive husband. They’d grown up together, too. Both of them were playing in Amminidav together in their yards.

“When my parents married, they hardly knew each other,” Mirav said to me in her Israeli-accented English. “Me and Avi grew up together. We were always best friends, so getting married seemed natural.”

Outside that, my short time at Mirav’s home before we drove to see Tova was kind of humorous. Mirav kept apologizing and joking with sighs of exasperation because the house was a little disheveled. I hardly noticed it. It looked like the normal cottage of a young married couple starting their married life with their small boy. They didn't have a lot of furniture. That was all I noticed.

The time came to visit Tova, Shabi’s former wife. I became accustomed to her when I stayed there eleven years ago. She was a woman of Hungarian origin. Her father lived in a Kibbutz somewhere in Northern Israel when I lived in Jerusalem before. The poor man was a virtual mental vegetable. He didn’t speak Hebrew, and never came completely out of shock from what happened to him during the Holocaust. Survivors functioned at various intellectual levels, and required various amounts of assistance. He was one of those who didn’t come out in good shape. He hardly seemed to realize what really happened in 1989.

There were some in Israel like that, though. Fewer every year because they were dying naturally of old age. I remember going to private homes for Shabbat dinners and, sometimes, there would be one at the table, very old, broken looking, who talked in mumbles, participating in dinner talk only minimally or peripherally. The outlook was probably better when the survivors were younger, just coming from Europe. Most have passed away by this time, and by the time this writing greets others, many survivors – Jewish or not -- will be present only in sacred family photos.

If one assumes from the outside that Israelis treat them lovingly, they would be correct, but it also seemed that modern Israelis often did not know what to say to them exactly, or what was proper procedure on heartfelt occasions. That’s what I thought I was witnessing in 1989-1990, at least. The family routines and practices which sprung up while incorporating survivors into the family episodes might be one of Israel’s unrecognized stories.

For example, I sometimes thought I was noticing a schism between the European war generation, and their children. I felt and saw something substantially different with their outlooks, even in the way they looked at one another sometimes. It wasn’t disrespect, but more like a thick pane of reality between them. In some cases, even a complete reversal in the normal parent/child chain of authority. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist. It’s obvious what you were seeing at the dinner table. Nobody was talking about it because they were used to it by 1989.

I myself half-acknowledged them and half-ignored them. It’s hard to know what to do, how to carry one’s self in the literal dinner table presence of a survivor of Europe’s atrocities. I was an American child of the space age, the new era of Civil Rights.

Neither Tova nor Shabi ever mentioned Tova’s mother. I did not know if she was a victim of the Holocaust. There are many possibilities. I did not want to quiz Tova.

“Nobody understands him,” Shabi said of Tova’s father while we were once visiting in 1989. “Tova does what she can by visiting him, showing her face to him, doing a few things for him.”

Tova did seem to openly carry deep sorrow about her father, but you could see it in an underground-kind-of-way when she was in the same room with him, in her face if you looked carefully and compared it to her usual expressions while puttering around the house. When Tova was next to her dad that 1989 day, I remember her appearing a bit blank, but clearly retaining the postures of the “good daughter.” She did small things for him in the house without being asked, like he was still giving the directions in the house, even if she was there for only an hour or so; she straightened pillows, refilled water glasses.

That would not be unexpected behavior for a family with a war survivor. I’d read stuff about it in the states, saw photos. I thought I had a good grasp. But being in a home containing an old survivor of those years in Europe, and the children who must take care of the survivor until he or she passes on, is a different matter altogether. It’s not a book.

So was seeing the behavior of nearby individuals who were Jewish, but not of European origin. They did not claim European history as exactly their own. This is what was very painful to watch indeed because it was inside families.

Shabi’s family is from Iraq. They had completely different monsters to battle – wait!

Do you notice any thread of similarity in this particular people’s history? It’s all you can take to read half the outline of the last 300 years of Jewish history. Jewish-American princess? Henry Ford’s International Jew? Oh, please!

Come on! Please don’t buy this garbage. Have your disputes and dislikes if you feel you must, but don’t fall for this rot.

So, my memory is of Shabi standing nearby Tova’s crippled father bored, indifferent, but then suddenly seeming to be overcome by an angry face and tone of voice.

“They found him hiding in the forest, eating grass,” Shabi said angrily. “He doesn’t speak Hebrew, he doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t speak anything except Hungarian.”

Shabi displayed a combination of sympathy, confusion, and resentment toward the man. Shabi seemed to want Tova’s father to bounce back, to cheerfully accept his new life in Israel. I don’t think Tova’s dad ever completely did. Time froze for him in Europe. I never knew him.

Tova married Shabi sometime in the 1960s and they had their first child, Ayal, around 1964 or maybe as late as 1968. I’m not sure. I saw a black-and-white photo of Shabi and Tova then holding their new baby; young couple, young state and a young hope. Who cares about murder and hate?

That’s the odd tone I found in Jerusalem during each visit, too. That weird, childish cheer.

In that old photo, both of them are young and smiling like clowns. I’ve never been able to forget that picture. It is embedded in the photo essay of my mind. Now, I was with Mirav to see Tova again after eleven years.

Mirav was driving. She chatted on the way about how she moved toward marriage with her trusted, childhood friend. There was nothing amazing in the story, but it had some slightly calming influence on me. Why? I think because all we Americans born in the 1960s saw during the 1970s as we were growing up was divorce, custody battles, moves to new homes, new schools, alimony settlements and less. Less of the relatives and friends we once had. There were good things about those decades, too, but too few stories about happy ties. So Mirav’s talk about life, predictable or not, was a good example of a stable life. I am not trying to say it was iconic, but the chat is worth mention today because there was nothing amazing about it. Plus, her boy was so cute, running around his little patch of yard.

We were driving to a modest community somewhere in downtown Jerusalem to see Tova. It was all apartments and cars. Nothing like the luxury she had with Shabi. What makes a woman leave a lovely home and family history to go hole up alone in a tiny apartment, I wondered.

When we arrived, it was indeed small; one room. Nothing modern about it. Small kitchen, minimum furniture, clean, organized, a few nice decorations. But the most stunning thing of all to my eyes was that Tova was literally not the same woman anymore. She must have been some 75 pounds lighter!

“Tova!” I gave her a hug.

“How you? You good?” she said. Her English was fragmentary as it always was. She understood more English than she spoke. She had little need for the language, though.

“Forget me. Look at you. Tova, you look very good. What in the world did you do to yourself?”

We all sat down at the table. Even the way she moved in this apartment was something new to my eyes. In Aminidav, she moved toward, away and between chunks of furniture. Now, the shapes and things in her apartment were things that were fine on their own whether she cleaned them that hour or not; she inhabited the place like it was hers, and as a woman responsible for everything in it. How can I be more vivid? These might have been my most stunning few minutes in Jerusalem that October of 2000.

In Amminidav, her lovely home would have stood up to the finest of San Francisco, I often thought. Yet, she seemed a servant in her own home sometimes. From the time she got up in the morning to the time she curled up on the couch with Hagar to watch the nightly movie, she worked for the house because the house demanded it from each nagging corner. Nothing against the house, of course, but you felt a mild fatigue from her sometimes.

Tova set a bowl of potato salad – Tova-style potato salad I remembered with that tangy flavor. We started talking and laughing. She enjoyed having foreign company for a few minutes. Maybe she was happy I made a point of visiting her during the short trip.

“Yes, Lurene, maybe I will get married again some day, but when I want. I go out on a date sometimes and I come home and do what I like,” she said. “It not marriage I not like. I just did not wanted marriage with Shabi anymore…”

She struggled a bit with her English, but I’d never heard anything more articulate in the language. I knew precisely, to the head of a pin, what she was telling me.

“Is food okay?” she added.

“Hmm? Oh! Yes, yes, the food is good, Tova. I only came here today with Mirav to see you.”

I was sitting at the east side of the rectangular table somewhere, and Tova was sitting at its north border. Mirav was sitting at its northwest corner. Describing those compass points of the table are the only way I can recall our places with respect to one another. When a brief event is important, you remember the lines involved, for some reason. Just the way the brain works, I guess. Really!

One time, a bird attacked me in a park. Deliberately clawed my scalp with his claws! I couldn’t do anything about it. What could I do? Call the San Francisco Police Department? I said nothing, but today recall the angles of his escape, the slant of the little criminal as he returned to his nest. Of course, I only mention it here because I remember the geometry of the event years later.

Mirav now dug around in her purse and produced an envelope. She handed it to Tova. It was the size of a small, child’s birthday party invitation. The envelope had some kind of ornamentation on it suggestive of a greeting card.

Tova picked up a card on the table and opened it while Mirav continued digging through her purse. She and I chatted about something immaterial as Tova viewed the card.

I looked up and saw that Tova was holding this little card open and soundlessly crying. Tears were streaming down her face. Mirav spoke to me.

“That’s a card from my sister, Hagar, that I brought my mother. When my mother left my father, Hagar was the one who couldn’t accept it. She quit talking to my mother. She left to vacation a while in India after she finished the military, to have some time to think out of our father’s house. The house we all grew up in. You know what I mean? Now, she writes my mother this card saying she loves her and forgives her and that everything is behind them now. She’ll return to Jerusalem soon now.”

Tova was opening and closing the greeting card. I was watching her and Mirav was still digging for something in her purse. Tova was opening and reopening like there was something more on the cardstock than the three or so handwritten Hebrew sentences. Watching her, I realized it was like a fragile plate in her hand.

Have you ever watched someone try to describe a controversial symphony right after they leave the auditorium? There is always this 7 to 10 second delay as they try to convert their perceptions into words. In this sense, Tova had no words to denote the card in her hands. Some words, like musical notes or tangible objects, expand once at the mind of the recipient.

The fact Hagar had written Tova from India was an immense weight off both their hearts. What a day it must have been when Hagar returned to Jerusalem

BAGHDADI PROPOSAL....6

2010-02-16T12:40:00.000-08:00

Now, I was getting ready to see the Kennedy memorial in Amminidav, deliberating otherwise how to spend the day. Sure, I thought to myself with a big yawn while putting make up on my face near the window of Shabi’s formal living room, there was the unforgettable inauguration speech John F. Kennedy made….January 20, 1962? No, no…1961 it was. Oh, yes, that’s it. ’61…the mist of bitterly cold Washington air leaving a literal trail of this American president’s spoken words. Was he the first American president born in the 20th Century? I wasn’t born yet when he was assassinated. I was born June 19, 1964…..but, Jeesh….Oh, and before stepping to that podium to make the inauguration speech he wrote, the 43-year-old President reviewed Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural speech. “It’s better than mine,” he remarked….Oh! The Cuban Missile Crisis shortly into his term….If properly remembered….

Or so my thoughts rambled, strolled and meandered before getting out to visit the memorial which was within walking distance of Shabi’s home. I walked into the kitchen. Shabi was busy on the phone. He stubbed out a cigarette and swept his hand across the kitchen table to remove surface dust as he spoke articulately in Hebrew on the telephone. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen looking at him with my right hand on my hip, smiling.

His phone voice, the distinct style of his determined, amplified Hebrew wafting through the house. Funny how I never forgot the way he used his language, even if I did not recognize many of the words he was using. In some ways, I felt I’d been folded into the walls of his house when I heard his Hebrew, so familiar was its sound to my brain.

Shabi raised his striking Iraqi eyes to mine from the table as he listened to the caller. A rich sweep of his Iraqi hair lay over part of his forehead. I never complimented Shabi then, and still can’t say I ever have. But in my mind he’s one of the most naturally handsome men I’ve ever seen anywhere.

He noticed me standing there smiling at him, looking at him. He smiled at me as he listened to the voice on the phone. The caller said last words and disconnected.

“Do you think it’s alright to walk to the Kennedy Memorial today?”

“Yes, it’s okay,” he said, waving me off with a friendly tone.

He was busy this morning. I started walking the streets of Amminidav.

I returned to my all-American thoughts, which felt more like habits…. The Kennedy era was not all romance elsewhere in the world. To captives of the old Soviet Empire as it existed, he might have been the man who talked an eloquent game, but through their imprisoned eyes didn’t make an atom of difference for the East before his assassination – and atom is the appropriate term if you consider for a moment the typical news reports of those days. Those radio, television and newspaper reports were forming the thoughts of much of the world’s population….

It was a still, sunny day in Jerusalem. I began to walk down the main road toward the outskirts of the moshav. I got into a wooded, well-maintained portion and saw the memorial 150 yards before me.

I heard the engines of motorcycles approaching. They were coming closer to me.

They were riding quickly. I could make out two young men, and now I saw that they were armed. They stopped in front of me. I stood still, my arms at my sides loosely.

“Shalom,” said one, looking at me cautiously.

“Hello.”

“American, yes?”

“Yes. Walking to the Kennedy Memorial.”

They looked at each other. “You’re the only American we’ve seen around here,” said the man on my right. “We came because we were not sure who it was.”

“You shouldn’t be walking by yourself around this area,” said the other man, who lit a cigarette.

“Maybe it would be better to have someone with me, but I used to live here when I was a student. I used to walk here all the time,” I said. “The friend I am staying with trusts me to use some judgment.”

“You lived here? When was that?”

“Back in ’89 and ’90. I was at The Hebrew University for a year.”

The two men got off their motorcycles and took off their helmets. They were racy-looking guys, the kind you would see in downtown Tel Aviv on a Saturday afternoon flirting with girls in coffee shops. Well, should see, anyway. We made quick introductions.

“Why do you visit now?” asked the man on my right, the more humorous and talkative one. He smiled and set his weapon down on the seat of the bike.

“I had the ticket. Besides, the first Intifadah was going on the entire time I was here last time. I knew a little of what to expect. This time, it’s bitter though.”

Looking at them, I was a little fogged. I had the impression now, as I had four or five times since landing in Jerusalem, that the Israelis to whom I was speaking were behind glass and, like prisoners, kept putting their hands on a glass partition trying to get me to understand; always trying to get the outsider to see in.

“Yes, it’s more dangerous. We found the remains of a small campfire in the forest further back. Watch yourself, and don’t come around here to wander at night.”

“I sure won’t.”

The other guy, the enthusiastic one, smiled and leaned forward a little. “What do Americans think of us? You must think our lives are insane,” he said, laughing boyishly.

“There’s no sweeping answer. Different people say different things. Most Americans don’t perceive life here as normal, I can tell you that much. They sure wouldn’t picture two guys like you running around your neighborhood as you are with those weapons. But I guess most are sympathetic to your problems.”

“Really?” he said.

“Sure!” I said, trying to bring some cheer to the discussion. “But many are sympathetic to the Palestinians, too. Or only for the Palestinians. I should mention that. It’s a cause, you know? Like Apartheid once was, or Global Warming is for some now. They’re a bit distant from the sites of violence in most cases. Never been here.”

“We get those types,” he said, turning his head toward the length of the road.

“We’d better get going,” said the other man quietly to his partner. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Be safe. Shalom.”

“Shalom,” I said, watching them ride off.

I didn’t linger long at the Kennedy and Rubenstein memorials. I just wanted to look at them again, and sit there a while. Americans are never truly away from home because our influence for good or not is far and wide, even if in hostile regions.

I remember Israeli-Americans when I studied here who were always hunting around for a This Week with David Brinkley broadcast at the American Cultural Center, or an American snack they had growing up, like Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts. They had waves of homesickness.

I’d been questioned now a number of times about why I was here, and asked myself why I was the only one never asking myself that question, even now that I was here. I comically thought of how American car-rental agencies don't rent to people under 25, or unpredictable people like me if they can avoid it.

But I had a stranger image in those few moments I’ve never forgotten. It was an undaunted image.

It was an image of standing at the foot of a half-dressed bed to unfurl a clean, white sheet. I snapped it open and watched it slowly drift down like a wandering, October leaf to rest itself on a bottom sheet.

The only meaning an image like that could’ve had was, “You made your bed, hope you're fixing to sleep in it.”

I rambled back to Shabi’s house.

Israel is an obvious product of a lengthy and recorded Jewish history, as well as the more recent – and recorded – Oriental and European history.

The anguished themes of Western history, and its Jewish history in particular, hit me immediately in casual talks with Israelis.

But so do the threads of magnificence inherent in each history. They are weaved into Israel’s daily life; an appreciation of history – every history -- that I can’t understand exactly, given the constant hardships heaped upon Jewish populations on every continent, through every era.

Yes, success has come to Jews century after century, but some authority has nearly always come to take the prizes of hard work back, along with all the security they thought they’d finally earned. The Jewish guy who says, “Mom and dad lived a great life and died peacefully” is disturbingly uneven from region to region, era to era. That’s the chunky and potholed road of Jewish history to me – at least in my readings of it.

There are other readings, and other histories. I know. But I’m discussing Jews in this work, and it’s worth my effort. Israel still catches my attention.

Why? Maybe Israelis give me hope. In spite of the hate continuously hurled toward them from both the Palestinian territories and much of the outside world, they’re optimistic. This is even though I’ve heard Israelis often using hurt tones about the way they’re viewed elsewhere.

The exact angles of Jewish history form a geometry I can’t calculate, though. The values of the numbers involved change from decade to decade, region to region, even language to language. It’s over my head in terms of its complexity; Jews have been expected by others – especially their families -- to understand, argue, forgive, and keep their eyes on the roads ahead. That’s one of the reasons outsiders like me have something to learn here, and should take the trouble.

Similarly, however, I have often tried hard to understand the political position the Palestinians are trying to force upon themselves today. It’s never worked for them, not in the era of the Ottoman Empire, and not in late 2000. Why do they keep to this dead end road? Why are the Israelis the only obstacle they claim as their own?

The more we see of riots on Palestinian streets, the less we see. The distance between now and the day a settlement’s in sight is vast in terms of political diplomacy, accurate journalism and even -- I pause when writing this -- democracy.

Instead, mass terror is the diplomacy for the modern Arab, or so all the newspapers and cable broadcasts teach. Terror thugs use broadcast media of all kinds with an air of international legitimacy.

It’s nothing new, we sigh. The spirit of the Arab leader Saladin, who conquered Jerusalem in 1187, has supposedly returned to confront the difficulties of the Arab masses. At least that’s what it seems to the man on the decaying Arab street for a time. In reality, the headlines are telling him someone had his throat cut the night before and was left on the street with a note by an Islamic militant. The name of the victim is new, but it’s pretty much the same old note.

It might look revolutionary for a while, but it’s not. It’s a rank and aimless wind flowing through the streets of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tripoli…

The Arab world needs a leader who can call that wind what it is.

For instance, when it’s time to set up a modern municipal budget, the mythical Arab hero fails completely. Like people everywhere, Arabs live in cities. It doesn’t matter whose flag occupies the town square. When it’s time to take the garbage, you need a guy who can do the job, and an accountant to make sure he’s paid on time.

How do Arab states work? To explain it, we might we might even see the region through the lens of Salvador Dali for a few moments. How might he paint? Ahhh!! Now we arrive at a nightmare painting with a question!

The Press Conference

On this imaginary canvas, I see a room with a stage where a press conference is about to take place. There is a kind of design to it – a centrally located vanishing point and a 16th Century stage. But it’s a show created to satirize itself. The people who buy tickets for this are a breed in themselves.

There is a man in vivid yellow on the stage. He’s a stage hand. He is holding an empty suitcase with a Roulette Wheel on it. Another man, a cub reporter assuming the mind of an illiterate, innumerate child in his work, is being photographed by a third world journalist who thinks he’s the standard, and the journalist filming him is an over-made up woman who is overweight and is herself being tape recorded by a touch of old Hollywood; It’s Lon Chaney as The Wolfman! He’s dead, but he’s got his press pass, headphones, and microphone. People are walking past him like they do anyone because he’s got as much credibility as the rest of them.

The audience watching the news reporters work is the Arab world and only the Arab world. An embarrassing number of them are sleeping. The whole show is set up to impress them – that’s right, NOT us, but THEM -- because the play lacks a defining central event.

Crusaders are excusing themselves as they squeeze themselves into the empty chairs in the middle of the fifth row that are saved for them. The lines of perspective seem drawn already as if by Dali himself.

Yasser Arafat’s on the left side of the stage, toward the front, nailing his own hand to the cross while smirking out to the audience like a game show host. Catcalls and trills from the back; His head is backward, with his face seeming to be facing the same direction as his decaying ass.

The colors are unnatural. The walls are hung with posters featuring comedians with instant rice in one hand, and machine guns in the other which the star is pointing toward himself – none of them accountable for anything which makes this more opera buffa than political commentary.

The stage is slanted against the audience so they can only see portions of events from the very start, anyway – the libretto better be good! They can’t sensibly applaud and they can’t boo. Their judgment’s null by being in the theater at all.

The camera is ignoring the speaker who finally makes it on the stage, focusing instead on the Pilipino maintenance guy changing the light bulb.

Some red-haired spectator in a “Go Giants” t-shirt is standing near the fourth row. He’s holding a museum brochure with a big pre-Columbian statue on cover. The wrong….auditorium? He looks around the room.

“Jill?”

Nobody answers his call. The poor man’s not only in the wrong room, he’s in the wrong world.

Meanwhile, a United Nations Peacekeeper is serving alcohol on a tray, and the really cheap stuff – low-grade Russian vodka and cheap American beer with high alcohol content. Hitler is waiting at a corner on the right side of the room with a neon sign. He is ignored, though, like the old cigarette billboard he is for the world today.

He has his free ticket, though, so although he makes only senile, nonsense comments and is selling a product that was unmasked as poison long ago, he still shows up. He’s thin and stupid as a skeleton literally is. He’s rolling a cart with oxygen, using a cane. His Nazi salute -- if he can manage one -- is about as politically persuasive as a one-legged bull in Spain.

I am almost certain that there are traumatized populations the world over who can paint their own surrealistic picture, like this fantasy above, of the scene in Israel’s West Bank today.

It’s the same drumbeat over and over, day after day after day after year after year after year after century…it becomes a Dali. When anger and panic flood Jerusalem as they were in October of 2000, emotions turn illiterate, and art is the only medium that can read or be read. It has a kind of accuracy journalism can’t transmit.

People couldn’t get a reasonable feel for one another on the Jerusalem streets in times like those were. There were the usual neon signs, buildings of past centuries open to tourists, the big windows of modern architecture, yes, but too few people were walking through the aromas of fresh bread and steaming, spiced meats. All the fresh food but no lines of tourists like I was used to seeing in that part of town; it was like walking past a stack of yesterday’s newspapers.

What were they going to do with all the yummy food?

It was that way for at least the days I wandered through in early October of 2000. Riots again erupting all around. Depression. Confusion – especially that.

Yet, amid all the strife, how many lovelorn faces locked with mine? On the Jerusalem streets, too many.

I remember a guy my age, which was 36 at the time, who seemed in a massive rush in asking me to have coffee with him in a nearby café on the street. I started to order, then excused myself and left the café because even after twenty minutes of casual conversation he seemed in too much of a hurry for a romantic signature. I don’t think he was a normally pushy sort, but he had irrational ideas that day. I felt sorry for him, upon reflection.

How can I best explain it?; Hurry, sit down, order something, anything, let’s discuss anything anything anything right now and I hope you have the money to pay your own tab as we talk about our new friendship!! I never saw the man in my life and he was acting like we’d somewhere met. This was incredible behavior for a previously unknown man – a teacher -- and I did not want to struggle with his desperation. It’s what I saw in his face. I got up and left. He sat staring at me like I’d just slapped him.

He wasn’t the only one I met on the street who seemed off. Another young man approached me while I was viewing necklaces in a window. He asked why I was in Jerusalem at this odd time.

He started to joke about the last time Israel was threatened and suddenly found his memory out of his head. He stopped mid-sentence.

“When was it we were wearing gas masks,” he muttered, a blank look coming over his face. He was gazing into the middle street. He looked like a distressed child.

I stood looking at him for about one minute quietly. I was waiting for him to finish his words, but nothing came from his lips. His eyes moved down and right, as if he would find the information there.

“It was 1991 you were wearing masks, friend,” I finally said with a smile. I didn’t want to seem like I was teasing him about his difficulty. “I’ll be getting on now.”

Well, I told myself, these new riots flamed up just days ago. People are disoriented. They’ll regain their balance in a few days.

I attracted an unusually high number of pained eyes toward my face in those hours I wandered the streets of downtown Jerusalem. For those unforgettable passers-by in downtown Jerusalem, the guns mattered less when looking into other eyes – any other eyes.

I never saw a real attraction in those faces. It wasn’t possible. They were scared and confused. But even in that unbalanced state, a chance of love forces the riots back, however delusional it may be. Suddenly, the man in Jerusalem -- the defensive Israeli -- has a reason to stroll along his street that he doesn’t need to contemplate.

After all, he’s like the man in Paris or Rome or San Francisco. He sees a female and his eyes flare like a child’s. Who cares what’s going on in the papers! The 20th Century is gone!

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

The Talon

I flew over southwest canyons. I ate inedible testaments. I wailed the plainchant quotes. Heroic and vainglorious rays of golden syrup approached my perfect black hair, flawlessly smooth and reflective like the Pharaoh’s cheek, then ran the other way, crying straight in sympathy to a translucent desert cloud, which laughs at light every day, every day, every day, bragging hot light.

I was a great and airborne bird, born opposed to the light, finding confrontations everywhere I flew. Delicate degradations of the rays that lent the life to all beneath me.

My legs walked on sand simply to watch the sand as it fled under my little feet. It was wet and dry, the perpetual earthquake under my talons. Down on the sand, but too close to the sun. I never understood it.

I had to condescend to the human black and massive canyons. It was there I ate.

I was a great and airborne bird, everywhere I flew….and everyone saw me!

It was an orange cracker.

There’s no such thing as florescent orange in a bird’s light. My friends flapped nearby in warning, “Don’t Do It! Don’t eat those human and unreal crumbs! They are not for us!”

But my beak is just a beak and when I was on the beach I was just a common crow. I was born, innocent as dirt, blindly ambitious and foolish like the pavement ant. I never knew that pull on my wing…

I wanted that florescent cracker, that evil, ruffian thing! It was a fraud; the black lion disguised as a billowing leaf…I JUST WANT TO BE A BIRD AGAIN…WHAT HAPPENED TO ME WHEN I LEFT MY AIR?

Shhhchhhshhhhchhhh…..

“Hello?” Ah! I’m on the freeway now. Yes, should be in Phoenix soon enough…well, yes, it’s a long, dry road, but I guess I’m okay. Funny, this feeling -- like I’m in an element. I feel like I was something else….the desert puts such a sense to my mind, then demands its bow. It happens to us all one day or another.”

Sigh…

All I can do is keep driving.”

-- END EPISODE EIGHT --

BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...7

2010-02-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

On the drive back with Mirav, I was uncharacteristically silent. Mirav turned her face to me.

“Lurene, what is wrong?”

“Nothing. Just thinking about the political matters I read about this morning,” I said.

It was a lie. I was thinking about all I’d just seen with Tova. I think Mirav could tell I was lying. She drove cheerfully back to the moshav.

One mistake men of every culture make – Norwegian, Czech, Mexican, South African, and Chinese – is to see themselves as enhanced, more alluring, with a reputation for womanizing.

The sexual roamer is attractive to women who either have ulterior motives or have a key screw loose in their heads. I am not trying to insult; it’s simply a law of love for every society I’ve visited. It’s the cold, hard law of life in the United States, too.

For some years, the player may think he’s doing well, and having the greatest time in life a man can concoct for himself.

As these men skateboard through their 30s and waterslide through their 40s, they attract women who are either too dim-witted to understand the inevitable result of the relationship, or women who’re equally cunning in romance. By the time the poor man is into his late 50s, he has one or two health problems and, hopefully, has learned to moderate his behavior.

If he’s a real idiot, still walking the same glitzy road in his late 50s, he’s with women that even other women don’t trust.

One friend I had, a handsome, 60-year old man who was well-traveled and had his eyes always open for new women, was just like this. But he began getting women who were either with him for a few months only, or with him because they needed help keeping a roof over their heads, i.e., recovering cocaine addicts, mothers who need help paying the bills for their aimless kids -- I mean literally aimless -- kids that, even if launched by Mom with a bow toward their point in life, complain while flying 150 mph toward the bull’s eye that they lost their key again.

My personal opinion is that the only way to face this breed of man is warily. Insist on meeting a few of his long-time female friends.

He may have none.

If you don’t take these precautions, you’re going to be left, after he’s had his fun, to rot alone like a 1950s billboard on the Route 66 of failed love.

I begin with that commentary because I’m intending to recall a handsome man who was just that type, but defied all those laws: Uri Levi. Today, I still have to ask myself if I turned my back on him unfairly. Should I have taken him seriously?

Uri was definitely an Israeli lover of women all over the globe.

You could guess in the first 15 minutes of dining with him by the contemplative way he paused, wine glass elegantly in hand, before reciting like actor Lawrence Olivier his Marcia story, Wendy story, and Beatrice story. Those are just the American names!

In Uri’s case, around him lay ex-wives and ex-girlfriends everywhere, plainly visible if you poked around. They were of all nationalities. Israelis like himself, visitors to Israel, Costa Ricans, visitors to Costa Rica, San Francisco East Bay chicks, friends of East Bay chicks. The list gets long. (I never knew him to go out with a New Yorker, but maybe that’s because they’re so hard to sweet-talk.)

He’s got kids from one, kids from another, and kids from women he doesn’t even know – but that is due to his being a sperm donor, as if what the world lacks is Uri’s genes.

Truthfully, I couldn’t fault Uri for that last item. Who can say what will become of that child? Who can predict what will become of any child? Uri’s regular kids – the kids who grew up calling him Abba or Dad -- were smart, good-looking and healthy. They lacked for nothing material.

I still recall my first meeting with Mr. Levi. We agreed to meet at the Diggery Inn in Oakland, California. It was in the Oakland Hills, above Fruitvale and below Montclair. It’s a lovely area of the East Bay community, peaceful. Montclair’s the site of an occasional murder, but even that is a big story in the city’s main daily, The Oakland Tribune, since it normally does not happen in that neck of Oakland.

For those who are not familiar with the San Francisco Bay area, Oakland’s a major city, cultural magnet, crime shrine and commercial flashpoint that easily matches San Francisco and San Jose on each evening’s financial and crime news broadcasts.

In this case, it was May of 1989 and I’d put an ad in The Oakland Tribune seeking any individual who could help me in my upcoming trip to Jerusalem. I did not save the advertisement, but it was asking for helpful tips, financial grants, or friendly faces in anticipation of my travel to Jerusalem. I did not know anyone in Jerusalem.

I’d won a spot in the foreign study program. I would be at The Hebrew University for one academic year. Jerusalem was, at the time, a literal riot scene with the advent of the first Intifadah.

I figured I might attract some calls from good-deed doers who had contacts in the area and, if I was lucky, a financial contributor. I never got any financial gifts, but I did get a few calls from people giving useful hints about how to do well as a visitor to the area. Nice people, too. Not weirdoes as one might assume an ad like that could attract. (In fact, I sometimes wonder where the hate-spewing weirdoes were that week. What’s wrong with me?)

So, Uri called. He sounded like a rational, Israeli guy. We had a good conversation, though I can’t now remember the details of it. I have a vague memory of him having a respect and thirst for societies of the third world in South America.

He made vigorous efforts to understand history. Both his own and that of different cultures, including the Islamic ones that hated his own. He most loved the cultures he made no clear difference in, was ignored within. There he was standing amid Mexican peasants so he could be a brown-skinned invisible man somewhere, relax.

The restaurant was down the block from me on Park Boulevard. I always liked that street, paved with palm trees in the middle. Hollywood’s casting call in Oakland, and just the stage a man like Levi needed to enter my life, or any woman’s life, for that matter.

The moment my eyes landed on him, I knew the handsome face and manner in some way. The easy but determined walk, the lopsided grin. It was the way he looked at me, smiling, his head bobbing up and down like the tricky boat that knew the waves of the San Francisco Bay that day.

As I’ve said, I try to avoid these men in romance, but this was not a date.

If it had been a date, I would have had to remind myself that starting a relationship with a Don Juan is like trying to satisfy your taste for iceberg lettuce with Stinging Nettles, then trying to calm the sting of those with an elegant glass of battery acid.

If you’re a woman unfortunate enough to be recently married to one, picture a woman falling from a plane, landing on the steel-cold pavement of Moscow. That woman is you.

If you know what you’ve got and think you can save your union with counseling, you may as well leave your problems for the Tooth Fairy, and then take a match to your head to address your dandruff. At least you’ll see results.

So, Uri had evidently left the moshav in Jerusalem, with his kids still living in it, to chase a woman he liked, and chase dreams of the United States.

I don’t know what the exact story is, but this is what his daughter Galit said, if I am remembering it right.

Uri and I had a nice lunch, but it was clear by the end of it that he had viewed our meeting as a launching pad for romance. We saw one another casually three or four times more, I think, and talked on the phone often. He seemed to know something about everything, so it was hard not to talk. It was hard not to like him even if you did not want romance.

One time I was playing some foreign music I’d been given. Uri called.

“Iran. I know it!” he said.

“You recognize this music? I got it as a gift a few days ago.”

“I know Iranian music the second I hear it,” he said.

Before I left for Tel Aviv, he called Shabi Gamlieli in Moshav Amminidav in Jerusalem.

“Please, help her, Shabi. I love the girl,” he reportedly said to Shabi before I got on the plane to Tel Aviv in 1989.

It was a profitable, academic year for me in Jerusalem, but I’ll get to that some other time. Cutting to my return to San Francisco, I returned to my talks and friendship with Uri Levi. I went multiple places with him, dinners, camping trips with him and his kids from one of his marriages. I stayed at his home one time for several weeks. I became friends with his beautiful, older daughter, Galit, who had moved to be with her father from Israel. She was also from Amminidav. She had a great sense of humor, which added to her vanity, somehow.

One time, she came to a Halloween party dressed as a Mermaid -- carp suit if you ask me. You had to be in her living room that week, listening to her detailed plan: She was going to be hot. She thought she could get the attention of her new husband that way. She was afraid of his ex-girlfriend, who was going to the party.

I did not go to that party, but I can see the face of her competitor that night stepping into the room, well enough.

For seven years, I hung out with Uri and his kids. Often, he would mention his idea that he’d always pictured us as a serious couple.

I brushed his comments off. I always was too busy with an Iranian man I was going with, Kaveh, to take Uri seriously in that regard. It looked stupid to Uri, because Kaveh and I argued regularly and broke up frequently, only to get back together. Kaveh wouldn’t let our relationship get on a serious footing. He did not want to marry. He was a refugee from Iran’s revolution and a combatant in the Iran-Iraq War. I never pictured myself with an Iranian man, but we were together on this rocky path for years.

In this manner, life moved on. One night, Uri and I went out to a restaurant on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. It was a small, quiet French restaurant.

Uri was intending to ask me to marry him, or suggest a new relationship between us of a serious, committed nature. I did not guess this, but it had come down to an either/or night for him – one of few such nights in a man’s life. He wanted to marry, and he was sick of waiting around for me to devote myself to a life with him and his kids.

“Seven years I’ve waited for you, Lurene. Seven years. Seven is a very important number for Jews. Do you know that?”

“No,” I said, as if telling the waiter I didn’t need my water glass refilled. What a blind idiot I was. Sitting there, looking at him like he was a discount tire billboard on Oakland’s East 14th Street.

Like a 3 p.m. sun in Death Valley, I sat there dumbly radiating heat. I was afraid to say anything and make the situation worse.

“Are you going to start with me or not?”

“No,” I said repeated, meekly. “Not now.”

“Then you never will,” he said, taking his wallet out to pay the bill. He had tears in his eyes. It was stunning to see that night how seriously he felt. It did not change my position, though.

It was the last time we would talk for many years. Many, many years.

This is where I come to my point: Committing to a man who has a history of womanizing, infidelity, two-timing, or lying to women is like hiring a boxing promoter with a long prison record to direct your investment needs. Oh, you might see a good fight, but your original investment?

As your dollars wave goodbye? Probably not. There goes the cute house and the picket fence and the whole dreamy scene: Poof.

So, that was Uri Levi. Now, here I was in Jerusalem again with Shabi. It was 2 a.m. We were in the kitchen. Shabi’s phone rang. It was Uri.

Shabi must have told him earlier that I was in Jerusalem.

I gestured to get the receiver.

Shabi put his finger over his lips and waved me down.

He talked for a time in Hebrew, and then hung up.

“Why didn’t he want to say hi?”

“He didn’t want problems with his wife.”

I leaned back in my seat and smiled. Any woman married to Uri is watching him. Uri had money and intelligence and many other good traits – I’ve no problem admitting that -- but a loyal husband he’s probably still not.

I will now always wonder what underlying effect the Uri Call, as my memory now terms it, had on my unfolding and fateful decisions toward Shabi that evening. I have to say this because I then forced myself to see the man in front of me as he really was.

“Lurene, I spoke with my daughter, Hagar. We talked about you staying here with us. She said she would accept you to be with us here. Stay here with us in Jerusalem. We could even have one child,” said Shabi.

I sat looking at Shabi blankly, just as I had with Uri some three years ago. His face, after Uri’s call, had turned into a big STOP sign.

“Well….” I said.

Now, I had to quit lying to myself and face at least part of what drove me to the plane in San Francisco. It was regret. Regret led me back to Israel that day. Regret that I was not fulfilling my opportunities in life, and life was running fast. I had regrets over a million small things, like books I was given and never finished reading. I had Principia Mathematica on my shelf and never read it. I had relationships I never finished, and never even started while people waited as long as they could. There was a man who asked for my help in Cairo back in 1990, a Jewish tourist who felt alone and terrified. I did not remain with him even though it's all he was asking. I still think about that man. Especially that man. Why didn't I help? Why did I not do so many things I could have done? Yes, it's no mystery today when I look back on this trip why I boarded that plane when few others would. I wanted to be there this time because there was no other time.

But what about Adah? Why hadn’t he told her something was amiss between them already? Was I supposed to toss the ice water in her face for him? If he'd already decided to go so far as to propose that we have one child, why had he not warned Adah of his reluctance to commit to his relationship with her? Regrets or not, the landscape did not look real to me on this night.
We never know ourselves completely. You can never know yourself completely because a great part of the meaning of what you are to the world is trapped -- PAUSE -- in the glance of a passing stranger on a New York street, or in a Los Angeles elevator, or….

Shabi took my hands in his and sat up from his chair. He pulled them upward. “Come on. Let’s go now, Lurene.”

He wanted us to walk together for the first time to his bedroom, and into what I was supposed to view as a new life.

He kept pulling. I kept pulling back. He kept pulling, and I kept pulling my hands back. He yanked, I pulled my hands back.

He threw up his hands.

“Oh, forget it all!”

He walked back to his room and shut the door.

I couldn’t believe after all these years of wanting to return to Jerusalem, and even after getting the news of Tova’s departure; I resisted, and gave no reason for my refusal. But this is what I did.

I slept fitfully. It must have been nothing compared to the way Shabi slept, if he slept at all. The next morning, when I came out of Hagar’s room, he was standing at the closet, looking for a towel. He was in his underwear. I shrieked.

“Oh, Lurene. I am looking for a towel. A towel!!”

I drew my breath back in. “I’m sorry. I am not quite awake, that’s all.”

Baghdadi Betrayal

After Shabi digested the answer to his proposal, he seemed to be trudging through grief with anger. At the same time, he seemed to be searching for a reason for his failure. He could not understand why I’d said no.

I’m not sure I knew yet, either. Even though I am the one who decided not to start the relationship because he had a girlfriend and I did not want to get myself into a foreign controversy any more than I was already in simply by flying into the country, I also wondered why, after having so many affectionate conversations over the years, I could pass up the opportunity to make it real.

Had he not done everything he could to provide the details as to what he was proposing?

He did, yet, I needed to see some sort of impending separation between Adah and Shabi. When he spoke on the cell phone with Adah in the car, I did not hear a relationship in its final stages. I felt even if he made moves to part with her, the separation would be done in phantom steps for years. He would never completely make the break. He would turn into the man with the ex-girlfriend in the wings. He wasn’t going to wave goodbye so easily, and neither was she.

Michal would never be on my side, either. She liked Adah.

I was hearing him say “we” when Adah was in the room, and calling her “a nice friend” when she was not and he was facing just me.

The fact was, Shabi had not given Adah fair notice. He expected me to do it for him, and in the worst way.

Sorry, friend. Not me.

That was my answer.

-- END EPISODE NINE –

-- EPISODE TEN; CONCLUSION --

The true cure for our world is a few inches beneath the glassy surface of a Venezuelan stream, waiting quietly. You lean down and see your reflection and enjoy a moment of complete serenity. “I was always looking,” you hear yourself whisper, “and now I’ve…”

SUDDENLY, HE’S IN YOUR FACE. YOU HAVE THREE SECONDS. MOVE OR DIE. RIGHT NOW!

That’s a real alligator in your real face. Not a TV alligator. An alligator, dammit! One that will K I L L Y O U! That’s right, the face you can reach up and touch right now. When it happens, we’re all real. Just you and the reptile. The most tremendous sight of your life is now a remote, locked cell. You’d better do something accessible to your instincts for life or you’ll be dead by the time you count to five. There is no key, no lock, no bars. Your problem is much worse in today’s world, and deep down, you know that.
That’s reality. This garbage we’re swimming in as a civilization over and over and over again incessantly is not reality. It’s self-immolation. Wake up. Now.

Any Country: Its Boundaries

Once in a while, I thought of the situation of the country I was in, and why the world thought of Israel in different terms than it regarded other countries.

We seldom are aware that countries are human constructs. No country exists in a fundamental way, though its people may behave as if their country exists like air and water. When people say Israel does not truly exist by law, I think the speaker does not realize what a country, any country, is in the first place. It is a geographical area given boundaries by human thought. This will always be true.

Israel exists because there are people inside a zone who believe it to be so and because there is a culture specific to the place that cannot be transferred in thought or deed to another culture. That means Egypt, that means Iran, that means Madagascar, that means Sweden, and yes that means the United States too…..take your pick! That’s right, no other country. You don’t have to like it, because it exists whether you, who are reading this, exist or not, and whether I, who am writing this, exist or not.

A few years back, we had something called the Soviet Union. Today, it doesn’t exist because of a change in world consciousness. Yesterday, there were a lot of things extant that aren’t today. That fact demands recognition.

It wasn’t the Soviet land that vanished; minds in Europe switched one ghost for another. Countries are categories of human thought, vaporous and vital like exhaled breath but bound by time at all their boundaries.

Read any history book! Visit an art museum with a collection of art going back at least 500 years and you will see this! One of my personal favorites is an etching made about 1635 by Hercules Seghers, an untitled work depicting his impression of the ruins in the Roman Campagna. Like artists in so many eras, he was barely surviving financially, so it may have influenced his work. But he still showed a stark awareness of the temporary nature of glory. The Campagna as portrayed here, with its menacing, midnight blue sky and crumbled buildings that were once public structures, could to this day humble a tin-pot revolutionary or two.

So, some insist that Israel has no right to exist? Neither does your country, if the hard truth of the universe is measured with the right tool. If we make way for the bones of the matter, The Ottoman Empire existed on ground as solid as Switzerland’s is today. This is so regardless of how we see and regard them today. A dictatorial empire does not need our approval to have once existed, to go on having its redundant influence on diplomatic affairs.

One could go about telling this to struggling nations, but the only purpose would be to insult. This is not a legitimate form of international diplomacy, although some people might think it reasonable, when addressing a fringe slab of geography with no economy or history in the middle of an ocean. Fleeting or not, every nation’s accomplishments deserve recognition.

I sometimes suspect that this is what truly frightens the world about Israel. Israel exposed the idea of nationalism for what it was, and a lot of us don’t like it.

It’s not so shocking. I have long accepted that America exists because most of us agree it does. Our meaning to the world as Americans is one of intellectual and interpretive fragility.

Our existence as nations is a product of the human mind, but we’re in the custody of a universe with an unhuman eye. The fact that the world doesn’t exist for our benefit is obvious. The day we recognize this plain fact is the day we will step far forward in handling our world affairs.

In the entryway near the door to his magnificent house, it was close to noon. It was quiet outside except for the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves outside, which we could hear because of the open window in the kitchen.

“My dear, pack some things. I am taking you to Nahum,” Shabi said. He looked me straight in the eye like someone gazing at a subway door about to open.

I looked at him confused. I was trying to understand what was happening. His face had the expression that can only be used to convey nothing, but what I could not expect was impossible to miss.

I felt he was trying to punish me for an argument where I had said something unforgivable, an argument where I had belittled him and mercilessly teased him in front of a crowd, at just the moment he expected me to save his life.

But by reminding me of an argument we never had – and there is such a thing that can happen between two people – he left me no literal place to go and nothing of substance to protest. This, to me, is the most terrible space that can exist between a man and a woman as they stand looking at each other.

“Nahum? I’ve never talked to Nahum. Why should I pack for a little…”

“Nahum speaks good English. He’s a clever man,” Shabi said with a brief lift of his eyebrows. His eyes were like he was addressing someone he’d heard bad things about, or had put up with too long, though I’d been there only a week since 1990, and he’d invited me to return many times over in his calls to San Francisco. His lips were welded together like a thin zipper.

“Come, dear. Pack your things. You did not come all the way to Jerusalem to sit in a house,” he said.

He flashed me a last glance. I took a step back. Our talks were over. But do I look back with anger or bitterness?

No. It’s not possible. Writing this story is my way of demonstrating that fact. Jerusalem has enough anger today. I’m not going to increase it.

-- END --

Author’s Note:

I want to add a few notes about this manuscript. First, Marten Plante of Palm Springs, California helped me a bit in 2005. He read the material to some degree and suggested I cut the introduction; bring the reader right into the airplane with me as it lands in Jerusalem in October of 2000. Thanks to him, I was able to edit my work a bit more realistically.

Also, I want to mention Dana Negev and Laurie Winestock, friends from San Francisco. Both Israeli, they both spoke excellent Hebrew. One of the poems in this work I originally wrote in Hebrew. Bad Hebrew. They took the English version of the poem and translated it into the correct Hebrew for me. It was for the record of my library, and is only cited within this Jerusalem memoir in English. It is the brief poem near the end of episode one, “It got to be eleven…”

Finally, one is tempted to read a short memoir like this and interpret it as somewhat predictive of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. I try not to think this way, however. By that literary standard, we can as accurately call this memory of mine a harbinger of violent events in multiple locations in the world since October of 2000. Naturally, as an American, I am quite partial to New York.

But a victim of terror is a victim of terror. I know that and quickly acknowledge it on April 11, 2009.

Best Regards,

Lurene Gisee