Room for a View
Line of Defense: The View from Israel
by Linda Zisquit

Line of Defense (excerpt) I don’t let the news in at dawn. I have rules for morning hours, my ear trained to the warble and whistle of returning birds. It’s nothing, I say, a repetition of sightings—oh but birds, a friend says, that isn’t nothing. Maybe if I knew their names or could decipher, on first encounter, a plane circling from a formation veering home, wings flapping as if the sky’s performance deserved applause. Oh, it’s mad here—to plan a day around explosions, or to hold my pen as if my hand could keep danger at bay, my son’s safety locked in this little plan. Linda Zisquit

Jerusalem. 16 April, 2002
Life in this country is always provocative, dynamic, often confusing; pain and celebration always lead to national introspection, discourse, and argument. And in spite of a history of war and conflict, there has always been a strong sense of purpose, vitality, hope, and expectancy of peace. But for a year and a half, since the Camp David talks failed and the Palestinian intifada was launched, frustration and fear have overwhelmed the Israeli psyche.

Since September 2000, every time Israelis meet and say, “Hi, how are you?” there is always the pause and then the response, “Personally, we’re fine,” because no one is fine in terms of the larger picture. And always these days to be able to say, Well, personally, I am fine, and my family is fine,” seems an enormous blessing in light of the terror and violence.

I am just back from the weekly Peace Now rally, which was going on as the latest terrorist attack occurred in a downtown neighborhood. I am convinced that we must leave the territories, although the settlements are not the cause of the terror. In 1948 we fought for survival. The following wars were started by all the Arab neighbors who don’t want us here—Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iraq—after 54 years, only Egypt and Jordan have agreed to recognize our existence as a state and agreed not to war against us. The Palestinians know that we are here, and they have to begin educating their people to accept that. But we must dismantle the settlements no matter what the Palestinians do, because ruling another people is never good, even if we won the land through winning a war we didn’t start or want.

And even though everything the Palestinians want, including a Palestinian State in the West Bank, was offered at Camp David, they refused and started a violent uprising instead of saying, “Hey, let’s talk some more.”

Yet, we must, in spite of the evil and heinous terror attacks by Palestinians against Israeli civilians, continue trying to negotiate. The present Israeli leadership, like the Arab leadership, is not making peace its prime concern. The retaliations, though understandable, are not to anyone’s benefit. War won’t get what either side needs. There is a dangerous malignant fundamentalism at work in Palestinian society. People on the right here in Israel believe that the only way to fight that is to do what President Bush has done in Afghanistan. I think we have to give the Palestinian people hope. And that’s a long process. A lot of hate and distrust on both sides has been sowed since the intifada started. Though it’s taken the peace camp time to get back on its feet after the blows of the intifada, protest is stirring because we care about this place and cannot let it be destroyed by misguided people who see war as the way to live. For me, personally, it has been a time of deep confusion and determination to go on living, working, writing.

Moments after I finished writing, there was another suicide bomb attack in downtown Jerusalem. More families were devastated, more children left parentless, more fuel for hatred loosed. And then another and another. A crowded Jerusalem café. A Passover seder at a Netanya hotel. An Arab-owned popular restaurant in Haifa filled with families and friends having a holiday meal. Each attack’s carnage eclipsing the horror of the last. Until a country of people who love eating at street cafes and walking everywhere are afraid to go outside. Restaurants, supermarkets, malls, movies—there are no safe borders. Everyone is a target. Why?

It occurs to me that a very simple equation probably appears to people outside of Israel on the order of, “If they’re attacked and suffer, they must have done something to deserve it.” Arab leadership has never put its efforts into building a Palestinian State, but rather into destroying Israel. That has been their focus since the beginning, from their refusal of the Partition Plan up to the Barak/Clinton plan. David Ben Gurion said yes to the Partition Plan and started building Israel, which has never stopped having to defend itself through all its 54 years of growth and development as a thriving democracy. The surrounding Arab countries have never helped the Palestinians.

Three times they’ve slaughtered thousands of them in order to send them running.

One theory says that when leaders do not provide their people with a decent life, they need to provide a scapegoat. And the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for the last thirty years has given rise to a great humiliation and hate among the Palestinians. While the Israelis—both in the government and out—recognize the mistakes of years of occupation, and the idea of a Palestinian State alongside Israel has become an accepted reality by a majority of the people here, these months of terror have created new doubts in the minds of many. We know the terror is not a result of the occupation. We need to retreat from the territories in order to set up clear borders, to find a way to prevent more terror from shattering our lives—and to build trust among those who live on the other side.

I still believe that. And everyone I know continues hoping for a cease fire, for negotiations. But the days and weeks since I started writing this, trying to put my confused and conflicted thoughts into some cohesive whole, have brought increasing terror, increasing despair over the Israeli military incursion into the territories in its effort to defend us against Palestinian terrorism and destroy its infrastructure, and outrage from a world over the Israeli maneuvers—the same world that didn’t blink during the murderous suicide bombing attacks that became an almost daily occurrence in Haifa, Netanya, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv before the army went into Ramallah and Jenin. As one friend said recently, there seems to be an inevitability to the events that have a life of their own. She is originally from England, and together we sit at the peace vigils, worrying about our children in the army, trying to understand how we can stop the useless escalation of violence, asking each other the questions we ask ourselves constantly:

What does anything matter if we destroy life? What situation can justify that? Does it matter that we feel wrongly accused? My friends says, “When arguments seem to deny our raison d’être, the Holocaust, the ethos of the Jewish people, I feel a limb has been stolen from us. Yet why should our enemies not have the right to fight a heroic struggle for their existence? Are they really evil? Is theirs a society bred on anti-Western values...Is that what all the difference is? All this fighting when we could have given our children opportunities to study and work and become independent and, if possible, help others as we believe one should in a welfare state. Is the basis of anti-Semitism just the negation of logic? If all the world is against us, then we must be wrong. But we cannot be wrong to exist. What seems clear is that we cannot live by standards of other countries...We cannot afford to set up accepted modes of behavior and reaction as acceptable in solving this crisis...We know it won’t help to fight, but it hurts when we are blamed for this natural reactive step.”

Another friend, a native Israeli and a Talmudic scholar, said that what we need, if we are going to be the great country we could be, is modesty. It is her opinion that since 1967 we have been too proud of our successes and strength, and that has led to tragic mistakes. My daughter’s boyfriend said, “No, that is our mistake, to always examine ourselves and find ourselves at fault. That’s why we aren’t decisive in this war against terror. We have to make a decision and stand behind it, to be smart, and not always right or just.” One friend, an American who moved here more than 30 years ago and who has been active on the far left said, “What if we were to fall asleep for 10 years and, if we haven’t destroyed each other by then, what would we find?”

She is convinced that we will find the State of Israel and the State of Palestine side by side, the map close to how the Barak plan proposed it. So why shed more blood if we know the outcome? Why not just get to work. The response from the right, of course is, “We’ve tried, but where’s our partner? He’s busy sending out suicide bombers.” And she would counter, “You think you’ve tried, but while you talked peace you built settlements.” And the response back is, “as Mr. Arafat agreed to peace he continued building summer camps to train kidnappers and killers, promising his people that soon they would have all of Israel.”
A majority of Israelis think we are naive to still trust that there is a way to negotiate a peace with Arafat once we leave the territories. Most believe that we are only defending ourselves against an evil terrorism perpetrated by a hateful, selfish Palestinian leader who rejected a generous peace offer and violated an agreement to avoid the use of violence. The violent, bitter intifada shows that we are still facing the same problems with the Palestinians and the Arab world that we faced in 1948. It will take a leadership with courage and vision to help this country reach the conclusion that bloodshed has not brought, security. And the only way is to be free of the burden of the territories.
Someone said that the problem still remains that the tragic situation we are in only reinforces each side’s beliefs in its own ideology.
Today is Memorial Day for the thousands of Israelis killed in five wars and endless acts of terror. It is a painful, somber day. Tomorrow is Independence Day, celebrating 54 years of Israel’s independence. The mood is grave, the economy is at a standstill, pain and confusion and soul-searching permeate the atmosphere. Yet, as journalist Yoel Marcus wrote in this morning’s Ha’aretz newspaper:

“In our 54 years of existence, we have fought five major wars. Between one war and the next, between terrorist attacks and the war of attrition, from one Independence Day to another, Israel has known a 14-year US arms embargo, Arab boycotts, the threat of Russian missile attacks, economic hardship, and monstrous inflation. But in spite of our tiny size, in spite of the wars and the terror and the boycotts, Israel has become a glorious country, a marvel...law-abiding, with freedom of expression, the sole democracy in the region...While the oil-rich Arab nations kept the Palestinians holed up in camps for decades, Israel, with a population of 600,000, absorbed millions of Holocaust survivors, Jewish refugees from Arab lands, and Russia...It took Arab leaders 20-30 years to realize that there is no eliminating Israel by force; we are here for good, with an overwhelming majority that believes in the principle of land for peace, as long as there is another side prepared to talk instead of shoot and bomb...but Israelis have a manic-depressive tendency...When things are good they think they can do anything...like building settlements in the territories...For a country that has rocked back and forth between high and low from the day it was born, it is only a matter of time before we recover again and get back to business...we sign a cease-fire agreement and start negotiating, Arafat is expelled, Sharon is ousted, or both leaders go home.”

I’m not a political analyst, but I would have said it like that if I were. From the first day my son went into basic training six weeks ago, I made a pact with myself that as long as he’s in the army and until there is peace, I won’t let myself read the paper until I’ve worked on a poem or read something unrelated to this conflict.

Born in Buffalo, NY, Linda Zisquit now works as a teacher and translator and runs an art gallery in Jerusalem, where she lives with her husband and five children. She has published two books of poetry to date: Ritual Bath (1993) and Unopened Letters (1996). Zisquit is also the aunt of Chronogram publisher Jason Stern.