Lingering faith in the dreams of Jewish statehood
Seeker
Israel.
-------------------------
October 27, 2002
Dread and Dreams Travel by Bus in Israel
By JAMES BENNET
JERUSALEM, Oct. 26 - With the Mediterranean glinting to the passengers'
left, the No. 842 bus from Tel Aviv rolled north through Israel's fertile
coastal plain, through fields where the first Zionist settlers tended lemon
orchards and dreamed of a Jewish state more than a century ago and where,
more recently, the country's Internet industry ripened, then rotted.
As is often the case on Israeli buses these days, most of the passengers
were soldiers returning to base. They listened to music blasting through
earphones. They stared out the windows, their M-16 rifles in their laps, an
ammunition clip, in some cases, jammed through the handgrip of the back of
the seat before them.
The bus would soon branch to the northeast along the Wadi Ara road, the site
of repeated attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers. But the soldiers -
sleepy, bored, used to it all - seemed fatalistic to the point of numbness.
"You know the difference between Russian roulette and Israeli roulette?"
asked one of them, Capt. Dan Ravitz, 21, putting aside his spy novel. "In
Russian roulette, you choose your bullet. Here, you just pick a bus."
A recent three-day bus trip through northern Israel began in Jerusalem, in
the randomly chosen company of a 34-year-old yeshiva student born in Rhode
Island who fears for his adopted country's soul. It ended in the same
coveted city in the company of a 21-year-old German convert to Judaism, a
paratrooper on fire with those Zionist pioneers' dreams, his fingernails
cracked and his hands stained purple from harvesting grapes in the Golan
Heights.
Perhaps those are not bad bookends for Israel today: a state bracketed by
growing fear - of violence, of economic stagnation, of pious bullying or
secular decadence - and by a lingering, sometimes wistful, faith in the
dreams of Jewish statehood.
Israel, like its buses, has been battered. A state of six million citizens,
among them one million Arabs, and in addition holding more than three
million Palestinians with their own national dream under its military
control, Israel is groping for some route that will allow it to be Jewish,
democratic and at peace.
Along a triangular path with its tip at Safed, the ancient center of Jewish
mysticism in the mountainous north, Israeli passengers - Jewish and Arab,
born here or in Ukraine, Estonia, Yemen and elsewhere - talked about their
fear, indifference or determination in boarding a bus.
In two years of conflict, Palestinian militants have attacked Israeli public
transportation - buses, bus stops, trains, and stations - 114 times with
bombs or guns, the Israeli police said. In these attacks, 171 people have
been killed, 1,039 wounded.
Suicide attacks account for most of the casualties - 124 of the dead and 727
of the wounded, the police said. The vast majority of the incidents involved
buses, said Gil Kleiman, a police spokesman. It is not hard to see why buses
make appealing targets, because they carry a random, close-packed assortment
of potential victims in an accessible, combustible envelope.
Some moments from the road: At Jerusalem's fringe, an 8-year-old schoolgirl
sitting alone at a bus stop, holding a cheese sandwich; in an evacuated
station in Tiberias, a police robot firing five shotgun blasts into a
leather bag left behind on the armored bus from Jerusalem; on a
moon-polished stretch of road high above the Sea of Galilee, a clutch of
soldiers in the last seats swaying shoulder to shoulder, performing a
mocking, a cappella version of "Stand by Me."
"A bunch of half-hysterical refugees and survivors" is what the Israeli
novelist Amos Oz once called his fellow citizens. From even before the
creation of the state, barely 54 years ago, its builders fretted for
Israel's survival.
Israel, of course, has survived. Backed by the United States, it is the only
nuclear power in the region, with an economy envied by its much larger
neighbors. Yet it was striking how few young people interviewed - seeming,
like the young state itself, so much older than their years - could summon
hope for a brighter future, even as most said they would stay here.
Captain Ravitz, a medic who lost one friend in a bus bombing and others in
fighting in the West Bank, made a grim prediction as the 842 headed north
toward Wadi Ara. "In 20 or 30 years, I don't think any Jews will live in
Israel," he said, "Half of them will leave, and half of them will die."
He smiled and appended an embarrassed disclaimer, as many did after offering
dire prophecies. "It's a kind of joke," he said. The smile faded. "But it's
black."
A Journey of Faith
Jerusalem's No. 31 bus begins its run in the streets of Gilo, built on land
that Israel occupied and settled, expanding Jerusalem's boundaries, when it
took the West Bank in 1967. It skirts a cement barrier at Gilo's edge,
erected to deflect gunfire from the nearby Palestinian town of Beit Jala and
painted with the view that the residents used to enjoy.
The bus descends from the hilltop and winds its way through town, past the
stop at the Patt Junction where, on June 18, a suicide bomber killed 19
passengers.
"What Palestinian state are they talking about?" Ariel Sharon, the Israeli
prime minister, asked that morning, as he surveyed the black body bags
lining the sidewalk. That night, Israel announced that it would begin
seizing land ceded under the Oslo peace accords to Yasir Arafat's
Palestinian Authority and holding it "as long as terror continues."
Israelis who can afford to do so put themselves and their children in taxis
rather than buses. But last week, the No. 31 nevertheless filled with
children on their way to school, shoppers going downtown, soldiers reporting
for duty and religious men who seemed oblivious to the crowd around them,
heads bent over prayer books as the bus snaked through the cramped city
streets. The ride cost a little more than a dollar.
Densely bearded, dressed in the black fedora, black suit and white shirt of
the ultrareligious, Ephraim Weinstein, 34, did not want to be interrupted at
his prayers. But then he turned in his seat and smiled, and said he was
willing to chat for a while.
Mr. Weinstein takes the bus every day to and from his yeshiva downtown,
without fear, he said. "I believe in the God of Israel," he said mildly. "He
is the one who decides who lives or dies. Everything he does is, in the end,
for merciful purposes."
In the lives of people and of nations, he acknowledged, "inexplicable
things" happen. "And sometimes they're very painful." As he grappled with
the reality of suicide bombing and the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, he
invoked the Jewish concept of the nistar - "the hidden reason," he called
it, "that God has for why he does things."
The bus was moving now into Jerusalem's downtown. Trash littered the grass
of Sacher Park and, on the sidewalks, it eddied waist-high around
overflowing garbage cans, on the third day of a strike by municipal workers
around the country.
Posters supporting the strike were everywhere in Jerusalem and other Israeli
cities. They bore a white-on-black version of the smiley face with its
expression inverted, frowning beside a bleak message: "This is the face of
our social state."
But it was the spiritual state of his fellow citizens that troubled Mr.
Weinstein. Artists, doctors, lawyers and others all had specific jobs to do,
and so did Jews, he argued.
"What is the job of the Jewish nation?" he asked. "The job of the Jewish
nation is to give soul to the world."
Israel, he said, was "the younger, spiritual brother of the nations," and
its citizens were not performing their divinely assigned role, of
sanctifying life by living according to the teachings of the Torah.
It was right, he argued, according to those teachings, for the army to be
fighting this year as ferociously as it ever had in the West Bank, so long
after Israel first occupied it. The nation was under attack, he said.
"If you have to fight, fight," Mr. Weinstein said. "But you have to fight
with faith. Because if you don't, what are you fighting for? To eat pizza?"
An Israeli Arab's Gantlet
The young man looked like a typical Israeli hipster, with his cropped, spiky
black hair and wispy goatee. At the back of the No. 405 bus to Tel Aviv, he
was scanning a graphic in a Hebrew-language newspaper detailing a new sex
survey. The digital readout of his cellphone, which rang frequently, was
also in Hebrew.
But as he folded the newspaper, he identified himself as an Israeli Arab:
Usama Darawshe, "You know, like Osama." He was 22, from Nazareth, and he
studied dentistry in Jerusalem.
Mr. Darawshe described running his own particular gantlet in boarding the
bus at Jerusalem's central station, to Tel Aviv, where he would catch a taxi
homeward, avoiding the perilous Wadi Ara bus route.
He said he tried to pass as an Israeli Jew, not speaking any Arabic into his
cellphone to avoid the "silly questions" of the guards. Then, once aboard,
he scanned each new passenger, keeping the same fearful watch as his fellow
travelers for suicide bombers.
"It's not so easy being an Arab in Israel these days," he said. "The
situation now is that the Jews in the country don't distinguish between the
Arab Israelis living inside Israel and the Palestinians living in the
territories. I'm an Israeli. I'm a fan of the same soccer teams, I listen to
the same music, I love the same TV shows."
On Route 1 headed west, the bus reversed the course of the Zionist
soldiers - newly minted Israelis - who battled their way up these hillsides
to Jerusalem in 1948. Then, six Arab states, rejecting the United Nations
partition of Palestine, declared war after the declaration of Israeli
independence.
Israel emerged with more land than the United Nations allotted it. Along
this road, the husks of army vehicles, the sagging terraces of olive groves
and the ruins of evacuated Arab villages testify to the ferocity of the
struggle for Jerusalem. As the remains of war flashed by, Mr. Darawshe said
he felt suspected, if not despised, by both non-Israeli Arabs and Israeli
Jews. He said he did not understand why Israeli Arabs were not used by both
sides to "draw them closer to conversations."
"We can serve as a bridge," he suggested.
Mr. Darawshe said that he far preferred life in Israel to the prospect of
life in any Arab state. Though some Jewish students in his school do not
speak to him, he goes to clubs with other Jewish friends.
Like other Israeli Arabs, he was not required to perform the military
service demanded of Jewish citizens, and he did not volunteer. Suicide
bombing, he said, was not human, "but also the killing of children in the
West Bank is not human."
He chafed at Israel's identity as a Jewish state. "It can't be at the same
time both democratic and a Jewish state," he said. "I recognize that it's
the state of the Jewish people - but not only of the Jewish people. It
should be the state of all the people in it."
One of the few optimists interviewed, Mr. Darawshe predicted that the
conflict would draw to a close in a year or more. Demography, he said, would
eventually address his worries about Israeli democracy.
"Even if the Palestinians get their own country, demographically, the Arab
population is increasing at a greater rate than the other side," he
explained. "So maybe in 20, 30 years you'll have as much as 40 percent of
the population being Arab. So the reality has to change."
In what way? "No people will be preferred over another, like in Holland or
South Africa."
Reading a Road's Signs
The Wadi Ara road: brown cotton fields tufted white, dark green avocado
orchards, olive trees heavy with this fall's harvest. The signs of the new
Israel are here, too, so different from the agricultural idyll conjured by
the Zionist pioneers. One strip mall boasts a Tower Records, a McDonald's,
and a Toys "R" Us.
To reporters, the road evokes other images: here a windshield was pitched
100 yards ahead of a bus's blasted skeleton; there, on another occasion,
cellphones rang futilely among the wreckage; here, in a stench of burning
flesh and rubber, sheet metal from a bus dangled in the barbed wire around a
prison holding Palestinians.
On that day, June 5, someone drove a car bomb up beside a bus, by the gas
tank, and detonated it, turning the bus into a rolling fireball and killing
17 people.
Last Monday, the tactic was repeated along the Wadi Ara road, and 14 more
passengers in a bus and nearby cars died.
Backed up against a hill just south of the road is the West Bank city of
Jenin, encircled now by Israeli trenches and fortifications, its residents
under regular 24-hour curfews. It has been the source of many of those
suicide attackers, and the scene of some of the fiercest battles of the
conflict.
Moti Shaman has been driving the Wadi Ara road, Route 65, for the past year
and a half. A jar dangles from his rear-view mirror. In it are jammed small
white balls, each with two yellowed eyes. "People under pressure," the jar
is marked.
"In all honesty, if you ask me if I feel comfortable making a stop here, I
don't," he said, as he drove his bus past one of the Israeli Arab villages
lining Route 65. Dressed in white, a couple picked olives by the side of the
road.
Mr. Shaman, 35, said there was only so much he could to protect himself and
his passengers. He did not have the authority to look in people's bags, he
said, and he could not efficiently screen suspects at his stops. "If I have
to screen everyone looking suspicious, every third person is ruled out," he
said. "And here enters racism."
Sometimes passengers approached him with fears of a suspicious passenger, he
said, but if the suspect was in fact guilty, the game was already over.
"Once he's on," said Mr. Shaman, who has one child and another on the way,
"it's too late."
Mr. Shaman said that he knew drivers who had died on this road, but that he
he also knew men who died in the army. Like Mr. Shaman, many drivers are
also in the army reserves, and when they have not been driving this year
they have been on guard or fighting, some in Jenin.
The bus was approaching the intersection of the June 5 blast - Megiddo
Junction. For 4,000 years this strategic area has been bloodied by battles
among Egyptians, Israelites, Greeks, Crusaders and others. Archaeologists
say that it gave rise to the concept of Armageddon, the final clash between
good and evil.
"Sometimes, if I'm obligated by the law to make a stop, my heart overcomes
the law," Mr. Shaman confided.
A Passenger's Predicament
Facing Jenin across the fields is the Israeli city of Afula, envisioned by
its planners as the cultured metropolis of the Jezreel Valley. Afula never
quite met its planners' expectations, though its open-air central bus
station came to function as a hub for the valley, and therefore, more
recently, as a terrorist target.
In the center of the station, the Bistop falafel stand bears the scars of
two shooting attacks and one suicide bombing. As bus ridership has dropped,
business has fallen off too, by 30 to 40 percent, said Tomer Gisser, 25, who
works at the stand.
The Jezreel Valley was a center of the Zionist pioneering movement that set
out to achieve a "muscular Judaism," replacing the dissipation of the
Diaspora with the sweat of working the soil of the biblical homeland.
These pioneers' struggles and achievements, pastoral and sometimes violent,
passed quickly into myths that served the Zionist cause and still inspire,
or shadow, young Israelis.
"Grandfather told me how they had danced, hungered, drained swamps, quarried
rock, plowed fields, and hiked together through the Galilee and the Golan,"
wrote Meir Shalev in his novel about a pioneering village, "The Blue
Mountain." "They slung stones like shepherd boys, sang in Russian to the
waterfowl that arrived each autumn from the delta of the Don, and bathed but
twice a month. All night they danced barefoot, and with the break of dawn
they walked across the country."
As she waited in the Afula station for a bus to Yavniel, the community her
Russian great-grandparents founded 100 years ago, Moran Goren, 24, said, "I
think about it and I say, `I'm incredibly spoiled.' They had no electricity,
no water, and the Arabs all around. They really fought."
A communications and management student in Tel Aviv, Ms. Goren was on her
way back to her family's almond orchards and onion fields for the weekend.
She said when it came to riding the bus, "Basically, I'm not worried." But
she said she had taken a taxi rather than risk a bus ride on the Wadi Ara
road. And there are times on buses, she said, when "I see a suspicious
person, and I say goodbye to the world."
She seemed far more worried about Israel's future: "I give this country 50
years. It's going to explode someday."
It was not the conflict with the Palestinians that would destroy it, she
said. Instead, she spoke of civil conflict caused by a deepening divide
between religious Israelis, centered on Jerusalem, and secular Israelis.
"It's such a strong issue, and we don't deal with it now," she said,
recalling a recent weekend visit from sandy, secular Tel Aviv to stony
Jerusalem. "It's a different world," she said. "I don't know those people,
and they don't know me. That's what scares me."
Yet, she added, hemmed in by the contradictions, "on the other hand, this is
a Jewish country."
Ms. Goren says she thinks sometimes of leaving the country her ancestors
helped build, the land that was a refuge from, and a response to, the
Holocaust. But, then she thinks, they came here and survived, so who am I to
leave this place?
For now, she said, she is planning a long vacation in the Far East - "to run
away from all this."
Looking Back, Looking Up
As the drivers adjusted their radios, the trip was set, partly, to pop
songs, in English and Hebrew. It was also set to the sorrowful music and
words that accompanied the seventh annual commemoration, by the Jewish
calendar, of the assassination by a Jewish extremist of Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin, the chilly, daring signer of the Oslo peace accords, which
were ultimately to have ended the conflict with the Palestinians.
Haunted by might-have-beens, some passengers lamented his loss; equally
haunted, others scorned his choices as disastrous. What was clear everywhere
was that the peace Mr. Rabin sought has been buried in fear and suspicion.
"It's a big loss, the biggest loss," said Avi Tauber, 38, as he took the 830
bus home from Tiberias, past Mr. Rabin's old high school, where a crowd was
gathering for a moonlit memorial. "When he was prime minister it was, I
think, the best time."
Mr. Tauber, a travel agent who spends his days arranging tickets for others
to fly, said he thought about leaving "every minute, every day." He is
seeking a green card to take his wife and two children, ages 5 and 9, to the
United States, where he believes his family would have more opportunities.
Fear accompanies the No. 961 bus from Tiberias to Jerusalem as it travels
along the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, then parallels the Jordan
river southward along the bed of the rift valley.
The Jordanian mountains form a wall to the east, and the heights of the West
Bank, bored with abandoned hermits' caves, shield the west. The desert floor
blooms with banana trees, grapevines and date palms
From the No. 961, all this is seen through thick armored windows. In the
West Bank, Israeli buses are armored.
"It's not logical," said Daniel Schmidt, 23, on his way to Jerusalem to see
his girlfriend. "We - in our country - have to drive around in armored
buses."
He had no patience for the argument that he was traveling through occupied
territory that Palestinians regarded as properly their own national
homeland. The Palestinians had proven they would not settle for a reasonable
deal, he said, sweeping aside the Palestinian argument that past Israeli
proposals were miserly.
"The Palestinians - they want, they want, they want," he said. "You give
them one finger, they want the whole hand. They want Jerusalem."
"Where do we go?" he asked, referring to Jews. "Uganda?"
Mr. Schmidt immigrated with his family from Germany as an infant, then
converted to Judaism at age 13. As a paratrooper fighting in Lebanon, he
said, he switched seats with a friend shortly before their vehicle was
attacked. The friend was critically injured; another soldier died.
"After this, you must ask yourself, `Why did this happen to me?' " Mr.
Schmidt said. "It didn't happen without a reason. So I asked this, and I
believe I got an answer from God."
Like Ephriam Weinstein, the yeshiva student, Mr. Schmidt, a slender 6-footer
in work boots, a gray T-shirt and a knitted yarmulke, said that if Jews were
properly pious, God would take care of the rest. But he had no patience for
the yeshiva life, insisting that hard work must precede Torah study. "I
can't sit in a chair," he said.
He accused the United States of restraining Israel from using its full might
to defeat Palestinian terrorism
He also blamed American influence for a problem that seemed to concern him
more: what he described as creeping decadence, materialism, and inertia in
Israeli life. People did not seem to know what they believed, he said, or
else they lacked the courage to act on their beliefs.
"All my life, I've followed my heart," he said, as Jericho came into view.
"That's the point - that the first people who came to Israel, who worked the
ground, they really believed they must be here. And that gave them power.
The power of conviction."
The bus swung west and began the steep climb to Jerusalem. Mr. Schmidt spoke
enthusiastically of his work at a Golan Heights winery, work that was about
to end with the harvest. "I don't have problems finding work," he said
confidently, waving away his peers' worries about the economy.
He counted on God's help, he said, but only if he first worked as hard as
possible. "You must do the maximum in life," he said, recalling a message he
said he had written on his wall. "Life is like a bicycle: If it's hard, you
go up; if it's easy, you go down."
Climbing still, the bus passed a checkpoint outside Jerusalem, then threaded
its way through an ultrareligious neighborhood as Mr. Schmidt described his
hope for living a life out of the past. He did not particularly want a
mortgage, a cellphone or McDonald's, he said. He preferred his two fish
tanks at home to any television; he was content sleeping and rising with the
sun.
"I want to go back 60 years," he said, dismissing the pessimism of others.
"If you look down, you will be so sad, and you will lose all your power,
your power to live."
Mr. Schmidt looked up himself and saw through the hazy glass the entrance to
the central bus station.
"Jerusalem," he said, and smiled.
Sauron M
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