The power of that vision indeed seems weak when faced with the stench of charred flesh and spilt blood. Fear masters everything: when you walk down the street you inspect all those who pass you with, as we say in Hebrew, seven eyes. Any one of them could be your murderer (and to your surprise you discover that in almost all of them, even the familiar faces, you can discern some sort of sinister feature). Every decision is a fateful one. Should I stop for a drink at this stand, or wait until I reach the next one? Should I send both boys to school in the same bus? And if not, which one will get on the 7:10 and which one on the next bus? I find myself walking down a main street I have traversed since my boyhood, Jerusalem’s noisy, lively, somewhat provincial major thoroughfare, and my mind cuts that favorite landscape into little pieces. Everything is so fragile – the body, routine, family, the fabric of life.
We Israelis are accustomed to living in the vicinity of death. I will never forget the young couple who once told me of their plans for the future. They would get married and have three children. Three – so that if one died there would still be two left. This macabre way of thinking is not alien to me, either. It is the product of that same unbearable lightness of death that pervades this country, a kind of perception that, in my opinion, is also characteristic of the Palestinians, whose lives have also been permeated with suffering. It is precisely the ailment that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat wanted to cure when they embarked on the road to peace. Hamas’s suicide bombers want to perpetuate the disease, and they volunteer to spread it. Years ago, they hijacked planes. Now they want to hijack our future.
It is depressing for us Israelis to think that we are conducting a peace dialogue with people among whom are spiritual/religious shepherds who with such enthusiasm send more and more young people to their deaths, just in order to kill Jews.
And it is depressing that, so far, there have been almost no Palestinian voices condemning these mass murders. Where are the Palestinian intellectuals? Where are the writers, where are the humanists? Don’t you understand that this is no longer only Israel’s war? These extremists want to force their fanatical world view on you, the moderates and the freethinkers.
The Israelis are fired up. They are demanding revenge and the nullification of the entire peace process. Yet even at this difficult hour we must remember that this is the only way open to us if we want to live. We tried the other way, the one opposed to peace, for decades, and we still bear the scars it left on our bodies and our souls. The peace process will be long and painful, and apparently not all of us will be privileged to survive it, but there are no quick solutions to such a complex and long-standing conflict. Israel and the moderate Palestinians must help each other in every possible way, because peace is the only state that can promise that at least our grandchildren – I no longer believe it will be true for our children – will be able to live a life of security, normality, regularity and happiness, a life in which young couples will want to have three children, maybe more, for no other reason than the joy of raising them.
