The Toll of Violence

Friday night, the kids had gone to bed, and we found ourselves in the living room with some long-overdue quiet time. I was reading Tom Segev’s book, “One Palestine, Complete,” a revisionist account of the British Mandate, at a point in the book in which he spells out the seemingly unending cycle of violence between Jews and Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. I happened to glance up for a moment and saw my wife, Elisheva, reading that morning’s paper. The front page was capped by a large headline, “One Killed in Taxi Bombing.” Two days later, the paper led off with “Three Killed by Suicide Bomber in Netanya.” Bottom line: It’s been about 85 years or so since the British took this place over from the Turks, and nothing much seems to have changed.

The sense that there’s no way out of this has gripped the country and, in a way that is hard to describe, has made it a radically different place than it was even two months ago. Life now feels surreal. The tension is virtually indescribable, the sense of imminent explosion palpable. And no one — at least no one sane — has any idea what to do about it.

We were at a bat mitzvah party about two weeks ago. Early in the evening, a few people organized a minyan for a quick ma’ariv on the side of the hotel lobby. I joined them. No one had siddurim, but most of us knew it by heart, so it didn’t really matter. Halfway through, though, I noticed that a good number of the men were davening off of their PalmPilots, on which they’d saved the texts of ma’ariv. It seemed that I was one of the few without my PalmPilot out, and, I noticed, I was one of the very few without a pistol stuck into the back of his belt. New dress code for Israeli bat mitzvah parties, it seems: dark pants, white shirt, Palm V and a pistol in the back. Thank God it’s still no ties.

That’s Israeli life today: part Europe, with academic, cultural and technological sophistication, part Middle East and Africa, with everyone armed and either willing or eager to fight. Not the place to which we thought we were coming when we made aliyah a few years ago. Last week, late one evening, the house was very quiet, and we were both just about asleep, when the quiet was shattered by a relatively brief burst of gunfire from Beit Jala. Suddenly completely awake, Elisheva said to me, “You know, don’t you, that if this was our sabbatical year, there’s no way we would have stayed.” It was obviously true, but the implications were so far-reaching that I really didn’t know what to say.

Not, by the way, that either of us has regrets. We don’t have a country of our own because people chose not to be here when the going got a bit unpleasant. The place is ours because people stuck it out, and for me, the times that were always hardest to be in the States where when things like this happened. It was at moments like that that I really felt most guilty, and ironically, I think we both feel more committed to staying than we ever have before. But to say that we’re having a grand old time would be a bit too much.

As I look back on the last few weeks, trying to figure out when things changed, I think that the real turning point was the bus murder at the soldiers’ bus stop (the one that Arafat, our “peace partner,” called a “traffic accident”). It was a turning point, not only because more people died in that incident than in any other of recent memory, but because it destroyed many of the assumptions people here had taken for granted.

Assumption: The security guys know what they’re doing, and if they let a Palestinian in to work, they have good reason. Reality: the driver had had his security clearance renewed two weeks earlier, and no one suspected anything. Bottom line: anyone is now a potential terrorist, and we’ve got no way to weed them out.

Assumption: Having your kid in the army these days is no fun, but if your kid is serving inside the Green Line, he or she will be OK. Even the terrorists know the unwritten rule that you don’t “do stuff” inside the green line. Reality: forget the Green Line. Jerusalem, Netanya, the Tel Aviv road are all game. The old rules are no longer.

Assumption: Some girls don’t like being in the army, but at least they know they’re safe. The work may be boring or tedious, and the army may be (i.e., is) sexist, but you can’t get killed if you’re a girl. Reality: six of the eight people killed were young women in uniform, all where they were because they were going back to their bases.

We’d thought — all of us — that we were beyond this. Camp David didn’t work, OK, but how far apart could they really be? Very, it now seems. These days, all bets are off, all the rules are changing. And the most powerful armed force in the Middle East has absolutely no idea what to do. The frustration, even rage, is becoming palpable.

In the midst of all this, we try to remind ourselves that not everything is as it was during the Mandate. History does move forward, even if at a snail’s pace, and this time around, much is different. We’re a sovereign state, Hebrew has been reborn, virtually half the world’s Jews and the majority of Jewish children now live here. Sure, life here is a bit unpleasant and the future uncertain. But as our kids go to bed to the sound of gunfire at night and I wonder how we could have brought them to this, I remember books like Segev’s and realize how far we’ve come. We’ve gotten here because Jews from across the globe chose not to watch history but to make it. Perhaps, I hope, when my kids tuck their own kids into bed under the Jerusalem sky, the history they’ve made will have wrought something very different.

Dr. Daniel Gordis and his family made aliyah from Los Angeles in 1999. He is director of the Jerusalem Fellows program at the Mandel School in Jerusalem, and the author, most recently, of “Becoming a Jewish Parent” (Crown)