Bracing for Impact: Fight or Flight in an Israel with "Intifada Fatigue"

Beneath the auspices of elaborately angled terraces and curlicue guard rails, the Rimon restaurant and cafe serves its renowned grilled meats to a Friday afternoon crowd of nearly no one. Walk a few feet from one of the formerly outdoor tables under Rimon's red awning and the usually congested shops of the fashionable Ben Yehuda Street beckon the separation of an awestruck tourist and his new Israeli shekels. A few days before New Year's, it's possible to twirl around and around on Ben Yehuda's bereft plaza, arms extended, with no danger of clobbering anyone.

The Rimon has a plexiglas partition corralling its empty tables, but it's a wonder to me that the steakhouse would attract any customers to protect. Less than a month before I came to haunt Jerusalem's suddenly empty spaces, two Palestinians walked in front of the Rimon, mumbled prayers and pressed their detonators.

Danielle Savir, a raven-haired 21-year-old who recently finished her active service in army intelligence, was in nearby Zion Square during the pre-midnight massacre, near where a car bomb exploded as police and emergency crews rushed to the maelstrom. Ten Israelis died, 180 were wounded.

"First, there's shock. 'I cannot live here,'" recalls Savir's boyfriend, 22-year-old Issachar Honigstein. "Second is, 'This is my place. I need to help here, stay here.'" Savir's father works in the foreign ministry, and watching the CNN footage from his assignment in Eritrea even he suggested to his obstinate daughter that leaving wouldn't be the worst idea.

Maybe not?and yes, it would. Here is where contradictory truths maddeningly present themselves. Hours before I checked the Rimon for signs of typical restaurant behavior, PLO East Jerusalem representative Sari Nusseibeh released a flock of white dovelike pigeons from a perch in the New Imperial Hotel. Over the death-to-the-Jews/death-to-the-Arabs slurs outside, the Al-Quds University president-turned-politician and his ideological ally, Knesset opposition leader Yossi Sarid, presided over the signing of a declaration urging a return to the bargaining table and the cessation of the 15-month bloodletting. The sunlight Nusseibeh's doves flew into also reflected off the hull of the Karine A, the 4000-ton ship chopping the waters around the Arabian Peninsula en route to the Suez Canal to bring Iranian 122-mm and 107-mm Katyusha rockets to Gaza.

"I'd love to leave, but I don't want to," Savir says, a more perfect elocution than she may realize.

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Finishing dinner at the Merom Golan kibbutz, a group of huge, chiseled Sabras shoot a glance at me and burst out laughing at the group of college journalists on this American Jewish Committee-sponsored trip. As the snickers break into gales of wheezing derision, we pretend nothing's happening and walk out like, yeah, no, we bad. A friend of Savir and Honigstein is a bit more diplomatic. "I see Americans my age," reports Ilan Cohen, a 21-year-old soldier on intelligence duty. "They're children."

It's the same verdict at Netanya's Beit Goldmintz leadership training center, where a pretty squad leader named Yael cavalierly tells us, "I think you have long childhood." The perpetual twilight of American adolescence is no trivial point when visiting Israel, and in front of teenagers toting rifles I feel every ounce of baby fat on my cheeks and the lack of calluses on my dainty hands.

Despite the we-are-Israelis-now bromides after our New York nakba, the chasm between the Israeli (and Palestinian) and the American experiences of terror is massive. The enormity of the World Trade Center destruction placed New Yorkers in qualitatively different and unfamiliar territory, but for Israelis the latest nightmare, while stinging acutely, exists on a continuum of horror. When visiting Ground Zero, notice the stiffened backs and reflective gazes. Such discontinuity from behavior would be a luxury for Israel. Everyone here professes fear and uncertainty when asked, but Israeli body language is supple, self-paced and fluid. No one could possibly memorialize every locus of catastrophe. People can only pay respects at the latest monument. Ben Yehuda Street has to become a place to shop, eat and waste time again?and immediately, because Israel is too small and atrocity is everywhere. Endlessly Israelis express condolences for Sept. 11, but still that laughter echoes, its context shifted.

And a deeper discrepancy between our suffering and theirs lies in what we each want to protect. President Bush invokes "our way of life," but given a moment of introspection, the phrase unravels, revealing nothing. At the term's most meaningful, we are saying we want to live uninterrupted by terror with our intact families. Half a world away, Israelis mean they want to return to a place where they won't be blamed for stolen military secrets, or face the wrath of misdirected peasant anger, or clench their teeth when they see a chimney.

The Israeli burden of knowing what exactly they mean by words untranslatable into English is not lost on Palestinians, since the term is also meaningful in Arabic. "Being a Jew is a psychological problem," exclaims Nafez Nazzal of the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies of Brigham Young University, out of anger and frustration. "One thing the Jews are not willing to do is forget or forgive. They tell us this! Here we have a modern democratic state living in the shadow of the Holocaust! You cannot forget!"

But the memory is not uniform. Asaf Stein, a student in education and sociology at Tel Aviv University, speaks of an exasperation with the horror, leading to a cynicism about foundational Zionist propositions. "Now people talk with sarcasm in response to the Holocaust. They hear, 'We built ourselves from nothing,' and they're like, 'Oh, yeah, sure.'" Differences exist in how Israelis place themselves within the 15 months of chaos after years of momentum toward a resolution. While no one told me it was time to uproot and abandon the enterprise, some young Israelis are extricating their identities from Israel. One of them is Pelly Shaviv, who studies economics at Tel Aviv University. "I don't want to keep my Jewish identity," Shaviv confesses. "I want to be me."

A generation earlier, Jews like Idele Ross came to Israel precisely because they wanted to be themselves. Originally from Detroit, Ross gave up on America during Vietnam, and came to a kibbutz. "I'd like to see more Jews come here, and not just from the U.S.," she says, despite or perhaps because of Israel's current dire straits. (Aside from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, unemployment is nearing 10 percent as Israel faces its worst economic health since 1953.) Ross takes her Israeli identity as a fait accompli. Her husband, Ontario-raised Norman Slepkov, reminisces about getting high with Arab friends in the Old City he no longer visits, and says, "I'd like to see my daughter get out."

A term losing currency these days is yerida, or "stepping down"?the opposite of the " rising up" denoted by aliya, the word for the Jewish process of leaving the Diaspora for Israel. "It's a big cultural change," Stein observes. "There used to be shame in Israelis saying they were leaving. That's the way of thinking. Now, they don't say that."

Pelly Shaviv sees his future overseas, breaking with the social atmosphere of Israel he finds distasteful. "No one can really see a solution here," he laments.

Fellow Tel Aviv University student Shirley Goldfarb is more representative of Israeli consensus. "We only exist for 50 years. We're so young. We still have so much to do."

But none of Shaviv's peers challenges his point. Israel and the Palestinians speak about Tenet, then Mitchell, then?what? Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Abu Ala, both Oslo architects, have discussed a plan to recognize a Palestinian state on 42 percent of the West Bank and most of Gaza?with Oslo final status issues like settlements, refugees and shared Jerusalem sovereignty negotiated afterward?a plan so unacceptable to Prime Minister Sharon that Peres submitted it to Abu Ala without Sharon's approval. Sharon as well refused to allow President Moshe Katsav to visit Ramallah in support of unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, which would end the occupation but also neglect the more intractable problems.

Shaviv pondered his future on the morning of Thursday, Jan. 3, when Nusseibeh's peace pigeons continued to scatter and Israeli naval commanders set the captured Karine A, taken in international Red Sea waters to avoid provoking the Egyptians, on course for the port of Eilat.

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New Republic correspondent Yossi Klein Halevi talks with us about the other half of Zionism at the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem. "Palestinian history is mimicking, mocking Zionism," he says. "So in that sense, it's like we have a shadow."

Despite the objections of scholars like Rashid Khalidi, it may be true that Palestinian national consciousness begins with the Zionist assertion in Palestine. But ultimately the origins of Palestinian nationalism have little relevance. Irreversibly, there are now two nations in very close company.

When the Palestinians speak of the way-of-life issue, they have in mind, in part, stretches of road. "Our 'liberated' cities are big jails," says Nazzal, producing his blue Israeli identification badge from his back pocket. "It takes me two hours to come from Ramallah to Jerusalem, and I carry an Israeli ID card." On his way, Nazzal must traverse four roadblocks in the 10 miles separating the two cities. Palestinians endure the occupation while noticing the alternate system of roads that the approximately 200,000 Jewish settlers travel on, living amidst 3 million Palestinians. Like Efrat settler Eve Harow, an L.A. expatriate we meet who unashamedly declares that the Palestinians have no historical claim to Palestine.

"I have been depressed these last 15 months," Nazzal admits. "We cannot continue as is. We can't go on. So exhausted, but we are so proud. So proud, so proud."

In the current issue of the Jerusalem Report, Khaled Abu Toameh finds Nazzal's sentiments indicative of Palestinian opinion, despite opinion polls showing continued support for the Intifada. "[M]any Palestinians privately express...a deep fatigue and a desire to return to a more peaceful life. It appears that some answer pollsters with the 'politically correct' pro-uprising view, whether or not that's their true feeling. In the same way, relatives of 'martyrs'?who have been killed in confrontations with Israeli troops or in suicide attacks?will say on camera that they are proud; off-camera, they weep and say they want an end to the suffering."

If the Palestinians are indeed experiencing Intifada fatigue, the question returns to the prospects for a brokered settlement to bring a Palestine out of the last exhausting 15 months. Nazzal has no faith in Sharon or Arafat to make peace, calling the power game between the two "1982 revisited," a reference to the devastating war in Lebanon to oust the PLO.

Over a kebab lunch at Homot HaGafen in Jerusalem, Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Aker also notes how precarious Arafat's position is. "The general feeling is that Arafat is in a way confronting his own people since the Intifada. We've almost reached something like 900 dead. People are questioning the Authority." By turning against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, he says, Arafat "did not gain popularity from the street. He's not popular right now."

And if not Arafat, who? Abu Toameh floats West Bank security chief Jibril Rajoub as one possibility in his Jerusalem Report article. Rajoub, a member of Arafat's Fatah faction, spent 17 years in Israeli prisons, learning Hebrew in the process. He's got an official force of 5000, which may assist him in reining in the Hamas terrorists who consider him a collaborationist. "According to some Palestinian officials, American and European diplomats are saying in private meetings that they are impressed with...Rajoub," Abu Toameh writes.

And Rajoub maintains ties with Sari Nusseibeh. On the day of the Karine A seizure, Yossi Sarid published an op-ed in Ha'aretz accusing Sharon of being "petrified" of Nusseibeh, who "symbolizes a more sober-minded, thoughtful approach that is also non-violent." Nusseibeh, who joined Arafat's negotiating team at the beginning of the month, is willing to compromise on one of the most crucial final status issues: the right of return for Palestinian refugees. The refugees, he says, should have the right to return to a Palestinian state?not Israel, where an influx of 3.8 million Palestinians would mean the end of a Jewish state.

"Rajoub in particular seems sane and practical," observes Jerusalem Report columnist Stuart Schoffman. "As for Nusseibeh, who wouldn't want a Harvard- and Oxford-educated president of the PA? But whether he can emerge as a viable leader of the pack, or wants to...a big question."

Yet asked to discuss the ubiquitous stateside term "moderate Palestinians," Nazzal places Nusseibeh outside the category. "Sari Nusseibeh says forget about the right of return, or have it limited to the West Bank and Gaza. But moderates say no way?it must be negotiated." Moderate Palestinians are those who "are willing to accept Israel's right to exist, accept a two-state solution," Nazzal says. "But I don't know anyone willing to sell out."

With roadblocks and checkpoints on the ground and the Karine A in the water, Nazzal's "sell out" comment points to a serious problem for Palestinian self-identity, with serious implications for the prospects for peace. "I cannot sell out my people in the name of being moderate," he says. "My people want to be free?how can I avoid that?"

At Homot HaGafen, Abu Aker accuses Abu Toameh of yellowing up his West Bank dispatches for the Hebrew-language press (both reporters write for the foreign media as well)?a charge Abu Toameh emphatically denies. "I shouldn't talk about corruption in the PA, only so-called 'human suffering,'" Abu Toameh sneers. "And I do?but in their eyes, I shouldn't write for the Hebrew papers. I'm on the wrong side." After the lunch ends, he tells our tour guide that he was afraid to express his opinions, concerned that Abu Aker might slip the PA some interesting information.

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Frost works its way into my knuckles on top of Mt. Bental in the Golan Heights. It's an early morning at a high altitude the day before the IDF will storm the unguarded deck of the Karine A, and I'm watching the extended arm of IDF spokesman Mitch Pilcer, who lived on the Upper West Side before his 1979 aliya. Standing outside an army barracks whose main duty right now is to provide location for a movie about gay soldiers in the Lebanon war, he's pointing to a small series of beige houses with pale-red roofs. It's the Syrian town of Quneitra. And it's right there.

My frigid knuckles seem like the warmest part of my body when I consider the mist-obscured vistas of the kilometers-distant mountains are Syrian territory, home to one of the world's most despotic regimes. On a clearer day, Pilcer tells us, we could see all the way to Damascus, about 40 miles. ("That's 35 minutes in a tank, one minute in a plane.") If any Syrian stepped out of his beige house with the red roof, I could probably follow his footsteps through my camera's zoom lens.

The next scene the IDF shows us is supposed to complement the view of proximate Syria. As we step onto well-broken brown clay, we are introduced to the sound of a 747 turbine run through a mountain of bass amps. Well, that's what a tank shell sounds like to me from 50 yards.

We're sitting in on a drill session for the Barak ("lightning") company of the 7th Brigade's 82nd Battalion, getting our bearings as Israeli-designed Merkava tanks spark and discharge $1000-apiece ammunition into nowhere that I can see. Barak company isn't conducting the session for our benefit, though; a class of seniors from a nearby high school, a few months from draft age, is touring the tank unit to see if it appeals to them. There's a tremendous difference between the H&M styles and streaked hair of the unruly students and the stoic discipline and camouflage of the barely older Barak troops; then there's us unconscripted Americans, unable to fire a rifle or explain why we'd need to.

Two students, a diminutive girl in a blue sweatshirt named Ortal and a cow-eyed beauty named Maya, show complete sangfroid about their impending tenure in basic training. They make no distinction between the current tensions and any other in their nation's history.

"Over 50 years we've been in this situation, so there's nothing to be afraid of," Maya says, annoyed by the line of inquiry. Ortal shrugs and nods, half-asleep, and soon they're getting their introduction to close-range shelling. A full second after the company goes silent again, Ortal maintains her shriek, and Maya keeps her hand on her pulsing heart. Wide-eyed, they stare at each other for a moment, acknowledging the departure from norm they just experienced.

The next shell is bearable. Even my New York ears learn to handle it.