Which Way Out

The Jews settled there in 1948 after the Holocaust. The Palestinians have never had a state. Two peoples for one same land. Fifty years of war, including the recent dramatic events, where the battle spreads from house to house, all the way to Grotto of the Nativity

BY GIANCARLO GIOJELLI

What can one say that is not banal, taken for granted, rhetorical, useless–above all useless–in front of a man embracing what is left of what a few instants earlier were the body, eyes, face of his son, and weeping, prays: “I beg you, don’t die, I love you”? Or in front of a little girl ripped apart by a bomb, with her hand desperately gripping her mother’s; she holds onto her favorite doll as if she were holding onto life that is ebbing out of her, and her eyes cloud over and her gaze drifts off somewhere else. A minute earlier she was laughing happily on the feast of Passover and her mother was joking with relatives and with the elderly woman who survived the concentration camps and wanted to spend her last years here, in the Promised Land. Now she too is a splotch of screaming flesh among the rubble of the seaside hotel.
And what can you say about the little children who, hidden in their houses, tremble as they hear the tanks pass by and later cry under the rubble? They cry ever more softly, because their mother is there under that beam and she is not moving, and no one comes because the soldiers won’t let the ambulances pass. First they have to find the terrorists.

Beyond right or wrong
On the hill of Bethlehem, once again the grief of Mary and a Child is running its course. The war has never come so close to the holy places. It is right in the grotto where Jesus was born. It is right around the house where He lived and where the Angel came to His mother. The steps of yet another Way of the Cross are being measured out on Golgotha. “Suffering is sharing Christ’s Passion,” Mother Teresa of Calcutta used to say. The crowd watching the martyrdom of so many ordinary people no longer wonders who is right or wrong, so far away are the reasons and the reason that could sum them all up.
The world watches this pain and is maybe already tired of it, because horror can be borne in small doses and then one becomes accustomed to it. Thus the world is growing accustomed to the fate of this land, the Holy Land; even the Muslims and Jews are happy to accept the name given it by Christians, partly because it really is holy for everyone and partly because it solves the embarrassing diplomatic problem of naming places that for some people are part of Israel and for others are part of Palestine. People always speak of “territories,” but if you ask an Arab, the exact term is “occupied territories,” whereas if you ask a Jew, he will speak of “liberated territories.”

Return home
This is the paradox that Ben Gurion illustrated, and he is certainly not a suspicious source, because he was the founder of the State of Israel, uniting the Zionist dream of a Jewish state with the hope of the Aliah
, the return home to the Promised Land and the desperate need for a safe place for the concentration camp survivors.
“Israel,” Ben Gurion said, “wants to be a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a big state, safe in its boundaries. But it can choose only two of these goals, because another people lives in this land. We can be great and democratic, but we will not be able to build a solely Jewish state. We can be Jewish and democratic, but then we shall have to give up a part of the territory. We can be a big Jewish nation, but not democratic, because we will have to limit the rights of the Palestinians who live alongside us.”
Since that time, Israel’s dilemma has been precisely this, an unresolved dilemma that is joined to what the Israelis themselves call the Yad Vashem complex.

Immense Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is the Holocaust museum, which every Jew must visit periodically and which recalls in a strong, heartrending way the martyrdom of six million Jews. But that immense slaughter weighs on the consciousness and the very formation of the personality of those who live in Israel. The reiterated remembrance (repeated on a hundred school trips, a hundred pilgrimages) of what happened is transformed into the certainty of what could happen–what could happen the day that Israel disarmed, that it accepted peace conditions that put security at risk. What could happen is not a weakening of the military and economic strength and power of the State, but something much worse: the destruction itself of Israel and all the Jewish people. A new holocaust is at the gates, many think, perhaps unconsciously, and will become real the day that Israel no longer exists. The first defeat could also be the last. Thus it is necessary to arm and to use the arms, and Israel has become an immense Yad Vashem with the best aviation and combat craft on earth, writes Thomas Friedman, the journalist who knows the Middle East best, a Jew who lived many years in Beirut and then in Jerusalem.

Kamikaze
The Palestinians, on the other hand, have never had a state, and hundreds of thousands of them grew up in refugee camps, without even having a home. For them, it is not a question of saving their lives because, for many of them, life is not even worth living. Their lives themselves become an instrument of battle, and the battle is to wield death: this is the consciousness with which the kamikazes grow up, these suicidal terrorists who are ready to blow themselves up among the crowd of civilians shopping or eating in a restaurant. They are young, just as the Israeli kids are young, just as their countries are young.
The Israeli population has an average age of just 28, and a life expectancy, war permitting, of 79 years. The Palestinians have an average age of 17 and, according to statistics, can hope to live to 72. But the statistics say other things: every Jewish woman has an average of two children; every Palestinian has six, and it is easy to understand how the story would end up by mere demographical projection, if it were not for the fact that the Israeli population has grown exponentially because of immigration and the Law of Return.

Question of descent
The Law of Return is the Constitution, the Fundamental Law of the State of Israel, approved in 1950, two years after the country was founded.
It is very simple: every Jew has a right to Israeli citizenship.
When the problem came up of who should or could call himself a Jew, the rabbinate settled the question. A Jew is the child of a Jewish mother. It is a question of people and descent, not of language, culture, or even of religion.
In Jerusalem, there is a mill that is the most beloved and most hated symbol–beloved by the Jews and hated by the Arabs. As it turns in the wind, it recalls the gesture of someone beckoning: come, from every part of the world, come. Thus they came in these past fifty years, and they populated the semi-deserted land bought from the Arab landowners, and then the land on the West Bank liberated/conquered after the Six Days War. They colonized the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip, and above all the West Bank. So much the worse for the Palestinians–the colonizers say–who have never had a land, and when they could have had the territories the UN assigned to them in 1948, preferred to yield to the illusory hopes raised by the Arab nations and to attack Israel, sure that they would drive the Jews out, drive them into the sea. Things turned out as we all know, the Jews won, and the Palestinians were forced to flee into refugee camps.

Potential combatants
And again, looking at the figures, the jump in the Jewish population since 1989 leaps to the eye. Fleeing from the rubble of the former Soviet empire, 907,000 Jews arrived from Russia. Many settled in Upper Galilee, many went to live in the new settlements, in the land that the Israeli government was giving up to the Palestinian administration. Territories in exchange for peace, as the slogan went, but in an apparently contradictory policy, Israel encouraged the arrival of new colonizers, who had nowhere else to go, right in the areas that they had just turned over to the Arabs.
Thus there are six million Israelis, and 800,000 of them are soldiers. There are three million Palestinians in the territories, a million in Israel, and four and a half million scattered among the Arab countries–and many consider themselves potential combatants.

Unjustified hatred
Two peoples and only one land... The differences are apparent: anyone visiting Israel knows immediately if he is in an Arab or a Jewish quarter. The Palestinians have an unemployment rate of 38%, the Jews 9%. The Palestinians have an average monthly salary of $360, the Jews $1,500. The literacy rate is about the same, but while one Israeli in three has a high school education, only one Palestinian in ten goes beyond elementary school.
The numbers do not explain everything, and especially they are not enough to explain–and even less to justify–the hatred. To explain that, something more is needed. But fifty years of opposing wrongs and rights have tangled everything up, and war and terrorism leave no room. The front line does not follow an established border, but runs through every house. No one feels safe and no one is willing to risk any more. No one knows how to or wants to, and no one can trust. It is the defeat of reason, and when reason loses, horror is ready to be unleashed. And horror knows no limits.