Vicious Circle (15 page)

“—outspoken is the understatement of the year. I’ve shouted it from the rooftops until I was blue in the face. Jews have no
choice in the matter: we are under a sacred obligation to settle in the land God gave us, what you call the occupied West
Bank and the Torah calls Samaria and Judea.” The Rabbi added tiredly, “All that is a matter of record.”

“Your attachment to the central spine of hills in the country of Palestine, your habit of referring to these areas by their
biblical names, Judea and Samaria, is nothing more than a kind of fossilized nostalgia, a theological mania bordering on hysteria.
You speak of an aching for the land. Before Hitler appeared on the scene, Zionism was only able to produce a trickle of Jews
willing to settle in the Holy
Land, and the great majority of those insisted on living along the coast. As painful as it may be for you to acknowledge,
the conclusion is inescapable: Hitler, and not Ibrahim, must be seen as the founding father of the modern state of Israel.
Without the Holocaust,
ya’ani
, the Jews would still be living in their ghettos in Eastern Europe. The psychological conclusion one must draw is that you
have no core identity; you don’t exist. The Frenchman Sartre hit the nail on the head when he wrote: ‘The Jew is one whom
other men consider a Jew … it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.’”

“If anyone doesn’t exist,” the Rabbi cried, leaning forward and squinting in order to better make out the shadowy figure taunting
him, “it is the Palestinians. Palestinian nationalism is an artificial flavoring; it’s saccharine, as opposed to sugar. In
the history of the planet earth, there never was a Palestinian people; Palestine itself belonged to southern Syria. You have
been seduced by your own spin doctors into thinking there is such a thing as a Palestinian nation.”

“Once again you stand history on its head—”

The Rabbi was warming to his subject. “Admit it if you dare, you are lucky to have Jews for enemies. Who today gives a flying
fart for the Kurds struggling against the Turks, or the Berbers against the Algerians, or the Tibetans against the Chinese?
If a Russian shoots a Chechen teenager hurling stones, does the BBC interrupt its program for a special bulletin? Don’t hold
your breath! But you so-called Palestinians are struggling against Jews, and the world is mesmerized.” The Rabbi sniffed in
manic delight. “We are the world’s longest running sit-tra.”

“Sit-tra?”

From under his hood, Efrayim said, “Sit-tra is an Apfulbaumism. It’s the opposite of sit-com. It means situation tragedy.”

Apfulbaum elaborated. “Tune in tomorrow, same time, same station, to see what the chosen people, the descendants of prophets
and psalmists and a light unto the nations, see what they’ll do now that they’re no longer the eternal victims. Will they
turn out to be like the Americans ethnically cleansing native Indians? Or the French Catholics flinging Protestants into rivers
with stones tied to their ankles? Oh, the columnists can barely wait to find out. If Israel uses
its power to fulfill the biblical promise to Abraham, the world will wring its hands in an ecstasy of masturbatory satisfaction.
You Jews have been boring us to tears for three thousand years with all this blah-blah-blah about morality, the Sartres of
the world will bleat like goats, but when push comes to shove, ha! you’re like everyone else. The Sartres, the others glued
to the Middle East sit-tra on their TVs will feel less guilty for having done nothing to prevent the Holocaust. Absolutely
nothing,” the Rabbi muttered several times, as if he were reminding himself of some terrible truth. “Zilch. Zero.”

Lost in meditation, the Doctor let several minutes slip by without saying a word. Finally he looked up. “It is true that we
Palestinians owe you Jews a debt, though you are the last ones in the world to understand the real nature of this debt. If
today we define ourselves as Palestinians, it is because you came here with your Western money and Western technology and
Western music and Western art and looked at us as if we didn’t exist; you looked through us. You saw Palestinians as a drop
in a sea of Arabs stretching from Morocco to Iraq, without cultural or historical links to the land of Palestine.”

The Doctor stood up and turned around his seat several times to stretch his legs, then sat down again. “You have a lot to
unlearn, Rabbi. You need instruction.”

“Instruct, instruct.” He frowned at a thought. “I am what you could call a captive audience.”

The Doctor’s voice took on an abrasive edge; he sounded as if he were singing slightly off key. “I will instruct you,
ya’ani
. I will teach you that there is not
one
Arab, and not one way of
being
Arab. I will teach you that, more often than not, things in the Middle East are the opposite of what they seem: it isn’t
a question of winning or losing wars, but how you win the wars you win, which is something you Jews never—
never!
—grasped. Take the Sixty-seven war. You swept Arab planes from the skies and three Arab armies from the fields of battle.
But you didn’t see then, you don’t see now, that this so-called victory was a great defeat for Israel.”

Apfulbaum rolled his eyes in their sockets.

“Yes, I tell you it was a great defeat. Before Sixty-seven, the struggle
was between the Jews who had washed up on our shores and the invisible Palestinians living in their midst. After Sixty-seven,
after you conquered Jerusalem, the third holiest city in Islam, after you occupied its sacred shrines, after you humiliated
Muslim pride and Muslim faith, the conflict turned into a struggle between the world’s fifteen million Jews and a billion
followers of Islam. How can you not see it,
ya’ani
? After Sixty-seven, our bodies were in Isra’ili-occupied territory but our heads and our hearts were in Palestine. And now,
after our
intifadas
shook your confidence, you are ready to throw us a few crumbs—you are ready to give us a mini state of our own on a small
part of the land that was always ours, with the big Jewish brother breathing down our necks. And you expect us to lick your
hand in gratitude. The Palestinian Authority may leap at the opportunity but not me—I don’t want a miserable and truncated
Palestinian state on the West Bank and Ghazeh. What do I care about the West Bank or Ghazeh? Until they were expelled by the
Jews, my family lived in Haifa. I want Haifa! I want Jaffa. I want
all
of Jerusalem. Every square centimeter. I want the complete elimination of the Jewish entity the West imposed on us. If we
ratify the existence of the Jewish state by accepting this peace, we will have lost the hundred-year struggle against Zionism.
I don’t want peace for the simple reason that without peace, the Jews can’t win. Time is on our side. You will drown in a
sea of Arabs. With God’s help, we will look back on the Jews the way we look back on the Crusaders crushed by Salah ad-Din—as
a minor episode in Islamic history.”

On the cot, both Azziz and Aown dozed, the head of the younger brother on the shoulder of the older. From the front room came
the voice of Yussuf reciting passages from the Qur’an. Efrayim, lulled by the drone of voices, tried to follow the conversation
but eventually gave up and day dreamed, with his eyes wide open, of how his mother and father would react to the news of his
death He could picture his father, his face drawn but unmistakably proud, holding a press conference on the small lawn of
their modest Long Island family home. The elder Mr. Blumenfeld would spell his name to be sure it appeared correctly in the
newspapers and then, with Efrayim’s mother standing tearfully at his side, read from a prepared statement.
Looking up from a scrap of paper, blinking into the television cameras, he would respond to questions with questions. So what
makes you think that my son was a fanatic? he would ask. So what father, he would ask, his voice finally breaking, would not
be proud of a son who sacrificed his life for a biblical dream?

Getting a second wind, the Doctor again and again steered the conversation back to Beit Avram and the Jewish terrorism that
began with Rabbi Apfulbaum’s arrival in Israel. The Rabbi shook his head wearily. Yes, he admitted, he had known several of
the Jews accused of trying to blow up the Dome of the Rock; yes, he had been to meetings in which they had analyzed where
Zionism had gone wrong; yes, he himself had become convinced that the Zionists had to forget about world opinion, which would
condemn the Jews no matter what they did, and concentrate on finding a solution to Israel’s Arab problem; yes, pushing masses
of Arabs over the frontier into Syria and Jordan had been one of the options he himself had suggested; no, he had never been
tempted by Communism, although he agreed with Lenin when he said that if you wanted to make an omelet you had to crack eggs,
or words to that effect.

The Doctor pulled a large watch from a pocket and snapped it open, causing it to chime the hour and the fifteen minutes. “Three
thirty,” he announced. He could feel the stiffness in his back and neck. “We have a great deal in common,” he told the Rabbi.
“I also have attended endless discussion groups—as a medical student in Beirut, later in various villages and towns in the
occupied West Bank—in which we analyzed where Zionism had gone wrong. I personally made a painstaking study of Zionism in
order to better comprehend the movement’s mania to occupy my ancestral land. In the beginning the Zionist
raison d’etre
was to rescue Jews from the anti-Semitic environment of Eastern Europe and Czarist Russia. But with each victory over the
backward Arabs, the Zionists moved away from this rescue mission and toward redeeming the land they thought God had bequeathed
to Ibrahim. It does not require a Freud to grasp the psychological reasons for this change of focus. For two thousand years
you Jews didn’t have an army. Suddenly, with the creation by the Western powers of the colonial outpost in the Middle East
called
the State of Isra’il, you not only had an army, but one that swept its illiterate and poorly armed Arab enemies from the battle
field the way a broom sweeps sand from a Bedouin carpet. This Maccabean revival, as I call it, intoxicated you; it was almost
as if you had taken a collective dose of LSD. You glorified military service, you deified the soldier-warrior defending the
Holy Land. You failed to notice that Zionism succeeded because it had become the surrogate for Western colonialism, and a
mouthpiece for the West’s visceral anti-Arabism. In short, if the Jews, armed with Western planes and Western tanks and subsidized
by great doses of Western financial aid, succeeded in occupying land belonging for centuries to Palestinians, it was because
the world was on your side—”

Apfulbaum could contain himself no longer. “I suppose the world was on our side when the British closed off immigration to
Palestine in the nineteen thirties, dooming millions of Jews to the flames of Hitler’s furnaces. Swell! I suppose the world
was on our side when Roosevelt and Churchill refused to bomb the rail lines along which Jews were being transported to Hitler’s
death factories. Naturally the world was on our side in nineteen forty-eight when it created a Jewish state and then failed
to defend it from the British-armed and British-trained and British-led Arab Legion and four other Arab armies that vowed
to throw the Jews into the sea. Ha! We can cope with our enemies, but God save us from our friends!”

The Rabbi ran out of steam. “My legs ache,” he announced. “My heart, too. The problem with you, you see history through the
prism of an ancestral hate for Jews. Your Prophet and Messenger, Muhammad, disputed with the Jews in the oasis of Medina,
after which some of the Jews were exiled, others were killed. You surely remember what happened then—Muhammad ordered Muslims,
who until that time had been facing Jerusalem to pray, to turn instead toward Mecca. From that day to this you are still turning
away from the Jewishness of Jerusalem, and the Jews. I am practically blind but I can see you shaking your head. Why deny
it? I have read what your fabulous Koran has to say about the Jews.”

The Doctor shut his eyes and began to recite a verse from the Holy Qur’an.

Whoso judges not,

according to what God has sent down—

they are the unbelievers
.

And therein We prescribed for them:

“A life for a life, an eye for an eye,

a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear,

a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds

retaliation.”

He opened his eyes and attempted to bring the blurred face of his prisoner into focus. “‘
For wounds, retaliation
,’” he repeated. “In my case the punishment
preceded
the crime,
ya’ani
, which meant that the crime, when I finally got around to plotting it, had to fit the punishment.”

“What wounds? What punishment?”

“I will tell you what wounds, what punishment. I was studying at the American University of Beirut in the Lebanon at the time,
and returning to my parents’ home in Hebron for Ramadan by way of the Allenby Bridge over the River Jordan. I was so ashamed
of being a Palestinian in those days that I wore a Western suit and tie and replied in English if someone put a question to
me. The Jews, who knew an Arab when they saw one, dragged me from the bus and locked me in a latrine until nightfall. Not
realizing I could barely see, they blindfolded me and drove me around for hours to disorient me before taking me to a prison.
Only later did I discover it was the Isra’ili Army base of Hanan outside of Jericho, minutes away from the Allenby Bridge.
I was questioned for forty days and forty nights, during which time I was not permitted to sleep for days at a stretch. The
hair on my head and my beard were shaved off—a grievous humiliation for an Arab. The Isra’ilis never called me by name, only
by number; I was seven seven two three. My Isra’ili interrogator told me that I had been denounced as a terrorist belonging
to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When I wasn’t being questioned, I sat in a small room with a leather
hood not unlike the one you wear fitted over my head. It reeked of sweat and
vomit; it stank of fear. Once, when I dozed, the guard touched the electrodes used to heat water to my handcuffs. I woke up
screaming as the heated handcuffs burned into my swelling wrists. I still bear the scars; I wear these dark bracelets around
my wrists to remind me of my humiliation at the hands of the Jews. My interrogator was something of a pedagogue. He would
tell me precisely what he was going to do, and then he would do it. ‘You will become completely dependent on me for permission
to urinate, for food, for sleep, for news of your family,’ he would say. ‘At first you will resist. Then, slowly, you will
come to accept this dependency. Eventually you will be grateful for every crust of bread I throw you.’ He was mistaken; I
devoured the crusts but I was never grateful. I tell you,
ya’ani
, that I was innocent of the charge against me—the worst thing I had done was to drink Turkish coffee and talk politics at
the café called Faisal’s across the road from the main gate of the university. But when, after forty days, the Jews freed
me, I became guilty; I joined the group they accused me of belonging to. I tracked down the collaborator who had denounced
me and attempted to strangle him. The Isra’ilis rushed him to a hospital and saved his life. I was arrested for attempted
murder and sentenced to twelve years in prison. It was in prison that I decided to use a more surgical technique if I ever
needed to kill someone again.”