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Authors: Robert Littell

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BOOK: Vicious Circle
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The five soldiers, dressed, like Elihu, in frayed Arab robes with
kafias
wrapped loosely around their heads, were superstitious—last missions were notoriously jinxed for the individual who was retiring
from active service. To a man the team wanted Elihu to stay with the Mercedes-Benz taxi and survey the deserted street, but
he wasn’t buying into that; he had led his raids from the usual position of the commanding officer in an Israeli military
unit, which is to say from the front. His last mission would be no exception.

The team parked the taxi in the alley next to a closed petrol station. Elihu motioned for the driver to stay with the car;
if there was any activity in the street, he would alert the others. Each member of the team had a tiny speaker in one ear
and a small microphone
attached to the cuff of his robe at the wrist. Now they heard Elihu’s tinny whisper in their ear. “In the Torah there is a
formula that instructs Jews how to deal with the assassination of our Minister and the murder of the American girl twelve
days ago.
And thine eye shall not pity, but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand
.”

The men checked their weapons—three carried Uzis with folding metal stocks and clips taped back to back for fast changing;
Elihu and his second in command, Dovid Dror, were armed with Russian Makarov pistols fitted with silencers—and set off down
the deserted Street of the Prophet. Walking soundlessly on their Adidas basketball sneakers, they passed the entrance to the
apartment building and the shuttered windows of the mini-market and turned down an alleyway reeking from the overflowing metal
garbage bins. At the back of the apartment building they scaled a wooden fence and jumped into a well-tended garden filled
with bougainvillea clinging to an arched steel trellis. One of the men picked the lock on the coal chute and pulled open the
slanting wooden doors. Signaling for the others to put on their night vision goggles, Elihu dropped into the coal bin and
led the way through several vaulted brick-walled basement rooms to a narrow staircase.

The team’s specialist on locks tried half a dozen skeleton keys before he found one that worked in the old lock. Motioning
for his men to wait, Elihu stopped on the first step and listened intently. Satisfied with the quality of the silence, he
pointed at the fifth member of the team, who immediately crouched next to the door as Elihu led the others up the staircase.
At the third floor the team’s locksmith came up with a skeleton key that fitted into the hallway door. In the airless corridor
filled with the odor of fresh paint, the raiding party took up positions on either side of the steel door that led to the
apartment of the local head of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades.

Studying the door through his goggles, Elihu identified the two dead bolts mentioned in the Mossad pre-mission briefing, then
glanced at his men, all of whom nodded. Raising his Makarov, he shot out the two locks and shouldered through the door. One
member of the team crouched at the door of the apartment to cover the
hallway. Elihu’s second in command and the other raider swept into the apartment behind their leader. The sound of a woman
calling in Arabic, “Mustafah, is that you going to the toilet?” came from one room. With Dror covering his back, Elihu kicked
open the door with the poster of the Al Aksa mosque taped to it and burst into a bedroom. A fleshy woman sleeping on the four-poster
bed crushed a pillow to the bosom of her nightdress hoping it would protect her from a terror she could hear but not see.
The bald, rail-thin middle-aged man in gaudy pajamas lying next to her groped wildly for the pistol on the night table with
his only hand; he’d lost the other years before when a letter bomb he was preparing exploded prematurely. Elihu stepped up
to the bed and shot him once behind the ear, then fired a second shot through the palm of his hand so there would be no doubt
about who had delivered retribution. The woman screamed. The scream seemed to echo through the apartment, then the building,
then the neighborhood, which started to come to life.

“Lights visible all over the Street of the Prophet,” the team member at the taxi calmly reported into Elihu’s ear.

“We’re finished here,” Elihu said into his microphone as he backed out of the bedroom. Two women servants, with blankets pulled
tightly around their bodies, stood at the entrance to the kitchen staring into the Uzi of one of the raiders.

“Go, go, go,” Elihu cried into his microphone.

The commandos retreated from the apartment in the order they had decided on when they rehearsed the raid in a hangar on their
base. Elihu brought up the rear. Heads appeared in windows above them as the Israeli commandos raced under the bougainvillea
in the garden. Angry voices shouted in Arabic into the night. Elihu detonated a smoke grenade to cover the retreat as his
men scaled the wooden fence. In the alley he barked another order into the microphone. “Car to the mini-market.”

From the Street of the Prophet came the screech of brakes. The raiders flung themselves into the taxi, which began to move
before the doors slammed shut. The Mercedes, running without headlights, careened around a corner as shots rang out behind
them. The three men in the back seat ducked as a bullet shattered the car’s rear window,
showering them with shards of glass. At the end of the narrow street the driver spun the wheel, spilling the car down a slope
onto a dirt track that ran through a garbage dump dubbed “Gehenna” on the Israeli battle map. “Headlights,” Elihu snapped.
The driver flicked on the low beams in time to slalom around the goats grazing in the next field, their front legs tethered
to prevent them from wandering away during the night.

Elihu looked over his shoulder. All of Nablus seemed to be lit up. From the minaret of a mosque on the edge of the city a
hand-cranked siren began to wail. A swirl of dust, rising like a sandstorm toward the waning sliver of moon, trailed behind
the taxi as it raced between the two Army jeeps stationed along the route of the exfiltration. They were almost home free.
The taxi bounced up an embankment and turned onto a paved road. Only when they had driven past the two tanks, with sergeants
saluting them from the open turrets, did Elihu order the driver to slow down. He switched on the two-way radio to check in
with the base as the men, mentally exhausted, slumped in their seats. From the radio came the low growl of the Mossad operations
commander. “Congratulations on the successful conclusion of your last combat mission,” he said after Elihu had sent the coded
signal indicating the target had been killed and the raiders had escaped unhurt.

“Looks like you broke the jinx, Elihu,” Dror, the second in command, called nervously from the back of the car.

But Elihu, watching the lights of Jerusalem glimmer in the darkness ahead, was lost in thought. “We must never forget,” he
said softly. He was barely aware of talking aloud.

The men in the back seat exchanged looks. “What must we never forget?” Dror asked quietly.

Elihu could have been speaking to himself. “That we live in a corner of the planet where absolutely no one, least of all the
hundred million Arabs around us, respects weakness. Which is why, when the last verse of the Pentateuch is read, we chant:
Hazak, hazak, ve-nit’-hazak—Be strong, be strong, and we shall be strengthened
.”

SOMETIME IN THE NEAR FUTURE

An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

T
esting, three, two, one. If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. (This particular travel tip is
from Lewis Carroll.) The voice level work for you? Okay, here goes nothing. My name—

Excuse me a moment. Who? Have him get back to me. I'm going to be tied up until lunchtime. With the exception of the President,
don't put anyone through until I'm finished here
.

Sorry. Where was I?

My name is Zachary Taylor Sawyer, Zack to my friends, Old Rough and Ready to the people who associate me with my illustrious
ancestor, the twelfth President of the United States, Zachary Taylor, and think that, like him, I ride rough-shod over anyone
who gets in my way. I'm pushing fifty-five from the right side; will be for a few more months. I taught history and political
science at Harvard until eleven months ago, which is when I was invited to come to Washington as the Special Assistant to
the President for Middle Eastern Affairs. For the record, this morning I'm participating in Harvard's “Running History” Project,
under which senior government officials agree to record history as it's being made on the condition that these tapes will
not be released to the public for twenty-five years. The object of the project, as I understand it, is to give future historians
access to the raw material behind the decision making process—the endless battles over turf, the position papers that take
no position, the brain storming sessions where original ideas are shot down by time servers who have no alternatives to offer,
the furious disagreements that are shoved under the carpet to give the impression that the highest level of government speaks
with one voice
.

You really think I'm being cynical? I thought I was being accurate. Speaking as a historian, I suspect that history tells
us more about ourselves than the past—it tells us how we distorted what we chose to remember. But that's another story
.

Where to begin? I s'pose the best thing would be to describe where we're at, and then tell you how we got there. Where we're
at is nine days from the signing of the peace treaty between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the creation of a viable
Palestinian state within mutually agreed frontiers. The person who was on his way out when you came in was the White House
protocol chief, Manny Krisher. We were ironing out the last wrinkles in the signing ceremony. Manny was generous enough to
say that he didn't know how I'd convinced the Israelis and Palestinians to sit down around the same table, much less sign
a treaty of peace
.

I told Manny what I usually tell people who ask me how I did it. It was a matter of timing. I came on the scene long enough
after 11 September for the world to become weary of Bush’s endless war on terror and the so-called clash of civilizations—the
materialistic and secular West crusading against a spiritual and fundamentalist Islam—that was alienating Muslims around the
globe. I came on the scene when Wahabi fundamentalists posed a credible threat to the Saudi monarchy and the price of oil
out of Arabia hit one hundred dollars a barrel, driving up inflation and driving down economic growth in every industrialized
country. I came on the scene when European leaders—as his Excellency, the British Prime Minister, bluntly told Bush’s successor
in my presence—were ready to reassess their historic ties to America if Washington didn’t rein in the Israelis and get them
to agree to the existence of a viable Palestinian state, which, in the British view, would pull the rug out from under the
Wahabis and stabilize Saudi Arabia and bring down the price of oil
.

No, that part of the meeting didn’t make it onto the pages of the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
, and for good reason—it would
have scared the bejesus out of voters across Europe. The British PM, the German Chancellor, the French President, all over
here for that U.N. summit, sounded like Delphic oracles who had coordinated their message, which essentially was that, unlike
the U.S.A., their countries had enormous Muslim populations that might erupt like Mount Vesuvius if the Palestinians didn’t
get their homeland, and soon
.

Good question. Were they exaggerating? You know, even exaggerated perceptions have a way of shaping reality, which was the
case here. In essence the European leaders had swallowed the jihadist’s bait; without admitting it in so many words, they
were blaming Israel for the existence of Islamic fundamentalism in the world. The fact of the matter is that the Islamic fundamentalists
were around before the sovereign state of Israel was created in 1948 and they’ll be around after the sovereign state of Palestine
comes into existence. The fact of the matter is that the impoverishment of the Arab masses and their lack of hope that things
will get better before they get worse—which is the stuff off of which Islamic fundamentalism feeds—will still be around when
the struggle over this sliver of Holy Land winds down
.

Yes, yes, I have to agree: they will certainly come up with another festering issue to rally their troops if we manage to
solve the hundred-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But here’s the beauty of it all—here’s what I convinced the President
of: Just because the European analysis was driven by an imperfect grasp of Islam and the historical forces at work in the
world doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take them at their word, or look as if we are. In pressuring the Israelis, Washington would
be seen to be responding to Europe’s legitimate concerns. And solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—even if it’s not the
antidote to Islamic fundamentalism’s drive to restore the seventh century caliphate and what the Koran calls Hakimiyyat Allah
or God’s rule—could only serve America’s long-term interests in the sense that it will become more difficult, if not impossible,
to blame us for Palestinian tribulations
.

I’m laughing because you’re right. As the President was kind enough to point out at her most recent press conference, a good
deal more than luck was involved in getting the two sides to the negotiating table. Let’s start at the start. It's no state
secret that I was summoned to Washington by a President who'd been intrigued by my book
Breaking Vicious
Circles
. She seemed as much impressed by the tone of the book as its contents. As she told me the first time we met, she didn't come
across many Middle East mavens, her husband included, who were as detached as I was
.

BOOK: Vicious Circle
9.72Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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