Vicious Circle (38 page)

“
Occupied Palestine!
” Cohen could not contain himself. “The
katsa
forgets who he is and where he is.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the Prime Minister said, addressing Elihu with evident sadness. “I don’t recall ever hearing those
words cross your lips before.”

Elihu, never one to be intimidated by rank, shot back, “It’s high time we called things by their real name. The late demented
Rabbi Apfulbaum and his cronies called Judea and Samaria
liberated
Palestine. The entire world thinks of it as
occupied
Palestine. The occupation has corrupted our souls. Our citizen army, created to defend this sliver of a Jewish state from
the sea of Arabs around us, has become an army of occupation.”

With a visible effort, the Prime Minister pushed himself to his feet. “I am relieved that your man Sweeney came out of this
in one piece,” he informed the
katsa
. “Please convey my personal thanks when you see him.” He crumpled one of the two typed speeches and tossed it into a waste
basket. “I will with great reluctance accept your resignation when you deliver it in writing, Elihu. You’ve been in the forefront
of our never-ending battle for survival too long. You’re burned out—you need a change of scenery; you need a rest.” Striding
toward the door, the Prime Minister motioned for Cohen to follow him. “Time for us to go down and tell the world what heroes
we all are,” he said.

An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

A
s usual I had one eye glued to CNN and caught the news bulletin as it flashed on the screen—the Prime Minister appeared relieved
but grim as he read his prepared statement. When he refused to take questions, CNN cut to the Palestinian Authority Chairman—he
looked as if he had weathered a bad case of intestinal flu. My first reaction? The death of Abu Bakr was balanced by the death
of the Rabbi. I don’t mean to be crude about it but for us, for the Mt. Washington treaty, that’s the best thing that could
have happened. It lets everyone off the hook
.

The call from Zalman Cohen came through while the Chairman was still being interviewed. “The bullet that killed the Rabbi
came from the terrorist’s pistol,” he said gleefully. I could tell from his voice that he was celebrating the denouement.
“Are you watching the Chairman on CNN?” he asked. “The son of a bitch didn’t give us much help—our people found Abu Bakr on
their own. Which is par for the course. You need to understand, Zachary, they can’t be trusted. They condemn terrorism in
public but in their heart of hearts they are very happy to keep the pot boiling. Well, now that nobody has started shooting
we can come to Washington and sign your treaty. But the Palestinians are going to have to crack down on these Abu Bakr jokers
if they expect us to hold up our end of the bargain.”

I know why nobody likes this guy Cohen. He is a worst-case Cassandra. He believes that if something can go wrong, it will.
The trouble with this attitude is that too often it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
.

Hang on a minute. Yes, I’ll take the call…
.

Jesus! You’re sure? …

How did you find out? …

Thank you for letting me know
.

Excuse me—I need a moment to collect my thoughts
.

Yes, terrible news. That Palestinian woman I met in Paris—Lamia Ghuri—they found her body under one of the bridges early this
morning
.

How did she die? She’d been tied to a stanchion and executed with a single small caliber bullet fired with surgical accuracy
into the brain behind her ear. Someone’s trying to send us a message—the Abu Bakr brigade has a long arm
.

Oh my God, it must have been me! I led them to her … I’m responsible for her death!

A
QUICKSILVER DAWN SPREAD ACROSS THE
J
UDEAN WILDERNESS
, then slipped under a low ceiling of sullen clouds to stain, in washed-out blood, the stone houses and twisting alleyways
of the ancient city of Hebron, which trickled like a lava flow through a north-south
wadi
between the hills. A short walk into the
wadi
, at the entrance to the old
Kasbah
, stood the imposing fortress-like Herodian walls around the Cave of the Patriarchs, the tomb of the progenitor the Jews know
as the Prophet Abraham and the Arabs call the Messenger Ibrahim. On the lower terraces of the hills surrounding the city,
women collecting firewood on the backs of donkeys moved between century-old waist-high stone walls through orchards and vineyards
and gardens. Above the stone walls, goats clung to the flanks of the hills, grazing with sure-footed laziness between the
silvery-green leaves of the olive trees.

On one of the windswept hills dominating Hebron, a procession of mourners snaked out of Beit Avram and started down the dirt
path toward the small Jewish cemetery inside the chain-link fence marking the settlement’s limits. At the head of the procession,
religious Jews dressed in black skull caps and black suits, their lapels slit in sign of mourning, carried a body wrapped
in a white shroud on an Army stretcher. Television cameramen scurried along on either side, filming the funeral.

Far below, a cortège of religious Muslims appeared on one of the walled paths angling off from the Hebron
wadi
. They wore white skull caps and white robes and carried on their shoulders a body
wrapped in a white shroud. As cameramen sprinted ahead to film them, they began the steep climb toward the Muslim cemetery
a stone’s throw downhill from the chain-link fence.

Israeli soldiers in khaki and Palestinian police in blue, armed with long riot batons and plastic shields, stood around in
small groups on either side of the fence. Occasionally a metallic voice would blare from a walkie-talkie, then cut off in
mid sentence. The Israeli colonel in charge of security chatted with his Palestinian counterpart through the links of the
fence. Off to one side of the Jewish cemetery, near a white television relay truck with a dish antenna on its roof, Baruch
was deep in conversation with Max Sweeney.

“Elihu never did tell me how you got into the business of spying for Israel,” Baruch said.

“It’s a short story,” Sweeney, his right shoulder taped in bandages, his arm tucked into a sling, replied with a caustic smile.
“My father was Irish Catholic, a whiskey-drinking County Cork Sweeney right down to the laces on his working class boots.
He left Ireland for the proverbial streets paved with gold and wound up, God knows how, in Seattle, where he fell in love
with my mother, who was Jewish. Her mother was a survivor of Bergen-Belsen. Two months shy of my seventeenth birthday, my
father ran away with his boss’s secretary. To get me out of the line of fire, my mother packed me off to a kibbutz in the
Galilee for the summer, at which point I discovered my Jewishness and fell in love with the country. I wanted to settle here
and would have, except the kibbutz secretary turned out to be a Mossad talent scout. The next thing I knew I was being interviewed
by Elihu, who convinced me that if I really wanted to serve the state of Israel, I should return to Seattle and become a journalist.
All that seems like a lifetime ago. I enrolled in journalism school and put in time on a bunch of small town newspapers before
landing my present job. I spent four years reporting from Rome, which is where I had my first contacts with the Palestinian
Authority people. The stories I wrote about them were invariably sympathetic—given my paper’s reputation, my editors were
delighted to publish anything critical of Israel. I portrayed the Palestinians as Davids bravely struggling against the Israeli
Goliath. Because my
Arab connections were hot, I was shipped off to Beirut for four years. Gradually the Palestinians there came to trust me,
too. I used to buy whiskey at eighty dollars a bottle at the St. George Hotel and wind up drinking into the early hours of
the morning with the Palestinian leaders in their apartments. Later I would pass on their addresses, and the floor plans of
their apartments, as well as the license plates of their cars, to the
katsa
.”

“So you were the source for those commando incursions into the Lebanon and the helicopter raids that singled out automobiles
on the roads and destroyed them with missiles.”

“I was one of the sources, yes. When the shell exploded near my car at the height of the Lebanese civil war, I went back to
Seattle for a series of ear operations, after which I was posted to Jerusalem. It was Elihu who got the bright idea of putting
a hearing aid in my dead ear so the Mossad could keep track of me. When I was taken to meet the would-be suicide bomber in
Gaza right after the Rabbi’s kidnapping, Elihu’s people homed in on the signal and knew exactly where the interview took place.”

“You were taking a big risk.”

Sweeney shrugged his unbandaged shoulder. “Since the hearing aid actually amplified the sounds it picked up, and since it
only transmitted a signal in bursts eighteen minutes before and eighteen minutes after the hour, we figured it was pretty
safe.”

“When I came on the scene, Elihu had you writing stories that got you in hot water with the Israeli censors,” Baruch remembered.

“My anti-Israeli, pro-Arab slant pretty much cemented my reputation with the Palestinians.”

The
katsa
, watching the funeral from the edge of the Jewish cemetery, was breaking in the Mossad officer who’d been named as his replacement.
The agents Elihu was running, the safehouses and ciphers he was using, had been passed on at the Mossad hideaway in Jaffa.
Now he was bringing him up to date on the Apfulbaum affair. Spotting Sweeney and Baruch below him on the hill, Elihu scrambled
over from the cemetery to join them. Above him, under the watchful eye of the new
katsa
, the religious Jews were lowering the body of their Rabbi into a freshly dug grave in the rust-colored earth.
“‘
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
,’” Elihu remarked. “Let’s hope this miserable episode ends here.”

“Did you catch Sa’adat on CNN last night?” Sweeney asked the
katsa
.

Baruch grimaced. “The rat accused us of murdering the blind
mujaddid
and demanded an international inquiry into the raid. Coming from him the accusation has a special irony.”

“We had no intention of taking prisoners,” Elihu reminded Baruch.

Baruch studied the ground in discomfort. “You have a short memory, Elihu.”

“What am I forgetting?”

“You’re forgetting that Abu Bakr had no intention of taking prisoners when he gunned down the four young Jews guarding I.
Apfulbaum. You’re forgetting Efrayim, whose body turned up on a garbage dump in Aza. You’re forgetting the Rabbi—he may have
been a crazy Jew, but he was a Jew all the same. You’re forgetting the twenty-four Palestinians who were executed because
they cooperated with us.” Baruch studied the katsa’s face; he appeared to have aged a decade in the last week. “So what’s
eating you, Elihu?”

The
katsa
kicked at a rusting tear gas canister. “These funerals are what’s eating me. They’re burying two killers on this hill as
if they were national heroes.”

Sweeney said, “Does that mean Apfulbaum really was the head of the Jewish underground?”

Baruch flashed a dark look in Elihu’s direction. “Apfulbaum was a deranged Rabbi even before Abu Bakr terrorized him,” he
declared. “Speaking as a cop, I can tell you we have no reason to take anything he may have said in that room literally.”

Sweeney said softly, “When he admited he was Ya’ir, I knew it was true.”

“Whether he was or wasn’t Ya’ir is beside the point,” Elihu said. “Look at those characters—there are a dozen Ya’irs, a dozen
Abu Bakrs waiting to step into their shoes.”

The Jews from Beit Avram began filing by the Rabbi’s open grave. As they passed, each one dropped a handful of dirt onto the
shroud. At the foot of the grave, a tall rangy Jew with a long scraggly beard and a singularly intense gaze rocked back and
forth on the soles of his scuffed black shoes. His side curls dancing in the wind, the hem of his ankle-length black overcoat
caressing the freshly turned earth, he began intoning the
Kaddish
, the Jewish prayer for the dead. “
Yisgaddal v’yiskaddash shmay rabboh b’olmoh dee v’roh chirusay
…”

Below, in the Muslim cemetery, the body of Doctor al-Shaath was being lowered on ropes into a crude crypt as an austere young
Imam with a neatly trimmed beard recited verses from the Koran. Sunlight glinted off his thick spectacles as his words drifted
up the hill.

God has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of
God; they kill, and are killed; that is a promise binding upon God in the Torah, and the Gospel, and the Qur’an; and who fulfills
his covenant truer than God? So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him
.

Elihu raised a hand to shade his eyes and peered toward the east. The swollen sun was slicing upward into the underbelly of
a cloud. In the fault behind the ridge of mountains, the Jordan River gushed down from the Galilee to empty into the Dead
Sea. Beyond the sea, the hills of Edom, which burned a fiery red when the sun set into the Mediterranean, perched like a smudge
of smoke on the horizon. From where Elihu was standing, he could make out narrow
wadis
cutting eastward toward the Dead Sea. He had patrolled them scores of times during the long years of military service; in
the rainy season the soldiers would strip and bathe in the icy needle-like falls spilling down the sides of the
wadis
. Secret ravines filled with wild peach and plum trees branched off from the
wadis
. It was in a cave in one of these ravines that the young giant-killer David had hidden from the mad king Saul a thousand
years before Jesus. From the spine of the central Judean hills, on which Elihu was standing, to the Dead Sea surely had to
be one of the wildest and most glorious places on the surface of the planet.