For Things We Do Not Know

by Moshe Dann (July 2014)

rom our hilltop we watched scores of police and army forces massing along the road below, preparing their assault against us, red, blue and yellow roof lights spinning in the pre-dawn darkness. A sharp wind whipped across the hills as you zipped your khaki parka and gathered with other men at the entrance gate, hoping to block the road, at least temporarily, knowing that resistance was ultimately useless.  

“We can defend ourselves against our enemies,” you said quietly, leaning against the gate, your eyes alert to what was happening as headlights began to illuminate the landscape, “but how do we defend ourselves against our government?” An officer in the reserves, you knew what an army can do. 

Lights were on in the nearby Jewish community as supporters began to walk towards us. You put an arm around me as we waited.

As an army bulldozer began to clear obstacles, two boys ran down to ignite the tires into bonfires. Seeing the flames and heavy smoke, the horses instinctively tried to back up, as their riders struggling to control them.

“Will there be violence?” I asked.

“No,” you answered. “We will resist, but no violence. We won’t attack our brothers.”

 “How will you fight?”

Sounds of thunder echoed in the distance and lightning flashed across the sky. We ran for umbrellas and tarps to protect us as light rain soon became a downpour, stopping the advancing troops as they too began to seek cover in buses that had transported them from army bases. As beacon fires sputtered in the heavy rain, the line of vehicles began to back down to the main road.

When you returned home I told you that I was pregnant. You put your hands on my belly and then held my face, your eyes filled with tears, your damp parka smelling of use.

“We need the rain,” you said, looking at the vineyard you had planted. A few days later you received call-up orders. 

 

She remembers the way he held her in his arms. His guitar hangs on the wall, next to a framed blessing for their home. Home, she writes, the wind whistling through a crack in a window, her pen wandering along the empty page. Alone, the words seeping from memory, she writes in a brown paper covered notebook with blue lines, the kind used in Israeli schools.

She remembers working at a residential center in Jerusalem for severely handicapped children as part of her National Service. She celebrated her 20th birthday in the large playroom at the center filled with children and staff. He had completed his army service in a combat unit and was accompanying a friend whose son was one of the patients at the center. She remembers the children strapped in wheelchairs struggling to communicate with their eyes, pleading sounds scraped from inside, tangled in frustration as she fed them cake which Mazel, the social worker had baked for her.

She remembers him standing by the door, watching as his friend kissed his son and fed him. Across the room, a birthday song, their eyes are a bridge. She turns to the children, as if distracted, and over the shoulder hugs of the other girls who work with her, she notices that he is looking at her and does not move, as if they have already met, as if they are holding hands. She pretends to be focused on the children, her job, where she is needed and loved, where she is a woman with responsibilities and glances in his direction. And he does not move.

She knows. Sure of herself, she is free-falling into herself, soaring.

It was that way between them, a sense of awe for each other.

She writes:                   

I have lived alone without you for 2 years, but you are always there inside me, and the child that was in my womb, the son you never saw, who carries your name, and grows to look like you and me.

Your absence throbs like a dull pain, as if you are inside, pounding to get out. I try to soothe you with my hands, winds of memories fluttering against the emptiness. 

Sitting in front of the synagogue, arms linked with other young men, singing Psalms, they hoped to prevent soldiers from entering the sanctuary. They sang Hatikva as soldiers in black uniforms marched up the steps and broke through the human barriers of linked arms, ripping us apart, and then expelled the Jews of Gush Katif from their homes and their lands. Afterwards, the army returned with bulldozers to destroy the buildings and playgrounds, until every Jewish community was wiped out.

The hilltop community called Emunah, Faith, was built in the Shomron hills, near the settlement of Shilo, where the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Tabernacle, the Mishkan stood for 369 years. Emma takes out one of Boaz’s books that they had studied together, puts it back on the shelf, unopened. Words spill out.

Living with memories of you, a broken lamp that you fixed, our garden that you hoped would flourish with tomatoes and cucumbers is now full of weeds.

 “We’ll win.” You kissed me when you left for reserve duty, uniformed and unshaven, smiling your determination, and then suddenly you returned because you had forgotten your tallit and tefilin. I wanted you to stay and held you. We laughed and cried, a rope between our souls, your eyes lit in mine.

After the funeral I sat shiva, your absence unfolding inside, trying to make sense of life without you. We didn’t know that the government intended to destroy our hilltop community.

One Shabbat morning, a bus arrived filled with Arabs, foreign “anarchists” and Israeli “activists,” organized by Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, International Solidarity Movement and other NGOs. Some wore kafiyahs as they descended from their bus, led by Ezra, dressed in colorful clothing and a floppy straw hat. They moved through our vineyard, uprooting the plants that you had carefully tended, tearing apart the irrigation lines, trampling and shouting their hatred. Soldiers in an army jeep watched from a distance but did not intervene.

Then they attacked a small grove of olive and fruit trees with axes. Yosef, a 75 year old Russian immigrant had planted them in memory of his wife. When we tried to stop them they threw stones at us. One of the children was hit.

“This is Palestinian land. You are occupiers,” they shouted. “You are thieves, stealing our land. Get out! ” An army jeep arrived to separate us and then herded them back to their bus. After they left we walked through the ruined fields, trying to salvage what we could, our hearts like vines torn from the earth, stumps and broken limbs of trees.

“This is private Palestinian land,” Arabs and their left-wing Israeli supporters claim. The proof? Legal advisors employed by the Civil Administration, the military government, signed off on Arab claims without any court decisions, or evidence of legitimate ownership. A legal farce.

Mordecai and Michali built hothouses near their home on a hilltop near the semi-arid Judean settlement of Sussiya, an important Jewish town during the second Temple and Talmudic period. “Private Palestinian land,” Arabs claimed, without proof, sanctioned by the state and High Court. The army destroyed their hothouses. That’s “the law.” Bedouin living nearby steal whatever they can, protected by the army. Jews are “trespassers.”

“Jews out!” the EU and UN scream. Out of our homeland? “It doesn’t belong to you!”

 

“You’ll come to live with us?” Emma’s mother asks. “Being alone with an infant on an isolated hilltop isn’t easy …”

“No,” she replies quickly, instinctively, but unsure if she would be able to live with the pressures and complexities, struggling between wanting a safe place and her independence. Boaz had protected her, she twists the end of her kerchief around her finger, but now she would have to protect herself, and her son.

Shoshana came up from the nearby community with the youngest of her five children, the same age. Her husband had been stabbed to death a year before while waiting at a bus station, widows grieving in silence. “What will you do?” They hugged and knew. “This is our home,” she said, his whisper in the wind.

 

 

She recognized the officer who knocked at her door. “I remember you,” she said quietly.

“Yes. I was the officer who told you about Boaz.”

“And now?”

“I have been ordered to evict you.”

“But why?”

”Doesn’t this have to go to a court?”

“No. We decide.”

“Can I appeal?”

“Yes, to us.”

“But you have already decided.”

“Yes.”

“So why appeal?”

“Your choice.”

“And if I refuse …?”

“You will be evicted.”

“By force?”

“If necessary. It’s all legal, quite legal. By laws of the Administration …”

“So, you make the laws and then enforce them …”

“By laws of the state, medinat yisrael. We are the state.”

“And you will obey orders that you do not understand, that make no sense? You will tear down our home?”

“Please. I don’t want to do this. I’m only doing what I was ordered…” a silence between them.

“And you will do this without thinking? That is what you have learned?”

“To obey orders.” He looked at the window, her stove, the bookshelf.

“And you don’t ask why? Perhaps in a combat situation, but now?”

She did not move. Suddenly, he turned and walked outside.

“We are with you,” one of them spoke up. “We won’t do it. It’s wrong.” He looked at the others. “We’ll fight on a battlefield, we’re ready to give up our lives, but this is not why we are soldiers. Jews don’t evict Jews from their homes.” They moved toward their jeeps. “We’re going back to the base.”

She watched the jeeps move slowly down the road. A cry from the crib, she picked up her son and sat on the torn sofa and nursed, feeling him pull on her breasts, life flowing between them, his face serene as the morning sunlight fell upon them, his eyes closed and content, his fingers wound around one of hers, another miracle. 

 

______________________

Moshe Dann is a writer and journalist living in Jerusalem. His next book, As Far As The Eye Can See, will be published by New English Review Press this fall.

 

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