Items related to Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism
When peace talks between Palestinian and Israeli leaders collapsed at Camp David in 2000, a conflict as bloody as any that had ever occurred between the two peoples began. Now David Horovitz—editor of The Jerusalem Report—explores the quotidian and profound effects this conflict and its attendant terrorism have had on the lives of ordinary men, women and children.
Horovitz describes the “grim lottery” of life in Israel since 2000. He makes clear that far from becoming blasé or desensitized, its citizens respond with deepening horror every time the front pages are disfigured by the rows of passport portraits presenting the faces of the newly dead. He takes us to the funeral of a murdered Israeli, where the presence of security personnel underlines that nowhere is safe. He describes how his wife must tell their children to close their eyes when they pass a just-exploded bus on the way to school, so that the images of carnage won’t haunt them.
He talks with government officials on both sides of the conflict, with relatives of murdered victims, with Palestinian refugees, and with his own friends and family, letting us sense what it feels like to live with the constant threat and the horrific frequency of shootings and suicide bombings. Examining the motives behind the violence, he blames mistaken policies and actions on the Israeli as well as the Palestinian side, and details the suffering of Palestinians deprived of basic freedoms under strict Israeli controls.
But at the root of this conflict, he argues, is terrorism and Yasser Arafat’s deliberate use of it after spurning a genuine opportunity for peace at Camp David, and then misleading his people, and much of the world, about what was on offer there. He describes how the world’s press has too often allowed prejudgment to replace fair-minded reporting. And finally, Horovitz makes us see the vast depth and extent of the mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians and the enormous challenges that underlie new attempts at peacemaking.
Human and harrowing—and yet projecting an unexpected optimism—Still Life with Bombers affords us a remarkably balanced and insightful understanding of a seemingly intractable conflict.
Horovitz describes the “grim lottery” of life in Israel since 2000. He makes clear that far from becoming blasé or desensitized, its citizens respond with deepening horror every time the front pages are disfigured by the rows of passport portraits presenting the faces of the newly dead. He takes us to the funeral of a murdered Israeli, where the presence of security personnel underlines that nowhere is safe. He describes how his wife must tell their children to close their eyes when they pass a just-exploded bus on the way to school, so that the images of carnage won’t haunt them.
He talks with government officials on both sides of the conflict, with relatives of murdered victims, with Palestinian refugees, and with his own friends and family, letting us sense what it feels like to live with the constant threat and the horrific frequency of shootings and suicide bombings. Examining the motives behind the violence, he blames mistaken policies and actions on the Israeli as well as the Palestinian side, and details the suffering of Palestinians deprived of basic freedoms under strict Israeli controls.
But at the root of this conflict, he argues, is terrorism and Yasser Arafat’s deliberate use of it after spurning a genuine opportunity for peace at Camp David, and then misleading his people, and much of the world, about what was on offer there. He describes how the world’s press has too often allowed prejudgment to replace fair-minded reporting. And finally, Horovitz makes us see the vast depth and extent of the mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians and the enormous challenges that underlie new attempts at peacemaking.
Human and harrowing—and yet projecting an unexpected optimism—Still Life with Bombers affords us a remarkably balanced and insightful understanding of a seemingly intractable conflict.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
From the Back Cover:
"David Horovitz brings his eloquent voice and piercing witness to depicting the plight and persistence of Israel during the second Intifada. For those of us in the common-sense center, those of us who believed peace was imminent at Camp David and have been harrowed by the terrorism that followed, this book offers a vital dose of painful wisdom and realistic, tempered hope."--Samuel G. Freedman, author of Jew vs. Jew"David Horovitz possesses the most insightful and most articulate voice coming out of the Middle East today. His book is simultaneously realistic and hopeful and deserves to be read and heeded."--Harold S. Kushner, author, When Bad Things Happen to Good People
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
1.
Bethlehem, Then and Now
One day in May 2000, we strapped the kids into the backseat and drove to Bethlehem. The journey lasted all of ten minutes: out of the house, a couple of left turns and a short zip along Hebron Road, past a decaying mobile-home village hurriedly erected for Ethiopian immigrants a decade earlier, and an archaeological dig uncovering remains of a Byzantine church built sixteen hundred years ago at the spot where Mary reputedly rested en route from Galilee to her world-changing delivery. There was only one roadblock separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem--the Israeli one; the Palestinian Authority never wished to acknowledge the outer limits of areas under its control. I slowed, intending to ask the army personnel whether there was any reason not to cross into PA territory, but I didn't get the chance. Two dusty-uniformed soldiers, peering out from a roadside kiosk planted among assorted knee-high hard plastic and concrete blocks, waved us through indifferently.
There was no sense whatsoever of having entered a different neighborhood, much less a different country. For a start, we'd seen no uniformed Palestinians. The main road featured the combined Hebrew and Arabic signposting that is routine inside Israel. The houses on either side were finished in the same golden Jerusalem stone as those in the Jewish neighborhoods behind us. Many of the cars carried the registration plates of the PA (green numbers on a white background), but there were plenty with yellow Israeli plates as well, including a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles parked outside the restaurant where some friends had suggested we might want to eat.
Inside, the decor was simple and unremarkable. We knew we were in the fiefdom of Yasser Arafat, rather than that of then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, only because of the small framed photograph near the kitchen that showed the beaming, sparkly-toothed proprietor standing alongside an equally sparkly Palestinian chairman. The menu was commonplace--hummus and tahini, hamburgers and chips--although the waiters, attending to that small crowd of Israeli jeep drivers and to three or four quieter tables of Palestinian and Israeli families, were wearing immaculate white jackets, which you'd never see in an Israeli restaurant.
This day out in the nearest big city, albeit one that happened to be in quasi-Palestine, was hardly a daring foray into potentially dangerous land. Indeed, if I'd thought there was any risk at all, we wouldn't have gone. My kids were eight, six and three at the time, and I'm not the kind of dad who takes unnecessary risks with them. Or, at least, I didn't think I was that kind of dad in those relatively easygoing days.
We drove leisurely on after lunch, and Bethlehem's fuller character started to reveal itself. There were hints of its past and, as it would turn out, future potential as a war zone in the massive concrete walls that the Israeli army had constructed after gun battles three years earlier around Rachel's Tomb. Much visited by childless mothers seeking assistance from the divine power that gave Jacob's wife her beloved Joseph and Benjamin, the area saw Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen firing on one another for days in September 1996, in what became known as the "Temple Mount Tunnel Riots"--confrontations that erupted across the West Bank after Israel secretively dug out a new opening to an ancient water tunnel alongside the ultrasensitive Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City. Amid similar confrontations, Israel would later abandon other enclaves at less prestigious holy sites inside Palestinian territory--an ancient synagogue on the outskirts of Jericho, and a tomb, rather sketchily linked to the biblical Joseph, on the edge of Nablus. But Rachel's Tomb was too central to the Jewish narrative, too symbolic, to relinquish. So instead of pulling out, the army brought in the builders, whose bleak roughcast barriers had now given the formerly modest site the aspect of a high-security prison.
As we drove farther into the city, Israeli-planted Hebrew signposting thinned out. But the occasional grocery or hardware store advertised its name in both Arabic and Hebrew, and a few dentists had even put up what appeared to be new Hebrew signs to promote their services. For the first time in years, it seemed, Israelis were being invited to place the fate of one of the most sensitive of body parts in the hands, literally, of those who had so recently been perceived as their enemies. We stopped at a warehouse-size store to price Ping-Pong tables. At a roadside grocery, we bought British chocolate bars, scarce in Israel because of the lingering effects of Arab boycott threats against companies that traded with the Jewish state. We strolled around Manger Square, past the polished plate-glass windows of the stores selling olive-wood souvenirs, and ducked low to enter the grotto beneath the Church of the Nativity there, the reputed birthplace of Jesus. Unfazed, we drove past Deheishe refugee camp, once a major Intifada combat zone, where a towering stone sculpture showing the entire territory of pre-Israel mandatory Palestine stood in tribute to the "martyrs" who'd given their lives over the decades of struggle. And when we got lost en route to one of our destinations, Solomon's Pools, ancient reservoirs that used to be a staple of every Jewish tourist group's visit to Israel, we did what good boys and girls who grow up in London (me) and Dallas (my wife, Lisa) are told to do: We asked a policeman, in this case a machine gun-packing Palestinian policeman in a dark blue uniform, who cheerfully redirected us. He even commandeered a loitering teenager, who jumped into the car to ensure we didn't stray again, and who waved us good-bye when we'd found the historic spot, which was located next to the construction site of a substantial shopping mall.
Lisa had been mildly concerned when the youth bounded unexpectedly into the car, and she was more so when we drove farther from the main Bethlehem drag into a neighboring village called Artis, the site of an exquisite church and a backstreet art gallery. When I parked the car, we were immediately surrounded by curious young Palestinian children, who followed us to the doorway of the gallery. But Lisa's understandable concern was misplaced. The whole day passed as uneventfully as I had expected it would. We broadened our horizons and were back in Israel before dusk.
These, after all, were the months of hope and optimism, and the intermingling of our two populations. More than 100,000 Palestinian construction workers, agricultural laborers, hotel waiters and other jobholders were legally making the daily journey into Israel. Perhaps three times that number were making the same journey without the necessary work permits. Israel was thus the absolute mainstay of the Palestinian economy. And hundreds of thousands of Israelis like us were spending Saturdays shopping, eating and seeing the sights in a once Wild West Bank that had now apparently been tamed. Israel had a year earlier elected a prime minister, Barak, whose central campaign platform had been his pledge to attain a permanent peace accord with the supposedly eager Arafat. Peace with Syria, we were led to believe, was but a diplomatic finesse away, and our much-anticipated New Middle East seemed to be taking shape before our eyes. One of the Israel TV newsmagazine shows had just screened a feature about Israeli travel agencies running oversubscribed tours to Gaza, taking Israeli tourists to view firsthand the horrors of the notorious refugee camps mere minutes away: "Here we are at Jebalya, where the Intifada started in 1987." They didn't call it the "first Intifada" back then. The TV crew had filmed a middle-aged Israeli housewife calling home on her cell phone, wide-eyed at the indignities being suffered by the downtrodden Gaza populace she had just been to see, detailing the appalling overcrowding, the empty refrigerators, the sewage running down the narrow camp alleys. "You wouldn't believe it!" she exclaimed, every inch the pampered, camera-clutching Western sightseer, reeling with horrified fascination on initial exposure to the underdeveloped world.
The underlying assumption of these Gaza visits, indeed of the entire craze of visiting Palestine, was that here was a vanishing world, and that this was the last chance to espy the repressed Palestinian in his pitiful habitat, the manipulated pawn of the cynical Middle East powers now about to be liberated, freed to pluck the juicy fruits of peace. At The Jerusalem Report, we had just run a cover story titled "Crossing the Great Divide," which detailed that burgeoning phenomenon of Israelis weekending on the other side of the checkpoints. The article, by Peter Hirschberg, documented the lengthy traffic jams that built up every Saturday as thousands of motorists headed toward the West Bank shopping meccas, Palestinian stores where the prices for just about everything, from kitchen utensils to furniture to jeans and teddy bears, were 50 percent below Israeli costs. It noted the heavy baccarat, roulette and blackjack action at the Oasis casino, a pink-stone incongruity opposite a refugee camp in the desert outside Jericho, where daily takings were believed to commonly exceed $1 million, much of it heading into PA coffers. It listed the varied attractions that were drawing Israelis to other benevolent "hot spots": the healing waters of Nablus; the spanking new Jericho cable car, ascending to the monastery at Jesus' testing ground atop the "Mount of Temptation"; the line of cheap jewelry stores in Gaza City's "Gold Market." Shlomo Dror, an official from the Civil Administration, the Israeli authority that had overseen years of Israeli occupation and was gradually becoming irrelevant as territory was handed over to the PA, told us that the Palestinians were doing everything to protect the Israelis and thus safeguard the growing economic interaction. "The Palestinians are feeling the impact of the p...
Bethlehem, Then and Now
One day in May 2000, we strapped the kids into the backseat and drove to Bethlehem. The journey lasted all of ten minutes: out of the house, a couple of left turns and a short zip along Hebron Road, past a decaying mobile-home village hurriedly erected for Ethiopian immigrants a decade earlier, and an archaeological dig uncovering remains of a Byzantine church built sixteen hundred years ago at the spot where Mary reputedly rested en route from Galilee to her world-changing delivery. There was only one roadblock separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem--the Israeli one; the Palestinian Authority never wished to acknowledge the outer limits of areas under its control. I slowed, intending to ask the army personnel whether there was any reason not to cross into PA territory, but I didn't get the chance. Two dusty-uniformed soldiers, peering out from a roadside kiosk planted among assorted knee-high hard plastic and concrete blocks, waved us through indifferently.
There was no sense whatsoever of having entered a different neighborhood, much less a different country. For a start, we'd seen no uniformed Palestinians. The main road featured the combined Hebrew and Arabic signposting that is routine inside Israel. The houses on either side were finished in the same golden Jerusalem stone as those in the Jewish neighborhoods behind us. Many of the cars carried the registration plates of the PA (green numbers on a white background), but there were plenty with yellow Israeli plates as well, including a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles parked outside the restaurant where some friends had suggested we might want to eat.
Inside, the decor was simple and unremarkable. We knew we were in the fiefdom of Yasser Arafat, rather than that of then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, only because of the small framed photograph near the kitchen that showed the beaming, sparkly-toothed proprietor standing alongside an equally sparkly Palestinian chairman. The menu was commonplace--hummus and tahini, hamburgers and chips--although the waiters, attending to that small crowd of Israeli jeep drivers and to three or four quieter tables of Palestinian and Israeli families, were wearing immaculate white jackets, which you'd never see in an Israeli restaurant.
This day out in the nearest big city, albeit one that happened to be in quasi-Palestine, was hardly a daring foray into potentially dangerous land. Indeed, if I'd thought there was any risk at all, we wouldn't have gone. My kids were eight, six and three at the time, and I'm not the kind of dad who takes unnecessary risks with them. Or, at least, I didn't think I was that kind of dad in those relatively easygoing days.
We drove leisurely on after lunch, and Bethlehem's fuller character started to reveal itself. There were hints of its past and, as it would turn out, future potential as a war zone in the massive concrete walls that the Israeli army had constructed after gun battles three years earlier around Rachel's Tomb. Much visited by childless mothers seeking assistance from the divine power that gave Jacob's wife her beloved Joseph and Benjamin, the area saw Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen firing on one another for days in September 1996, in what became known as the "Temple Mount Tunnel Riots"--confrontations that erupted across the West Bank after Israel secretively dug out a new opening to an ancient water tunnel alongside the ultrasensitive Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City. Amid similar confrontations, Israel would later abandon other enclaves at less prestigious holy sites inside Palestinian territory--an ancient synagogue on the outskirts of Jericho, and a tomb, rather sketchily linked to the biblical Joseph, on the edge of Nablus. But Rachel's Tomb was too central to the Jewish narrative, too symbolic, to relinquish. So instead of pulling out, the army brought in the builders, whose bleak roughcast barriers had now given the formerly modest site the aspect of a high-security prison.
As we drove farther into the city, Israeli-planted Hebrew signposting thinned out. But the occasional grocery or hardware store advertised its name in both Arabic and Hebrew, and a few dentists had even put up what appeared to be new Hebrew signs to promote their services. For the first time in years, it seemed, Israelis were being invited to place the fate of one of the most sensitive of body parts in the hands, literally, of those who had so recently been perceived as their enemies. We stopped at a warehouse-size store to price Ping-Pong tables. At a roadside grocery, we bought British chocolate bars, scarce in Israel because of the lingering effects of Arab boycott threats against companies that traded with the Jewish state. We strolled around Manger Square, past the polished plate-glass windows of the stores selling olive-wood souvenirs, and ducked low to enter the grotto beneath the Church of the Nativity there, the reputed birthplace of Jesus. Unfazed, we drove past Deheishe refugee camp, once a major Intifada combat zone, where a towering stone sculpture showing the entire territory of pre-Israel mandatory Palestine stood in tribute to the "martyrs" who'd given their lives over the decades of struggle. And when we got lost en route to one of our destinations, Solomon's Pools, ancient reservoirs that used to be a staple of every Jewish tourist group's visit to Israel, we did what good boys and girls who grow up in London (me) and Dallas (my wife, Lisa) are told to do: We asked a policeman, in this case a machine gun-packing Palestinian policeman in a dark blue uniform, who cheerfully redirected us. He even commandeered a loitering teenager, who jumped into the car to ensure we didn't stray again, and who waved us good-bye when we'd found the historic spot, which was located next to the construction site of a substantial shopping mall.
Lisa had been mildly concerned when the youth bounded unexpectedly into the car, and she was more so when we drove farther from the main Bethlehem drag into a neighboring village called Artis, the site of an exquisite church and a backstreet art gallery. When I parked the car, we were immediately surrounded by curious young Palestinian children, who followed us to the doorway of the gallery. But Lisa's understandable concern was misplaced. The whole day passed as uneventfully as I had expected it would. We broadened our horizons and were back in Israel before dusk.
These, after all, were the months of hope and optimism, and the intermingling of our two populations. More than 100,000 Palestinian construction workers, agricultural laborers, hotel waiters and other jobholders were legally making the daily journey into Israel. Perhaps three times that number were making the same journey without the necessary work permits. Israel was thus the absolute mainstay of the Palestinian economy. And hundreds of thousands of Israelis like us were spending Saturdays shopping, eating and seeing the sights in a once Wild West Bank that had now apparently been tamed. Israel had a year earlier elected a prime minister, Barak, whose central campaign platform had been his pledge to attain a permanent peace accord with the supposedly eager Arafat. Peace with Syria, we were led to believe, was but a diplomatic finesse away, and our much-anticipated New Middle East seemed to be taking shape before our eyes. One of the Israel TV newsmagazine shows had just screened a feature about Israeli travel agencies running oversubscribed tours to Gaza, taking Israeli tourists to view firsthand the horrors of the notorious refugee camps mere minutes away: "Here we are at Jebalya, where the Intifada started in 1987." They didn't call it the "first Intifada" back then. The TV crew had filmed a middle-aged Israeli housewife calling home on her cell phone, wide-eyed at the indignities being suffered by the downtrodden Gaza populace she had just been to see, detailing the appalling overcrowding, the empty refrigerators, the sewage running down the narrow camp alleys. "You wouldn't believe it!" she exclaimed, every inch the pampered, camera-clutching Western sightseer, reeling with horrified fascination on initial exposure to the underdeveloped world.
The underlying assumption of these Gaza visits, indeed of the entire craze of visiting Palestine, was that here was a vanishing world, and that this was the last chance to espy the repressed Palestinian in his pitiful habitat, the manipulated pawn of the cynical Middle East powers now about to be liberated, freed to pluck the juicy fruits of peace. At The Jerusalem Report, we had just run a cover story titled "Crossing the Great Divide," which detailed that burgeoning phenomenon of Israelis weekending on the other side of the checkpoints. The article, by Peter Hirschberg, documented the lengthy traffic jams that built up every Saturday as thousands of motorists headed toward the West Bank shopping meccas, Palestinian stores where the prices for just about everything, from kitchen utensils to furniture to jeans and teddy bears, were 50 percent below Israeli costs. It noted the heavy baccarat, roulette and blackjack action at the Oasis casino, a pink-stone incongruity opposite a refugee camp in the desert outside Jericho, where daily takings were believed to commonly exceed $1 million, much of it heading into PA coffers. It listed the varied attractions that were drawing Israelis to other benevolent "hot spots": the healing waters of Nablus; the spanking new Jericho cable car, ascending to the monastery at Jesus' testing ground atop the "Mount of Temptation"; the line of cheap jewelry stores in Gaza City's "Gold Market." Shlomo Dror, an official from the Civil Administration, the Israeli authority that had overseen years of Israeli occupation and was gradually becoming irrelevant as territory was handed over to the PA, told us that the Palestinians were doing everything to protect the Israelis and thus safeguard the growing economic interaction. "The Palestinians are feeling the impact of the p...
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- PublisherKnopf
- Publication date2004
- ISBN 10 1400040671
- ISBN 13 9781400040674
- BindingHardcover
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- Number of pages288
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