33

Three:
Jerusalem

I have been living in Jerusalem for over nine months before I venture into its other half. I’ve thought about visiting East Jerusalem, but no one in my program has done so thus far. We have been warned against it. My year in Israel is approaching its close when a new friend, Gillian, suggests it. Gillian is from Montreal. She is tiny, with long ropes of hair and a brand of defiance that is at once familiar and a little daunting. Most of the time I can’t decide whether I want to follow her or argue with her.

“Let’s go into East Jerusalem,” she says to me one day. We are sitting on a bench just outside Hebrew University’s Rothberg International School, where most of our classes are held. It is a glorious day, the sky an azure-glazed bowl. Students flow around our bench and out to lunch in an ebbing tide, enveloping us in a menagerie of clanging American accents. I resent that I spend most of my time in Israel surrounded by other North Americans. Without fail, on weekends I flee the campus.

“Okay.” I am dubious. “Do you think it’s safe?” This is 1997, my junior year of college. Suicide bombers have yet to appear, like grisly couriers from the lower circles of hell. But there are bombings. The previous week I happened upon an entire block of Ben Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem taped off due to an ownerless backpack. The bomb squad arrived, and I waited at the corner with a small crowd, watching the indifferent faces around me with incredulity as the bomb was detonated with an ear-splitting thud. But even I have gotten used to the military presence here, to the young soldiers riding the buses with their AK-47s perched against the windows as they snore. During my first couple of months in Israel, while on ulpan in Haifa, I had an American boyfriend who was a paratrooper in the Israeli army. When he came to visit me on weekends he would stow his rifle under my bed, which was where I kept my dirty laundry. Every time I tossed a pair of socks down there I cringed.

34

“Of course it’s safe. We’ll be fine.” Gillian watches me intently. She is waiting for me to back down, ready to pounce, and I won’t have any of it.

“How do we get there?”

“Do you realize where we are? We just keep walking once we get off campus. It’s about ten minutes from here.”

Navigation has never been my forte. Hebrew University is on Mount Scopus, or Har Hatzofim, a tenacious island of West Jerusalem in the otherwise foreign terrain of East Jerusalem. The Romans camped on Mount Scopus in A.D. 70, ruminating on their final attack as they pored over the besieged and smoldering city. In 1949, at the close of the Israeli War of Independence, cease-fire lines left Israeli defenders in control of Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital, both squarely in the midst of what was then Jordanian East Jerusalem. Over the next nineteen years these outposts were supplied and maintained, while the institutions were transferred into West Jerusalem proper. During the Six-Day War of 1967, along with capturing the Gaza Strip and Sinai from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria, Israel commandeered the West Bank—including East Jerusalem—from Jordan. Mount Scopus was thereafter reinstated as the main campus of the Hebrew University. In 1980 Israel passed the Jerusalem Law, which formally declared East and West Jerusalem—“whole and united”—to be the capital of Israel. In response the U.N. Security Council, with the abstention of the U.S., unanimously adopted Resolution 478, pronouncing the annexation a violation of international law.

It’s amazing how quickly one can get used to living in half a city. Close to 60 percent of Jerusalem’s residents live in East Jerusalem. About 55 percent of these are Arabs. There are some places I know: technically the Arab Quarter of the Old City is part of East Jerusalem, and I visit its bustling markets whenever I get the chance. But from where I stand, most of East Jerusalem looks like the small, rickety shacks descending Mount Scopus, impoverished tenants quartered a safe distance from the sprawling white manor of the university. Off-limits, our administrators warn us. I think of the townships around Cape Town; of Langa, Guguletu, Khayalitsha. Except here Guguletu is on my doorstep.

My parents didn’t want me to spend my third year of college in Israel. “It’s a dangerous country, Mimi,” my mother pleaded. “There are bombs going off on the buses. Why don’t you just visit for a couple of weeks?” But I was bound and determined. Thanks to Habonim Dror, I had been immersed in Israel every summer for the past four years. I wanted to get to know the country I’d been courting from afar. Not just the postcard version, but the reality. Besides, my parents also hadn’t wanted me to go to Berkeley. They’d thought I should go to UCLA, to be close to home. But Berkeley had been the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. Berkeley had been my white knight, my rescuer from the cultural gulag of the Valley. I met remarkable people, formed enduring friendships, enrolled gleefully in feminist theory and art history and European literature. After living under my parents’ strict supervision, Berkeley meant independence, freedom, hedonism. I’d entered university intending to graduate in three years and go straight to law school. I left aspiring to be a musician. What an education! And every hour of it, thanks to a chancellor’s scholarship, on the university’s tab—including one whole year abroad in the country of my choosing. There was no doubt in my mind which country that would be.

Habonim Dror had educated me to some of the complexities of Israeli politics, but I arrive starry-eyed and indisputably naive nonetheless. I step off the El Al airplane and onto Israeli soil and I pause, motionless among the rushing Israelis and clamorous Americans. This is it. This is the dream held by innumerable Jews from myriad places across the globe for the past two millennia. I am living it. I am in her chambers, looking directly into her eyes, exulting in her arms. I resist the urge to kneel and kiss the concrete. I pick up my bag and keep walking. For the rest of the day, I am in a trance. The sun is setting as we approach Jerusalem in our bus: red fire pooled over white stone, and every square inch of the bald hills is shining, sacred, singing to me. We are taken to the Kotel, the holiest place in Judaism, the retaining wall left by the Romans when the Second Temple was destroyed.

36

“Can you believe that?” breathes my friend Nicole.

“No.”

We are looking down upon it from an elevated courtyard. The wall is massive, forged from huge white blocks of Jerusalem stone. Behind it the gold dome of Al-Aqsa mosque gleams dully in the slipping light. Arabic surges around us in urgent staccato: the muezzin is calling the faithful to worship. Below us, hundreds of orthodox Jews are gathering to pray. They draw toward the wall like bees to a hive, focused, rapt, ancient chains of words rising in a muted drone. Two religions, their sacred places flanking each other, their people praying to the same god. Yet here, in the nimbus of faith, is where the bloodshed begins. We descend the steps slowly, heading toward the women’s section of the wall. “We’re so lucky,” says a friend, as we pause at the margins of the swarm. “Thousands of Jews worldwide aspire to be here. Just think how many Jews have prayed over the centuries to be where we are now.”

“L’shanah ha’ba-ah b’Yerushalayim,” I murmur. Next year in Jerusalem: words recited at the close of every Passover seder, when the redemption of the Jews from bondage in Egypt is celebrated through elaborate ritual. After the ten plagues, after Moses parted the Red Sea, after its waters closed over the luckless Egyptian troops, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years. They learned not to worship false idols. They learned the true nature of God. Only then were they led into the Promised Land.

I plunge in. Around me, women are bobbing in prayer, siddurim clasped to their breasts. Many are weeping, eyes locked tight in rapture as they recite, lips molding to well-worn patterns. I wonder what it is they are feeling. How can they look at the world around them, at the injustice and the carnage, and still believe? I move toward the wall, raise my hand to touch the smooth stone. Next to me a woman clutches her infant, holding a tiny hand up to the wall as she dips and weaves in prayer. There are bushes sprouting from fissures between the blocks, and they bear white blooms. When I look closer I see that the lower blossoms are shreds of fabric and paper: the flowers of a multitude of sun-starved hopes and terrors, reverently sown in this holiest of soil. The lower cracks in the wall are crammed with tightly folded wads of paper, a flotilla of many-colored notes bearing the miniature print of fraught petitions. I lean my forehead to the stone, and for the first time in many months, I try to pray.

37

“Let me bless you.”

A hand is tugging at my shoulder.

“What?” I turn. She is very old, her face deeply furrowed, tufts of white hair poking out from under her headscarf. She grins at me, displaying a generous swath of gum and four eroding teeth. “Let me bless you.” Taking my hand into hers. I feel the cold knobs of knuckle, the folds of skin tough as rhinoceros hide.

“B’seder.” All right. We move back from the front lines to a calmer patch. She holds out her other hand. “Three shekels.”

I dig in my pocket. She accepts the coins with a nod of approval, knots them into one end of the shawl around her shoulders. Closes her eyes and begins intoning, pitching and muttering as I stare. After a minute or two she draws to an abrupt close, pulls a string out of one of the pouches in her dress, and proceeds to tie it around my wrist.

“What did you bless me with?”

She looks at me solemnly, sparking black eyes probing into mine. Doubting, I sense, my good judgment. “I blessed you with what every upright Jewish woman deserves. I prayed for you to have a good marriage and at least thirteen, fourteen children.”

It is July of 1996 when I step off the plane. Eight months earlier, during a giant peace rally, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated by right-wing religious settler fanatic Yigal Amir. This proved a catastrophic close to the most hopeful period in decades, and heralded the initiation of a bloody disintegration of the peace process. Ultraorthodox Jews had viewed Rabin as a traitor for his willingness to give away a part of Israel for the sake of peace. Religious settlers define Israel as the land God gave Abraham and his descendants in “everlasting covenant”; this includes the ancient nations of Judea and Samaria, known today as the West Bank, along with Jordan, Lebanon, and a sizable chunk of Syria and Egypt to boot. Rabbis in the West Bank sermonized that Rabin was a persecutor of the Jews, comparable to members of the S.S. A group of ultraorthodox rabbis gave religious sanction to his murder, reviving the obsolete halachic precepts of din rodef—the duty to kill a Jew who jeopardizes the life or property of another Jew—and din moser, the duty to get rid of a Jew who intends to turn another Jew over to non-Jewish authorities. The settlers heralded Rabin’s death as a miracle comparable to the parting of the Red Sea and held Amir as their savior.

38

I attend a peace rally on the first anniversary of Rabin’s assassination, in the renamed Kikar Rabin in Tel Aviv. Tens of thousands of people pack the square and surrounding streets. Security is high, as Islamic Jihad has been issuing threats recently. Garbed in black, Rabin’s widow Leah speaks. I watch as around me Israelis of all colors and ages weep openly, leaning on each other for support. The night is luminous with thousands of candles, sharp-scented from the countless wreaths lining the square. Some of the mourners carry signs: “Peace will avenge his blood” and “Chaver [friend], I remember.” The wall where Rabin was shot is covered in graffiti. “Save the Peace,” I read, and “Shalom, Chaver”: slashes of black and red and blue, eloquent captions to the mural of Rabin above. There is a palpable rage, too. What singes the edges of this grief is no less than hatred, a hard, glinting loathing for the ultraorthodox and all they represent. Among the dregs of peace lie the seeds of a cultural civil war that may prove more destructive to Israel than any external enemy.

Kol od balevav p’nimah

Nefesh Yehudi homiyah…

Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, “The Hope,” wings through the gathering. I have been singing this beautiful song as long as I can remember. It courses through my limbs like my own blood; it is our history, our longing, our despair, our gritty survival. I sway with my friends as we sing, our arms around each other. The whole crowd is rocking in serpentine currents of grief, and we are caught up now, twisting and wailing. The words wrenching as out of one being. We are a flayed beast gasping for air, every cell stoically intoning its coding, deaf to competing anthems: “The hope of two thousand years”— rising, floating, dissipating in the heavy-handed Tel Aviv night—“to be a free people in our own land.” I realize my face is wet with tears. We have been dreaming this dream for so long that some of us refuse to wake up. Our own land is not enough. We have been victims so long that victimhood is branded into our psyche, and we have lost the faculty to recognize our own ability to persecute. Yet in our zeal to prove we will not let ourselves be victimized, we become the bullies, defending an occupation that denies the Palestinians the very same dream to which we have clung for millennia.

Our program is based in Haifa for our first two months in Israel. We spend the weekdays doing ulpan, intensive Hebrew studies. On weekends, we are carted all over Israel, being introduced to the various wonders and predicaments of life in the Holy Land. We visit Tzvat, a sacred city that has historically been a center of Jewish philosophy and mysticism, on Tu B’Av, the Day of Love, and watch as the black-clad ultraorthodox men celebrate with delirious abandon and dance raucous through the streets. We marvel over the magnificent, obstinately enduring Roman ruins at Caesarea. We hike along the breathtakingly lush Yehudia falls in the Golan Heights, and then tour Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon, visiting a Syrian bunker from the Six-Day War. Our guide points out the town of Kiryat Shmonah, adjacent to the border with Lebanon. It was hit with Katyusha missiles by the Hezbollah months before our visit. The desert terrain along the borders is littered with tank monuments. I stare at the faded behemoths, rusting in rigor mortis, and the naked actuality of Israel’s microscopic size and vulnerability penetrates with a resounding thud.

While the orthodox bear piles of offspring and take care never to reveal an ankle, the rest of Israel feels like a night out at a particularly racy club. It is skintight or nothing for the young women here. In Berkeley, I was a hippie. I went with my friends to Grateful Dead shows, wore corduroys and embroidered peasant blouses. I arrive abysmally ill-equipped to hold my own among the hipsters peopling Israel’s nightly panorama. Nicole and I decide we are each in severe need of a new pair of pants. We head to Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street on a shopping mission.

“How’s my ass look?”

“Great. Like it was molded out of polyester. Mine?”

“Magnificent. Let’s go.”

It’s amazing what a pair of hip-huggers can do: as if I’ve been magically transformed, suddenly detectable by their radar, Israeli men start paying attention.

“Allo baby. I take you out tonight.”

“You have boyfriend?” Automatic, albeit untruthful, yes. “No problem. I’m better man, guaranteed.”

“You American?” I nod. Sometimes I tell people I am South African. It depends on the day, my mood. He looks at me quizzically, lovingly fingering a thick gold chain buried in a lush nest of chest hair. “Have you tried Israeli man yet?”

Early on, when I have been in Haifa only a week, I accept an invitation from an Israeli studying engineering at the Technion. He takes me out to a bang-up dinner at a spanking new restaurant and will not hear of splitting the bill. At some point the conversation veers into the illicit.

“Drugs? Terrible. I was offered grass once, but oh no. No no.” He shakes his handsome buzz-cut head, and eyes me warily. “You’ve tried it?”

“Uh…” I picture the numerous bowls circulated among friends on Wheeler Beach, the sunny green patch next to Berkeley’s English building. Then there was 4/20, practically a calendar holiday on campus. And the nightly toke I shared with friends following the dutiful completion of our reading. “Well, maybe once or twice.”

“How it was?”

“Yeah, okay, you know. Kind of like beer. So… what do you think of American music? A lot of what makes it here is really rather awful.” It takes about five minutes to convey this sentiment, between my stammering stabs at Hebrew and his broken English.

“Oh, pop music! Yes, American music. Yes yes, I’m big fan. I love Bon Jovi and Michael Jackson. I have each album.”

41

“I see.”

He leans in. “Yeah I’m wanted.” Beat. “Dead or alive.” He sings with bona fide emotion, wielding his knife as a makeshift microphone.

“Uh-huh, that one. I remember it well. So… How’s your dinner? Would you like to try some of my food?” I proffer a forkful of spaghetti.

“No thanks.”

“Are you sure?” I’m getting desperate. “It’s quite delicious. Here, have a taste.”

“Marisa, I’m not shy guy.” A vein pops out on his forehead. It is throbbing, I note with awe, in precise time to the monotonous thump of the trance music pumping through the speakers. He glares at me. “Israeli men not shy. When I want, I help myself.”

“Gotcha.” Two spoonfuls of Womyn Aloud, please, then call me in the morning. “So, nearly ready for dessert?”

When Israelis realize I am American, they treat me differently. For one, they insist on speaking English. “Not here,” I respond firmly. “When you come to America I’ll speak English,” and continue in Hebrew. They also assume I am weak and can be pushed around. At the shuk, I get quoted absurd prices. I rapidly adopt what I think of as an authentic Israeli accent, which seems to work fine for me, although it is well into the year before an Israeli friend informs me that I sound like a French ultraorthodox mother.

Decades of living in a state of near-constant warfare have saturated the culture, and assimilating—or even getting by—requires adopting a veneer of toughness. I learn to push madly to get on a bus. I learn that in order to garner the respect of the average Israeli, I need to be mercilessly assertive, even aggressive. “What, four shekels for these carrots?” Pawing them disdainfully. “Are you mad? I’ll give you two. That’s it, no more discussion.” But beneath the crusty exteriors, I discover, Israelis bear a thorough goodwill. “B’seder, two shekels. And for you, I’ll throw in a persimmon too.” Slowly I adapt, and gradually begin to love the reality that is Israel.

42

Having been part of a minority all my life, it is gratifying to live among an extended community of my own. Despite different nationalities, there is a shared cultural heritage among Jews, and being in Israel feels a little like showing up at an impromptu family gathering, especially as my Hebrew improves. Israelis may kvetch, but they are unfailingly hospitable and generous. The toughness unveils itself as the kind of familial intimacy that doesn’t require polite manners. Conversations with strangers begin at the point I would have reached a week into a friendship in the U.S. Terrorist bombs are a constant threat, but within Israel we feel safe enough to hitchhike.

In a way that runs deep as blood, Israel starts to feel like home.

In September, our ulpan completed, the University of California program migrates from Haifa to Jerusalem. Days after our arrival in this holiest of holy cities, everyone I know promptly abandons ship to visit Greece and Turkey, summer destinations of choice. I examine my scholarship-allocated budget and decide to stay and explore my new city. The next day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approves the opening of an ancient tunnel in the Old City to archaeological excavation. The Hasmonean tunnel lies right next to the foundations of Al-Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest shrine in Islam after Mecca and Medina. Opening it is equivalent to sacrilege. This comes on the heels of Netanyahu’s reneging on a string of political promises. Predictably, the Palestinians riot. “Don’t leave campus,” instructs Chana, the administrator of our program. “They’re throwing stones. It’s dangerous out there.” I huddle in the deserted dorms. I don’t have access to a television, can’t pick up the BBC on my radio, can’t comprehend enough of the Hebrew radio and newspapers to get a sense of the situation, and only get enraged reading the reactionary, albeit English-language, Jerusalem Post. My family and friends in the U.S. are probably far better informed than I, despite the fact that people are getting killed half a mile from my sunny little dorm room. But I understand enough to glean that seventy Palestinians and twelve Israeli soldiers die in the violence that ensues. “You can leave now,” Chana informs me a couple of days later, and I step tentatively out of the dorms to explore the sanctioned half of my new home.

43

The Arab Quarter of the Old City is without a doubt my favorite part of Jerusalem: it is a place where I can lose myself, and I am just beginning to understand the value of this. I wander its narrow alleys sniffing heady spices, fondling silk scarves, bargaining playfully with the vendors over henna or sandals. My interactions with Israeli Arabs—or Palestinians, depending on how they identify themselves to me—are generally very positive. But I find the relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs to be pungently, disturbingly reminiscent of apartheid South Africa.

Soon after arriving in Jerusalem I work for a brief stint as a waitress at a restaurant on busy Ben Yehuda Street. There are two other waitresses: Shlomit and Nitsan. Both are beautiful and popular with the customers. In the back are Mohammed and Hassan, the Arab dishwashers and food preparers. We have contact with them only through a small window used for passing dishes. Watching Shlomit and Nitsan feels like participating in a clinical observation of the mood-swings of two bipolar patients.

“Betakh, of course, one cappuccino, two lattes, one Greek salad, one Caesar, one penne with pesto.” Shlomit smiles beatifically, pencil tapping away at her notepad as the three businessmen ogle her ample chest greedily. “I’ll be right back.” She moves through the restaurant like a gracious empress indulging her subjects, dipping to check on beverage levels or smile at a child. When she reaches the corridor leading toward the kitchen, her entire demeanor shifts visibly. The smile curdles. Her brow tightens, neck sinks, shoulders draw forward. The easy gait quickens to a restrained sprint. She approaches the window and barks the order through. “And I said now! Etmol, chik-chuk! Did you hear me?”

Mohammed is bending down to peer through the window, nodding rapidly. “Yes, Shlomit, it’s coming right up.” His voice is carefully edgeless, tone dry as sawdust.

“And where in the hell is the pizza order I handed you three hours ago? Are you both complete idiots? Fucking Arabs. Lazy bastards. If that pizza isn’t out in one minute, then I’m going to tell Yitzchak to fire both of your asses, and you’ll have to figure out some other way to feed your nine brats in goddamn Ramallah.”

She pauses, realizing I am standing two feet away, staring at her, thunderstruck.

44

“What are you looking at?” Something faintly related to shame momentarily clouds her features, then is gone. “If you don’t get moving, there’s no way you’ll keep this job.” She picks some lint off her blouse, and both of us automatically move aside as Nitsan comes rushing through. “Hassan! What in God’s name did you do with the side salad—”

I follow Shlomit into the seating area. At the threshold she pauses, smoothes her hair, removes the notepad and pencil from her back pocket. Her entire body language transforms as she steps out: back straightens, hips roll, breasts bounce. From behind, I imagine her lips spreading into a wide smile, the kind of smile that makes you feel seen, that makes you want to order a chocolate croissant and a latte when all you came in for was a decaf.

The racism toward Arabs here is endemic and, like the whites in apartheid South Africa, most Israeli Jews appear to feel it’s natural. In contrast, when I visit Egypt and Jordan, I tell taxi drivers and waiters that I am American; if the topic of Israel somehow crops up, all and sundry are invariably subjected to a volley of virulent anti-Semitism. The Jews are responsible for all the evil in the world, I am told. Israel is a plague to be wiped off the face of the planet. I am horrified and scared by such vitriol. Yet while I do not hesitate to argue with the Egyptian taxi drivers, I recognize where my efforts are best applied— if indeed there is any tiny difference I can make in this daunting conflict. I am a Jew. Israel is, by definition, my homeland. As a citizen of Israel, I too am responsible for her actions. When it comes to Palestine, it is my people doing the oppressing. Just as the Palestinians need their leaders to push for nonviolent resolution, so the Jews need their own insistent and committed voices calling for an end to the Occupation. That, I resolve, is my role.

But I remain unclear about how to exercise my convictions. No one around me seems to care very much. I am disappointed by the almost complete indifference toward politics on the part of my peers in the foreign school, who far prefer guzzling bottles of Goldstar to deliberating the intricacies of waging peace. Many are unthinkingly conservative on the issue, standing resolutely behind Netanyahu’s decisions out of what strikes me as blind tribal loyalty. Here, when I say no, I am either ignored or called a fool.

45

Israel hardens me. It takes my idealism and turns it into a punching bag, belting away until I am exhausted from trying to prop it up. Over the course of the year, I stop calling myself a Zionist. And I move consciously away from Judaism. Where one stands within the religious spectrum of Israeli civil society, I learn, is generally a reliable indicator of one’s political views: the more religious, the more reactionary. After attending a couple of Shabbat dinners at the homes of orthodox Jews—those extending their hospitality with the explicit purpose of returning prodigal secular Jews to the fold—I stay away. These families are unfailingly gracious and kind to my friends and me. But I invariably lose my appetite; the white tablecloth and silver candlesticks are defiled by my hosts’ unobstructed loathing of Arabs. Religious observance becomes indissolubly tied, in my mind, to a set of sociopolitical views I find repugnant. What is the value in a religion that discounts one life in favor of another, that consigns women to glorified domestic serfdom, that gauges one people as inherently of higher worth than all others? What kind of spiritual truth manifests in such warped forms as to legitimate another’s murder? While sworn enemies, the ultra-orthodox Jews and the fundamentalist Muslims, I conclude, are nonetheless locked in an arctic embrace: both want all the land, neither is sincerely interested in peace, and each incites the other to further extremes in an escalating war dance of ever-bloodier proportions. I am appointed the Rothberg School representative to Ofek, the student Labor Party, and I try, by handing out flyers and sitting on organizing committees, to assuage my tugging conscience.

“Ready?” Gillian is set to go, small body strung about with bags and backpack and water bottle. She looks suitably outfitted for a bracing week in the Himalayas.

“Are you sure you have everything?”

“Well, I thought about bringing a cooler, but I figured the cheese would keep.”

46

It is early afternoon on one of those spring days that reduces all productive mental activity to the singular longing to be horizontal in a field. The sky is polished spotless, the air about us frenetic with parachuting seeds and waltzing motes of dust. I battle the urge to sink down right here on the path and take a nap. Gillian eyes me askance. “Y’allah nu,” she pronounces firmly. “Off we go then.”

We head south on one of the narrow paths winding across Mount Scopus, leaving Hebrew University behind and heading toward the adjacent Mount of Olives. The Mount of Olives, the traditional burial site for Jews, holds an estimated 150,000 gravesites. Stretching east of the Mount of Olives is Ma’aleh Adumim, the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank, home to thirty thousand Jewish settlers. Planned expansion of the settlement will close off East Jerusalem and divide the West Bank in two, which poses a serious threat to the viability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But we are blissfully ignorant of the barbed political future of the terrain across which we roam. According to our (admittedly limited) research, the top and eastern sides of the Mount of Olives are filled with Palestinian homes and shops, and so we advance in that direction. Our path—scored out of the long grasses by myriad feet over several millennia, no doubt—eventually broadens into a dirt road. We crest a dry hillock and find ourselves at the threshold of a sparse and seemingly desolate village. Haltingly, we walk into it, staring about for clues.

“Where is everyone?” Gillian is whispering.

“I don’t know. Do they have siestas?”

It is eerily still. Ramshackle homes lean into the day at odd angles, windows gaping scraps of darkness. A sudden movement sends my chest lurching, but it is only a tattered curtain. Wordless, we both pick up the pace.

“Allo! Allo!” On cue, we turn. Two Palestinian boys are running up to us from behind. Where did they come from? How long have they been watching us? They slow down as they approach, panting.

“You Israelis?” They are both young, maybe thirteen. One of them diminutive and skinny, too shy to meet my eyes. The other tall, already thickly muscled. He has a long, angular face, impudent nose, square chin languidly sown with delicate, wispy stalks. He speaks for the both of them, watching us intently. As if we are overindulged rats in his home laboratory, it occurs to me. The experimental group.

“No. American and Canadian.” If this tidbit surprises them, it certainly doesn’t register visibly. “Do you live here?”

“Yes.” He is wearing an ancient red T-shirt, dotted with the vanishing outlines of now-illegible Hebrew lettering. A vivid rectangle on his chest where a pocket used to be.

“Where?”

“Over there.” He gestures vaguely behind us. Upon the horizon, apparently. We turn to look. Nothing but more deserted village.

“You want to see a church? Very beautiful. Just over that way.” He points to our left, behind a sprawling building resembling a barn. I could recognize him as an Arab with my eyes closed; his Hebrew is densely layered, the r’s rolling bumpily instead of streaming out in guttural tugs. “It’s very special. Not to be missed.”

Gillian’s eyes snap to mine. “What do you think?” she asks in English.

“Why not?” I look back at the boys. “B’seder, show us.”

They dart off instantly, and we have to trot to keep them in sight. We wind around the building and pause when we reach the rear.

Later, counting my blessings that we emerged still clothed and with no bones broken, I will remember this moment. This is when we should have turned and run. Instead, we peer about us, baffled.

They have vanished.

“Where are those boys?” says Gillian finally. Her voice is rickety.

“And where’s the church?” Before us stretches a large square of red dirt. Beyond that, more grass. “I didn’t know they had pagans here.” Gillian laughs weakly.

And then they are upon us. Out of nowhere, out of the fragile, seething spring air. A hand on each of my breasts, clinging. Gillian is leaping up and down, batting at him ineffectually, screeching in incoherent blasts of fury. The smaller one hangs back, cowering, torn, but his friend is unmoving. Finally words come to me and I say what I know will wield the most impact. “Police! Police!” I am screaming through sacking rammed down my throat, clawing at eyelids that will not open, running on legs of concrete, stuck. Stuck. Stuck. “Police! I’ll send the Israeli police here!” His fingers ply my breasts like clay. Press, knead, pull. Ready for the firing. I am pushing at chest, shoulders, face. I am staring into pitiless wells of eyes as my mouth keeps shaping sounds into neat syllables, hardheaded packaging. I scream for the police. Shock reducing my vocabulary to a single word, a solitary regimented salvation. One well-armed hope. Mishtara. Police. Police. Dirty Arab, I am thinking, fucking Arabs, as he watches me from an immobile face while his hands work my flesh like it is his own. Like he walked onto it and made it his own.