Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (7 page)

I meditated on the story when I jogged along the clean rock walkways of the Sherover Promenade, through the clumps of sweet lavender and sage, past the strolling settlers who gave me silent approbatory looks and the skinny Arab boys who scrambled after me, bawling
yahud, yahud
—Jew, Jew. The path scooped around the hillside, over the ancient Old City walls, and the church bells and the call to prayer quavered from below. The last rays of light glinted off the gold Dome of the Rock and the sweet smell of herbs came up as the dirt grew cold at the roots. Palestinians trailed through the hills, prodding their goats. I ran through the olive trees and up, ancient rocks beneath me, the wonder of the Old City of Jerusalem. The physical beauty of Jerusalem, the transcendent power of a place packed with prayer and reverence, is not a myth. I felt it every day I lived there; it was the consolation for the politics and oppression and misery, and that wonder never faded. Everybody wanted that city for themselves, but in the quiet hours of twilight
they just walked and looked down at it, Arabs passing Jews, war suspended for no reason but that it cannot always, every minute, exist. Everybody has a Sabbath in Jerusalem and sometimes the war does, too, although it doesn’t come regular or announced.

I thought about the story, too, when I walked the glistening aisles of the Israeli shopping malls and supermarkets, among bent Holocaust survivors and olive-clad soldiers and settlers with small arsenals strapped to their backs. One of these anonymous men once sat in secret and wept with a Palestinian girl because she had been tortured. All Israelis had served in the army. What had they done, and who had they been, and what did they bring back home with them?

There was a problem with the corpses of the suicide bombers. They were piling up in the steel refrigerators of Israel’s morgue, and nobody could figure out what to do. The force of the blast eviscerates the middle part of the bomber’s body, sending the head and feet sailing off into the air. Now all those salvaged heads and feet were jamming up the morgue, crowding out the dead Israelis. Palestinians couldn’t get into Israel to pick up their dead; they wouldn’t dare come, anyway, as the widow or mother of a bomber. Under both Muslim and Jewish law, the bodies should have gone into the ground by first sundown after death, but many Jews were squeamish about burying a suicide bomber in the dirt of Israel. It came up on the floor of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and the attorney general’s office struggled to invent a policy. But they came to no resolution, and the pile of heads and feet kept growing. I visited the morgue, met the director, and wrote a feature. Nothing long or fancy, just a surreal little glimpse of war warping the most ordinary corners of the country.

The story ran. And then the hate mail began.

They called me stupid. They called me an anti-Semite. They lashed me with language so bilious I felt uncomfortable reading the letters, as if a stranger had suddenly pulled down his pants to show me something private and deranged. One of them went on at ranting length about how the Palestinians were pigs who deserved to have their bodies soaked in pigs’ blood and burned. Hundreds and hundreds of
e-mail messages clogged my inbox. A right-wing, pro-Israel website called “Boycott the Los Angeles Times” posted: “Megan Stack, another PLO propagandist, takes anti-Semitism to a level reminiscent of the 1930s.”

Everybody knows about the Jerusalem hate mail. All the reporters get it. You think you are ready to read mail like that. You’re not. Not at first. The smears are too personal. Suddenly friends from home were saying, “My mom saw this stuff about you on the Internet …” It’s meant to be like that: personal and awkward. Until you’re so badgered that you catch yourself reading through the stories—not for truth or good writing, but weighing phrases, wondering how much hateful e-mail they’re going to incur.

I hadn’t expected it, not for a story so innocuous, even marginal. Just a policy debate in Israel over a pile of old body parts. None of the Israeli staff in our bureau had been fazed or offended or even particularly interested. None of the facts were wrong. What was the big deal?

“You humanized them,” a reporter friend said. “You’re writing about suicide bombers as people who have corpses and families. They can’t stand to see them written about like that.”

“It’s not like I said suicide bombers were noble or good,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. You
humanized
them.”

By 2003 I’d settled in Jerusalem, and everybody was talking about a war in Iraq. By then I was used to accepting vitriol and character attacks as another part of the war, and they had oxidized me. This was an old battle of narratives, all the stories fighting to be the most true, and as a writer of stories you couldn’t help getting dragged into it. I printed one of the e-mails and tacked it to my office wall:

“You and the LA Times should go FUCK yourselves.”

It was part of the crusting you develop in Jerusalem. When the phone rang at four in the morning, I fumbled for instant coffee in a dark kitchen and hacked out a story about some fresh assault on Gaza, knowing even half asleep that nobody would read it—that many Americans don’t fully understand what Gaza is or how it was created, or what the presence of Israeli tanks there denotes, and that the people most likely to slog through twenty column inches of wire-style reportage are the ones scanning for a hint of bias, a misplaced adjective, a mistaken fact. But I got up and wrote through the dawn all the
same, because it was the job I had pined after and now it was mine, in all its dubious glory. Work was becoming work.

Arab children could be trained to think better. Miri really thought so. She was an Israeli photographer with a rusty scrape of a voice and big dark eyes under torrents of wild curls. Miri was liberal. She believed in peace past the point when most Israelis had thrown up their hands and decided to build a wall. She maintained what I imagined to be careful, fraught friendships with Israeli Arabs, as the Palestinians who live inside Israel proper are called. (On my first trip, I annoyed the Jerusalem bureau chief by asking, “But aren’t there also Jewish Arabs? Like Israelis from Morocco and Yemen?” “Yes,” she snapped, “but you don’t
call
them that!”)

I was sitting around a Tel Aviv television studio with Miri. Midnight was coming and we were eating sushi and talking about animals. Miri had been teaching Arab kids about animal rights.

“It’s terrible what you see,” she said. “They tie a cat or a dog to a stick and torture it. But you can explain to them. They don’t know any better.”

I was skeptical. “I would think that either kids have compassion, or not,” I said, soaking a tuna roll in soy sauce. “How can you put compassion where it wasn’t before?”

“Oh, you can,” Miri said. “They don’t know. So you say, ‘I have a cat at home and he’s very smart, he does this and that, his name is Frank.’ So they start to think of the cat like a person with feelings.”

“Do they respond?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said firmly. “They are very interested.”

Israeli news was running; it was late in the newscast, in the features. There was a talent show in an Israeli prison. The prison looked jolly and clean. An inmate chatted with a voice coach. The two men joked back and forth, chuckling and nodding their heads.

“That’s not where they put the Palestinians,” I said. I had driven past the tents out in the desert, tried to get permission to pay a reporting visit and been denied.

“No,” Miri said. “That’s for regular prisoners. Criminals. Not the Palestinians.”

I watched for another minute. Men were prancing onstage.

“It looks very nice,” I said.

“They try to be humane,” she agreed.

On the map, Nablus was right up the road. It seemed all you had to do was drive to the Israeli town of Kfar Saba, hang a right, and cruise to Nablus. The trouble with the geography of the occupied Palestinian territories, however, is that maps are misleading. Space yawns and vanishes. Checkpoints and closures crop up and disappear again. There are some roads for settlers and other roads for Arabs, and woe unto the unlucky driver who confuses his way. But on this day, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I wanted to visit a family in Nablus, and I was going by the map.

I’d met this family back in 2002, when Nablus was under Israeli closure and we’d had to drive a twisting, dusty path through the olive groves, hiding from the Israeli tanks, to reach their house. I hadn’t seen the family since then, and I had no particular errand with them now. But I wanted to visit this town, whose name Palestinians spoke with soft smiles, asking if you’d tried the honey-dripping
kanafeh
, if you’d visited the olive oil soap factories.

And now I found myself in Kfar Saba, spinning around grassy traffic circles and trolling the back streets, sense of direction scrambled, in the absurd position of looking for the West Bank in Israel. Understand: Kfar Saba is right next to the West Bank. Imagine driving around El Paso discovering that nobody knows where Mexico is. It seems logically impossible, except you keep slamming into it, this blank unknowing. I pulled over and asked some kids on bikes. Empty stares. Suspicious frowns. An old man at the roadside shook his head. The mechanics at the gas station weren’t really certain, either. If you lived in Israel and weren’t a settler, you could block the West Bank out of your mind. You’d have no business going there, and so you could simply remove it from consideration. Looking for the crossing in this sleepy Israeli community was like hunting for a gap in time and space, the gateway to another dimension. In the end, somehow, I found the checkpoint that marked the line between Israel and the West Bank.
The soldiers let the armored car through. Except the road didn’t go the way the map suggested. And soon I hit another checkpoint.

By now I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields of dead grass. I let the car shudder to a stop and took in the scene before me. About twenty Palestinians stood listlessly in a neat line, waiting their turn to be searched and interrogated so that they could continue along the country road. They stood on a line to nowhere, all spiffed up because they had someplace to be. They were mostly old men, their patched polyester blazers and stiff shoes coated in dust from walking the dirt trails out of their villages and scrambling over sand berms. They stood there like something out of an absurdist painting, as if they were queued up at a turnstile or ticket office. As if they’d been cut out of a city block and pasted over these golden fields.

A small cluster of Israeli soldiers in olive fatigues administered the checkpoint. They were in their teens or just out of them; they sneered at the Palestinians and horsed around among themselves. One of them sauntered over to the car, gun in hand. I shoved open the heavy, armored door; the shatterproof windows didn’t roll down. The soldier looked like a child to me.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I’m a journalist. I’m trying to get to Nablus.”

“You can’t go down this road.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t go.”

“Is it a closed military zone? Because if it’s not a closed military zone, I
can
go.”

He just stood there and smirked.

I felt like informing him that I was an American taxpayer, that my family and I had been compelled to pay for his guns and tanks and jeeps, for his salary, to the detriment of schools and homeless shelters and other miscellaneous things for our own country. That his country would surely have been overrun by hostile Arabs long ago without the billions of U.S. tax dollars pumped into the Israeli military. That I understood that’s what we’d collectively chosen to do with our money and I didn’t expect him to thank me. But that he could at least wipe the smirk off his teenaged face. Because every time I went to Gaza or the
West Bank and saw his colleagues harassing old, sickly Palestinians with the same youthful vigor with which old, sickly Jews had been tormented in Europe, I wanted to burn my notebooks and join a Buddhist monastery someplace. That I didn’t want to be staring at him and thinking these acutely uncomfortable thoughts. All I wanted was a small and theoretically simple experience: to drive down the miserable road and pay a visit to a miserable family a few miserable miles away.

But I didn’t say any of that. I just glared, feeling anger boil in my face.

The soldier did not let me through. I had to turn around and drive back the other way, plunge off into the West Bank and lose myself in the maze of roads. By the time I reached Adeeb’s
*
house, a cold dusk was gathering in the streets. I’d have to drive back after dark. I was tired, my bones ached from jouncing over the broken roads, dust matted my hair and streaked my face. I drank the tea his wife brought, struggling for small talk. They hadn’t been out of Nablus in months. They smiled strained smiles and had almost nothing to say. Had I heard that the Israelis destroyed some of the famous soap factories? Yes, I’d heard. Well then. Well. My family is fine, thank you. It was like a prison visit. Less than an hour later, I was headed back to Jerusalem. I got on a settler highway back, and the ride was smooth and fast.

It was dark, late, and cold when I got back to my little stone apartment in the old Israeli artist colony. Lying in bed, I felt the heaviness of melancholy inside my chest like a small spot of deadness, a Palestinian cancer. The entire West Bank was withering away, choked off by occupation. It was nothing but roads you couldn’t take, checkpoints you couldn’t pass, the spots of troubled Arab turf laced into the network of settler roads and settler towns like flies tangled in a spider’s web. Who was everybody kidding—where was a Palestinian state going to come from? There was no solid piece of land.

The maps around here didn’t mean a thing.

I loved living in Israel. That was the hardest part. I loved it every time I climbed the dry heights of Masada and felt the desert wind and saw the Dead Sea gleam below like spilled ink. I remember restaurants in
Tel Aviv; the cliffs of Jaffa; a few sticky summer mornings when I woke up with the sun and drove to the shore to swim, watching the old white men splash their flabby forearms, opening themselves to the Mediterranean like wary bears come out from winter hiding. I loved the music that dripped from the clubs on gritty summer nights in Tel Aviv, the darkened streets and young bodies and the sexiness of it all, the intensity of youth and desire against a backdrop of war.