Authors: Hesh Kestin
There was no Israeli bombing raid over Gaza on May 15, 1998. Commander Tawfeek’s wife and two children are safely abroad. He does not know how the legend began. Nor does he care. A Palestinian military commander must have an aura. He has no tanks.
On the high cliff, twenty-one intensely trained black-garbed commandos face their leader, each strapped into an identical black hang glider. They have been training with this equipment for months.
Tawfeek raises his own glider wings, holds a wetted finger to the wind, winks theatrically, then breaks—with the wild improbability of a Bollywood film—into sweet Arabic song.
No wind today
,
A sign for tomorrow
When our young martyrs will
Fall upon the filthy Jews
Like hawks upon rats
,
Like eagles upon snakes
.
His fighters join in heartily for the rousing chorus.
O purify the Muslim lands
Of Jews and Christians and their bands
Of rapists, murderers and thieves
,
Devils’ dung who won’t believe
.
Tawfeek holds up his right hand. “Praise God. Follow me now for one final practice flight. Radios off.” With a flourish, he lights a cigarette from a pack marked Liban, then leaps, the others jumping after by threes. Seen from below, the black wings of their gliders all but eclipse the sun.
At Montreal International Airport, a young El Al security inspector questions Al-Masri while an assistant—like the inspector, an Israeli graduate student enrolled at a Quebec university—carefully examines his suitcase, which has already gone through an automated check for traces of explosive. This is the backup check, concerned as much with conversational nuance as with physical detection. Machines interrogate poorly.
The security inspector scrutinizes the two passports she has been given, then asks in English: “Who is Mohammed Al-Masri?” Her tone is even, friendly.
“That is I,” Al-Masri says.
“And who is Edward Al-Masri?”
“The same.”
“Two names, two passports, one person?”
“In Israel I am known as Mohammed. I use Edward professionally. I changed my name legally upon becoming a Canadian citizen.”
She switches to Hebrew. “And what, professionally, does such a citizen do in Canada, Mr. Al-Masri?”
“I am a professor at McGill University. You may also have seen me on television. CBC, CNN. I am an author as well.”
“You speak very good Hebrew.”
“As both my passports indicate, I was born in Israel. Pardes
Hanna Agricultural High School, Haifa University. The complete sabra.”
“You served in the Army, then?”
“Arabs are exempt from conscription.”
Less friendly: “But not from volunteering. The purpose of your visit to Israel?”
“To see my family. And to do research for a book.”
“A book about what?” She has switched back to English.
“The struggle for a just peace.”
The security inspector looks to her colleague, who whispers something as she shakes her head: Nothing in the suitcase.
“That may take more than a book, professor. Have a pleasant flight.”
As Al-Masri moves into the El Al waiting room, the security inspector picks up a phone.
At the taxi stand outside Jerusalem District Court, Dahlia opens the door of the first cab in line. From down the street, another Mercedes taxi pulls suddenly ahead of it. A muscular man in blue jeans and dark glasses jumps out of the front passenger seat. “Madam,” he says. “You’ll find this taxi is better.”
As she stands holding the door of the first taxi, Dahlia’s driver lets loose in primal Hebrew. “You see the queue, ass-wipe?” he shouts. “Find the other end of it. I’ve been sitting here for an hour!”
The newcomer flashes an ID. “We’re a special taxi.”
Dahlia gives him a withering look. “
Habibi
, I have a taxi.”
“Ours gets you to Tel Aviv faster. We don’t stop for red lights.”
“Who says I’m going to Tel Aviv?”
“Zalman Arad.”
This gives her pause. “If Zalman Arad wants to see me, he can make an appointment.” She watches as the driver of the taxi that is clearly not a taxi gets out and looks impatiently at his watch. “Why does Zalman Arad wish to see me?”
“To tell you the truth, Ms. Barr, Zalman Arad doesn’t consult with me about such matters,” the man with the ID tells her. “You’ve got two choices. Sit in the backseat or sit in the trunk. It’s all the same to us.”
Seated next to Al-Masri in business class, an older man in skullcap, goatee, and vested suit whispers a request to the El Al flight attendant.
“You object to sitting with an Arab?” Al-Masri says. He is not whispering.
“Sir, I have Arab friends. Edward Al-Masri is not one of them.”
In the rear of the speeding taxi, Dahlia answers the insistent cell phone in her purse. “What is it, Dudik?”
“I filed. This morning.”
She looks out the window as the taxi winds down the highway past the orange-painted vehicles strewn like abandoned toys by the side of the road, the remnants of trucks destroyed by the Arab Legion as they sought to relieve a besieged Jerusalem in 1948. “Mazel tov,” she says. “Assuming a fair settlement, I won’t contest. Just let’s keep it out of the papers.”
“I moved some of my things this morning, after you left. I’ll come by for the rest. Hopefully, you won’t be there. I don’t need tears.”
“Dudik, what a prick you are. Tears would be the last thing. I stopped feeling anything for you years ago.”
“In that we’re equal.”
“We have to tell the boys.” She hears silence. “I said—”
“I told them.”
“
You
told them? When?”
“I phoned Ari at his base last night. Uri I told this morning before school, the minute you left.” He paused. “I was watching from the road.”
“I’m the last to know?”
She snaps the phone closed, dropping it in her purse, staring
blankly out the Mercedes window as the hills level out abruptly to the green fields of a well-watered Israeli winter, groves of orange trees already heavy with fruit, the orderly barracks of chicken farms that always bring to her mind the images of certain camps in Poland and Germany that she considers the cultural baggage of the Israeli Jew. To a citizen of any other country this would be a shocking connection; to an Israeli it is merely appropriate. Lamp shade: skin. Railway cattle car: concentration camp. Tattoo: Auschwitz. When the first Holocaust survivors were brought here after the war, mean Israeli children called them
soap
. Dahlia’s late father had taught her to say
cleansing bar
instead. He could not bear to say
soap
.
In a few minutes a road sign comes up for Ben Gurion Airport. They pass the exit. She reaches into her handbag for her phone.
Close to the Lebanese border, half-hidden in an apple orchard under camouflage netting, three Israel Defense Forces jeeps stand lined up next to a small tent, its flaps raised like wings. A twenty-year-old lieutenant is playing serious dominoes with his sergeant, a Bedouin tracker called Salim, who passes him a thick joint. The lieutenant in turn passes it to a grease-spattered corporal working under the closest of the jeeps.
“When you come to the Negev, I will show you a real tent,” the Bedouin says. “Not made of canvas from a machine, but of pure black wool from goats, loomed by hand.”
The lieutenant exhales. “If you’ve got more shit like this, I’ll fucking move in.” He checks his watch. “Yudka,” he tells his driver under the jeep. “We’re on the line in two hours.”
Yudka is all of nineteen, a chubby boy with acne and only two goals in life: to drive for a general and to have a girlfriend. “It’ll be ready, Ari.”
The lieutenant pushes over the dominoes, sprawling back on the stony ground. “Wake me when it is.”
Just then his cell phone rings. He reads the number flashing on the tiny screen. He lets it ring.
“Girlfriend?” the tracker asks.
“Worse. My mother.” He pauses. “How’s the Bedouin divorce rate?”
“Negligible,” the tracker says. “Should I marry and tire of my wife, I can get three more. Not so my mare. There is none like her. Let me tell you, Ari. They say we are primitive. We are not primitive. We are practical.”
Ari pulls the brim of his forage cap down over his eyes. “Jews smart,” he says. “Arabs lucky.” He is asleep.
“Or if the first wife gives me only daughters,” the tracker says.
At the Kiryah military compound in the center of Tel Aviv, a bored sentry examines the taxi’s occupants, then waves it through.
Once a pleasant neighborhood of two-story homes, the Kiryah is now headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces and certain of the nation’s security services. Except for the strange fact that everyone on the cracked concrete pathways is in uniform, the Kiryah might be a red-roofed holiday village. Below ground, tunnels lead to three floors of bombproof reinforced concrete command bunkers.
The cab draws up before a building unmarked but for a stenciled number.
“Last stop,” Dahlia’s escort announces from the front passenger seat. “You know where to go?”
“I know where to go,” she says.
Inside at a battered desk, an eighteen-year-old soldier, M-16 slung over the back of her chair, peers studiously into a compact mirror as she applies lipgloss. “Name?”
“Dahlia Barr.”
The girl checks the computer in front of her. “The left-wing attorney? From the newspapers?”
“The human-rights attorney.”
The girl points with her lipgloss to a staircase on the right, its
worn marble steps once a luxurious architectural detail. Now the steps are chipped, cracked, stained.
On the third floor Dahlia passes open doors, each framing an officer on the phone or facing a computer. At the end of the corridor she pauses before a west-facing window. It looks out over the city to the wall of hotels lining the beach.
The voice that greets her is familiar, yet spectral somehow, the voice of a powerful ghost. “Have yourself a good look. They’re building another hotel. Soon we won’t see water at all.”
Behind a tidy plywood desk in a small office sits a small, tidy man, skin olive against his shock of unruly snow-white hair. At seventy-five, he is still wiry, his intensity all but hidden beneath the perplexing calm that conceals an intimate knowledge of the strategic risks facing the State of Israel. He stands as Dahlia enters. His trim mustache is as white as his pressed open-collar shirt.
“I can remember when out these windows was nothing but blue,” he says by way of greeting.
“I can remember when I was your student.”
“The best law student I ever had. And the most charming.”
“I’m not sure of the protocol. Do I kiss you or salute?”
He motions like a beloved uncle, but they embrace with strained formality. “You were always my favorite, Dahlia.”
“Somehow I feel I let you down.”
A red phone lights up on the plywood desk. He picks it up. “Tell the prime minister I’ll call back.” The prime minister could be voted out tomorrow; the security establishment is forever. He smiles. “Only in Israel could we elect such a clown. How could you let me down?”
“Politically.”
“Because you defend those I would hang?”
“Something like that. Though as you know, hanging is now forbidden.”
“Unfortunately,” he says. “Dahlia, Dahlia. In a democracy,
even the worst scum must be defended in court. And you defend them so well.”
“Why am I here, Zalman?”
“And the lads?”
“Ari is a lieutenant, paratroops. Uri enters the Army in September.”
“The Jewish State in the hands of its infants. I saw them last at the young one’s bar mitzvah. Such beautiful boys.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but Zalman Arad never sits down to a meeting without already knowing everything about the person opposite. So why do you ask?”
“Dahlia, sometimes I think you are too much like me.”
“Except we are on different sides of the political divide.”
“Only within Israel does this seem to matter. The cousins see only filthy Jews.”
Cousins
is the term Israeli Jews commonly use for Arabs, Jews and Muslims being descended from one father, Abraham. The irony is implicit.
“Why am I here?”
He pushes a paper across the desk, then a pen.
A glance tells her what it is, but not why. Another person would give in, if only to learn what signing it will reveal. “The Official Secrets Act? I can’t sign this.”
“You have Zalman Arad’s word it will not affect your role as a defense attorney.”
“And if Zalman Arad is hit by a bus?”
“Let’s hope not. But I take your point.” He moves the paper and pen back to his side of the plywood desk. “Dahlia, you may not be aware that we are in the midst of a massive reorganization of the security apparatus.”
“There are rumors.”
“The state faces an evolving threat.”
“I deal every day with the state’s evolving efforts to contain that threat.”
“The cousins in Gaza are determined to wipe us out. In Lebanon the same. Iran will soon have nuclear weapons. Pakistan already. And now another front.”
“What are you saying?”
“According to growing intelligence, we face terror from within.”
Dahlia laughs derisively. “It’s never happened. They are Arabs, but they are Israelis.”
“They are twenty percent of the population, thirty percent among those of school age. In Algeria, five percent was enough to wear down the French. Terror is unpleasant, more so when it is homegrown.” He pauses. “We have information our enemies are now attempting to incite our fine Arab citizens to violence. Never mind that Israeli Arabs are not exactly lining up to emigrate to Gaza or Ramallah—apparently, living in a democratic society under the rule of law is habit-forming. But there is always the disaffected youth. These can be influenced.” He drums his fingers on the desktop. “I am not telling you a secret when I mention that we are currently negotiating with Washington for a massive arms deal. Certain persons wish to torpedo these negotiations. They wish to cause an uprising within Israel that will have a negative effect on public opinion in America. An internal intifada.” Another pause. “I will not allow this to happen.”