Israel's Last Line of Defense

 

Almost every other day in Israel, it seems, an ordinary waiter, store guard, or bus driver, a twenty-year-old soldier on leave or a fifty-year-old businessman, will seize a terrorist by the arms and, while his explosive belt is still ticking, push him away from the scene, simultaneously shielding bystanders with his own body. He may save dozens of lives, and may forfeit his own in the process. He is a new kind of citizen-defender, and Israel's last line of defense. The Jewish state begets many like him, but he is also a unique type-very much a local product.

As the world knows, the Israeli army and police force have not succeeded in creating a perfectly hermetic seal against the catastrophic terrorism that has hit the country over the past two years. Barriers, checkpoints, and occasional armed forays into the occupied territories function only partially to deflect the lone suicide bomber armed with TNT and hate. Since September 2000, this latest strategic weapon of the Arabs has claimed 700 dead and thousands of wounded, in a country of only 5 million Jewish inhabitants. Everywhere, you see children in wheelchairs, disfigured victims of every age, not to mention the legions of mourners for family members and friends lost in a moment's horror.

All this has changed the face of civil society in Israel, if not the very concept of civilian life itself. For now, the most effective protection against such attacks, aside from periodic incursions into Palestinian cities, is this spontaneous form of civil defense, the only thing that works even when the terrorists from Jenin and Nablus manage to get past the barriers and show up at a cafe in Tel Aviv or a gas station in the West Bank town of Ariel. It seems to function naturally, on its own, but in truth it is a very strange phenomenon.

Noon. Emek Refaim, the long street that runs through Jerusalem's German Colony, where bougainvillea and jasmine hang down from the weathered three- and four-story stone buildings. By this hour the daily racket has already reached its height: bus and car horns, mothers yelling at their children not to cross in the middle of the street, the din of rock music blasting from car stereos. In among the old Arab houses and the buildings of the Knights Templar-the cemetery of that medieval Christian order abuts the local supermarket and Burger Ranch, the boughs of its trees extending over the stone walls-are dozens of cafes, upscale wine bars, boutiques, sushi joints, vegetarian and Chinese restaurants. It is impossible to find a place to park; the police who patrol the area seem to have accommodated themselves to the prevailing chaos. The cafes are full, chic girls and boys are out walking their dogs, pretending they are in Tel Aviv The large glassed-in terrace of Caffit, where people sit sipping cappuccino, completely exposed to the street, is all open invitation to a terrorist.

Our hero, Shlomi Harel, twenty-three and a waiter, is dressed in a white shirt and dark pants. His eyes are puffy. He was up late the night before: being a waiter, a guitarist, a student, and popular with the ladies will do that. He wears a ring in his left ear and two studs in his right, sports a tattoo on his arm and spiky hair. How many lives has this boy saved? Around 50, but it doesn't show.

"On March 7 at 1:30 I saw a big, fat guy trying to come into the place," he begins. "The guard had already stopped him, but I immediately rushed over. He was sweating a lot, I learned Arabic in the army so I asked him, 'What's your name? What do you want? Where are you going?'-anything to try and identify him, to try to understand. He had this lost look, he was sweating like crazy, and he said, 'I don't speak Hebrew,' in Hebrew. I pushed him into the corner, with the guard's help. I wasn't thinking about anything."

Shlomi has black eyes that his Iraqi-born mother might have painted on him with a paintbrush. He is well mannered, reserved though not exactly shy, dead tired. He would not let me pay for the coffee I drank at the bar, allowing me instead to admire his method of carrying several cups and saucers in one hand. His coworkers and the bar's owners like to laugh about the great Shlomi, whom the international press has made briefly famous. "Oh, you're the real Shlomi, the one and only, the big hero," they exclaim. Everyone seems to adore him.

A civilian hero is deprived of the incidental benefits, such as they are, of armed combat: the adrenalin rush of anticipated battle, the comforting presence of commanding officers and mates. Instead, he is alone with a bomb, his hands clutching a crazy man bent only on killing and being killed. But Shlomi is very cool. From the instant he shoved the sweating and stammering stranger into a corner, he says, the rest of the event unfolded "like a machine."

"I pulled the backpack off his shoulders and it fell onto the floor. I opened the flap and saw the wires sticking out. It didn't explode because some­thing must have been broken. I was lucky. I picked up the backpack, I was still on automatic pilot, and I took it away while someone else pinned the guy down until the police came. Why did I carry it away? I said to myself, 'If someone has to die, better one than many.' And then I thought, 'If it blows up, we'll all die and I'll really look like an idiot.' But it worked out, and so I became a hero."

When he got home his mother screamed at him, hysterically: "You idiot!" She was lying on the sofa, a glass of water in her hand. "I ran home to warn her before she heard the news on the radio, but she raised her hand to slap me, crying' about how I could have been killed." Shlomi laughs, but his eyes are still a little frightened at the thought of his enraged mother.

Shlomi is something of a Zionist, as Zionists go in real life. He was not a big believer in the Oslo peace process, but he was a little believer in it. He likes the idea of peace, and terrorism scares him more than war. But what is the alternative? Slowly, the dirty cups still balanced in his hand, Shlomi offers his ex-post-facto philosophy: "It went well, that's a sign that life goes on. If the backpack had blown up, I wouldn't be here to talk about it. So," he lapses into Arabic, 'ya-Allah, we have to live. We move around, we keep going, nonstop. People do their best, they're walking on eggs."

In Gilo, the Jerusalem neighborhood where Shlomi lives, the whole area was under nonstop bombardment a year ago. "When a shell landed in my apartment building it was really scary. There, it was hard to plan: if it hit you, it hit you. But when you can do something, things go a lot better." For having done something, Shlomi came into $5,000, a prize from an American philanthropist. "I'm saving it," he says.

*

In the old days in Israel, heroism of the Shlomi type was both a national reality and a national ethic. It was part and parcel of the popular ideology of the ruling (mostly left-wing) elites, forged in the crucible of the 1948 war and, even earlier, in the age of the pioneering kibbutzniks and those who made the desert bloom. Driving it was a very anti­heroic dream: namely, the dream of a normal life in one's own land, among one's own people. This brand of valor had nothing to do with the outsized, myth-soaked heroism familiar to us from the propa­ganda and the statuary of fascism and Communism. It was not about gargantuan deeds by superhuman champions; it was family- and home-oriented, and rather intimate in tone. It was celebrated in lots of sad and even rueful songs, but few marches.

No doubt to the astonishment of many, it is still alive, having survived even the era of rampant consumerism and the good life. There are still many yuppies in Israel, but their roots would appear to run only a few inches deep. That there are also deep political divisions concerning the country's future goes without saying, some of them reflected in emigration figures and even in desertions from army service; but considering the circumstances, these, too, are remarkably contained. As for the post-Zionist interpretation of Israel's history, which replaced the anti-heroic hero with a bellicose, aggressive villain-the mythically rapacious, colonialist Jew who first oppressed and then drove out the native Palestinian inhabitants of the land-this mendacious reading likewise seems to have failed to take hold in Israeli consciousness, at least to anything like the extent once feared. The classic Zionist personality has assuredly gone through more than a few permutations over the last decades, but the essential character seems to have remained largely intact. Which is perhaps not so surprising, since it is unfortunately grounded in an implacable existential reality.

And it is evidently contagious. On October 12 of this year, Mikhail Sarkisov, a thirty-one-year-old recent immigrant from Turkmenistan, saved the lives of about 40 people who were sitting in the Cafe Tayelet along the oceanfront in Tel Aviv. Sarkisov had been a guard for three weeks, his training having consisted mostly of a stint in the Russian army. He was living in a trailer, without a bathroom or a refrigerator, his only items of luxury being a well-groomed moustache and a gold-well, maybe gold-ring. He had been issued a fake pistol because he did not yet have a gun license. When an Arab terrorist, his jacket bulging, approached, Sarkisov confronted him even as the metal detector started to go off.

"What do you have there?" he asked. "It's mine," the terrorist responded. "I didn't ask whose it was," was Sarkisov's swift retort. "I asked what you have there." As the Palestinian put his hand in his pocket, Sarkisov and two customers threw themselves at him and wrestled him down. "I understood that he was a terrorist because he spoke Hebrew very badly," says Sarkisov in a Hebrew flavored by a strong Turkmenistan accent.

Up until this day, Sarkisov had been treated very poorly by the company that hires guards for places like Tayelet and is linked to the worst criminal elements-whom it also recruits as guards. But now Sarkisov is smiling because they have given him a place to live. Also, he received $5,000 from the same American donor, and Prime Minister Sharon has presented him with an honorary plaque. Sarkisov the hero is a man without social or personal resources: recently separated from his wife, he lives alone; as if in a Charlie Chaplin film, he found himself armed with a fake pistol, and required blindly to act his part. But somehow he was prepared without question to give his life for his countrymen.

And how if not by some theory of positive contagion are we to understand the heroism of seventeen-year-old Rami Mahmoud Mahameed? This young Arab Israeli was at the bus station in Umm el Fahm in central Israel when he saw a Palestinian carrying a large black bag on his shoulders and wearing very dirty shoes. As the two were alone in the station, Rami politely asked to borrow the stranger's cell phone. Moving away, he quietly called the police. Then, instead of fleeing, he sat down next to the terrorist and waited. "I did what I wanted to do," Rami said later, as if surprised that anyone would find his actions peculiar. The police arrived in time to halt an arriving bus before it could enter the yard and grabbed the terrorist, who blew himself up. Rami was seriously injured. "Even if I had to die, I would have stayed there," Rami said later at the hospital, where at first he was under suspicion of having been an accomplice. "I thought to myself when I saw him, 'OK, if you want to kill yourself, go do it in Jenin.'"

*

Of course, it helps that Israel's regular army, the IDF, is a citizen-army in the fullest sense, based on almost universal conscription and drawing much of its moral and cultural strength from a national mentality of preparedness and service that has been built up over the generations. It also helps, if in a grotesque way, that the enemy is so completely ruthless. "When I went into Jenin, I was astonished," says a reserve officer who participated in the operation in that West Bank city last April. "Under the beds, in the cabinets, in the kitchen, in the refrigerator there were explosives. The portraits of shahids ['martyrs'] were everywhere. It was sheer madness. Here were people who had built themselves a lovely city, who had been doing quite well financially, who had excellent rapport with their Jewish neighbors. We met a child carrying a bag of explosives. He must have been about seven years old." The terrible, sickening aggression of the enemy, the feeling of oppressiveness and rage that it induces in everyone who must face it, brings out a potent response. Besides, thanks to army training, the plain fact is that many people are used to reacting-when necessary, "like a machine."

A typical case is Eli Federman. If his family name is known in Israel, it is mostly on account of his brother, Noam, a former spokesman for Meir Kahane's extreme right-wing Kach movement, who has been arrested 45 times. "My relationship with Noam is like my relationship with Yasir Arafat. To say we don't see eye to eye is an understatement," Eli asserts. On May 25, Eli saw in the distance a car driving much too quickly toward the Tel Aviv night club where he is a guard. With his imposing physique-he did his military service in a crack battalion-he started shoving people away and firing his gun. A bullet hit the oncoming terrorist, and the wildly careering car blew up.

Federman had lived in Thailand for a long time, and had married there; that country holds a totemic place in the mentality of many young Israelis, whose post-army years often begin with a tour of the Asian hot spots. Today he lives with his family in a relatively leafy, lower-middle-class suburb. After the car blew up, he says matter-of-factly, he went over and "shot a few more bullets in [the terrorist's] head. We have to be as thorough as possible in the territories, not let them get as far as here." Benjamin Ben Eliezer, then Israel's defense minister, inadvertently added a layer of complexity to the definition of the new Israeli hero when he hailed Federman as one "who deserves credit for defending the rights of people to get on with their daily routine and also have fun "-a hero who upholds a democracy's right to party.

I have not mentioned the bus drivers, who almost merit a category of their own as involuntary soldiers along Israel's civilian front line. They include Baruch Neuman, whose regular route runs from Petach Tikva to the Tel Hashomer hospital complex outside Tel Aviv. At the stop near Bar Ilan University, he saw a man trying to enter through the rear exit. This is forbidden for security reasons. He slammed the door in the passenger's face, causing him to fall back bleeding to the pavement. Terrified that he had injured someone, Neuman got off, together with a passenger who was a doctor, to inspect the damage. Opening the wounded man's jacket, they saw the explosive belt and, in a flash, pinned the man's hands. He tried to resist, and was kicking hard.

"He was big and strong, and he could have managed to activate the bomb at any moment," Neuman recalls. "We started to shout: 'It's a terrorist! Run! Run!' My only thought was, 'Hold onto those big arms.'" All the passengers except for one old lady managed to flee in time. "As the minutes went by he gained more and more movement, and we also un­derstood that the bomb could be activated from afar, like with a cell phone. We decided to get away, and on the count of three we started to run. He blew up, but by that point there was hardly anyone around."

"A hero knows what he's doing," Neuman says in self-deprecation. "I acted out of pure instinct. I was doing my job and I was responsible for the safety of my passengers; I see them every day, you know. Are my wife and children proud of me? Yes-especially of the fact that I came home in one piece."

On February 1 of last year, another bus driver named Menashe Uriel broke up a major bomb attempt by pushing away a young man who was trying to get on his bus strapped with explosives. He rolled onto the ground with him. "The boy was sixteen years old, and he held his bag tight. I was sure I was going to die, but the bus was jam-packed with kids going to the Love Festival, and with soldiers heading north "-a postmodern mix if ever there was one-"so I did what I had to do."

*

Not all who have done what they had to do have lived to talk about it. Yossef Twitto, the head of the response team in the West Bank community of Itamar, heard shots from a home one night last June but arrived too late to save the situation-three children dead, two wounded, all in the same family; when he burst in, the terrorist mowed him down, too. Another guard, Mordechai Tomer, nineteen, blond with a broad smile, was killed in Jerusalem when he stopped a car and asked to see identification papers; the driver blew himself up. And so it goes.

Sudden death, ever-present in the consciousness of Israelis, can lead to action, but also leads to a certain fatalism. Unlike in societies at peace, Israeli young people do not feel immortal. They live often to excess: dangerous trips, crazy nights, spur-of-the­moment impulses, exaggerated behavior punctuated by uncontrollable laughter and loud shouting. Beneath it looms the silence of death. "I knew perfectly well that he would have died to stop a terrorist. We'd discussed it many times," says the widow of Tamir Matan, forty-one, killed together with two young soldiers when the suicide bomber they were trying to stop blew himself up at a gas station.

This fatalism too is not new. In a 1947 novel by Moshe Shamir, He Walked in the Fields-a work much derided by later generations of intellectuals for its apotheosizing of the values of the old Zionist settlement in Palestine-the protagonist throws himself onto a bomb to save a comrade, even though his own girlfriend is pregnant with their child. Uri is a rural hero, torn between the dream of a quiet farmer's life and the ideal of service, of duty. For a man who would have preferred the countryside and love, duty wins out. He is like the boy in a famous ballad by the Zionist poet Natan Alterman, another self-sacrificing hero who gives his life to save his army buddies and does not even know why; or like the protagonist of another bal­lad about the terrible battle of Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem during the 1948-49 War of Independence, who "between the grenades and shots... ran and laid the explosive. I do not know why I got the medal of honor. All I wanted was to go home quietly."

*

Not too far from the King David Hotel, a sumptuous new hotel is being built; a suicide bomber blew himself up there, splattering blood onto the pale blue windows. A mere 100 yards away, in a pedestrian mall, dozens of kids lost their lives to two suicide bombers as they sat drinking Coca-Cola and chatting while music wafted from the restaurant doorways. Not far from the Moment Cafe, where eleven young people were murdered in June, and from the Sbarro pizzeria, where fifteen were blown to bits, lies the big Mahanei Yehuda market, and not far from the market is the large building that houses my gym. Everything is near everything else in a city as small as Jerusalem. After class one day, the gym instructor, soaked in sweat, her voice barely audible above the exercise music, shouted: "Good for you, girls, coming to gym even with the way things are."

Good for you? Whom was she talking to? What was she talking about? But as I looked around, at the Orthodox women, out of breath, carefully replacing their wigs or kerchiefs, at the rest of us pulling on our slacks before walking out the door to take our kids to school or shop in the supermarket or ride the city buses or sit and drink cappuccino as if mass murderers were not planning to murder us where we stood, my eyes welled with tears. Good for you. Really, well done.