It was not a full-scale prison, rather an army base with a military-police station. I was the sole refuser. My cellmates were young conscripts who had shown up late once too often or left their weapons in barracks or whatnot.
And they were there, too, in cells facing the main yard. They: the Palestinians, whose representatives today chip at walls in Madrid or Washington or Moscow. Through the bars in the walls they watched us, crying out sometimes for water or cigarettes.
It was Friday afternoon. An Orthodox reservist asked me to be the 10th man for Sabbath prayers. (We need 10 in order to do the whole service.) He led me past the cells of the Palestinians and out of the compound. A view of the great Rift Valley opened for a moment and I stood in awe. Then I found the entrance: it was simply a room in the same wing, but with the door on the outer side. Shabby. Yellowed, peeling walls. A small ark for the Torah. Some benches.
We prayed westward, toward Jerusalem. As evening came we launched into a Kabbalistic song, “Come, my love, to greet the bride . . .” The bride is the Sabbath. So on marital harmony. The brokenness of the world is to be, as it were, mended for the stretch of this day. We sang in booming voices. Like boisterous boys outside the nuptial chamber, we made the yellowed wall before us shake.
And then it occurred to me: that was the larger of the Palestinians’ cells behind the vibrating wall. We had entered from the outside, and I had lost track, but that would be them there, sitting or lying on the floor, enduring our fervor.
Their enemies at prayer. And what would they feel? An acknowledged fear, perhaps, that this league, of which they heard the ebullient human side, was for real. I too lent my voice to the potent mumbo jumbo of the conquerors.
The Palestinians were stone throwers. That was wrong. They should learn from Mahatma Gandhi. They should withhold taxes, burn ID cards, do without jobs and licenses, grow their own foods, let their belongings be confiscated and fill our prisons beyond capacity. In these ways and more, they should nonviolently cut the thousand strings that tie them to the occupation. Oh, it is easy to preach to them. It is easy to tell someone: swallow your rage, have faith and suffer.
Criminals? Terrorists? But who had the greatest guilt, those who lay there or those who sane I cannot avoid the basic fact: we have been occupying them for 25 years, saying, “We have no alternative!” But what have we done all these years? We have established settlements, pushing the possibility of an alternative ever farther away.
I imagined one of them sprawled out there. He threw something. " Oh, you should not have thrown that! " I say. He replies: “Well, what am I supposed to do? I am not nonviolent. I am not a saint. It’s you, you Israelis, who put me in this position. If I want clean hands, I have to choose between nonviolence and submission. And now you stand there singing your song to God. Your hands are dirtier, but I’m the prisoner. How can you sing so loud?”
We sang toward Jerusalem-and toward them. For reality is not divided into a spiritual realm and a physical. The fact that they lay there, between us and the holy city, was no more or less incidental than a bone in the throat.
That was the evening of the Berlin wall. More than two years have passed. I am beyond army age, but they or their colleagues are still listening to our songs on Sabbath eve. And now it’s the evening of South Africa of all places! Will freedom, equality, fraternity and all those good things come finally to everyone but us and the Palestinians? Will salvation reach unto the ends of the earth except unto this little corner, where the idea of salvation was born?
This corner is, indeed, the hardest. Our problem is intractable, and while we fail to solve it, the explosive forces of the earth converge toward us.
Our problem is intractable because, in contrast with Eastern Europe and South Africa, justice is the enemy of peace. For it is a basic principle that two bodies can occupy the same space only at different times. Jews went into exile and others took root in the land. Scattered among nations, we were supposed to politely disappear. But-against the natural order-we endured. In the want of earth, words held us together (often they were words of longing for this land). And now we have come back out of the mists of history, joining time to time. We are like a husband, long thought dead, returning to his wife. But to his remarried wife. For of course they were here.
Our national urge evoked theirs in response. My people, so grievously wronged, were determined never again to suffer the sovereignty of another. But they, the others, were also determined. They too have a right to sovereignty, and knowing that, we cannot trust them; we cannot believe that they will reconcile themselves to us.
That is why the present walls of Jericho do not fall down. Justice stalks justice, right slays right. We keep our foes locked up behind the synagogue. We pray with a bone in the throat. Talk will not reconcile–not here. We need first a new reality. We need a peace agreement to establish that reality. Changes in attitude will have to come later. If an agreement is ever reached, it will be a strange one, founded in Palestinian outrage and Israeli mistrust. But strangeness suits our little comer after all. A unique situation demands a unique response.
