Remember the story about the Man in the Iron Mask? Alexander Dumas
wrote a fine novel about him, pure fiction but with a core of truth
in it. The history books tell us that when Louis XIV was dying, he
revealed to his heir, the grandson who was to become Louis XV, the
secret of that man's identity. Presumably the secret was passed on
as long as the poor wretch survived in the dungeons of the
Bastille.
Here in Israel, we too have a man in an iron mask. His identity is
known, though, and so is his "crime." And instead of a dungeon, he
inhabits a tiled, window-less cell which the authorities describe
as spacious. In it he has been imprisoned in complete isolation for
nearly nine years. His name is Mordechai Vanunu. What he told the
world, via the Sunday Times of London, did not come as a total
sur¬prise to the various intelligence ser¬vices. But what
Vanunu did was to tell the public at large, abroad and in Israel,
that the Jewish state is a fully-fledged, if unofficial, member of
the nuclear club, and thus a for¬midable power, not a little
David threatened by the massive Goliath of the Arab world.
So he was kidnapped and brought back to Israel and charged with
nothing less than treason and espionage. His trial was not held in
secret, like the trials of people such as Klinberg and Levinson, oh
no! The whole world was invited to come and see how terribly
hush-hush it was - the courthouse windows were boarded up, the path
from the prison van screened off, and Mordechai was made to wear a
closed biker's helmet, the modem version of the iron mask. The
"world" got the point: everybody else's nuclear program, actual or
potential, is of legitimate internation¬al concern and subject
of discussion, but not Israel's.
Recently, when Francois Mitterrand ceded the presidency to Jacques
Chirac, he handed him, in private, a major secret - the code for
France's nuclear arsenal. In Israel, I presume, when one prime
minister cedes his position to the next, he too gives him such a
code - and with it the key to the cell of our Man in the Iron
Mask.
It is said that people know instinctively what is the justice that
is due to them. Unfortunately, they do not know what is the justice
that is due from them. Unless you keep this double-barrelled truism
in mind you may find history highly perplexing. Time after time,
people who suffered injustice and fought for redress and won it,
turn around and inflict extreme injustice on oth¬ers. They
seem to see no connection between the two sides of the story. It is
rather like the well-known psy¬chological fact that people who
abuse children were usually victims of abuse in their own
childhood.
Whenever bigwigs arrive in Israel from some other country, they are
immediately dragged to Yad Vashem, to remind them of the Holocaust.
The implication is obvi¬ous: We who have suffered so much are
a special case. After the ultimate horror of Auschwitz, it is
expected that the visitors will disregard the relatively lesser
horrors of the Occupation, the refugee and deten¬tion camps,
the daily grinding down of a people. Menachem Begin once said,
"With our history, no one has the right to preach to us!" Israel
has six million justifications for whatever she chooses to
do.
Doctors at the Kfar Sha'ul psychi¬atric hospital like to
discuss what has become known as the "Jerusalem Syndrome," about
which they are the world's leading authorities. This syndrome
affects an average four people a year. The vic¬tim, usually a
male Protestant pil¬grim visiting holy sites in Jerusalem,
taking part in processions and group worship, suddenly begins to
"speak in tongues," keeps washing and puri¬fying himself, and
in a little while dis¬covers that he is Jesus Christ, or at
least John the Baptist. Once in hospital and tranquilized, he
usually recovers in a matter of days, and may even have time to
rejoin his group. It must be something in the air. No such
syn¬drome is recorded in other holy cities.
But the definition given by the good doctors is a little too
narrow. The truth is that a slightly different variety of the
Jerusalem Syndrome has permanently affected thousands of people. An
early symptom was manifest in Naomi Shemer's pre¬1967 song
"Jerusalem of Gold," which proclaimed that the eastern half of the
city was empty. Since June 1967, thousands of Israelis have corne
to believe that they are the only real inhabitants of the city.
Moreover, they hallucinate that they are the incarnations of the
ancient Judeans, or at least the direct descen¬dants and legal
heirs of the folks who fought against the Seleucids and Romans, and
that everything that happened since then is merely an abomination
to be removed by any means possible. If that is not a psychiatric
condition, what is?
Incidentally, Kfar Sha'ul is roughly on the site of a vanished
vil¬lage called Deir Yassin. Perhaps that also explains
something.
Salwa Kanaana
A colleague and I were getting a ride to work with a third
co¬worker when our trip from Ramallah to Jerusalem inevitably
brought us to the infamous a-Ram checkpoint. As we neared the
barri¬er, we carne face to face with the backs of filthy
trucks, buses and many, many cars, and our hearts sank.
The driver gave a quick sigh, and our friend, seated beside him,
looked off out the window. I allowed myself a split second of
despair at the thought of once again having to wait in the
oppressive heat, in limbo, just to get to the other side.
Passengers usually keep quiet on these occasions, preferring not to
broach the painful subject of the wait at a-Ram. But that day I
decid¬ed to be brave: "You need to be very patient to be
Palestinian," I said to the two men. The driver gave a more
perceptible sigh and shifted in his seat, and the other passenger
brought his gaze back to the center of the car, nodding.
"Really," I said, encouraged. "Not only in the long run, like
patience in gaining political aspira¬tions, but in everyday
activities, just living." "Yeah," said the driver, and that was the
end of the conversa¬tion. But I suddenly realized that I had
finally understood the real meaning of a word, a concept, so
central to our existence, that I had never before really
felt.
Patience, or swallowing a terri¬ble reality while suppressing
the impulse to gag at its repugnant taste, is at the heart of
Palestinian existence. That split-second of des¬peration was
only that: a fraction of a second. After it was past, the
dri¬ver began to sing in a good-natured effort to entertain
the troops. The situation was symbolic of how our people survive:
you swallow your pride and you go on with life.
Palestinian culture portrays patience as a virtue, and saber in
Arabic connotes (in addition to the English meaning of the word)
patience specifically under hard¬ship. Saber is even heroic,
and is connected in people's minds with summoud, or steadfastness,
and is a means by which to fight Occupation, or any kind of harmful
situation. The expression saber Ayyoub, or the patience of Job, is
a saying often found in Arabic song lyrics, and Sabirin, or "We are
patient," is printed on the back win¬dow of trucks. Why a
truck would drive around with "We are patient" written on it is
never questioned, because it is understood that saber is, in fact,
a way of life.
But my question then was this: These small moments of despair one
feels at the thought of spend¬ing more of life in waiting -
what happens to a nation when they face tens of these little deaths
a day; when they file for entry permits they know will not be
issued; when they pocket the 13 shekels they get for a day's work
at local West Bank factories?
It also occurred to me that Palestinian women take on a
dis¬proportionate amount of patience. A UNDP study on the
status of women in Palestinian society car¬ried out earlier
this year found that young Palestinian women "are largely
prohibited from attending higher education establishments because
of the cultural restrictions on their movements."
Reading the report, I suddenly felt very, very sad. Women share in
the daily rations of patience-trying situations, under restricted
circum¬stances. It seemed especially terri¬ble because it
was the restriction of physical movement, which is some¬how
more arbitrary than other forms of repression. If your legs can
carry you somewhere, why can't you go? For the bodies of tens of
thousands of Palestinian women to be constrained seemed to me at
that moment to be inhumanly, intolerably cruel.
But because we have all been restrained, albeit in varying degrees,
we have accomplished through our ability at saber and summoud what
at least from an aer¬ial view would look like an
incredi¬ble feat. Inspections can be as strict as they want at
a-Ram checkpoint, and traffic trying to get through can be as
backed up as it pleases, but we can always find a way around it if
we need to.
I can think of at least seven dif¬ferent paths into Jerusalem,
chipped out of the ground sur¬rounding the a-Ram by West
Bankers dodging the checkpoint, in addition to other side-roads
that have been discovered since the bar¬rier was set up in
March 1993. Like ants, strong in our perseverance, we are blocked
at one hole but emerge at another; we take a deep breath and dig
and dig and dig until we find a way out.
