Maze of Terror: a Settler's Diary
Fear and faith in a West Bank settlement
I do believe my husband and I have a lot to offer the Jewish nation, and I do hope it's above the ground, and not below. If we die for Israel, they'll name some bourgeois apartment house after us. What irony! Please spare us.
My husband is not afraid. He believes people die when God wants them to, and where one lives and under what dangers have nothing to do with this.
Still the thought remains--God has an elect. I see on television Ariel Sharon, Raphael Eitan, men who exude confidence, strength and invulnerability. A bullet will not cut one of them down, causing them to leave behind 14 orphans. You feel that could not happen to them. They are immune to tragedy. But what about us? FEB. 25, 1994. Purim. We woke this morning to hear that someone from Kiryat Arba went into the Cave of the Fathers dressed in his Army uniform and killed and injured scores of Arabs who were praying. Later we found out the man who committed these murders was a man we've known for years, the town doctor, Baruch Goldstein, who many times stitched up my children.
What went on in his mind when he left this morning, kissed his wife goodbye and his four children?
I think he believed God wanted him to do this. He asked someone yesterday, "If you think God wants you to do something and you don't do it, are you sinning?"
When I first heard what Baruch Goldstein had done, and that he had died for it, I burst out crying. I thought of his wife, whom I've been friends with for many years, and his four children. Our first thoughts were, we're getting out of here. People here are praising what he did. We're living with a bunch of dangerous extremists.
After the shock came many thoughts. There were thoughts about the man. We've known him for 12 years, back in the Sinai, when he examined me for a stomachache and suggested I might be pregnant, which it turned out I was. Then he went back to America to finish medical school. The next time we heard from him was after the evacuation [of Jewish settlers from the Sinai after Israel's peace treaty with Egypt] in an angry letter. Why hadn't we opposed the soldiers physically?
We ended up settling in Kiryat Arba. So did he and his wife. From the time of his angry letter, we never did see things eye to eye politically. So we stayed off those topics. There were many things we did agree on. Taking care of the ecology. Preserving a nature strip against the bulldozing philosophy of the Likud. A fight against the televisions that turned this community from learners of Torah into gawkers.
But this year, we saw a man who had become rigidly fanatic. On one occasion when an elderly lawyer was brought here to speak and Baruch did not agree with his views, he took the microphone and did not allow the man to speak. I asked myself what kind of man can be so insensitive to another person?
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