Maze of Terror: a Settler's Diary
Fear and faith in a West Bank settlement
I came in to write this. I did not want to write about fear. Why should Jewish people be afraid if after all the thousands of years of persecution, they have their own homeland, their own Army? Why should we be afraid now, when Baruch Goldstein, for good or for bad, killed many of them? Isn't the man with the sword usually the one unafraid? Isn't the man who got the blow afraid?
The neighbor across the hall, a Russian lady, tells my 9-year-old daughter that she's frightened all the time. Now she just knocked frantically and asked if she can step outof the door. "Are there Arabs on the street?" she asked.
"There's a war starting! There's a war outside!"
She hears the shooting. Sees all the soldiers.
I screamed, "Stop being afraid. That's what the Arabs want! If you want to be afraid, go back to Russia. This is our land!"
Was that me speaking? What's come over me?
4:30 p.m.--things are quiet again. It's nice to see my children outside playing--10-year-old Joshua running with a balloon; Estie, 12 years old, arm over the shoulder of her friend Galit riding a bike, Miriam running after our dog. MARCH 19, 1994. This Sabbath, being summery, has brought everybody out of their houses and confusion. Including all the neighborhood children who are gathering on the lawn near our window. This is the favored place of the children on the Sabbath. For it is a high point, and the Arab road runs below, and they used to love to stone the Arab cars, and horses, and donkeys and women and children who went by. But as the Army now has an encampment there, this stone throwing was curtailed.
I saw Miriam Goldstein outside and we started to talk. I reminded her of a conversation we had once after our neighbors D and S got divorced. Miriam had said the whole idea had made her shiver. She couldn't bear to think of a man and wife not growing old together. "My greatest prayer," she had said with great emotion, "is that Baruch and I should grow old together."
Before the funeral, when I sat with her, I reminded her of this conversation. She said, "It was my greatest prayer because I always had the sense it wouldn't happen." MARCH 24, 1994. Yesterday at 3 in the afternoon, all the housewives put down our sponges for cleaning for Passover and ran out to the grassy stretch near our apartment building to watch the Army in a maneuver against terrorists.
The sky was white all night, like it was full of snow. A lot of our neighbors came out to the grassy stretch by our windows and started screaming, "Kill the Arabs." Arabs got on their rooftops and started screaming back, "Kill the Jews." So sleep was impossible.
These are very strange days.
With town doctor Baruch Goldstein buried in the park and his children going there every day to put stones on his grave.
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