Maze of Terror: a Settler's Diary
Fear and faith in a West Bank settlement
Fear and faith in a West Bank settlement Roughly 115,000 Jews live in 124 settlements in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of June 1967. For some, it is a dream come true, this life in the ancient land of Judea and Samaria. For others, it is a place where housing is relatively inexpensive or where jobs are available. For still others, the West Bank is a life of contradiction--of community and isolation, of joy and heartache, of security and fear.
It is all these things and more for June Leavitt, who grew up on Long Island, N.Y., attended the University of Wisconsin and moved to Israel 15 years ago. A writer, she has published one novel, finished a second and is completing a third. She and her husband and their five children live in Kiryat Arba, the West Bank settlement adjacent to Hebron, where Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer on February 25. Her diary begins nearly 18 months ago. The following excerpts reveal one view of life in a land of promise and peril. OCT. 24, 1992. My mind ran over my life here in Kiryat Arba. Living in the "occupied territories," my two boys travel every day to Jerusalem, passing through hostile Arab villages on the way. My husband, Frank, travels in the opposite direction to Beersheba, where he teaches philosophy and coordinates a program in ethics for medical students, also passing through Arab cities. Daughter Estie travels twice a week to Jerusalem for ballet lessons. Joshua once a week for a program for gifted children.
And every trip, I worry until each one is home. Why do I worry?
Memories. My husband had his jaw and eye socket smashed with a large stone 3 1/2 years ago as he traveled. He lost consciousness and control of the car. A hitchhiker he had picked up managed to stop the car, but I will never forget that phone call.
"Mrs. Leavitt?"
"Yes."
"Your husband was injured near Bethlehem."
"Injured?"
"Yes. A rock. He's in the hospital. Can you please come?"
P.S. I didn't mention the gulf war, or Estie's Rocky Mountain spotted fever brought here by way of Kuwait, or maintaining a house with five children and a quarrelsome but loving husband.
Nor did I mention Israeli society. The sun shines three fourths of the year. People are outgoing. Noisy. Unreflective. Uncontemplative. Can a Jew be a light to the world here? Or does a Jew need the quiet and isolation of the so-called exile to be this light?
I am often asked, since the establishment of the State of Israel, how can a Jew live with himself if he lives in "exile"?
I add, how can a Jew of good faith, and higher sensibilities, live in this noisy, bureaucrat-ridden, problem-ridden, crowded, concrete, socialistic, outgoing, extroverted, communally minded, radio-ridden, television-ridden, fast, unthinking, dangerous, violent country? OCT. 25, 1992. As I delved for the first time in a month into the writing ... (of my novel) I heard gunfire. The chop-chop of helicopters filled the sky; the sound of the military police ordering a curfew; the sound of Arabs defying it, rejoicing. Something had happened.
An Israeli soldier was shot and killed at the Cave of the Fathers. Another soldier was injured. This latest murder has brought out the brave Yeshiva boys who are now hollering and throwing stones at Arab traffic. OCT. 26, 1992. In response to the deteriorating defense situation here in Hebron, the local council called a general strike, closing the schools. So I suppose after the prayers at the Cave of the Fathers, all the children will be on the streets celebrating this vacation.
What is wrong with Israel? The education system is struck every time one group or another wants to make a point. This in addition to the four months of Jewish holiday that close the schools and the half-day of learning every day. This is the people of the book? This is to be the light unto the nations?
This doesn't mean I'm not sad about each Israeli killed; I am.
Yes, life in Kiryat Arba and the territories has become a maze of terror. Soldiers are being shot and killed. We always know something happened when we hear the border police calling for a "curfew." Then the sirens. And the stones smashing against the buses.
With the wailing, beating winds on the lonely hilltops, there is such a sense of being forsaken, as if you are in a maze of terror. Dear God, please give me strength and show me everything will always be all right. Living in the valley of death is hard on the psyche. DEC. 13, 1992. An Israeli border police officer was kidnapped. DEC. 15, 1992. The police officer was found murdered by terrorists. DEC. 16, 1992. Another man has disappeared. Only his car was found. DEC. 17, 1992. This man, too, was found dead. A flash flood washed him away with the boulders. FEB. 26, 1993. I no sooner thank God than I wonder if there is one. Wednesday afternoon at 3:30, Estie's best friend, Hava Waxberg, was in a terrible car accident when she was riding home from Jerusalem with her mother and brother. Her mother says Arabs threw stones, or she thought they did. There was a boom, and she rolled off the road. Hava was thrown from the back window, which had disintegrated, and the wheel of the car went into her head.
Hava is 11 years old. After 36 hours in the hospital, where she was kept alive by life-support systems, she died at 2:45 a.m.
My children have gone into trauma.
After a day and a half of prayer in school and at home, this child, a beautiful, intelligent, talented girl who loved to dance and studied with my daughter, the only daughter of immigrant parents from Mexico, the leader of the class and the most popular girl in school, died before she had a chance to do very much in the world.
I was with her parents for five hours in the hospital, holding the mother and giving her hope. I also was allowed in to visit Hava, who was in a coma. I told her she would be late to ballet, that she overshadowed everyone in her class, even my own daughter, but no matter. She should come back to life and do it again. FEB. 27, 1993. We went to Hava's funeral in Jerusalem yesterday and took all our children. This intimacy with death, the death of someone their own age, has shaken them to their foundations. We sat after the funeral from 1:30 to 10 at night, talking, crying, drifting off, each one into our own contemplations. MARCH 1, 1993. Israel is wearing away my powers yet I am unable to move. My husband loves Israel, and my children are Israeli. And I won't leave them. Also, it is seen as a "bad thing" to think badly of Israel. So I think and feel things I feel bad about. If it isn't enough that I see Israel wearing me away, and I can't do anything about it, I also can't talk about it without hearing "Everything is from God. Can you run away from God like Jonah tried to do? God runs the show here. Your life is not your own."
If that's not enough ... there's the problem that I do believe in the Bible. "Now when the spies were sent out to spy on Israel, and they spoke badly about this country saying, 'It's a land that eats its inhabitants,' their punishment was to die and not enter the land with the Jews."
The feeling here, aside from the trauma of Hava's sudden death, is anger against the Arabs. No one I know dares be angry at God. Yet if God does run the show here, as the people here believe, then he is using the Arabs to kill the Jews. MARCH 2, 1993. Bitterness causes illness. Yes, I am bitter. This land quakes. Yesterday, an Arab went on a rampage in Tel Aviv, killing several people and injuring eight others, two critically. Can you "walk the street" without feeling the ground crumbling beneath your feet, without knowing how you will go home, on your feet or in a hearse?
I am not alone. My neighbor Miriam Goldstein, the wife of Baruch Goldstein, told me this morning how she has no strength, how she feels she ages five years for every one, how women where we live have lost vitality--their skins don't look well, their eyes aren't bright.
I'm not a fatalist. Most Jews are. If it's written ... If it's supposed to be ... then it will be--Arabs throwing molotov cocktails or huge stones, or shooting or knifing do not alter one's fate. Jews only wish for better days and lay themselves at the mercy of a God whose ways they say cannot be known.
I have been meditating and doing yoga, trying to center myself in this maelstrom. From that, and a pretty healthy diet, I have some comfort. Not from the Bible, not from the existence of Israel, not from the Jewish euphemism that everything is for the best, not from Judaism at all. There is no comfort in Judaism, only unrest, disquiet, discomfort, the feeling of being hounded for 3,000 years and more.
Oh, to be in a treehouse in Oregon, or back again in the woods of Massachusetts worrying about the rhubarb patch instead of hearing: "Before the days of the Messiah, the days will be as they are--dark, turbulent, unsettling, unclear, unhealthy and unhappily confusing." Life is never normal here. MARCH 4, 1993. Another cause of my illness is Kiryat Arba's winter. The apartments here are small, not insulated, not centrally heated. Black mold grows on the walls and ceilings. Leave something against the wall, pick it up in the morning, and it's soaking wet. Now put seven people in this four-room dungeon, add their mess and clutter, add short, dark days, furious winds and rain and snows and heat that dissipates the moment the heater is turned off, add the smell of mold and chilled bones and circulatory systems made sluggish from the cold, and what have you got? Illness! JULY 1, 1993. I tried to write, to no avail. At 11:30, I heard that a frenzy had erupted in Jerusalem.
On Bus 25, which my boys travel on to and from their school, terrorists shot, killed and injured many passengers. SEPT. 19, 1993. The Arabs are on top of the world because of Rabin's "treaty" with Arafat. The security situation is terrible; Arabs firing on Jewish cars. A father of five, driving Rabbi Druckman from Kiryat Arba to Jerusalem, was killed by gunfire. The rabbi was wounded.
When you feel your life is cheap, when you know you or your loved ones might return covered by an Israeli flag, it is very hard to be strong, to concentrate, to do the work one has to do.
P.S. Kiryat Arba is the new section of Hebron, and in Hebron, Abraham bought land to bury Sarah in. So Sarah is buried there. Abraham next to her. Isaac and Rebecca, too. And the tradition is, Adam and Eve, too. Three couples are buried there. The essence of Kiryat Arba is the atmosphere of a holy burial ground, the atmosphere of death. DEC. 5, 1993. I was at my daughter's parent-teachers' conference when I heard that two people were mortally injured by gunfire next to Kiryat Arba, three people injured. I hurried home to find that the two mortally wounded and the three injured were from one family. Mordechai Lapid, my neighbor, and his son were killed; three of his children injured. Mordechai was the father of 15 children. These are the fifth or sixth people to die this month, after the peace treaty, by gunfire.
Horrible fear pervades here. Anger at the government.
I'm concerned for our children. What psychological effect will seeing their peers and peers' fathers shot to death have on them? Tomorrow their blood, or my blood or my husband's might stain the road. How can I promise them anything when their world is so insecure? When I say our children, I mean all of us who live these terrors now. In addition, the government is cracking down on Jews protesting against the spilling of all the blood. We have seen our friends arrested and put in jail. DEC. 13, 1993. Our battles are to raise deep-thinking, passionate, creative and happy children; to see them marry; to see our grandchildren; to establish a clan that will be rooted. Where will they be rooted?
We have never seen Kiryat Arba as that place. If the settlers win their battle to keep Judea and Samaria under Israeli rule, and without the constant terrorism, we will have no prize from that battle--no land around our house, constant noise of radio and television, neighbors, for the most part, we share nothing with intellectually. If the settlers win, we gain nothing. If the settlers lose, we lose, too. We lose our home, as imperfect as it is.
Early Zionist pioneers went through wars, Arab attacks, malaria and terrorism, but they knew if they won, they would have a land to claim for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren. American pioneers fought Indians for their ranches--for their homesteads, for their 500 acres for their progeny. Can the Leavitts fight Indians for their 961-square-foot rented apartment, which affords them no privacy or quiet? For an apartment in a town where our children insist they do not want to live?
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?
A cold man.
But this coldness of character went together with a flaming feeling for God and the Jewish people, not as individuals who could be hurt by his severe manner but as a nation.
He adored his family, yet his inner life was larger and more allegorical. He came to Israel because he believed the biblical prophecy that Jews would return to the land. He believed this was the time of the redemption. He was back in the Bible when God spoke to people.
Since the signing of the "peace treaty," at least 60 Israelis have been killed. Many of them he reached when their lungs and stomachs were hanging out. He saw the ancient Philistines before his eyes. Heard the Jewish nation crying. The night before he committed his act of revenge, as he tried to listen to the Book of Esther for Purim in the Cave of the Fathers, he heard the chants of the modern Arabs, "Itbach el Yehud" ("Kill the Jews").
How long he planned to rise up like an ancient Samson and slay the ancient enemy, no one knows. Family and friends sensed something was brewing. But he was very introverted. His family tried to soothe the uneasiness they felt by saying, "You're doing enough for the Jewish nation already, Baruch." He would just smile.
If there were a God, and if he came to people and made them do earth shattering things, then he would come to a man like Baruch. Cold and hard like ice, with a fiery devotion to things higher and deeper than this world.
God would choose a man who could unblinkingly sit with his son and listen to the Book of Esther in the night, and in the morning put on his Army uniform, take his rifle and much ammunition, creep out of the house, knowing the chances were he'd never see his sleeping wife or children again. FEB. 28, 1994. Today I ride into work with a neighbor. She stations herself in the aisle, and being obese, no one can move one way or another. Then she begins her loud monologue, which covers everything from the husband she hates to the Russians upstairs who drive her crazy. But today the monologue included much about Baruch Goldstein. "They say Baruch Goldstein committed murder? Lies, outright lies! He didn't murder; he was murdered! The goyim started the rumor about him murdering because he wasn't afraid to walk around freely. The goyim don't like Jews who aren't afraid, so they framed him. Baruch kill? No, he was killed." MARCH 13, 1994. At the Sabbath meal, we discussed tactics of slaughter. What's come over us?
Baruch Goldstein changed the consciousness of us all. Baruch acted like a biblical Jew. Shimon and Levi also slaughtered "unarmed civilians"--all the citizens of Shechem [Nablus], and that after their circumcision.
We argue a lot now in our family. Shmuelie and Estie support what Baruch did. Frank says it will only bring tragedy. This morning we heard on the news that the Army has been ordered to use every means to prevent Jewish settlers from firing their weapons at Arabs, even if it means the Army firing at the Jews! Is this the tragedy Frank meant?
And when the curfew of the Arab towns is lifted what will life be like? Hamas is [making] threats. They will dress up as settlers--knitted yarmulkes, ritual fringes; they will send Hebrew-speaking Arabs to do terrorist acts; they will set explosives by the roadside; they will pack trucks with explosives and drive them into a bus.
Soldiers are camped out on the grass by our bedroom window, doing 24-hour guard duty. Their radio static and communications enter into my dreams.
People go to Baruch's grave a lot. It is near the bank and shopping center--a temporary grave surrounded by police barricades.
I saw his wife the other day holding her 2-year-old daughter. I told her I was surprised to see her back in action. She said, "Do I have a choice?"
Often during the day, more often at night, we hear the muezzin [a crier who summons Muslims to prayer five times daily] in the mosque reciting verses from the Koran on loudspeakers. Suddenly the muezzin's voice rises in pitch, and we hear "Itbach el Yehud!" ("Kill the Jews!"). The tirade goes on, perhaps 15 minutes or more, then the muezzin falls into verses from the Koran again.
The prevalent feeling here, or the one most often expressed, is that Baruch was an angel dressed as a man, as a father, as a husband, as a doctor. As his mother said, "I can bear Baruch's death when I realize that the righteous have a mission and they cannot look right or left to accomplish it."
Before Baruch did what he did, there was a terrible atmosphere--a dreadful darkness seemed to hover--confusion, illness. Irena, a bioenergy healer, meditated that something should come to stop this. She believes Baruch was that force.
Others believe we will have a great civil war, then will come the war of Gog and Magog as predicted in the cabala [an occult philosophy based on a mystical interpretation of the Scriptures]. Many say all this is written in the cabala, that there will be rains and hail on the day the righteous are buried. And so there were when Baruch was buried. And they say after the war of Gog and Magog, the Messiah will come.
"Maybe he'll come for Kiryat Arba?" a woman shopping in the store said.
"Maybe I'm the Messiah?" the shopkeeper said to her.
"Don't forget me, then," the customer said. "Wasn't I always good to you?"
On the way to the swimming pool, my girls begged me that by their next birthday they should be out of Kiryat Arba. Their present should be a party in a new home. "What kind of place is this Kiryat Arba? I swear, Mom," Miriam said. "Once I leave, I'll never set foot here again."
"Maybe not," Estie said. "It might belong to the Arabs by then." MARCH 15, 1994. Suddenly I heard thousands of Arabs marching. Going outside, I saw a mob of Arabs in the valley two streets away. Army jeeps came racing down the streets by my house to strengthen their position. the streets by my house to strengthen their position.
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.
With the townspeople going to the grave to pray.
With the stationery store lady on tranquilizers to bear these turbulent times.
There are those who say, "We are witnessing the Redemption. These are the days before the coming of the Messiah." MARCH 28, 1994. We came to Kibbutz Lotan, 40 miles north of Eilat, to spend our Passover vacation. We have already had a drastic change from the chaos and gunfire and constant news reports to the utter quiet peace of the kibbutz. APRIL 5, 1994. Back in Kiryat Arba.
Back to worrying about my husband on the roads, my daughter Estie and my son Shmuelie.
Back to the Army encampment on the lawn by my window.
Back to the ghetto.
For that's what Kiryat Arba has become. Apparently, Kiryat Arba was made a ghetto during our absence.
We're not allowed into Hebron. On the Sabbath preceding the Seder, Jews who tried to go were arrested and put in jail at military headquarters. Then right before the Passover fell, they were transferred to Jerusalem, where no Seder and only two matzos awaited a group of six. I understand this is how Seders were made clandestinely in Russia. Two matzos shared with a community of Jews. There is a Bolshevik feeling in Israel now. The government is arresting all dissidents or harassing them.
We found out yesterday that this was because of the planned evacuation of Hebron. Apparently, that plan was put off when a lot of rabbis issued a proclamation that Jews must resist the Army if soldiers come to evacuate them.
The mood here is of incredulous disbelief. The hatred of the left-wing minority government against the "right-wing settlers," against the religious, is intensely felt and people wonder where it will end.
In two weeks, Rabin has agreed to allow U.N. observers and Red Cross observers into Hebron. They will be followed by Palestinian police. APRIL 6, 1994. I thought it was a beautiful spring day. I thought it would be a day you just could go outside and listen to the beautiful "coo" of doves. I wanted to see the flowers and feel the sun warming the ground.
You know, I said to myself, maybe Baruch Goldstein did clear the air. Since his massacre, no Jews have been killed.
I walked outside and heard the news. In Afula, a suicide driver in a booby trapped car exploded in front of a bus stop where students were gathered, killing at least eight people.
The Jews in Hebron are being kept under something like house arrest. Word sifted up to us that they're not allowed to leave their houses without an Army escort, but Army escorts are rarely available, so in effect they are confined.
No one is allowed to visit them. Chaya Barness's mother, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Kiryat Arba, is not allowed into Hebron to see her daughter.
People think this cracking down on the Jews in Hebron is either a preparation for evacuation or an attempt to make their lives so miserable that they run away on their own. [Map labels]: Israel; West Bank; Jerusalem; Med. Sea; Hebron; Kiryat Arba; Dead Sea; Beersheba [Map not available.]
This story appears in the April 18, 1994 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.