Soul Food:A year of living in Israel

The apartment was dark, even though outside the blazing June midday sun made a massive oven out of the city of Tel Aviv. The apartment had few rooms, and the rooms had few windows, all of which had been closed for far too long.

Now the rooms smelled like a newly opened storage chest, once dragged to the attic and forgotten. They were infused with the odor of the absence of air and abandoned memories, now decaying, longing to be reclaimed.

Against a faintly green wall, a neglected settee stood beneath a long, narrow and empty frame. Alongside it, a blank remnant of yellowed paper lay like a note never written on top of a small dusty table.

When I said I didn’t want to live there, the real estate agent rallied with his deal-closing shot. He threw open the shutters of a tiny window overlooking a concrete yard.

“See that?” he asked, pointing to a metal sign on a metal pole near the street at the edge of the yard. “That’s were the building’s bomb shelter is.”

Bomb. Shelter.

I was now living in a city where the proximity of an apartment to a private bomb shelter was a strong selling point. Until then, the closest I’d been to a bomb shelter were the ‘60s-era drop-and-cover drills in our California public schools.

But in 1988, modern Israel had been at war with its Arab residents and neighbors intermittently since it was proclaimed a state in May 1948. That I knew.

For the first time, though, I would find myself earnestly wanting to understand why. Until taking up residence in Tel Aviv, any pat answer had appeased me.

If someone told me the Israelis and the Arabs were destined to forever play out a blood feud with its roots in an ancient enmity between Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of their mutual patriarch Abraham, I handed them a dime and bought it. There are times, God knows, I still think they might be right.

But that doesn’t explain Iran — not an Arab nation, yet one of Israel’s most dogged enemies. Since its 1979 revolution, it hasn’t wavered in its stance, notably expressed by its current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that “Israel must be wiped off the map.”

To an audience of 4,000 students attending a “World Without Zionism” conference held in Tehran last year, Ahmadinejad spoke of a “historic war between the oppressor [the United States] and the world of Islam” and the “annihilation of the Zionist regime.” What he called “skirmishes in the occupied land” are, he said, “part of a war of destiny,” through which “the outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land.”

The capacity for conflict in the Middle East seems to have all the heads of Hydra — one immortal, the others, when destroyed, each growing two more in their place. Martin Indyk, the former ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration who had a role in the 2000 Camp David Summit, earlier this month described it as “an endless tale of tragedy.”

Before delivering the keynote address for a recent symposium on an array of global issues, Indyk confided to his audience that his outlook for the future in the Middle East is “everything but optimistic.” The events of Sept. 11, 2001 and since, he said, seem to be “creating a perfect storm.”

It’s a storm I’ve been keeping watch for since the hot summer my husband and I settled into a muggy but bright fourth-floor apartment in Israel (without a bomb shelter) overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

At the time, Israel was one year into what would later be called the First Palestinian Intifada — a somewhat kinder, gentler version of the second, the al-Aqsa Intifada, that began in September 2000 on the heels of Israel’s unilateral pullout from the 15-kilometer security zone in Lebanon where they had been trying to keep Hezbollah at bay.

During our year in Israel, my husband and I lived in relative peace. We were told to be on guard, not to hesitate to report anything that looked suspicious to the police.

Though in a world where soldiers walk the streets and ride buses with AK-47s slung on their shoulders, nearly anything will look suspect to the uninitiated. I could have been calling the police every few minutes.

I got used to having the contents of my purse searched every time I entered a store or a restaurant or a movie theater. I got used to sporadically being evacuated from a bus while a bomb squad searched it for explosives.

When a bomb took out part of a building near the Dizengoff Mall where we had almost leased an apartment, we were a little spooked. Yet a few evenings later we were at the mall taking in “Baghdad Café.”

We never needed a bomb shelter, but only because our timing was right. Two years afterward, during the Gulf War in 1991, we spotted our apartment in broadcast footage showing Iraqi Scud missiles striking Tel Aviv.

With each new clash, I’m always asked why there can’t be peace in the Middle East. When the question is posed as “What’s wrong with those people?” or “Don’t those people place any value on human life?” I know there’s no answer for it. But when someone tells me plaintively, as my mother always does with each new conflict, “I don’t understand why they can’t just live in peace with each other,” I try to sketch an analogy that might make some sense of it.

Imagine, I might say, that our Native Americans got fed up with living on their reservations. After all, this whole continent was pretty much theirs once upon a time.

Imagine they picked up some weapons, marched into town, sent you packing with the clothes on your back and moved into your house. Someone, maybe an ancestor of yours, once ran them out of their homes.

Now they’re running you out of yours. Fair’s fair. You can live in a tent. Build another house. Just get over it.

So you’d shrug your shoulders and philosophize. What goes around comes around. Right?

Imagine.

That has happened to people on all sides of these conflicts. Yet it is just one sort of trespass, one among so many others that have been rendered over hundreds, over thousands of years.

In the Middle East, a thousand years ago is as good as yesterday. Memories aren’t often left to decay like those in the apartment I didn’t rent. They’re not abandoned, left too long to be reclaimed.

Memories are nurtured. They’re kept alive, often even if it means dying for them.