1938 and all that

A counter-factual is an historical what-if, such as what would the course of history have been if Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union or if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War? Counter-factuals make for fascinating speculation but are ultimately self-defeating. Reality always has a habit of intruding in the end.

What, then, is one to call Binyamin Netanyahu’s ominous “it is 1938, Iran is Germany and it is arming itself with nuclear weapons?” Future non-factual, perhaps? Or under-the-counter factual? Whatever we call it, it was very far from being factual, either as an historical analogy or as a prediction with a reasonable basis for accuracy. Bibi may know how to move crowds but his grasp on reality is tenuous.

What’s interesting about the 1938 analogy is not that Netanyahu chose to use it – after all, what better bogeyman is there for an Israeli politician wanting to spread anxiety and fear than Hitler? – but what is says about Netanyahu himself and the contempt with which he treats the intelligence of his audience, American Jews and Israelis alike.

Why, for instance, did he choose the year 1938? He could have chosen 1937, say, or 1939, when the plight of the Jews in Europe was just as precarious as in 1938, if not more so. But he chose 1938, a year which has gone down in history as the year of Munich; the year in which Chamberlain and the other “appeasers” betrayed Czechoslovakia.

There’s a clear, if subliminal, message in that. Israel is Czechoslovakia, Bibi is telling us, and the UN, the EU and all the rest (with the exception, one assumes, of Bush’s America) are the appeasers. They’re hell bent on selling Israel out to the new Hitler.

Except, of course, that Czechoslovakia's army was no match for Hitler's in 1938 and most of its heavy industry and land defenses were in the Sudetenland, which had been ceded to Germany anyway. It was unable to defend itself after the sell-out, which is patently not the case with Israel, despite the pathetic performance in Lebanon recently. And Czechoslovakia had played no role in the crisis in Europe, whereas most Western politicians outside Washington believe that Israel has directly contributed to the instability in the whole of the Middle East. Czechoslovakia was a pawn, Israel is a participant.

So Israel, in the Netanyahu world view, is both Czechoslovakia and the pre-war Jews. Both a country on the verge of being betrayed and the defenseless innocents bound for the slaughter.

Iran is Germany, Netanyahu said. Is it? There’s no doubting the fact that Iran is run by a pernicious regime and its president is a particularly unappealing character. By perpetuating the ‘Holocaust is a myth’ line, Iran has put itself on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of decency. All that is a given. Iran is likely to continue to be a major irritant to the Western liberal democracies, not to mention to Israel.

But that doesn’t make it analogous to Germany in 1938, the strongest land power in Europe and a highly militarized society bent on territorial aggrandizement and racial domination. Iran's military power is unproven (by some accounts it has yet to fully recover from its war with Iraq in the Eighties) and it has shown little appetite for territorial acquisition or Shi’ite regional hegemony, other than its support of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran’s ambitions probably don’t extend much further than some sort of hegemony over the Iraqi Shia and the hunger of the perennially weak for recognition and respect.

None of that is of any importance, Netanyahu seems to be saying, because Iran is arming itself with nuclear weapons – the implication being that a nuclear Iran will run amok, with Israel as its first target. Not being a prophet, I can’t say categorically that it won’t; just as Netanyahu can’t know for sure that it will (unless prophecy is amongst the talents that this modest and unassuming man has hidden from the public.) But, if history is anything to go by, the chances are that it won’t.

For over a generation during the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union, both nuclear armed to the teeth, faced each other down without ever pushing the nuclear button. They fought dozens of proxy wars in Vietnam, Angola and elsewhere, but neither opted for the nuclear option. The reason was Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD.) the certainty that any resort to nuclear weapons would bring down both their houses. More recently, India and Pakistan have proved the same principle; despite their ongoing dispute over Kashmir, relations between the two long-time enemies have grown warmer since they both joined the nuclear fraternity. The possession of nuclear weapons tends to focus the mind.

A nuclear Iran, face to face (or warhead to warhead) with a nuclear Israel, is likely to show similar restraint. No doubt it will continue meddling in Lebanon and Iraq and its anti-Israel rhetoric is likely to be as vituperative as ever, but even Ahmadinejad is smart enough to understand that any nuclear strike on Israel will mean the end of Iran as we know it today.

If anything, the threat of Iran with nuclear weapons may be what is needed to persuade Israel’s leaders that stasis is not a viable diplomatic option in the long term.

Bibi got it wrong. Israel, despite it’s ‘we won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons’ camouflage, is a nuclear power, not the hapless Czechoslovakia of 1938 nor the defenseless Jewish communities of Europe before World War II. If Europe and perhaps even the US (with the assistance of James Baker) do begin to pressure Israel to finally negotiate with the Palestinians, it will not be because they want to throw a bone to Iran, a la Czechoslovakia and Germany, but because they have concluded correctly that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is at the heart of the anarchy and despair that characterize the Middle East today.

Nuclear weapons are a blight on our so-called civilization and their possession by any country is regrettable. But if Netanyahu wants to do something useful for Israel and the region, he should stop his scare-mongering and start making peace. Only at peace will Israel be secure.

Remembering Robert

Much has been written about Robert Rosenberg in the few days since he died and Robert, I suspect, would have been gratified but a little embarrassed by the superlatives. Beneath his larger-than-life persona and his penchant for self-aggrandizement, Robert was a private person and he took himself, along with much else, with liberal pinches of salt. Robert was not one to be taken in by hyperbole.

Not that what has been said and written about him is hyperbole; far from it. Robert was an accomplished writer and journalist, with an almost clairvoyant understanding of the possibilities of technology in the Information Age and a keen nose for the ridiculous and pretentious in our daily lives. He richly deserved all the praise that has come his way.

How many of us, after all, have written a bunch of novels, been a blogger before the term even existed, single-handedly run a Web site with an international audience for over 10 years and provided the production backbone for a daily national newspaper, as Ha’aretz editor David Landau wrote this week? The answer is very, very few. Robert was one of a kind.

But Robert’s myriad accomplishments tell only part of the story. And the public Robert, tall and dashing with a cavalry mustache and a mouth that moved faster than the speed of light, is also only part of the story. Like all consummate personalities, Robert was a complex individual and his true beauty lay in the quieter, more subtle recesses of his nature.

Robert was a good person; “good” in the majestic, almost religious sense of the word, though religious is not a quality that I would readily associate with him. (Silvie, his wife, assures me, however, that he could hold his own when it came to knocking off a bracha. That was a side of him I never knew.) He was a virtuous person. He knew instinctively the difference between right and wrong and his life was a constant quest after right. In his politics, as in his personal relationships, Robert embodied an innate humanity and kindness.

Others have written that they never heard him say a bad word about anyone and I can testify to the truth of that. Despite the strength of his opinions – and Robert was never lacking in the opinion department – he had a genteel, almost old-fashioned sense of propriety. Coarseness was alien to him. He was an island, a beacon, in this increasingly crass and boorish society. He was that rarest of all things, a truly gentle soul (which may come as a surprise to those who only knew his bluff, sometimes intimidating exterior.)

Above all, Robert was an optimist, another rare quality in today’s depressed world. He not only was good, he believed in good, and he believed that good would prevail. I can’t recall ever having seen him really down, even when he had every reason to be so. Despite the knocks he took, and there were many, Robert was always ready with another idea, another goal. He never let the present distort the promise of the future.

Not even cancer could hold Robert down. There were many times during his illness when he was the most positive, the most optimistic, person in the room. The same self-confidence that sometimes put him over the top when he was healthy was his great strength when he was ill. In the first year or so of his illness he was full of plans for the future and he was writing a novel when he died. Three weeks before he finally succumbed to his cancer, we were discussing how Ariga, his Web site, could be continued without him. Weak and in great pain, he nevertheless jumped up with typical Robert impetuosity and began knocking out a new site layout on his laptop, his mind working and his mouth going a mile a minute. He was Robert until the end and in his last days he had more life in him than most of us have in a lifetime.

I happened to have an operation and was off work for several weeks just when Robert began his final descent towards death. We would sit around – no longer with a couple of bottles between us; his health no longer permitted liquid indulgence – and talk about things for hours. We spoke about current affairs and books (one of the last things he did was receive a new consignment of books from Amazon, though by then he was unable to read much) and we laughed a lot. I laughed more and spoke more utter nonsense with Robert than with anyone else. There was very little nostalgia, which is surprising for middle-aged people whose lives are mostly behind them. But that was Robert; he rarely looked back.

Robert may have died, but a big part of him remains – and her name is Silvie. Robert and Silvie were more than lovers, more than just another married couple. They were symbiotic, virtually one unit. They exemplified a mutuality of love, caring and respect. I don’t think I have ever had a friendship with a couple in which there wasn’t an imbalance, a natural leaning on my part towards one of the partners. But Rob and Silvie were different. It was impossible to love one without loving the other.

I have a final image of Robert lying in his hospital bed in the week before he died and Sylvie leaning over him, her long blonde hair splayed over his emaciated chest. She was caressing his drawn, jaundiced cheek and whispering in his ear. What she said remains between them. But it was lovely to see.

Logic and Illogic

Back in Israel after a three-week family vacation in South Africa. Before leaving, I said facetiously to friends at work that they had three weeks to sort out the mess in Lebanon. I figured I was on safe ground, but it turns out that I was wrong.

The war is still raging - though limping is probably a better way of putting it. I have spent the time since my return immersing myself in the Israeli media. Unlike my 22-year-old daughter, for whom war news is an unwelcome distraction from the really important things in Tel Aviv life, I can’t bear to have major events unfolding around me without knowing the minutiae. Wars are made for news junkies like myself.

This is what I’ve found:

Israel is reverting to fractious form. The initial national consensus in favor of the war is fragmenting – at least as portrayed in the media. According to a poll in Ha’aretz today, a minority of Israelis now believes that the war will end well for Israel. Other reports portray government ministers as being at loggerheads with each other (Prime Minister Olmert and his Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, for example) and sharp differences between the political and military echelons. Some things never change, apparently.

Not that the war is universally unpopular, of course. The TV is full of interviews with wounded soldiers lying in hospital beds who, to a man, seem to be itching to get back to the fray. I even heard a prominent TV commentator describe it as “a war of survival,” which surprised me somewhat. Clearly, a reasonably convincing argument can be made that Israel had to respond in force to the initial Hizbollah attack, but to describe the threat posed to Israel by Hizbollah as existential seems to me to be stretching things a bit.

It wasn’t too long ago that Hizbollah was treated with disdain by Israeli officials and the media. But the fundamentalist militia seems to have benefited from some elastic arithmetic as the fighting has ground on and Israeli military losses have mounted. I could swear that Israeli intelligence sources credited them with far fewer men and missiles at the start of the hostilities than they do today. Hizbollah seems to be a unique form of fighting force; its numbers increase as its men are killed and its missiles multiply as launchers are destroyed. We should all be so lucky.

Not being a betting man, I have no intention of predicting how all this is going to play out eventually. But it’s a safe guess that the wisdom of going to war will come under close scrutiny, along with the manner in which the war has been waged. Olmert’s initial bravado, intelligence estimates about Hizbollah strength and preparedness, the early reliance on air strikes only – all are already being questioned in the media. In all likelihood, yet another Israeli judge will soon be giving his name to yet another commission of inquiry.

The question that irks me is how a country with so many ostensibly smart people can behave so stupidly. When Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said in the first days of the campaign that Israel was bombing the Lebanese so that they would turn against Hizbollah, surely there was someone in his immediate circle who could have pointed out the ludicrousness of such thinking? (It’s too much to expect that the a man who feels only a slight shudder of the wing when dropping a bomb on civilians would be able to figure it out for himself.)

Surely, when Defense Minister Amir Peretz gave the go-ahead for the destruction of Lebanese bridges, refineries and other infrastructure he did not actually believe that it would endear Israel to the Lebanese and instill in them a belated understanding of their true self-interest?

Did the leaders of Israel honestly believe that the civilized world (with the exception of George Bush and his Downing Street puppet) would regard the bombing of Beirut and the killing of hundreds of civilians as a proportionate reaction to the killing of one Israeli soldier and the capture of another two?

Difficult as it may be to believe, I suspect that the answer to all these questions is that Israel’s leaders and generals did actually believe their own perverted logic, I say that because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate: that our neophyte prime minister and his military masters launched a war under false pretences and with scant preparation, at the price of dozens of fatalities and hundreds of wounded, the collapse of normal life in the entire north of the country and the opprobrium of the civilized world.

And that leads us to the deeper question: what is it about the Israeli reality that distorts our judgment to such a degree? We have some of the world’s smartest scientists, businessmen and academics, but confront us with the existential questions of war, peace and relations with the Arabs and our reason deserts us. Our vision is suddenly channeled through a prism that turns white into black and wrong into right. We act and react in a manner that is usually counter to our own self-interest.

I have a work colleague of messianic bent who would probably say that it is in fact Israel which sees the true dimensions of the Islamic threat and it is the rest of the so-called civilized world which is suffers from reduced vision. (in fact, he would attribute clarity to only a small minority of Israelis, namely those living in the occupied territories. He’s no fan of the government.)

I don’t buy that. There’s no doubt that fundamentalist Islam is a malignant force with which Israel and the rest of the world need to contend. But Israel’s myopia began long before Bin Laden entered the picture and the intractable conflict in the Middle East has only added fuel to the fundamentalist fire. Terrorism is a consequence of the inability to reach peace between Israel and its neighbors, not its cause.

The illogic of Israeli logic comes from different places entirely. It has to do with the legacy of the Holocaust and our compulsion to apply the lessons of the Nazi genocide to our modern day lives in the Middle East, which is an historical absurdity. It comes from the centuries of Jewish suffering prior to the Holocaust and the “poor Samson” complex that has resulted from the contradiction between past weakness and current strength. It comes from too many years of conflict and loss which have amputated our ability to see the suffering of others. It comes from almost 40 years of occupation of Palestinian land and people, which has engendered in us a baleful hard-heartedness and anti-Arab racism.

Most of all, it comes from the seductive power of military might and the blinkered world view of men and women whose formative experiences occur in the military environment. Armies are dangerous things, not only to those against whom they are wielded but to those who wield them as well. They can foster leadership and initiative in young people but only within a tightly restricted frame of reference. Armies do not, as a rule, expand horizons. Israel would be a lot better off living in peace with its neighbors in a small and modest state than as the regional super-power in constant conflict.

China Diary: Fighting Talk

For the past year I’ve been visiting China on an average of once a month on business. These are my impressions


I visited the Beijing military museum during my recent stay in the city. It was a Saturday during summer holidays and the museum was packed with school children and organized groups. But I was the only Westerner I saw, though the city itself was awash with tourists. The military museum is clearly not on the standard tourist itinerary.

That is a pity because, while it might not be everybody’s cup of tea, the military museum gives a fascinating perspective on China and one that is difficult to experience in the sterility of the Forbidden City or the down-market consumerism of the Silk Market. I would venture to say that it is impossible to begin understanding China and the Chinese people without seeing them from the perspective of their recent history – and that history has been dominated by war to an extent that few of us realize.

The building itself is a typical Soviet era edifice, concrete and granite grey and built in layers like a square wedding cake. Incongruously, it is topped by a soaring needle which resembles a church steeple, though the symbol at its peak is not a cross but the hammer and sickle surrounded by the five Chinese stars. Inside, it’s a pretty gloomy place. Though there are ample chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling, very few of them were actually lit when I was there. I very much doubt that was to save electricity, as the rest of Beijing was on a summer electricity binge. I guess it was simply the required atmospherics.

Another possibility is that the lights have to be kept dim because most of the exhibits are behind glass of unusual reflectivity. The end result is that what little light there is reflects off the glass, while the detail of the exhibits (particularly the photographs, of which there are many) is difficult to see in the murkiness. However, the light is just right for highlighting the handprints left on the glass by the streams of children who are no doubt bussed to the place against their will.

Most of the museum is devoted to the wars of the 20th Century. The homeland of Sun Tzu could not ignore its rich martial history from the distant past, of course, and the author of “The Art of War” gets his fair due. But the bulk of the exhibits are devoted to the virtually constant combat that lasted from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 until the end of the Korean War in the mid-Fifties.

That is probably the most significant perception which a student of China takes from the museum. The leaders of the country from 1949 onwards spent close to 30 years fighting for their cause and the Communist state was baptized in blood. It is a legacy from the not-so-distant past which permeates the fabric of modern China, however remote it seems from the cell phone-toting, hipply dressed youth of Shanghai, Shenzhen and the other major cities.

First, in the Twenties, the Communist cadres formed an alliance with the Kuomintang against the reactionary remnants of the Imperial court. In 1927, the two allies turned against each other, precipitating a long and bitter struggle that lasted until the Japanese invasion in the mid-Thirties. It was a period of immense hardship and deprivation which culminated, for the communists, in the Long March, which saved the communist First Army from decimation. With the arrival of the Japanese occupation forces, the erstwhile enemies joined forces again to fight the invader, only to turn against each other once again after the Japanese had been defeated.

In 1949, the communist forces succeeded in driving the Kuomintang out of mainland China and communist rule was established. That seminal event in the history of modern China is also the prism through which the museum’s exhibits are displayed. Anyone expecting a dispassionate presentation of Chinese military history has come to the wrong place. The overt purpose of the Beijing Military Museum is to provide a communist version of the past; the Kuomintang gets very short shrift. This is the history of the winning side.

Interestingly, while the bulk of the exhibits are adequately labeled in English, the hall dealing with the Korean War is entirely bereft of English. Not a word can be found. I have no idea why that is so, though I assume that, in an age of rapprochement with America, the authorities didn’t want to highlight a war fought between the two countries.

The hall dealing with the struggle against the Japanese, which is called the Great Patriotic War, gives a visceral underpinning to the antipathy which many, probably most, Chinese have for Japan. The small exhibit dealing with the massacre that has become known as the Rape of Nanking is particularly disturbing. The inhuman treatment meted out by the Japanese still rankles in the Chinese psyche – particularly the fact that, unlike the Germans, say, the Japanese have never acknowledge or apologized for their war guilt.

A Chinese friend of mine, an ostensibly educated and modern person who has spent considerable time in the US and Europe, is of the firm opinion that China should wipe out Japan. He has his doubts (though he does not express them publicly) about the legitimacy of the mainland’s claims to Taiwan and Tibet, but when it comes to Japan he is a bloodthirsty warmonger. And he is not alone in that.

China is a complex and anomalous place, with deep national traumas rooted in its colonial and more recent past. The Beijing Military Museum brings that home. Despite its clear ideological slant and the rather stolid displays, it is well worth visiting.

China Diary: Power Play

For the past year I’ve been visiting China on an average of once a month on business. These are my impressions


Beijing is being spruced up for the Olympics, now just over two years away. Huge tracts of land have been cleared of their previous inhabitants, many of them living in small, courtyard-based neighborhoods known as hutongs, and turned into building sites, with high-rise apartments, office buildings and shopping malls going up at an astounding pace. Right now the Beijing skyline is dominated by cranes (a French construction engineer working here said that there is more building going on in Beijing than in the whole of France) but by late-summer in 2008, Beijing intends presenting a sparkling and very Western face to the world.

Which is all well and good, but the effect may be marred somewhat by the mass slaughter of Olympic visitors on the roads unless the authorities do something about China’s driving culture. Beijing and the country’s other large cities are not alone in suffering from traffic problems; most large metropolitan areas around the world are similarly plagued. But China is definitely in a league of its own when it comes to mule-headed and very dangerous driving.

Most drivers around the world, certainly those in countries which aspire to Olympic status, accept the principle that pedestrians are also allowed on the road – if not the principle of pedestrians first. In virtually all the countries that I’ve visited, drivers wait for pedestrians to cross (I’m talking about crossing at marked pedestrian crossing points with traffic lights showing green) before driving through an intersection.

In China, however, drivers seem to regard pedestrians as an affront to their right to drive where and when they want to. When the light turns green, the Chinese driver goes for broke, irrespective of how many pedestrians are in his way. You cannot walk the streets of a large Chinese city without seeing cars bulldozing their way through crowds of pedestrians legitimately crossing the road at green lights.

Not that the pedestrians seem to care much, mind you. Like the drivers they seem to have adapted to a culture in which the car has the right of way. They simply wait for the cars to pass through or edge their way around them when the cars get stuck in traffic.

Most visitors to the Olympics, however, will have grown up in a very dissimilar environment and will cross roads instinctively, in the belief that a pedestrian crossing and a green light give them the right to do so. China runs the very real risk of sacrificing all the credit it is trying so hard to earn on the altar of driving madness.

A Chinese friend of mine explained it thus: The car, he said is a symbol of status and power in China, and what is the sense of having power if you don’t exercise it? The Chinese driver regards his possession of this symbol as sufficient reason to throw his weight around when challenged by puny pedestrians.

Another explanation is that driving is new to the average Chinese and a driving culture has not had time to develop. Twenty-five years ago, private cars were hardly seen on Chinese roads, which were the preserve of swarms of cyclists and the odd official limousine. So, not only those driving on the road today are relative newcomers but so are those teaching them how to drive. Any culture is only as good as those who hand it down. If driving teachers don’t propagate the values of consideration, safety and regard for pedestrians, those who learn from them are unlikely to practice them.

Whatever, the reasons, China’s roads give a revealing glimpse into one of the less salubrious characteristics of a society which is trying so hard, and with a good deal of success, to join the club of developed nations. The Olympics are regarded here as the culmination of that process; China’s coming of age. It would be a pity for the party to be spoiled by the blood of visitors on the streets.

The authorities in Beijing would be well advised to redirect some of the effort and expense they’re investing in preparations for the Olympics to road education. Not only for the sake of the visitors but for the Chinese themselves. Not having experienced orderly roads, they may not be aware of their civilizing value. To paraphrase Robert Frost, good drivers make good neighbors.

Boxed In

This week’s grim events, capped by the air force bombing of Gaza on Thursday night, substantiate the suspicion that the Israeli descent into irrational, medieval nihilism is getting perilously close to its nadir. Far from being the sober, measured response of a responsible democracy, Israel’s knee-jerk rebound into overkill (air and artillery bombardments, mass arrests of lawmakers, escalatory flights over Damascus) testifies only to the impoverishment of military-political thinking in the country. Decades of feudal contempt for the Palestinians and tit-for-tat responses to violence have stultified our strategic judgment. We have no options, other than greater force.

That’s the good news. The other alternative is that the capture of an Israeli soldier is being deliberately exploited by the country’s leadership to demolish any semblance of Palestinian statehood and thus neutralize the danger of a political settlement, which, even according to the prime minister, would entail substantial withdrawal from the occupied territories.

Whatever the ultimate fate of the unfortunate Gilad Shalit, it is undeniable that the events of the past week have further curtailed the already slim prospects for peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians and elevated the entire region to a new plateau of distrust and hatred. At a time when the majority of Israelis seem to have internalized the need for the occupation to end, the country’s leaders show every sign of willfully plunging the region into a new spasm of bloodletting, precisely in order to preempt any such accommodation.

In the first place, there is essentially no difference between the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian fighters during a raid on a military outpost and the almost nightly detentions of Palestinians carried out by the Israeli army in Palestinian territory. To describe, as we do, one as an abduction and the other as an arrest – one as a terrorist action (pigua) and the other as a military action – is to deliberately distort the reality of the ongoing struggle between the two sides.

It is tendentious for the government to argue that, following the withdrawal from Gaza, there is no longer any justification for Palestinian resistance emanating from that benighted spot and that every action is therefore, by definition, terrorism. As if they acknowledged the justification for resistance before the withdrawal. The fight for an independent Palestine is indivisible, even if the land itself is fractured. So long as the occupation over all the Palestinian territories persists and a solution to the national aspirations of the Palestinian people is not found, Gaza will continue to be a launching pad for offensive operations.

Israel has no grounds for its arrogant presumption that the capture of an Israeli soldier is of any greater import than the detention of tens of thousands of Palestinians, never mind that it justifies the wholesale abrogation of Palestinian sovereignty (such as it is) that has occurred in recent days.

And even if a forceful response was justified, it wasn’t smart. Knee-jerk reactions seldom are. Laying siege to a civilian population and firing artillery shells into residential areas have the inevitable effect of creating martyrs and solidifying hatred. Even if the military action does bring about the release of Gilad Shalit (which is unclear at the time of writing,) the repercussions of the onslaught on Gaza will haunt us for a long time to come.

Acknowledgement of the necessity to end the occupation (something which Prime Minister Olmert does with such facility when conferring with Bush, Blair and Chirac) and negotiating in good faith for the release of prisoners could have provided the necessary human dimension for the start of dialogue. But neither Olmert nor his generals are capable of such suppleness. Too many years at the political or military helm have atrophied their mental agility. Talking to Bush about talking with the Palestinians is one thing; actually talking with the Palestinians is another thing entirely. Israeli officials are unable to relate to Palestinians who do not assume the bended-knee posture of the vassal.

Israelis, and foremost amongst them the media, would do well to drop the language of terrorism, terror attacks and kidnappings. Such language is both smug and self-deluding. Like a baby’s pacifier, it gives the illusion of contentment and keeps the harsh world at bay. The sooner we acknowledge that the occupation and its attendant disdain for the Palestinians is at the heart of the conflict, the sooner we will begin to realize the options for its solution.

Opting for the use of force is the fool’s solution. Unfortunately, it has become the Israeli norm. We have boxed ourselves into a corner.

Coelho's navel gazing

The Zahir, Paul Coelho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Harper Collins, 2005

The Zahir is the first book by Paul Coelho that I have read. I’ve seen his name often enough on the bookshelves but never felt the need to know more. Perhaps that had something to do with the off-putting esoteric nature of the titles – The Alchemist, The Valkyries and so on. But this book was given to me by a dear friend and I had a long flight home from Beijing, so . . .

Let me put it bluntly. This is also the last Paul Coelho book that I will read, unless either he or I undergoes a radical transformation - and I can’t see that happening. Paul Coelho’s philosophy, if one can call it that, or his spiritual quest is as far from my tastes as bacon from a synagogue. The Zahir is a search for love gone wrong and a paean to a variety of rituals, which somehow are meant to amount to a comprehensive spiritual world view. To me it amounted to a pretentious bore.

Throughout my reading of the Zahir I had a nagging feeling that it reminded me of something but I couldn’t put my finger on it. In his author’s note at the end of the book, Coelho was kind enough to solve the riddle for me, attributing one of the rituals in the book to Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan. Carlos Castaneda! The name hadn’t entered my head for over 30 years. Does any one still read Carlos Castaneda, let along mention him in an author’s note?

Sure, I’d been hot and bothered about Castaneda in my late teens and early twenties but I soon got over it. Even then I had been unable to finish his books and his importance was more as a provider of a rationale for taking huge quantities of hallucinogenic drugs than as a spiritual teacher. As addled as my brain undoubtedly was, I couldn’t take his stuff seriously.

But Paul Coelho clearly does; very seriously. Enough said. And I wonder to myself: in a world of Auschwitz, Rwanda and Srebrenica, is not Coelho’s agonizing about love and getting rid of his personal history the mental masturbation of the rich and famous (both Coelho and his protagonist?) Had the Jews, the Tutsis and the Bosnian Muslims being a bit more diligent about getting rid of their personal histories, would Hitler, the Hutus and Milosevic have said “Well now, they’re getting their shit together. I think I’ll let them live?”

Of course that’s not a fair comment to make. Writers are free – must be free – to write about whatever they want. But I can’t escape the feeling that The Zahir is not only trivial and boring, it’s also nasty.

In the positive column, the writing is clear and precise, though almost totally lacking in metaphor, irony or just a little wit. It is also more a tract than a novel; the story line is a very thin covering for the spiritual points which Coelho wants to get across.

No doubt there are many people who thrive on this sort of stuff. For myself, I haven’t disliked a book as much in many years.

On the Margins of War

In “Poisoned Peace,” his book on the end of the Second World War, Gregor Dallas writes about the “margins” which accompanied the allied forces as they advanced into the countries occupied by Hitler. The margin that preceded the liberating armies (though true liberation was, of course, the last thing on Stalin’s mind) comprised the indigenous resistance forces, such as the Home Army in Poland and De Gaulle’s National Council of Resistance. These quasi-armies had sprung up soon after their respective countries were occupied, but their activities were mainly low-level, hit-and-run affairs until just before the arrival of the Soviet or Western forces. At that point, when it was clear that the Germans were on their way out, full-scale uprisings erupted in many of the occupied countries.

The margin that followed in the wake of the liberating armies was a period of chaos: haphazard violence and looting, revenge attacks on collaborators and internecine warfare between ethnic and political groups. The latter, exacerbated by the undeclared but increasingly obvious intention of the Soviet Union to control all the territories its armies passed through, to a large extent determined the map of Europe until the fall of communism in the early Nineties. The most far-reaching result of World War II, other than the overthrow of Nazism, was the forced transfer of much of Eastern Europe into the Soviet orbit and the strengthening of Communist movements in the countries of Western Europe, from Greece to France.

Interestingly, the occupation of Germany itself was not preceded by a margin of resistance activities. That could be attributed, if only partly, to the sheer brutality with which the Nazi regime dealt with the July 20 conspirators up to and including those on the furthest fringes of the conservative military revolt. That, plus the penchant of the retreating Nazis to hang both military personnel and civilians at the least sign of defeatism, put paid to any further thought of resistance, even as the Soviet forces converged on Berlin and the Western allies occupied the country’s industrial heartland.

Another reason was given by Field Marshall Montgomery in an order of the day to his troops. Crossing the German frontier would be entirely different from entering into France, Belgium or Holland, Montgomery said. The allies would not be seen as liberators but as invaders. Even after the horrors of the war precipitated by the Nazi regime, Germans would not take kindly to the invasion of German territory.

That was then. What struck me, while reading Dallas’ fascinating book, was the thought that the invasion of Iraq has been accompanied by its own margins and it is of interest (if not more than that) to reflect to what extent they were taken into account by the war planners in the Bush Administration.

As in the case of Nazi Germany, there was very little internal resistance to the Saddam Hussein regime, a consequence no doubt of the regime’s viciousness in putting down the revolt of the Shiites following the first Gulf War as well as its gassing of the Kurds. Thus, the entry of the invasion forces was not accompanied by an Iraqi resistance uprising – and nor was such an uprising anticipated by the Americans, to the best of my knowledge. What they did expect, though, was a rapturous reception by the downtrodden civilians (showers of petals, if my memory of Paul Wolfowitz’s statements doesn’t fail me) and for a while it seemed as if they just might get it. But the tearing down of Saddam’s statue was as good as it got. From then and until today, the Americans have been contending with the other margin, the chaos in the wake of the invasion.

First came the looting - of the national museum, of hospitals and of private property – followed by revenge attacks on Baathists (with the benign neglect, if not connivance, of Paul Bremmer’s administration. Then, and most ominously, came the internecine warfare. Replace communist cadres with Islamic fundamentalists and you have a reasonably accurate facsimile of the events in the Balkans and the Baltic states in 1945 and 1946. The overthrow of tyranny was accompanied by the unwelcome invasion of sovereign territory and the machinations of an unscrupulous group with its eyes on the world stage. Like Stalin in the last year of the war, Bin Laden, Zarqawi and the other amorphous Islamic fundamentalist leaders saw the opportunity and took it.

Whatever good the invasion of Iraq was intended to bring (and that is another discussion,) it has resulted in a virtual civil was between Sunnis and Shiites and has provided radical Islam with a windfall it could never have dreamed of when it lost its power base in Afghanistan. In circumstances eerily similar to those that lead to the communist-inspired civil war in Greece after the defeat of the Germans, fundamentalist Islam is taking advantage of the anarchy provoked by the American invasion to advance its own agenda. Greece was saved from Communism by the timely and tough intervention of British forces; the Americans at the time were curiously disinterested in the Communist encroachment in Europe.

The invasion of Iraq was similarly, inexcusably blind. If the so-called War on Terror was indeed at the forefront of its strategy, the Bush Administration should have had the historical awareness to understand that the invasion of a sovereign state in the heart of the Middle East with inadequate forces and minimal world backing would be more likely to serve the interests of the enemy than its own. But America, dazzled by its own strength and omnipotence, has never been good at learning from history.

Cyril

One by one our pets were being poisoned. In the fractious way of the kibbutz, there were as many explanations for the killer’s motives as corpses. Some surmised he was after the bloated gangs of cats that haunted the place, defiling garbage cans at night and peering out from the trees during the day with their evil, luminous eyes. Others attributed the homicidal spree to one of the founders, whose experiences with the vicious, yellow-toothed German Shepherds of the Nazis had left him with a pathological fear and hatred of all dogs.

Whatever the motives of the poisoner, his little meatballs impregnated with death went a long way towards decimating the animal population of the kibbutz, both cats and dogs.

One of the younger kibbutz members found a half-eaten meatball clenched in the frozen jaws of his Afghan one morning and, being more enterprising than most, took it to a laboratory in the city to be analyzed. It was an organophosphate, the lab results showed, of a type widely used as a spray for fruit trees. That focused suspicion on the orchard workers. But seeing that the store room which housed the canisters of poisonous spray was always left unlocked, we were no closer to discovering the identity of the killer in our midst.

Almost every morning, the carcass of an animal was found in the bushes or lying on the step of its owner’s house like a bulky doormat. A tremor of panic coursed through the ranks of the kibbutz mothers, whose children were also quite capable of taking a bite out of a strategically placed meatball. The carefree existence of the kibbutz came to an abrupt end as parents reined in their offspring and dog owners kept their pets well-leashed and close to home. Fear and suspicion flourished; animals continued to die.

Yet, with all the killing going on, he never got Cyril.

Cyril was a mutt; a canine melting pot. As a puppy he was round and furry and colored a pristine white. Having a fairly good idea of his antecedents, I should have anticipated that the promise of his infancy would soon give way to a more realistic compromise between the stringy off-white of his mother and the mangy brown of his likely father. It took a love far deeper than the aesthetic appreciation that had been aroused in me originally to keep Cyril and I together as he grew older. He elongated alarmingly without ever gaining in height and the whiteness of his fur soon yielded to a mottled dung-brown.

I consoled myself with the knowledge that his sweet nature, at least, had not changed. But that only held true until I took him for his distemper shot at the age of six months. He whimpered pathetically in the car while returning from the vet and regarded me accusingly, his eyes saucers of betrayal. Once home, he crawled into my cupboard and ensconced himself on a shelf using my sweaters as bedding. He stayed there for a week, refusing to come out and demonstratively ignoring the bones and scraps I tossed in to him.

Eventually, he deigned to leave his retreat and rejoin the material world; but he had changed perceptibly. Like a guru returning from a period of isolated meditation, Cyril gave the impression of having found Truth in his cupboard sanctuary. Nonplussed, I waited for him to tire of the spiritual life until a chance encounter with a lascivious terrier named Beauty revealed to me the true nature of Cyril’s calling.

It was at the height of the poisoning spree. Cyril and I were relaxing on my verandah one late afternoon when Beauty came by, trailing her heat behind her like a snail’s slime. Unknown to both Cyril and myself, Beauty had encountered one of the fatal meatballs only seconds before she became the object of Cyril’s ardor. With uncharacteristic verve, he bounded off the verandah and, being a dog of the old school, accosted her from behind without even perfunctory foreplay.

Cyril locked into Beauty with dour determination. His eyes rolled back and his tongue lolled heavily from his panting mouth. At first, she accepted his invasion with abject resignation, this not being the first time he had violated her and Cyril, in his macho mood, not being one to argue with.

Then suddenly she began to shudder. Grey flecks of foam erupted from the corners of her mouth. Spastically, she angled her face towards him, depositing a wad of foam on his snout. Encouraged by her reaction, Cyril humped away with renewed vigor. He spread his hind legs for greater traction and sunk his nails into her flanks.

Beauty began to jerk uncontrollably. Cyril matched his rhythm to hers, pumping at a manic pace and beating time on the top of her head with his slack lower jaw. Here, finally, was a bitch transported beyond herself by his sexual exertions. Cyril let her have it.

With a choked moan, Beauty dropped down dead. Caught unawares on a down-stroke, Cyril somersaulted wildly over her prostrate body. He sprawled in confusion for a moment then stood up and went over to her, lying drenched with spittle and dead at his feet. An ugly smile twisted his mouth. He had done it. He had fucked her to death.

He nudged her with his paw, as if to make certain, and sniffed her genitals with what seemed like mild regret. Then, with his head rampant with pride and his tail waving cockily, he strolled nonchalantly off.

We never discovered who the poisoner was. He evidently finalized his solution shortly after Beauty’s death, for the killings stopped and the kibbutz reverted to its slow, serene existence. Animal lives are cheap and poison is necessary to keep the trees in fruit. Those whose dogs had died got new pets and the cats returned to their nocturnal scavenging. Nothing changed, though Cyril was insufferable after that.



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I was preparing to replace a section of sunken floor tiles in the bedroom of an elderly couple with five sons, one of whom was an army general and was destined to become prime minister of Israel. It was a simple, characterless room, with two single beds separated by a wooden night stand.

Pulling one of the beds away from the wall to expose the floor, I revealed instead a stockpile of foodstuffs. There were tins of baked beans, tuna and sweet corn, slabs of chocolate, a large salami, vacuum packed slices of cheese, assorted tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and salad greens and bread from the kibbutz bakery. All stacked meticulously under the bed as if in preparation for placing on shelves.

It was what Israelis call a slik, a term used to describe the illicit stockpiles of weapons hoarded by the Hagana and other Jewish fighting units in the years preceding the establishment of the state. But this slik was of a different variety altogether.

The kibbutz had been established in 1946 by Czech survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom had been through Thereisenstadt and other Nazi death camps. They had arrived in pre-state Palestine after the war on small, mostly illegal, refugee boats and had erected tents on the bare ground that they had been allocated for their new home. They planted orchards, dug fish ponds and erected rows of rickety chicken sheds. They also built a communal dining room, a clinic and children’s houses, carved out paths with lighting for the dark nights and planted gardens and trees.

By the time I arrived, a generation later, the kibbutz was a lush and leafy retreat, a quiet, verdant place that combined the rough utilitarianism of a farm with the placidity of a holiday resort. Its founders were mostly in their sixties by then, small, tough people, dressed in simple work clothes and with an air of uncompromising industriousness about them. In all material respects, they had come a long way from the hollow, haunted survivors of the killing fields of Europe.

Or had they?

My stereotyped image of the forever-scarred survivor did not last long. Not that they weren’t scarred, but their wounds were a lot less overt than I had expected. They were concealed under an abrasive crust that had hardened layer by layer over the course of a generation. Each year, I was struck by their nonchalance on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The German volunteers on the kibbutz would sniffle and squirm during the simple evening ceremony in the black-fringed communal dining hall while the founders of the kibbutz invariably sat impassively. Some even joked about it.

One time, I sat next to Isadore, the feisty, veteran manager of the vehicle garage. He nudged me during the ceremony.

“Not a bad shiksa,” he remarked, gesturing towards a sturdy German girl with tears glistening on her swollen cheeks.

“Not bad,” I agreed.

“Have you fucked her?”

I was astounded. He and I had never discussed anything more personal than brake pads.

“Not yet.”

“Do it,” he said mildly. “Her grandfather probably fucked us.”

It wasn’t indifference, I learned. It was obstinacy. They weren’t about to give a bunch of interlopers the vicarious satisfaction of sharing in their purgatory. That was theirs alone.

I had never had much to do with Holocaust survivors before the joining the kibbutz. I had read a huge amount about the Holocaust but had rarely come face to face with its principals. That wasn’t only due to lack of opportunity. All my life I have shied away from personal encounters, preferring the written word to the awkwardness and discomfiture of sharing someone else’s misery.

The two, identical brothers who ran the decrepit grocery store in my Jerusalem neighborhood and wore fedoras indoors, winter and summer, had faded camp numbers on their arms and I had seen the same numbers on the shrunken arms of old women on the bus. In the supermarket one time, I broke off a petty argument with an old man when he raised an arm to remonstrate and I saw the tell-tale smudge on the loose skin of his inner forearm.

That had been the extent of my interaction with the Holocaust generation until I got to kibbutz.
Living with them up close schooled me in the limitless complexities and contrariness of the human psyche. Most of the survivors were profoundly cynical, disparaging of anything that smelled of sentiment. They had turned hardness into a virtue and were soft only with children, preferably those who were one or two generations removed.

Amongst themselves, the veterans were often caustic and derogatory, insulting each other casually to their faces. In the beginning, I took it for a pervasive callousness that stemmed from the harshness of their wartime experiences. Over the years, I came to a deeper understanding. They had an intimacy that was exclusive yet raw and discomfiting. It was as if they shared a secret which, if revealed, would incriminate them all. It was a sub-text of mutual confidence, suspicion and unwelcome reliance. The collective culpability of the victim.

I’m generalizing, of course, and maybe I read too much into it. It’s easy to mistake the tones and inflections of people from a culture with which one is not familiar. Not only were they, as a group, impenetrable to me but they spoke a patois of Hebrew, Yiddish and Czech that excluded me from a lot of their repartee. I was a stranger and with strangers they were mostly off-hand and grudging. We weren’t even in the outer orbit of their club.

But standing in that modest kibbutz bedroom with the stockpile of foodstuffs at my feet, I came as close as I ever would to touching the soft underbelly of the Holocaust survivor.

The loaves of bread on the floor were same-day fresh, the cheese well within its expiry date. It was no forgotten stash, dusty and mold-covered with age. Someone had gone down to the bakery that very morning and replaced the bread before I got to the house at seven. Assumedly, someone did that every morning.

A generation after they were liberated from the camps and in the manifest security of their home for the past 30 years, these two aging people, parents of a future prime minister, were stockpiling provisions for the next Holocaust.

I decided to start with the floor in the bathroom, where years of seepage through the cracks between the tiles had resulted in a dangerous sinkhole. Moving the slik would have been too much of an intrusion. It would have been like going through their underwear or rifling through the old photo albums on their shelves. As it was, I felt embarrassed. There was something intensely personal, naked even, about that pile of food on the bedroom floor.

I pulled up the bathroom tiles and carted them outside, where I chipped the old plaster off those that could be reused and discarded the rest. Back inside, I cleared out the old sand that covered the concrete base and laid a layer of fresh beach sand, damping it down with a plastering trowel. Then I prepared a stack of new tiles by the side of the hole and laid out my tools; a couple of trowels, a meter-long builder’s spirit level, a roll of string and a short-handled, heavy hammer for knocking the tiles into place.

It was lunch time. I looked around for Cyril but he had evidently made his own lunch arrangements.

At the entrance to the dining room, I bumped into Emanuel, co-owner of the slik, washing his hands in one of the basins.

“How’s it going?” he asked, wiping his wet hands on his grubby workpants.

“OK. I’m doing the bathroom today and I’ll do the bedroom tomorrow.”

“So I’ll have to piss in the kitchen sink tonight?”

“I guess so.”

“That’s OK with me,” he said, walking away. “But I don’t know what my wife’s going to do.”

He made no mention of the salad under the bed. Perhaps they all do it, I thought. Perhaps it has become so much a part of their lives that they don’t even find it worth mentioning. Was it conceivable that I was the only one on the kibbutz who didn’t sleep on top of a private supermarket?

Over lunch, I scrutinized Emanuel, sitting at the table diagonally opposite to me. Like most of the kibbutz founders, he was short but built like a tank. Stubby, powerful arms extended from the rolled-up sleeves of his blue work shirt and his spotted, gray-spiked head rested on a sun-browned neck as thick as the barrel of a cannon. He ate his food with one hand, grasping the fork shovel-like in his fist.

It was as difficult to picture him stockpiling fresh loaves of bread every morning as it was to imagine him as a fragile refugee from Hitler’s death machine.

I returned to the cottage after lunch and mixed up a batch of plaster, using a packet of cement, a bucket of white, jelly-like lime and sea sand that I had brought over earlier that morning on the tractor-trailer. I filled two buckets with the mixture and carried them into the house.

A snuffling noise came from the bedroom. I glanced inside to find Cyril on the floor with the contents of the slik scattered around him. He had pinned a package of cheese to the floor with his two front paws and was foraging inside it with his snout. He looked up at me with a glazed expression as I entered the room, scraps of food dangling from his nose like Christmas decorations. Around him was the residue of the salami and scraps of plastic packaging.

Bizarrely, my immediate association was with war profiteers, Rothschild and the like, who made fortunes out of Europe’s many wars. Cyril, it occurred to me, was gluttonous proof that one man’s war is another’s opportunity. But in Cyril’s case, profiteering didn’t take much effort; he had simply lucked out.

Leaving the buckets of plaster on the floor, I headed towards the kitchen, pondering how I would persuade the woman responsible for the groceries to part with a salami, several herrings and a packet of vacuum-packed cheese. Cyril trotted beside me, sated and self-satisfied.



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Cyril and Yankel were at loggerheads from the start. Yankel’s initial kick, which caught Cyril square in the ribs and sent him squealing down the path towards the chicken houses, was not designed to get their friendship off on the right foot. After that, Cyril treated Yankel with defiance, though leavened with a good deal of wariness.

He would seek out Yankel and bark at him raucously from a safe distance. When Yankel made a move to respond, usually by raising an arm or kicking out with a leg, Cyril would yelp loudly as if wounded and retreat behind the nearest shelter. In that way, he would follow Yankel around the kibbutz.

Cyril’s histrionics were annoying. I fully understood Yankel’s exasperation with him. But it went deeper than that. Yankel’s initial kick had been vicious and unprovoked. Had he instead bent down to pat Cyril or even thrown him a kind word, like a bone, he would have made himself a lasting and undiscerning friend; one who didn’t mind that his breath stank of garlic and his work clothes of stale sweat. But Yankel hated dogs and Cyril was not one to allow a man his prejudices.

It took a return bout between the two of them for me to understand what lay behind Yankel’s unrestrained loathing of dogs and how it tied in with his generally brusque and callous behavior. It also had something to do with the grotesque remnant of his left ear that clung to the side of his head like a lump of useless meat.

Yankel was squat and thick, with the physique and power of a wrestler. Which is exactly what he had been in the old days in Poland, he told me, and he would have made it to the top had Hitler not intervened. He had out-fought all the boys on the shtetl with ease and had gone on to create a new, grudging respect for Jews in most of the larger towns of Silesia. He was the new Jew, with sidelocks removed and a leather jerkin instead of a long black coat; a Jew prepared to meet the Poles on their own grounds – brute strength.

His prodigious strength was supplemented by a quick cunning and an iron determination to beat the shit out of the Poles, a combination that soon had him fighting in the professional ring in Warsaw. But then the war broke out and Yankel soon had other problems to wrestle with, such as how to survive in the ghetto of Warsaw and, later, in Auschwitz.

Somehow he survived. He arrived on the kibbutz after the war, still relatively young, without a family and with no ambition to return to the wrestling ring. What he did have was a compulsion to build. When I met him years later, he was still building. The house I lived in had been built by him as had many others on the kibbutz. By then, he was well into his sixties; he had grown stouter and heavier but he had lost none of his strength. He was still the strongest man I had ever known.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that he was the nicest, though, after working with him for a couple of years, I was able to identify a certain naive kindness underlying his brutishness. Between the shtetl, the ghetto, Auschwitz and the kibbutz, Yankel had never managed to pick up life’s graces. He was incapable of waiting in line or allowing someone else to go first and his table manners were atrocious. Human contact was a disaster. On the one or two occasions that he attempted to pat my shoulder for a job well done, it was delivered like a back-hander. Children cried when Yankel smiled, admittedly not too often, and praise spilled from his mouth like a snarl. That gulf between intention and effect created its own spiral of misunderstandings. He could not help but be aware that his small attempts at niceties were, more often than not, met with affront by those on whom they were conferred.

So he refrained from pleasantness and built houses instead of bridges. That is what he was doing when I joined the kibbutz and that is what the two of us were doing when, some months later, I fell in love with a round, furry chimera and got lumbered with Cyril.

Two creatures could hardly have been more dissimilar. Where Cyril, at least in his puppy days, was delicately featured and almost beautiful, Yankel’s features were coarse and lumpy. Cyril was sly and conniving, his true nature often hidden beneath an exterior of fawning sweetness, while Yankel had the naive simplicity of a peasant. With Yankel, what you saw was what you got, even if what you saw was not particularly appealing.

Above all, Yankel was a laborer, obsessed with building and repairing houses, while Cyril was a dilettante.

Yankel abhorred laziness, even in a dog. And he abhorred it most of all when the laziness was manifested in shortcuts through freshly-laid concrete, leaving a trail of celebrity paw-prints for posterity. For his part, Cyril seemed to regard Yankel’s industriousness as a blot on an otherwise placid and amenable landscape. He would lie in the shade, head resting on fastidiously folded paws, and sigh delicately at the unpleasant sight of Yankel’s exertions. Soon enough, one would do something to annoy the other, nails would fly, strident barks would rend the air and I would have to step in as mediator.

In between his bouts with Cyril, Yankel worked at a hectic pace. He would be on the building site long before breakfast and could be seen trudging up the path to his workshop after dark, long after the rest of us had showered, rested and readied for supper. He carried his tools in a long, wooden box and usually had a ladder, plank or length of pipe balanced easily on one shoulder. For a city boy like myself, his dexterity was amazing.

He would hammer in nails while instructing me in some task and never miss a stroke. Stubborn screws, which brought me to the brink of suicide, would unwind meekly into his palm at the merest hint of coaxing. He never hesitated, never seemed to need to consider his next step. He worked with a ceaseless, blunt rhythm, even when yelling at me or tossing things at Cyril.

But he wasn’t an innovative builder. He had no time for newfangled techniques or materials, insisting on doing a job as he had always done it. The modern silicones and epoxies that I tried to introduce remained in their boxes. The only conceivable reason for compromise was price. If I could prove that my method was cheaper, he would sometimes listen. Granted, he didn’t listen graciously; he would grumble about my wasting his time and would invariably be pulling a nail out of a plank as I spoke or performing some other minor task that could reasonably be construed as work.

But he did listen sometimes and there were even occasions when he took my advice. On the whole we got along. He was not only the strongest person I have ever known but also the most stubborn and exasperating.

The day of the Cyril-Yankel rematch started out pleasantly enough. It was another steamy kibbutz morning and Cyril was relaxing in the shade of some scaffolding doing his best to ignore the splattering of plaster from Yankel working above. I was knocking together a crude wooden frame for the concrete verandah that we intended laying that afternoon. Cyril’s deep brown eyes gazed at me compassionately from above his delicately folded paws.

Then Cyril spotted a lurking cat. Cyril had a problem with cats. They drove him to distraction. They seemed to affront him, as if all four-legged creatures, even an honorary two-legger like himself, were tarred with their sneaky, skulking brush. He was certainly not about to tolerate the presence of a vagrant cat on his building site.

With a drive usually reserved for his sexual couplings, Cyril took off after the cat, forgetting that I had leashed him to one of the supports of the scaffolding as a compromise with Yankel after the paw-prints-in-the-concrete incident.. Cyril’s acceleration came to an ignominious halt as the leash tautened and his collar bit into his throat. He rose horizontally into the air and seemed to levitate for a second or two before crashing onto his back. The scaffolding swayed drunkenly and a bucket of wet plaster plummeted to the ground, landing inches from the stunned dog. Yankel held onto a protruding roof beam and, cursing madly, groped blindly for the first weapon he could find. His claw hammer, a massive, cast-metal monster, sailed through the air and struck Cyril heavily on the back leg. Cyril cried out in pain, leapt up and fled. This time, he brought the entire construction, scaffolding, buckets of plaster and Yankel, down in a seething mass around him.

Ignoring Yankel, who had picked himself up and, cursing bitterly, was wiping gobs of plaster off his pants, I rushed to Cyril. He was yelping pathetically and his injured leg hung limply. When I touched his leg, deep moans welled up from inside him and he sank his head into my arms. Without a word to Yankel, I unleashed Cyril from the pipe of scaffolding he was trailing and carried him to the sick bay. The nurse, not at all happy at the presence of a dog in her impeccably antiseptic clinic, hurriedly arranged us a lift to the vet in the nearby town.

It was evening by the time Cyril and I returned to the kibbutz, X-rays in hand and shiny, new plaster on Cyril’s hind leg. Distracted by the constant, hysterical tattoo of Cyril’s nails on his metal examination table, the vet had given Cyril too much sedative. He lolled in my arms like a drunk and licked my face earnestly whenever it came within licking distance. His breath was thick and cloying.

After a couple of days recuperation at home, Cyril took to the paths of the kibbutz, hobbling gamely on three legs and displaying his white cast of courage for all to see. He wore his injury like a medal. He may not have won his skirmish with Yankel but he had put up a damn good fight. Not even the cats could shake Cyril’s self-satisfied equanimity.

I returned to work the day after the incident, leaving the injured Cyril at home. Yankel had cleaned up the mess by then, re-assembled the scaffolding and laid the concrete verandah in my absence. I went to work silently, tiling the bathroom of the house with Italian ceramic tiles, the latest craze on the kibbutz, while Yankel continued plastering the exterior. Neither of us spoke. The next morning, I arrived at work to find bare, cinder-block wall where I had tiled the previous day.

“You forgot the water pipe,” Yankel muttered and kept on working. He was right. That was the extent of our conversation for the day.

We continued that way for several days. Yankel would sooner have donned a tutu and danced on his toes than apologize and I, angry and upset, was waiting for him to make the first move. Neither Yankel nor I was much of a talker and banter had never been a feature of our work environment. But there had always been an easy camaraderie between us. That was now gone. We worked in sullen silence.

It must have been a week or so after the incident that Yankel came to visit. I had returned to my room after supper and was drinking a beer on the porch, considering my options for the evening. Cyril was lying at my feet gnawing at his cast. The novelty had worn off by then and the cast, muddy and shredding at the edges, had begun to irritate him.

Suddenly, Cyril sensed something. He stood up, glowering in the direction of the dark silhouettes of the pecan trees that separated my room from the parking lot, His tail quivered at half mast and a throaty growl bubbled up from inside him. A shape materialized out of the blackness but remained standing in the shadows of the trees. Cyril recognized Yankel before I did. His growling bravado evaporated and he retreated in a flash through the open door to the safety of the room.

“Who is it?” I asked in the direction of the shadows.

“Me.” On hearing Yankel’s voice, I recognized his stocky, powerful shape.

“Why don’t you use the path like normal people?”

“I was in the shed.” The store room where we kept our building equipment was the other side of the parking lot. He had cut through the trees to get to my room.

“So, why are you just standing there?”

“Will he attack me?”

I laughed at the absurdity of it. Cyril was cowering under my desk while Yankel, the ex-wrestler, the strongest man I had ever met, was too scared of him to leave the safety of the trees.

“I hope so.”

He had started moving towards the room but stopped as I said it. Humor was lost on Yankel.

“Come on,” I said. “He won’t touch you.”

Yankel approached the room cautiously. There was something different about him. His movements, normally blunt and staccato, were loose, vague even. Then I saw that he had a bottle in one hand, gripping it by the neck as if to ward off attack by Cyril.

Yankel had never visited me in my room and I certainly had never seen him drunk. I couldn’t recall ever seeing him even have a drink. It was a night of firsts.

He held out the bottle as he climbed the couple of steps to the verandah. I looked at the label. It was Slivovitz, a plum brandy much beloved by eastern Europeans of his generation. I thought it was vile.

“The real thing,” Yankel said proudly.

Cyril, still hiding in the room, yapped at the sound of Yankel’s voice. It was a hybrid sound, half warning, half protest. I got up and fetched some plastic cups from the room, closing the mesh mosquito door behind me. I figured it would be enough to keep the adversaries apart, though Cyril had been known to charge right through the mesh when the feeling moved him. He still sported the scar on his snout from the last time he had done it.

Yankel sat down in a garden chair facing the room. Presumably he wanted fair warning if Cyril came bursting through the mosquito mesh. I sat facing him, looking out over the dark, shapeless trees. We drank Slivovitz and I smoked cheap kibbutz cigarettes. The plum brandy tasted surprisingly good. I knew there had to be a purpose to the visit and let him take his time.

“You know,” he said finally, just when I began to consider the possibility that there wasn’t in fact a purpose, “I don’t … I mean … dogs, you know. I don’t really like them.”

“Ahuh,” I agreed gravely, as if something profound had been uttered. I took a long, foul drag on my Dubek cigarette, spitting out stray pieces of unidentified organic matter.

“I was in the camps, you know.” He said it in an off-hand sort of way. He might have asked me to hammer in some nails in the same, flat tone.

I nodded.

“The dogs there, they weren’t like … your dog.” He gesticulated vaguely in the direction of the room, from which came a persistent, rumbling growl like the constant buzz of a bee hive.

“That’s when I started building. They took me to Auschwitz, well Birkenau really. We built the factory for IG Farben. I had never built before in Poland but I found that I had a skill for it. And of course I was very strong. Even after four years of the ghetto and the labor camp and then Birkenau, I was very strong. That’s what kept me alive. Everyone else was … gone. My family. Gone.”

That was more than I had heard him say in an entire day. He spoke casually, a trifle boastfully even. But the fact that he was stringing together full sentences, one after the other, indicated a drive to communicate that I had never known in him.

“There were dogs there. Everywhere there were dogs. Big, ugly things on chains. They would pull on the chains trying to get us and the guards, yemach shemam, would laugh. Sometimes, they let them go, just for the fun of it. Just for … for sport. I saw Jews torn apart by the dogs.”

Yankel gulped down a mouthful of the sweet, astringent plum brandy. He shuddered as it seared its way down, then smiled ruefully and held up his cup.

“Lehayim. This reminds me of parties we used to have before the war. We weren’t really drinkers, you know, though we thought we were.. Not like the goyim. The Poles, they could drink. Anti-Semitic bastards. But I enjoyed a drink in the old days.

“Anyway, we were building the factory. It was winter. People were dying from the cold. There were bodies lying in the snow at the building site. They just left them there.

“I was working inside, thank God. Preparing the foundations for the boilers. It was still cold, of course, but not nearly as bad as outside. I wasn’t well that day. I don’t remember what was wrong with me but I wasn’t thinking straight. I found a … a corner, a little niche downstairs that was isolated and I sat down. Just for a moment, for a rest.

“Next thing I knew, I was waking up from a sleep. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping. It couldn’t have been … well, maybe a few minutes. So, I woke up and there in front of me was a guard, one of the Ukrainians, yemach shemo, with a dog. A big, horrible brute. The Ukrainian, I mean. The dog was even worse”

He smiled again. A smile that creased his mouth but came nowhere near his eyes. A touch of humor from Yankel. Another first.

“I could smell him from where I was lying, well, crouching really by now. And his spit showered all over me. He was that close and slobbering as he tugged at the chain. I started the usual song and dance in my best German. How sorry I was and it wouldn’t happen again and I was looking for something I dropped in the corner. He just looked at me, the Ukrainian. I knew him well. He’d been on the guard detail for a few months. They said he had been in Treblinka before that. Once I saw him and his dog play with a man, trying to herd him like a sheep, until he ran into the electric fence and killed himself. The guard thought it was a big joke. He gave the dog a biscuit afterwards. I would have killed for that dog biscuit.”

Yankel paused for breath and a drink. He seemed to have surprised himself with his garrulousness. Or maybe he was just drunk. He looked vulnerable, which is not something one would normally have said about him. And he was making a big dent in the Slivovitz.

“He bent down slowly, the Ukrainian, and slid the chain off the dog. Pulled it over his head, like this.” He stretched the arm that wasn’t holding the cup of plum brandy over the top of his head and demonstrated the chain coming off.

“The dog was onto me in a second. He grabbed me by the ear. He was wet from the snow and his stinking fur was all over me. The noises in my ear as he tore at it like a piece of meat were terrible. I tried to push him off but I couldn’t. He was very heavy and I wasn’t strong that day. I couldn’t move. The pain was awful.”

Yankel sloshed the brandy around in his cup and stared fixedly at it. He was talking as much to himself as to me. He had clearly forgotten about the pampered canine in the room who, having been ignored for too long, had ventured out from under the desk and was standing behind the mosquito door with his muzzle pressed up cautiously against the mesh.

“I was lucky that the ear came off. Or a big chunk of it anyway. Otherwise the dog would have just kept on eating, I suppose. But he had my ear in his mouth and he lost interest in me. He was playing with my ear like it was a piece of meat. A piece of Jew meat.

“The guard also seemed to lose interest in me. There was no-one else down there. Just him and me and the dog. So, maybe he wasn’t inspired without an audience. Usually, when they killed or tortured us it was to impress the other guards. To show off. But down there in the boiler room he had no-one to show off to. So, he put the chain back over the dog’s head and pulled him away. The dog still had my ear in his mouth and blood was running down his jaws.

“That was it.” Yankel looked up.

“The Ukrainian didn’t say anything to me. He just walked off with his dog and my ear. I went outside and put snow on my ear to stop the pain and the bleeding. I was sure it would get infected and I’d die. But it didn’t. It healed.”

Instinctively, he touched the creased, shapeless blob where his left ear used to be. I looked away. I had examined it surreptitiously many times over the years but to look at it now it seemed too personal. Too much of an intrusion.

We sat in silence for a while, drinking our Slivovitz. I felt strangely put-upon. I think I preferred Yankel as an enigma. Knowing conferred obligations and I didn’t want to feel obliged to Yankel.

From my youth, I had been a Holocaust groupie. My curiosity was not a Jewish involvement of the sort that takes youth delegations to the death camps every year with Israeli flags and subliminal political messages. I was, I must confess, a lot more interested in the killers than in the victims. There was no mystery, no puzzle, in being led like sheep to the slaughter. Sure, there was tragedy and pathos in the Jewish story but few questions. The Nazis, on the other hand, were a riddle that I returned to compulsively. What was it that made normal men and women into beasts? What confluence of events and circumstances did it take? Was every person capable of making the leap? And the clincher: Could Jews become Nazis?

I would gladly have sat all night listening to Yankel’s stories. But to do so would make me privy to his secrets; it would give me a stake, however small, in his being. It would change the tenor of the comfortable working partnership that we had built up over several years. In short, we ran the risk of becoming friends.

I drank up and smoked, feeling the limp cylinders diminish in my fingers as I dragged on them. Eventually, Yankel yawned, stood up and left, taking what remained of the Slivovitz with him and acknowledging the intimacy that we had shared with a curt nod.

Cyril was scratching at the mesh. I let him out of the room and he hobbled to the edge of the verandah, barking derisively in the direction that Yankel had gone. I let him bark. I remembered a saying we had taunted each other with as kids. “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Cyril’s barks would never hurt Yankel. There was nothing more to hurt.



++++



My first intimation of danger was a low, throaty rumble from Cyril’s end of the bed. Surfacing from a deep sleep, I propped myself up on one arm and glanced down to where he normally lay like a deadweight between my feet. It was not yet a full-scale alert. Cyril was still curled up in sleeping position though his head was raised and staring fixedly at the door. I could feel his tension through the thin, summer blanket.

Cyril had not yet taken an irreversible position on the intrusion. Though he was growling, his tail vibrated in pole position, ready to beat out a greeting for a welcome visitor. It could go either way. Cyril was usually disappointed by late-night visits on the kibbutz. They often began with Cyril being absentmindedly petted but soon degenerated into petting of a different sort. Invariably, he found himself being tossed around on the bed like a buoy in a storm and eventually dumped onto the floor, where he would lie in undignified, offended silence. I got the feeling that Cyril would have preferred that I did my couplings elsewhere and in private.

Sex may not have been what inspired the socialist founding mothers and fathers of the kibbutz movement but it sure kept the rest of us going. Through some fortuitous stroke of luck (it was just too good to have been the product of design), kibbutzim had become a magnet for young, careless volunteers from all parts of the world. They lived simply, two or three to a room, worked wherever they were assigned, drank prodigiously and fucked gloriously. My kibbutz specialized in lanky, randy Danes and Swedes, with some dour Germans and English roses thrown in for good measure. That, too, was not planned. I could just as easily have ended up with the tight-zipped fundamentalist Baptists who were the staple of the volunteer corps on a kibbutz down the road. But, happily, I found myself with the Scandinavians.

Whatever it was that had alerted Cyril, I couldn’t hear it. The dense silence of the night enveloped the room. I sat up and listened, straining to hear something. Nothing. Not even the muffled shutting of car doors from the adjacent parking lot or the regular revelry of tipsy volunteers as they diligently trashed the flower beds while attempting to keep to the dark paths.

And then I heard it. The squeaking of rusty hinges as the mesh mosquito door was slowly opened. It was a sound that was almost as familiar to me as my own breathing, but now, in the dead of night, it grated like fingernails dragged over polystyrene.

My initial annoyance at the intrusion quickly yielded to a hard-on and tingling thoughts of sneaking, anonymous, groping-in-the-dark sex. I glanced at the alarm clock, which flickered “3:21” in luminous green. Instinctively, I did the arithmetic. I had barely been asleep four hours and had less than two to go. It would have to be a quickie.

The lights from the parking lot threw a glow into the room. Cyril was standing on the bed now, his body rigid like steel rope. I put my hand on his back to silence him and felt him throb with anticipation. I pulled him into my arms and held him against me as, together, we watched the door handle rotate.

The door cracked open and a hand materialized. It patted the wall next to the door as if searching for the light switch. Then the door opened further and I saw a tall, featureless figure, outlined against the light of the naked bulb on the porch. It was not the shape of a female, certainly no female that I wanted to meet.

In the doorway stood a man, unfamiliar and menacing.

My hard-on depleted. The hot, pulsing anticipation of seconds before dissolved in a cold rush of dread as, in a sudden flash, I recalled the events of the previous afternoon.

There had been a terrorist incident not far from the kibbutz. I first heard about it when I came across a scrum of women behind the communal kitchen, huddled around a transistor radio. From where I sat on the rattling tractor, I was unable to hear what was being said on the radio, but the taut stillness of the women radiated bad news. I jumped off the tractor and joined the group.

A bunch of terrorists had hijacked a bus outside Haifa a couple of hours before and driven it, with the passengers inside, for about 50 kilometers down the coastal road, pursued by an armada of police and military vehicles. Determined to prevent the bus from entering the heavily-populated central plain that begins just north of Tel Aviv, the army had prepared a roadblock on the highway at the junction with the road leading to the kibbutz. We all knew the junction well. It was less than ten kilometers from where we were standing.

The bus had attempted to run the roadblock. It had punctured its tires on the sharp spikes of the concertina-like obstacles on the road and slammed into a group of military vehicles by the side of the highway. Commandos had stormed the stricken bus, lobbing tear-gas grenades into it and shouting to the passengers to stay down. There was a brief, fierce shoot-out. The radio reported dead and wounded among the passengers, who were being evacuated to hospital. Initial reports said that three terrorists had been killed. But a passenger interviewed by the radio said that there had been four or even five hijackers.

After listening for a while, I continued on my way to the store-room, where I parked the tractor and off-loaded equipment. As I was locking up, a military jeep pulled up beside me. Two grim-faced officers hopped out, leaving the motor running and the canvas doors of the jeep flapping open. They asked me where the kibbutz secretary could be found and I pointed them down the path towards the low, nondescript building that served as our administrative center.

Kibbutz bush telegraph swung into action. The officers had barely entered the secretary’s office before the purpose of their visit was generally known and even disputed. A small crowd gathered on the grass separating the administrative center from the dining room. One, possibly two, terrorists were thought to have escaped the carnage. The army was mounting a massive search mission but it didn’t have the manpower to post guards at every settlement. We were instructed to go onto emergency footing.

The rest of the afternoon was a tumult of activity. Vehicles were sent to bring in the workers from the orchards and the fish ponds. Guards were posted at the entrance to the kibbutz, children were gathered in the children’s houses and air-raid shelters were unlocked and provisioned. I was tasked with plugging the holes in the kibbutz fence. Gathering together a group of volunteers, I hitched a trailer onto the tractor and loaded up with rolls of fencing, barbed wire and fence poles.

It was a lost cause. Before the war of 1967, the kibbutz had been regarded as a border settlement, its outlying orchards slap up against the border with what was then the West Bank of Jordan. The place was still littered with scraps of barbed-wire, disused bunkers and even the odd tank trap. Relics from a previous era. But security had lapsed in the intervening years and the kibbutz fence had been breached in numerous places. Several meters of fencing had disappeared entirely in the gloomy, wooded area separating ourselves from the larger, neighboring kibbutz where our children attended high school. On the other side of the kibbutz, a large opening gave easy access to the bus stop in the adjoining village.

We did what we could but it wasn’t much. Erecting a good fence takes time. Mostly, we drank the beer that one of the volunteers had thoughtfully brought with him and smoked cheap cigarettes. Cyril entertained himself by chasing birds.

It was almost dark by the time we returned to the parking lot, which by now resembled the staging area for a military campaign. The armory had been opened and men milled around with sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders. Two pickups had been allocated to the ad hoc response team and they stood at the ready in the parking lot, with doors open, motors running and headlights lit. An ambulance was also parked there. I had never seen the place in the grip of such intensity and purpose. War brings out the best in the Israeli.

After a tense, distracted supper, the kibbutz security officer handed me an M-16 with two, full magazines which were taped together for rapid replacement.

“You know how to operate this thing?” he asked.

I nodded gravely. Those were the days before my military service but I had occasionally guarded groups of volunteers and ulpan students on their excursions to the desert or the nature reserves in the north of the country. I had even shot off a couple of rounds in practice.

“Well, God help us all if you have to use it.”

I didn’t much like his tone but I had to agree with the sentiment.

We were visited later that night by the general commanding the central sector. He was one of us, born on the kibbutz to a couple with five sons. He was already a local icon, the best and brightest of the first generation of kibbutz kids and destined to go far, it was said. Prime minister material. I had worked with him a few times in the fish ponds during his days off from the army and had found him arrogant and condescending. Still, it was comforting to have one of our own in charge at a time like this.

“I hope you know how to use that,” he remarked to me in passing as he strode to his car at the end of his visit, trailed by a clutch of officers in flak jackets. It was nice to be appreciated.

That had been a few hours earlier.

With the terrorist framed in the doorway, I reached gingerly down for the M-16 that I had casually discarded on the floor by my bed before going to sleep. Cyril seemed to have understood the gravity of the situation. He had stopped his growling at the first sign of real danger and flopped, soft and warm, in my lap. The thought passed through my terrified mind that he had fainted, but more likely he was simply playing dead.

The terrorist just stood there. Those who have never been face to face with a terrorist are probably unaware of just how much can actually flash through one’s mind in the space of a second or two. I couldn’t see a weapon on him but had no doubt that he would kill me with his bare hands if he had to. Years before I had seen a TV report on Palestinian fighters training in Syria. As part of some sort of initiation ceremony, they had bitten off the heads of live snakes and strangled puppies with their hands. At the time, I scorned it as ridiculous; the huffing and puffing of primitives who didn’t have what it takes to fly F-16s or fire precision-guided missiles.

Having a snake biter right on your doorstep is a different proposition entirely, however. With the only puppy in the room pretending to be a fur rug, I had little doubt who would be singled out for strangling.

I groped desperately for the rifle with my left hand while attempting to remain in a sitting position and appear motionless. I had no idea what the terrorist could see from the doorway but assumed that any sudden movement would set him off on a murderous rampage. Luckily the bed was low and my flailing fingers eventually collided with the cold, hard metal of the rifle.

I moved my hand slowly along the length of the weapon until I felt the safety lock and, with one finger, clicked it upwards into what I hoped was the single-round position. Then I ran my hand back down until I was grasping the plastic flash shield. Gingerly, I bent my elbow and tested the weight. I couldn’t remember whether I had inserted the taped magazines or simply tossed them on the floor with the rifle. One thing, was becoming clear. There was no way that I would be able to lift the M-16, insert a magazine, cock it and fire without alerting the murderer in my doorway to something amiss.

He didn’t move. Just about anything would have been preferable to his still, looming presence and the deathly quiet in the room. Well, not exactly deathly. I swear I could hear Cyril snoring gently.

The only way to do it, I decided, would be in one deafening, cataclysmic movement. Clutching the rifle inches off the floor in my left hand, I breathed in deeply and flexed my leg muscles, feeling the weight of Cyril in my lap. My heart was pounding and I felt like someone had cut off my oxygen supply. My body was emitting so much heat, I must have been glowing in the dark. Then, with what was intended to be a simian roar, I sprung up onto the bed, catapulting Cyril onto the floor, and lifted the M-16 to chest height.

It appeared that I had taken the terrorist by surprise. He stumbled backwards and blurted out something in a surprisingly squeaky voice. It sounded like a name, “Janie” or “Jeanie,” though it could just as easily have been “Jihad.” I wasn’t about to stop and find out.

I slapped the underside of the rifle with my right hand, feeling the magazine thump satisfyingly into my palm. I pushed hard and it clicked into place. Swapping hands, I held the rifle by the magazine and groped for the bolt with my left hand. Finding it, I tugged it sharply towards me and felt the easy, well-oiled motion as it slid backwards into the breech, ejecting a cartridge.

By this time, the terrorist had disappeared from view, though I heard him thrashing around on the porch. What happened next was entirely out of character, but I was a fear-crazed, testosterone-charged coward with a loaded gun. I leaped off the bed straight onto Cyril, who yelped pitifully and scurried for safety underneath my desk. Then I charged out of the room, the M-16 preceding me at waist height like a monstrous phallus.

The terrorist was at the bottom of the stairs and starting down the path. He must have hurt himself because he was dragging one leg. I hesitated momentarily. I had never shot anybody before, never mind in the back. Never mind that he was injured and not carrying any visible weapon. To my meager credit, I didn’t aim. Holding the rifle on my hip, macho-style, I squeezed the trigger.

The retort was deafening. The rifle recoiled painfully into my hip and then swung upwards, glancing off my chest. In fright, I let go of it and it clattered to the ground. I looked at my victim. He had fallen and was lying face down in the path, his legs shaking spastically. In the piercing silence that followed the shot, I heard him sobbing.

No, I didn’t feel like Cyril after his triumph over Beauty. I felt numb, stunned. I felt as if I were drained of blood.

People came running. First my next-door neighbor, pulling on his pants, and then the guards, who had been patrolling nearby. They crouched around the terrorist and turned him over. I stood frozen on the verandah, the rifle at my feet, I couldn’t see the terrorist’s face but I could hear him as his sobs became strangled words and before long he was shouting. It sounded oddly, horribly, like Hebrew.

One of the guards came over to me and picked up the rifle. With the barrel pointing upwards, he cocked it twice in quick succession and then flipped the safety catch on.

“You’d better go inside,” he said awkwardly.

I nodded and remained standing where I was.

He pointed at my groin. I looked down to see my penis in full retreat and a harsh, red welt where the rifle had kicked into me. I was stark naked.

I entered the room and sat dully on the bed, my bare feet on the cool tiles of the floor. Cyril left his refuge under the table and curled up between my feet, licking my toes in commiseration. Outside, I could hear the voices of other people joining the fray and the insistent yelling of the man I had shot.

A little later, the kibbutz secretary came into the room, accompanied by the guard who had emptied the rifle and my neighbor. I pulled the blanket over my lap to hide my nakedness.

“You OK?” he asked.

I nodded.

“He’s OK too. You didn’t hit him.”

I was too drained to say anything but a wave of relief licked over me. My body drooped and tears welled up in my eyes.

“He must’ve fallen out of fright,” the secretary added. “You sure shook him up.”

“Is he … is he one of the guys from the bus?” I asked my voice surprisingly strong and controlled.

There was an awkward pause before the guard took over.

“We don’t think so. Looks like he’s one of ours… He says he’s from Netanya.”

The intruder was escorted to the dining room, where he was soothed with cups of coffee and biscuits. I remained in my room in the company of some friends. We were like two bloodied boxers after a bout, separated but obsessively scrutinizing the actions of the other just minutes before.

Apparently, he had met one of the American ulpan girls in town earlier in the day. She had told him her name, Jeanie, and which kibbutz she was on before it dawned on her that he was not the sort of guy her mother would approve of. He was what we derogatorily called an ars, a smug punk, often a petty hustler, indigenous to the streets of urban Israel. Jeanie had given him the brush-off but he had apparently decided that what the force of his personality had not achieved during the day, some other form of force would achieve late at night.

Seeing guards on the main gate, he had driven a little further, parked in the shadows beside the road and hopped over the fence. The first room he had come across was mine. All he had wanted, at three o’clock in the morning with the kibbutz on high alert, was to ask where he could find Jeanie.

There was a police inquiry a few hours later. Shooting people was taken seriously in those days, before two rounds of intifada elasticized the definition of terrorism and gave carte blanche to any idiot with a gun. I told of how I had chased the intruder from my room and fired a warning shot into the air as a last resort, after he repeatedly ignored my calls to halt.

For once, I didn't allow my propensity to humanize Cyril get the better of me. It was, after all, a serious incident and the two cops questioning did not seem to be the types who would appreciate doggie humor. So, I left him out of my version of the events and brought him a bone from the kitchen instead. He was happy.