Is Normal?
Don’t be macho, she said. The Palestinian militant group Hamas had tossed a rocket into a crater in the Negev Desert last night and for this Hadassah wanted us to cancel our expedition to the south. The crater, Maktesh Ramon, was located 70 miles south of our destination for that evening, the desert city of Arad, but that was too close for the comfort of Elahna’s mother. She warned me that Avi and Alex and the men of the family disregard danger, make a big pose out of ignoring it. But I agree with them, I told her. Unless it’s a major assault – which happened five months later, as Hamas showered Israel with 1,506 rockets over eight days – I just don’t believe terrorists should be granted the power to affect my plans. As the saying goes after 9/11, then they win.
No, you have to be smart, she said. Relax, I told her, don’t worry. Hadassah and I stood in the kitchen in Rishon LeZion, where Sima concocts her feasts and a flat-screen TV rises by remote control out of the marble-coated island. We drank instant coffee. Lila the mad dog barked at ghosts in the backyard and the early morning sun slanted through the kitchen’s wall-high windows, setting the floor afire. Now Hadassah had a story to tell, this one about an incident in Detroit where she lived in 1961 after she’d left Israel to study on a Fulbright Scholarship… everyone had said stay at home, especially her brother Yitzhak, but it was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up and…and normally I wait quietly as my mother-in-law trolls out her snaggle-toothed tales, but I’d heard the Detroit Saga many, many times before. Abruptly, I cut her off. Please, Hadassah, I know. Detroit, the danger, the neighbors, the poor black people, the perception of risk, the reality of risk, believe me, I know.
No, you don’t understand, she insisted, and she reset the world to 1956. She’s in the Army, it’s the Sinai campaign, there are these cardboard tanks…
Elahna and I went upstairs to confab with Avi. Not nine in the morning, he laughed, and Hadassah’s in a panic. Look, relax. The election’s tomorrow in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood probably asked Hamas to shoot a rocket at Israel. Attack the Jews, always a vote-getter. Besides, there’s a greater chance of getting in a car accident on the road to the Dead Sea – so, what, you’re going to stay home because of that, too?
No, we weren’t. Before going south, however, we brought Hadassah back to Jerusalem for an outing at the Machanah Yehuda souk. We escorted her through the market’s long corridor, past shelves of bread and fish, and into dim, alleyway stores stocked with sacks of colorful spices, nuts and dried fruit. Mounds of cherries were going for a buck a pound, the bumper crop caused by a cold snap last fall. For lunch we ate kubba, pockets of rice dough stuffed with herbs and meat. Hadassah said that she used to meet her boyfriend Nesh in this very souk – Nesh being short for a long Russian name no one could pronounce. He drove a red Vespa, she recalled, and she loved him and asked him to come with her to America, but he declined. Why, I asked, what did he say? Wouldn’t you know it, this story I wanted to hear in all its juicy, timeless detail and she clammed up.
Maybe I deserved that for cutting her off in Avi’s kitchen, for not listening for something new in her old, tiresome tale. Life, sometimes, seems like a series of frustrating conversations. No one says what they really mean. No one hears what is really said.
We took Hadassah to her sister’s and pledged on our hearts to be careful; she suppressed, I think, another parable. Then we drove east out of Jerusalem on Route 1, on a highway paralleling the Wall, also known as the Security Barrier, which runs around and through the West Bank. When the road surmounted a hill, the land appeared in all its epic barrenness, a desert expanse traced with housing clusters and scrubby ridges. Soon the houses disappeared and our car slipped through a sand-scrubbed landscape that reminded me of stretches around Lake Mead in Nevada. The place seemed ravaged – the result of overgrazing? Neglect, abandonment? We came to a stop, idled in traffic, and then pulled up to a military checkpoint. I rolled down my driver’s side window and gulped dry, hot air. A silent boy-soldier leaned forward and gave us maybe a five-second going over. He leaned back and granted us passage with a discreet wave of his hand, not a dismissive flick, but it seemed calculated for intimidating effect, a practiced wave by a hand existing miles from the young mind that propelled it. His non-expression didn’t change.
“We’ve just been profiled,” stated Elahna.
Pulling duty in the West Bank is a dehumanizing experience both for detained Palestinians and the IDF soldiers who man checkpoints and walk patrols, according to former Israeli soldier Oded Na’aman, co-editor of a book of testimonies by soldiers who have served in the Occupied Territories. (Territories – the word makes me think of Indian Territories, of Apaches in cowboy movies skittering across mesas, the White Man ever encroaching.) To aggressively surveil and be surveilled – each state of being is thoroughly unnatural; the requirements of surveillance subvert and corrupt even the most respectful, everyday checkpoint encounters. Better, in such circumstances, to tuck one’s humanity away and hope it won’t shrivel too much in the shadows. Better to seem invulnerable.
The thing about the Israeli occupation/presence (you choose) in the West Bank is its amorphous nature. The why of it is well known, thoroughly documented and argued over, but the what of it, the shifting details, remains a hard matter to grasp for foreigners and American Jews and, I suspect, many Israelis.
For instance, the several hundred IDF checkpoints aren’t just set up at key travel intersections in and out of the West Bank. Over time they’ve become established inside the West Bank; many are fixed, and many migrate enigmatically from place to place, sowing uncertainty. Israeli soldiers also patrol West Bank towns and frequently search buildings and homes for weapons and bomb supplies. The Palestinian Authority has been granted political autonomy with limited policing powers, but the Israeli Army constantly moves throughout the region, making itself known, asking for papers and deciding who can pass and who cannot. Strictly speaking, the IDF is not in charge of the West Bank, but it does exert a strategic form of control that, because it’s implemented by human beings, can seem arbitrary. It’s not an occupation, and it is. It's an abnormal fact of life.
(Several months later, Elahna and I saw the Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers in a theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The film primarily consists of interviews with six former leaders of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service responsible for intelligence gathering in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. To varying degrees, the men expressed regret for tragic events and, uniformly, they criticized Israeli politicians for not vigorously pursuing peace with the Palestinians. You leave such a job, said one, and you become a liberal – “you turn left,” he said, grinning. As we departed the theater, we overheard an Israeli woman state in Hebrew to her companion, “Why do the Americans have to see this?”)
There it was, the Dead Sea! Some call it the Salt Sea, because it’s ten times as salty as regular sea water. Some call it the Stinking Sea, and on a downhill stretch Elahna and I got a hearty pulse of sulphur in our noses. Zooming south along the 42-mile length of the vast inland lake, we took a break at a pullover in Ein Gedi. This became getting ice cream at a shed. Became a stroll toward the sea, became let’s go down that steep incline to the water’s edge. There, on a strip of muddy sand colonized by salt-encrusted stones and coral-like, isometric crystals (rock salt), we joined a scattering of mellow folk. Some stood on the shore, others floated with surreal ease in the ultra-buoyant, mineral-dense waters.
A young couple slathered each other with Dead Sea mud, black gunk containing magnesium, calcium, bromide and potassium. Mud treatment is considered therapeutic for rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, a health benefit touted by the Dead Sea Research Center and purveyors of authentic Dead Sea mud sealed in plastic packets. Just nip the corner and squeeze. The mud man wore a swimsuit, crocs and porkpie hat; the mud woman, barefoot with hair bunned, hit a sexy pose in a white bikini scrawled with pink hibiscus flowers. It was something out of National Geographic: primitive tribesmen enact purification rites.
We stood 1,300 feet below sea level, the lowest spot on the planet’s surface. The air down there was a salty brew, as well as oxygen-rich and bursting with barometric pressure, factors deemed to aid respiration – and indeed it felt good to breathe, especially taking it in. I waded to my ankles. This became dipping my hands; they gently tingled, as if tied to electric prods. Became throwing my shirt and belt to my wife on shore, became immersing myself completely. In this stinky, salty, dead sea – nothing lives here, except for a few daredevil algae and bacteria – I bobbed like a champagne cork and couldn’t stop smiling.
It would be hard to drown in these waters, as long as you didn’t take too many bitter sips and remembered to stare skyward and not down into the sterile depths. I realized that I was relatively safe here – the Life Sea? You could toss in a baby…no, bad idea…and now I’m reminded of my father’s attempt to teach me how to swim by throwing me off the side of his fishing boat, several miles off the Cape Cod coast. Madly I thrashed my limbs in the salty, crisscrossing waves and, cause not producing desired effect, began to sink; he fished me out with the stubby end of the gaff hook that he used to spear and haul blue fish into the boat.
“Mate” this and “mate” that – Aussies batted words back and forth behind me. I dangled my feet, still strapped in sandals, above the waterline and laced my fingers behind my head – the one millionth tourist to do the “lounge chair” in this very spot. I rolled on my side like an exuberant otter; I pushed myself down and popped back up. Elahna sat on a clump of rock salt. She didn’t like how the salt water stung the bug bites on her ankles, and she remembered too well her first trip to the Dead Sea as a four year-old. Like mad her scratches had smarted! And that awful burning between her legs…she’d cried and cried that day. So now she sat and took photos and asked a middle-aged Russian man what he was going to do with the crazy sculpture of salt he’d hefted from the shore. “Bathtub,” he said, and made a chopping motion. “Dead Sea at home.”
Down the hill came an obese woman, an aged babushka in flowered swimsuit and swim cap bedecked in rubber flowers, the kind Esther Williams wore in those 1930s water ballets. Her grandson, I presume, held one of her fleshy arms; in the other she gripped a multi-pronged cane. Behind them, another man carried a wheelchair, perhaps for the return trip uphill. The two men cajoled her to the mud and then into the water; she got about ten feet off shore and that was that. She plopped onto a submerged rock and wouldn’t budge. The water rose just above her thighs and she commenced splashing herself and rubbing it on.
The grandson, chest-deep in the Sea, beseeched her to join him. “Babushka,” he said. “Please, babushka.” She replied not at all, didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if she was content on the rock or frozen with fear. “Babushka,” the boy called, “come with us, please.” Nothing doing. I wanted to call out, too, root her on – you can do it, Babushka, yes you can! Alas, we didn’t stay long enough to find out if she ever left her rock and allowed herself to float and bob like a champagne cork, to be free of her heavy burden for a moment or two.
Halfway up the hill, I desalinated myself under a shower rig. Nearby, a blonde Russian woman held the hand of a wet little girl in a swimsuit, maybe five years old. The mother looked about, distressed, as her child bawled. The girl cried and cried, like an air raid siren. Her limbs shook with the exertion. Her eyes were smashed closed, as if seeing would only make everything worse. Elahna approached them and in simple English explained the situation with the nasty salt water. The scratches, the bug bites, the stinging inside. The not knowing what was happening. The not knowing why. She made a gentle, pointing gesture at her own crotch; this produced a look of even greater alarm from the mother. Elahna kept talking, with her most reassuring voice and warmest smile, kept talking as she has as a pediatrician to thousands of worried mothers, and the child’s sobbing soon abated into sniffles and the woman’s head began to nod up and down.
“Is normal?” she asked. “Is normal,” said my wife.
@ @ @
No, you have to be smart, she said. Relax, I told her, don’t worry. Hadassah and I stood in the kitchen in Rishon LeZion, where Sima concocts her feasts and a flat-screen TV rises by remote control out of the marble-coated island. We drank instant coffee. Lila the mad dog barked at ghosts in the backyard and the early morning sun slanted through the kitchen’s wall-high windows, setting the floor afire. Now Hadassah had a story to tell, this one about an incident in Detroit where she lived in 1961 after she’d left Israel to study on a Fulbright Scholarship… everyone had said stay at home, especially her brother Yitzhak, but it was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up and…and normally I wait quietly as my mother-in-law trolls out her snaggle-toothed tales, but I’d heard the Detroit Saga many, many times before. Abruptly, I cut her off. Please, Hadassah, I know. Detroit, the danger, the neighbors, the poor black people, the perception of risk, the reality of risk, believe me, I know.
No, you don’t understand, she insisted, and she reset the world to 1956. She’s in the Army, it’s the Sinai campaign, there are these cardboard tanks…
Elahna and I went upstairs to confab with Avi. Not nine in the morning, he laughed, and Hadassah’s in a panic. Look, relax. The election’s tomorrow in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood probably asked Hamas to shoot a rocket at Israel. Attack the Jews, always a vote-getter. Besides, there’s a greater chance of getting in a car accident on the road to the Dead Sea – so, what, you’re going to stay home because of that, too?
No, we weren’t. Before going south, however, we brought Hadassah back to Jerusalem for an outing at the Machanah Yehuda souk. We escorted her through the market’s long corridor, past shelves of bread and fish, and into dim, alleyway stores stocked with sacks of colorful spices, nuts and dried fruit. Mounds of cherries were going for a buck a pound, the bumper crop caused by a cold snap last fall. For lunch we ate kubba, pockets of rice dough stuffed with herbs and meat. Hadassah said that she used to meet her boyfriend Nesh in this very souk – Nesh being short for a long Russian name no one could pronounce. He drove a red Vespa, she recalled, and she loved him and asked him to come with her to America, but he declined. Why, I asked, what did he say? Wouldn’t you know it, this story I wanted to hear in all its juicy, timeless detail and she clammed up.
Maybe I deserved that for cutting her off in Avi’s kitchen, for not listening for something new in her old, tiresome tale. Life, sometimes, seems like a series of frustrating conversations. No one says what they really mean. No one hears what is really said.
We took Hadassah to her sister’s and pledged on our hearts to be careful; she suppressed, I think, another parable. Then we drove east out of Jerusalem on Route 1, on a highway paralleling the Wall, also known as the Security Barrier, which runs around and through the West Bank. When the road surmounted a hill, the land appeared in all its epic barrenness, a desert expanse traced with housing clusters and scrubby ridges. Soon the houses disappeared and our car slipped through a sand-scrubbed landscape that reminded me of stretches around Lake Mead in Nevada. The place seemed ravaged – the result of overgrazing? Neglect, abandonment? We came to a stop, idled in traffic, and then pulled up to a military checkpoint. I rolled down my driver’s side window and gulped dry, hot air. A silent boy-soldier leaned forward and gave us maybe a five-second going over. He leaned back and granted us passage with a discreet wave of his hand, not a dismissive flick, but it seemed calculated for intimidating effect, a practiced wave by a hand existing miles from the young mind that propelled it. His non-expression didn’t change.
“We’ve just been profiled,” stated Elahna.
Pulling duty in the West Bank is a dehumanizing experience both for detained Palestinians and the IDF soldiers who man checkpoints and walk patrols, according to former Israeli soldier Oded Na’aman, co-editor of a book of testimonies by soldiers who have served in the Occupied Territories. (Territories – the word makes me think of Indian Territories, of Apaches in cowboy movies skittering across mesas, the White Man ever encroaching.) To aggressively surveil and be surveilled – each state of being is thoroughly unnatural; the requirements of surveillance subvert and corrupt even the most respectful, everyday checkpoint encounters. Better, in such circumstances, to tuck one’s humanity away and hope it won’t shrivel too much in the shadows. Better to seem invulnerable.
The thing about the Israeli occupation/presence (you choose) in the West Bank is its amorphous nature. The why of it is well known, thoroughly documented and argued over, but the what of it, the shifting details, remains a hard matter to grasp for foreigners and American Jews and, I suspect, many Israelis.
For instance, the several hundred IDF checkpoints aren’t just set up at key travel intersections in and out of the West Bank. Over time they’ve become established inside the West Bank; many are fixed, and many migrate enigmatically from place to place, sowing uncertainty. Israeli soldiers also patrol West Bank towns and frequently search buildings and homes for weapons and bomb supplies. The Palestinian Authority has been granted political autonomy with limited policing powers, but the Israeli Army constantly moves throughout the region, making itself known, asking for papers and deciding who can pass and who cannot. Strictly speaking, the IDF is not in charge of the West Bank, but it does exert a strategic form of control that, because it’s implemented by human beings, can seem arbitrary. It’s not an occupation, and it is. It's an abnormal fact of life.
(Several months later, Elahna and I saw the Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers in a theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The film primarily consists of interviews with six former leaders of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service responsible for intelligence gathering in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. To varying degrees, the men expressed regret for tragic events and, uniformly, they criticized Israeli politicians for not vigorously pursuing peace with the Palestinians. You leave such a job, said one, and you become a liberal – “you turn left,” he said, grinning. As we departed the theater, we overheard an Israeli woman state in Hebrew to her companion, “Why do the Americans have to see this?”)
There it was, the Dead Sea! Some call it the Salt Sea, because it’s ten times as salty as regular sea water. Some call it the Stinking Sea, and on a downhill stretch Elahna and I got a hearty pulse of sulphur in our noses. Zooming south along the 42-mile length of the vast inland lake, we took a break at a pullover in Ein Gedi. This became getting ice cream at a shed. Became a stroll toward the sea, became let’s go down that steep incline to the water’s edge. There, on a strip of muddy sand colonized by salt-encrusted stones and coral-like, isometric crystals (rock salt), we joined a scattering of mellow folk. Some stood on the shore, others floated with surreal ease in the ultra-buoyant, mineral-dense waters.
A young couple slathered each other with Dead Sea mud, black gunk containing magnesium, calcium, bromide and potassium. Mud treatment is considered therapeutic for rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, a health benefit touted by the Dead Sea Research Center and purveyors of authentic Dead Sea mud sealed in plastic packets. Just nip the corner and squeeze. The mud man wore a swimsuit, crocs and porkpie hat; the mud woman, barefoot with hair bunned, hit a sexy pose in a white bikini scrawled with pink hibiscus flowers. It was something out of National Geographic: primitive tribesmen enact purification rites.
We stood 1,300 feet below sea level, the lowest spot on the planet’s surface. The air down there was a salty brew, as well as oxygen-rich and bursting with barometric pressure, factors deemed to aid respiration – and indeed it felt good to breathe, especially taking it in. I waded to my ankles. This became dipping my hands; they gently tingled, as if tied to electric prods. Became throwing my shirt and belt to my wife on shore, became immersing myself completely. In this stinky, salty, dead sea – nothing lives here, except for a few daredevil algae and bacteria – I bobbed like a champagne cork and couldn’t stop smiling.
It would be hard to drown in these waters, as long as you didn’t take too many bitter sips and remembered to stare skyward and not down into the sterile depths. I realized that I was relatively safe here – the Life Sea? You could toss in a baby…no, bad idea…and now I’m reminded of my father’s attempt to teach me how to swim by throwing me off the side of his fishing boat, several miles off the Cape Cod coast. Madly I thrashed my limbs in the salty, crisscrossing waves and, cause not producing desired effect, began to sink; he fished me out with the stubby end of the gaff hook that he used to spear and haul blue fish into the boat.
“Mate” this and “mate” that – Aussies batted words back and forth behind me. I dangled my feet, still strapped in sandals, above the waterline and laced my fingers behind my head – the one millionth tourist to do the “lounge chair” in this very spot. I rolled on my side like an exuberant otter; I pushed myself down and popped back up. Elahna sat on a clump of rock salt. She didn’t like how the salt water stung the bug bites on her ankles, and she remembered too well her first trip to the Dead Sea as a four year-old. Like mad her scratches had smarted! And that awful burning between her legs…she’d cried and cried that day. So now she sat and took photos and asked a middle-aged Russian man what he was going to do with the crazy sculpture of salt he’d hefted from the shore. “Bathtub,” he said, and made a chopping motion. “Dead Sea at home.”
Down the hill came an obese woman, an aged babushka in flowered swimsuit and swim cap bedecked in rubber flowers, the kind Esther Williams wore in those 1930s water ballets. Her grandson, I presume, held one of her fleshy arms; in the other she gripped a multi-pronged cane. Behind them, another man carried a wheelchair, perhaps for the return trip uphill. The two men cajoled her to the mud and then into the water; she got about ten feet off shore and that was that. She plopped onto a submerged rock and wouldn’t budge. The water rose just above her thighs and she commenced splashing herself and rubbing it on.
The grandson, chest-deep in the Sea, beseeched her to join him. “Babushka,” he said. “Please, babushka.” She replied not at all, didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if she was content on the rock or frozen with fear. “Babushka,” the boy called, “come with us, please.” Nothing doing. I wanted to call out, too, root her on – you can do it, Babushka, yes you can! Alas, we didn’t stay long enough to find out if she ever left her rock and allowed herself to float and bob like a champagne cork, to be free of her heavy burden for a moment or two.
Halfway up the hill, I desalinated myself under a shower rig. Nearby, a blonde Russian woman held the hand of a wet little girl in a swimsuit, maybe five years old. The mother looked about, distressed, as her child bawled. The girl cried and cried, like an air raid siren. Her limbs shook with the exertion. Her eyes were smashed closed, as if seeing would only make everything worse. Elahna approached them and in simple English explained the situation with the nasty salt water. The scratches, the bug bites, the stinging inside. The not knowing what was happening. The not knowing why. She made a gentle, pointing gesture at her own crotch; this produced a look of even greater alarm from the mother. Elahna kept talking, with her most reassuring voice and warmest smile, kept talking as she has as a pediatrician to thousands of worried mothers, and the child’s sobbing soon abated into sniffles and the woman’s head began to nod up and down.
“Is normal?” she asked. “Is normal,” said my wife.
@ @ @