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Isabel Maxwell consults for Apax Partners, Israel, and is a member of the Board of Directors of BackWeb Technologies. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the Peres Center for Peace & of the Board of the American Friends of the Soroka Medical Center of the Negev.
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By Isabel Maxwell
September 25, 2002
The day after the grim reaper came once again to Tel Aviv in the shape of a bomb inside a backpack on the back of the latest suicide bomber who had just boarded the #4 Dan bus at the intersection of Allenby and Montefiore streets, I was visiting New York from California - clambering aboard an up-town M2 bus on Lexington Avenue at 15th Street. The weather was wonderful. Probably the last balmy days before the fall chill descends on the city, heralding winter and the rains to come.
I had several pangs in my heart. I remember thinking very clearly that I knew I would not be doing this - boarding a bus - if I was in Israel (I'm lucky that I have a choice!) I remember reflecting too that it had been almost six weeks of a sort of phony peace for Israelis from such wrenching deadly events, but that it had been brought about at the price of locking down 3.5 million people in some kind of curfew or lock-down.
As I was waiting on the bottom of the bus stairs to get on, my eyes wandered idly down the ticket/token machine and widened in a horrible kind of fascination at what I read there in faded blue large print - "Parcels and duffel bags and baby carriages welcome" (!) Oh my God - this felt so far away from buses in Tel Aviv and Israel! If there was ever any description on Israeli buses it would never read that!
Leading the whole country, New Yorkers had held ceremonies and remembrances all day that Wednesday to mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and most poignantly, in the memorial circle at the 16-acre concrete pit that formed the foundation of the trade center. The Mayor of New York had begun the reading out loud of the names of the victims - all 2,801 of them - a reading which lasted nearly 2 ½ hours. I was struck that it would take much longer to read off all the names of just the Israeli and Palestinian civilians that have fallen victim in this Intifada alone. Perhaps that is what should be done. But it seems that whereas in New York when the names are read off, the official reactions are moving and dignified, in the streets of Tel Aviv, Gaza or Jenin or Hebron, the reactions would be more like blind revenge and anger from both sides.
I was in New York to celebrate my son's 18th birthday in his new city, for he has now joined the thousands of college-bound freshmen this fall and I have joined the thousands of parents whose sons and daughters are no longer present on the home front. Though New York feels huge and Tel Aviv decidedly small in comparison, some kind of almost imperceptible bonding that Israelis will recognize well has taken place in all the various communities that make up this teeming metropolis since 9/11 - a feeling of "being in it" together. In the cities of Israel, the bonding is visceral and almost demanded and those who don't "completely bond" must struggle to maintain their own integrity and balance.
I feel almost guiltily fortunate - that my son has [only] gone off to college rather than off to the army - even if, unlike college kids in the states (unless they go in their home town) newly minted soldiers get to come back home two weeks later and many other weekends after that.
I got off my bus at East 84th Street and stood watching pensively as it geared up and away, its engine finally combining and fading away into the surrounding noises that so identify New York - the cab horns and the rumble of the subways, that bus inscription felt deeply already the product of a by-gone era of innocence not yet lost. I doubt very much that such signs will ever be re-painted on any public transport, anywhere again.
On countless occasions since I started coming regularly to Tel Aviv, I have walked or run down the narrow streets abutting Sheinken and done my share of ogling at the skimpy fashions and jumble of clothes and candle and thrift shops and cafes with the sharp smells of cigarettes and coffee and international foods mingling in the hot air as I made my way down towards Hayarkon Street and the beach. Frequently I have crossed that fateful junction at Allenby... How many times have I run down Tarba Street and past the army barracks on my way to work out at Homes Place, or over to Shaul Hamelech Street to the Peres Center? Or all the way over to Rabin square, to sit in painful remembrance of a very dark day in 1995? Memories are tumbling over each other in their efforts to hang on, and not be obliterated by the fear that now must surely accompany the new trip I shall be making.
I was and am, sick to my stomach at the thought of the new spiral of violence and dread that has surely blanketed again this sorely troubled land. I am witnessing more blind retribution in the searing pain of losing yet more innocent lives. The tanks have rolled back into Arafat's compound in Ramallah and as I write this, the Mukata is reduced to Arafat's office building and piles of rubble and debris from the rest of the compound. And Arafat himself is feeling more 'rubble and debris-like' every day.
I remember well my own visits to Ramallah in the almost halcyon days of 2000. I remember going up to some offices high up in a building in the center of the city, and being very struck by its teeming life and size and the many new buildings going up everywhere. Regardless of the strategies of how this happened, to imagine and glimpse from the TV, Ramallah and her sister cities locked down by continuous curfew with so many of its buildings destroyed or damaged by Israeli tank shells, is a sad and troubling thought indeed.
And what else? More blind retribution in the shape of a trumpeted closing for the second time, of the east Jerusalem Offices of Al Quds University, whose President is a leading Palestinian moderate, Sari Nusseibeh. Except that it was not. The offices stormed by security forces were in fact two quite different Palestinian institutions, and were not the offices of Al Quds University at all, but the Jerusalem Cultural Association and the Union of Sports Clubs in East Jerusalem.
The several hours I spent talking with Dr. Nusseibeh, discussing the political situation and reminiscing about mutual friends at Oxford, just inside the old walls of the city back in July, already feel like they happened in another lifetime. WHERE OH WHERE is the strong political track?!! Where are the Allies? Where is the UN? Where is America?! A transformed famous Pete Seeger line floats from my throat and into the air...."Gone to 'Baghdad' every one... When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?"
What a difference a city makes indeed. Depending on which city you live in, the shape of your lives is entirely different. New York, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Jerusalem. But in all of them there is a strand of commonality and that is Humanity. All of us share in the responsibility for an [in]human conflict that has cost too many lives, shattered too many dreams and hopes and denied many of the values shared by both peoples.
Somehow, may all those who share these same values, come together to stand against the forces that would obliterate these very dreams and hopes. And that most strongly includes the strongest intervention by the United States. For without the political will to affect this, the shape of this wonderful land is doomed to be forever in flux and its peoples forever victim of their own history and traumas.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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