TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072390/0723005.000

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 36

COVER STORY

An Intifadeh Of the Soul


During the 2 1/2 years of their uprising, the Palestinians have
been building a nation without a state. No matter what happens,
they will never be the same.

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Jamil Hamad


    Now, after five days, the army lifts the curfew.

    In a bright June morning, all the locked-up normalities come
tumbling into the streets of Nablus -- the fruits and
vegetables, the figs and grape leaves and fragrant mint, the
baklava with its hovering bees, the butchered goats and lambs
and live chicks in cardboard boxes, rectangles of softly
agitating yellow fluff. The narrow alleys of the Casbah fill
with the smells and bustle of marketing after curfew.
Palestinian life in the steep-sided hills of the occupied West
Bank makes one of its dreamlike passages back to the state of
mind in which, for a moment, it feels normal.

    Then, just at noon, news shoots through the Casbah, an
articulate electricity: there was an Israeli army raid a moment
ago -- one activist killed, many captured.

    Now groceries tumble back behind shutters. Mothers drag
children, fleeing up the lanes. Adolescent boys collect on
corners, muscles jumping, vibrating for revenge.

    A thin young man with the look of an unslept jailbird -- he
is wanted by the army, like his best friend who was killed just
now -- stops for a second, his body's engine racing, in front
of a shop with a mannequin in its window dressed in a stately
white wedding gown. The fugitive speaks with a distracted
courtesy, wanting to be polite but needing to flee for his
life, and then vanishes into an alley. The owner of the shop
slams down his steel curtain over the window with the wedding
gown. The mannequin bride goes blank.

    Curfew again: Nablus returns to its motionless antiworld,
its un-Palestine.

    The glaziers of Jerusalem will be rich if the intifadeh goes
on like this. They charge $1,500 to install car windows that
are shatter-resistant. People are paying. The Palestinian
uprising is 2 1/2 years old. It has hardened into a dreary,
bitter ritual. The reciprocal stoning and beating obey Newton's
Third Law of Motion -- for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction. Each side has found its threshold of
acceptable suffering and cruelty.

    On both sides, the leadership, such as it is, grows more
evasive, craven and empty. In a war of victims, no one plays
the grownup. Among the Palestinians, effective moral authority
now has a median age of 14 or 15 and a good throwing arm.
Fathers and grandfathers have signed over their moral duties
to the children in the streets. The traditional patriarchy
begins to disintegrate. The Palestine Liberation Organization
still serves as banner and facade, but many Palestinians
believe that it is increasingly feckless, corrupt and out of
touch. The failures of leadership on either side of the struggle
collaborate to create a sense of hopelessness. Hamas, the
fundamentalist Islamic movement, feeds handsomely upon the
ambient despair.

    Some American Plains Indians in their late 19th century
twilight took to ritual "ghost dancing" in the hope of ridding
themselves of the white man. The intifadeh is either ghost
dancing or nation building, and sometimes it is both
simultaneously. It has crystallized the Palestinians' sense of
themselves as a nation, but it is a phantom nation still,
incandescent but insubstantial.

    To many Israelis, the intifadeh is no more than a chronic
irritation. They worry more about the possibility of war with
Syria or Iraq. Worry more, that is, until the stones get
personal. One Sunday a month ago, the philosopher David
Hartman, who says, "I will not be at peace in Israel until the
Palestinian has achieved his dignity," was riding in a taxi up
the Mount of Olives. He was thinking about Maimonides and the
relationship between Jewish tradition and modernity. Suddenly
modernity came through the window in the form of a chunk of
Jerusalem stone the size of an avocado, heavy and jagged. It hit
Hartman in the face and might have killed him. Hartman keeps
the stone on the windowsill in his office. As you walk in the
door, he stabs the air with his finger: "Look at this! This is
not an instrument of protest, this is an instrument of murder!"
And then, recovering philosophy a little, he shakes his head:
"The veneer of civilization is very thin."

    There is no such veneer in Shati refugee camp in Gaza. Not
long ago, Mohammed Abu Zinnada, a 68-year-old blind imam, died
after the Israel Defense Forces raided his house in the middle
of the night. The I.D.F. says it touched no one, and the man
died of a heart attack. The family tells a rather detailed
story of how the I.D.F. forced its way in, clubbed the blind
imam with rifle butts, beat his grandson Naim, 9, and even
knocked around his manifestly retarded son Hussein, 29.

    An Israeli patrol chased Imad Khatib, 13, just down the
street from the imam's house the other day. The boy's crime was
flashing a V sign at the soldiers. They caught Imad, who weighs
70 lbs., beat him repeatedly, raised him high in the air, threw
him to the ground and kicked him with their boots. Several
witnesses say that three of the soldiers took souvenir pictures
of this exploit -- even passing the camera around so everyone
could be in the shot.

    In 1937 Britain's Palestine Royal Commission observed, "No
other problem of our time is rooted so deeply in the past." I
have seen the past, and it doesn't work. It is a deepening
disgrace.

    At the birth of Israel 42 years ago, one people crashed back
into history, another spilled out of it. For the world's Jews,
1948 was a miracle after nearly 2,000 years of diaspora. For
the Palestinians, the year was what they call al nakba, the
disaster.

    When the intifadeh began, the Palestinians thought they had
arrived at last at their St. Crispin's Day -- their long
delayed critical mass as a people. They would mobilize a new
identity, reassemble the atoms of dispersal. In a story by the
late Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, the driver of a
tanker truck is smuggling Palestinians across the desert to
illicit jobs in the Persian Gulf. The occupants silently
suffocate in the heat of the tanker as it waits at a border
checkpoint. They could have banged on the sides to attract
attention in order to save themselves, but they were too
afraid.

    The intifadeh has been a loud, persistent banging on the
sides of the tanker. And although the uprising has helped
develop the Palestinians as a people, they remain inside the
tanker, and the sense of suffocation is growing more desperate.
The Arab Godot has not arrived to deliver their freedom. The
Palestinians in the occupied territories have grown tired of
waiting.

    The Zionist idea was so powerful, it has been said, that it
created not one nation but two. The Palestinian existence since
1948 has been one long, surreal search for that nationhood. As
the Palestinian American author Edward Said has written, "Their
story cannot be told smoothly." The Palestinians, in any case,
are diverse. Like any people, they have many stories.


    THE MADMAN'S VICTIM'S TALE

    There is not a Palestinian anywhere who believes that the
killings at Rishon Le-Zion, south of Tel Aviv, on May 20 were
the work of a madman lost in some apolitical lunacy.
Conversely, every Israeli probably believes that the man held
responsible, Ami Popper, 21, an Israeli soldier dismissed from
the army as being unsuitable for military service, was exactly
that: an isolated crazy.

    The seven laborers killed by Popper came from Gaza towns and
refugee camps. One of the dead, 35-year-old Youssef Abu Dakka,
traveled each day to work as a laborer building houses in
Israel. Now, in the bright midday sun of the courtyard of his
house, the family gathers to receive official sympathizers. The
victim's mother, her sharp bird's eyes silently following
everything, sits on a sheepskin in a shadowed corner. The
father, Ibrahim Abu Dakka, has a ceremonial place among the
encircling men. A leader of the Gaza Laborers' Union, a man of
swelling gravitas, delivers a harangue about the son's
unforgettable martyrdom.

    Jamal Abu Dakka, 28, Youssef's brother-in-law, who was there
at the shootings, tells what happened. At 6 in the morning, the
laborers were driving in a Peugeot 504 toward work in Rishon
Le-Zion. A man dressed in an Israeli army uniform waved their
car down. He told the laborers to get out but to leave the
car's engine running. He ordered the six men in the car to join
other Palestinians sitting on the ground, and asked in Hebrew,
"Do you know why you are here?" The men said no. The Israeli
said, "Better for you not to know." Then he opened fire with
a Galil assault rifle, killing seven of the laborers and
wounding eleven. He jumped into the Peugeot and drove away.

    The killings on "Black Sunday" blew fresh rage into the
uprising. The territories rioted for three days; 14 more
Palestinians died and an additional 800 were wounded.


    EVERYBODY COMES TO RICK'S

    On the road outside the American Colony Hotel in East
Jerusalem, a bus is burning. A Molotov cocktail sailed out of
the dusk moments ago and burst into bright wild blossom.
Presently the flames subside, and the bus is reduced to an
abandoned black shell, like that of a hermit crab on the beach.

    The American Colony is the Rick's Cafe Americain of East
Jerusalem, a place where journalists, diplomats, scholars and
P.L.O. contacts meet. The hotel's basement bar is a rock-walled
grotto, a honeycomb of whisperings. In an upstairs salon called
the Pasha's Room, Mohammed, a leader of the Palestinian popular
committee in Bethlehem, explains how it came to pass that 40
years ago he was born in a cave.

    His village was partly demolished by the Haganah, the Jewish
militia, in 1947. His family moved to a cave at Wadi Fokin,
southwest of Bethlehem. There his mother gave birth to
Mohammed. Eventually, the family settled into Dheisheh refugee
camp near Bethlehem, in what was then Jordanian territory. When
he was 17, there came the second nakba, the decisive disaster
of the 1967 war. The air shrieked with Israeli jet fighters,
and with rumors that they would destroy the camp and massacre
everyone in it. The Palestinians took to the roads again,
struggling to get across the Jordan River.

    Once in Jordan, Mohammed joined Al Fatah, the largest
faction within the P.L.O. He forsook Islam. He groped toward
an identity, inventing himself. He put himself on a heady diet
of Hegel, Nietzsche, Arab nationalism. He became a communist.

    But Mohammed has an independent, defiant mind that tends to
swerve in unorthodox directions. After a year in prison, "I
decided that the slogan of destroying Israel was a waste of
time," he says. "This conflict has to be settled through two
states, Israeli and Palestinian." When he was in jail in the
mid-'70s, he tried to persuade fellow prisoners of that. The
prisoners' court judged him a traitor and tried to kill him for
being an Israeli stooge. The Israelis tortured him, he says,
for being a Palestinian agitator. The countervailing dangers
seem to have given him a strange serenity.

    Mohammed, unorthodox still, accepts a cold beer. "Each
people," he says, "must have its story of ordeal."


    THE TRIBE OF BLESSINGS

    The hills of Moorpark, Calif., look like a memory of
Palestine, except they are greener. They do not have the harsh
abstraction of the landscape that lies ten time zones to the
east -- or the army vehicles that crawl up the roads like
porcupines, bristling weapons.

    When the intifadeh was younger, more hopeful for them, the
Barakat family gathered for a reunion in Moorpark. Barakat
means "blessings." This was an ingathering of the tribe of
blessings. The five brothers were there, all together for the
first time in 30 years. Adnan arrived from Jordan, Samih from
Kuwait, Walid from Germany, Khaled from Morocco. Adel, who
lives in Moorpark, was host. Each brother speaks English with
a different accent, and each has a passport from a different
country. "This is what it means," they said, "being a
Palestinian."

    The brothers told the story of a Palestinian, carrying only
Egyptian travel documents, who spent six weeks in 1983 flying
from one airport to another in the Arab world, refused entry
in one country after another. His papers said he was stateless.
Finally, Jordan let the wanderer in.

    Other Arabs mistrust Palestinians almost as much as Israelis
do, and often treat them worse. Palestinians are considered too
cosmopolitan, too educated, too apt to stir up trouble, too
dangerous politically. "The Jews of the Arab world," the
Palestinians call themselves with a complex, rueful pride. The
Arab states think it best to keep them in refugee camps,
watched by the secret police, in order to dramatize their
misery and to justify revenge: to force them to play their part
in the pageant of Arab honor.

    But Palestinians have also proved to be their own
accomplished enemies, with a long record of missed political
chances and a tradition of terrorism that the West has had
trouble accepting as the work of freedom fighters. It is no
wonder that even their Arab brothers are sometimes afraid to
let them in.

    The Barakats, reunited, told stories about when they were
young in Anabta, their native village, near Nablus. Adel, now
prosperous with real estate, remembers the primal Anabta,
famous for its olive and almond trees, where he wants to retire
to play backgammon and think of his childhood: "You have the
most happiness in your life when you are a child. You had good
dreams and you were happy in your village."

    Palestinian memories of the native villages grow idealized
in exile and occupation. The world's 4.5 million Palestinians
have polished the stone of that primal Palestine in nightly
retellings until it shines in the mind like the first
innocence: ur-Palestine, the origin myth.

    The Palestinian after the fall has been double-selfed,
abstracted out of homeland. But many Palestinians have also
flourished, soared even, in their forced dispersion. It is not
always pitiable to be double-selfed.

    The memories are a stylized passion for the essential thing:
a land, and therefore an identity of one's own. Would all those
Palestinians prospering in Kuwait or Detroit, working as
doctors, merchants, engineers, really wish to return, to invest
their money and skills in the Palestinian homeland they demand?
If the homeland ever comes, reality will test nostalgia.


    THE DAUGHTERS OF GAZA

    Three daughters of Abu Faisal sit in the sunlight in a
courtyard in Gaza. Zeita remembers the evening during Ramadan
when soldiers fired tear gas because the shabab (young
Palestinians) had been throwing stones in their refugee camp,
Jabalia. A canister sailed over the wall into the courtyard.
Screams, confusion. The canister pinwheeled on the floor,
spewing gas. The daughters ran for the bottles of cologne that
they keep. They soaked tissues with it and held them to nose
and mouth as they retreated gasping to the corners of the house.
Cologne works against tear gas. So do onions.

    Two of the sisters are named for other sisters who are now
dead. One night in 1971, six armed P.L.O. fedayeen were
crossing the street, just outside the house, and heading east
toward Israel when they were spotted by an Israeli patrol.

    A street battle started. One Palestinian fell wounded.
Faika, who was 18, also belonged to the P.L.O. She grabbed her
two-year-old sister Hanan as a prop -- just a baby-sitter
blundering into a fight -- and got to the fallen man, seizing
his Kalashnikov. She was about to start firing when the
Israelis shot her down, and her two-year-old sister. There are
many martyred babies in the tribal cause. "We are proud of our
sisters who were killed," say the girls in the courtyard. Their
shining black eyes are direct and passionate.

    The house of Abu Faisal is a peaceful island this morning.
Outside its walls, the unpaved, rutted streets brim with last
night's rain. Goats browse in the street garbage. Donkeys graze
among gravestones. An open sewer empties into an enormous,
death-gray cesspond. Astonishing metal debris lies everywhere,
as if a sadist of automobiles had been stabbing cars and
ripping them apart and scattering their flesh.


    THE ZEAL OF THE ABSENTEE

    Samar Dudin Karajah has a sharp and beautiful face. She is
28, the daughter of a former Jordanian minister, and dresses
like a European woman of privilege. Married to a young lawyer,
she lives in Amman and teaches drama at the Aliya Girls School.
She is now on a maternity leave.

    "A Palestinian always has a sense of pain wherever he is or
whatever he does," she says. "Every Palestinian is in exile."
When she teaches grade-school children, she makes up plays.
Here is a Palestinian girl crossing the Allenby Bridge from
Jordan to the West Bank. An Israeli soldier gives the girl
candy, but then he breaks open her doll to see if she is
carrying anything dangerous. The girl throws the candy back at
the soldier.

    "We were brought up," says Samar, "to distinguish between
Zionism and Judaism. My mother had many Sephardic Jewish
friends. But Zionism emerged out of the Holocaust. So why do
the Palestinians have to pay for that? They were the victims.
Now we are the victims. They came and took our land! They
cannot solve their agony by victimizing the Palestinians."

    She chokes on her outrage. "Why do we have to explain
ourselves so much?"


    THE POLTERGEIST'S TALE

    Steep Nazareth in a bright sun. The 60,000 Arabs here are
Israeli citizens, but the character of the town is distinctly
Arab, with winding streets and souks. The Jews live on an
opposite hill in modern houses with broad streets that might
have been transplanted from suburban America.

    In Israel more than 700,000 citizens are Arab. They regard
themselves as third-class citizens. They have made a
double-jointed accommodation with the Israeli state.

    Johny Jahshan works as an accountant in the Galilee
Christian College. His house on a hillside overlooking Nazareth
has a middle-class comfort that makes a stranger think twice.
This is a dissonance one sometimes feels among Palestinians who
live very well. Their comfort does not invalidate their
grievance, but it subtly shifts the moral ground, or at least
complicates their status as victims. Israel has been
economically profitable for many Palestinians, even as Israelis
have exploited Palestinian labor and markets. Now, however,
Palestinians are boycotting as many Israeli products as they
can.

    The Palestinians living in Israel feel thrice removed. First
in privilege and status come the European Jews, then come the
Oriental Jews, then, a distant third, the Israeli Arabs. Many
of their grievances sound like the complaints of American
blacks, and sometimes Israel gives off something of the Old
South, of race hate and sheer meanness. The other evening on
Salah el-Din Street in East Jerusalem, a middle-aged man in a
business suit was stopped by a beefy policeman who addressed
him in Arabic: "Ya, walid [Hey, boy]!" The policeman took the
Palestinian's left hand and twisted it back slowly, painfully,
saying softly all the while in Arabic, "You do intifadeh, boy?
I think you're intifadeh, boy!"

    It sometimes seems to a Palestinian in Israel as if he and
his family had been killed in an accident and now live on as
ghosts in the same house. Another family, Jewish, has moved in.
The ghosts observe the new tenants with sardonic commentary.
The new tenants watch the furniture move and objects fly
through the air. The Arabs have become poltergeists at their
old address.

    But it is, after all, a Jewish state. A stranger proffers
hard-line Israeli logic: "Look, wars have consequences. This
is a violent and dislocating century that has created millions
of refugees all over the world. There are more than 200 million
Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, occupying 5 million
sq. mi. There are 3.8 million Israeli Jews on a tiny sliver of
land. The Arabs have tried in war after war to destroy Israel.
The Jews have prevailed. What do you expect from them? Besides,
what law of history says that a people aspiring to be a nation
will have a state? Look at the Kurds, the Armenians, the
Basques, the Ibos."

    Jahshan answers, "The Crusaders and the Turks were here for
a long time, and then they left. Israel is only 42 years old.
They can kill us all and send us anywhere. Do you think we will
forget? Honor! People die for honor! He who does not have land
does not have honor."


    BUTCH AND SUNDANCE

    The village of Kafr Ni'ma lies in the hills west of
Ramallah, a high village with an ancient terracing of stones.
The people there grow figs, olives, almonds, grapes, plums. On
a hill opposite, across the valley, one sees the bright white
cubes and rectangles of a Jewish settlement -- a bedroom
community for people who work in Jerusalem. The settlements on
the West Bank are usually erected on the high ground for
defense, and sit upon the landscape like moon stations.

    A green-eyed 16-year-old named Farid, who wants to become
a doctor when he grows up, is sitting in the back seat of the
car, explaining how to stone Israeli soldiers. "You stay behind
walls, follow the soldiers, throw and then dodge out of sight.
Always know where you are, and have a way to escape in mind."

    It is his duty to throw stones, Farid believes. "Sooner or
later you will die, so there is nothing to be afraid of. They
took our land, they killed our brothers, they arrested my
friends. Our life is not so good that we can regret losing it."

    Palestinian flags flutter everywhere in the village. The
walls are coated with spray-painted slogans. The army will
arrive soon and order the villagers at gunpoint to take down
the flags and paint out the slogans. When the army leaves, the
flags and slogans reappear.

    Nassim and Mahmoud, leaders of the popular committees that
run the village, sit smoking in a large bare room. Nassim, 31,
is tall, thin, with calm dark eyes, though his crossed leg
jumps in spasms when he speaks. Mahmoud is a short, blondish
tough guy. They are Butch and Sundance, outlaws of the
intifadeh.

    The popular committees formed during the uprising have
assumed much of the social, economic and political authority
of running the territories. There are food committees,
education committees, health committees, and public-safety
committees, which guard the villages against Israeli settlers.

    The surrounding hills are filled with caves, where the
Palestinian activists often hide. One moonlit night, some
months after our talk, a young collaborator led Israeli
soldiers to the bush that concealed the cave where Mahmoud had
set up a cozy apartment, with mattress and blanket, a lantern
and jars of olives. Mahmoud is now in an Israeli jail.


    THE EXECUTIONER

    Of the 947 Palestinians killed so far during the uprising,
at least 230 have been shot, beaten, stabbed or hacked to death
by fellow Palestinians. Collaboration is not the only capital
offense. Some victims have offended Islamic factions by
trafficking in drugs and sex. Others were killed in personal
vendettas.

    An activist who calls himself Yazeed is 29. He bites at his
fingernails, his thin face crossed by sudden gusts of anger and
fear, and says, "Killing the collaborators will cut the fingers
of the Shin Bet." Yazeed has spent seven years in Israeli jails
for his work in what he calls the "armed struggle against the
Zionist occupation." He refuses to marry: "Why should I? I have
nothing to offer my children." Besides, he expects to be a
martyr.

    Yazeed says he has personally executed three people accused
of collaboration. He feels no remorse. He insists that
collaborators are given warnings, a chance to "come to their
senses."

    Why does a Palestinian become a collaborator? Life under
occupation is very inconvenient; the occupier controls every
detail. The Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security agency, can
arrange a thousand favors to ease the way. They might come to
an unemployed university graduate, for example, and say, "Why
suffer? We can make you a teacher." In return the Shin Bet will
start by asking something very easy: "We just need the names
of your neighbors." By degrees the collaborator is drawn deeper
into the web. If he tries to retreat, the Israelis say, "We
will expose you as a collaborator." It is widely believed in
Nablus that Shin Bet agents have given drugged drinks to
Palestinian women, then removed their clothing and taken
pictures, threatening to shame them by showing the pictures to
their families unless they cooperate. Some corrupt village
mukhtars (headmen) have collaborated in exchange for permission
to gouge money from their people. That is a dangerous game.
Such collaborators wind up turning their homes into armed
fortresses, with transmitters to keep in touch with the Shin
Bet.


    THE PRISONER'S TALE

    Pictures hang high on the walls of a Palestinian's house,
the tops of the frames nearly touching the ceiling. Is it that
such elevation of the gaze suggests respect for the figures
pictured there -- for the father staring down in formal Arab
robes, for the first son, working in one of the gulf states and
sending home the money that the family survives on? Such images
look down upon Qassem in his sitting room. His own gaze is
lowered. He is talking about his prison time and about being
interrogated by Israeli agents.

    Qassem has served three stretches in jail on suspicion of
being an activist. He is a man in his mid-30s, with black
Heathcliff eyes and deep grooves like parentheses around his
mouth. In the dusk he recalls the rituals of interrogation.

    "You begin with two days and nights isolated, standing up,
handcuffed, with a sack over your head. You just hear crying,
loud voices, an iron door slamming. You are very frightened.
If you fall, they throw cold water on you to wake you up."

    Ex-prisoners are always very precise about how many hours,
or days, they have been subjected to various stages of
interrogation, but it is hard to know how they can be sure of
the passage of time, especially if their heads are covered with
sacks.

    He continues. "Then they start the interrogation. They make
you very, very tired, physically and mentally. You forget
everything outside after a time. You are utterly alone. There
are two of them, and they play good guy and bad guy, the bad
guy slapping you and spitting on you. You wonder, `Where does
he get so much spit from?' They dig at your genitals with a
boot or a stick. Sometimes they tie you to a pipe so that you
cannot stand or sit or kneel and leave you that way for days.

    "The sacks they put on your head are never cleaned, and they
smell of vomit. They can add more sacks, and you begin to
suffocate -- that works very fast on some guys.

    "You cannot imagine your joy at the words `Take him to the
cell.' After many days of isolation," says Qassem, "I sometimes
missed seeing the interrogator if he did not show up. To see
a human face -- even his!"


    THE GLOBAL VILLAGE

    In the village of Deir Dibwan, northeast of Ramallah, the
newer houses are made of rich blond limestone, with lemon trees
in the front yards and, on the roofs, miniature Eiffel Towers
to brace television antennas. The village has simultaneously
the smell of goats and an air of affluence. It is a theme park
of Palestinian authenticity, a once-was village sustained by
money from America. Deir Dibwan has a population of 8,000. At
any given time, some 4,000 are in the U.S. making money.

    Once immigration was irrevocable. The refugee boarded a ship
and departed for the New World. He might return to the
ancestral village years later and try to remember his
childhood. But now immigrants can go time-traveling in their
own histories, back and forth. One family, the Dalias, have
been commuting thus between their pasts and their futures since
1926, when a forebear, Abdul-Hameed Dalia, began shuttling
between the Middle East and the New World. The resulting state
of mind may be painfully torn, but is often miraculously freed
and creative. A sense of being treacherous to the tribe and
its values coincides with a heady liberation.


    THE STONES

    The diamond cutter stares at the stone until it discloses
its inner structure, its secret. If the moralist stares long
enough at Palestine/Israel, he thinks it will disclose a
miracle of resolution.

    But the place is not one stone. Here are two monoliths that
by an intolerable trick of metaphysics stand upon the same
spot. The Muslim's Dome of the Rock looms above the Jew's
Western Wall. The promised land is also hell in a very small
place.

    Sunlight shafts down upon Jerusalem through gunpowder
clouds, the city immobile, the sky above in tumbling motion
like time-lapse photography. Pure light and Jerusalem stone
give the city its astonishing beauty. The dolomite limestone
changes miraculously with the light: blind white at noon gone
to pink and rose and peach at sunset.

    The stones have a strange abstract fertility, like dreams
breeding. They come teeming up in geometries to make temples,
cities. They also have their power in smaller sizes. They come
up in the hands of children and fly through the air, to make
a nation, or at least to trouble the dream of Zion.