What Good Is This Revenge?

Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it.

--Genesis 13:17

To go from Belfast to Israel is to be shot from a cold dark into an astonishing light, but one with a darkness inside it.

For the Israeli children the darkness is composed of apprehension and memory; apprehension felt mainly in the north, where towns lie open to terrorists and Katyusha rockets; memory felt everywhere in a land that is itself a child of war, where even the youngest know of places like Auschwitz and Dachau. For the Arab children in the occupied territories, darkness is in the present; the land is no longer theirs, their freedoms are snatched away. Like the children of Belfast, both the Israeli and the Palestinian children resist the life imposed on them. The Palestinians show their strength of will in bitterness toward the enemy. The Israeli feelings are often more generous, perhaps because they are children of the victors.

Hadara, for example, has managed to work her way toward feelings of accommodation largely on her own--though not without professional help. Zion Ben-Eli, a young therapist in Nahariya, treated Hadara for several months after the incident. In the beginning she clammed up entirely, would not go to school, would not leave the house. She expressed herself in art. First she painted a hand, which she called the "hand of fate." It is dark green, almost black, outlined in white with watery blue streaks running along the index finger. It looks more like a bay than a hand. To its right she put: "And in their death they commanded us to live." Then she wrote a poem. Its opening and closing stanzas are the same:

If there's a God and yes, many claim there is, then how does it happen that little kids get killed?

The little kids of the poem were the only children of Danny and Semadar Haran, for whom Hadara, now 15, used to babysit. Einat, 5, and Yael, 2, were both killed in April 1979, when terrorists entered Nahariya from the sea in a motor-powered dinghy and attacked a four-story apartment house. In one apartment they found Einat and her father, whom they took back to the beach. Danny they shot to death, and when Israeli forces approached, one of the terrorists picked up Einat by the feet and cracked open her head on a rock.

Yael died differently. When the terrorists burst in on their apartment, Semadar and Yael were in a utility room, where they remained in hiding. Yael started to cry. In order to keep her daughter quiet, Semadar clamped her hand over her mouth, very hard. It is believed that she inadvertently suffocated the child. When the story was published, it drove the entire nation into profound mourning. There was Israel's history in a single incident: the nation continually at war; the nation as mother protecting her children; the nation unwittingly suffocating her young for the wars in which it is caught.

Hadara's loss was more personal, and she embraced a deep silence. Yet she pulled herself out of it. She organized a peace conference in her high school between Arab and Jewish children. She called her conference "To Bring the Hearts Closer."

Such a response to one's own hatred is, of course, rare; and it is not the rule among Israeli children either. Nor, on the other hand, is the frantic bigotry expressed by two teenage girls in Qiryat Shemona, another besieged northern town. Both girls are chatty and friendly, except when it comes to Arabs: "They have terrible eyes. Oh, terrible! And mustaches!" When you ask if they would ever consider marrying an Arab, they erupt like hens: "Are you crazy?" The attitudes of most Israeli children fall somewhere between the extremes of Hadara and those girls. The majority deal with their hatreds and fears on a case-by-case basis, and they are likely to shift their opinions according to the nearness of the danger.

For those in the north, war has been close most of their lives.

In Ma'alot in 1974, three Arab terrorists attacked a school and held 88 children hostage, 23 of whom were killed when the building was stormed. In Qiryat Shemona that same year, terrorists made an assault on an apartment house; eight children died in the fighting. There have been dozens of such incidents in recent years--sudden death visited upon an otherwise tranquil area. Black goats feed on scrub. Trees crop up in spurts. Cows graze in fields stained brown where the rockets have seared them.

Two fathers were killed by a Katyusha rocket in 1978 as they walked past a wall in the Manara kibbutz. There is a hole in the wall, like a bite mark, where they were hit. It is the only sign of destruction in Manara, where everything else seems to flourish. Red flowers glow in dark green bushes. Babies in colorful sun hats waddle in the playground where the cab of an old truck has been painted yellow and pink and made into a toy. The older children use the pool. From the water they may look down into a valley full of plums and avocados.

Dror and Nimrod, both 10, are the best of friends, and share a bedroom in the kibbutz. Dror wears glasses and looks professorial. Nimrod has a dreamer's face. His brown bangs are cut evenly like a monk's over a pair of eyes the same shade of brown. The boys' room is spare, full of sunlight and, like most boys' rooms, ridiculous. On the wall hang pictures of two white kittens, a deer, Popeye and Olive Oyl, and an El Al jet. The boys have done some pictures of their own. Dror displays a drawing of Begin and Sadat, both saying "Peace is going to come." Nimrod presents a picture of Indian tepees. Why Indians?

"After the Jews they are the people I love most." He talks in a smoky whisper. "First, because the white men came and made them suffer, and they didn't deserve that. Second, I love how brave they are. I sympathize with them." Asked if his sympathies go toward all oppressed peoples, he says yes, "if they are innocent, and if they are not against us." Asked specifically about the Palestinians, he answers that he is still trying to make up his mind about which side is right. Yet he is troubled by the fighting.

"Last summer on TV they showed the damage we did when we bombed Lebanon. All the kids--me included--jumped up and cheered. Later I thought: What good is this revenge?"

If a shelling of the kibbutz occurs in the night, a nanny leads the children to a special shelter connected to the building. The parents have their own assigned places and duties. Nimrod says that he feels a great responsibility for his parents during an attack. "The first thing I think of is myself. But immediately afterward I worry about them." The time the two fathers were killed near the wall, Dror and Nimrod felt the tremors in their shelter. They can both make the sound of a falling Katyusha; Dror doing the rush of wind, and Nimrod the squeaking flute.

Lately Dror has been writing poems, mostly about death.

Nimrod writes poems about loneliness, which he keeps in a secret drawer. Sometimes he writes about Israel's loneliness, as if the country were "a little speck of sand alone in the world, with only a few other specks of sand who care about it." He has been rummaging for a poem he wrote about being abandoned. As he reads, you can hear the internal rhymes in the Hebrew:

I stood in front of a street lamp

without moving an eyelid,

without even thinking

And a small tear began to slip

And fall into the ground.

I swallowed my saliva with a deep breath,

And I said: This is a difficult departure.

I stood in front of a street lamp without moving an eyelid, and without even thinking: Will it be bad or will it be good?

Nimrod is quite still after reading his poem. You see him thinking about it again, looking into it. Would he write a poem about abandonment if his country were not at war? Perhaps. Abandonment is not a fear limited to war. Yet it seems clear that the atmosphere of threat has brought that poem to the surface, just as it has brought Dror's poems about death to the surface; that in spite of the sunny, florid world of the kibbutz, real specters visit these children. How could Dror and Nimrod have failed to hear what happened to Einat and Yael Haran only a few miles away? Having heard, how could they not wonder when terrorists would be coming at night for them?

Then too there is the matter of death itself, apart from fear, particularly the death of children. When a child dies, he remains a child forever in the mind, a small lively ghost. The war zones are full of such ghosts--the Haran girls here, Julie Livingstone in

Belfast--preserved in the local memory as terrible contradictions of terms: dead children. The grownups feel their presence as a plea, accusation or heartbreak. But the children feel it differently. The dead share their territory, customs and desires. They have transactions with the living. So Dror and Nimrod will be cheerful one moment, brooding the next. They move between the light and the dark as smoothly as Persephone.

The Palestinian children in the occupied territories are in less danger of shelling than their Israeli counterparts in the north, but many are shelled within. Their books are confiscated, their free movement curtailed. Dror and Nimrod wanted to stage a protest demonstration against the grownups who were about to exclude the Manara children from the performance of a visiting Ecuadorian choir. Palestinian students protest exclusion from more basic things. When they demonstrate, it is considered seditious, not amusing.

"How is the leg now?"

"Quite fine." Hania displays the crease below the knee where, after two operations, the limb is healing. She will need a third operation eventually, to straighten out the leg, but she is walking without much of a limp. Hania is 15, dark-haired, her expression alternately friendly and rueful. She was shot by an Israeli soldier during a protest demonstration in Ramallah, a small town north of Jerusalem, where she attends a private school.

"I was scared at first. I thought they might have to cut off my leg. In the hospital I realized that wasn't so. Then I was angry, and I wanted revenge. Still, I wouldn't shoot anybody. I couldn't. Even if I had had a gun at that moment, I could not."

Her classmate Nabil is unfolded in a sprawl under the window of the principal's office, where the children are talking. He is a tennis player, with the alert, innocent face of someone who adores competition. Asked if he feels that his life has been robbed of essential freedoms, he says yes at once. Asked how he knows that, if he has never experienced freedom, he answers, "You feel it inside you."

He explains that he does not think of all Jews as enemies; only Zionists. He is persuasive, but there is also an element of cant in this distinction. Make it, and you retain your liberality and political loyalties simultaneously. When he is asked if he ever feels sympathy for his counterparts on the other side, he says, "Not really," without rancor. "These Israeli kids are taught to hate us. They are forced to hate us."

"Don't your parents do the same thing?"

"They don't teach us to hate Jews." He is getting worked up, politely. "They teach us to hate occupation. But it doesn't only come from our parents. We see the shootings. When things happen to you directly, you don't need to be taught.

"One night last year, for instance, three other boys and I were returning home from a dance. A Jeep pulled up. The soldiers demanded our identity cards. Then they took us with them. I asked why--when we had our cards. I got slapped for that. We were taken to the military center, where we were made to he down in the street. Then they transferred us to a cell about 1 1/2 meters high. You could not sit up. There was almost no air. My friend asked for water; he got slapped for that. 'What makes people behave this way?' I asked one of the soldiers. He said: 'We are not policymakers. We are just taking orders.' "

The system of roadblocks and identity searches that Nabil describes must have long-term effects--here, in Belfast, in Lebanon or anywhere where soldiers command the streets. On the surface a checkpoint is merely a place where one is asked to identify himself for purposes of security. In essence, however, it is a moment when one must prove who he is; and in a way he must prove that he is. It is easily enough done, so there is nothing to fret about. Show your card and pass along. But a year or two or ten of someone challenging your existence every mile or so, or as in Beirut every 30 yards, or as in Belfast, at the shifting mobile checkpoints that one morning might arise in front of your own door--what then? At first, one will depend on one's identity card for proof of existence, and then on the card examiners, on the cool-eyed guards who raise their arms like priests giving benediction, and stop you, and stand there at ease reading words with your life in them. After a few years they could remove the checkpoint entirely, and somewhere in your submerged desires you would beg them to stay. You are your own checkpoint.

This may be truer for grownups than for children, of course.

For the children there is an element of game playing in this identity-card business too, just as there is in all facets of warmaking, and perhaps it is in some way comforting for a child to know that there are places on earth where he can prove without doubt who he is. But what happens when someone like Nabil eventually begins to think of himself as the person at the checkpoint? What happens when he realizes that safe progress is a rite of passage, and that he has been proceeding year by year into adulthood simply because he has been able to identify himself properly according to the standard of the roadblock? This is how freedoms go--not all at once in a flood, but in the slow heat and silence, the way beaches gradually disappear.

To the question of what he would teach his own children when he has them, Nabil answers "Love." On the office wall hangs a motto: LOVE is PATIENT. At the same question Hania looks away. "I would not have children," she says. "I am afraid to bring children into this world."

The Palestinian grownups who preach love to the children under such conditions often have a hard time balancing their lessons. The headmaster of a Quaker school in the West Bank was old by his 13-year-old son: "If Quakers believe in not fighting or one's rights, I want to be Greek Orthodox." A political science professor's three-year-old boy, who witnesssed the demonstration in which Hania was shot, wants only to become a Palestinian soldier; he spends hours saluting the Palestinian flag. "It is so hard to teach them to defend their rights," explains Sameeha Khalil, "and yet not to breed hate."

Mrs. Khalil runs the Society of Ina'sh El-Usra in Al-Bireh, a combination kindergarten, secondary school, vocational training center, gift shop, museum, charity, folklore institute, and a general haven for Palestinian children that she built up with her own dogged will in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. She is called Urn Khalil by the children and staff, and she looks um--built low to the ground, unlikely to topple. She is about 60. Her voice is made for speeches; her hair tied back to promote the clear, essential face. When you tell her that she reminds you of no one so much as Golda Meir, she shrieks and fumes.

In a large, uninteresting reception room at the society, Aida stands and Hilda sits. Aida is 16 and a beauty, her brown-and-pink skin made to glow against a long-sleeved off-white blouse so elegant as to seem part of a royal costume. Hilda at six is no beauty yet, but she has possibilities, and ambition. Her loud red knee socks exactly match her huge square purse. She wears the purse on her chest, hanging from her neck. Her eyes sparkle at everything that is said, but she says nothing herself, content to listen to Um Khalil, Aida and the strange foreign man. Mrs. Khalil asks her to sing a song. Hilda responds with I Am a Palestinian Child, words and music by a member of the society. Delighted by the applause, she smiles demurely at the three others to ensure their continued devotion.

Aida's father has been hauled off to jail again. She does not know why. Aida recalls that when he was taken to prison the first time, she was 13. "I was afraid. I did not know if I would ever see him again." Whenever she looks at an Israeli, she sees "an enemy. Only an enemy."

Her voice is throaty, unrelenting.

"When you hear about a terrorist attack on an Israeli family, where children are killed, do you feel pity?"

"It is a matter of mathematics," says the beautiful girl. "The more Israelis who die, the more Arabs there will be. Therefore, eventually we will be in control."

Made edgy by the conversation, Mrs. Khalil emphasizes that the aim of her society is to teach the children to love the beautiful things in the old country, and not to frighten them. "You don't want to start striking out right and left." She waves right and left with her arms; her English rolls in a heavy swell. "You want to make distinctions. A good Jew from a bad Jew. A good Arab from a bad. Also you want to show that life is not all hardship. There is joy here too."

Aida is asked whether she recalls anything joyful in her life.

She tells of the time that her uncle made her laugh, but does not laugh in telling it. He was being evicted from his home. As he was pushed out the door, he suddenly beamed at the children who were standing watching the spectacle, and he made a V with his fingers as a victory sign. The children gave him a cheer. Hilda giggles at this story, and tries out the sign with her own hand.

Now there must be a tour of the society, a complete and thorough tour, says Mrs. Khalil, who, locking her hand on the visitor's arm, pushes him through corridors from section to section. He shakes hands with everybody--every secretary, every group leader. He admires the embroidery done in the sewing room, and stands in awe of the beautician training center, and congratulates everyone on the jams and pickles--all bottled there. Mrs. Khalil points out "this and this and this"--until the two of them make a full circle and return to where the little children are packed in a classroom, shouting out a rhyme that sounds like "Ring-Around-a-Rosy." Their desks levitate with the noise. At the side of the room opposite the door sits Hilda, bouncing with the others. She sees the grownups and waves. Then she makes her fingers into the sign of the V.

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