(Continued from my previous post.)
We’ll be safe here, the director of the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research told me, the night of the day the Yom Kippur War began. And we were.
On that Yom Kippur–October 6, 1973–Egypt and Syria had launched a coordinated attack across the borders Israel had claimed as its own. They’d taken the Israelis by surprise. Ferocious tank battles were going on a hundred miles from Jerusalem, where I and a half dozen or so other fellows of the Institute were living. But to look at our neighborhood, you’d hardly even know there was a war on.
By daytime, at least. Every night there was a blackout. I sat on the floor of my room, reading by candlelight.
Others weren’t so safe. Late the following spring, I would move out of the Institute and rent a room in an apartment with an Israeli family. On the mantelpiece in their living room was a photo of a hulking, beetle-browed young man in an army uniform. He was the boyfriend of my landlady’s daughter, a winsome, delicate 17-year-old. Or he had been her boyfriend, until the war broke out.
“He went,” my landlady told me, “and the next day he wasn’t.”
He wasn’t. Eynennu. He no longer existed.
(Over 2500 young Israelis died during those three weeks in October, like this boy whose name I don’t think my landlady ever mentioned. That’s out of a population of not much more than 3 million. Do the math; compare this to the toll COVID-19 has already taken on Italy. The toll its worst-case scenarios project it to take here.)
Back in the US during the Vietnam War, there’d been draft deferments for college students. Not here. A small country surrounded by enemies can’t afford to spare its university students, or even its university teachers. An instructor at the Hebrew University, whose specialty was the Book of Ezekiel and whom several people had mentioned to me as a scholar I ought to be working with–well, I couldn’t. Not after the war. He’d gone into battle, and there he had died.
And a man who later became a university colleague and a close friend here in North Carolina was taken prisoner by the Syrians on the Golan Heights. He spent the winter to come as a POW in one Syrian prison camp after another. Compared to his life that cold, rainy, intermittently snowy winter, mine at the Albright Institute was the height of privileged luxury.
It was hard, though.
Like Chinese boxes, sort of. I was the lone Jew in an American Christian research institute in an occupied Muslim Arab city–for all the talk about the “unifying” of Jerusalem, Arab East Jerusalem was a city taken in war and everybody knew it–in a beleaguered Jewish country. Beleaguered and, as Israel discovered to its sorrow once the United Nations began weighing in, drastically unpopular through much of the world.
In the two months before the war, I’d gotten to know the Arab staff at the Institute. I liked them and, unless I’m much mistaken, they liked me. But I knew how different their sympathies were from mine–the sensibilities of the “occupied” versus those of the “beleaguered.”
(One night at dinner, though, I bit into something hard in the Brussels sprout I was eating. It turned out to be a metal staple. I made a joke about it being “a staple of my diet,” or something equally lame. I couldn’t help thinking, though: had someone put it there deliberately?)
There was no policy of “social distancing” during the weeks of the war, or the cold, rainy weeks that followed. But seldom have I felt so distanced, this being measured not in three or six feet of physical separation but in psychic alienation, from each of those Chinese boxes by which I was enclosed.
Distance, I came to realize, is a psychological construct. The half-hour walk from East into West Jerusalem, which even before the war had felt longer than the similar walk from my home in Berkeley to the University of California campus, was now a journey from one planetary orbit to another.
Buses were few and far between. Most of them, and their drivers, were still at the front. As they began to trickle back, I found myself riding them to Jerusalem neighborhoods that I couldn’t have reached on foot. I wandered around the streets where I knew no one. I paused before the door of an apartment building where one of the residents had put up a plaque with a poem in memory of his beloved son, killed in one of Israel’s previous wars. I may have written the poem down in the little pad I carried with me to record my observations of what this city of Jerusalem was, a subject that had come to obsess me now that the studies for which I’d come to Israel were on ice. (Of course university classes had been cancelled. Nearly all the male students were in uniform.) I may still have it with me somewhere. I remember the last four lines:
Al ha-moledet
Halakh le-hageyn
Ve-nafal giboree
Yakeer lee, ha-beyn.
(He went to protect
The homeland
And there fell my hero,
My dear one, the son.)
Could my father, back home in the States, write such things of me? Of course not. Being a young man in Israel was a different order of existence from being a young man in the US, at least if you could shelter behind draft deferments and the like, and in any case war was something waged in a distant land and not a hundred miles away from you and everything you’d ever known. A few months earlier, packing my trunk in Berkeley with clothes and books I’d need for my year in Israel, I’d thought I knew who I was. I’d had some confidence I could face anything I needed to and do what a young man needed to do. Measured by the yardstick that now seemed truer, more suited to the bedrock reality of life in this bitter warring world, I fell way short.
Was I still the same person I’d been back home?
“I don’t know whether I feel like a Martian among human beings,” I wrote to Steve, the friend with whom I’d traveled in Europe that impossibly distant summer, “or a human being among Martians.”
How long would it go on?
It’s the same question we ask now, isn’t it? In those days we didn’t have the internet to suck us in as we search for clues, some hints of a light at the end of the tunnel. At the Albright Institute we had the International Herald Tribune and the English-language Jerusalem Post as our daily fare, plus the international edition of Newsweek. I studied them just as obsessively as I surf the web now–seeking omens of good, hints that something positive might come out of all the suffering and death.
No Zoom back then. No email. An international telephone call was a rare luxury. The normal means of contact was a blue aerogram that would take days to cross the ocean. For the three weeks of the war, no mail was delivered. It felt like floating in space. Was “home” as I knew it still there? Or had it also been transformed by the eruption on the Sixth of October?
In the middle of the war, the Arab oil-producing countries slapped an embargo on their oil. Aimed at any country that might consider supporting Israel.
The Europeans caved. At least that’s how the Israeli press represented it. “Oil blackmail,” they called it, and it seemed to be working. A savage cartoon in one of the Hebrew newspapers depicted a stereotype “oil sheikh,” wrapped in desert robes and grinning malevolently, sitting in the midst of a huge puddle of oil. Wearing suits and ties, the representatives of the European nations knelt before him. “Yes, yes, O master,” they cried out in unison as they grovelled in the oily muck. “We condemn Israel, we condemn Israel.”
America stood with Israel. And paid for it.
This was the beginning of the “energy crisis” that was to cast its shadow over the rest of the 1970s. A crisis we could have seen coming years before–any fool could see how dependent America had become on Mideastern oil, just as it was obvious months ago that COVID-19 wouldn’t stay in China. But it was a shock when it came.
(A strange irony: the economic crisis back then was set off by Saudi Arabia’s cutting back on oil production and jacking up its prices. Today’s crisis was partly triggered by its doing the exact opposite.)
Gasoline, once proverbial for its cheapness–GAS – CHEAPER THAN LSD, proclaimed a sign on one gas station in the pre-1973 era, the point being that you took trips with both–became as precious as, well, toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Winter was coming; shortages spread through the American economy. The cover of the November 19, 1973, Newsweek depicted a sorrowful Uncle Sam, his stovepipe hat patched and icicles hanging from his nose and beard, staring into an empty “horn of plenty.” The caption: RUNNING OUT OF EVERYTHING.
When a ceasefire is at last declared in the coronavirus war, and we can leave our homes once more, what kind of world will we find out there? Around the breakfast table at the Albright Institute we asked ourselves much the same question. One man declared: it will be a jungle, nations cutting each other’s throats over the last barrels of oil, the last remaining scraps of the commodities we’d once taken for granted. I said: you’re just latching onto some particularly depressing trends and assuming they’ll go on indefinitely.
He: “I’m being realistic!”
(He wasn’t. But we didn’t know that until long afterward.)
That Christmastime, the Institute hosted a visitor from the US who told us how bumper stickers were beginning to turn up: WE NEED OIL NOT JEWS. And I wondered what kind of country I’d be returning to next summer.
I lit a Hanukkah menorah that year and placed it in my window, facing out on the Arab street. As if to say: this little bit of light is still possible. Even in a world going dark for ever.
One or two nights after this past Friday the Thirteenth, when President Trump at last recognized COVID-19 as a national emergency and I finally grasped that everyday life was no longer going to be the life I’d taken for granted, I had a pair of linked dreams. In one of them, I was visiting with my Israeli landlady, who looked as she did back in May 1974 when I moved in with her family instead of going back to the US as I’d planned.
For me, at least, that move was the start of a happier time. And this was the point of the dream. It came to remind me, or more exactly I dreamed it to remind myself: what we’re about to go through now is akin to what I went through then. The worst of it did have an end.
“Akin”–not identical. Coronavirus and the Yom Kippur War are not the same thing; history, as one witty soul has remarked, doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. But I wasn’t the only one then to feel as we do now, that something dreadful had burst upon us with dizzying speed and life would never be the same again. The future held awful things whose shapes we could barely guess at.
There was truth in this perception. But there was also much failure of perspective, which we couldn’t have avoided then any more than we can avoid it now. It’s too early in the current crisis to find that perspective, to say where our darkest ruminations miss the truth. Only in retrospect can we see that 1973 wasn’t the apocalypse after all.
That was the first dream. In the second I was living, apparently alone, in the one-story house in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where I spent my childhood and teen years. Snow had fallen; the streets were icy. Snow covered the back yard, and I would need to shovel it. But the sun had come out; the snow was melting; the yard really didn’t need shoveling; and although there were long patches of ice in the street in front of the house, cars were moving.
When will the snow that entraps us begin to melt? Your guess is as good as mine. But I have it on my dream’s authority: it will melt. Our cars will move once more.
by David Halperin
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