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I GOT STONED ON MY WAY TO JERUSALEM YESTERDAY. I am not confessing use of a controlled substance while driving but rather identifying a minor episode in the Jews' Hundred Years' War with the Arabs of Palestine.
There were three of us in the car at 8 a.m., driving up from Beit Yattir, a village about 45 miles south of Jerusalem – by American standards, easy commuting distance. It was a beautiful day; winter rains and unseasonably warm weather were turning the drab yellow hillsides green.
We had just passed El Arub, an Arab town that sprawls along one side of the road a few minutes south of the Jerusalem suburb of Ephrat. I was in the back seat looking in the other direction, so I did not actually see the young Palestinian who, from an elevation at the side of the road, lofted a block of concrete about 10 inches in diameter in our direction. He made an almost perfect hit, midpoint on the front windshield. Thunk!
Because the window was made of plastic -- a protection advisable for those who live or travel often beyond the Green Line -- it did not shatter into lethal shards. It sagged inward at the point of impact, dropping small fragments of plastic onto the young mother in the passenger seat, while metamorphosing into a dense network of spidery fault-lines that partially blocked the driver's vision. Had the windshield been glass, the rock would have crashed through and injured one of the riders in the front seat. (In a similar incident north of Jerusalem a few months ago, the driver suffered a fractured skull.)
And yet this attempted murder was a kind of non-event. We reported the incident at the police station near Ephrat and learned that several vehicles, including a police car, had been stoned that morning at the same spot. In general, the police do not treat car stonings as important acts of violence; they are too frequent, and the perpetrators are virtually impossible to apprehend. The driver of our car received a voucher to have his windshield replaced, and we continued on to Jerusalem.
So nothing much had happened, and no one would be punished, and the damage would be fixed at government expense. Drive on.
But the personal question did, of course, occur: What am I doing buying a house in a "settlement"? From the beginning, others have asked me this same question. Some of them were concerned for my family's safety; others had a political agenda. One whole family spent an evening trying to convince us that living beyond the Green Line was a provocation to the Palestinians and a hindrance to the peace process -- an absolute mistake. A few people regretted that their own ideological commitments would prevent them from visiting us beyond the Green Line. Others get a look on their faces that is hard to describe; politely disturbed or politely hostile, they make no comment, but I think I can read their minds.
Nonetheless, we are making an increasing commitment to our house in the "shtachim," the Territories.
Ideology plays a small part. I have some pride in living at Beit Yattir, a community of 55 Religious Zionist families just over the Green Line. I feel that I am making a small statement of my personal belief that all the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea ultimately belongs to the Jewish people, a gift of G-d.
At the same time, like many others, including some of the "settlers" at Yattir, I remain in favor of territorial compromise, of surrendering land in return for real peace. If the government insisted on giving away Beit Yattir to the Arabs as part of a peace agreement, I would pack up and go.
But it is unlikely that any government will give away Beit Yattir, not only because true peace seems increasingly improbable but because Beit Yattir occupies the high ground in the region. When the area was captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, the only building on these hillsides was a Jordanian fort. The settlement's location protects the Green Line, and the government is unlikely, I think, to give that military advantage away.
The risks involved in living beyond the Green Line are real. Although in its 18 years, Beit Yattir has never suffered any hostile incursion, there have been a couple at Susseya, only four kilometers down the road; one was a terrorist, who was killed, the other, a thief, was captured in the regional school building very early one morning. And the road to Jerusalem is, though generally fine, clearly not totally secure.
But what is the greater risk, to live at Yattir or to have an innocent cup of coffee on Jerusalem's downtown mall, the site of a suicide bombing last year? To drive the road from Yattir to Jerusalem or to go downtown on a Jerusalem city bus, the arena for two suicide bombings that helped Shimon Peres lose the last election? Is the road from Yattir more dangerous than the "safe" road near Bet Shemesh, inside the Green Line, where two motorists were killed in a terrorist drive-by shooting? Or, for that matter, more dangerous than living in urban America, where going out on foot after dark may be a questionable adventure?
One picks one's risks; one picks one's rewards. For the sake of an affordable house in the country, with a half-dunam plot of land and an elevated view of hillsides and villages (both Jewish and Arab) all the way to the horizon, one goes beyond the Green Line. One adjusts to the knowledge that at least some of one's neighbors are filled with murderous hatred.
As for the politics --- well, my sympathy for the Palestinians is at low ebb. The peace they mean seems simply a continuation of the war.
Why should I feel forced to scurry back behind the Green Line, to a dubious safety, when the land is
Jewish World Review Feb. 24, 1999 / 7 Adar, 5759
Getting Stoned
By David Margolis
The three of us drove on virtually without speaking, except to ascertain that the others were "all right." The incident made us quietly thoughtful, as brushes with death do, reminding us that our stone-throwing Palestinian cousins are not merely exercising their right to protected symbolic speech but want to kill us.
New JWR contributor David Margolis is a journalist and novelist, most recently of Change of Partners. A resident of Israel, he can be reached by clicking here.
