An American in Jerusalem

Date: Mon, 30 Oct. 1995
Jerusalem is a very intense place, as you might imagine. It's not too difficult to assimilate into a culture that is very ethnocentric, materialistic and enclosed--in a word, quasi-American--but it was really hard to settle in during our ten-week Ulpan. Partially because I had three days to say to myself, "OK Jay, you're now residing in the city which for however many years has been central to your world view and it's not a thing like you expected--deal and then begin a grueling Hebrew class that was forty hours a week.

I had very little time to myself, which became all the more precious after the bus bombing here in August--the 21st, I think. Two of my roommates were on that bus, and I was on the one twenty minutes behind, the same route from our dorms in Kiryat Hayovel out to school on Mt. Scopus. Six people, including three Hebrew University students, were killed, and over 100 others seriously injured.

One of my roommates is a Moroccan named Abdel. He wasn't hurt, but was scared into leaving Ulpan and returned to his family in Morocco. He suffered a perforated eardrum from the blast, and he was really shaken up for a few weeks but he's doing just fine now. I'm proud of my little trooper.

But yeah, the intrusion of random violence was a huge disruption in my life. I never thought that it would hit so close to home as it did that day. My dad suggested that I come home, my sister just freaked, my grandma wondered out loud why they don't just arrest this guy named Hamas (cute, ain't she?), and I spent a lot of time reflecting on why I really wanted to be here. In the end, I decided that terrorism is only effective if you let it be, and besides, this isnıt my fight. Iım just an innocent bystander trying to understand it all. So I take the good about living here with the bad and just live my life with whatever semblance of normalcy that I can muster and pray each day to the gods that this shit doesn't happen to me.

Date: Wed, 28 Feb. 1996
I'm doing the full-time student, maverick-critic-of-Israel thing until the end of June. "Maverick" implies that the vast majority of the kids with whom I study in the school for overseas students at Hebrew University are Americans who come as Jews and leave as rabid Zionists. So whenever I introduce the Palestinian narrative or else an outsider's critique of Israeli policy or culture into conversation, kids freak. Hence, a lot of times I find myself without company on Friday nights.

Upon returning to Israel we were met with horrible news. The very minute we crossed the border at Rafah (i.e., Gaza) we heard the Hebrew language news broadcast saying that two bombs had exploded and killed over 20 people, one at a soldiers' hitchhiking station near Ashkelon in the southwest, and one on a bus in downtown Jerusalem. Hamas, man...

From a more removed perspective, I was pissed. The final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian government begin in March, with the key issue being how to share sovereignty of Jerusalem. The attack only makes an impossible situation more difficult for everyone. Itıs even possible that Israelis will back out on talks over Jerusalem altogether, meaning that the Palestinian liberation struggle will continue in a bloody and even more threatening way than ever before.

Further, Israel is demanding that Arafat crack down in the territories while Israel closes the borders indefinitely, thus leaving the short-handed Palestinian police to do the Israeli armyıs job as an occupying army. That is totally antithetical to everything the Palestinians have accomplished through their negotiations and concessions to Israel, and it is the worst threat to what we had all hoped would be the beginnings of democracy in Palestine with January's elections. Hamas' little jihad can still destroy everything that both sides have struggled for in the last three years, and its residual effects on an already paranoid Israeli public could cause Rabin's death to be in vain. The attacks were senseless and idiotic. I only hope that Israel might actually live up to the myths it promotes about itself this once. Exhibiting some resolve and political maturity by re-electing Peres so that the peace process can continue would be a good start. The elections were pushed forward to May 29--about three weeks before I leave. By then I will have truly seen it all...

Jay C. Lininger wrote this for the Oregon Commentator