May 23, 2005
[Schwartz] Is/Pal - Sassōn forgive me
October 31st, 2004: I wasn’t supposed to be in Lūd that night.
Lūd is a terrible, desperate place. I’ve sometimes heard Palestinians from the Gaza Strip refer to it as “hell.” There are sections of the city where the houses are constructed of stapled aluminum siding and dried mud. The more civilized sections of Lūd and its sister city Ramle are fortresses. Most residents live in giant concrete blocks. The city elite (cops, politicians, and drug dealers) live in walled mansions. Lūd’s dealers pioneered “ATM drugs”: the junky walks up to a tiny slit in the wall of his or her dealer’s mansion, deposits some shekels, and out pops their heroin...
Since July I had been working in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, the Middle East’s first and only Jewish-Arab cooperative village, situated in the war-torn Latrūn region, near Lūd. The cooperative’s Palestinian and Israeli founders dreamt of establishing, amidst the ruins of Maccabee forts and Crusader castles, rusting husks of exploded Israeli tanks and the ghosts of Palestinian villages, a sacred “Oasis of Peace.”
My boss at the cooperative granted me a four-day leave to do some travelling. I first rode northward, on Highway 6, Israel’s main road that starts in Elat, slithers along the Green Line and ends somewhere just south of Lebanon. My car passed Qalqiyah and Tulkarem. Minarets peeked out over the top edge of the Separation Wall, and tendrils of black smoke from burning tires licked the blue sky.
I spent two nights and a day in Kufr Manda, a poor farming village of Palestinian citizens of Israel located in the southern Galilee region. I made excursions to Nazareth, a dumpy city if ever I saw one, and to tiny Kufr Kana, one of the last settlements of the Shirkas. The Shirkas once administered all the Holy Land for the Ottoman Turks. Today, they sell Nike and Reebok shoes.
Friday, I hitch-hiked westward, across verdant kibbutz farms and booming Jewish towns, to the eternal Acre. I spent a day in the impoverished Old City of Acre, a granite cube of ancient history that sticks out into the Mediterannean, defying the sea. The spidery cracks and musket bullet holes in its immortal walls are a message: ‘‘What is time? Not even Napoleon could defeat me.”
The next day, I went to mountainous Haifa, the prophet Elijah’s old hang-out. I breathed in the brisk winds that whisked through the city’s steep streets and strolled the luscious Bahai gardens. Then, that night, I hopped onto the train for Latrūn.
Turned out to be the wrong train.
Several hours later, deep into the night and even deeper in the Negev desert, I sat with two security guards in the railway terminal of Beer Sheva. One guard was a newly immigrated Russian; the other, a second-generation Sepharadi. They had just finished their mandatory military service. They both served in Gaza, protecting the Israeli settlements there.
“I once saw a terrorist with a rocket,” the Russian said. “I shot him.”
“I ran over an Arab with my tank,” the Sepharadi said. “I don’t know if he was a terrorist.”
They both grinned with a savage joy. The Russian was twenty-four; the Sepharadi, twenty-one.
I hitched a ride with the train conductors, many of whom lived in and around Latrūn. Their tiny white Citreon zoomed across the dark desert, northward on Highway 6. Looking out the car window at the utter flatness of the black sands, I wondered if we were riding alongside the sea. But then the ruby glow of Gaza reminded me just how far away from everything I really was.
They dropped me off in Lūd, early in the morning. I knew the city’s reputation, and immediately set about finding a taxi to get me the hell out of there. But no driver would take me back to Neve Shalom for anything less than 80 shekels. After all my travelling, I had very little cash on hand. I was stuck... until one driver took mercy on me. He had me split the fare with another customer, a giant Sepharadi man named Sassōn.
Sassōn was really giant: as round as a granite boulder, as heavy and intimidating as a bear. He struggled to get into the taxi, so the driver and I helped him into his seat. He tried to eat a falafel he had just purchased, but the sandwich disintegrated in his hands—which were cut and bleeding. The driver and I looked at each other. We asked Sassōn what happened to his hands, but he only whimpered for his falafel. That’s when I noticed the stench: this bear of a man had soiled his sweatpants.
Minutes later, I returned to the night road. First we drove back onto Highway 6, then veered off into dark dirt paths which zig-zag throughout Latrūn’s farmland. It was sometime during cotton season. Everywhere stalks with puffy buds of cotton rustled in the midnight breeze.
The driver decided to take Sassōn to a hospital, but first the bear-man should go home and get cleaned up.
Sassōn lived in one of the many moshavs of Latrūn. Decades ago, when the State of Israel was just a newborn, waves of Middle Eastern Jews flooded the country. The world has often seen the United States as a land “where the streets are paved with gold”; for the Sepharadim, this mythic land of opportunity is Israel. But the Jewish State was created by and for Ashkenazim, European Jews. What was to be done with these dark-skinned, Arabic-speaking immigrants? The answer: concentrate them in Ramle, Lūd and Latrūn, the No Man’s Land, a region devastated by the 1948 war. Stick them in hastily built concrete huts and make them til the soil for their livelihood. Thus were born the moshavim, the Jewish shantytowns of Israel.*
Many moshavs have since clawed up from impoverishment, becoming middle class towns and suburbs. Not Sassōn’s. The houses were boxes on stilts, the road was ruined, and even the trees seemed twisted and bent from poverty.
The taxi pulled up to Sassōn’s concrete box. He stumbled out, rang the doorbell. An angry thirty- or forty-something man opened the door.
“His brother,” the driver whispered.
The man screamed at Sassōn and punched the door. Sassōn didn’t seem to notice. He quietly shuffled into the house, and the door closed. The driver and I chit-chatted for a few minutes.
“I’ve known Sassōn for many years,” he said. “He is crazy. This happen to him when he was soldier.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are many of us who get crazy. Israel takes care of them.”
“Why haven’t I ever heard about them before?”
He smirked. “They are, how do you say? They are patriots. Israel takes care of them, and in exchange, they say nothing.”
He glanced at me. “You should ask Sassōn about himself. He likes to tell his story.”
The door re-opened. Sassōn, wearing a new pair of sweatpants, shuffled out. The brother appeared behind him, arms crossed, scowling at the meek bear-man. A woman timidly peered over the brother’s shoulder. The brother, noticing her, yelled and slammed the door. Sassōn climbed back into the taxi (with our help) and we drove off.
Sassōn looked at me with two round eyes and asked in Hebrew, “Are you Jewish?”
“Half,” I answered in my broken Hebrew. “My father is Jewish.”
“You are good. Don’t let anyone tell you different because you are a Jew.” Tears welled up in his eyes and streamed down his cheeks. “Do you like Israel?”
I had seen many awful things in this country. Did I like Israel? I sat back and thought about this: did I like Israel? No... Yet, I cared for Israel.
“Israel is a good place,” Sassōn said. “It is the only place where Jews can be Jews.”
And then he began to tell me about himself: “My parents were from Morocco and Iraq, but I was born here. I served in the army in 1973. I was in the Golani unit.”
His chest swelled with pride.
The driver explained in English: “He was, how do you say? He was commando.”
Sassōn continued: “I killed hundreds of Arabs. I sneak up to them with my knife and,” he ran a chubby finger across his throat. “Not only in Golan. I was in the Suez, too.”
He gazed blankly at the floor. The driver and I waited. Then: “I stopped being myself in the Golan. It was night. I was sneaking and I saw the Syrians line up a hundred Israeli boys and... shoot them all dead. I stopped being myself then.”
The taxi came to a halt. We were at the Kibbutz Nachshōn junction, where the well-lit highway met the shadowy road that snaked up an ancient hill to Neve Shalom. I could see the “Oasis of Peace,” about an hour’s walk away, atop the hill’s crest. Beside it rose the tel of al-Latrūn, upon which sat the ruins of the Crusader fortress that gave the region its name. Salahadin and Richard the Lionhearted fought there, as did Israel and Jordan a millennium later.
The hospital was too far out of my way, the driver explained. He would take Sassōn by himself. I turned to the bear-man, who smiled like a child. He extended a quivering, bloody hand to me. Between his fingers was a paper, upon which he had scrawled his name and phone number. I promised to give him a ring sometime, and then stepped out of the taxi. I then watched the taxi drive away.
I was alone. The moon was as full and bright as a newly minted shekel. Somewhere in the night, jackals howled and the radio of Bedouins broadcasted a woman’s voice. She cried out to the universe, wailing the sorrow of generations upon generations upon generations. With her wail echoing in my ear and the moon illuminating my way, I grabbed a board of wood and began the long walk back to where I had to go.
I never phoned the bear-man. I never intended to. And sometimes, when I am alone on a dark road in New York or Philadelphia or London or wherever, I find myself thinking: O Sassōn, please forgive me...
*Alot of good information on moshavim can be found here.
Posted by Schwartz at May 23, 2005 06:07 PM