The New Equilibrium of Terror in the Middle East
July 29, 2006
I am spending my last days in Jerusalem following the famous Israeli Jewish lawyer, Lea Tsemel, as she goes about her daily work. Her days are swamped by legal defence work for Palestinian prisoners accused of a wide range of plots and attacks on Israel; by taking affidavits from prisoners that the Israeli Shin Bit continues to torture despite a 1999 Israeli Supreme Court decision declaring torture illegal; and by submitting endless and fruitless pleadings for the waves of Palestinians who are the victims of Israel’s “quiet”, relentless, and massive deportation of Palestinians from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza through laws that preclude husbands from living with wives and children from living with both of their parents.
Baffled as I am by the insanity of the current war in Lebanon, I asked Lea Tsemel if she could explain to me why Tehran and Damascus would be left alone at this juncture and the defenceless Lebanon destroyed, leaving a thousand-fold more tangled and reinvigorated Hezbollah to swiftly and effectively repopulate out of Israel’s slash and burn.
She told me a story to help me to understand the psychology of such strikingly irrational behavior on her country’s part:
30 years ago, when Lea Tsemel and her family moved in to the Nachla’ot neighbourhood of West Jerusalem it was inhabited by poor Oriental Jews who worked in the shuk to the north, and by drug addicts and whores and criminals. Anyone who knows Jerusalem knows that Nachla’ot has since been completely regentrified and is now one of the loveliest and most expensive neighbourhoods in the city, nestled between the Supreme Court, the Knesset, the Israel Museum, and the Western Wall.
But then, as a newcomer, Tsemel was taken aback by how violent, and public, all of the local debacles were, displayed dramatically out on the streets for all to see. She recollected a scene next door when a drug dealing youth was upset with his mother and proceeded to smash in the television and the rest of the furniture. The mother, an old woman otherwise unable to defend herself, ran out onto the street and started to tear her clothes off, screaming, half-naked, about what her son was doing. Her public display of the rending of all social propriety was the clearest signal that she was disturbingly crazy and out of control and a threat to all equanimity on the street.
The neighbours intervened and the youth was restrained. And for a while, calm was restored. Lea described it as a prevailing equilibrium of terror.
Next Tsemel told me about some new neighbours who moved onto her dead-end street several months ago, right across from her home. Last month, she was leaving for work in the morning and saw that they had left the garbage out overnight on the street and that the verminous garbage cats had strewn it everywhere. She called the children over who were playing in the yard and told them that that is not done in this neighbourhood (I cannot vouch for this being communicated any too politely).
As the father saw Lea Tsemel talking with his children, he rushed out, puffed up, like a monster emerging out of a bottle.
“I know who you are, Lea Tsemel,” he spat. “You’re an Arab lover. I’ll bet you enjoy sucking the cocks of Haniyeh and Meshal and the rest of the Arab world. I know where you live. I know what you do.”
Lea had a terrible panic rise up inside her. This man lived right across from her home and his capabilities could not be fully gauged, though his hatred and intent were naked.
Lea’s response was swift and spoken with the immediate and astonishing volcano of erupting rage that is all the more breathtaking when it blows from the person of a 5’1” woman:
“Yes, and it tastes very good. You should try some.”
At this the man lost all self-control and puffed up even larger and started to tower over her, swinging, and said:
“If you weren’t a woman, I would beat the fucking shit out of you.”
“Go ahead and hit me. I know every Arab in this land and I defend all of the terrorists and I know where you live. The terrorists love me. Go ahead and hit me. I know exactly where you live.”
The man’s wife rushed out and started to restrain her husband.
“Do you want me to recommend a good insane asylum where you can take him?” Lea yelled at the wife whose was pulling as hard as she could on the matrimonial leash around her husband’s neck.
Lea Tsemel has not had a problem with her neighbour since.
Tsemel underlined again that it was a desperate sense of panic for what he could do to her home and all that is beloved therein that provoked her to be ever so much more ostensibly crazy than her neighbour.
That the current battle in Lebanon is a profound and terrifying existential campaign on which Israel has now embarked can hardly be doubted. Israel IS surrounded by a furious Arab population, all the more inflamed now by what Israel is doing. And the Jews are excruciatingly aware of what it means to live surrounded by such enmity.
And the sense of existential threat is no less palpable on the other side. The evidence is overwhelming that Israel loathes the Arab neighbourhood in which it is lodged with an intensity that matches its sense of terrifying peril. Not only does Israel have full nuclear capability, Israel is backed by a country that now has nuclear-tipped bunker busters that can exact “low yield” nuclear havoc. The Arab world knows, again with excruciating familiarity, what Israel and the United States can do to their homes and all that is beloved therein.
Lea Tsemel understands better than any other Israeli Jew the depth of anxiety and anguish that provokes the need on both sides to appear to be more ostensibly crazy than the other. Her days are filled with the details of which bloody and brutal attacks were carried out and which thwarted, of how torture or a bomb has mauled a human body, and with the details of the venom that Israeli Jews feel towards her and her clients.
What is incomprehensible in the logic of the current implosion of the Middle East is how a country like the United States, that does not live in the neighbourhood and will not suffer the direct and painful losses of this horrific new equilibrium of terror, can summons the morbid sangfroid to allow the anguish and panic to mount on both sides, setting the thermostat at an impossibly high pitch. No friend of Israel, no friend of the Middle East, would so coolly sit back and watch the conflagration consume the foreseeable future while retaining the power to modulate the temperature.
Professor Susan G. Drummond teaches comparative law at Osgoode Hall Law School