BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...3

We were on the way to Northern Israel the next day. Shabi was driving. I wanted to quit with the politics, practice some Hebrew again. I did not realize how bad I really was.

We were doing okay as long as we were doing the easy words. Car. Dog. Time. Head. Arm. Eyes. Hands. I don’t know how the talk got so twisted during the scenic drive.

“Is this why I came to Jerusalem? Like, ‘Oh, sure! Better know how to call Moshe a penis if he takes cuts in…..”

Shabi raised his hand in mock exasperation. “What, Lurene? You asked me what the word is for the penis and I’m telling you….”

“That’s not what I meant. Why do I need this word? These are the friends I need in Jerusalem?” I was laughing, could hardly speak English now, let alone Hebrew.

We laughed about my red face and useless speech in Hebrew on the fragrant roads of Northern Israel. We were going to a kibbutz to visit Adah, Shabi’s girlfriend. Having lived in California most of my life, driving to northern Israel felt to me like driving to the Oregon border.

First of all, the Israeli road through its northern section had just as much traffic as California’s freeway. Fewer old cars in Israel, though, and more fatal accidents. Israelis did not all learn to drive in the same culture.

“Traffic accidents claim more Israeli lives than terrorism does,” you’re often told. I include it because most Israelis at one time or another will tell you that in routine conversation if that kind of thing interests you.

Most notable of all, though, is the varying climates in Israel. Pick your favorite according to your interests; Israel is like a color wheel in nature that never stops spinning. The massive Negev, the temperate and subtropical zones of Israel’s Mediterranean climate, its 511 species of birds and other forms of animal life are some of Israel’s attractions for a person like me who grew up visiting U.S. National Parks. Countrywide, Israel has 200 million trees -- forests of pine, tamarisk, carob and eucalyptus. Wildflowers and medicinal plants grow in profusion, according to sources on the internet and elsewhere.

I don’t know why these images came to my mind, though, when I remember our drive that day toward the Israeli/Lebanese border region, because the Israeli border with Lebanon is nothing like the border between two U.S. states. Particularly this border. Lebanon was the site of yet another Israeli war from 1982 to 2000. I guess a border is a drab, man-made idea. Nature is nature and remains nature.

Shabi and I were joking like this while stuck in the traffic near Haifa. He was testing me on the Hebrew I learned ten years before. I remember some guy in a Keepah looking at us at a stop like we were in purple fish suits or something.

The kibbutz where Shabi’s girlfriend Adah lived was just like Northern California in some ways. The small houses were clean and well tended. As we approached Adah’s little house, I noticed an old typewriter gathering moss on a credenza underneath a tree. It must have been there since the 1950s or early 1960s. Whatever the year of its placement under that generous and merciful tree, you never see such machines in use these days. Not in American offices, that is. I guess someone just left it there, initially because they had no more use for it, and finally because it was charming and attracted small birds. It was a potted plant now. It had its own goals now whether it was tended or not.

Any number of weird birds is passing over yards just like this while migrating over the area on routes from Europe and Asia to Africa. Israel’s bird lovers monitor them. Probably a lot of bird watchers here, I thought.

When we walked in, I looked into Adah’s large eyes before casually introducing myself. We shook hands. She looked to be in her mid-40s and wore loose, comfortable clothing in thin, flowered print fabric. Slightly more tasteful clothes than many women her age would wear while wandering the isles of a typical American shopping mall. She was nevertheless casual in her appearance and tone.

I could already sense a chill from her, though. I was coming through her front door with her boyfriend. Her smile was strained.

Maybe she wasn’t sure why I was with her boyfriend, or why he’d dragged me in with him on this day. Didn’t he tell her I was coming? She didn’t stand in front of me in a pose of greeting for long, as some people do when you’ve come from such a long distance. I know that look on a woman’s face. I’d seen it before.

I want to say she looked at me warily for a moment, then went into her small kitchen, but that’s not quite what she did. She avoided looking at me for a moment while pointing her eyes toward the space I occupied, and then walked into her small kitchen.

There was nothing rude about her, but I think it was the lack of curiosity she displayed toward my…it’s hard to adequately express the guarded quality one woman can adopt in the face of an unknown other at times like these. Picture it for a moment: I walked into her house with her man.

Shabi plopped down on the couch. The television news was playing in the living room. I sat with my right leg crossed over my left in a stuffed chair facing the television. Shabi lit a cigarette and pulled the ashtray on the table closer to himself. Adah did not smoke, but accommodated Shabi’s smoking. Maybe she offered that hospitality to all smokers. Americans either smoke and allow smoking, or don’t smoke and their smoking friends are booted outside with a stern smile.

“So, Lurene, how long are you in Israel?” said Adah, while preparing lunch at the counter.

“I fly back to San Francisco October 17. Another week?”

I looked and smiled at her modestly, averting my eyes from the television.

She walked a few steps into the living room with a cut onion in one hand and a knife in the other. She looked at the screen. It was a live broadcast showing helicopter gun ships firing on Palestinian neighborhoods.

The residents who lived on those streets were growing more violent every day I had been there, and would become more militant as the days passed toward my departing flight. While looking at the picture, I privately thought of how I’d run out of pity for Palestinian leadership over the years. I had pity, however, for the powerless Palestinian family looking to the likes of Arafat for a permanent diplomatic solution. Arafat was supposed to take responsibility for the society’s illegitimate and unprofitable ideas and lead the residents and their kids to something more beneficial. He’d done nothing but the opposite, and I felt the Palestinians had been played like dice.

With the vote for Arafat that had taken place in the mid 1990s, the Palestinians had done little more than harden the corruption they already had. Even the far left seemed to hope Arafat was going to be some sort of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley if things went okay. Daley is now remembered as corrupt and quite tolerant of racism, but nevertheless on some kind of constructive road that could benefit generations far into the future. I have to admit that my thoughts frequently were in that box, too.

As I sat watching the news with Adah and Shabi during these few seconds, it flashed in my mind that the Palestinians might be better off building a functional capitalist state before even trying a democratic one, if such a thing is possible. In capitalism, they’d have something to protect from house to house, rather than faction to faction. It’s hard to get far in simple capitalism without acknowledging Elm Street and Main Street have different interests. You can be as liberal as you please, but capitalism’s the capillary network underneath most human endeavors.

Yet, other people who are closer to the daily issues in the territories have considered those financial ideas unworkable. It’s based on a hopeless negativity about human potential. They say Palestinians must have democracy before anything, no matter how rocky the road to its completion.

Adah pointed her kitchen knife at the television, but it was a resigned, hopeless hand gesture, like the wave someone uses to point to garbage that keeps piling up in a vacant lot across the street.

“Look at this, Shabi. This is war. We are at war now,” Adah said, stepping a few feet into her living room to be closer to the images playing on the screen. Her voice was laced with mild depression. I’d heard that tone often since landing. She turned her face toward me for a moment to show her mood. She seemed down.

Shabi never seemed optimistic about current events, either, but I saw him slip in and out of denial. I never saw him do that during the first Intifadah, when I was a student at The Hebrew University. Now, he seemed a different man.

“The Arabs will settle down. I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. He looked toward Adah, away from the television. “I’m hungry.”

She went back to slicing her onion. Shabi always liked fresh onion slices near his plate. I had a memory flash of Tova setting fresh onions near Shabi’s lunch plate as the sun poured into his kitchen, hearing little Hagar laughing outside.

“I don’t know if this will die out.” Adah said. She looked up at me from her cutting board. “It wasn’t this way a few weeks ago. It’s too bad you’re here now, just as this all happens.”

I looked at her for a moment then let out a contrived laugh. “Oh, it won’t last. We’ll all be in Eilat by next week! I wish I had a shekel for every time someone apologized to me for this…” I had to think a few seconds, “…situation…since I’ve landed in Tel Aviv.”

Nobody laughed. I shut up. Adah got polite but distant. She would have preferred other company. Any other company! Maybe she did not enjoy having to be hospitable to some American woman her boyfriend dragged in. Couldn’t I stay somewhere else?

It’s interesting in retrospect how Adah carried herself. Here she was talking about these new hostilities nobody wanted. Yet, when I looked at her face, she seemed more afraid of me being in Jerusalem than she was of the Arab combatants who were trying to rip and bleed Israel into nothingness. What’s really weird is that Shabi’s face showed that he wasn’t getting that like I was.

Adah’s fear of rising war, gripping as it was for her, was probably not in the same area of her heart where her fear of a life without Shabi lived. Both filled her with dread. Fear is a fascinating thing to watch. So is anger. What a wide variety of stories war concocts!

Maybe I could sympathize with her, though. Adah was a single mother of two boys, one of whom was showing some behavior issues. I figured it stemmed from the earlier break-up of her marriage, but it was a weak guess. I didn’t know what the boy’s life had been, but I knew part of what it was going to be: The IDF.

I think Adah looked at me not simply as a threat to her romantic life, but as a clear threat to her material future. A single mother with a feisty boy could look hard and long for a stable, relatively affluent Israeli boyfriend and never find him. I understood at least that about her.

Kibbutzim rarely have large savings accounts, or at least that’s what I’d always heard. They work the land and the Kibbutz in return houses them, feeds them, offers recreational opportunities, some safety and may send a promising student to the university – I don’t know the details of the arrangements in Israel’s various organizations. These are not wealthy communities, but they uphold what Americans would consider a healthy middle-class housing standard and a safe, friendly neighborhood for families.

But there’s a catch: A Kibbutznik is not free to do as he or she wishes, to make any decision he or she wishes, to take off on a three-month vacation without acquiring the cooperation of fellow Kibbutzim. No police state mentality, of course, but it’s a cooperative living scheme that requires cooperation. It’s essentially socialist. It’s no place for a Donald Trump.

It’s really not an American thing. Like forms of socialism everywhere, it’s hard to sustain in the long term. Some countries seem to do it fairly well, but they have serious weak points.

We wolfed down Adah’s tasty food, which included fresh salad and warm bread. We piled into Shabi’s van shortly after for the ride back to Jerusalem. If I had any doubts about seating arrangements, Adah made things clear immediately.

I didn’t mind, but I was in the habit of seeing a gesture, at least. Something like, “I’ll sit in the front, okay?”

No, Adah was not going to be a close friend. That much was sure. But women are not in general friendly to each other in situations looking anything like this one. Also, I was in a foreign country. I had to expect a changed tone, anyway.

As we were in the car again and moving fast toward Jerusalem, Adah did not turn to talk to me. There was no like or dislike about it, but I was threatening the quality of her life. That’s it.

Life can get to throat-cutting between women. I guess it’s worth mentioning Israel is one of the most competitive societies I’ve ever known when it comes to romance. I’ve noticed it’s their habit to watch their mates closely, without showing what they’re doing. I have never noticed Israelis showing outright jealousy in public, though. Maybe I haven’t been around enough, though. I’m guessing in this, at best.

Call it American practicality, if you want, but I always try to see my dates and friends for who they are at first glance – especially the dates.

When I’m with a man who is seeking amusement with other women while I’m in his life, I hear my grandfather’s voice inside my head. “You’ll be sorry, baby.”