BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...4

In Napoleon’s day, there was a mathematician named Jean-victor Poncelet. He discovered in his studies that the lengths and angles of a figure bear no relation to the lengths and angles of its shadow. Therein lays the inaccuracy we all carry within us regarding the past. One nearly needs to be a born mathematician to avoid distortions of reflection.

That’s an important point, because sometimes, in the dead of night, laying alone or not alone in total darkness, I ask myself what happened during that horrifying and violent October in 2000 Jerusalem. When I visualize myself standing somewhere inside that ancient city, I have to see events not only as I tell myself they happened, but as they were seen around the world, as they were seen around Jerusalem, and in the distorted and emotionally strained way my proud Kurdish friend must have seen them unfolding. It’s the only truthful way to view those anarchic, ungovernable days, and even then one might throw the whole fractious record into the fire, suspecting it’s all a feeble-minded lie.


I can’t prevent such dismal thoughts sometimes; the next event was our visit to Yitzhak Rabin’s grave.

The former Israeli prime minister rested on a ridge in West Jerusalem. Mount Herzl (Har Herzl in Hebrew) is the name of the site because Israel’s historical figures are buried there, like principal Zionist founder Theodore Herzl, whose remains did not arrive in Israel for burial until 1949, though he died in 1904.

I read his 1896 essay while at The Hebrew University. The essay is recognized as the founding document of Zionism. The essay remains relevant today because it says so much about the Europe that appeared some thirty years after his death with the advent of World War II:

“Only an ignorant man would mistake modern anti-Semitism for an exact repetition of the Jew-baiting of the past. The two may have a few points of resemblance, but the main current of the movement has now changed. In the principal countries where anti-Semitism prevails, it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews.”


As Shabi and I were preparing to go to the Rabin site that morning, he became particular about the way I would dress. When we got to the memorial park and he looked down and saw I was in fur-lined sandals with heels.

“I told you to wear shoes for rough ground,” he barked, his eyebrows turned down. He continued walking. I hopped along to keep up.

Seeming to adopt a military tone in the emerging presence of Rabin, Shabi’s pace quickened in stridency the closer we got to the grave.

I should have worn different shoes. Shabi was correct. Here I was, hobbling along in heels, trying to catch up to this Jewish Kurd’s determined, angry stride on dry gravel.

When we got to the grave, I stood in the open sky looking at the Hebrew characters spelling Rabin and the grey and black stones marking it. The isolation of the space was something I was breathing.

Some locations in the world have a distinct feeling and scent. I remember once traveling through a dark and wooded highway in California toward San Juan Capistrano. I opened the car’s window. It was the fragrance of the Southern California coast. That smell clings to most of the California coast, or maybe I just want to think it does because I love that part of the world.

In such moments, I’m a plain dog panting on the shore, paws lodged in the warm Western sands, my face toward the blue and milky sky.

This area of Jerusalem was distinct in a different way. Words, phrases and disparate ideas came to my head that day. Why these thoughts of a deserted factory floor, a quarry pit, a perfume with its flowers and herbs asphyxiated? It was a feeling of the unhuman space between lifeless planets.

Did they place him this way to underscore the enduring feeling of desolation Rabin’s assassination gave the state? Whether all inhabitants in Israel feel the way this place looks I’ll never know, but Shabi sure did.

He was standing, looking at the headstone of Rabin. He took a Marlboro out of the box and looked at me with distance. He wasn’t angry about my shoes anymore.

“I come here sometimes to think about the advice he might have given me. Rabin was a straight, direct man. Do you know?”

“Yes. I remember. You used to call him your prime minister.”

Our tones were quiet, but a deep-toned counterpoint in the immense calm framing us.

“I come here to think, be alone, smoke one cigarette, solve problems,” he said.

When Shabi speaks in that way, he seems to reveal a humility he didn’t have often. I only remember him using that tone on one other occasion. That was when he was forced to recall Egypt as a soldier during the 1967 war. He cited it once to me, in just this way – the low tone, the feeling there was another face aside from my own he was addressing, the manner which shows the very opposite of the kind of man portrayed in a Greek Statue. That time was in 1990 when I was preparing to visit Egypt. I’d asked him if he wanted to go, too.

“No, my dear. I saw enough of Egypt in 1967. Here,” he said putting $300 in my hand unexpectedly, “You’re not going to Egypt without money.”

The memory was clear to me. If I’d been a bird that day, however, I would’ve had to face what was surrounding us that very moment.

Arab citizens of Israel were rising up with rage throughout the country. Several main roads were blocked; Israeli Jews in the Galilee were being attacked by mobs with flaming Molotovs, being hit with ball bearings hurled from slingshots. Stores, post offices and all categories of public buildings were being ransacked. Forests blazed. Few cities were calm as we stood near Mr. Rabin’s resting place.

This was one of the few places of peace that day. Nazareth, Jaffa, Haifa all were sites of violence as we paced.

We were the only tourists there in those minutes, and maybe in that entire day. This account of our visit to Har Herzl is bombast if I display it without its encompassing reality.

For that reason, and because of the mood Shabi was in as we stood there, I am glad he wasn’t that bird in the skies of Israel, having to see the landscape as it really was that day. Sometimes it’s better to be an ant than an eagle, if only for a few minutes.


I paced and looked toward the buildings of Jerusalem. I did not talk about all of my thoughts with Shabi that day, but as we walked in half-circles near the grave, I thought about how I did not remember seeing Rabin in formal attire in news pictures on television or in newspapers, either in Jerusalem or back home in San Francisco. The leader wanted to be known for ideas, for the strategies he devised that he thought might work for Israel in the far future.

Maybe Rabin was wrong about some things. Did he think sufficiently of his enemies? Too little of his enemies? Did he not foresee their capabilities?

He misidentified the enemy in this case, since his assassin was another Israeli, Yigal Amir. I’ve never seen a quote from Mr. Amir expressing regret.

I wondered back then if peace was even remotely possible, and still do. We’ve seen on both sides people who do not want deals. They are willing, like Yigal Amir, to sit in jail the rest of their lives to demonstrate it, to be known for the concept of non-negotiation on key issues.

On the Arab side, assailants don’t consider jail at all; they just settle the whole question by blowing themselves up, along with all contemplation about the wisdom of the act. Unfortunately, contemplation would mean that any Palestinian leader who proposes a deal with the Israelis would have to imply that all those suicidal “martyrs” did not have to die at all.

What Palestinian leader could survive after implying that those suicide bombers died for something less than complete Arab victory, for a compromise? I think he might meet the same fate as not only Yitzhak Rabin, but also Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981. These days, the fact still floats around my head that both Sadat and Rabin were recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace.