In a Nation So Small, Tragedy Is Always Nearby

The problem in Israel is that you always know someone. When something terrible occurs, it’s not just a news story.

It had been raining for a week when the helicopters went down in the north of Israel on Tuesday. February was not a good month in Israel last year: The whole country seemed to be exploding with terror. A sense of fatal anniversary loomed when the month began this year. Would the signing of the Hebron agreement last month mean a new round of bus bombings? And then there was what seemed to be the answer: metal pieces scattered on the ground, bodies being pried loose, a fire burning, men in yellow, plastic uniforms. Even though it had nothing to do with the peace process, the disaster played into the country’s mood of political confusion. Fog everywhere.

This is a country of 5 million people, far fewer than live in New York City. Its policy of universal, mandatory conscription means that, in every family, there is someone who has served in the Israeli Defense Forces, or someone who is serving, or someone who will serve, and, often, someone who has been killed or maimed in the line of duty. As Jews, Israelis have a highly developed, quite biblical sense of themselves as a nation.

And because the country is so small, the nation does come together, especially in times of war or national tragedy. On Tuesday, some 10 minutes after 73 soldiers were killed in a midair helicopter crash, you couldn’t call someone without hearing about it. Israelis are all glued to the news, and when news comes, espe- cially bad news, it is quickly transformed into hundreds and thousands of phone calls. In Israel, the words “national reaction” have real meaning.

The intensity of popular participation in the country’s fate has political repercussions. Just after the crash--and a short week after three soldiers were killed by a Hezbollah bomb--former Prime Minister Shimon Peres told Israeli radio that Israel has to reexamine its reason for being in Lebanon (the helicopters that crashed were on their way to the conflict in what is known as the Security Zone in south Lebanon, where Israel and the South Lebanese Army have been waging a ground war of sorts with Syrian-backed Hezbollah militias). The whole country is furious with Peres now, because in the wake of a national tragedy, you must never criticize Israel.

What this means is that every incident and every attack exacerbates Israel’s already combative and besieged mentality. After Israelis watch the battered bodies of their young men being pulled from the crash, their initial response is to continue on in Lebanon, rather than question the validity of the political reasoning for which these soldiers gave their lives. This is a country that has established itself on extremely unfriendly territory. It has had to fight many cruel wars cruelly in order to survive--including the one it is still waging against Palestinians as it pursues the peace alternative. Israel is not suffering from the Vietnam syndrome.

In so many ways, Israel is like an old-fashioned ghetto, a ghetto of its own devising. An enclave in an inimical region, its citizens feel fear--and disgust--about the land of the non-Jews that lies around them. “I don’t go there,” says a middle-aged Israeli man about Arab East Jerusalem. “My friends wouldn’t go there, either. That’s where the enemy lives, those are the people who want to kill us.”

Most Israelis have never visited the West Bank. They do not want to know about what lies abroad, the Hebrew translation of which, chootz ha-aretz, means outside the country, literally. Understandably, they don’t trust outside. Like a number of countries, but more intensely, Israel is isolated in its own story, fascinated by its own idiosyncrasies, in love with its joy and splendor--and its tragedy.

The closeness of all Israelis--the tight-knit, ghettoish solidarity of the country that feels under siege--registers in the details. It doesn’t take long to get caught up in the drama. Five months after I arrived in Jerusalem, I was initiated. A bomb ripped apart the No. 18 bus on Jaffa Street early on a workday morning. Nineteen were killed. This seemed to me a terrible tragedy, but distant--though it happened only a five-minute drive from my house. Then I discovered that someone I’d just interviewed, a well-known Israeli journalist, had lost a son in the explosion. I have three sons. This man, with his dead son, was the first victim of Middle East terror I’d ever known, and it made me feel the tragedy more viscerally. It made me understand better the tribalism of the Israelis. It’s easier to put yourself in someone else’s shoes when you know there they live, when your friends are their friends.

A few days later, I had dinner with a trauma specialist from Hadassah Hospital, quite by accident: He was the husband of a woman who was invited to dinner. He came very late, because there had just been another bus bomb in Jerusalem. He had worked long hours that week, and he had an unusually hearty appetite. This is how things work in Israel--you always just happen to know someone who knows someone who’s related. They just show up at dinner, and in between bites, they tell you, quite laconically, about the gruesome facts of suffering and pain.

“You may hate your neighbor, or refuse to talk to anyone who votes Likud, but when there’s a bomb or a military incident or war, we’re all family,” said one older Israeli woman, whose two sons both served in the Israeli Army, one during the Yom Kippur War. “In a war, every family has someone fighting, and every night brings fresh tragedy to every community. With every phone call you make, you just pray you’re not going to hear bad news.”

But, after all, this is Israel, where everyone is in a bad mood all the time and only the rarest person can manage a bit of politesse, even on a good day. The famous rudeness is the flip side of Israel’s warm, provincial attitude. It is another way Israelis show concern. Israelis get into your physical space a lot. They argue with complete strangers a lot. They tell you what they think you should do a lot. Yet, this lack of gentility disappears when tragedy strikes. Then, suddenly, everyone is pulling seamlessly together.

People fall all over each other to help light memorial candles, to organize funerals. They offer neighbors rides to hospitals, to services. Everyone wants to talk about what happened, and who they know. And it’s really not a reaction against terrorism, it’s a mass outpouring of nationalist fervor: Any incident that has to do with Israel’s security provokes this war reaction--a manifestation of the fact that, in some way, almost all Israelis consider each other family.

It’s happening again. My baby-sitter’s friend lost a son in a roadside bombing in Lebanon a week ago. Today, my landlord’s daughter is crying downstairs because her friend’s brother was killed in the helicopter crash.

Sometimes, living in Israel reminds you of what it must have been like to endure one of the world’s great wars. People from all walks of life are involved, and they are weeping in the streets. And this is because Israel is a nation at war--no matter its attempts to move toward peace; no matter that the vast changes that have taken place since the Zionist pioneers tilled the land; no matter how many times the pioneers’ great-grandchildren go to the mall and have a barbecue and shop at Toys ‘R’ Us and have a cup of cappuccino on Shienken Street down in Tel Aviv. This is still disputed territory, and the Israelis are living with that reality.