Days of Foreboding, Rumors of War

In Jewish tradition, these summer days traditionally are a time of mourning. Orthodox men don’t shave, weddings and other public celebrations are suspended, the religious radio stations play only vocal, not instrumental, music. Known as the “Three Weeks” marking the ancient Roman siege of Jerusalem and culminating in the fast day of the Ninth of Ab, there is no more somber or ominous time of the Jewish year. Into the Ninth of Ab are condensed Jewish history’s major disasters: the destruction of both the first and second temples, the loss of national sovereignty, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. World War I, the beginning of modern Europe’s disintegration that led to the Holocaust, also began on the Ninth of Ab.

Nature, too, conditions the religious Israeli to expect disaster in summer: The rains, biblical symbol of God’s favor, entirely cease, and the earth reverts to thistle and stone, a land of graves.

And so Wednesday’s terrorist atrocity in Jerusalem seems to be part of a predetermined pattern, a reassertion of hostile history. The attack has occurred at a time of increasingly vocal speculation of imminent war. The most serious threats are coming from the Middle East’s three most pathological regimes. Western and Arabic intelligence reports quoted in the Israeli press say that Iran, Iraq and Syria, alarmed by Israel’s growing strategic alliance with Turkey, are trying to resolve their long-time mutual antipathy and create a military pact. According to Israeli intelligence, the Syrian army is actively preparing for war or at least an attack on Israeli positions in the Golan Heights. In Lebanon, Iran is encouraging fundamentalist Islamic guerrillas to intensify attacks on Israeli soldiers and provoke retaliation, while leaders of the Palestinian Authority warn constantly of a “spontaneous explosion of the Palestinian street”-- by which they mean orchestrated violence.

Like the Jews of ancient Jerusalem who accused one another of treasonous accommodation or provocative militancy toward the Roman empire, modern Israelis agree only about this: If the next war happens, other Israelis will be to blame. Leftists fault the right-wing Netanyahu government for failing to nurture the fragile peace process and accept Arab territorial demands. Rightists assert that the countdown to the next war began with the empowerment of Yasser Arafat’s terrorist army as a police force in the heart of the land of Israel. They cite the recent arrest by Israeli soldiers of three Palestinian police on their way to randomly kill Jewish settlers. Israeli intelligence says the three were dispatched by Palestinian Police Chief Gazi Jabali. Wednesday’s suicide bombers, apparently members of the Iranian-backed Hamas, may not have been dispatched by Arafat’s police, but the police made no attempt to stop them.

Orthodox Jews blame both secular leftists and rightists for summoning God’s anger by polluting the Holy Land with Western vices. The salvation of Israel, insist rabbis who travel the country preaching penitence to increasingly larger audiences, won’t be found in any political formula but only in a return to the ways of the Torah.

Even as we mourn the destruction of ancient Jerusalem, we debate the fate of resurrected modern Jerusalem. Is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to call back the bulldozers at Har Homa a provocation that has restored us to pariah status and opened the way to the next war? Or is his unexpected opposition to building a new Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem’s Ras al Amud a betrayal of Jewish history and the beginning of the dismemberment of the city between rival Palestinian and Israeli sovereignties? And what about the Temple Mount: Should Jews be allowed to pray at Judaism’s holiest site, as an Israeli court has ruled, or is allowing Jewish prayer at Islam’s third holiest site an invitation to a Muslim holy war?

Like the Jews in Roman times, we are trying to discover the way out of the siege. We search, each group in its way, for the political or religious solution to the mutually conflicting demands of history and security and morality. If we can draw any strength as we bury our dead and anticipate worse to come, it is that, after all the exiles and destruction, we are still debating our impossible dilemmas here in Jerusalem.