In the Jerusalem summer of my youth I rambled from Abu Tor
down to the Jaffa Gate into the Old City, to the left through the Arab shouk, to
the right onto a little street whose name I now can’t conjure that took me past
the magnificent Dome of the Rock, and then down again to the Wailing Wall, liberated
not so long before from the hands of the vicious little Jordanian king.
I took the bus from Kiryat haYovel on Mount Herzl, where my
sister lived, with its flimsy apartment buildings thrown up hurriedly in the
1950s to provide shelter for some of the hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing the
murderous pogroms and expulsion campaigns that had erupted against them across
the nominally post-Nazi Arab world with the declaration of the Jewish State,
down to Rehavia, to the fantastic, book-laden, haute-kulturni apartment of Gershom
and Fania Scholem—in exchange for the cakes and tea with which Fania plied me,
I supplied gossip, which she collected, as she collected young people, and
which Scholem, as they both called him, inhaled with all the ardor of a
boundless genius and the world’s greatest scholar of Kabbalah and mysticism
(sorry, red-stringed Hollywood dupes)—and from there to the old station where I
caught the train to Haifa and shared a car with a raucous family of Indian Jews
(I hadn’t even known there were
Indian Jews, such was my ignorance).
From the shaded, flowered loveliness of the King David Hotel,
whose very walls and air crackled (and do so still) with the life story of the
tiny great country (for good and ill), I walked to the packed, filthy old central
bus station, whence I was carried, in a fabulous, mad, crush of impatient,
disorderly Israelis, onto the bus for Tel Aviv, then tumbled out with them all into
that seaside city—with its anti-Biblical facades eroded by sea air and sand and
diesel fuel, and pock-marked by bullet-holes put there by Arab snipers and
their infatuated British defenders in their 1948 siege—then rushed, and crushed,
back again to the glorious, sun-bleached, ancient Jerusalemite stones.
I wandered all these places, by bus and on foot, loving the
fine dust collecting like mist in my hair, in the crooks of my arms, on my eyelashes,
in my ears, in the wrinkles of my blouse, on the straps of my sandals. It was
Jerusalem dust, and if I knew embarrassingly little about Judaism, the religion
of my people, I knew plenty about Zionism, the religion of my family, and I
rejoiced to be covered in its dust.
But all that innocent joy in dust and Zion was marred by the
looming, leering, familiarity of vendors in the Arab shouk—all of them male—inching
ever closer, closer—because I wasn’t covered—if I stopped to look at their
wares, or staring at me if I didn’t, until I flinched away, and the sounds of their
shouts “Yallah! Hamoudi! Come back please, baby!” followed me down the narrow
alleyways that stank of the dead, fly-covered sheep swinging from hooks in the
food stalls; and marred, too, less frighteningly but more shockingly, by the
grotesque sight of Haredi men flinging themselves against buildings and throwing
their hands over their eyes in order not to look at me as I passed in my summer
dresses, and the repulsive experience of feeling those same creatures
pressed up against me, clammy with intent, whenever a crowded bus gave them the chance.
I was no feminist; I laughed with pleasure at the catcalls
that to the bawling ladies of the women’s movement were so odious—the barbed poison
arrows of the patriarchal master-class of rapists, or whatever it was they called men—and felt scorn for those same sobbing chicks when they preached the
superiority of primitive cultures—the ones in which the men did in fact harm and enslave their women.
And I’d learned, as every New York girl must do, how to stomp on the feet of
the pervs on the subway, and how to hurt them with my umbrella.
But those Arab men scared me, and those Haredi men disgusted
me, and they do so still today: Unlike the appreciative, hooting construction
workers and neighborhood winos who were beaten so tragically into cowering submission
by the tribe of women’s-movement Amazons that took over and defenestrated most of
Western civ, some of these men seem to have sprung directly from a pre-Abrahamic
tribalism that sees women as sinning temptresses, to be avoided, blamed,
maligned, attacked, spat upon, raped, and, in the case of the Arabs, anyway,
destroyed in the acts of child sacrifice that are politely known as “honor killings.”
In the post-Intifada, post-disengagement, post-Arafat, post-Cast-Lead,
post-Obamic-settlement-freeze-obsession, post-hopeless-“peace-process” period
of Islamofascist ascendancy, the Arab Quarter shimmers with hostility, and the words
echoing in the alleyways are as likely to be “Go to hell, Amriki Jew!”—if any
Amriki Jew venture there—as “Wait, hammoudi, for you, only $10!” But the quality
of the woman-hatred of some is unchanged.
And all these years later some Haredim traverse the city in
their own buses, with the men sitting in front and the women sitting in back,
lest someone be tempted to look in someone else’s direction and something . . .
explosive . . . happen.
The effort to avoid the legion snares of secularism and
modernity have driven these two groups even further into a primitivism that looks
worrisomely interchangeable; like their counterparts on the “Palestinian” side,
young Haredi men are already hurling stones at Israeli soldiers. How long
before the nexus is complete, and Haredi women are strapping bombs to the
torsos of their sons and sending them off to martyr themselves at IDF checkpoints
or sidewalk cafes or pizza parlors?
