MICHAL GOVRIN
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attraction of victimhood-Raeda in her staging of "The Temple of the
Valley of Hell" and I in the novel
The Name.
I kept track of the chil–
dren's theater she set up in Beit Jalla and of her flourishing career.
But in the summer of
2000,
the pressure rose. In August, during the
Camp David talks, and shortly before his death, Yehuda Amichai signed
a petition against destroying Jewish finds in the archaeological digs on
the Temple Mount. And in September, Sharon's bombastic (but not ille–
gal) visit to the Temple Mount served as a pretext for the beginning of
the armed Palestinian attack, which was led by the military arms of the
Palestinian Authority (Force 17, the AI-Aksa Brigades, and the Tanzim)
in cooperation with terror organizations (Hamas, Islamic Jihad). In
October, Arafat called for a million
shahids
to descend on Jerusalem.
In the fall of
2000,
Jerusalem, especially the southern neighborhood of
Gilo, was one of the Palestinian targets. Forces of the Palestinian Author–
ity from Bethlehem found cover among the houses of Beit Jalla to shoot
at Gilo, and the Israeli army returned fire. The lives of the residents of
both neighborhoods, separated by a green valley, turned into a night–
mare. The residents of Gilo tried to minimize their fear and continue busi–
ness as usual. "So what if they shoot?" went the joke. "There's a problem
only if the kitchen looks south and the refrigerator is next to the window.
Well, then you can bend down when you take something out. Of course,
when you have to take schnitzel out of the freezer there is a problem. So
who says you have to eat schnitzel?!" At my younger daughter'S school,
where there are many students from Gilo, I heard a conversation between
children. "How will you go home? They're shooting at your street," they
asked one little girl. She tried to evade, to claim that the shooting wasn't
really on her street, and finally she shrugged and said: "So what? I'll get
off the bus and run. Anyway ... I'm so skinny they won't hit me."
The residents of Beit Jalla, a well-to-do Christian minority who had
already been under enough Muslim pressure for many to have left, now
turned into hostages in the middle of gunfire exchanges. Raeda ! I
thought anxiously, but I was afraid to phone, to put her in a compro–
mising position, to expose her to danger. When I finally did get in touch,
I told her: "You're like my relatives in the Soviet Union we were afraid
to contact for years." She laughed in embarrassment and said that her
children's theater had been hit by mortar fire, but they were continuing
to perform. "We're mobilized for hours to put on shows for the children.
They're traumatized," she said . "Very good," I commended her, with the
pride of a teacher. I trusted her to maintain the obligation to humane
theater, even if with a national message, without incitement. I suggested
that we work together on a children's play between Gilo and Beit Jalla
