MICHAL GOVRIN
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neighborhood of Beit Israel exploded . Pictures of Jews dressed in caf–
tans and streimels stirred fears of pogroms in the national subconscious.
And the following Saturday night, an explosion rocked our house, and
simultaneously, the sounds of sirens burst onto the screen, along with
information about a suicide bomber in the yuppie cafe, Moment.
Twelve young people were murdered. And the last cycle of calm we
imagined in the streets of our quiet neighborhood was shattered. The
next day, I went with my daughter
to
her violin lesson so she wouldn't
be alone when discovering the ruins at the site of the murder, the mob,
the television cameras, the customers of the cafe, the mother of a bar–
man who was saved because just then he had bent down to pick up a
bottle of beer. The managers of the clubs, who go on making young peo–
ple dance in the strongholds of Jerusalem secularism, were distributing
stickers saying "This Moment Must Not Be Stopped." Defending sanity
in their own way, with coffee and a croissant, as Ari Shavit wrote in
Ha'aretz
the next day. Immediately he earned hostility for self-indulgent
whining, instead of protesting the "crimes of the army" or the "set–
tlers." The violence of silencing pain and empathy, silencing the self and
silencing the other, is characteristic of the rigidity of the Left.
For Passover, we went to Paris, and the violence pursued us. Dozens
of casualties in an attack on a Passover Seder at a hotel in Netanya, a
fatal attack in a restaurant in Haifa, a woman suicide bomber in a
supermarket in Jerusalem.
In
France, synagogues burned-incitement at
its height, and the Jewish community in a panic. The plane was full of
a French delegation in support of Palestine, who shouted slogans all
through the flight. As we were disembarking, someone mentioned, in
reply, the million victims in the French war with Algeria. After a
moment of silence, they shouted in standard postcolonial guilt: "So you
leave too, like the French!" "Where to? Auschwitz?" I exploded. They
burst out laughing. "We know that answer, too."
In
line for passport
control, two Orthodox Jews whispered to me : "Madame, you
shouldn't make them mad." And then, the day after the attack on the
Passover Seder, a Parisian taxi driver delivered a speech of admiration
about the "courage" of the "desperate" suicide bomber, of fascination
with force that raised dizzying connotations. And while the Foreign
Minister, Vedrine, was sharply condemning Israel, there were calls for
putting Sharon on trial; there were anti-Semitic declarations, anti-Israeli
demonstrations, and petitions against academics, Israeli leftists. They
were reminders of how much hatred of the State of Israel and Israelis,
like anti-Semitism, isn't because of what the Jews do, but because the
