Daily Havoc in the Holy Land

By C. Lawrence Malm

If you are an American living in the Middle East today, people back home are worried about you. These days you cannot live here without a strategy to reassure concerned friends and family in America. After conversing with several people here, I have discovered that the most popular method of inducing loved ones to relax is to downplay the severity of the situation. People constantly tell the folks at home that life here is "not that bad." This trivializes the pain and suffering the Israelis and Palestinians are experiencing. If you have friends studying or working in this troubled region who tell you "it's not that bad," be advised that what they are telling you is, "Relax, I'm not in constant, immediate danger and I'm probably not going to die." They cannot mean that the situation here is truly "not that bad."

The fantastic pictures from CNN do not tell the whole story. Gunfire does not interrupt every hour of every day. People do not run with their heads covered from doorway to doorway. Bombs are not exploding every few seconds. To be sure, all of these things do happen--just not everywhere at every time. In fact, life here for American ex-pats usually feels quite normal--we go to restaurants and bars, do our grocery shopping, study, work and play.

But the situation is extremely difficult for the people who really live here. In fact, the malevolence of the situation is worse than can ever be captured in those fantastic 30-second television shots. The suffering and uncertainty are constant, everyday and unspectacular. While CNN captures the moments when the violence boils over, it cannot capture the daily grind of conflict: emotions of fear, uncertainty, anger and frustration. Every Palestinian is not out in the street, head wrapped in a kafeeyah, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. But Palestinians do live with constant uncertainty as to whether the Israelis will arbitrarily alter their lives. I live right on top of an Israeli checkpoint on the line between East and West Jerusalem and each night I watch the police detain every Palestinian car that passes. Sometimes, the Palestinians are waived through after a quick paper check; other times they are detained at length. On one occasion I watched three Israeli soldiers threaten to beat a Palestinian boy.

Each Palestinian who approaches this checkpoint has no idea how the police and solders will treat him, but he does know that he has little recourse if he is mistreated. I know a Palestinian who was harassed at a checkpoint until he lost his temper; for his verbal barrage, he received a series of vague fines that destroyed the better part of his income for the week. I have met Palestinians who traveled for hours and took huge risks to circumvent the Israeli closure of the West Bank so they might earn enough money to provide their children with food for the first time in several days. I know children who have missed untold amounts of school because of curfews. None of these events make their way onto CNN because they are unspectacular compared to the short bursts of violence. Nonetheless, these events affect Palestinian life just as much as the dramatic scenes that make the news. The Palestinians live in constant fury that their combination of everyday inconvenience and widespread trauma seems to illicit no response from the outside world.

On the Israeli side, the situation is little better. Far away from the television cameras, Israelis walk the streets, unsure of which car might suddenly explode and scatter their remains. I had the misfortune of being quite close to an explosion in West Jerusalem; I saw the faces of Israelis twisted with inexplicable horror, sadness, fear and anger. Some roads that Israelis used to use are now unsafe for cars with Israeli plates. I have watched mothers sit in front of the television, anxiously watching the news and hoping that their loved ones are away from the front lines. I have talked to 18-year-old soldiers whose superiors order them to make agonizing but instantaneous moral judgments and live with the consequences if they make a mistake. I have seen hotels and restaurants devoid of tourists while their nervous proprietors bleed money.

All the while, Israelis worry that the outside world has lined up against them and views their society as brutal and uncaring rather than afraid and insecure. In addition, the recent violence has left many Israelis resigned to the idea that their country will be embattled and besieged forever and that peace with the Arabs is only a dream. The nation-wide depression and the widespread frustration that the situation causes cannot be captured on television.

So the next time you get a phone call or an e-mail from one of your friends reassuring you that "it's not that bad," be advised that they are telling you not to pressure them to come home--they either enjoy their life here, or they feel they are doing meaningful and necessary work. They surely cannot mean that the situation here is not arduous for the people on both sides who are inextricably and passionately tied to this struggle. For the people who are directly and indefinitely in the midst of this conflict, things here are "that bad."

C. Lawrence Malm '00 is spending a year in Jerusalem on the Michael C. Rockefeller fellowship. He frequently volunteers at the Seeds of Peace Center for Coexistence to work with Israeli and Palestinian youth.