Martyrs’ Crossing by Amy Wilentz Page B

worry too desperately about the outcome of a single moment in the rapid flow. What did an hour matter? He would just do his bit and save himself and let history rush onward. History would rush onward, regardless of him and Doron and the dead boy, he knew. The Zen of working for the Israeli Defense Forces, he thought to himself.
    It was too bad for Doron that the baby had turned out to be a virtual Arab dignitary. Yizhar himself had personally never heard of George Raad before, although Hajimi’s name was of course familiar to him. Hamas bigwig—great. It was seriously and really too bad the kid had to be Hajimi’s son. Son of a political prisoner, Yizhar had read in the International Herald Tribune. Right, he thought. Translation from the bullshit: Son of a jailed terrorist. And even more too bad that the child had to be the grandson of some wild-eyed Pal intellectual type. A doctor—why were they always doctors? But this guy was not some local dentist who had organized terror cells or some oddball gynecologist who happened to be the Chairman’s closest confidant. The Raad guy was known throughout the world, it seemed, he was highly respectable, apparently, a brilliant writer, and famous as a doctor, too, even if he, Yizhar, who thought of himself as not entirely brainless, had never heard of him and neither had anyone he knew. Israelis never knew shit about Palestinians, Yizhar always said. Anyway, suddenly this Raad was practically a Nobel prize–winner, now that his grandson turned out to be the kid who died. That was fate and the onward rush. A phone ringing in the middle of the night.
    So now a little boy who would have just been some Palestinian toddler who had the misfortune to have an asthma attack at the wrong political moment turns out to be an international cause célèbre. Died at Shuhada crossing, where else? Shuhada meant “martyr” in Arabic, and Yizhar had noticed over the years that any Palestinian who ever died anywhere was immediately transformed by the Authority or by whoever was speaking for the Palestinians into some kind of glorified god, an Allah-inspired victim of the evil Israelis.
    Yizhar imagined a small boy in a head scarf and white robes, with a golden sword strapped to his side, and gold medals hanging from his neck, and gold braid around his waist, like a Palestinian warrior from the days before statehood. A cause célèbre and a major big problem for the Israeli Defense Forces, and Yizhar will have to stay up late for this night and many other nights, to say nothing of having to hear ad nauseam and to the nth degree the pathetic and lame and possibly whining excuses of this Doron fellow and his other nameless buddies at the checkpoint.
    Yizhar didn’t want to hear it. What was the point? He already knew exactly what had happened. We’d just get it out our way, and then never let the media know who the guys at the checkpoint were, don’t give them any idea who was responsible. The mere possibility of being on television could make a man start spouting information, either because he was scared or because he was excited. Yizhar feared the Israeli press, who knew everyone and everything and who were always faxing the international media top secret documents from the army hours before the head of central command had seen them. After the Israelis, he feared the English, who read the Hebrew media—or got someone to translate it for them—and then extrapolated and embroidered till you had a story there in front of you that at least seemed to make sense, even if it was a tissue of vividly constructed lies. And he feared the wide-eyed international human-rights people. The foreign, hunger-striking, nose-sticking, meddling, prattling, babbling, sermonizing, peace-loving, underdoggy folks. Lord, they were a dangerous crew. Sometimes when he listened to them he wondered if they could possibly mean what they were saying. They lived in some other