Translating the Guardian’s Sam Bahour

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
08 February '11

A couple of years ago my dear friend Chas Newkey-Burden of ‘Oy Va Goy’ (and other) fame sent me a Hannuka gift which, within minutes of opening it, made me cry.

It was Daniel Gordis’ book ‘Coming Together, Coming Apart’ – a very personal account of his family’s life in Jerusalem during the years of the second Intifada. Gordis not only recounts his experiences, but also wrestles with the complexities of peace and war from the tangled political macro right down to the micro of trying to raise a family in such a situation.

It is a book which offers no answers – only questions – and it is a must for anyone who wishes to really understand how and why the Intifada years shaped Israeli society. It is also an account of a portion of the history of this region written from an angle never employed by history books or grand op-eds in Western newspapers.

So why did it have me in tears by page 3? Because Gordis’ children were my children, his fears my fears, his moral and political dilemmas mine too. He begins by recounting how, after months of nightly shooting from Beit Jala which kept his children awake, he and his wife decided one evening to take advantage of a lull in the fighting to go to see a movie and what happened when they arrived home and found their youngest child – a ten-year old – awake because of fireworks from a local community centre party which he thought was gunfire.

“Holding him, I could feel him shivering. It was a warm spring night in Jerusalem, not even a chill in the air. He was wearing boxers and a T-shirt, and there was no reason for him to be quivering like that. But he was shaking, shuddering in my embrace, so I held him tighter, hoping I could get the shaking to stop.

“It’s just fireworks, Av, just fireworks. I promise.”

He looked up at me, his big blue eyes staring right into mine. “Good,” he said, gripping my shirt tight, with fingers that suddenly seemed very small. “Because I can’t do this anymore.”

All of us who experienced those years had days when we ‘just couldn’t do this anymore’. ‘This’ was trying to explain what was happening to our children, but without lowering ourselves to the point of making sweeping stereotypical generalisations about the murderers of Israeli school-children or grandparents.

(Read full "Translating the Guardian’s Sam Bahour")

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