The Silencer
Bloomsbury, 1991, original paperback.
Interlink Books, Brooklyn, NY, 1993, hardback & paperback.
MAN HAT ON – February, 1989:
A CERTIFIED PARANOID, Son of my People, I suspected for some time I
had a
Silencer but had no real proof until he turned up, creeping up on me
like a bad dream, whispering his existence in my ear. In this case
it was he, not I, who was Daniel in the lions' den, as he had gatecrashed
the Special Conference on Jewish-Palestinian Peace in the guise of
a human being. Correction, a journalist, flying the colours of some
obscure ethnic rag in New Jersey. They proliferate, I am told, out
there over the Hudson, espousing views ranging from a little left of
Isaiah to far right of Attila the Hun.
My People! And my Cousins, the Palestinian Enemy, crowding into the
New York University hall like lemmings who have misplaced the ocean.
Hawking, spitting, muttering and grumbling about precedence, they take
their place in the Aaron Spelling Lecture Hall. Outside, the mock Greek
temple building's pediment is inscribed with noble, historical names:
Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero,
Virgil. But inside we are unable to field more than Yochai Magen-David,
ex-Chief of Military Intelligence and converted ex-guru of the anti-Arab
crusade, now a spear carrier for Israeli-Palestinian Peace; Daoud Abu-Naim,
Deputy Speaker of the Palestine National Congress and one of the twelve
right arms of Chairman Yassir Arafat; Eliyahu Saltsman, Member of the
Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, for the Citizens Rights Party which
espouses dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Reserve
Sergeant Major and Professor of Human Ecology at Tel Aviv University;
Akram Ibn Ghallallah, deposed Mayor of Rammallah, on the Israeli occupied
West Bank; Yirmiyahu Dubcek, Industrialist and founder of the IsraeliPalestinian
Centre for Reconciliation; Hatem Abu Riad, ex-terrorist newly converted
to pigeonhood; Howard Battalion-Gold, ex-President of the World Jewish
Congress and convertee to the Great Historical Compromise which the
Conference was called to proclaim. Haloes shone above everyone, none
so brightly as above the grey-white head of Dorothy Morgenthal, Conference
Organiser, a tough leather-hide mother-of-four and ex-wife of three
who had cut her teeth on the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and
had, only three weeks before, bearded, so to speak, Chairman Arafat
himself in a hotel room in Stockholm and prised out of him his first
unequivocal declaration of recognition of the State of Israel. It was
breakfast time, she had revealed to me over a late Bagel Nosh down
in the East Village, and the Chairman had wheeled into his presence
the morning slops he had become addicted to since the Beirut siege
of 1982: A large bowl of salad topped with cornflakes washed down with
hot tea, which the Chairman stirred vigorously with a wooden spoon,
then adding two spoonfuls of honey. Matching bowls were offered to
each of the four American Jewish delegates who had come to Sweden to
persuade the Chairman not to shirk his decisive Peace Initiative at
his coming United Nations address due three days thence at Geneva.
`I was the only one who ate the concoction,' she told me, biting through
baked dough and cream cheese, `while my colleagues simply picked at
it, very timidly. Then I called for more. He gave me half his. I said
to him: Can't we do the same with the land? He laughed, and told me
I reminded him of his own mother. I concealed my unease.'
Of such trifles are historic moments conceived. But I liked Dorothy.
She reminded me of my own mother, but I didn't tell her this. Some
analogies I am not yet ready to take. When my editor, Nahum Lauterman,
manipulator extraordinary, asked me to abandon my usual TV column and
take the next El Al flight out of Tel Aviv, Israel, to Jew York to
cover the Jewish-Palestinian Conference I did my usual Moses act: But
I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue, and cleft palate. See, no
mole upon the right cheek, no gap between the teeth. I am definitely
not the Mahdi, the Expected One. But he pooh-poohed my fears. Get your
head out from between your legs, Joe Dekel, he said, using the shem
hamephorash, the Explicit Name, in a vain attempt to appropriate my
soul. Peace! he said, the great Salaam, the sulha, the reconciliation
of mortal enemies which alone can end the hundred years' war in this
benighted sliver of shit both sides call our homeland. I can't have
you, one of the nation's ace journalists, sitting at home and drivelling
about Dynasty and Are You Being Served? Here is a First Class ticket
to New
York, son of a bitch, see how I mollycoddle my Chosen Ones? Now get
out there and make good!
So here I am, not even bothering to hide my hattie, the emblematic
skullcap or kipa of the Faithful and Devout, as I usually do on jaunts
abroad, to avoid being accosted in the streets and subways and underwhelmed
by declarations of sympathy and support for policies I hate and revile.
But here in Manhattan, I thought, there should be safety in numbers.
As in the Homeland, I should be inconspicuous in the melting pot, the
other promised and promoted land...
There is no doubt the times demand action. It has become too difficult
to hide, even in one's own four walls. Too damaging to the self, the
self's esteem, to crawl under the bed, the armchair, the sofa, to barricade
the door, seal up the windows, put on blindfolds and earplugs and switch
off the sounds of battle, insurrection, pain, anguish, the anger and
frustration of the oppressed, the loutish bays of the oppressor, the
thud of wooden clubs against flesh and bone, the clattering fire of
`plastic' bullets and `five' rounds, the teeming babbles and strangled
protests of thousands rounded up into detention camps, prisons and
police cells.
The times, they are a-changing, Bob Dylan sang, twenty million years
ago, but he did not have this in mind. Since December 1987 the Palestinian
intifada, or insurrection, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, has
been a fact of life shattering official conceptions, overturning moribund
expectations, killing myths, destroying shibboleths: The `liberal occupation',
`the creation of facts', `the wholeness of Israel', `time is on our
side'. Myths of the primitiveness of our enemies: And lo, the natives
are not happy to be hewers of wood, drawers of water, passive, quiescent,
untermenschen shaken occasionally by `outside incitement' leading to
acts of mindless terror. Suddenly they are an organised force, united
in voice and action, demanding rights, refusing collaboration, facing
armoured cars and armed soldiers with rocks in slings and petrol bombs
made out of milk and soda-pop bottles.
How are the mighty fallen. And yet, not so fast. For are we not too
victims, Davids, not Goliaths, charred remnants of holocausts, bona
fide wretched of the earth, a card-carrying oppressed people, having
by circumstance to bite and scratch to survive? Spewed out by the world's
nations, have we not, by our blood, and the sweat of our brow (not
to speak of diaspora donations and United States aid), carved out for
ourselves a home in our ancient homeland, readied ourselves to defend
it, our lives, our women and children, by all means, sadly, in a savage,
ruthless world? And so, in our eyes, the children of stones, no longer
mute victims, are transmuted, by our own fears, into slavering Nazis,
riding on grey unseen tanks, their slingshots deadly arrows aimed at
the heart of our will to fight on...
`We fucked ourselves up completely,' I told Dorothy, as she demolished
a Bagel Nosh salad. `We used to be Ari Ben-Canaan, Paul Newman, with
blond hairs on our chest. Today we're back to being Janusz Korcak,
following the kiddies into the gas chamber. All our tanks and guns
and warplanes are will-o'-the-wisps, ghosts that have failed to frighten
our enemies. We're back in the ghetto again.'
`Nebesch,' she said. `I weep for the bastards who run your country.
Rabin, Peres, Shamir. Who do they think they're fooling? Don't tell
me: The diaspora, mainly America's Jews. Well, let me tell you, they
have not lobotomised all of us. We can still smell a turd under our
face, even if they call it a rose.'
I knew the feeling. The same happened to me long ago, but never so
strongly as over the Lebanon War of 1982. The sense of the terminal
collapse of the myth under napalm, in the reek of burnt corpses and
mass graves. The lies, the perfidy, the total collapse of all moral
values, the plunge into the abyss of stupidity and deceit. The tanks
that punched into refugee camps and cities, the planes that bombed
apartment houses. And at the finale, the hands washing themselves clean
of the Sabra and Chatilla massacre. I wrote a novel, trying to encompass
that madness, a work of fiction, about the aftermath. A thriller, based
loosely on an old friend who had become embroiled in the shadowy world
of spy-counterspy and had vanished into the oblivion of censored reports
and gossip. It was called The Death of Moishe-Ganef. And therein lies
the curious root of my present tale, the first echoes of my Silencer's
whisper ...
And behold, in the abyss post-Lebanon we found there were depths which
we had not yet begun to plumb! The ten thousand clubs ordered by the
army from a carpenter in Tel Aviv, which his Arab workers refused,
to his surprised chagrin, to produce, the Defence Forces' gravel-shooting
truck, the Ministerial order to break bones and heads, the children
inexplicably dead of gunshot wounds ... Intifada time, and out of the
pit, out of the deepest despair, nevertheless, new moves, the desperate
attempt to crawl up and out, at long last, towards the impossible,
forbidden discourse, now raising its hesitant head ... Yochai Magen-David
makes the keynote speech. He praises a historical breakthrough: When
Chairman Arafat recognised Israel at Geneva, everything in the Middle
East changed. The historic roles of compromiser and rejector had switched.
The PLO was now a partner for dialogue, whatever the government of
Israel might say. Private persons must step in now where the government
fears to tread. He himself, who had once accused the Palestinians of
planning genocide, was recanting his old ideas in public. He beat his
breast physically, producing a somewhat hollow sound, which nevertheless
earned him applause. He called for a change of heart, of mind, of policy.
He saw light at the end of the tunnel. Then he sat down, and was heard
to demand a hamburger should be brought to the podium. Dorothy Morgenthal,
at his left, calmed him with a hand at his neck, fingers poised over
the pressure points.
Daoud Abu-Naim, deputy to Yassir Arafat, spoke next, praising his predecessor.
We have all got much to learn from each other. We meet to build a bridge
over a chasm of misunderstanding and hatred. For decades we have killed
and maimed and destroyed each other. Now the time has come to speak
of brotherhood. The brotherhood of the Jews, who have suffered so much
in the past, and of the Palestinians, who are suffering now. Peace,
in the Holy Land, between equals, for our children, and for all humanity.
I joined the applause. After all, here was a bona fide terrorist, the
slavering Arab beast of our propaganda, a baby killer from our worst
nightmares, cooing and stroking our ruffled feathers. Here at least
was something new. Perhaps, after all, there is hope, Joe Dekel? You
never know until you've tried...
As when I wrote my book, and sent out the manuscript. My friend in
Tel Aviv, Yigal Zayit, the publisher, published it in the Holy Tongue.
He put on it a cover with an exploding truck and a portrait of the
Ayatollah Khomeini. I favoured a naked girl with open legs, but he
decided to stick with the text. Then we sent the manuscript to a string
of New York houses. No result. What else could we expect? My next-door
neighbour, the veteran author Bardak, laughed in my face to hear my
woes. `To die in New York,' he said. `It is our destiny. Who wants
to read your gloomy prognoses? And anyway. . .' He edged away towards
his german motorbike, disappearing in a wodge of nods and winks, hints
of enemy action, boycotts, blacklists. I have heard all this before.
My friends are all convinced their world fame is blocked by sinister
forces: Powerful right-wing lobbies, ultra-Zionist zealots, market
forces, the Illuminati. I am as paranoid as the next liberal bleeding
heart in this country. I look under my bed, my pillow, my car chassis,
every day, for booby traps, bombs, blood, lice, frogs, the plague of
the first, second and third born. We have been taught from birth to
fear our enemies. But we were not warned how they might so proliferate.
We have become like Chico Marx's grandfather, who put the cheese in
a-moustraps, and brought his own mice with him. `In Each Generation,
They Rise Upon Us To Destroy Us, And In Each Generation, The Lord Blessed
Be He Saves Us From Their Hand.' And if not the Lord, the Israel Defence
Forces. Many people have now confused the two. So I just continued
to send out my manuscript, filing away the rising tide of rejections,
counting my modest local gains. Living my life with Anat, the lady
I live and love with, in the few moments she could tear from her professional
devotion as an organiser for the Arts of the City. We now have a modest
flat in the white areas of town, in Rehavia, away from the ultra-orthodox
neighbourhood near which we lived before, whose youthful zealots took
to slashing the tyres of our beloved beach buggy, Alexander, in protest
at our abandoned lifestyle, i.e. Anat's perambulation in summer in
bare-armed and bare-legged clothing, anathema to God's Own Troops.
At least in our present apartment in the secular section we can put
our feet up and joyously curse the bizarre antics of our people as
seen on our TV. The never-ending Wars of the Rabbis, the Yogi Kibbutz,
the Saga of the Stolen Brazilian Baby, the Jewish Sioux Chief arriving
for his Bar Mitzvah, not to speak of the repeated saga of our election
process, the ur-satire of our election broadcasts: The mumbling Rabbis,
the Cult of the Lubavitch, the pro-Transfer Party, the battle of the
pigmy giants; Likud versus Labour, the two Golems who hate each other
but are unable to tear the Aleph off each other's foreheads to render
one or the other Met - Dead, and so have ended up in the sweaty contraceptive
embrace of another National `Unity' government. And, amid all this,
the intifada, appearing, like an inevitable superimposition on a censored
screen that can't quite be cleared of the rolling bad news.
`In all this,’ said Anat, ‘you want to worry about whether
they’re going to publish your little book in New York? Just be
thankful they've decided not to call you up to batter ten-year-old
kids to death with a club.'
She was right, as usual. I have no sense of proportion. My own life,
and that of the Universe, seem to me to be interchangeable. It is a
personality defect, intensified by four decades of life on Our Soil.
I have to have things that are tangible to prove to me existence is.
I have been reduced by the grotesqueness of my surroundings to a pre-Kantian
mode of being. I cannot accept synthetic judgements a priori. Only
my self, my friends, my VCR, my personal computer and television screen,
my hi-fi, my fridge, my blender. Everything else, the Nation, the State,
the Government, the Financial Recovery Plan, can only function as potentialities.
Apart from God. My own private vision. No salesmen or delegates need
apply. This particular issue is now closed to discussion. Does anyone
want to buy a used soul?
The Conference's first session broke up, amid an optimistic glow. Mortal
enemies had sat together and yodelled. The lion and the lamb, et cetera,
though it was more like a reunion of geriatric vultures, who have nothing
left but each other to feed on. The Israeli journalists, my colleagues
who had flown with me across the oceans, were already getting bored.
`So who cares about meeting with the PLO?' said Milek Stuckman from
M-, `they are uninteresting people who dress very badly, smell of garlic
and use terrible aftershaves.' He should know, having won the World
Halitosis Championship fifteen times running, against stiff opposition.
But my colleague, Amnon E-, who is a decent scribbler, was impressed,
and said it was `a good show. Anything is better than Algiers . . .'
he added, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling. Dorothy Morgenthal,
visibly relieved, motioned to us and said: `We're going out to get
Yochai his hamburger. God save me from ex-generals and ministers, they
can't tie their own shoelaces. There used to be a Chock-Full-O'Nuts
on the corner. If not, it'll have to be Grandma's Cafe.'
I said I would join them and sat down to gather my notes together.
I was not sure whether I could take either option. I was not quite
up to listening to Yochai and Abu-Naim beating each other again into
the ground with which side had murdered more of the other's secret
agents in 1959. Newly-found brotherhood between enemies is fine in
principle, but the practise can get a bit queasy. It's not only nuts
they can be chock full o'. As I stayed behind, the hall thinning out
and the security men filing in to check if anyone had left anything
lethal, I felt a presence at my right elbow, and glanced up to see
a willowy American youth with a wispy moustache and a knitted skullcap.
They cannot be escaped, and I cursed the day I decided to drop my usual
policy of dispensing with my own hattie outside the Holy Land, not
that even that precaution might have saved me here. The youth wore
a tag marked `PRESS: THE NEW JERSEY JEWISH COURIER'.
`You're Joe Dekel,' he said. `I've seen your picture.'
`I haven't made a movie since Stroheim,' I said, alarm choking me.
Had they posted my monicker on the U S Mail Wanted section? Or on twenty-foot-high
posters, as of the Ayatollah Khomeini, stuck on the side of the Empire
State Building? Paranoia can only go so far. But he went on: `I know
all about you. I've read your book, the English manuscript. Unfortunately
I can't read Hebrew. I really enjoy the way you write. But you wonder
how I know. I'm not really a journalist. Do I work for a literary agent
or publisher? No. Can I see through walls? Not really. Have you guessed
yet.? I'm your official Silencer. I work with the people who make sure
your kind of book won't be published in the United States. In Israel,
that's your privilege. Sweden? We don't mind. San Marino? Be our guest.
But the United States, that's a problem. I think we should talk outside.
Do you have a moment? I'm sorry, I didn't tell you my name…
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