“I have news for you!” my friend says. “Gravitazione works also in Palestine and Israel!” “What?” I asked. My friend is Italian, and I don’t always understand his English. “Gravitazione, you know, things fall.” Ah, the law of gravity. A journalist, he was driving back from the funerals this morning in Nablus, where he had found himself under a shower of bullets. “They shoot up, and it falls down. Idiots!” He said a man standing next to him was shooting live fire into the air, and when he asked him not to, the man shot more. “So many wounded now!”

Meanwhile, I was driving back to my Jerusalem home, hearing reports about a pipe bomb that blew up, but only partially, in the gardens of the King David Hotel. The number of the Nablus wounded was not yet on the air.

Let there be no doubt: Jerusalem is under siege this week. Our radios are back on 24 hours a day. Like people walking through a minefield knowing it is a minefield, we walk on, our bodies tense for the next explosion. Police officers in Jerusalem are working an average of 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Mickey Levy, their exhausted spokesman, is on the radio day and night reminding us, pleading with us, because Jerusalem is number one on the list of places about to blow up. A decade after we all got into the habit of going to bed with rubber gas masks, this is a reminder that the human species can get used to almost anything.

This reminder is useful, because right now almost nothing feels safe. Going to the zoo, for example, is a real question — will I get out alive? Yes? No? Do you know what their security is like? The Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, let me add, is an extraordinary, magnificent creation of one of this city’s principal benefactors, Teddy Kolleck’s Jerusalem Foundation. It crosses my mind to call them up and ask about security, but I hold off.

The question of going to the market is a matter of serious debate among my crew, serious food junkies all. Mahane Yehuda, Jerusalem’s open air market, has no parallels, as far as I’m concerned, anywhere. There you can buy grey mullet bottarga at a discount price even New Yorkers would appreciate, despite the risk to life and limb. The only place to buy fresh fish is at the stall of David Dahan, numbers 13 and 15 on Simtat HaShaked, Almond Alley. David hauls in his Mediterranean catch every morning before dawn, and if you call up about seven you can ask for dinner while it is still twitching in his water tanks. David is a man who loves his trade.

Yesterday was the kind of day in which, after three weeks of avoiding the market, I felt I could no longer go on without fresh fish. As my friend Yael pouted over her early morning coffee, wondering whether she could responsibly take her toddlers to the zoo, I made up my mind and announced
I was going to the market.

“You’re crazy,” she said offhandedly, with the quiet certainty of those who hold the truth in their hands. “Mahane Yehuda is definitely going to blow up.” What could I say? Our radio stations have turned into improvised community bulletin boards, with minute by minute reports of the latest shootings, knifings, gunship retaliations, bombings, and the degree of success or failure of every such operation.

The radio is a frustrating lover, addictive and unsatisfying. Yesterday, after weighing my hunger against my life, and without breathing a word to Yael, I went to the market, making it out alive and with a beautiful sea bass in hand, a sea bass good enough to die for. Later, radio on, it was once again beyond my capabilities to keep track of the evening’s inventory of disaster, my spirit perhaps sidetracked by the cool wind blowing in from the window, carrying with it Jerusalem’s magical summer scent of jasmine blossoms and the rumbling booms of mortar fire in Gilo.

How do we live like this? Under these conditions, it is impossible to think straight, which may perhaps explain, at least partially, the predicament in which our various political leaders find themselves embroiled. This week, terror has won, hands down.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2001 and is filed under opinion.