A moment later, the border officer returned. She stared Nadir in the eye. Her face bore no smile, nor makeup. She was almost at the end of her shift, and exhausted.
"And why again are you visiting the United States?" she asked.
"I am here on business," Nadir said, only partially lying.
"Why aren't you flying in directly from Rome?"
"I had some business in Mexico City. I'd never been to Mexico before. I thought it might be nice to drive a bit and see some scenery."
"Where are you staying in San Diego?"
"At the Del Coronado — let's see, I've got my reservation number."
Nadir frantically fished through his briefcase, trying to find the paper, cursing himself for not having it out already, yet trying not to betray how nervous he really felt. A few seconds later, he found the paper. The customs agent read it over and gave it back to him.
"Have a nice stay in the United States." She smiled, and waved him through.
It couldn't be that easy. First stop: San Diego to exchange rental cars and get one with American plates. Then he'd race cross-country. He had to be in position in less than seventy-two hours and he still had to pick up the "package" along the way. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bottle of Tylenol. It was actually full of amphetamines. He popped two into his mouth, washed them down with bottled water, thanked Allah, and gunned the engine.
He still couldn't believe it. He was "in."
TWENTY-SEVEN
It was decision time.
He'd heard all the arguments, sifted through all the intelligence, asked all the questions. Now it was his decision to make, and his alone. Again.
David Doron stood up, and thanked his Security Cabinet. He asked them to reassemble in fifteen minutes, then walked out of the conference room, back to his personal office, trailed by his four ubiquitous bodyguards. He needed a few minutes alone — time to think, time to process.
At seventy-one, he was getting too old for this, he told himself as he strode down the hall — too old, too tired, and worst of all, too cynical. Growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 1950s, he'd never imagined that one day he'd be the prime minister of Israel. Sometimes it was hard for him to believe there still was a State of Israel. How could the Jewish people, much less the Jewish state, still be around after the horrors of the twentieth century? What drove so many to try to exterminate the Jews? Why couldn't he and his family and his people just live a quiet, peaceful, uneventful life?
As a combat veteran of four Arab-Israeli hot wars — the Six Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to destroy the PLO, and the launch of the first Palestinian intifada in December of 1987 (he'd been too young for the War of Independence in 1948 and the Suez Crisis in 1956) — he'd seen with his own eyes the worst human beings could do to each other. He had seen his closest friends blown to pieces right beside him.
There'd been those three months as a prisoner of war in Iraq, the terrors of which he still refused to talk about with his wife of forty-one years. Why should he burden her more? She and her father were Holocaust survivors. Somehow, they made it out of Auschwitz alive. Her mother and three sisters had not. She still bore emotional scars so deep that they rarely talked about her past. How could he, then, talk about his? Instead, they talked constantly about the future, but their future always seemed to hold in store another war that threatened to annihilate everyone and everything they'd ever held dear.
The more pain they experienced, the more cynical he'd become, determined to protect Israel's security at all costs, yet increasingly exhausted by the conflict with the Arab world in general and with the Palestinians in particular. He didn't believe peace would ever come, not now, perhaps not ever, but frankly he was sick of being such a passionate ideologue.
In public, he was careful to preach his party's line — no Palestinian state, no compromise on the Golan Heights, no dismantling of the Jewish settlements, no relinquishing Jewish access to the Temple Mount, and not one single solitary inch of Jerusalem would ever be given away. Ever. That's what he said in public. And he was turning out to be a rather eloquent speaker, despite his wife's constant teasing that his Hebrew was almost as bad as his English.
But in private he was slowly coming to the point that he just wanted the whole mess to be over with. He didn't know how. He didn't know when. He didn't have the energy or the political self-interest to try to figure out a way forward. He just knew he was tired. So was his country.
If he could, he'd give away Gaza in a heartbeat. Only as a demilitarized zone, of course. But of course he'd give it back to the Palestinians. Who wanted to occupy such a wasteland? Even Likud's patriarch, Menachem Begin, tried to give Gaza back to the Egyptians during the Camp David peace talks in the late 1970s. The Egyptians said no.
As for Judea and Samaria — what the world insisted on calling the West Bank of the Jordan River — yes, Doron believed that the God of the Bible had given that land to the Jews for time immemorial. Bethlehem, for example, was on the so-called West Bank. But it wasn't a Palestinian town. It was Jewish. It was the birthplace of David, King of Israel — David the Jew— David whose son Solomon built the first Temple in Jerusalem — David who defeated Goliath the Philistine — that's right, the Philistine, from whom the modern day word Falastine or Palestine, was derived.
Jericho, too, was on the so-called West Bank, but it wasn't Palestinian, Doron had long argued. It was conquered fair and square a couple of thousand years ago by Joshua, the Jewish right-hand man to Moses, the leader of the Jews, not the Arabs. And what of Hebron? It, too, was on the so-called West Bank of the Jordan. But it was the home of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the great Jewish patriarchs who first established the Jewish presence in the land of milk and honey.
So yes, Doron believed all these things. But somehow, such arguments were beginning to wear thin, at least to him. Not because they weren't true, They most certainly were. But they weren't the only truths on the ground. The West Bank was now home to nearly 3 million Arabs. They were angry at the appalling living conditions in which they found themselves. They were bitter and resentful, and rightfully so. They lived in hopelessness, and something had to give.
He'd never give away Jerusalem, of course. But he hated everything about the current situation. He hated the idea of the Jewish people being an oc cupying power. He hated sending in young Israeli soldiers into the "disputed territories" to kill and get killed. He did it only because he had to. He had a job to do, to protect his people, and he took his job seriously. But in his heart, Doron knew the current situation was unsustainable. Occupation — was there honestly any other word for it? — was steadily eroding the character of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. It was turning them into a hard, bitter people. The generous, hospitable spirit of the Israeli people was slowly fading in the intense heat, and it grieved Doron. Yet here he was. The prime minister of Israel. It didn't seem real. Some-how, he'd become a successful cynic. Somehow, after Doron had gotten out of the army, he'd been fortunate enough to get a bachelor's degree from Tel Aviv University, and then a masters' and doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. He'd eventually been tapped as a young economic advisor to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, then deputy finance minister for Bibi Netanyahu. Somehow, he still looked back in amazement, the Likud party had insisted that he run for a seat in the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, and he'd won handily. Eventually, he'd been asked by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to serve as deputy foreign minister, then as minister of industry and trade, then as a deputy prime minister. Then he'd run, albeit reluctantly, for the top slot — and won.