Six hours later, Misha Shulman returns with four hundred and twenty-two men and women collected from every corner of Ghetto Tel Aviv, all willing, all sensitive in their fingertips.
“Blind,” Misha tells Peri. “A whole camp in Siberia for political prisoners who were blind. Even then, it made me think: for every problem there is a solution.”
Peri pulls his assemblers off their workbenches and turns them into instructors, each with ten students. “You know what Ben-Gurion said?”
“The airport?”
“The first prime minister of Israel, for which it was named.”
“I knew he was something like that.”
“In 1948, when the state was declared and eight Arab armies invaded, he said it. It’s in every history book.”
“Alon, please don’t make me regret I didn’t once upon a time break your legs.”
“‘The difficult we do immediately,’ Peri quotes. “‘The impossible takes longer.’”
99
AN OLIVE-GREEN CADILLAC BEARING Egyptian military plates and flying a huge pair of white boxer shorts emblazoned with a schematic Israeli flag in red lipstick might have stopped traffic in Tel Aviv less than a month before, but in Ghetto Tel Aviv there is no traffic to stop. The city is eerily empty of cars and trucks, other than those still as roadside monuments for want of fuel.
Cobi drives westward into the northern suburbs, passing on his right the bombed-out clifftop headquarters of the Mossad and on his left the towers of Ramat Aviv, once among the city’s most desirable neighborhoods. At the top of each high-rise the vegetation that adorned penthouse terraces is shriveled and brown, the streets below mostly deserted except for the ever-present tent camps shaded in the lee of buildings. It is already tortuously hot, the sun climbing up over the city like the angry muttering of a crazed neighbor, always there, always threatening.
“This is bad,” Cobi says. He drives slowly, as though out of respect, the way people drive in a cemetery. Only weeks earlier, on this same road, he pushed his motorcycle, a present from his reluctant parents upon graduating high school, to ninety miles per hour, weaving through traffic with the casual athletic heedlessness of adolescent males everywhere. “So bad. I didn’t know.”
“I thought I did,” Abed tells him. “There was talk. I thought, well, Tel Aviv. It’s Tel Aviv. A metropolis, thriving, a beehive. Now…” Abruptly he changes his tone, but not his topic. “Your father is Yigal Lev?”
“How do you know?”
“Google.”
“A truck, a television, and a computer?”
“Your condescension is underwhelming. Cobi, my wife has a blender. And a microwave. Also one of those devices that shoots water to clean between the teeth. At home there is no shortage of power.”
“Not here.”
“Cobi…”
“Look at that. People living in the street. Every street.”
“Cobi, are there a lot of Yigal Levs?”
“It’s not an uncommon name.”
“That run a company called Isracorp.”
“Only one.”
“My young friend, what I am about to tell you may come as a shock.”
“After seeing this, I’d be surprised.”
“Your father is the prime minister.”
Cobi takes his eyes off the road. It is not dangerous. The two have not come across a vehicle since dropping Alex off with the captain and his squad, and that vehicle was some sort of bicycle rigged to pull a wagon. The wagon had a small plastic tank on it, like the water tanks over the outdoor sinks in temporary army encampments. “What do you mean, prime minister? Prime minister of what?”
“The State of Israel.”
“The prime minister of Israel is Shula Amit.”
“Killed.” Abed considers. “Probably. Missing, anyway. They’re all missing. The whole government.”
“That’s crazy. Who says so?”
“The soldiers who rode with us.”
“You’re saying my father is prime minister of the State of Israel?”
“That’s what I’m told.”
“Who elected him? He’s not a politician. He’s…”
They pull up before the villa in which Cobi lived all his life. Sandbags are piled three feet high all over his mother’s flowerbeds. The lawn is gray. Military vehicles surround the house, and beyond these, on the beach, two Chariot tanks.
“Stay in the car,” Abed says. “It may be that two Arabs approaching the prime minister’s house in a car with Egyptian military plates and flying these stupid boxer shorts may spook someone. But if I have to sing Jerusalem of Gold again, I’ll throw up. I don’t even like Jerusalem.” He pauses. “Too Jewish. But I used to love Tel Aviv.” Cobi stays. Abed has guided him safely this far. From the driver’s seat, he watches the Bedouin walk with exaggerated calm slowly down the path, his hands in the air, in one of them his Israel Defense Forces ID. Immediately three soldiers are on him. He watches the Bedouin point to the car, then to the house. One soldier checks Abed’s ID. The soldiers consult for a moment, then nod. There are smiles. One of the soldiers slaps Abed on the back. Even from where he sits, Cobi can see, or perhaps only imagine, a puff of dust rising from Abed’s robes. They have been on the road for almost a week.
Accompanied by a major—paratroops, brown boots, red beret tucked in his left epaulet—Abed approaches the driver’s side window. “We are cordially invited,” Abed says.
The rest happens quickly.
Still in charge, Abed knocks at the door. There is a doorbell, but of course without electricity it is merely a button in the stucco wall. After a time a woman in a robe opens it, looks out at the two Bedouin, the one behind partly obscured by the first. Out of habit, Cobi’s face is partially shrouded by the filthy keffiyah that hangs down around his face like curtains in a slum window. The woman is middle-aged, still attractive, but tired, as if she has not slept in a long time.
“Good morning, dear lady,” Abed says. “Good news. I bring you a gift.”
Judy looks past the two Arabs to the major, who hangs back, grinning. “I don’t…”
“Despite my attire, I am Staff Sergeant Abed Abu-Kassem.”
“Yes?”
“And this, I believe, belongs to you.” With flair, as though revealing a work of art, he uncovers Cobi’s face.
She falls upon her son, engulfing him, staring at his face and then holding him again as though he is a small child who has wandered off, wandered off and been found. Suddenly she turns into the house.
“Yigal, come down!” she shrieks “Yigal!”
100
PLANNING THE CONQUEST OF the State of Israel posed special problems for Iran’s theologians. Not since 1453, when the Ottoman sultans took Constantinople and converted wholesale its mostly Christian population, has Islam been compelled to come to terms with implementing its very raison d’etre, the conversion of an entire population and their absorption into the Muslim polity. Certainly Islam is no stranger to the role of conquerer: Mohammed brought all of Arabia to Allah; his descendants carried Muslim civilization from North Africa through southern Europe to India and the Far East. But those converts were pagans, induced to accept Islam by the opportunity to participate fully in a new world order, with all the rights and privileges thereof.
Israel presents a different problem.
Like Christians, throughout history Jews were afforded special status as protected peoples or dhimmi. But leaving in place six million insincere converts to Islam would be demographically untenable and politically impossible. A few mullahs insisted the Jews be offered the chance to live as Muslims, but this solution would still leave such new Muslims a majority in the holy city of al Kuds, which the Jews call Jerusalem, and in Tel Aviv and Haifa and throughout the land. The conflict was in Shar’ia law itself: these Jews must be permitted to live, but by force of numbers would remain a threat. Left in place, the clever Jews would win again. Thus principle warred with pragmatism.