Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [20]
The Palestinian woman told me her own story one night. We were both drinking and I didn’t take notes, but I never forgot it: When they arrested her and brought her to jail she made the soldiers angry because she yelled at them, Fucking Jews, I wish I were Hitler. She was embarrassed about yelling those things. I was so crazy, she said. I was just crazy. She told me that she was tortured for days, beaten, abused, threatened with rape. One day a particularly brutal Israeli interrogator wounded her breast with a nail, left it bleeding. She pulled her blouse aside and showed me the scar, deep and permanent. Then she told me about the young Israeli guard. This stranger, this anonymous Israeli man, sat with her hour after dark hour, fanning her raw wound with a magazine. And all the while, he cried.
I saw her scar, I listened to her words. I don’t know if the story is true, in that I don’t know if it actually occurred. It may have been apocryphal. These are my memories of her memories. And this is Jerusalem, world capital of dubious stories, centuries of stories half forgotten and passed on, stories of saints and prophets and torturers, everybody fighting for the best story, the one that gives you a religion, a claim, a right. But I never doubted the emotional truth behind this one story, and I have kept it because it encapsulated the things I could sense but not say: that after their awful history, locked in a death match for survival, Israelis and Palestinians had become what they never wished to be—one people after all, each one half of a whole, locked together in a union you could not touch or understand from the outside, torturing one another, tarnishing their own souls with each other’s blood, speaking hidden words in voices pitched so only the other could listen, maybe even loving one another in some secret and sublimated way. Each capable of a cruelty that is deeper because it understands exactly what it does, because it is not blind. It is a story not only about pain inflicted, a strong torturer and a helpless victim. It is that story, yes, but it’s also a story of a weeping teenager confronting the underbelly of his own country, fighting his conscience with nothing but a magazine to flap in the dark. It’s about the pain that turns back to gnaw on the tormenter, about the damage we do to others because we want to protect ourselves, and how that damage echoes back into our own souls. This is not, perhaps, a productive way to think about foreign affairs, least of all in the Middle East, where power is currency and weakness must be hidden at all costs. In this part of the world, statesmen survive because of what they smash, not because of what they say. And yet there was truth and humanity in this story, and so I kept it. Maybe I needed the story, and need it still, to organize my thinking. Maybe I clung to it because it helps, when people are killing their neighbors, to believe they cry over it in the dark. Years later, I do not track down the woman who told me the story. I don’t want to double-check. Maybe I am afraid she will take it away again. I have lived with it too long to give it back now; it has become mine, and that is how the stories of Jerusalem have worked for centuries.
I meditated on the story when I jogged along the clean rock walkways of