‘You Started a War, You’ll Get a <em>Nakba’</em>
Last week, on a dusty road in the West Bank, I received a phone call from the office of the spokesperson of the Israel Defense Forces to schedule a meeting the next day. “Hello,” I said. “It’s difficult to talk right now. I am being menaced by two men with knives.”
“Are they Jewish or Arab?” he asked. He sounded concerned.
“Jewish.”
His level of concern didn’t change. No one ever said being a spokesperson for Israel was an easy job. “Do you want me to talk to them?”
About a minute earlier, these two young men had driven their beat-up white car in front of my Mazda and screamed at me in Hebrew, gesturing for me to pull over and get out. They wore IDF-style olive-drab pants, although their tops were civilian. On their waists they had long, fixed-blade Nimrav-style combat knives, and on their heads, the style of kippah and the sidelocks of hair, payot, common among West Bank settlers.
I had paid for an upgrade at the Hertz counter and figured I could run them over faster than they could stab me. So I declined the spokesperson’s help, prepared to shift my foot over to the accelerator, and yelled back to them that I was a journalist.
“Who are you? What do you want?” they asked. In this case the classic American theory that if you yell loud enough in English, foreigners will reply in English turned out to be correct.
One of them came up to my window. “This place is dangerous,” he said. “Terrorist people. Don’t come here.” I said I’d
