Mideast: At home with terror

By JUSTIN HUGGLER

The door to the flat where Motti Salzberg and his family are spending their first few nights in Israel is covered in notes from well-wishers.

"We are so happy for you," reads one.

The Salzbergs have just moved to Israel from Columbus, Ohio, and since they arrived, Salzberg says, his three young children have been showered with gifts.

Salzberg, a softly spoken young man in a kippa, a Jewish skullcap, is brimming with enthusiasm and is already trying out his Hebrew.

The family arrived on a chartered flight with 320 other immigrants from the US and Canada - the largest single influx from North America for years.

But behind the excitement, there is an awareness of another side to coming to live in Israel.

It surfaces briefly as we talk. He looks at his daughter playing, and says: "I'm very aware as a father that my three children are now considered legitimate targets."

This is the dilemma facing those who emigrate to Israel.

They are coming to live in what seems to outsiders to be a war zone.

This week, five foreigners, including three Americans, and two Israelis were killed when Palestinian militants detonated a bomb in a crowded cafeteria as students ate lunch at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.

As Salzberg points out, ordinary life goes on here. But it goes on under conditions that are far from normal.

This is a conflict that takes place in the crowded markets and cafes of the city centres.

At any moment you could be the victim of a suicide bombing. Your children could be gunned down on the bus.

Every restaurant, cafe and supermarket has an armed guard at the door. In crowded places, you find yourself looking over your shoulder, taking a second glance at anyone who looks overdressed in the hot weather, as if they might be concealing a suicide-bomb belt.

For that matter, the new immigrants will have to watch as Palestinian homes are demolished and Palestinian children are killed by the Israeli army, as nine were in this week's air strike on Gaza.

Those who are young enough will have to serve on the front lines in the army.

More than 350 Israeli civilians have been killed in suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian militants since the current intifada began, says Amnesty International.

Yet thousands of Jewish people continue to emigrate to Israel.

It is perhaps easier to understand the attractions for those from countries such as Russia or Ethiopia, who face grinding poverty at home.

But hundreds like Motti Salzberg are giving up the relative peace and prosperity of North America and Western Europe to make the move, although the numbers have been declining since the mid-90s.

Last year, 1243 people migrated from the US and 307 from Britain. (Three came from New Zealand.)

So far this year, the numbers have remained steady.

They include people such as Raymond Cannon, a London lawyer who has decided to retire here; Jonny Whine, another Londoner who is 25; Avi and Rachel Abelow, who have brought their 21-month-old baby to live in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank.

The flight the Salzburgs came on was paid for by an organisation called Nefesh b'Nefesh, which wants to keep the numbers arriving from North America up.

Without it, arrivals would be well down on last year.

Nefesh b'Nefesh is financed by Christian Zionists.

"Our decision to come really had nothing to do with the situation," says Salzberg.

"The decision was, do we want to move to Israel? Of course we were aware of the situation. The moment we really decided to come was when my wife said something to me.

"She said that if we had come three years ago, which we nearly did, would we have gone back to the US because of the violence?"

His wife, Rachayle, sitting beside him, nods in agreement.

Part of the explanation lies in one of the messages pinned to the Salzbergs' door. It reads simply: "Welcome home."

For many Jewish people such as the Salzbergs, moving to Israel is a far bigger question than the danger involved.

In Hebrew, it is called making aliyah. It is about Zionism, and the return to the promised land.

The district of Jerusalem the Salzbergs are staying in for now is a typical Orthodox Jewish area.

The men are in heavy black coats and hats despite the heat, the women in long skirts and sleeves.

Yet at the end of the street, across the main road, lies another world.

It is the same city, but everything is abruptly different - the types of shops and cafes, the music spilling from open windows, the scent. Arabic, not Hebrew, is spoken on the streets. This is Arab-dominated East Jerusalem.

Those two words "welcome home" encapsulate the conflict here. For Jews such as Salzberg, this is the Jewish homeland, their birthright.

But to the Palestinians, it is their homeland which has been taken from them and occupied by outsiders like the Salzbergs.

"There are issues of oppression and repression among the Palestinians," says Salzberg.

"But whatever I might have thought about that before, the methodology they have chosen overshadows that.

"When someone chooses the methodology of terrorism against Israeli civilians, it's subhuman."

In April, when fighting in the West Bank was at its height, Ariel Sharon called on Jewish people in other countries to move to Israel. "We need you," he said.

Immigration is a political issue. It is about keeping Israel a Jewish state.

Twenty per cent of Israeli citizens are Palestinians - not those in the West Bank, Gaza Strip or East Jerusalem, who do not have citizenship, but the minority who stayed in Israel proper after 1948.

Their birth rate is far higher than that of the Jews.

The Salzbergs say Sharon's appeal had nothing to do with their decision.

"We're more spiritual Zionists than political Zionists," he says.

"To me it's what Jews bring to Israel that is important."

In the US, Salzberg was a social worker, and he plans to open a counselling centre for those traumatised by bombings and other attacks.

From the windows of Raymond Cannon's new apartment in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, the blue of the Mediterranean stretches on forever . In the square, locals are drinking beer under the scorching sun.

Like many of their friends, Cannon, a 68-year-old lawyer, and his wife, who used to live in the prosperous London suburb of Harrow on the Hill, have decided to retire to Israel.

A few minutes' walk from their new flat is the hotel where in March 29 people at a dinner to celebrate the holy Jewish festival of Passover were killed by a suicide bomber.

Cannon was 100m away when the bomb went off, on a trip to arrange the move.

Yet he and his wife decided to come.

"I lived through the Second World War and the Blitz in London," he says. "I lived in London through the IRA bombings.

"Life has to go on. I remember when I was a child in London during the war, people slept on the platforms of Tube stations, hundreds of them. We used to continue our school classes in the air-raid shelters.

"We don't regard coming here with great intensity, but it's not an unnatural thing for us to do - the concept of a Jewish state is something with which I've identified all my life, simply because I experienced the Second World War and I had the feeling that if the Jews had a place of their own, the Holocaust would not have taken place as it did."

Cannon is a practising Jew, and says he wants to spend his retirement in a Jewish society.

But, echoing Motti Salzberg, he says the move was not political.

"If I go to live in the United States it doesn't mean I support the US policy on Iraq."

Jonny Whine, who has just arrived from Finchley in London, is young enough at 25 that the Israeli Army can call him up to fight in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

"I'd prefer not to, but if I have to I will," he says.

"I wouldn't want to live here and have other people doing that for me."

He grew up in a Zionist youth movement in Britain. For a time, he was director of it, but it took an Israeli girlfriend to make him decide to move.

He is hoping to find a job in education, but knows that soaring unemployment could be a problem for him.

Of the danger of suicide bombings and other attacks he says: "I think if something is important to you that's not such a big problem.

"If young people are willing to move here, that might show that maybe the war isn't being won by the other side."

In the hot hills south of Jerusalem, Avi and Rachel Abelow have brought their 21-month-old baby from Riverdale, New York, and come to live in Efrat, a cluster of gleaming, new, white buildings on a hilltop, the neat flower beds at odds with the rocky landscape all around.

This is the West Bank and Efrat is a Jewish settlement.

It is a 20-minute drive to Jerusalem, and Palestinians have been known to shoot at cars on the road.

By choosing to live in a settlement, the Abelows have put themselves on the front line.

The neat rows of houses are surrounded by a wire fence, and an armed guard is at the gate.

Last week at another, more remote settlement, nine settlers were killed when their bus was ambushed by Palestinian gunmen.

"There were better times before, and we believe there will be better times again," says Avi Abelow, who has a job at a financial consultancy.

"We really felt we wanted to be together with the people of Israel, with everything they're going through at the moment.

"It's a wonderful thing, being a Jew living in Israel."

The settlements are particularly politically charged.

To many settlers, they stake a claim as a Jewish homeland, not only to the land internationally recognised as Israel, but to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But to Palestinians, who feel they have already lost most of their homeland to the Israelis, the settlements on the 22 per cent they have left are the last straw.

They are built on occupied land, in contravention of international law, and Palestinian officials say this makes the settlers legitimate targets.

"I think it's unfortunate it's become a political issue," says Abelow.

But like it or not, the new immigrants are involved in the politics.


- INDEPENDENT

Feature: Middle East

Related links