Pumpkinflowers Read Online Free
Author: Matti Friedman
personal memories. But they left barely any collective memory at all. What remain are a few dramatic incidents vaguely recalled, related to each other in ways no longer entirely clear. The period doesnât even have a name. Though hardly distant, it is already sinking into the depths behind us, soon to be unrecoverable. So a few words are necessary about the series of events into which the rebel A. is about to be inserted.
Southern Lebanon in the nineties evoked something of Spain in the thirties, the scene of violent jostling between the local proxies of greater forces and ideologies preparing for greater conflictâour enemies with their Iranian trainers and Russian rockets, their veneration of martyrs and vision of a resurgent Islam; us with bourgeois aspirations and rifles stamped HARTFORD, CONN., USA . Suicide car bombs, roadside explosives, booby-trapped boulders, videotaped attacks, isolated outposts, hit-and-run, a modern military on hostile territory fighting a long, hopeless war against a weaker but more determined enemy for unclear and ultimately unattainable goalsâbefore Iraq, before Afghanistan, there was this protracted affair in Lebanon. It is hardly possible to understand current events without understanding these ones, and yet they have been overlooked. Many thousands of Israeli men of Aviâs generation, my generation, people whose awareness of the world blinked on around the interval between
Appetite for Destruction
and
Nevermind
, share the sense of owing an important part of our personalities to a time and place of no concern to anyone else, and to a war that never officially happened.
It will be clear to those familiar with the literature coming out of Israel in the past few thousand years that hilltops are considered places where the human and the divine might touch, and where great or terrible events might occur. There is Sinai, where God delivered his law to Moses. At Masada, a flat-topped hill in the desert along the Dead Sea, zealots who wouldnât surrender to Rome killed themselves before legionnaires breached the walls. There is Mount Moriah, where Abraham was said to have nearly sacrificed his heir Isaac in an incident whose legacy has ensured, according to one of the modern Hebrew poets, that their descendants are all âborn with a knife in their heart.â Tradition held that this hill was where Godâs spirit dwelled, so Solomon built a temple there, and Herod did too, before the Romans replaced it with a temple dedicated to Jupiter. The followers of Muhammad came to believe that this was the place where the Arabian prophet ascended to heaven in a mystic night journey, and thirteen hundred years ago they built an exquisite golden-domed shrine that stands today. There are a lot of stories about that hill, but this isnât one of them.
Traveling north, into Galilee, you pass Mount Gilboa, where Saul fell on his sword, and the hill north of the Sea of Galilee where a preacher addressed an audience in the early rumblings of a new religion and which adherents named the Mount of Beatitudes. To the west, along the coast, is Mount Carmel, where the prophet Elijah once challenged 450 priests of a rival god to a contestâeach side would build an altar, and they would see whose deity could set it alight. This is where today the neighborhoods of Haifa spread above port cranes and industrial smokestacks. Moving farther north you cross a ridge that meets the sea in a warren of chalk grottoes, and then youâre out of the modern state of Israel and in the mountainous south of Lebanon.
Inside Lebanon, three miles north of Israelâs northernmost extremity, is a castle built by crusaders eight hundred years ago atop a sheer rock face. Itâs still known as Beaufort Castle, the name the crusaders chose. This story isnât about that hill either, but now weâre close.
In the late 1960s border raids by Palestinian guerrillas from Lebanese territory started
Southern Lebanon in the nineties evoked something of Spain in the thirties, the scene of violent jostling between the local proxies of greater forces and ideologies preparing for greater conflictâour enemies with their Iranian trainers and Russian rockets, their veneration of martyrs and vision of a resurgent Islam; us with bourgeois aspirations and rifles stamped HARTFORD, CONN., USA . Suicide car bombs, roadside explosives, booby-trapped boulders, videotaped attacks, isolated outposts, hit-and-run, a modern military on hostile territory fighting a long, hopeless war against a weaker but more determined enemy for unclear and ultimately unattainable goalsâbefore Iraq, before Afghanistan, there was this protracted affair in Lebanon. It is hardly possible to understand current events without understanding these ones, and yet they have been overlooked. Many thousands of Israeli men of Aviâs generation, my generation, people whose awareness of the world blinked on around the interval between
Appetite for Destruction
and
Nevermind
, share the sense of owing an important part of our personalities to a time and place of no concern to anyone else, and to a war that never officially happened.
It will be clear to those familiar with the literature coming out of Israel in the past few thousand years that hilltops are considered places where the human and the divine might touch, and where great or terrible events might occur. There is Sinai, where God delivered his law to Moses. At Masada, a flat-topped hill in the desert along the Dead Sea, zealots who wouldnât surrender to Rome killed themselves before legionnaires breached the walls. There is Mount Moriah, where Abraham was said to have nearly sacrificed his heir Isaac in an incident whose legacy has ensured, according to one of the modern Hebrew poets, that their descendants are all âborn with a knife in their heart.â Tradition held that this hill was where Godâs spirit dwelled, so Solomon built a temple there, and Herod did too, before the Romans replaced it with a temple dedicated to Jupiter. The followers of Muhammad came to believe that this was the place where the Arabian prophet ascended to heaven in a mystic night journey, and thirteen hundred years ago they built an exquisite golden-domed shrine that stands today. There are a lot of stories about that hill, but this isnât one of them.
Traveling north, into Galilee, you pass Mount Gilboa, where Saul fell on his sword, and the hill north of the Sea of Galilee where a preacher addressed an audience in the early rumblings of a new religion and which adherents named the Mount of Beatitudes. To the west, along the coast, is Mount Carmel, where the prophet Elijah once challenged 450 priests of a rival god to a contestâeach side would build an altar, and they would see whose deity could set it alight. This is where today the neighborhoods of Haifa spread above port cranes and industrial smokestacks. Moving farther north you cross a ridge that meets the sea in a warren of chalk grottoes, and then youâre out of the modern state of Israel and in the mountainous south of Lebanon.
Inside Lebanon, three miles north of Israelâs northernmost extremity, is a castle built by crusaders eight hundred years ago atop a sheer rock face. Itâs still known as Beaufort Castle, the name the crusaders chose. This story isnât about that hill either, but now weâre close.
In the late 1960s border raids by Palestinian guerrillas from Lebanese territory started
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