Mideast Strife’s Long Reach

It has been at least two weeks since Bajis Dodin slept through the night. Where once he might have watched a television show or read a book before he and his wife turned out the light, now he watches the news, in Arabic and English, flipping through the channels for hours. Then he lies awake, staring into the dark, searching his soul for hope.

Sometimes he picks up the telephone and dials the numbers he knows by heart, trying again to get through to his brother, his sister, his uncles and cousins who live in towns on the West Bank. Many nights the phones are down, but they are the only link left. A letter can take months, and it has been days since Dodin was able to communicate by e-mail--very few Palestinian homes, he said, have electricity anymore.

In the morning, only the sky over his Riverside home has lightened. Dodin’s thoughts remain weighted with worry, for his elderly mother and the rest of his family who, he said, struggle to procure the bare necessities for survival--food, water, shelter from the fighting. He has tried to send them money; he has tried to get many of them out. Nothing, he said, has worked.

Peace between Palestinians and Israelis has often been tenuous and bloody conflict not extraordinary. But never has the region known a time like this; in the last two weeks, Arab suicide bombers have killed and maimed on an almost daily basis, Israeli soldiers and tanks have demolished buildings and opened fire on crowds, and every day brings death to both sides.

Thousands of Southern Californians have families living in the cities and settlements of Israel and the West Bank. From across an ocean and a continent, they have watched and prayed for a solution when none seems forthcoming. Their reactions, no matter what side they’re on, are remarkably similar: anger and fear; frustration--with the warring factions, with the U.S. government, with the media; depression bordering on despair and, of course, exhaustion.

“I cannot concentrate,” Dodin said. “I cannot think. I am strained always, tense and nervous. I try to keep away from my family, from even my children so not to take out my anger on them. It is a nightmare. I do not see an end.”

In a house in Irvine, sleep is also elusive. Beverly Jacobs e-mails her daughter, Rachel Jacobson, trying not to ask the questions that roil in the vivid dark. The 14-year-old son of Jacobs’ cousin was recently outside a restaurant when an Arab shot an Israeli Jew; the boy took cover and called his parents on the cell phone, asking what he should do.

“This is not a call a mother should ever get,” said Jacobs. It is the call she hopes she never gets. For seven years now, Jacobson and her husband have lived in Israel; their 2-year-old was born there. There is a second child on the way. Every day, Jacobson drives half an hour to her job as an art therapist in a Jerusalem hospital; every day, Jacobs worries that her daughter’s car will break down or she’ll get a flat tire or something will happen to isolate her, to keep her from getting to her home and child.

“She told me the other day, something was wrong with one of the wheels, and I said, ‘You have to get that fixed, right away, right away, ‘ and she said, ‘Yes, Mother, we know that.’”

Jacobs would like her daughter to come home, at least for a while, but she knows better than to say such a thing--for Jacobson, Israel is home. And so Jacobs confines her conversation to everyday things.

“My daughter is trying to live her life without letting events interfere,” Jacobs said.

“I’ve been calling more often than usual, but we really make an effort to make the conversation as normal as possible, which is very hard.”

“Every morning you wake up and it’s like a lottery,” said Yuval Rotem, the L.A. consul general of Israel. “Who will be hit? What will have happened? Every morning, I check into the Internet. If there’s a story close to Tel Aviv [where his parents and sister live], I call. If it’s Jerusalem, where my friends from the foreign service live, I call. Every day I call. It is a constant toll of anxiety and fear, especially for those of us over here.”

Rotem has been in Los Angeles for 21/2 years. It is his second stint in the U.S.; he was serving in the consulate in New York during the Gulf War, which he said was also very difficult.

But, he said, the events of the past few weeks have been unprecedented. The killings that occurred during Passover, he said, marked a shift in the reactions of the Jewish community. “Before, there was the belief that they would not touch holy days,” he said. “Then the line was crossed.”

A little more than a month before the holy days began, Barry Weiss and his wife had decided not to spend Passover in Israel as they have for the past several years. And even when events tragically proved their decision wise, they remained torn. “The emotional side says, ‘Why aren’t we there?’ and the sensible side says, ‘We’ve got three children, there are no safe places, it isn’t reasonable.’”

Many members of Weiss’ wife’s family immigrated to Israel in the mid-’80s, and the family has suffered injury and loss in the conflict. Last year, a rock was thrown through the windshield of a cousin’s car, killing their 4-month-old baby. Last week, another cousin was injured in one bombing; another attack in a shopping mall killed family friends and neighbors.

“We don’t go an hour without checking in by phone or Internet,” Weiss said. “It’s much more nerve-racking than a military conflict. These are aimed at civilians.”

Meanwhile, he and his wife try to do what they can to help from their home in West Hollywood. “We try to fill in the gaps of worry with charity and prayer; we do what we can on a political action level, to get information out so people know what’s happening.”

For Palestinian Americans, the fear and the resolution are the same, but the anger and frustration have an extra level.

“My family is under occupation, and they are resisting occupation,” said Dodin. “Their lives are hell. They can’t drive on the roads; their kids can’t go to school; they have no lights; they have to get their water in small buckets; they go to sleep with a tank in front of their house; they wake up with a tank in front of their house. But then we hear from the media that Israel is under siege.”

When friends and colleagues ask how he is coping, he said, they don’t really want to hear what is happening. And when they do express their support or outrage, they will only do it in whispers. “Everyone is afraid to show support of the Palestinian people because then they will be branded anti-Semitic. People tell me, ‘Don’t send me that kind of e-mail at work because I’ll get in trouble; give me a hard copy.’ It bothers me that in the United States, you can’t speak your feelings.”

According to Michel Shehadeh, West Coast regional director of the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Palestinian community, which is scattered throughout Southern California, has also come together, in fear and outrage, as they try to help their families on the West Bank and to correct what they see as a pro-Israel bias of the American media.

“We don’t sleep here,” said Shehadeh, of the Garden Grove-based office. “For the past 10 days, we stay on the phone and we watch television. It’s never been this way before. It’s hell.”

His sisters and cousins live in a village near Ramallah, and whenever the phones are working, they gather in one house and call him.

“We tell them we haven’t forgotten them, that we are with them,” he said, his voice shaking with fatigue and emotion. “We tell them that we are with them always.”

He added, “I would rather be with them. It’s harder being away.”

Shehadeh and his colleagues have participated in rallies and plan to do so again. They write letters to editors and politicians and try to make people see their point of view--that the root of the conflict is the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and that the suicide bombers are men driven to the edge by oppression that leaves them no hope.

“We cry and scream,” he said. “We just don’t believe how biased the media is, how out of context they portray Palestinian life. We don’t get equal time. Our story is not getting out.”

And neither are any of his family. “They are resolved to stay,” he said. “This is their home, and they will either stay or be killed.”

Seven thousand miles away from the tanks and the screams and the blood, those with families living in danger share wakeful nights and prayer-filled days. They share fear, fury and frustration and, perhaps most disturbing, they share the inability to see when, and how, the fighting will end.

“It is well past who is to blame,” said Weiss. “I think there’s a solution; there’s no reason two cultures can’t live in peace. But it’s crossed the line now. So many immoral and unjust things are happening. It’s hard to know what will happen next.”