When The War Hits Home

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For 10 years, Shamas has headed the Women's Center for Legal Aid and Counseling. Two years ago, the powerful sheik of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque condemned her in his Friday sermon for demanding that Palestinian courts stand up against tribal traditions that favor husbands and trample women's rights. Since the latest conflict with Israel began in the fall of 2000, the Women's Center has registered an increase in reports of family violence. With Palestinian men facing new financial pressures from the loss of jobs in Israel and suffering constant humiliation at the hands of Israeli soldiers, Shamas explains, "they take it out on the people closest to them."

Shamas fights the impulse to hate Israelis, but she has cut back on her contacts with Israeli human-rights activists, because, she says, they won't recognize the decades of Palestinian suffering. "They want to keep their national legends, but they want us to give ours up," she says. Her fear is that her children's generation will harbor an unrestrainable hatred for Israelis. "There's more anger in them," she says.

The daily degradation that feeds that anger can be witnessed right outside Shamas' window. Across a patch of dirt stands the A-Ram checkpoint, a set of concrete roadblocks and a guardhouse manned by twitchy Israeli soldiers. It's a place of humiliation and occasional brutality as Palestinians line up their cars to enter East Jerusalem.

Last month Shamas' husband, a Brooklyn native of Lebanese descent, failed to pick up on a soldier's signals as he crossed the checkpoint and suddenly found the red laser dot of the Israeli's rifle sight dancing on his face. He was saved by his American-accented English and the U.S. passport he slowly pulled out of his pocket. "My God, it hit me," Shamas says. "Nobody is safe. Think of the ease with which that soldier could have decided to kill." Every day her daughter Diala, 17, crosses the checkpoint to go to school. "Not every day do I have the inner strength," says Shamas, "to think about that."

JERUSALEM
The Disappointed Peacenik
Dorit Seideman, 40/three children

Dorit Seideman's daughter Yael, 7, had been learning about the biblical Pharaoh before the Passover holiday earlier this month. Yael's schoolteacher assigned her to write a letter to Pharaoh. "Dear Pharaoh, please come over for coffee," she wrote. "I'd like to ask you to bomb the Palestinians." Seideman was appalled. "Do you really want to kill them all?" she asked. "No," said Yael, "only the bad ones." Right now Israel's official policy is in line with Yael's letter, and that's disturbing to Seideman, who campaigned for the Peace Now movement until the birth of her three daughters left her with no time for activism.

These days Seideman's concerns are focused on her own family. Her daughters go to more slumber parties, since the fear of suicide bombers discourages their band from loitering as they once did in crowded malls. After a bombing, Seideman knows she has less than 10 minutes to make sure all her loved ones are safe, before the cell-phone network crashes under the weight of panicked calls. She is worried that her daughters will leave Israel when they're old enough, fleeing the violence. A suicide bomb exploded outside her daughters' youth club last month.

Most Israelis have shifted their political views rightward during the recent violence, and many have concluded that the Palestinians will never make peace with Israel. Seideman still maintains her conviction that a negotiated settlement is the only way to ensure the safety of her children. "We all know the solution is political, not military," she says. But for now it seems to Seideman that the Palestinians--even the liberal ones who built ties with Israelis--keep insisting on concessions without being prepared to compromise themselves. "I'm trying not to feel hatred, and I see that they are so desperate," she says. "But I don't feel any reciprocity."

MAALEH EPHRAIM
The Unsettled Settler
Nitza Tzameret, 48/three children

The funeral cortege drove north toward the Israeli settlement of Itamar to bury a resident killed by Palestinian gunmen in an ambush. Nitza Tzameret was in the third car in the procession, behind an army-jeep escort. When the vehicles approached the Palestinian village of Kafr Khalil, shots rang out. The cars halted, and the terrified mourners poured out. Tzameret and her husband lay in a ditch at the roadside as Israeli soldiers returned fire up into the olive groves. The gun battle lasted 30 minutes. Since then Tzameret has slept no more than two hours a night, fearing intruders in the settlement where she lives, which has no perimeter fence. Each time she leaves the house she fears that she too might be ambushed on the winding desert road from her home in the Jordan Valley up to Jerusalem. She puts on clean underwear in case she's injured and hospitalized; she fills the refrigerator so that there will be enough food for her family during the week they might spend mourning her. "Every day I bury myself," she says.