My Lunch in Jerusalem

I spent the afternoon with an Israeli friend and a Palestinian just days before Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel, and the degree to which their lives have changed speaks worlds about the havoc the savagery has wreaked on the lives of decent people.

Beautiful, warm weather graced the leafy neighborhood in Jerusalem, where my Palestinian friend pulled over his SUV and dropped me off for lunch with a lovely Israeli woman whose grace and charm glowed with her civility.

photo by Viktor Solomonik

Because of the nasty, vindictive mood generated nearly everywhere by the ongoing savagery in Israel, I’m not going to use the names of either friend in this story. That’s quite rare for me. I usually use names, but I fear retribution by someone who doesn’t like what they have to say, as valid or innocent as their remarks may be. They are both good people who deserve so much better than the bitter aftermath of the violence now wracking Israel, Gaza, and the Occupied West Bank.  

My Israeli friend and I enjoyed lunch and conversation on a sunny patio crammed with holiday tourists who had flocked to booths adjacent to the restaurant for a street fair where children could get face paints. I couldn’t imagine how the scene of such a joyous reunion would be shattered within days. We struggled to overcome the banter from nearby tables as we caught up on years past, on common friends and shared experiences. We took a short walk to her office before we bid a fond farewell.

My Palestinian friend picked me up and drove me through a city he calls home and one I had visited often. He later took me to his home, where I met his wife and son, who proudly wore a red Moroccan football jersey. He was a year older than my grandson. We had a lovely, substantial Palestinian dinner accompanied by the legendary hospitality among Arabs. We had fruit and tea on his patio. Later, he would drive me to Bun Gurion airport for the long flight home.

Three days after my plane touched down in America, Hamas launched a vicious attack on innocent people, unleashing a ferocious Israeli response. Allegations of beastly, cruel behavior surged on each side of the ensuing battles. Thousands of innocent civilians have died or been grievously wounded in a country where bloodshed and tragedy are the bookmarks of history.

From my home in North Carolina, I reached out to my Israeli friend, who, by the way, is no fan of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government. Her response was heartbreaking.

“Thanks for reaching out, Jim,” she wrote. “These past few weeks, I thought a few times about our pleasant meeting and how it's a completely different reality now.” In my note, I mentioned the fraught political reality that triggered the violence.

“I appreciate your clarity in this complex reality. There is a tremendous amount of pain, anger, loss of trust, and so many more emotions,” she wrote. “Our sons were all immediately drafted and are on the southern and northern borders. I find myself speechless.

I hope to see you soon again in better times.

Warmest regards, and thanks again for thinking of all of us here.”

My Palestinian friend faces an equally complex reality, shuttling around the country from places where he lives and from where he works.

“Thank God we are all safe,” he told me in a message. “Today I came back to Jerusalem and, when I was in. a meeting, rockets were launched into Jerusalem. My kid was midway home from school on a bus with no safe shelter. It was a terrifying moment. Once he arrived home, I hugged him like no tomorrow.”

Like my Israeli friend, my Palestinian colleague, a sensible man who does not speak ill of all Israelis, expressed anger and disappointment with the headlines flowing out of his country. He described a living hell with shell-shocked coworkers in Gaza marooned in a car that had run out of petrol in a place already running on empty. Wherever one looks, he says, the news is full of attacks by aircraft, militants, radicals, soldiers, and fighters on both sides. Anger dominates a political menu of vengeance and violence. Water, food, and medicine are in short supply. My Palestinian friend mourns some 9,000 people in Gaza who have been killed, half of them women, children, and babies. Uprooted from their homes, millions flock southward to “safe areas,” but he says, “there are no safe areas in Gaza," the Palestinian enclave on Israel’s southern border from where the Hamas attacks were launched.

The journalist in me wants to know who fired those rockets into Jerusalem? Are the gruesome statistics accurate? The Israeli government admits it's now passing out arms to violent settlers illegally occupying land on the increasingly treacherous West Bank, Palestinian land that was already seething with anger. What is the Israeli government thinking? This could only make things worse.   

Every journalist, no matter how hardcore or seasoned against the horror of war, is a human being, someone with friends like mine scorched by sorrow. At a certain point, the right questions become just as important as the answers. Do all the big weapons and daring raids make the leaders on both sides seem as strong as they seem to believe they are? I think not.

Powerful rockets and big guns show that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a weak man. Likewise, the savage attacks by Hamas make Ismail Haniyeh, chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, just as weak. The truth is both men represent the policies of extreme minority elements of their respective political parties, unpopular with most voters in Israel and Gaza. Their planes, guns, and attacks on innocent people reveal them to be failures, men who lack the guts to stare down the extremists in their ranks. They are doomed to drown in a moral swamp because they can’t set aside their fears and biases and solve problems like real adults.

What’s next?

Unfortunately, Israel is not alone. We live in an era where vocal minorities, often with strong religious ties, seize the initiative and impose their will and priorities on the majority. If citizens in Israel, America, and many other nations don’t reverse this imbalance, we invite the same tragedy we are witnessing in Israel. 

“The Israeli people are looking for revenge,” my Palestinian friend says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the political or militant leadership, but it also includes the average Israeli, and no one wants to raise his head and ask the only question I’ve been asking since day one to all of my Israeli friends: What’s next? The Palestinian idea involves living in peace in a country of our own. We steal a thread from a silkworm to weave a sky and a fence for our journey. You can kill as many people as you want,” my Palestinian friend says, “but you can’t kill an idea.”

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

Any opinions or observations in this blog are purely those of the author and do not represent the official positions of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) or of the U.S. State Department’s Agency for Global Media, which administers federal grants to the MBN.