Vicious Circle Read Online Free PDF Page A

for Isaac Ap
ful
baum, with an f after the p—and quote me accurately, my arguments will resist your efforts to distort them. In a nutshell,
     I’m a religious Zionist. I have bad teeth because I’m too busy studying Torah to go to a dentist. I wear a hand-knitted
kippah
on the back of my head and would carry a gun if I could see well enough to shoot my enemies and not my friends. I am absolutely
     convinced that the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was a religious event. I believe our victory in 1967, which reunited
     what you call the West Bank and we call the biblical provinces of Judea and Samaria with the rest of Israel, was the handiwork
     of God. For me, Genesis 17:8—where God gives Abraham and his seed
all
of the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession—is the heart of the heart of the Torah. For too long Jews were a people
     without a land, and Palestine was a land without a people. Now the people and the land have come together and nobody—not our
     crazy Israeli politicians, not the conscience-stricken Diaspora Jews, not the lunatic Islamic fundamentalists, not even a
goy
journalist with a chip on his shoulder—is going to separate them again.”
    The word
goy
struck Sweeney like a slap in the face. He snapped shut the copy book and slipped it into a pocket of his worn safari jacket.
     “There are good-thinking people, Jews as well as
goys
, who would argue that Palestine was never a land without a people. When the British counted noses in 1918, they found 700,000
     Arabs and 56,000 Jews—”
    “In the history of the world there has never been a Palestinian people,” the Rabbi said flatly. “Jews have lived on this land
     for the last three thousand years, long before Islam’s hooligans swept down from the Arabian desert to plunder Palestine.”
     Squinting, he studied the bloated sun, which appeared to be snared in the barbed wire atop the chain link fence ringing an
     electricity station. “We could continue this discussion for hours, but I have to get back to Beit Avram for a meeting.”
    Neither man offered to shake hands. “Another time, perhaps,” Sweeney said.
    “Fax your article to my office. Then we’ll see about a second interview.”
    The Rabbi turned on his heel and, splashing through an oil slick, crossed the road to the station wagon. The three young religious
     Jews serving as body guards flicked away their cigarettes, checked their weapons and climbed back into the Chevrolet. The
     driver, a reserve lieutenant in a reconnaissance unit when he wasn’t studying Torah at Beit Avram, rolled down his window
     and called to the Russian-Jewish Zionist behind the wheel of the Rabbi’s Nissan, “Stay close. Whatever happens, don’t stop.”
     Then, with the Chevrolet in the lead, the two cars sped off toward Beit Avram, a Jewish settlement of three hundred souls
     planted like a
yarmulke
atop a windswept Judean hill in the spine of mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea.
    Both cars switched on their headlights as the twilight thickened into night. The Rabbi, worn out from the long day on the
     road, tried to cat nap in the station wagon’s back seat but the headlights of oncoming cars kept him awake. “How long?” he
     called to the driver.
    “Three quarters of an hour, an hour if we run into traffic.”
    Efrayim said, “It’s not sure we’ll get there in time for the meeting.”
    “My getting there,” the Rabbi observed dryly, “will be the signal for the meeting to begin.”
    After a while Efrayim looked over his shoulder and whispered into the shadows of the back seat, “Rabbi, are you sleeping?”
    “If I were sleeping I wouldn’t have heard you ask if I were sleeping.”
    “Excuse me, Rabbi, but what did you mean this morning when you said prayer was a waste of time?”
    “To pray is not the worst thing you can do with your time, but it’s a waste of time in the sense that there are better things
     you can do.”
    “For instance?”