ent
On The Bookshelf
The author's
diary covers the
period from Sept.
30, 2000 to Feb.
15, 2002.
`Storm Of Terror'
American-born settler writes a searing account
of living in a land without peace.
HELEN SCHARY MOTRO
Special to the Jewish News
le
ither excoriated as illegal
conquerors or praised as
pioneers, Jews living in the
territories conquered by
Israel in the Six-Day War are never
portrayed neutrally.
The very name of where they live
depends on the political bent of the
writer: to critics they live in "the West
Bank in the Occupied Territories,"
while proponents mystically term the
area "Judea and Samaria."
Although at the crux of the Israeli-
Palestinian controversy, settlers them-
selves rarely tell their own stories in
Helen Schary Motro, an American
lawyer and writer living in Israel, is a
columnist for the Jerusalem Post.
print. With Storm of Terror: A Hebron
Mother's Diary (Ivan R. Dee; $22.50),
June 0. Leavitt has filled that. gap.
Leavitt is an American Jewish
woman who grew up in a secular
home in a wealthy suburb of Long
Island. She left for the University of
Wisconsin with a trunk full of new
mix 'n' match clothes, then found
herself floundering into the drug cul-
ture.
Today, she is a fervently Orthodox
mother of five who lives with her hus-
band and children in the Jewish
enclave of Kiriat Arba in the West
Bank Palestinian city of Hebron.
Storm of Terror is the intensely per-
sonal diary of her life during the first
year and a half of the new intifada
(Palestinian uprising), which erupted
in fall 2000.
Apart from emotional references to
biblical patriarchs, the book is not a
political polemic. Leavitt, passionately
convinced of the Jews' historic right
to live in the whole of biblical Israel,
feels no need to justify her a priori
position. Rather, she tells the story of
how it feels to live through the trau-
ma of violence and death that daily
strikes her neighbors and friends.
Thomas L. Friedman offers insights in a collection of columns and
his personal diary in response to Sept. 11.
s a rule, newspaper columns
don't fare that well between
covers because it's hard to
read them in bulk. Glitches
and gaffes become apparent — mis-
perceptions and mispredictions, the
same.
. Then there's Thomas L. Friedman's
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the
World after September 11 (Farrar Straus
& Giroux; $26) — brilliant and
intensely readable.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,
best-selling author and saving remnant
of the New York Times op-ed page,
Friedman knew what he was talking
about long before Sept. 11.
He is unique. A practicing Jew with
seemingly unlimited access to Muslim
Philip Gold is a senior fellow of the
Discovery Institute in Seattle. This
review first appeared in the Washington
Times and is reprinted with permission.
12/6
2002
76
leaders and thinkers, a man of no
small chutzpah and total freedom to
write as he chooses, Friedman spent
the six months after Sept. 11 mostly in
the Muslim world.
His perceptions and conclusions
merit careful consideration. Friedman
regards the Arab world as neither an
inevitably failed civilization nor
doomed to endless anti-Americanism.
He writes, and apparently tells Arab
leaders to their faces, that whatever
America's and Israel's misdeeds and
failings, their real problem is them-
selves.
Instead of maintaining power by
building modern societies, they
foment dissatisfaction and hatred in
the Arab street — a street they must
fear even as they manipulate it.
Instead of learning to trade with the
world, they "barely trade with each
other," writes Friedman.
They blame everyone but themselves
for their problems when the harsh fact
is that, were Israel and the U.S. to dis-
appear tomorrow, the Arab nations
Juggling Viewpoints
The real power of the narrative is its
honesty, as when Leavitt agonizes
about watching her own children on
psychobabble explanations. But he
does intuit a deadly gap between. the
Arab/Islamic sense of superiority and
the Arabs' real-world weaknesses —
failures that can only be overcome by
opening their societies to the perils
and allures of globalization.
Friedman's solution: a combination
of tough love and patience.
and peoples would be no different.
"Yes, we've backed the despots.
So, why do they deceive and delude
Now, maybe we should help the mod-
themselves, at such horrific cost in
erates. We can't go tromping through
treasure and in blood?
the Middle East, bestowing democra-
Friedman knows the Arab world too
well, and respects it too much, to offer cy, but let's do what we can. As for the
region's anti-Americanism
— let's tell our story bet-
ter, while accepting that
anti-Americanism will
exist so long as Arabs feel
they need it.
"As for the terrorists .. .
destroy them. Preferably
covertly, working through
and with the locals and
those who know their
),
phone numbers.
But what makes these
columns so permanently
Thomas L.
important is less their
Friedman on the
analysis than their sensibil-
Arab world:
ity. Friedman manages to
Neither an
be a realist without wor-
inevitably failed
shiping realpolitik, a hope-
civilization nor
doomed to endless ful man who needs no illu-
anti-Americanism. sions to sustain his hope, a
`Longitudes And Attitudes'
PHILIP GOLD
Special to the Jewish News
Leavitt relates
-chronologically the
relentless terrorist
incidents in which
settlers have been
attacked in fields,
cars, and buses —
even their own beds.
In each case, Leavitt writes not of
some anonymous victim but of
acquaintances in her tight-knit com-
munity.
They are people she meets in the
streets, in the grocery and in her chil-
dren's schools: "We are burying
another of our dead ... orphans.
Orphans everywhere."
When the right-wind politician
Rehavim Ze'evi was assassinated in
2001, it was not some remote politi-
cian she lost but a close family friend.
Years earlier, he had joined her hospi-
tal vigil when her husband was
assaulted in the head with a rock.