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A doctor's memoir of life in Jerusalem

2006; Elsevier BV; Volume: 368; Issue: 9540 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(06)69398-7

1474-547X

Terry Eagleton,

Health and Conflict Studies

Emma Williams has worked as a doctor in the UK, Pakistan, Afghanistan, New York, South Africa, and Jerusalem, yet has managed to snatch time to write this superbly informative account of her time in strife-torn Jerusalem. If she is as fine a physician as she is a memoirist, I would entrust her with my own innards any day of the week. It's Easier to Reach Heaven than the End of the Street—a splendidly inventive title for a book about life in Jerusalem—delivers its narrative in lucid, unflinching, mesmerising detail. It is, among other things, excellently informative about the Palestinian-Israeli hostilities, and anyone who wants to bone up on the history of this desperate deadlock in the most enjoyable, least arid way could do worse than start here. Williams began her career after Oxford University as a surgeon, before moving, while in South Africa, into research on the role of the uterine cervix on the transmission of HIV. When her husband was posted by the United Nations to Jerusalem, the family transplanted themselves from New York to a small village on the border of East and West Jerusalem, where the author worked with Palestinians in Ramallah during the day—working on a childbirth project at local hospital—and spent her evenings with Israelis in Tel Aviv. She was, then, quite literally in the centre of one of the globe's most tragic, protracted struggles; and she writes about the conflict with a justness and equipoise that never degenerate into bland neutrality. She is a woman trained to heal plunged in the midst of blasted limbs and burnt bodies. “Flesh”, she writes, “is something you deal with in medicine. You become accustomed to it. It is made acceptable…In Israel there is flesh everywhere. Some of it is covered, modest, Orthodox flesh, but most of it is on display and beautiful…And then there is the other flesh: not on-the-beach glorious living flesh, tanned deep-dark and animate, but dead. Dead flesh. Dismembered, dehumanised by a human bomb, a man or woman who sets out to detonate and kill.” Yet this is no mere war memoir. Williams views her surroundings with a novelist's fastidious eye, portraying Jerusalem's Old City with its “Christian domes and Arab domes in metal, silver, gold and stone, flights of alam and crucifix, bustling blocks of old and new, arches and buttresses, all pale stone, emerald tile and shaded green, clustered within the great thick walls we stood on”. If Martin Amis could amputate a limb, one would have an equivalent mixture of talents to this doctor-turned-word-painter. War is the enemy of truth, while art is its bosom companion. Rather as a great realist novel combines everyday life with dramatic crises, so this book subtly interweaves Williams's personal, professional, and domestic life in Jerusalem with the political drama from which it was inseparable. It is the privilege of the west to distinguish the personal from the political; but no such cleavage is possible in Israel, Gaza, or Iraq. “Personal dramas”, Williams writes, “echo and mirror and fester within the wider human tragedy”. One can find similar sentiments in George Eliot. What we have in this fragment of autobiography is politics brought vividly home to felt experience, as casual horrors crop up on random street corners. The hospital in Bethlehem where Williams was due to give birth to her fourth child is shelled by the Israeli army, and the neonatal department rapidly evacuated. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph had problems in the city, but nothing on that scale. An Arab woman in labour is held up at a checkpoint, prevented from getting to the hospital, and ends up with a dead baby. Shooting, one member of the Israeli Defense Force remarks, is a soldier's way of meditating: “It's like shooting is your way of letting go of all your anger when you're in the army”. It's just a pity, Williams observes, that there may be an Arab child on the other end of the unleashing. Williams is stern on the corruption and incompetence of the Palestinian Authority, and unsparing of Palestinian atrocities. One Arab suicide bomber, disguised as an Orthodox Jew, blew himself up near the school that the author's children were attending; his severed head landed with a thud at the feet of a teacher, and an eye ended up on someone's shoe. She is also ironically alert to the way that both parties to the conflict manipulate their own suffering, as well as the myths which they recount. An Israeli informs her that Arabs arrived in Palestine only a century ago, while a Palestinian loudly asserts that there were no Jews in Israel when Jesus was born. Even so, she refuses to yield to the banal prejudices of the western media and political establishment, for whom terrorists are always Arabs rather than Jews. Taking other people's land, she comments dryly, is not terrorism; trying to reclaim it is. It is not just the routine brutality of life in Jerusalem, but also instances of vindictiveness by the Israeli authorities that the author depicts so well. Every state needs to shield its people from those who would blast toddlers to bits; but there is no need to hold people for hours at checkpoints, or deliberately block ambulances on emergency runs with tanks. Unlike most western commentators, Williams is clear-eyed enough to recognise that the only solution to terrorism is justice. Most political states are founded on revolution, usurpation, occupation, displacement, extermination, and the like, and the UK and the USA are no exception. It is just that these nations have had long enough to live down the memories of this original sin—a process known as political legitimacy. States like Israel and Northern Ireland, by contrast, are too recent for the remembrance of their founding crimes to have faded. And nations established on such frail foundations, whatever their indubitable right to survive and flourish, will never rest in peace until, like Freud's neurotic patient, they learn to stare the Medusa of their historic guilt squarely in the face. As southern Lebanon lies in ruins, and whole armies of murderous suicide bombers wait to spring from its broken villages, it would not seem that Israel has quite absorbed this essential lesson.