True Ancestor: City of David

On the Friday of our trip in Israel, Ezra took us to Jerusalem's oldest neighborhood, the place where Jews and Arabs coexist in a silent tug of war that is the Jewish-Arab relationship in microcosm. The City of David, perched beneath the walls of the Old City and above the floor of the Kidron Valley, on the southern slope of Mount Moriah, is a mostly Arab enclave that is being bought up by Jews.

Like many popular stops in Israel, there is a paved promontory atop this neighborhood, providing astonishing views. We looked across the valley at what was, until 1967, part of Jordan (including the Mount of Olives, covered almost entirely with the white slabs of Jewish tombs), and down into the Kidron valley, where graves and tombs thousands of years old are located.

As we stood gazing out, an Arab woman was hanging clothes on a line in the tiny backyard of her home. The roof of her modest house was about three meters below our feet.

This is a sight that has stayed with me since the trip: the tour bus full of American teens squinting distractedly across the narrow valley; the tour guides from their group recognizing and chatting with our friend and guide Ezra; and, literally beneath us, the Arab woman going about her life as best she could. All along this sloped neighborhood, you could see the silent battle playing out: every home occupied by Jews flew an Israeli flag. They flew in clusters, with an occasional outlier.

When you see this -- when you see how Jews and Arabs have lived and continue to live silently, warily in each others' midst -- you newly understand a couple of things: first, you realize how intimately an inextricably related we are, and how the hatred and distrust that occasionally blooms is the kind that only family can foster.

Second, you begin to understand how claims on the land will never, ever be sorted out. How there never will be what we are privileged to know as peace. How, throughout all time since the days of Jacob and Esau, what seems to belong to one nation will likely be claimed by the other to have been stolen.

Third, you understand the triumphalism of construction. Through the millennia, cities were built on top of the ruins of cities, and mosques on top of the ruins of temples, as a matter of necessity, as a signpost of meaning, and as a statement of dominion.

And finally, you realize why so many are outraged that Israel is smashing cockroaches by dropping anvils: because Hezbollah has employed distinctly unWestern zoning practices, hiding stockpiles of weapons and building tunnels and bunkers in the most civilian of areas.

The Western mind has trouble grasping this, but when you go to the Middle East, you see the terrifying proximity of peace and peril, and how it's lived with every day. You see how neighbors engage in silent war, and how the whole fabric is made woven of threads that will explode if they touch.

Hezbollah will continue to gain ground in the war of opinion in the Arab world, with each day that this struggle drags on, because Israel cannot stop until it destroys more of Hezbollah's infrastructure. That infrastructure, however, has been grafted to the bone of Lebanese communities. Destruction -- of any kind, of any people -- serves Hezbollah's purposes. Destruction of buildings in Haifa and Tiberias is good, because it means Jews are suffering; razing of whole towns in Lebanon is good because it means the Jews will continue to sow hatred among its Arab neighbors.

The whole region is a game of Chicken, and whoever touches the wheel and swerves away from collision is weak. Weakness in your neighbor is good. It means you are closing in on the kill.

The rubble of generations thus serves as the compost from which new, more determined communities grow. We are appalled because of the pictures we see. What we fail to see is how this same drama has played out, across the eons, in the region where brilliance and brutality were born.

--T.A.