Storm of Terror: A Hebron Mother's Diary

Rating:
Summary: compelling snapshot
Review: Reviewed by Samuel G. Freedman in Moment Magazine

The settlement of Israelis on the West Bank, with all of its idealism and bloodshed, all of its messianism and domination, is in many ways the story of Hebron. It was there that an Arab pogrom in 1929 ended centuries of Jewish presence. It was there, in the aftermath of the Six Day War, that the celebrants of a Passover seder declared their return. It was there, and in neighboring Kiryat Arba, that the most controversial figures made their homes'Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the founders of Gush Emunim; Meir Kahane, exponent of Arab expulsion; Baruch Goldstein, the beloved doctor turned mass murderer at the Machpelah.

Against such a backdrop, one reads June Leavitt's Storm of Terror not simply as a first-person account of death, fear, and resilience amid the Al-Aqsa Intifada, but more broadly as an intimate portrait of daily life among the believers. Although she is a professional journalist, Leavitt consciously identifies herself in the book's subtitle as a mother. Indeed, this book achieves its most intense and revealing moments because she resolutely stays with the daily details. At the same time, however, this slender volume comes with the shortcomings endemic to publishing a diary.

In much of Israel, to say nothing of an often-hateful outside world, the settlers of Hebron and Kiryat Arba stand as pariahs, fanatics who obstructed peace when it seemed imminent and who stretch the army dangerously thin to defend them in wartime. The greatest accomplishment of Storm of Terror, then, comes in Leavitt's ability to defy or at least muddy the harsh clarity of such stereotyping. She herself is as much a creation of '60s counterculture as of Greater Israel ideology, a woman who reads tarot cards, does yoga, met her future husband on a hiking trail in Vermont, and, yes, considers Judea and Samaria to be Jewish property by divine covenant.

Fascinating fault lines run through her household, as well. Two of Leavitt's sons help build an illegal settlement to mark the spot where a friend was ambushed and slain by Palestinians. One of her daughters, Miriam, is 'ultraorthodox and fanatically right wing,' while another, Estie, is a land-for-peace liberal with a pierced navel. At several searing moments in the book, the two daughters find themselves on opposite sides of violent confrontations'Estie with her army unit, Miriam with protesting settlers. Leavitt's husband has veered over the years from deep involvement with the Moledet Party, which favored ousting Arabs from the West Bank, to meeting with Palestinian Authority leaders to plan for Hebron and Kiryat Arba to remain Jewish communities within an independent Palestine. How unexpectedly poignant is that moment of long-lost possibility.

In ways Leavitt probably never intended, though, her book displays the settler psyche. By her telling, for instance, the Oslo accords ruined the companionable relations between the Hebron area's Arabs and Jews, as if Palestinian nationalism had not been a roiling force for decades by then. She approvingly quotes an Arab telling a Jewish settler, 'We would have been your serfs ' but what did you do? You said this land was ours ' Why couldn't you understand the Arab mentality? We admire fierceness and strength! We see goodwill as weakness.'

By its very nature, a diary freezes each such encounter in its moment. This immediacy brings Storm of Terror the documentary impact of a snapshot; the book recounts events as recent as the suicide bombing in Netanya last Passover. But a published diary'anyone's'by definition deprives the author and the reader of a more considered, more self-consciously crafted, version of reality. And, precisely because Storm of Terror affords such an unanticipated window into the settler experience by such an idiosyncratic narrator, one hopes that next time June Leavitt will use her diary as the raw material, not the finished product.

Samuel G. Freedman, associate dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is the author most recently of Jew vs. Jew'The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.