Guarding the Wrong Gate

The Oslo Follies. Chapter One.

The Guard

As far as reserve duty went, this was the ideal kind—the type where, upon receiving our posting, we kept poker faces and nodded seriously during the initial briefing. It didn’t get much better than this. There were six of us on this assignment. Four were from Neve Dekalim, the main town in Gush Katif, and the other two, my friend Haim and myself, were from Gan Or, an agricultural settlement. The first four preferred the day and evening shifts, so that they could be with their families at night. Haim and I preferred the night shift, so that we could look after our farms during the day.

It was an unlikely posting. We were to guard a base at one end of a horseshoe complex in Khan Yunis. The other end of the horseshoe was the military government building and connecting the ends were one or two smaller compounds that housed what we guessed were the secret services. This was during the First Intifada, and the base we were guarding belonged to the Border Patrol—the spearhead against rock-throwers and occasional firebombers at the time. This was before the 'Geniuses of Oslo,' Rabin and Peres, decided to arm the terrorists with assault rifles and have US and UK special forces train them, effectively turning them into actual soldiers. Still, things were heating up.

There we were, supporting troops guarding the sanctuary of the fighting troops. We couldn't drive directly to or from the base because we were in uniform, and traveling through the refugee camp on Khan Yunis's western side was already too dangerous. We drove north on the main Gush Katif road, cut east for a mile and a half, and then turned right, south, on the Gaza-Rafah Road, reaching the base in the center of Khan Yunis after a further short drive of three miles. On our first drive to the base, Haim and I finally let ourselves enjoy the situation. We couldn't believe our luck—we were already shipping produce overseas, so it wasn't a great time for reserve duty. Not that the army ever considers that when calling us up.

At one time, we did have it better. We were assigned to guard the gates at our own settlements. That was the best. Close to home and close to family, even when on duty. That didn’t last long. We were left to governing ourselves, just so long as the entrance to the settlement had two guards at all times. There are various levels of conscientiousness, even among friends. Guard duty so close to home came with a built-in temptation: attending to household and farm affairs as if you weren't on duty. Being late always came at the expense of a friend, even if that friend understood the explanation, having similar concerns himself. Eventually, relationships became frayed under a flurry of tit-for-tat retaliations, until the district commander swooped in and put a flaming stop to the infighting.

With our common history, the one unspoken agreement between Haim and myself was that we were not going to screw this assignment up. We would be on time, always alert, and pro-active in opening and closing the gate at the coming and going of the patrol jeeps. We arrived at the entrance to the base. The perimeter wall was about four meters tall, made of concrete. The gate consisted of two green, hinged sheet-metal doors, both needing to swing open for vehicles to pass. As we waited to enter the base we saw in a flash what our duties would be. Obviously, one of us would be on the other side of the doors, waiting for a patrol to leave or for a patrol to return, notifying us with the jeep’s horn from about a hundred yards away, so that the door would be open for them when they reached it. The other one would man the guard tower, which rose up above the wall at the corner of the base to the left of the entrance. We received a lazy look from the reservist manning the tower, who we would be replacing. It was easy to see that he was at the end of his twenty-two days of yearly duty. As the other reservist opened the gate Haim and I looked at each other with resolve; we would not tire like these two. We would remain fresh and alert. We would not endanger our good fortune.

It was a mini base. There was a central paved courtyard where the two off-duty jeeps were parked ready for action and a designated area at the far end for reservist’s cars. Around that courtyard were several buildings with their backs abutting the perimeter wall. On one side there were barracks housing the two off-duty crews, and on the opposite side a small mess-hall and communal area, and, connecting the two sides, another building the size of the barracks divided into three rooms, a radio room and command post, the officer’s quarters, and at the far end a room for the Bedouin trackers. We were surprised to be given our orientation by the commanding officer himself, who turned out to be a Druze. The Border Patrol, an equal opportunity employer.

“This should be the easiest duty you’ve ever had,” he said. “All you need to do is keep alert.” I could sense that Haim was feeling what I was feeling: that our initial assessment was being confirmed. He continued: “I know you are all religious, so I have some news for you. You do not need to be here on the Sabbath.” This was met with total silence from our side. Six of us standing there, already feeling lucky, now hearing words that could never be expected to come out of an officer’s lips. We were all thinking the same thing. He’s a Druze. A Jewish officer, especially a religious one, would never allow a benefit like that. On principle. A principle understood and acceptable to us: two to be released on the Sabbath, with the remaining four covering for them eight hours on eight hours off until they returned on Saturday night at the end of the Sabbath. If there were a Geiger counter for warm feelings it would have been clicking off the scale like Chernobyl with our feelings for this officer, and for the Druze people in general, and for the simple foot soldiers manning the base because the onus of the guard duty would be falling on them, at the expense of their down-time. Then the officer said: “Two days ago someone threw a grenade over the gate. Luckily, it didn’t explode. Both guards were asleep at their posts and didn’t notice it. The morning patrol saw it as they were heading out. If it had exploded, the guard at the gate would have died—shrapnel tearing through the quiet night.”

That got our attention. There is never a free ride that is free. However, we were not overly concerned because we were going to be alert one hundred percent of the time. That was our intention. And easier intended than done. The guard tower was doable. There were things to see. Khan Yunis in all its morning glory. Things to admire, things to ridicule. All sorts of things. The problem was guarding the gate. Being on the inside, there was nothing to see. Nothing. Haim and I logically divided our duty into two. Four hours in the tower and four hours in the pit. I volunteered to guard the gate first and within fifteen minutes I was feeling tired. All enlisted, past present and future, know whereof I speak. We could all do four hours guard duty standing on our heads unless we were tired or bored out of our brains in the first second of duty. Usually, on guard duty you are paired, and that way there is someone to talk with to relieve the boredom. In our case, we were paired after a fashion, in that we were physically close to each other, but there was no line-of-sight connection between us, and we could not converse.

I quickly fell into my time-honored solution to ward off sleep: marching solo on parade along a four-by-four-meter square on the asphalt under my feet. I could do it for hours, but I usually only needed to employ the tactic near the end of a stretch of duty. Using it within the first half-hour of my first guard duty was not a good omen. Finally, when it came time for us to exchange places, Haim saw the look on my face and asked: “That bad?” I just shook my head and climbed up the ladder of my new post on the tower. Before disappearing inside I stopped climbing and turned to look at Haim and said: “Good luck.” Inside the booth I climbed up to my perch, checked the mechanism of the machine gun, and sat back to take in this corner of Khan Yunis.

Contrary to popular thought, not all of Khan Yunis is a refugee camp of tin-sheet walls and roofs. We were in a gentrified section, probably made up of merchants and landowners. Directly in front of the tower was the access road that led to another neighborhood farther down. Beyond the road was an enclosed property, with a main building serving as a residence, a courtyard turned into a citrus grove. During the hot afternoons the owner would walk slowly amidst his lemon trees. Sometimes he would look up at me. If I waved, he would wave back, but no smiles were exchanged— a silent acknowledgment in tense times. I mention that because during the three weeks that I manned that tower, not one of the other residents going about their business looked up at me. We were invisible.

As it happened, on the side opposite this private compound was the local mosque. We would later learn that it was a main recruiting and indoctrination center for the Muslim Brotherhood. It served us as an alarm clock. Some minutes after four in the morning the speaker in the minaret would give an echoing pop and we knew that the call to prayer would soon follow. For non-Muslims, it is a torture to sit through this charming aspect of Islamic culture. You can get used to it, like you can get used to anything, but sitting in the guard tower I was at the level of the speaker in the minaret and though it was not pointed directly at me, it was damn loud. Sometimes I was of a mind to swing the machine gun around and blast that amplifier to smithereens, yelling: “Shut up!” but common sense prevailed. Still, I would think: “So you get up early to go to prayer. Big deal!” Later, after sunrise, I admit that I had some admiration for this example of Islamic devotion. Making that early morning prayer every day meant that one was in bed by at the latest nine or ten at night, meaning that one was not having one’s mind polluted by the low level of television programming that was broadcast during those hours.

But beyond the cultural quirks, something about the tower's setup bothered me after a few days. This is no surprise, as during the long hours of guard duty you have time to wonder about anything you want to wonder about. Here, though, even to my lightly trained military eye, there was a problem. Normally, a machine gun is set up to face the direction of threats. In our case that would be in the direction of the access road to the base. That would mean that it could also cover the entrance to the mosque off to the left of the access road. That would make sense. Instead, the gun was fixed to swivel through a field of fire that covered the entire expanse of the compound of the friendly man in the lemon grove. The machine gun was useless in case of a frontal attack from, say, a suicide driver, or a teenager wanting to prove his mettle by lobbing a grenade over the wall after hearing some radicalizing sermon in the mosque. The solution was to have our personal weapon, an M-16, loaded and ready and within an arm’s reach. After a few more days of wondering, I had a moment of enlightenment. I knew why. It was set up that way in consideration of the feelings of the Arabs walking to and from prayer. Prayer was a peaceful endeavor, and why would we want to shove our unwanted presence in their faces by pointing a machine gun at them? We were foolish to the point of idiocy back then. For whatever reason, we were pointing our guns in the wrong direction.

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Near the end of the three weeks of our reserve duty, we concentrated on one single important thing: getting through the last few days. We were tired. After our midnight to eight shift, we rushed back to Gan Or to hurry through morning prayers and see the children and wife before they left for school and then straight on up to the greenhouses for a full day of work on the farm. On paper, we should have been able to get enough sleep, but as I mentioned, we were at the height of picking season and there was always something more to do on the farm, and of course we had to spend time with the family, so by the end of our reserve duty, we were sometimes arriving to take our posts with just two or three hours sleep.

On the last night of guard duty, I arrived after not having slept at all. I figured I could hold out just this once. I began my shift on the tower and managed to stay awake, but when Haim and I exchanged positions at four o’clock, I knew that I was in trouble. I figured that it would be hard going for about an hour and a half until first light, then, as the sun rose it would be easier. I hadn’t figured that I would be questioning my ability to keep awake even for five minutes. I paced back and forth, I parade marched, I ran in place, I ran in circles, and at about four-thirty, I nodded off, while standing at my post. It’s not as hard as it sounds, sleeping while standing up. You tighten your webbing and ammunition belt and kind of slouch down into that support. It’s not a deep sleep because you must be awake enough to keep standing, but it is sleep, and I was well into a dream when I heard the cryptic message: “So. Are you coming to Gan Or?” At the mention of my settlement, I jumped. Had I dreamt it? There was no reply forthcoming on the radio, so I was starting to think that it had been part of a dream. I called to Haim up in the tower, but he didn’t answer. I called his name again and when I saw his eyes peeking back down at me I realized that he had been sleeping too.

I was wide awake. At least that. I had convinced myself that the whole episode had been a dream and we finished our last duty without incident and drove home. Neither of us mentioned the fact that we had fallen asleep on duty. We were both thinking of our predecessors who had a grenade thrown at them. They were obviously sleeping at the time. We felt so superior to them when we first arrived. Now we were simply happy that no-one had caught us, even more than we were happy not to have had a grenade thrown at us. We drove home in silence. By the time we made the final turn towards Gan Or I had forgotten about the mysterious transmission.

As we approached the main gate, we were surprised to see an endless line of military vehicles parked on the side of the road leading to the center of the settlement, and then on to the perimeter road to the left. Something had happened. The line probably extended until the greenhouses, we thought, where most of our security problems occurred. However, as we reached the turn to the greenhouses I was surprised to see that the line did not turn there, rather, it continued to my street and turned in there. As we approached my home, I saw that the line stopped there. My heart fell. What I had thought might be a dream was turning into a nightmare. As soon as I reached my home, I felt relief. There was my wife Dvora, holding our baby son, talking with the district commander. I parked in the middle of the street because of all the military vehicles and jumped out and ran to Dvora. She saw the worry in my eyes and said “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

I ignored the commander because off to the side I saw our settlement’s security coordinator, and he was giving me a look that I did not like at all. I held Nissim Serusi in high esteem, so I approached and stood by him. I did not initiate a conversation. He would give me an update when he was ready. After a few minutes I looked at him and asked: “That bad?” He said: “Worse.” He told me that at first the army claimed that they had not brought a tracker with them and that if they called for him now by the time he reached Gan Or the intruders would be sipping tea in Khan Yunis. Nissim insisted. They called for the tracker. That is what I had heard on guard duty. The request had been transmitted on the wrong frequency. That was the frequency that I had been listening on. They immediately corrected on their end when they didn’t receive a reply, and that is the reason I didn’t hear a follow-up on that initial transmission and could allow myself to think that I had been dreaming. Nissim continued, and as he relayed further details, I began to grow as angry as he was. The tracker arrived about an hour later and grumbled that there was no sense in tracking, as the intruders were by now already back in Khan Yunis. Nissim was furious. He did not back down and forced the issue. They found the intruders lounging under a tree about two hundred yards beyond the perimeter of Gan Or’s greenhouses, resting before continuing to Khan Yunis. They were a couple of teenagers who had been high on hashish and were trying to steal a car.

Now, next to my house, I looked in the back of the jeep that held the blindfolded and handcuffed culprits. Nissim and I, and our neighbors who had gathered, were all thinking the same thing: if a couple of drugged-up losers could casually enter our settlement and move from car to car trying to jack one, what would have happened if they had been motivated terrorists with a different purpose? All of the IDF’s horses and all of the IDF’s men couldn’t put a slaughtered Jew back together again.

It was all wrong, the whole attitude of the Israeli army at the time. A great threat was looming on the horizon like storm clouds, and the only thing facing it was a Jewish woman holding her infant. The guards were posted in all the wrong places. I approached my wife Dvora, seeing instantly that she was more collected than the district commander, whose job here it was to project confidence. It was all wrong. Backwards. Upside-down. This feeling of dread was only intensified by the presence of the district commander and the rest of the high brass in attendance. We felt a total lack of confidence in the army. True, we were religious Jews who never put our complete trust in flesh and blood no matter what the rank, rather, that trust was always in our Father in Heaven, but still, flesh and blood had an important part to play in confrontation with enemies.

Dvora was about to state the obvious—obvious to everyone except those whose job it was to protect civilians.

“Those two creeps are heroes now,” she said.

The officers laughed with a hint of friendly ridicule.

“They are,” she continued. These men were not aware that Dvora had a military background. “You are going to release them before sundown, and half an hour later they will be reporting to their handlers that they just took a walk in the park inside a Jewish settlement and almost had to jump and shout to be caught.” That got the officers’ attention, and mine, as I hadn’t thought of it either.

This was not the first time that the words of my wife rang true, like the words of her namesake the prophetess Dvora:

The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Yisra᾽el, until I Devora arose, I arose a mother in Yisra᾽el.

They chose new gods; then was war in the gates: Was there a shield or spear seen among forty thousand in Yisra᾽el? (Judges 5:7-8)

Nissim’s “prophesy” may have been more pertinent. It was to get worse, much worse. We were guarding the wrong gate, indeed, pointing our vigilance in all the wrong directions.

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