Can you live a moral life in the holy city of Jerusalem?

While you are reading about violent attacks in Jerusalem on the home page of your newspaper, Jerusalemites are living their lives, most of the time, as if they dwelled in a happy little European nation, say Luxembourg or the Netherlands... or suburban New Jersey. That's how you can feel there a lot of the time, if you live on the Israeli side. That is assuming you're not a crazed extremist of some kind.

I lived there for four years.

Although Jerusalem is located in the -- shall we say troubled? -- Middle East, right there in the Holy City you can find organic baby greens, fine French wines, balsamic vinegar, vegetarian baby formula, disposable diapers, yoga classes, outspoken newspapers and good nursery schools. It's a seemingly modern city, in a democracy, with mass transit and high-rises and apartment complexes, really nice beaches not far away and clean, cookie-cutter hilltop developments that only rarely are thought of by most people as settlements.

So you send your kids to school, and you go to the supermarket, and you shop at the mall, and you go to restaurants and clubs.



And it feels, somehow, out of context to you when two young Palestinian cousins shoot and hack their way through an Orthodox congregation and murder a policeman, as well as four rabbis in mid-worship. It seems wholly out of keeping with the day-to-day country you know as your own.

But of course, it stands to reason. The senseless, vicious attack makes sense. That's what's so scary: the underlying understanding everyone has of what's happening and why. Everyone in Israel knows why the two men stormed the synagogue. No one is scratching his head and wondering. On both sides of the divide everyone understands.

It was even scarier when I lived there -- but I managed to block most of it out. I was following the Israeli example. I lived in Jerusalem at the height of the peace process. That's when it was most dangerous to live there, in modern memory, although the city is always right on the edge of violence -- for reasons we all pretty much know, even if we can't agree on how we want to describe them.

When I was there, I used to drive my kids and their schoolmates in the morning carpool. A small private school bus would bring them home, driven by Mohammed, a man in his late 20s or early 30s who smoked while he drove, much to the children's dazzled astonishment.



My main goal when I drove the carpool in the crowded morning traffic was to avoid the red Egged buses that had been such easy targets for suicide bombers, or bus bombers, as we used to say. Those buses blew up with clockwork regularity when I lived in Jerusalem.

So if -- on the way to school -- a bus pulled out in front of me, I would lag back, with the kids in the car shouting and whining and crying and making jokes and doing all the things small kids do in a carpool. I'd be feeling pretty confident: Surely that was a long enough buffer zone ahead of me to serve as a blast shield.

Israelis with their usual bravura and willful courage would quickly fill in the spaces in front of me in order to ... well, to be in front of any slow, stupid person like me. So I'd be feeling good and safe. Then I'd check the rear-view mirror and see, pushing its nose right up into my car's rear -- with all the carpool children, laughing and singing, unaware -- another damn Egged bus.

Joke on me.



I still remember two Hebrew words that were very current when I lived there: pigua, for attack, and guf, for body. They're probably back in regular use again.

One day my sons were coming home on the little school bus. The school year had barely begun. I was at home, working, when I heard the bomb go off.

Now, you always tried to assume -- in those days -- that the huge noise you heard from all the way across town had been made by a plane breaking the sound barrier. (Today, supersonic flights no longer fly over the city.) Whenever there was the sound of an explosion, everyone in Jerusalem would stop what they were doing in uncanny unison and look up to the heavens in silence, waiting hopefully to hear the sound of a supersonic Israel Defense Forces jet that would follow a boom.

But today there was no plane. It was a bomb, not a boom. Then I heard by telephone that the blasts had been set off by three suicide bombers at the Ben Yehuda outdoor mall. It was right on my children's bus route home.

For 15 frightening minutes, I did not know that Mohammed had already passed Ben Yehuda before the bombs went off. As my boys descended from the bus, oblivious as usual, Mohammed raised his eyebrows at me over the ash that had gathered at the end of his cigarette.

I still remember that look.

Israelis are brave, no question. They also try hard to ignore the dangers to themselves that are created by living next door to a population their country has occupied, controlled, limited and demeaned for almost half a century. They try to live normal lives while really not far away their army is bombing neighborhoods into Dresden-like destruction.



The closer the damage is that your country is doing, the more effort you have to put into trying to pretend it's not happening. When you live in a war zone, you have to ignore certain realities or life is just too awful, the situation too awful.

That said, Jerusalemites on both sides of the old green line live in a state of terrible suppressed stress. When I would leave Jerusalem and go back to New York for mental health breaks, I'd feel an incredible surge of relief from tension, even in the middle of Times Square. It was as if, leaving Jerusalem, arriving in Manhattan, I had emerged from a battlefield onto a deserted Caribbean beach.

I feel sad and horrified about the four rabbis. I feel bad about the Druze cop who tried to stop the cousins at the beginning of their attack -- he's another victim of history and the situation. I feel terribly sorry about all the people who've been killed or maimed or traumatized in bombings, suicide and otherwise, over the many years of this unmitigated, ongoing regional disaster. I felt indignant and disgusted about the continuing destruction of Gaza; the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers, and the brutal revenge murder of a perfectly innocent West Bank boy. I felt particularly sad about the young boy who hid under the pews at the synagogue while the most recent attack took place -- in so many ways, he could have been one of my boys at their school or on the street or in a bookstore. They, too, could have witnessed horrors, and I was just lucky -- they were just lucky -- that they didn't.



Then I think about the four boys last summer, little cousins playing on the beach at Gaza in the sun when that afternoon's IDF bombardment began, and blew them apart. They could have been my boys, too. My husband and I went to the beach with our kids often -- that same stretch of beach where, farther south, the Gaza boys were playing.

On the beach, my three sons enjoyed sea and sun the way people do everywhere, and we, the mother and the father, tried for the moment not to think too much about the situation.

Since those days, I have often wished I still lived in Jerusalem. I love the city. I call it the city of my heart -- and it is, because that's where my children lived when they were little. It's such a beautiful city, so intense, and for a writer, the story is so huge, brilliant and important.

But these days, I feel that less and less. Because the longer the catastrophe goes on, and the harsher the occupation gets, the less plausible and the less possible it becomes to live there normally and to live there morally.

PHOTO (TOP): A man holds an Israeli flag during a mass prayer for soldiers and civilians at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem's Old City, Nov.18, 2012. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

PHOTO (INSERT 1): Pools of blood are seen near a religious Jewish text at the scene of an attack at a Jerusalem synagogue in this handout picture released by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) Nov. 18, 2014. REUTERS/Kobi Gideon/GPO/Handout via Reuters

PHOTO (INSERT 2): Israeli bomb experts searches the bus number 32, blown up by a suspectedPalestinian suicide bomber, near the neighborhood of Gilo in Jerusalem, June 18, 2002. REUTERS/Gil Cohen Magen

PHOTO (INSERT 3): A general view of the remains of a bus blown up by an explosion, surrounded by the remains of private cars and another bus destroyed in downtown Jerusalem, Feb. 25, 1996. REUTERS/Archive

PHOTO (INSERT 4): A woman grieves during the funeral of the four Palestinian children from the Baker family, whom medics said were killed by a shell fired by an Israeli naval gunboat, in Gaza City, July 16, 2014. REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly

PHOTO (INSERT): A Palestinian man carries the body of a boy, whom medics said was killed by a shell fired by an Israeli naval gunboat, on a beach in Gaza City, July 16, 2014. REUTERS/Mohammed Talatene

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/11/24/jerusalem-city-of-yoga-organic-baby-greens-and-horrific-violence/