The Threat of the Buzzing Saw
The Threat of the Buzzing Saw

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was quoted as saying she was “profoundly disappointed” by Thursday’s approval of a project to build 930 new homes in the Har Homa neighborhood in southern Jerusalem, adjacent to the Jerusalem neightborhood of Talpiot. Arutz Sheva, 06/08/11.

The sun’s slow journey westward above the Har Homa neighborhood in southern Jerusalem had tempered the searing summer heat and Yoni was at peace as he arranged  the plywood panels in the yard of his modest stucco home. He was building a small attachment to the garden apartment, a room for three-year old  Shosh, now the older child after the recent birth of Yael.

Reclining with pride in her tiny plastic chair, Shosh observed her father with rapt attention. Yes, Yoni assured her not for the first time, this will be only for you. And, yes, you will have lots of shelves for your dolls.

Shosh’s chattering aside, the only intrusion into the perfect afternoon silence was the warbling  of a congregation of bluebirds who had taken up residence in a nearby oak. That, and the buzz of Yoni’s electric saw as he cut through the  measured  panels.

Between responses to Shosh’s bubbly enthusiasm, Yoni revisited the animated discussion earlier that day in the local high school where he sought to introduce the rudiments of English poetry to reluctant Sabra students. The subject was T.S. Eliot.

Ignoring reference to the famous  writer’s occasional anti-Jewish excesses, Yoni had selected “The Hollow Men,” and  had asked how they understood  the well-known coda to the poem: “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Did the lines reinforce the message of spiritual despair the piece was meant to convey?

Surprisingly, but perhaps not, the youngsters, most of them facing imminent service in the country’s defense forces and impacted by  the scars of war among family members and friends, could not accept the prospect of the world collapsing with a “whimper.” In their view, the end, if Heaven forbid it came, would result only from a violent “bang,”

In the cool of the evening, Yoni and his wife Tikvah relaxed in canvas chairs, surrounded by the evidence of his handiwork. With the aid of a magnifying glass and a flashlight, he was examining a shard he had discovered on a recent excursion, a jar handle with an inscription. “Just think,” he tells her, “thousands of years ago one of our ancestors may have  owned  this.”

“You are a dreamer, my husband,” she said, then added, “My dream  is you finish this job soon. The constant noise of your saw reminds me that I’m overdue for a visit to the dentist.”

The next afternoon, absorbed in his task and spurred by Tikvah’s gentle admonition, Yoni  was at first oblivious to the  ragtag crowd scrambling  up the nearby  hill  and advancing in his direction. A physical confrontation was avoided by the rapid appearance of a border police unit, but the rage of the mob was clear.

Yoni stood transfixed, his now-silenced saw dangling from his hand, as a spokesman for the protestors shouted through a megaphone. “We demand you stop cutting off another piece of occupied Jerusalem.” Beside him a man in a sport jacket over a turtle-necked jersey, obviously not from the nearby Arab village, held up an oak-board sign. “You shall not steal,” it said, under the heading: International Committee for   Justice.

Yoni was perplexed by the unwelcome attention, all the more so when Israel’s Supreme Court decided to consider a complaint by the Palestinian Authority. He was especially confounded to learn that, in response to a petition by the P.A., the UN General Assembly had taken up the matter, the delegates poring over charts and measurements that depicted the precise dimensions of the room he was building for his daughter in the home he had bought legally, built where there had been only barren, unclaimed hills that Israel categorized as state land.

Following two days of debate and  condemnation by the Arab League, Iran, and the Quartet,  the G.A. adopted a resolution declaring that  the use of  electric saws and other “implements of destruction in East Jerusalem” violated  international law and was a threat to regional stability and the UN’s commitment to world peace.

It was odd that they considered south Jerusalem part of East Jerualem.

As the weeks went by, Yoni continued to seek out the afternoon respite of his yard. The wooden frame for the unpretentious addition to his home was in place, but the plywood wall and floor panels remained neatly stacked on the ground.

He was a respecter of the law. The Supreme Court had issued a restraining order while it considered the implications of the General Assembly’s vote. On most days, Shosh sat beside him in her pink little chair favoring one or another of her family of dolls, occasionally glancing up at her father.

In his poetry survey class Yoni had left Eliot for a few poems by Whitman and Emily Dickinson. But his thoughts now returned to the possible meaning of the cryptic lines in Eliot’s poem. With bemusement, he was struck by the idea that those who had risen up against his innocent desire to bring happiness to a three-year old child were driven by the fear that universal cataclysm would be signaled neither by a bang nor a whimper, but by the cacophony of a circular saw in Jerusalem.