Boys With Guns

August 15, 2006 - 11:51 AM by Allison

Despite the criticism of the decision to agree to a ceasefire, everyone in Israel shares some relief that the shooting has stopped, that their sons, husbands, friends and neighbors, are for now, out of immediate danger, and there is a break from the sad pictures of young lives snuffed out on the pages of the daily newspaper. Noorster describes the feeling: I’m not even in love with him. He’s not a boyfriend, he’s more of a… fixture. I’m very fond of him, that is true.

Pretty Boy is 27 years old, but looks about 20. He’s not particularly tall, and although he has a six-pack and a wiry body, he’s really rather skinny. He has hazel eyes, long, luscious eyelashes and curly black hair.
He’s hungry all the time. There are many people in my life I love more than him, and yet he’s the only person I actually cook for on a regular basis. He eats like he’s never seen a meal before, he doesn’t consume food, he destroys it.
He grew up on a tiny moshav in the Negev. He’s recently moved to Tel Aviv, and he admits the city still confuses him. He shares a flat with two friends and says he couldn’t live alone because he’d feel lonely.

We watched Monsoon Wedding, one of my ultimate feelgood movies, and it made him all pensive and depressed to the point where he almost cried. We ordered pizza. He asked the person taking his order what her name was, then complimented her unusual name. He cuddled with Marzipan, and shoved yesterday’s paper under a cushion, saying he stopped reading the news because it broke his heart.

I looked at the front page, with all those pictures of dead young men (do they have to be that beautiful?) and asked him in jest, You’ve not been called up, have you? Then I found out he was a combat soldier in Nahal, an elite infantry unit in the army. His last stint of reserve duty was over a year ago, pre-disengagement, in Gaza. It did not compute. You don’t know Pretty Boy, I do. He doesn’t look like he could carry an assault rifle, let alone use one. The distant possibility that he could, in theory, end up in Lebanon frightened me.

I’ve realised I live in a bubble inside the bubble. I’ve been spared the real tragedy. I live in Tel Aviv, where suicide bombings are a threat but in the end we didn’t get hit by Hezbollah’s rockets. I have little connection to mainstream Israeli society: my friends are almost exclusively immigrants, some veterans, others fresh off the boat. I have no brothers or a husband I could lose. Pretty Boy is the only close friend I have who served in the army, and he hasn’t been called up.

And yet I went to sleep and had this nightmare where his passport size photo was on the cover of Yediot Aharonot among pictures of the fallen, and I woke up shaken and stricken by fear. We lost dozens of young men. They died in uniform, but they had probably been just as unlikely as candidates for combat as Pretty Boy. And for me, that alone is good enough a reason to applaud this fragile ceasefire.

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