"Onward," someone shouted, and we obeyed, surging down King George Street toward Frumin House. No longer a tight, orderly column; now a disorganized mob. Not all the demonstrators joined the advance, but hundreds did. All of us driven by a conviction that an abomination was about to take place, and that we had a duty to our dead families and friends to stop it.
Frumin House was just ahead. The Knesset hall was on the ground floor. The windowpanes glowed with light. There, beyond those windows and walls, the fate of our country, of our people, was being decided.
Before us stretched a cordon of cops, more than two hundred strong, their faces made hideous by gas masks. The cops stood shoulder to shoulder, like a Roman phalanx. The shouts of the demonstrators, in Hebrew and Yiddish, bounced against their formation like projectiles. Beside me, a woman shrieked that she had lost her entire family in Treblinka. She implored the cops to stand aside. To not defend this evil government. To not take part in this desecration of the dead.
I shouted too, though what I don't remember. I only know that I uttered each word with such force that it seared my vocal cords as it burst from my mouth.
Then came the stones. A fusillade of them arching through the air. Mostly launched by a cluster of teenagers atop a hillock of earth across the street from the Knesset.
Some of the stones landed short of the policemen. Others found their mark. Two cops went down after being struck on the helmet. Others sustained body blows. The cars of the ministers parked outside Frumin House suffered their share of damage. Windshields and side windows disintegrated. Dents pocked the doors and roofs.
Several stones went long, or perhaps found their true target. They soared over the officers and into the Knesset. Windows shattered. Glass sprayed. A manic cheer rose from the crowd.
The demonstrators charged, with me among them. An avalanche of bubbling anger. A sharp command sounded from somewhere ahead. A flurry of round black objects swooped toward us. They detonated upon hitting the street, spewing acrid gray fumes.
"Gas!" someone screamed, and numerous others took up the cry. "Gas! They're using gas!"
The word was laden with several million meanings. I imagined my loved ones suffocating in the gas chambers. Others must have done the same. People wailed hysterically. Others snarled imprecations at the cops and at the government. Yet others simply looked stunned that Jews would employ such a weapon on each other.
For a stitch of time, there was wild panic. But, of course, this was not the gas the Germans had used to kill millions. Not a deadly gas at all.
Within seconds, my eyes were stinging and watery. My throat blazed. Every breath was painful. Through the blur of flooding tears, I saw people retching, coughing. One man vomited. But nothing worse than that.
Our advance halted, but only temporarily. The wind picked up, clearing away much of the gas. And the use of it, nonlethal though it was, inflamed us further.
We charged. I had no weapon. I had not come here to spill Jewish blood, but to protest the selling of it. All I wanted was to reach the Knesset. To shout my objection right in the prime minister's face.
The other demonstrators, sharing my purpose, were similarly unequipped for battle. But propelled by a mindless rage, they slammed headlong into the wall of masked officers. They knocked policemen to the ground, battered them with booted feet, pummeled them with naked fists. The cops returned the favor, using their truncheons with growing ferocity. Casualties mounted on both sides. Here, a protester lay unconscious in the street. There, two policemen carried an injured comrade to the safety of Frumin House. To my right sat a dazed man with a yellow star on his breast and blood streaming from his temple. To my left, a grimacing police officer limped in retreat.
The skirmish was messy, chaotic, close-ranged. The lines of cops and demonstrators weaved into each other. Thuds of truncheons against flesh. Shouted curses. The banging of stones against walls. The breaking of glass. The howls of the injured. A maelstrom of sound punching my ears.
More tear gas, and the battle subsided. The officers pushed us away, hauling some of the demonstrators into police cars. Smoke seeped through the broken windows of the Knesset. Ambulances wailed in and out. Medical crews tended to the injured or evacuated them to the hospital.
The smoke cleared again, and the battle resumed. Yells and grunts and cries sliced through the air. Blood mingled with rainwater on the road. Jewish blood spilled by Jewish hands in the capital of the country that was the culmination of two thousand years of Jewish prayers.
A few members of Knesset emerged to peer at the fighting. Those in the opposition yelled at the police to stand down. Others simply looked horrified.
And so it continued. Jews fighting Jews. The cops motivated by their wish to maintain order and enforce the law. I, like the rest of the demonstrators, propelled by a sense of wrongness so acute it threatened to rip my soul into shreds. To strip me of my hard-won identity as a proud independent Jew, strong and honorable, equal among nations, and reduce me to my old unbearable identity, the one from Auschwitz—that of the powerless slave who had failed to protect his family.
For if we agreed to accept reparations from Germany, if we even entered into negotiations on that issue, it meant that the dead could be quantified in dollars or marks. That the crime could be redressed monetarily. And it couldn't. Not for all the money in the world.
The next few minutes passed in a blur, during which time I was driven entirely by fury. Everything else, all traces of thought and rationality, had deserted me. Around me, the fighting raged, shifting like the sea, back and forth. We pushed toward the Knesset, and the cops pushed us back. More and more people were injured or arrested. Stones and glass fragments littered the street. Fallen banners and signs lay trampled. I didn't remember striking anyone, nor being struck, but when I slipped on the wet road and fell to my knees, I saw that my knuckles were bruised, and my body ached in numerous places.
I raised my eyes to the sky, and there, at the tip of a pole on the roof of Frumin House, the flag of Israel shuddered.
At the sight of that blue-and-white cloth, the tide of anger that had engulfed me receded partway, and the ensuing void instantly filled with bewilderment and shame. I gazed at the mayhem around me and couldn't fathom how it had come to this. These demonstrators were regular men and women, good citizens, law-abiding by nature. But they, and I, had raised our hands against our fellow Jews and against the Knesset, the shrine of Jewish sovereignty after centuries of exile and longing, of persecution and displacement, of pogroms and genocide.
This was an abomination. Similar to what the government was trying to do. This wasn't why I had come to this land, not why I had fought in the War of Independence and nearly died when an Egyptian soldier put two bullets in me. The Nazis would have loved seeing this, us fighting among ourselves. It had to stop.
A few meters to my left, a young man was bent over a fallen policeman, punching him repeatedly. "Enough!" I yelled, catching the demonstrator unaware with a hard shove that sent him sprawling. I showed him my fists when he turned on me with a snarl. "Enough," I yelled again. "No more."
The demonstrator fixed me with a hard stare. For a tense moment, I thought he would lunge at me. But then he blinked, and a look of what might have been shame flitted across his face, and he muttered something I didn't catch and turned away.
I knelt beside the policeman. He had lost his helmet and gas mask in the melee and was bleeding from the nose and mouth. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing, and his pulse was strong and steady. I was about to get him some help when I sensed rushing footfalls behind me. Before I could whirl, a devastating blow slammed into my kidney. A flash of scorching pain exploded up my side, robbing me of breath. Gasping, I crashed down on top of the injured policeman, banging my forehead on his.
An instant later, my hands were wrenched backward, and a ring of cool metal wrapped itself around each of my wrists. Someone slapped the back of my head. "You son of a bitch, you're going to jail for what you did to him."
I opened my mouth to protest, to explain that I had not beaten this policeman, when from the corner of my eye, I caught a black object streaking toward me. I identified it as a boot just before it connected with the side of my head. Then a dark, impenetrable cloud descended upon me, swallowing up my consciousness, choking off all sensation and thought.
I came to in the back of a police wagon. I was lying on the hard floor between two benches that were bolted down. Sitting on them were several other men, all handcuffed, some showing signs of minor injuries. The air was thick with the pungent aromas of cooling sweat and wet clothes, with an undertone of fresh blood. My head throbbed as though someone had given it a violent shake, and there was a coppery taste in my mouth. I must have bitten my tongue when I got kicked in the head. My vision swam, dark spots dancing before my eyes. My body was pressing down on my cuffed hands, which were sending sharp stabs of pain all the way to my shoulders.
With a groan, I flipped over onto my stomach. The pain in my arms subsided. The floor of the jouncing vehicle felt cold against my cheek. Someone asked if I was all right. "Yeah," I mumbled, which seemed all the speech I was capable of. The fogginess enveloping me began to recede, but then the police wagon went into a pothole, and my head was bounced up and then back down onto the floor, and I was out again.
Next time I awoke, I was lying on a metal cot with a mattress so thin it could only be described as emaciated. Uncomfortable, but I'd slept in harder beds. Much better was the fact that I was no longer handcuffed. A few inches before my eyes was a concrete wall, pitted and scratched and stained. Slowly, I raised a hand to my head to touch the spot where I'd been kicked, and immediately regretted it when pain flared down my face.
Hearing voices, I raised myself on my elbows and swiveled my head to the other side. I was in a jail cell. Made for two men, but with five crammed within its walls. Two of my cellmates were sitting on the other cot; the other pair stood puffing on cigarettes, blowing smoke through the bars into the hallway beyond.
All four of my cellmates displayed signs of recent violence: cuts, abrasions, bruises, torn clothing. They were in the middle of a raucous conversation—mainly lambasting Ben-Gurion, the government, and the police—so it took them a minute to notice I was awake.
"You're up," one of the smokers said, a lanky man with receding dark hair. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I got kicked in the head. Which is exactly what happened."
"A cop?"
"Yeah. How did I get here?"
"From the police wagon, you mean? You walked. Kinda. A couple of us had to hold you up. Not so easy with handcuffs, but the bastards wouldn't take them off until they put us in this cell. I told them maybe you needed to go to the hospital, but they said there weren't any available ambulances, so they'd let you sleep it off. But if you feel you need to see a doctor, I can holler for the guard."
