“The border in Israel is everywhere,” Aaron, our bus driver, a Jew of Uzbek origin, father of four, who speaks little but conveys an aura of security, tells me. His parents came to Israel in 1972, a year before the Yom Kippur War, from a country that many of us know only from hearing about Samarkand and the Silk Road.
They built a neighborhood of poor and very religious Jews in Jerusalem, giving it the name of the “Bukhara neighborhood”, after the sacred Uzbek city. “My parents were repeating ‘next year in Jerusalem’ and so they came here from the Soviet Union,” says Aaron. “I served in Gaza in the 1990s. One day we stopped a woman. She carried a kitchen knife half a meter long. Today is the era of Islam, the Turkish empire, the Chinese empire and the Russian empire. The West no longer exists”.
