In his story “Throwdown at the Playground,” Etgar Keret tells about a visit to Ezekiel Park in Tel Aviv with Lev, his 3-year-old son.
There a question from a mother of another boy surprises Keret. “Tell me something,” asks Orit, the mother. “Will Lev go to the army when he grows up?”
Keret replies that he and his wife haven’t talked about it. “We still have time,” he adds. “He’s three years old.”
That night, Keret relays the incident to his wife.
“Isn’t that weird,” he asks her. “Talking about recruiting a kid who still can’t put on his underpants by himself?
No, she answers. “All the mothers in the park talk to me about it. I’ve been dealing with it from the day Lev was born. And if we’re already discussing it now, I don’t want him to go into the army.”
“I think it’s very controlling to say something like that,” Keret replies.
“I’d rather be controlling than have to take part in a military funeral on the Mount of Olives fifteen years from now,” she counters.
The exchange edges toward an argument.
“You’re talking as if serving in the army is an extreme sport,” Keret says. “But what can we do? We live in part of the world where our lives depend on it. So what you’re actually saying is that you’d rather have other people’s children go into the army and sacrifice their lives, while Lev enjoys his life here without taking any risks or shouldering the obligations the situation calls for.”
“No,” he wife says. “I’m saying that we could have reached a powerful solution a long time ago, and we still can. And that our leaders allow themselves not to do that because they know that most people are like you: they won’t hesitate to put their children’s lives into the government’s irresponsible hands.”
Keret is about to answer when Lev appears. “Daddy, why are you and Mommy fighting?” the boy asks.
“It’s not a real fight,” Keret tells him. “It’s just a drill.”
Keret and his wife manage to end their argument. Keret suggests that when Lev is 18, Lev can decide for himself whether to serve in the army. But his wife disagreees, contending that Lev would be unable to make a free choice with all the social pressure that would surround him.
“In the end,” writes Keret, “out of exhaustion, and in the absence of any other solution, we decided to compromise on the only principle we both truly agreed on: to spend the next fifteen years working toward family and regional peace.”