The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

Lily was clutching a bottle of wine for our American hostess, who she said had ‘made aliya’. In the protected garden of an Arab house that looked as if it had been built around the same time as the American Consulate, were a group of English-speaking immigrants. They had all ‘made aliya’, that is, immigrated or ‘risen up’ like a wave to live in Israel. There were two South Africans, Benji and Anne Pogrund; a British couple, the Goldmans; and a woman who appeared to be Canadian and did not say much. During the introductions, Anne Pogrund told me that her black eye, which I could not make out in the dark, was not what I thought it was. I didn’t think anything. She said she had really walked into a door. Her husband, a rotund ex-journalist with a bearded, friendly face, did not look like he would hit anyone, especially his wife. Benji Pogrund had been a journalist on the Rand Daily Mail, a brave and honourable opponent of South African apartheid. He and Anne, a painter, had fled Johannesburg for London and then for Israel. Bob Goldman was a videotape editor in the ABC News Jerusalem bureau. Our hostess worked for an Israeli millionaire named Stef Wertheimer.

After a drink in the garden, we went into the flat. It was a redesigned Arab house set on different levels, with a dining table next to the open kitchen. We’d finished our hostess’s first and only bottle of red wine in the garden, and someone opened the one Lily had brought. Our hostess drank white, and there wasn’t much of that. Dinner was à l’américaine, no first course, spaghetti on the boil in the kitchen going limp while she stirred a tomato and onion sauce, green salad with more vinegar than oil. That was all. She put two bowls on the table, and we served ourselves pasta and salad. We sipped Lily’s red wine. We talked. About newspapers. About television. About Israel. About the Middle East. About the massacres in New York and Washington. About Osama bin Laden. Polite. Civilized. The Goldmans’ children had disappointed their parents by leaving Israel. The Pogrund children had done the opposite. They went religious and would never leave. Their mother and father did not dwell on similarities between the race-based society they opposed in South Africa and the one in which they subsequently raised their children. They sounded like people who would have preferred their children to resist military service in the occupied territories or live in the West.

Someone said that an internet website was criticizing the ABC News anchorman, Peter Jennings, for being too favourable to the Arabs. ‘He had an Arab wife,’ Benji Pogrund said, confirming the internet verdict. Jennings had married a beautiful Lebanese woman, Annie Malouf, in 1973. They divorced, and his next two wives were Jewish, including the one he had now. ‘So,’ Benji said, ‘Jewish wives. That’s why he likes Arabs.’ Peter Jennings, whose journalistic integrity made him scrupulously fair, was said to be anti-Israeli by people accustomed to the anti-Arab bias of American television. Later, other journalists told me Benji Pogrund was a ‘good guy’, who invited speakers with divergent points of view to address Israel’s Anglo-Jewish community.

My argument that night was not with Benji, but with his wife, Anne. She was a painter and an interesting woman. She had made paintings from old studio photographs of South African blacks, formal portraits for family occasions; and she was looking for similar family photographs of Arabs in Gaza. When she discussed the September 2001 attacks in the United States, she lost me. We spoke in a polite, civilized way, but we were arguing. Her case was a psychologist’s rationale, that the killers acted out of envy. They wanted what they admired but could not have. America’s democracy and its high standard of living had made it their target. Perhaps, I said, there was another explanation. Holland, Norway and Canada had democracies and high living standards, but no one hated them. Why did they hate the United States? Not because it was richer – per capita there were wealthier lands – or more democratic. Could it be, I asked her, that the Norwegians and Canadians did not install and maintain regimes that robbed their people, did not break open the doors to their markets and did not bomb or invade them? This went on and on, towards no conclusion. There was a widespread belief in the United States that Americans were attacked because of their goodness; as many Israelis were convinced that Arabs attacked them – not because Israel occupied their territory and confiscated their land – but because they were Jewish. If anti-Semitism motivated the Arabs, would they have given their lands and their homes gladly to any other people who came from outside to displace them? Is it likely that they would have moved to make way for Albanians, Basques, gypsies, South Africans or any other group of Gentiles? The discussion went on and on and, like the political conflicts themselves, got no further than the arguments of fifty years before.

I left dinner early to meet Andrew and Emma Gilmour in the Ottoman courtyard of the American Colony Hotel. There, I drank the red wine I’d been deprived of at dinner. We talked about politics, the intifadah and, Andrew’s special interest, negotiations to end the fighting. Andrew worked for United Nations negotiator Terje Roed Larsen, and Emma was a physician. Andrew’s older brothers – David, Oliver and Christopher – were probably my closest friends in Britain. Emma was expecting their fourth child in December. They invited me to stay in their house at Abu Tor, an Arab neighbourhood above the old city. Even with the discount that Pierre Berclaz, the Colony’s Swiss manager, had kindly allowed me on a good room, my advance would run out soon.

Upstairs in the Pasha Room, dance music played. An American was marrying a Ramallah girl. One of the hotel guests complained about the noise, as I did once in 1987 during a wedding reception at the New Omayyad Hotel in Damascus. Then, it annoyed me so much that I left. Now, I loved the noise of a wedding. Perhaps I had improved. The music stopped at one-thirty, when I fell asleep. In Damascus, it had gone on all night.

Daughter of the Revolution

I had my first lunch in Jerusalem with Nadia Sartawi. Her father, Dr Issam Sartawi, was one of the heroes of the Palestinian cause. He acted on behalf of what he believed were his people’s interests – not in line with the cant and slogans of the revolution. Any journalist who reduced him to the status of ‘Yasser Arafat’s special envoy’, as a few did, enraged him. He insisted with pride that he was no diplomat. Along with Sabry Jiryis and Sayed Hammami, Issam pioneered the Palestinian dialogue with the Israelis. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I invited Issam and Israeli general Mattityahu Peled to lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, Fakhreddin, opposite Green Park in London. When I asked Peled if he were a Sabra, meaning someone born in Israel, he nodded and said, ‘Issam’s a Sabra too.’ They were already friends, both born in northern Palestine, each a patriot to his own people, both working to spare the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians more warfare. Issam saw early the futility of the armed struggle for a people as militarily weak – but with a strong moral case – as the Palestinians. He had once headed a small commando organization and knew the effect of raids into Israel: unarmed Israelis killed, world outrage against Palestinian terrorism, more hostility and retaliation by Israel. Arafat never understood. Nor did he understand that no leader could abandon certain principles, like self-determination, and maintain his enemy’s respect.

When I asked Issam why the Palestinians had not produced leaders more capable than Haj Amin Husseini and Yasser Arafat, he said, ‘We had a good leader once, but we crucified him.’ He accused Syria of doing more harm to the Palestinians than Israel. He called for the United Nations to declare the Syrian regime a threat to world peace and dispatch a force to overthrow it. A few months later, in the spring of 1983, the hired assassins of the Palestinian radical Sabry al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal, shot Issam dead in the lobby of a hotel in Portugal during a conference of Europe’s Socialist International. The Syrians, Abu Nidal’s benefactors at the time, may have put him up to it. Abu Nidal had already assassinated the director of the PLO’s London office, Sayed Hammami, in 1977, for the same supposed crime of meeting with Israelis. Issam Sartawi’s criticisms outraged Yasser Arafat, whose security service was secretly cooperating with the CIA and thus indirectly with Israel’s Mossad. In 1982, Arafat evacuated Beirut, claiming victory over the Israeli army. Issam made a public declaration: one more Palestinian victory like Beirut, and the Palestine National Council would hold its next meeting in Fiji. No one said that Arafat had killed Issam, but many Palestinians believed he had ‘withdrawn his protection’, exposing him to Abu Nidal and to Syria. Abu Nidal would himself be murdered by another benefactor, Saddam Hussein, before America invaded Iraq in 2003.

Issam was a gentle, well-dressed man, who had trained as a physician and married another Palestinian doctor. I remember him at our house in London, playing with our children when they were small. Having lunch with his daughter at an Arab restaurant near the American Colony, I listened to a woman young enough to have missed most of her childhood playing with her father. She had grown up in Paris and spoke perfect French. Her English had a French rather than Arabic accent, like many Lebanese women in Beirut. Ahmed Querei, a member of Yasser Arafat’s cabinet and one of the Palestinian negotiators at Oslo, had hired her as special assistant. I asked what her father would make of her working for Abu Ala, the name by which Qurei was known. She ignored the question. Would she introduce me to Nurit Peled, the daughter of Issam’s friend Matti Peled? I knew that, after Issam’s assassination, the two families had become close. A few years after Issam’s assassination, Matti died without having seen the Israeli – Palestinian dialogue that he and Issam pioneered lead anywhere. In 1997, a Palestinian suicide bomber took the life of Nurit’s young daughter, Matti’s granddaughter, in West Jerusalem. Smedar was thirteen. Phil Jacobson, the former Times correspondent, had written a heart-breaking account of the suicide bombing that had killed Smedar and its effect on Nurit and her husband, Rami Elhannan. Nadia said that when the prime minister of the time, Benyamin Netanyahu, offered to pay his respects to the Peled family, Nurit told him not to bother. She blamed him for policies that had led to her daughter’s murder.

In my view, one not shared by everyone, Dr Issam Sartawi would have condemned the agreement that his daughter’s employer had negotiated at Oslo in 1993. Issam had recognized Israel’s ‘right’ to exist, although the ‘right to exist’ is not a concept in international law, years before any other PLO leader. Recognition and dialogue did not mean surrender, and even surrender did not require self-annihilation, the price exacted at Oslo. What the Israelis and the Palestinians got instead of democratic neighbours was the submission of one, weak tribal leadership to the power of the other. It left Israel a permanent military oppressor, with all that implied for Israeli society, and the Palestinians as helots to acquiesce when settlers wanted their land, when settlers needed their water or when the Israeli army confined them to their villages. Nothing in the agreement prevented Israel from expanding old settlements, constructing new ones or building roads between them – activities that required the seizure of what little land the Palestinians had. While Palestinian Authority police protected the demographic shift caused by a doubling of settlers in the West Bank, no one protected Palestinian farmers and householders from having their land taken. Was this intended to establish peace or to extend the occupation? Was it consistent or inconsistent with the old Zionist aim of seizing Palestine ‘goat by goat, dunum by dunum’? Oslo’s terms compelled the weaker tribe to wait until it was strong enough to redress the imbalance or so close to suffocation that they exploded. At the end of September 2000, that explosion came.

It was a year into the explosion when Nadia and I met for lunch. The last time I had seen her was the year before, when the uprising began. Then, she went to her office and hoped the Israelis would propose some compromise that would allow the Palestinians to end the intifadah and resume discussions. In the meantime, the Israeli electorate chose General Ariel Sharon as their prime minister. Now, Nadia said, Israeli checkpoints prevented most of the Palestinian Authority from reaching their offices. She was living – more of the confusion of this area – in an old Arab part of the Jewish, western half of Jerusalem. She was renting an Arab house, whose original residents had either fled or been expelled in 1948, from an Israeli landlord. She was an Arab, but she carried a French passport. The passport allowed her not only to live in a Jewish-owned Arab house, it permitted her to clear the Israeli checkpoints to reach the Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah. Other PA staff in Jerusalem could not reach Ramallah, as those in Ramallah could not go to Jerusalem. The only Palestinians moving freely within the occupied territories were those who – through marriage or some other accident – had foreign, non-Arab passports. As natives, they could not go anywhere. Only new visitors to this lunatic asylum noticed that the set-up, both on paper and in reality, was untenable.

Nadia was one of many Western-born or Western-raised Palestinians to return to the homeland after Oslo in 1993, when they imagined they would build a state. You would meet them in the offices of the Palestinian Authority, private companies and charities, all speaking perfect English with British, American or Canadian accents. Many were studying Arabic for the first time. The country had not seen such idealism, hope and talent since young, educated European Jews answered Zionism’s appeal to build the kibbutzim, irrigate the desert and learn Hebrew. Working for Abu Ala, one of the most egregious prototypes of the unpopular Palestinian politician with big bodyguards and bigger cigars, had made Nadia more cynical than I remembered from the year before. Her belief in working within the PA towards statehood was becoming harder to maintain. Israel was dismantling its institutions and the PA’s leaders were stealing from it. My criticisms of the PA annoyed her, and she talked about what help she might offer me. Like a Lebanese aunt, she told me which was the best hotel in Gaza, where to rent a cellphone and how to lease a car for a few months. She also made me write down a dozen useful telephone numbers. Abu Ala must have found her indispensable.

Palestinian Neighbours

Emma Gilmour, pregnant and every inch a natural beauty, was driving me through West Jerusalem with her three children in the back seat. The car was a big Land Rover, white with United Nations number plates. We stopped at a red light near Yemin Moshe, the pretty collection of old stone cottages that Jerusalem’s mayor lent to visiting artists and writers. The driver of a car beside us motioned to me to roll down my window. His knitted kippa covered most of his clipped hair above a short, patchy beard. He pressed a printed sign against his window for us to read: ‘UN UNwelcome No Bodies, Go Home!’ This spontaneous act of bravery seemed to please him. The light changed, and we went our separate ways. Later, I told a friend at another United Nations agency about it. She said the settlers did that all the time: ‘They hate us.’

At six in the evening, the Gilmour children were having tea in the kitchen of their house in Abu Tor. The lights went off. Caitriona, one of the prettiest and most fey three-year-olds I knew, cried. She was not noisy. She was afraid. Emma lit candles so that the children could see their food. Outside, all the streets and houses of Silwan and Abu Tor were in darkness. In the distance, the Jewish quarters of west Jerusalem were in full light. Their power was never off. Ours came on again an hour later, while the children were in a candlelit bath.

From time to time at the Gilmours’, Palestinians neighbours would drop by. One was a young woman, who, like Emma, was about to have a baby. You meet people and don’t think much about them, until someone tells you that this pregnant woman with a bridal veil of dark hair had spent two years in prison. And you look at the young mother, playing with her children, and you ask yourself, as you would in a country where people were free, what she could have done to merit a two-year sentence. Later, Emma told me her story.

After the Israeli security forces shot dead fourteen unarmed young men for throwing stones in the Al Aqsa mosque grounds, Intisar took a knife from her kitchen and went down to Jerusalem to take revenge. Several other Palestinian women – not in concert or with any plan – did the same. They went, each on her own, to the Jewish Quarter of the old city to stab an Israeli settler. Did Intisar stab anyone? No. The soldiers searched her, found the knife, put her under arrest and sent her to the court that passed judgement. Two years later, she went home.

Another woman came to the Gilmour house one evening to babysit the children, so that Emma, Andrew and I could go to Fink’s Bar for dinner. She did not say much. Her dress was black, and her long hair had almost as many white strands as brown. In the car on the way into the city, Andrew and Emma told me that the Israelis had shot and killed her husband at the end of the June 1967 war. She raised five children on her own. Her husband’s family offered her no help, unusual in Arab society in which children are the responsibility of the paternal family. She refused payment for babysitting the Gilmour children. To look after the younger son, Xan, I’d have demanded a year’s salary. In return for the favour of watching her neighbours’ children, the widow expected reciprocal favours: a ride into Jerusalem, help with her shopping, advice. It was an exchange between equals.

Defending the Doomed

At nearly ninety, Mrs Valentine Vester was the grande dame of old Jerusalem. Proprietress of the American Colony Hotel, she was the niece of Gertrude Bell, the English Oriental traveller and linguist who helped to create modern Iraq when Britain occupied the country during the First World War. I had met Val and her husband, Horatio Vester, in 1972. The Colony belonged to his family, descendants of nineteenth-century American religious pilgrims. They also had an ophthalmic hospital in the old city. Horatio, whose urbane demeanour reminded me of Noël Coward, ran the place in those days. Raconteur and bon vivant, Horatio was loved, especially in the bar, by the hotel’s guests and staff. When he died, Val employed a Swiss company to manage what was beyond doubt Jerusalem’s finest hotel. She went on living there and kept an eye on the place, as she always had. With her snowy hair and benevolent smile, she oversaw the Israeli gardeners and the Palestinian receptionists. She had known them for generations.

Perhaps I should not have repeated to Val the joke that Andrew Gilmour told me about her hotel restaurant’s fame for slow service. She had returned the day before from a visit to her son in London. Her hearing was beginning to fail, and I had to shout without letting the head waiter, Ahmed, and the rest of her long-time and loyal employees hear. ‘Do you know how the Jordanian army lost Jerusalem in 1967?’ The Jordanian general staff were having lunch here at the American Colony. When they heard that the Israelis were invading, they asked for their bill. By the time it arrived, the Israelis were in Jericho.

Val laughed. Ahmed watched us from his corner of the garden, and I knew I would wait longer than usual for my club sandwich. Ahmed was just as slow to bring Mrs Vester her rabbit risotto. She didn’t mind the wait, she said. She’s had thirty-eight years to get used to it.

My favourite place to meet people was the courtyard where we had lunch. It may have been the stone walls and the parapets or the oriental arches or the gushing fountain and the scented blossoms. It may also have been the mix of Palestinians, Israelis and sojourners in a setting that predated the British occupation, Zionism, nationalism and uprisings. It was the most tranquil corner of Jerusalem, and there were days when I hated to leave it for the chaos outside.

Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian-American lawyer whose practice was in Jerusalem, came to the courtyard for coffee. I had met him first in the spring of 2000, a few months before the failed negotiations that Bill Clinton had staged between Yasser Arafet and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David. I had come to Israel to do a story on torture for American television. The Israeli High Court had just banned certain forms of torture. The court’s decision meant that, in the absence of laws authorizing the mistreatment of detainees, anyone who committed torture could be held to account in the civil courts. The decision had two consequences: it reduced torture, and it prompted Likud Knesset members to introduce legislation to protect torturers from lawsuits.

Jonathan Kuttab, a University of Virginia graduate, had represented hundreds of security detainees during the first intifadah. After the Palestinian Authority was established, it detained Jonathan’s brother, a respected West Bank journalist named Daoud Kuttab, for criticizing Yasser Arafat. Amid Valentine Vester’s flowers, the fountain, and the bougainvillea, Jonathan and I ordered Turkish coffee.

I asked if the High Court ban on torture had expired with the new intifadah.

‘Totally,’ he said.

Jonathan was more than a lawyer. Like all other Palestinians, he was a political analyst. He augmented the basic knowledge that circumstances gave every Palestinian with lessons from the political prisoners he represented, from the Israeli military and civil courts in which he worked and from his American formal education. The last time we had met, before the Camp David failure and the uprising, he told me that disaster was inevitable.

‘The Israeli grand design to have and to expand settlements and contract out security to the Palestinian Authority could not work,’ he said, one year into the new intifadah. ‘In fact, if this intifadah had not been against Israel, it would have been against the PA.’

The question that confronted Palestinians about Yasser Arafat was: is he governing for us or for the Israelis? If for the Palestinians, he should have been moving politically to dismantle the Israeli settlements and give the land back to their owners. If for the Palestinians, he should have made his executive accountable and open to them. If for the Palestinians, he would have made it impossible for his ministers to steal and to help the Israelis construct settlements. But, if he governed for Israel, he would arrest Palestinians who attacked settlements, allow his advisers to grow rich selling cement to the settlements, cooperate with the intelligence agencies of Israel and America to suppress resistance to occupation and demonstrate his contempt for those who criticized him in the Palestinian legislature, media and civil society.

‘Arafat,’ Jonathan said, ‘I think, sensed it wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t so much Jerusalem or the refugees, but Barak’s insistence at Camp David that this was it, the end of the road. There was no possibility you could improve the terms. He couldn’t do it. His people would not have gone along with it. From that day to this, Tenet, Mitchell’ – meaning the missions of the two Georges, the CIA director and the former senator – ‘everything has been an attempt to revive security cooperation. If Arafat hits Hamas, the Israelis will stop hitting him. Nothing else. It’s simply not going to work.’

What will work?

‘A two-state solution.’