Tony, John and I had tried to slip into the Haram before the soldiers arrived. There was only one sleepy Moslem guard on duty at 6:00 A.M. at the Gate of the Tribes. We'd wrapped black and white checked kaffiyehs-traditional Arab kerchiefs-over our heads. But since I was wearing a Burberry trench coat and they were carrying thirty pounds of camera equipment, this wasn't much of a ruse. The elderly guard was having none of us. While we were arguing with him, Ahmed stepped out of a crowd of morning prayer-goers and took our part. (This happens all the time in the Middle East. No matter who you're arguing with or what you're arguing about, some stranger will always come to your defense. They're generous with their contention; you never have to argue alone in the Arab world.)
When he couldn't prevail on the guard, Ahmed took us home to a warren of ancient stone rooms (though the furniture was Danish Modern) and served us sticky tea and rolls and bread and coffee thick as syrup.
Several of Ahmed's knuckles were enormously knobbed and one of his fingers was bent at a sickening angle. There were scars around his wrists. He had been imprisoned by the Israelis for four years during the Seventies, he said, for "Palestinian activities' and again during the early Eighties for helping a friend repair a gun. He said he had been tied in a chair once for five days with a black hood over his head. "It was beautiful when they would take me away to beat me"-he gave us that big grin everyone wears in these parts when they talk about something grisly-"because then I could breathe and see."
Ahmed claimed there would be a demonstration at al-Aksa and that the journalists, the sahaffi, must be inside the mosque to see how Jews treat Moslems in this holy place. He led us through the Arab Quarter to the Via Dolorosa which runs parallel to the Haram's north wall. Then he opened an iron door near the Ecce homo Arch-the place where Pontius Pilate, saying "Behold the man," presented a flogged Jesus to the Jerusalem mob. We went through somebody's house, across roofs and down concealed spiral stairs with stone treads worn hollow by a thousand years of excapes and forays. It was a scene from an Indiana Jones movie except the stairs opened into someone's modern bathroom. We went out through the kitchen, down one more flight of steps cut into the Haram's wall and there, framed in a Byzantine Empire back door, was the Dome of the Rock-a big gold cupola rising from an octagon of royal blue tiles and set upon a vast stone platform like a bonbon on a deck of playing cards.
Burnooses were produced to conceal Tony and John's photo gear. I ditched my trench coat. And Ahmed showed us how to fasten the kaffiyehs properly with the ukals, the tasseled headbands. Then we went, stiff with adrenaline, down the length of the Haram esh-Sherif compound, past guards and policemen and "fellow" Moslems. "Walk comfortable!" whispered Ahmed with some irritation. Tony's cameras were clanging under his lumpy robe. Israeli soldiers lined the sanctuary walls and helicopters swayed back and forth overhead.
The dim interior of the al-Aksa Mosque was the size of a large suburban house lot. There were no furnishings at all except luminous antique carpets spread two and three deep across the entire floor. Scores of columns, thick as automobiles, supported a roof so high it was nearly invisible. A few of the slippered worshipers knelt alone on prayer rugs; others gathered in small groups along the walls. For the next four hours Tony, John and I hid in these majestic shadows, wondering what the hell we were doing.
It was unlikely that the Israelis would let anything important erupt again in the Haram or overreact if it did. They'd taken too much flak about the mosque gassing. To put it in Protestant American terms: throwing a tear gas grenade into the al-Aksa Mosque on a sabbath was like attacking the Pebble Beach golf course with Agent Orange on a Sunday in June. So we weren't going to see much action. And we weren't really doing our jobs either. Outside the sanctuary, all through the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine's West Bank and Gaza Strip, there were riots, retaliations, strikes, curfews, stonings, shootings, beatings, shoutings, whinings, and wild excuse-makings-the complete folderol of a Mideastern political crisis. Eager, ambitious reporters would have been out there interviewing the pants off everybody and filing serious, indignant yet balanced and thoughtful pieces. Instead, here we were dressed like ninnies and sneaking around in mosques.
However, dressing like ninnies and sneaking around in mosques is an important tradition among old Arab hands, dating back at least to 1853 when the explorer Sir Richard Burton dressed like a ninny for nine whole months and managed to sneak all the way into the holy Kaabah at Mecca. Like Sir Richard, T. E. Lawrence and others before us, we were trying to penetrate the soul of the Arab, trying to become one with him and fathom the Mystery of the East. It's just something you have to go through if you're going to be an old Arab hand, like eating a live guppy to get into Sigma-Nu.-
Shortly before noon, as the mosque was beginning to fill, Ahmed suggested that I go outside and mingle. I thought this was a little too P. J. of Arabia, especially since I look about as much like an average American jerk as it's possible to look and speak exactly two words of Arabic. But Ahmed thought I'd pass, thanks perhaps to a high school fist fight which left me with a Levantine nose. "If they start throwing stones," he said, "feel free to join in."
Pulling the kaffiyeh down over my forehead to hood my blue eyes, I walked outside into a milling crowd of two thousand Mohammedans. The crowd was all men and boys. Women pray separately in the Dome of the Rock. A few of the men were in church-going clothes but most wore jeans and sweaters like my own. My deck shoes-not a popular fashion item with desert peoples-were the only anomaly.
I didn't know quite what to do with myself, so I milled too. Fortunately the Arabs are also fond of lounging. And I lounged for a while-leaning against pillars, sitting on the edge of fountains, that sort of thing. Nobody bothered me; only a couple of small boys looked twice at my yokel face.
The men were chatting or walking alone lost in contemplation. Some strolled in pairs, holding hands. Then the muezzin called the faithful and suddenly I was the only person not facing Mecca. Not many O'Rourkes have ever bowed to Mecca, but I did and followed all the gestures and prostrations as best I could, half a beat behind the others, like singing along when you don't know the words.
There was a peculiar casualness to the worship. People ambled in and out of the mosque all through the service. It was God as an informal thing, but a serious informal thing, the way lunch is when you're hungry. A large part of the crowd stayed outside, listening to loudspeakers mounted on al-Aksa's portico, listening as though they were hearing something they were actually interested in, not a sermon or a scripture reading. I grew up in the prim and glacial ceremonies of the Methodist church-half grammar lesson, half drill inspection. It had never occurred to me that anyone might want to just come and hang out at a religious service.
This was no stick-on, decal God here, but a woven-in-thecloth, blown-in-the-glass diety. In the Holyland, God comes with the territory. And though I don't suppose the Moslems would like to hear it, Israel, too, has God as standard equipment. After all, here it is, the State of Israel, with no other rationale for existence except a promise from God. I wonder what a Methodist homeland would be likemandatory stay-pressed shirts, federal regulations about keeping feet off furniture and automatic death penalty for anybody with crab grass in his lawn.
There was, in fact, a demonstration after prayers, though not a very exciting one. Men came out of al-Aksa and yelled; women came out of the Dome of the Rock and shrieked. An Iman, a portly visiting president of the mosque in some West Bank town, was hoisted upon shoulders and carried around the Dome. Dozens of pocket-sized Korans were waved in the air. I demonstrated a bit myself by milling around at a slightly faster pace than I'd milled before.
True to Arab form, the demonstration immediately broke into two quarreling factions: The group hoisting the Iman wanted to keep a strictly religious tone of outrage to the proceedings; the other group wanted to wave a small, homemade Palestinian flag and scream at the Israelis. The soldiers along the walls looked tense, and one platoon moved into the
enclosure and stood along the edge of the Dome's platform with weapons in array. But they didn't interfere. A few young Moslems made feints at collecting stones to throw but didn't follow through. With nothing to oppose it, the demonstration died down in half an hour.
By the time Tony, John and I got smuggled out of the sanctuary, it was after three o'clock. Old Jerusalem was a very different place in the afternoon. Israeli soldiers pried at locks with crowbars, trying to force Moslem shopkeepers to end the general strike that started in December while young Palestinian activists darted through the marketplaces warning merchants not to open. Arab boys of ten and twelve were picking up rocks and chunks of cement and yelling encouragement to each other from the roofs. Armored personnel carriers, filled with irritable-looking draftees, squeezed along the few large streets. Islamic fundamentalists barked over PA systems from storefront mosques. Greek monks, Armenian priests, Catholic nuns and Coptic whatsits lumbered around in full fig like parade floats. Ultra-Orthodox Jews plodded by, wearing ridiculous beaver hats and making sour faces. Jesusaddled German tourists strode overenergetically from one holy hot spot to the next.
At dawn in Jerusalem, you could be in any century. But at mid-afternoon, you know exactly what century you're in-the twelfth, when everybody was bashing everybody over the head about God.
The rock over which the Dome of the Rock is built is supposed to be the altar where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac (until Yahweh explained He was just kidding). David parked the Ark of the Covenant here. And Mohammed is believed to have leapt into heaven with this rock as his trampoline. The hill the rock sits onindistinguishable from the thousand other dumpy hills of Judea-is called Temple Mount by the Jews, Haram esh-Sherif by the Moslems and Mt. Moriah by the Christians. Solomon's Temple was here and the great Temple complex of Herod, destroyed by the Romans in 70 A. D. Thus the western wall of the Haram is the Wailing Wall of the Jews, who bemoan their fate on one side of it while the Moslems bemoan theirs on the other. The early Christians considered the place cursed because Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple (a safe enough prediction; the whole of Jerusalem has been destroyed more than thirty times). Score that round of theological debate to the early Christians.
In fact, I think it can be fairly said that everything in the Holy Land is cursed The Gaza Strip certainly is. I drove down there to take a look at the place where Israel's current batch of troubles began. The Strip is desolate and, at the same time, one of the most thickly populated places on earth. (Desolately overpopulated, cursed Holyland, blood-soaked home of the Prince of Peace-this region never seems to run out of oxymorons.) Gaza City has the same crowded poverty as Arab Jerusalem, but it's all new and made of cement. The land around it, the mere 140 square miles that make up this gigantic international sore spot, should be a place of gilt-sand beaches and graceful dunes dotted with palms and oasis wells. Instead it's Hell's Riviera with eight refugee camps housing a quarter of a million people.
The Palestinians in these camps were displaced by the 1948 war-the one Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint won in Exodus. Since then they've been "temporarily" sheltered by the jack-off U.N.; ruled first by useless Egyptian bureaucracy, then by coldhearted Israeli military fiat; ignored by the Western bloc; exploited by the Eastern bloc and just left there, like live bait in a geopolitical leg trap by their fellow Arabs.
In between the refugee camps are some ratty Arab farms (Palestinians, unlike Israeli citizens, do not get subsidized irrigation water). Also in between the camps are Jewish settlements. I have no idea why. The Jews have no biblical claim to Gaza except for some exploits of Samson's. ("Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there a harlot, and went in unto her." Judges 16:1) The settlements are cheerless places surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire and featuring the usual dreadful Israeli architecturea style that crosses the worker housing of Gdansk with the branch banks of Hollywood, Florida.
All the refugee camps had been put under curfew, which meant no one could stir outside the shack houses at any time for any reason. The curfew was lifted for only an hour or so a day, the time never announced beforehand. Even then only the women could go outside and get food.
I made my way into the largest of the camps, Jabalia, which houses fifty-two thousand people in what looks like, from a distance, a valley full of packing crates with electrical lines. Entering the camp was a less romantic business than getting into the al-Aksa Mosque and more dangerous, too. In the occupied territories, unlike Jerusalem, the Israelis were shooting people.
I crawled into Jabalia through a scraggly vineyard and spent an unhappy five minutes with my gut pressed to the sand, trying to look like a grape plant while an armored personnel carrier rolled along a nearby road. I visited an architect there, named Ali, who did not miss the irony of being an architect in a two-room cinderblock house with a corrugated asbestos roof.
I could see daylight all around the eaves in the eight-by-tenfoot living room. There was no heat, and a cold wind was blowing off the Mediterannean. All said the camp had been under curfew for seven days. The Israeli-controlled electricity had been cut off twice and at one point the water mains were shut for three days; people had to drink from rain barrels. The food in the camp stores had all run out, and the break in the curfew was not long enough for the women to walk into town and back. Money, too, had about run out, because of the Palestinian general strike and the fact that no one could get to work anyway. However, the United Nations was usually allowed to distribute food to children and nursing mothers once a day. And an informal smuggling network had grown up around the camp perimeters. Nobody was going hungry yet.
All counted himself lucky. There were only five in his family. Some people in the camp had households of ten or fifteen. I asked Ali's wife what she was feeding her kids. "Bread and tea for breakfast," she said, "and tomatoes and vegetables that are smuggled." There was no meat or milk. She had no more said that than Ali invited me to stay for dinner. You can't fault Arab manners. It took ten minutes of diplomatic maneuvering to escape imposing on their larder.
"Where are you from?" I asked Ali. Though, of course, since he was only thirty-two years old, he was from nowhere. He was born in the camp. But without hesitation Ali named a little village in what's now Israel proper.
"My father goes to cry there. Nothing is left."
The press stands accused of holding the Israelis to higher moral standards than it holds the other peoples of the Middle East. That's not our fault. Moses started that. Are the Israelis treating the Palestinians any worse than the Palestinians would treat the Israelis if the sandal were on the other foot? Of course not. The Munich massacre and hundreds of killings, bombings, hijackings, rocket attacks and other mad-hat actions prove it. Unfortunately, morality is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping.
The Israeli-administered hospital in Gaza City, where Arabs wounded in the rioting are treated, was a pile of shit. The floors were dirty, the bathrooms were dirty and the little kitchens on each floor were pathetic in their filth. The walls had been painted, a very long time ago, in awful landlord colors. Damp marks spread across the ceilings. Screens were missing from the windows and light bulbs from the light fixtures. The hospital looked like the "colored" waiting rooms used to look in bus stations down South. The doctors were all Palestinian, but none of them would talk to me for fear of Israeli ire. The patients, however, were pitifully eager to talk, as if exposing their plight would make any difference in the dead-end hatreds of this land. Maybe the Western powers will intervene, said the Palestinians with forlorn hope. But we've done that before. When Godfrey of Bouillon conquered Jerusalem in 1099 he slaughtered all the Moslems and burned the Jews in their synagogue.
I went from bed to bed hearing dreadful stories. A fifteenyear-old who looked twelve, and didn't have an eyelash's worth of down on his upper lip, had been shot through the thigh bone an inch below his balls. He said he had been bringing food home when a soldier told him "come here." He did and got shot. He probably wasn't as innocen
t as that, but any grown man could have knocked this kid cold with a pancake spatula. The slightly larger boy in the next bed had an eye the size of a teacup and bruises like zebra stripes. He said he'd been detained by soldiers and beaten for thirty minutes. In a small room next door were four young men; all had been shot-in the chest; in the side; in the belly. Only one had been shot in the leg, the traditional shoot-to-wound target. In the ward across the hall was a ten-year-old with a bullet in his rib cage and a man and his teenage son who'd both been beaten senseless, they claimed, in a police station, and an old man who'd been beaten all over and had both his shins broken. And so on.
This is bullshit. This is barbarism. I've covered a lot of rioting and pushes-come-to-shoves, and there is no excuse for this kind of civilian-hammering by soldiers and police. Panamanian kids can throw a rock in a way that Palestinian boys, who are innocent of baseball, only dream about. The Panamanians have been rioting steadily since last July and only one rioter has been killed. Korean college students are the most organized and determined bunch of rioters on earth, and Korean riot cops are no bowl of Sugar Pops. But the Koreans have been at it since June 1987 and the death toll is only two.
A few days later Tony Suau and I got into a little riot, a riot- ette, in the Kalandia refugee camp on the West Bank several miles north of Jerusalem. This camp wasn't under curfew, but the Israeli army was running patrols through it and holding down intersections and generally acting like this was downtown Hue in the middle of the Tet offensive.
Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This? Page 27