Yes, that’s what you do if you want to stay alive in this town: you “handle” the press.
I put in calls to both the Palestinian and the Israeli leaders. Their keepers tried to palm me off on deputies so I went into my “Old Rough-and-Ready” act—I let them know I wouldn’t settle for deputies, I didn’t want spokesmen or spokeswomen, I wanted principals, I wanted the horse’s mouth. If for some reason they couldn’t come to the phone to speak to the representative of the President of the United States, I suggested it might be in their best interests if someone brought the phone to them. Needless to say, I was put through to both of them but I got the impression that, like me, they were getting their information from CNN. I received assurances from both that they would say nothing and do nothing to make matters worse for twenty-four hours. Which is to say, everyone was going to take a deep breath. I briefed the President, then I put a call through to the Director, CIA, and asked him to have his people supply me with updates every half hour—I didn’t come right out and say it in so many words but I was asking him if he could tell me more than CNN. I instructed my secretary to assemble the usual suspects in the operations center. We were going to hunker down and go into a damage control mode. Then I settled back into my chair and shut my eyes and took a deep breath myself.
As a matter of fact, I did see the piece on the Mt. Washington negotiations in the New York Review. He asked for an interview but I politely declined—I subscribe to the theory that the best Presidential advisers are the ones who are neither seen nor heard. Yes, some of what he wrote was accurate, though by no means all of it. The business about our getting off to a slow start misrepresented what actually happened. The opening sessions at Mt. Washington weren’t slow, they were excruciating. At the first meeting the two sides wrangled over everything under the sun: the shape of the negotiating table, the level of representation, whether the Americans should be seated at the table or standing by in the next room to break stalemates, whose maps would be used when it came to discussing actual frontiers, whether the United Nations ought to be involved, how contacts with the press would be handled. It took five days of intense negotiations just to fix the number and composition of subcommittees that would work out compromises on which settlements would be dismantled and what the status would be of those that remained inside the new Palestinian state, water rights, Palestinian access to Israeli ports, control of the air space over the Palestinian state, the size of its militia and what arms would be permitted, how many Palestinian refugees would be allowed back into Israel, what compensation would be offered to the others. When, after three weeks, the negotiations stalled, the President personally intervened. Everyone today remembers the speech in which she declared the day was long past when America would permit lunatic fringes on both sides to drive policy; and she went on to lay out, for the first time, the general guidelines of an American-sponsored plan for peace—a seismic departure from the previous American position, which supported only a process designed to produce just such a plan.
It’s true that I wrote the chunks of the speech dealing with America’s support for a peace plan instead of a peace process, but the President deserves the credit for delivering it.
Behind the scenes, we upped the ante: we let it be known that unless the Israelis and the Palestinians agreed to our plan, the United States would suspend economic as well as military aid to the Middle East and refuse to veto UN Security Council resolutions calling for interposing United Nations peacekeepers between the two sides. One by one the differences between the negotiating teams where whittled down until they fitted into the President’s “General Guidelines.” The work in the final inch, to use Solzhenitsyn’s memorable phrase, was agonizing for both sides, not to mention for us. The Authority reluctantly abandoned its insistence on the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel and the Israelis, in turn, promised to provide compensation for those who had been obliged to flee their homes in 1948. The Israelis also agreed to evacuate most of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and cede Arab east Jerusalem and half of the Old City to the new Palestinian state in return for a solemn declaration from all Arab states in the region acknowledging Israel’s right to exist within internationally recognized borders. A last hurdle—Israel’s insistence on keeping a security zone along the Jordan River—was cleared when I convinced the Pentagon to agree to guarantee Israel access to real-time US satellite surveillance of the entire Middle East.
Fair question. Where I’m at now is I’m shrugging off a persuasive despair. I have the sinking feeling this is going to be the last moment of grace before a terrible khamsin rouses the Levantine demons to fire and fury because a quirky Jewish rabbi managed to get himself kidnapped.
SEVEN
LOCKING HIS CAR IN THE SPRAWLING PARKING LOT, SWEENEY MADE his way on foot to the festering wound known as Erez, the main crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Since the kidnapping of the Fiddler on the Roof, security had become tighter than ever. The edgy Israeli frontier guards kept loaded clips in their assault rifles and their fingers on the triggers as long lines of sullen Palestinian men wound past on their way to work in the fields and factories up the Israeli coast. From a low tower, an Israeli officer bellowed through a battery-powered bullhorn, in Arabic, for a Palestinian truck to stop before it came to the first cement-and-sandbag strong point in the wide Erez alley. Behind one of the sandbags, a pudgy sergeant wearing a net-covered helmet and high-collared flak jacket swiveled his machine gun and sighted on the truck’s tires, ready to shoot them out if the driver didn’t instantly obey.
The spectacle at Erez never failed to dazzle Sweeney: one hour and ten minutes down the road from the creature comforts of Jerusalem—the roof-top terrace of his apartment in Yemin Moshe with its spectacular view of the Old City walls, the ice cubes rattling in the driest martinis this side of the river Jordan, his hand resting lightly on the sexiest female thigh in the holy land—and he was knocking on the gate of D. Alighieri’s inferno.
Not that there was any problem getting in. Getting out of Gaza, for a Palestinian, was an ordeal; you had to have a spanking clean charge sheet and no known relatives in any fundamentalist organization and a special magnetic identity card that the Israelis swapped for new ones whenever they wanted to give the Palestinians a hard time. Entering Gaza, on the other hand, was a piece of cake. Barely glancing at Sweeney’s American passport and his government-issued press card, a baby-faced border guard who looked as if he had never shaved in his life waved him through the indoor border post. Sweeney appeared to be a consenting adult, the cranky gesture seemed to say. If he was dumb enough to walk into this hell on earth, the Israelis weren’t going to stop him.
A hundred yards up the Erez alley, past endless coils of tangled concertina wire and more strong points protected by steel spikes set in the road, Sweeney reached the local Palestinians, come to pick up their clients in ancient automobiles that billowed clouds of dense brown smoke when the drivers kicked over the motors. For a hundred dollars a day, cash on the barrel head, you got ferried to your rendezvous in Gaza or one of the swarming refugee camps; for another hundred the driver would organize a demonstration for or against anyone or anything you named; for an additional sawbuck, he would translate the slogans scrawled on every naked wall in the Strip. Two Christian Arabs Sweeney recognized as reporters from a Gaza news agency were loading television cameras into the back of a battered Buick station wagon. A prime-time newscaster Sweeney remembered from his Beirut days—the newscaster used to pick his brain for the price of a three-course meal in the St. George Hotel—was passing out American cigarettes to the scrawny Palestinian kids hawking tiny cups of thick sweetened coffee. “My man Sweeney, how you doing?” Prime Time called.
“I’m hanging in there,” Sweeney answered. “What do you have lined up?”
“I’ve got a noon interview with the head honcho. I promised him six minutes, no commercial breaks, as long as he wears a checkered kerchief—shit, what do yo
u call those damn things?”
Sweeney, who had not managed to arrange an interview with anyone higher than dog catcher in his eight months as Jerusalem bureau chief, said, “Kiffiyehs.”
“Yeah. That’s it. Kiffiyehs. I knew that. I just couldn’t remember how to pronounce it. Hey, Sweeney, there are three problems with growing old. The first is you start to lose your memory. Awh, shit! I can’t remember the second and third.” Prime Time cackled at his own joke until he was short of breath.
Sweeney’s driver, universally known as Roger because the Palestinian had picked up the habit from American war movies of acknowledging orders with the word “Roger,” had parked his beat-up Lada at the end of the line. It occurred to Sweeney that only God knew how a car constructed in Russia wound up in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, all cars finished in a junk yard, so there was probably a logic to it after all. Roger, wearing his habitual Indian shirt buttoned up to the neck, a brown suit and sandals, squeezed his over-weight body in behind the wheel. “Where we off to today, Mr. Max?” he asked as Sweeney settled onto the seat next to him.
“I want to see the wake,” Sweeney said.
“Roger, Mr. Max,” Roger said, an eager smile spreading across his round face, the gold crowns glittering in his lower jaw. “The wake it is.”
There was a grinding of gears and a violent shudder under the hood as the Lada, with a backfire that sent several men ducking for cover, started up the road. A hundred yards further along they came to the Palestinian Authority check point. Another baby-faced policeman, this one wearing a crisp blue uniform and a blue beret and carrying what looked like a brand new Chinese-manufactured Kalashnikov tucked under his arm, took Sweeney’s passport and passed it to a short mustached man wearing goggle-like sunglasses and a green belted raincoat.
The Green Hornet, as Sweeney dubbed him, looked up from the passport. “Max could be a Jewish name,” he announced in perfect English, scrutinizing Sweeney through the open window.
“Jesus could be a Jewish name, too,” Sweeney shot back.
“Jesus was not a Zionist,” Green Hornet said.
“There’s a lot of things Jesus wasn’t,” Sweeney retorted. “A Christian is one of them.”
“Westerners cannot resist giving lessons to Palestinians,” observed the Green Hornet. “One day you will understand that there are also things to be learned from us.”
Sweeney smiled uncomfortably. He didn’t see himself getting into a theological discussion with the boss of a Palestinian policeman who had one finger on the trigger of a Kalashnikov. “Look, I’m not Jewish,” he said. “Sweeney is an Irish Catholic name.”
Roger leaned across the seat. “Sweeney is a friend of the Palestinian people,” he said in English. (Sweeney always came across with a generous tip at the end of the day, a charitable action Roger liked to encourage.)
The Green Hornet handed the passport back through the open window and turned toward the next car. Struggling with the gear box, Roger jammed the stick shift into first and, with a series of jerks, managed to get the Lada rolling in the direction of Gaza City.
A Mercedes taxi filled with Arab women and valises piled high on the roof rack overtook the Lada, kicking up a cloud of chalk dust that obliged Sweeney to cover his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. Laughing at the discomfort of his passenger, Roger swung around a Bedouin boy, a goat slung around his neck, leading a string of camels, and a donkey pulling a cart sagging on its axles under a load of oranges, then splashed through a swamp of sewage onto a side road that took them, within minutes, into the heart of Gaza City.
With the abduction of the Fiddler, who was believed to be somewhere in Gaza, security was high on this side of the border, too; Palestinian police armed with submachine guns stood in front of their jeeps surveying traffic at every crossroad. The streets, dust-clogged and reeking from garbage, teemed with barefoot children and women in long robes lugging baskets of vegetables. Clustered around small tables in bleak cafes, bearded men smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and played backgammon. At every corner claxons shrieked; there were very few stop lights in Gaza and each intersection had become a test of manhood as drivers tried to bluff their way through. The Lada swung past the sprawling office complex in central Gaza known as Al Saraya, where the Palestinian Authority held court; workmen on bamboo scaffolds were rebuilding the wing that had been bombed into rubble by Israeli helicopters before the cease fire went into effect. Leaning on the horn, Roger inched the car through a horde of people waiting for the bride and groom to emerge from a wedding hall, and turned into the Gaza neighborhood of Shajaiyah. “The martyr lived in his family’s house down the narrow street there,” Roger said, pulling onto the side-walk and cutting the engine. Carefully locking the car, he led the way to a portal in a whitewashed stucco wall. He pointed to the Arabic writing over the door. “This is the word Shahid, which Westerners translate as martyr but really means witness, meaning that the dead boy, whose name was Anwar, bore witness to God and the Prophet.”
The driver rapped his knuckles on the door. A teenage boy wearing a sweatshirt with a Palestinian flag on the chest opened it. Roger spoke to him in Arabic. The boy, gesturing with the grace of a ballet dancer, motioned with his palm for the two visitors to enter.
Sweeney stepped onto the concrete of the bare open courtyard filled with rows of white plastic chairs. Thirty or so men in polyester trousers and sandals sat silently around an open grate on which coffee was being brewed. A giant framed photograph of the late Anwar hung from one wall; it had been taken in a Gaza studio but made to look as if the boy was posing in front of the great Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem. There was Arabic writing on the wall under the photograph, which Roger, leaning toward Sweeney, translated. “It is what we call the shahada, the single most important verse from the sacred Qur’an, which an infidel recites when converting to Islam and a Muslim recites at the time of his death. ‘Ash’hadu an la illahu ila Allah wa’ash’hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allah.’ ‘I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.’”
The boy in the sweatshirt, who turned out to be Anwar’s kid brother, made his way down the rows of mourners holding a tarnished brass tray filled with almond biscuits and small porcelain cups of brackish coffee. Roger handed a cup to Sweeney and took one himself. “It is polite to drink,” he whispered. “The coffee is bitter even though at the home of a martyr it is usually sweet. This is because the boy’s father is bitter at the death of his son at such a young age.”
“I heard he threw garbage at the feet of a local Imam who came to pay his respects,” Sweeney said.
“This may be true,” Roger said with artful vagueness.
“Which one is the father?”
“The older gentleman with patent leather shoes and his head bowed onto his chest.”
“I’d like to ask him some questions.”
Roger turned to the gaunt Palestinian sitting next to him and said something. The Palestinian got up and walked over to Anwar’s father. Bending, he mumbled something in his ear. The father lifted his eyes and studied Sweeney, then nodded his head once.
“The father of Anwar accepts to reply to your questions,” Roger said.
Sweeney looked across at the father. “Please accept my condolences on the death of your son.”
Roger translated. The father, his features drawn, the lids of his eyes heavy with grief, nodded again.
“Is the coffee you serve bitter because the bullet that killed your son was fired by a Palestinian?”
When Roger hesitated, Sweeney said, in a tone that left him no room to maneuver, “Translate.”
“Roger.” Sweeney’s driver turned back to the father and repeated the question in Arabic. Sweeney knew he had translated correctly when several of the men sitting around the room gasped.
The dead boy’s father thought a moment before responding. Then, measuring his words and speaking with great dignity, he launched into a lengthy reply. Swee
ney turned to Roger. “He tells,” the driver said, whispering a running translation as Sweeney scribbled notes on the back of the page containing the interview with Rabbi Apfulbaum, “that he would find no comfort if an Isra’ili bullet had killed his son. He tells that he himself is for the treaty of peace even if it leaves the Jews in possession of Arab lands. He tells that he bitterly regrets the death of his son, but understands the frustration that drove Anwar to join the armed struggle against the Jews.” The Palestinians around the courtyard rocked back and forth on their chairs in solemn agreement. “He tells that his son’s wrist was broken by the Jews during the intifada when he was caught throwing stones at an Isra’ili patrol. He tells that the broken bones mended, but not the broken pride in Anwar’s head. He tells that he himself works for the Palestinian Authority tax assessment office, so he knows that more than a million Arabs, half of them under the age of sixteen, are crowded into this forty-kilometer-long open-air concentration camp. He tells that the lucky ones get permits to work in Isra’il; that the wage one man earns supports the twenty others who sit around cafes playing sheshbesh and thinking up schemes to hurt the Jews.”
Vicious Circle Page 6