This was soon to end. We had just passed the Palestinian village of Zbeidat when we came upon an installation that felt stridently out of place in the midst of this beautiful valley. A large sliding iron gate, the width of the road and painted yellow, was flanked on both sides by high barriers of barbed wire. To one side was a prefabricated structure that I had often noticed as we passed but to which I had never paid much attention. We slowed down and stopped at the barrier, rolled down our windows, greeted the soldier and presented our identification cards like all the other travellers.
After inspecting them the soldier did not hand them back but said: ‘You go there,’ pointing to the prefab. As we pulled over to the right we heard him call out in Hebrew to the soldier standing in the sun that he is sending him ‘more Palestinians to check’. I now surveyed the scene and saw one young man carrying a machine gun, with three bullet magazines stuck in his belt, standing ready to shoot, a woman with long black hair holding a black dog by his collar, and a very young-looking man with a fleshy round face wearing a black cowboy hat who approached the first soldier and received from him our documents.
The young man now asked us to switch off the engine and leave the car, after opening all four doors, the hood and the trunk. Then he politely asked that we take out our stuff from the trunk. We unloaded two bags and placed them on the ground, then waited for the next order. The young man said: ‘You must take everything out of the car. Leave nothing inside.’
I looked at our plastic bags, boots, sticks, towels and said: ‘You can’t be serious. Why do you want us to take these out?’
‘They have to pass through the machine.’
‘What machine?’
‘The inspection machine over there,’ he said and pointed to the prefab.
‘But this is not an airport and we are not taking a flight from here. All we’re doing is driving a short distance to the Galilee. What is this about?’
‘These are my orders. You have to do what I ask you.’
‘But this is ludicrous. Your orders make no sense. When one is taking a flight I can see the logic of searching. But here, in this green valley, in the midst of these cultivated fields, it makes no sense.’
‘Do you need a trolley?’ the young man asked as if he had heard nothing of what I said.
I didn’t feel like accepting favours. I said, ‘No thanks,’ and proceeded to lift as many bags in my two arms as I could manage, slinging a backpack on each shoulder, Penny trailing behind me with the rest. We must have looked ridiculous but I didn’t care. I was getting angry. Then I stopped, dropped my heavy load and eyeing the young man with the cowboy hat said: ‘Can’t you see that your orders are ridiculous?’
He muttered: ‘I’m just obeying orders,’ as if to imply this has nothing to do with either of us.
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you how dangerous it is to obey orders without thinking about them?’ I responded. ‘Don’t you know what this can lead to? Think for yourself. For God’s sake, think.’
I heard the young man mutter: ‘You don’t want to know what I think.’ Then after a short pause and in a lower tone, he added, ‘Of you.’
But I pretended not to hear him. I suddenly felt my years, an older man concerned about – or perhaps afraid of – what the thoughtless behaviour of the younger generation, in this case one in control of my life and movements, could do.
‘Here we are in the middle of nowhere, in the Jordan Valley’s fertile cultivated fields, and you are acting as though we are going to board a plane when all we’re doing is taking a drive along this two-lane road, don’t you find all this bizarre?’
He remained silent.
I don’t often act paternal but I somehow felt responsible for this young man’s fate. He had an innocent face with big eyes and a silly hat and I could not let this pass. I kept on repeating, rather stupidly now, imploring him to think, think, just think.
‘I am here to protect my country against terrorism,’ he said to shut me up.
How could he believe this, I thought to myself. Doesn’t he realise that anyone interested in smuggling explosives can just cross through the low hills west of here where the border is open? Could he not have thought of this? But when I looked straight into his eyes, I could see he had not given any thought to what he was doing or to the strong possibility that his mission could so easily be thwarted. He was just a well-trained operative in a system far stronger than himself. So for the moment, I gave him a break and stopped bidding him to think, turning my attention to transporting my various items of luggage to the inspection machine which he was now manning.
As I stood looking at my suitcase and plastic bags, my hiking boots and the wooden stick that I found one day in the Ramallah hills, all riding down on the conveyor belt into the scanner, my anger began to dissipate. I felt that my words were being blown away by an indifferent wind that swept through the Rift Valley, all the way from the north of Syria to Lake Tiberias, in the midst of which he and I stood like specks in a gorgeous landscape that will endure beyond the short span of our lives and that of the political entities to which each belonged.
My attention was then directed to my car which now had a crucified look with all its doors open. The woman with the long black hair was directing the German shepherd where he must sniff. The dog did not seem enthusiastic but his nose was being led to the carburettor, the battery, the various tubes and plugs. When he finished one round he was taken again for a second one. Then came the turn of the guard with a pen light who opened the glove compartment and flashed his light inside it. Then he dived under the seat and inspected there. Like the dog he also repeated his round twice. I wondered whether this was what he was instructed to do or if he was just taking a personal initiative.
I was pondering the futility of it all and thinking about how the repressive system of occupation that has been in operation for over forty years was now being sub-contracted and commercially exploited. This young man with the funny hat was merely an employee of a business, a security company that needs to show its muscle to win more contracts in Israel and elsewhere in the progressively more paranoid world. Israel’s domestic security technologies are now amongst the country’s biggest exports with more than four hundred Israeli companies exporting $1.5 billion annually in domestic security goods and technologies which are touted as field proven, tested on the nearly-human Palestinians.
I did not notice the other Palestinian who had been detained until he was standing next to me, whispering in my ear. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘I always go through here, it is never like this.’
I said I didn’t know. Perhaps they were testing a new security system on us, one that they were preparing to offer for sale to Western countries enamoured of Israel’s expertise in security matters. As we spoke I looked at the cars of the fortunate ones – the Jewish settlers – as they whizzed through.
WITH THE NEXT SUSPECT on hand, I realised my time would soon be up. Now they had another customer to keep them busy lest their employer should appear and find them idle. The man with the cowboy hat came towards me. Before he handed me our IDs I implored him one last time to think. I said: ‘Please, for my sake, think of what you’re doing. It is too dangerous to obey orders without thinking.’
He answered: ‘Give me your mobile number. When I do, I will call and tell you.’
I said: ‘I don’t want you to call me. I only want you to think.’
I was getting ready to get into my car when he approached, handed me our IDs, and, without taking his eyes off mine, a Swiss penknife that I was not aware had been in my backpack. It was a kind gesture on his part. I know of Palestinians who have been charged with possession of a knife while passing through an Israeli checkpoint. He nodded knowingly as though to let me know that sometimes he does think about what he is doing.
I was taking my time putting my ID back in my wallet when Penny cried: ‘For God’s sake, hurry up! I want to get out of here.’ I did and we were soon on our way through a Rift Valley t
hat was now carved up by barbed wire in double rounds cutting through the hills, breaking their natural continuity. Tall cement blocks like gravestones were placed side by side, emblematic, I felt, that this has become a cemetery of a land.
As we drove away, I remembered a sculpture at the Kishon Gallery in Tel Aviv – a life-size, soft plastic replica of Ariel Sharon, with his eyes wide open and a stomach that moved up and down at regular intervals. It was the myopic Sharon as Prime Minister of Israel who was responsible for erecting over five hundred checkpoints throughout the West Bank and who began the construction of the abominable wall. For the past five years he has been lying in bed comatose after a massive stroke. The curator of the exhibition described the sculpture as an allegory of Israeli society that, like my young man, has wide open eyes that cannot always see.
Decide To Be Bold
JANINE DI GIOVANNI (born New Jersey, USA, 1961) is a journalist and author who has reported conflict and humanitarian crisis for nearly two decades. She is the author of five books, including The Place at the End of the World, about Sarajevo, and, most recently, a memoir of life as a war reporter, Ghosts by Daylight (Bloomsbury, 2011). She lives in Paris.
Decide To Be Bold
JANINE DI GIOVANNI
Of all the hundreds of photographs of war and conflict I have sifted through over the years, the one I cannot forget, the one that gives me nightmares still, nearly two decades after it was taken, is the one that epitomises the terrible phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’.
The French photojournalist, Alexandra Boulat, who died in 2007, took it. It is a photograph of a family, or what was left of a family, in Sarajevo during the bloody backyard war in the early 1990s. The ‘liberators’ – the Bosnian Serb Army who burnt down the houses, killed and plundered villages, raped and destroyed a society – had found a family photograph inside one of their newly acquired houses. It’s a typical photograph that any of us would have in our memories, or in our photo albums. It looks like the late 1970s. There is a neat little mother, a neat little father, two neat little children. They are wearing their good clothes and standing proudly in front of a neat little square house with a neat little fence. Before the war, they probably had a neat little life.
But this photograph is cursed. Because before the ethnic cleansers destroyed everything, one of them took the time to painstakingly scratch out the eyes and the faces of each member of the family. So what remains are heads and bodies, but no faces, just blank, scratchy, chilling lines. Lives utterly and completely deleted, completely denied existence. What was before will never come again.
Sarajevo family – photo courtesy of the estate of Alexandra Boulat
HAD MY LIFE taken a different route, as it was perhaps meant to, that photograph would have meant nothing to me. But now, in many ways, it represents my life, and what I do, and what I hope to do.
In the late 1980s, I was a postgraduate student. My field was obscure – Chekhov’s influence on Katherine Mansfield – and limited. I spent all my time in the British Library in Bloomsbury and on my sofa, with a book and a notebook. My plan was to finish my thesis, start a PhD in Comparative Literature and spend the rest of my life teaching at a university. I was very young, very naïve, and very protected. I lived in the ivory tower of academia and rarely, if ever, picked up a newspaper or watched the news. I was perfectly happy for my life to stay that way.
But one freezing cold December day, visiting my then-husband’s family in Chicago, I idly picked up a newspaper while eating my breakfast. The cover story was an article about the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising. The photograph was of young Israeli soldiers who looked no older than teens, sitting in a bulldozer burying alive some teenage Palestinians. The picture horrified me, as did the article, which was about a Jewish lawyer who defended Palestinians in military court.
According to the article, the lawyer – Felicia Langer – had fled World War II from her native Poland, where her family were incarcerated in the camps, for Israel. She had been a life-long Communist, and, after having her son, put herself through law school. Unable to bear the injustice of the treatment of Palestinians following the 1967 war, she became one of the few lawyers who would defend their rights.
Her life was a misery because of it. She was spat upon, bombed, tormented, and hated. But she kept doing it, despite the fact that she lost nearly all her cases and that she was exhausted by the system, the process, the fact that she was one of the very few up against a huge machine. Every morning she got up and did it, over and over again, knowing she would lose, knowing she was Sisyphus pushing a rock uphill, only to have it roll down.
That winter morning in Chicago, my life changed forever. I stopped eating my toast and decided to become a journalist. I did not know how, but I had always believed in what Goethe said: when you decide to be bold, great forces come to your aid. In my case, they did: a newspaper launched in the UK called the Sunday Correspondent, and an editor named Henry Porter believed in me enough to send me to the West Bank to find out who Felicia Langer was.
I WAS SURPRISED how easy it was to meet her. I simply found her number from the International Operator – this was long before the days of Internet – and rang her. She picked up the phone, and in halting English, invited me to come and see her. ‘If you really want to know what this is about,’ she said, ‘you have to come to Israel.’
I arrived in the spring. The intifada was in full force, the young men – known as shabbab – hurling rocks with slingshots at Israeli tanks. People were dying in Gaza, in Ramallah, in Jerusalem. Children were being shot with rubber bullets. Unbearable torture was taking place at secret prisons in the Negev.
When I arrived at Langer’s office in West Jerusalem, she was sitting at her desk, crying. It was a dingy place, and there was a dying plant on her desk. She herself was in her fifties at the time, pretty, plump, wearing lipstick. Her skin was very good – later she showed me the exact sun block I should be using, by Lancaster, to protect myself from the Middle Eastern rays – and she looked utterly exhausted.
That day, Langer became my guide into a world I never would have known. My trajectory of life was meant to be simple: marriage to a wonderful man; children; an academic life and then comfortably settling into retirement without war and conflict and torture and columns of refugees touching me. It touched some people in some part of the world, I knew in some part of my brain, but certainly not me.
Langer was crying over a case she had just lost, the murder of a teenage Palestinian boy by Israeli Defence Forces. But of course, it was not called murder; he died ‘in detention’. She was trying to get the body exhumed. Her requests to the court had failed. She looked up from a huge stack of files, and invited me to sit down.
I did not really know how to interview someone, was not really a professional journalist, but I had my notebook and I began to listen. At some point she told me something that resonated so strongly with me that I literally felt as though I had touched a live electricity wire: if you have the ability and the power to go places where other people don’t go, she said, and you have the courage to give a voice to people who do not have a voice, then you have an obligation.
She took me to refugee camps. I had never seen people live without water, without sanitation, and behind barbed wire. She introduced me to torture victims who jumped when I walked too quietly behind them. She introduced me to people who had lost limbs in Mossad car bombs, to Jewish left-wing activists who had spent time in jail for treason against the Israeli government, to doctors and psychiatrists and politicians in Gaza and Ramallah and Jenin and Nablus.
That trip lasted three weeks, but I flew back to London an utterly changed person. I finished my thesis but the trajectory on which my life was meant to go was dismantled forever.
THE ARTICLE CAME OUT on 19 November, 1989, an issue celebrating the fall of the Berlin wall. I had written about Felicia with the same passion she possessed, and although I did not know how to write a magazine article, it was
as though I too was possessed by the same demons that had gripped her. I would never be able to live the way I had before.
The rest would never have happened if I planned it, a bit like falling in love – if you look for it, you never get it. But an agent saw the article. She got me a book deal. I went back to Palestine and stayed for several years interviewing victims on both sides of the conflict. I would return over and over again to that country and remember that first time, the way the pink light hits the white buildings, the way I felt when I first felt the bitterness of injustice in my throat, and my desire to do something about it.
After that, I went to Bosnia and witnessed the dismembering of Yugoslavia. Then to Africa. Liberia, Somalia, Congo, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone. Chechnya, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. My quest was finding people who did not have a voice, and giving them the chance to speak. To shine a light in the darkest corners of the world, to quote a colleague. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes the people I thought were good betrayed me, or the victims weren’t really victims. But most of the time, I sat on the floor taking notes and listening.
Of course, along the way, my marriage broke up. No one could sustain that lifestyle, least of all a husband who wants a wife. My vision of a life with five kids in the suburbs went out the window. I slept in sleeping bags for years, lived on the road, survived on cigarettes and alcohol and stale bread and chocolate and vitamins.
But the occasional victories – the people I managed to get safely out of war zones, the children who grew into beautiful adults and were not scarred by war, the policy makers I got to confront and attack, the way I could channel my indignation at injustice into words – were worth it. I believed in the power of words. In Chechnya, as Grozny was falling and I was trapped by Russian forces pummelling the hell out of me and a group of Chechen soldiers, I thought, This is it. I really am not getting out this time, so say your prayers.
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