Women journalists on the spot are also often aware of the way in which our own positions and feelings closely parallel situations within countries and peoples. Once in Riyadh, for instance, a young American woman, Martha, who was teaching in the girls' college, and I had a long talk about the "shame" aspects of the Saudi culture -- and how those attitudes affected us. Martha was wearing floor- length skirts, long sleeves, and shawls. She admitted that she instinctively lowered her eyes when she saw Saudi men. I admitted that I, too, felt an overwhelming sense of shame when in these cultures.
"Would we respond with this demureness and guilt unless it responded to something inside us that said, 'Yes, that is basically right'?" I asked. We agreed that it reawakened certain shame aspects of our own background -- which I found a disturbing but totally female thought and reality.
Indeed, I discovered over and over again that these odd kinds of "exchanges" flowed back and forth between women correspondents and the men and women of the countries we covered and worked in -- and even, in an odd but real sense, between us and the countries themselves. Men, particularly in countries that were in traumatic stages of development, often spoke far more openly and emotionally to me than to male correspondents.
In the fall of 1974 in Saudi Arabia, for instance, I was quite accidentally sent to interview a young Saudi planner. The tempter was "How would you like to interview the first Saudi Bedouin boy to get his doctorate in the United States?" Since no one could turn down an offer like that, I soon found myself sitting with this slim, pleasant, intense young man with blazing black eyes who had just returned home.
At one point I happened to say to him, "You must be very proud of yourself. And your family must be very proud of you." To my amazement Faisal Bashir almost burst into tears. His dark face clouded even darker. "Proud?" he said, almost jeering at himself. "I'm not proud. I'm very ashamed. My mother needs me. They are with the herds somewhere up in Iraq now. I should be with her. Instead, I am here."
Before I left, I asked Faisal Bashir if he minded if I wrote about him, quoting his anguish, and he said to go ahead. In fact when I did write about this, he sent me a kind letter of thanks. Somehow I was never able quite to put aside the memory of that haunted young man, such a quintessential type in today's troubled and inex act world of development: a man so troubled, so conflicted, so haunted, in spite of the fact that he was doing great good for his people.
Then, when I returned in 1980, suddenly I got a message to call "Faisal Bashir, deputy minister of planning." Though I had remembered him, I had forgotten his name, so I was delighted. "You must come over and see my office," he said on the telephone, effusive and excited.
What a pleasure it was to see him! He was still slim, still darkly intense, but quite a man of the world now. He had moved into an elegant, wood-paneled office in the marble-hailed Ministry of Planning, and was outgoing and all charm.
"Here I am, deputy minister of planning of Saudi Arabia, trying to implement the policy that will destroy the life that made me," he told me, a certain wistfulness and at the same time wonder in his voice. And the destruction of the old way of life that he had suffered over so much in 1974? "It was inevitable," he said now. "From the human element, it's true that I am working against the forces that created me. One more generation and it will end. Give us ten years, two more plans, and then Saudi Arabia will reach the stage of maturity in economic life."
Suddenly a small smile played on his lips. He got out the new issue of National Geographic magazine. The story of Saudi Arabia starts out with quotes from him. He was also a star on the TV special,
The Saudis. They described him as "electronic magic." His American wife "advises" him. We both smiled.
I was happy, really happy, to see Faisal Bashir again. I was happy to see a balanced, immensely creative, and productive person at the core of a developing country. And perhaps I understood him because, on another level, I, too, had been "first" -- as a woman in so many areas -- and had hammered out so many of the same traumas. There was one big difference: his planning budget was $236 billion!
Again I found, in Saudi Arabia, that men in positions of power talked differently to me. They spoke honestly and, ironically, seemingly without hesitation and without embarrassment. They spoke of their traumas about their own women and they spoke of their own traumas vis-à-vis the United States; most of the new leaders had been the first generation to be educated, and almost all of them were educated in the United States. They had an inordinate love for the United States. Yet they felt that the U . S ., in large part because of its support for Israel and its despising of the Arab world, did not appreciate them: a dangerous equation for our policy.
I wrote this -- and I spoke about it. One day in Chicago I was speaking about it to the prestigious Chicago Committee of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and I happened to be sitting next to the president of one of the big oil companies. There I was, a girl from the South Side, telling this immensely powerful man about the Saudis' real feelings--and he was sensitive enough to listen and, I am convinced, to understand. It was an interesting role: Again, the woman as the interpreter of man to man, yet on a new level.
***
In contrast to what appears, Saudi Arabia is a country haunted by women. On the surface -- on the streets and in the public places -- it is a society quite simply without women. In the universities, even, women "see" their own professors, if they are male, only on television screens.
And yet the Saudis admit that they are "in turmoil" over women. Women are the terrible underground obsession, an obsession, more over, that could ultimately destroy what they are trying to build.
They talk about women "working," yes, for how can they keep the intelligent and ambitious educated Saudi women down? So they plan for them to work in all-female offices, schools, hospitals, and banks. One man suggested using computers at home. The number one development goal of the new development plan of Faisal Bashir, for instance, is to get over the need for foreign workers --but they cannot do this unless they utilize women's skills.
A further irony lies in the fact that when women there remain in their most dramatically traditional and primitive "place," that "place" could actually destroy the society men are trying to build. Thus arises the obsession, and somewhere way in the background are the whispers telling the Saudi men, who so need totally to control, that it is actually they who are being controlled.
On that same trip, in 1980, I had a strange reaction that was so spontaneous -- and so intense and angry -- that I knew it must represent something more. When I was leaving Riyadh to go home, I was seated in the Saudi plane near a window. All the other seats around me were free. A Saudi woman, completely covered with that ugly black veil, came up and started to sit down next to me. I was suddenly so repulsed by the veil that I waved her off (not at all my usual way) with an angry, "Why don't you take the free seats?" She fluttered away like a smitten black moth, and I sat there sulking, troubled by the knowledge that she had wanted to sit next to me for safety, because women in these areas cannot sit next to men on planes. But I did not want to be contaminated by a woman who had accepted this fate -- if I threatened her, she also threatened me.
***
When anybody tells me that I am imagining the things that still tie and imprison women, I tell them two stories:
Once, about to take off on an assignment, I needed a prescription for the Pill as well as the usual shots. Chicago is filled with Catholic doctors: to be avoided under such circumstances at all costs. So, I got out the Yellow Pages and went down the list of doctors, finding a fine Dr. Shapiro right in the neighborhood. A Jewish doctor -- that was what I needed. Off I went.
Dr. Shapiro was a fine sort, but I must admit that he seemed a little surprised to have me, known to him after all from the papers, suddenly drop in on him. Where had I heard about him? Why had I come to him? What could I tell him? Because he was Jewish and this was my day to avoid Catholics who might lecture me on birth control, a
nd increase my guilt?
I started out -- indirection in such matters has always been my way -- by asking him for the necessary shots. Then, finally, I stammered out, "And doctor, I would like to get the Pill."
This pleasant, friendly man suddenly dropped all pretense of friendliness and became the righteously angry father. "And are you married?" he demanded. I shook my head. "And you want me to give you the Pill...?" He went on and on. Finally, he had his son, a charming young man, come in from the adjoining office -- and he gave me the Pill, and apologized for his "old-fashioned" father.
Dr. Shapiro, you see, was a professor at Loyola Medical School, the largest Catholic medical school in the area!
Thinking back on this, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. That I should have accepted such treatment... that I should have had put inside me such feelings about myself in the beginning and still have had them at thirty-three ... certainly shows clearly the cruel absurdities heaped upon women of my generation and all those before. How really extraordinary, when you think about such things. How really sad.
***
Then, early in the 1970s, when I was covering the Middle East, I started to find myself growing physically weaker and weaker. Once, in Iran in the spring of 1973, I actually collapsed on the Teheran airport floor and had to be on intravenous feeding for three days. When one doctor could not tell me what was wrong, I went to others. In fact I went to twelve doctors in twelve countries.
Each one gave a different -- but similar -- diagnosis: they all placed the "stomach problem," for that was what it was, right squarely in my little female mind. The Israeli doctor told me peremptorily and pedantically, "If you would get married and have children and settle down, you wouldn't have these emotional problems." The American doctor suggested that it was due to the fact that I stayed with my mother when I was in Chicago Finally, irritated and impatient, I asked, "Doctor, why don't you do the stool test?" Something none of them had done.
The next day the doctor phoned me and said, "Gee Gee, I think you'd better sit down." I was prepared for the worst: He was going to tell me that there was nothing wrong with me. "You have a very bad case of amoebic dysentery," he said. "You must have had it for two years, for you have what we call a carrier case or a chronic case. It is quite serious."
To his consternation I began to laugh uproariously. It took only a few days, with the right medicine, for me to feel enormously better. In five weeks I was cured. For two years all those male doctors had only presided at my misery; clucking like "old wives," they made fun over what could have meant death. As a woman I was at the mercy (or lack of it) of male doctors who still looked at a woman in 1973 -- a woman who had obviously been traveling constantly through infectious areas -- and saw only what Freud had seen fifty years earlier in woman: hysteria.
By then I was indeed hysterical, hysterical with rage over their ignorance and over the disdain and hatred for women that sustained it.
XIII.
Avida and Kemal
"The Jews and Arabs of Jerusalem cannot afford to get to know each other because, if they did, they would have to acknowledge to themselves that part of what the other side says is right."
-- Meron Benvinisti, Israeli scholar and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem
The Moslem Arab world was supposed to be a difficult, even impossible assignment -- it wasn't. Israel, on the other hand, a country I long had idealized, a country whose people I admired enormously, a country with citizens far more similar to mine, was supposed to be easy, a cinch -- it wasn't, either. This again only confirmed the rule that a journalist has to "be there," because nothing is ever what we expect it to be. Indeed, Israel presented me with the greatest and the most profound moral quandary of all, with a sort of professional and personal wandering in the wilderness.
I had first gone to Israel in the fall of 1969 as an admirer of the Jewish people and of their phoenix-like rising in their new-old state out of terrible historic suffering. I would have liked to go to Israel long before. But since we had a fine correspondent stationed permanently in Tel Aviv, the Daily News editors naturally sent me first to the Arab world, where in its vast entireties of desert and garden we had no one.
Still, my first day in Tel Aviv, when I walked into Beit Sokolov, the government news agency, the officer in charge looked at me. "We've been watching you as you went around the Arab world. You certainly are an Arab lover."
I was stunned. Didn't a person have the right to go to the Arab world? Shouldn't the Arab world be covered by the press? For the moment I put it aside, but they would not let me be; I was already dubbed an "Arab lover" only because I had written objectively about the Arab countries. It resounded deep in my soul, along with the "Jew lover" and "nigger lover" from my youth. But, no, I did not believe that this kind of prejudice existed in Israel. Certainly not.
Then I began to read the history and found more surprises. Not even half of the very basic "history" that Israel and its friends had so carefully propagated throughout the world, and in particular the United States, was true. I believed -- and fervently believe today -- that the Jewish people have a total right to their state and to its security. But what about the five million Kurds, the scattered Armenians, and the four million Palestinians displaced by the Israeli state?
When I looked into history, I found that in 1918 there had been about sixty-five thousand Jews in what was then Palestine, up from only two hundred families in 1883. The Arab population, which had lived there for thirteen hundred years (long enough, one would think, to accrue some rights) was roughly six times that many. By 1948, when the UN divided Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, the Jewish population had risen to 600,000, compared with 1,200,000 Arabs. Then, in the Palestine wars of 1947-48, all but 200,000 of the Arabs fled Israel proper in the ensuing war started by the neighboring Arab states against the Israelis. They were later moved a second time, from the West Bank and other areas. And here is where the conundrum begins.
What is true is this: Part of the Arab population fled out of terror of the fighting; part of it fled in response to the calls by Arab leaders to flee in order to return once the war was over; and enormous numbers also fled because they were brutally murdered and driven out by Jewish groups like the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi of Prime Minister Menachem Begin or the Stern Gang of Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir. They were never allowed to return, and their properties, which were substantial -- for Palestine was not at all a poor area -- were simply taken over by Israeli Jews. All of this is very important, for the Israelis' claim to total purity and their claim to having no responsibility for the "Palestine question" rests on whether or not they drove the Palestinians out. They did.
From the beginning I was torn by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seeing good and bad, guilt and innocence, suffering and overcoming, very balanced on both sides. But in the Middle East you were not permitted by either side to see both sides. This bothered me more in Israel than in the Arab world simply because they lay claim to moral superiority as the basis of their national life and our extravagant support is based on that. When you do this, then you must accept being judged by your own standards.
I came to the Middle East as I come to most areas, in a basically non-ideological frame of mind. I have always felt that sentimentality is the graveyard of the journalist, who has to know and always remember that today's guerrilla or victim can well be tomorrow's totalitarian. There are not -- or should not be -- any final chapters in the journalist's life, not if she believes (as she should) that life is process.
What's more, most stands against oppression are all too fashionably late. Journalists and others must not be always fighting the last moral war but the new one. (Avoid the cliché of your time.)
Retroactive guilt -- a dangerous thing. It is so very easy to say you will never again let happen something that already has happened, and that you cannot do anything about, and that will never happen again. In effect we were being asked to live for and write against "the Holocaust
," and ignore the present sufferings of the Palestinian Arabs, who were the new oppressed people: the "New Jews."
As I went through this torment, I kept asking myself, "Is it enough to hate the evil done forty years ago and not have to do anything about the evil going on now?" I had always abhorred racism, sexism, ethnicism, tribalism -- everything that cut person off from person--so how could I in conscience avoid writing about the Palestinian question?
But that came to mean criticizing Israel's policies, which were to ignore the Palestinians and to do anything necessary to keep them down on the West Bank. And that meant constant and bitter accusations of "anti-Semite." I truly loved and believed in Israel, and the Arabs were quite capable of doing any number of stupid and feral things. But as the years went by and I continued to cover the Middle East, I could only come to agree with the early Zionist Theodore Herzl, who said, "We have one right against another right."
Most of my friends in the Labor Party agreed with this, for that party was based on the idea of the two peoples living together and also of the "normalization" of the Jewish people. But it soon became clear that the Israel of Menachem Begin, the old super-terrorist, would have no truck with such rational solutions. Rather the Begin people looked upon the Arabs in much the same way, as a despised people and "vassal state," that the Germans and the Poles and the Russians had looked upon the Jews.
Buying the Night Flight Page 27