As the seventies passed and I visited Israel regularly and saw the changes occurring, I grew sadder and sadder about what was happening to this once idealistic and revered state. One night, for instance, I sat in the cozy apartment of Eliah Ariev, one of the founding fathers of Israel, the former powerful secretary-general of the Labor Party under Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, and one of the finest total human beings I have known anywhere. We were talking with a friend of his, Yigal Elam, a young professor of history at Tel Aviv University.
Yigal cared deeply, as did "Lova" Ariev, about the original universalist vision of Zionism as the Jewish idea of justice for all, and he was deeply troubled. For as he went around to the kibbutzes to lecture on the origins of the movement, he found deep changes.
"It is obvious," he told me soberly, "that the early kibbutzim were idealists. But today when I say this, even in some of the socialistic kibbutzes, I always find some of the elders shouting something at me like, 'You dare to tell us it was not for the security and boundaries of Israel?'" He shook his head sadly. "Even the elders have forgotten," he went on. "I always bring old documents showing what the original concept was, and I always win the argument. But they never forgive me."
What I was finding in Israel during the seventies was a country that had totally changed -- and I started to analyze it. By 1978, for instance, it was clear that the "new Israel" of Begin was annexing the West Bank, thus driving the Palestinian Arabs out of still another part of their land (most families already had been driven out two or three times, first from parts of Israel, then from other parts of the West Bank). I wrote:
Approximately one-third of all the land in the formerly Jordanian West Bank, occupied by Israel in 1967, is already in Israeli hands. In the crucial Jordan Valley, about 80 percent of the land is estimated by specialists to be owned by Israel, thus encircling the highlands still in Arab hands....
In the years that will come, with more of "no war and no peace," the Israeli government, using "security" to cover anything it does, will go on to create more new "facts" until this hopeful moment is past and the West Bank effectively is Israel. It may already be.
Then in the spring of 1981 I wrote an analysis of the passing of power from the Ashkenazim or European Jews who founded the state to the Sephardic, or Oriental, Jews who came later and who had totally different values. Now I wrote:
... Congress is dealing with an Israel that no longer exists. The special American relationship with Israel is based on a moral premise of support for the people who suffered the Holocaust. Yet the Israel of Prime Minister Menachem Begin -- and the negative twist he has brought to the original Zionist mission -- is now a state with a majority of Sephardic, or Oriental, Jews who know neither Europe nor the values of Central and Eastern European Jewish culture.
The Sephardim have no personal experience of the Holocaust, but do have a great deal of personal experience with Arabs. They like and support autocratic leaders such as Begin. Their hatred for Arabs is legendary, and the most brutal treatment of Arabs and of Arab prisoners on the West Bank virtually always turns out to be from Sephardic soldiers or prison officials.
It is the Sephardim, too, who are the strongest supporters of Begin's "Greater Israel" policy, which would annex the Arab West Bank as part of Israel. There is virtually none of the moral questioning among them that there is among the original Ashkenazi founders of the state over these matters. Nor, at heart, is "security" really their major concern -- expansion of the state and the use of power are.
In all of this I remained a staunch supporter of Israel. But I could simply not accept the fact that I could not criticize another country when I freely criticized my own, particularly when that country was not only totally dependent upon us but when our foreign policy and its were closely interwoven. But I soon discovered that to the Begin people and thus to the professional American Jewish community, which followed Jerusalem totally, I could not criticize anything about Israel. I could not criticize anything about policy or any government of Israel at any moment, or even anything that they did that impinged upon American policy, which was clearly expected to follow the Israeli lead.
The moment I wrote the slightest thing suggesting that Israel was not totally right, I began to get dozens and then hundreds of letters. Though I'd never so much as permitted an anti-Semitic (any more than an anti-black or an anti-female or an anti-Arab) remark to be made in my presence, these letters called me a "vulgar anti-Semite." Others, encouraged by American Jewish leaders who never budged overseas, wrote, "I hope you die of the most painful kind of syphilis." Though I tried in my reporting to work toward a real peace for everyone in the Middle East, I was told by American Jewish leaders, whose directions came straight from Jerusalem, that I was not writing in the "American" interest. There was no way that a person of conscience could not but grow more and more disturbed -- and finally disgusted.
Then in 1978 I attended an "Arab-American Dialogue" conference in Tripoli, Libya, sponsored by an American Arab committee and the Libyan government. I gave a paper, which was a great deal of work, on the American press and the Arab world, in which I was extremely critical of the Arabs but in which I also tried to offer them ideas about how to open up more -- legitimately -- to the American media. For this I received two thousand dollars, about what I get for a speech in the U.S. I wrote two columns about Libya and in each one clearly and honorably specified that I was a "guest" of the government and a paid speaker. I was extremely critical of Qaddafi and carefully outlined his terrorist connections. Different American Jewish lobby groups peppered my papers with letters saying I was a "Libyan agent." My publisher at the Los
Angeles Times was embarrassed at a publishers' conference by papers circulating that implicated the Times with Libya. Even today, four years later, every few months I get a letter from some concerned person at one of my papers because some "nut" has again accused me of "taking money from Libya." When I spoke at Georgetown University, on something quite different, there was a vicious letter in the student paper. When a young woman student went through all the letters, from very different places, she found all of them included exactly the same points and phrasings.
Yet, unlike some self-styled friends of Israel, I was the one who really tried to help. In the spring of 1973, after spending weeks in Cairo and "listening" to what the Egyptians actually were saying, I had the instinctive and informed feeling that they were going to attack Israel. I wrote this and said this in an interview. When I was in Jerusalem, I told this to Moshe Sasson, the very intelligent Israeli diplomat who then headed the Foreign Ministry.
He roared with laughter. "My dear," he kept saying, "my dear girl, you just don't know our Arabs."
Later that year in October, when the Egyptians rushed across the Suez in one of the most startling attacks of military history -- and, caught totally by surprise, the Israelis even brought out their atom bombs in desperation -- I wondered how well they knew their
Arabs, or who was really their friend.
In the ensuing years I also tried to tell them that Egypt's President Sadat was totally changing; that he wanted to make peace; that the Egyptian people themselves were pushing Sadat toward an end to all the righting. Again all the Israeli officials I spoke to scoffed at this. Had they "listened" then, they would not have been so surprised when Sadat sprung his trip to Jerusalem upon them that fall of 1977 -- and they would have been far better prepared to benefit from it.
To make the whole Israeli situation even more painful, my Jewish friends at home would not usually criticize me but I could see their hurt. Meanwhile, incongruously, friends in Israel, many of them leading Laborites, would openly urge me to criticize the Begin policies, which relied upon the original moral reputation of the Israeli state, while carrying out the most immoral policies. They couldn't criticize them, they said -- and they didn't want to urge the American Jewish leaders to criticize them.
However, I continued hoping that, as the situation in the Middle East indeed was ch
anging -- Egypt had made peace, the PLO would accept a confederation with Jordan, Jordan would work with Arafat, even radical Iraq was changing -- we could arrive at a true peace, with security for Israel and a just solution for the displaced Palestinians. And there was one man in Israel who I believed -- and still believe -- could carry this through.
I interviewed Shimon Peres, the leader of the Labor Party, on a sparklingly beautiful April day atop the Mount of Olives, in the spring of 1981, with the single most spectacular view of the Old City of Jerusalem spread before us. Golden domes glowed in the spring sun, as this eloquent and rational man gave precisely the opposite viewpoint from Menachem Begin. Where Begin used the historic suffering of his people in the most evil of ways, not to transcend but to impose suffering on others, and to create a new, fortified ghetto that would lash out at everyone, Peres wanted to return Israel to its original transcendent and superbly decent dreams.
"I think there is an opening in the Middle East," Peres told me, speaking thoughtfully yet forcefully. "And we have to try our hand to take part." Then in words that echoed those spoken by Egyptian President Sadat three years ago, he said, "There is always a psycho logical dimension. Perhaps, today, the Arab world exists more in psychological terms than in political terms. We have to break the logjam of suspicion and hostility. What has happened is we've grown used to the jargon of belligerency and not the reality of peace.
"On local issues, we'd be willing to negotiate straight with the Palestinians on the West Bank -- and with the Jordanians also, if they like. After all, these Palestinians were the legitimate leaders there." He wanted to bring Jordan into the negotiating process with the eventual idea of a West Bank Palestinian entity confederated with Jordan (which was what any rational person looked to as the solution to the decades of misery and slaughter). "If Saudi Arabia came in [to the peace process], Jordan would," he went on. "We even see a change in the traditional, hard Iraqi position. The Iraqis are unhappy with Russia and they blame Russian technology for their problems in the war. This is a change, and a vacuum."
About the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, which now include upward of twenty thousand persons and which were the dishonorable tool for the annexation, Peres said, "They would re main, as would Arab settlers under Israel and Israeli settlers under Arab sovereignty. The main problem is not the settlers but settlement." He would "enlarge our relations with Egypt, which is the key: conclude the autonomy talks [for the Palestinians in the occupied territories] and start autonomy in a specific place and in good faith. I'd say the Gaza Strip would be a good place to begin."
Finally he outlined a fascinating new vision of the area, taking in the entire rift and sea area from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea to make it an "area of peace without threats and armaments." Peres's ideas, worked out over the previous four years, were not to create more hatred in this area of the great religions of the world, as Begin and his people are doing, but to build in this area the "infrastructure of goodwill from which we could begin" and to concentrate Israel's new policies on working in the Middle East itself instead of in Europe and in the rest of the world. In effect he believed in the "normalization" of the Jewish people that was the very crux of the dream of the original Zionists, while all of Begin's policies and all of his impulses were precisely and psychologically designed to keep the Jewish people forever in a ghetto, alone and despised and under attack from everyone without.
I left Peres that day feeling that I had seen and heard a man of perception and vision not seen since the halcyon days of Ben-Gurion. While Begin's unsavory coalition looked constantly backward, Peres was looking forward. But when the election came that June of 1981, Begin won over Peres by a hair's breadth. In the last days of the uniquely bitter and dishonest campaign waged by Begin, as his bully boys broke up Labor meetings and burned down Labor offices, Peres and other Labor leaders had desperately warned of "Jewish fascism." They could see what was happening to the state they had founded and loved.
In short, the coverage of Israel, with its pulls toward the very best in man and its tugs from the very worst, with its undertones of guilt and its overtones of rage, tormented me, as it has many journalists and diplomats and others who have covered it and worked with it. Yet it helped no one, certainly not Israel itself, not to tell the truth about it, as many Labor friends urged. The others, those who did not want the truth out, were leading Israel to a new holocaust and slaughter -- there was not the slightest question about it--and they were following blindly a mad leader who wanted, not Jewish right, but Jewish conquest. You cannot have both.
I suppose the Middle East was the most tormenting area for many journalists because there always was so much hope. Somewhere underneath, in deep-flowing currents never lost in history, we always really believed something could be done. On the parts of both Jews and Palestinians there was often a yearning for the other. They would remind you that, after all, they had historically lived together -- and it was completely true that the Moslems had always treated the Jews much better than the Christians had.
Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1977 the entire "hope" became palpable. Indeed, it was right there before our eyes. Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem, and it looked for a moment as though the whole world teetered on the brink of real change: only this time real, deep, lasting change. And suddenly I saw this change, before my eyes, in the Cairo Conference where the Israelis went to Cairo for the first time to meet with the Egyptians.
The mood was euphoric, contagious, unbelieving. My friend Zeev Schiff, the brilliant military analyst of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz stood in Cairo one of those golden days in the shadow of the pyramids shaking his head. "All these years, I've been studying this area in terms of military maps from the air," he said, a distinct sense of wonder in his voice. "Even the pyramids I saw from up there. Now, being down here, I can't quite absorb it all."
Quite unintentionally I came to cause the only "stir" of the entire Cairo Conference, which was noted for its remarkable harmony. Most of the press was staying at a jolly little motel, appropriately called the "Jolie Ville," right across from the historic Mena House Hotel, where the diplomats were housed. We had been warned to look for any "trouble," for it was believed that the Palestinian Left or other forces might try to disrupt the conference. There were Egyptian security men standing at the end of every arm of little cottages, and ... it was raining! It never rained in Cairo, never. Yet it was raining, giving an additional eerie turn to the mood.
The second night I returned from a pleasant dinner downtown and repaired in an appropriately jolly mood to my little room. I was lying in bed when I heard this "tick ... tick ... tick... ." It was exact, and it was exactly like a clock. Only there was no clock in the room. I dismissed it for a moment -- and then remembered all the warnings. When I called the security, they ran to the room, heard the ominous tick, and immediately evacuated me. I was lucky, because they just moved me to another room, where I immediately went to sleep.
In the morning when I was walking calmly across the lobby to breakfast, I heard this sort of muted hiss come up from some of my colleagues seated around the lobby. Then they started in unison to go "Tick ... tick ... tick."
What it appears happened, for I ignored their taunts and did not ask, was that as I was settled peacefully into my new room, the rest of the motel was evacuated from their rooms. The security men thought my ticks were a bomb, as I had myself feared. As my friends stood out in the rain, the security men discovered it was only the certain way the rain was falling upon my roof, which caused the terrifying tick. My colleagues never forgave me this contribution to the Cairo Conference.
The Cairo Conference and its mood, its transcendence, its beauty, did indeed show what could come in the Middle East. I went from there to Jerusalem, where I wrote with a deep hope and belief that history has seldom allowed me to express:
What has really happened here in the Middle East this last month is Christmas Wonder updated, if you will. The transformation of the spirit t
hat is at the core of Christmas has just, to filch from the Bible, been made flesh....
We have tended to think that the transformations they created were magical or mystical things. Lightning bolts from heaven. Signs given because of grace or whim but not because of worth or virtue. Proper and even edifying to observe but not, if we are to be honest about it, really for us or for our time.
Well, maybe these few weeks in the Middle East have got me a little lightheaded, but they have led me to wonder why we cannot or do not think of updated wonder and, God forgive me, even updated miracles for our time. With this stroke of the typewriter, I forever decry leaving the divine to the dead, and I declare myself for modernizing wonder, transforming love and redefining transformation....
So what, then, is left? Hard work, complicated work. People who work to heal not only people's bodies but their psyches. People who work to feed people and regulate the overpopulation that kills and maims. People who study the psychology of nations and work doggedly in the diplomatic realm to bring an Egypt and an Israel together because they saw that, despite all the apparent hatred, there was a deep longing for transformation. People like President Sadat who have the courage that Churchill called the most important virtue because it "guarantees" all the rest.
Here you have real transformation in our time. Here you have the sense of wonder acted out before you in modern ballet and the prophetic tradition democratized by modern communications that include everyone, not just the way-siders that Paul met on the road to Damascus. Here you have my friend Zeev seeing the universally horrible bombing maps transformed into the soul-quenching beauty and mystery of the pyramids and Sphinx, once he can touch them.
Buying the Night Flight Page 28