Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  For me, as The Observer’s Middle East correspondent, the story was a nightmare. There was simply no way I could follow up the Sunday Times’s scoop, not only because I had no access to their information but also because Israel was, and still is, neuralgic about anything to do with its nuclear weapons programme. I did what I could, pieced together a story for the following weekend and, in accordance with the rules, submitted it to the military censor. Back it came, with every line deleted except the ones repeating information that had already appeared in the Sunday Times. When it was published, it was accompanied by the words: ‘The following report was submitted to the Israeli military censor, who ordered four significant deletions.’82 In the circumstances, it was the best we could do.

  One of the oddities of the way the system worked was that anything that had already been published overseas could subsequently be published in Israel, so that enterprising Israel-based correspondents, including some Israeli journalists, would occasionally arrange for information that they had acquired to be published under a London dateline with someone else’s byline. Did I ever do that? Next question, please…

  June 1987 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Six Day War, during which Israel had won a lightning victory against the combined might of its Arab neighbours. The war had ended with Israel in control of all of Jerusalem, a city that had been divided between Israeli and Jordanian control since Israel’s war of independence in 1948, as well as the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. The repercussions of that victory, with Israel still in effective control of the territories it conquered, continue to this day.*

  I chose to mark the anniversary by telling the stories of Israelis and Palestinians who had been born in 1967, the so-called Generation of ’67, and to reflect their thoughts two decades after the war.

  Najeh [Palestinian]: The very first Israelis I ever saw were soldiers. They came to my village and entered the school … When I see any soldiers, I think that those soldiers will be killed some day … Some day there will be another war, and the Arabs will be successful. We will take back all of Palestine.

  Yaacov [Israeli]: You have to understand the Jewish people. We are a small people; our identity in the past was as a persecuted people, a hated people. Young Israelis like me feel that it is about time Israel is not oppressed but a nation that is independent and controls its own destiny.83

  Being a foreign reporter in Israel in the 1980s was to live a life quite different from those of ordinary Israelis, or indeed of ordinary Palestinians. I might spend a morning talking to militant Israeli settlers in a West Bank outpost, and then the afternoon with equally militant Palestinians in a coffee shop in a refugee camp perhaps only a kilometre away. They inhabited worlds so deeply divided from each other that I sometimes felt like a science fiction space traveller, traversing galaxies that were no more than a couple of miles apart.

  Even without leaving Jerusalem, I could walk in less than half an hour from the loud, bustling Mahane Yehuda food market in the west of the city, the heart of Jewish Jerusalem, thronged with shoppers in knitted skull-caps or long black frock coats and wide-brimmed hats, along the Street of the Prophets, where my son was one of the youngest pupils at the Anglican School (we wanted him to learn to read in English, not Hebrew), and end up at Damascus Gate, the heart of Arab Jerusalem, from where battered buses and taxis would take passengers to towns and villages on the West Bank of whose existence Jewish Israelis were hardly aware.

  The stories I filed from Jerusalem were a relentless litany of ever more pessimistic analyses of how attempts to begin a ‘peace process’ between Israelis and Palestinians were going nowhere, and how Israeli politicians were endlessly jockeying for power in a coalition government that was often borderline dysfunctional.

  Under the terms of the coalition agreement, the Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, of the left-of-centre Labour Party, and the foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir, of the right-of-centre Likud, were due to swap jobs halfway through the government’s term – but Peres seemed to spend much of his time trying to find a way to back out of the deal. In the event, to everyone’s surprise, it stuck, and the job swap duly took place in October 1986.

  They were an odd, ill-matched couple from very different Israeli political traditions. Peres came from the country’s Labour establishment; he was urbane, smooth and an arch-schemer; he had played a major role in creating Israel’s military capacity in the days before it became an independent state and later was a key player in moves to develop Israel as a nuclear power. (The film star Lauren Bacall was his first cousin.) Shamir, by contrast, was a man of little charm and fewer words, a former Mossad official with a reputation as a hard-liner who had refused to back the 1977 Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.

  He had also been a leading member of the pre-independence Jewish paramilitary group known as the Stern Gang, which was responsible for the assassination of the British minister of state in the Middle East Lord Moyne in 1944 and of the Swedish UN Middle East mediator Count Bernadotte in 1948. I asked him once during an interview if he would accept that there was little difference between what he had done in the Stern Gang and the ‘terrorism’ of which he routinely accused the PLO.

  This was his reply: ‘There are two important differences between the activities I undertook before independence and the terrorism practised by the PLO. First, our aim was never to destroy a country or a people – it was to fight for an independent state. Second, we never attacked civilians – our objectives were always military.’84

  Which might have been fine if it were true. But, some years later, I had good reason to recall his words as I stood in the grounds of the Kfar Shaul mental hospital on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Scattered through the grounds were the remains of an Arab village, Deir Yassin, which had been attacked by Jewish fighters in April 1948. According to one of the most respected books of Israeli history: ‘More than 200 Arab men, women and children were slain, their bodies afterward mutilated and thrown into a well.’85 The killers were members of two Jewish paramilitary groups, one of which was the very same group that Shamir had assured me ‘never attacked civilians’. Deir Yassin was not the only such atrocity in the period leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence, but it became one of the most notorious and, as news of the massacre spread, thousands of Palestinians fled from their homes to find safety in neighbouring countries. It is their descendants who make up the bulk of the five million Palestinian refugees who are still eligible to receive help from the United Nations, more than one and a half million of them in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.86

  I returned to Israel many times after I started working for the BBC, and I watched with sinking spirits as the divide between Israelis and Palestinians deepened with every passing year. The brief moment of optimism after the signing of the Oslo peace accords in September 1993 was followed by the murders of more than twenty Israelis, the massacre of Palestinian worshippers in the West Bank city of Hebron by a Jewish settler in 1994, the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist in 1995, suicide bomb attacks on Jerusalem buses in 1996, and then the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in 2000.

  There have always been too many people on both sides of the Israel–Palestine divide who subscribe to the old Leninist principle of ‘the worse, the better’. The theory is that if you can ensure that people believe that the situation is getting worse, the more likely they are to follow your vision of a better future. So, immediately after Oslo, extremists on both sides were determined to blow as big a hole as possible into an admittedly flawed agreement that was so full of compromises that it offered neither side anywhere near what they regarded as their rightful due. (Its most serious failing was that it contained no requirement that Israel should halt its settlement-building programme in occupied Palestinian territory, apparently because the then Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, feared he would not be able to get the agreement approved by the
Knesset if he had agreed to such a provision.) Palestinian attacks on Israelis would inevitably trigger an Israeli military crackdown, thus ‘proving’ that nothing had changed. Similarly, attacks by Israeli zealots would serve to warn moderate-minded Israeli leaders that they were not carrying their country with them.

  When the second intifada erupted in October 2000, I wrote of ‘what seems to be a total loss of confidence on both sides in the idea that problems can be solved by negotiation … The streets are in charge. Vengeance is in the air … I have never felt so fearful for the future of this blood-soaked region.’87 As things turned out, my fears were amply justified: over the next four years, an estimated three thousand Palestinians and one thousand Israelis lost their lives.

  In 2003, on the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo peace accords, I found two families, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, each with a child who had been born at roughly the time of the famous handshake on the White House lawn in Washington between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.

  Shortly after Simon Griver [Israeli] told his 10-year-old daughter, Sivan, that a man from BBC radio was coming to visit them, he found her playing a game of make-believe with her eight-year-old brother, David. Sivan was pretending to be a radio newsreader. ‘Here is the news,’ she said. ‘We have just heard that there has been another suicide bomb in Jerusalem and David has been killed.’ Then she turned to her brother and asked: ‘David, what is it like to be dead?’

  …

  Taghreed Kishek [Palestinian] has a 10-year-old daughter too. Her name is Merna and she lives with her mother and younger sister in the West Bank town of Ramallah. They too live in fear – not of suicide bombs – but of Israeli tanks and guns. Last year the Israeli army staged a major incursion into Ramallah … The memory of those terrifying nights of bombs and missiles has never left them. When I met Taghreed and her daughters at her parents’ home, she told me: ‘One night, my daughter became so cold and pale from fright that I really thought she was going to die.’88

  I tried to arrange for the two families to meet, because they had so much in common. But Israelis were not allowed to cross into the West Bank, and West Bank Palestinians were not allowed to cross into Israel. There was no way to bridge the divide. Ten years later, when Sivan and Merna were both twenty, I got back in touch with their families. Both would have been happy to meet me again, but by then no one was interested any more in the shattered hopes of Oslo. I still hope that if somehow they do get to meet one day, they might become friends.

  Having moved to the BBC, I quickly discovered that reporting from Israel–Palestine for the world’s best-known public broadcaster was fraught with even more difficulties than I had encountered while writing for The Observer. The BBC’s output is obsessively monitored by pro-Israel lobby groups, determined to find evidence that the BBC is institutionally biased against Israel and that its reporting is, in consequence, not to be trusted. In the US, where pro-Israel groups are both well-resourced and, often, highly influential, I found myself under attack in ways that would sometimes have been farcical if the underlying issue had not been of such importance.

  When I spoke at a fundraising event for one of the BBC’s partner stations in Boston, for example, I found protesters brandishing placards that branded me as an ‘anti-Semite’, which, given my family background, was probably a step too far. On another occasion, a US-based pro-Israel media monitoring group organised a mass email campaign to protest against something that I had said on air, the effectiveness of the protest being somewhat marred by the fact that the emails were all identically worded and referred to me as ‘she’, thus suggesting that the furious complainants had not actually heard the item to which they took such grave exception.

  Trying to steer a steady course through the claims and counterclaims of a decades-long conflict was tricky enough when all I had to worry about was what I said on air. But then some bright spark invented emails and the internet, and suddenly BBC journalists were expected to publish their material in many different ways. Before long, I was writing a weekly email newsletter, and then a blog as well, in addition to making radio news programmes.

  The BBC’s editorial guidelines for news presenters – a set of rules that should really have been inscribed in stone for Moses to bring down from Mount Sinai – are meant to help presenters negotiate a path between the safe ground of ‘news’ and the treacherous shoals of ‘comment’. They are not, alas, quite as clear cut as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

  Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC output the personal prejudices of our journalists or news and current affairs presenters on matters of public policy, political or industrial controversy, or on ‘controversial subjects’ in any other area. They may provide professional judgements, rooted in evidence, but may not express personal views in BBC output, including online.

  The fine distinction that separates ‘professional judgements’ from ‘personal views’ is the kind of thing that could easily keep you awake at night if you were the worrying kind. And it can equally easily lead you into trouble, especially if you want to comment on highly contentious issues that happen to be dominating the headlines. BBC bosses loved the idea of their senior journalists ‘interacting’ with viewers and listeners online – but they quaked in fear at the thought that we might occasionally say something mildly controversial. So every word that I wrote online had to be vetted and approved by at least one senior editor; fortunately, I was blessed most of the time with an editor who saw the world very much as I did, and who allowed me as much latitude as between us we felt we could justify.

  I faced a particularly delicate challenge in December 2008, when the Israeli military launched an operation in the Gaza Strip that they called Operation Cast Lead. The aim, they said, was to stop rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel and to halt the smuggling of weapons into Gaza from Egypt. During a three-week operation, between a thousand and fifteen hundred Palestinians were killed. Thirteen Israelis also lost their lives. I knew I should write about it, but I also knew that it would be like traipsing through a minefield in hob-nailed boots. The chances of escaping without injury were extremely slim.

  Sometimes, it’s useful to try to look at the world through someone else’s eyes. So here’s what I might be writing today if I were a Palestinian living in Gaza.

  ‘You want to know what it’s like in Gaza at the moment? It’s Hell on earth. But that’s nothing new – it’s always Hell on earth here. Since the day I was born, I have lived in a stinking, rotten prison, with no freedom and no dignity. I remember my grandfather telling me about the beautiful home he once had, and of the lemon trees and olive groves he tended – I still have the huge metal key to his house, and he told me before he died that one day I would be able to go back and live there again. Yeah, right. I doubt it still exists: it was probably buried under the Tel Aviv ring road years ago…

  ‘Do I support Hamas? Yes, I do – because they stand up for me and they fight for me. I’m not a fundamentalist – I like to drink beer and I don’t pray very often – but I don’t see anyone else taking on the Israelis, and I can’t live my whole life like a snivelling dog, just waiting for the next blow to fall.’

  …

  And here’s what I might write if I were an Israeli:

  ‘You want to know why Israel is attacking Hamas in Gaza? Do you really need to ask? Do you know how many rockets they have fired at us since we left Gaza? How many times they have tried to send suicide bombers into Israel to kill us in our shopping malls and our bus stations? Have you any idea what it feels like when your neighbours are terrorists?

  ‘Am I worried that we’re losing friends around the world? Let me tell you something: the Jewish people have learned over hundreds of years that friends don’t save you. For hundreds of years, we have been both hated and weak: if it’s a choice between that, and being hated and strong, well, I’m sorry, I know which I prefer.

  ‘Look at a map. Look how small Israel is. It’s all we’ve got, and if
we lose it, we lose everything. I’m sorry if some Palestinians have lost their homes – but so too have hundreds of thousands of Jews, in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and many other places. We remember the Holocaust, even if you don’t. We all know what it means to suffer.’89

  (Old habits die hard: I have just checked that I have quoted roughly the same number of words from each viewpoint.) I knew that the piece would generate a reaction: what I did not anticipate was more than 750 comments – a huge response by usual BBC blog standards – before the in-house moderators called a halt. But I had got through the minefield in one piece, and I emerged unscathed.

  One of the laziest clichés available to a Middle East correspondent is to describe Israel as a nation of contradictions. So here goes: Israel is a nation of contradictions. It has a vibrant and diverse culture, and produces some of the world’s leading musicians, writers and film-makers. It is in the forefront of global medical, scientific and technological innovation. Its press is free and rumbustious, and its civil society groups are vocal and active.

  Israelis also tell good jokes: a driver in Jerusalem, notorious for its appalling traffic, is looking in desperation for somewhere to park. He casts his gaze heavenward and pleads with the Almighty: ‘Lord, if you will just find me a parking space, I solemnly swear that I will attend synagogue every day and follow every one of your teachings as set out by the rabbis.’ And at that precise instant, a parking space appears directly in front of the driver’s eyes.

  ‘Forget it, Lord,’ he says. ‘I’ve found one.’

  All of this, to a European liberal like me, is highly admirable and makes Israel one of the most exciting places to report from anywhere on earth. It also makes it unique in the Middle East, where liberal democracies are somewhat thin on the ground. But there is another side to Israel, and it is this other side that over recent years has become increasingly dominant.