by Tony Horwitz
It was midnight when we gathered for the two-hour drive back to Basra. Artillery still pounded in the distance, a gunpowder heartbeat. An Iraqi flare lofted into the sky to illuminate the enemy position; another concussion of shellfire shuddered through the sand. Then flares began whooshing and popping every which way across the desert. Machine-gun fire erupted all around us as soldiers emptied their automatic weapons into the air. The Iraqis were celebrating their victory.
I stood there, slack-jawed, marveling at how much the display looked like July Fourth fireworks. Then the Turk grabbed my arm and dragged me into a bunker.
“Third lesson of war reporting,” he said. “All that lead has to land somewhere. Let us make sure it is not on our heads.”
9—THE JORDAN RIVER—I Came for the Waters
River is deep and the river is wide. Milk and honey on the other side.
—Southern black spiritual
Khalaf Ghoblan, his face framed by a black-checked keffiya, stood gazing across the Jordan River. Bare limestone hills climbed the West Bank above a thin band of green snaking along the valley's floor. Shielding his eyes against the setting sun, the eighty-seven-year-old bedouin pointed to the spot where his clan had once camped in long sheepskin tents by the river.
“There was a wooden bridge just there,” he said, gesturing at the near bank, obscured by reeds. Israeli and Jordanian sentries now straddled the river bend, staring at each other through binoculars. “It cost half a Turkish penny to cross.”
Ghoblan chuckled, a raspy, old man's laugh. To dodge the toll, he often swam across instead. “Half a penny was a lot in those days.” The river was mightier then, and crowded with boats. Black African slaves, imported by the Turks, poled downstream on rafts filled with sheep. Russian Orthodox pilgrims canoed the other way, headed to a site near Jericho, revered as the site of Jesus' baptism.
When the young Ghoblan reached the other bank, he would buy cotton shirts from Jewish seamstresses, among the first of the Zionist settlers. To keep the clothes dry, he paid the half-penny toll on the return trip to his home in what is now Jordan. “I felt the Jews were fellow Semites and the river was ours to share,” he said.
Then came the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, after which a stretch of the river became a tense border between Jordan and the new state of Israel. Still, Ghoblan recalled occasional instances of neighborly contact. When kibbutz-owned cows strayed through the shallow water, Jordanian farmers returned them and received chocolate as a reward.
But after the Six-Day War in 1967, the only thing Arab and Jew exchanged across the river was gunfire. Bridges closed. Barbed wire and minefields sprouted on both banks. And anyone who tried, like Michael of spiritual song, to row his boat ashore risked'being shot by border guards. “I cry for the old times,” Ghoblan said, turning his back on the river. “War is the only language Jews understand.”
We wandered back to his house, a two-story stucco villa which had replaced the tent in which he was raised. He served me coffee flavored with cardamom, then ducked into his bedroom and returned carrying an enormous Turkish musket. “I used to shoot at the Jews many times in the wars,” he said. With shaky fingers, he lifted the flintlock to his shoulder and aimed it across the river. “Thank God,” he said, “I never hit anyone.”
I arrived at the Jordan River in November 1987, five weeks before the start of the Palestinian intifada. Like most journalists, I had no inkling that the tranquil, balmy autumn was the end of an era in Middle East affairs. Many Israelis still blithely supposed the Palestinian problem would somehow melt away. And Arabs returned the insult by pretending that the Jewish state simply didn't exist.
Astonishing effort went into sustaining this fiction. At a government office in Abu Dhabi, I'd studied a map of the Middle East with the name “Israel” carefully blacked out with magic marker. Officially, the word itself was unmentionable; on the news, Israel was “occupied Palestine,” or the “Zionist entity.” Western journalists in Cairo acceded to the taboo, confiding in hushed tones that they were off to visit “Dixie.” The code name dated from the days when Middle East correspondents were based in Beirut and a trip to Israel had meant heading south of the border, to Dixie. It was considered offensive to Arab ears—and therefore ill-advised professionally—to utter the unmentionable word, even in Egypt.
I traveled to Dixie by land, through Jordan, a country that was the most Western of Arab states, yet the most insistent in blotting out the country occupying its entire western border. On the television news, the weather report skipped from the Jordanian cities of Aqaba and Salt to a mysterious locale called “the Western Heights,” which included Jerusalem. One morning, I read in the International Herald Tribune that an Israeli tennis player had reached the finals of a major tournament. The Jordanian sports report that night included only the result of the women's matches.
In Amman, I shared a taxi with a Palestinian couple headed to the Allenby Bridge, a tightly controlled crossing between Jordan and, the occupied West Bank. Israel didn't exist there either. Jordanian border guards checked the passports of incoming travelers and turned back anyone with an Israeli stamp. There was no other country the traveler could have just come from. But appearances had to be maintained. Journalists and other frequent border-crossers carried two passports, or asked on entering Israel that their documents be spared the offending imprint.
It was the Jordan River I intended to write about. Unfortunately, like most travelers before me, I was woefully misinformed about the waters I had come to view.
“When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide,” Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad. In fact, he soon discovered, “It is not any wider than Broadway in New York.”
A century later, having been diverted for irrigation and poisoned by fertilizer, the Jordan wasn't any wider than Wall* Street. As the border bus bumped across the wood-slatted floor of the Allenby Bridge, I aimed my camera out the window. A murky trickle came into view, but I didn't have time to focus before the River Jordan was gone. The Allenby Bridge is fifteen yards long.
A sandbagged pillbox loomed ahead, and a soldier stepped out holding a submachine gun loosely in one hand. In the seat beside me, the Palestinian couple visibly tensed. The soldier peered into our bus, said, “Sbalom,” and waved us through.
Before crossing the Jordan, I hadn't worried much about how being Jewish would affect my work in Israel. I felt I'd managed to report on Arab countries with journalistic “objectivity” and didn't see why reporting on Israel should be any different.
This high-minded professionalism lasted about as long as it took me to walk from the bus to the immigration hall. A blue-and-white Star of David fluttered above the building, stirring some inchoate allegiance bred of endless dull Sundays in Hebrew school. The little Jewish state, circled by hostile Arabs, like a pioneer wagon train, draining swamps and dancing the hora.
Inside the immigration hall, Israeli soldiers stood behind tables, going through bags and asking questions. I approached a soldier with thick glasses and a tiny yarmulke pinned atop red kinky hair. The big bad Zionist looked like a pimply classmate whose name I could no longer recall. I half expected him to ask if I wanted to sneak out back to bet my allowance on a few rounds of dreydl.
Instead, he flipped through my passport, studying the Arabic stamps on every page. After several months in the Middle East, my passport resembled a pocket Koran.
“Horwitz?” His eyes swam behind Coke-bottle lenses. “Do you have any special connection to the Jewish community in America?”
“No. Except that I'm Jewish.”
He handed back my passport and smiled. “Welcome to Israel. I hope you will have a good time.” He hadn't even bothered to unzip my bags.
I stepped outside and gazed at the stark hills of the Promised Land. Arid gullies and ridges rose on all sides, enclosed by barbed wire and dotted with signs saying “Danger! Mines!” Taxis were parked nearby, the
ir Palestinian drivers prostrate on the ground, reciting midday prayers. The hill behind them was emblazoned with an enormous Star of David, facing Mecca.
I'd agreed to share a taxi to Jerusalem with the Palestinian couple from Amman. It was forty-five minutes before they emerged from the immigration hall. The husband's face was purple and his wife was crying softly. While I'd been reliving Hebrew school with the redheaded soldier, they'd been having their suitcases emptied, their shoes X-rayed and their orifices probed for weapons and “anti-Israel” material, a category including everything from PLO keyrings to copies of The Merchant of Venice.
The couple, resident in Jordan for twenty years, had come across the river to attend afuneral. “I was born here in Jericho and now I must be naked for a Jew so I can see my cousin buried,” the man said, straightening his black suit. “I feel like a dog.”
I nodded gravely. I was to spend a lot of time nodding gravely as bile poured from both Palestinians and Israelis. It was easier than explaining that I thought they were both right, or both wrong. I wasn't sure which.
The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: “Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time.”
In Egypt it is considered abrupt to begin any conversation without at least half of the following:
Good morning.
Good morning to you.
Good morning of light.
Good morning of roses.
Good morning of jasmines (and so on, through the rest of the garden).
And how are you?
Fine, and you?
Fine also, thanks be to God.
Thanks to God.
Welcome, most welcome.
Welcome to you.
(Chorus)
The same tedious singsong is reprised upon departure, with a minimum of two cups of tea or coffee served in between. A lot of this hospitality is false, of course, particularly when it comes from Arab officials; the sipping and small talk help conceal the fact that the bureaucrat you're interviewing hasn't imparted one comment of even trivial significance. In Cairo, I often tore home from government offices, pumped up on Turkish coffee, to type up my notes and rush them into print. Only to find, flipping through my notebook, that all I had to write was “Thanks be to God” and “Would you like some sugar with your coffee?”
It came as a rude shock, then, to pick up the phone my first day in Jerusalem and have the following conversation with an Israeli secretary.
ME: Shalom. This is Tony Horwitz. I'm a reporter—
SHE: Ma? (What?)
ME: I'm an American reporter and I'd like to speak to Mr. Levi.
SHE: So who wants him?
ME: I told you. Tony Horwitz. I'm a—
SHE: Ma?
ME: Horwitz! H-O-R—
SHE: Not here. (Click)
Taxi trips in Israel also elevate the blood pressure, though reckless driving is the least stressful part of the ride. Rather than disable their meters, in the Egyptian fashion, many Israeli cabbies prefer to hide their meters in the glove compartment. Discovering this midway through my first ride, I politely asked the driver to turn the meter on. Then I asked him again. On the third request, he grudgingly flipped open the glove box and turned the switch. Then, when we reached the hotel, he tacked ten shekels (about five dollars) onto the fare for the half-mile we'd traveled off the meter. I protested. He yelled. I yelled. We almost came to blows.
“Cut ummak!” he screamed, finally giving in. Cus ummak is the one Arabic phrase known to every Israeli cabbie. It means “your mother's cunt.”
There were compensating pleasures, of course. I went to a Woody Alien movie and ate borscht. I gawked like a fifteen-year-old at women in short skirts and sleeveless blouses, something I hadrr? seen for months. And I even found it refreshing to join the Israeli fray: butting into lines, shoving to be the first off buses, shouting “Cus ummak!” at cabdrivers—behavior which would have got me knifed or deported in Arabia. But after two or three days, after losing more shoving matches than I'd won, I found myself drifting toward the Arab quarter to exchange a dozen or so pleasantries over three or four cups of sugary tea.
“How are you?”
“Fine, and you?”
“Very well, thanks to God.”
The second striking thing about Israel, arriving from the Arab world, is how much the two cultures have in common. Hebrew and Arabic are closer to each other than to any third tongue. The Arabic greeting salaam akikum (“peace be upon you”) is shalom akikum in Hebrew, though it's not a phrase often spoken between Arab and Jew. Many other Arabic words I'd learned were identical in Hebrew: belt (house), yarn (day), Kla (evening).
Roughly half of all Israelis are first- or second-generation emigres from the Muslim world, particularly Morocco and Iraq, and their olive skin, dark hair and strong features often make these “Sephardic” Jews indistinguishable from Arabs. Religious fanaticism has also bred a certain kinship. Bowing their beaver hats and sidelocks at the Wailing Wall, the ultra-Orthodox Chasidim reminded me of nothing so much as the bearded, skullcapped fundamentalists in Cairo, bowing toward Mecca. Both share an attachment to bygone days: one pines for the spiritual purity of the Polish shtetl, the other for the desert asceticism of Mohammed. Both see God's hand in everything they do, and godlessness in everything done by anyone else. Orthodox wives, hidden beneath kerchiefs and trailed by herds of children, seemed, at first sight, a mirror image of the veiled, housebound wives of Arabia.
Ask almost any Israeli over forty to tell you his or her life story and you'll hear a tragic tale beginning with the Holocaust and continuing through the 1948 war, the 1967 war, the 1973 war and so on. Ask any Palestinian to tell you his or her life story and you'll hear a tragic tale beginning with the 1948 war and the diaspora that followed (known as Al-Nakba—the Disaster), then continuing through the 1967 war, the 1973 war and the occupation of their land that followed from these conflicts. I later met Palestinians as far away as Tunis and Baghdad who had never laid eyes on their homeland, but who still kept the keys to homes in Haifa or Jaffa that their parents had fled in 1948.
Palestinians also tend to be well educated, entrepreneurial and distrusted by other Arabs, who stereotype them as cliquish, grasping, arrogant and suspect in their allegiance to whatever country they've settled in. Palestinians, it seemed obvious, were the Jews of the Arab World.
The next thing you notice, once you've tallied all these similarities, is that Palestinians and Israelis are alike in ignoring the kinship completely. Ask people if they see parallels between the two populations and they will most likely answer with a resounding Hebrew ma? (what?) or an Arabic misb mumkinl (impossible!).
Deciding to leave this tangle of contradictions for another day, another story, I rented a car to finish my reporting on the Jordan River. Driving out of Jerusalem, I offered a ride to a Palestinian hitchhiker. He seemed surprised I'd picked him up and relieved to discover I was American, not Israeli. As we passed the Damascus Gate, I commented on the beauty of the ancient walled city. He glanced out the window; his eyes latched onto a blue-and-white pennant fluttering in the breeze. “This flag, it is very ugly.” Soon after, we passed through the edge of the Jewish quarter. Young children scampered across a small playground. “Look at all these babies,” he said, his face wrinkling in disgust. We wound down the hills toward the Jordan, and I turned on the radio. He asked if I'd rnind lowering the volume. “Hebrew, I cannot stand the sound of it.”
I let him out in Jericho and headed north along the river, through a desolation of army camps and unsown fields labeled “restricted security zone.” This stretch of the occupied territory seemed lar
gely unoccupied, except by hitchhiking soldiers. The first one I picked up was a twenty-year-old woman named Orna, who had just finished her army training at a sentry post near the Dead Sea. It had been her job to stare through binoculars at Jordan and write down everything she saw, as warning against terrorist attacks. “For six months, all I ever entered in the book was donkeys,” she said.
I laughed for the first time in several days. Relaxing, I glanced across at Orna. She had my coloring, my mouth, my nose. Her grandparents could have come from the shted next door to mine. For a moment I felt the same familial glow I'd experienced with the redheaded soldier at the Allenby Bridge. As the road dipped, revealing the deep rift -surrounding the Jordan River, I slowed down to take in the view.
“Nice, huh?”
Orna looked at me strangely. “So what's to see?” She was staring the other way, at a Palestinian village beside the road. Then, without prompting, she added: “If the Arabs want a state they can have it—on the other side of the Jordan River.” She was suddenly irritable. “Always we feel guilt problems. Why? America moved out all the Indians. So what if we do the same?”
We drove to the next army camp in silence. Orna climbed put and two other hitchhikers climbed aboard. In front sat a soldier named Nati, returning north to “walk the line” in Lebanon. He wasn't looking forward to resuming the dangerous night patrols.
“If you see an Arab you shoot,” he said, shifting the submachine gun between his legs. “If you sleep, you die. I almost make a shit in my pants many times.”
The other passenger, Yitzhak, was from a kibbutz near Jericho. He gave me a leaflet about the kibbutz printed in halting English. It said: “See the greening of the desert, experience unique way of life! Time warp back with us 2000 years!”