by John Lyons
CHAPTER 2
My Long Journey to Jerusalem
1961 to 2009
THAT MOMENT ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN IN SEPTEMBER 1993, watching two men who had long despised each other shaking hands under the encouragement of Bill Clinton, had become seared into my memory. Reporting on such a momentous international event confirmed my decision to become a journalist.
At high school in Melbourne, I had my heart set on becoming a barrister. As a 16-year-old during school holidays, I’d take a tram into the city to the County Court. I took delight in opening any random door of the court complex and then sitting in the public gallery. I loved the intellectual challenge: what was the case about? How strong was the prosecution? Was the accused’s lawyer doing a good job? Was the judge being fair? Which way was the jury leaning? Sometimes I’d get hooked on a particular trial and return to it day after day after day.
When I achieved 100 per cent in my Higher School Certificate for what was called Commercial and Legal Studies it validated my career choice. I succeeded in getting into Law and Commerce degrees at Melbourne University.
But it was literally on my last day at school that one of the teachers put the idea of journalism into my head. Pat Brown, a gentle man who all the boys felt they could trust, shook my hand as I was about to leave the school for the last time. For a reason I’ve never understood, he said to me: ‘I know you want to be a lawyer, but why don’t you think about journalism? It’s about observing the world around you then translating that into words.’
His question echoed with me for days. I had also wanted to travel, and the idea that as a journalist I could live almost anywhere in the world was what, in the end, won me over. I wrote to the papers.
After several interviews with the Melbourne Herald, I was one of the five chosen out of a field of 400 and I deferred my Law degree. After completing my cadetship with the Herald, The Australian offered me a job in Melbourne in 1984. I was then posted to their bureau in the press gallery in Canberra and from there I moved to Sydney to be the National Chief of Staff – a tough job for a 24-year-old. In that role I met David Leser, one of the reporters on the paper. So began not just a lifetime friendship but what amounted to a 30-year discussion (which continues until today) about the Middle East. David’s passion for all things Middle Eastern and his belief that one day there could be an end to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict fired my interest in the region.
Then in 1989 John Alexander, the Editor-in-Chief of the Sydney Morning Herald offered me a job as a senior writer, with the strong possibility that I could become a foreign correspondent. I took the job and three years later would be posted to New York, then later re-hired back to The Australian by Paul Kelly to be Washington correspondent. It had been a whirlwind first 15 years in journalism.
In 1994, a year after the signing ceremony at the White House, my phone in Washington rang. It was my former Editor John Alexander, who’d been brought back to run the Sydney Morning Herald and try to stem a serious fall in circulation. The paper had gone down-market chasing a broader audience but instead had shed a large number of readers.
Alexander wanted me to be one of his deputies, with the strong prospect of becoming the Editor. The chance to be the Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald at 33 was too good to pass over. So I accepted and returned from Washington to Sydney.
It was around this time that I met Sylvie Le Clezio, a Mauritianborn film director and producer and still photographer. She’d produced many films, particularly documentaries.
I met Sylvie in Sydney through a mutual friend in 1994. She was then directing a documentary about a young Catholic nun who worked on the Sydney waterfront. When I met Sylvie I thought it would be good to work on a project with her.
Growing up in Elwood and going to school in St Kilda, I’d been in the heart of a very Jewish part of Melbourne. I played a lot with Jewish kids and became a very close friend of Moishe Gordon, a Chabad Orthodox Jew. We decided that a documentary on Jewish identity would be interesting. We began looking at whether Judaism was a religion, an ethnicity or a nationality – or all three. We would examine the culture, the challenges it faces, the humour and the future.
We worked on the Jewish-identity project in our spare time, filming about 64 interviews, including with luminaries such as Lord Jonathan Sacks and Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, a scholar who translated the Talmud into modern Hebrew. We interviewed Rabbi Steinsaltz on a visit to Israel in 1998.
Sylvie and I married in 2000. Later that year our son Jack was born. Jack is the third of Sylvie’s children – he has an elder brother, Nicolas, 30, an engineer, and a sister, Isabelle, 27, a social worker assisting with refugees.
As SMH Deputy Editor, I found my phone began ringing with requests for meetings with leaders of the Jewish community. I only learnt later that once you have ‘deputy’ in your title or are perceived as being on the rise within your media organisation you become a target for cultivation by the fiercely efficient pro-Israel lobby.
Usually the caller was Robert Klarnet, the public affairs director of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. The board would later coordinate tours in partnership with the Melbourne-based Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC). It has become almost a rite of passage for deputy editors of any major Australian news outlet to be offered a ‘study trip’ to Israel. Colin Rubenstein, the head of AIJAC, told me that AIJAC has sent at least 600 Australian politicians, journalists, political advisers, senior public servants and student leaders on these trips over the last 15 years. It is my assessment that by ‘educating’ rising media executives, the Israeli lobby has in place editors who ‘understand’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today, I barely know an Australian newspaper executive who has not been on one of these trips.
Klarnet was good company, but invariably at the end of each meeting came: ‘We’d like to invite you on a trip to Israel.’ After a year or so of phone calls and meetings, I accepted his offer. And so it was that two years after ‘the handshake’ – in 1996 – I made my first trip to Israel, courtesy of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.
My group included Bruce Guthrie, Editor-in-Chief of The Age, and Tony Parkinson from the Melbourne Herald Sun. We flew through Athens to Tel Aviv for our five days of wining, dining and briefings (including a stay in a kibbutz).
Once in Israel, though, I quickly realised how narrow a range of opinions we were receiving. The organisers set us up for an hour or so with some Palestinians to hear the point of view of the Palestinian Authority, but apart from that we were getting only one side of the story – and a hardline side at that. It became clear to me that the whole point of the trip was to defend Israel’s settlements in the Palestinian territories.
To give myself a broader perspective, I asked to go to Hebron, in the occupied West Bank. I’d read enough to know that in Hebron you can see the raw conflict. Hebron is instructive because it’s the only Palestinian city where there is an Israeli settlement in the middle of the Palestinian population; normally, the settlements are separated. In Hebron several hundred settlers live in the middle of 200,000 Palestinians. It’s therefore easier for visitors to see the reality of life for the Palestinians. In Hebron the same Israeli Army that occupies the West Bank operates; in Hebron the same rules of engagement for the army apply.
I told my hosts that I wanted to go, and set out with my paper’s correspondent Ross Dunn. Guthrie also took a trip to Hebron, after telling the Israeli hosts that he wanted to hear more of the Palestinians’ side.
The cruelty of Hebron is there for all to see. I saw how the conflict between the settlers and Palestinians played out at the most basic level. In Hebron, the streets are empty; Palestinians are not able to drive on some roads or walk on others. As my own editor Paul Whittaker would remark when I took him there years later, ‘It’s like Dresden after the bombing.’
Whittaker had broken away from the group he was with – as his correspondent, I had picked him up after the day’s meetings and driven h
im to Hebron. We arrived late at night. The heavy Israeli Army presence, the lights and the empty streets gave the city a certain eeriness. Whittaker was confronted by what he saw. He asked one soldier at the closed checkpoint into the Old City: ‘Where are the Palestinians?’
The soldier smiled and replied: ‘They’re all tucked up in bed!’
On this first trip I believed the claims that Hebron is an exception – but I would come to realise it’s only different because you can see everything.
In Hebron, Palestinians have put wire over their market stalls to stop them being hit when Jewish settlers living above them throw bricks, chairs, dirty nappies and rotting chickens onto them. Israeli soldiers will sometimes decide, without notice, to lock the Palestinians into the old part of the city at night, behind big security gates that look like cages.
I thought to myself that this was where the real story was, not in all the fine restaurants paid for by the organisers of our trip. I also took Paul Whittaker to Bethlehem, where we stood under the ‘fence’. He looked up at the structure, more than twice the size of the Berlin Wall.
‘Is this a wall or a fence?’ I asked.
‘A wall,’ he said.
‘So can you remember this next time you get a letter complaining that I refer to it as a wall?’
What I had not realised when I first arrived in Israel was that wave after wave of journalists, editors, academics, student leaders and trade union officials were taken to hear the same spin from the same small group of people used to defend Israel’s policies in the West Bank – that is, the occupation through settlements.
I came back from that trip and said to Sylvie, ‘We really must push ahead with our Jewish project.’
Meanwhile, in 1995, John Alexander appointed me the Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. I’d been determined to get back to Israel with Sylvie, and during our holidays that year we finally managed it.
We interviewed Shimon Peres, former Israeli Prime Minister and future president, a man who was older than the State of Israel itself. Peres’s staff had agreed to a 15-minute interview. Peres walked into the room. He’d done thousands of interviews, and the prospect of yet another one no doubt loomed heavily. At first his answers were dour. But one question changed everything.
‘Mr Peres, when was the first time that you felt Jewish?’
Time became irrelevant: Peres talked for the next 90 minutes. He described what it was like to be a boy in Poland in 1931. Anti-Semitism had been on the rise and he recalled walking down the street with his grandfather, the famous Torah scholar Rabbi Tzvi Hirsh Meltzer. When people shouted anti-Semitic abuse, Peres had been frightened. ‘My grandfather reached down and took my hand,’ Peres told me. ‘At that moment, through my grandfather’s hand, I felt for the first time a connection to my Jewish ancestry.’
Two days after that interview, Sylvie and I were in a different world. We wanted to understand the mindset of Israel’s enemies, so we drove south and walked into Gaza. Thanks to a Palestinian journalist contact, we were able to meet with all three major Palestinian factions: Fatah (Yasser Arafat’s party), Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The PIJ was founded in 1981 by disillusioned members of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. According to the US’s Council on Foreign Relations, the PIJ violently opposes the existence of Israel. Hamas was founded in 1987 and also emerged from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In 2006 Hamas defeated Fatah in an election in Gaza, and has ruled since then. Hamas opposed Fatah’s engagement in the Oslo peace process.1
Sylvie and I visited the home of Ismail Abu Shanab, the number two Hamas official in Gaza, second only to founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Shanab met us at his front door. He was not a typical Hamas leader: the 43-year-old with 11 children had a Masters degree from Colorado State University. His children played in the backyard as we sat talking. We were there as part of our research into the Jewish identity – I wanted to try to understand how a group such as Hamas viewed the Jewish people in general, rather than the State of Israel.
Shanab was at first surprised when I asked him about Abraham. But then he drew on the Old Testament to support his view that Israel was in this part of the world illegitimately. ‘You should take note,’ he said, ‘that in the Old Testament Abraham has to buy the burial site in Hebron to bury his wife Sarah. If the Jews owned the land he would not have had to buy it.’
Shanab quickly changed the conversation. He talked about how Israeli bulldozers were demolishing houses, how Israeli settlers were killing Palestinian farmers and the Israeli Army was killing Palestinian children. This, he said, was terrorism. ‘We do not justify violence, we defend ourselves from very heavy attacks from the Israelis – the settlers, the government, soldiers, tanks – and the stealing of our land.’ Then he added: ‘We can make the strongest military in the Middle East cower. There is no atomic bomb and no weapon against the human being bomb. We have a million of them. There are children here in this refugee camp that have nothing to live for. They have no hope. They have no future. We tell them to go into Israel to do this and they will go into Israel and do this. So who’s got the power here? You know?’
When you grow up in a country like Australia, you think there is always a chance for negotiation and peace. I said to him, ‘Surely this is not the way. This is not the future.’
He replied, ‘It’s easy for you to say this from Australia but we are under occupation. This is a war. The Israelis are bombing us and we respond. It’s a war. This is not coexistence. For Hamas there is no grey, just black and white, it’s just, “Forget about negotiation. One day Israel will accept the fact that they can’t be the occupier and until that day we are at war with them.”’
Next our journalist contact took us around and around the back blocks so that we would not be able to remember where we had driven, and finally to a tall building where we went up to the 10th floor and then down to the ninth floor and met a senior member of Islamic Jihad. Then word came through to us that if we came to ‘Chairman Arafat’s’ compound we might meet the PLO leader himself. That evening, with a breeze blowing from the Mediterranean, we walked through the compound. As we looked up we could see security guards on the rooftops watching us. Given the number of assassination attempts on Arafat – both from Israel and from Palestinian militant groups – this was no surprise. In the end Arafat did not appear.
The Peres and Shanab interviews in particular had challenged us. So complicated were the politics of the Middle East that the public positions of these two men apparently differed from their private positions. Internationally, Peres is hailed as a peace-maker – he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Oslo Accords – but within Israel he was known as one of the strongest supporters of settlements and the Hilltop Youth, a hardline group of national religious settlers who would take hilltop after hilltop and turn them into outposts which were illegal even under Israeli law.
And while Ismail Abu Shanab talked about ‘human-being bombs’, within Hamas he was known to argue against the use of bombs, and to have advocated a long-term political solution with Israel. He once told the Israeli media: ‘Let’s be frank, we cannot destroy Israel. The practical solution is for us to have a State alongside Israel. When we build a Palestinian State, we will not need these militias. All the needs for attack will stop. Everything will change into a civil life.’ In 2003, Shanab would be assassinated by an Israeli helicopter as he drove his car through Gaza City, leading Hamas to declare an end to a truce with Israel. Two months before his assassination, Shanab told American television journalist Ted Koppel that Palestinians were willing to renounce violence and accept Israel’s existence in return for Israel withdrawing from the West Bank.2
The Peres and Shanab interviews had shown Sylvie and me that in the Middle East what people say is not necessarily what they believe. We were determined that we would come back.
So how would we get back to the Middle East? For the next 10 years this was an issue ticking away in the back of my mind.
After editing the Sydney Morning Herald for another three years, I moved to The Bulletin then joined the Nine Network’s investigative program Sunday for seven years. By this point I was quite keen to get back into newspapers, and it felt like the right time to start thinking seriously about the Middle East. Sylvie and I wanted to go to Israel to finish our Jewish-identity series; you can’t understand modern Judaism without understanding Israel.
One day I ran into Paul Whittaker of The Australian, who suggested I have lunch with him and his boss, Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell. They offered me a position on the paper. My one request was to be the paper’s next Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem. They agreed.
I worked at The Australian for just over a year, then the Middle East position came up when the current correspondent, Martin Chulov, went to The Guardian.
Despite the dangers of living in such a politically volatile region, Sylvie was just as keen as I was to move there. But we would be taking an eight-year-old child with us. So we looked into the security situation. We ascertained that there was an official French Government school similar to the one Jack had been attending in Sydney, the International French School in Maroubra. Jack was not so keen to leave his friends but took it in his stride.
One thing that weighed on my mind was that Jack might absorb the idea that the world is full of hate and conflict. So we resolved to shield him as much as possible. We decided that when I returned from a work trip I wouldn’t tell Jack about the things I’d seen in places like Iran, Egypt, Libya and Gaza.
Still in Sydney, Sylvie and I began Arabic classes and I decided that I would learn Hebrew in Jerusalem. Then, in October 2008 – two months before I flew out – The Australian put me into ‘hostile environment safety training’. For this I travelled south of Sydney to bushland with Michael Sainsbury, a colleague from The Australian who was being posted to Beijing. We were coached in navigation, the use of cover, satellite communications, evacuation and how to react when under attack in a vehicle.