A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  The response to Virov’s statements was typical of what often happens in Israel – publicly, he was rebuked and a criminal investigation launched against him. Privately, his career went from strength to strength – the criminal case was dismissed for ‘lack of evidence’, even though his own words had condoned the use of violence. Two years later Itai Virov was promoted to brigadier general and made commander of the Gaza Division – responsible for the behaviour of Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

  This contrasted with the treatment of Shachar Berrin, a 19-year-old Australian-born soldier who, in a public forum on the subject ‘The Occupation is Destroying Israel’, said: ‘I serve in the Jordan Valley and we see every day how soldiers … look at these people [Palestinians] not as human beings, not as someone who is equal, but someone who is less than them. And to think that we can just leave the racism and xenophobia – that they will only be racist when they humiliate Palestinians – of course not … I think that once you are conditioned to think something, you bring it back with you [to Israel] and that it deeply affects Israeli society and causes, as our President [Reuven Rivlin] says, to be more racist.’

  Within 12 hours of speaking those words, Berrin was ordered back to his barracks, tried, convicted and sent to a military prison.12

  One ruling in the Jerusalem District Court highlighted the way racism is often a factor in court decisions. Judge Moshe Drori heard the case of Itamar Biton, who did not want to pay 18 shekels for his parking ticket as he left a car park. On 1 January 2006, when the attendant, Ethiopian-born Noga Zoraish, insisted he pay, he rammed her. She screamed but he kept driving, so fast that she fell from the car’s bonnet and was seriously injured. He drove off. Biton pleaded guilty but Judge Drori acquitted him – he said he did not want to give Biton a criminal record and harm his chance of becoming a rabbinical court judge. While publicly the system acted – the Supreme Court in August 2009 overturned the verdict. The Supreme Court issued a suspended sentence. Biton did not serve a day in prison.13

  The Supreme Court’s verdict in the case of an apartment block in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, was also revealing. A property developer had marketed apartments for Jews only. The marketing was clearly discriminatory, something that technically is illegal in Israel. The residents had conclusive evidence – the marketing brochures. The Supreme Court agreed the marketing was discriminatory. The President of the court, Dorit Beinisch, said the project was ‘wrongful discrimination’. However, the Supreme Court allowed it. The marketing project was too far advanced to be stopped – it was ‘a done deal’, the court ruled, so any suggestion of taking the land off the developer was ‘theoretical’, Beinisch ruled. The fact that the Supreme Court had allowed an illegal deal to proceed meant a precedent had been established – if a Jewish-only development could become advanced enough before anyone appealed then developers could argue that the Supreme Court had set a precedent.

  While the Supreme Court rhetorically argues against discrimination and sometimes makes decisions that entrench it, some Israeli leaders are open about their racism. The chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, David Rotem, has said: ‘In my opinion, every Jewish town needs at least one Arab. What would happen if my refrigerator stopped working on a Saturday?’14

  The case of 19-year-old Maysam Abu Alqian demonstrates how shocking the racism can be. To earn money, he worked at two jobs in Tel Aviv – one at Burger King and one at the Super Yuda supermarket. On 22 May 2016, while working at the supermarket, he took some rubbish outside. Two men – one dressed in shorts – demanded Alqian’s ID. According to eyewitness Erez Krispin, Alqian replied: ‘The ID is inside, who are you?’ Krispin says: ‘Before he even finishes speaking, he’s being beaten senseless, a beating like you’ve never seen, teeth flying through the air. The Arab is crushed.’

  Krispin said that an elderly woman tried to intervene, but one of the men yelled: ‘Fuck off before we finish you too!’ Krispin said police arrived and joined in – there were five men beating Alqian. The store manager, Kobi Cohen, said other employees who intervened were also hit. ‘They hit him mercilessly until he was incapacitated,’ Cohen said. ‘Everyone is shocked by what happened. And there’s only one reason for it – the guy was Arab.’15

  Despite the existence of videos and eyewitness accounts, the head of the Israeli Police media department, Chief Inspector Sharon Yamincha, called for a boycott of the supermarket on Facebook. ‘I don’t shop at a supermarket whose employees beat cops,’ he wrote. Yamincha’s post drew support from other police.16

  Israeli writer Ari Shavit wrote in Haaretz newspaper:

  An evil wind is blowing in this country. First it was the rabbis who prohibited the renting of apartments to Arabs. Then it was Jewish youths who attacked Arab passersby … A series of incidents that are ostensibly unrelated, and aren’t even similar, have created a new atmosphere of xenophobia. They have turned Israel into a country that exudes a xenophobic stench. What’s happening to us? Why have dark forces that always bubbled beneath the surface suddenly erupted into the city square? Why has racism reared its head … Instead of arguing about the foreigners who surround us, we’re arguing about the foreigners who live among us.17

  In Haaretz newspaper, under the headline ‘Berlin 1933, Jerusalem 2014’, Israeli journalist Chemi Shalev wrote that as the son of parents who lost their families in the Second World War he needed no convincing that the Holocaust was a crime unique in its evil. ‘But I am a Jew … and when I saw the videos and pictures of gangs of right-wing Jewish racists running through the streets of Jerusalem chanting “Death to the Arabs”, hunting for random Arabs, picking them out by their appearance or by their accents, chasing them in broad daylight, drooling like hysterical beasts and then beating them up before the police could arrive, the historical association was automatic’, he wrote. This public racism was ‘growing by the day, encompassing ever-larger segments of Israeli society, nurtured in a public environment of resentment, insularity and victimhood, fostered and fed by politicians and pundits – some cynical, some sincere – who have grown weary of democracy and its foibles and who long for an Israel, not to put too fine a point on it, of one state, one nation and, somewhere down the line, one leader.’18

  Despite my first bizarre meeting with Captain Shalicar at the café in the German Colony, the Israeli Army did not give up trying to pressure me. That first meeting was friendly, but a few months later Captain Shalicar phoned me again

  ‘John, I want to let you know the IDF is considering banning you.’

  ‘Banning me?’ I replied. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It would mean you would not have access to the IDF.’

  Over 35 years in journalism, I’d upset some powerful people, but this was the crudest attempt at intimidation I’d experienced. ‘Arye, could you please let me know when you do ban me?’

  Shalicar seemed surprised by my response. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I think I can get a page one story out of this.’

  ‘You wouldn’t actually write about being banned, would you?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘When we met at that café in the German Colony you told me you had no problems with the facts of my reporting. You still have not indicated you have any problem with that. My editors would not appreciate us being banned for doing nothing wrong.’

  Shalicar quickly changed tack: ‘We’re not going to ban you, but we’ve been talking about it.’

  Through my six years in the Middle East I’d come under constant pressure from Israeli Army lobby groups to pull my punches. I realised from many discussions with other foreign journalists that this pressure was applied in many countries around the world. Essentially, the Israeli Government, Army and lobby groups did not want the reality of the occupation reported. Of the many hours of discussions I had with my colleagues in the foreign media, one comment shocked me. It was when I asked Philippe Agret, the bureau chief of Agence France Press, a question. AFP is
one of the most powerful news agencies in the world. It is highly regarded as credible and independent. It is famous for resisting pressure in whichever country it operates. Agret and I were discussing how some media groups censored their reporting out of Israel in a way that they did in no other country. I asked him who he thought was self-censoring out of Israel. Without hesitation, he replied: ‘Everybody.’

  CHAPTER 13

  Walking into Syria

  March 2012

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, IT LOOKED LIKE A TYPICAL SUBURBAN house, painted white and nestled in a small village in southeast Turkey. But after some time in this ‘safe house’ of the Free Syrian Army, we realised what it was: a place where everyone wanted to bring down the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

  There was something suggestive of the old IRA about this place: a nondescript house in which men in their 30s and 40s sat on the floor drinking coffee. Boxes of ‘blood stoppers’ – medical goods used in emergencies – lay on the floor. There was no furniture, just piles of mattresses and blankets. Between dozing or talking, the men were on their mobile phones, quietly coordinating one side of a war.

  I was with Australian video journalist Ed Giles in Antakya, or Antioch, and from this house we could look across a valley into Syria, which was about a kilometre away. Suspicion levels in this area were high. This village had a long history of trading across the border – weapons, cigarettes, alcohol, anything. But if goods could cross a border so too could fighters and spies, and this part of the border had become crucial for the movement of weapons and supplies into Syria.

  On a later trip to this border, without my knowledge, my fixer started asking a shopkeeper about how much it would cost to take weapons across the border. The shopkeeper even offered a valet service where your weapons would be waiting for you on the other side after you crossed. There were youths at illegal crossings who would help you cross if you gave them US$30. A whole industry had grown up based on the war just on the other side of the hill.

  Ed Giles and I wanted to come to this border to try to work out the role that Turkey was playing in the Syrian conflict. Turkey was trying to give the impression that it was not helping the rebels to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and I thought that by spending time along the border we could observe whether in fact there was tacit support being given to the rebels by allowing easy transit of supplies and fighters from Turkey into Syria. Syria had become unpredictable, and we’d figured our best chance of getting in – and out – was with the Free Syrian Army. For now, they were the government’s main opposition. But within a year, their uprising against Assad would collapse amid divisions and distrust.

  We visited the safe house three days in a row, trying to get to know the commander, who told us he might be able to get some of his fighters to escort us across into Syria. The commander, a former Syrian Army officer, expressed anger at the role Russia was playing in this war, selling weapons to both sides. He said the price he had to pay for bullets had gone from US25c to US$3 in recent months as the Russians profiteered.

  I asked the commander what strategies he was employing, given that the Assad regime had a serious advantage in terms of firepower. ‘Shoot and hide,’ he replied. ‘We are snipers. We shoot, we run, we hide.’ He said his fighters were under instructions to attack only Syrian soldiers who were not backed up by tanks, and if they killed them it was their chance to take weapons. The commander was overseeing a guerrilla movement, some of whose fighters were teenagers.

  On our fourth day in the safe house, the commander finally gave approval for one of his fighters to take us across the border. The three of us headed down the valley and walked through a field of Turkish orchids. A red sign about 200 metres from a Turkish Army tower warned us that we were entering a Turkish military zone. We had no idea where we were going.

  We walked through the military zone and along a deserted road. We were now entering Syria.

  We walked down a mountain track. Ahead, through a forest, we heard voices.

  Our guide said, ‘Don’t worry, they are our people. I won’t put you in a situation where you are in any danger.’

  We walked another 50 metres and came across tents, barbed wire, trenches, guns and a campfire, around which about 50 fighters sat chatting and drinking tea. They showed us a command post they had built on the hill.

  From the lookout, we could see across the valley to where soldiers were walking around houses taken by the Syrian Army the night before. The fighters that Ed and I were with knew that they could be the targets of an attack. To try to defend themselves, they’d erected a wall of canvas so that anyone attacking would not be able to tell how many fighters were behind it. And if any attackers got this far, there was a final line of defence. ‘Look here,’ one of the fighters said, pushing aside some bushes. Underneath was an explosive device which, he told us, would be detonated from further up the hill if the army attacked.

  The location of the camp was instructive. It was about 100 metres inside the Syrian border, between two Turkish military towers. It was clear that it had Turkish approval: Turkish soldiers in the towers watched us come and go. Not only could these Free Syrian Army fighters cross in and out of Turkey freely, but they could bring ammunition and supplies in too.

  It was clearly a case of plausible deniability: the Turks could still deny accusations that their soil was being used, but at the same time could undermine Assad. It would also be difficult for the Syrians to shell this camp, as they would risk hitting the Turkish Army towers. Because of the relative sizes of the two armed forces – Turkey’s army is the second largest in NATO, and dwarfs the Assad army – Syria did not want a war with its neighbour.

  But on this day, the fighters from the Free Syrian Army made one thing clear to us: they were being beaten. ‘We are exhausted and depressed,’ one said. ‘We don’t have enough weapons to defend ourselves.’ He, too, was critical of the way Russia ‘has been playing both sides’. Russia’s exports of weapons into the Middle East were believed to have increased 20 per cent in the first year of the Arab Spring. Profits from this conflict might have been one reason why Russia would repeatedly oppose any UN resolution calling for Assad to step down.

  We departed with a clear sense that as long as Russia and China opposed any meaningful intervention, Bashar al-Assad would be free to turn Syria into a killing field.

  The last time I’d been to Syria with Sylvie and Jack, two years earlier, it had been a beautiful place. Then the conflict started in March 2011 in the southern city of Daraa, where a peaceful protest had escalated when President Assad sent in his security forces.

  Assad had seen what had been happening in Egypt and Libya, and his thinking would have been that he could not let a small group of protesters become a large group, and that he should crack down early, and hard. Mubarak had allowed the protesters to build up in the streets of Cairo. Millions massed in the streets for 18 days, crippling the economy: the unions refusing to work, massive national strikes. The message to Assad would have been: ‘Crack down, be ruthless, and you have more chance of toughing your way through this.’

  So Assad sent troops in to break up the protests, and instead of just the usual tear gas, they used live ammunition and shot several protesters dead. Assad’s brutality added a new dimension to an already highly stressed population which had endured a harsh drought. Researchers from NASA and the University of Arizona estimated that it had been the worst drought in 500 years, according to media agency Vice News. It reported that between 2006 and 2011, the drought caused 75 per cent of the country’s crops to fail, forcing as many as 1.5 million people off the land and into the cities where they were unable to find jobs.

  Assad had thought that it would end things, but the crackdown was so brutal that it created a sudden welling up of anger across Syria and induced others to come onto the streets. The more security forces Assad threw at the uprising, the more people pushed back – and out of this the Free Syrian Army was formed.

  At Damascus Univer
sity at the start of 2012, about a year into the violence, Assad gave a speech that had a big build-up. It was his first public speech in months, and there were expectations that he was going to either resign or say something historic that would signal genuine reform.

  Instead, Assad decided that he was digging in. He blamed the West and took no responsibility himself. He had done what the hard men around him urged him to do. The same hard men who had urged his father to slaughter 20,000 people in Hama. He went against his own instincts, which were more liberal. He agreed to go down the hard road of brutality.

  Thus he signed the death warrant of any chance of peace in Syria. It was a historic decision. The country was at a crossroads and the President took the wrong road. And now hundreds of thousands of people have paid the price, either by losing their lives or by becoming refugees.

  The Free Syrian Army had been a moderate group that wanted democracy. But a significant portion of the population was against the revolution. The civil war continued because some people benefited from the status quo and didn’t want to lose their power.

  The rise of the Free Syrian Army was quickly derailed by an extraordinary number of outside influences, waging proxy wars. Syria soon became Jihadist Central. The civil war broadened to also become a war against the West.

  With the help of Alawite militia, Assad’s army was involved in a series of massacres of the regime’s opponents. Russia supported Assad from the beginning. Syria hosts a huge Russian naval base on the Mediterranean and Assad is Russia’s major ally in the Middle East. Later, Hezbollah forces came across the border from Lebanon and started to help Assad, and were involved in some decisive battles.

  By my count, 10 distinct outside forces would come to have identifiable roles in Syria, some occasionally and some permanently: Russia, the US and its allies (such as Australia), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Hezbollah, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Kurdish fighters. US intelligence would later estimate that there were about 1500 different rebel groups operating in Syria.