February 2009
JERUSALEM: A BEGUILING CITY, WITH ITS OWN HIDDEN rhythms. One moment normal, the next frenzied; one moment enchanting, the next a battleground. Things are rarely what they seem.
After a month in our temporary accommodation, we’d found an apartment at the end of the Haas promenade in what was ‘no-man’s-land’ – in front of our balcony was Palestinian East Jerusalem and behind us was Jewish West Jerusalem. We’d been in contact from Sydney with a wonderful agent called Eva Aviad. She dealt with most of the foreign media and started referring possible options to us.
One day, she showed us an apartment. We loved it. It was a warm family home, but what charmed us was the stunning balcony with panoramic views over Jerusalem and Jordan. It was huge and beyond our budget, but the owner and Eva had a solution – we could take half of the apartment on our budget.
We met the owner, Avi Mordoch, who told us that even though this was his dream home he’d decided to move his family to the beaches near Tel Aviv. ‘It’s time for me to show my children a normal childhood,’ he said. A secular Jew, he disliked the growing influence of ultra-Orthodox Jews and what he believed was the growing number of Palestinians. (Avi reflected the view of many Israelis that the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem was increasing, when in fact it was falling.)
Our view was so spectacular that Avi had once invited Ehud Olmert, then Mayor of Jerusalem and later Prime Minister, to bring a foreign delegation here. ‘You are now on the roof of the world!’ Olmert told them.
We would move into another place during our last year in Jerusalem, but for the next five years Avi’s dream apartment, with its amazing views, would be our home.
In our first months in Jerusalem everything seemed exotic. As the sun set over the Old City we’d enjoy a religious symphony from our balcony. First came the Muslim call to prayer from the mosques below. ‘Allah hu Akbar!’ – ‘God is Great!’ – echoed across the valley. The green lights of the mosques would glow as the sky faded. From each mosque a muezzin would chant through a microphone.
Then at sunset on Fridays the ‘Shabbat siren’ would sound, ushering in 24 hours of prayer and family time for Jews. I loved the way the different sounds blended into one; they’d hit the hills of Jordan then bounce back.
Our Jewish neighbours would recite Shabbat prayers. In the apartments around us we could see them light candles and sway back and forth as they prayed towards the Western Wall, the holiest place for Jews. We could see the Western Wall from our balcony. On Friday nights the beautiful, ancient stones would be illuminated to create a wall of light. Some worshippers would place their hands against these stones, reciting prayers that were thousands of years old. Others pushed pieces of paper with handwritten prayers between the cracks.
Amid the Friday night Hebrew songs and Muslim calls to prayer, my own tribe – the Christians – doggedly refused to concede defeat. Although Christians are now very few in the Holy Land, the bells of the Catholic and Armenian churches would ring out across the Old City. From our balcony, we’d have to listen carefully to hear them; in this battle of the airwaves between the three monotheistic religions, the Christians came in a distant third. But every so often – between the ‘Allah hu Akbar’s and the Hebrew psalms – you could hear them. It might have been due to my days at Christian Brothers’ College, or perhaps because I’ve always supported the underdog, but those Christian bells always gave me a lift. Two thousand years – and still hanging in there. Just.
I would realise how much Christianity in Israel was struggling, though, when I visited holy sites such as the place near Nazareth where Mary, mother of Christ, was born. There was not even a plaque. On the spot where Jesus is believed to have delivered his famous Sermon on the Mount, there was not a single reference to him. Bethlehem, his birthplace, was now a town virtually crippled by Israel’s occupation.
Life for Christians is not easy in the Holy Land – it can be quite hostile. We spoke to priests who told us they do not walk in the Old City in their cassocks, as this makes them a target. One afternoon Sylvie saw an ultra-Orthodox man spitting at an elderly nun walking near Jaffa Gate, in front of Israeli Border Police; they did not react. A few weeks beforehand, a member of the Knesset, Michael Ben-Ari, tore up a copy of the Christian Bible and threw it into a bin in front of a television camera crew. The Bible, he said, was an ‘abominable’ book.
As a family, we embraced local life with gusto. We enrolled Jack in an Israeli judo school and summer camp, and he made friends with some Palestinian students at the French school, while I began to study Hebrew and learnt to read and write it to a basic level. The street signs in Jerusalem were in Hebrew, English and Arabic, and traffic was appalling, so I used the time to teach myself the Hebrew alphabet. I would later take formal lessons at an ulpan, or language school.
There are almost 800 foreign journalists registered to work in Israel, second only to Washington DC. I found it useful comparing stories – what we had seen or done, where we had been, and our attitudes to the situation in Israel. We soon got to know a large number of journalists and diplomats – but many of them would only stay two or three years, which made it difficult in terms of friendships, especially for Jack. On the other hand, locals knew that we would be going home at some stage too. But gradually we did make friends, mainly through Jack’s school, and in our building and our neighbourhood. An Israeli couple on the floor below, Ilan, a historian, and Stephanie, a museum curator, became very good friends; we regularly had dinner in each other’s apartments, and they arranged lunches for us to meet their Israeli friends.
We lived near the wonderful Jerusalem Cinematheque and the German Colony neighbourhood, a famous inner-city area. It also had a local swimming pool, so sometimes on Fridays, after I’d filed for the weekend paper, I’d go there with Jack. In West Jerusalem, most things close on Friday nights for Shabbat, so if we wanted to go out we’d head to the Arab section in East Jerusalem.
Everything around us was new – and much of it unexpected.
There was a ritual at our swimming pool in the German Colony that I watched with fascination. The ultra-Orthodox Jewish men refused to swim with women, so the management insisted that once a week – Thursday nights – all the women leave. I’d be in the changing room as scores of ultra-Orthodox men came in to take off their religious garb. It felt like a scene from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Slave, set in 17th-century Poland. The women from 21st-century Israel filed out of the gates so the men from the 17th century could swim for a couple of hours, freshening themselves up for the next day’s Shabbat. From women to men, from one century to another. All happening at our local swimming pool.
On the buses in ultra-Orthodox areas, men sit at the front and women at the back. Sometimes the men insist on this outside their neighbourhoods. Once, an ultra-Orthodox man told two women on a bus in central Jerusalem to move to the back. The women ignored him. He kept insisting. Finally, one of the women, who had just returned from overseas, said to her friend: ‘I thought I’d landed in Israel but there must have been a mistake – I’ve arrived in Iran!’ The man angrily moved to another seat.
Many secular Israelis told us they wanted to live in a ‘normal country’. But the ultra-Orthodox want Israel to be religious, and their numbers are growing. Their attitudes alienate many secular Israelis, like our landlord Avi. At a lunch with our neighbours, a British-born Israeli likened the ultra-Orthodox to the clerics of Iran. ‘Our men in black coats and beards are just as bad as their men in black coats and beards!’
This was one of the changes that had taken place since Sylvie and I had last been here a decade earlier. But the biggest difference was that there was no significant contact any more between Israelis and Palestinians. On our previous visit, Sylvie and I had gone to a place called Neve Shalom – New Peace – where Jews and Palestinians would live together and make a point of discussing peace and other issues. In those days, there were student-exchange programs to foster mutual understanding between Palestinian families in Ramallah and Jewish families in Tel Aviv. I realised almost all of that had stopped.
Civilians walking around Jerusalem with guns was another big surprise. We were having lunch in a sushi restaurant three months after our arrival when we noticed a man wearing a Glock handgun. He told us he was from New York and had moved to a settlement in the West Bank. ‘I love it here!’ he said. ‘We have a lot of guns in the US but I can’t walk around New York with one of these!’ We would be surprised going to a supermarket or café and having to be searched and go through a metal detector while heavily armed Israeli youths passed through without being checked.
Many people in their 20s had come from overseas – including Australia – to join the ‘messianic mission’ to build up the settlements in ‘Greater Israel’, or the biblical land of Israel. They talked of ‘reclaiming Judea and Samaria’ (i.e. the West Bank) from the Palestinians who, in their view, were wrongly given it by the United Nations in 1947, even though Israel agreed to that deal.
Another thing that surprised us was how small this part of the world is. When we travelled to the Golan Heights we could look into Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. In southern Israel, we could swim in the Red Sea and look into Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
In the Middle East you see wars close up. Locals told us how, during the Gulf War in 1990 to 1991, scud missiles ordered by Saddam Hussein in Baghdad could be seen flying past Jerusalem on their way to Tel Aviv. Television crews set up on rooftops to film them. Once, a siren warned of an incoming scud; it led to a famous photograph of patrons at the Jerusalem Theatre wearing gas masks and listening to Isaac Stern playing with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Saddam Hussein could not stop the Sarabande from Bach’s D Minor Partita for solo violin.
War had become part of daily life. In Israel we discovered the ‘Code Red’ app, which alerts people to where rockets from Gaza are falling. People sit in cafés in Israel and look at their phones for Code Red alerts – ‘A rocket towards Ashkelon’, ‘A missile fired towards Efrat’.
We heard that Israelis were taking folding chairs and binoculars to a hill in Israel looking into Gaza and would cheer when missiles exploded there. Sylvie and I went to see if it was true. It was quite obscene – it was like an outdoor café, with an old sofa, lots of chairs and someone had even set up a barbecue. People cheered and took selfies with bombs exploding as a backdrop.
Even around Jerusalem, we watched wars in the skies. One night Sylvie, Jack and I went for dinner at the Hosh Jasmin Restaurant near Bethlehem in the West Bank, only 15 minutes from our apartment. It was a beautiful evening and we were eating outside. A siren began and we saw a missile shooting across the sky. Then a second missile appeared, pursuing the first. The first was a Hamas rocket from Gaza and the second a rocket fired by Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’, designed to destroy the first.
The Iron Dome is a brilliant device: a computer system that can tell within seconds the trajectory of a missile and whether it is heading for a populated area. If so, it will fire a missile to hit the incoming missile. If the incoming missile is heading into the sea, or the desert, the Israelis will save the US$90,000 that each missile costs.
On this night in Bethlehem, we watched one rocket chase the other. Finally the Israeli rocket caught up with the Hamas rocket and we heard a massive clash of metal. Seconds later we heard a thud as all this metal crashed to earth. We looked at each other, realising what an extraordinary new life we had.
It’s no surprise that people who have lived in this atmosphere for 50 years have been affected by it. Israelis are some of the most stressed people in the world. Israelis near the Gaza border have lived for years with Code Red sirens, bomb shelters and psychological trauma. I interviewed a psychologist in Sderot whose entire practice was dealing with traumatised Israeli children.
The conflict is not the only cause of stress – there are also financial pressures. Israel has a high cost of living due to the lack of competition among retailers, and wages are low. This pressure creates a culture of distrust.
So notorious are many tradespeople at over-charging that Israel’s Channel 2 runs a show called ‘Yatzata Tzadik’ – ‘You Emerged as Honourable’. Filmed by hidden cameras, tradesmen, dentists and other professionals are asked to give quotes. The dishonest are humiliated on national TV; the ‘honourable’ are given a medal.
Daily life is frantic and pressured. In West Jerusalem, which is predominantly Israeli, arguments and tension are commonplace, whether you are in a bank or a post office. And when you go into the Old City or East Jerusalem, with a high Muslim population, you can get caught up in the Israeli–Palestinian tensions.
The pressure-cooker atmosphere extends to the roads. There are constant traffic jams, noise and stress as people travel around in the heat. In car parks, when two cars are trying to push ahead of each other, the battle becomes which driver will lose their nerve first. I told a shopkeeper that I’d never experienced anything like driving in Jerusalem. ‘People here aren’t very nice sometimes,’ he said. ‘They won’t back down.’
One of our neighbours – a diplomat from the European Union – argued at a traffic light with another driver. He gave her ‘the finger’. She reached into her glove box and pulled out a gun. He panicked and took off. ‘I’m always giving people the finger in Brussels,’ he told me later, ‘and no one gets upset.’
In the space of four months, we had two car accidents. First a bus filled with settlers travelling to Hebron ripped off the front of our car, knocking our bumper bar 15 metres up the road. The next accident happened when we stopped for pedestrians at a zebra crossing: a taxi smashed into the back of us. The driver told us he was distressed and needed to collect his thoughts, then sped off the minute our backs were turned. When we told an Israeli friend about the accident, she said: ‘In Israel you need to make it clear to pedestrians that you’re not going to stop and then they won’t cross.’
Many months and $2400 in repairs later, we were told that if we wanted to get any of that money back we’d have to take the driver to court. But there are so many car crashes in Israel that chasing him down was the last thing the police wanted to do. The Hyundai Getz we’d bought, a former Avis rental car, was getting newer all the time: it now had a new front and back.
The apparent threat of missile attacks seemed to justify the heavy Israeli security presence we noticed everywhere we went. That was how we felt at first, but as time went on we were no longer so sure. As the months went by, a shadow began to creep across our balcony, as we began to realise the situation in Israel was not all it seemed.
Many insights came from passing through Israeli checkpoints.
We would sometimes go to Bethlehem to do our shopping. One day I arrived at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem to find the gates shut.
‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.
‘Security,’ the soldier said.
‘Has there been an incident?’ I asked.
‘Security,’ he repeated.
What I discovered was that the gates had been closed for nine days for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (the Feast of the Tabernacles). I had not realised that for each Jewish holiday, Israel sealed off the West Bank, with only Israeli West Bank settlers allowed to travel into Israel or Palestinians with special permits.
I gradually learnt these border rules can change according to the soldier of the day. On one occasion, an Israeli border policeman in East Jerusalem would not let me speak to a group of Palestinians who were being intimidated by young Israelis during a rally. As a journalist you receive a media card that’s meant to give you access to all public areas. I showed the policeman my card, explaining that it was an official accreditation from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office.
‘Then telephone the Prime Minister,’ he said.
When I responded that that was unfair, he challenged me to a physical fight. ‘Push me!’ he said. ‘Push me here!’ he repeated, pointing to his chest.
I told him I didn’t want to fight and left, finding a side street which allowed me to interview the Palestinians.
To travel by land from Israel to Jordan, you need to cross the Allenby Bridge. Because Israel has no diplomatic relations with most of the Arab world – Egypt and Jordan being the main exceptions – to fly to countries such as Lebanon, Iran or Libya I first had to travel to Amman in Jordan. Foreigners such as me have the option to fly from Tel Aviv to Amman, but this is not an option for Palestinians – they are not allowed to use Tel Aviv airport.
Allenby is the only land crossing that Palestinians are allowed to use. It’s therefore a place where foreigners can observe the interaction between Israeli authorities and Palestinians. You need to get a bus across the no-man’s-land border into Jordan. One time in 2009 I got onto a waiting bus, assuming it was for all passengers.
‘Only Palestinians!’ an Israeli guard insisted.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Palestinians here, foreigners there,’ he replied, pointing at another bus.
When I asked again, he said: ‘That’s the way it is.’
One of the most unpleasant things I saw at Allenby was when Sylvie, Jack and I were returning to Israel after a holiday in early 2010, and waiting, among hundreds of Palestinians, to go through security. Next to us was an elderly Palestinian woman whose trolley was overloaded – blankets, bags, water. It looked as if it was about to topple over. Then an Israeli security guard walked by. Seeing the woman’s trolley, he kicked it, causing much of the contents to fall off.
Jack helped the woman load it all back on. The guard returned and kicked it off again. ‘Why did he do that?’ Jack asked. All I could say was ‘I don’t know.’
On my next visit to Allenby, with Sylvie in mid-2010, Israeli security wanted to examine my bag, so I was taken to a private room. There was a large metal table in the middle of the terminal for Palestinians only. Later we saw an Israeli security officer holding up the clothes of a Palestinian man’s wife. The officer ran his hand along the woman’s underwear. He then held up the woman’s bra. The man stared across the table at the officer while his wife sat nearby with her head in her hands.
To Sylvie and me, the way the security officer was running his hand along the underwear was offensive. This seemed to be about humiliation, not security.
On another occasion at Allenby, Sylvie, Jack and I were waiting alongside an elderly Palestinian man in a wheelchair and his nephew. The man had just been in a car crash; his nephew told us it was a hit-and-run. His leg was bleeding, the blood dripping into a plastic container. He had passed through the security check, openly bleeding, but no official was helping.
His nephew tried to gain the attention of the official behind the counter. She ignored him. The nephew then asked if I, as a foreigner, could help, so I approached two other officials. They pointed me back to the woman in the booth.
I went back and told her that the man needed help. She waved me off, telling me she would attend to him when she’d finished dealing with the line of people at her window. I asked the people in the line whether they would let the injured man go ahead of them, and they agreed. I raised my voice, telling her this was unacceptable.
The woman then turned to the official who had entered the booth next to hers and, indicating me, said I should be ‘punished’. When our turn came, the second official took our passports. She handed back Sylvie’s and Jack’s passports, but not mine. Instead, she gave it to an official from the Interior Ministry, who took it away.
After 20 minutes I sought out Baruch, the manager of the centre, who I knew. I told him that a clearly injured elderly man had been made to wait and that my passport had been taken without reason.
I was then called into an office inside the terminal for a meeting with Interior Ministry officials. When I walked in, the first woman who had refused to help was present. She threatened to cancel my press accreditation. I told her it was a Government Press Office (GPO) card, which she could not cancel. The woman said she wasn’t threatening me, but handed me a new visa – no longer my B1 journalist’s visa but a B2 ‘Not Permitted to Work’ visa.
Instantly my work status had been downgraded. From then on, each time I entered Israel my passport was stamped ‘Not Permitted to Work’. The GPO, however, told me that I could continue to work.
The shadow even invaded our balcony when Sylvie and I entertained our friends. We quickly learnt to keep two different beers in our fridge: Goldstar for Israelis and Taybeh for Palestinians. We would sometimes put on a kosher dinner for our Israeli friends and the following night a dinner for our Palestinian friends. Often the conflict became the main topic of conversation. Many Israelis are automatically hostile towards foreign journalists – but even at social functions, I soon realised that I shouldn’t offer an opinion on the conflict to anyone, no matter what it might be.
On one occasion we were invited to one of our neighbours’ apartments for a Saturday lunch and the conversation turned to the Palestinians and the Israelis. I said something about how I thought the situation with the Palestinians needed to be resolved, and a woman at the lunch turned to me and said, ‘Well, you can’t talk. Look how you’ve treated the Aboriginals. It’s a disgrace what you’ve done to the Aboriginals.’
I said, ‘I agree with you.’
‘What do you mean?’ she responded.
I told her that I agreed that the way we’d treated our Indigenous population was appalling.
She said, ‘But you’re an Australian.’
I replied, ‘Well, yes, and I think it’s wrong, and we’re trying to rectify it. But why should that stop me from having an opinion on the Palestinians?’
It taught me how sensitive Israelis are to criticism from foreigners. After that I became careful never to reveal my personal views.
On another occasion, some Australian friends invited us to their house to watch a rugby game between Australia and South Africa. They also invited some South Africans.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable event: Australia won 21–6. Afterwards, the conversation turned to politics. They said they had been surprised to discover that there were ‘dozens’ of different permits which covered Palestinians – indeed, what I did not know then until I began researching it was that there were 101 different permits which Israel had devised to apply to Palestinians. I asked the three South Africans how they saw the situation between Israelis and Palestinians. The South Africans were from three different backgrounds: a white English South African, a white Afrikaner South African and a black South African. Each of them said that the permit system which Israel used in the West Bank was worse than the notorious ‘pass system’ used during apartheid. Their verdict was that in terms of movement, Israel’s permit system made daily life more unpredictable than the pass system in South Africa.
Their reasoning came as a complete surprise to me. They said apartheid was designed to be an ongoing economic system based on race. White South Africans relied on workers from the townships to perform the blue-collar work. It was about segregation, not expulsion, because if the blacks had left, the economy would have collapsed. But to them, it appeared that the Israelis wanted to make the lives of Palestinians so difficult they would eventually leave.
I’d just watched a great Wallabies win, but as Sylvie and I drove home I wasn’t thinking about the rugby – but about how three South Africans from different backgrounds believed that Israel’s occupation was worse than apartheid.