6 January 2015
IT WAS OUR LAST DAY IN JERUSALEM. SYLVIE, JACK AND I woke up at the American Colony Hotel. It was almost six years to the day since we arrived here to begin our great adventure. Six years since we landed at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, excited but uncertain about what lay ahead. A few days earlier we’d moved out of our house, and since then we’d been based here, saying goodbye to friends and contacts and doing tasks such as closing bank accounts and trying to convince a bureaucrat in the water company that we wanted our programmed payments to cease.
Early in our time here, Sylvie and I had talked about how, when we finally left, we’d have a farewell party to which we’d invite our Israeli and Palestinian friends. How naïve we’d been. We now realised how absurd that idea was. The days when Israelis and Palestinians would share social occasions were long gone.
On this, our last morning, we gathered for breakfast. There was a certain sadness for the three of us. The Middle East had become such a major part of our lives. Jack had virtually grown up here. He came here as an innocent, wide-eyed, eight-yearold boy and was leaving a 14-year-old on the verge of young adulthood. Most of his real friends were here. Likewise, Sylvie and I had enjoyed a golden period in our marriage, travelling for work and pleasure, and building up a wonderful circle of friends.
However, the conflict was with us until the very end. The American Colony Hotel, which is in East Jerusalem, ordered a Palestinian taxi driver for us – what the Israelis call a Jerusalemite. He told us his family had stayed here during the violence of 1948 when Israel was established, and he only had Israeli residency, not citizenship. This meant he had limited rights – for example, Israel did not allow him to vote in national elections.
As we arrived at the security gates leading to Ben-Gurion Airport, he wound down his window. When dealing with armed Israeli security officers at these checkpoints, Palestinian drivers often try to speak Hebrew with thick Israeli accents, in the hope that they won’t be taken aside.
On this, our last trip to the airport, this strategy failed as dismally as such attempts usually did. The Israeli officers could tell immediately that he was a Palestinian, which meant we would have a much longer security check and he would be given a serious interrogation.
Finally we were allowed into the terminal. We sat at the gate waiting to board.
‘What an extraordinary time we’ve had,’ Sylvie said to Jack and me. We discussed where we thought Israel was heading. The conversation had a sad personal note for Sylvie: two days earlier, a Palestinian woman she knew from the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank was shot by Israeli soldiers, although had survived.
I asked Jack how he looked back on his time here. ‘It’s been fun,’ he said. ‘But I think the political situation is terrible. Some of my friends from school have to stop themselves from speaking Arabic in the street for fear that they will be attacked. It’s sad.’
My own thoughts wandered across the extraordinary stories I’d covered while based here. I’d been an eyewitness to the optimism of the Arab world as it tried to find democracy then watched it all come crashing down so violently. My view was that the Arab Spring failed not because ‘Arabs and democracy don’t go together’, as some say, but because countries cannot go from dictatorships to democracies in one step. Democracy will come, one day, to various Arab countries, but first they need to set up independent institutions such as police forces and civil services. I’d covered the funeral of Nelson Mandela, who I regarded as the greatest man of the 20th century. I’d covered three wars between Israel and Gaza, and seen the senselessness of that conflict.
Finally our plane took off. As I looked down at Tel Aviv’s high-rise buildings glistening beside the Mediterranean Sea, I felt a sadness that these years had passed – so quickly. Professionally, I felt proud that I’d done my job honestly. The Israeli lobby made all sorts of efforts to get me to soften my reporting. I was pleased I hadn’t buckled.
This had been the toughest assignment I’d ever had – by far. But those who’d read my reports over those six years could have been confident that they were reading facts, not propaganda. Back in Australia, I will often run into people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who remark that they were surprised I was able to get published what I did, and that they appreciated it. That, in the end, is what journalists should do: report what’s in front of them. Then it’s over to the politicians and the public to decide what they do with that information. But without facts, they cannot know what they are dealing with.
Several crucial events had occurred during our six years in Jerusalem. Firstly, Israel reached its demographic tipping-point between Israelis and Palestinians: a crucial factor in any potential solution. Depending on whose figures you accept, the number of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza equalled or passed the number of Jews in Israel and the West Bank (since 2005 there have been no Jews in Gaza).
Professor Sergio DellaPergola is regarded as Israel’s foremost demographer. According to him, as of 2016 the Jewish population of Israel, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem was 6,336,400. This compares with the Palestinian population of 5,967,100 – made up of 1,757,700 living in Israel, 2,448,800 in the West Bank and 1,750,600 in Gaza. However, the Israeli Civil Administration estimates that there are 2,919,350 registered Palestinians in the West Bank. This would mean that the Palestinian population has passed the Jewish population. Whichever figure one accepts, the tipping-point has either arrived or is arriving, with faster birth rates of Palestinians than Israelis.
The reason this is so important is because it means, now or in the near future, a minority Jewish population has control over the lives and movements of a majority Palestinian population. While Israel does not occupy Gaza the way it does the West Bank, it controls movement in and out of Gaza with its naval blockade and it controls entry and exit points, along with Egypt in the south.
The other major event that happened in our time in Israel was a dramatic escalation in settlement growth. When we arrived in 2009 there were 296,000 settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. When we left, there were 385,000, according to the Israeli human rights group Peace Now. This meant the number of settlers had grown by 30 per cent.
As we sat for the first time all those years ago on our balcony over Jerusalem, there was so much we didn’t know. We did not truly understand either Israelis or Palestinians, and we did not understand that the powerful side of the equation – Israel – has, for now, pushed away the desire for peace.
Six years on, we had seen so much. We had lived and breathed this place, the good and the bad, the wonderful and the dreadful. We had met good people on both sides of the conflict who yearned for peace, and for their children to have better lives than they’d had.
But we were also leaving disappointed and sad. We knew that what is coming could have been avoided. And we got to know too many of the people – both Israeli and Palestinian – who will face this coming storm.
This tragedy now seems inevitable. Almost 3 million people in the West Bank cannot be denied all civil rights for more than 50 years without dire consequences and almost two million people in Gaza cannot be locked forever in the world’s largest open-air prison. One day many of those five million people will rise up.
We arrived back in Australia on 10 January 2015. Shortly after our return, we were invited to a Bar Mitzvah in the northern Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay. The son of some friends of ours had come of age.
Something occurred at the event that surprised me. Towards the end of the ceremony, the rabbi asked us all to pray for the Israeli Defence Forces. He drew on Deuteronomy 20:4: ‘For the Lord, your God, is the one who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.’
I was surprised both by the explicit message and the fact that it was being delivered in Australia. I’d heard many such exhortations in Israel, but hearing this in Sydney jarred. My reading of the prayer was that virtually anything the IDF do in battle is justified because, after all, God is not just with them, but fighting against the enemy to save them.
I’d covered three Gaza wars and found it hard to believe that any god could justify the dropping of white phosphorus onto heavily populated areas. The fact that we were being asked in a relatively modern Jewish community in Sydney to pray for a foreign army confirmed how deeply the propaganda of ‘the most moral army in the world’ had seeped into Australia.
Another event occurred after our return that confirmed why the Israeli Government believes it has the support of countries like Australia in continuing its occupation. In February 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu made an official visit: the first by a sitting Israeli prime minister. The reception he received was extraordinary; I had no doubt that he would never receive such adulation in Israel.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office invited me to a lunch for Netanyahu in Sydney. It was attended by about 400 business men and women, including leaders of the Jewish community. This was a serious show of business power; I walked past six billionaires before I even found my table.
That night, Netanyahu received a rapturous reception at the Central Synagogue in Sydney’s Bondi Junction. Soon afterwards, I had lunch with Rabbi Levi Wolff, chief minister at the synagogue. Over chicken soup and a bottle of kosher wine in Bondi, Rabbi Wolff told me he’d never seen anything like the interest the Netanyahu visit evoked. Two Holocaust survivors who were desperate for a seat in the synagogue on the day came to see Rabbi Wolff and rolled up their sleeves, displaying their tattooed numbers from the Holocaust. For them the opportunity to see Netanyahu rounded out their circle of survival.
Rabbi Wolff and I talked about some of the themes of this book. He predicted that I would be hit by some criticism, but he toasted me with a glass of wine: ‘You have an important job to do. As Dick Cheney said, “Dogs never bark at parked cars.” If you’re moving and actually doing something in life then people will attack you.’
A year and a half after we returned to Australia, we went back to Jerusalem. It was our first overseas holiday after coming home and the three of us all nominated Jerusalem as the place we’d most like to visit. For all its problems, we were drawn back. Leaving Israel had made us realise the depths of the friendships we had made there, both Israeli and Palestinian. ‘Welcome back to your second home!’ Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar quipped when we went to dinner at his apartment in Netanya.
When you live in conflict, friendships and family become even more important. We were keen to experience the strange magic of Jerusalem again. The city may be, as Amos Oz once wrote, ‘an old nymphomaniac who squeezes lover after lover to death, before shrugging him off her with a yawn’, but we were enchanted by her. We visited our neighbours from Avi’s apartment, Ilan the historian and Stephanie the museum curator. Ilan had developed lymphoma, but was being successfully treated. ‘My doctor is an Arab woman,’ he told us proudly, explaining that hospitals remained perhaps the only place of coexistence. Ilan and Stephanie were old-time Israelis who were distressed at how the occupation was sabotaging their country.
While I was there, I checked the situation in the military court. After my various articles, the Israeli Government had vowed to improve the system. The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Yigal Palmor had two years earlier told me that his government had taken note of my reporting about children. ‘You’ve made a difference,’ he said.
But in fact I found the situation had worsened. Detention rates for Palestinian children were up 93 per cent in 2016, according to Military Court Watch. I realised that this situation could never really improve as long as the occupation continued. There might occasionally be a dip, but the ongoing detention of Palestinians is a key weapon in maintaining settlements and enforcing the occupation.
For many years, Israeli lawmakers had given lip service to the idea of a Palestinian State. But they’d always fallen back on a range of excuses as to why this was not possible – most commonly that the Palestinians were not ‘partners for peace’.
But in 2017, the Israeli Government dropped all artifice when the Knesset passed the Regularisation Bill. This law allows Israel to retroactively legalise Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It allows Israel to expropriate private Palestinian land and give it to Jewish settlements for their exclusive use. In effect, it makes ‘theft’ an official Israeli policy.
Even leading lights of the Likud Party expressed their concern. Former Likud Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor described the law as ‘evil and dangerous’, explaining that ‘the Arabs of Judea and Samaria did not vote for the Knesset, and it has no authority to legislate for them’. Another Likud heavyweight, Benny Begin – the son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin and considered one of the most right-wing members of Netanyahu’s government – called it ‘the robbery Bill’, saying it allowed for the ‘looting’ of Palestinian land.1
The leader of the Labor Party, Isaac Herzog, predicted that the law would see Israel’s leaders face international justice one day. Speaking before the Bill was passed, Herzog said: ‘It is not too late to stop the horror of a freight train. The train that leaves from here will only stop at the Hague’: a reference to the International Criminal Court. ‘Its car will carry international indictments against Israeli and Jewish soldiers and officers.’2
But the ruling extreme right wing applauded the passing of the Bill. Bezalel Smotrich, a member of Orthodox party the Jewish Home, called it ‘an historic day for the settlement movement’, adding: ‘From here we move on to expanding Israeli sovereignty [in the West Bank] and continuing to build and develop settlements across the land.’3
The Knesset also pushed ahead with a range of new laws that weakened the position of Palestinians still further. Documented by the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, they included a law allowing the State to revoke someone’s citizenship in absentia. It prevented a citizen who is outside Israel from returning home if the State has a ‘concern’ that their return could endanger Israel’s national security. It also permitted courts to sentence someone convicted of throwing stones to 20 years’ imprisonment, and even to impose fines on the parents of stone-throwers. Another law allowed the banning of entry to Israel or the West Bank of someone regarded as an advocate of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
The Israeli–Palestinian ‘marriage’ has become so abusive that every sign of conciliation goes nowhere. In January 2017, Hamas announced that it would rewrite its charter, in response to claims that its old charter was anti-Semitic. It agreed to change the language of the charter to make it clear that it did not oppose Jews but the occupation. The draft of the new charter said that Hamas ‘considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of 4 June 1967’.4 This meant that Hamas was accepting the existence of Israel up until its occupation of the West Bank began – that is, accepting the boundaries set out by the United Nations in 1947.
This was big news: it essentially meant that Hamas accepted a two-State solution, putting it in line with countries such as the US and Australia. But that change led to nothing: a few weeks later, Hamas leader Mazen Faqha was shot dead outside his home in Gaza City, a killing Hamas claimed was a targeted operation by Israel.
It is still important to cling to hope, no matter how forlorn this hope may be.
One idea that former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin put forward involved developing a large parcel of land between Israel, Egypt and the Gaza Strip into one massive hospital complex. Patients and doctors from all three places would come together for medical care. Those advocating the idea saw it as a way of building on one of the few areas of common interest, and seeing enough relationships develop from this to create a well of goodwill. From that well of goodwill, it was hoped that greater understanding of each other could be found.
Developers and architects were engaged for the project – but they were sworn to strict confidentiality. A Turkish benefactor offered US$800 million as a contribution. Rabin’s advisers also looked at building a similar complex at a site where Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria meet. Doctors from Gaza could sit in the cafeteria next to doctors from Israel, while children from Lebanon would be lying in beds next to Israeli children.
But one day it all came to a halt. The Israeli Ministry of Defence informed those involved in the project that it would not be proceeding. Their reason? That they could not guarantee security of the hospitals. Even though an Israeli prime minister had come up with the plan, Israel’s defence establishment sank it. It confirmed my view that the Israeli military establishment was sometimes more powerful than the country’s elected officials.
My own suggested solution draws more broadly on the fundamentals of the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. I believe that that plan stands the test of time. The great advantage – from Israel’s point of view – is that in one document it delivers a peace agreement with the 22 members of the Arab League.5 The economic power that this would deliver to Israel is unimaginable: the commencement of business and diplomatic dealings with countries as regionally powerful as Saudi Arabia and Qatar would unleash a new economic bloc on the world. Business dealings already go on between Israel and the Gulf States – indeed, even discreetly with Iran – but they are done at an unofficial and under-the-radar level. Enacting the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative would exponentially increase trade and joint ventures.
One factor rarely considered when people discuss the Arab Peace Initiative is that it would deliver to Israel a new peace agreement not just with 22 countries but with 57. This is because the Arab Peace Initiative was also endorsed by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a group of 57 countries that include Iran.
‘Israel is in the region but not part of the region,’ a senior Jordanian official – a supporter of the Arab Peace Initiative – told me during a visit I made to Amman in 2012. ‘To become part of the region they need to solve the Palestinian issue, and that means helping to create a Palestinian State.’
The world was given a taste of what peace could bring to the Middle East after Israel and Jordan signed a peace agreement in 1994. The change within Jordan was profound. Before that deal was signed, the conflict with Israel – and the potential for war at any time – had consumed Jordanians and their political dialogue. But once peace was made, Jordan began to focus on internal issues: creating employment, alleviating poverty and building schools and hospitals.
The enthusiasm of a move towards Israeli–Palestinian peace ended, of course, in 2000, amid the disappointment of the failure of the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David, and the beginning of the Second Intifada after Opposition Leader Ariel Sharon famously visited the Temple Mount (one of the contentious topics of the peace talks). Four years later, around 4000 Palestinians and Israelis were dead.
Israeli writer Amos Oz believes that the end to the conflict will not be a happy one, but continues to hope that it will not be marked by violence. ‘The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a clash of right and right,’ he wrote. ‘Tragedies are resolved in one of two ways: the Shakespearian way or the Anton Chekhov way. In a tragedy by Shakespeare, the stage at the end is littered with dead bodies. In a tragedy by Chekhov, everyone is unhappy, bitter, disillusioned and melancholy but they are alive. My colleagues in the peace movement and I are working for a Chekhovian not a Shakespearian conclusion.’6
Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote in Jerusalem: The Biography that the city belongs to no one and exists for everyone in their imagination. ‘And this is the city’s tragedy as well as her magic; every dreamer of Jerusalem, every visitor in all ages from Jesus’ Apostles to Saladin’s soldiers, from Victorian pilgrims to today’s tourists and journalists, arrives with a vision of the authentic Jerusalem and then is bitterly disappointed by what they find.’7
Like so many through the ages, I, too, left Jerusalem bitterly disappointed. For me, though, it wasn’t a disappointment with my vision of Jerusalem but with the decisions of modern politicians – led by Benjamin Netanyahu. He and his government today have unprecedented power. They could give the Middle East its best chance – its only chance – for decades to resolve one of the region’s most destabilising conflicts – the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (the other being the Shia–Sunni conflict whose resolution will rely on Iranian and Saudi Arabian leadership). As long as Palestinians living with no rights and no hope keep increasing in number, a time bomb ticks away. Israel does not need to pretend any confected warmth towards the Palestinians. Now is the time to act, not when another round of sustained violence envelopes Israel in the distrust of the international community.
Twenty years ago, when Sylvie and I first visited Israel, debate among Israelis was fierce. Now, as the country becomes more isolated, many Israelis want to cut contact with those who challenge what their government is doing in the West Bank.
When Sylvie, Jack and I arrived in Jerusalem, we had hope. As we sat on that balcony at the beginning of our great adventure, we looked across Jerusalem with awe and excitement. But now we’ve seen the reality.
If the whole world could see the occupation up close, it would demand that it end tomorrow. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians would not pass muster in the West if the full details were known. The only reason Israel is getting away with this is because it has one of the most formidable public-relations machines ever seen, and enormous support from its diaspora communities. But while this worked for the first few decades of the occupation, now virtually every incident between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian is filmed by a mobile phone. Military occupations look ugly because they are ugly. Israel’s reputation will bleed as long as its control over another people continues.
I predict – with sadness – that one day history will catch up with Israel. The longer that takes, the more tragic it will be.
Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham once said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. From our balcony over Jerusalem, I’ve written this first draft of an extraordinary period. I deeply hope that the final version of history is not what it is shaping up to be.
We must avoid a coming tragedy.