It would take weeks for his wounds to even begin to heal. Meanwhile, he returned to Nicaragua and buried himself in his work. Whereas Rwanda was high international politics and the universal issue of genocide, Nicaragua was the more parochial world of Latin American development economics: no one there outside of Cindy and Tony really cared or understood what he had just gone through.
But by January 1995, only a few months after he returned from Rwanda, the four-year development project in eastern Nicaragua was over. Bob and Cindy, after almost half a decade in Nicaragua, with Bob working seven days a week as a paid consultant, suddenly found themselves back in his small apartment in Manhattan. Bob was depressed. Cindy complained how rude people were at the supermarket compared to the Nicaraguans.
The phone rang.
It was Toni Christiansen from USAID, who knew Bob from Barbados, where fifteen years before he had worked on Dominica hurricane relief. She had money for a jobs project in the Gaza Strip and Janet Ballantyne had just recommended Bob to her.
“I’m your guy,” Gersony said.
He needed work, and because he was still ambitious at fifty, he recognized that Gaza would get him to the Middle East, adding another region to his résumé.
En route to Tel Aviv he stopped in Washington to see Carol Lancaster, the deputy administrator of USAID, right below Brian Atwood. She told him that USAID had $25 million and was looking for impact in order to ease tensions in the occupied territories, but the mission was stalled. There was the usual, hideous Palestinian-Israeli politics—despite the Oslo peace process—made worse by the fact that the State Department did not trust the Israel-based USAID mission for the occupied Palestinian territories. Gersony didn’t care. It was an employment project, and therefore he could apply his experience in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and elsewhere.
He arrived in Tel Aviv, his brain overloaded with logistical questions. He needed an apartment for himself and Cindy since he would be there for six months. He needed background briefings from both the U.S. Embassy and USAID mission in Tel Aviv, as well as a briefing from the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, which dealt with the Palestinians. He had just so many new people to meet and a new region to learn about. He was in shut-his-mouth-and-listen mode, again working long days, seven days a week.
As for Israel itself, it curiously remained only in the background of his thoughts, despite his family history—such a workaholic was he. Tel Aviv itself didn’t help. It was a sterile modern city on the Mediterranean, without the grace, sensuality, and indigenous cultural allure of a Barcelona, Nice, Tunis, or Palermo. The USAID mission was in Dizengoff Tower, an ugly, brutalist twenty-nine-story building with a Sbarro fast-food restaurant in the basement. Visually, being in Tel Aviv was not like being abroad at all.
The USAID office was run by Chris Crowley, the mission director, and Maureen Dugan, the project director for Gaza. Chris Crowley was calm, amiable, very good-looking in a conventional CEO sort of way. He seemed like a guy who was going places in the bureaucracy. The chemistry between him and Gersony was instantaneous: similar to that between Gersony and Mike Ranneberger in Mozambique.
“I liked Bob immediately,” Crowley recalls. “He was serious and full of analytical rigor without being a wonk.”
As for Maureen Dugan, she had chronic back pain and often spoke while lying supine on the floor of her office. She was another one of the great women of USAID, like Carol Lancaster and Janet Ballantyne, who had virtually adopted Gersony, and were less stodgy than the men. At the embassy a few blocks away, the political and economic officer, Norm Olsen, who made constant trips to Gaza—and who was fiercely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause—had one overriding message for Gersony:
“Find things for the kids to do after school.”
Otherwise, Olsen implied, those kids would constitute a breeding ground for Palestinian radicalism. Olsen, a talkative Mainer, knew of what he spoke. He had previously worked for USAID in Gaza and had an intimate knowledge of the territory. Gersony had made a strong impression on him. “A lot of people were always coming out to the Tel Aviv embassy from Washington. Bob was the only one who hadn’t already written his report in his head. He let the evidence on the ground drive his conclusions,” Olsen says.
After meeting his new colleagues at the embassy and the USAID mission in Tel Aviv, Gersony started exploring a bit. He first experienced the visual drama of the Holy Land when he traveled from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, quickly passing by the Old City with its monumental sixteenth-century Ottoman walls built by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, which enclosed the Temple Mount, Wailing Wall, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and so much else. The sunlight seemed to blind him, further sharpened by the ubiquitous stone, which changed from warm rose to cream to dazzling white, depending upon the time of day. He saw a pageant of Gothic, Romanesque, and Moorish arches: the entire panorama crowned by the octagonal Dome of the Rock, with its gold cupola and Hellenistic blue faience frontage. Whereas Tel Aviv was the drab architectural expression of a new and raw Western-oriented settler society, Jerusalem suddenly brought history in a visual sense into the equation for him.
“I’ll have to come back here with Cindy,” he thought.
His car swept by the Rockefeller Museum, built during British rule in Crusader style. The nearby visa section of the U.S. Consulate, with its stone facade, arched windows, and tiled roof, conjured up the period of the late Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate: before the creation of the State of Israel.
The political offices of the consulate, located in West Jerusalem close to the Arab eastern section of the city, operated virtually independently of the embassy in Tel Aviv, and reported directly to the State Department in Washington. The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, though it included Gaza as part of its responsibilities, was immersed in the world of the Jewish state. The consulate, whose area of representation was predominantly the West Bank and the Jerusalem municipal authorities, was generally immersed in the Arab Palestinian side of reality, and point of view, therefore. The embassy dealt intimately with the Israeli government; the consulate tried to have nothing to do with the Israeli government. Though close geographically, the two missions were far apart politically and at a deep emotional level truly distrusted each other: this little diplomatic turf war mirrored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself.
For all these reasons, in addition to being overwhelmed by Jerusalem’s visual pageantry, Gersony was anticipating his meeting with Ed Abington, the U.S. consul general, who Gersony assumed would be a fount of gritty, streetwise wisdom on the Palestinian territories. Abington even bore a vague resemblance to Chester Crocker, with his round glasses and tight WASPy looks, which Gersony over the years had learned to appreciate.
But Abington proved a letdown, filling the time with broad generalities that Gersony felt he could have gotten from the most basic textbooks. “He’s a cold fish,” Gersony thought.
Meanwhile, Norm Olsen, despite being based at the embassy in Tel Aviv, appeared to have a better feel for the occupied territories than Abington. Olsen fixed a meeting between Gersony and retired Israeli brigadier general Fredy Zach. General Zach was the deputy head of the civil administration in the Palestinian territories, and therefore had the job of making the occupation work on a daily basis. He was a bit of a slick operator, but one who knew his subject. He immediately launched into a dense economic briefing, rife with statistics, of the kind that Gersony, given his own background, appreciated. Gersony thought, “He speaks my language. This nuts-and-bolts military guy has been forced to understand the Palestinian situation because the lives of his own people depended on him not being a bullshitter.” In fact, General Zach, born in Basra on the Persian Gulf, was a native Arabic speaker who had spent a year living in a tent with his family in Israel, having just been expelled from Iraq in 1948. Though an ardent Zionist, Zach knew what expulsion was all about and therefore could empathize with the Palestinians.
Zach repeatedly emphasized to Gersony that the Palestinians did not want temporary, make-work jobs. They wanted real jobs in a real economy. Don’t be condescending toward them, he warned. He was one of those high-ranking Israeli officers who had a visceral sense of reality, based on experience, that many of Israel’s own politicians lacked. Gersony was impressed, but was hesitant to become emotionally attached to a former general in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) so soon after his arrival. Picking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when it wasn’t necessary could ruin a State Department or USAID career.
It came time to pick a guide and translator. Chris Crowley in Tel Aviv introduced Gersony to a number of FSNs (Foreign Service Nationals). One stood out: Dr. Jamal Tarazi, a Palestinian medical doctor from a prominent Christian family in Gaza, who had what appeared to be a good bedside manner. Jamal would prove to be an excellent facilitator; he knew everybody in Gaza and was “smart as hell.” Likewise, Jamal’s first impression of Gersony was “of an absolutely good personality with immense experience. And I could judge,” Jamal goes on, “since my father worked in relief assistance for many years for the U.N.” Gersony and Jamal would spend five weeks together in Gaza, conducting 137 one-on-one interviews, going to the homes of ordinary Gazans from all walks of life, in addition to interviewing officials from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). Jamal would make sure that Gersony also got to meet and give a fair hearing to the territory’s leading opinion makers. “We went into some risky neighborhoods,” Jamal recalls, “which even back then were Hamas strongholds. People would gather around us. But Bob was unfazed. He just kept asking questions.”
Gaza then comprised 900,000 people, mainly refugees and their descendants from the vast population movements that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. It was an extremely hot, humid, and crowded place—an Arab version of Soweto. One journalist described it as a “dense, gray concrete shantytown” with black sewage water, crude septic tanks, dingy food stalls, all without greenery.1 It was the kind of physical environment that would turn anybody radical. People were often in a bad mood and out of hope. The water was brackish; not a lemon tree was left. And now, in the spring of 1995, it faced an acute economic and employment crisis, arising from tectonic shifts in the Middle East that were the following:
For decades, arguably the biggest booster of the Palestinian Arab cause against Israel had been oil-rich Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians worked in the wealthy Persian Gulf sheikhdom—20 percent of its population—earning hard currency in Kuwaiti dinars. They sent much of this money back in remittances to relatives in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan. The taxes they paid in Kuwait went not to the Kuwaiti government, but straight to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. This was in addition to direct aid, hundreds of millions of dollars, that the Kuwaiti government sent to the PLO.
But in August 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Arab League, famous for issuing lowest common denominator platitudes of little value, uncharacteristically united with a firm and nearly unanimous statement of support for the Kuwaitis and condemnation of Saddam. There was only one complete holdout: PLO leader Yasser Arafat. It may have been the most unfortunate and inexplicable decision of Arafat’s life, even if Saddam had been giving $10,000 to each of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. (Saddam, though not supporting al-Qaeda, was in fact supporting many other terrorist groups such as Islamic Jihad and the Arab Liberation Front.)2 Perhaps it was the innate radicalism of Saddam’s invasion of the land of these rich and complacent Gulf Arabs that appealed to Arafat’s romantic sensibility, in addition to widespread support for Saddam in the Palestinian street.
The reaction was swift.
The Kuwaitis called Arafat a “traitor.”3 Not only Kuwait but other wealthy Arab Gulf kingdoms deported their Palestinian populations, many of whom had nowhere else to go, other than Gaza and the West Bank. Everything was lost: the remittances in hard currency, the tax rebates to the PLO, and the direct aid to the PLO, even as the population of the occupied territories swelled. The financial damage to the Palestinian territories was $405 million in 1990 alone.4
Simultaneous with these events was the Intifada, the general Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation authorities that began in 1987 and fully ceased only in 1993. Because of the deterioration of the security situation, Israel dramatically reduced the number of Palestinians it allowed to cross its borders daily for work inside Israel. The number of Gazans allowed to work in Israel fell from 50,000 in 1987 to 10,000 in 1995. This mattered, since at the high point of these border crossings, as many as one-third of Gazan families had somebody earning a decent wage in Israel. Finally, Israel allowed large numbers of foreigners, mainly Thais and Romanians, to replace the Palestinians, signaling that there would be no going back to the previous status quo.
One step at a time, the Palestinians, especially the Gazans, had alienated their principal employers—Kuwaitis and Israelis both.
When Yasser Arafat shook hands with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, it was not a triumph for him, but the ultimate humiliation, culminating the train of events that had begun with his fateful decision to back Saddam Hussein three years earlier.
Because the PLO, under the Oslo Accords, recognized Israel’s right to exist, the U.S. Congress appropriated $25 million to Gaza and $100 million to the West Bank.
The money was to be administered by USAID, which had eventually dispatched Gersony to Gaza to help figure out how best to spend it.
What did Gazans think? Gersony asked himself.
As Gersony found out in the course of his 137 interviews, they wanted permanent jobs and small business expansion, based on importing raw materials that they would process and ship out. Everyone from unskilled workers to teachers told him that temporary jobs were getting them nowhere.
“We want jobs measured in person-years, not in person-days,” people repeatedly said.
In other words, the Israeli general’s analysis had been right.
A United Nations official backed this up, telling Gersony:
“I’ve not come across a single Palestinian who agrees with the donor analysis”—that what was needed was more temporary jobs, such as clearing fields of garbage and whitewashing graffiti-strewn walls.
Keeping his thoughts to himself, Gersony could not agree. For despite believing in the essential truth of what people told him in interviews, by now he had decades of experience in similar situations and knew a thing or two. He had seen in Latin America how getting people to work immediately, no matter how menial the jobs, did in fact help to stabilize the political situation. He felt that the hostility to temporary jobs had more to do with the Palestinians’ self-image as a First World people than with the actual needs of Gaza at the time. Yet he kept telling himself, “My job is to be a human listening device. I’ve got to document what people here think.” After all, as his thoughts ran, “This was a sensitive political thing, much more so than Latin America. It’s the first significant, official interface between the U.S. government and the Palestinian people. My survey is more than a survey. It’s a question of relationships before a global audience, unlike with the Miskito Indians.”
As the days and weeks in the concrete slum of Gaza went on, Gersony became gradually more impressed with UNRWA, whose presence was felt everywhere he went. It employed 116 Palestinian engineers, and any project it took on it did properly. Whatever UNRWA had evolved into by the second decade of the twenty-first century, in the mid-1990s UNRWA was a first-class organization, far superior to the European NGOs also working in Gaza. It was the only politically neutral organization with decades of experience in the territory, since the Israelis were always disliked, and even the PLO was seen sometimes as distant and corrupt.
And UNRWA led him to a factor invisible to the outside world: the basketball courts.
UNRWA had built many basketball courts made entirely of concrete slabs and completely enclosed. They were bleak and ugly to look at, but there was little wood in Gaza with which to build courts with proper backboards and so on. These basketball courts also served as spaces for volleyball and other sports, and were wildly popular during school hours. Gersony discovered that the cliché about Arab girls and women not liking sports was false. Because these courts were enclosed, girls and young women could play matches as often as the boys and men.
It got him thinking.
He also noticed UNRWA’s successful small business loan program, which administered $4.5 million annually with a 98 percent repayment rate, creating 450 jobs at salaries of $3,000. It had limited capacity, sure, but might be something to build on, he thought.
He was under no illusions about the overall situation. Visiting those schools with the concrete basketball courts, he also heard students chanting, for up to half an hour sometimes, “It’s an honor to die for the state of Palestine.” The school corridors were plastered with regional maps where “Israel” did not appear. The conflict was unending, so it was a matter of finding partial, stop-gap solutions.
The years of the Intifada meant curfews and continued security lockdowns. There had been few opportunities for safe, after-school activities. Now, in the wake of the Oslo Accords, there were no more lockdowns, but the basketball courts remained unused after midafternoon, when school ended. This meant that the young guys hung about in the streets and the girls were confined in their houses.
In Gaza City, he saw Zainab al-Wazir, the director of physical education in one of the ministries. She was the sister of a famous PLO martyr, Khalil al-Wazir (“Abu Jihad”), and so he felt that he was talking with the heart of the resistance against Israel.5 He asked her why all the basketball courts were going unused in the afternoons and evenings. “I would play there myself if they were open!” she exclaimed, explaining that they were closed only because there were no security personnel or coaches available. “More security people, that’s more jobs created,” he thought.
He returned to the USAID office in Tel Aviv with a plan.
Ten people crammed into the small conference room to hear his briefing, including Chris Crowley and Maureen Dugan. He began by saying: “Let’s all be humble. It’s only $25 million, and this conflict has been going on for a long time. If the Israelis would merely allow 722 more workers from Gaza across the border daily, it would have the same impact as our $25 million. Also, for us it’s an emergency, since we believe in creating jobs fast. But for the Gazans, who go home every day at 2:30 p.m. as they have for years, life goes on.”
At the words “let’s all be humble,” the scales fell off people’s eyes. Because he was speaking a somewhat new language, he had a rapt audience.
These were his recommendations:
USAID should work with UNRWA to repair schools damaged in the Intifada.
Add 50 more all-purpose, concrete basketball courts.
Give UNRWA $1 million to hire 200 Gazan security personnel and sports coaches to keep the courts open throughout the afternoons.
Appropriate money for nighttime lighting, since the best time to play sports was in the cool evenings.
Give UNRWA $4 million to expand its small loan program.
Expand the reach of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to tile the streets and create even more jobs.
“You can own Gaza by making kids and parents happy,” he concluded. “I stake my reputation on it.” He didn’t mean that literally, since little or none of this would matter without political progress at the top.
Nothing Gersony said was remotely original or ambitious even. It was all about humility: the recognition of how little could be accomplished by USAID alone. UNRWA was doing great work already, so USAID should build on it, rather than compete with it. What else could you do with only $25 million, anyway? Chris Crowley felt at the time that Gersony, without saying it, had identified a key political-demographic problem of the Arab world, the male youth bulge, and had a plan, however small and partial, to deal with it.
But by USAID standards, Gersony’s ideas were actually controversial, since the AID bureaucracy at the time normally frowned on having anything to do with sports: sports stadiums and the like were the kind of things the Russians and Chinese preferred to build. “But if you dropped a thousand soccer balls from helicopters into Gaza, you might actually cut down on terrorist attacks,” Gersony now quips.
A year later, on June 13, 1996, a USAID public affairs officer, Suchinta Wijesooriya, sent out an email, saying:
“The after-school program is going great guns and is now all over Gaza…everybody loves it….Next to [the] water [project], it is one of the most worthwhile things we are doing.”
After the $25 million was spent, the Danish government picked the program up and kept it going.
But on September 28, 2000, the Israeli opposition leader at the time, former general Ariel Sharon, visited the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam. He was accompanied by 1,500 armed Israeli police, anxious for his security and to prevent a riot. The upshot was another Intifada against Israeli occupation. Whatever impact Gersony had in Gaza was completely overtaken by events.
Upon Gersony’s completion of the Gaza project, Chris Crowley had a real problem on his hands. Congress had given USAID $100 million to spend in the West Bank, but Crowley did not trust the consultant teams that Washington had sent out to tell him how to spend the money—the teams that unfailingly served up the least creative, boilerplate analysis. He was frankly suspicious of their recommendation to spend all the money on roads, schools, and education. It just seemed too easy and obvious. So he sent Gersony out on a fact-finding trip to investigate the teams’ recommendations. Gersony took with him the USAID mission engineer Carl Maxwell, an extremely taciturn man who was part Eskimo. He rarely talked or smiled, and always seemed withdrawn.
At this point Cindy had arrived, and she and Bob were living in a small apartment in downtown Tel Aviv. For a week, Gersony drove from Tel Aviv into the West Bank with Carl Maxwell to inspect the roads, schools, and health centers that the USAID consultants wanted to spend $100 million improving. After Gaza, the West Bank was sheer paradise to Gersony, an utterly different country and plane of existence. It was more prosperous, more normal, not as hot, and people seemed much less aggravated. The gaunt and dizzying hillsides, which burst out in lemon green after the rains, were truly majestic and suffused with biblical associations. Gaza, a generic, baking-in-the-heat-and-humidity shantytown, was not meant to carry the population it did. That, combined with its sealed-off isolation, had the effect of creating monsters. The West Bank was beautiful: it had cobblestones, old houses, Roman arches, archaeological sites, and so forth. The West Bank, like Jerusalem, was rooted in history, whereas Gaza seemed rootless.
Gersony and Maxwell found no problem with the roads, which were in pristine condition and perfect for access to the villages: to widen them, as the USAID consultants wanted to do, would have involved destroying olive groves, cutting into the rock, and threatening landslides. Bigger wasn’t necessarily better. The schools and health centers were also in decent shape. By this time, watching Gersony work till late each evening writing up his daily reports, Carl Maxwell began warming to him. They went back to Chris Crowley and told him that they couldn’t fathom why USAID wanted to spend $100 million to fix things that did not need fixing. Gersony told Crowley:
“Why don’t you let me and Jamal [Tarazi] go out for a week just to talk to villagers in the West Bank and get a sense of what’s going on, to see what they feel they need?”
For a week, he and Jamal conducted open-ended conversations with village sheikhs, local teachers, and others throughout the West Bank, traveling in both Samaria in the north and Judea in the south. All he and Jamal heard from everyone was one word: “Water!”
Most water came from rain, which ran down the corrugated iron roofs into plastic buckets. Because there were no proper storage facilities, the villagers explained, each family paid up to $240 per season for periodic deliveries of water. You could see the water trucks traveling up and down the roads of the West Bank, especially in the warm, dry months. There were natural springs, but they were often contaminated by livestock. Where clean water did exist in abundance, it was often located several miles away from each village. There was a desperate need to collect, store, and efficiently distribute water.
Gersony went to see the chief engineer and project officer of the UNDP in Jerusalem, Lana Abu-Hijleh. She immediately made a lifelong impression on him. “Lana was terrific, young, attractive, thoroughly professional, alluring, fastidious, and a perfect English speaker.” When Gersony told her that everyone he had met in the West Bank said water was the big issue, she shot back that she had a $4 million water project at the proposal stage, and had already gotten all the permits from the Israeli occupation authorities. At the micro level, she wanted to do the same thing as Gersony. Carl Maxwell, despite his reserve, actually smiled.
“Here is where the rain falls,” Lana remembers telling Gersony. “He immediately understood what I meant,” Lana now explains. “Bob had an open mind to the facts and wasn’t blinded by the [Israeli] propaganda machine that always managed to twist them. He knew that control of water and the underground aquifer was an essential reason for the Israeli occupation [since water was scarce in the region and was therefore a strategic resource]. Bob was an unusual USAID consultant because he was so concerned about people’s suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. He always listened intensely because he cared, and thus he understood everything I told him. I wish I had gotten to know him better.”
Lana took Gersony and Carl to her ancestral village, Deir Istiya, in central Samaria, south of the big West Bank town of Nablus. In 1995, it had 370 families, of which hers was among the most prominent. The architecture, as in so many places in the West Bank, conjured up the historical ages from the Romans to the Mamluks, with stone archways and cobbled streets. Gersony loved cobblestones, since for him it meant a solution to mud and flooding, even as laying the cobblestones gave people jobs. Carl took out a notebook and pencil and designed an overhead water storage tank on the spot, complete with cladding appropriate to the village architecture.
Gersony reported back to Chris Crowley.
He told Crowley and his team that the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank needed water, pure and simple. And that the UNDP should play a significant part in implementing the project. The USAID mission in Israel and the territories could not oversee roads, schools, health systems, and so on as the consultant teams wanted to do. It was too extravagant and multifaceted for one mission. “USAID here should spend the whole $100 million on water, with help and advice from the UNDP.” He told Crowley that USAID needed to hire a few water engineers in order to become the go-to intermediary for anything having to do with water for the West Bank.
Crowley sat silent for a minute, then for two minutes. A big smile gradually formed on his face. “That is exactly what we’re going to do,” he said.
“All my instincts said yeah,” Crowley now remembers. “I knew enough about the Middle East to know that water was the key to everything.”
Of course, whereas Gersony was thinking about all the details below him—working with the engineers, with Lana and the UNDP, and with the Palestinian Authority—Crowley was thinking about all the politics above him: which constituted a yawning universe of big shots with big egos, given the world media attention lavished on the West Bank. Yet water was an elemental, powerful symbol. It was about life itself. Thus, it was an idea he felt that he could sell in one sentence to his ambassador in Tel Aviv, Martin Indyk. Crowley’s assessment proved accurate. He also sold the project to the Middle East peace process team led by Dennis Ross. But he had some difficulty convincing the consul general in Jerusalem, Ed Abington, whom Crowley felt harbored resentments both political and personal against Indyk: it was a typical case of a career diplomat sympathetic to the Palestinians versus a political appointee sympathetic to the Israelis.
Partly as a result of the success of Gersony’s water project, Crowley was able to stay in Israel for another four years, and then would go on to become USAID mission director for Iraq from 2010 to 2013; after that he became the senior career official for USAID throughout the whole Middle East.
Gersony brings all of these high politics down to earth, though.
“When you listen to ordinary people, there is so much wisdom,” Gersony explains. “That is what Jamal and Lana and myself did all over Gaza and the West Bank. That is what Chris Crowley, Norm Olsen, and General Fredy Zach did. We talked to real people who told us about their problems and what they needed. Chris was a seasoned USAID diplomat. Jamal and Lana were Palestinians. Norm was pro-Palestinian. Zach was an ardent Zionist, and I was sympathetic to Israel because of my own family background. But I feel close to all these people, as if we were all on the same side. Because we believed in applied common sense issuing from the ground up, in all its granularity, rather than imposing our beliefs and assumptions, however idealistic, on others.”
Years later, after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in the Arab Spring in early 2011, Chris Crowley tried to get Bob Gersony to do an assessment of what the Egyptian population needed at the mundane, ground level for further development. But the Washington bureaucracy turned him down. The bulk of the development assistance would be spent on democracy promotion programs, all of which turned out to be wasted, and which in fact backfired. Egypt, a complex, poverty-stricken, ancient civilization with its very own historical experience different from America’s, easily fell back into dictatorship.
Their home in Israel constituted among the happiest periods of Bob and Cindy’s life together. Bob liked living in Tel Aviv. He felt a revival of his Jewishness there. He liked Palestinians like Jamal and Lana. He liked working with UNRWA and UNDP. He loved the weather. And he felt very close to Chris Crowley. He felt settled in Israel in a way he hadn’t elsewhere since Guatemala, and he assumed that Crowley would have continuous work for him there.
Unbeknownst to Gersony, immersed as he was in his work in the Palestinian territories, in Dayton, Ohio, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, Richard C. Holbrooke, was orchestrating a complex arrangement of accords among the warring parties in Yugoslavia that was to be hailed by the media as the greatest diplomatic achievement of the post Cold War. Under the assumption that Holbrooke would succeed, USAID administrator Brian Atwood wanted his agency on the map first in the former Yugoslavia—quickly, visibly.
Doug Stafford, the head of humanitarian operations for USAID and former deputy U.N. high commissioner for refugees, who had been so impressed with Gersony’s work in Rwanda and elsewhere, told Atwood: “Gersony’s the one you want to send to Bosnia.” Carol Lancaster, the deputy administrator of USAID, who had mastered six languages in her own legendary career, seconded Stafford’s suggestion, even though Atwood needed no convincing on the matter. Bill Garvelink was tasked to get in touch with Gersony.
Garvelink called Gersony in Tel Aviv:
“Atwood wants you back in Washington now. You’ve got to get to Bosnia right away.”
Gersony thought of the sunshine in Tel Aviv and the frigid, dismal cold of Bosnia, with winter approaching.
He went to the Western Wall with Cindy and wrote a note: “Please God, give me the wisdom to understand what the ordinary people of Bosnia are saying.” He rolled the note up tight and stuck it deep between the great ashlar stones.
While he was in Washington for briefings on Bosnia, Cindy called him on November 4, 1995, with the news that Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist. It would begin a chain of events that would overtake the work Gersony had done in the occupied territories. “It may have been one of the most successful political assassinations in history,” Norm Olsen observes. “The assassin wanted to stop the entire Oslo peace process in its tracks, and he did.”
On October 11, 2002, Lana’s mother, Shaden Abu-Hijleh, a peace activist no less, was quietly sitting outside the family home by the garden in their well-to-do neighborhood in Deir Istiya, knitting, when an Israeli patrol stopped, and shot her dead for absolutely no reason, with no advance warning. It was an utterly stupid, senseless killing. “When I heard about it, I was overcome with grief for Lana and with absolute fury at the Israeli military,” Gersony says.
But despite these dark and overwhelming forces of Middle Eastern politics, Bob Gersony still left a legacy, however slight. Jamal Tarazi, now a group leader for cancer research at the Pfizer pharmaceutical company in the San Diego area, made a return trip to Gaza in 2012 to visit relatives. There, by the beach in Gaza City, he happened to see the lovely cobblestone streets that one of Gersony’s projects had created, which had recently been extended to other areas. Sometimes the legacy Gersony left behind was pivotal, and many more times it clearly was not. He was only one man, after all.