Short wars may produce unanimity but long, seemingly endless wars lead to bitter dissension.
—Amos Elon, The Pity of It All
The Sun’s Jerusalem office was in a government-owned office building, Beit Agron, the “House of Agron,” on Hillel Street, across from an unkempt park. The office, with its telex machine and a long wall of books, anchored one end of the building’s top floor. None of us needed to travel far to find colleagues and competitors. Nine other papers, a wire service, and the BBC were down the hall. Two other papers resided one floor down.
None of the papers put much stock in parachutists, the reporters who excitedly dropped in during crises. The economics and competitive self-interest of newspapers, for a long time, supported a straightforward theory: if a long-running story mattered, then reporters needed to live where the story was. To know the cast of characters and grinding fault lines of the Middle East, a reporter should live under its blindingly white sky. Everyone on the hallway was his newspaper’s khedive, reporting on a large unruly province.
The editors in Baltimore paid more attention day to day to Israel than anywhere other than Baltimore or Washington. Among the foreign bureaus, Moscow mattered a great deal because it was one-half of the meta conflict that colored everything red or not-red. The Middle East developed a toxic dynamic of its own. If both Palestinians and Israelis were involved, you could write about a traffic accident that occurred in Tel Aviv and see the story on the front page in Baltimore. And editors pressed for that story. Correspondents did not file dispatches like that from Moscow. All of the other reporters in Beit Agron wrote the traffic accident story, too.
In Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, we wrote about the conflict and “The Conflict.” Each side—Israeli and Palestinian—cited reasons why it was entirely in the right. There were claims of perfect rectitude based on the contents of holy books, on who inhabited a place first, and on use of force. You could pore over maps that showed the movements of armies or where especially horrifying events occurred. It hardly mattered when the map was made. The parties’ grievances were based on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 or in 1982; the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 or of 1967. Some of those fighting wanted to readjudicate 1948, when Israel became a state; others wanted to include in the balance sheet violence that occurred in 1929. I wrote about battles being fought for the second or hundredth time.
Even when it was exhausting, the day-to-day reporting was in important ways not hard. In Israel, almost everyone would willingly talk at length, whether a government minister, a military officer, or residents of any community, to an extent nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the region. Because American support was vital to Israel, American newspapers greatly mattered to Israeli officials, who had a keen sense of hierarchy among the papers. The Sun mattered enough, just enough, to make access relatively easy. I could reach any given cabinet minister as easily as a reporter on Calvert Street could reach the head of the Baltimore Department of Public Works. The Palestinian leadership was badly fractured, energetically undermined by both itself and Israel, but no less keenly aware of the United States’ importance, and thus was nearly as attentive to the American press. Israelis and Palestinians indulged almost equally in lectures and cant, but you could see and talk with almost everyone, a degree of access impossible in Moscow or in Washington.
Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was a special case, especially before his return from exile in 1994. Security worries and habit made his whereabouts unpredictable and any announced schedule meaningless. He conducted much of his business at night, and his entourage seemed harried even when waiting was the main activity. It took hours and hours even to reach an outer office. I never saw him on my own. During the years of exile, his lieutenants, among them Mahmoud Abbas, the present leader of the Palestinian authority, would knowledgeably ask about fine points of Israeli policies or actions and defend the chairman’s strategy. I had to settle for hurrying down hallways with other reporters in Arafat’s wake on the off chance of hearing a few words.
Arafat countenanced great violence during part of his career and made catastrophic errors. More tragic, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization learned to mimic the worst of each other: obstinacy; fluency in instilling fear; a misplaced determination to exploit loopholes; engagement in ever more pitiless cycles of violence. But, for good reason, Palestinians believed Arafat was wholly dedicated to their cause. Many—most, I believe—would have accepted any terms that he and Israel agreed upon, if only he and his Israeli counterparts had fully lived up to them.
For good reason, the Palestinian leadership was more opaque for us. Israel arrested would-be public figures as soon as their stature became noticeable. It drove many intelligent, thoughtful Palestinians underground and radicalized others. The ostensible leadership was caught by surprise as much as the Israelis were by the marches and stone throwing that became the first Palestinian uprising. The intifada began in December 1987 after an Israeli truck in the Gaza Strip accidentally crashed into two vans and killed four Palestinians. It was literally a traffic accident, then a wave of increasingly violent protests. They were unplanned. Israel responded with mass arrests and then violence by the army.
After the first several weeks of turmoil, a small number of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank drafted fourteen political demands. They were approved by most of the underground factions and became a first attempt to give the uprising concrete goals.
Figure 15.1. The Conflict.
Courtesy of KAL.
Everyone from Beit Agron, plus Palestinian and Israeli reporters, crowded into a poorly lit ballroom at the National Hotel on Salah el Din Street, the tatty Broadway of East Jerusalem, for the public announcement of the fourteen points. It was a chaotic scene; Israel had threatened to arrest the Palestinians who attended, and the speakers could not be heard over the shouted questions. A besieged aide handed out typed copies of the fourteen points, a radical document for the time and guaranteed to land the authors in jail if Israeli authorities could ever identify them.
We speculated even more about who was behind “The Unified Command,” which emerged at about the same time. It issued a leaflet on the ninth of each month, and demonstrators regarded each leaflet’s themes and instructions as their orders. Sari Nusseibeh, an Oxford- and Harvard-educated philosophy professor, was one of the Palestinians I asked about the people behind the leaflets and the Unified Command. “No idea,” he said. Years later I learned that the coordinator of the Unified Command and the author of many of its leaflets was Nusseibeh.
None of the demands contained in the fourteen points now seem radical in any way: direct negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel, withdrawal of the Israeli army from Palestinian cities, free municipal elections in Palestinian cities, fairer allocation of underground water resources, and more equitable use of taxes collected from Palestinian workers. Nevertheless, such thinking was a guarantee of arrest. During a series of detentions and interrogations by the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic secret police, Nusseibeh was pressured to go into exile to avoid imprisonment. He would eventually be detained for three months on fantastical charges of spying for Iraq; no trial was ever held.
Looking closely, you could find seeds of the future. An important sign of change was a series of attacks by Palestinians against Gaza’s liquor stores. More women began keeping their heads covered and gave up Western-style dress. Young couples began to favor weddings in a more traditional style. Students at Gaza’s Islamic University enrolled in Islamic law courses, in classes segregated by sex. Rashid al-Shawa, an aristocratic former mayor of Gaza, removed from office twice by Israel, described the early tremblers in 1987: “People are using religion to express their political views and it is gaining ground very, very quickly. If I feel such a movement is going to help me get rid of the occupation, I’m quite willing to follow it.”
Israel saw religion as a counterweight to the PLO and allowed Saudi Arabia to pay for new mosques in Gaza. Religion hardened into a substitute nationalism. Hamas, introducing a virulent strain of Islamic fundamentalism, was a fast-growing infant. Like Amal and then Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and religion filled the void of ideology created by the failures of Arab nationalism and the PLO’s guerilla war. Israel grew so inured to one set of combatants and so confident of its existing networks of informants that it failed to appreciate the importance of the changes. Most of the press made the same mistake.
* * *
You learned from everyone on the Beit Agron hallway: we ate together, endlessly gossiped, fiercely competed, traveled together, and knew each other better than anyone outside of romance. After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, three of us flew from Amman to Baghdad as soon as our visas came through. We were the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, and the Sun. In Baghdad, we went straight to the hotel room of the Los Angeles Times, already in town for several days. It was an oven-hot Saturday afternoon, plenty of time to file for Sunday.
The day was stone dead, the LAT said. No news, really.
“You don’t understand,” the Washington Post said. “We’re in town now and we told our desks last night we were coming. We’re going to file. We’re here.” If you reached Baghdad, by definition there was news. But the possibilities for reporting at that time and place were limited. The story at that early stage was about the mirage of diplomacy; the armies remained in the wings. Iraqi officials were unavailable for any type of interview and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq would always be unavailable. No one outside the government could discuss politics safely. Out of necessity, Iraqis silently accommodated themselves to their government even when it seemed unhinged. Hussein’s birthday was a national holiday. People praised the president more than their children. The government insisted that fear was love.
April Glaspie, the American ambassador, having recently assured her government that Iraq had only peaceful intentions, was out of the country when the invasion of Kuwait occurred; she would not be returning. Joseph Wilson, the senior remaining American, told the Marine guard to let us come inside the embassy. It was a large townhouse that appeared to have expanded without benefit of an architect. In this era before suicide vests, it was set back a half dozen steps from the sidewalk along a narrow tree-lined street. Wilson lit a cigar and gave us enough scraps for a story. Since we were there, it was on the Sunday front page.
A lot was about to change in how news came to us and to newspapers. Correspondents and foreign desks were early victims of the change, which forced, or should have forced, a rethinking of what correspondents did. The still future Internet had nothing to do with the initial revolution; cell phones were even further in the future; “social media” a nonsensical phrase. The Gulf War, in terms of press, was CNN’s. Because of CNN, with its digital cameras and satellite phones, editors no longer needed to read the wires, much less wait for us to file to know the day’s headlines, even the hour’s.
The build-up of armies and ships gradually took over from the diplomats before the one-sided fighting began. I started my coverage of the war from a refitted Navy battleship that launched cruise missiles. I then moved to Dhahran, one of the jumping off points for the US military and reporters, and headquarters for the Saudi national oil company Aramco. When Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles against Israel and Saudi Arabia—America’s allies—he targeted Dhahran. The first time the air raid siren sounded there, I walked down a staircase to the basement shelter. The second time, my phone rang within a few seconds. “I see a Scud is heading your way,” an editor said on the line from Baltimore. A newsroom TV was audible in the background. I heard the siren sounding in Dhahran and on television in Baltimore via the telephone. Then a short deep thud that was felt, then heard. I could have watched it on TV or heard it again with a slight lag by phone. The desk saw more than I did, in some sense knew more, which was not a problem—far from it—if we trusted and valued correspondents reporting and writing stories that were truly our own. That is, if we let CNN (and later the Internet) liberate us from “reporting” what was already well-known. Instead of writing “the war,” we could focus on what we discovered ourselves. Every Sun subscriber knew the war story—and the daily developments of every subsequent war—long before the paper was delivered.
I should have understood and acted on its impact earlier, as the paper should have, too. I became foreign editor a few weeks before 9/11. Our resources for coverage were neither paltry nor limitless. The foreign desk had the liberty of using them largely as we chose. I was never told during the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq to hold down spending or meet a budget, which was a praiseworthy silence.
No one had to be coaxed into reporting from dangerous places. The Moscow correspondent traveled to Tajikistan before crossing into northern Afghanistan. A second reporter reached Kabul. The Beijing correspondent went to Islamabad and Quetta, a fourth to jittery Peshawar and then Afghanistan. The Johannesburg correspondent repeated the Islamabad–Quetta journey. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, a reporter and a photographer traveled to Baghdad from Kuwait with the Marines; the officer assigned to watch over them was killed along the way. A member of the metro staff went to Baghdad and then north to Mosul. A second photographer went to Baghdad. The Moscow correspondent went to Turkey and then, perilously, into northern Iraq. The London correspondent traveled almost everywhere, including around Baghdad by municipal bus. Doug Birch, Scott Calvert, Will Englund, Dan Fesperman, Frank Langfitt, John Makely, Liz Malby, John Murphy, Todd Richissin: they demonstrated that the greater the freedom to report, write, and photograph what only they could see, the richer, the more true the story.
When publishers began shrinking the newsroom staff, the presumed extravagance of the foreign budget became a focus of discontent. But even before the first bureaus were shuttered, the foreign budget was a pittance, however you measured it: per bureau, per story, or by lump sum; not including salaries of the correspondents (less than a million dollars overall), that paid the cost of airplane tickets, cars, hotels, the bare bones support staff some bureaus employed, office rent (where there were offices), computers, the electric bills, telephones, and every meal put on an expense account. It also paid for most of the front page (also, some of the work and careers likely to inspire younger colleagues). Our salaries, as best as I could determine on my own behalf, were for a long time generally second-lowest among the papers with overseas correspondents. The Christian Science Monitor was the one serious competitor in that dismal contest; in later years, the Sun prevailed, unfortunately. There was never a windfall from the foreign bureaus for the newsroom to inherit, none. Great events made for great reporters, the saying went, and some great events occurred beyond Maryland.
* * *
Everyone who became the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent felt, eventually, a deep fatigue about “The Conflict” and varying levels of disgust about the combatants. We saw the limits of both force and diplomacy, even when leaders in the region did not. Whatever was gained here solely by force always crumbled away. The landscape included examples more than three thousand years old—Hazor, Jericho, and Megiddo among them.
Tel Hazor is a high grassy mound that flatbed Israeli army trucks carrying tanks and artillery pass as they climb the last hills toward the border with Lebanon. Hazor has partially excavated remains of a once powerful city where the Canaanites and then their conquerors kept watch over trade routes linking their kingdoms south to Egypt and east to Babylon. As many as twenty thousand people lived there before the Canaanite city, sometime after 1200 BC, was violently destroyed. An Israelite city that eventually replaced it was burned to the ground by the Assyrians in 732 BC, the residents killed or deported.
More recent lessons about force were Gaza and southern Lebanon. So was Iraq. With the best-equipped military in the world, the United States could not impose stability in Iraq. Israeli commanders cited their own chastening experiences in Gaza. Israel failed to find political allies or support an economy that might have tempted Gazans away from resistance, during an occupation that lasted more than thirty years. Israel’s failure was not for lack of superior weaponry or inventive tactics, assassinations of gifted bomb makers, bulldozing of border areas, mass arrests, destruction of ministries, and suspected barracks. Hamas and other factions in Gaza were no less creative and at least as pitiless. They relied on suicide bombings, kidnappings, would-be attacks by sea, and never put Israeli civilians off limits.
Retired Israeli commanders admitted that military gains could be only short-term. “You cannot achieve peace only by using the Israeli army, but you can gain time,” Ori Orr, a retired general who had served as deputy defense minister, told me.
Orr was captain of a reconnaissance unit during the six-day Arab–Israeli war of 1967. Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, gained control of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and seemed a superpower. “I wrote my wife,” Orr said, “‘This is the last war.’”
Usually the tragedies were not large enough to command lasting attention. They were our traffic reports. But the expectation and fear of violence stunted millions of lives. The refugee camps stood as monuments to the failures of every party. In The Yellow Wind, a prescient account of Israel’s near blindness to the effects of its policies, the Israeli author David Grossman called the camps “ruins of ruins.” Israelis and Palestinians shared a profound unease.
Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian philosopher, told me in 1990, “We are entering one of the worst chapters in our history.”
“What fighting does,” Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general told me in 2006, “is prepare the background for a diplomatic solution.”
The Conflict would not be resolved by adding up examples of brutality or forgiveness and awarding the prize to whoever had the better score. Everyone had points. Almost everyone knew on some level that the land in some way would need to be shared. I took seriously the absolutists on both sides—Israelis who wholly rejected creation of a Palestinian state or wanted to deport Israeli Arabs; Palestinians who rejected Israel’s right to exist or favored violence over all else. They were always minorities, however, even when the violence was at its worst. Israelis and Palestinians wanted what others want: a good education for their children, economic opportunities for their families, and security for their communities. Wholesale violence and total defeat of “The Other” are not parts of the majority’s wish list on either side.
In the early 1990s, I heard an Israeli politician describe an analogy for relations between Israelis and Palestinians, and an appealing solution to their conflict. His model was relations between Germany and France, countries that mercilessly fought each other during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The border province Alsace-Lorraine changed hands several times. “They killed each other over Alsace-Lorraine for, what, a hundred years? Three, four major, horrible wars. Now everything’s peaceful, and there’s an open border and tourism. The French and Germans can’t stand each other, and it’s paradise.”
For Israelis and Palestinians, it should be possible.