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WARRIOR JEW HEADS TO THE UNHOLY LAND
Despite Danny Pearl’s grotesque and outrageous murder, given the strain and tension I was feeling at Fox News’ home base in New York because of the smoldering Tora Bora controversy, it was a relief to travel back to the Mideast war zone. Going first to Israel and Palestine, I wrote in my journal, “The warrior Jew heads for the Unholy Land.”
Our hotel in Palestine sat on a ridge overlooking their de facto capital, Ramallah. On March 9 we had a front-row seat from the hotel balcony restaurant as an Israeli missile hit, with pinpoint accuracy, a vehicle in a convoy carrying Palestinian militant leaders. Like a lightning bolt it cut through the night sky. We later found it was righteous retaliation for a suicide bombing earlier that evening in Jerusalem, which killed eleven Israeli civilians and wounded scores of others in and around the Café Moment coffee shop near the prime minister’s office in downtown.
During that time, provocations from both sides were constant. A couple of days after the Café Moment bombing, in one of the most poignant, painful incidents I have ever witnessed in a conflict zone, I watched as a Palestinian father and mother in traditional Muslim garb who had just given birth in an East Jerusalem hospital were prevented by soldiers at an Israeli checkpoint from returning with their newborn to their West Bank home.
On this chill night, the new mother held her crying, swaddled newborn tightly in her arms. The parents had the appropriate identification and were pleading unsuccessfully to be allowed through to get their baby home out of the cold.
The inhumanity of the scene was exaggerated by the infuriating nonchalance of the IDF soldiers, who were brushing off the woman as if she were trying to sell them a bad watermelon. Witnessing it began a kind of emotional chain reaction. If it did not turn me against Israel and the side I had always taken, then at least it sowed doubt. I never felt the same about Israel after that night.
On edge because of the spreading anarchy and violence, the IDF was using quick-trigger muscle to quiet discord. We were heavily tear-gassed one afternoon outside Ramallah at Checkpoint Kolandia, and as we approached another checkpoint, shots were fired close over our heads from about a block away.
Aside from making you want to rip your eyes out to stop the burning irritation, tear gas does not bother me. A heavy dose of water usually does the trick, easing the irritation. Anyway, if you do not get gassed from time to time, you are not getting close enough to the action. What accelerated my doubts about Israel’s moral supremacy at the time was a more troubling tactic. The soldiers had begun using magic markers to write identifying numbers on the forearms of the hundreds of young Palestinians being rounded up.
It reminded me of my Uncle Phil, a Holocaust survivor. Related to me by marriage, Phil was built like Popeye. He was a butcher with bulging forearms. What fascinated us kids growing up on Long Island was the faded but still readable numbers the Nazis had tattooed on the inside of Phil’s arm. I remember running my fingers over the tattoo in disbelief at the inhumanity of it. The fact that Israelis had adopted an obviously more benign but arguably similar technique for keeping track of detainees made me sick.
I got understandably reamed for agreeing with Arafat’s condemnation of the technique as “Nazi-like.” Nothing compares to the Nazis, and shame on anyone, including me, who uses the comparison to make a point. But I have not changed my mind about the branding. Interestingly, the IDF dropped the technique soon after the controversy blew up.
My subsequent commentaries about Israel’s oppressive occupation of Palestine had a profound effect on my standing at Fox News. My views were extremely unpopular, in a practical sense, affecting me almost as negatively as Tora Bora, although not in the same soul-rattling way.
Make no mistake, Israel, frightened, frustrated, and angry, was suffering abundant Palestinian provocation during what was becoming a full-fledged uprising. The Second Intifada was beginning. Civil order was being challenged. There were dangerous demonstrations, and insurrection was widespread, including suicide bombers. Most of the worst was still to come.
I remember how sincerely unapologetic Palestinian intellectual Hanan Ashwari was at dinner one evening in East Jerusalem, defending the suicide bombings. A high-level PLO official, she and I have known each other for decades. Usually I am sympathetic to her family’s struggles with occupation and to the plight of her people. She has spoken to me of the humiliation of living in a territory totally controlled by an occupying force, and how not having a real passport caused complications for her family, involving everything from college to marriage. That night, though, she startled me when she told me with chilling frankness, “They [the suicide bombers] are our F-11s, our strategic bombers.” Here, she used two-fingers walking to make sure I got the reference that the number eleven represented human bombs on legs; suicide bombers were Palestine’s answer to Israel’s superior weapons. As President Trump frequently trumpets, Israel’s Great Wall, sitting astride Israel’s version of the 1967 border with the Occupied West Bank, has virtually ended the practice.
Marine General Anthony Zinni, President George W. Bush’s peace envoy, was visiting the region when I again appeared on Special Report, the network’s signature show, Tuesday, March 12. Having heard my condemnation of the hideous new IDF practice of painting numbers on the arms of Palestinian detainees, Fox News principal anchor Brit Hume debriefed me after we resolved some technical problems.
Brit Hume: Earlier in the broadcast before we were rudely interrupted by satellite problems, Geraldo Rivera and I were talking about the change that some journalists undergo when they experience covering the Middle East firsthand. Geraldo, himself part Jewish, has been feeling some of that and he was telling me about that. Please continue.
Geraldo Rivera: The most insidious thing about evil, the most insidious evil about terrorism, I should say, is that because it is sometimes difficult to fight, you become something like the thing you are fighting.
You become someone who violates some of the basic concepts of your own fundamental democracy; who you are. That is the danger in the United States and a danger being realized in Israel.
When you use tanks and F-16s and these sledgehammers against thickly populated civilian towns and cities, that’s not fighting terrorism; that is inflicting terrorism.
You may get some of the bad guys, but I walked down the streets of Bethlehem the other day. There were fifty-nine Palestinians killed, 367 injured by the Israeli action, and many were women and some were children.
You remember that infamous video of some months ago that showed a Palestinian father huddled with his nine-year-old son against the wall, caught in a crossfire between the Israelis and Palestinians, who were throwing rocks and shooting, and before it ended, the boy was dead and the father severely injured.
I would die for Israel. But watching the suffering of the Palestinian people, the real suffering, I’ve become a Palestinianist in a sense.
Like our president, like President Bush’s stated United States policy, I believe the only solution is two states, living side by side with internationally recognized and maybe United States–guaranteed borders.
Brit Hume: When you come to see a certain equivalency, and you even used the word terrorism to refer to what Israel does, Israel inflicting terrorism. Do you really think that Israel is intentionally killing civilians or are they in a sense collateral damage?
Geraldo Rivera: I think that—it’s more than collateral damage. There’s an expectation when you use a jet fighter they’re flying at five hundred miles an hour to get a terrorist nest, although the Israelis are the best at it, as precise as any of our guys, there is an inevitability that there will be civilian casualties.
They do not intend to hurt the Palestinian civilians. I don’t mean to suggest that at all. That’s not the case. The tactics they’re employing, that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon over the severe objections of his defense minister, as we at Fox News broke the story of the secret argument about the incursion into Ramallah on the eve of General Zinni’s visit. You cannot do those things. You cannot round up Palestinian young men and put numbers on their arms to make it easier to identify them in the future.
What does that remind the world of ? That reminds the world of what Hitler and the Nazi pigs inflicted on the Jewish race during the Second World War. Maybe the comparison is not precise or exactly parallel, but the echoes of it are unmistakable. It’s indefensible.
These people, the Palestinians, they bleed just like we do. They suffer just like we do. They have the same aspirations. They want to make a living. Yes, there are terrorists among them. Yes, there are young people who would strap explosives to their body and on the promise of something in heaven, blow themselves up. We cannot become the thing we loathe. That is indefensible and non-Jewish.
Brit Hume: Geraldo, very interesting. Great to have you. Geraldo Rivera, having a change of heart on this issue not unlike that which many other journalists have had in that region. It is striking.
THE WRATH OF THE JEWS, SPRING 2002
Roger Ailes later told me how he and our boss of bosses, Rupert Murdoch, watched my Brit Hume interview together, and how at one point Murdoch asked him incredulously, “Is he [meaning me] pro-Palestinian?” Roger told me his reply was, “The Israelis think so.”
The viewer reaction to my remarks was much more intense. It blew up the Fox News audience email system and main switchboard in New York, as supporters of Israel heaped scorn and outrage. It was not just that Israel was being criticized, but that in the midst of another Intifada someone who had consistently supported the Jewish state was criticizing it and doing it on the most conservative news network in America.
Doing a live shot later outside the Café Moment bombing site, I was berated by a middle-aged, potbellied, gold-necklace-wearing Russian Jewish cab driver who pulled over to lecture me about being dangerously naive. “Do you see what these people are doing?” he said, gesturing dramatically at the scene where eleven Jews were murdered three days before. He gave me a disdainful sneer as he got in his cab, slammed the door, then spun his wheels leaving rubber as he sped off.
As is my custom, I stayed at the King David while in Jerusalem. Built in 1931, the deeply historic five-star hotel overlooks the walls of Old City and hosts endless conventions by the JCC, B’nai B’rith, ADL, Federation, countless aliyahs, bat and bar mitzvahs, weddings, class trips, and reunions.
The hotel was not immune from violence, the deadliest attack coming from militant Zionists. In 1946, when it was being used as a headquarters by occupying British forces, it was severely damaged in a bombing that killed ninety-one people. Future prime minister Menachem Begin’s Irgun Gang carried out the lethal attack. Its aim was to terrorize the British authorities and make them eager to end their rule, called the Palestine Mandate, which the League of Nations granted Britain following World War I. The Irgun and its similarly violent adversaries wanted them to leave and let the Jews and Arabs fight it out among themselves, which they have predictably done for seventy-five years and counting.
Over its long reign as the best hotel in the country, the King David has housed everyone from the dowager empress of Persia to the emperor of Ethiopia and virtually every world leader who has ever visited modern Israel. The 1960 film Exodus was shot there, and if it was good enough for Hollywood royalty Paul Newman and Emperor Haile Selassie, it is good enough for me. And, because I use my hotel room as both road office and VIP interview location, my suite tends to be among the best in the building.
On the weekend following the Brit Hume eruption, I was visited in my room by once and future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi and I met during the taping of the 1980 “The Unholy War” special for 20/20, getting along great, hanging out in New York and Israel over the years, before drifting apart as his career soared and mine soldiered on.
Even though he was not formally in the government at the time, I had the distinct impression when Bibi showed up in my room on short notice that he had been dispatched as part of a charm offensive by the Israelis. The government seemed to be operating on the assumption that if it just treated me better, my reports would be more favorable to Israel’s position.
Skiing at an unlikely resort outside Beirut, Lebanon, April 2002.
A few years earlier, Netanyahu had been Israel’s youngest-ever prime minister and the first to be born there. At the time of our meeting at the King David, he was no longer in the top job, having been crushed by former IDF commander Ehud Barak in a reelection bid in 1999. When Ariel Sharon defeated Prime Minister Barak a few months later, in November 2002, Bibi was appointed Sharon’s foreign affairs minister and later finance minister. Bibi later returned to the premiership, getting reelected a record three consecutive times. As of this writing, he is still prime minister, although various corruption controversies swirl around him and his wife, Sara.
More than any Israeli leader in history, Bibi is an inflexible hard-liner against independence for the Palestinian territories. He calls the West Bank “Judea and Samaria” in deference to their Old Testament roots as Jewish states, and his mental map of Israel includes them as a biblical imperative. An MIT and Harvard graduate, he is hugely popular among American conservatives. He also became the first Israeli leader to choose sides in terms of American politics, bluntly and boldly campaigning for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election against Barack Obama. Arrogant and self-assured, Bibi also had the audacity to come to Washington, DC, uninvited by President Obama, to receive the adulation of the Republican-led Congress in 2015.
I feel about Bibi the way I feel about President Trump as I write this. Both are undeniably powerful, charismatic, and charming, while both propose policies I sometimes detest. Perhaps the Trump administration will have more success in promoting peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Early signs are not encouraging—the announcement that President Trump is moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem seems fraught, but you never know with Donald Trump; he may pull off another miracle.
When I opened the door to my big duplex suite in the King David, Bibi sailed in, lit a big cigar, pulled up a chair, which he spun around, sat down, gestured to a second chair, and said bluntly, “We’ve got to talk.”
He then lectured me for the next hour on the impossibility of the two-state solution, and more generally, on trusting the Palestinians on anything. Remember, at this time the Intifada was escalating dangerously, and day-to-day life in Israel was being profoundly disrupted by horrible acts of mass violence. Fear stalked Israel’s streets.
Bibi was scornful and dismissive of the current, frantic, and ultimately fruitless efforts of the Bush administration to get traction on the peace process. Bush 43 had taken to referring to the territories for the first time as Palestine, which took guts. President Bush also dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney on a diplomatic offensive to the region, having already appointed Vietnam War hero Zinni as special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
“Do you know what the sum total of my concessions to the Palestinians was when I was in office?” Bibi smirked, as he gestured broadly with his lit cigar in our hotel room confrontation.
“A casino in Jericho,” he said, barking a short laugh. He went on to explain that his sole concession to the peace process was allowing the Palestinians in 1998 to open The Oasis casino in Jericho, the world’s oldest city. Located deep in Palestinian territory and frequented mainly by Israelis, the casino was closed two years later as a security risk.
Bibi was pushy in suggesting that I resume backing Israel unambiguously, but he was not unpleasant, granting me a formal sit-down interview on the security situation the next day, Sunday, March 17. Unlike Bibi, many of those phoning my room that week were intensely disagreeable, even threatening my job. Some were leaders of various Jewish groups in the States, others just regular civilians, and they were barraging my suite at all hours, until I put a do-not-disturb order on the line, something a foreign correspondent on assignment abroad rarely did in those days before reliable international cell phones.
We pulled out of Jerusalem for Tel Aviv the next day, ultimately making the difficult border crossing into the Gaza Strip to do several confrontational interviews with assorted radicals, including the leader of Islamic Jihad. One of their terrorists had just killed seven more Israelis, including four IDF soldiers, while injuring twenty-seven others when he blew himself up on a bus going from Tel Aviv to Nazareth in northern Israel.
Despite the Intifada’s accelerating descent into full-scale religious warfare, newly elected warrior prime minister Ariel Sharon was struggling to maintain some semblance of a peace process, and the government wanted me to know that.
Their relatively liberal defense minister in the new and still-shaky coalition government, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, an Iraqi Jew, gave me an intimate briefing suggesting that if only the Palestinians would toe the line of civility, peace was still possible. He also told me there was some positive stirring in the Arab world that I should watch, in Beirut.
PASSOVER MASSACRE, MARCH 2002
With little advance planning, but now informed that the Arab League was meeting in the Lebanese capital to propose something dramatic to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we set out immediately.
It is only 125 miles from Tel Aviv to Beirut, but you cannot get there from here. There is no direct air, sea, or land traffic between Israel and Lebanon. You can fly to the island of Cyprus and then change planes to fly to Lebanon. Or, since Israel’s heavily fortified northern border is impassable, closed tight, you can drive the long way around through Jordan, which is what we did this trip, driving across Israel and Palestine, across the tightly guarded Allenby Bridge spanning the Jordan River, across the desert to the capital city of Amman, where we caught the short Royal Jordanian Airlines flight to Beirut.
I was thrilled to be back for such an auspicious occasion. The summit conference marked the first time the Arab nations were officially throwing their weight behind a comprehensive peace plan that recognized Israel’s right to exist as a nation. They were scheduled to vote on the Saudi-sponsored resolution the next day, which coincidentally was the first day of Passover, March 28, 2002.
Certain to have unanimous support because of its Saudi imprimatur, the resolution coming out of the summit called for Israel to withdraw from Syria’s Golan Heights and from the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for normal relations. It was to be “Land for Peace,” and I was practically dancing in the streets of Beirut.
During that groundbreaking conference, I met and interviewed the most reasonable Sunni Muslim leader in the Middle East of the era, Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafik Hariri. There will never be peace in that troubled region without the help of people like him. Though a devout Sunni Muslim who specialized in building mosques for the faithful, he was another confident, self-made billionaire businessman. This one, though, wanted to help steer the Arab world into the modern era.
Hariri, always dressed in sharp, shiny business suits, black-gray hair slicked back, and sporting an ample mustache, reminded me of an Arab Prince Rainier, Princess Grace of Monaco’s husband. The prime minister’s opulent palace in Beirut, personally refurbished by him, made him seem royal despite his humble birth.
Prime Minister Hariri told me that the Arabs were ready to take a chance for peace. But he complained bitterly that the Israelis were “stealing Palestinian land” with their continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Still, he told me passionately, the Arabs were ready to make their historic proposal, if only Israel was ready to compromise.
Then hell was unleashed back in Israel by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Disguised as a woman, Abdel-Basset Odeh entered a big Passover Seder celebration in the Park Hotel in suburban Netanya outside Tel Aviv. Inside were 250 guests, many of them elderly Jews in Israel without family. The Seder was a hotel tradition for the lonely who gathered for conversation and company at its annual party on this festive holiday.
Detonating his powerful explosive vest, the bomber ripped apart twenty-eight of the innocent old folks and injured 140 others, many of them Holocaust survivors. The Palestinian terror group Hamas claimed responsibility. The fury in Israel was raw and understandable. My lesson for then and now is clear and indelible. Never bet on a happy ending in the Mideast. Violence always wins.
With this mass murder, Hamas killed the peace process for my lifetime and beyond. I was bereft. It was the end of hope, the last best chance for peace in the Mideast. Even today I look back on that singular atrocity, the Passover Massacre, as the moment disorder finally routed hope. It is over. We will never get that close again. Trust me, never.
The next day, after reporting at a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, I cornered the highest-level Hamas official attending the Arab summit. I fired off a rapid-fire series of angry, condemning questions about the immorality of slaughtering innocent elderly civilians. The smug creep responded coldly with a question, “Are you Jewish?”
I was flustered. To say yes would be to make my righteous anger parochial, as if only a Jew would think the bombing was a disgusting atrocity. So I picked the middle road, avoiding the question.
“What the hell difference does that make?” I responded angrily. “Why did you ask me if I was Jewish?”
“Just a question.”
“Why?”
“Just a question.”
“Why?”
“Because you were talking about them as if they were innocent people.”
“They are innocent people.”
“No, they are not.”
The next evening, I was on with Sean Hannity and cohost Alan Colmes.
Sean Hannity: We continue now with Geraldo Rivera reporting from Beirut tonight. This is why—I got to tell you something; it’s your reporting that—and I’m an optimist by nature—that causes me not to be optimistic.
When you have people sworn to the destruction of the State of Israel like the leader of Hamas you showed us last night—I want to remind our audience—I don’t know how there could ever be peace . . . They’re not going to be happy even if we went back to the pre-1967 borders. They won’t be happy with that mind-set until Israel is pushed into the sea. Correct?
At which point I made a pitch for Palestinian sovereignty, if only to have a political entity that could be held responsible for atrocious acts of violence. Alan, a sharp observer, brought me down to earth.
Alan Colmes: Geraldo, he wanted to know if you were a Jew because he clearly felt that you had an agenda. That was a very scary question.
At this point in the live shot I described and demonstrated how the Hamas confrontation had unfolded.
Geraldo Rivera: This is what happened—we did the interview here. Right where I’m standing. We started walking over here. And it was over here where I finally got the kind of rage in me where I said, “Why in the world would you ask me if I was Jewish?”
By the time we got to this light-stand over here, Craig and I are united [indicating my brother as the camera panned over to show him]. You know, we’re Jewish, our mom, our dear mom is watching right now in Sarasota [Florida], Jewish, our dad Catholic. And right here, both of us wanted to thump that guy. Both of us wanted to give him a couple of overhand rights and say, “How dare you? You’re a pig, you’re an animal, and you don’t deserve to . . .” And then I bit my tongue at the very end because I didn’t want an international incident. I didn’t want to fight my way out of Beirut.
I understand that these are devilish, terroristic kinds of people. But Arafat can—listen, the sainted former prime minister of Israel blew up the British in the King David Hotel in 1946. He was then considered a terrorist, and then he became a statesman. Give the guy [Arafat] a chance. He’s a better—it’s better to make friends with these people. You can’t—Palestinian and terrorist are not synonymous. That’s my basic point.
Sean Hannity: Alright. We’ll give you the last word tonight. I say he’s still a terrorist. I hope you’re right. Great reporting.
THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT, MARCH 2002
I left Beirut for JFK via Paris on Air France the next day, flying to meet Erica and her family in her hometown of Cleveland for Friday Seder dinner. During the long flight, I penned a blog to my Jewish viewers explaining how hurt I was by their continuing rage.
It was a weird and troubling experience. In the thirty-two years I’ve been in the television news business the response to my work from viewers of the Jewish faith has been unswervingly positive. The walls of my den in Rough Point were lined with plaques, a large percentage of which were given by Jewish organizations for work like my 1980 ABC News documentary The Unholy War.
After my televised battles with neo-Nazis and skinheads, and with the Star of David tattoo on my left fist, I’ve been one of America’s most highly visible, tough-guy Jews.
Now, all I’m getting is hate mail from my old admirers, 18,000 angry emails and still counting. The problem is that I broke the 11th Commandment: I publicly criticized Israel. The issue is Palestine.
On the eve of Gen. Anthony Zinni’s peacekeeping mission to the region, in February I traveled there with my TV crew. It was clear even then that the administration of George W. Bush had become convinced that America’s strategic interests required it to resolve the issue, and that the resolution required nudging the parties into meaningful peace talks.
For Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians, that meant at a minimum stopping the suicide bombing. For Ariel Sharon that meant negotiations the end result of which would be the creation of an independent (Palestinian) state. Over the bloody weeks and months that followed it became clear that neither side was willing or able to do it. The result was more chaos and violence and an escalating conflict, despite the further visits of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Powell.
My break with my traditional Jewish allies came when I began warmly endorsing America’s calls for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories Israel has occupied since the 1967 War.
While constantly hammering the Palestinians for their hideous use of suicide bombers and the targeting of innocent civilians, I also criticized Israeli abuses of Palestinian human rights. One specific tactic I found particularly offensive was the rounding up of all men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, stripping them, and then painting numbers on their arms to better administer the incarceration and interrogation process. When I commented about the world seeing this kind of thing before and that if the roles were reversed, can you imagine Jewish reaction? The stuff hit the fan.
First there was the deluge of angry phone calls, hundreds of them, followed by the email avalanche. My new bosses at Fox News were soon shell-shocked. When I refused to back down, citing the fact that I was merely stating support for express U.S. policy as set forth in a recent U.S.-sponsored UN Security Council resolution, the situation calmed, only to flare whenever I pointed out that Israeli-occupation of the territories had to end.
No amount of lobbying can change that fact. Occupation and terror are organs of the same beast. They feed off each other. Arafat may be the savage Ariel Sharon portrays him as. Still, as long as Israel remains one of the few countries occupying the land of another, the violence and misery will continue. It might continue in any case. But at least Israel will be fighting from the moral high ground, as a democratic nation intent on protecting its people and its recognized borders. Not as a military occupier intent on inflicting its will on others. Please, keep your cards and letters.
WE’RE MAKING ALIYAH! MARCH 2002
I came up with a flamboyant fix for my specific “Jewish Problem” on my way to Seder in Cleveland. The brilliant idea was that Erica and I would marry ASAP and resettle in Israel. Here is the good part: Having established residence, I would then run for the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, from Herzliya, an upscale neighborhood on the north side of Tel Aviv, popular with expat American Jews. How better to prove that I loved the Jewish State than to move there and become part of the government?
After my hotel-suite confrontation with Bibi, and after many long phone calls to Erica in New York, I went so far as to apartment-shop in Herzliya. My dear friends Hanani and Naomi Rapoport live in Tel Aviv. She was a real estate agent, he an Israeli television-news executive who worked with me as a producer on 20/20 when the couple lived in the States.
Our families are still close. They provided the ten men or minyan for my son Gabriel’s bar mitzvah in Jerusalem in 1993. Their baby daughter, Dana, grew up to be a producer of mine at Fox News. We have known and loved each other since Hanani’s dad, Azaria Rapoport, was Israel’s consul general in New York. Consul General Rapoport was instrumental in getting me embedded with the IDF during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Holding public office was something that always appealed to me. My dream growing up was to be mayor of New York. As a representative of two of the big city’s most important ethnic groups, Jewish and Puerto Rican, I felt born for the job. In 2000, when two-term mayor Rudy Giuliani was set to leave office, I went so far as to commission a poll to determine my chances running as an independent. It would have required moving my voter registration back into the city from New Jersey, where I was still living at the time, but I was keen on making the race.
As expected, the poll showed the probable Democratic candidate, a lifelong politician named Mark Green, winning easily, with me as the independent tied with the probable Republican candidate, Michael R. Bloomberg, a little-known rich guy from Boston. When Bloomberg announced that he would spend up to $50 million to win the office in City Hall, I pulled out. Now a billionaire and one of the world’s richest men, Bloomberg spent that $50 million and about $950 million more in winning three full terms in City Hall.
The political bug kept buzzing in my ear. Years later, in 2013, I came within minutes of filing to run as a Republican against then-mayor Cory Booker of Newark for the US Senate seat vacated by the death in office of long-serving senator Frank Lautenberg. In contemplating making the long-shot run against a powerful celebrity Democrat in a hard-blue state, I consulted various, very connected experts, beginning with Roger Ailes, who was skeptical. I also spoke with Kellyanne Conway, the brilliant pollster and frequent guest on my CNBC Rivera Live show, who later became President Trump’s mouthpiece and White House consigliere.
Mayor Booker is a camera-ready media darling, well known for frequent appearances on Bill Maher and other celebrity talk shows. A tireless self-promoter, he got a ton of press for getting Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to donate $100 million to Newark schools. The money was squandered on thousand-dollar-per-day consultants, changing next to nothing in the school system. The mayor also attracted attention driving around Newark searching for crime, and for running into a ghetto house fire to rescue a family pet, like an action hero. Kellyanne advised me to tape my campaign spots in the wrecked heart of ghettoized Newark, where Mayor Booker had long held sway. “Your spot could say, ‘In the Senate, Corey Booker will do for New Jersey what he did for Newark.’” Ouch.
I pulled out of that Republican primary race literally a few minutes before a midnight deadline for filing. Again, it was about the money. The immediate reason was the just-announced support for my primary opponent, a hard-right-wing, small-town mayor named Steve Lonegan, by the fabulously wealthy Koch brothers. They were said to be willing to invest $5 million to back Lonegan, the truly conservative candidate, which I was obviously not. Running against him would have busted me in the primary alone. My argument that a rigidly conservative GOP candidate had no chance in relatively left-of-center New Jersey fell on deaf ears. Booker won easily, as expected.
In 2002, the possibility of the far more exotic run for Israel’s Knesset did not even last as long as my Jersey US Senate dream. When we arrived at the Levy home in suburban Shaker Heights, Ohio (where we now live), a distinct chill was in the air, and it was not all coming from the notorious lake-effect snow on the lawn. Although her parents had been remarkably accepting of Erica’s and my relationship despite the enormous difference in our ages, they were firmly opposed to our moving to Israel, especially as an Intifada raged.
Erica’s dad, Howard A. Levy, was an excellent labor lawyer who handled discrimination cases and did precedent-setting work on the limits of electronic discovery. Discovery in this context is what opponents during a lawsuit are permitted to see of the opposition’s emails, text messages, and so forth. He was also a highly regarded official in the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL. Her mom, Nancy, taught preschool and English to immigrants and was active in the heavily Jewish east-side Cleveland community where Erica was born and raised and that, fifteen years later, we now call home.
Both a couple of years younger than their notorious son-in-law-to-be, they were invariably kind, defending me to their close-knit group of friends in Shaker, many of whom were following our very public romance. Afflicted by the prostrate cancer that would kill him five years later at age sixty-two, Howard was not remotely amused by the prospect of his daughter’s moving to violence-torn Israel. Usually deferential, he dismissed this notion and refused to hear another word. Eventually, I felt foolish enough that I dropped the subject. Over the years, Erica and company have had a few laughs at my expense over that Knesset scheme.
RUNNING BACK TO WAR, APRIL 2002
Having celebrated the tail end of Passover with my future in-laws in Cleveland, and soon to celebrate the Catholic confirmation of my then-fifteen-year-old son, Cruz, in his hometown of Dallas, I completed my ecumenical family travels when I went to ultra-Episcopalian Marion, Massachusetts, to be with the girls and their mom, C.C., on Easter Sunday.
Like every man who ever left his family, I was weighed down by guilt, but I was soon heading back to the Middle East. That is one of the fringe benefits of being a globe-trotting correspondent. Whenever dealing with real life gets uncomfortable, you leave. Before returning to the Intifada, though, the immediate plan was to sail Voyager to New York Harbor from her current berth in picturesque Beaufort, North Carolina, where she had spent the 2001–2002 winter getting a new engine installed after the grueling trip up the Amazon and back. She was coming to the new home I was building on the Hudson River just south of the George Washington Bridge in Edgewater, New Jersey. Designed as the ultimate bachelor pad, it was being converted in a hurry to a family home now that Erica and I had fallen in love and planned to marry.
The trip on board Voyager did not go as planned. What I hoped would be a pleasant early-spring sail up the coast instead turned out to be a crashing, smashing several days of fighting a full gale on the nose in the area known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” I described it at the time as “Cape Hatteras fucks us again, freezing, awful, true shit, but nonetheless a vivid experience.”
After we had passed the cape, slowed by the wicked weather, the much-longer-than-expected journey was aborted after I was summoned to New York to do a special episode of Warzone. I left Voyager with the crew in Norfolk, Virginia, and flew home, before heading back to the Mideast on April 16, 2002. Israeli forces had just occupied the biblical city of Bethlehem in the Palestinian West Bank, and the region was on the brink of all-out war.
As the Israeli Army (IDF) continued to sweep up thousands of suspected Palestinian militants, dozens took refuge in the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birthplace of Christ. When they sought sanctuary, the Franciscan monks had no choice but to grant it. The church was surrounded, IDF snipers were in place, and a tense standoff was attracting the attention of the world.
Gambling that the situation at the church would hold, we went first to Southern Lebanon, where I planned to meet with bitterly anti-Israeli UN Special Envoy Terje Larsen. As I reported, “With escalating exchanges of fire coming on the eve of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s scheduled visit here to Lebanon and to neighboring Syria, the fear is of a second front in a full-scale shooting war.”
Ground zero in Southern Lebanon was an area called Shebaa Farms, a disputed hamlet-sized pocket of land located in the border corner where Lebanon, Syria, and Israel meet. Israel claimed that the farm was under its control as part of its occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights since the 1967 War. The Lebanese, led by Hezbollah militants, claimed Shebaa Farms as its historic territory and had mustered their army, threatening war, if necessary, to get Israel out.
“On a day as stormy and miserable as the current political situation here in the Middle East,” I began my live show from the edge of a minefield on a black, wet night.
The sign says it all, “Danger, Death, Minefield.” I’m standing right now on the border between Lebanon on this side of that fence and Israeli-occupied (Syrian) territory on the other. And between here and there, as the sign says, is a minefield that promises to kill anyone foolish enough to tempt it. Less than a week before, fierce fighting between Israelis and Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas ripped through Shebaa. The fighting was so intense it seemed on the verge of becoming a second front in an expanding Arab-Israeli conflict. The fact that it has not yet happened is one of the few bright spots in this tortured region.
BEIRUT, MARCH–APRIL 2002
On this trip, I interviewed Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri for the second time. Welcoming me to his palace like an old friend, this gregarious man was beset by melancholy, holding little hope that a pending visit to the region by Secretary Powell would do any good. Although he was deeply concerned about the standoff at Shebaa Farms in his own country, events in Palestine were foremost on his mind. Bloody fighting in the West Bank town of Jenin horrified the prime minister, and he was fearful the incendiary standoff in Bethlehem would explode in full-scale war.
Underlying his pessimism, Hariri told me on camera, was the fear the Israelis had been emboldened by the 9/11 attacks on the United States, with Americans now regarding all Muslims as enemies. Long before the advent of Donald Trump on the political scene, the prime minister said woefully, “Now to American eyes we are all terrorists. If President Bush doesn’t step in, things will get worse.”
The next day the crew and I flew from Beirut back to Amman, Jordan, en route to Bethlehem and the standoff at the Church of the Nativity. As it entered its fourth week, Israeli snipers began picking off Palestinian militants foolish enough to poke their heads out the windows of the old church.
ALLENBY BRIDGE, APRIL 2002
I was anxious to get to the action, which brought the region back to the front page, leading news shows in the United States. But the tension in the region made getting across the historic Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River into the Israeli-controlled West Bank more difficult and interminable than usual. Even in the best of times, Israeli security is not like our TSA. They are humorless, ruthlessly efficient, and meticulous, going through every crevice and wrinkle of every bag. Rather than waste time waiting for stern-faced IDF reservists to sift through our two tons of stuff, I wrote a short essay based on my conversation with the Lebanese prime minister.
Allenby Bridge, Jordan River Crossing, Occupied West Bank, 22 April 2002
An old rabbi once described the Middle East as a dark basement in which all kinds of horrors were being perpetrated: human rights abuses, torture, suppression of women and ethnic minorities, etc.
Israel, he said, was the one small corner of that basement where the light of democracy, free speech, and freedom of the press shined. But because it was the only place in that dark basement light enough to see anything, critics were always saying, “Look at this problem or that with Israel.”
I relate the old rabbi’s story to suggest that since its creation in 1948, Israel has suffered unfairly from criticism made possible only by its open and democratic nature. And that virtually every other country in the region experiences far worse abuses.
But Israel’s relative goodness is no longer enough to shield it from being raked over the coals of public disapprobation. Her harsh and unfocused military response to the suicide bombings has made sure of that.
“How can any Arab ignore what is happening in Jenin and the West Bank?” asks Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese Prime Minister, his voice cracking with emotion, his arms spread wide. “It’s on every television station, American, British, Lebanese, and the Gulf States. You can’t avoid the images of destruction and suffering. My daughter called me from Paris. She heard that I had arrested four Palestinians trying to cross our southern border to attack Israel. ‘Dad,’ she asked me. ‘How can you arrest people trying to struggle for their freedom?’ I explained how Lebanon has laws and that they were breaking our laws and if we don’t follow the law, how can we criticize the Israelis for their illegal acts in the West Bank?”
In this anecdote, more of a loving father and his daughter, than of a political figure explaining policy, I found some scant hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.
Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, the most reasonable Sunni Muslim leader, later assassinated by Syrians. Beirut, Lebanon, 2002.
A consistent voice for reasoned accommodation in the Middle East, Hariri was murdered in a massive February 2005 bombing in Beirut, engineered by the Syrians. The longer I live the more alarming becomes the number of dead friends and the prospect of joining them. The explosion wiped out his motorcade, claiming twenty-two lives, wounding hundreds of others. Rest in peace, Rafik Hariri, a fine man.
CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY SIEGE, APRIL–MAY 2002
The Israeli offensive in the West Bank and the subsequent siege of the Church of the Nativity were making a mess of the ancient city of Bethlehem. While driving to the scene past destroyed buildings, burned vehicles, and garbage-strewn, smoke-filled streets, I reported:
Given the awful provocation of the murderous suicide bombing attacks against innocent Israeli civilians, when you look at the widespread damage and devastation here in Bethlehem, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a kind of collective punishment has been meted out on the Palestinian people, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the seeds are sown for future conflict.
The Church of the Nativity and its host city of Bethlehem are an island of Christianity in a Muslim sea, unique in Sunni-majority Palestine. For various reasons including religious intolerance, as in Lebanon and throughout the region, the religion of Jesus is fast diminishing in this land. Holy places are profaned and antiquities destroyed, especially with the coming of al Qaeda and later its savage progeny ISIS and al Nusra. Religious oppression threatens to make Christianity a relic, like the ruins of past civilizations that dot the ancient landscape.
I have Palestinian friends in Bethlehem, families I have known for generations. I met Joseph and his family in the 1970s. Long-established in Bethlehem, his dad was my fixer when I worked at ABC News during and after the Yom Kippur War. His namesake son worked with me at Fox News despite the obvious bias of my network in favor of the Israeli point of view.
A couple of years ago, we put together a mini-rapprochement when I brought my assistant, Israeli-born Dana Rapoport, to a family dinner in Bethlehem. Although her parents’ home in Tel Aviv is just fifty miles from his, it was the first time Dana had ever been in the “Territories,” which is the sanitized way Israelis reference occupied Palestine. I am convinced that if native-born Israelis, known as Sabras, and native-born Palestinians spent more time together, they would see how close they are, cousins really, at least genetically/DNA-speaking.
The situation is worse, and the future bleaker, today in 2018 than it was in 2002. Nowadays there is not even a legitimate attempt to bring the sides together. Outsider peacemakers have given up. President Trump openly and enthusiastically embraces Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard line. The Palestinians simmer and can burst into another full burn at any time. When President Trump made the announcement that he will move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and that we recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the world condemned it as one-sided and unproductive. Worse, the US is tacitly allowing Israel to continue expanding settlements in the West Bank. If there is no land left for a viable Palestinian state, what will happen with the Palestinian people? Will they be vassals of Israel forever, living in isolated enclaves in a Greater Israel?
In 2002, the ancient Church of the Nativity was plunged into this heart of Muslim discontent when Palestinian rebels occupied it. The church lies at the end of a broad, tree-lined plaza across from a town square lined by two- and three-story buildings, with restaurants, small hotels, and shops selling Nativity trinkets on the ground floors, Palestinian Authority and other offices above. During Christmas and Easter celebrations, Manger Square is traditionally filled with Christian celebrants, although because of the Intifada it was not in 2002.
The sacred church structure is a patchwork that reflects the changing fortunes of the region, going from pagan to Christian to Islamic, back to Christian, then back to Islamic. Built during the Roman Empire, and then lost to the Muslim conquest of the seventh century, the original building sheltering the manger was largely destroyed. But some of the fortress-like, massive stone walls and towers have stood since the very beginning of this formal church in the fourth century.
The European Crusades of the Middle Ages liberated this traditional birthplace of Jesus for eighty-eight years, from 1099 until 1187, when the conqueror Saladin recaptured Palestine for Islam. Now, during this siege of April 2002, 815 years later, Muslim militants protected by Christian clergy sought refuge behind its walls as a Jewish army laid siege. All eyes were focused on “Humility Door,” the main entrance, a single heavy wooden door clearly visible across the empty square.
As I reported:
According to various sources, the negotiations for ending the impasse at the church, now in its fourth week, while stalemated over the larger issue of what to do about the Palestinian militants wanted by Israel, have agreed on something.
While the standoff and siege of the 1,700-year-old Church of the Nativity promises to drag on, today the expectation is that the Israelis will allow the two dead bodies inside to be removed. They’ve been inside now for days, and are said to be decomposing.
We’re told that the teenagers inside the building, or at least some of them, will also be coming out. The young people have been a point of considerable controversy. The Israelis allege that they’re being held by the Palestinians against their will, the Palestinians countering they’re in there because they want to be.
BE NICE TO GERALDO, APRIL 2002
Defying bitter complaints from journalists gathered from dozens of the world’s news networks, the commanders of the besieging Israeli forces, including IDF spokesman General Ron Kitrey, gave us preferential treatment. The Be Nice to Geraldo – So He’ll Be Nice to Israel strategy was clearly still in place.
All press, including us, were kept at a distance of about a football field from the church door, but even though we had just arrived in Bethlehem and our rivals had been covering the siege for four weeks, we were taken to the head of the line and given the best vantage point, on the second floor of a building called the Peace Center, a sweet spot from which we could broadcast Humility Door on live television.
Remember, in those days, spring 2002, to be live on TV required a cable from the camera to a satellite uplink, which requires substantial equipment. It was neither easy nor convenient, not like today’s lightweight, handheld wireless devices. In any case, we were in the perfect spot to watch the excruciatingly slow surrender process take place. On Sunday, April 28, I reported:
Now in its second month, the bitter and bloody standoff here at the birthplace of Jesus seems headed for a conclusion sooner rather than later. Another melancholy, empty Sunday for what has become the most watched entrance in the world, Humility Door, the Church of the Nativity’s main entrance facing Israeli troops occupying Manger Square.
On May 1, the sanctuary seekers finally began emerging in a steady stream, twenty-six of them, but as they were leaving, American and European peace activists were using the commotion to sneak past the Israelis and join the besieged inside the church. The damn standoff seemed endless. Even the kindness shown me by the IDF could not alter the fact that the stalemate went on long enough that we were forced to move when the Peace Center closed for security reasons.
At our new location, we found ourselves spending a cold night clinging to a slippery steep roof overlooking the church square, not knowing when the siege would break. This waste of time is why I hate stakeouts. They are the hardest part of original reporting. You wait around for something to happen, and if you take a bathroom break or grab a bite, you might miss the money shot.
The hang-up prolonging this crisis was the ultimate fate of the militants inside. All were required by Israel either to go to jail or at least be exiled from the Middle East. Would they get asylum in friendly countries or be deported to the Gaza Strip?
SHARING HUMMUS WITH ARAFAT, MAY 2002
Under intense pressure from America and Britain, the Israelis lifted a weeks-long blockade of Yasser Arafat’s Mukata walled compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah. As I reported:
That would pave the way for the Palestinian president to be released from his house arrest, and for the Israeli army to release its iron grip, its siege of the devastated compound as early as tonight. The fear among all the parties is that the sort of fighting we’ve been tracking from that fierce fight we witnessed last night that lit up the sky over Ramallah would spread even wider.
Emerging from his 34-day-long confinement under Israeli siege, Yasser Arafat is one of the most enigmatic people on the world stage. Branded a terrorist by the Israelis and those who support them, he is hailed here as a hero by most Palestinians, a kind of Founding Father.
The 73-year-old Arafat has been part of the public dialogue on the Middle East for most of the last four decades. Credited with giving the Palestinians a national identity, he also stands accused of consistently choosing confrontation over conciliation. But who is this frail strongman whose face has been featured on so many front pages and so many cartoons?
To answer that question, I used sharp elbows and a determination not to be beaten to scoop an exclusive interview with the Palestinian chairman, beating every other reporter crowding around him. Apparently impressed by my aggressive performance, Arafat, through an aide, later invited me to spend time inside his still-surrounded West Bank compound.
“Yasser Arafat was one of the most enigmatic people on the world stage.” April 2002.
What he did not seem to remember was that this was actually our second encounter. I had first interviewed Arafat nineteen years earlier in June 1983 in Tripoli, Lebanon, as his encircled followers were being forced to surrender to a dissident Palestinian faction backed by a surrounding Syrian army. It was a low point in his life. He was being deported from the Holy Land. As he emerged from a bunker in 1983, I asked him if this was “the end of the Palestinian Revolution.”
“Of course not,” he replied curtly, his eyes bulging in anger and frustration, as he headed under heavily armed Syrian escort by convoy to Damascus and from there to be flown to exile in Tunisia, where he would spend the next decade.
Flash forward to May 2002 as he was released from confinement in his compound in Ramallah. But in any case it was a compound no more. The Israelis had torn down the adobe wall that long encircled his headquarters and were driving their military vehicles around it like Apaches attacking a wagon train in our Old West.
Arafat seemed unperturbed by the provocation. He was just relieved to be free from house arrest and able to speak to comrades and the gathered world press. In a buoyant and reflective mood, he shared a lavish Lebanese mezza consisting of heaps of tabbouleh, hummus, and kebabs with Craig and me. I didn’t bring up the fact or the circumstances of our first meeting in Tripoli, and he didn’t mention it, either. At one point, he was so keen on making friends he hand-fed us an elaborate pita sandwich piled with cucumber and hummus.
“Taste this,” he insisted as he daintily put the food in our mouths.
We took pictures, and he quietly reflected on his greatest disappointment, making news when he confessed that his biggest mistake was not accepting the 1999 Clinton two-state peace initiative, which came closer than any other to resolving the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict. Arafat balked because he did not feel an impeachment-wounded President Clinton could deliver on his promises. When I later shared with Prime Minister Ehud Barak after he was out of office and visiting New York what Arafat had told me about the near miss of the Clinton peace process, Barak, a former fighting general, replied earnestly, “I wish he [Arafat] had told me that.”
As I reported from Ramallah:
In a wide-ranging interview with the Palestinian president on the very night he regained his freedom of movement, we spoke of many things, including his willingness, indeed his eagerness, to have an international peacekeeping force inserted between his people and the Israelis.
Conducted before Israel released its latest intelligence claiming Arafat personally approved acts of terror against Israeli civilians, I did press him during the interview to denounce suicide bombing.
It is doubtful that Chairman Arafat’s statements will change any minds, certainly not [then-prime minister] Ariel Sharon’s. The Israeli leader is scheduled to meet with President Bush this weekend.
From that day, I felt more sympathetic to Arafat than almost any of my colleagues. He should have trusted President Clinton, regardless of Monica Lewinsky. The deal Bubba proposed was so specific it defined the exact borders of the proposed “two states living side-by-side in peace” down to named streets and landmarks. Arafat did not take the offered deal, in my opinion, because he had no faith given impeachment that Vice President Al Gore could win the 2000 election and be able to implement the fragile deal.
Meanwhile, the Church of the Nativity siege finally broke a week later when the remaining militants, and various civilian sympathizers, slowly began emerging to go either into exile abroad or a local prison, or to be released. We were there as it happened. Fox News interrupted a taped episode of the O’Reilly Factor to go to me live.
I reported,
The negotiators accompanied by the monks have just come out. Eight men have just come out of the Church of the Nativity. They are gathered at the lower left of your screen . . . There you see them. They are apparently waiting.
It seems as if they are waiting for the others to come out of the church to leave Humility Door, the main entrance of the 1,700-year-old building built over the birthplace of Jesus. We understand the two groups to be coming out with the civilians—the seventy-five to eighty or more people who are relatively innocent and of whom the Israelis said they will be able to go home, go free. It seems inevitable now. This is Geraldo Rivera standing by live at the Manger Square at the Church of the Nativity.
ABE MEETS GERALDO, SPRING 2002
In the right place at the right time to record the historic moment of surrender, I noted at the time, “We kicked CNN’s butt.” But the Arafat/Nativity scoop was a small triumph in the scheme of things, and had no enduring impact either on this highly charged saga or on my career.
Rather than propel me to greater heights inside the Fox News hierarchy, this April 2002 trip was essentially the end of my uncensored criticism of Israel. Like former president Jimmy Carter, whose 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid made him a pariah among Zionists, for years after Bethlehem, like so many other commentators who do not toe the pro-Israeli line, I too was intimidated into silence. It’s one thing to stare down Islamist terrorists or gangbangers or ghetto muggers. It is another to take on the Jewish establishment, which truly never forgets.
Hoping to repair my rift with the pro-Israeli world, my future father-inlaw, Howard Levy, later arranged a dinner with Abe Foxman, the fiery head of the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL. As I mentioned, Howard was a ranking ADL official representing the Midwest from his base in Cleveland. The lunch in New York’s Plaza Hotel did not go well.
During an afternoon none there will ever forget, all conversation ceased when red-faced and veins-popping Abe exploded at me, demanding to know who the hell did I think I was to criticize Israel? How dare I? And so forth. I responded calmly, knowing by this time that I was not going to change his mind on the subject. The Levys, although they generally agreed with Abe’s position, were mortified by his rudeness and ill manner. We made up years later, when Abe and I shared a stage doing a marathon reading of Eli Wiesel’s Night to benefit the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan.
Abe won our battle in 2002. After Bethlehem, Arafat, and the Intifada, I did not allow myself to speak of Israel’s transgressions on the air with the same courage and frankness that I showed that spring 2002. For one thing, Fox News stopped sending me to the Middle East. In the August 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese-based Hezbollah, I was not asked to go, and chose not to volunteer. I knew that almost everyone assigned would cover the war from the Israeli side, and that because the IDF made access easy and relatively safe, many desk-jockey anchors would jump at the chance to play war correspondent.
In any event, the fierce border skirmish between Israel and Hezbollah ended inconclusively. One hundred eighteen IDF soldiers were killed in combat in Southern Lebanon. About thirty-five Israeli civilians also died, killed by Hezbollah rockets. The number of casualties on the Lebanese side was far larger, but in no sense was this battle a victory for Israel.
Despite having a force numbering 20,000, the vaunted IDF’s failure to destroy Hezbollah led to the collapse of the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and a shakeup in the Israeli army command. If anything, it revealed how powerful the Shiite militia had become, and how vulnerable Israeli civilians living in the north were to attacks by cheap, easily handmade, unguided missiles.
By 2014, in the similarly vicious mini-war in the Gaza Strip against Hamas, the Sunni militia widely considered a terrorist group, Israel was ready for those unguided terror rockets, deploying the American-supplied “Iron Dome” anti-missile system. I covered that deployment of the Iron Dome in Gaza, but that assignment was an exception.
For the ten years beginning in 2002, I focused on the wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan and seldom visited Israel, except to pass through coming and going from Jordan. I avoided Israel to avoid the “Palestinian Problem” and my conscience. From the encounter with Abe Foxman until relatively recently, the last couple of years really, I muted my public criticisms of Imperial Israel in a way that now feels cowardly.
