A Zionist among Palestinians

CHAPTER 1

Jericho I

Introduction to the Intifada

Wajiha (pronounced wa-JEE-ha) was in her twenties and still unmarried. Her impatient parents could wait no longer, so they forced her into an arranged marriage with a cousin from Jordan. But after the wedding Wajiha ran away and hid for forty days and forty nights. In the end, her opposition to the marriage succeeded; her parents had to give in. The newlyweds were then divorced, and Wajiha came out of hiding and returned home. Consequently, the groom’s family was furious, and Wajiha knew that she could never go back to Jordan after insulting his family’s honor.

Back in her home in the West Bank town of Jericho, Wajiha felt ill one day and started walking to her doctor’s office. It was 1988. The houses in Jericho were all flying black flags in memory of Abu Jihad, Yasser Arafat’s second-in-command, who had just been killed in Tunis—on 16 April—by an Israeli commando raid. As Wajiha approached the road leading from the mosque to the graveyard at the southern end of town, she saw a mass procession carrying a coffin: a mock funeral to protest the killing. The situation grew ominous because, while the Israel military authorities allowed the Palestinians to vent their anger by raising flags of mourning, the authorities would not permit a mass march to take place.

An Israeli officer called on the people to disperse. When they refused, soldiers began to fire tear gas into the crowd. Palestinians countered by throwing stones at the soldiers. Wajiha and others who were caught up in the clash escaped into a courtyard. The Israeli colonel commanding the Jericho region, a career officer, radioed orders to the reserve officers from my unit to fire live bullets at the Palestinians who were inciting the crowd. However, none of our officers would obey. So the colonel fired by himself, shooting and wounding a young man named Subhi in the leg. This clash had erupted very close to the house of Wajiha’s sister Yusra. Yusra’s husband, Sa’ed, rushed over with some friends and began dragging Subhi away so that he wouldn’t be captured. The soldiers charged at Sa’ed. He tried to get away, but a large officer, a man with a black mole, chased after him.

Massive confusion ensued. The soldiers charged into the courtyard where Wajiha was waiting. The Palestinians all fled, except for Wajiha, who felt too sick to run. One of our officers, Uri, pulled up in a command car. Uri’s driver, Wolf, grabbed Wajiha triumphantly and pulled her into the street where Uri was sitting in the command car.

This is the one who was throwing stones, shouted Wolf, mistaking Wajiha for a boy. His imagination running away with itself, Wolf continued, "His face was masked with a kufiye [an Arab man’s headdress], but he threw away his kufiye just as we entered."

Uri was a good-natured officer, a kibbutznik, and would almost certainly have let Wajiha go, but at that moment the Israeli military governor of Jericho drove up. Hearing Wolf and not knowing, as we all did, that Wolf was an unreliable hot-head, the governor arrested Wajiha on the spot.

Uri didn’t know this, but I had almost killed him—Uri—several years earlier. It was during our annual reserve training, and we were pretending to capture a fortified position. The training was taking too long, the sun was already setting, and regulations required that we carry out the exercise during daylight. But the officers wanted us to complete the practice despite the semi-darkness. Uri ran over to an empty oil drum that was meant to symbolize an enemy pillbox. He pretended to place an explosive charge next to it, and then was supposed to run back to our lines. For some reason, he remained next to the drum and crouched down, his huge olive-drab doubon (hooded, quilted coat) making him look, in the semi-darkness, like a rock. All the shooting had stopped, and I was sure that Uri had already run back. I was an inexperienced and eager squad commander, responsible for three machine gunners, and decided that we needed to resume fire to soften up the enemy. I was preparing to give the command To the oil drum: fire! but before the first word issued from my mouth Uri moved. I gasped and swallowed hard. From then on, each year when I would see Uri while I was on reserve duty, I would give a prayer of thanks that he was still alive. Uri was a big-hearted, roly-poly man with a soft, tolerant smile. He wouldn’t have taken Wajiha.

Meanwhile, Wajiha’s brother-in-law, Sa’ed, ran up a dead-end alley with Doron, the Israeli officer with the mole, in pursuit. With no place to go, Sa’ed turned and raised his hands to protect his head. To Doron it looked as if he were trying some kind of karate maneuver. Expecting to be attacked, Doron came down hard with his billy club, almost breaking Sa’ed’s hand. (When we had come to Jericho a few weeks earlier, for our first reserve duty during the intifada, our unit was issued billy clubs for the first time ever, in response to a call to break Palestinians’ arms and legs. But our commander had locked up the clubs in the quartermaster’s storeroom. This was the first time our soldiers were carrying batons.)

Doron was new to our unit. He had served formerly in the border police. Some of my fellow soldiers related that in Lebanon his unit had beaten an Arab to death. In the ensuing investigation of this action, all the soldiers gave the same cover-up story—except Doron, who told the truth. Later, when Doron was back in his moshav (cooperative farm), a group of his comrades showed up to teach him a good lesson, tying him and dragging him behind a jeep by a rope, until his skin was abraded. Consequently, he had to quit the border police and came to do reserve duty with us. He was an offbeat kind of guy, but not mean like many of the others in the border police. Two other men who joined us from the border police had put out cigarettes on the arm of a Palestinian whom they had stopped. Our commander made it clear to them that our unit didn’t behave that way. But Doron wasn’t cruel like that. He slept in the bunk next to mine, and we talked a lot. He had just thought that Sa’ed was about to use a karate move.

I was home on leave the morning when the mock funeral procession for Abu Jihad took place. When I returned in the afternoon to the base in Jericho (less than an hour’s drive from my home in Jerusalem), I saw a row of Palestinian men sitting on the ground, waiting to be interrogated by the Shabak (the general security service). One of them was thin and short and looked, even from a distance, like a girl. This was the frail Wajiha. My commander, Shammai, told me that my job would be to guard her. Perhaps he picked me for this task because I was the oldest soldier in the unit. I was fifty-two, and even though compulsory reserve duty ended at age forty-five, I volunteered each year to continue serving with my unit, for about a month a year. Perhaps he picked me because he knew that I was not filled with hatred for Arabs.

I had no idea how a male soldier guards a Palestinian woman while respecting her modesty, her honor, and her good name. It seemed to me that propriety required our being clearly visible, so I set up two folding chairs in the middle of the soldiers’ yard, and there we sat. I had my battle gear, M16 assault rifle, seven magazines with twenty-nine bullets each, and two full canteens. Poor Wajiha, looking so little and tired and miserable, was resigned to her fate. I spoke to her a bit in English, but she barely responded. I couldn’t tell if she didn’t know the language, or if she didn’t want to talk with her captors and occupiers. I asked whether she wanted something to eat. She declined, saying it was Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast from sunup to sundown. I asked whether she wanted to drink, but she said that too was forbidden. I was surprised that such a modern-looking young woman, wearing jeans and lipstick and with her face unveiled, observed the religious laws. My big fear was that she would need to go to the toilet, and that I would have to clear the large soldiers’ latrine to give her privacy. But apparently Ramadan helped me out, and she never asked to go. As the sun began to set and the desert heat changed to coolness, I told her to wait a minute and I would bring her something warm to wear. I felt confident that she would not run away. Under my bunk I found my civilian windbreaker, and then, realizing that she might be on her way to jail, added a Hemingway novel to give her something to read. She accepted the windbreaker, putting it on against the evening chill. She took the book too, although I wasn’t sure if it would be of any use to her.

There is no place to lock up women in Jericho. After the Shabak interrogated Wajiha, they sent her home and told her to wait there until the police came to get her. She was not guarded. At about midnight the police van arrived from Jerusalem. The police blindfolded her, tied her to a bar in the van so she couldn’t escape, and transported her to the infamous Russian Compound jail in Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, the men who had been arrested were all put into a large, barred lock-up room in the army camp, with wall-to-wall mattresses. Each evening, their wives or mothers would come to the base with home-cooked food for the men to break their day-long fast. While it must have been against regulations, our commander, Shammai, let them eat their own food, after checking to see that there were no concealed weapons. Shammai enjoyed chatting with the women, especially with Wajiha’s sister Yusra, who was the leader of the women and spoke the best English. Her husband, Sa’ed, was called the singer by the soldiers, for he played and sang Arabic music professionally. Another prisoner was called the photographer. He would probably be punished more severely than the others, because he had stood on a roof and photographed the riot. The soldiers from my unit spent a lot of time talking about the prisoners, the only Palestinians with whom we had any real contact. One of our radio men, Itzik, would bring them their food from the army kitchen. When he talked just with us, he would regularly curse all Arabs, but because his family had immigrated to Israel from an Arab country, he would chat with the prisoners in their own language. He was their favorite soldier.

The First Intifada had erupted four months earlier, in December 1987. At home, Israelis learned about it on the television evening news, watching scenes of stone-throwing and mobs of rebellious Arabs. When our unit arrived in Jericho for our first real taste of the intifada, the company commander of the outgoing reserve unit taught us the ropes. He said that we would find this to be an entirely different experience from anything we had done in the army. He said that he had commanded soldiers who had supported the Peace Now movement, but after they saw what was going on, they had changed their thinking 180 degrees. He showed us that he kept a bottle with some gasoline in his jeep at all times, so that if he killed a Palestinian, he could convince the inquiry that the Palestinian had thrown a Molotov cocktail. When the Palestinians closed their stores for the daily strikes called by the intifada’s leaders, he demonstrated how he destroyed the front of a poor man’s shop by driving his jeep through its locked front door.

But what we saw was different. Driving around in our jeeps in Jericho, armed to the teeth, we saw busloads of European tourists—British and Germans and Swedes, sunburned bright pink, girls in the briefest of attire—walking around freely and looking at the sights. Jericho is the oldest city ever uncovered, with its archaeological tel, a green oasis in the hot, dry, dusty desert. In the town were run-down shops selling old copper and brass pots and utensils. The tourists would shop in this market, eat in the garden restaurants, and visit the site where John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River nearby.

Shammai wasn’t looking for problems. He made us drive our jeeps in pairs so that there was always enough power to keep a soldier from feeling threatened and reacting violently. He didn’t park the jeeps in front of the school to draw the children into confrontations. Friday prayer days, when the mosque lets out, are known as times for trouble. But instead of stationing his troops in front of the mosque to show who was boss, Shammai had us wait on a knoll a short distance away, from which he could keep an eye on things without being noticed by the congregants. On one Friday while waiting for prayers to end, my partner couldn’t get his jeep started. I drove up behind him to push him, but we locked bumpers, and my ancient jeep had lost its reverse gear long ago. By the time we had disengaged, the crowds were already pouring out of the mosque. We had begun to push the second jeep to start it when a group of Arab men, seeing that the jeep wouldn’t start, laughingly came over and helped us push until it started. It was hard to understand what was going on.

Early one morning an Arab man was walking home from his night’s work. We stopped him and told him to clear away a roadblock that kids had set up during the night. But I didn’t build it, he complained. We didn’t relent, so he began to take it apart. There was something dignified in his manner, a simple man in the suit jacket that Arabs wear regularly (but we do not). I went over and started helping him. There was a big steel bed in the roadblock, and each of us took one end. We chatted together in English as though this were the most natural thing. Just then, the military governor of Jericho drove up. He called out to me, saying I should let the Arab do the work alone. I replied that I was just helping him. The governor then said that in Gaza, Palestinians had planted a hand grenade in rocks piled across the road, and when an Israeli soldier removed the rocks the grenade had exploded and he lost his hand. I said that if there were a suspicion of a bomb, we should call for army sappers to come and dismantle it, and not let an innocent passerby be blown up. The governor, who by definition is always an army officer in uniform, lost his patience and told me to quit. But Shammai growled firmly, He’ll do what he wants to do. The governor backed off, and the Palestinian and I finished the job together.

Although we basically did not clash with the population, two weeks into our three-and-a-half-week tour of duty there were nightly throwings of Molotov cocktails. No one was hurt, but one night an Israeli woman driving with her young child received a Molotov cocktail through her open car window. It fell on the back seat, but didn’t explode. From then on, we lay every night in ambushes in the banana groves beside the main road that connects Jericho to the entire Jordan Rift and the Sea of Galilee. It was a complicated situation. We were prepared to kill children throwing Molotovs, yet were casually relaxed with the population of this rebelling Palestinian town. I was confused, but my actual contact with Palestinians was strangely reassuring.

Toward the end of my reserve duty, all the arrested men were released from the lock-up in the army base. But poor Wajiha, in her jail cell in Jerusalem, had been forgotten, and there she stayed. When we were discharged, I decided that I had to find Sa’ed and Yusra and try to understand what was going on.

CHAPTER 2

Jericho II

The Dialogues

I finished my reserve duty a day before the rest of the unit, as I had a day’s leave coming to me. I found out Sa’ed’s address from our office, and went to find him. Unfortunately, the only pants I had that were not olive drab were a pair of running shorts, which would look odd in Jericho. However, Jericho is a small town (population about 15,000), and I figured that I could quickly jog over to any place in it. I was a little anxious about going around alone in a Palestinian town, but I felt reassured by the familiarity achieved during the weeks in which I had driven around the town. And my own friends were still serving there in the army, so soldiers would probably not give me a hard time.

I went into town and asked a Palestinian standing in the street how to get to Sa’ed’s home. The Palestinian man invited me in for coffee, but I told him that all I wanted was directions. He said that his brother would drive me, it would be better, but first I should have a cup of Arabic coffee. I said that I knew it was Ramadan and I didn’t want to drink while he was fasting, but he insisted, and so I drank the coffee while he looked after me, and his brother got dressed and pulled his car out of a little garage. They continued to insist that it was best for him to drive me, and that anyway Sa’ed was the man’s wife’s cousin. So I rode with the brother to find Sa’ed and Yusra.

In the car, after a couple of minutes of driving, the brother said to me meaningfully, You must know that I am a soldier also, like you. I had no idea what he was leading up to. I was dressed in running shorts, running shoes, and the windbreaker that I’d lent Wajiha, which Yusra had returned after Wajiha had been taken away. The brother continued, I am not just a soldier, I am an officer. Frequently, I drive to Tel Aviv or to Gaza to meet my contacts in the Shabak. We are working together, you and I, for the same purpose. I was shocked. I was being driven to Sa’ed’s house by a collaborator. If people knew that he was a collaborator, I would not be trusted. If they did not know, I had to be sure to do nothing to blow his cover, since he was working with our security forces. What a terrible circumstance! But before I could consider my plight, we were at Sa’ed’s house. The driver led me in, and he and Sa’ed gave each other hugs and cheek-to-cheek kisses, in the Arab way. They exchanged pleasantries in Arabic, and then the driver excused himself and I was alone with Sa’ed and Yusra.

I said in English, I’ve come because I wanted to talk with you, but I can understand if you don’t want to talk to an Israeli, and a soldier at that. I’ll leave if you wish. Sa’ed invited me in with the Arabic welcome, Ahalan w’-sahalan. I saw that his hand was bandaged where Doron had hit him with the club. We sat and began to talk, and then Yusra came in with a small cup of coffee. I know that it’s Ramadan, I said, and I don’t want to drink if you are fasting. It’s all right, Sa’ed replied. I am Muslim, so I will not drink. But you aren’t, and you are my guest in my house, so I would be pleased to see you drinking.

I said that it was a shame that we were always fighting each other, and wondered if they thought there was hope for a better future. Sa’ed began to talk, while Yusra sat and listened. Sa’ed said that what the Palestinians wanted was a state next to Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and not to destroy Israel. He spoke at length and in such a moderate way that I was amazed. This was April 1988, four months into the intifada, and before Yasser Arafat made his conciliatory pronouncements in Algiers and Geneva. From the Israeli press I had understood that the intifada was a new method for achieving the Arabs’ age-old goal of throwing us into the sea. Yet Sa’ed was obviously one of the rare Arab moderates with whom we could really make