7
R
amadan had indeed cast a pall on the buffet efforts of the kitchen staff. I made do with limp toast, watery yogurt, and grainy instant coffee. Previous experience in the Islamic world told me that things weren’t likely to get better. By the end of the month nerves would be frayed and tempers short. There were always a few murders attributable to the strain of fasting—a deprivation that didn’t even allow for water. As the days wore on, local judges would begin dismissing many a petty charge as the price of doing business during a time of sacrifice. At least this year the holiday was in October. Summer Ramadans were positively brutal.
No such worries for me, of course, although finding lunch might be tricky. I walked to a small market near the hotel for fruit and bread, so I could snack later in the privacy of my room. Then, having put off the moment of truth long enough, I hailed a taxi to Omar’s office.
“You are here for long?” the driver asked.
“A few months.” Then I considered my cover. “Or maybe for good. I’m taking a new job. We’ll see how it goes.”
“You are welcome in Jordan.” He nodded emphatically.
The closer we came to our destination, the more I worried. Omar and I had been through too much together for me to approach betrayal lightly. But if he
had
gone off the deep end, maybe I would be doing him—and the world—a favor. Black, White, and Gray had offered little to back their suspicions. Their only hard information was a two-page bio, most of which I already knew. I had heard Omar’s life story firsthand, back in the wild days of ’88.
We never would have met if not for Hans Wolters, a big German with a generous laugh whose life mission was to save the entire Middle East, Jew by Jew, Arab by Arab. Hans had begun his hopeless quest as a twenty-year-old tourist, one of those earnest young backpackers in a sweaty bandanna who sleeps in hostels and rides the same teeming buses as the natives, subsisting on falafel by day and ramen noodles by night.
He had arrived in Jerusalem only months after the Six-Day War, and upon reaching the stone gates of the Old City he found himself in a moral quandary: With whom should he empathize more—the plucky survivors of the death camps or their downtrodden conquests, the West Bank Palestinians? As a descendant of Crusaders and Nazis, Hans felt deeply indebted to both sides. So he volunteered for a summer of labor on a kibbutz, and then enlisted in the UN’s effort to feed and clothe the children of the Jabaliya Refugee Camp in benighted Gaza.
Two decades of this evenhanded approach made Hans the perfect choice to run the show once UNRWA began organizing its human rights observer patrols in late ’87, shortly after the intifada uprising began.
He found it a trying experience, especially as Palestinian boys began to die in the streets. The hardest part, he told me later, after a fifth bottle of Maccabee beer at the UN’s Gaza Beach Club, was to keep from thinking of the harsher officers of the Israel Defense Force as latter-day storm troopers.
“It is the Star of David, not the swastika,” he slurred in his Bavarian accent, his face a study in tortured inebriation. “But to see those skinny boys just standing there, waiting for the tanks…”
I wondered if the recent legions of Palestinian suicide bombers had brought on another crisis in faith. Or maybe Hans had finally thrown in the towel, after discovering like the rest of us that neutrality only meant you ended up despising both sides.
Yet back then, he had never tired in his role as our matchmaker, pairing the bold young sons and daughters of the Palestinian elite with international partners for each of our daily patrol teams. At any one time, ten pairs were on duty—five in Gaza and five on the West Bank, from Jenin down to Hebron—working almost continuously in a three-day shift while the ten teams of the next shift cooled their heels.
Hans delighted in the matchups that clicked and sulked about the few that didn’t, although only one actually ended in divorce, famously so, when a roaring, bearded Belgian earned a quick flight to Brussels by throwing a full pot of steaming coffee at his stubbornly proud consort.
I met Hans in late ’87, just as he began rounding up volunteers. I, too, was working at Jabaliya at the time, helping supply a children’s clinic for a now-defunct NGO known rather grandiosely as Save the Planet, a mission it tackled largely on the strength of $300-a-week employees like me.
I’d already been knocking around in the aid business for seven years, long enough to realize that Hans offered my best shot yet at true adventure. It was also a way to get my foot in the door of the many-roomed mansion of the United Nations. Once its blue globe adorns your résumé, you’re welcome on almost any of the mansion’s floors. Play your cards right and you’ve got a career, as well as a lifetime badge of neutrality, a universal entrée into the wider world of strife.
I joined too late to make the original cast of observers. But in March I got the call, and Hans shipped me off to Vienna, of all places, for a crash course in training.
Five of us took the course together. We were an eclectic bunch: a pipe-smoking Danish military officer in his fifties, an Italian accountant around my age who was always impeccably dressed, a rather hot-looking nurse from London in her twenties with the unlikely name of Antoinette, and a New Zealand PR man who had dropped out of the rat race at age forty-two and was forever declaring that everything was “bloody brilliant,” in sincerity when he liked it, in sarcasm when he didn’t.
For three days we listened to management trainers spout platitudes about administrative skills and conflict resolution, in the bowels of the Vienna International Centre, a hideous ziggurat of concrete on the Danube. Then, only hours before our departure, our trainers flipped off the lights and said, “We’ve put together a fifteen-minute video of what a refugee affairs officer does.”
It was a horror show of blood, screams, gunshots, and flaming cars. Before we even stopped shaking they shoved us into cars for the airport, and as soon as the wheels left the ground I ordered my first of four martinis. By the time we touched down at Ben-Gurion I was seeing double.
Hans paired me first with Munira Mirza, a prim and proper young woman whose father lectured in history at Al-Quds University. For the Palestinians, the observer jobs offered a certain prestige, mostly because you had to be well connected to land one. And by local standards the pay wasn’t bad. That went for me, too. I was finally making enough money to rent a roomy new apartment in an Arab neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, a sunny place with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Old City.
But everyone figured the jobs would be short-lived because we assumed the intifada would soon spend its anger, burning out like a matchstick. Even the worst pessimists among us couldn’t imagine it would drag on for six years.
It was strange and stressful work. Much like a beat cop, we spent our days making a rough circuit of our territory. Sometimes the dispatcher called in an incident, and we raced to the scene. But usually we found trouble on our own, and then expended our energies trying to avert more of the same. We engaged daily in dozens of small negotiations, trying our tact on a bewildering variety of officers from the IDF. Some were high, some were scared, and others were alternately bored, angry, nice, brutal, and fair-minded. You had about fifteen seconds to get a read on their mood and motivation, and about fifteen more to establish enough rapport to defuse the situation.
Munira showed me the ropes. She had been on the job since December, and I learned more about what it meant to be a Palestinian in those first three months than I had in a year of working at Jabaliya. She also taught me the finely balanced etiquette of our pairings. None of the Palestinians ever wanted to be patted on the back or shown any sort of familiarity by an Israeli officer, which would brand them forever as a collaborator. None of the army officers ever wanted to lose face by having a Palestinian talk down to them or brandish one of our handheld radios in their presence.
In all our time together, I don’t think Munira once opened her mouth in the presence of a soldier, yet she almost always set the tone in our dealings with the vast, restive rabble of Palestinian teenaged boys known on the streets as the
shebab.
By the time June rolled around, I was beginning to think I knew all there was to know about our odd new profession. Then Hans paired me with a newcomer named Omar al-Baroody, and it was my turn to be the teacher.
Omar was twenty-seven then, a graduate in urban planning from Birzeit University whose father had achieved a certain status and wealth as the owner of a few hotels on the West Bank. Our first week was rocky, the second rockier. I kept having to remind him not to carry the radio when we left the car, and he kept taking it anyway. Whenever we watched the
shebab
creep within stone-throwing range of the tanks, Omar always seemed on the verge of running to join them, balanced on his toes with eagerness burning in his eyes. In meeting army officers he perfected the art of the bristle, head thrown back and chest out, a smoldering glare in his eyes. We talked about it, of course, with Omar always professing ignorance of any attitude problem. Until one day, with only a week left in our hitch, everything boiled over.
It happened during a visit to an IDF central military office near Nablus. The Nablus route was my favorite, partly because of its stark beauty—not only the city, set between steep, barren mountains, but also the rolling landscape, which in the spring bloomed riotously with wildflowers. It also offered the most action. The Palestinians called Nablus “Jebel Amnar,” the Mountain of Fire. The Israelis answered that they would turn it into “Jebel Ramadh,” the Mountain of Ash.
Because the city was so far north of our headquarters in Jerusalem, Nablus was the one patrol that required an overnight stay on location, at a UN crash pad, and by the end of each shift in Nablus you were thoroughly wrung out. That was the condition Omar and I were in as we approached the IDF headquarters.
These compounds were scattered around the Occupied Territories. Each was fenced in and heavily fortified, with its own military court, prison, interrogation center, and barracks. We always parked our Passat outside, out of regard for our own image as much as theirs, entered through a revolving barred gate and then crossed the yard to the main building, where a presiding officer monitored the comings and goings much like a police desk sergeant at a precinct house.
On this occasion we were visiting on behalf of a family in Nablus whose son had been detained an hour earlier after some rioting. The soldiers had come to his house. He had never been in trouble before, so his parents were naturally concerned about his fate. As luck would have it, three soldiers brought the boy out the door of headquarters just as we arrived. Luckier still, Captain David Ben-Zohar led the procession. He had one of the better reputations among the officers, and while I would never have called us friends, I liked to think we had a grudging mutual respect. Captain Ben-Zohar always seemed a little regretful about the business of military occupation, but his reputation for occasional leniency had never cost him an ounce of loyalty among his men, who were invariably well disciplined. No high-as-a-kite young recruits in his command.
But this time I was disappointed to see that the boy in custody was bruised and bloody. It looked like he had gotten quite a going-over, and when Ben-Zohar spotted Omar and me he seemed almost sheepish.
“What’s happened to him?” I asked. I tried not to sound confrontational, but, as I said, it had been a long day. Perhaps the same was true for Ben-Zohar, judging from what followed.
“He arrived this way,” the captain said wearily. “We only picked him up a minute ago.”
“We just came from his family, who told us you took him an hour ago. He’s been beaten.”
“Jews don’t torture people.”
“Give me a fucking break.”
“Sorry. I don’t have time for this.”
Ben-Zohar shoved me aside.
The next thing I knew Omar was unclipping the handheld radio from my belt. He began hailing our dispatcher in Jerusalem, shouting loudly, “An injustice has been done in Nablus!”
Ben-Zohar exploded.
“What the hell’s he doing with that thing?”
Omar answered before I could.
“I am calling in this outrage. You are acting like a Nazi.”
“
Nazi?
Did you say
Nazi
?”
The three soldiers surged forward as one. All I remember now is pushing my hands against their chests. It was a bit like fending off a stampede with a cattle prod. Omar at least had the good sense to take shelter behind me instead of striking back. The first blow glanced sharply off my head, and fortunately that was enough to jolt Ben-Zohar back to his senses. He quickly shouted a command in Hebrew to restore order, and it was a testament to his abilities as a commander that his men immediately backed off, even though they were still snarling for a chance to bring down the uppity young Arab.
“Get him out of here! Now! And don’t ever bring him back! You’re lucky I’m not arresting you both.”
Omar was trembling in anger or fear, maybe both, and once we were back in the car with the doors shut I decided to strike while he was still off balance.
“What the hell was that?
Never
do that again! You are never to use the radio in the presence of a soldier, and you are
never
to cause an officer to lose face. You nearly fucked our entire operation. Do you understand?”
He looked at the floor a few seconds before answering in a tone of wounded indignation.
“I cannot stand by in silence when they lie. I am sorry, but there is no way around it. I must be true to my people. I must be true to myself.”
I waited to see if he would say anything more. When he didn’t, I took a deep breath to collect myself, while trying not to dwell on what a close call we’d just had. Under a lesser commander they would have beaten both of us senseless and locked us away. Then I spoke again, firmly but gently.
“Omar. From now on you must try to practice
taqiyya.
”