And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (7 page)

The Palestinians were no slouches at this game either. You could call Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian peace negotiator, at midnight, and he’d pick up the phone himself and stay on the line for as long as it took to answer your questions. There was never a time when a Palestinian leader wasn’t available. They had learned from the Israelis that they needed to be quick in getting out their side of the story. Ordinary Palestinians also seemed to be far more sophisticated than the Egyptians, who were apt to think that the capital of the United States was New York. I was a novelty to Egyptians, and they talked to me mostly out of curiosity. The Palestinians talked to me not because I was a foreigner, but because
I was an American journalist, and it was important to them that I understood their history and their cause.

During my nearly four years in Cairo, I lived in the world of the Arab big men, leaders like Mubarak who saw themselves as the fathers of their nations and who were opposed by a complex web of Islamic groups. Over the next three years based in Jerusalem, I witnessed the death of the peace process. But I didn’t know it was about to die when I arrived. Back then there was so much hope. There was a feeling that a peace deal would finally result in a two-state solution and the creation of an internationally recognized state called Palestine with clear borders, passports, and maybe even a small army.

One of my first stories was about Palestinians designing their own currency. This was six months before the Camp David talks in July 2000. I was talking to the Palestinian negotiators and advisors every day—Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi, and Yasser Abed Rabbo—and they sounded optimistic even though they knew that a lot of big issues still needed to be resolved.

At that time, relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the West Bank were governed by the Oslo II Accord, an “interim agreement” signed in Taba, Egypt, in September 1995, and reinforced by the Wye River Memorandum, signed three years later in Maryland. These agreements, temporary and highly legalistic, were aimed at establishing a status quo that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to live together until “final status” negotiations could resolve the more complicated questions as part of a comprehensive peace plan.

Life under Oslo II was highly regulated and lawyerly. The agreements established three administrative designations for
Palestinians living in the West Bank. The three categories were determined by behavior not geography, and the map of the West Bank was a kaleidoscope of colors. Access to each area was restricted by Israeli checkpoints, which numbered six hundred at one stage.

Area A, which was under full Palestinian control, covered only 3 percent of the land area but included eight cities important to the Palestinians, among them Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus, and 80 percent of Hebron. These areas were off bounds to Israelis except in security emergencies. Area B covered roughly one-fourth of the West Bank and included 440 Palestinian villages and no Israeli settlements. It was under Palestinian civil control but responsibility for security was shared by the Israelis and Palestinians.

Area C, which included all the Israeli settlements and encompassed 70 percent of the West Bank, was under full Israeli control.

It was a strange system in which Palestinians had different rights depending on where they lived. In Area A, Palestinians theoretically controlled their own destinies, but only within that space. A areas were like tiny islands of Palestinian autonomy. B areas were even stranger because Palestinians were governed by both their own leaders and the Israel government, and it was never clear who ran what. In C areas Palestinians were theoretically under full Israeli control, but didn’t enjoy the same rights as Israeli citizens. The system was a mess, but it was all supposed to go away once a “final status” deal was agreed to.

The A-B-C zones amounted to a good-behavior system. If an area showed it was stable and secure, it could move up a rung, from C to B or even B to A. In other words, if the Palestinians
showed they could run a place peacefully and successfully, the Israelis were supposed to give them more autonomy. But the process was slow, and even a minor infraction, or alleged infraction, could knock a whole village down a rung.

The “final status” talks at Camp David brought together Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat, and President Clinton. The negotiations were supposed to tackle the hard issues and end up with a two-state solution that would supplant the complicated A-B-C system, which required a law degree to understand. The core issues of the “final status” talks hinged mainly on Palestinian refugees and their right of return, redrawn borders, and the Old City in Jerusalem—in other words, what the Palestinian state would look like, who would live there, what its capital would be, and how the two sides would handle the religious sites in the Old City.

The talks sometimes seemed like an exercise in hairsplitting, but how the hairs were split could have profound consequences. The negotiators would spend days talking about “control” versus “sovereignty”—that is, who would control the land as opposed to who actually owned it. These distinctions took on outsize importance when applied to what Jews consider their holiest site and call the Temple Mount and Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary or Al-Aqsa compound in the Old City, Islam’s third holiest site.

After two weeks of talks at Camp David, on July 25 the negotiators started discussing the issue of how to handle the Old City, a tiny 220-acre parcel encompassing four quarters (Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Armenian) and on its east side the rectangular-shaped Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa compound. The Palestinians were ready to give up the “right of return” to land captured by the Israelis in return for reparations of roughly $30 billion, to be raised
mainly by the United States. The two sides reportedly agreed that Jerusalem would be the capital of both Israel and Palestine. While the final borders had not been settled, they could be resolved with some land swaps. But agreement on the status of the holy sites in the Old City remained out of reach. These were the last days of the Clinton administration and, as is often the case, the political clock ran out before a historic resolution could be reached.

Whether an agreement could have withstood events on the ground in Israel is an open question. When Camp David unraveled, the conservative Likud Party smelled political blood and started hammering at Barak and the Labor Party as weak and prepared to give away the store.

The internecine squabbling turned deadly after September 28, 2000, which marked the beginning of the Second Intifada, Arabic for uprising. The revolt was sparked when Ariel Sharon and a Likud delegation visited the Temple Mount. It’s hard for many Americans, even regular churchgoers, to appreciate the religious passions stirred by the Temple Mount, which is a raised plateau buttressed on its west side by what is known as the Wailing Wall. The Wailing Wall, also called the Western Wall, is believed to be the last vestige of two Jewish temples that once stood on the spot. Three sacred Islamic structures—the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Dome of the Chain—were built between AD 685 and 705 on the ruins of the temple site. Muslims who pray on top of the Temple Mount can look down and see Jews worshipping at the Wailing Wall. The Jews below can look up and see Muslims worshipping on land where their temples once stood. It is a religious conflict set in stone.

It is also hard for Americans to appreciate the passions stirred by Sharon. Regarded by some as Israel’s greatest field commander,
he’s a tough-guy hero to many Israelis for his assault of the Sinai during the 1967 war and his encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army in 1973, widely viewed as the decisive moment in the Yom Kippur War. To Palestinians, though, he is evil incarnate because of his role in the Lebanon War, in which he failed to stop the massacre in 1982 of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Israeli troops encircled Sabra and Shatila and illuminated the sky while pro-Israeli Christian militiamen (the Phalanges) entered the camps and slaughtered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinians.

In September 2000, Sharon went on top of the Temple Mount, with an entourage, walking through the area where Muslim mosques have stood for centuries. Sharon’s stroll was his way of showing “we’re in charge here.” It clearly signaled to the Labor government that the Likud Party was preparing a political challenge. More importantly, it was an unmistakable provocation to the Palestinians. Overnight, the dream of two peoples living peaceably in adjacent states gave way to a nightmare of urban combat between Israeli armed forces and Palestinians.

Many Israelis then, and equally true now, scarcely saw the Palestinians as human. Despite the interim peace accords, the Israelis did everything possible to make the Palestinians’ lives miserable. The streets in Palestinian areas controlled by Israelis were potholed and the trash often wasn’t picked up. If you were in Palestinian East Jerusalem, you struggled to get a taxi to Jewish West Jerusalem. If you wanted cable television, the YES Network, an Israeli company, wouldn’t come to your home. To pay bills, Palestinians in East Jerusalem had to go to West Jerusalem. West Jerusalem, by contrast, was like a European capital. Shops were on every corner, with clean and safe streets lined with restaurants
serving international cuisine with fine wines and espresso afterward.

Because I was covering the Palestinians, I frequently went through the Qalandia checkpoint en route from my home to the West Bank, where I would go to Ramallah, Nablus, and other Palestinian areas outside Jerusalem. I had West Jerusalem plates on my little car and Israeli press accreditations, so it usually took me between ten minutes and half an hour to get through the checkpoint. It was managed by a half dozen Israeli soldiers—boys and girls, really. A line of hundreds of Palestinians waited to get through, and it would take them hours, often sitting by the side of the road in the hot sun. The Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint spoke only a few words of Arabic, and when they encountered people whose papers weren’t in perfect order, they were curtly dismissive. With their palm down, they flicked their fingers outward, as if to say, “Get away from me.” The Palestinians would have to go to the back of the line and wait another hour or two to talk to another soldier. At first I wondered how so few could control so many, but I came to understand that the Palestinians knew that reprisals would be swift and severe if they stepped out of line.

After Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, violent clashes broke out between the Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. I watched many of them in Ramallah, about a forty-five-minute drive from my home, depending on how long it took me to get through the Qalandia checkpoint. The clashes began like the confrontations in the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993 and resulted in the deaths of 160 Israelis and 2,200 Palestinians. Typically some Palestinian boys would start throwing rocks at the Israeli soldiers, who would respond by firing rubber bullets at them. (Rubber bullets aren’t as benign as they sound. They’re slugs
or marbles encased in a thin layer of hard rubber or plastic. They were designed to cause contusions and hematomas, without being lethal, although shots to the head can be fatal. I was hit several times, mostly by ricochets. They still left enormous welts and sometimes knocked me down.)

These face-offs took place in areas no longer than a football field and considerably narrower. The scene usually unfolded like this: A road would be blocked by two Israeli jeeps with eight Israeli soldiers in helmets and flak jackets. A hundred yards away, Palestinian boys would throw stones that usually fell short of their target. Occasionally they rushed forward to get within throwing range. The Israelis would try, usually without success, to disperse the crowd with tear gas. Then they would fire rubber bullets, aiming primarily at legs, but not always. A boy would get hit in the head and be dragged away by his friends. An emotional scream would pierce the air. Another boy might sneak around the Israeli flank and toss a Molotov cocktail at a jeep. Or some older Palestinians would take potshots with live ammunition from a nearby building.

Things would then get deadly fast. The Israelis would replace their rubber bullet magazines with live ammunition and start firing. Instead of fifteen or twenty Palestinians injured by rubber bullets, five or ten or even fifteen Palestinians might wind up dead. That day or the next morning, there’d be a funeral. The funeral would turn into another protest. Kids would throw stones, then Molotov cocktails. Then someone would fire live ammo, and the Israelis would respond in kind. Another five or ten Palestinians would get killed. Then there’d be another funeral, and the cycle would begin anew.

I remember sitting at home in February 2001, with a pile of
newspapers in front of me, thinking that it was a month of grim foreboding. On February 6, Sharon trounced Barak in the Israel elections. Ten days later, President Bush sent twenty warplanes to attack five air defense installations in Baghdad because of increased targeting of allied planes policing “no-fly” zones over Iraq that were imposed after the 1991 Gulf War. Bush had been in office less than a month, and 9/11 was still seven months away. Arab nations accused him of focusing on Iraq when the real Middle East crisis was the bloody showdown between the Israelis and Palestinians.

By this time, even before Sharon formally took office on March 7, 2001, the Second Intifada was gaining ugly momentum. Under Sharon it grew white-hot. The Israelis sent tanks into the West Bank and targeted Palestinian militants for assassination, often with helicopter gunships.

Disheartened by their casualties, demoralized that their protests were having so little effect and were barely getting noticed internationally, the Palestinians quickly turned to suicide bombings to get revenge. They formed secret cells to carry out the attacks. They knew they would still take a disproportionate number of casualties (more than three thousand Palestinians died in the four-year conflict, and about a thousand Israelis), but suicide attacks allowed them to strike back in a dramatic and terrifying way. The attackers would put nuts, bolts, and nails around their bombs to create shrapnel, sometimes coating it with rat poison (an anticoagulant to increase bleeding) or animal feces (to cause infection). Oftentimes the head of a suicide bomber popped off like a champagne cork and remained incongruously intact amid the carnage.