Is This Your First War? (19 page)

Late that afternoon we returned to the UN compound. One of the local boys who worked there was standing on the wings of a black-feathered rooster to stop it from struggling while he sawed at its neck with a dull knife. The rooster's blood, pooling into the sand, was dark and viscous. When the bird was dead, the boy flung its carcass on hot coals to singe its feathers and make them easier to pluck.

The compound's director was waiting for us. “Abéché was attacked this afternoon,” she said.

It turned out that shortly after we had left, a column from a rebel group calling itself the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development, almost certainly a proxy for the government of Sudan, had assaulted the town, clashing with members of the Chadian army there and driving them out. The rebels then looted everything of value they could find, including from warehouses belonging to the World Food Program. Prison guards fled and detainees escaped. Several civilians were shot dead. That night the rebels still occupied the city.

“No one's flying in or out of Abéché,” the director continued. “You're going to be here for a while.”

We, and everyone else in Bahai, were effectively trapped. There were no safe roads out of the area, and it was doubtful that we could find the gas necessary to guarantee passage to N'Djamena, were we to make a run for it. Besides, no one knew where the rebels would hit next. They had assaulted N'Djamena itself in April, only seven months earlier, before they were beaten back, and now appeared to be striking westward again. It was late November. I started to get a bad feeling that I would be leaving Janyce, who was by now pregnant with our first child, Norah, alone for Christmas. I reached her that night on the satellite phone. She was on her way to Montreal to cover a Canadian political convention.

“I heard about it on the BBC,” she said. “Are you safe?”

“Yeah. The fighting isn't close. But we can't go anywhere.”

“I had my first ultrasound this morning.”

“Could you see anything?”

“Sort of. I think it was sucking its thumb.”

“My sister did that.”

“I heard the heartbeat.”

“How'd that sound?”

“Fast.”

Bahai wasn't home to much besides aid agencies and a refugee camp, but it also had a hospital that was in worse shape than the one in Goz Beida. Patients lay on thin and dirty mattresses on the floor, cigarette ash scattered around them. But the rundown condition of the place appeared to be the result of poverty rather than neglect. Bedpans were emptied, bandages changed.

Many of those sprawled on the hospital floor were survivors of a recent battle between the Sudan Liberation Army and the Sudanese army. They had clashed across the border near Kariari, where the SLA attacked an army encampment and killed as many as 300 Sudanese soldiers. The surviving Sudanese spent four days bleeding alone in the desert, surrounded by the bodies of their dead comrades, before they too were brought to Bahai, a stronghold of their SLA enemy. In the hospital the Sudanese soldiers lay next to the rebels they had tried to kill the previous month. It was impossible to tell who belonged to which side without asking. All were without uniforms, their shattered limbs splinted and elevated with basic pulleys.

“We have become friends and brothers,” one man said.

“War is political,” another added. “Here in the hospital we're all the same.”

The Sudanese soldiers gave different answers when asked if their unit had worked with local janjaweed militias. Some said no. But it later became clear that a column of Arab horsemen had joined their unit for several weeks to guide them through Darfur's unfamiliar territory. The Arabs were then evacuated by plane, leaving the soldiers with little ammunition in unfamiliar territory.

Most of the Sudanese soldiers were from black tribes outside of Darfur. They said they had little idea why there were being deployed in Darfur. One claimed he was told he was being sent to Somalia as a peacekeeper. “I got here and found the situation was awful,” another said. “The villages were mostly burned and empty. The people were gone. The government never told us the truth. I had to learn that from local people.… They wanted those of us who are Africans to fight each other. They wanted to empty Darfur of black people.”

“There is a saying in Sudan,” another added. “If you want to hit a slave, it is best to use another slave to do it.”

Meanwhile, the rebels who had attacked Abéché and stranded us in Bahai pulled out of the city. But there were reports of fresh violence in nearby Biltine, which was assaulted and occupied by a second rebel column, leading to more ransacking and looting. No one seemed to know where the main rebel force was heading. It consisted of hundreds of men and boys on pickup trucks, armed mostly with machine guns, assault rifles, and rocket launchers. They could race hundreds of miles through the desert scrub and then melt away. Chadian forces were clearly unable to stop them. The French military, however, had a presence at an airbase in Abéché and secured its perimeter. International aid agency staff had withdrawn to the base during the fighting, and the French air force agreed to fly them to the relative safety of N'Djamena. The United Nations was sending a plane to Bahai to bring out its non-essential staff and offered us space on the flight. We spent a final night in the compound, cooking a meal of dried pasta and fresh garlic that we bought in town. We ate it by candlelight and washed it down with cans of beer that had somehow been trucked in and sold at the market for a buck apiece. We got drunk and played poker for stones and pebbles. An antelope that had been adopted by the United Nations security detail bolted around the enclosure, leaping twenty feet at a time and not making a sound.

The small plane that picked us up the next morning and flew to Abéché descended over the airport in a tight corkscrew to avoid any potential ground fire. We slept at the French base, bedding down outside on army cots with built-in mesh covers to keep out malarial mosquitoes. There was some minor chaos at the French aircraft hangar in the morning as the dozens of people hoping to leave queued for space on a military transport jet that taxied on the baking tarmac outside. It wasn't obvious who was in charge — the French military or the United Nations.

A UN official approached me as I waited in line with Donald, Marco, and the two Danes. Mohammad was nearby, talking to some Chadians on the staff of an international NGO. “Your translator can't come,” she said.

“What?”

“We can only evacuate foreigners.”

My stomach dropped. A few seconds before, we watched the large transport plane that would take us to safety land outside the hangar and felt safe and relieved enough to joke about how quickly our luck had turned for the better. We wouldn't be spending Christmas in the desert after all.

“Mohammad's not from here,” I said. “He's from N'Djamena. There's a war outside the base. You can't abandon him here because he's the wrong nationality.”

“I'm sorry. We have our regulations.”

I spent the next twenty minutes arguing, with increasing frustration and urgency, in English and in French, with different United Nations staff members. They sat at wooden tables with clipboards and lists in front of them while others begged for space on the plane. They talked about rules and avoided looking people in the eyes. They said they were very sorry. Those not picked to leave got angry. Their voices sounded scared.

Disorder increased as the plane's departure time neared. I argued that Mohammad's family was in the capital and he had no way of getting to them except on this plane. And besides, I was responsible for him and couldn't leave him here. United Nations officials didn't want to deal with me. They passed me on to their colleagues and their bosses, who passed me back. I got angrier and more desperate. Nobody would budge.

“It's okay,” Mohammad said to me, but clearly it was not. His face streamed with beads of sweat. The French military was trying to separate those with spots on the plane from those without. All our bags were strapped down under military webbing on wooden pallets. The plane was about to leave. I gave Mohammad most of the money I owed him and promised to leave the balance at a hotel in N'Djamena, as a soldier ushered him outside the aircraft hangar.

This was the moment when, for me, the moral foundation that underpins international aid organizations began to dissolve. The United Nations, the World Food Program, the Red Cross, the whole lot of them, will feed and shelter millions of people. They'll save lives. They'll provide locals with jobs translating, guarding their compounds, and driving at which they'll make more money than they could hope to earn doing anything else in a flyblown patch of desert next to a war. But when the shit hits the fan, when it really hits the fan, and there are pickup trucks full of murderous, strung-out teenagers with AK-47s prowling outside of town, then there are two classes of people: the mostly white internationals inside the aircraft hangar about to be flown to safety, and the black and vulnerable locals outside the wire waiting for hell to arrive.

I stood in line with the other chosen ones picked for evacuation. Guilt burned in my gut like acid. “Fuck it,” I muttered, mostly to myself.

I left the line and jogged toward the hangar's exit. A French soldier — young, female, gorgeous, blonde hair in a ponytail — was standing at the gate. Normally I would have smiled or said hello. I walked past her. By now I was sweating, too. I couldn't think of anything I hadn't tried.

“If you leave this area, you can't get back,” another, more senior male French officer said as I passed.

I saw Mohammad a little ways on. I called to him. He came to me as I approached the UN official I had argued with since Mohammad was turned away. I leaned over her desk and launched into the same arguments, my face less than a foot from hers, my uneven French making me sound even more belligerent than I would have in English. Other UN staff began to gather around defensively. Mohammad, visibly worried but calm, stood behind me, following the English bits of the conversation.

“I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do. Only foreigners are allowed on the plane,” she said, repeating the same reasoning I had heard half a dozen times already.

Mohammad interjected. “I'm a foreigner, too,” he said. “I was born in Sudan.”

With that, he sliced through the red tape that was keeping him off the plane. Mohammad had spent most of his life in Chad, and the country was now his home. But once he was able to produce a faded, barely legible document showing he had been born in another country, he joined the protected ranks of French and Belgian aid workers, and Canadian journalists. I walked him back into the hangar, past the beautiful French soldier, into the line with the other internationals. Donald and the others were surprised and happy to see Mohammad and slapped him on the back. We filed onto the transport jet — a gunmetal-grey behemoth. Inside, pallets of gear were strapped to the floor. The passengers sat facing each other on collapsible canvas-and-metal seats. The engines roared to life and the plane rolled forward. I pulled on the noise-muffling headphones that had been hanging above. Facing me across the plane's cargo hold, Mohammad smiled. I looked around him. There were empty seats.

N'Djamena's streets were close to deserted when we arrived, save for Chadian soldiers preparing for an expected assault on the capital. Our bubble of a hotel still served beer and cheeseburgers. Rebel columns ranged across eastern Chad for several more weeks, attacking Guéréda, northeast of Abéché and clashing with Chadian forces all along its frontier. They faded away, only to reappear in greater strength a little more than a year later, this time reaching and directly assaulting N'Djamena. They were again forced back, but not before tens of thousands of Chadian civilians fled the capital across the border to Cameroon.

In March 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the actions of Sudanese soldiers and janjaweed in Darfur. A charge of genocide was added in July 2010.

Meanwhile, al-Bashir and Chadian President Idriss Déby sought to normalize relations between their two countries. Al-Bashir visited Chad in 2010. As a member of the International Criminal Court and a signatory to the Rome Statute, Chad was supposedly bound to honour the global court's warrant and detain al-Bashir, but did not. The Sudanese president described his visit as a success.

Holy Lands

O
n
a clear day, from a hilltop outside Ramallah, just about dead centre of all the land controlled by Israel, it is possible to look east and see the mountains of Jordan, another country, then turn around and see the smudged skyline of Tel Aviv and, a little farther on, the ocean. One sweeping glance captures the boundaries of a conflict that has persisted for more than sixty years and continues to divide so much of the world. There are a lot of ways to start thinking about Israel and Palestine, but it helps to remember how geographically minuscule is the land in question. There isn't a lot of space to share.

Israel's earliest advocates understood the challenge their dreamed-of homeland would face years before the Zionist project really got under way. Shortly after Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, published
The Jewish State
in 1896, two Viennese rabbis decided to travel to the Middle East to explore for themselves the idea of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Their visit resulted in a cable home in which the two rabbis wrote: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”

Not much has changed. At its heart the conflict is still about two peoples who covet the same patch of land. Other territories are similarly fought over, but this one gets all the attention. Jerusalem must have more foreign correspondents than any other city in the world. There are good reasons for this. The conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and surrounding Arab states lies at the heart of Arab and Muslim grievances with the West. Israel is a screen on which so many anti-Semites project their hatreds, and Jews their hopes. Jerusalem itself is holy to half the world's population. And for those looking for what the Israeli historian Benny Morris described as “righteous victims,” there are plenty: Israeli victims of terrorism, rocket attacks, and the fear of another existential war; and Palestinian ones of air strikes and the constant crush of occupation.

I intended for my first visit to be as a tourist. Shachar, an Israeli friend from Oxford, invited Janyce and I to stay with him in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2006. Then war erupted between Israel and Hezbollah, followed by an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. Both were in full swing when we approached passport control at Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv. The female official at the counter was wearing an olive-green uniform and looked to be about eighteen. She glanced at Janyce and her passport and waved her through. Flipping through mine took a little longer.

“Where's this visa from?” she asked.

“Iran.”

“And this one?”

“Lebanon.”

The girl lifted her eyes from my passport. “Have you been to any other Arab countries?”

Iranians aren't Arabs
, I thought, but bit my tongue. “I think there's a visa from Syria in there, too.”

“Wait here.”

She walked away to speak with an older woman in civilian clothes. Janyce, waiting on the other side of passport control, saw all this and came back. “You two are together?” the older woman asked when she returned to the counter.

Janyce considered the question. “Yes,” she said finally, with what sounded like regret.

The woman said she was with security but didn't specify which branch. She asked me a lot of questions, especially about my relationship with Shachar, whose mobile number I fortunately had kept handy. She took this and then directed us to a room full of Arabs who looked drawn and tired, as if they had been stuck there a long time. Several wore sports jackets worn thin at the elbows. One continuously fiddled with a cigarette pack — pulling out a cigarette, tapping it twice against the arm of his chair, and replacing it.

After three hours, the woman returned and I was officially allowed into Israel. Shachar met us on the other side of customs with a bemused grin and hugged us both. “You're lucky you weren't strip-searched,” he said.

My job with
Maclean's
, and the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, meant I ended up working during the planned vacation. But even during downtime, the wars were hard to avoid. Black Hawk helicopters buzzed the beach at Tel Aviv as they flew north to Lebanon. We went out for dinner with a reservist friend who had packed his army bag earlier in the day and was waiting to rejoin his unit. When we visited Shachar's parents north of Tel Aviv, a Hezbollah rocket hit near the hometown of some of his relatives. Shachar's mother, while cooking dinner for at least eight of us, held a lit cigarette aloft with one hand, tucked a phone under her ear with a shrugged shoulder, and called family to make sure everyone was safe. Shachar's grandmother, who had fled Germany in the 1930s and was well into her eighties, was cheerfully philosophical. “You can't pick your neighbours,” she said.

Two years later, I was back, sitting in the cool and shaded office of David Rubinger's home in the German Colony of Jerusalem. Rubinger's adult life has encompassed the length of Israel as a modern state. He was born in Vienna and was a young student there when the Nazis occupied Austria. In gym class one day, the principal came in and told all the Jewish kids to get dressed and go home. A few weeks later, his father was deported to the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. “He came home a skeleton, crying,” Rubinger said. His father got an exit visa to go to Britain. Rubinger and his mother did not. He escaped to Palestine. She perished in the Holocaust.

In Palestine, Rubinger joined the British army's Jewish Brigade. Later, on leave in Paris, he met a French girl, Claudette, in a bar while he was waiting to go to an opera with a friend. “We didn't go to the opera that night,” he told me with a meaningful look. “We had better things to do.” Claudette later walked him to the train station to begin his trip back to Palestine. Before they parted, she gave him a camera and launched the career of Israel's most iconic photographer.

When I met Rubinger, then eighty-three, he sported a goatee and still had a thick, muscular frame. White chest hair spilled out of his shirt. He had an open and somewhat wry manner of speaking. “My office is a mess,” he said, nodding at my notebook. “Make sure you describe it.”

His office
was
a mess — papers strewn everywhere. But it was also soothing. The harsh sun outside was blocked by the trees and cascading flowers in his yard. On the walls were prints of his photographs. Rubinger had got to know most of Israel's prime ministers, and many of their images hung in his office. One, of Ariel Sharon, was signed and addressed to “My friend, who will never vote for me.” Elsewhere hung the photograph for which Rubinger is most known, reproduced on posters and cards and sold all over Israel. It depicts a moment during the 1967 Six-Day War shortly after Israeli forces captured the Western Wall — all that remains of the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem. Three paratroopers pause beneath the wall, one with his helmet in his hands, another with his arms around his comrade's shoulders. For many who see it, it captures a moment when anything and everything seemed possible. A tiny country had stared down death and was now poised for great things.

“I was crying when I took that picture,” Rubinger said. “I didn't cry because the Western Wall is holy. I couldn't care less about those stones. It was the relief. Suddenly, you're not doomed any longer. Three weeks before, we were living in a feeling of total doom. We were sure that we were facing another Holocaust. The stadium in Tel Aviv was planned as a burial ground for 40,000 people. Now, if they put you up on the gallows, put the rope around your neck, just when they're about to let it drop you're not in a very good mood. You're scared. You're probably shitting your pants. And then somebody comes up, takes off the rope and says, no, no, you're pardoned. And not only are you pardoned, you're rich, and a millionaire, and a king. You'll go nuts.”

This, according to Rubinger, is what segments of Israeli society did when they rushed to settle Israel's newly captured territory. “Many people who were even slightly religious felt that a victory like this couldn't be man-made. It was divine. That was the moment when the messianic movement was born, the settlers. ‘God has given it to us, and we're not allowed to reject it. Because it's God's gift.' I cried because of relief. But for many religious people, this was a religious experience. ‘God saved us. We were doomed, and God gave us a sign that all of Israel is ours. We'll settle the land, and to hell with the Arabs. And the word occupation doesn't exist, because God has given it to us.'”

Victory in the Six-Day War was, Rubinger said, the greatest disaster that could have befallen the country. “If you quote me only on that, I'll kill you,” he added. “Because there could have been one greater disaster — not to win.”

Anything short of victory in the 1967 war would have been a disaster for Israel, and the Jewish people. But the consequences of victory — namely the settlement of occupied territories — have fundamentally weakened Israel, because they undermined its foundation as a Jewish and democratic state. Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has put it in control of millions of Muslim and Christian Arabs who don't enjoy the rights of citizens and therefore have no say over the government that has ultimate control over their territory. Within a generation or two, these Arabs will outnumber Jews in all the land that Israel controls. When that happens, if there is still no Palestinian state (and in the absence of large-scale ethnic cleansing), Israelis will be forced to choose between two futures. Their country will either be Jewish, but not demographic — in other words, a Jewish minority will control a land mostly inhabited by Palestinians — or Israel will be democratic, but not Jewish, because Arabs will form the majority in what will become a bi-national state.

Demographers differ over population predictions, but it is indisputable that the Palestinian population is increasing faster than the Jewish one. Sooner or later, they will reach parity. Analysts can argue over when this will happen, but it seems irrelevant to me whether Israeli Jews make up forty or sixty per cent of the population in all the land Israel controls fifty years from now. Israel's founders imagined a Jewish and democratic state. Most Israelis want the same thing. And a state cannot claim to be democratic when so many of its residents aren't citizens. Pragmatic Israeli politicians have long recognized the threat occupation poses to Israel. “I'm telling you plainly that we don't need the West Bank,” the Zionist leader and politician Zalman Aran said following Israel's victory in the Six-Day War. “It will do us more harm than good. We will choke on it.” More recently, in 2007, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would be “finished” if a two-state solution collapsed and Palestinians instead campaigned for equal rights in a bi-national state. Israel, he warned in an interview with the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz
, would then “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens the state of Israel is finished…. The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”

For Rubinger, the photographer, the harm Israel inflicts on itself through occupation is less tangible but more profound. “The occupier always gets morally weaker, while the occupied gets stronger,” he said. “If you're the underdog, your morality, your moral strength, is much stronger. So it eats into our social makeup. We were much better before 1967 — more social justice, more moderate. Our leaders didn't smoke fat cigars. Ben Gurion used to apologize when he came in with a tie and say, ‘Excuse my working clothes.' He used to brag that his driver had a greater salary than he did, because his driver had eight children. That was the spirit we had of egalitarianism and idealism. That was all gone after 1967. Our whole social structure has been weakened. That's what I mean when I say occupation hurts us more than the Arabs. People call us leftists Arab lovers. I'm a leftist because I'm a Jew lover. I think we are going with our eyes open toward catastrophe by insisting that everything can be done by force.”

As the Second World War drew to a close, members of the British army's Jewish Brigade, in which David Rubinger served, turned their efforts toward smuggling Jewish survivors of the Holocaust into Palestine. Despite opposition from the British, more than 200,000 European Jews successfully reached Palestine. Among them was Margalit Zisman, barely twenty when the war ended, who survived the Holocaust hiding in Belgium. Jewish Brigade soldiers told her about Gush Etzion, a group of Jewish settlements on the northern slopes of Mount Hebron, south of Jerusalem. The weather was good, they said, and the landscape beautiful. Her parents didn't want her to emigrate alone, so she married another Zionist, Akiba Galandaver. It was a difficult journey. They slept under tables on the boat that took them to Palestine and settled in Kfar Etzion, one of the village
kibbutzim
that made up the Gush Etzion settlement block.

For a while, Zisman said, life was happy there. She said residents of the Jewish villages in Gush Etzion worked with local Arabs, and the two communities invited each other to their weddings. This changed on November 29, 1947, when the United Nations approved a plan to divide Palestine into two provisional states — one Jewish and one Arab. The Arabs rejected the plan, and civil war commenced in Palestine. Gush Etzion fell within the area that was to be allotted to the Arabs. It was deep inside what is now the West Bank and was soon besieged by Arab irregulars and the Jordanian Arab Legion. The Haganah, the main Jewish paramilitary force, nevertheless decided not to evacuate the block, with the exception of women and children, who were pulled out in January 1948 with British assistance.