The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (24 page)

“Go ahead,” our host said, though he opted to stay in the car for fear Israeli snipers might start shooting from the watchtowers above us.

At last Muna’s father took us up to Beit Jala to see the hospital, and we thanked him for his hospitality. Dr. Edmund Shehadeh, the general director of the hospital, met us and gave us a tour of the facility. It is an immaculately clean and well-kept modern facility, and almost completely dependent on donations, making its existence at once crucial and miraculous.

We saw patients in the red wheelchairs our project had donated and we all posed for pictures together. We sat with Edmund in his office for a while. He pointed to the tracts of land being confiscated by Israel to build settlements, particularly the settlement of Gilo just south of Jerusalem, which we could see from his office window. You could also see the work being done to expand the wall and tunnels to allow Israeli settlers to travel from Israel to the settlements in the West Bank without having to see or interact with Palestinians.

Upon leaving, we were not sure which way to go. My friend was unable to come get us, so we took a local Palestinian taxi that could only take us as far as the checkpoint but not beyond it, since most Palestinian cab drivers in the West Bank are not permitted to enter Israel. As our taxi approached the checkpoint leading to Jerusalem, we realized that it was not the same way we had come, and a saga began that we did not expect.

This was Checkpoint 400, or Rachel’s Tomb Checkpoint, situated near the place where tradition has it that the matriarch Rachel was buried. We asked the cab drivers who were present where to go, and they all pointed in the direction of this checkpoint or terminal. It was a menacing facility—more like a prison than a checkpoint—with high walls and fenced walkways. The place was empty. Nader and I wandered around for a while, not knowing which way to go. We both thought we were in the wrong place. Finally we exited the facility, found some soldiers, and asked them how to get out to go to Jerusalem.

“Go right in, and they will show you,” they responded.

So we entered the structure again, as they suggested. All we saw were metal revolving doors with green and red lights, but not a single living soul. It was so quiet it felt eerie. I was very uncomfortable, and Nader began cracking jokes to diffuse the tension. We entered through the metal doors and found ourselves in a large hall with stalls with darkened windows.

A disembodied voice summoned us over a loudspeaker: “Come forward.” We approached a window, and through a small crack we could see there was a frowning female soldier sitting behind it. She took Nader’s American passport and handed it back to him. I was relieved. Then she took mine. I used my Israeli
passport, as the law requires. We waited for some time, then a door opened and a soldier with a semiautomatic called me in to another section of the facility. He had my passport in his hand.

“Come with me.”

“Why, what’s the problem?” I asked.

“You’ve violated the commanding general’s order that prohibits Israelis from entering Area A.” I had entered Bethlehem, which is in Area A, and while I was aware that Israelis were not allowed into Area A, I had no idea what it meant to be “caught.” I was completely overwhelmed by size of the facility and by the fact that a soldier with a loaded semiautomatic was holding my passport.

I was taken at gunpoint into the office of the checkpoint commanding officer— a simple man wearing the markings of an officer on the shoulders of his stained shirt, his buttons strained by an overinflated gut. As I entered the office, he quickly removed his feet from the desk.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, as the soldier handed over my passport.

“This man violated the commanding general’s order not to enter Area A.”

The commander looked up at me. “Do you have any idea how serious this is?” He began to lecture me on the severity of my actions. “I was in Beit Jala at the hospital as part of a mission to deliver wheelchairs to Israeli and Palestinian—” I tried to explain the nature of our mission.

“I’m not interested!” He cut me off abruptly. At that point I’d had enough, and I became focused very fast. “How dare you sit here and lecture me, commanding this monstrous facility and enforcing a brutal, illegal occupation. You are a criminal and a shame to your country. Now I demand my passport back so that I may proceed to Jerusalem.”

I was abruptly ordered out of his office. I sat in the corridor with an armed soldier facing me for a couple hours. Meanwhile Nader was out there somewhere with no phone or money or the slightest idea where to go. I called Rami to tell him what had happened and where we were, so that he could come for Nader. As it turned out, Nader was resourceful enough and had already found a way to contact Rami. The two of them were now concerned about me.

“Here sign this.” Another officer came by and handed me a document.

“What is this?”

“It is a document saying we didn’t harm you or take anything from you.”

“Where is my passport?”

“We will return it to you shortly.”

“Fine, I’ll sign just as soon as you return it.”

After another long wait, two armed soldiers came for me. They had my passport.

“Come with us.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the police headquarters in Jerusalem for questioning.”

As we approached the police car, one of the soldiers turned to me. “Why didn’t you tell them it was all a mistake? You’d have been out by now. People do this all the time.”

By then it was after five, and rush-hour traffic was terrible, which meant we had a long ride ahead of us.

“Pretty bad traffic,” I offered, trying to start a conversation. The officer in charge barked at me, saying I was not permitted to speak.

But the silence only lasted a minute or two. “So, how is life in America?”

I guess they do want to talk
. I was calm by then, and I wanted them to listen.

“Take a look at the date of issue of my passport,” I said.

He complied. “September 5, 1997.”

“Exactly. I bet you don’t remember what happened the day before that? Well I will never forget. The passport was issued the day after Smadar was killed.” I proceeded to tell them about Smadar, and about my father and my family. I told them about the Bereaved Families Forum, the Israelis and Palestinians who meet regularly to find ways to end the violence. They became quiet. When they realized I was a member of the “holy order,” they suddenly became polite and friendly.

“Yes, but why would you want to help those stinking Arabs? Don’t you know they could have kidnapped you, and then we would have had to launch a rescue operation,” one of them said in a sincere tone.

“Really?” I said. “I am not a soldier. I was invited to visit. I had a meal with friends and then I was shown around a magnificent rehabilitation facility. They thanked me for providing them with much-needed wheelchairs. Here, on the other hand, I am being held at gunpoint and my passport has been taken from me. Which seems more like kidnapping to you? And my Palestinian-American friend is seeing all of this, and what do you imagine he is thinking about how my people are treating me for doing this charitable work? Do you think this reflects well on Israel?

“You guys talk to me about the commanding general’s order. Let me ask you about another general. Have you heard of General Matti Peled? He was one of the commanders of the Six-Day War. Here is what he said would happen forty years ago.” I told them about my father and what he predicted would happen if the occupation continued. When we reached the precinct, everyone but a few police officers had already gone home.

“We need an investigator to question this man.”

The cops took one look at me and realized I was no hardened criminal. “Why? What did he do?”

“He violated the commanding general’s order by entering Area A.”

“Is that all? Release him and forget it.” But these guys were determined to complete their mission. “It’s nothing personal,” they said.

At last an investigator was found. I was questioned, reprimanded, and told that if I were caught in Area A again, I would be fined or even arrested. Just as he was
finishing up with me there was a knock on his door. Rami and Nader stood in the doorway smiling at me.

“Are you OK?”

I was glad the ordeal was over and I was very glad to see them there. But I was not OK. My own people had arrested me for doing something good. My disillusion with Israel had sunk to a new low.

1
Palestine and Israel are the same place, and with time I found that I myself began using both names when speaking about our shared homeland.

In early 2008, I ate lunch with Rob Mullally, a great friend and fellow Rotarían, at a restaurant in San Diego’s Old Town. We had just come out of a meeting of Rotary’s Pathways to Peace Committee, where I had announced that Nader and I were going to Gaza.

Rob was dismayed. More than dismayed. What he said, precisely, was: “Miko, why the fuck are you going to Gaza?”

It’s not so much that he was surprised, because he knew me well enough by then to know that I was very committed to doing something on the issue of Palestine. However, he couldn’t help but be concerned. Gaza was difficult if not impossible to enter, it was controlled by Hamas—which wouldn’t appreciate an Israeli Jew poking around, not even a well meaning one—and Israel could decide to strike at any time. In other words, things in Gaza were so volatile that it was not the most prudent thing to do. Rob was thinking of Gila and our children.

In the greater scheme of things, I knew that many Rotarians had accomplished more difficult feats—going into remote areas of Africa and Asia to immunize children against polio, starting microcredit lending projects for women in male-dominated societies around the world, and building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. So it didn’t seem like such a stretch for Nader and me to go to Gaza for a few days. I wanted an opportunity to use our Rotary connections to bring in much-needed medical supplies, to build bridges that would allow for an ongoing relationship to develop, and to open a crack in the walls that surrounded Gaza.

Personally, I also saw it as an opportunity to try, in some small way, to defy the Israeli domination over Palestine. And my experience exiting through the Bethlehem checkpoint convinced me that the best way to defy Israel was to defy the laws that supported that domination. Israeli law prohibited Israelis from going to Gaza.

“I’ll tell you why, Rob,” I replied.

“Israel is getting away with murder, and it’s making me sick to sit around here and do nothing. Innocent people are being killed, children are hungry, there is mass unemployment and poverty, and it’s happening an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv. None of this was caused by a natural disaster. It was caused because Israel deliberately created these conditions, and no one in America says a thing. The
literacy rate in Gaza is more than 90 percent, and it can become a haven for commerce, education, culture, and stability. If we could only get Israel’s boot off their neck, if we could only defy the occupation. And I think that Rotarians can help me do this. That is why I am going to Gaza.”

What I told him was true. The situation is so severe in Gaza that it makes domination of the West Bank seem practically benign. Israel’s restrictions on travel and movement and the import and export of goods, plus the occupier’s complete control over land and sea, have created a siege that is choking one and a half million people, including 800,000 children. Gaza has essentially been turned into an enormous concentration camp. On top of that, Israeli military incursions have left countless civilians, including children, maimed and traumatized, both physically and emotionally, and usually without access to treatment.

But the history of Gaza demonstrates what the future could hold should it be free. Ancient Gaza was a prosperous trade center and a stop on the caravan route between Egypt and Syria. The city was occupied by Egypt around the fifteenth century B.C., and the Philistines settled the area several hundred years after that. Gaza became one of their chief cities.

In the Old Testament the Philistines’ presence in Gaza marked the city and its occupants as the traditional enemy of the Jewish people. For example, the Philistines caught and killed the great Jewish hero Samson; the young David killed the giant Philistine Goliath with a sling and stone; and King Saul, the Israelites’ first king, fell on his sword after being defeated by the Philistines in a war where his beloved son Jonathan was also killed.

During the days of the Roman Empire, Gaza was a center of learning and culture. It is even believed that as a young boy, King Herod the Great attended school in Gaza, which was known for its superior education institutions. During that time, Gaza was one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the region. It is also believed to be the site where Mohammed’s great-grandfather is buried. Under Islamic rule, the city became an important Islamic center.

In the twelfth century, Gaza was taken by Christian crusaders, and although Christians did not hold it for long, Gaza and its surrounding area developed into an important center of Christian monastic life and learning. When the British came to conquer the Holy Land in 1917, it took them three attempts and thousands of casualties before they were able take the city.

After the establishment of Israel in 1948, thousands of Palestinian refugees were driven from their homes and into Gaza, thus creating the “Strip” around the city of Gaza. These refugees and their descendants make up the majority of the population of Gaza today. Since that time, Gaza has made a name for itself as a persistent center of resistance, and the people of Gaza have paid a heavy price for this. Since the early 1950s, Israeli commandos have conducted “punitive” operations against the people of Gaza—in spite of the fact that the people of Gaza never had an army and never posed a military threat. Although there were incidents where Palestinian
fedayeen
attacked within Israel, for the most part all the refugees wanted was to collect their crops and feed their families and ultimately to return to their homes.

When President Jimmy Carter published his book
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
, Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House of Representatives and she decided to join the crowd of Israel supporters and publicly denounce the book. In an advertisement published by the Anti-Defamation League, Pelosi stated, “It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression.” In fact, Israel was a staunch ally of South Africa during the apartheid years, and Israel used ethnically-based oppression for decades to achieve its goal of creating a Jewish majority in Israel/Palestine. Nowhere has this oppression been more evident than in Gaza.

In
The Tribes Triumphant
, arguably one of the best books ever written about the Middle East, journalist Charles Glass illustrates his travels through the Levant with a rare intimacy. He visited Gaza countless times and stayed there long enough to know the place well. In one of the most moving passages in the book, Glass describes children in Gaza on their way to school in the morning:

…in smocks of blue or grey, little girls with white fringe collars, boys leading their younger brothers…with canvas bags of books on their backs, hair brushed back and faces scrubbed…Thousands and thousands of children’s feet padding the dusty paths between their mother’s front doors and their schools… Gaza is a children’s land…beautiful youngsters so innocent that they could laugh even in Gaza.
¹

While I was studying in Japan I got to know many Israeli travelers, and most of us were young enough to still have memories of our military service fresh in our minds. One of the guys was as an officer in Israel’s naval special forces, a captain in the revered Naval Commandos. He told us once how he and his unit would patrol the Gaza coast aboard their naval warships. They would come upon Gazan fishing boats and from time to time they would single out a particular boat, order the fishermen to jump into the water and blow up the boat. Then under gunpoint, they told the fishermen to count from one to a hundred and then when they were done to start over again. They would make them count over and over again until one by one the fishermen could no longer tread water, and they drowned.

The young Israeli officer said this was done, as he put it, “…to set an example, and teach the Arabs who was boss.” I thought I was going to throw up when I heard this, but over the years I heard many similar stories from Israeli soldiers.

In an article I published about Gaza, I mentioned this story, and a few days later I received an e-mail from Charles Glass. In addition to publishing
The Tribes Triumphant
, Charlie is an award-winning journalist. He was ABC News’s chief
Middle East correspondent from 1983-93. He also worked for
Newsweek
and
The Observer
, among many other publications. He’s best known for a 1986 interview with the crew of a hijacked TWA flight on the tarmac of the Beirut airport. In 1987, Charlie was taken hostage by Shia militia and was kept prisoner in Beirut for 62 days. He was the only Western hostage in Lebanon known to have escaped. He relayed the entire story in his book,
Tribes with Flags
, which is the precursor to
The Tribes Triumphant
.

In his e-mail to me he wrote,

Dear Miko, Great piece. I hope it is published everywhere. It reminded me of the story that
The Chicago Daily News
, for whom I was writing in Lebanon in 1974, killed when I wrote it. The Israeli navy was blowing up the fishing boats of kids off Tyre, and they had to swim back to town. I met the kids and saw the boats, and I wrote the story. At age twenty-three, I was innocent enough to believe it would be published. I learned then something that was taught to me again and again over the years: you cannot write even simple facts about what Israel was doing if your editors cannot accept that Israel would do such things. I don’t know if they didn’t believe the story or they wanted to protect the image, but it happened with just about every American news agency I ever worked for. Anyway, well done. Warmest wishes, Charlie.

When Tzipi Livni was serving as Israel’s foreign minister, she defended the Israel Defense Forces’ operations against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as necessary for the advancement of peace negotiations.
Ha’aretz
newspaper reported that Livni said she would expect people not to make a comparison between Israeli civilians harmed by terrorism and Palestinian civilians harmed during Israel’s defense operations. I was confused. Ms. Livni saw no problem with Israeli forces killing Palestinian civilians, including children, but it was not permissible to criticize Israel for doing this. How did Israelis turn away so completely from the values I thought we all held so dear?

As I prepared for the trip to Gaza, my dear friend Samir Kafiti, Bishop Emeritus of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, put me in touch with Dr. Suheila Tarazi, the general director of Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza.

Dr. Suheila and I had communicated by phone and e-mail over several months, and I told her about our plan to come to Gaza and bring a few small useful items with us—to test the waters, so to speak. Because of the tight siege, nothing could come in and what little was allowed was scrutinized by Israel in a manner that seemed completely arbitrary. I had heard stories from medical teams that were not permitted to bring in their equipment, of expensive machinery that had to be left behind and was ruined because Israel would not allow it in, with little or no explanation.

Suheila gave me a list of items, and since we were planning to travel through Egypt, we decided to purchase these items there with the help of Egyptian Rotary members. We were hoping it would lead to a point where we could deliver more significant items in the future.

Nader and I embarked on our trip in November 2008. I contacted members of Rotary in Cairo, Egypt, and Nader contacted Rotarian friends of his in Amman, Jordan, and they all agreed to help us. I flew to Jerusalem and then traveled to Amman, where I met Nader. That evening we had dinner with Jordanian members of Rotary, and the next morning we left for Cairo.

At the airport I felt anxious, but just as things seemed to be going well (security checks had gone fine, and the flight was leaving on schedule), I spilled an entire cup of hot coffee all over my laptop and my lap. A young Jordanian airport employee came up to me as I scrambled to recover my laptop and what was left of my dignity. He asked me, “Are you OK?” And then he got me another coffee, free of charge, while a second young man cleaned up the mess. Luckily I had on a dark grey suit, so the coffee stain didn’t show. I had to laugh; I guess I was in good hands in the Arab world.

We soon boarded our plane, and an hour and 10 minutes later we were in Cairo. Mahmoud Ayoub, a retired Egyptian diplomat, Renaissance man, and member of a local Rotary club, met us at the airport appearing as determined as we were to see our project succeed.

He took us to our hotel in his tiny car, negotiating the city’s notorious traffic like a mouse maneuvering through a herd of buffalo. We settled in our room and I stepped out onto the balcony to see the Nile and take in the sights and sounds of the city.

Cairo is known for its thousands of minarets, many of which date back hundreds of years, and most of which seemed within sight of our hotel room balcony. The Nile, which more than anything symbolizes Egypt’s vast history and enormous size, was flowing right in front of my eyes. I was in an Arab capital—in many ways, it is considered
the
Arab capital—and I loved it. In this old hotel, I felt like an actor in the movie
Casablanca
, or some other 1940s movie set in the Middle East.