Charles Glass - The Tribes Triumphant - Return Journey to the Middle East

After a drink in the garden, we went into the flat. It was a redesigned Arab house set on different levels, with a dining table next to the open kitchen. We’d finished our hostess’s first and only bottle of red wine in the garden, and someone opened the one Lily had brought. Our hostess drank white, and there wasn’t much of that. Dinner was à l’américaine , no first course, spaghetti on the boil in the kitchen going limp while she stirred a tomato and onion sauce, green salad with more vinegar than oil. That was all. She put two bowls on the table, and we served ourselves pasta and salad. We sipped Lily’s red wine. We talked. About newspapers. About television. About Israel. About the Middle East. About the massacres in New York and Washington. About Osama bin Laden. Polite. Civilized. The Goldmans’ children had disappointed their parents by leaving Israel. The Pogrund children had done the opposite. They went religious and would never leave. Their mother and father did not dwell on similarities between the race-based society they opposed in South Africa and the one in which they subsequently raised their children. They sounded like people who would have preferred their children to resist military service in the occupied territories or live in the West.

Someone said that an internet website was criticizing the ABC News anchorman, Peter Jennings, for being too favourable to the Arabs. ‘He had an Arab wife,’ Benji Pogrund said, confirming the internet verdict. Jennings had married a beautiful Lebanese woman, Annie Malouf, in 1973. They divorced, and his next two wives were Jewish, including the one he had now. ‘So,’ Benji said, ‘Jewish wives. That’s why he likes Arabs.’ Peter Jennings, whose journalistic integrity made him scrupulously fair, was said to be anti-Israeli by people accustomed to the anti-Arab bias of American television. Later, other journalists told me Benji Pogrund was a ‘good guy’, who invited speakers with divergent points of view to address Israel’s Anglo-Jewish community.

My argument that night was not with Benji, but with his wife, Anne. She was a painter and an interesting woman. She had made paintings from old studio photographs of South African blacks, formal portraits for family occasions; and she was looking for similar family photographs of Arabs in Gaza. When she discussed the September 2001 attacks in the United States, she lost me. We spoke in a polite, civilized way, but we were arguing. Her case was a psychologist’s rationale, that the killers acted out of envy. They wanted what they admired but could not have. America’s democracy and its high standard of living had made it their target. Perhaps, I said, there was another explanation. Holland, Norway and Canada had democracies and high living standards, but no one hated them. Why did they hate the United States? Not because it was richer – per capita there were wealthier lands – or more democratic. Could it be, I asked her, that the Norwegians and Canadians did not install and maintain regimes that robbed their people, did not break open the doors to their markets and did not bomb or invade them? This went on and on, towards no conclusion. There was a widespread belief in the United States that Americans were attacked because of their goodness; as many Israelis were convinced that Arabs attacked them – not because Israel occupied their territory and confiscated their land – but because they were Jewish. If anti-Semitism motivated the Arabs, would they have given their lands and their homes gladly to any other people who came from outside to displace them? Is it likely that they would have moved to make way for Albanians, Basques, gypsies, South Africans or any other group of Gentiles? The discussion went on and on and, like the political conflicts themselves, got no further than the arguments of fifty years before.

I left dinner early to meet Andrew and Emma Gilmour in the Ottoman courtyard of the American Colony Hotel. There, I drank the red wine I’d been deprived of at dinner. We talked about politics, the intifadah and, Andrew’s special interest, negotiations to end the fighting. Andrew worked for United Nations negotiator Terje Roed Larsen, and Emma was a physician. Andrew’s older brothers – David, Oliver and Christopher – were probably my closest friends in Britain. Emma was expecting their fourth child in December. They invited me to stay in their house at Abu Tor, an Arab neighbourhood above the old city. Even with the discount that Pierre Berclaz, the Colony’s Swiss manager, had kindly allowed me on a good room, my advance would run out soon.

Upstairs in the Pasha Room, dance music played. An American was marrying a Ramallah girl. One of the hotel guests complained about the noise, as I did once in 1987 during a wedding reception at the New Omayyad Hotel in Damascus. Then, it annoyed me so much that I left. Now, I loved the noise of a wedding. Perhaps I had improved. The music stopped at one-thirty, when I fell asleep. In Damascus, it had gone on all night.

I had my first lunch in Jerusalem with Nadia Sartawi. Her father, Dr Issam Sartawi, was one of the heroes of the Palestinian cause. He acted on behalf of what he believed were his people’s interests – not in line with the cant and slogans of the revolution. Any journalist who reduced him to the status of ‘Yasser Arafat’s special envoy’, as a few did, enraged him. He insisted with pride that he was no diplomat. Along with Sabry Jiryis and Sayed Hammami, Issam pioneered the Palestinian dialogue with the Israelis. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I invited Issam and Israeli general Mattityahu Peled to lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, Fakhreddin, opposite Green Park in London. When I asked Peled if he were a Sabra, meaning someone born in Israel, he nodded and said, ‘Issam’s a Sabra too.’ They were already friends, both born in northern Palestine, each a patriot to his own people, both working to spare the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians more warfare. Issam saw early the futility of the armed struggle for a people as militarily weak – but with a strong moral case – as the Palestinians. He had once headed a small commando organization and knew the effect of raids into Israel: unarmed Israelis killed, world outrage against Palestinian terrorism, more hostility and retaliation by Israel. Arafat never understood. Nor did he understand that no leader could abandon certain principles, like self-determination, and maintain his enemy’s respect.

When I asked Issam why the Palestinians had not produced leaders more capable than Haj Amin Husseini and Yasser Arafat, he said, ‘We had a good leader once, but we crucified him.’ He accused Syria of doing more harm to the Palestinians than Israel. He called for the United Nations to declare the Syrian regime a threat to world peace and dispatch a force to overthrow it. A few months later, in the spring of 1983, the hired assassins of the Palestinian radical Sabry al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal, shot Issam dead in the lobby of a hotel in Portugal during a conference of Europe’s Socialist International. The Syrians, Abu Nidal’s benefactors at the time, may have put him up to it. Abu Nidal had already assassinated the director of the PLO’s London office, Sayed Hammami, in 1977, for the same supposed crime of meeting with Israelis. Issam Sartawi’s criticisms outraged Yasser Arafat, whose security service was secretly cooperating with the CIA and thus indirectly with Israel’s Mossad. In 1982, Arafat evacuated Beirut, claiming victory over the Israeli army. Issam made a public declaration: one more Palestinian victory like Beirut, and the Palestine National Council would hold its next meeting in Fiji. No one said that Arafat had killed Issam, but many Palestinians believed he had ‘withdrawn his protection’, exposing him to Abu Nidal and to Syria. Abu Nidal would himself be murdered by another benefactor, Saddam Hussein, before America invaded Iraq in 2003.