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

Issam was a gentle, well-dressed man, who had trained as a physician and married another Palestinian doctor. I remember him at our house in London, playing with our children when they were small. Having lunch with his daughter at an Arab restaurant near the American Colony, I listened to a woman young enough to have missed most of her childhood playing with her father. She had grown up in Paris and spoke perfect French. Her English had a French rather than Arabic accent, like many Lebanese women in Beirut. Ahmed Querei, a member of Yasser Arafat’s cabinet and one of the Palestinian negotiators at Oslo, had hired her as special assistant. I asked what her father would make of her working for Abu Ala, the name by which Qurei was known. She ignored the question. Would she introduce me to Nurit Peled, the daughter of Issam’s friend Matti Peled? I knew that, after Issam’s assassination, the two families had become close. A few years after Issam’s assassination, Matti died without having seen the Israeli – Palestinian dialogue that he and Issam pioneered lead anywhere. In 1997, a Palestinian suicide bomber took the life of Nurit’s young daughter, Matti’s granddaughter, in West Jerusalem. Smedar was thirteen. Phil Jacobson, the former Times correspondent, had written a heart-breaking account of the suicide bombing that had killed Smedar and its effect on Nurit and her husband, Rami Elhannan. Nadia said that when the prime minister of the time, Benyamin Netanyahu, offered to pay his respects to the Peled family, Nurit told him not to bother. She blamed him for policies that had led to her daughter’s murder.

In my view, one not shared by everyone, Dr Issam Sartawi would have condemned the agreement that his daughter’s employer had negotiated at Oslo in 1993. Issam had recognized Israel’s ‘right’ to exist, although the ‘right to exist’ is not a concept in international law, years before any other PLO leader. Recognition and dialogue did not mean surrender, and even surrender did not require self-annihilation, the price exacted at Oslo. What the Israelis and the Palestinians got instead of democratic neighbours was the submission of one, weak tribal leadership to the power of the other. It left Israel a permanent military oppressor, with all that implied for Israeli society, and the Palestinians as helots to acquiesce when settlers wanted their land, when settlers needed their water or when the Israeli army confined them to their villages. Nothing in the agreement prevented Israel from expanding old settlements, constructing new ones or building roads between them – activities that required the seizure of what little land the Palestinians had. While Palestinian Authority police protected the demographic shift caused by a doubling of settlers in the West Bank, no one protected Palestinian farmers and householders from having their land taken. Was this intended to establish peace or to extend the occupation? Was it consistent or inconsistent with the old Zionist aim of seizing Palestine ‘goat by goat, dunum by dunum’? Oslo’s terms compelled the weaker tribe to wait until it was strong enough to redress the imbalance or so close to suffocation that they exploded. At the end of September 2000, that explosion came.

It was a year into the explosion when Nadia and I met for lunch. The last time I had seen her was the year before, when the uprising began. Then, she went to her office and hoped the Israelis would propose some compromise that would allow the Palestinians to end the intifadah and resume discussions. In the meantime, the Israeli electorate chose General Ariel Sharon as their prime minister. Now, Nadia said, Israeli checkpoints prevented most of the Palestinian Authority from reaching their offices. She was living – more of the confusion of this area – in an old Arab part of the Jewish, western half of Jerusalem. She was renting an Arab house, whose original residents had either fled or been expelled in 1948, from an Israeli landlord. She was an Arab, but she carried a French passport. The passport allowed her not only to live in a Jewish-owned Arab house, it permitted her to clear the Israeli checkpoints to reach the Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah. Other PA staff in Jerusalem could not reach Ramallah, as those in Ramallah could not go to Jerusalem. The only Palestinians moving freely within the occupied territories were those who – through marriage or some other accident – had foreign, non-Arab passports. As natives, they could not go anywhere. Only new visitors to this lunatic asylum noticed that the set-up, both on paper and in reality, was untenable.

Nadia was one of many Western-born or Western-raised Palestinians to return to the homeland after Oslo in 1993, when they imagined they would build a state. You would meet them in the offices of the Palestinian Authority, private companies and charities, all speaking perfect English with British, American or Canadian accents. Many were studying Arabic for the first time. The country had not seen such idealism, hope and talent since young, educated European Jews answered Zionism’s appeal to build the kibbutzim, irrigate the desert and learn Hebrew. Working for Abu Ala, one of the most egregious prototypes of the unpopular Palestinian politician with big bodyguards and bigger cigars, had made Nadia more cynical than I remembered from the year before. Her belief in working within the PA towards statehood was becoming harder to maintain. Israel was dismantling its institutions and the PA’s leaders were stealing from it. My criticisms of the PA annoyed her, and she talked about what help she might offer me. Like a Lebanese aunt, she told me which was the best hotel in Gaza, where to rent a cellphone and how to lease a car for a few months. She also made me write down a dozen useful telephone numbers. Abu Ala must have found her indispensable.

Emma Gilmour, pregnant and every inch a natural beauty, was driving me through West Jerusalem with her three children in the back seat. The car was a big Land Rover, white with United Nations number plates. We stopped at a red light near Yemin Moshe, the pretty collection of old stone cottages that Jerusalem’s mayor lent to visiting artists and writers. The driver of a car beside us motioned to me to roll down my window. His knitted kippa covered most of his clipped hair above a short, patchy beard. He pressed a printed sign against his window for us to read: ‘UN UNwelcome No Bodies, Go Home!’ This spontaneous act of bravery seemed to please him. The light changed, and we went our separate ways. Later, I told a friend at another United Nations agency about it. She said the settlers did that all the time: ‘They hate us.’

At six in the evening, the Gilmour children were having tea in the kitchen of their house in Abu Tor. The lights went off. Caitriona, one of the prettiest and most fey three-year-olds I knew, cried. She was not noisy. She was afraid. Emma lit candles so that the children could see their food. Outside, all the streets and houses of Silwan and Abu Tor were in darkness. In the distance, the Jewish quarters of west Jerusalem were in full light. Their power was never off. Ours came on again an hour later, while the children were in a candlelit bath.

From time to time at the Gilmours’, Palestinians neighbours would drop by. One was a young woman, who, like Emma, was about to have a baby. You meet people and don’t think much about them, until someone tells you that this pregnant woman with a bridal veil of dark hair had spent two years in prison. And you look at the young mother, playing with her children, and you ask yourself, as you would in a country where people were free, what she could have done to merit a two-year sentence. Later, Emma told me her story.

After the Israeli security forces shot dead fourteen unarmed young men for throwing stones in the Al Aqsa mosque grounds, Intisar took a knife from her kitchen and went down to Jerusalem to take revenge. Several other Palestinian women – not in concert or with any plan – did the same. They went, each on her own, to the Jewish Quarter of the old city to stab an Israeli settler. Did Intisar stab anyone? No. The soldiers searched her, found the knife, put her under arrest and sent her to the court that passed judgement. Two years later, she went home.