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

Another woman came to the Gilmour house one evening to babysit the children, so that Emma, Andrew and I could go to Fink’s Bar for dinner. She did not say much. Her dress was black, and her long hair had almost as many white strands as brown. In the car on the way into the city, Andrew and Emma told me that the Israelis had shot and killed her husband at the end of the June 1967 war. She raised five children on her own. Her husband’s family offered her no help, unusual in Arab society in which children are the responsibility of the paternal family. She refused payment for babysitting the Gilmour children. To look after the younger son, Xan, I’d have demanded a year’s salary. In return for the favour of watching her neighbours’ children, the widow expected reciprocal favours: a ride into Jerusalem, help with her shopping, advice. It was an exchange between equals.

At nearly ninety, Mrs Valentine Vester was the grande dame of old Jerusalem. Proprietress of the American Colony Hotel, she was the niece of Gertrude Bell, the English Oriental traveller and linguist who helped to create modern Iraq when Britain occupied the country during the First World War. I had met Val and her husband, Horatio Vester, in 1972. The Colony belonged to his family, descendants of nineteenth-century American religious pilgrims. They also had an ophthalmic hospital in the old city. Horatio, whose urbane demeanour reminded me of Noël Coward, ran the place in those days. Raconteur and bon vivant , Horatio was loved, especially in the bar, by the hotel’s guests and staff. When he died, Val employed a Swiss company to manage what was beyond doubt Jerusalem’s finest hotel. She went on living there and kept an eye on the place, as she always had. With her snowy hair and benevolent smile, she oversaw the Israeli gardeners and the Palestinian receptionists. She had known them for generations.

Perhaps I should not have repeated to Val the joke that Andrew Gilmour told me about her hotel restaurant’s fame for slow service. She had returned the day before from a visit to her son in London. Her hearing was beginning to fail, and I had to shout without letting the head waiter, Ahmed, and the rest of her long-time and loyal employees hear. ‘Do you know how the Jordanian army lost Jerusalem in 1967?’ The Jordanian general staff were having lunch here at the American Colony. When they heard that the Israelis were invading, they asked for their bill. By the time it arrived, the Israelis were in Jericho.

Val laughed. Ahmed watched us from his corner of the garden, and I knew I would wait longer than usual for my club sandwich. Ahmed was just as slow to bring Mrs Vester her rabbit risotto. She didn’t mind the wait, she said. She’s had thirty-eight years to get used to it.

My favourite place to meet people was the courtyard where we had lunch. It may have been the stone walls and the parapets or the oriental arches or the gushing fountain and the scented blossoms. It may also have been the mix of Palestinians, Israelis and sojourners in a setting that predated the British occupation, Zionism, nationalism and uprisings. It was the most tranquil corner of Jerusalem, and there were days when I hated to leave it for the chaos outside.

Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian-American lawyer whose practice was in Jerusalem, came to the courtyard for coffee. I had met him first in the spring of 2000, a few months before the failed negotiations that Bill Clinton had staged between Yasser Arafet and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David. I had come to Israel to do a story on torture for American television. The Israeli High Court had just banned certain forms of torture. The court’s decision meant that, in the absence of laws authorizing the mistreatment of detainees, anyone who committed torture could be held to account in the civil courts. The decision had two consequences: it reduced torture, and it prompted Likud Knesset members to introduce legislation to protect torturers from lawsuits.

Jonathan Kuttab, a University of Virginia graduate, had represented hundreds of security detainees during the first intifadah. After the Palestinian Authority was established, it detained Jonathan’s brother, a respected West Bank journalist named Daoud Kuttab, for criticizing Yasser Arafat. Amid Valentine Vester’s flowers, the fountain, and the bougainvillea, Jonathan and I ordered Turkish coffee.

I asked if the High Court ban on torture had expired with the new intifadah.

‘Totally,’ he said.

Jonathan was more than a lawyer. Like all other Palestinians, he was a political analyst. He augmented the basic knowledge that circumstances gave every Palestinian with lessons from the political prisoners he represented, from the Israeli military and civil courts in which he worked and from his American formal education. The last time we had met, before the Camp David failure and the uprising, he told me that disaster was inevitable.

‘The Israeli grand design to have and to expand settlements and contract out security to the Palestinian Authority could not work,’ he said, one year into the new intifadah. ‘In fact, if this intifadah had not been against Israel, it would have been against the PA.’

The question that confronted Palestinians about Yasser Arafat was: is he governing for us or for the Israelis? If for the Palestinians, he should have been moving politically to dismantle the Israeli settlements and give the land back to their owners. If for the Palestinians, he should have made his executive accountable and open to them. If for the Palestinians, he would have made it impossible for his ministers to steal and to help the Israelis construct settlements. But, if he governed for Israel, he would arrest Palestinians who attacked settlements, allow his advisers to grow rich selling cement to the settlements, cooperate with the intelligence agencies of Israel and America to suppress resistance to occupation and demonstrate his contempt for those who criticized him in the Palestinian legislature, media and civil society.

‘Arafat,’ Jonathan said, ‘I think, sensed it wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t so much Jerusalem or the refugees, but Barak’s insistence at Camp David that this was it, the end of the road. There was no possibility you could improve the terms. He couldn’t do it. His people would not have gone along with it. From that day to this, Tenet, Mitchell’ – meaning the missions of the two Georges, the CIA director and the former senator – ‘everything has been an attempt to revive security cooperation. If Arafat hits Hamas, the Israelis will stop hitting him. Nothing else. It’s simply not going to work.’

What will work?

‘A two-state solution.’

To many Israelis that was an unacceptable, maximalist demand. It was, however, the result of an evolution in Palestinian thought born of eighty years of defeat and a compromise of their previous ideal of a ‘secular, democratic state’ in all of Palestine. It had taken generations for them to realize they did not have the strength to win back the part of Palestine – 78 per cent – they lost to Israel in 1948. By the first intifadah in 1987, they were ready for independence in Gaza and the West Bank. The settlers and Israel’s then prime minister Ehud Barak told Palestinians they were unreasonable to demand all of the West Bank and Gaza, all of Israel’s 1967 conquest, all of the 22 per cent. At Camp David, where Bill Clinton caused a conflagration with his quixotic pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize to redeem his tarnished presidency, Barak had excluded the largest settlement blocs from discussion and was prepared to consider adjustments only to the rest of the occupied territories. Under Barak’s vague proposals, Israel would have kept about 30 per cent or more of the land, 80 per cent of the water and all of the sky above for its right to fly and use the airwaves. Even a leader as craven as Arafat could not say yes to a mere 15 per cent of all Palestine on which to build his Arab Bantu-stine.