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

‘Israel holds all the cards,’ Jonathan said, ‘and they know it. They are furious with the Palestinians for failing to recognize that. This is more on the left than on the right.’ Jonathan had discussed this with the foreign minister, Shimon Peres. ‘Peres told me, we are not negotiating with the Palestinians. We are negotiating with ourselves.’ The Israeli leadership regarded its decision on what to ‘give’ the Palestinians as an internal matter rather than as a subject for negotiation with the occupied people.

‘When subcontracting control to the PA failed,’ Jonathan concluded, ‘the left had nothing else.’ Israel turned to Sharon ‘with his policy of hit them and hit them harder’. Sharon had his critics, but Jonathan said they were even further to the right, demanding that the old Arab killer ‘get tougher, expel’. The Palestinians were making the settlers feel insecure on their roads in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Palestinians now have guns and are willing to use them,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Gaza settlers are no longer safe. Period. Palestinians can exact a daily price, which means Israelis don’t hold all the cards.’

In response, he admitted, ‘The Israelis made life absolutely miserable.’ Sharon was, he said ‘absolutely furious. And he’s trying to keep it going. More incursions, more killings.’

In his pink Ralph Lauren shirt with preppy button-down collar, Jonathan Kuttab was as much American as Palestinian. But he misjudged the United States, as parts of the world did when the attack on Afghanistan was beginning. ‘America needs the Arab world,’ he said. ‘It cannot invade Afghanistan without neutralizing this place. Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and the rest will not go along with this crusade unless the Americans do something about the Palestinians.’ He was wrong. The United States let Sharon deal with the Palestinian problem as if its only dimension were security, as if Israel provided the model for the US to deal with Osama bin Laden and the tribes of Afghanistan. It did not seek or obtain Arab support. ‘The only basis for optimists,’ Jonathan said, ‘is that you cannot ignore one billion Muslims for ever.’ Jonathan, a Christian, may have been wrong about that as well.

We went back to the local conflict that was emblematic of the larger dispute between an all-powerful America and a helpless, supine Arab world. And we were back where we began more than a year before: that total weakness of the man in the torture chamber. ‘It’s not pure sadism,’ Jonathan said. ‘In the first intifadah , the problem was that ordinary soldiers were doing the interrogation. That’s sadism. They beat them up. But it was not effective. They have to force them to give information and to sign confessions. And they need professionals to do that. When you physically weaken someone, humiliate him, you can force him to do what you want. They use sleep deprivation and violent shaking. They are more effective. They study this. They are scientific and methodical. There are time limits, when people are vulnerable. If they have not broken down by the fiftieth day, they let them go.’ Did he know anyone who had taken it longer than fifty days? ‘I had a client who did. They released him on the fifty-fifth day. He had a few teeth broken. He was tired, weak, but in very good shape.’

The ones who survived the best were those who neither confessed nor implicated their comrades. Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist who wrote The Wretched of the Earth , based on his experience of French repression in Algeria, had observed the same phenomenon. Those who cracked, who named names, left prison ashamed and broken. Those who held out – despite being tortured longer – recovered. One of Fanon’s other observations was that those most in need of psychiatric treatment were the torturers. He told of a French policeman who came to Fanon begging for help. He wanted to stop beating his wife and children but to continue torturing Arabs. A journalist at Ha’aretz told me of an Israeli psychiatrist who specialized in torturers, some of whom found their only remedy was to quit.

What had the Palestinians achieved with their suffering? In my lifetime, the Vietnamese had driven out the French and the Americans. The Algerians had expelled the French. The Belgians, the British, the French and the Portuguese had left Africa, the Dutch abandoned the East Indies. The whites of South Africa had surrendered power to the majority. Yet the Palestinians were left behind, ignored by the great powers, betrayed and used by the Arab states, beaten down by the Israelis. Young Palestinians emerged from the Russian Compound to repair their damaged spirit and flesh, then grew old to watch their sons relive the experience.

‘Let me tell you something,’ Jonathan said. His elbows were on the table. His black hair and moustache made him look like a sombre Charlie Chaplin. I leaned forward to listen. ‘I never defended anyone accused of possessing, manufacturing or buying communications equipment. Give me a break. I’ve defended thousands of security defendants. How come no one is trying to listen to the Israelis? This is so embarrassing. In terms of armed struggle, we Palestinians are not serious.’ It wasn’t the coffee or Valentine Vester’s young blossoms that filled the morning air of the courtyard just then. It was despair. Jonathan, who for most of his professional life had attempted to defend Palestinians in the military courts, said that he had switched to business law.

Papa Andrea’s restaurant was empty. I liked the place, not for the food, but for its open roof in the Christian Quarter. Most of the old city’s landmarks were nearby, all Jerusalem’s domes and spires and rain troughs and polished stone roofs. Just below were the souvenir shops, whose owners had set tables and chairs to play cards with one another outside. The largest shop, Yasser Barakat’s, was shuttered and padlocked. Two years earlier, in preparation for Pope John Paul II’s visit, the shopkeepers had no time for cards. The streets were crammed with pilgrims and tourists along the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Today, the large fountain where five streets met was dry. Flies swarmed over discarded cans of Coke and Pepsi where clear water should have collected. At street level, the cobbled walkways, the deserted businesses and the broken fountain made the old city a forlorn setting. Between the street and the roofs were the windows of the settlers’ flats. Each window sprouted a flag and blue metal mesh shutter. Tiny T-shirts and large underwear dripped in the sunlight. In one window, children pressed against the grille to watch the Arabs at their card tables. Their parents had settled there with the express purpose of forcing the Arabs out, as they had forced other Arabs out of Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh and, more recently, much of the West Bank.

Would those young faces one day rebel against their parents’ radical hatred and learn Arabic and play cards in the street with their neighbours? Or would they, like their mothers and fathers, find some subterfuge to seize another flat and evict its Arab residents?

A middle-aged settler – her hair bundled under a scarf and her legs hidden inside a long skirt, like so many modest Muslim women – limped past the card players. Dragging her groceries in a bag from the Jewish Quarter, she did not look at the men. They did not glance up from their cards. Neither existed for the other, the Arabs living in their pre-Israelite past, the settler in some Arab-free future.

The Armenians dwelled, like ghosts, between the two. ‘There are two thousand Armenians in the old city now,’ George Hultunian, community historian, said. ‘Their children have no future.’ Armenia was the first kingdom in history to embrace Christ, and its priests were among the earliest to establish hostels for pilgrims visiting the scene of their Saviour’s execution and resurrection. Most of the two thousand lived within the walls and gates of St James’s Convent. The Armenian Quarter had no shops apart from a few groceries, Vic Lepejian’s ceramics factory, the Armenian Tavern and a photo shop.