A Balcony Over Jerusalem Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Sylvie, my great love, and Jack, our wonderful son,

  who shared this extraordinary adventure.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue The Handshake

  Chapter 1 A Balcony Over Jerusalem

  Chapter 2 My Long Journey to Jerusalem

  Chapter 3 Arriving to a War

  Chapter 4 A Shadow across the Balcony

  Chapter 5 Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Iran

  Chapter 6 The French School of Jerusalem

  Chapter 7 Dirty Tricks

  Chapter 8 The Arab Spring

  Chapter 9 ‘I Think Egypt is Going to Blow’

  Chapter 10 Colonel Gaddafi’s Gangster Regime

  Chapter 11 Frankenstein’s Monster

  Chapter 12 Coffee with the Israeli Army

  Chapter 13 Walking into Syria

  Chapter 14 The American Factor

  Chapter 15 The Lobby

  Chapter 16 Eight Dead Omars

  Chapter 17 Sunset in Gaza

  Chapter 18 Returning to Iran

  Chapter 19 The View from Palestine

  Chapter 20 Netanyahu’s Israel

  Epilogue Farewell, Jerusalem

  Endnotes

  Photos Section

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  The Handshake

  13 September 1993

  MY FASCINATION WITH THE MIDDLE EAST BEGAN WITH A handshake. Standing in front of me were Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. It was one of those moments that makes being a journalist worthwhile. I was the Washington correspondent of The Australian newspaper, and on this crisp autumn morning I found myself standing on the South Lawn of the White House, 30 metres from history.

  These three men had a chance to resolve one of the most damaging conflicts in the Middle East, one which has impacts through the region. There had been doubts about whether Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, would shake hands. At a private meeting inside the White House before the ceremony, the Israeli and Palestinian delegations had refused to do so. As the New York Times reported:

  They both walked to the Blue Room, where several people were already drinking coffee and orange juice … The Israelis clustered at the southern end of the oval room, with Mr Arafat and Mr Abbas [later Arafat’s successor] gravitating to the west end, about 15 feet away. After all the other dignitaries filed out of the Blue Room to be introduced, Mr Clinton, Mr Arafat and Mr Rabin were left alone together for a minute in the diplomatic entrance and it was then that the two old antagonists exchanged their first words.

  ‘You know, we have a lot of work to do,’ Mr Rabin said sombrely, according to a Clinton aide.

  ‘I know, and I am prepared to do my part,’ Mr Arafat answered.1

  Outside, hundreds of us waited. I sat next to Michael Stutchbury, Washington correspondent for the Australian Financial Review. For me, at age 31, this was more than I could ever have hoped for as a boy from Christian Brothers’ College St Kilda, in Melbourne, whose father had left school at 14 and worked as a printer’s assistant at Fairfax in Sydney. When I got a cadetship at the Herald in Melbourne as an 18-year-old, Dad told me how proud he was. He said that when he worked at Fairfax it was a big thing if, during the evening meal break, the journalists would speak to him – because the journalists were considered at the top of the pile and the printers at the bottom.

  Now, I was one of those guys, not just at the top of the pile, but sitting at the White House watching history being made.

  At 11.43am, Arafat and Rabin stepped forward to sign what would become known as the Oslo I Accord. Both men had enemies on their own sides who were prepared to kill them for what they were about to do.

  What President Clinton had done that day was extraordinary: he’d brought two bitter enemies together. He’d come closer than almost any other president to bringing peace to the Middle East. For both sides he had that most valuable asset: credibility.

  Then came the moment of truth. They’d signed the deal, but now Clinton was determined that they shake hands. As a president he wanted a peace agreement, but as a politician he wanted a photograph.

  Arafat extended his hand. Rabin stared at Arafat. For a second that seemed an eternity, Arafat stood with his hand poised in the air. This could have been one of the most famous snubs in history. Then Rabin raised his hand. The men shook. The crowd erupted.

  As a journalist, it’s the most powerful moment I’ve ever experienced. The world was on the brink of resolving one of the most relentless conflicts in history.

  As I stood there in Washington, I knew that I wanted to be part of the momentous events in the Middle East – somehow. When I finally arrived on 2 January 2009, as The Australian’s Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem, I landed with great expectations.

  Over the next six years, through experiencing life in the suburbs of Jerusalem to spending time with senior political and military officials in Israel and beyond, I would come to understand how Israel works. I would also come to realise the belief that peace was possible had gone. The notion that Israelis and Palestinians could co-exist had gone. The ultra-Orthodox had gained greater power. And the settler movement – represented by the ‘national religious group’ – had become the dominant power.

  I would get to know the Middle East. I would cover the collapse of corrupt regimes during the Arab Spring. I would speak to jihadists in Lebanon who had just fought in Syria. I would interview families in Turkey who had just fled from Islamic State.

  This is the personal journey of a foreign correspondent – my Middle East memoir.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Balcony Over Jerusalem

  January 2009 to January 2015

  WE HAD THE BEST BALCONY IN JERUSALEM. FROM IT, WE could see the best and the worst of this ancient city – the extraordinary past and the beguiling present. The good and the bad, the hope and the despair. And it was from this balcony that I would go forth around the Middle East, flying to wherever yet another dictator was slaughtering his people.

  It was from this balcony that I would travel to a meat refrigerator in Libya where Colonel Gaddafi’s body had been taken. Muammar Gaddafi lived in obscene wealth. Yet for all the family’s trappings, his end was appalling.

  It was from this balcony that I’d travel to Egypt to cover the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and his security forces would blindfold me and tie my hands with electrical cord. Soon after doing so, they used the butts of their guns to bash the Egyptian man sitting in front of me.

  From this balcony I’d travel to Iraq. ‘We think Islamic State might be close to taking Baghdad,’ one of my editors said to me. ‘Can you get there as soon as possible?’ That’s the sort of phone call you get in journalism: while everybody else is scrambling to get out of a place, you’re trying to get in. Islamic State – the most savage terrorist group of our age – was within 50 kilometres of Baghdad and it was thought they might take the capital. As the plane came in to land at Baghdad International Airport, I wondered what I’d do if Islamic State did make those last 50 kilometres. But I’d been in journalism long enough to know that I could worry about that later.

  And it was from this balcony that my paper sent me to South Africa to cover the funeral of Nelson Mandela, the man who slayed apartheid. In Pretoria, I joined the long queue and filed past his body. I then drove 16 hours to the Eastern Cape for the funeral in Qunu and walked with locals along a dirt road as the coffin of ‘Madiba’ was pulled on a carriage to the family cemetery. Overhead, helicopters from the South African Army flew in formation – the same army which once would have targeted Mandela because of the colour of his skin.

&
nbsp; On that trip, I teamed up with Or Heller, the military correspondent for Israel’s Channel 10. We rented a car and drove to various memorial events. At one point, Heller, whose grandmother survived Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, turned to me and said: ‘You know, Nelson Mandela was on the right side of history. In Israel we’re on the wrong side of history. South Africa used to be an apartheid state and Mandela changed that but I fear that for us apartheid may be ahead of us, not behind us.’

  For me, my wife Sylvie and our son Jack – eight when we first arrived – so much of family life during our six-year adventure in the Middle East happened on this balcony. The balcony became not just our base, but also our favourite place. On warm evenings, we’d have dinners with friends out here as we looked over the Dead Sea to Jordan. We could see below to the place where, according to Jewish history, Abraham stood 4000 years ago on the site of what would one day be Jerusalem. He then had his famous meeting with King Melchizedek, a man whose name resonates to this day for both Jews and Christians.

  From our balcony, we looked across an extraordinary landscape: rows of gnarled olive trees; the Old City of Jerusalem with its golden Dome of the Rock, sombre-looking al-Aqsa Mosque and Western Wall; the grandeur of Mount Zion; historic Mount Moriah; the Mount of Olives; and the Judean desert. If we looked to the left we could see the Garden of Gethsemane, where Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ with a kiss to the cheek, condemning him to a death that would echo for the next 2000 years.

  And while we could see the Old City, we also had a view of modern Jerusalem, with all its high-tech entrepreneurs, who have made Israel the largest foreign contributor after China to New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange.

  From our balcony, we could see the old government house, now the United Nations’ Middle East headquarters. I always found it incongruous that the blue UN flag flew so triumphantly, given the powerlessness of the UN in this part of the world.

  In front of our apartment, as well as the Western Wall, we could see the other famous ‘wall’ – the concrete snake that separates Israel from the occupied West Bank. As with everything there, people can’t even agree on its name: the Israelis call it a ‘security fence’, the Palestinians an ‘apartheid wall’. Israel’s supporters in Australia prefer not to call it a wall but a fence.

  Every day we would see Israeli Army Jeeps driving along the ‘wall’, checking on a new Israeli settlement that was being built on the outskirts of a Palestinian village.

  Our balcony became our private time machine. We could fast-forward from the biblical past to the troubled present. We would see tear gas being fired at Palestinians and rocks being thrown at Israeli soldiers.

  On Fridays – the Muslim holy day and start of the Jewish Shabbat – I developed a routine. As soon as I woke I’d go onto the balcony, where I could see this conflict in the Middle East taking place right in front of me. If there were merely police helicopters circling the hotspots, I knew it was a run-of-the-mill confrontation. When Israeli police prevented access by males aged five to 55 to the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, I knew the violence would be much worse. If things were really bad, an army blimp would fly above. On those days, Sylvie and I would jump into our car and head towards the trouble spot. Sylvie would take photographs and videos for The Australian, as well as for other media outlets.

  These Friday clashes were mainly unremarkable. Locals dismissed them as ‘a bit of Tom and Jerry’. Usually at about two o’clock the Israeli soldiers and the Palestinians would go back to their lives until the following week. We were watching the world’s slowest war.

  In front of our balcony was the ‘peace park’. Not once did we see an Israeli talking to a Palestinian. This was part of the unwritten code of Jerusalem: Israelis would place their picnic baskets on the higher parts and the Palestinians on the lower parts.

  On Friday evenings, when a siren announced the weekly Shabbat, Israelis would walk to their Shabbat dinners. This was the cue for Palestinians to appear, carrying plates of kebabs and tabouli. For 24 hours, the Palestinians would move to the higher parts. You could set your clock by this changing of the guard. Jack and I would hear everyone in the park speaking Hebrew at five o’clock and everyone speaking Arabic at six o’clock. In one extraordinary hour, one religion, language and culture would be replaced by another. Then on Saturday evening, as Israelis returned to the park, Hebrew again became the language of the higher parts, and the Palestinians moved back down the hill. Every weekend I wondered: how was it, amid all the wreckage of the Middle East, that these rituals endured?

  So much of this conflict happened quietly.

  From our balcony, if we looked really carefully at the rolling hills between us and Jordan, we could see a tiny Palestinian house 300 metres in front of us, in East Jerusalem. It had a single light, and two or three goats in the yard. From a distance, we got to know this family – its habits, its movements, its celebrations. We’d see the children head off to school each morning. During the day their father herded goats on the hill.

  The oldest child was doing his final year at school, and there’s a Palestinian tradition that if a student graduates the family lets off fireworks. It’s a way of letting the neighbourhood know the news. We knew what day the results of the final exams were due so we watched to see whether fireworks were let off that night. We saw several other homes in the valley celebrating – then came fireworks from the little house. The boy had passed.

  Then one morning the little house was gone. The Israeli Army had come while we were asleep and bulldozed it, claiming it was an illegal structure. The little house had been a part of our lives. Sylvie, Jack and I decided to walk down the valley to speak to the family. The army had demolished everything except the stairway. When we arrived we found the owner sweeping it.

  It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. A broken man sweeping his stairway to nowhere.

  Yet it was also from our balcony that I saw one of the only rays of hope in six years. As the Middle East deteriorates – the situation has dramatically worsened with the emergence of ISIS – I often think back on this moment. I believed then – and still do – that if the right people built on such goodwill then perhaps peace would come.

  It was 27 September 2009, our first Yom Kippur in Jerusalem. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar. For one day of the year, this stressed-out city, trying to function on 17th-century donkey tracks, stops.

  In the hours leading up to Yom Kippur, police close roads. As the sun sets, traffic lights begin flashing. Cars disappear, as if we have rewound to a time before they existed. If you drive a car during Yom Kippur you may be stoned by religious Jews.

  People dress in white clothing to symbolise the purity of angels. Thousands of families walk together to their synagogues.

  Although a solemn holiday, there was one wonderful feature of Yom Kippur: with the roads free of cars, children would take bikes and roller skates and become the masters of the streets. Jack invited his friend Mark over and they revelled in the freedom. For one day, Jerusalem – one of the most remarkable cities in the world – was ours.

  Our apartment was technically in ‘no-man’s-land’: in front of us was East Jerusalem, and the Palestinian village of Jabal al Mukaber, but from a smaller balcony off our bedroom at the back we could see West Jerusalem, which was mainly Jewish. On the ‘Jewish side’ there were some 20 synagogues within 2 square kilometres.

  When we finally arrived home at the end of that first Yom Kippur, Sylvie and I took a bottle of red wine to the main balcony. Below us was dead silence. Normally, a Sunday night in East Jerusalem would be full of life. We knew that West Jerusalem would be quiet, but we were looking across the Palestinian suburbs of East Jerusalem. We sat there as the moon rose over Jordan. Every village below us was silent. We found out later that out of respect for Yom Kippur, the Palestinians remained quiet for 24 hours.

  ‘We don’t drive our cars on Yom Kippur out of respect for the Jewis
h holiday,’ one Palestinian told me. ‘Palestinians and Jews have coexisted peacefully here for hundreds of years. Our argument is not with Jews, it’s with the policies of the Israeli Government, such as the occupation.’

  Over our six years in Jerusalem, we experienced the same thing each Yom Kippur: a serenity that proved to be a rare glimmer of hope.

  Our balcony was an important part of our life, but nothing was more important than the fact that from up here, each Yom Kippur, we heard what peace sounded like. Never had silence sounded so good.

  This book covers much of the Middle East and North Africa (particularly Egypt and Libya), which was also part of my brief. But, because we lived in Israel and observed daily life in that country in intimate detail, much in the following pages focuses on Israel and its major political problem – the occupation of the territory of 2.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank. That occupation turned 50 in 2017, making it one of the longest occupations in modern history. I came to realise that it was an extraordinary case of social engineering.

  Whether one is passionately pro-Israel, anti-Israel or neutral depends largely on the information one consumes. My view is that, ultimately, the Israelis and Palestinians have to sort out their own problems. Both sides detest each other, both sides have done bad things to each other. This is a physically, emotionally and psychologically abusive marriage, yet they share the same house. The answer, I have come to believe, is in divorce – but who would broker this divorce and on what terms?

  Among other things, this book examines how the media report on Israel. It is the result of interviews with the leading foreign correspondents in Jerusalem – including journalists from the New York Times, Die Welt, The Guardian, Reuters, Agence France Presse and The Economist.

  As for my own perspective, I approach reporting of Israel from a ‘pro-journalist’ stance. I’m neither ‘pro-Palestinian’ nor ‘pro-Israel’. My home is in Australia, on the other side of the world. To use an old Australian saying, I don’t have a dog in this fight.