A Balcony Over Jerusalem Read online

  Even around Jerusalem, we watched wars in the skies. One night Sylvie, Jack and I went for dinner at the Hosh Jasmin Restaurant near Bethlehem in the West Bank, only 15 minutes from our apartment. It was a beautiful evening and we were eating outside. A siren began and we saw a missile shooting across the sky. Then a second missile appeared, pursuing the first. The first was a Hamas rocket from Gaza and the second a rocket fired by Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’, designed to destroy the first.

  The Iron Dome is a brilliant device: a computer system that can tell within seconds the trajectory of a missile and whether it is heading for a populated area. If so, it will fire a missile to hit the incoming missile. If the incoming missile is heading into the sea, or the desert, the Israelis will save the US$90,000 that each missile costs.

  On this night in Bethlehem, we watched one rocket chase the other. Finally the Israeli rocket caught up with the Hamas rocket and we heard a massive clash of metal. Seconds later we heard a thud as all this metal crashed to earth. We looked at each other, realising what an extraordinary new life we had.

  It’s no surprise that people who have lived in this atmosphere for 50 years have been affected by it. Israelis are some of the most stressed people in the world. Israelis near the Gaza border have lived for years with Code Red sirens, bomb shelters and psychological trauma. I interviewed a psychologist in Sderot whose entire practice was dealing with traumatised Israeli children.

  The conflict is not the only cause of stress – there are also financial pressures. Israel has a high cost of living due to the lack of competition among retailers, and wages are low. This pressure creates a culture of distrust.

  So notorious are many tradespeople at over-charging that Israel’s Channel 2 runs a show called ‘Yatzata Tzadik’ – ‘You Emerged as Honourable’. Filmed by hidden cameras, tradesmen, dentists and other professionals are asked to give quotes. The dishonest are humiliated on national TV; the ‘honourable’ are given a medal.

  Daily life is frantic and pressured. In West Jerusalem, which is predominantly Israeli, arguments and tension are commonplace, whether you are in a bank or a post office. And when you go into the Old City or East Jerusalem, with a high Muslim population, you can get caught up in the Israeli–Palestinian tensions.

  The pressure-cooker atmosphere extends to the roads. There are constant traffic jams, noise and stress as people travel around in the heat. In car parks, when two cars are trying to push ahead of each other, the battle becomes which driver will lose their nerve first. I told a shopkeeper that I’d never experienced anything like driving in Jerusalem. ‘People here aren’t very nice sometimes,’ he said. ‘They won’t back down.’

  One of our neighbours – a diplomat from the European Union – argued at a traffic light with another driver. He gave her ‘the finger’. She reached into her glove box and pulled out a gun. He panicked and took off. ‘I’m always giving people the finger in Brussels,’ he told me later, ‘and no one gets upset.’

  In the space of four months, we had two car accidents. First a bus filled with settlers travelling to Hebron ripped off the front of our car, knocking our bumper bar 15 metres up the road. The next accident happened when we stopped for pedestrians at a zebra crossing: a taxi smashed into the back of us. The driver told us he was distressed and needed to collect his thoughts, then sped off the minute our backs were turned. When we told an Israeli friend about the accident, she said: ‘In Israel you need to make it clear to pedestrians that you’re not going to stop and then they won’t cross.’

  Many months and $2400 in repairs later, we were told that if we wanted to get any of that money back we’d have to take the driver to court. But there are so many car crashes in Israel that chasing him down was the last thing the police wanted to do. The Hyundai Getz we’d bought, a former Avis rental car, was getting newer all the time: it now had a new front and back.

  The apparent threat of missile attacks seemed to justify the heavy Israeli security presence we noticed everywhere we went. That was how we felt at first, but as time went on we were no longer so sure. As the months went by, a shadow began to creep across our balcony, as we began to realise the situation in Israel was not all it seemed.

  Many insights came from passing through Israeli checkpoints.

  We would sometimes go to Bethlehem to do our shopping. One day I arrived at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem to find the gates shut.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.

  ‘Security,’ the soldier said.

  ‘Has there been an incident?’ I asked.

  ‘Security,’ he repeated.

  What I discovered was that the gates had been closed for nine days for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (the Feast of the Tabernacles). I had not realised that for each Jewish holiday, Israel sealed off the West Bank, with only Israeli West Bank settlers allowed to travel into Israel or Palestinians with special permits.

  I gradually learnt these border rules can change according to the soldier of the day. On one occasion, an Israeli border policeman in East Jerusalem would not let me speak to a group of Palestinians who were being intimidated by young Israelis during a rally. As a journalist you receive a media card that’s meant to give you access to all public areas. I showed the policeman my card, explaining that it was an official accreditation from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office.

  ‘Then telephone the Prime Minister,’ he said.

  When I responded that that was unfair, he challenged me to a physical fight. ‘Push me!’ he said. ‘Push me here!’ he repeated, pointing to his chest.

  I told him I didn’t want to fight and left, finding a side street which allowed me to interview the Palestinians.

  To travel by land from Israel to Jordan, you need to cross the Allenby Bridge. Because Israel has no diplomatic relations with most of the Arab world – Egypt and Jordan being the main exceptions – to fly to countries such as Lebanon, Iran or Libya I first had to travel to Amman in Jordan. Foreigners such as me have the option to fly from Tel Aviv to Amman, but this is not an option for Palestinians – they are not allowed to use Tel Aviv airport.

  Allenby is the only land crossing that Palestinians are allowed to use. It’s therefore a place where foreigners can observe the interaction between Israeli authorities and Palestinians. You need to get a bus across the no-man’s-land border into Jordan. One time in 2009 I got onto a waiting bus, assuming it was for all passengers.

  ‘Only Palestinians!’ an Israeli guard insisted.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Palestinians here, foreigners there,’ he replied, pointing at another bus.

  When I asked again, he said: ‘That’s the way it is.’

  One of the most unpleasant things I saw at Allenby was when Sylvie, Jack and I were returning to Israel after a holiday in early 2010, and waiting, among hundreds of Palestinians, to go through security. Next to us was an elderly Palestinian woman whose trolley was overloaded – blankets, bags, water. It looked as if it was about to topple over. Then an Israeli security guard walked by. Seeing the woman’s trolley, he kicked it, causing much of the contents to fall off.

  Jack helped the woman load it all back on. The guard returned and kicked it off again. ‘Why did he do that?’ Jack asked. All I could say was ‘I don’t know.’

  On my next visit to Allenby, with Sylvie in mid-2010, Israeli security wanted to examine my bag, so I was taken to a private room. There was a large metal table in the middle of the terminal for Palestinians only. Later we saw an Israeli security officer holding up the clothes of a Palestinian man’s wife. The officer ran his hand along the woman’s underwear. He then held up the woman’s bra. The man stared across the table at the officer while his wife sat nearby with her head in her hands.

  To Sylvie and me, the way the security officer was running his hand along the underwear was offensive. This seemed to be about humiliation, not security.

  On another occasion at Allenby, Sylvie, Jack and I were waiting alongside an eld
erly Palestinian man in a wheelchair and his nephew. The man had just been in a car crash; his nephew told us it was a hit-and-run. His leg was bleeding, the blood dripping into a plastic container. He had passed through the security check, openly bleeding, but no official was helping.

  His nephew tried to gain the attention of the official behind the counter. She ignored him. The nephew then asked if I, as a foreigner, could help, so I approached two other officials. They pointed me back to the woman in the booth.

  I went back and told her that the man needed help. She waved me off, telling me she would attend to him when she’d finished dealing with the line of people at her window. I asked the people in the line whether they would let the injured man go ahead of them, and they agreed. I raised my voice, telling her this was unacceptable.

  The woman then turned to the official who had entered the booth next to hers and, indicating me, said I should be ‘punished’. When our turn came, the second official took our passports. She handed back Sylvie’s and Jack’s passports, but not mine. Instead, she gave it to an official from the Interior Ministry, who took it away.

  After 20 minutes I sought out Baruch, the manager of the centre, who I knew. I told him that a clearly injured elderly man had been made to wait and that my passport had been taken without reason.

  I was then called into an office inside the terminal for a meeting with Interior Ministry officials. When I walked in, the first woman who had refused to help was present. She threatened to cancel my press accreditation. I told her it was a Government Press Office (GPO) card, which she could not cancel. The woman said she wasn’t threatening me, but handed me a new visa – no longer my B1 journalist’s visa but a B2 ‘Not Permitted to Work’ visa.

  Instantly my work status had been downgraded. From then on, each time I entered Israel my passport was stamped ‘Not Permitted to Work’. The GPO, however, told me that I could continue to work.

  The shadow even invaded our balcony when Sylvie and I entertained our friends. We quickly learnt to keep two different beers in our fridge: Goldstar for Israelis and Taybeh for Palestinians. We would sometimes put on a kosher dinner for our Israeli friends and the following night a dinner for our Palestinian friends. Often the conflict became the main topic of conversation. Many Israelis are automatically hostile towards foreign journalists – but even at social functions, I soon realised that I shouldn’t offer an opinion on the conflict to anyone, no matter what it might be.

  On one occasion we were invited to one of our neighbours’ apartments for a Saturday lunch and the conversation turned to the Palestinians and the Israelis. I said something about how I thought the situation with the Palestinians needed to be resolved, and a woman at the lunch turned to me and said, ‘Well, you can’t talk. Look how you’ve treated the Aboriginals. It’s a disgrace what you’ve done to the Aboriginals.’

  I said, ‘I agree with you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she responded.

  I told her that I agreed that the way we’d treated our Indigenous population was appalling.

  She said, ‘But you’re an Australian.’

  I replied, ‘Well, yes, and I think it’s wrong, and we’re trying to rectify it. But why should that stop me from having an opinion on the Palestinians?’

  It taught me how sensitive Israelis are to criticism from foreigners. After that I became careful never to reveal my personal views.

  On another occasion, some Australian friends invited us to their house to watch a rugby game between Australia and South Africa. They also invited some South Africans.

  It was a thoroughly enjoyable event: Australia won 21–6. Afterwards, the conversation turned to politics. They said they had been surprised to discover that there were ‘dozens’ of different permits which covered Palestinians – indeed, what I did not know then until I began researching it was that there were 101 different permits which Israel had devised to apply to Palestinians. I asked the three South Africans how they saw the situation between Israelis and Palestinians. The South Africans were from three different backgrounds: a white English South African, a white Afrikaner South African and a black South African. Each of them said that the permit system which Israel used in the West Bank was worse than the notorious ‘pass system’ used during apartheid. Their verdict was that in terms of movement, Israel’s permit system made daily life more unpredictable than the pass system in South Africa.

  Their reasoning came as a complete surprise to me. They said apartheid was designed to be an ongoing economic system based on race. White South Africans relied on workers from the townships to perform the blue-collar work. It was about segregation, not expulsion, because if the blacks had left, the economy would have collapsed. But to them, it appeared that the Israelis wanted to make the lives of Palestinians so difficult they would eventually leave.

  I’d just watched a great Wallabies win, but as Sylvie and I drove home I wasn’t thinking about the rugby – but about how three South Africans from different backgrounds believed that Israel’s occupation was worse than apartheid.

  CHAPTER 5

  Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Iran

  June 2009

  WITHIN A MONTH OF MY ARRIVAL IN ISRAEL, IN FEBRUARY 2009, I went from covering a war to covering an election: a battle between the far-right Benjamin Netanyahu, who led the Likud Party, and the centre-right Tzipi Livni, who led Kadima. Livni won more votes, but was unable to form a coalition, so Netanyahu – who had already served as prime minister between 1996 and 1999 – was declared the leader.

  Many commentators made clear their view: that Israel had re-elected a man who did not want peace with the Palestinians. Gradually, too, I would become convinced that Israel’s two-State solution died the night Netanyahu was reinstated as prime minister.

  Meanwhile, Lebanon and Iran both decided to try to convince the world that they were vibrant democracies.

  In the lead-up to the Lebanese national election on 7 June, neither major candidate appeared in public for fear of assassination. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who led the 8 March Coalition – which is dominated by Hezbollah – addressed his supporters by video from bunkers. Saad Hariri, who led the 14 March Coalition, campaigned from Saudi Arabia. Hariri was worried (justifiably) that Hezbollah would try to assassinate him, while Nasrallah was worried (justifiably) that Israel would try to assassinate him.

  Saad Hariri’s own father Rafik, a former Prime Minister, had been killed years earlier by a massive bomb. Both 8 and 14 March were the dates of major demonstrations in the aftermath of that assassination.

  Just days later I was in Iran, covering yet another national election. For a country that normally restricts foreign journalists, suddenly Iran had put out the welcome mat.

  Every four years Iran elects a president. These events are always choreographed – the ruling Ayatollahs choose four acceptable candidates – so they rarely mean real change. But in 2009, one of the four candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi, went rogue. Either he fooled the Ayatollahs during the vetting process, or he decided afterwards to seize the day. The election became real.

  On the flight from Amman to Tehran, I met an English woman who spoke fluent Farsi, or Persian. She regularly visited Iran for business. To protect her identity, I’ll call her Susan. She introduced me to many Iranians during what would be a turbulent time.

  We landed at Imam Khomeini International Airport two nights before the election. My taxi could barely move as thousands of Mousavi supporters filled the streets. They were keen to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – the hardline Holocaust-denying President.

  A record number of foreign journalists arrived, and we were all required to stay at the Laleh Hotel, where government officials could keep an eye on us. As I walked into the 1970s-style reception area I noticed several intimidating-looking men sitting around the foyer watching everyone.

  The hotel said I must hand over my passport and contact the ‘Ministry of Islamic Guidance’, which would assign me a fixer at US$150 a day. I put this o
ff – the idea of being accompanied everywhere by a government spy had no attraction. I calculated that there were so many journalists that by the time the ministry discovered I hadn’t contacted them I would have bought a few days of freedom, and hopefully found some real stories.

  I met with Susan, who knew Tehran well. The buses in Iran have a pole across the middle; men are required to stay in the front half and women in the back. Just like the ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.

  Susan and I were talking across the pole when a woman demanded of her in Farsi: ‘Are you married?’ Under Iran’s version of sharia law, men and women are only allowed to talk in public if they are related.

  ‘Yes,’ said Susan, wanting to avoid a confrontation. She told me later that the ‘Islamic police’ had sometimes walked up to her and said that her scarf did not hide her hair. Once, two policewomen told her to wipe lipstick off her face and she pretended she could not speak Farsi and kept walking. Back in Australia, before I’d begun my posting, Iran’s Ambassador had told me how good life was for women in Iran – now I was getting the chance to see for myself just how much equality women really enjoyed.

  Friday, 12 June 2009: election day. In the capital there seemed to be strong support for Mousavi. But Tehran was a stronghold for reformists, whereas Ahmadinejad was popular in rural areas.

  At polling booths I did my own poll – most Iranians speak some level of English. Every person I spoke to who used the internet said they would vote for Mousavi, while those who had never touched a computer – particularly the elderly and the poor – supported Ahmadinejad.

  On Friday night, only three hours after the polls had closed, Ahmadinejad went on television to claim victory – overwhelmingly. People were stunned.

  It was inconceivable that all the votes could have been counted within three hours, particularly given it was done by hand, and the results were too neat. In region after region, the result was 63 per cent for Ahmadinejad and 34 per cent for Mousavi. Ahmadinejad had received about 10 million more votes than expected. He’d even beaten the other candidates in their home towns by two to one.