A Balcony Over Jerusalem Read online

  Chris Mitchell decided not to run the letter in the paper. That’s the sort of backing that is invaluable for a correspondent. If a story contains errors then the media outlet should correct it quickly, but if the story is correct and the letter is wrong that is, in my view, a different matter.

  There was one bizarre aspect of Shapira’s letter: he claimed that my article had harmed the peace process. ‘In publishing this story, the Weekend Australian damages the ability of parties to the peace process to negotiate with trust and credibility.’ In response to Dor Shapira, Steve Waterson wrote: ‘If you really believe that we are the obstacle to the peace process, I fear your priorities are sadly misplaced.’

  I’d headed off the attacks from the Israeli Embassy and AIJAC, but now an entirely new assault began – the Dirty Tricks campaign. This new campaign would be led by a mystery Israeli journalist.

  The first hint I had of it was when I rang Nasser Jaber in September, a month after my article was published, to check if there were any developments in his case. He told me, ‘I’ve had a call from a woman who says she’s an Australian journalist based in Jerusalem and she wants to do a story on me.’ This intrigued me: there were only three Australian journalists based in Israel, and I knew them all. Jaber continued, ‘She wanted me to say that you misquoted me, and I said you had not.’ Jaber told her that if she wanted to interview him she would need to do it in person. She left her name – Noga – but would not leave her telephone number. Jaber found this odd; why would a journalist not leave a telephone number? She said she’d ring back. When she did call back, she insisted – for a second time – that he had been misquoted in the story. Jaber insisted – for a second time – that he had not been misquoted. This time she left her phone number, which would prove her one mistake when it came to me discovering her identity.

  I checked through the list of journalists in Israel. The only Noga was Noga Tarnopolsky. It would not be her – we’d spent our second Friday night in Jerusalem having Shabbat dinner at her place with a mutual friend, and Noga had been to our house for lunch.

  I would subsequently uncover the movements of this ‘Noga’ in the weeks after my article was published. She was aware that there was a television program on the ABC in Australia called Media Watch, dedicated to keeping journalists accountable. But how would she get material to them without revealing her identity? She knew a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald, Asher Moses, so she decided to use him as a middle man. She told him that she thought my story had been made up. Moses would later tell me that Noga had told him that for many Palestinians, the fabrication of facts was considered normal. It was clear she believed that Nasser Jaber was one of these Palestinians. Moses told me that Noga said: ‘It’s a world view in which “facts” do not exist independently, but as objects one can manipulate to one’s benefit, thus racking up points in a long-term struggle.’ In contrast, Israel had an admirable approach to correcting anything that it said that was wrong. She sent Moses material to pass on to Media Watch, but told him that to protect her identity she would use the name of a friend, Lydia Rener, a bag designer. Noga, who was apparently part of the foreign journalists’ community, didn’t want her fingerprints anywhere near what she was about to do.

  Moses then got in touch with Mark Franklin, a producer at Media Watch, to tell him that he would soon be contacted by someone with strong credentials – a leading journalist who had written for the Jerusalem Post and the New York Times, among other publications. But the need for secrecy was paramount. Moses wrote, ‘I won’t tell anyone else about it before you broadcast.’

  Noga then sent Moses material that she hoped would discredit both me and Jaber, exposing me as the typical biased foreign journalist and Jaber as the typical Palestinian with a flexible view of the truth. She explained that Micky Rosenfeld, the official spokesman for the Israeli Police, knew nothing about the Jaber case. Noga didn’t realise that the police who attended Nasser Jaber’s house were the Border Police – who come under the army, not the police.

  She had also contacted Israeli human rights group Ir Amim. ‘Very significantly, Ir Amim has no record of this case at all,’ she wrote to Asher Moses. Ir Amim, however, had never had anything to do with the case. Peace Now was the human rights group that had been attending the court hearings. Had she rung them her entire attack would have collapsed.

  But Noga was convinced that the whole story was a fabrication. She wrote to Asher Moses: ‘It really appears that The Weekend Australian simply got the story wrong – the heart of the story, not just tangential details. In other words, it’s not the story of the midnight highway robbery of a house, it’s the complicated story of one member of an Arab family screwing another member, and a Jewish non-profit organisation taking advantage of that situation. Life in the Middle East (and especially in the Old City of Jerusalem) is filled with complexities, and superficial or not properly researched stories just muck things up.’

  Moses passed the information on to Media Watch in Sydney. He pointed out to me later, ‘My only involvement was forwarding an email.’ One day in early September, Noga took a bus from Jerusalem to Lydia Rener’s house in Tel Aviv. Using Lydia’s email address, she wrote to Mark Franklin at Media Watch: ‘I am glad that Asher [Moses] forwarded you all the phone numbers and info I had sent him. Great news.’ Noga wanted her material on me to be seen not just as an isolated story but as an illustration of how the foreign media in general cover Israel. ‘The contacts that I sent along will be useful for you and grant legitimacy to any other incident that might arise from Israeli news coverage’, she told Franklin. She talked about ‘the general failures in Israel coverage’.

  Noga also told Franklin, ‘I am personally friendly with Foreign Ministry personnel who were involved with drafting the Israeli response [to my article].’ I’d heard separately from a contact inside the Israeli Foreign Ministry that its legal team had indeed been told to attempt to find faults in the story.

  On 22 September, Noga made another bus trip from Jerusalem to Lydia Rener in Tel Aviv. She wanted to give Franklin a push-along. Her email read: ‘Hi Mark, Shana Tova [Happy Jewish New Year]! Any progress? Any interest? All best, Lydia.’

  Franklin was nervous about having Media Watch base an attack on someone not prepared to use their real name. He was worried that because ‘Lydia’ had concealed her identity she might not be accountable for the information she provided. Franklin told ‘Lydia’: ‘I have to say … it troubles me that you are using a false name. I have to be suspicious of sources who ask for anonymity and I can see no good reason why you won’t even tell me your name. How do I know that you’re a journalist who has been published in the J-Post and NYT? Really, I’m only pursuing this story on the strength of your credentials, and I can’t even verify those.’

  ‘Lydia’ replied: ‘I understand the suspicions you feel. For many reasons, both personal and professional, it is inappropriate for me to be involved in this story. I know both the journalist involved and his competitors … also, I know the Australian media world is a firey and divey thing.’

  She continued: ‘I feel very awkward, of course, because I have published in the NYT and other fab places! But truly, this has nothing to do with my ego or my credentials, or, you know, anything other than your own professional judgment about whether this story is worth pursuing for your very excellent program. If so, let me know, I’ll be happy to help, and I trust we’ll find a way around my temporary anonymity. Incidentally, I am a real Media Watch admirer, and under my own name will be happy to assist you with other stuff should you ever require some local footwork.’

  ‘Lydia Rener’ added a note of intrigue. She told Franklin: ‘Just to let you know, the AJN have contacted me and have a researcher working on this case.’ How would the Australian Jewish News know to contact someone who was hiding her identity about a story with which she had no association?

  About the same time, I got a call from Bob Magid, the owner of the Australian Jewish News. I didn’t kno
w him but he was in Jerusalem for Shimon Peres’s presidential conference and wanted to meet. When we met at the conference, he told me that he’d engaged Haviv Rettig-Gur, a journalist with the Jerusalem Post, to check the veracity of my story about Nasser Jaber. Rettig-Gur was attending the conference, so I suggested that the three of us get together so I could answer any questions they had.

  The three of us sat down together. The next 20 minutes were truly odd. To find out what research Rettig-Gur had done, I asked him whether he’d checked the court records, including the statement of claim of both sides. He said no. I asked whether he had spoken to Nasser Jaber. He said no. (I gave him Jaber’s phone number.) I asked whether he had been to look at the house in the Old City. He said no. The expression on Magid’s face when Rettig-Gur kept saying no to all my questions was one of ‘Then what am I paying you for?’ Rettig-Gur said that if I could help him prove that the story was true then ‘perhaps the Jerusalem Post can campaign on behalf of Nasser Jaber’. I told him I did four months’ research into the story and we proved it was true; that was why we published it. I also found his comment about the Jerusalem Post campaigning on behalf of a dispossessed Palestinian ludicrous. I never heard from Rettig-Gur again.

  For weeks I’d refused to believe that the ‘Noga’ running the campaign could be Noga Tarnopolsky. It was inconceivable that someone who knew Sylvie and me would engage in such a cloak-and-dagger operation. But a nagging doubt grew in my mind.

  I telephoned Nasser Jaber and asked if he still had the telephone number that Noga, the ‘Australian journalist’, had given. He looked around for the piece of paper then rang me back.

  It was Noga Tarnopolsky’s telephone number. The whole campaign had been run by Noga – our friend.

  I decided that she and I should meet and discuss what it was that she was upset about. We sat down in a café in the German Colony and I told her I knew all about her operation.

  She looked stunned.

  ‘Why did you do it? I asked.

  ‘I think the foreign media cover Israel unfairly and I thought you were doing the same thing,’ she said.

  Over the next hour, she explained the whole operation. She said that when Micky Rosenfeld knew nothing about the Israelis who had moved into Jaber’s home she became suspicious that it had never happened. When she called Ir Amin and they, too, knew nothing about it, it seemed to confirm to her that the whole thing had been made up. She said if she’d known it was the Border Police, rather than the regular police, and that it was Peace Now, rather than Ir Amim, she would never have pursued the operation to feed material to Media Watch.

  ‘But couldn’t you have rung me and asked me?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, clearly embarrassed.

  The whole saga confirmed something about Israel that I had begun to understand. If a foreign correspondent writes about ‘Palestinians’ as a generic group there is no problem. But if a journalist gives a Palestinian a name as I did – an identity, an ambition, a profession, a life – it can bring down the wrath of Israel’s supporters, even acquaintances such as Noga Tarnopolsky.

  A few months later, a leader of the Melbourne Jewish community visited Israel. Over lunch, I asked him why he thought the Nasser Jaber story had caused such a fuss.

  ‘You portrayed him as a professional, middle-class Palestinian,’ he told me.

  ‘But he is a professional, middle-class Palestinian,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that now he’s a professional, middle-class Palestinian who can’t live in his own home.’

  CHAPTER 8

  The Arab Spring

  December 2010

  FEW DEATHS IN MODERN TIMES HAVE HAD SUCH AN IMPACT. In life, Mohamed Bouazizi was an unremarkable character – a 26-year-old fruit seller with a modest stand in the small village of Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia. Bouazizi’s life had been tough. He’d left school early to provide for his widowed mother, Manoubia. He’d set up his fruit stall and diligently attended each day. But on 17 December 2010, a council worker made the fateful decision to tell Bouazizi that he was not allowed to operate at that spot, and confiscated his cart. Bouazizi snapped. What he did next would engulf the Arab world in what became known as the ‘Arab Spring’.

  Bouazizi set himself alight. His suicide unleashed the anger of Tunisians against the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. After they took to the streets the regime cracked down with brutality. For two weeks Tunisia was crippled, until El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia.

  Manoubia Bouazizi later said the municipality had long made trouble for her son, often taking away his weighing scales. She could never have imagined his act would lead to the ousting of the president. ‘I thank God we were sent this caring boy who opened the gates for all the people of Tunisia – and for all the Arab world,’ she said.1

  There have always been pressure points in the Middle East, but what happened in Tunisia was something that the Arab world rarely sees: big crowds in the streets demonstrating against their leader. For decades, many Arab nations had been ruled by nepotistic, hardline regimes. It was the same formula almost everywhere: dictators who abused their power and abused human rights. Those regimes were all based on fear. Often people did not know whether their neighbour was going to inform on them.

  The situation in these countries deteriorated because the cronies of the dictators were awarded key parts of the economy, and it became corrupted. These regimes might have survived, but oppression and no jobs were a lethal combination.

  Inspired by Tunisians, a powerful mood of optimism soon developed: people in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain believed that they, too, might be able to dislodge their dictators.

  The ‘Arab Spring’ – a misnomer if ever there was one – meant that I needed to fly from one uprising to the next in the Middle East and North Africa. As it turned out, the West’s belief that Arab nations could go from dictatorship to democracy overnight was hopelessly naïve.

  Our first trip to Syria as a family had been in August 2010. It was seven months before Syria descended into civil war. When Sylvie, Jack and I arrived in Damascus, the city had been booming: luxury hotels had been fully booked and the Al-Hamidiyah Souq (market) had been bustling with ice-cream shops, clothing boutiques and antiques stores. The New York Times had even listed Syria as one of the world’s hottest travel destinations. Young entrepreneurs had renovated old mansions into magnificent hotels, charging US$400 a night per room.

  From Jerusalem we’d taken the 35-minute drive to Allenby, the land crossing into Jordan. Another three-hour taxi ride, and we were in Damascus in time for afternoon tea. Leaving our hotel, a beautifully renovated 17th-century building, we headed for the souk. It was bursting with silk, cotton, jewellery, spices, medicinal herbs and antiques. Everywhere there were big open-air restaurants where people would sit until 11 or 12 at night. We met Fadi and Ziad, brothers who became our drivers in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

  Syria had always held a powerful interest for Sylvie and me. We had long wanted to visit the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, and historic sites like Palmyra, the Krak des Chevaliers and the Cardo Maximus in Apamea.

  As a cadet journalist, I’d been greatly intrigued by the career of Syria’s dictator Hafez al-Assad, public enemy number one of the West. Assad had come to infamy in 1982 when he’d ordered tanks to surround the town of Hama, a stronghold of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and open fire, killing as many as 20,000 people.

  His son, Bashar, had become the accidental dictator. His father had always wanted Bashar’s brother, Basil, to succeed him. Major Basil al-Assad was an engineer and army officer who was leader of the Presidential Guards; he had been groomed for power and invited into the leader’s inner circle. But his death in a car accident at 33 threw succession plans into disarray. Bashar, his younger brother, was training as an ophthalmologist in London. On the death of Basil, Bashar took over and quickly positioned himself as a reformer, but he soon came under the influence of the old military machine
that had supported his father.

  After we visited Hama, I asked the brothers about the brutality of Hafez al-Assad. They did not want to talk about this, but Ziad was positive about Bashar. He pointed out the many universities between Damascus and Jordan, all established by Bashar. He told us how different Bashar was from Hafez. ‘His father was a hard man but Bashar is trying to make a future for young Syrians,’ he said.

  One thing that stood out for us was the number of images around Damascus of Bashar al-Assad with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah in Lebanon. These were two of the main leaders in the Middle East aligned with Shia Islam. Syria had a majority of Sunni Muslims – about 60 per cent of the population – but was governed by an Alawite regime, which was an offshoot of Shia. The Alawites made up only 12 per cent of the population. What the number and prominence of the Shia images said to me was that the Assad regime wanted the image of the ‘Shia brotherhood’ of Assad and Nasrallah displayed for all to see. In every market, we noticed flags and posters of Nasrallah holding a machine gun, the symbol of Hezbollah. Some Syrians saw Nasrallah as the new Gamel Abdel Nasser (Egypt’s second president): the face of pan-Arab ‘resistance’.

  Damascus was a particular stronghold of the Assads. The secret police had done a brilliant job of disguising the hard weaponry of the dictatorship, but I sensed there was a lot of underground opposition to the 40-year regime.