Daughter of the Final Solution
Lily Galili had asked me to meet her in front of the American Consulate in West Jerusalem at 7.15 in the evening. An Arab taxi took me from the American Colony Hotel across the ‘seam’, as Israelis called the old Green Line between east and west, to the consulate. The car stopped opposite the late-nineteenth-century consular building, and security guards raced out of their post towards the car. I asked the driver to go another hundred yards uphill to avoid an hour’s questioning. I got out and walked towards the consulate. An Israeli security guard asked me what I wanted. I was meeting a friend. What was the friend’s name? What was my name? I ignored him, standing as I was on a public pavement, and walked further down the hill in search of Lily. Another security guard, a young woman, followed and said, ‘Lily said she would wait for you at the corner.’
Lily’s corner was dark, out of range of the consulate’s spotlights, near a passage between two stone houses that led to her friend’s flat. She apologized for choosing the consulate as our rendezvous. She had forgotten about America’s security worries. We talked a bit in the dark, catching up before we went to the dinner. Her voice was like a precocious child’s, whose judgements, criticisms, observations and stories were astute and unexpected. She was leaving soon for Krakow, the city of her birth where she said her spirit was most at home, to celebrate her fifty-fifth birthday. Lily looked a good ten years younger than I did, and I was fifty. She was a journalist at Ha’aretz, a Tel Aviv daily that employed more talent – among them Danny Rubinstein, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Daniel Ben Simon – than the top ten Western newspapers combined. Lily and I had met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was a Nieman fellow at Harvard. My friends Bernard Avishai and Sidra Ezrahi had taken me to a dinner that Lily cooked at her place, and we became friends. She once called me from London on my British cellphone, when I happened to be in a kosher restaurant in Krakow’s old ghetto. Klezmer music played behind me, and she told me about her love affair with Poland’s most beautiful Renaissance city. After the war, her family had returned to Krakow. Her mother brought her to Israel in 1956. She was ten.
Lily was clutching a bottle of wine for our American hostess, who she said had ‘made aliya’. In the protected garden of an Arab house that looked as if it had been built around the same time as the American Consulate, were a group of English-speaking immigrants. They had all ‘made aliya’, that is, immigrated or ‘risen up’ like a wave to live in Israel. There were two South Africans, Benji and Anne Pogrund; a British couple, the Goldmans; and a woman who appeared to be Canadian and did not say much. During the introductions, Anne Pogrund told me that her black eye, which I could not make out in the dark, was not what I thought it was. I didn’t think anything. She said she had really walked into a door. Her husband, a rotund ex-journalist with a bearded, friendly face, did not look like he would hit anyone, especially his wife. Benji Pogrund had been a journalist on the Rand Daily Mail, a brave and honourable opponent of South African apartheid. He and Anne, a painter, had fled Johannesburg for London and then for Israel. Bob Goldman was a videotape editor in the ABC News Jerusalem bureau. Our hostess worked for an Israeli millionaire named Stef Wertheimer.
After a drink in the garden, we went into the flat. It was a redesigned Arab house set on different levels, with a dining table next to the open kitchen. We’d finished our hostess’s first and only bottle of red wine in the garden, and someone opened the one Lily had brought. Our hostess drank white, and there wasn’t much of that. Dinner was à l’américaine, no first course, spaghetti on the boil in the kitchen going limp while she stirred a tomato and onion sauce, green salad with more vinegar than oil. That was all. She put two bowls on the table, and we served ourselves pasta and salad. We sipped Lily’s red wine. We talked. About newspapers. About television. About Israel. About the Middle East. About the massacres in New York and Washington. About Osama bin Laden. Polite. Civilized. The Goldmans’ children had disappointed their parents by leaving Israel. The Pogrund children had done the opposite. They went religious and would never leave. Their mother and father did not dwell on similarities between the race-based society they opposed in South Africa and the one in which they subsequently raised their children. They sounded like people who would have preferred their children to resist military service in the occupied territories or live in the West.
Someone said that an internet website was criticizing the ABC News anchorman, Peter Jennings, for being too favourable to the Arabs. ‘He had an Arab wife,’ Benji Pogrund said, confirming the internet verdict. Jennings had married a beautiful Lebanese woman, Annie Malouf, in 1973. They divorced, and his next two wives were Jewish, including the one he had now. ‘So,’ Benji said, ‘Jewish wives. That’s why he likes Arabs.’ Peter Jennings, whose journalistic integrity made him scrupulously fair, was said to be anti-Israeli by people accustomed to the anti-Arab bias of American television. Later, other journalists told me Benji Pogrund was a ‘good guy’, who invited speakers with divergent points of view to address Israel’s Anglo-Jewish community.
My argument that night was not with Benji, but with his wife, Anne. She was a painter and an interesting woman. She had made paintings from old studio photographs of South African blacks, formal portraits for family occasions; and she was looking for similar family photographs of Arabs in Gaza. When she discussed the September 2001 attacks in the United States, she lost me. We spoke in a polite, civilized way, but we were arguing. Her case was a psychologist’s rationale, that the killers acted out of envy. They wanted what they admired but could not have. America’s democracy and its high standard of living had made it their target. Perhaps, I said, there was another explanation. Holland, Norway and Canada had democracies and high living standards, but no one hated them. Why did they hate the United States? Not because it was richer – per capita there were wealthier lands – or more democratic. Could it be, I asked her, that the Norwegians and Canadians did not install and maintain regimes that robbed their people, did not break open the doors to their markets and did not bomb or invade them? This went on and on, towards no conclusion. There was a widespread belief in the United States that Americans were attacked because of their goodness; as many Israelis were convinced that Arabs attacked them – not because Israel occupied their territory and confiscated their land – but because they were Jewish. If anti-Semitism motivated the Arabs, would they have given their lands and their homes gladly to any other people who came from outside to displace them? Is it likely that they would have moved to make way for Albanians, Basques, gypsies, South Africans or any other group of Gentiles? The discussion went on and on and, like the political conflicts themselves, got no further than the arguments of fifty years before.
I left dinner early to meet Andrew and Emma Gilmour in the Ottoman courtyard of the American Colony Hotel. There, I drank the red wine I’d been deprived of at dinner. We talked about politics, the intifadah and, Andrew’s special interest, negotiations to end the fighting. Andrew worked for United Nations negotiator Terje Roed Larsen, and Emma was a physician. Andrew’s older brothers – David, Oliver and Christopher – were probably my closest friends in Britain. Emma was expecting their fourth child in December. They invited me to stay in their house at Abu Tor, an Arab neighbourhood above the old city. Even with the discount that Pierre Berclaz, the Colony’s Swiss manager, had kindly allowed me on a good room, my advance would run out soon.
Upstairs in the Pasha Room, dance music played. An American was marrying a Ramallah girl. One of the hotel guests complained about the noise, as I did once in 1987 during a wedding reception at the New Omayyad Hotel in Damascus. Then, it annoyed me so much that I left. Now, I loved the noise of a wedding. Perhaps I had improved. The music stopped at one-thirty, when I fell asleep. In Damascus, it had gone on all night.
Daughter of the Revolution
I had my first lunch in Jerusalem with Nadia Sartawi. Her father, Dr Issam Sartawi, was one of the heroes of the Palestinian cause. He acted on behalf of what he believed were his people’s interests – not in line with the cant and slogans of the revolution. Any journalist who reduced him to the status of ‘Yasser
