Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  A sandbagged pillbox loomed ahead, and a soldier stepped out holding a submachine gun loosely in one hand. In the seat beside me, the Palestinian couple visibly tensed. The soldier peered into our bus, said, “Shalom,” and waved us through.

  Before crossing the Jordan, I hadn’t worried much about how being Jewish would affect my work in Israel. I felt I’d managed to report on Arab countries with journalistic “objectivity” and didn’t see why reporting on Israel should be any different.

  This high-minded professionalism lasted about as long as it took me to walk from the bus to the immigration hall. A blue-and-white Star of David fluttered above the building, stirring some inchoate allegiance bred of endless dull Sundays in Hebrew school. The little Jewish state, circled by hostile Arabs, like a pioneer wagon train, draining swamps and dancing the hora.

  Inside the immigration hall, Israeli soldiers stood behind tables, going through bags and asking questions. I approached a soldier with thick glasses and a tiny yarmulke pinned atop red kinky hair. The big bad Zionist looked like a pimply classmate whose name I could no longer recall. I half expected him to ask if I wanted to sneak out back to bet my allowance on a few rounds of dreydl.

  Instead, he flipped through my passport, studying the Arabic stamps on every page. After several months in the Middle East, my passport resembled a pocket Koran.

  “Horwitz?” His eyes swam behind Coke-bottle lenses. “Do you have any special connection to the Jewish community in America?”

  “No. Except that I’m Jewish.”

  He handed back my passport and smiled. “Welcome to Israel. I hope you will have a good time.” He hadn’t even bothered to unzip my bags.

  I stepped outside and gazed at the stark hills of the Promised Land. Arid gullies and ridges rose on all sides, enclosed by barbed wire and dotted with signs saying “Danger! Mines!” Taxis were parked nearby, their Palestinian drivers prostrate on the ground, reciting midday prayers. The hill behind them was emblazoned with an enormous Star of David, facing Mecca.

  I’d agreed to share a taxi to Jerusalem with the Palestinian couple from Amman. It was forty-five minutes before they emerged from the immigration hall. The husband’s face was purple and his wife was crying softly. While I’d been reliving Hebrew school with the redheaded soldier, they’d been having their suitcases emptied, their shoes X-rayed and their orifices probed for weapons and “anti-Israel” material, a category including everything from PLO keyrings to copies of The Merchant of Venice.

  The couple, resident in Jordan for twenty years, had come across the river to attend a funeral. “I was born here in Jericho and now I must be naked for a Jew so I can see my cousin buried,” the man said, straightening his black suit. “I feel like a dog.”

  I nodded gravely. I was to spend a lot of time nodding gravely as bile poured from both Palestinians and Israelis. It was easier than explaining that I thought they were both right, or both wrong. I wasn’t sure which.

  * * *

  The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you’re left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: “Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying ‘welcome, most welcome’ and drowning each other in tea until the end of time.”

  In Egypt it is considered abrupt to begin any conversation without at least half of the following:

  Good morning.

  Good morning to you.

  Good morning of light.

  Good morning of roses.

  Good morning of jasmines (and so on, through the rest of the garden).

  And how are you?

  Fine, and you?

  Fine also, thanks be to God.

  Thanks to God.

  Welcome, most welcome.

  Welcome to you.

  (Chorus)

  The same tedious singsong is reprised upon departure, with a minimum of two cups of tea or coffee served in between. A lot of this hospitality is false, of course, particularly when it comes from Arab officials; the sipping and small talk help conceal the fact that the bureaucrat you’re interviewing hasn’t imparted one comment of even trivial significance. In Cairo, I often tore home from government offices, pumped up on Turkish coffee, to type up my notes and rush them into print. Only to find, flipping through my notebook, that all I had to write was “Thanks be to God” and “Would you like some sugar with your coffee?”

  It came as a rude shock, then, to pick up the phone my first day in Jerusalem and have the following conversation with an Israeli secretary.

  ME: Shalom. This is Tony Horwitz. I’m a reporter—

  SHE: Ma? (What?)

  ME: I’m an American reporter and I’d like to speak to Mr. Levi.

  SHE: So who wants him?

  ME: I told you. Tony Horwitz. I’m a—

  SHE: Ma?

  ME: Horwitz! H-O-R—

  SHE: Not here. (Click)

  Taxi trips in Israel also elevate the blood pressure, though reckless driving is the least stressful part of the ride. Rather than disable their meters, in the Egyptian fashion, many Israeli cabbies prefer to hide their meters in the glove compartment. Discovering this midway through my first ride, I politely asked the driver to turn the meter on. Then I asked him again. On the third request, he grudgingly flipped open the glove box and turned the switch. Then, when we reached the hotel, he tacked ten shekels (about five dollars) onto the fare for the half-mile we’d traveled off the meter. I protested. He yelled. I yelled. We almost came to blows.

  “Cus ummak!” he screamed, finally giving in. Cus ummak is the one Arabic phrase known to every Israeli cabbie. It means “your mother’s cunt.”

  There were compensating pleasures, of course. I went to a Woody Allen movie and ate borscht. I gawked like a fifteen-year-old at women in short skirts and sleeveless blouses, something I hadn’t seen for months. And I even found it refreshing to join the Israeli fray: butting into lines, shoving to be the first off buses, shouting “Cus ummak!” at cabdrivers—behavior which would have got me knifed or deported in Arabia. But after two or three days, after losing more shoving matches than I’d won, I found myself drifting toward the Arab quarter to exchange a dozen or so pleasantries over three or four cups of sugary tea.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine, and you?”

  “Very well, thanks to God.”

  The second striking thing about Israel, arriving from the Arab world, is how much the two cultures have in common. Hebrew and Arabic are closer to each other than to any third tongue. The Arabic greeting salaam aleikum (“peace be upon you”) is shalom aleikum in Hebrew, though it’s not a phrase often spoken between Arab and Jew. Many other Arabic words I’d learned were identical in Hebrew: beit (house), yom (day), lila (evening).

  Roughly half of all Israelis are first- or second-generation émigrés from the Muslim world, particularly Morocco and Iraq, and their olive skin, dark hair and strong features often make these “Sephardic” Jews indistinguishable from Arabs. Religious fanaticism has also bred a certain kinship. Bowing their beaver hats and sidelocks at the Wailing Wall, the ultra-Orthodox Chasidim reminded me of nothing so much as the bearded, skullcapped fundamentalists in Cairo, bowing toward Mecca. Both share an attachment to bygone days: one pines for the spiritual purity of the Polish shtetl, the other for the desert asceticism of Mohammed. Both see God’s hand in everything they do, and godlessness in everything done by anyone else. Orthodox wives, hidden beneath kerchiefs and trailed by herds of children, seemed, at first sight, a mirror image of the veiled, housebound wives of Arabia.

  Ask almost any Israeli over forty to tell you his or her life story and you’ll hear a tragic tale beginning with the Holocaust and continuing
through the 1948 war, the 1967 war, the 1973 war and so on. Ask any Palestinian to tell you his or her life story and you’ll hear a tragic tale beginning with the 1948 war and the diaspora that followed (known as Al-Nakba—the Disaster), then continuing through the 1967 war, the 1973 war and the occupation of their land that followed from these conflicts. I later met Palestinians as far away as Tunis and Baghdad who had never laid eyes on their homeland, but who still kept the keys to homes in Haifa or Jaffa that their parents had fled in 1948.

  Palestinians also tend to be well educated, entrepreneurial and distrusted by other Arabs, who stereotype them as cliquish, grasping, arrogant and suspect in their allegiance to whatever country they’ve settled in. Palestinians, it seemed obvious, were the Jews of the Arab World.

  The next thing you notice, once you’ve tallied all these similarities, is that Palestinians and Israelis are alike in ignoring the kinship completely. Ask people if they see parallels between the two populations and they will most likely answer with a resounding Hebrew ma? (what?) or an Arabic mish mumkin! (impossible!).

  Deciding to leave this tangle of contradictions for another day, another story, I rented a car to finish my reporting on the Jordan River. Driving out of Jerusalem, I offered a ride to a Palestinian hitchhiker. He seemed surprised I’d picked him up and relieved to discover I was American, not Israeli. As we passed the Damascus Gate, I commented on the beauty of the ancient walled city. He glanced out the window; his eyes latched onto a blue-and-white pennant fluttering in the breeze. “This flag, it is very ugly.” Soon after, we passed through the edge of the Jewish quarter. Young children scampered across a small playground. “Look at all these babies,” he said, his face wrinkling in disgust. We wound down the hills toward the Jordan, and I turned on the radio. He asked if I’d mind lowering the volume. “Hebrew, I cannot stand the sound of it.”

  I let him out in Jericho and headed north along the river, through a desolation of army camps and unsown fields labeled “restricted security zone.” This stretch of the occupied territory seemed largely unoccupied, except by hitchhiking soldiers. The first one I picked up was a twenty-year-old woman named Orna, who had just finished her army training at a sentry post near the Dead Sea. It had been her job to stare through binoculars at Jordan and write down everything she saw, as warning against terrorist attacks. “For six months, all I ever entered in the book was donkeys,” she said.

  I laughed for the first time in several days. Relaxing, I glanced across at Orna. She had my coloring, my mouth, my nose. Her grandparents could have come from the shtetl next door to mine. For a moment I felt the same familial glow I’d experienced with the redheaded soldier at the Allenby Bridge. As the road dipped, revealing the deep rift surrounding the Jordan River, I slowed down to take in the view.

  “Nice, huh?”

  Orna looked at me strangely. “So what’s to see?” She was staring the other way, at a Palestinian village beside the road. Then, without prompting, she added: “If the Arabs want a state they can have it—on the other side of the Jordan River.” She was suddenly irritable. “Always we feel guilt problems. Why? America moved out all the Indians. So what if we do the same?”

  We drove to the next army camp in silence. Orna climbed out and two other hitchhikers climbed aboard. In front sat a soldier named Nati, returning north to “walk the line” in Lebanon. He wasn’t looking forward to resuming the dangerous night patrols.

  “If you see an Arab you shoot,” he said, shifting the submachine gun between his legs. “If you sleep, you die. I almost make a shit in my pants many times.”

  The other passenger, Yitzhak, was from a kibbutz near Jericho. He gave me a leaflet about the kibbutz printed in halting English. It said: “See the greening of the desert, experience unique way of life! Time warp back with us 2000 years!”

  “It is something like a joke, this paper,” he said, staring disconsolately at the riverside fields, hemmed in by sentry posts and security fences. “We can make the desert bloom, but not minefields. If the Arabs want it back, they can have it.”

  And so the drive went, all the way through the Jordan Valley; a fanatic, a liberal, a cynic, a fanatic again. If I had two hitchhikers at the same time, they were almost sure to disagree. If I had one, he was sure to disagree with me. It was exhausting, and after a few hours I accelerated past the long lines of hitchhikers. Why should I feel guilt problems?

  * * *

  Late in the afternoon I pulled in at a kibbutz called Kfar Ruppin, the closest Israeli settlement to the Jordan River. It seemed like the logical place to gather a counterpoint to the bedouin, Khalaf Ghoblan, whom I’d interviewed on the Jordanian side of the river. A gardener named Micha Hellman put down his trowel and offered to show me around. He was a handsome, square-jawed kibbutznik my own age, with clear blue eyes and blue work clothes that stank of manure. Like Ghoblan, he’d spent his whole life by the river, and he toured the bank with a proprietorial air. “I know the history of every stone in this place,” he said of the fifty-year-old kibbutz. “I either put it there myself or I know who did.”

  Hellman showed me the underground bunker where he slept as a child. After the 1967 war, Palestinian commandos roamed the opposite bank and often shelled Kfar Ruppin, killing several people. Hellman and the other children at riverside kibbutzim slept below-ground for three years, becoming known in Israel as “shelter kids.”

  “In the morning we boys would come out and collect missile tails,” he said. Then the missiles were traded, like baseball cards. “One-twenty-one-millimeter shells were the best. They made nice candle holders.” Sometimes the incoming shells turned up shards of Byzantine pottery and Roman coins as well.

  To defend against terrorists, the Israelis mined the river’s bank. In 1970, they added an electrified fence and a graded strip of sand, which soldiers checked daily for footprints. Though the border was now peaceful, cows at Kfar Ruppin occasionally stepped on unexploded mines and blew themselves up.

  Hellman walked me to the fence and pointed through the wire at a small patch of muddy Jordan, just visible between tall reeds. “Kids grow up here now without ever putting a toe in the water,” he said.

  Jordanian farmers picked oranges in a grove just on the other side of the river. Hellman said they sometimes shouted at their Israeli neighbors, but because he didn’t know Arabic he couldn’t understand what they said. Technically, Israel and Jordan were still at war. Even telephoning across the narrow divide was impossible.

  At sunset we sat on a bluff overlooking the river valley. A Jordanian village was clearly visible on the other bank, and the evening call to prayer wafted across in the twilight. “I have sat here almost every day of my life, watching them do the same work as us, wake up with us, go to sleep with us,” Hellman said. “And I do not even know their names. I do not even know the name of their village.” He went silent for a moment, then turned and asked, “Do you think neighbors anywhere else in the world live like this?”

  * * *

  I rolled along the Israeli side of the river for two more days before returning to Jerusalem through the occupied West Bank. At the Palestinian village of Marj al-Naja I pulled over to balance my story with one more Arab voice. The village was as run-down and unprosperous as the kibbutzim to the north were lush and fertile. A hunched farmer named Mohammed Abu-Helal was carrying his eggplants in from the field and stopped to exchange pleasantries. He invited me for a cup of tea at his home, a windowless one-room hovel that he shared with his wife and six children. It was so cramped that the family rolled out mattresses each night, then rolled them back up to make living space in the morning.

  Mohammed’s English was poor, so one of his boys ran off to find the village schoolteacher to translate. I sat there awkwardly, swatting flies, and looking around the cramped room. I couldn’t help wondering about the couple’s sex life. Did they have none? Did the children just lie there in the dark and listen?

  The boy retur
ned with a twenty-five-year-old named Ahmed who had bitterness oozing from his pores. He introduced himself by saying that he’d spent several months in an Israeli prison for painting pro-PLO slogans.

  Taking out my notebook, I asked Mohammed about his life by the river, and he launched into a rambling monologue. I picked up a few words; it was mostly about sheep and goats and oranges. I turned to Ahmed for a complete translation.

  “He says for you that Palestine was once a paradise, but now the Jews make us live like donkeys.” This was all Ahmed said.

  I asked Mohammed whether he had family on the river’s east bank and how often he saw them. Again, the farmer’s answer was amiable and long-winded, and he often pointed to one of his boys with pride. I turned to Ahmed.

  “He says for you, the West Bank and Jordan used to be one big village. Now the river is one wall in a big Palestinian prison.”

  After half an hour I abandoned the interview. I’d learned that the government subsidized kibbutz water but not that of Palestinian settlements; there was no electricity in Marj al-Naja and one toilet for the school’s one hundred fifty students. The land was so poor that villagers worked as day laborers in neighboring Jewish fields. But I had learned very little about Mohammed’s view of life by the river.

  Ahmed walked me to my car. “Listen to what he says for you,” Ahmed said, jabbing a finger at my notebook. He was bothered that I hadn’t taken down every syllable of his tirade against the Israeli occupation, “He says for you, there will be bloodshed unless the Zionists leave our land.”

  I reached Jerusalem at sunset and sat in a café by the Damascus Gate, sipping Turkish coffee and watching the stones of the old city glow pink and orange in the fading autumn light. Greek Orthodox monks scurried past in their long brown robes. At sunset, a siren’s blast announced the Jewish Sabbath, mingling with the Muslim call to prayer from the city’s minarets. It was, for the moment at least, a peaceful and harmonious vision.