And yet you tell them: “We can’t afford it. I swear. We really can’t.”
And so I came back to Ramallah.
Because for months now, there has been only Syria. For months I’ve written about Syria, read about Syria, lived and breathed Syria. And criticized everyone who didn’t cover Syria. 110,000 deaths, 1,976,835 refugees—what else should you write about? What else should you think about?
It seems inhuman to me.
What else can be more important to you, to all of you? What is more urgent than Syria?
But then you get these emails from readers. From South Sudan, from Mexico. From the Central African Republic. From Iraq. Or even just from Taranto, from the Tamburi neighborhood in Taranto where the Ilva steelworks is, where dioxin was even found in breast milk. And it doesn’t seem like a war in Taranto, though people are dying of cancer, because their deaths are deferred. And yet there you are, always talking about Syria. With your finger pointed at the indifferent individuals in the world. You who are surrounded by wars which you know nothing about. Somalia. Mali. Drones. The CIE (Center for Identification and Deportation).
The CIE in Bari is located right outside the airport.
Like everyone else, I ignore it.
I write about other things, talk about other things.
Yet there it is: to my left each time I leave for Syria, with its barbed wire, its iron gates. Right there. With its concrete walls.
Invisible.
With its blood on the walls.
While someone, at this moment, is trying to tell me about it, I’m sure, but, distracted, I don’t listen. And I try to talk about Syria to someone who, distracted, doesn’t listen . . .
And so I came back to Ramallah.
In search of that beauty that is only found here for me. Where when a factory collapses on the other side of the planet, in the midst of their demonstrations, in the midst of their own many problems, you find someone collecting funds for the workers in Bangladesh.
And if you’re sad, someone always notices that you are sad.
Because the world you live in here is always a little more generous.
Ramallah.
Except that I’m in an unfamiliar city. The first photo I took here in 2007 was of a young boy drinking rainwater from a reservoir. Now that reservoir is the swimming pool at the Mövenpick hotel, $200 per night. Now Ramallah has traffic lights. Traffic lights and street lamps. And basalt paving stones downtown. It has trees, flowers, and shrubs. New model cars. And evenings turn into nights to a soundtrack of hit music in these shiny cafés with their cheesecake, apple pie, and banana cake, and if you ask for a Turkish coffee, they say: “Sorry, only Illy.” They tell you that in English, even if you asked for it in Arabic. Because you get to Ramallah as you always do. From Jerusalem. You go to Jerusalem and from Jerusalem you take a minibus, which now is no longer a minibus but a coach with air conditioning. The place you leave from is no longer a dusty plaza, but a station, and the checkpoint that separates Ramallah from Jerusalem, the Wall, is now marked by a sign, all shiny, that reads: Qalandia Bus Stop. This is where you get out and they search you, and you cross over to the other side between bomb-sniffing dogs.
Well, so I wake up every night at 3 a.m. I wake up and look at the monument to the resistance in the square below my window. It’s a pole. A pole with a Palestinian climbing up, attaching a flag to the top. Because during the Intifada, you ended up in jail if you waved a flag. It was a crime. And so the monument, now, is a pole. And the pole stands in a fountain. I mean an actual fountain with water. Which is always the first thing you notice, at the airport in Tel Aviv: the airport’s fountain. Because water, which is scarce here, is one of the most contested issues between Israelis and Palestinians. The Wall’s route in Israel encompasses not only the settlements, but also the water reserves. And so the fountain is the first thing you notice. Because the Palestinians, in contrast, don’t have water, even today.
Outside of Ramallah.
Because in Ramallah, on the contrary, they have fountains.
In Ramallah they have power.
They don’t have a state, but they have a capital.
And a president.
Even though the president doesn’t have a passport. He needs Israeli authorization to go and negotiate with the Israelis. But they also have Independence Day.
The only thing that matters today in Ramallah is making money.
This city which was the beacon of the Middle East. Which everyone, when they were under the Mubaraks, under the Gaddafis, suffering submissively, wanted to be like. Like the Palestinians. And now that everyone around Ramallah is fighting for freedom, here they’re fighting to pay the TV installments.
They’re all in debt, the Palestinians. Because at some point it became clear that the peace process was exactly that: a process. Never ending. Negotiations after negotiations. So Salam Fayyad, who was prime minister, decided: Meanwhile we’ll construct our state. Right away. Without waiting for the world’s permission. He decided: We’ll build our institutions, our economy. And we’ll apply for admission to the UN. Otherwise, we’ll wait another sixty years. And so getting a mortgage, a loan, has become easy as pie here. And everyone has bought a car, a house. Or opened a café for staffers from the NGOs. And some say Israel is satisfied with this. Because people who have a mortgage to pay don’t have time to go and blow themselves up in Jerusalem. People who have a life, they say—who have a house, a job, even an iPhone—never mind that they have no freedom—have no desire to destroy their gains with another Intifada. While others, of course, say the opposite. They say it’s not real wealth, because the Palestinian economy depends structurally on that of Israel, and in any case it’s only a minority who are wealthy: only four fountains, while the rest don’t have water. And so they say just the opposite: that there will soon be another Intifada.
Because Palestine is complicated.
In the meantime, though, here I am. At my favorite café, La Vie, where we are all journalists or aid workers glued to our Macs, all blond, from the West, with Birkenstocks. The only Palestinians are the waiters. Then someone, with his iced frappe, predictably says to the person sitting beside him: “Do you know she’s come from Syria?” And the other one replies: “No, really? Awesome!”
I sit here and I read. I read and it never seems to end, because suddenly everything is in turmoil. It began in Turkey with protests over the demolition of a park in Istanbul; not so much because of the trees, of course, but because the shopping center that will replace the park is somewhat symbolic of the Islamist party in power, and how it exercises that power without consulting anyone. Because Turkey is complicated. A Muslim country, yet secular. And above all, an extremely dynamic country with strong economic growth. Only it ultimately lacks an opposition party, and freedoms such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press aren’t very well protected. And so, whether the dispute is over trees or the constitution, the only way to protest is to take to the streets. And at the time eleven people were killed. Then Egypt exploded, with a coup that nobody calls a coup but which is of course a coup, because Morsi, president of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a democratically elected president, but now he’s in prison, though no one knows where, no one knows why, without even a lawyer, while the head of the army occupies his office. So of course it’s a coup. No one would have had any doubts if the Muslim Brotherhood had overthrown a democratically elected president. And so Egypt, too, exploded. And Egypt is terribly complicated right now, with all these revolutionaries who one year ago chose Morsi at the elections so they wouldn’t have a president from the old regime, and now, to get rid of Morsi, they are choosing the old regime. At the moment, all we know is that the number of deaths in Cairo is in the hundreds. And even in Tunisia now, where secularists and Islamists are in power together and it seemed like an ordinary transition was underway—some disturbances but nothing special—even
there the leader of the opposition was shot the other day. So here we all are glued to Al Jazeera, watching Cairo burn. All of us at a loss because Libya is in a state of anarchy with all its militias, Syria is what it is, and now even Egypt and Tunisia have fallen into chaos.
And without Egypt and Tunisia—what’s left?
Because it’s not as if the rest of the Middle East is any better off. Because, to be clear, the main supporter of the rebels in Syria—the main supporter of democracy—is Saudi Arabia. Which doesn’t even have a real parliament, and which I’ll never be able to write about because to go there I need a male guardian. So either find me a husband who will take me there on a leash, or I will never be able to tell you about this country, champion of freedom in Syria.
Well, so, things are a bit of a mess these days. Everywhere you turn. And where things seem to be going well, it’s only because they haven’t begun to flare up.
And so here we all are, glued to Al Jazeera, watching Cairo burn.
And no one knows where to start.
This morning, one after the other, within a few miles’ range: Ramallah is in turmoil because three boys were killed in Qalandia. A rocket was launched from Lebanon, as part of the constant war against Israel, while as part of another war—since Lebanon is now also experiencing a war between pro-Assad and anti-Assad factions—a car bomb exploded in Beirut. And as a result Israeli planes are over Lebanon this morning, helicopters are over the West Bank, and drones are over Gaza, because, as usual, the Gaza border has been closed and people are locked inside, starving, and rockets are raining down from there too. And the Israelis also bombed Syria yesterday, a weapons depository. And in Cairo, they’re shooting in the streets. And it’s only 11:27 a.m.
It was December 17, 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi, twenty-six, a street vendor selling fruits and vegetables, was stopped by police in southern Tunisia. He had no license, and when they confiscated his pushcart, he set himself on fire. Because that was all he had. Only that cart. That’s how it all started. With a generation that decided it had nothing left to lose. “But now the military and the Islamists are vying for power, a power won with our blood, while we are on the fringes. Again. Too divided to reclaim a place. And too depleted. Because we have no work, no nothing. The priority for many is simply to find something to eat,” Wael Abbas, one of the leaders of Tahrir Square, tells me from Cairo.
D for Disheartened and Divided. S for Scattered.
“And no matter where you turn in the Middle East, it is no different. Crisis everywhere.”
C for Confused and Crushed.
D for Defeated.
“You are lucky to be from Italy,” he tells me.
He says: “Here a person studies, he earns a degree, and he knows it is useless. That he will never find work.”
Or have rights.
That he will never count for anything.
Because power is all corruption and collusion, he says. “And they keep telling you they lack the funds—the funds for hospitals, for schools—but they always find the funds for weapons. And they call it poverty, they call it a crisis, when instead it’s about inequality.”
He says: “You are lucky to come from Italy.”
He tells me that.
And I read. I’m reading La Repubblica.
Marco Cacciatore was also twenty-six years old. All he wrote was: “I am ashamed. I can’t even buy cigarettes.” And he shot himself.
He was unemployed. And so were his parents.
And he shot himself.
In Milan.
Where things appear calm only because they have never got started. Among those of us who have nothing left to lose, all without work, without dignity—all perpetual temporaries, by day a biologist, in the evening a waiter, Saturday a gardener. All disheartened and divided—we who criticize the Arab Spring, asking, What did they gain? Wars and dictatorships. We who are so good at not failing only because we are so good at not trying.
then he finally wrote to me. My boss, that is. After more than a year, a bout of typhus and a bullet to the knee, he saw a clip on television and thought the kidnapped Italian woman was me. And he finally wrote: “If you have Internet, couldn’t you tweet about the capture?”
I mean, a person gets home in the evening—though “gets home” aren’t exactly the right words in Syria, with these mortars exploding all around you, the dust, the hunger, the fear. A person takes a break in the evening at a rebel base in the midst of the inferno, and hopes to find a friend on email, a word, a hug, and instead finds only Elena, who is on vacation in her house and has written eight messages marked “Urgent!” because she can’t find the spa pass. I mean, eight times, and the rest are notes from readers scattered around, messages like this one from Paolo: “Beautiful piece, reminds me of your book on Iraq.” Only my book isn’t about Iraq. It’s about Kosovo.
I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is that people have this romantic image, right? The freelance journalist ready to give up the security of a steady paycheck in exchange for the freedom to follow the stories she most wants to follow. But you’re not free by any means. Quite the opposite. You’re driven by front-page news. The truth is that the only chance I have of working, today, is to stay in Syria. That is, to stay where no one else wants to stay. After Italian, the second second-language in Aleppo, and in particular at the front, is Spanish, because at this point the Greeks don’t have enough money to pay for plane tickets. And then all the editors ask you for is blood, all they want is bombing. I mean, you report on the Islamists and their entire network of social activities, you describe the reasons for their strength, a much more difficult piece than writing about the front, and you try to explain, not just sensationalize, and they tell you: “But here in six thousand characters nobody died.”
Actually I should have realized it when they asked me to do a piece from Gaza, because Gaza, as usual, was being bombed and because, the email said, you know Gaza by heart. What sense does it make for you to stay in Aleppo? But I came to Syria, I said, because I saw the photos taken by that guy, Alessio Romenzi, in Time, the photographer who crept into the water pipes and crawled out in Homs when nobody even knew Homs existed. And one day I saw those photos, while I was listening to Radiohead: I saw those looks, so direct, I swear, eyes that bored into me, because they were under siege in Homs and Assad was exterminating them, one by one, and no one even knew Homs existed, and—and I swear to God, those photos stung my conscience and in the end all I could say was: I have to go to Syria. Right away. I must go to Syria. And it turns out the most frustrating thing is that writing from Aleppo is no different than writing from Rome. You’re paid the same: $70 for each piece. In places where everything costs three times as much, because in war people speculate, and to sleep in Aleppo, say, under mortar fire, on a mattress on the floor and with yellow water that tomorrow will give me another round of typhus, costs $50 per night. A car is $250 a day. The result is that you end up maximizing rather than minimizing the danger. Because not only can you not afford insurance, almost a thousand dollars a month, but in general you can’t afford a “fixer,” that is, a local who will see to your logistics, the arrangements, and you can’t afford an interpreter either. You find yourself in a foreign city completely on your own. In the midst of flying bullets. And in the newsrooms they are perfectly aware that with $70 per piece you are forced to cut back on everything, hoping you’ll die if you’re hit, because you could never afford to be wounded. Still, they buy your piece. Even though they would never buy a Nike soccer ball sewn by a Pakistani child. Like the time in Castelvolturno, when the migrant workers went on strike. I got this email: “I want a piece that’s outraged! 50 euros! They only make 50 euros per day! What kind of a world is it?” While there we all were getting paid 20 euros each for that piece.
And then with these new technologies, there’s this idea, right? This basic misunderstanding that information equ
als speed: a race to see who’s first to plant a flag on the moon. And so it goes without saying that the agencies, the Reuters, are unbeatable. Yet it’s a self-defeating logic. Because that way you end up with redundant material, and your newspaper has no angle: there’s no reason why I should pay to read you. I mean, I have the Internet for news. Free. I demand more of a newspaper. I demand analysis, I demand in-depth coverage—I demand the ability to understand, not only to be informed. Because the crisis today has to do with the newspapers, not the readers. The readers are out there, and contrary to what the editors think, they are intelligent readers who want intelligent pieces. Simplicity, which is not to say simplification. Because every time I publish a sensational piece, I always find a dozen emails afterward, people telling me, “Yes, but,” “great piece,” “a superb depiction, but I want to understand what’s happening in Syria.” And I would love to explain that I can’t write an analysis, because if I try to analyze the situation, they will reject my piece, saying, “Who do you think you are?” Even though I have two undergraduate degrees, a Master’s, two books, and ten years of war experience behind me, and my youth truly ended with the first war I covered. But the truth is that as freelancers we are second-class journalists. Even though we are all you find in Syria, because Syria is a bastard war, a war of the last century, a trench war fought with gunfire, never mind drones. It’s a war fought inch by inch, street by street, and it’s terrifying, shit, it’s terrifying because there you are writing with your iPad, writing while everything around you is exploding and—and still they treat you like a kid. You take a photo worthy of the front page or a cover and they tell you: “You just happened to be in the right place at the right time.” You write an exclusive piece, like the one about the mosque, which Stanley and I were the first to enter, and they say: “How can I justify the fact that my correspondent wasn’t able to get in and you were?” One editor wrote to me: “I’ll buy it but he’ll get the byline.”
Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War Page 11
