Peace, Love and Lies

by Oren Sanderson

  “What?!” I was astounded. “A collaborator?” I still wasn’t getting what they were trying to explain to me. The craziness of it all wasn’t connecting into a coherent image.

  “Watch your mouth!” Harel bellowed.

  Haroush, as fatherly and charming as always, with no remorse whatsoever for having lied to me all those years of working together, tried again to explain.

  “You need to understand that domestic security was my domain for almost thirty years. I was discharged against my wishes when I turned fifty. Today, the military discharges people at thirty-eight, especially sergeant majors who are wrongly thought to be the lowest level of career soldiers. At any rate, the security service today needs to keep an eye on the domestic scene as much as on the countries surrounding us.”

  “Do you mean military attachés who spy on us, or regular good old Arab spies?” We sped past the decrepit buildings of the Arab parts of the city of Lod. The alleys were empty.

  “Not exactly. The field of mass communications gives us at the security service the possibility of monitoring the most important means of forming public opinion and lets us prepare ourselves better against hostile influences.” Haroush smoothed his thinning white hair.

  “Are you referring to political commissar work, like in the Soviet Union? Are you responsible for informal censorship and message manipulation? Brainwashing and such? This can’t possibly be legal!” I found it hard to believe.

  Harel focused on the empty and dark road ahead, trying hard not to miss the turn in the road.

  “God forbid!” Haroush exclaimed. “Only in the case of a threat to our national security. It is imperative that the state has some way of avoiding serious and irreversible damage.” I was amazed at Haroush’s new face. Even his tone and vocabulary seemed to change, but the seeds of understanding had started to grow in my mind and with them came anger.

  “Haroush!” I screamed in rage. “You’ve been using my station all this time for covert activities?! Are you spying on me? You’re giving away information behind my back?”

  “God forbid! Heavens, no!” In his gentle style, he continued to condescend. “Only in times of emergency, as I told you. My loyalty to you was never, and will never, be damaged.”

  “So what are you doing here now?”

  “This is clearly an emergency. The army needs our cooperation…” suddenly he stopped in his tracks. “Harel, why don’t you explain it to her once and for all?”

  The car turned at Bilu Junction towards Gedera. Harel’s face was lit with specks of green light from the dashboard dials. After a long pause, he started to explain.

  “Two hours after the hijacking took place, we started getting messages from the PLO and we are still receiving clear messages from them that Abu Shahid is a black sheep in the Palestinian camp.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nabil Sha’ath, Arafat’s right-hand man, made it clear to us that if Abu Shahid was to be eliminated, it wouldn’t be considered a reason to deteriorate our relations with the Palestinians; on the contrary, it would help calm things down in the Palestinian camp because the radical faction of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam would suffer a serious blow. But there is still one more necessary condition.” Harel suddenly clammed up.

  “What condition?”

  “The Palestinians are demanding that we hand over to them the wife and daughter of Abu Shahid, because if we don’t, then the wife, already a symbol of what they call the ‘staunch stance’, or non-compromise with Israel, might cause the struggle inside the Palestinian camp to deteriorate even further.”

  “What will happen to the two if you do that?”

  “I don’t even want to think about it,” Harel admitted.

  “So what is it that you want from me?”

  Haroush said, “As a leading TV crew, we can buy some time first of all. Danny Taylor is doing a good job in stalling, but we need a TV crew that will cooperate with us. You and I can agree on that.”

  “Do you realize that I can fire you right now for this?” His calmness was driving me crazy.

  “I know, but you won’t do it. You want to save the people on that plane.”

  “What about professional integrity?” I refused to give in.

  “Integrity is fine for those who can afford it. It’s a luxury that might be good for a university discussion,” Haroush moaned.

  “Anything else I should know?” I still refused to resign myself to the mother and daughter thing.

  This time is was Harel who replied, “We’d like to make every effort possible, through the TV crew, to get the hijackers off the plane. The most important thing is to separate them from the hostages.”

  “I’ll help,” I said. “On one condition, that you return the mother and daughter to their village.”

  As long as they were using me, I might as well help the two, who were nothing but pawns in a very cynical game played by someone willing to go on using them. I had to help them.

  “That’s out of the question,” Harel replied immediately.

  “So you won’t have CNN’s cooperation,” I told him.

  “Haroush!” Harel was hoping for some salvation.

  “You heard the lady,” the security service advisor said in the voice of good old Haroush.

  “Returning them to the village right now is very dangerous,” Harel said, thinking out loud. “But we might give them temporary shelter in Israel.” After a moment of thought, he added, “I need to get approval from high above first.”

  In the darkness of the car, he pulled the cigar butt out of the ashtray and started playing with it. “We’ll try to make this work. Your cooperation is more valuable to us right now.”

  “Are you certain that all your plans aren’t leaking out all the time?” I asked.

  “Probably,” Haroush admitted sadly. “There’s a leak somewhere, but we haven’t located it yet.”

  “I’m not sure we would agree to send a crew out to the plane before you find out who is leaking information,” I said. They didn’t react.

  Harel reached the Tel Nof Air Force Base fence, turned to a dirt road along the fence and there, past the bend in the road, we saw an amazing scene. Through gates that were opened in the fence, buses were going into and out of two huge hangars that served as an alternate airport replacing the one that was out of use due to the hijacking of the air force plane. Along the runway, at regular intervals, and in an organized diagonal angle, stood at least six passenger planes, loading and unloading passengers.

  “That’s it, people,” Harel said. “I need to inspect the security disposition here. God only knows what additional surprises they have prepared for us. Dagan will prepare for your broadcast as soon as the cabinet meeting is over and we get the go-ahead.”

  By the side of the runway, an office Peugeot was waiting for me, having followed us all the way from the international airport. I boarded rapidly, shut the door before an amazed Haroush, and told Sigal, the driver, to speed away.

  “What about Haroush?” she asked with concern.

  “He’ll be OK. Let’s go.” Through the side view mirror, I could see him standing there, shocked, looking at us as we rode away. After three hundred feet, I asked her to stop.

  “OK, fine,” I told her. “Go back and pick him up.”

  We drove in silence through the empty streets of Rehovot and Nes-Ziona.

  “How could you do this to me?!” I burst out again, unable to contain it.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he replied quietly after a short pause. “We can talk about it later.”

  “We’ll talk now!” I barked. Sigal was a mute participant of all my secrets anyway. “As a military man, don’t you care at all about this thing called loyalty?”

  “What loyalty? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t pretend. You’re serving two masters.”

  “And what exactly do you think that you are doing? Aren’t you using Ehrlich’s services? Who do you think he’s really working
for? For Yediot newspaper? Or maybe for the army spokesman? Or maybe he’s really your guy? What determines it? Is it determined by who pays the most, or by whom he loves the most? You’ll never really know, will you? And why does it matter? Does it mean that Yediot are losing something in the deal? I am sure they aren’t, and neither does the army spokesman, and certainly not you. So he is a little bit loyal to everyone and he’s also cheating everyone.”

  I almost choked. From the moment that Haroush had reconciled himself to the fact that I knew of his second job as a security service informant, his vocabulary had changed completely.

  “How can someone be a little bit loyal?” I managed to get over my astonishment. “It’s just like being a little bit pregnant.”

  “Not at all, my dear,” Haroush replied calmly and without hesitation. “I think that you understand it even if you do not admit it. What do you think you are doing right now at the most important tactical headquarters in the Middle East? You have been drafted to the military to help neutralize the Red Cross.”

  “Not to neutralize it. I was drafted to enable communications with it!” I corrected him.

  “OK,” he agreed. “We won’t argue about that and it doesn’t really matter. You are drafted as liaison to the Red Cross, and yet you managed to supply us with some very exclusive information. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  “That was on a professional level,” I mumbled. “And it didn’t harm anything operational.”

  “OK, if you say so,” he dismissed me sarcastically. “And you continue to run our network’s office, correct? And let’s assume that you do have some noble motivation because there is someone near and dear to you among the hostages on that plane. Are you really certain that you are able to be loyal to everyone all the time?”

  I shrank in my seat, and Haroush shrank in his own corner. “Do you understand? I am first and foremost Israeli, and only then am I a journalist, and I don’t see any harm in that. Life is a compromise between necessary evils,” he concluded. “And I get the feeling that you know how to walk among the rain drops pretty well yourself.”

  “I still can’t believe that you are the same person I knew all this time. You are entirely different now. Like in the horror movies I once saw. I hope you will not become a green monster at the next phase, later tonight.”

  “Call your mom,” he said, trying to play the role of good old Haroush again.

  * * *

  Chapter 23

  I learned about their return from New York from Mom’s weekly letter. The newspapers supplied me with the explanation. There was some kind of a circular deal between the foreign minister and the prime minister who was led to appoint Danny as the cabinet secretary. Danny’s picture was splashed all over the newspapers and his profile appeared time and again on every news outlet. They all mentioned that he was the third-youngest cabinet secretary ever, at only forty-one years old. His younger predecessors were Dan Meridor who had been thirty-eight when he had got that job and Yossi Beilin who had been thirty-six. Again, as at the UN, he had failed to win the coveted prize of being the youngest-ever, but this time he cared less. He had begun to mature. He undoubtedly thought about that position as a springboard to a ministerial position in government. The foreign minister, smiling smugly, said, “Well, they say that his age is a liability, but it is a liability that will be resolved in due course.” Two days later, the prime minister started recycling that witticism.

  Mom insisted that they live in Tel Aviv, not far from me, on the prestigious Hamdina Square, ‘so they can keep in touch with the girl’, which gave Danny a good enough reason to often stay overnight in Jerusalem. He had a black leather armchair brought into the large office of the cabinet secretary, which he would use for his afternoon naps. In the long hours of the night, he would sit and write minutes, and from time to time entertained some of his female admirers.

  Every Sunday night after the cabinet meeting, I would see him on the evening news sitting on the left side of the prime minister, handing him a note, whispering in his ear, and mostly taking notes. He would come home twice or three times a week. His service car this time was a Peugeot 405, which was driven by Victor from the foreign ministry; the same Victor who had been his driver back in the days when he was the minister’s chief of staff. Victor, who once terrified me, was now Danny’s bag man and confidant, competing with Ofer, a new and promising assistant, for the position of Danny’s loyal lackey and favorite doggie. Danny had serious problems with his new boss, the prime minister. After the prime minister exiled for the second time a group of thirty-five Palestinians and the whole foreign press corps waited to see them at the border crossing, I received a call from Uzi. He was now chief of cabinet for the foreign minister and senior deputy director general for special assignments. He invited me to the cafeteria at the Press Club of Sokolov House. Uzi tried to ask me to do something about the situation, if I could, please.

  “We’ve had no true contact with Danny since he returned to Israel. Actually, since six months before that.” Uzi’s eyes were sad and his forehead was furrowed.

  “You know him better than anyone else. You knew it would happen. What do you want from me? What can I do about it?”

  “He has a soft spot for you,” Uzi explained with his usual patience. “We have a problem with him. In order to gain the prime minister’s trust, he’s letting him do stupid things like this exile affair. He’s not listening to what the foreign minister wants and the minister, as you know, is on the prime minister’s enemy list right now. The PM enjoys humiliating him.”

  “I am the last person who would talk to him and the last one he would listen to,” I said. “You know what happened to him. He is too important now. He wouldn’t listen to anyone. Not only would he go with this prime minister into another war in Lebanon without thinking twice, he would also explain to us all why it is necessary.”

  “But, Shira.” Uzi was very serious. “This is the big crossroad! It’s not just an empty phrase; this is not just a lesson in the diplomatic cadet course. We have a chance to embark on a path toward true peace or we can head into another collision that will lead to yet another one, after which there will be nothing left. We wanted Danny to be cabinet secretary because the whole idea was to harness the prime minister to the peace cart. As you well know, the PM always follows whoever has the most convincing and deepest baritone voice.”

  “Danny isn’t a baritone,” I said. “You know just as well as I do, that he had to work very hard to gain the man’s trust. And in order to do that, I am sure he had no qualms about smearing you or the foreign minister or whoever else, as long as it would please the boss. I am also sure that he finds opportunities to allay some of the prime minister’s personal fears that only he can detect. Past experience tells us that, Uzi, and you know it. In his case, it’s not just a matter of having a baritone voice, although I am sure he is still trying hard to adopt one.”

  “Yes, I do know that he didn’t join the PM because of his voice,” Uzi conceded. “He went there because he would be the man who would assemble the right people and lead the cart in the right direction.”

  “What is important is not to pull the cart out of the mud but rather to pull the mud out of the cart, right?” I quoted one of the foreign minister’s overdone witticisms and we laughed again. Maybe laughing kept us from crying.

  I knew I was right. Danny dedicated entire days to ingratiating himself to the prime minister who appointed him cabinet secretary because he had no choice. Uzi’s concern was only partly real. He was still working for Danny, creating a smokescreen to hide their strategy. At the end of the day, Danny was the man tasked with leading the prime minister in a new direction designed and planned by the foreign minister. ‘The new direction’ was a slogan that was hanging in the air and it took me some time to understand what was behind it. But on that day at Sokolov House, as Uzi was trying to convince me to bring Danny back from the path on which he was going, he knew that I had no way of influencing Danny.


  We sat on an upholstered plastic bench enjoying asparagus soup and looked on at the old journalists trying to hit on fresh young things looking for openings into the media world. Parading before us were female soldiers from the Army Radio and old geezers, columnists whose names were bigger than they were, old farts longing back to their youthful days in the pre-state illegal immigration, in the underground, around the bonfires and at the student raves in Jerusalem. They sat down around large tables, talked dirty and felt young once again.

  Uzi caught a glimpse of Stieglitz, a young history professor whom I would later see more and more of. He waved at him and Stieglitz came over with an embarrassed smile and sat down with us. After the usual exchange of greetings, Uzi asked with a conspiratorial smile, “So, what’s happening up in the cold north?”

  “It’s not bad at all,” said Stieglitz smiling too. “The conference is over, the talks continue, and there will be another conference and we will be back there.” They were trying not to reveal details, but a week later Danny flew to Paris, and from there to Copenhagen, and then he disappeared. Three days later he returned and said that the Norwegians were the best hosts he had ever had. The relationship he had with Stieglitz became closer and closer and Danny started handing over the day-to-day management of cabinet meetings to his deputy, Gabriel.

  I enjoyed the city. I liked the flower beds of pansies and azaleas around my block. The grocery store owner on Be’eri Street was friendly from the day I met him and as soon as he heard that I came from an important family, he told me in confidence that former top-model Pnina Rosenblum as well as composer Yoni Rechter both lived in the area. On Fridays, the neighbors would wash their cars lovingly and at the nearby schoolyard, the forty-plus crowd played soccer on the weekends, screaming and shouting with the enthusiasm of teenagers.

  Tel Aviv was an accommodating city, charming and full of life. It was friendly and yet completely oblivious to whatever was happening to me. I was the mistress of my own destiny and actions, free to roam without anyone butting into my life or into my pants or sticking their nose into whatever I was or was not doing. Friday afternoon was Tel Aviv’s finest time. At around three o’clock the phone would stop ringing. I had a crew on weekend stand-by in case of terrorist bombings or important government decisions. On one such Friday, I threw my big brown handbag over my shoulder and went down to Ibn Gvirol Street, walking slowly as if heading nowhere, heading to the Israel’s Kings Square. Crossing Kaplan Street, Karni waved at me from Zanzibar Pub. It had been a few months since I had last seen her. All sorts of rumors were going around about her, but I didn’t believe most of them. We sat on the sidewalk with two other friends who were chatting, drinking strawberry daiquiris and generally looking chirpy and full of verve. It was fun to sit with them and I wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere. We sat facing the street. Traffic was dwindling, the din of the buses was ebbing, and the noise level coming from the pub was increasing. The ficus trees were in full bloom and covered the sidewalk in a thick, dirty carpet of tiny purple-black fruit. There was a permanent joy in the air as people greeted each other, backs were slapped, and compliments were shouted. We sat gazing at the distant army headquarters with its antenna tower sticking out like an arrow pointed at the sky between the tops of the trees.