by John Lyons
The one-kilometre-long cage traverses a no-man’s-land that is technically Gaza, but no Gazans are game to come into it. Occasionally, quite a distance away outside the cage, you’ll see Palestinian children with buckets clambering over the rubble of destroyed buildings, collecting concrete to be recycled. But some children have been shot by Israeli soldiers, so few risk coming here. This is a walk that journalists and aid workers mostly make alone.
By now, through other correspondents, I’d found a reliable fixer. He was waiting for me at the end of the cage. He drove me a further kilometre to a Hamas checkpoint. The Hamas officials always search your bags. It took me a couple of visits to realise what they were really looking for. A sign in their office says: ‘Do not bring alcohol into Gaza.’ And then, as if they know how to punish journalists, they add: ‘If you try, we will pour it out in front of you.’
My fixer and I decided to drive along the border. This was where the Israeli tanks had come and where most of the fighting had taken place. We visited house after house. I could see the Israeli border, its concrete wall with army checkpoints snaking its way to the Mediterranean. All there was between us and Israel were magnificent strawberry fields and rubble. The Palestinians grow remarkable strawberries that often the Israelis don’t let them export.
As the day wore on I learnt more about the reality of the Gaza War. I interviewed three farmers in a strawberry field, standing near tyre marks made by the tanks, about what they saw when the Israeli soldiers came in. I was eating some of the strawberries, which the farmers had insisted I try.
Suddenly, the three started running. ‘Drone!’ one of them shouted. ‘Run!’ I followed them.
They told me afterwards that they heard a drone get louder, and often a loud drone would be followed by a missile, particularly if the Israelis saw three or four men standing together in a field. The claim was that the men could be Hamas fighters preparing to fire a rocket into Israel.
Over the course of a day I heard many times about an incident on 4 January. I met three Palestinians who said that at about 4pm they were on a crowded tractor in the village of Beit Lahiya. Two of them were on a trailer being pulled by the tractor and one was sitting on the tractor’s wheel covering. Israeli soldiers, who had taken over a house along the street, shouted at them all to stop the tractor and get off.
Two men on the tractor got off with their hands in the air. People I spoke to said the two men were shot several times; one died instantly, the other shortly after. A few minutes later, two others who had been on the tractor–trailer, Nabeela Abu Halima and Omar Abu Halima, were also shot, but survived; I interviewed them both. Nabeela said she was shot in the arm because she refused to leave the scene, wanting to help the injured, while Omar said he was shot through the arm because he refused to strip. This was interesting; it contradicted what the Israeli lobby had been telling me about the conduct of the IDF: that it was ‘the most moral army in the world’.4
I wanted to double-check the story, so I went back the next day and tracked down the three witnesses at different locations so I could speak to them separately. I took each of them back to the location and asked them to walk me through what happened. They showed me the building the Israeli Army took over; they said an Israeli tank later crushed the tractor. I visited the garage where the remains of the tractor were taken. I cross-checked with human rights workers, who independently verified the incident.
I then contacted the Israeli Army, putting to them the entire incident – the time, the location, the names of those killed. They replied with the following statement: ‘In this incident, two armed militants were spotted riding a tractor along with an infant’s body. The militants opened fire on IDF troops, and both the terrorists were killed in the following exchange of fire.’
The story was published on the front page of the Weekend Australian on 31 January 2009, with the IDF response included prominently. The IDF had no problem with it. In fact, they said that they appreciated the fact I gave them enough time – 48 hours – to provide a statement. But the AIJAC lobby group in Melbourne opened fire.
Under the headline ‘Atrocity or atrocious reporting?’ AIJAC and the Australian Jewish News based an entire attack on an anonymous blogger who was ‘left asking many questions’. The blogger queried whether one man I mentioned had actually been shot in the arm and run away, because the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem had not mentioned him. It didn’t matter that we ran a photograph of the injured man in the paper. Because B’Tselem had not mentioned this man then it might well have been ‘atrocious reporting’.5
For me this raised a question that I would ask about many other stories over the next six years: how would a lobby group in Melbourne know that something in Gaza had not happened while I had gone to the spot and investigated it? I would come to realise a favourite tactic of AIJAC: they cherry-picked the articles they liked and talked up the journalist responsible, but personally attacked journalists who wrote stories they didn’t agree with. When I covered human rights abuses in Iran or Lebanon or Syria, I was a leading Australian journalist; when I reported what I had seen done by the Israeli Army, I was an unreliable reporter.
The first AIJAC attack on me would be followed by years of abuse by sections of the Jewish community. A frequent abuser from the Melbourne community dubbed me ‘Ayatollah Lyons’. In another email, he referred to me as ‘naturally Hamas smelly used tampon John Lyons’. In case I hadn’t got the message, he added: ‘Fuck yourself John.’ Another email from the same person said: ‘Can’t single Jews out forever Lyons as world history has shown that Jews and Israel have outlived their enemies like the scum that you are.’
After receiving this sort of abuse, I asked some of the other foreign correspondents in Jerusalem about their experience. The bureau chief of Reuters newsagency, Crispian Balmer, told me this story. ‘One time I got something absolutely foul from somebody on Facebook who wrote to my own personal Facebook address. There she was in her picture sitting down with her baby in her arms and she was basically saying, “I hope the next time a bomb goes off in Jerusalem that you and your family are sitting on it.”’ When Balmer asked her what gave her the right to be so abusive to someone she had never met, she replied: ‘Because you are journalist scum.’
I was coming to realise that when you write about Israel you are open to a level of abuse I had never seen before. As a journalist, you quickly learnt that you could have a very pleasant life if you wrote what Israel wanted you to. In contrast, if you wrote what you saw in front of you – such as the massive growth in Israeli settlements in the West Bank – your editors would be hit with complaints and your professionalism would be impugned.
As the Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, I’d dealt with our network of correspondents, who were often travelling to dangerous places. I’d worked as a foreign correspondent myself. I regarded myself as experienced and pretty tough.
But the pressures of being a foreign correspondent are particularly acute when you’re covering a sensitive part of the world and are coming under attack. And the problem for me with the attacks that AIJAC and other groups made was that they would slowly chip away at my credibility, often without my even knowing. Sometimes I only found out about them much later.
CHAPTER 4
A Shadow across the Balcony
February 2009
JERUSALEM: A BEGUILING CITY, WITH ITS OWN HIDDEN rhythms. One moment normal, the next frenzied; one moment enchanting, the next a battleground. Things are rarely what they seem.
After a month in our temporary accommodation, we’d found an apartment at the end of the Haas promenade in what was ‘no-man’s-land’ – in front of our balcony was Palestinian East Jerusalem and behind us was Jewish West Jerusalem. We’d been in contact from Sydney with a wonderful agent called Eva Aviad. She dealt with most of the foreign media and started referring possible options to us.
One day, she showed us an apartment. We loved it. It was a warm family home, but what charmed us was
the stunning balcony with panoramic views over Jerusalem and Jordan. It was huge and beyond our budget, but the owner and Eva had a solution – we could take half of the apartment on our budget.
We met the owner, Avi Mordoch, who told us that even though this was his dream home he’d decided to move his family to the beaches near Tel Aviv. ‘It’s time for me to show my children a normal childhood,’ he said. A secular Jew, he disliked the growing influence of ultra-Orthodox Jews and what he believed was the growing number of Palestinians. (Avi reflected the view of many Israelis that the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem was increasing, when in fact it was falling.)
Our view was so spectacular that Avi had once invited Ehud Olmert, then Mayor of Jerusalem and later Prime Minister, to bring a foreign delegation here. ‘You are now on the roof of the world!’ Olmert told them.
We would move into another place during our last year in Jerusalem, but for the next five years Avi’s dream apartment, with its amazing views, would be our home.
In our first months in Jerusalem everything seemed exotic. As the sun set over the Old City we’d enjoy a religious symphony from our balcony. First came the Muslim call to prayer from the mosques below. ‘Allah hu Akbar!’ – ‘God is Great!’ – echoed across the valley. The green lights of the mosques would glow as the sky faded. From each mosque a muezzin would chant through a microphone.
Then at sunset on Fridays the ‘Shabbat siren’ would sound, ushering in 24 hours of prayer and family time for Jews. I loved the way the different sounds blended into one; they’d hit the hills of Jordan then bounce back.
Our Jewish neighbours would recite Shabbat prayers. In the apartments around us we could see them light candles and sway back and forth as they prayed towards the Western Wall, the holiest place for Jews. We could see the Western Wall from our balcony. On Friday nights the beautiful, ancient stones would be illuminated to create a wall of light. Some worshippers would place their hands against these stones, reciting prayers that were thousands of years old. Others pushed pieces of paper with handwritten prayers between the cracks.
Amid the Friday night Hebrew songs and Muslim calls to prayer, my own tribe – the Christians – doggedly refused to concede defeat. Although Christians are now very few in the Holy Land, the bells of the Catholic and Armenian churches would ring out across the Old City. From our balcony, we’d have to listen carefully to hear them; in this battle of the airwaves between the three monotheistic religions, the Christians came in a distant third. But every so often – between the ‘Allah hu Akbar’s and the Hebrew psalms – you could hear them. It might have been due to my days at Christian Brothers’ College, or perhaps because I’ve always supported the underdog, but those Christian bells always gave me a lift. Two thousand years – and still hanging in there. Just.
I would realise how much Christianity in Israel was struggling, though, when I visited holy sites such as the place near Nazareth where Mary, mother of Christ, was born. There was not even a plaque. On the spot where Jesus is believed to have delivered his famous Sermon on the Mount, there was not a single reference to him. Bethlehem, his birthplace, was now a town virtually crippled by Israel’s occupation.
Life for Christians is not easy in the Holy Land – it can be quite hostile. We spoke to priests who told us they do not walk in the Old City in their cassocks, as this makes them a target. One afternoon Sylvie saw an ultra-Orthodox man spitting at an elderly nun walking near Jaffa Gate, in front of Israeli Border Police; they did not react. A few weeks beforehand, a member of the Knesset, Michael Ben-Ari, tore up a copy of the Christian Bible and threw it into a bin in front of a television camera crew. The Bible, he said, was an ‘abominable’ book.
As a family, we embraced local life with gusto. We enrolled Jack in an Israeli judo school and summer camp, and he made friends with some Palestinian students at the French school, while I began to study Hebrew and learnt to read and write it to a basic level. The street signs in Jerusalem were in Hebrew, English and Arabic, and traffic was appalling, so I used the time to teach myself the Hebrew alphabet. I would later take formal lessons at an ulpan, or language school.
There are almost 800 foreign journalists registered to work in Israel, second only to Washington DC. I found it useful comparing stories – what we had seen or done, where we had been, and our attitudes to the situation in Israel. We soon got to know a large number of journalists and diplomats – but many of them would only stay two or three years, which made it difficult in terms of friendships, especially for Jack. On the other hand, locals knew that we would be going home at some stage too. But gradually we did make friends, mainly through Jack’s school, and in our building and our neighbourhood. An Israeli couple on the floor below, Ilan, a historian, and Stephanie, a museum curator, became very good friends; we regularly had dinner in each other’s apartments, and they arranged lunches for us to meet their Israeli friends.
We lived near the wonderful Jerusalem Cinematheque and the German Colony neighbourhood, a famous inner-city area. It also had a local swimming pool, so sometimes on Fridays, after I’d filed for the weekend paper, I’d go there with Jack. In West Jerusalem, most things close on Friday nights for Shabbat, so if we wanted to go out we’d head to the Arab section in East Jerusalem.
Everything around us was new – and much of it unexpected.
There was a ritual at our swimming pool in the German Colony that I watched with fascination. The ultra-Orthodox Jewish men refused to swim with women, so the management insisted that once a week – Thursday nights – all the women leave. I’d be in the changing room as scores of ultra-Orthodox men came in to take off their religious garb. It felt like a scene from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Slave, set in 17th-century Poland. The women from 21st-century Israel filed out of the gates so the men from the 17th century could swim for a couple of hours, freshening themselves up for the next day’s Shabbat. From women to men, from one century to another. All happening at our local swimming pool.
On the buses in ultra-Orthodox areas, men sit at the front and women at the back. Sometimes the men insist on this outside their neighbourhoods. Once, an ultra-Orthodox man told two women on a bus in central Jerusalem to move to the back. The women ignored him. He kept insisting. Finally, one of the women, who had just returned from overseas, said to her friend: ‘I thought I’d landed in Israel but there must have been a mistake – I’ve arrived in Iran!’ The man angrily moved to another seat.
Many secular Israelis told us they wanted to live in a ‘normal country’. But the ultra-Orthodox want Israel to be religious, and their numbers are growing. Their attitudes alienate many secular Israelis, like our landlord Avi. At a lunch with our neighbours, a British-born Israeli likened the ultra-Orthodox to the clerics of Iran. ‘Our men in black coats and beards are just as bad as their men in black coats and beards!’
This was one of the changes that had taken place since Sylvie and I had last been here a decade earlier. But the biggest difference was that there was no significant contact any more between Israelis and Palestinians. On our previous visit, Sylvie and I had gone to a place called Neve Shalom – New Peace – where Jews and Palestinians would live together and make a point of discussing peace and other issues. In those days, there were student-exchange programs to foster mutual understanding between Palestinian families in Ramallah and Jewish families in Tel Aviv. I realised almost all of that had stopped.
Civilians walking around Jerusalem with guns was another big surprise. We were having lunch in a sushi restaurant three months after our arrival when we noticed a man wearing a Glock handgun. He told us he was from New York and had moved to a settlement in the West Bank. ‘I love it here!’ he said. ‘We have a lot of guns in the US but I can’t walk around New York with one of these!’ We would be surprised going to a supermarket or café and having to be searched and go through a metal detector while heavily armed Israeli youths passed through without being checked.
Many people in their 20s had come from
overseas – including Australia – to join the ‘messianic mission’ to build up the settlements in ‘Greater Israel’, or the biblical land of Israel. They talked of ‘reclaiming Judea and Samaria’ (i.e. the West Bank) from the Palestinians who, in their view, were wrongly given it by the United Nations in 1947, even though Israel agreed to that deal.
Another thing that surprised us was how small this part of the world is. When we travelled to the Golan Heights we could look into Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. In southern Israel, we could swim in the Red Sea and look into Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
In the Middle East you see wars close up. Locals told us how, during the Gulf War in 1990 to 1991, scud missiles ordered by Saddam Hussein in Baghdad could be seen flying past Jerusalem on their way to Tel Aviv. Television crews set up on rooftops to film them. Once, a siren warned of an incoming scud; it led to a famous photograph of patrons at the Jerusalem Theatre wearing gas masks and listening to Isaac Stern playing with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Saddam Hussein could not stop the Sarabande from Bach’s D Minor Partita for solo violin.
War had become part of daily life. In Israel we discovered the ‘Code Red’ app, which alerts people to where rockets from Gaza are falling. People sit in cafés in Israel and look at their phones for Code Red alerts – ‘A rocket towards Ashkelon’, ‘A missile fired towards Efrat’.
We heard that Israelis were taking folding chairs and binoculars to a hill in Israel looking into Gaza and would cheer when missiles exploded there. Sylvie and I went to see if it was true. It was quite obscene – it was like an outdoor café, with an old sofa, lots of chairs and someone had even set up a barbecue. People cheered and took selfies with bombs exploding as a backdrop.
