The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  “Bob and I have a great respect for the factual truth. The world is not just an interpretation or a place for competing narratives. That is our fight,” Prunier says.

  THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS

  CHAPTER 12

  Gaza and the West Bank

  1995

  “I Wish I Had Gotten to Know Him Better.”

  Rwanda traumatized Bob Gersony. He refused to talk to journalists who were contacting him about his report since he had made a commitment to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata that he would not do so. Although articles began emerging in the major media that supported his version of events, they were intermittent, and in significant cases would take years to see the light of day. In fact, it would be decades before he was fully vindicated. Thus, he felt isolated and betrayed. He hadn’t known at the time that Assistant Secretary of State for Africa George Moose and Deputy Assistant Secretary Prudence Bushnell were utilizing his report to pressure Paul Kagame’s Tutsi regime to stop the mass killing, and that together with United Nations efforts to secretly threaten the Rwandan government with releasing his report, the overall effect would be to halt the killing in its tracks. Yet in the halls of the State Department he was treated as if he had the plague, especially by the ambitious careerists and political types like Tim Wirth. So once again Gersony felt that his career was over.

  It would take weeks for his wounds to even begin to heal. Meanwhile, he returned to Nicaragua and buried himself in his work. Whereas Rwanda was high international politics and the universal issue of genocide, Nicaragua was the more parochial world of Latin American development economics: no one there outside of Cindy and Tony really cared or understood what he had just gone through.

  But by January 1995, only a few months after he returned from Rwanda, the four-year development project in eastern Nicaragua was over. Bob and Cindy, after almost half a decade in Nicaragua, with Bob working seven days a week as a paid consultant, suddenly found themselves back in his small apartment in Manhattan. Bob was depressed. Cindy complained how rude people were at the supermarket compared to the Nicaraguans.

  The phone rang.

  It was Toni Christiansen from USAID, who knew Bob from Barbados, where fifteen years before he had worked on Dominica hurricane relief. She had money for a jobs project in the Gaza Strip and Janet Ballantyne had just recommended Bob to her.

  “I’m your guy,” Gersony said.

  He needed work, and because he was still ambitious at fifty, he recognized that Gaza would get him to the Middle East, adding another region to his résumé.

  En route to Tel Aviv he stopped in Washington to see Carol Lancaster, the deputy administrator of USAID, right below Brian Atwood. She told him that USAID had $25 million and was looking for impact in order to ease tensions in the occupied territories, but the mission was stalled. There was the usual, hideous Palestinian-Israeli politics—despite the Oslo peace process—made worse by the fact that the State Department did not trust the Israel-based USAID mission for the occupied Palestinian territories. Gersony didn’t care. It was an employment project, and therefore he could apply his experience in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and elsewhere.

  * * *

  —

  He arrived in Tel Aviv, his brain overloaded with logistical questions. He needed an apartment for himself and Cindy since he would be there for six months. He needed background briefings from both the U.S. Embassy and USAID mission in Tel Aviv, as well as a briefing from the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, which dealt with the Palestinians. He had just so many new people to meet and a new region to learn about. He was in shut-his-mouth-and-listen mode, again working long days, seven days a week.

  As for Israel itself, it curiously remained only in the background of his thoughts, despite his family history—such a workaholic was he. Tel Aviv itself didn’t help. It was a sterile modern city on the Mediterranean, without the grace, sensuality, and indigenous cultural allure of a Barcelona, Nice, Tunis, or Palermo. The USAID mission was in Dizengoff Tower, an ugly, brutalist twenty-nine-story building with a Sbarro fast-food restaurant in the basement. Visually, being in Tel Aviv was not like being abroad at all.

  The USAID office was run by Chris Crowley, the mission director, and Maureen Dugan, the project director for Gaza. Chris Crowley was calm, amiable, very good-looking in a conventional CEO sort of way. He seemed like a guy who was going places in the bureaucracy. The chemistry between him and Gersony was instantaneous: similar to that between Gersony and Mike Ranneberger in Mozambique.

  “I liked Bob immediately,” Crowley recalls. “He was serious and full of analytical rigor without being a wonk.”

  As for Maureen Dugan, she had chronic back pain and often spoke while lying supine on the floor of her office. She was another one of the great women of USAID, like Carol Lancaster and Janet Ballantyne, who had virtually adopted Gersony, and were less stodgy than the men. At the embassy a few blocks away, the political and economic officer, Norm Olsen, who made constant trips to Gaza—and who was fiercely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause—had one overriding message for Gersony:

  “Find things for the kids to do after school.”

  Otherwise, Olsen implied, those kids would constitute a breeding ground for Palestinian radicalism. Olsen, a talkative Mainer, knew of what he spoke. He had previously worked for USAID in Gaza and had an intimate knowledge of the territory. Gersony had made a strong impression on him. “A lot of people were always coming out to the Tel Aviv embassy from Washington. Bob was the only one who hadn’t already written his report in his head. He let the evidence on the ground drive his conclusions,” Olsen says.

  After meeting his new colleagues at the embassy and the USAID mission in Tel Aviv, Gersony started exploring a bit. He first experienced the visual drama of the Holy Land when he traveled from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, quickly passing by the Old City with its monumental sixteenth-century Ottoman walls built by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, which enclosed the Temple Mount, Wailing Wall, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and so much else. The sunlight seemed to blind him, further sharpened by the ubiquitous stone, which changed from warm rose to cream to dazzling white, depending upon the time of day. He saw a pageant of Gothic, Romanesque, and Moorish arches: the entire panorama crowned by the octagonal Dome of the Rock, with its gold cupola and Hellenistic blue faience frontage. Whereas Tel Aviv was the drab architectural expression of a new and raw Western-oriented settler society, Jerusalem suddenly brought history in a visual sense into the equation for him.

  “I’ll have to come back here with Cindy,” he thought.

  His car swept by the Rockefeller Museum, built during British rule in Crusader style. The nearby visa section of the U.S. Consulate, with its stone facade, arched windows, and tiled roof, conjured up the period of the late Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate: before the creation of the State of Israel.

  The political offices of the consulate, located in West Jerusalem close to the Arab eastern section of the city, operated virtually independently of the embassy in Tel Aviv, and reported directly to the State Department in Washington. The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, though it included Gaza as part of its responsibilities, was immersed in the world of the Jewish state. The consulate, whose area of representation was predominantly the West Bank and the Jerusalem municipal authorities, was generally immersed in the Arab Palestinian side of reality, and point of view, therefore. The embassy dealt intimately with the Israeli government; the consulate tried to have nothing to do with the Israeli government. Though close geographically, the two missions were far apart politically and at a deep emotional level truly distrusted each other: this little diplomatic turf war mirrored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself.

  For all these reasons, in addition to being overwhelmed by Jerusalem’s visual pageantry, Gersony was anticipating his meeting with Ed Abington, the U.S. consul general, who Gersony assumed would be a fou
nt of gritty, streetwise wisdom on the Palestinian territories. Abington even bore a vague resemblance to Chester Crocker, with his round glasses and tight WASPy looks, which Gersony over the years had learned to appreciate.

  But Abington proved a letdown, filling the time with broad generalities that Gersony felt he could have gotten from the most basic textbooks. “He’s a cold fish,” Gersony thought.

  Meanwhile, Norm Olsen, despite being based at the embassy in Tel Aviv, appeared to have a better feel for the occupied territories than Abington. Olsen fixed a meeting between Gersony and retired Israeli brigadier general Fredy Zach. General Zach was the deputy head of the civil administration in the Palestinian territories, and therefore had the job of making the occupation work on a daily basis. He was a bit of a slick operator, but one who knew his subject. He immediately launched into a dense economic briefing, rife with statistics, of the kind that Gersony, given his own background, appreciated. Gersony thought, “He speaks my language. This nuts-and-bolts military guy has been forced to understand the Palestinian situation because the lives of his own people depended on him not being a bullshitter.” In fact, General Zach, born in Basra on the Persian Gulf, was a native Arabic speaker who had spent a year living in a tent with his family in Israel, having just been expelled from Iraq in 1948. Though an ardent Zionist, Zach knew what expulsion was all about and therefore could empathize with the Palestinians.

  Zach repeatedly emphasized to Gersony that the Palestinians did not want temporary, make-work jobs. They wanted real jobs in a real economy. Don’t be condescending toward them, he warned. He was one of those high-ranking Israeli officers who had a visceral sense of reality, based on experience, that many of Israel’s own politicians lacked. Gersony was impressed, but was hesitant to become emotionally attached to a former general in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) so soon after his arrival. Picking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when it wasn’t necessary could ruin a State Department or USAID career.

  It came time to pick a guide and translator. Chris Crowley in Tel Aviv introduced Gersony to a number of FSNs (Foreign Service Nationals). One stood out: Dr. Jamal Tarazi, a Palestinian medical doctor from a prominent Christian family in Gaza, who had what appeared to be a good bedside manner. Jamal would prove to be an excellent facilitator; he knew everybody in Gaza and was “smart as hell.” Likewise, Jamal’s first impression of Gersony was “of an absolutely good personality with immense experience. And I could judge,” Jamal goes on, “since my father worked in relief assistance for many years for the U.N.” Gersony and Jamal would spend five weeks together in Gaza, conducting 137 one-on-one interviews, going to the homes of ordinary Gazans from all walks of life, in addition to interviewing officials from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). Jamal would make sure that Gersony also got to meet and give a fair hearing to the territory’s leading opinion makers. “We went into some risky neighborhoods,” Jamal recalls, “which even back then were Hamas strongholds. People would gather around us. But Bob was unfazed. He just kept asking questions.”

  Gaza then comprised 900,000 people, mainly refugees and their descendants from the vast population movements that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. It was an extremely hot, humid, and crowded place—an Arab version of Soweto. One journalist described it as a “dense, gray concrete shantytown” with black sewage water, crude septic tanks, dingy food stalls, all without greenery.1 It was the kind of physical environment that would turn anybody radical. People were often in a bad mood and out of hope. The water was brackish; not a lemon tree was left. And now, in the spring of 1995, it faced an acute economic and employment crisis, arising from tectonic shifts in the Middle East that were the following:

  * * *

  —

  For decades, arguably the biggest booster of the Palestinian Arab cause against Israel had been oil-rich Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians worked in the wealthy Persian Gulf sheikhdom—20 percent of its population—earning hard currency in Kuwaiti dinars. They sent much of this money back in remittances to relatives in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan. The taxes they paid in Kuwait went not to the Kuwaiti government, but straight to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. This was in addition to direct aid, hundreds of millions of dollars, that the Kuwaiti government sent to the PLO.

  But in August 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Arab League, famous for issuing lowest common denominator platitudes of little value, uncharacteristically united with a firm and nearly unanimous statement of support for the Kuwaitis and condemnation of Saddam. There was only one complete holdout: PLO leader Yasser Arafat. It may have been the most unfortunate and inexplicable decision of Arafat’s life, even if Saddam had been giving $10,000 to each of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. (Saddam, though not supporting al-Qaeda, was in fact supporting many other terrorist groups such as Islamic Jihad and the Arab Liberation Front.)2 Perhaps it was the innate radicalism of Saddam’s invasion of the land of these rich and complacent Gulf Arabs that appealed to Arafat’s romantic sensibility, in addition to widespread support for Saddam in the Palestinian street.

  The reaction was swift.

  The Kuwaitis called Arafat a “traitor.”3 Not only Kuwait but other wealthy Arab Gulf kingdoms deported their Palestinian populations, many of whom had nowhere else to go, other than Gaza and the West Bank. Everything was lost: the remittances in hard currency, the tax rebates to the PLO, and the direct aid to the PLO, even as the population of the occupied territories swelled. The financial damage to the Palestinian territories was $405 million in 1990 alone.4

  Simultaneous with these events was the Intifada, the general Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation authorities that began in 1987 and fully ceased only in 1993. Because of the deterioration of the security situation, Israel dramatically reduced the number of Palestinians it allowed to cross its borders daily for work inside Israel. The number of Gazans allowed to work in Israel fell from 50,000 in 1987 to 10,000 in 1995. This mattered, since at the high point of these border crossings, as many as one-third of Gazan families had somebody earning a decent wage in Israel. Finally, Israel allowed large numbers of foreigners, mainly Thais and Romanians, to replace the Palestinians, signaling that there would be no going back to the previous status quo.

  One step at a time, the Palestinians, especially the Gazans, had alienated their principal employers—Kuwaitis and Israelis both.

  When Yasser Arafat shook hands with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, it was not a triumph for him, but the ultimate humiliation, culminating the train of events that had begun with his fateful decision to back Saddam Hussein three years earlier.

  Because the PLO, under the Oslo Accords, recognized Israel’s right to exist, the U.S. Congress appropriated $25 million to Gaza and $100 million to the West Bank.

  The money was to be administered by USAID, which had eventually dispatched Gersony to Gaza to help figure out how best to spend it.

  * * *

  —

  What did Gazans think? Gersony asked himself.

  As Gersony found out in the course of his 137 interviews, they wanted permanent jobs and small business expansion, based on importing raw materials that they would process and ship out. Everyone from unskilled workers to teachers told him that temporary jobs were getting them nowhere.

  “We want jobs measured in person-years, not in person-days,” people repeatedly said.

  In other words, the Israeli general’s analysis had been right.

  A United Nations official backed this up, telling Gersony:

  “I’ve not come across a single Palestinian who agrees with the donor analysis”—that what was needed was more temporary jobs, such as clearing fields of garbage and whitewashing graffiti-strewn walls.

  Keeping his thoughts to himself, Gersony could
not agree. For despite believing in the essential truth of what people told him in interviews, by now he had decades of experience in similar situations and knew a thing or two. He had seen in Latin America how getting people to work immediately, no matter how menial the jobs, did in fact help to stabilize the political situation. He felt that the hostility to temporary jobs had more to do with the Palestinians’ self-image as a First World people than with the actual needs of Gaza at the time. Yet he kept telling himself, “My job is to be a human listening device. I’ve got to document what people here think.” After all, as his thoughts ran, “This was a sensitive political thing, much more so than Latin America. It’s the first significant, official interface between the U.S. government and the Palestinian people. My survey is more than a survey. It’s a question of relationships before a global audience, unlike with the Miskito Indians.”

  As the days and weeks in the concrete slum of Gaza went on, Gersony became gradually more impressed with UNRWA, whose presence was felt everywhere he went. It employed 116 Palestinian engineers, and any project it took on it did properly. Whatever UNRWA had evolved into by the second decade of the twenty-first century, in the mid-1990s UNRWA was a first-class organization, far superior to the European NGOs also working in Gaza. It was the only politically neutral organization with decades of experience in the territory, since the Israelis were always disliked, and even the PLO was seen sometimes as distant and corrupt.