The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  And UNRWA led him to a factor invisible to the outside world: the basketball courts.

  UNRWA had built many basketball courts made entirely of concrete slabs and completely enclosed. They were bleak and ugly to look at, but there was little wood in Gaza with which to build courts with proper backboards and so on. These basketball courts also served as spaces for volleyball and other sports, and were wildly popular during school hours. Gersony discovered that the cliché about Arab girls and women not liking sports was false. Because these courts were enclosed, girls and young women could play matches as often as the boys and men.

  It got him thinking.

  He also noticed UNRWA’s successful small business loan program, which administered $4.5 million annually with a 98 percent repayment rate, creating 450 jobs at salaries of $3,000. It had limited capacity, sure, but might be something to build on, he thought.

  He was under no illusions about the overall situation. Visiting those schools with the concrete basketball courts, he also heard students chanting, for up to half an hour sometimes, “It’s an honor to die for the state of Palestine.” The school corridors were plastered with regional maps where “Israel” did not appear. The conflict was unending, so it was a matter of finding partial, stop-gap solutions.

  The years of the Intifada meant curfews and continued security lockdowns. There had been few opportunities for safe, after-school activities. Now, in the wake of the Oslo Accords, there were no more lockdowns, but the basketball courts remained unused after midafternoon, when school ended. This meant that the young guys hung about in the streets and the girls were confined in their houses.

  In Gaza City, he saw Zainab al-Wazir, the director of physical education in one of the ministries. She was the sister of a famous PLO martyr, Khalil al-Wazir (“Abu Jihad”), and so he felt that he was talking with the heart of the resistance against Israel.5 He asked her why all the basketball courts were going unused in the afternoons and evenings. “I would play there myself if they were open!” she exclaimed, explaining that they were closed only because there were no security personnel or coaches available. “More security people, that’s more jobs created,” he thought.

  He returned to the USAID office in Tel Aviv with a plan.

  * * *

  —

  Ten people crammed into the small conference room to hear his briefing, including Chris Crowley and Maureen Dugan. He began by saying: “Let’s all be humble. It’s only $25 million, and this conflict has been going on for a long time. If the Israelis would merely allow 722 more workers from Gaza across the border daily, it would have the same impact as our $25 million. Also, for us it’s an emergency, since we believe in creating jobs fast. But for the Gazans, who go home every day at 2:30 p.m. as they have for years, life goes on.”

  At the words “let’s all be humble,” the scales fell off people’s eyes. Because he was speaking a somewhat new language, he had a rapt audience.

  These were his recommendations:

  USAID should work with UNRWA to repair schools damaged in the Intifada.

  Add 50 more all-purpose, concrete basketball courts.

  Give UNRWA $1 million to hire 200 Gazan security personnel and sports coaches to keep the courts open throughout the afternoons.

  Appropriate money for nighttime lighting, since the best time to play sports was in the cool evenings.

  Give UNRWA $4 million to expand its small loan program.

  Expand the reach of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to tile the streets and create even more jobs.

  “You can own Gaza by making kids and parents happy,” he concluded. “I stake my reputation on it.” He didn’t mean that literally, since little or none of this would matter without political progress at the top.

  Nothing Gersony said was remotely original or ambitious even. It was all about humility: the recognition of how little could be accomplished by USAID alone. UNRWA was doing great work already, so USAID should build on it, rather than compete with it. What else could you do with only $25 million, anyway? Chris Crowley felt at the time that Gersony, without saying it, had identified a key political-demographic problem of the Arab world, the male youth bulge, and had a plan, however small and partial, to deal with it.

  But by USAID standards, Gersony’s ideas were actually controversial, since the AID bureaucracy at the time normally frowned on having anything to do with sports: sports stadiums and the like were the kind of things the Russians and Chinese preferred to build. “But if you dropped a thousand soccer balls from helicopters into Gaza, you might actually cut down on terrorist attacks,” Gersony now quips.

  A year later, on June 13, 1996, a USAID public affairs officer, Suchinta Wijesooriya, sent out an email, saying:

  “The after-school program is going great guns and is now all over Gaza…everybody loves it….Next to [the] water [project], it is one of the most worthwhile things we are doing.”

  After the $25 million was spent, the Danish government picked the program up and kept it going.

  But on September 28, 2000, the Israeli opposition leader at the time, former general Ariel Sharon, visited the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam. He was accompanied by 1,500 armed Israeli police, anxious for his security and to prevent a riot. The upshot was another Intifada against Israeli occupation. Whatever impact Gersony had in Gaza was completely overtaken by events.

  * * *

  —

  Upon Gersony’s completion of the Gaza project, Chris Crowley had a real problem on his hands. Congress had given USAID $100 million to spend in the West Bank, but Crowley did not trust the consultant teams that Washington had sent out to tell him how to spend the money—the teams that unfailingly served up the least creative, boilerplate analysis. He was frankly suspicious of their recommendation to spend all the money on roads, schools, and education. It just seemed too easy and obvious. So he sent Gersony out on a fact-finding trip to investigate the teams’ recommendations. Gersony took with him the USAID mission engineer Carl Maxwell, an extremely taciturn man who was part Eskimo. He rarely talked or smiled, and always seemed withdrawn.

  At this point Cindy had arrived, and she and Bob were living in a small apartment in downtown Tel Aviv. For a week, Gersony drove from Tel Aviv into the West Bank with Carl Maxwell to inspect the roads, schools, and health centers that the USAID consultants wanted to spend $100 million improving. After Gaza, the West Bank was sheer paradise to Gersony, an utterly different country and plane of existence. It was more prosperous, more normal, not as hot, and people seemed much less aggravated. The gaunt and dizzying hillsides, which burst out in lemon green after the rains, were truly majestic and suffused with biblical associations. Gaza, a generic, baking-in-the-heat-and-humidity shantytown, was not meant to carry the population it did. That, combined with its sealed-off isolation, had the effect of creating monsters. The West Bank was beautiful: it had cobblestones, old houses, Roman arches, archaeological sites, and so forth. The West Bank, like Jerusalem, was rooted in history, whereas Gaza seemed rootless.

  Gersony and Maxwell found no problem with the roads, which were in pristine condition and perfect for access to the villages: to widen them, as the USAID consultants wanted to do, would have involved destroying olive groves, cutting into the rock, and threatening landslides. Bigger wasn’t necessarily better. The schools and health centers were also in decent shape. By this time, watching Gersony work till late each evening writing up his daily reports, Carl Maxwell began warming to him. They went back to Chris Crowley and told him that they couldn’t fathom why USAID wanted to spend $100 million to fix things that did not need fixing. Gersony told Crowley:

  “Why don’t you let me and Jamal [Tarazi] go out for a week just to talk to villagers in the West Bank and get a sense of what’s going on, to see what they feel they ne
ed?”

  For a week, he and Jamal conducted open-ended conversations with village sheikhs, local teachers, and others throughout the West Bank, traveling in both Samaria in the north and Judea in the south. All he and Jamal heard from everyone was one word: “Water!”

  Most water came from rain, which ran down the corrugated iron roofs into plastic buckets. Because there were no proper storage facilities, the villagers explained, each family paid up to $240 per season for periodic deliveries of water. You could see the water trucks traveling up and down the roads of the West Bank, especially in the warm, dry months. There were natural springs, but they were often contaminated by livestock. Where clean water did exist in abundance, it was often located several miles away from each village. There was a desperate need to collect, store, and efficiently distribute water.

  Gersony went to see the chief engineer and project officer of the UNDP in Jerusalem, Lana Abu-Hijleh. She immediately made a lifelong impression on him. “Lana was terrific, young, attractive, thoroughly professional, alluring, fastidious, and a perfect English speaker.” When Gersony told her that everyone he had met in the West Bank said water was the big issue, she shot back that she had a $4 million water project at the proposal stage, and had already gotten all the permits from the Israeli occupation authorities. At the micro level, she wanted to do the same thing as Gersony. Carl Maxwell, despite his reserve, actually smiled.

  “Here is where the rain falls,” Lana remembers telling Gersony. “He immediately understood what I meant,” Lana now explains. “Bob had an open mind to the facts and wasn’t blinded by the [Israeli] propaganda machine that always managed to twist them. He knew that control of water and the underground aquifer was an essential reason for the Israeli occupation [since water was scarce in the region and was therefore a strategic resource]. Bob was an unusual USAID consultant because he was so concerned about people’s suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. He always listened intensely because he cared, and thus he understood everything I told him. I wish I had gotten to know him better.”

  Lana took Gersony and Carl to her ancestral village, Deir Istiya, in central Samaria, south of the big West Bank town of Nablus. In 1995, it had 370 families, of which hers was among the most prominent. The architecture, as in so many places in the West Bank, conjured up the historical ages from the Romans to the Mamluks, with stone archways and cobbled streets. Gersony loved cobblestones, since for him it meant a solution to mud and flooding, even as laying the cobblestones gave people jobs. Carl took out a notebook and pencil and designed an overhead water storage tank on the spot, complete with cladding appropriate to the village architecture.

  Gersony reported back to Chris Crowley.

  He told Crowley and his team that the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank needed water, pure and simple. And that the UNDP should play a significant part in implementing the project. The USAID mission in Israel and the territories could not oversee roads, schools, health systems, and so on as the consultant teams wanted to do. It was too extravagant and multifaceted for one mission. “USAID here should spend the whole $100 million on water, with help and advice from the UNDP.” He told Crowley that USAID needed to hire a few water engineers in order to become the go-to intermediary for anything having to do with water for the West Bank.

  Crowley sat silent for a minute, then for two minutes. A big smile gradually formed on his face. “That is exactly what we’re going to do,” he said.

  “All my instincts said yeah,” Crowley now remembers. “I knew enough about the Middle East to know that water was the key to everything.”

  Of course, whereas Gersony was thinking about all the details below him—working with the engineers, with Lana and the UNDP, and with the Palestinian Authority—Crowley was thinking about all the politics above him: which constituted a yawning universe of big shots with big egos, given the world media attention lavished on the West Bank. Yet water was an elemental, powerful symbol. It was about life itself. Thus, it was an idea he felt that he could sell in one sentence to his ambassador in Tel Aviv, Martin Indyk. Crowley’s assessment proved accurate. He also sold the project to the Middle East peace process team led by Dennis Ross. But he had some difficulty convincing the consul general in Jerusalem, Ed Abington, whom Crowley felt harbored resentments both political and personal against Indyk: it was a typical case of a career diplomat sympathetic to the Palestinians versus a political appointee sympathetic to the Israelis.

  Partly as a result of the success of Gersony’s water project, Crowley was able to stay in Israel for another four years, and then would go on to become USAID mission director for Iraq from 2010 to 2013; after that he became the senior career official for USAID throughout the whole Middle East.

  Gersony brings all of these high politics down to earth, though.

  “When you listen to ordinary people, there is so much wisdom,” Gersony explains. “That is what Jamal and Lana and myself did all over Gaza and the West Bank. That is what Chris Crowley, Norm Olsen, and General Fredy Zach did. We talked to real people who told us about their problems and what they needed. Chris was a seasoned USAID diplomat. Jamal and Lana were Palestinians. Norm was pro-Palestinian. Zach was an ardent Zionist, and I was sympathetic to Israel because of my own family background. But I feel close to all these people, as if we were all on the same side. Because we believed in applied common sense issuing from the ground up, in all its granularity, rather than imposing our beliefs and assumptions, however idealistic, on others.”

  Years later, after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in the Arab Spring in early 2011, Chris Crowley tried to get Bob Gersony to do an assessment of what the Egyptian population needed at the mundane, ground level for further development. But the Washington bureaucracy turned him down. The bulk of the development assistance would be spent on democracy promotion programs, all of which turned out to be wasted, and which in fact backfired. Egypt, a complex, poverty-stricken, ancient civilization with its very own historical experience different from America’s, easily fell back into dictatorship.

  * * *

  —

  Their home in Israel constituted among the happiest periods of Bob and Cindy’s life together. Bob liked living in Tel Aviv. He felt a revival of his Jewishness there. He liked Palestinians like Jamal and Lana. He liked working with UNRWA and UNDP. He loved the weather. And he felt very close to Chris Crowley. He felt settled in Israel in a way he hadn’t elsewhere since Guatemala, and he assumed that Crowley would have continuous work for him there.

  Unbeknownst to Gersony, immersed as he was in his work in the Palestinian territories, in Dayton, Ohio, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, Richard C. Holbrooke, was orchestrating a complex arrangement of accords among the warring parties in Yugoslavia that was to be hailed by the media as the greatest diplomatic achievement of the post Cold War. Under the assumption that Holbrooke would succeed, USAID administrator Brian Atwood wanted his agency on the map first in the former Yugoslavia—quickly, visibly.

  Doug Stafford, the head of humanitarian operations for USAID and former deputy U.N. high commissioner for refugees, who had been so impressed with Gersony’s work in Rwanda and elsewhere, told Atwood: “Gersony’s the one you want to send to Bosnia.” Carol Lancaster, the deputy administrator of USAID, who had mastered six languages in her own legendary career, seconded Stafford’s suggestion, even though Atwood needed no convincing on the matter. Bill Garvelink was tasked to get in touch with Gersony.

  Garvelink called Gersony in Tel Aviv:

  “Atwood wants you back in Washington now. You’ve got to get to Bosnia right away.”

  Gersony thought of the sunshine in Tel Aviv and the frigid, dismal cold of Bosnia, with winter approaching.

  He went to the Western Wall with Cindy and wrote a note: “Please God, give me the wisdom to understand what the ordinary people of Bosnia are saying.” He rolled the not
e up tight and stuck it deep between the great ashlar stones.

  * * *

  —

  While he was in Washington for briefings on Bosnia, Cindy called him on November 4, 1995, with the news that Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist. It would begin a chain of events that would overtake the work Gersony had done in the occupied territories. “It may have been one of the most successful political assassinations in history,” Norm Olsen observes. “The assassin wanted to stop the entire Oslo peace process in its tracks, and he did.”

  On October 11, 2002, Lana’s mother, Shaden Abu-Hijleh, a peace activist no less, was quietly sitting outside the family home by the garden in their well-to-do neighborhood in Deir Istiya, knitting, when an Israeli patrol stopped, and shot her dead for absolutely no reason, with no advance warning. It was an utterly stupid, senseless killing. “When I heard about it, I was overcome with grief for Lana and with absolute fury at the Israeli military,” Gersony says.

  But despite these dark and overwhelming forces of Middle Eastern politics, Bob Gersony still left a legacy, however slight. Jamal Tarazi, now a group leader for cancer research at the Pfizer pharmaceutical company in the San Diego area, made a return trip to Gaza in 2012 to visit relatives. There, by the beach in Gaza City, he happened to see the lovely cobblestone streets that one of Gersony’s projects had created, which had recently been extended to other areas. Sometimes the legacy Gersony left behind was pivotal, and many more times it clearly was not. He was only one man, after all.