P
eople react to threats by fighting or fleeing, but journalists take neither tack; this meant that I had to negate reality and some of the signals my brain was sending. I went about my business like an overworked policeman ignoring a problem neighborhood. It works for a while, but the lawlessness inevitably spreads from street to street until the whole city is affected. It must have happened like that to me, too. First, I stopped feeling my fear; but when the threat continued, other parts of my emotional apparatus were affected. A friend in Lebanon told me that the civil war had permanently disrupted his “sense of reality.” He told me, “In order to survive, you have to convince yourself that reality is different from what it is. That works and you survive. But how do you then find out what that reality was ... and is?”
In the year that I lived there, more journalists were killed in the Holy Land than anywhere else. I checked my blood type, and learned new English words such as shrapnel, stray bullets, and “war-risk insurance”—the policy didn’t pay out for “war damage,” so you had to pay hundreds of euros a day in top-up insurance. I got a bullet-proof vest and a helmet but, well, you know how it is. Those things are dead heavy, and
soon I did the same as most of my fellow journalists—when the cameras were rolling I’d put on my helmet and vest, and afterwards I’d quickly drop them off in the car. I felt like such a monkey walking around in them amongst the Palestinians, none of whom wore any protection.
This was how I pulled through the violence. I now see that I was making out as if the bullet-proof vest wasn’t necessary, as though everything was a show, an amateur dramatics production in which I had to improvise. It was a mind game I continued to play, whatever happened, and quite a lot did.
I’d been living in my new house in East Jerusalem for a few weeks when a crossroads just 150 meters outside my house was bombed. The target was a bus stop at which Jewish settlers had been waiting for the regular service to their home district. I stood there watching the havoc from my rooftop—a gin and tonic in one hand, the mobile telephone in the other, on the line to the studios: “What did you say? Right in front of your door? Hang on, I’ll ask the chief ... He says that if there are a lot of casualties we’ll do something on it, probably after six-thirty; it depends on whether that parliamentary debate overruns ... damn, sorry, someone else is calling. That’ll be Jakarta—good luck, eh.”
A couple of weeks later, another bomb went off in the area, and a month later the same crossroads was targeted again. The first time, the bomber was the only one who died, and twenty-five people were wounded. This time, seven Israelis were killed, along with the bomber, and my neighbor found a hand in his garden. “Get out of there,” you might think; but, instead of packing my bags, I studied the behavior and rituals that went with such an attack, just like an anthropologist would.
It began with a second of silence, the survivors’ shrieks,
and then almost instantly the sound of sirens from every point of the compass, as if the city itself was screaming out in pain. Usually the people from Magen David Adorn, “the Red Star of David,” would be the first on the scene. These Jewish Red Cross volunteers would lay colored strips next to the wounded so that the medical teams knew who to treat first. Green was for the slightly wounded; yellow was badly wounded; red was critical; and black was dead. “You have to decide in a split second who you are going to try to save,” one of them told me. “And who you’re not.” The police would screen off the bodies while the spokesmen who’d arrived at lightning speed gave their great quotes to the camera teams who’d also arrived at lightning speed. Next, a handful of chanting activists would arrive: “Death to the Arabs, may the army win, no Arabs means no terrorism.” Once all these people had returned home for their dinner, the Zakah people would arrive, a Jewish organization of volunteers who would scour the vicinity for organs, limbs, and even bloodspots, and bury them according to the laws of their religion. The infrastructure service would clear up the remaining traces at breathtaking speed and so thoroughly that the following day you could drive past without spotting a thing.
W
hy didn’t I leave? In his book
From Beirut to Jerusalem,
the
New York Times
correspondent Thomas Friedman discusses the bloody Lebanese civil war. He describes a chic dinner in which the hostess asks, “Shall we eat now or wait until the ceasefire?” War and terrorism become normal: You give them a place in your life and you carry on, because that’s what everyone else is doing. Friedman said that this was why the Lebanese didn’t leave when limbs went on flying through
the air for years on end—the limbs of people who’d all said the same thing that morning to their partners, “Don’t worry about me, darling. You know I’m always careful.”
Being careful—as if that had any effect. But I was always on my guard; if I didn’t watch out, I did little else. A single siren was a heart attack; two, a traffic accident; three, an attack. Traffic: Avoid the buses, because if you were next to one at a traffic light, you’d be right next to a potential bomb. Open spaces: Does anyone look Arabic? Is anyone wearing a long coat that could hide a bomb? Is that an abandoned bag? Do I still have my own bag? If you leave anything unattended in Israel you’ll soon see a special robot blow up your shopping behind a quickly erected barrier. It becomes so automatic that during one short trip back to the Netherlands, I went up to the security guard at the department store entrance to have my bag checked.
The danger had me permanently on my guard but, paradoxically, I became less and less aware of it. I knew that people were dying each day, but I learned to bargain with the Grim Reaper. This gave me my sense of control and safety back—as long as I didn’t really think about it, of course. Should I drive home from Ben-Gurion airport along the road through Israel that is sometimes jammed for hours, or should I take the road for Jewish settlers that goes right through the occupied zone? That one is quicker, but there are Palestinian snipers around who don’t check first to see whether it’s a Jewish settler driving the car—they’ll find out later on the news. On the other hand, what are the chances of my car being shot at? Should I get a taxi to the beach in Tel Aviv, or take the ten-times-cheaper bus, knowing that there is a 0.0001 percent chance of it being blown to smithereens? Should I go to the Palestinian shop that often doesn’t have
things and is expensive, or to the cheaper Israeli supermarket where they’ve got everything, but which has a minuscule chance of being a target?
That was the numb state I got myself into, and everyone had their own way of achieving it. A friend, a theoretical physicist, once invited me to dinner in Jewish—and thus unsafe—West Jerusalem. How should a tough correspondent respond to that? He sensed my hesitation, and reassured me that he knew what he was doing. We drove through West Jerusalem, and when we passed a restaurant with enormous windows right next to the road he shouted, “That place is death! Look, it’s so easy to get into—people who eat there must be suicidal!” According to him, terrorists had a list of places with blow-up potential. “One of their guys drives around noting down targets. Well, that restaurant has got a star!” He listed his criteria for a safe meal: The place should be well tucked away, and the doorkeeper should be at a good distance from the diners, otherwise the terrorist would just throw himself at him. It helps if Israeli Arabs eat there, too, and basements and enclosed spaces should be avoided—an explosion that can’t “get out” carries on reverberating, which is the reason that terrorists prefer narrow alleyways to squares. As we ate, my friend told me casually, after an hour and a half of discussing football, women, and the laws of gravity, that the week before he’d had a coffee in his local café, had paid and left, heard a rumble and turned round, and it had been blown up. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. “But it was logical. The prime minister’s office is in the area—they wanted to send a message. I should have thought of it.”
Everything was different in the shadow of terrorism, but then again it wasn’t; looking back on it, that was what was most alarming. Despite the permanent threat, I’d had the
same trivial thoughts as always. Would the butcher have any chicken fillets left? Had I offended the ambassador’s wife with my drunken behavior? Had that garage owner screwed me? The topic of conversation at an expat party could slip seamlessly from sports to tips about hidden restaurants, a back road that never had any snipers along it, or the café with new security
and
the best latte in town. You didn’t call to say you’d survived an attack, because the network would be down afterwards, but text messages would get through. There was the same tone as in Amsterdam, and the same inclination to trump the other guests with the latest hot tips. And yet there was also an ever-present anxiety, which everyone denied. I was just as enthusiastic in my denial, and it carried over to my work.
There was that time in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. I can still picture myself nodding at my colleague as he cried out angrily: “We’re getting out of here. We’re getting out of here NOW!” Yes, yes, I nodded again, just let me finish this phone call—you know how difficult it is to get an international connection in Gaza. But the gunshots close by got so noisy that it became impossible to hold a telephone conversation anyway, and I had to hang up. Only then did I realize what was going on: There was a shoot-out going on, twenty-five meters away. Naturally, we knew that Palestinian fighters and Israel border troops often “came to blows” here, even during the daytime. That’s what we’d come for, and there were signs of it everywhere—bulldozered Palestinian houses, bullet holes, and rocket strikes ... I’d seen it so often in television dramas that I just couldn’t imagine that, amongst these concrete ruins, Palestinian men my own age were trying to shoot their Israeli peers in the watchtowers just further up, and vice versa.
Real bullets were flying about, but the people in the
vicinity didn’t seem to be bothered—if they weren’t running away, it obviously wasn’t dangerous, and I could just finish my call. My colleague, though, let his fear show, and was shaking all over. The local kids fetched him a chair, and showed him all the stickers they’d got from the foreign camera teams they’d met. Then they got bored, and began to imitate my colleague’s quivering lip. One of the children shouted “Boo!” and the rest of them pulled frightened faces: “Oh, how scary!”
I tried to get through to the paper again, because it was going to be impossible to write my article, and they had to know that. I tend to pace up and down when I’m on the phone and, because the shooting had died down, I nearly walked back onto the battlefield. “No, mister!” they shouted.
T
he violence came even closer. At the peak of the largest wave of attacks ever to hit Jerusalem, I would only go to the Jewish part of town when I had to do live cross-talks for TV That was how, on a clear evening on April 1, I found myself within a few meters of an attack. Immediately afterwards, I sought refuge in denial and immediately called the newsroom to say I’d probably be late for the live Q&A segment. I jumped into a taxi and focused on what we were going to discuss—I’d requested we didn’t mention this bomb. I was on time, and my colleagues back home said that I didn’t come across any differently than usual. Afterwards, I went off to get drunk with a few NOS associates in a hotel in East Jerusalem. The initial shock wore off, and I returned to downplaying things with quips like, “There’s a bomb behind you ... April Fool!” or joking about the fact that Palestinians call an unsuccessful attack a “falafel bomb,” and that the
Dutch refer to Ben Yehuda Street as
Ben Op Je Hoede
(“Be on Your Guard”) Street.
Over the days that followed, I told other journalists about it, and with each retelling of the experience it disappeared further over the horizon—so much so that I can no longer call to mind the person I was when I typed out these notes on my computer:
I’m in a taxi bus full of Palestinians. We’re approaching the crossroads with east and west, where the wall once stood across which Jordanian and Israeli snipers fired at each other. Doesn’t matter. You can turn right at the crossroads, into west Jerusalem. And you can turn left, into the walled old city. We stop at a red light. I see a boy running away from a car; he’s running fast. I mean, running away fast. That’s odd, I think to myself, someone running so fast. Should I say something to the driver? Oh, an Israeli policeman is going over to the car. Boom. I pictured myself watching a film, at the cinema or at home on the sofa with crisps and beer and a joint to get nicely pie-eyed. The bang was different, duller and less echoey; the fireball was the same. Did the roof fly up in the air, or did I just imagine it later? I still see the policeman walking over, not understanding, his shoulders slightly back, his weapon tightly gripped. He’s dead, it was in the paper, my fellow bus passengers were right when they’d commented
“rah isshurti”
—that policeman’s had it.
You reconstruct it. That world champion sprinter was supposed to drop the terrorist off in the midst of shopping Israelis. They ran into a police checkpoint at the crossroads. They pull over, the terrorist stays in his car, waits until a policeman comes over and, “What does this button do?”
Because he’s still in the car, the bodywork absorbs the blast, and our bus seven meters away is hardly damaged. Otherwise I might be in a wheelchair now, or under the ground.
Even after that experience, I didn’t return home. I became more careful, but that wore off over the course of the following year. Living and working in a war zone is like the proverbial hot bath. You keep adding hot water, and after a while it’s hotter than anything you’d ever climb into, but you’re already in it.
PART III
Chapter Thirteen
New Puppets, Old Strings