Part 1 of this post, published over a week ago, included details of my first meeting with Phil Wilcox, an American official in Vientiane, Laos, who was almost certainly working for, or with, the CIA at the time (1968).
In this second part, I meet Mr. Wilcox again, 23 years later. He is the United States Consul (of ambassadorial rank) in East Jerusalem. I recognized him – and he recognized me.
A lot more than that was going on. It was only a few days after the cease-fire in the first Gulf War; the entire Middle East was, even more than usual, jittery and seemingly about to explode – again.
I don’t want to simply clip out the two meetings with Wilcox, because they are too much part of the fabric of those times and places. But I hope readers will note, if nothing else, the easy permeability of the membranes that supposedly separate officials of the State Department, branches of the military, and intelligence agencies.
As my stories illustrate, that was as true in 1968 and 1991 as it was just recently when CIA head Leon Panetta moved over to become Secretary of Defense, and 4-star General David Petraeus took over Panetta’s job at CIA.
Also here, for those who have not seen it in this blog before, is a meeting with some pretty senior Palestinians who warned us, in 1991, about the possibility that Arabs might get angry enough to “blow up buildings in New York” if there were no other way “to get your attention.”
Palestinians and Israelis and Americans
In the Spring of 1991, immediately following the cease-fire in the first Gulf War, I got a phone call from Scott Kennedy, mayor of Santa Cruz, California, asking if I would like to accompany a group of peace activists on a "delegation" to the Middle East. (Scott was an activist himself, which was not at all atypical of a municipality whose majority was considered by many to be left of Berkeley or even, by some jokers, left of Karl Marx. My friend and graduate school colleague, Mike Rotkin, was at one point elected mayor of Santa Cruz as a socialist.) I'd been a feature writer on two local weeklies, the Santa Cruz Express and the Sun, and Scott and his fellow activists hoped I would write about the delegation's visit to Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
We flew into Amman, and were bused to the Jordanian end of the Allenby Bridge. We climbed down from the bus with all our luggage, where we were met by a detail from the Jordanian Army, who herded us halfway across the long bridge to the barricade which constitutes the international border. We were handed off by the nervous, alert Jordanian soldiers to an equal number of nervous, alert Israeli soldiers, who escorted us across to the riverbank on their side. I felt a little like an actor in one of those B-movies who gets handed off by the bad guys to the good guys in a prisoner exchange… except that here, everybody claimed to be the good guys and called everyone else the bad guys and there was no script. The “mighty Jordan” river below the bridge looked like a minor trout stream back home.
The peace group I traveled with, a coalition of church-based and other peace organizations (Witness For Peace is a name I remember), had arranged lodging for us in East Jerusalem. From there each day we would be escorted to pre-arranged “dog-and-pony shows” (as journalists tend to call them): presentations by various Palestinian and Israeli newspaper editors, retired military officers, and politicians who, for the most part, agreed on the necessity for peaceful dialogue and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. They also agreed on the need for the establishment of a Palestinian state, while lamenting the fact that such a state seemed a long way off, due to the lock-step intransigence of Israeli and American policies. There was no presentation of the strident Israeli position that the Palestinians had been taken over by terrorists and must be met by equally forceful measures. The majority of the presentations reflected the agenda of our delegation’s organizers, which was to inspire and embolden us to return home and pressure friends, community members, church groups (I was the only non-Christian in the group), and politicians to change the “lop-sided” U.S. Government policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the direction of less military and financial support for Israel and advocacy for a Palestinian state.
One of our visits was to the Ramallah home of Hanan Ashrawi, a university professor of English and a senior Palestinian diplomat.
It was a modest but comfortably furnished middle class home. She answered the door, showed us into the dining room, and invited us to sit around the table and in a few extra chairs that had been brought in from other rooms. Her husband, a tall slim man with a relaxed and friendly manner, served us coffee – that wonderfully strong “Arab coffee” that we’d already become accustomed to – and cookies. One of our group couldn’t help but remark about the seeming anomaly of an Arab man serving coffee to his wife, and a collective chuckle went around the room. Ms. Ashrawi met our stereotypical notions of Arabs with a graceful remark: “When he’s busy I serve him; when I’m busy he serves me.” Her husband endured the situation with a patient grin, and left the room.
She was a strikingly handsome woman, with her dark hair done up on the back of her head in an arrangement both efficient and attractive. I took a seat just to her left, and got at least one decent photograph, a sharp profile, as she spoke.
She talked about both the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the current situation, arguing that the Palestinians also, like the Israelis, had strong historical claims to land in the region, noting that Palestinian people had been not only resident in the West Bank and Gaza, but also Israel itself, for generations – many since before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. She pointed out that numbers of Palestinians resident within the borders of Israel, at the time she spoke, were Israeli citizens, but because they were Palestinians, were not accorded the same rights as Jewish citizens.
Ashrawi spent some time speaking about the role of the United States in the region, and about the sometimes simmering, sometimes erupting, Arab anger toward that role. Ever-increasing Israeli military power, she said, was due in large part to the nature and scope of U.S. aid to Israel, military aid in particular. Palestinians were squeezed into a crucible by a combination of Israeli intransigence and expansionism – in the form of new settlements, under a shield of force, on land which Palestinians saw as theirs – and the habitual blindness of the U.S., and the world community in general, to what her people saw as the patent injustice of the situation. Specifically, they pointed to the swiftness with which the U.S. supported United Nations resolutions seen as negative toward Palestinians, but ignored resolutions calling upon Israel to vacate the Golan Heights and Gaza, thus supporting Israel’s failure to comply with those resolutions.
We took a bus from East Jerusalem to Bethlehem; it took a half hour or so to get there. In fact I was startled by how close together all these places were: Jordan, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Gaza… and as a kid who’d grown up in the wide-open spaces of the American West, specifically remember thinking as I was looking out the bus window during that trip at the rocky soil alongside the road, no wonder everyone here is so mad: they’re all crammed together, on ground where it looks like it would be difficult to scratch out a living even if the situation were less crowded! We were amazed that such a seemingly sere landscape could produce the abundance of voluptuous fruits and vegetables that we had seen, for example, in the main market in Tel Aviv, and were told that since water was so precious in the area, Israeli innovations in drip irrigation were markedly improving food production. At the same time, however, there was much concern that population pressures would sooner or later outstrip the ability of rainfall, the few rivers, and the region’s aquifers to irrigate the land sufficiently. So, as in the American West from the time of the encroachment of the first white settlers, the allocation and use of available water was becoming an increasingly contentious issue.
The small bus dropped us off in an open cobblestoned area in Bethlehem; the weather was bright and comfortable. We walked a short distance, then were led down some steep, worn, apparently ancient stone steps into an underground space, a small, stone-lined (as I remember it) chamber that, we were told, historians believed to have been the manger where Christ was born. Two of us, not feeling quite so reverent as our colleagues, stood slightly off to the side and conversed about the physical attributes of the place: how many animals it might have held, what sort of feed might have been kept there and where it might have been stored, that kind of thing. We agreed that, in winter, body heat from a few large mammals, absorbed and reflected by the stones, would have made it not such a bad place to give birth, or to be born, given that the young family had been denied lodging in a building more specifically meant for human habitation.
One of the more religious members of the group stepped over and asked us in a whisper to be quiet and respect the fact that for most of the group, at least, this was a sacred place. Though we hadn’t thought of our talking as being disrespectful, we acceded.
There had been tension lately in Gaza. For that matter, we had felt ourselves to be wading in tension from the time we’d arrived at the Allenby Bridge - or the King Hussein Bridge, as it was called by Arabs. (I was struck by how many structures, things, and places had two names, until the nature of the human reality on the ground began to soak through my sometimes thick skin.) After all, the cease-fire in Operation Desert Storm was only a few days in the past. But tension in Gaza, we were told, was ratcheted even higher than in the rest of the region because the Palestinians there tended to be particularly unsettled regarding such issues as the right to work in Israel, the problems involved in documents for, and transport to and from, such work; not to mention the larger political issues regarding political authority and occupancy of land. During this time it struck me, as it had so many times before in my life, that when a basic fabric of trust exists among a certain group of people, or between groups, such impediments as documents related to work or passage between two political entities can be easily scooted past; where if such trust is lacking, the smallest obstacles can lead to friction, even serious violence.
So it was an open question whether we would be allowed to enter Gaza.
It was still a question when we boarded the bus to ride there, and still a question when the bus stopped and we sat sweating in the noon heat while our group leaders walked gingerly over to the gate through which we hoped to enter Gaza, and spoke to the guards.
There followed a terse, on-again-off-again process of talking with the guards, hand gestures, nervous smiles, and glum faces before they came back to the bus and said we could, for the time being, step down and walk around. That is, within a few yards of the bus. You can go over here and back, stretch your legs. Not over there. Not by the gate.
Anan Ameri, a thirty-something Palestinian-American who was accompanying us, perhaps sensing my restlessness, asked if I’d like a coffee. She nodded toward a small kiosk maybe thirty yards from the gate in the chain-link fence separating Israel and Gaza. As we approached the kiosk, she said in a low voice that I’d have to do the talking. I didn’t know how these people were able to tell one another apart - Jew from Arab (they all looked similar to me, unless they were wearing some article of national dress) – but it was obvious, even to me, that it was clear to the scowling young Israeli man in the kiosk that Anan was Arab. That is, to the scowling young Israeli man with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol in an open holster on his belt, on the right side of his belly, where it was always near his right hand.
I approached the window and said, “Two Arab coffOOF! ”, as my “…coffees, please….” was truncated when Anan elbowed me sharply in the ribs and hissed: “SSSST! TURKISH coffees!” By now the young man’s expression had turned to one of barely suppressed anger. I changed my order to “Two Turkish coffees, please,” paid for them, and thanked him. We fled his presence to rejoin the others. Two names. For the same cup of coffee.
There followed a game of waiting in scattered groups in the noonday sun, watching as our minders approached the gate guards again, watching those conversations from out of earshot, and waiting for The Word. It reminded me of troop movements in the Marine Corps: wait, move a little. Wait again, move closer to the gate. We’ll cross… not yet, but soon, maybe….
Finally, after the changing of the guard, they let us cross, on foot. We’d brought only overnight bags, and would return to our lodgings in East Jerusalem the following day.
We walked a few blocks to a small hotel and settled in. We were told not to leave the building: the situation on the streets, while not openly violent at the moment, was too tense. Our minders – or leaders, or guides, – were a couple of women who didn’t look to me to be over twenty years old, and seemed, to me, to be cautious to the point of fright. I’m not saying that women, including young women, can’t be brave or competent; I’ve known many who were. But my experience with this group so far, combined with my own impatience and prejudices, had me feeling that I was in the company of people who, while competent enough, were timid to a point that frustrated me profoundly.
After dinner we gathered in a large common room for a group meeting. I raised the question whether I, a working journalist (or so I wanted to think) with considerable experience at staying alive in troubled areas, might be allowed at least a short walk into the streets of Gaza and try to talk with some locals. Not to offer opinions, controversial or otherwise. Just to ask people to speak briefly, in their own words, about their lives in Gaza. In front of the group I asked Anan Ameri, who spoke both Arabic and English fluently and who had spent considerable time in the region, whether she thought I could safely do this. She answered affirmatively, and offered to accompany me as both guide and translator. I was sure that Anan’s position and willingness to go along and help would carry the day. Just a couple of hours, I pleaded, just a few blocks….
Our leaders strongly cautioned against my going, then put it to a vote of the group. Still exuding fear and negativity, and casting looks at me that showed clearly her opinion of me as a loose cannon who might wreck the whole project of the “delegation,” the young woman in charge called for a show of hands. Only Anan and I voted yes. Then, when I looked around the room as our leader called for a show of hands voting “no,” searching the faces of the few people I thought had any backbone, I saw each of them in turn search the faces of the others, avert their eyes from me, raise their hands, and jump on the bandwagon. The nays had it, many to two.
I was angry, but my hands were tied: in a meeting before we’d boarded the plane in New York for London and then Jordan, the organizers asked for a pledge from each of us – I believe the phrase “your word of honor” was used – that we would without exception obey the instructions of our group leaders. Those who did not agree would not be allowed on the plane, period.
After my request was voted down, a slim, intense young Palestinian man in a black leather jacket was introduced – or presented, I should say: a first name was given, and that was to be understood as just something we could call him. The word Hamas was whispered around the circle. The young man mostly kept his eyes down, but his manner was unambiguous, and when he did make eye contact his gaze seemed, to me, to carry more menace than conciliation. Still chafing from what I considered to be the generally spineless behavior of the people I was with, a part of me kind of liked this guy: he walked the walk, he put his ass on the line.
There had to be space, he said, geographically and politically, for his people in their homeland. If such space were not granted by Israeli and American policies and actions, such space would be created. He shrugged, and here his eyes burned around the room. His words – and even more strongly, his silences – left no doubt, at least to me, that he had already made his personal decision to make whatever sacrifice might be required.
Our meeting with the American Consul in East Jerusalem took place on a bright, sunny day in a spacious Mediterranean-style courtyard graced with a number of olive trees and surrounded by white stuccoed walls.
We were called together and reminded that the Consul held ambassadorial rank, that his name was Phil Wilcox, and we should address him as “Ambassador Wilcox.”
A tall, patrician-looking man in a tropical suit entered the courtyard in the company of an aide, who dropped off to the side as the Consul strode across to our group. Suddenly my own history came crashing around my shoulders. Could it be? Phil Wilcox… Phil Wilcox…!
He walked past the others in our group and stopped in front of me, held out his hand, and leaned in close.
“Ambassador Wilcox, have you ever been in Laos?” I blurted as I took his hand. Still shaking my hand and leaning in closer to speak in a low voice, accompanied by – I thought – a somewhat rueful smile, he said, “Yes, Dean, I recognize you….” Of course, his attempt at privacy was thwarted by the equally eager leaning-in of several people in our group who cocked their ears, open-mouthed, to hear what we said.
I responded to their curiosity as Wilcox and I were still shaking hands: “We met - what was it, twenty-three years ago? – in Laos.” He leaned in again, and I have to admit to a certain gleefulness at the situation, as he said, quietly and close to my ear, trying at once to maintain ambassadorial dignity and ask me not to spill the beans: “I’m not doing here what I was doing then.”
“The beans,” of course, was the fact that I knew, and he knew that I knew, that when we had met in Vientiane during the summer of 1968, as the aftermath of the major North Vietnamese and Viet Cong Tet Offensive that changed the course of the war was still winding down (see above, “Spook-Hunting in Laos”), his position as press officer at the US Embassy in Vientiane was really with the CIA. As my friend John Stockwell told me in one of our wide-ranging conversations about the Marine Corps, the CIA, and the US foreign policy adventures and mis-adventures of our lifetimes, “Every American in Laos during that time was CIA…” and here, Stockwell had made a level cutting notion with his hand above the table. “Everybody. Period.”
(He should know: after growing up in Africa as the son of missionaries, he entered the Marine Corps and became an officer. Following his discharge as a Major, he entered the CIA in 1964, still following the values he’d been raised with: service laced with a healthy (or unhealthy, as he later came to believe) dose of anticommunism. He saw duty with the Agency in Vietnam (his wife was Vietnamese), and advanced in rank and prestige within the organization, at one time earning the Agency’s second-highest medal. He became Chief of Station for the Angola operation in support of Jonas Savimbi, and opposing the Cuban-supported faction in the Angolan civil war. He later resigned from the CIA, becoming the highest-ranking officer to both resign and write a book denouncing the CIA. That book, published in 1978, was In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, which of course made enemies within the Agency, but which resulted in no convictions of Stockwell, because he carefully avoided naming any personnel whose names were not already public, or disclosing any state secrets.)
But now, I could see that Wilcox really was a diplomat, rather than the spook he’d been when we’d first met. I could also see, even more clearly than I had before, the absolute permeability of any purported membranes, within the US Government’s foreign policy establishment, between the executive branch, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies. Remembering people like Colonel Edward Lansdale, I should throw in the military services as well.
I decided not to make an issue of what I knew, at least not then. What was I going to do: tell my story to a bunch of well-meaning superliberals with whom I shared, by now, almost no mutual respect? What would come of it, if anything?
It paid off, really: in another aside, Wilcox gave me some information, not yet made public, that he said would shortly be announced by the (George H.W.) Bush Administration. He gave me the information only after he’d made it conditional upon the accepted professional agreement, between diplomat and journalist, and we had agreed on the wording. I could not quote him by name or position; the wording we agreed on was something like “a highly placed U.S. Government source in East Jerusalem.” Soon after our return to the U.S., I heard, on a national newscast, precisely the announcement he had predicted. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. By the time I returned home, my ability to interest any serious media outlet in a news story by me was nil: the trip had been partly paid for by peace organizations in Santa Cruz, which compromised my objectivity with, for example, the Los Angeles Times, with whom I’d recently had a special correspondent’s credential. That credential, which had been for the purpose of the Drew Harrington story, soon evaporated anyway. The rush of major media to “get aboard the train” for purposes of reporting on the recent Gulf war seemed to suddenly end any enthusiasm for negative reports about the U.S. military. I had virtually nothing useful anyway: my ability to gather material that I considered real and useful had been reduced virtually to zero by the impossibly short leash the peace people kept me on.
It was nearing time to go home. In a way, I’d enjoyed being in both Israeli and Arab neighborhoods. Though the diaspora had sent Jews to the far reaches of the earth, events since World War II had brought many of those same people home to the new state of Israel, and they had brought with them a plethora of languages, foods, musics, dress, and customs that made it a pleasure, for me at least, to walk down a busy street in Tel Aviv and just absorb the stuff bombarding all senses from shops and passersby. I remember walking with others in our group along a crowded city street one day and noticing a sign in Russian in front of a shop, with a middle-aged man leaning against the sign. I couldn’t help saying “zdravstvuitye,” and making eye contact with him as I passed. The guy grabbed me, grinning all over himself, and wouldn’t let me go until he’d grilled me about where I’d learned Russian, when I’d been there, what city… I finally had to run several blocks down the street to catch up with the others. As I was running down the street, I remembered our first hours in the country, after walking across the Allenby Bridge, when one of us had picked up a Spanish-speaking accent as the guy in the immigration booth asked us the questions required to complete our documents, and asked him, “Es que Usted habla español?” And of course the guy lit up and replied with a wide smile, ”O sí, yo soy nacido en Argentina…”, which was a way of saying “I was born…” that was foreign to those of us who’d used our Spanish in Mexico and Central America.
The fact that our documents to enter Israel were being processed by an Argentinian Jew reminded me that there was not only a sizeable Jewish community in Argentina, but a significant number of German expatriates as well. I remembered reading Eichmann in my Hands, an account by the Mossad agent Peter Z. Malkin, of his own capture of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s chief executioner for the “Final Solution,” on a street in Buenos Aires. (Malkin’s co-author was Harry Stein.)
Being a habitué of cafés in my very soul, I personally thought it would have been delightful to just hang out in Tel Aviv eating food from a different part of the world every meal, listening to jazz of many colors... that is, if one weren’t always worried that one of these interesting people walking in might be some poor soul who’d been promised seventy virgins when he got to heaven after blowing as many of us as possible to hell.
Another multicultural experience proved not so happy as my interchange with the Russian emigré shopkeeper. That was my cab ride, alone and late at night, from somewhere in the Jewish sector of Jerusalem. I’d given the driver the name of the street our lodgings were on, and climbed into the cab. We drove for some distance through the city, and I saw the driver begin to get visibly nervous. Finally he slowed, crept along for a couple of more blocks, then stopped. “No,” I said, “not here. It’s farther on.” I motioned for him to drive ahead.
“Non, non, ici, pas plus… les Arabes… ici, c’est tout….» Shit. The poor guy’s Israeli, not Palestinian; he’s scared; speaks only French, among European languages; and isn’t driving any farther into the Arab sector, period. He reached behind his seat, opened the back door, and motioned me out of his cab. I paid him; he pointed in the direction I should go. I got out and walked, and in the small hours of the morning found my meandering way back to the place we were staying.
As our allotted time in Israel was winding down, I, at least, was ready to quit the place. I was glad I’d come, though I had no great hopes of publishing significant stories about what I’d seen and learned. The information and images kicking around my head those last couple of days in East Jerusalem were of a fleeting and general nature, stuff that would at least (and perhaps at most) lend context and shading to my future reading of the news from this part of the world.
We had returned to Amman, and had a day or so to wait before our flight to London. The delegation’s organizers came around and offered one more meeting, to those of us who might be interested, with a group of men in a long-established Palestinian refugee area on the outskirts of Amman. They didn’t push it as being very important, and enthusiasm for another meeting wasn’t very high. The stressful atmosphere in which we’d been moving for a little over a week had put most people in a mood to relax and wait for the flight that would be the first leg of our journey home.
Four or five of us crammed ourselves into a small taxi and rode through the more prosperous part of the city to an area that, while not squalid, consisted of very simple buildings squeezed tightly together along narrow streets. We were told that this was a long-standing refugee area, which had begun to be populated when the first of about seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of the area taken over by Israelis in the years following the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
We stopped in front of a nondescript building pretty much like the others on the street. After agreeing with the driver that he’d return for us in a little over an hour, we entered the building, climbed a flight of stairs, and filed into a small room where stood five or six Arab men, in their 40’s and 50’s, who were waiting for us. There were some simple chairs arranged in a rough circle, but not quite enough for all of us. The men were polite but terse: they insisted that we sit. All wore business suits and ties except for one man in full Arab dress, a brown robe with white kafiyeh.
Introductions, of sorts, were made. Each of us “delegates,” upon being named, received a curt nod from one or two of our hosts. They already knew the nature and affiliation of our group, and seemed bored with us as individuals – that is, until I was introduced as the journalist traveling with the group. That sent a jolt through them, and one of their number said, in clear English, that they had not been told there would be a journalist with the group, and they did not like it. He pointed at my camera, which still had its lens cap on, and made it clear that there should be no pictures taken, period.
The meeting proceeded - it certainly wasn’t an “interview,” or “discussion,” or “presentation;” it was more like a series of diatribes, with the Palestinians speaking, and with us listening in stunned silence. The men – all of them – were highly educated, and very articulate in English, which was virtually unaccented, though some sounded more British, some more American. I remember that there was a doctor among them, and at least one architect or engineer. They were all introduced as having postgraduate academic credentials, and it showed plainly in their speech. Their knowledge of the history of Arab peoples in general and Palestinians in particular, going back a thousand years and more, seemed, to me at least, to be both deep and wide. They also knew, better than any of us did, the history of Western interventions – especially American – from the time of the Crusades to the recent war with Iraq.
And they were angry.
At first they all spoke in the modulated tones of men who were obviously leaders in a culture where such men did not insult guests, even if those guests were seen privately as enemies.
There had been times, in my intermittent career as a journalist, when my very presence, and more certainly my status as journalist, were so patently hateful to the person or people I was observing, that I put away the camera and notepad and just watched, just listened – at times in the interest of staying alive, as in the case of standing next to the Cuban mercenary who called himself “Perico,” in the contra camp along the Río Coco between Honduras and Nicaragua in 1985, as he pointedly showed me his garrote. And, at times, out of simple respect for the overarching human reality unfolding in front of me in that moment. Like the moment during that same trip to the Río Coco, when I actually saw the skin color of the four North American Indians I was with turn from their natural color to what seemed to me to be an almost ashen gray.
I had thought the light and the speed of my film sufficient to capture that reality with the camera. But what changed me in that moment from journalist to simple witness was the palpable orb of grief that suddenly settled over the group of four North American Indians upon being led by North American mercenaries to a cluster of skulls of Miskito Indians. Those Indians had perished, we were told, as the Sandinista Army had driven them out of their villages (in this case, Tulin Bila) and forced them to flee at a speed faster than some of the old people could survive.
I closed my notebook without having written anything in it. But rather than feeling that we were about to sit through another more or less academic snoozer about Labor, Likud, Fatah, Hamas, and other groups, I soon got the feeling that we were in for a blast of keenly articulated fury that would go straight to the heart of the troubles in the region, and the United States’ presence there.
The first speakers were the men in business suits, whom I recall having been introduced as a doctor, an engineer, and a couple of men who had done postgraduate work in the humanities. A recurring theme was the shared sense of amazement at the degree to which each succeeding American administration had, in the eyes of educated Palestinians, betrayed their own founding documents and principles: government of laws, not of men; equal justice under the law, and so forth. As they spoke, I began to have a feeling similar to what one sees in a child who’s been betrayed by his parents in a particularly blatant manner.
The speakers began to get more and more personal: Who are you people? You, sitting here in this room. You say you are a democratic nation. Are you making your leaders accountable? And you say you are Christians. The way you, and your army, are acting here, in our part of the world - is this the way Christ would behave? Is this the way your Jesus would have you behave? As one speaker followed another, I got the clear impression that their anger was not just on behalf of their own Palestinian people, but that they increasingly saw the battle lines being drawn between all Israelis and all Americans, on the one hand, and all Arabs on the other. And all Muslims. And, indeed, all people other than ourselves.
It was there, in that room on the outskirts of Amman, that we first heard about the Rodney King incident, where several Los Angeles cops had been videotaped beating King past the point of submission, just a day or two before. We had not been watching CNN, but the rest of the world had, including these angry Arab men.
It seemed to me that the men in business suits had been quietly deferring to the man in the brown Arab robe and white kafiyeh. He was fully as fluent in English as the others. Now, as he spoke, he first expressed amazement that we hadn’t heard of Rodney King. Then his voice rose to a shout and his finger pointed angrily across the room at me. I assumed that because I was a journalist and perhaps also because I was clearly the oldest male in our group, that somehow made me even more personally culpable for crimes against his people than the younger members of our group. He gave vent to his rage: You! You have no respect for human beings other than yourselves… you don’t even respect your own! Your police beat this black man as if he were an animal… you fight a war against Arabs without even coming out on the field like men, you sit in an air-conditioned bubble([1]) and push buttons and kill Iraqis from a distance without even knowing who they are… but the whole world knows who YOU are, except you! You do not know who you are! You have no idea of the consequences of what you do in the world! What do we have to do to get your attention – blow up buildings in New York?
Since I am writing this from memory rather than from notes, the words above are a paraphrase, though a close one: that whole meeting was seared into my consciousness. The angry Palestinian’s last sentence, however – the question “What do we have to do to get your attention – blow up buildings in New York?” – is verbatim.
Ten years later, on that September morning in 2001, my friend Timm Turrentine called excitedly from The Hydrant, a bar in Joseph that was the only place he could find a television set to watch the repeated video clips of an airliner flying into one of the Twin Towers. He had meant to apologize for being late for work, but the magnitude of his news eclipsed the need for apology. It eclipsed everything, changed everything.
I hung up the phone with a feeling of great sadness, but no surprise: So now it’s begun.
[1] As he spoke, I remembered a brief flurry of news stories about a tidy method the U.S. had developed for overcoming Iraqi soldiers sheltering themselves against the Allied ground attack in long trenches along the Saudi/Iraqi border. A helicopter gunship and a bulldozer – probably a Rome plow – worked together: the gunship pinned the soldiers down in the trench as the bulldozer came along and buried them, alive and dead. One U.S. official, responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the helicopter’s gun camera tape, denied the request, saying “If that got out we’d never fight another war.” He seemed to think that was a bad idea.
