Buying the Night Flight (38 page)

However, I continued hoping that, as the situation in the Middle East indeed was changing -- Egypt had made peace, the
PLO
would accept a confederation with Jordan, Jordan would work with Arafat, even radical Iraq was changing -- we could arrive at a true peace, with security for Israel and a just solution for the displaced Palestinians. And there was one man in Israel who I believed -- and still believe -- could carry this through.

I interviewed Shimon Peres, the leader of the Labor Party, on a sparklingly beautiful April day atop the Mount of Olives, in the spring of 1981, with the single most spectacular view of the Old City of Jerusalem spread before us. Golden domes glowed in the spring sun, as this eloquent and rational man gave precisely the opposite viewpoint from Menachem Begin. Where Begin used the historic suffering of his people in the most evil of ways, not to transcend but to impose suffering on others, and to create a new, fortified ghetto that would lash out at everyone, Peres wanted to return Israel to its original transcendent and superbly decent dreams.

"I think there is an opening in the Middle East," Peres told me, speaking thoughtfully yet forcefully. "And we have to try our hand to take part." Then in words that echoed those spoken by Egyptian President Sadat three years ago, he said, "There is always a psycho logical dimension. Perhaps, today, the Arab world exists more in psychological terms than in political terms. We have to break the logjam of suspicion and hostility. What has happened is we've grown used to the jargon of belligerency and not the reality of peace.

"On local issues, we'd be willing to negotiate straight with the Palestinians on the West Bank -- and with the Jordanians also, if they like. After all, these Palestinians were the legitimate leaders there." He wanted to bring Jordan into the negotiating process with the eventual idea of a West Bank Palestinian entity confederated with Jordan (which was what any rational person looked to as the solution to the decades of misery and slaughter). "If Saudi Arabia came in [to the peace process], Jordan would," he went on. "We even see a change in the traditional, hard Iraqi position. The Iraqis are unhappy with Russia and they blame Russian technology for their problems in the war. This is a change, and a vacuum."

About the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, which now include upward of twenty thousand persons and which were the dishonorable tool for the annexation, Peres said, "They would re main, as would Arab settlers under Israel and Israeli settlers under Arab sovereignty. The main problem is not the settlers but settlement." He would "enlarge our relations with Egypt, which is the key: conclude the autonomy talks [for the Palestinians in the occupied territories] and start autonomy in a specific place and in good faith. I'd say the Gaza Strip would be a good place to begin."

Finally he outlined a fascinating new vision of the area, taking in the entire rift and sea area from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea to make it an "area of peace without threats and armaments." Peres's ideas, worked out over the previous four years, were not to create more hatred in this area of the great religions of the world, as Begin and his people are doing, but to build in this area the "infrastructure of goodwill from which we could begin" and to concentrate Israel's new policies on working in the Middle East itself instead of in Europe and in the rest of the world. In effect he believed in the "normalization" of the Jewish people that was the very crux of the dream of the original Zionists, while all of Begin's policies and all of his impulses were precisely and psychologically designed to keep the Jewish people forever in a ghetto, alone and despised and under attack from everyone without.

I left Peres that day feeling that I had seen and heard a man of perception and vision not seen since the halcyon days of Ben-Gurion. While Begin's unsavory coalition looked constantly backward, Peres was looking forward. But when the election came that June of 1981, Begin won over Peres by a hair's breadth. In the last days of the uniquely bitter and dishonest campaign waged by Begin, as his bully boys broke up Labor meetings and burned down Labor offices, Peres and other Labor leaders had desperately warned of "Jewish fascism." They could see what was happening to the state they had founded and loved.

In short, the coverage of Israel, with its pulls toward the very best in man and its tugs from the very worst, with its undertones of guilt and its overtones of rage, tormented me, as it has many journalists and diplomats and others who have covered it and worked with it. Yet it helped no one, certainly not Israel itself, not to tell the truth about it, as many Labor friends urged. The others, those who did not want the truth out, were leading Israel to a new holocaust and slaughter -- there was not the slightest question about it--and they were following blindly a mad leader who wanted, not Jewish right, but Jewish conquest. You cannot have both.

I suppose the Middle East was the most tormenting area for many journalists because there always was so much hope. Somewhere underneath, in deep-flowing currents never lost in history, we always really believed something could be done. On the parts of both Jews and Palestinians there was often a yearning for the other. They would remind you that, after all, they had historically lived together -- and it was completely true that the Moslems had always treated the Jews much better than the Christians had.

Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1977 the entire "hope" became palpable. Indeed, it was right there before our eyes. Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem, and it looked for a moment as though the whole world teetered on the brink of real change: only this time real, deep, lasting change. And suddenly I saw this change, before my eyes, in the Cairo Conference where the Israelis went to Cairo for the first time to meet with the Egyptians.

The mood was euphoric, contagious, unbelieving. My friend Zeev Schiff, the brilliant military analyst of the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz
stood in Cairo one of those golden days in the shadow of the pyramids shaking his head. "All these years, I've been studying this area in terms of military maps from the air," he said, a distinct sense of wonder in his voice. "Even the pyramids I saw from up there. Now, being down here, I can't quite absorb it all."

Quite unintentionally I came to cause the only "stir" of the entire Cairo Conference, which was noted for its remarkable harmony. Most of the press was staying at a jolly little motel, appropriately called the "Jolie Ville," right across from the historic Mena House Hotel, where the diplomats were housed. We had been warned to look for any "trouble," for it was believed that the Palestinian Left or other forces might try to disrupt the conference. There were Egyptian security men standing at the end of every arm of little cottages, and ... it was raining! It never rained in Cairo, never. Yet it was raining, giving an additional eerie turn to the mood.

The second night I returned from a pleasant dinner downtown and repaired in an appropriately jolly mood to my little room. I was lying in bed when I heard this "tick ... tick ... tick... ." It was exact, and it was exactly like a clock. Only there was no clock in the room. I dismissed it for a moment -- and then remembered all the warnings. When I called the security, they ran to the room, heard the ominous tick, and immediately evacuated me. I was lucky, because they just moved me to another room, where I immediately went to sleep.

In the morning when I was walking calmly across the lobby to breakfast, I heard this sort of muted hiss come up from some of my colleagues seated around the lobby. Then they started in unison to go "Tick ... tick ... tick."

What it appears happened, for I ignored their taunts and did not ask, was that as I was settled peacefully into my new room, the rest of the motel was evacuated from their rooms. The security men thought my
ticks
were a bomb, as I had myself feared. As my friends stood out in the rain, the security men discovered it was only the certain way the rain was falling upon my roof, which caused the terrifying
tick.
My colleagues never forgave me this contribution to the Cairo Conference.

The Cairo Conference and its mood, its transcendence, its beauty, did indeed show what
could
come in the Middle East. I went from there to Jerusalem, where I wrote with a deep hope and belief that history has seldom allowed me to express:

What has really happened here in the Middle East this last month is Christmas Wonder updated, if you will. The transformation of the spirit that is at the core of Christmas has just, to filch from the Bible, been made flesh....

We have tended to think that the transformations they created were magical or mystical things. Lightning bolts from heaven. Signs given because of grace or whim but not because of worth or virtue. Proper and even edifying to observe but not, if we are to be honest about it, really for us or for our time.

Well, maybe these few weeks in the Middle East have got me a little lightheaded, but they have led me to wonder why we cannot or do not think of updated wonder and, God forgive me, even updated miracles for our time. With this stroke of the typewriter, I forever decry leaving the divine to the dead, and I declare myself for modernizing wonder, transforming love and redefining transformation....

So what, then, is left? Hard work, complicated work. People who work to heal not only people's bodies but their psyches. People who work to feed people and regulate the overpopulation that kills and maims. People who study the psychology of nations and work doggedly in the diplomatic realm to bring an Egypt and an Israel together because they saw that, despite all the apparent hatred, there was a deep longing for transformation. People like President Sadat who have the courage that Churchill called the most important virtue because it "guarantees" all the rest.

Here you have real transformation in our time. Here you have the sense of wonder acted out before you in modern ballet and the prophetic tradition democratized by modern communications that include everyone, not just the way-siders that Paul met on the road to Damascus. Here you have my friend Zeev seeing the universally horrible bombing maps transformed into the soul-quenching beauty and mystery of the pyramids and Sphinx, once he can touch them.

In the spring of 1973, I got to know Kemal Nasser, then the spokesman of the
PLO
. Kemal was a square-shouldered man, husky, with a good face whose eyes gave him away. Though working for the
PLO
, his eyes and his smile were the eyes and smile of the poet, which is what he was. He was a good one. He never fought, never carried a gun. At night, by candlelight, he still wrote.

One afternoon the Lebanese diplomat Clovis Maksuud and his wife-to-be, Hallah, and Abdul Karim Aboul Nasser, the columnist for the respected paper
an-Nahar,
and I had a memorable lunch. It went on for six hours at an exquisite blue and white fish restaurant that hung off the rocks over the sea.

Kemal was in absolutely top form, telling stories about his old friend Yasser Arafat and about himself. Though they were the same age Kemal joked that, "I told him that I was a babe in arms when he was in Jerusalem." Kemal lived in the downtown Hamra district, and Arafat wanted him to move to the Sabra refugee camp for his own protection. "I told the Old Man [the nickname for Arafat], 'Better to die in Hamra than to live in Sabra.'"

How telling.

Later, as we walked down the street, the Mediterranean Sea spreading out before us toward Spain and Italy and then the New World, he said to me, a sudden sadness overtaking him, "We must protect this city, we must. It is all we have left."

Looking at his face then, I saw a terrible vulnerability behind all the tough pronouncements he made so confidently. He had been talking a lot about dying recently; all his friends noticed it. Yet the next night, when he took me to visit his aunts who were visiting from the West Bank, he was again the happy, debonair man of the world.

Through the next weeks in Beirut I was struck and at times overcome by a strange, haunting sense of things ending. I thought it must be the unusually early hot weather, because that early, cloying part of spring has always depressed me. It promises too much, and we are driven to dream of impossible heights and perfect emotions that we never can reach.

I went from Beirut to Baghdad. One day I was walking into the archaeological museum with a young Italian diplomat when he suddenly spoke. "Oh, I meant to tell you," he said. "You did hear about the killings in Beirut, didn't you?"

I stared at him. I had the consciousness of my heart stopping as the question hung there in the air.

"The Israelis... " he stuttered. "They sent commandos right into the center of Beirut. They killed three Palestinian leaders. Abu Youssef and Kemal Nasser and..."

So Kemal was dead -- one more statistic in the slaughterhouse.

From then on, as I continued to travel about the Middle East, I felt somehow driven to know more about the Kemal Nasser whom I had known so little. So I talked with his friends and family, and a picture of him began to emerge. He was often playful, always romantic. He loved to sit up all night in coffeehouses, arguing poetry, love, revolution, in his dramatic, ultra-British accent. "He was such a presence," Abdul Karim said. Yet in his last months his hulking, graying, forty-seven-year-old body seemed to tire as though the growing brutality of the Middle East conflict was wearing it out. He talked of having a fifty-fifty chance, perhaps of retiring and "leaving things for the young people."

After his death Kemal did not return to the stern and stony hills of the West Bank, where he had been born and nurtured. He was buried in Beirut in the commandos' cool, dark "martyrs' cemetery," under black cedar trees. But when I was on the West Bank later that spring and drove up to Bir Zeit College, which had been founded by his family, they were still mourning him.