Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (11 page)

Knight and I tried to evaluate the situation calmly. True, Terry Anderson, the Associated Press bureau chief in Beirut, had been held for years by Hizbullah guerrillas, chained to radiators in a succession of tiny cells in the Lebanese capital's southern suburbs. But Gaza was smaller and still vastly more orderly than anarchic 1980s Lebanon, and the chances of our rotting here for the long term seemed highly unlikely. For that matter, Palestinian militants hadn't demonstrated a grudge toward Western journalists and indeed, usually seemed to cultivate us; they saved their antipathy for the Israelis. The Palestinian intifada would take a more virulent turn in the months ahead, with horrific suicide bombings in Israeli nightclubs and cafés and on buses (suicide attacks would escalate dramatically, from six in 2000 to eighty-four in 2001), and occasional threats against foreign journalists; in 2007 BBC correspondent Alan Johnson would be grabbed in Gaza by a militant group calling itself the Army of Islam, held for 114 days, and repeatedly threatened with execution. But this was all in the future. On top of everything else, that excellent meal seemed somehow reassuring. Would anyone who harbored evil intentions toward us have bothered to serve us such a spread? The gunmen were young, impetuous, immature, perhaps, but surely they didn't intend to harm us.

That assessment turned out to be correct. After three hours of isolation and mounting boredom, we were permitted to make cell phone calls to our head offices. I reached the editor-in-chief of
Newsweek
, Rick Smith, at eight o'clock in the morning New York time, and explained what was happening. One hour later, CNN broadcast the news of our kidnapping. Grinning behind
his kaffiyeh, Abu Mohammed handed us our cell phones back and profusely apologized “for the inconvenience.” The gunmen shook our hands. Abu Mohammed sent us on our way with an invitation to return the next day, “and we will serve you an even better lunch.”

A taxi took us to the seaside apartment of Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian Authority's chief of preventative security in Gaza. Amid probing questions from the chain-smoking Dahlan, we dined on more meze and kebabs for two hours with what seemed like the entire upper echelon of the Palestinian Authority. No serious invitation in the Middle East, it seemed, could take place without piles of food and drink; it was a cultural code, a deep-seated sense of obligation, felt as intensely by the men who had kidnapped us as by the men who were now determined to hunt them down. According to Dahlan and his PA colleagues, the “Fatah Hawks” weren't members of Yasser Arafat's political organization at all, but rather “rogue elements” and “unruly youths” who needed to be punished. From the sharp tone of Dahlan's questions and the murmured asides to his generals and police commanders, I got the sense that there would be no second helping of chicken kebabs and flat breads with the Fatah Hawks. Our former captors, I presumed, were toast.

That night, on the drive back to Jerusalem, I gave a phone interview to a colleague at
Newsweek
in New York. Asked how we'd been treated during our four hours in detention, I told him that I'd only fleetingly felt in danger, and mentioned the feast that Knight and I had been served. Hours later, a short article appeared on the
Newsweek
Web site: “Hammer says he never feared his captors would hurt him or Knight. ‘They never threatened us or pointed their guns at us,' Hammer says. ‘They actually fed us one of the best meals I've eaten in Gaza.' ”

I couldn't have imagined at the time that a single off-the-cuff comment about food, made partly in jest, would shadow me for the rest of my Middle Eastern tour. Yet within days the taunts, criticism, and, yes, outrage came
pouring in. In the immediate aftermath, Israeli journalists phoned me simply to verify that I'd been quoted accurately. That should have been my tip-off. Soon, interviews conducted with Israeli politicians and military officers were invariably prefaced with, “Are you the guy who said his kidnappers fed him a good lunch?” Bestowing on me one of its Dishonest Reporting Awards for 2001, the pro-Israeli “media watchdog” site
www.honestreporting.com
declared, “One would expect a kidnap victim to be traumatized and angry. But Hammer had only compliments for his Palestinian captors, as described in
Newsweek
.” A media critic named Samuel Bahn cited my comment as evidence of how Western journalists bent over backward to stay on good terms with the militants. “Journalists filing reports perceived to be harmful to the Palestinian cause, will not be likely permitted to reenter and could encounter a problem while in the territories,” the blogger declared. “[After]
Newsweek's
Israel Bureau Chief Joshua Hammer was kidnapped . . . rather than criticize his kidnappers, Hammer had [nothing but] positive words for them.” The
Jerusalem Post
made reference to the kidnapping in a discussion of an article I wrote in April 2002 about a teenage female suicide bomber and her teenage female victim. Despite my obvious pro-Palestinian sympathies as evidenced by the kidnapping experience, the writer declared, the piece about the bomber had shown surprising balance.

Even the
Princeton Alumni Weekly
, my college alumni magazine, referenced the kidnapping in a review of a book I later wrote about the intifada: “Hammer, who rejects charges of bias by some readers, sometimes has been a source of controversy himself. In 2001 a pro-Israel group criticized him for not voicing outrage over his own mini-kidnapping by armed Palestinians in Rafah to protest U.S. and British news coverage. After his release, Hammer said, ‘They actually fed us one of the best meals I've eaten in Gaza.' He says he knew he wasn't in danger.” By this point abductions of Western journalists and others by militants in the Middle East had become a serious, sometimes gruesome business. In 2002 terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda had abducted
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi,
Pakistan, and videotaped his decapitation. (The 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would later claim that he personally executed Pearl.) And in chaotic Baghdad, al-Qaeda in Iraq militants had carried out a spate of kidnappings and executions of Western relief workers and contractors, including the Irish-born country director for CARE, Margaret Hassan. Amid the carnage and terror, my lighthearted comment praising militant hospitality seemed, perhaps, off-kilter. But it was made, I reminded myself, in a pre-9/11 world, a more innocent time. The divide had grown wider and the conflict uglier, and journalists, like relief workers and other noncombatants, had become fair game. The lavish meal seemed an expression of civility and hospitality that would be difficult to imagine now.

Then in early 2003, I visited the office of the Israeli media relations director in Jerusalem. A hawk-faced right-winger who routinely denied Palestinian translators accreditation and permission to enter Israel, the media man had taken a dislike to me shortly after my arrival in Jerusalem. The kidnapping and my praise of the militants' cuisine had intensified his antipathy. I'd gone to see him to follow up on a letter I'd written requesting permission to interview, for the book, an imprisoned suicide-bomb cell commander from the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. I had reason to believe that the media man either had never passed on the letter to the prison authorities, or had recommended that the authorities deny my request. I was pissed off and wanted an explanation.

He sneered at me when I confronted him in his office. “Eaten any good meals in captivity lately?” he taunted.

I told him I'd heard he'd intervened to stop me from interviewing the prisoner. “That's a lie,” he said.

“I heard it from reliable sources,” I said.

“You want to know something?” he said, coming out from behind his desk and moving toward me. “If it were up to me, I wouldn't let you inside that prison.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I don't want to humanize these people. And that's exactly what you'd do.”

“So you
did
block my request!”

“And everybody knows you staged your own kidnapping to get yourself some attention.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”

And with that, he shoved me out of his office and slammed the door.

It has been nearly seven years now since anyone has confronted me with the incontrovertible proof of my pro-Palestinian bias—the meal comment. The last time was when I participated in a panel discussion at Princeton University during reunions in June 2004. I was there to discuss matters I thought were important—the future of peace in the Middle East, how to prevent yet more generations of Israelis and Palestinians distrusting and even hating each other—but a member of the panel came to the meeting with my lunch on his mind. “If you remember,” he said, after I'd finished a spiel criticizing Israel's policy of targeted assassinations, which often ended up killing many civilians along with militants, “this is the journalist who praised his captors for the lunch they served him after taking him hostage in Gaza.” My eyes rolled and I tried to answer him with a measured tone and more politeness than I had shown the Israeli press director.

In March 2011 I returned to Israel and the Palestinian territories, visiting the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, historic Hebron, and other notorious clash points. The region was significantly calmer than the roiling mess I'd left behind in 2004, but it didn't take me very long to see how little, really, had changed. Once again I found myself whipsawed between Arabs and Jews, between settlers and (former) militants, between conflicting historical narratives. And once again I realized that in this charged environment, even the most innocent gestures can bring one grief. Desperate
for a bite to eat outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron—a holy site to which Muslims and Jews have shared access—I was faced with a choice: patronize the Jewish pizza shop favored by a settler acquaintance, or the falafel stand run by a friend of my Palestinian guide. I hesitated, I waffed, I looked them both in the eye. In the end, I decided to go hungry.

JASON BURKE

NOT MUCH HAPPENED IN ISLAMABAD IN 1998. NOT MUCH HAPPENED
in Pakistan, in fact—or at least not much that troubled editors, viewers, readers, or policy makers in Europe or the United States. The country had slid inexorably away from international attention since the end of the war fought by the mujahideen against Soviet troops in neighboring Afghanistan almost a decade before. Most media organizations covered Pakistan from India. It was not a big story. The rediscovery of Pakistan and Afghanistan would come, with breathless haste, on September 12, 2001.

Just behind my apartment in Islamabad that year was a plot of land covered in mimosa trees, wild cannabis, and scrub. It was a graveyard, and though no one tended it or came to grieve at the dozen or so mounds of earth that lay among the rubbish under the trees, no one built on it either—though the potential for profitable development of such a prime piece of urban real estate was high. To one side of the graveyard was the substantial embassy of North Korea, to whom, it was whispered, Pakistan sold blueprints for nuclear bombs. These rumors were later proved to be at least partially true. Watching the embassy were two plainclothes intelligence agents, who usually sat on the pavement in the shade below a eucalyptus tree and read
popular local-language newspapers. I knew them quite well after a while, and they smiled sheepishly when we greeted each other.

On the other side of the graveyard was the home of Benazir Bhutto. Those watching the Koreans could thus watch the former head of state, too. Out of power since her second government had been dismissed by the president on the prompting of the military two years before, Bhutto was fighting a series of graft allegations in the courts, and the intelligence services naturally wanted to know whom she was meeting. A few weeks after my arrival in Islamabad I was one of those giving their name to the bored policemen outside Zardari House—her home was then named after her controversial husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who had been in prison on corruption charges for several years.

I had received an invitation from Bhutto to come and “take tea.” She was talking to her lawyers when I arrived, and for the first half-hour of our interview she went over what she claimed were the flaws in the case against her. She said she was a victim of a political conspiracy. This was at least partially true.

Since the death of military dictator Zia-ul-Haq in 1987, Pakistan had had four democratically elected governments. Two had been Bhutto's. Two had been those of her rival, Nawaz Sharif, scion of a Punjabi industrialist and leader of the Pakistan Muslim League. Sharif had been removed from power himself after a disastrous period from 1990 to 1993, but not before imprisoning Bhutto's husband. Back in power in 1996, Sharif had relaunched his investigations against his archrival. The allegations against Bhutto were serious, involving tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks, ownership of mansions in Britain, jewelry bought and held in Swiss banks. Bhutto's father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, charismatic and cynical in equal measure, had founded his Pakistan People's Party, which his daughter had inherited, on a mix of populist socialist and nationalist rhetoric and with the slogan
roti, kapre, makan
(food, clothes, and shelter). If the PML was the party of the Punjab,
Pakistan's wealthiest province, and of rich businessmen or shopkeepers, then the PPP was supposed to be the party of the poor, especially the rural poor. The allegations of looting her country's exchequer, even if most were directed at her husband, hurt politically, if not personally.

Bhutto, forty-five years old, was wearing a blue
shalwar kameez
and her trademark white
dupatta
or scarf. Pearls the size of marbles dangled from gold clasps at her ears, and she wore a ring the size of a small matchbox on her finger on which I counted at least seventy-two individual diamonds in twelve rows. As she spoke she delicately nibbled cubes of
burfi
, sweetmeats popular throughout South Asia.
Burfi
is made from condensed milk cooked with sugar until it forms a solid cube of flaky paste. It is often mixed with rose water, cardamom, coconut, mango, pistachios, or cashew nuts, sometimes even cheese, all of which take the edge off the otherwise tongue-curling sweetness. Cut into mouthful-size blocks and saved for special occasions,
burfi
is decorated with flakes of silver foil and takes on a festive air.