The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (18 page)

Bibi’s older brother, Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, was also a legend. He served as commander of The Unit and was killed in July 1976, during the famous Operation
Entebbe.
²
After Yoni was killed, Nurit and I visited the family again. I will never forget the look on their father’s face, the unmistakable look of a bereaved father.

My naïve admiration for Bibi went on for many years. However, when he entered politics, my admiration quickly faded. He seemed insincere and opportunistic, and his views were uncompromisingly hawkish. It was obvious to me that no government under him was going to advance the cause of peace.

Netanyahu was elected prime minister in 1996, sweeping into office after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder—capitalizing on the country’s total disillusionment with the Oslo peace process and a rash of suicide bombings, which Netanyahu promised to put a stop to. He had campaigned under the slogan, “Making a Safe Peace.” Things didn’t seem very safe or peaceful at the moment.

After it was confirmed that Smadar was killed, Bibi had called Nurit to offer condolences, adding, “I don’t suppose Rami would want me to come.” He was smart enough to know Rami and the rest of us abhorred his politics and held him responsible for Smadar’s death. Nurit’s response was unambiguous: “No, he would not.”

Nurit and he were like brother and sister, yet Bibi did not go to Smadar’s funeral, and he did not visit, even once, during the week of mourning, the
shiva
.

Ten years later, in the summer of 2007, Nurit and I and my boys ran into Bibi at the coffee shop by the pool at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Bibi was there with his oldest daughter. He was not in office at the time, and he was as cordial and personable as ever. We all talked, and he mentioned that he still remembered me as a child. Nurit, too, was friendly and relaxed. After he took his leave, Eitan, who by then was almost 13, noticed that this person seemed important. “Who is this guy?” he asked.

“He used to be the prime minister, which is kind of like the president.”

Doron, who was almost 11 and missed nothing, asked, “Why does he have bodyguards?”

Nurit quietly sipped her Earl Grey tea. “He must have done something really terrible and now he is afraid for his life,” my sister said, comparing the hawkish politician to mafia bosses who have blood on their hands. As she saw it, every Israeli
politician who did not end the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians was responsible for the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians. She reasoned, and still does, that this is not a question of policy or inability to reach an agreement but callousness, greed for land, a desire to rule, and a lack of will to end the conflict.

After Smadar’s death, I stayed in Jerusalem for the week of shiva and then had to return home and resume my routine.
How do people do this?
I kept thinking.
How do people keep on living as though nothing happened?
So many songs have been sung, poems and stories written, about this feeling—the feeling one has when the unthinkable happens, yet the world doesn’t end. Bialik described it in his epic poem “
Ir Hahariga
” (“In the City of Slaughter”) when he wrote: “The sun rose, the trees bloomed and the butcher slew.”

It seemed impossible to carry on. My mother Zika always said that life was stronger than death, and she was right. Doron was a year old, Eitan was barely four, and both Gila and I had businesses to run.

I had always taken the political situation in Israel to heart, but after Smadar’s death, it became deeply personal, even more so than before. Up to that point, I was fine with the decision I had made many years earlier not to be active politically, but after Smadar was killed I was no longer content to sit still.

Unfortunately, no one around me cared much about the Middle East. Our lives in southern California did not include any Israeli or even American-Jewish friends, and in our immediate surroundings people knew little and cared little about my homeland and its problems. Besides, bringing up the issue of Israel-Palestine with the friends we did have seemed burdensome, outside the realm of topics people cared about. On top of that, talking about Smadar was always awkward. It took me a long time before I could even mention what happened to her without choking up. And when I did, people didn’t know what to say or think. I couldn’t really talk to anyone unless I called my mother or sisters in Jerusalem.

As time wore on, the urge to get involved, to be active, became stronger and stronger, but I couldn’t find an outlet for it. Rami became involved with the Bereaved Families Forum, an organization that brings together Israeli and Palestinian families dedicated to promoting reconciliation. In 1998, my brother-in-law met, as he describes it, “a large and impressive man with a knitted
kippah
on his head.” Rami assumed this meant the man was a member of Gush Emunim, the right-wing Israeli settler organization. (The
kippah
, or yarmulke, was a sign of a casual Jewish Orthodoxy that had been co-opted by the settlers.) He was mistaken. Itzhak Frankenthal told Rami that his son was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas militants in 1994, and that after that he had founded an organization for people who lost their loved ones to the conflict but still believed in peace.

Suddenly Rami recognized the man’s face. He had been one of the thousands of people who had visited their apartment during the shiva. Rami was furious. “How dare you walk into the home of someone who just lost a child and talk about peace and reconciliation? Where do you get the nerve to do that?”

Frankenthal was undeterred; the pain of the bereaved was not new to him. According to Rami, “He was not offended by my words. He calmly and patiently invited me to come and see with my own eyes what the meetings were like.”

So Rami went to a meeting. “I stood watching as people arrived by bus. Old Palestinian women who had lost their children, Palestinian fathers alongside Israelis from all walks of life who had lost loved ones. For the first time in my life I was deeply and truly feeling hopeful.” From that moment on Rami gave his heart and soul to the Bereaved Families Forum and the cause of reconciliation. The forum’s message was simple: If bereaved parents could sit and talk with one another, so could everyone else. There was a partner for peace, and peace was possible.

“From that day on, I had a reason to get out of bed each morning,” Rami said. He dedicated his life to this one thing, going from place to place, from person to person, and telling anyone who would listen that ours was not a fate that could not be changed. “It was not written anywhere that we had to live like this and sacrifice our children.”

Meanwhile, Nurit had been speaking and writing extensively about the need to stop the bloodbath, pointing an accusing finger at anyone who sent children to kill or die. The
New York Times
quoted her saying that the Israeli government led by Netanyahu “sacrificed our children for their megalomania – for their need to control, oppress, dominate.”
³
Two days later, she was quoted in the
Los Angeles Times:
“This is the fruit of their (Israel’s) misdoings…they want to kill the peace process and blame the Arabs.”
⁴
Her words drew an enormous amount of attention both in Israel and abroad. In December 2001, she received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament. She received it jointly with Izzat Ghazzawi, a Palestinian writer and peace activist whose son was shot by Israeli soldiers.

I took Eitan to the ceremony; Doron was still young so Gila stayed home with him. The two of us met the rest of the family in Paris, where we spent a few days, and then we all took the train to Strasbourg, France, where the European Parliament sits in session. It was a moving event and Nurit invited Dr. Widad Sartawi, the widow of our father’s partner Issam, to join us. Nurit delivered her speech in French at a session of the parliament.

“I dedicate this award to the memory of my father Matti Peled and Dr. Issam Sartawi,” she told the audience. “And I thank my mother and Madame Sartawi for joining us here today.” I couldn’t hold back my tears, and it seemed neither could anyone else, for there was not a single dry eye.

Rami and Nurit’s devotion to reconciliation had increased my already considerable admiration for them. When I visited Jerusalem, I would often accompany
them to meetings or go with them when they gave talks in schools or visited groups who wanted to learn about the conflict. I had never encountered such deeply devoted and principled people in my life. The connection between those who lost loved ones and chose to reach out instead of lash out is a deep and intense one. Through my sister and brother-in-law I met many fascinating people, and I found myself wishing I could do something similar back in San Diego. Only I had no idea where to start.

1
In Israel, we address people by the most common and diminutive name possible. Ehud is Udi. Avraham is Avi, Rami, or in my case Miko. Benjamin is Beni or Bibi, even if he is the prime minister.

2
On June 27, 1976, two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and two Germans hijacked an Air France flight en route from Tel Aviv to Paris and diverted it to Entebbe, Uganda. They demanded the release of 40 Palestinians held in Israel and 13 other detainees imprisoned in Kenya, France, Switzerland, and West Germany. They threatened that if these demands were not met, they would begin to kill hostages. The hostages were held for a week in the transit hall of Entebbe Airport. Four Israeli planes flew secretly to Entebbe Airport under cover of night, infiltrated the terminal, killed the hijackers (three hostages were also killed in the crossfire), and evacuated the hostages under fire from the Ugandan military, killing about 45 Ugandan troops. Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu was the only Israeli soldier killed.

3
Serge Schmemann, “Netanyahu’s Hard Line Faces Rising Israeli Dissent,”
The New York Times
, September 9, 1997.

4
Rebecca Trounson, “Mother Blames Israelis Policies for Child’s Death,”
The Los Angeles Times
, September 11, 1997.

My journey into Palestine began in San Diego in 2000. I was 39 years old.

I used to think of Jerusalem as a “mixed” city because both Israelis and Palestinians live there. The sad reality is that Israeli and Palestinian communities in Jerusalem are completely segregated. As I look back on my childhood in Jerusalem, I realize that I never had an Arab friend, or even a close acquaintance. There was “us” and there was “the Arabs,” and we might as well have been living on different planets.

I assumed that we lived separate lives because we were so different: Arabs spoke a different language, they went to different schools, and it seemed to me that they even wore different clothes; their schools usually required uniforms and they generally dressed in a more formal and conservative manner than we did. Their food was different, and whereas the society I knew was very relaxed about mixing men and women, in Arab circles that was not common. All of this I somehow knew without ever meeting or speaking to Arabs. When, on a trip somewhere with family or friends, we would stop at an Arab town, it seemed dusty and backward, which reinforced my preconceived notion that Arabs were poor and less developed than us.

I was 10 or 11 when I began asking questions. I remember once during a trip we visited a very poor village somewhere in the Negev. The children did not look like us, and I asked my father why they were so dirty. He did not reply. I remember asking him once why it was that Arab men beat their wives, as though this was a fact that everyone knew. It was another stereotype I had picked up somewhere. He became very angry and once again he did not respond, which of course I did not understand. My mother tried to get him to engage and talk to me about this, but he was not willing to even acknowledge such questions. By then he was teaching Arabic literature, and I think he was angered by these characterizations, and by the fact that his own son was bringing them home. Not knowing how to deal with this other than through anger, he chose to say nothing.

As an adult, my more liberal views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict set me apart from other Israeli and Jewish friends, and I constantly felt conflicted and unsettled. Whenever I returned to Israel I found that my old friends, some of whom used to share my views, had moved toward the consensus, which in Israel
was becoming more chauvinistic and constantly shifting to the right. When my best friend’s son was about to be drafted, I asked the boy where he was going to serve and he told me he wanted to join the Special Forces.

I looked at my friend in surprise.

“You know that what they do is wrong—didn’t you tell him?” I asked my friend later.

“You don’t understand,” my friend said. “You don’t care about my son, all you care about are your Palestinian friends.”

“Yes, I care about my Palestinian friends and what the Special Forces do to them, but this will backfire, and this will hurt your son, too. How could you not tell him?” That was the last time we spoke.

When I met Jewish Americans, my position on the Arab-Israeli conflict made them uncomfortable. American Jews for the most part wanted to believe that Israel was good and that Arabs were bad. I remember visiting a foot doctor who was Jewish. Once he realized I was Jewish and from Israel he allowed himself to unleash a few venomous anti-Arab remarks, thinking I must feel the same way about “these fucking Arabs.” At first I was so shocked I was speechless. Then I dropped off a brochure published by the Bereaved Families Forum, to give him some food for thought. I never went to see him after that.

He was not the only one to do that around me. More and more I could sense an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment taking over what I had always thought was “moderate” America. If I had any regular contact with local Jewish people I could not talk about politics in the Middle East because it would get in the way of our friendship. Needless to say few of these friendships lasted very long. I remember thinking once that if I were to set the issue aside, stop talking and thinking about it, and move on with my life, then maybe I would just “get over it.”

But after Smadar died, I cared so much that it hurt and I realized that getting over it was not an option. The political reality in my homeland would continue to follow me, not to say haunt me, for as long as I lived, regardless of where I chose to make my home. I searched and searched for an outlet, for something I could do in southern California, and the final push to make me become more active came almost three years after Smadar was killed.

As always, the process was tied to internal Israeli politics. In 1999, Israel had elected Ehud Barak, who promised he would negotiate with the Palestinians and end the conflict once and for all. My mother was visiting us in Coronado right after the elections and we had dinner with Marshall Saunders, a good friend and mentor of mine. He asked my mother, “So Zika, what do you make of Mr. Barak, your new prime minister?”

“He is just another general like the rest of them,” my mother said. “I have no reason to believe that things will be any different.” I, on the other hand, was full of optimism, and I had no idea she felt that way.

In the summer of 2000, Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat met at Camp David in Maryland at the invitation of President Bill Clinton to finalize and seal a peace agreement. Arafat insisted it was premature to hold a summit, but his opinion was ignored and the summit was convened on July 11. It gave rise to great expectations around the world. I, too, was buoyed: I really expected the leaders would finalize the process and it would result in peace; I chose to believe that Barak would pick up where Rabin left off before he was murdered and that he was serious about peace and compromise; and I chose to believe a peaceful resolution in the shape of a two-state solution was inevitable.

As the days went by, word was that all the parties had left to do was to sign on the dotted line. But the talks went on and on, with no sign of an agreement. I spoke to Rami constantly because he knew people that were on the Israeli delegation. “All that is left is to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, the deal is done,” he kept saying. “I have it from people who are as close to the top as you can get.”

Then, on July 25, I felt the floor drop out from under me. It was announced that the delegates were leaving with no agreement. I was devastated, as were millions of other Israelis and Palestinians who were hoping for an end to the conflict. President Clinton emerged from the summit and said, “The prime minister moved forward more from his initial position than Chairman Arafat.”
¹
This was a serious accusation coming from the guy who was supposed to be the “honest broker.” He was blaming Yasser Arafat for not being flexible enough. Barak said, “We tore the mask off of Arafat’s face,” and now we know that Arafat did not want peace after all.

I felt that things did not add up. I had followed the process closely, and I knew that Yasser Arafat had been consistent for years. For the sake of peace he was willing to give up the dream of all Palestinians to return to their homes and their land in Palestine. He was willing to recognize Israel, the state that destroyed Palestine, took his people’s land, and turned them into a nation of refugees. He was ready to establish an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza—which make up only 22 percent of the Palestinian homeland—with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.

He was ready to do all this, but he was not going to settle for anything less. He had always been clear about what he saw as the terms for peace.

In the end, it turned out that my gut feeling was right. As accounts of the negotiations began to surface—through articles, first hand accounts, and books like
Harakiri: Ehud Barak: The Failure
by journalist Raviv Druker—it was clear
that what the Israelis had demanded at Camp David was tantamount to total Palestinian surrender. It also became clear that Ehud Barak himself was despised by his own aides and that none of his political allies remained with him due to trust issues. Barak demanded that Arafat sign an agreement to end the conflict forever and in return, he would be permitted to establish a Palestinian state on an area of land that could not be defined clearly because it was broken into pockets with no geographic continuity. Instead of Arab East Jerusalem, he would receive a small suburb of East Jerusalem as his capital. To that Yasser Arafat refused to agree.

In September 2000, frustration and disappointment ran high and the atmosphere was charged when Ariel Sharon who was opposed to the peace process from the beginning decided to march to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He did it surrounded by hundreds of fully armed police in riot gear. The Temple Mount, or
Haram al Sharif
as it’s known to the Muslim world, is a 35-acre plaza that takes up one-sixth of the Old City of Jerusalem. It is home to the Dome of the Rock, the most iconic structure in Jerusalem, and the Al Aqsa Mosque. This mosque is believed to sit on the spot where patriarch Abraham was going to sacrifice his son. It is believed to be the site of the First and Second Jewish Temples, and it is the place from which the prophet Mohammed made his night journey into the heavens. It is so holy for Jews that observant Jews refrain from entering it for fear of defiling the Holy of Holies. For Muslims around the world, only Mecca and Medina are holier than Jerusalem.

Sharon claimed he was merely exercising his right to visit the place. It was more like an invasion than a visit. The response was immediate and entirely predictable. Palestinians from all walks of life saw this as desecration of holy ground, and massive protests began. Israel reacted with violent force. The unrest spiraled into ever-harsher Israeli repression and massive Israeli military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian-Israelis in northern Israel also protested and they too were met with violent response from the police, who shot and killed 13 civilians. Sharon lit the fuse over this barrel of explosives, and thus the second
Intifada
or Uprising was born.

Then the entire peace process came crashing down, as well as Barak’s government. He had serious internal political problems, and he had hoped that sealing a peace deal would save him politically, but in the end he was forced to call early elections. These were held in February 2001, and Barak suffered a humiliating defeat, making his period in office the shortest of any Israeli prime minister. Ariel Sharon, who ran against Barak, won in a landslide. All of Sharon’s shortcomings and past offenses were forgotten, and he was now at the helm in the prime minister’s seat.

To understand why Sharon was elected, we have to understand how Israel views its generals—and this general in particular. Ariel Sharon, or Arik as he is known in Israel, was larger than life. He was a war hero. He fought in 1948, he
headed Commando Unit 101,
²
he fought in 1956 in the Sinai Campaign,
³
and he proved to be a brilliant commander in the 1967 War. He seemed destined to be the IDF chief of staff, but in early 1973 it became clear that he would not get the job, and he was forced to resign. IDF chief of staff is as much a political appointment as it is a military post. The public and the army would never accept another chief of staff as long as he was in uniform, so Arik was forced to end his military career and resign. Following his resignation, my father wrote an article lamenting the fact that the IDF lost “a military genius.”
⁴
He said Arik Sharon would have been a brilliant chief of staff, that he “combined the unique quality of being a brilliant military man, an admired leader and he knew how to organize his command so as to achieve the best possible results on the battlefield.”

When the 1973 Mideast war broke out, the only war that was not initiated by Israel and where Israel was caught completely off guard, Sharon was immediately called back to the army. He commanded a reservist armored division and he saved the IDF from a humiliating defeat. He was fearless, and he represented the Israel in which Israelis wanted to live: strong, fearless, no-nonsense. He was the average man’s general, who grew up and lived on a farm—not one of those sophisticated generals who hobnobbed with the rich and powerful. The battles he commanded are taught at military colleges around the world, and many of Israel’s top commanders served under him as junior officers. Not unlike George Patton, the legendary World War II hero he was often compared to, Arik Sharon was both brilliant and dangerous. In Israel, the feeling was that no one else could bring the security people wanted, and certainly nobody could punish the Arabs as he could—on that he had a solid record.

I sensed disaster approaching and could no longer sit still. Compounded with Smadar’s death, these political developments were all too much for me. I had to do something.

The first step, I thought, was finding people with whom I could talk, but how? I placed a few ads in
The San Diego Reader
classified section asking about dialogue groups but got no reply. I searched the Internet, and finally I came across the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and they referred me to George Majeed Khoury, a Palestinian from Jerusalem who lived in San Diego. He and I communicated by e-mail and phone for several weeks, unable to get together because of our busy schedules, until finally we met at his office.