The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
The ship, he explained, accepted only Cypriot pounds.
I drank beer on deck. The BBC World Service reported that the US was preparing to attack Afghanistan. Friends called from the United States and Tuscany to question the wisdom of my journey. My only agony so far was caused by the bad muzak (is there such a thing as good muzak?) of the Nissos Kypros bar. A couple whom I had met in the passport queue joined me. Anne Marie Sorensen, and Juwal, pronounced Yuval, Levy were, I guessed, in their late twenties. A Dane, she had a degree in Arabic and Hebrew. Juwal was born in Switzerland to Israeli parents and had completed high school and military service in Israel. He was hoping to go to university, probably in Denmark. They were motorcycling from Denmark, where they lived, to his family in Israel’s Negev Desert. After visiting his family, they would fly to New Zealand and Australia. He planned to return alone to Israel to ride the motorcycle back to Denmark and join his wife there.
They were among those lucky – or blessed – married couples who go well together, relaxed, listening to each other, interested in what the other said. We talked about – what should we have called them, bombs? – the hijacked aeroplanes and mass murders in America. Every few hours the radio raised the death count. By then, it was thought to be about three thousand. We talked about Israel. The people whom Juwal seemed to detest were not the Arabs so much as fanatically religious Jews. They did not recognize his marriage to his Danish wife and accused him of, in his words, polluting the blood. Anne Marie and Juwal had Bedouin friends who sounded more sophisticated – with university degrees – than more traditional nomads I had known in the deserts of Jordan and Syria. Some were academics who had, like Juwal, married Danish women.
In the morning, the radio raised the body count in America, speculated about possible culprits and predicted global economic calamity. The Nissos Kypros docked at the island of Patmos, where I had a breakfast of cheese, olives and what the Greeks call ‘Greek’ coffee. From there, we cruised beside the Turkish shore towards Rhodes. When we arrived, I went looking for my son George.
He was waiting, as promised, in an old hotel beside a forlorn, disused mosque in the centre of the Crusaders’ fortress. Twenty-three, healthy and sunburned from a week’s sailing, he took me to dinner in a tiny place he knew. The restaurant, with no name posted anywhere, lay hidden in a tight passage amid crumbling houses. Its plump and maternal proprietress had already adopted him. She was about my age and had lived in England. My son, she said, did not eat enough. She put us at a large table that more or less blocked the alley and covered it with cold beer, lots of mezze and a bountiful platter of mixed grilled meats. George was on his summer break from studying Middle East history at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Like me, he speculated on the impact of the attacks in America. Like his sister Julia, he had misgivings about my proposed trip. We would stop in Cyprus for a few days. If the hangings of Westerners started in the Middle East, I’d fly with him back to London and postpone my trip to Aqaba a second time.
After lunch, we toured Rhodes’ old town, where Ralph Bunche, America’s United Nations mediator, negotiated the 1949 truce that interrupted the war between Israel and Egypt and led to Israel’s subsequent truces with Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The accords he signed at the Hôtel des Roses left 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, three-quarters of Palestine’s Arab majority, permanent refugees. Under Bunche’s agreements, the UN recognized the Israeli army’s conquests of 1948 and 1949. UN Security Council Resolution 181 of 1947 had partitioned Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state with Jerusalem as an international city. The proposed Jewish state was 55 per cent of Palestine, but Israeli victories awarded the Jewish state 78 per cent. The Rhodes and subsequent agreements left the West Bank in the hands of King Abdallah of Jordan and allowed Egypt’s King Farouk to keep the strip around Gaza City next to Sinai. The Palestinian Arabs got nothing. With the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan and Egypt inherited hundreds of thousands of refugees cleansed from what had become the Jewish state. The Palestinian Arabs, then as subsequently, were not consulted. Israel, the Arab states, the United Nations and the United States were content to leave most of them as wards of the UN. The UN established two temporary agencies – the UN Troop Supervisory Organization that monitored the disengagement lines and the UN Relief and Works Agency that fed, housed and educated Palestinian Arab refugees. Both have been in the Middle East ever since. The UN’s pro forma Resolution 194 of 1948, renewed annually, required that Palestinian Arab ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date’. No one enforced it, and the 700,000 refugees became, with their descendants and those expelled in the 1967 war, more than three million. Ralph Bunche, setting a precedent, accepted a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiations that produced – not peace – but more punishing wars.
Back on the deck of the Nissos Kypros, where the muzak blended with the engine’s rumbling, Juwal, Anne Marie, George and I discussed the Middle East to which we were sailing. Juwal told us a story about his father, Udi Levy. Udi Levy had demanded that the word ‘Jew’ be removed from his national identity card. In Israel, nationality did not mean citizenship. It meant racial origin. Udi Levy was proud to be a Jew, but he did not accept being defined as one by the state, especially when the state gave its Jewish citizens privileges it denied to Arabs. He fought through the courts and won. Juwal had inherited some of his father’s dissidence, refusing to serve in the army of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. As with many other refuseniks, the military found a way to avoid prosecuting him. They let him serve in the navy. The sea was not occupied.
Where Juwal came from, kids made tougher decisions than ours had to. Some joined the army. Some ran away to other countries. Some went to prison rather than shoot Palestinian children, demolish houses and enforce a military occupation in which they did not believe. On the Palestinian side, youngsters threw rocks at tanks, ambushed settlers or committed suicide in order to kill other kids they believed were their enemies. Some Palestinian boys worked for the Israelis, as labourers in settlements or as police collaborators; others languished in Israeli interrogation rooms or prison cells.
Dreams on Maps
When the Nissos Kypros reached Cyprus, my friend Colin Smith met us at Limassol port. Colin lived in Nicosia. When we met first in Jerusalem, he was the Observer’s roving correspondent and I was working for ABC News in Lebanon. A few months later, we covered the independence war in Eritrea together with the photographer Don McCullin and Phil Caputo of the Chicago Tribune. A couple of weeks of hell in the desert with guerrillas who got us lost, denied us water and nearly left us for dead started our long friendship. Caputo went on to write novels, and Colin had collaborated with the journalist John Bierman on books about Orde Wingate, the British officer who more or less created the Israeli army, and on the battle of El Alamein.
That night, Colin, his wife Sylvia and their grown-up daughter Helena took us on foot to a Greek restaurant in an old house near the Green Line between Turkish and Greek Nicosia. The Aegean’s owner was a Greek Cypriot political fanatic named Vasso. Vasso, with a beard as long and black as an Orthodox archbishop’s, could have given lessons in political intransigence to Israeli settlers and Palestinian suicide bombers. His cause was Enosis, the union of Cyprus with Greece. The décor of his courtyard hostelry gave his politics away. Pride of place went to a huge wall map that showed Cyprus as part of Greece – not just politically, but physically, a few hundred miles closer than it is on the earth. The eastern Mediterranean was the region of creative map making. Syrian maps included Turkish Alexandretta in Syria and left a blank for Israel, a void that Syrian politicians called ‘the Zionist entity’. Many Israeli maps included Judaea, Samaria and Gaza in ‘Greater Israel’. Some Arab nationalists’ maps, based on those of the eighth century, showed an Arab state from Morocco to Iraq. A Kurdish map delineated Greater Kurdistan from the Mediterranean to Armenia and Iran.
When Colin introduced me as his American friend, Vasso said, ‘I am strongly anti-American … policy.’ The delayed ‘policy’ seemed to come out of consideration for the thousands who had died a few days before. It was clear he did not normally add it. He confessed that, despite his politics, he sympathized with Americans over the massacres. Perhaps the struggle between Christendom and Islam took precedence over his hatred of Henry Kissinger, who, as secretary