Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide - Hardcover

9780375412349: Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
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They met in 1990 during the first Palestinian uprising—one was an American Jew who served as a prison guard in the largest prison in Israel, the other, his prisoner, Rafiq, a rising leader in the PLO. Despite their fears and prejudices, they began a dialogue there that grew into a remarkable friendship—and now a remarkable book. It is a book that confronts head-on the issues dividing the Middle East, but one that also shines a ray of hope on that dark, embattled region.

Jeffrey Goldberg, now an award-winning correspondent for The New Yorker, moved to Israel while still a college student. When he arrived, there was already a war in his heart—a war between the magnetic pull of tribe and the equally determined pull of the universalist ideal. He saw the conflict between the Jews and Arabs as the essence of tragedy, because tragedy is born not in the collision of right and wrong, but of right and right.

Soon, as a military policeman in the Israeli army, he was sent to the Ketziot military prison camp, a barbed-wire city of tents and machine gun towers buried deep in the Negev Desert. Ketziot held six thousand Arabs, the flower of the Intifada: its rock-throwers, knifemen, bomb-makers, and propagandists. He realized that this was an extraordinary opportunity to learn from them about themselves, especially because among the prisoners may have been the future leaders of Palestine.

Prisoners is an account of life in that harsh desert prison—mean, overcrowded, and violent — and of Goldberg's extraordinary dialogue with Rafiq, which continues to this day.

We hear their accusations, explanations, fears, prejudices, and aspirations. We see how their relationship deepened over the years as Goldberg returned to Washington, D.C., where Rafiq, quite coincidentally, had become a graduate student, and as the Middle East cycled through periods of soaring hope and ceaseless despair. And we see again and again how these two men—both of them loyal sons of their warring peoples—confront their religious, cultural, and political differences in ways that allowed them to finally acknowledge a true, if necessarily tenuous, friendship.

A riveting, deeply affecting book: spare, impassioned, energetic, and unstinting in its candor about the truths that lie buried within the animosities of the Middle East.

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About the Author:
Jeffrey Goldberg is Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. He was for ten years a Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker and for The New York Times Magazine. A winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting, he is also a former columnist for The Jerusalem Post and The Forward. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. This is his first book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter One
THE THIEF OF MERCY

On the morning of the fine spring day, full of sunshine, that ended with my arrest in Gaza, I woke early from an uneven sleep, dressed, and pushed back to its proper place the desk meant to barricade the door of my hotel room. I unknotted the bedsheets I had tied together into an emergency escape ladder. Then I hid the knife I kept under my pillow, cleaned the dust from my shoes, and carefully unbolted the door. I searched the dark hall. There were no signs of imminent peril. Most people wouldn’t be so cautious, but I had my reasons, and not all of them were rooted in self-flattering paranoia.

I was staying at the al-Deira hotel, a fine hotel, one of Gaza’s main charms. On hot nights, which are most nights, it brimmed over with members of haute Palestine, that small clique of Gazans who earned more than negligible incomes. The men smoked apple-flavored tobacco from water pipes; the women, their heads covered, drank strong coffee and kept quiet.

By day the hotel was mostly empty. The hotels of Gaza had been full in the 1990s, during the long moment of false grace manufactured by the Oslo peace process. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, and it seemed as if the hate would melt away like wax. At that moment, even a pessimist could envision an orderly close to the one-hundred-year-long war between Arab and Jew. But this was now the spring of 2001, and we were six months inside the Palestinian Uprising, the Intifada, the second Intifada, this one far more grim than the last. The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan was once again steeped in blood: Arabs were killing Jews, and Jews were killing Arabs, and hope seemed to be in permanent eclipse. Optimists, and I included myself in this category, felt as if we had spent the previous decade as clueless Catherines, gazing dumbly from our carriages at the Potemkin village of Oslo.

So the Deira did negligible business, except after a noteworthy killing or a particularly sanguinary riot, which is the specialty of the heaving, thirsty demi-state of Gaza. Then, the press corps would colonize the Deira; reporters would come to catalogue the dead, and slot the deaths into whatever cleanly explicable narrative was in current favor.

The hallway was dim, and empty. I went downstairs to a veranda overlooking the Mediterranean, which shimmered in the early sunlight. Arab fishing boats spread their nets across the smooth water. An Israeli gunboat cast a more distant shadow. My breakfast companion was waiting for me. He rose, and we kissed on both cheeks. His nom de guerre was Abu Iyad, and he was an unhappy terrorist who I hoped would share with me illuminating gossip about Hamas—of which he was a member—and Palestine Islamic Jihad, two fundamentalist Muslim groups whose institutional focus is the murder of Jews. I bought him a plate of hummus and cucumbers.

Abu Iyad was a thin man, his face hollow and creased. His nails were yellow, and his hair was gray and thinning. I had known him for a dozen years. We weren’t friends. We were more like companionable acquaintances; I could not be a true friend of anyone in Hamas. He had been a bomb-maker earlier in his career, but he no longer submitted himself to the group’s hard line. His personality wasn’t that of the typical Hamas ultra. The average Hamas man tends toward narcis- sism and humorlessness, and projects the sort of preternatural calm organic to people who believe that what follows death is exponentially better than what precedes it. But Abu Iyad seemed, on occasion, free of certitude, taking a jaundiced view of some of his more strident colleagues. He only tentatively endorsed the notion, common among Hamas theologians, that the Jews live under a cloud of divine displeasure. He was well-educated—Soviet-educated, but still—and he was cultured, for Hamas. He was familiar with Camus and he was partial to Russian literature, though not to Russians. We often talked about books. Once, we spent an afternoon on the beach, near Nusseirat, his refugee camp, eating watermelon and talking about, of all things, the nihilism in Fathers and Sons.

It was a year before the second Intifada, our day at the beach. The strip of gray sand was the property, in essence, of Hamas; each political faction ruled a stretch of Mediterranean seaside. The Hamas cabanas were rude concrete slabs, topped with green flags that read, “There Is No God but Allah,” and “Muhammad Is the Messenger of God.” A crust of garbage lay over the beach, which was frequently used as a bathroom by donkey and man alike, but a breeze pushed the smell of shit away from us. The few women on the beach sat separate from the men. They wore black hijabs of thick cloth, head-to-foot, and they boiled inside them like eggs. Even when the women went to the water, they went in hijab. They waded in, up to their knees, splashed each other, and giggled. I could tell from the eyes, and the turn of their ankles, that they were pretty. I steered my own eyes away, though; even an innocent glance could have a terminal effect on me.

One of the men with us was a terrorist named Jihad Abu Swerah, a typically inflamed Hamas killer. He believed that the company of any women at all was an affront, even women who were serving us food. “Women by their presence pollute everything,” he said. A real killjoy. He reminded me of something the Ayatollah Khomeini once said: “There is no fun in Islam.”

Abu Swerah would eventually die at the hands of Israeli soldiers, who would find him in 2003 and cut him down in his Nusseirat hideout.

We tried to ignore him. Abu Iyad and I talked amiably on the beach that day with a few of his friends. The sky was soft blue and the water was gentle. It seemed to me an opportune time to throw an apple of discord into the circle. Just to make the day interesting, I accused Hamas—and the Muslim Brotherhood movement that gave birth to it—of succumbing to the temptations of nihilism.

ME: The Islamists believe in nothing except their own power. This frees them from the constraints of morality, allowing everything.

ABU IYAD: No, we believe in one surpassing truth, in tawhid, the cosmic Oneness of God. This is an overpowering belief. A nihilist, on the other hand, believes in nothing.

ME: This is true, in theory, the Islamist does believe in something. But that something is the supremacy of death, not the supremacy of God’s love. No one, not even Turgenev’s Bazarov is perfect in his nihilism. But Hamas comes close.

ABU IYAD: Jews fear death, Muslims don’t. Death isn’t even death. It’s a beginning. Love and death are both manifestations of God.

ME: You can’t murder people and say you’ve done them a favor.

ABU IYAD: Hamas does not target the innocent.

After the chastising Abu Swerah and his janissaries left, Abu Iyad allowed that the actions of Hamas bombers could be seen as nihilistic, which is why he said he opposed some of the more bestial manifestations of his group’s ideology. The men of Hamas, he said, sadly, were not his sort of Muslim. It was a victory for me, Abu Iyad ceding the point.

Sometimes, I couldn’t quite believe in his apostasy. His distaste for Hamas orthodoxy seemed real enough, but I sensed that it grew from some apolitical vendetta. Hamas, like any well-established terrorist group, is a bureaucracy, and, as in any bureaucracy, there are winners and losers, and I got the sense that he had lost—what, I didn’t know.

There was something else, too: Every so often, when we talked, he would pare off the edge of his words, speak in euphemism, even deny what I knew he felt. The Shi’ites call this taqiyya, the dissimulation of faith, the concealment of belief in the interest of self-preservation, or temporal political advantage. Sacramental lying, in other words. I worried that the face of Abu Iyad I saw was only one in a repertoire of faces. He did, after all, kill a man once.

The man was a Palestinian, his own blood, but a “collaborator” with Israel; Abu Iyad killed the man with a knife, in an alley in Nusseirat. Abu Iyad only remembered the man’s first name, which was Mustafa, and he remembered that he was taller than most Palestinians.

But then there were times when I stopped watching Abu Iyad through a veil of distrust, when I thought him to be a decent man, content to search for imperfect justice, not the world-ending justice sought by Hamas.

In the early 1990s, he favored, in principle, the murder of Israelis, in particular soldiers and settlers. But in November 2000, a group of Palestinians detonated a mortar shell near an armored bus traveling between two Jewish settlements, not far from Gaza City. Two settlers were killed, and three small children—all of the same family—lost limbs. This was unacceptable to Abu Iyad.

“It’s not the children who are at fault,” he said, an uncommon thing to say in Gaza, where children are both victim and perpetrator. Abu Iyad did not believe, for reasons both expedient and theological, that the slaughter of Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would be helpful to his cause, and he questioned whether God smiled on the self-immolating assassins of Hamas. “A person can’t be pure and admitted to Paradise if he kills himself, is my belief. There is a lot of debate about this among the scholars.”

He sensed, even then, at breakfast, that the second Uprising, which was just beginning, would end badly for the Palestinians.

“The Israelis are too strong, and they’re too ready to use violence against us,” he said.

Nonsense, I said. Things will end badly for the Arabs because it is the Ar...

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  • PublisherKnopf
  • Publication date2006
  • ISBN 10 0375412344
  • ISBN 13 9780375412349
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages336
  • Rating

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