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DATE August 17, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air
Interview: James Bennet discusses his three-year stint as New York
Times Jerusalem bureau chief
DAVE DAVIES, host:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily
News, filling in for Terry Gross.
James Bennet has just completed three eventful years covering the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict as Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.
He's chronicled suicide bombings, the Israeli incursions into the West Bank
and, most recently, the construction of a controversial security barrier in
the West Bank and plans to withdraw from Israeli settlements in Gaza. His
reporting has focused not just on policy-makers and military leaders, but on
grieving relatives and survivors of violence as well as ordinary Israelis and
Palestinians struggling to live their lives and understand the conflict that
divides them.
Bennet's most recent piece is the cover story of this week's Times Magazine on
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Sharon's story, Bennet writes, has
become Israel's story. I spoke to James Bennet this morning.
Sharon nearly died in a battle in the 1948 war, in a place that's visible from
the main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Plains of Latrun(ph).
You spoke to him about that in your most recent interview with him. What is
his perspective on that period, on that event?
Mr. JAMES BENNET (The New York Times): This is one of the most searing
battles of that war, because there were a large number of new immigrants who
fought. Many Israelis feel they were totally unprepared because they went
into battle with bad intelligence, because they lost, day after day, trying to
take this one extremely strategic hill, which has, for centuries, really,
thousands of years, been used as a redoubt to guard the main route to
Jerusalem from the coast and from Egypt.
Sharon was a platoon leader in 1948, and he was leading his men towards the
hill, believing it was very lightly defended. They were coming in at dawn, in
a thick fog. They were supposed to have struck hours before that, but for
various reasons of bad, poor logistics, they were delayed. They get--they're
approaching the hill, they're in these barley fields; all of a sudden, the sun
comes up, the fog lifts, and the men were totally exposed. The Arab Legion,
it turned out, was guarding the hill at the time, very heavily armed. They
pinned them down. Sharon and his men took refuge in this small gully and were
basically being picked apart. Only a handful out of 35 men escaped uninjured
from this.
Sharon himself was shot in the stomach and thigh, and lay for hours, bleeding,
in this gully. His radio was destroyed, and he didn't hear the order to
withdraw. He says that he only realized that the Israeli forces had withdrawn
when he looked over his shoulder and saw that there were now Arab fighters
behind him. So he was then confronted with trying to get out of there, badly
wounded, with only a handful of his men.
The story he told me was about dragging himself to the bottom of this gully,
where there was a small amount of water, kind of green-slimed standing water
there that had mixed with the blood of the wounded, who had been dragged back
to that area. He said he hesitated for a minute, and then stuck his face into
this mix of blood and scum and muddy water, and drank deeply, and it was only
that, he said, that gave him the strength to get out of there.
DAVIES: You wrote that Sharon, when he was a paratrooper, developed a
strategy for responding to ambushes, which was that you attack. You have to
immediately regain and retain the initiative. I'm wondering if you see that
approach in his response to the latest Palestinian uprising?
Mr. BENNET: This has characterized his approach to everything, I think,
throughout his career. He believes that if you surrender the initiative, if
you give up the initiative, you're on your way to losing. That's what
happened at the beginning of the 1973 war, the Yom Kippur War, when he also
learned a searing lesson, and I think it does characterize his approach to
this conflict throughout, while the Palestinian leadership has fallen into
disarray, into chaos, as the Bush administration has occasionally tried to
put forward its own peace initiative, Sharon has really been the one figure
who's been in constant motion, I think, who had some idea of what he wanted
and a strategy for achieving that. And that's very much what we're seeing
now, as Ariel Sharon is really the only force who's attempting to change the
situation there. The Palestinian leaders have largely fallen apart, the Bush
administration has put its own peace initiative, the road map, on the shelf,
and Ariel Sharon is basically putting everybody else on his back and carrying
them where he wants them to go.
DAVIES: Before we talk about his current initiatives in Israel, I have to ask
you, your reflections on his other--well, one of the times in the past when he
seized the initiative, and that was the invasion of Lebanon, which began, I
guess, as an attempt to clear out Palestinian sanctuaries which were used to
attack northern Israel, but which, you know, became a bit of a disaster,
militarily and diplomatically for Israel. How does he regard that episode? I
mean, was--in his career?
Mr. BENNET: Well, let me say before addressing that question, the Lebanon
invasion was sold to the public by Ariel Sharon as a very limited effort to
clear away the PLO from the northern border with Lebanon. But in fact, he had
much grander strategic aims in mind. He wanted to install a new Lebanese
government that would be friendly to Israel, and, in fact, establish relations
with Israel. He hoped that by going into Lebanon, he would reshuffle the
strategic balance and bring forth a new tractable Palestinian leadership in
the West Bank that Israel could then deal with. He had these very grand aims,
as he often does, and it completely blew up in his face with, first, the
assassination of his chosen Lebanese leader, and then the massacre of
Palestinians in two refugee camps that an Israeli commission of inquiry later
held him indirectly responsible for.
Sharon tells people privately that one thing he learned from that experience
is that you cannot go to war into some sort of a controversial action like
that if you don't have the Israeli public fully behind you, and if you don't
have some kind of unity government, which is to say, a broad-based coalition
not made up only of right-wing parties, but also left-wing parties. I think
you're beginning to see that at work here. He's trying to assemble a new
governing coalition, will over time, I think, that will include more moderate
parties because he wants to have that kind of broad-based political support.
DAVIES: The interesting thing about that lesson, I suppose, is that he
doesn't conclude that there were limits to what Israeli power could accomplish
in a complex Arab environment. It was more that he didn't have the support
that he needed to sustain the effort and get where he needed to go.
Mr. BENNET: Exactly. He writes, in a very interesting way, in his
autobiography about this experience. Most of his anger seems to be directed
at fellow Israelis who he feels turned on him unfairly. He's very angry at
what he saw as disunity in Israeli society, that that was the real problem
here, this lack of unity in the face of a real external threat, and I think
that's where he draws his political lessons about forming a new unity
government, etc., etc. But you're right. He does not say, `Boy, the whole
idea might have been wrong. I've been mistaken about what I was trying to
do.' He's a guy who really believes in grand strategy, complex plans, as long
as he's the one who came up with them.
DAVIES: One of the things that happened in that 1982 invasion was that he
appeared to have his arch-nemesis, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat,
cornered, and in the end, Arafat got away. Is he pursuing a lifelong goal
here, I mean, when he made the move against Arafat in Ramallah?
Mr. BENNET: He certainly has always regarded Arafat as an enemy of the
Israeli state. He did try numerous times in Lebanon to kill Arafat. I mean,
they were bombing around Arafat and they simply missed him, and Arafat was
finally able to leave with many of his comrades in a deal that was brokered by
the United States. Israel saw that as something of a humiliation of Arafat.
Arafat, of course, did it with great pageantry and tried to make withdrawal
look like a victory, but the fact is that ultimately, Sharon drove Arafat out
of Lebanon only to find Arafat in his own back yard in Ramallah as a
consequence of the Oslo peace process.
Sharon's own advisers are divided about whether Ariel Sharon ever thought he
might be able to make a peace deal with Arafat. Some of them say he came into
office believing that he might be able to make such a deal, and he actually
sent his son, Omri, as an emissary to Arafat a couple of times. But Sharon
says no, that he never saw Arafat as a potential partner. Now he's obviously
successfully almost completely isolated him in Arafat's ruined compound in
Ramallah and has simply kept him parked there, saying that there is no
Palestinian peace partner because Arafat is still leader of the Palestinian
people, and Israel can't hope to make a deal with him.
DAVIES: My guest is James Bennet. He has just completed three years as The
New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief. We'll talk more after a break. This
is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
DAVIES: We're back with James Bennet. He has just completed a three-year
assignment as the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.
Ariel Sharon, who was the champion of the settler movement, who had a lot to
do with actually designing, I guess, the settlements in Gaza, in a remarkable
reversal of approach now talks about a voluntary withdrawal from Gaza and an
enforced isolation from the Palestinians. What's he up to?
Mr. BENNET: Well, I think you can't overstate the importance of what he's
already done in simply declaring that it is not in Israel's interest to remain
in Gaza. This is a real earthquake in Israeli politics, I think. The father
of the settlement movement has essentially said that some settlements are not
only not in Israel's security interests, but actually a threat to Israeli
security interests. So even if he fails in this plan, if his support
collapses and he vanishes as prime minister, I think he's already done a lot
of damage to a cornerstone of the settlement movement, and certainly the
settlers feel that way, which explains their intense anger at him now. And
the Israeli Shin Bet intelligence service is extremely concerned now about
threats against the life of Sharon from the right wing. I mean, it's a real
kind of through-the-looking-glass moment, if you step back and think about
what this means in Israeli politics.
DAVIES: Back in 1948, when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict broke out in what
Israelis, of course, refer to as the War of Independence, the posture of the
Israeli government was you don't give up an inch of land. You hold on to
everything you have and you fight for all that you can hold. Why is Gaza
something that Sharon believes Israelis should now give up? Do the
demographics of Gaza as opposed to other parts of the occupied territories
distinguish it here?
Mr. BENNET: Yes, because of the large number of Palestinians living in Gaza,
1.3 million. Gaza presents an opportunity for Israel essentially to postpone
what Israelis regard as the so-called demographic threat, that is, that within
a few years--how many depends on what demography you consult--there will be
more Arabs than Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean,
that is, more Arabs than Jews living in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip. The problem there in the minds of many Israelis is that Israel will
then be faced with a choice of possibly giving up its demography or giving up
its Jewish identity, that the Arabs will succeed in doing by demography what
they haven't been able to do by force of arms.
In order for that to happen, the Palestinians would have to overcome a huge
psychological obstacle of their own and say, `We give up. We want to be part
of the Israeli state. Make us Israeli citizens.' And then what Israeli Jews
fear is that the Arabs would then vote in an Arab-led government in the state
of Israel. Again, that's a long way off, and it's more of a theoretical
exercise right now than anything else, but it's on the minds of a lot of
Israelis. And Sharon has begun to address it recently as one of the reasons
for a Gaza withdrawal.
DAVIES: He's also endorsed the idea of a security barrier which would, in
effect, isolate Palestinians on the West Bank. Now this was something which
actually I guess the Israeli left had talked about for years, right?
Mr. BENNET: Yes. Like the Gaza withdrawal, this is an idea that really
originated on the left. And Sharon initially was opposed to the idea of
building this barrier. It became politically irresistible, though, because it
was such a popular notion. And I think it's an example of, again, classic
Sharon political maneuvering in that he was willing to shift tactics very
quickly and incorporate them into a larger strategic plan. Having opposed
this barrier for a long time, he embraced it and then tried to build it where
he thought it would go in a way that would include a large portion of the West
Bank on, if you will, the Israeli side of the barrier.
Now the settlers were opposed to this barrier from the beginning because they
saw it as ultimately becoming some sort of political boundary and that the
settlements on the wrong side would eventually have to be dismantled and
evacuated. The Israeli government continues to insist that this barrier's
being built only for security reasons, not for political ones, but privately
they acknowledge that it does have political consequences, not only for the
Palestinians but for the settlers.
DAVIES: Does the withdrawal from Gaza, combined with the incursions into the
West Bank and his embracing a security barrier, do they all fit into a vision
for Israel's future that he sees?
Mr. BENNET: Yes. He's trying to draw what he sees as the most secure
boundaries for Israel, hold on to those pieces of the West Bank that he
regards as most important for Israeli security, get out of Gaza, which is
becoming this kind of demographic threat and this trap for the state of
Israel. The barrier forms the line in the West Bank that he would ultimately,
I think, retreat to if necessary. But the key aspect to all of this is that
he's doing it unilaterally and without negotiating with the Palestinians.
These are not concessions he's making to the Palestinians. These are
concessions, in a sense, that he's making to what he sees as reality, that
these are the lines Israel should move to. But he doesn't want to talk about
dividing Jerusalem. He doesn't want to talk with the Palestinians about where
these lines should go. And so far he's successfully gotten the world to sign
off on this approach.
DAVIES: You know, Americans often say that it was no accident that Nixon
could open the door to China because he had been such a staunch anti-Communist
all his life. And I'm wondering if people in Israel, who have been committed
opponents of Ariel Sharon throughout his career for taking a hard-line,
hawkish view towards the Palestinians, do they now look at his reversal of
course and his voluntary cessation of occupied territory as the kind of
flexible and innovative thinking that a great leader needs? I mean, has he
redeemed himself in the eyes of his critics at all?
Mr. BENNET: I wouldn't put it as strongly as achieving redemption yet. But,
yes, it's really interesting to talk to members of the Israeli left these
days, to doves who find themselves suddenly agreeing with Ariel Sharon at
least about a Gaza withdrawal. There's this kind of baffled, self-questioning
response to this that they can't quite believe that they actually are finding
themselves supportive of Ariel Sharon, a guy that many of them had accused of
essentially being a murderer for what happened in Lebanon. Some of them still
think he's not serious, that he doesn't mean it, that it's all some sort of
political feint. This is obviously happening at a moment of incredible
disarray on Israel's left and partly because Sharon has been so successful at
seizing the political center there and taking some ideas from the left that
the left has not been able to propose any kind of alternative.
DAVIES: In your recent piece in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, you
describe the army as Israel's most politically and socially important
institution. Why?
Mr. BENNET: Almost every Israeli passes through the army. They have to do
military service. They're drafted out of high school, and that's always been
the case. They have to do reserve duty that carries many of them through
their mid-40s. The intensity of the military experience in Israel is
something that I think marks Israelis for their whole lives, particularly now.
You're having a generation that's growing up in this really difficult
environment of fighting in the occupied territories: manning checkpoints;
demolishing Palestinian homes, the homes of the families of wanted men, for
example. And I think that's having a real effect on the society.
The army has always supplied prime ministers. It's supplied--many of the top
politicians in the state of Israel have not just served in the army but have
become generals. It's a kind of political shorthand for left-wing Israelis
that they're tired of being led by generals; that they need somebody whose
experience isn't totally formed by the army. But I think in these sorts of
troubled times, they turn to people like Ariel Sharon partly because of that
military experience.
DAVIES: What was the effect of the collapse of the Oslo peace process on the
army, and why is that important for Israel's culture and society?
Mr. BENNET: Well, the army bought into Oslo. The top generals in the army
accepted the essential logic of Oslo, which is that peace would bring security
as it's formulated by Israelis. The notion was that if you signed an
agreement with the Palestinians, gave them what's called a political horizon,
the elements of sovereignty, the beginnings of some sort of proto-state, which
was the Palestinian Authority, and begin to remove the Israeli presence from
the occupied territories, begin to bring soldiers out so that Palestinians
didn't experience them as a suppressive force all the time--if you took those
steps, a pragmatic Palestinian leadership would then have the popularity in
the street to crack down on groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The
militants would lose political support to begin with. Their actions would
become unpopular because they would be seen as jeopardizing a peace that
Palestinians had come to value. And as a result, the Palestinian Authority
would be able to act against these groups.
The Israeli army says that the Palestinian leadership was never serious about
reining in these militant groups; that Arafat liked to keep them around, so
that he could kind of turn up the gas on the stove a little bit, turn up the
heat on Israel when things weren't going so well and extract new concessions
from Israel. As a result, the army has reached much the same conclusion that
Ariel Sharon has long held. And the shorthand for this in Israel is that it's
not that peace will bring security but that security will bring peace; that
is, you must have a complete cessation of violence, tranquility before you can
begin talking about these big issues that divide the two people, the issues of
territory, Jerusalem, the right of return--that those matters need to be put
on the shelf and you must secure not just Israelis but Palestinians. Take
violence out of the picture and then you can begin to advance toward peace.
DAVIES: The Israeli army, you know, I think, well, in its early years was
populated by people who'd come from the Kibbutz movement, which was sort of,
you know, this idealistic view. I mean, who's in the Israeli army now? Is it
different?
Mr. BENNET: Well, it is changing. Again, this is, I think, a long-term
social change but one that's become evident in recent years. The Kibbutzes
are supplying less of a proportion of the top leadership in the army, and it's
the National Religious movement I think that's now supplying more of those
soldiers. The army, like the rest of society, is becoming more religious.
And some of these guys have come out of a background that really does regard
the West Bank and Gaza as Israel's biblical birthright.
DAVIES: James Bennet. He's just completed three years as the Jerusalem
bureau chief for The New York Times. He'll be back in the second half of the
show. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
(Announcements)
DAVIES: Coming up, life in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. We
continue our conversation with James Bennet, former Jerusalem bureau chief for
The New York Times.
(Soundbite of music)
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, filling in for Terry Gross.
Let's get back to our interview with James Bennet. He's just completed three
years covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as Jerusalem bureau chief for
The New York Times.
Well, in July, you wrote a couple of deep pieces about life in two Palestinian
settings, one in Gaza and the other in the city of Jenin. Let's talk about
Jenin for a bit. What has happened to the Palestinian Authority and to life
in Jenin as a result of--well, over the years in which we've had this uprising
against the Israeli occupation, combined with an aggressive Israeli incursion
into these areas? How has it affected life there?
Mr. BENNET: Well, towns like Jenin, Nablus, the big cities in the West Bank,
have been effectively isolated from each other now for a couple of years. The
Israeli forces have blockaded them, raided them regularly, almost nightly in
the case of Jenin, during part of this summer, in a continuing search for what
Israel calls `wanted men.' Arrested large numbers of young men, detained
them. There was a very famous much-talked-about Israeli incursion into the
Jenin refugee camp more than two years ago in which a large portion of the
camp, the center of the camp, was smashed by Israeli bulldozers.
People in Jenin describe a beginning state of social chaos, a kind of steady
social erosion. The Palestinian Authority continues to function but really
only in providing paychecks and running the schools. Those are both very
important functions, but they aren't leadership functions. They aren't the
kind of things that provide coherence to a society. Law enforcement is broken
down in Jenin. The police no longer have any respect. They've been forbidden
by Israel to carry weapons for a couple of years now because Israel said many
of them were using those weapons against Israeli soldiers. They were
policemen by day, terrorists by night, that sort of thing.
And it's surprising given that absence of law to what extent order has managed
to be sustained there. But it's breaking down. And the groups that are
stepping into the vacuum and trying to provide some sort of order are actually
the militant groups, particularly the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is a
group linked to Arafat's Fatah faction. The leader of the al-Aqsa Brigades in
Jenin, a guy named Zakaria Zubeidi, told me he is now the highest authority
there. Many people in Jenin say the same thing.
DAVIES: Now the--what's interesting is that the Fatah movement, you know,
which, is--Arafat has been associated with, has traditionally regarded--has
believed in a two-state settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli problem,
whereas, you know, more militant groups, like Hamas, have taken a different
view. Have the politics of the public--of the citizens there--changed? I
mean, do you find more militant groups like Hamas becoming more popular than
the Fatah movement?
Mr. BENNET: This is true throughout the territories, but it's a nuanced
condition. It's--you have to have studied these numbers a little closely and
talked to a lot of people. Those groups have gotten more popular, groups like
Hamas, and even Islamic Jihad, but particularly Hamas, has become more popular
in Jenin and elsewhere. But, at least judging by the polling of Khalil
Shikaki, who's the most eminent Palestinian political scientist, Palestinians
themselves are actually in a more compromising mood than that support for
Hamas would reflect. That is, there's still more lean towards a two-state
solution rather than Hamas' goal, which is the total destruction of the state
of Israel.
I think a lot of the support for Hamas reflected not support for that
overarching goal, but rather opposition to the Palestinian Authority,
unhappiness with Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, because
they see a government that's failed to meet their needs that has produced a
lot of corrupt office holders who have enriched themselves without doing much
for their people. That frustration is leading Palestinians to look for some
other alternative form of leadership. That's what takes them towards Hamas.
The anger in Jenin at the Palestinian Authority, and even anger at Yasser
Arafat himself now, is quite striking.
DAVIES: Is that because they failed to provide security or because they
failed to provide jobs and development?
Mr. BENNET: Both. Both. It's the absence of a normal, tranquil, secure life
in the Palestinian territories that's driving a lot of this. I mean, people
want to do the same things there that people want to do all over the world.
They want to be able to get up and go to work in the morning. They want to
know that their children are safe. They want to be able to send their kids to
decent schools. They want to see the garbage picked up in their streets. And
this is very basic governance, and I think a lot of people lose track on
that--of that when they see this thing only in terms of a conflict, only in
terms of suicide bombers and Israeli soldiers, and they don't think about it
as two societies made up of people who just want to live normal lives and
cannot seem to find a way to make that happen.
DAVIES: As people in places like Jenin see the security barrier going up,
what do they think that means for their own future?
Mr. BENNET: Jenin historically survived economically because its residents
were able to work in Israel. They went to jobs in Israel. They sold
vegetables in Israel. They worked construction there. That is disappearing
now, and people in Jenin don't really have an alternative yet. They don't
know how they're going to survive economically once this break occurs. So you
can barely see this fence from Jenin. At that point it is fence rather than
wall, a chain-link fence that's going up with a number of roads and electronic
monitoring and Israeli pillboxes spread out along it. But they used to be
able to--even in the first couple years of the conflict--get back and forth
out of Jenin fairly easily. And those days have now come to an end. And I
think a lot of people there don't really--they're having trouble, a lot of
trouble, I think, now, looking ahead, and saying, `What's life going to be
like here a year from now, two years from now?' I don't think--it's a
question I kept asking and I never got very good answers from people.
DAVIES: Has the erection of the security barrier in Jenin had an impact on
the suicide bombings in Israel?
Mr. BENNET: Unmistakably, yes. And the number of attacks from Jenin has
dwindled as the barrier has been built. And it's now dropped to zero,
according to Israeli security. That is attacks launched from Jenin across
the boundary with the West Bank into Israel. Those have almost entirely
stopped. There--I think it's--it's partly a function of the barrier; it's
probably a function of the disarray in these groups now. And I got the
impression from Zakaria Zubeidi that he spends more time these days thinking
about law and order in Jenin and his role as kind of warlord in this small
enclave as opposed to thinking about how to go after the Israelis.
DAVIES: What about the population? I mean, we know you write, and many
others write, about the fervor of Palestinian mothers and fathers to send
their sons to fight the Israelis. Are--is there less commitment to that now?
Mr. BENNET: You can still find that, and sometimes it's because people
believe it and it's sometimes because people know that that's what they're
expected to say, which is a tremendous problem. It's almost worse in a sense
because it tells you what the social expectation is, or how fearful they are
of these militant groups. They don't want to criticize them. And I should
say, by the way, that while some parents do praise their children for having,
as they would say, martyred themselves in the cause, there are parents, a lot
of parents, who are very unhappy about this. I was standing at a falafel
stand in Jenin one evening and it turned out--I fell in a conversation with
the guy next to me. And it turned out, like so many residents of Jenin, he'd
lost his child. A son of his carried out a suicidal shooting attack on an
Israeli settlement and was killed in the process. This guy was not proud of
what his son had done. He mourned his son every day, he said. Every second,
he said. And there is a sense of exhaustion and despair in the Palestinian
territories now that maybe would provide some political basis for a way out of
this conflict.
DAVIES: If the security barrier were to become, in effect, a border for
decades, and, you know, this barrier in places is huge and electrified and
fortified, is what's left of the West Bank the basis for a viable Palestinian
state?
Mr. BENNET: This is a question I'm just not qualified to answer. I can at
least tell you some of the areas I would think would need to be addressed for
that to happen. We had--there's a fair amount of thinking that's being done
in the World Bank about how you would create an economically viable Palestinian
state, if you were able to stitch together some sort of sovereignty in the West
Bank with sovereignty in Gaza. But all that thinking in the past has been
premised on the idea that there would be free flow of goods between Israel and
the Palestinian territories. That is, that the Palestinians would be able to
work in Israel, that they'd be able to sell goods to Israel. That's always
been the relationship. That's disappearing now because of this barrier.
People talk about the barrier in terms of its security effect and its
potential political effects, but some of its most profound consequences are
actually economic, and how you would create a state that could function
alongside Israel and be viable is a very big question. It's possible that by
opening the border with Jordan, allowing free flow of goods back and forth
there, Palestinian wages came down--Palestinian wages have been artificially,
one might say, inflated, by the proximity to the Israelis who pay more for
labor than the Egyptians or the Jordanians.
Maybe if the Palestinian wages came down, they'd become more economically
competitive, but, at the moment, with this tight division, and with Israel
still saying that they're going to need to control access for the Palestinians
to Jordan and Egypt because Israel says there's no other way that they can
prevent arms from flowing across those borders, as long as those controls
remain in place, I think it's going to be very hard for the Palestinians to
maintain a self-sufficient economy. Already the Palestinian economy is
extraordinarily dependent on donations from abroad to an extent unequaled,
according to the World Bank, to any country since World War II.
DAVIES: Our guest is James Bennet. He's just completed three years as
Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.
We'll continue after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
DAVIES: We're speaking with James Bennet. He's just finished a three-year
assignment as The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief.
The security barrier appears to restrict suicide bombings and play a real
security role. At the same time, it clearly inhibits the economic
interactions that are important for both Palestinians and Israelis. How are
people evaluating in balance kind of the wisdom of this?
Mr. BENNET: Israelis overwhelmingly believe it's necessary, essential, for
their own security. Even some Palestinians will say the idea of a barrier and
separation of these two peoples is not necessarily a bad idea, that there
needs to be something that can force the two sides to cool off a little bit.
The great Palestinian complaint is not that the barrier exists, but that it's
being built partly in the West Bank.
Now I think from the Palestinian leadership, this is probably a little bit
disingenuous and they are opposed to the barrier in itself, partly for the
economic reasons that we discussed earlier. But the Palestinian complaint is
essentially that it's not just about securing Israelis, that it isn't a
security barrier at all, that it's a political barrier that's consuming West
Bank land deliberately in order to make part of the West Bank part of Israel
forever. So that when the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled
against Israel on this barrier over the course of the summer it wasn't--the
ruling didn't speak to the barrier itself, it spoke to the route that the
barrier was taking. It's a nuanced point that kind of gets lost in the debate
back and forth, but the real complaint that's made on the Palestinian side is
where it's being built, rather than whether it's being built. I don't think
they'd be unhappy--I don't think they'd be overwhelmingly happy with it if it
were right on this boundary, but they're certainly very unhappy with it where
it's being built.
DAVIES: The view of many Israelis that Palestinians were never serious about
a two-state solution, that they only wanted to advance the agenda of the
complete destruction of Israel, to what extent do you think that's an accurate
view of--I mean, I know Palestinians have diverse views, but to what extent is
that a widely or dominantly held view among Palestinians and their leadership?
Mr. BENNET: I had a--one of Sharon's top advisers estimated to me recently
that maybe 30 percent of the society really felt that way, and he argued that
the problem was that that 30 percent was essentially in control of the conduct
of the conflict, and I think actually there's a lot of sense in that. I don't
think most Palestinians, as I said earlier, would welcome some sort of peace
agreement that allowed them to live normal lives and gave them a sovereign
state but also gave them a functioning economy and the ability to send
their--educate their kids in peace. But there's no question there are
powerful elements in Palestinian society now that have--that had the
destruction of Israel as their goal and essentially they've been empowered by
the way this conflict has been conducted.
It should be said that while Israelis may have made believe that the
Palestinians were never serious about the two-state solution, Palestinians
generally now believe the same thing of Israelis; that is, that Israelis were
never serious about it. It's been a process of kind of symmetrical
disillusionment, as is so often true in this conflict. Something that's found
on one side of it has its analog, really, its mirror image, on the other
side. Palestinians say, `Look, the population of settlements doubled over the
course of the Oslo peace process,' which is true. They say, `How could we
have possibly believed Israel was ever serious about this process, that they
were ever serious about giving up the West Bank and allowing us to build a
state here while they were bringing more settlers into this territory?'
DAVIES: You've written about a man named Elias Khoury in The Times. Tell us
why he's such a compelling figure to you. Not a political leader.
Mr. BENNET: Elias Khoury is an amazing man who has suffered greatly, not just
in this intifada but from the grinding conflict between Jews and Arabs. His
father and his family owned a great deal of land in northern Israel and was
dispossessed in the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. His father believed he could
work through the system legally to get the land back. He took Israeli
citizenship. Elias is now an Israeli-Arab himself. And Elias himself went to
law school and became a lawyer. His father was killed in the mid-'70s walking
through Zion Square in Jerusalem. He was blown up by a bomb that Palestinians
had hidden in a refrigerator there. Killed several Israeli citizens,
including Elias Khoury's father.
Earlier this year, Elias' son, George, went for a jog in the French Hill
neighborhood of Jerusalem, which is a neighborhood built on occupied West Bank
land, and was shot dead by members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, who then
issued statement saying that they had successfully killed an Israeli settler.
So Elias Khoury has lot his father and his son to Palestinian violence, and
finds himself in this extremely sorrowful position.
DAVIES: The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade ultimately realized that, in fact, they
had shot a Palestinian, didn't they?
Mr. BENNET: Yeah, they realized it pretty quickly. I mean, it became a news
story. The boy was identified and--I say boy; young man was identified. And
they then issued a subsequent statement declaring that Elias--excuse me. They
then issued a subsequent statement declaring that George Khoury was a martyr.
His father rejected that. He said it hurt him a great deal to hear that. He
is the kind of man that can't celebrate the deaths of anybody on either side
of this conflict. He said to me, `Is this how we're going to build our state,
you know, by killing people this way?'
DAVIES: I think our time is short, but I want to ask you a few reflections
about your time in the three years that you've spent in Israel in covering
this conflict. You wrote in one piece that there was a time when the peace
process had momentum, that Jews would go to an Arab nightclub in Ramallah.
How much of the social interaction in Israel, or on the West Bank, between
Jewish and Arab citizens, has there been? And how have you seen that change
in the time you've been there?
Mr. BENNET: There's very little. There are still some people-to-people
programs that continue to function, but as the checkpoints have hardened, it's
gotten harder for people to get back and forth. I watched these checkpoints
progress from fairly informal affairs to really bunkered, fenced points of
passage that look like international border crossings between hostile states.
Obviously, the barrier was built during my time there, which I think is the
biggest change in the landscape since the 1967 war. I would regularly ask
Israelis who had had contact with Palestinians before the conflict, and I
would ask Palestinians who had contact with Israelis before the conflict, if
they'd been able to maintain those communications. And often they say no,
that it just came too hard to get messages back and forth, that they kind of
lost track over the course of the fighting. And they came to have their
opinions of the other side. Their opinions of the other side were degraded by
the violence, like everything else. And it's part of the great sadness of
this conflict.
And, of course, the less contact there is like that, the more the difficult,
the ugly contact comes to define their relationship. That is, Palestinian
children who once were able to go to beaches in Israel now experience Israel
and Israelis as the Israeli army, which is what they see in their towns. And
on the Israeli side, Israelis largely think of Palestinians now, I think it's
fair to say, as being defined by these suicide bombers that for reasons they
simply cannot understand are willing to blow themselves apart in rooms that
contain children, in buses on which children are riding.
DAVIES: My guest is James Bennet. He has just completed three years as The
New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief. We'll talk some more after this break.
This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: If you're just joining us, our guest is James Bennet. He's just
finished a three-year assignment as The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief.
This can be a dangerous part of the world. You were there with your family.
Is it a relief to be away? Was it hard on you and your family to be there?
Mr. BENNET: Oh, it was hard at times to be there, there's no question,
particularly in periods when there are a large number of bombs going off
or--and I think it was sometimes hard on my wife when I was out trying to
cover these military incursions in the territories. The kind of anxiety I
spoke about earlier is anxiety that I definitely felt myself. You know, your
wife calls you and tells you she's headed out to a store, to a grocery store,
and once you've covered a couple of dozen suicide bombings, it's kind of hard
not to ponder the variables. And that's hard.
But, look, in many ways it is a wonderful place to live. You can't beat the
climate. The people are very interesting. The expensive food is generally
pretty bad, but the cheap food on the street is some of the best I've ever
had. And there's a lot we're going to miss about our life there.
DAVIES: You were in a very dangerous situation yourself in May at Rafah,
right?
âDAVIES: Well, James Bennet, thanks so much for speaking with us again.
Mr. BENNET: Thank you.
DAVIES: James Bennet. He's just completed three years covering the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict as Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.
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(Credits)
DAVIES: For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.
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