The Long Road From Hope

On a brilliantly sunny day in 2001, American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was seized by armed Palestinians working for one of the myriad security services that function like private militias on the mean streets of Gaza City. His main abductor and interrogator, who called himself Abu Hamad, accused Goldberg of being an Israeli spy. He had one fundamental question: “Mr. Jeffrey,” Abu Hamad wanted to know, “what are you doing here?”

Goldberg was released unharmed that same evening, but the question resonates throughout his engaging new book, Prisoners. Like so many Jewish pilgrims before him, Goldberg comes to Israel seeking a home, an identity and a sense of purpose that he finds lacking in the soft, insidiously undemanding climes of Long Island, where he was born and raised. And like many of them, he discovers a moral rot in the Jewish paradise and is inevitably disappointed. Prisoners, he would have us believe, is a story of the unrequited love of a young man for a country.

Goldberg comes from a relentlessly non-religious family—“the Mosaic equivalent of lapsed Unitarians,” he tells us early on. Ham and cheese sandwiches frequented the menu, served by agnostic parents who paid dues but little devotion to the bland local Reform synagogue. Goldberg wants meaning and self-assertion and he finds it in the tension of being a Jew in a world that treats Jews at best as a nuisance and at worst as a plague. He says he despises Jean Paul Sartre’s claim that the Jews exist merely because anti-Semites invented them. But, he concedes, he has concluded that “it is truer—about me, at least—than I care to admit.”

After flirting briefly with Meir Kahane’s radical racist movement, Goldberg attends a camp in the Catskills run by Hashomer Hatzair, the international socialist Zionist movement. There, he falls hard for Israel, the homeland where Jews reign not just as effete intellectuals, bankers and rabbinical scholars but as soldiers, policemen and farmers. He embraces 20th-century Zionist pioneer A.D. Gordon’s concept that Jews can redeem themselves from centuries of persecution by the sweat of their brows. As Goldberg puts it: “The Diaspora was the disease, and Israel was the cure.”

Goldberg buys a plane ticket to Israel in the late 1980s—proud of himself that it’s only one-way. But reality begins to hit him almost as soon as he lands. The kibbutz he first settles on turns out to be a cold, clannish, insular little enclave whose members have permanently parked their principles—if they had any—at the front gate. Like all new citizens below a certain age, he enters the Israel Defense Forces, confidently declaring that the real lesson of the Holocaust is “it is easy to kill a unilaterally disarmed Jew but much harder to kill one who is pointing a gun at your face.” He and his fellow army conscripts bond by sadistically taunting their unit’s weakest member, a troubled young man named Scott. It gets worse. Goldberg graduates from basic training in December 1987, the same month that the first Palestinian uprising begins with mass rioting in Gaza.

He winds up in a military police unit and is assigned to Ketziot, the elaborate prison camp that the Israelis constructed in the Negev Desert to warehouse thousands of Palestinian detainees. Here is where Goldberg begins to confront the reality of Israel and the Palestinians and his narrative begins to take wing.
As Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post, I was one of the first foreign journalists to be allowed to visit Ketziot in June 1988, a few months after it opened. It was a bleak, heartless, sterile zone—the model for Donald Rumsfeld’s Guantanamo. “It isn’t a Holiday Inn,” Ehud Barak, then deputy army chief of staff, told me at the time. The detainees received hearings every three months in closed courts where secret evidence prevailed. While I was there, an Israeli prison guard took me aside and confirmed allegations of Palestinians that those who misbehaved were taken to an empty shower room and beaten. But it was clear even then that Ketziot was self-defeating—rather than breaking Palestinian will, a term in detention became a badge of honor for young activists. They organized themselves in cells where they studied Palestinian nationalism. It was, as the Israelis themselves eventually acknowledged, a graduate school for militants, with room and board supplied by their hapless oppressors. “I don’t think Israel is holding Gaza anymore,” Meron Benvenisti, the iconoclastic Israeli political scientist, once told me. “I think Gaza is holding Israel.”

To his credit, Goldberg’s portrait of Ketziot—which Israel shut down in 1995 but reopened in 2002 during the second intifada—is remorseless and unblinking in describing solitary confinement, tear gas and clubs. He agonizes and sometimes resists orders, at one point defying his commanding officer by refusing to arbitrarily choose a prisoner for isolation after an unidentified prisoner has inadvertently hit a guard with an errant rock.
Because he seeks to be a reasonable man in a palace of irrationality, Goldberg is constantly pummeled by both sides. His Israeli commanders consider him a whiner and a wimp, while the Palestinian prisoners have little interest in his small acts of humanity. When Goldberg inquires after the health of a prisoner who had been injured, a Palestinian expresses surprise. He tells Goldberg he has never experienced any kindness from a Jew.

When Goldberg tries to help a young prisoner who has been sodomized by fellow Palestinians, no one seems concerned—neither the prison commander, nor senior Palestinians, nor the Red Cross representative who is supposed to look after prisoner welfare. Goldberg retreats to his tent in despair, concluding that each side deserves the other: “The Palestinians, who let violence into every corner of their lives; and the Israelis, these Jews devoid of pity. Let them suffer together in the desert.”

After Goldberg leaves the army, he works for a time at The Jerusalem Post. But his growing disenchantment with Israel—and his love affair with an American woman whom he eventually marries—propel him back to America. He sounds both self-righteous and naïve in explaining why: “My love for Israel was so bottomless that my disappointment with it was bottomless, too.” Oh dear, such a sensitive soul. Or as one Israeli points out to him: “Who asked you to come here, anyway?”

Back in the United States, Goldberg writes for the Forward and The New York Times, before taking a job at The New Yorker. His assignments inevitably take him back to the Holy Land, this time as a seasoned observer. As he loosens his grip on his identity as Super Jew, Goldberg begins to engage with Palestinians and they with him. On an assignment for The New York Times Magazine in 1997, he tracks down some of his former prisoners to see what their lives are like and whether peace is possible. They are invariably shocked to see their erstwhile jailer and welcome him with the hospitality that Arab culture dictates for treating guests, invited or otherwise. But always there is an undercurrent of bitterness and wariness to these encounters. “What do you want from me?” one of the Palestinians demands of Goldberg. “You want me to make you feel better?”

This is exactly what Goldberg seems to be demanding from both sides—that they settle their petty struggle so he can feel okay about being a proud Jew. No one, unfortunately, is ready to oblige. They’re too locked into their conflict to even notice his discomfort, let alone care. Poor Goldberg is left to navigate the moral shoals by himself.

The former prisoner he comes to like best is a young man like himself, Rafiq Hijazi, a university student from the Jebalya refugee camp in Gaza. Back in Ketziot, Goldberg and Hijazi had engaged in periodic discussions—prison guard to prisoner. Now on the outside, their wary dialogue blossoms into friendship.

For Goldberg, Hijazi, who gets his master’s degree at American University in Washington, DC, and becomes a professor of statistics, is perhaps the only Palestinian who understands the moral justification for Zionism; and by the same token, Goldberg believes he may be the only Israeli whom Hijazi meets who doesn’t deny the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Their friendship sours eventually as Hijazi becomes a more devout Muslim and angrier at America and its ally, Israel. Still, they manage to overcome their political differences and preserve a relationship that in some ways redeems them as people, not warriors for a cause.
Prisoners is subtitled A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, but that’s misleading. This is Goldberg’s book, and Hijazi at best is a supporting player and at times merely a foil for Goldberg’s longings and angst. Goldberg is acute about why Hijazi is so important to him: “I wanted to make sure I could still have it all: my parochialism, my universalism, a clean conscience and a friendship with my enemy.”

There are times when Goldberg is hyperbolic, voyeuristic and just plain annoying. He is prone to unwittingly placing himself and his hosts in dangerous situations where experienced journalists would know not to tread. He also offers simple-minded prescriptions—he contends that the Palestinians might have won their struggle for statehood in a week had they engaged in nonviolent resistance à la Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Still, he’s a first-rate reporter and skilled narrative writer, and every now and then he rolls out a moment that feels truthful and terribly sad. After the second intifada begins, Goldberg, now working for The New Yorker, journeys to the West Bank city of Ramallah and is reporting on a confrontation between soldiers and stone throwers when a Palestinian teenager standing next to him is shot in the neck. On his way out of town he asks an army sergeant in Hebrew why he and his men are firing live rounds into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators.

“They have guns,” the sergeant replies.

No, they don’t, Goldberg replies. They have stones.

“No, they have guns.”

Bullshit, I was just there, Goldberg tells him. They don’t have guns.

“They will,” the sergeant says.

Indeed, they will.