PRISONERS
A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
By Jeffrey Goldberg
316 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-41234-4. $33 Canadian
Back in 1979, the New York Times unwittingly broke the taboo against American Jews serving as Middle East correspondents, when it appointed David Shipler its Jerusalem bureau chief. Shipler isn’t Jewish – but many readers assumed he was. He was followed by Thomas Friedman, who does happen to be Jewish, just as many subsequent Jerusalem-based correspondents for American and Canadian newspapers have been – including myself.
Like Friedman, many go on to write insightful books based on their experiences. These professionals, with varying degrees of “Jewishness” in their backgrounds, sometimes mildly reference that part of their identity as they write. But most are primarily members of the tribe known as “western journalist”.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a veteran of both The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, instead brazenly exposes himself as a “tribal” Jew who also happens to be a journalist. Goldberg’s Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East Divide comes two decades after Shipler’s and Friedman’s prize-winning books, in an era when memoir has overtaken essay as the prevailing trend in narrative non-fiction. In Goldberg’s hands, the approach works beautifully, penetrating the Middle East tragedy more deeply and honestly than thousands of pages of more circumspect journalistic accounts have done – whether penned by Jews or non-Jews.
Goldberg’s is the story of a Long Island boy who as a teenager discovers Jewish nationalism and then immigrates to Israel, going on to serve in the Israeli army. He becomes a “prisoner counselor” in the notorious Ketziot prison, which Israel erected in the Negev Desert during the first Palestinian Intifada or uprising (1988–1993). In 1991, Goldberg manages to befriend Rafiq Hijazi, a devoutly Muslim prisoner whom the author pursues years later in Gaza and Washington, after both have left the barbed wire behind to build their careers in America. Goldberg’s uneasy friendship with Hijazi is the prism through which he seeks an answer to the ultimate question: is peace truly possible?
With self-deprecating wit, and a sharp ear for the conversational style of both Jews and Arabs, Goldberg never sugar-coats the relationship. He manages to be both cynical and hopeful as he takes us on his personal journey, which includes the disillusionment common to North American Jews who probe both sides of “the Middle East divide.” Still, Goldberg’s Jewish pride remains his touchstone. Unlike other journalists, he is a participant in this drama, not an observer.
The first half of Prisoners is a Zionist coming of age story. The author describes his brushes with schoolyard anti-Semitism and the admiration he felt for the Israeli style “new” Jew who was to supersede the old Diaspora Jew, oppressed for centuries. Goldberg’s mini-portraits are vivid, whether he is describing Orthodox Jews on an airplane rushing about to get a minyan (the 10-man prayer quorum), or recounting, years later, the patronizing comments of Israelis who find his interest in Palestinians naïve.
Goldberg excuses the gruffness of the “leather-necked,” sandal-shod driver who picks him up and takes him to his first home in Israel, a kibbutz in the Galilee. “I needed to remind myself that these were not shtick-friendly American Jews. Israelis, in my limited experience, did not understand American humor,” he writes. “This wasn’t a negative, in my mind: Jews didn’t need a sense of humor when they had an air force.”
Likewise, Goldberg describes his delight at being handed, along with other new immigrant soldiers, a rifle “electric” with the promise of post-Holocaust Jewish power. “…most of us having lived our lives in the company of quisling Jews who, for reasons inexplicable and bizarre, believed that the main lesson of the Shoah was that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, instead of the actual lesson of the Shoah, which is that it is easy to kill a unilaterally disarmed Jew but much harder to kill one who is pointing a gun at your face.”
The story’s turning point is Goldberg’s insider account of his Israeli army training and, in particular, the workings of Ketziot prison, also known as Ansar 3. Goldberg is ordered to do things which he finds simply un-American, and which force him to realize he understands far less than he thinks about Israelis and their nearest enemy, Palestinians.
Hijazi’s admission that he is capable of killing Goldberg – but that it would be nothing “personal” – propels Goldberg to find out more about Islam and the Arab world. It also prompts him to try even harder to win his reticent friend over to his more liberal, western ways, just as Hijazi is becoming more fundamentalist and anti-American. After some shaky encounters, the two men ultimately find themselves in an Abu Dhabi Starbucks, coming closer to solving the conflict over Jerusalem that their leaders had managed to do at Camp David back in 2000.
The book is not without flaws. There is a jarring gap in the narrative between 1991 and1997. And Goldberg struggles in the later chapters to keep his personal story paramount, amid journalistic accounts of the Oslo peace years and their collapse into the second Palestinian uprising, the al-Aqsa Intifada. Even the friendship-as-literary-device becomes confining at times, almost as if Goldberg can hear his agent and editor hovering over his shoulder as he writes, reminding him to keep his eye on what is unique about his particular story.
Some readers have criticized Goldberg for failing to fully empathize with the Palestinians he encounters. He never completely lets down his guard as he strives to understand his enemy and achieve peaceful co-existence. But therein lies the value of this book; Goldberg displays a visceral distrust that is authentic to many Jews and Israelis, and one that is mirrored on the Arab side. The title “Prisoners” is a metaphor for both peoples, imprisoned by their own versions of the conflict. Still, Goldberg’s candor about his allegiance to Israel is refreshing – and illuminating. (I can’t recall any book by a Palestinian, struggling emotionally to understand Jews and Israelis).
The author sums up his quest near the book’s opening, when a Palestinian militant who has kidnapped him asks Goldberg just what exactly he is doing in Gaza.
“I could have said… I am here exploring the contradictions of Jewish power. I am here seeking the elimination of ambiguity. I’m looking for the bridge that will carry me across the black hole of cognition that separates Arab and Jew. I’m here to quiet the conflict in my heart.” Instead Goldberg invokes his journalistic cover. “I’m working on a story,” he tells his Palestinian captor.
In the end, Goldberg is still unsure whether peace is possible. But he has worked harder to find out than have many American Jews or journalists. And, he is still friends with Rafiq Hijazi.
Nomi Morris is a former Middle East correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (now McClatchy).
