Buying the Night Flight (30 page)

I remember walking out of the big, ponderous, gray government central building that early evening in the rain and suddenly catching myself up and shaking my head. I had been listening for an hour and a half as though it were the most normal thing in the world to have the Polish national spokesman telling me why communism had failed. Suddenly the fact hit me with all its resonances -- it was, simply, extraordinary!

We journalists were, once again, privileged. We were there at the window the moment the curtain opened, and we were the only ones allowed to step inside -- into this wonderland we had suspected, but did not know, existed. Only we were allowed in to seek out the little (in this case, not so little) truths of the great historical saga that had so suddenly revealed itself to the world -- and that could just as suddenly close.

No matter what happened, I knew inside myself that Poland would never again be the same. One of the brightest men at Interpress told me, "We have three crises in Poland--economic, political, and moral. The moral is at the base of the political. And in the moral, we have to first have the clarification in terminology. Until now we have used different terms for the same phenomena. It is the first time that we have different viewpoints but don't feel offended at different viewpoints. We treat it as natural that we differ in viewpoints."

Again -- the importance of "terminology" or of "information." Again - -the purifying aspects of my profession are calling.

Still, as intellectually and morally exciting as it was, Poland was in a dangerous situation of collapse. The forces -- the Communist Party and government, Solidarity, the army and the Church -- could not hammer out the new form of government. And they could not call upon the people to make sacrifices if they could not tell them what the new institutional form that would save them would be. That was the danger. It was not unlike the disintegration I had seen elsewhere, an "ideological Lebanon."

You could often feel and see it collapsing as you made your rainy rounds and observed it. The Polish zloty, at the regular rate, was thirty-three to the dollar. But the black market rate was four hundred to the dollar!

The first night, reacting to the regular rate, I ate carefully in the hotel dining room. After changing the money the second day, I had smoked salmon, creamed mushrooms, chateaubriand, and a good bottle of red wine -- every night. The dinner cost about two dollars.

Did I not feel guilty about sitting there in that relatively nice atmosphere and eating so well, while the Poles were lined up outside every day for hours and hours waiting for the most paltry of food rations? Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. But I did it. I rationalized that I was walking ten miles a day, which was true, and that I needed nourishment. And basically, I knew that whether or not I ate an elaborate dinner didn't matter.

Some nights the dining room reminded me a great deal of the foreign currency bars in Russia; waiters were changing money in every known currency at every table. One night, in a fit of final madness, I attempted even to include in my feast the Russian caviar that was on the menu.

"No caviar," the waiter said impassively. Then he whispered loudly, "You like to buy some in dollars?"

I asked to see it, and he brought it out barely covered with a pink napkin, which he elegantly lifted to display the precious little black cargo. But he was greedy -- he wanted eighty dollars, which after all was what it cost in Washington--and I said, "Absolutely not!"

Another day I was wheeling around Warsaw in the rain with my big, burly cabdriver, who was also my money changer. We would "change" between the seats as we traveled through the city. This day, I said, with rather exaggerated politeness for the situation, "Do you speak English?"

"Nah, nah," he said ebulliently, "Chust money .... Change ....

Changea money .... "

Then, for some reason, I went on to ask him,
"Sprechen sie Deutsch?"
or, "Do you speak German?"

He started the most eerie singsong. "Nah, nah, chust
Geld.
...

Wechseln .... Wechseln Geld
.... " Then he proceeded with this strange singsong, in five different languages in which this man of the street and man of our times used only -- only -- words that had to do with "changing money." It became a kind of interchangeable singsong, and as we spun through the streets, I found myself under standing Bertolt Brecht.

Despite these amusing scenes, I knew that what I was seeing was a society falling apart, disintegrating, dying, where some were suffering a greed for freedom and knowledge and others were still indulging their greed for untrammeled power and for
"Geld."

***

Exactly two weeks after I left Warsaw that gray, rainy November of 1981, the Polish army declared martial law -- and virtually destroyed the "Polish revolution" -- for the moment. Those of us who had "been there" -- the foreign correspondents, the Western diplomats on the spot, the other analysts -- all said, as had the American embassy, that it would not be a Soviet invasion, that it would be a Polish military takeover. Yet, far away in Washington, ideologues who refused to be governed by "knowing" the intrinsic qualities of a situation again mis-analyzed and mis-predicted what would come. When martial law was declared, they were still predicting a Soviet takeover and therefore were unprepared to respond to the real situation that occurred.

Again the people who "didn't have to be there" but were ... were the ones who were right. They "knew."

Entering the World of International Terrorism

"The base of the lighthouse is dark."
--Old Japanese proverb

In 1969 I entered the world of international terrorism. I entered as a journalist, which meant an even more intricate balancing act among the dangers than it did for a participant. Journalists are in danger not only for what they might do, but for what they might think, for what they might write, or even for what might be interpreted as their intent or beliefs.

This entire business was full of questions with few answers. How do you analyze guerrilla or terrorist movements? How do you tell the difference between them? What standards do you use; in an area in which no journalistic -- or other -- standards have been hammered out? How do you separate necessity from brutality? How far should you go out of the way to try to balance any imbalance of the general media, such as we certainly had in the Middle East? Finally, how much do you forgive and how do you survive?

I was one of the first journalists thrown into this murderous and maniacal milieu, and one of the very first women, so I was working out guidelines and principles as I went along. The first task, as always and everywhere, was to get to know the people you were writing about, to fathom their cause and problems and correctly to judge their insecurities and insincerities. And this was, of course, made more complicated (to say the very least) when a movement was basically underground and afraid.

Oddly enough, when my foreign editor and friend, Nick Shuman, sent me to the Middle East in the fall of 1969, I had little or no interest in the area, in the Arabs, and particularly in the Palestinians. I had long been extremely pro-Israeli and the "Palestinian question" frankly drew a blank for me. But soon after I was there, I began to realize that this "situation" was not at all what I had been led to believe. I had seen many situations where the reality little resembled what one had been led to expect beforehand -- but never had I seen such a chasm of misunderstanding as this one.

At that time the monarchy of Jordan's legendary King Hussein was largely ruled by the regulars and irregulars of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Indeed, as I drove into Amman by cab from the airport that first night, open jeeps of
PLO
men in full uniform careened around the streets of that lovely city with its villas of gold-colored stone. It was all too obvious that they were taking it over from the king; an air of imminent civil war hung about the entire place.

In the evenings on the outdoor terrace of the Hotel Intercontinental, the guerrillas of Fatah, As Saiqa, or the Popular Front, or a score of other movements, would walk around with macabre "politeness" asking for donations. The silent machine guns they carried lent the requests a certain urgency and clarity. When you donated to any one group, that group would put a yellow or a red or a green slip of paper on your table -- you would not be bothered by
them
again.

One of the most exciting efforts I have undertaken has been to penetrate these organizations. They are madly suspicious, and being an American certainly did not help. They can turn on you at any moment and their important functions are, for the most part, underground.

Only in the beginning, in dealing with this strange shadow world, does it seem odd that these "underground" movements have "information offices." Then your mind adapts and you become just as crazy as everyone else and it seems perfectly natural to go along with the often sinister drama.

So the first thing I did was to go to the Fatah Information Office, where I first met Zudhi Terrazzi, the fiftyish scion of an old crusader family from Jerusalem. They spelled his name "Terzi" on his visa application, so he turned out as "Terzi" at the
UN
. Then sleeping on a cot in the office, Zudhi was later to become the
PLO
's first ambassador to the
UN
. A cultured, calculating man who was utterly dedicated to the cause, Zudhi started me on the little journeys necessary for a journalist's work.

The first thing for a journalist to do in such a situation is to create trust, which takes time. One way to do this is to "make the rounds." Dutifully, day after day, I trooped out of the Jordan Intercontinental, sometimes with a group and sometimes alone, to see the training camps, to see the little Palestinian boys training, to see the wounded in the hospitals, in effect to go through the whole ritual.

In order more fully to understand, I spent a night in the Marka refugee camp with a refugee family. We drove out that day to the Marka camp just outside of Amman, and I settled in with the Abdel Khader family, originally from a village named Jemsu in what was now Israel. The first little "crisis" came when, despite the fact that I had (I thought) worn a very conservative black dress, as I sat on a low stool my knees showed slightly.

There was a flurry of whispers. But everything was solved when the manager of the camp himself appeared with a towel, which he demurely draped over my knees. It was my first encounter with the fact that elbows and knees drove Arab men quite mad.

Later that evening I had put on a heavy long nightgown of the wife's (apparently just fine to wear in front of the men) and when it was time to sleep they all piled their thin mattresses up one on another and I found myself sleeping several feet above the rest of the family!

But it was in the Marka camp I began to see, firsthand, the real problem of the three million Palestinians and, even more so, the dangerous unreality of our ideas about them. I could see with this family, who talked endlessly about the day when they would return to their old village of Jemsu (as though it were still as it was when they left), how the poor Palestinians had made out. One million of them remained in camps, mostly without citizenship and without work, having been driven from or having left voluntarily what had been Palestine and what was now Israel. But there were also other Palestinians -- neither hungry nor in refugee camps.

Soon I was in Beirut with these others -- the vast body of business men and intellectuals and educated people that also made up the Palestinians. One day there, Walid Khalidi, a brilliant man who refuses to indulge in "vulgarizations about his Jewish cousins," was explaining to me why it was that of all the refugees in the modern world it was only these Palestinian refugees who kept on with this insane insistence upon a return.

"It was the wholeness," he explained, "the wholeness of everybody being put across a frontier ... and not on a time scale to allow the Great Healer time to do his work. You woke up and you said, 'Am I not in Jaffa? Of course, I must be.' Then, compounding injustice, plus insult, there was the closeness of standing in Jerusalem and seeing a Jewish family washing clothes on your balcony. And at the same time, there was the din of applause for your persecutors ringing constantly in your ears."

I was beginning to put the Palestinian "problem" into some perspective, and I realized that there was a new theme just lying there and waiting to be sung -- the truth that the Palestinians were only secondarily the Abdel Khaders in the camps. With 100,000 college graduates or more, they are the most developed people in the Arab world and
the
major catalyst for change. In November 1970 I wrote in
The New Republic:

The Palestinian Arabs -- those ultimately fanaticized people who just masterfully sabotaged the Middle East peace plan -- are not what they seem to be. They are not, as they have widely been pictured, poor. They are not, by and large, uneducated. They are not a people without hope and their cause is not a cause born primarily of depredation and poverty ....

It is nearly impossible, among the 30,000 to 50,000 commandos or "fedayeen" (the Arabic word for "those who sacrifice") to find a leader or sub-leader who is not a doctor, lawyer or literary person. And in this apparent contradiction, almost unnoticed in the plethora of news coverage of this obstreperous revolutionary movement, lies the fascination of this curious people. They are a revolutionary force in the world today not because they are poor and without hope but rather because they are the most advanced people in the Arab world.