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Authors: Janine di Giovanni
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Abidjan and told him. There was a pause, the usual crackle of the terrible phone lines connecting us from London to Africa. Then he burst into tears.
And so, perhaps in denial of my new role, and unsure of my identity, as the autumn grew colder, I went to Palestine, in the middle of the second intifada, to work.
I landed in Ben Gurion Airport and took an early morning taxi to Jerusalem, the car climbing higher and higher into the city which had meant so much to me in my former life – my first big story, the first time I walked into the American Colony Hotel in the late 1980s and saw a gaggle of foreign correspondents gathered around a Reuters machine spurting out wire copy and realized I wanted to be part of it.
My very first trip was the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada, and it was the first time I saw a refugee camp, or met someone who had been brutally tortured and survived. It was the first time I went to the Gaza Strip, and heard gunfire. It was the first time I experienced a checkpoint, soldiers pointing guns, and adolescent fighters, their faces covered in keffiyehs , hurling stones at windscreens.
I met teenagers who were on the run from the law, for whom I waited anxiously in safe houses; mothers of Jewish soldiers who had been killed serving in the territories; a Palestinian mayor who had lost both his legs in a car-bomb attack; and a woman who would change my life for ever: an Israeli lawyer defending Palestinians in military court. She told me to go everywhere, write everything, and gave me a brief, a blueprint for life: if you have the chance to give a voice to people who do not have a voice, she told me in her decrepit office in West Jerusalem, then you have an obligation.
I was only in my mid-twenties and I took her words very seriously. I was so young that I remember being embarrassed by my youth, by my inexperience, by my lack of nerves – those would come later – when a veteran correspondent bought me a drink and said, ‘How old are you, anyway?’ And when I answered, embarrassed, rounding off my age to my next birthday, he laughed and looked even more perplexed.
Now I was returning, pregnant, much older, and this second intifada was even more violent, even more tragic than the first. There were more settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank since my last trip back just a year before, and the children I had spent years interviewing in Gaza and Ramallah and Jenin and Nablus were grown-up, some dead, some in jail, some in exile. The man who had stood in Gaza with me during my first trip and told me he imagined peace sometime in the next fifteen years was long gone. The tactic used by Palestinians, who felt they had nothing to lose, was to employ their young as suicide bombers. Everything and nothing had changed.
The light on the ancient stone walls in West Jerusalem was turning pink the morning I arrived, the same way it had that first journey all those years ago, and I could see people rushing to work: the men in their long coats and side curls and beards and nineteenth-century hats, the women in scarves and long dresses, the tiny children, everyone moving rapidly towards something. I saw the fierceness of the pink of the bougainvillea that grows against the stone walls. The grey hill towns, the light on stone. I counted back the events of my life and my visits to Jerusalem.
I remembered once arriving a few days after my father’s funeral. I was still numb. Yitzhak Rabin had just been murdered and my office had phoned me in the middle of the night, as soon as the news broke. I took an early flight from Heathrow, packing one of my father’s cotton dress shirts which I had stolen from his drawer the day after the funeral. It still had his smell. At night, in my hotel room in Jerusalem, I slept in it, and one morning I went to the Mount of Olives and left a piece of paper with his name.
Another afternoon, rainy and cold, the skies open and menacing, I took a taxi to
And so, perhaps in denial of my new role, and unsure of my identity, as the autumn grew colder, I went to Palestine, in the middle of the second intifada, to work.
I landed in Ben Gurion Airport and took an early morning taxi to Jerusalem, the car climbing higher and higher into the city which had meant so much to me in my former life – my first big story, the first time I walked into the American Colony Hotel in the late 1980s and saw a gaggle of foreign correspondents gathered around a Reuters machine spurting out wire copy and realized I wanted to be part of it.
My very first trip was the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada, and it was the first time I saw a refugee camp, or met someone who had been brutally tortured and survived. It was the first time I went to the Gaza Strip, and heard gunfire. It was the first time I experienced a checkpoint, soldiers pointing guns, and adolescent fighters, their faces covered in keffiyehs , hurling stones at windscreens.
I met teenagers who were on the run from the law, for whom I waited anxiously in safe houses; mothers of Jewish soldiers who had been killed serving in the territories; a Palestinian mayor who had lost both his legs in a car-bomb attack; and a woman who would change my life for ever: an Israeli lawyer defending Palestinians in military court. She told me to go everywhere, write everything, and gave me a brief, a blueprint for life: if you have the chance to give a voice to people who do not have a voice, she told me in her decrepit office in West Jerusalem, then you have an obligation.
I was only in my mid-twenties and I took her words very seriously. I was so young that I remember being embarrassed by my youth, by my inexperience, by my lack of nerves – those would come later – when a veteran correspondent bought me a drink and said, ‘How old are you, anyway?’ And when I answered, embarrassed, rounding off my age to my next birthday, he laughed and looked even more perplexed.
Now I was returning, pregnant, much older, and this second intifada was even more violent, even more tragic than the first. There were more settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank since my last trip back just a year before, and the children I had spent years interviewing in Gaza and Ramallah and Jenin and Nablus were grown-up, some dead, some in jail, some in exile. The man who had stood in Gaza with me during my first trip and told me he imagined peace sometime in the next fifteen years was long gone. The tactic used by Palestinians, who felt they had nothing to lose, was to employ their young as suicide bombers. Everything and nothing had changed.
The light on the ancient stone walls in West Jerusalem was turning pink the morning I arrived, the same way it had that first journey all those years ago, and I could see people rushing to work: the men in their long coats and side curls and beards and nineteenth-century hats, the women in scarves and long dresses, the tiny children, everyone moving rapidly towards something. I saw the fierceness of the pink of the bougainvillea that grows against the stone walls. The grey hill towns, the light on stone. I counted back the events of my life and my visits to Jerusalem.
I remembered once arriving a few days after my father’s funeral. I was still numb. Yitzhak Rabin had just been murdered and my office had phoned me in the middle of the night, as soon as the news broke. I took an early flight from Heathrow, packing one of my father’s cotton dress shirts which I had stolen from his drawer the day after the funeral. It still had his smell. At night, in my hotel room in Jerusalem, I slept in it, and one morning I went to the Mount of Olives and left a piece of paper with his name.
Another afternoon, rainy and cold, the skies open and menacing, I took a taxi to
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