Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (40 page)

The dim interior of the al-Aksa Mosque was the size of a large
suburban house lot. There were no furnishings at all except luminous antique carpets spread two and three deep across the entire
floor. Scores of columns, thick as automobiles, supported a roof so
high it was nearly invisible. A few of the slippered worshipers knelt alone on prayer rugs; others gathered in small groups along the
walls. For the next four hours Tony, John and I hid in these majestic
shadows, wondering what the hell we were doing.

It was unlikely that the Israelis would let anything important
erupt again in the Haram or overreact if it did. They'd taken too
much flak about the mosque gassing. To put it in Protestant American terms: throwing a tear gas grenade into the al-Aksa Mosque on
a sabbath was like attacking the Pebble Beach golf course with
Agent Orange on a Sunday in June. So we weren't going to see
much action. And we weren't really doing our jobs either. Outside
the sanctuary, all through the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine's West Bank and Gaza Strip, there were riots, retaliations,
strikes, curfews, stonings, shootings, beatings, shoutings, whinings, and wild excuse-makings-the complete folderol of a Mideastern political crisis. Eager, ambitious reporters would have been
out there interviewing the pants off everybody and filing serious,
indignant yet balanced and thoughtful pieces. Instead, here we
were dressed like ninnies and sneaking around in mosques.

However, dressing like ninnies and sneaking around in
mosques is an important tradition among old Arab hands, dating
back at least to 1853 when the explorer Sir Richard Burton dressed
like a ninny for nine whole months and managed to sneak all the
way into the holy Kaabah at Mecca. Like Sir Richard, T. E.
Lawrence and others before us, we were trying to penetrate the soul
of the Arab, trying to become one with him and fathom the Mystery
of the East. It's just something you have to go through if you're
going to be an old Arab hand, like eating a live guppy to get into
Sigma-Nu.-

Shortly before noon, as the mosque was beginning to fill,
Ahmed suggested that I go outside and mingle. I thought this was a
little too P. J. of Arabia, especially since I look about as much like
an average American jerk as it's possible to look and speak exactly
two words of Arabic. But Ahmed thought I'd pass, thanks perhaps
to a high school fist fight which left me with a Levantine nose. "If
they start throwing stones," he said, "feel free to join in."

Pulling the kaffiyeh down over my forehead to hood my blue
eyes, I walked outside into a milling crowd of two thousand
Mohammedans. The crowd was all men and boys. Women pray separately in the Dome of the Rock. A few of the men were in
church-going clothes but most wore jeans and sweaters like my
own. My deck shoes-not a popular fashion item with desert
peoples-were the only anomaly.

I didn't know quite what to do with myself, so I milled too.
Fortunately the Arabs are also fond of lounging. And I lounged for
a while-leaning against pillars, sitting on the edge of fountains,
that sort of thing. Nobody bothered me; only a couple of small boys
looked twice at my yokel face.

The men were chatting or walking alone lost in contemplation.
Some strolled in pairs, holding hands. Then the muezzin called the
faithful and suddenly I was the only person not facing Mecca. Not
many O'Rourkes have ever bowed to Mecca, but I did and followed
all the gestures and prostrations as best I could, half a beat behind
the others, like singing along when you don't know the words.

There was a peculiar casualness to the worship. People ambled in and out of the mosque all through the service. It was God as
an informal thing, but a serious informal thing, the way lunch is
when you're hungry. A large part of the crowd stayed outside,
listening to loudspeakers mounted on al-Aksa's portico, listening
as though they were hearing something they were actually interested in, not a sermon or a scripture reading. I grew up in the prim
and glacial ceremonies of the Methodist church-half grammar
lesson, half drill inspection. It had never occurred to me that
anyone might want to just come and hang out at a religious service.

This was no stick-on, decal God here, but a woven-in-thecloth, blown-in-the-glass diety. In the Holyland, God comes with
the territory. And though I don't suppose the Moslems would like to
hear it, Israel, too, has God as standard equipment. After all, here
it is, the State of Israel, with no other rationale for existence except
a promise from God. I wonder what a Methodist homeland would be
likemandatory stay-pressed shirts, federal regulations about
keeping feet off furniture and automatic death penalty for anybody
with crab grass in his lawn.

There was, in fact, a demonstration after prayers, though not a
very exciting one. Men came out of al-Aksa and yelled; women
came out of the Dome of the Rock and shrieked. An Iman, a portly
visiting president of the mosque in some West Bank town, was hoisted upon shoulders and carried around the Dome. Dozens of
pocket-sized Korans were waved in the air. I demonstrated a bit
myself by milling around at a slightly faster pace than I'd milled
before.

True to Arab form, the demonstration immediately broke into
two quarreling factions: The group hoisting the Iman wanted to
keep a strictly religious tone of outrage to the proceedings; the
other group wanted to wave a small, homemade Palestinian flag and
scream at the Israelis. The soldiers along the walls looked tense,
and one platoon moved into the enclosure and stood along the edge
of the Dome's platform with weapons in array. But they didn't
interfere. A few young Moslems made feints at collecting stones to
throw but didn't follow through. With nothing to oppose it, the
demonstration died down in half an hour.

By the time Tony, John and I got smuggled out of the sanctuary, it was after three o'clock. Old Jerusalem was a very different
place in the afternoon. Israeli soldiers pried at locks with
crowbars, trying to force Moslem shopkeepers to end the general
strike that started in December while young Palestinian activists
darted through the marketplaces warning merchants not to open.
Arab boys of ten and twelve were picking up rocks and chunks of
cement and yelling encouragement to each other from the roofs.
Armored personnel carriers, filled with irritable-looking draftees,
squeezed along the few large streets. Islamic fundamentalists
barked over PA systems from storefront mosques. Greek monks,
Armenian priests, Catholic nuns and Coptic whatsits lumbered
around in full fig like parade floats. Ultra-Orthodox Jews plodded
by, wearing ridiculous beaver hats and making sour faces. Jesusaddled German tourists strode overenergetically from one holy hot
spot to the next.

At dawn in Jerusalem, you could be in any century. But at
mid-afternoon, you know exactly what century you're in-the
twelfth, when everybody was bashing everybody over the head
about God.

The rock over which the Dome of the Rock is built is supposed
to be the altar where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac (until
Yahweh explained He was just kidding). David parked the Ark of the Covenant here. And Mohammed is believed to have leapt into
heaven with this rock as his trampoline. The hill the rock sits onindistinguishable from the thousand other dumpy hills of Judea-is
called Temple Mount by the Jews, Haram esh-Sherif by the
Moslems and Mt. Moriah by the Christians. Solomon's Temple was
here and the great Temple complex of Herod, destroyed by the
Romans in 70 A. D. Thus the western wall of the Haram is the
Wailing Wall of the Jews, who bemoan their fate on one side of it
while the Moslems bemoan theirs on the other. The early Christians
considered the place cursed because Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple (a safe enough prediction; the whole of Jerusalem
has been destroyed more than thirty times). Score that round of
theological debate to the early Christians.

In fact, I think it can be fairly said that everything in the Holy
Land is cursed The Gaza Strip certainly is. I drove down there to
take a look at the place where Israel's current batch of troubles
began. The Strip is desolate and, at the same time, one of the most
thickly populated places on earth. (Desolately overpopulated,
cursed Holyland, blood-soaked home of the Prince of Peace-this
region never seems to run out of oxymorons.) Gaza City has the
same crowded poverty as Arab Jerusalem, but it's all new and made
of cement. The land around it, the mere 140 square miles that
make up this gigantic international sore spot, should be a place of
gilt-sand beaches and graceful dunes dotted with palms and oasis
wells. Instead it's Hell's Riviera with eight refugee camps housing a
quarter of a million people.

The Palestinians in these camps were displaced by the 1948
war-the one Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint won in Exodus.
Since then they've been "temporarily" sheltered by the jack-off
U.N.; ruled first by useless Egyptian bureaucracy, then by coldhearted Israeli military fiat; ignored by the Western bloc; exploited
by the Eastern bloc and just left there, like live bait in a
geopolitical leg trap by their fellow Arabs.

In between the refugee camps are some ratty Arab farms
(Palestinians, unlike Israeli citizens, do not get subsidized irrigation water). Also in between the camps are Jewish settlements. I
have no idea why. The Jews have no biblical claim to Gaza except
for some exploits of Samson's. ("Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there a harlot, and went in unto her." Judges 16:1) The
settlements are cheerless places surrounded by armed guards and
barbed wire and featuring the usual dreadful Israeli architecturea style that crosses the worker housing of Gdansk with the branch
banks of Hollywood, Florida.

All the refugee camps had been put under curfew, which
meant no one could stir outside the shack houses at any time for
any reason. The curfew was lifted for only an hour or so a day, the
time never announced beforehand. Even then only the women
could go outside and get food.

I made my way into the largest of the camps, Jabalia, which
houses fifty-two thousand people in what looks like, from a distance, a valley full of packing crates with electrical lines. Entering
the camp was a less romantic business than getting into the al-Aksa
Mosque and more dangerous, too. In the occupied territories,
unlike Jerusalem, the Israelis were shooting people.

I crawled into Jabalia through a scraggly vineyard and spent
an unhappy five minutes with my gut pressed to the sand, trying to
look like a grape plant while an armored personnel carrier rolled
along a nearby road. I visited an architect there, named Ali, who
did not miss the irony of being an architect in a two-room cinderblock house with a corrugated asbestos roof.

I could see daylight all around the eaves in the eight-by-tenfoot living room. There was no heat, and a cold wind was blowing
off the Mediterannean. All said the camp had been under curfew
for seven days. The Israeli-controlled electricity had been cut off
twice and at one point the water mains were shut for three days;
people had to drink from rain barrels. The food in the camp stores
had all run out, and the break in the curfew was not long enough for
the women to walk into town and back. Money, too, had about run
out, because of the Palestinian general strike and the fact that no
one could get to work anyway. However, the United Nations was
usually allowed to distribute food to children and nursing mothers
once a day. And an informal smuggling network had grown up
around the camp perimeters. Nobody was going hungry yet.

All counted himself lucky. There were only five in his family.
Some people in the camp had households of ten or fifteen. I asked
Ali's wife what she was feeding her kids. "Bread and tea for breakfast," she said, "and tomatoes and vegetables that are smuggled." There was no meat or milk. She had no more said that than
Ali invited me to stay for dinner. You can't fault Arab manners. It
took ten minutes of diplomatic maneuvering to escape imposing on
their larder.

"Where are you from?" I asked Ali. Though, of course, since
he was only thirty-two years old, he was from nowhere. He was born
in the camp. But without hesitation Ali named a little village in
what's now Israel proper.

"My father goes to cry there. Nothing is left."

The press stands accused of holding the Israelis to higher
moral standards than it holds the other peoples of the Middle East.
That's not our fault. Moses started that. Are the Israelis treating the
Palestinians any worse than the Palestinians would treat the Israelis
if the sandal were on the other foot? Of course not. The Munich
massacre and hundreds of killings, bombings, hijackings, rocket
attacks and other mad-hat actions prove it. Unfortunately, morality
is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping.

The Israeli-administered hospital in Gaza City, where Arabs
wounded in the rioting are treated, was a pile of shit. The floors
were dirty, the bathrooms were dirty and the little kitchens on each
floor were pathetic in their filth. The walls had been painted, a very
long time ago, in awful landlord colors. Damp marks spread across
the ceilings. Screens were missing from the windows and light
bulbs from the light fixtures. The hospital looked like the "colored"
waiting rooms used to look in bus stations down South. The doctors
were all Palestinian, but none of them would talk to me for fear of
Israeli ire. The patients, however, were pitifully eager to talk, as if
exposing their plight would make any difference in the dead-end
hatreds of this land. Maybe the Western powers will intervene, said
the Palestinians with forlorn hope. But we've done that before.
When Godfrey of Bouillon conquered Jerusalem in 1099 he slaughtered all the Moslems and burned the Jews in their synagogue.

I went from bed to bed hearing dreadful stories. A fifteenyear-old who looked twelve, and didn't have an eyelash's worth of
down on his upper lip, had been shot through the thigh bone an
inch below his balls. He said he had been bringing food home when a soldier told him "come here." He did and got shot. He
probably wasn't as innocent as that, but any grown man could have
knocked this kid cold with a pancake spatula. The slightly larger
boy in the next bed had an eye the size of a teacup and bruises like
zebra stripes. He said he'd been detained by soldiers and beaten
for thirty minutes. In a small room next door were four young men;
all had been shot-in the chest; in the side; in the belly. Only one
had been shot in the leg, the traditional shoot-to-wound target. In
the ward across the hall was a ten-year-old with a bullet in his rib
cage and a man and his teenage son who'd both been beaten
senseless, they claimed, in a police station, and an old man who'd
been beaten all over and had both his shins broken. And so on.