Operation Shylock: A Confession (20 page)

“And how do you account for this?” I asked him.

“One’s interest allows anything. Very, very basic. Comes from the desert. That blade of grass is mine and my animal is going to get it or die. It’s my animal or your animal. That’s where interest begins and it justifies all duplicity. There is in Islam this idea of
taqiya
. Generally called in English ‘dissimulation.’ It’s especially strong in Shi’ite Islam but it’s all over Islamic culture. Doctrinally speaking, dissimulation is
part
of Islamic culture, and the permission to dissimulate is widespread. The culture doesn’t expect that you’ll speak in a way that endangers you and certainly not that you’ll be candid and sincere. You would be considered foolish to do that. People say one thing, adopt a public position, and are then quite different on the inside and privately act in a totally different way. They have an expression for this: ‘the shifting sands’—
ramál mutaharrika
. An example. For all their bravado about opposing Zionism, throughout the Mandate they sold land to the Jews. Not just their run-of-the-mill opportunists but also their big leadership. But they have a wonderful proverb to justify this as well.
Ad-daroori lih achkaam
. ‘Necessity has its own rules.’ Dissimulation, two-facedness, secretiveness—all highly regarded values among your friends,” he told me. “They don’t think that other
people have to know what is really on their minds. Very different from Jews, you see, telling everything that’s on their minds to everyone nonstop. I used to think that God has given the Jew the Arab to bedevil his conscience and keep it Jewish. I know better since meeting George and the bard. God sent us the Arab so we could learn from him how to refine our own deviousness.”

“And why,” George asked him, “did God give the Arab the Jew?”

“To punish him,” the lawyer answered. “You know that better than anyone. To punish him, of course, for falling away from Allah. George is a great sinner,” he said to me. “He can tell you some entertaining stories about falling away.”

“And Shmuel° is a greater actor even than I am a sinner,” said George. “In our communities he plays the role of a saint—a Jew who defends the Arab’s civil rights. To be represented by a Jewish lawyer—this way there is at least a chance in the courtroom. Even Demjanjuk thinks this way. Demjanjuk fired his Mr. O’Brien and hired Sheftel because he too is deluded enough to think it will help. I heard the other day that Demjanjuk told Sheftel, ‘If I had a Jewish lawyer to begin with, I’d never be in this trouble now.’ Shmuel, admittedly, is no Sheftel. Sheftel is the antiestablishment superstar—he’ll squeeze those Ukrainians for all they’re worth. He’ll make half a million on this Treblinka guard. That isn’t the humble way of Saint Shmuel. Saint Shmuel doesn’t care how little he is paid by his impoverished defendants. Why should he? He receives his paycheck elsewhere. It isn’t enough that Shin Bet corrodes our life here by buying an informer in every family. It isn’t enough to play the serpent like that with people already oppressed and, you would think, humiliated quite enough already. No, even the civil-rights lawyer must be a spy, even
that
they must corrupt.”

“George is not fair to his informers,” the Jewish lawyer told me. “Yes, there are a great many of them, but why not? It is a traditional occupation in this region, one at which its practitioners are marvelously adept. Informing has a long and noble history here. Informing goes back not just to the British, not just to the Turks, it goes all the way back to Judas. Be a good cultural relativist, George—informing
is a way of life here, no less deserving of your respect than the way of life indigenous to any society. You spent so many years abroad as an intellectual playboy, you were away so long from your own people, that you judge them, if I may say so, almost with the eyes of a condescending Israeli imperialist dog. You speak of informing, but informing offers a little
relief
from all that humiliation. Informing lends status, informing offers privileges. You really should not be so quick to slit the throats of your collaborators when collaborating is one of your society’s most estimable achievements. It is actually on the order of an anthropological crime to burn their hands and stone them to death—and for someone in your shoes, it is stupid as well. Since everybody in Ramallah already suspects everyone else of informing, some foolish hothead might someday be so misguided as to take
you
for a collaborator and slit your throat too. What if I were to spread the rumor myself? I might not find doing that too unpleasant.”

“Shmuel,” George replied, “do what you do, spread false rumors if you like—”

While their bantering continued, Kamil stood apart smoking in silence. He did not seem even to be listening, nor was there any reason why he should have been, since this bitter little vaudeville turn was clearly for the sake of my, and not his, education.

The soldiers who’d been smoking together at the other end of the yard started back toward the courtroom door and, after expectorating into the dust from behind one hand, the lawyer Shmuel, too, abruptly headed off without another insult for any of us.

Kamil said to me, now that Shmuel had gone, “I mistook you for somebody else.”

Who this time? I wondered. I waited to hear more but for a while there was nothing more and his thoughts appeared to be elsewhere again. “There are too many things to do,” he finally explained, “in not enough time. We are all overworked and overstrained. No sleep begins to make you stupid.” A grave apology—and the gravity I found as unnerving as everything else about him. Because his rage wasn’t flaring up in your face every two minutes, it struck me as more fearsome than George’s to be near. It was like being in the vicinity of
one of those bombs they unearth during urban excavations, the big ones that have lain unexploded since World War II. I imagined—as I didn’t when thinking about George—that Kamil could do a lot of damage when and if he ever went off.

“Whom did you mistake me for?” I asked.

He surprised me by smiling. “Yourself.”

I did not like this smile from a man who I surmised
never
horsed around. Did he know what he was saying or was he saying that he had nothing more to say? All this performing didn’t mean that a play was in progress; it meant the opposite.

“Yes,” I said, feigning friendliness, “I can see how you might be misled. But I assure you that I am no more myself than anyone else around here.”

Something in that response made him promptly turn even more severe-looking than before the dubious gift of that smile. I really couldn’t understand what he was up to. Kamil spoke as though in a code known only to himself; or perhaps he was just trying to frighten me.

“The judge,” George said, “has agreed that his brother should go to the hospital. Kamil is staying to be sure it happens.”

“I hope nothing’s wrong with your brother,” I said, but Kamil continued to look at me as though I were the one who had given the boy the injection. Now that he had apologized for having mistaken me for somebody else, he seemed to have concluded that I was even more contemptible than the other guy.

“Yes,” Kamil replied. “You are sympathetic. Very sympathetic. It is difficult not to be sympathetic when you see with your own eyes what is being perpetrated here. But let me tell you what will happen to your sympathy. You will leave here, and in a week, two weeks, a month at the most, you will forget. And Mr. Shmuel the lawyer, he will go home tonight and, even before he is in the front door, before he has even eaten his dinner and played with his children, he will forget. And George will leave here and perhaps even George will forget. If not today, tomorrow. George forgot once before.” Angrily he pointed back to the jail, but his voice was exceedingly gentle
when he said, “The one who receives the strokes has an experience different from that of the one who counts the strokes.” And with that went back to where his brother was a prisoner of the Jews.

George wanted to telephone his wife to tell her he would shortly be home with a guest, so we walked around to a door at the front of the complex, where there was no one standing guard, and George simply pushed it open and went in, with me following closely behind. I was astonished that a Palestinian like George and a perfect stranger like me could just start down the corridor without anyone’s stopping us, especially when I remembered that no one had checked at any point to see if we were armed. In an office at the end of the corridor, three female soldiers, Israeli girls of about eighteen or nineteen, were typing away, their radio tuned to the standard rock stuff—we had only to roll a grenade through the open door to take our revenge for Kamil’s brother. How come no one seemed alert to this possibility? One of the typists looked up when he asked in Hebrew if he could use the phone. She nodded perfunctorily, “Shalom, George,” and that’s when I thought, He
is
a collaborator.

George, speaking English, was telling his wife how he’d run into me in Jerusalem, the great friend he hadn’t seen since 1955, and I looked at the posters on the walls of the dirty, drab little room, tacked up probably by the soldier-typists to help them forget where they worked—there was a travel poster from Colombia, a poster of little ducklings swimming cutely in a lily pond, a poster of wildflowers growing abundantly in a peaceful field—and all the while I pretended to be engaged by them and nothing more, I was thinking, He’s an Israeli spy—and who he is spying on is me. Only what kind of spy can he be if he doesn’t know that I’m not the right me? And why should Shmuel have exposed him if Shmuel works for Shin Bet himself? No, he’s a spy for the PLO. No, he’s a spy for no one. No one’s a spy.
I’m
the spy!

Where everything is words, you’d think I’d have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing
that cannot be said … no, I’d be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar’s a roar and one is hard put to miss its meaning. Here I had only the weakest understanding of what might underlie the fighting and the shadow fighting; nor was my own behavior much more plausible to me than anyone else’s.

As we walked together down the hill and out past the guarded gatehouses, George berated himself for having imposed the miseries of the occupation on his wife and his son, neither of whom had the fortitude for a frontline existence, even though for Anna° there was compensation of a sort in living virtually next door to the widowed father whose failing health had been such a source of anxiety to her in America. He was a wealthy Ramallah businessman, nearly eighty, who had seen that Anna was sent to the best schools from the time she was ten, first, in the mid-fifties, to a Christian girls’ school in Beirut, after that to the United States, where she’d met and married George, who was also Christian. Anna had worked for years as a layout artist with a Boston advertising agency; here she ran a workshop for the production of propaganda posters, leaflets, and handouts, an operation whose clandestine nature took its toll in a daily dose of nagging medical problems and a weekly bout of migraines. Her abiding fear was of the Israelis coming at night and arresting not her but their fifteen-year-old son, Michael.°

Yet for George himself had there been a choice? In Boston he’d held the line against Israel’s defenders at the Middle East seminars in Coolidge Hall, he obstinately opposed his Jewish friends even when it meant ruining his own dinner parties, he wrote op-ed pieces for the
Globe
and went on WGBH whenever Chris Lydon wanted someone to battle for three minutes with the local Netanyahu on his show; but idealistically resisting the occupier from the satisfying security of his tenured American professorship turned out to be even less tolerable to his conscience than the memory of going around all those years disavowing any connection to the struggle at all. Yet here in Ramallah, true to his duty, he worried continually about what returning with him was doing to Anna and, even more, to Michael, whose rebellion George hadn’t foreseen, though when he described it I
wondered how he could have failed to. However heroic the cause had seemed to Michael amid the patriotic graffiti decorating his bedroom walls in suburban Newton, he felt now as only an adolescent son can toward what he sees as an obstacle to his self-realization raised by an obtuse father mandating an outmoded way of life. Most reluctantly, George was on the brink of accepting his father-in-law’s financial help and, at Anna’s insistence, sending Michael back to a New England boarding school for his remaining high school years. To George—who believed the boy was big enough to stay and be educated here in the hard truth of their lives, old enough now to share in the tribulation that was inescapably theirs and to embrace the consequences of being George’s son—the arguments with Michael were all the more punishing for being a reenactment of the bitter conflict that had alienated him from his own father and embittered them both.

My heart went out to Michael, however callow a youth he might be. The shaming nationalism that the fathers throw on the backs of their sons, each generation, I thought, imposing its struggle on the next. Yet that was their family’s big drama and the one that weighed on George Ziad like a stone. Here is Michael, whose entitlement, his teenage American instinct tells him, is to be a new ungrateful generation, ahistorical and free, and here is another father in the heartbreaking history of fathers, who expects everything blindly selfish in a young son to capitulate before his own adult need to appease the ghost of the father whom he had affronted with his own selfishness. Yes, making amends to father had taken possession of George and, as anyone knows who’s tried it, making amends to father is hard work—all that hacking through the undergrowth of stale pathology with the machete of one’s guilt. But George was out to settle the issue of self-division once and for all, and that meant, as it usually does, immoderation with a vengeance. Half-measures are out for these people—but hadn’t they always been for George? He wanted a life that merged with that of others, first, as Zee in Chicago, with ours and now all over again here with theirs—subdue the inner quarrel with an act of ruthless simplification—and it never worked. But sensibly
occupying the middle ground in Boston hadn’t worked either. His life couldn’t seem to merge with anyone’s anywhere no matter what drastic experiment in remodeling he tried. Amazing, that something as tiny, really, as a self should contain contending subselves—and that these subselves should themselves be constructed of subselves, and on and on and on. And yet, even
more
amazing, a grown man, an educated adult, a full professor, who seeks
self-integration!