Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [22]
“You humanized them,” a reporter friend said. “You’re writing about suicide bombers as people who have corpses and families. They can’t stand to see them written about like that.”
“It’s not like I said suicide bombers were noble or good,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. You humanized them.”
By 2003 I’d settled in Jerusalem, and everybody was talking about a war in Iraq. By then I was used to accepting vitriol and character attacks as another part of the war, and they had oxidized me. This was an old battle of narratives, all the stories fighting to be the most true, and as a writer of stories you couldn’t help getting dragged into it. I printed one of the e-mails and tacked it to my office wall:
“You and the LA Times should go FUCK yourselves.”
It was part of the crusting you develop in Jerusalem. When the phone rang at four in the morning, I fumbled for instant coffee in a dark kitchen and hacked out a story about some fresh assault on Gaza, knowing even half asleep that nobody would read it—that many Americans don’t fully understand what Gaza is or how it was created, or what the presence of Israeli tanks there denotes, and that the people most likely to slog through twenty column inches of wire-style reportage are the ones scanning for a hint of bias, a misplaced adjective, a mistaken fact. But I got up and wrote through the dawn all the same, because it was the job I had pined after and now it was mine, in all its dubious glory. Work was becoming work.
Arab children could be trained to think better. Miri really thought so. She was an Israeli photographer with a rusty scrape of a voice and big dark eyes under torrents of wild curls. Miri was liberal. She believed in peace past the point when most Israelis had thrown up their hands and decided to build a wall. She maintained what I imagined to be careful, fraught friendships with Israeli Arabs, as the Palestinians who live inside Israel proper are called. (On my first trip, I annoyed the Jerusalem bureau chief by asking, “But aren’t there also Jewish Arabs? Like Israelis from Morocco and Yemen?” “Yes,” she snapped, “but you don’t call them that!”)
I was sitting around a Tel Aviv television studio with Miri. Midnight was coming and we were eating sushi and talking about animals. Miri had been teaching Arab kids about animal rights.
“It’s terrible what you see,” she said. “They tie a cat or a dog to a stick and torture it. But you can explain to them. They don’t know any better.”
I was skeptical. “I would think that either kids have compassion, or not,” I said, soaking a tuna roll in soy sauce. “How can you put compassion where it wasn’t before?”
“Oh, you can,” Miri said. “They don’t know. So you say, ‘I have a cat at home and he’s very smart, he does this and that, his name is Frank.’ So they start to think of the cat like a person with feelings.”
“Do they respond?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “They are very interested.”
Israeli news was running; it was late in the newscast, in the features. There was a talent show in an Israeli prison. The prison looked jolly and clean. An inmate chatted with a voice coach. The two men joked back and forth, chuckling and nodding their heads.
“That’s not where they put the Palestinians,” I said. I had driven past the tents out in the desert, tried to get permission to pay a reporting visit and been denied.
“No,” Miri said. “That’s for regular prisoners. Criminals. Not the Palestinians.”
I watched for another minute. Men were prancing onstage.
“It looks very nice,” I said.
“They try to be humane,” she agreed.
On the map, Nablus was right up the road. It seemed all you had to do was drive to the Israeli town of Kfar Saba, hang a right, and cruise to Nablus. The trouble with the geography of the occupied Palestinian territories, however, is that maps are misleading. Space yawns and vanishes. Checkpoints and closures crop up and disappear again. There are some roads for settlers and other