Review
“Revelatory . . . [Goldberg is] talented and ambitious . . . A tale far more grim than hopeful and, in that sense, a useful primer on why things seem so pessimistic just now. And yet, the final encounter between Mr. Hijazi [the Palestinian prisoner Goldberg guards] and Mr. Goldberg has a poignancy and power that bar utter despair. For the bittersweet complexity of that moment, offered in the context of all that has preceded it, this is a genuinely admirable book.”
- The New York Times
“Sensitive, forthright and perceptive . . . a forceful reminder of how rewarding, and how difficult, discourse between Israelis and Palestinians can be.”
- The Washington Post
“Sharply observed and beautifully written . . . a bracingly clear-eyed, deeply emotional and often humorous account of his life as an American Jew in love with Israel.”
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Goldberg’s sensitive portrayal of the nuances of his freighted relationship . . . gives soul and depth to Prisoners, a vivid account of the passions and prejudices, the tensions and terrors that exist in every camp, and every household, in today’s volatile Middle East.”
-Francine Prose, O: The Oprah Magazine
“A rich, large-hearted and melancholy political bildungsroman . . . The author has a novelistic gift for conjuring the optimism of the Oslo era, which makes the nihilistic nosedive of the second Intifada even more searing. But while Prisoners is a story of multiple disenchantments, there’s a defiant hopefulness about it–a faith, despite too much evidence to the contrary, that individual human understanding can transcend historic hatreds.”
- The New York Observer
“Chilling . . . Goldberg escapes predictability by tunneling past received notions and antique resentments.”
- St. Petersburg Times
“Brilliant . . . Perhaps the best on-the-ground portrait since Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem of the hatreds, passions, and illusions gripping the contemporary Middle East . . . Those familiar with his work . . . will recognize the skills that have made him one of America’s finest foreign correspondents: an eye for detail, a flair for story-telling, an unflinching self regard, and a measured tone that lends his work an air of authenticity and authority . . . breathtaking.”
-Washington Monthly
“One of the finest journalists of his generation . . . a classic coming of age story . . . [Goldberg has] a magnificent sense of irony, timing, and surprise . . . Ketzoit was a desert prison in which Israel held Palestinian Arabs and in which Mr. Goldberg, during his days in the IDF, had served as a military policeman. Mr. Goldberg’s description of this prison is worthy of Kafka and will no doubt end up on a shelf where classics of the genre are kept . . . [Goldberg is] one of the most eloquent narrators of the struggle in which new leaders arise in every generation.”
-The New York Sun
“Fascinating . . . an intimate portrait. . . he takes us somewhere we usually don’t go . . . [a] brave and relentlessly honest new memoir.”
- The Forward
"Jeffrey Goldberg has done the impossible–found some hope in the rubble of the Middle East. Prisoners will bring you to tears."
–Malcolm Gladwell
“This brutal, beautiful book about the discovery of decency in an indecent war is morally refreshing. With vivacious candor, Jeffrey Goldberg describes the unexpected refinement of his identity by an encounter with his enemy. The story of his unsentimental education is not only deeply heartening, it is also deeply Jewish.”
–Leon Wieseltier
“Jeffrey Goldberg’s Prisoners is brilliant–at once a memoir of a young man’s spiritual and political education, and a lucid and perceptive account of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. The story of Goldberg’s evolution from Long Island Zionist to Israeli prison guard to hardened but hopeful observer is both an education and a delight.”
–Jeffrey Toobin
“Jeffrey Goldberg’s brilliant journey of self-discovery carries his reader crashing through barriers of old, facile assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. He manages the near-impossible task of proclaiming his Zionism while embracing some dreams of Palestinian nationalism without sacrificing good humor, great reporting, and wonderful storytelling.”
–Ted Koppel
“Jeffrey Goldberg has written an important book about his struggle as an American Jew to discover roots of common humanity buried in centuries of hatred in the Middle East. What a powerful story he tells, how moving, smart, hard-headed, and honest. Anyone who had lived his story would have a good book in him, but in the hands of a reporter and writer as skilled as Goldberg it becomes a great one.”
–Mark Bowden, author, Black Hawk Down
“From the most intimate human details to the enduring desert truths, Jeffrey Goldberg’s Prisoners touches the entire sweep of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy. Insightful, closely observed, and often improbably funny, it offers wisdom gained not from mere research but from experience lived.”
—Caroline Alexander
“Fiercely honest, alive and kicking on every page, and grippingly suspenseful, this memoir by an American Jew of his friendship with the Palestinian he once guarded in an Israeli prison camp takes us deep inside the paradigmatic dilemma of the Jews and the Arabs of the Holy Land: Can the guards and the guarded ever dismantle the prison that holds them both?”
–Jack Miles, author, God: A Biography
About the Author
Jeffrey Goldberg is Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. He was for ten years a Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker and for The New York Times Magazine. A winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting, he is also a former columnist for The Jerusalem Post and The Forward. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. This is his first book.
From The Washington Post
A few years ago, when the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000 was still raging, I had occasion to chat with a group of young Christians who had come to Israel to help bring peace to the Holy Land. "If we could just get Jews and Palestinians talking to each other, that would be a huge step forward," one of them suggested hopefully. Dialogue can indeed be a cause for hope, but it can also cause despair. Prisoners is Jeffrey Goldberg's sensitive, forthright and perceptive account of his years as a soldier and journalist in Israel -- and of his long-running conversation with a Palestinian whom he once kept under lock and key. It is a forceful reminder of how rewarding, and how difficult, discourse between Israelis and Palestinians can be.
Goldberg grew up in a family of liberal Democrats and attended a socialist Zionist summer camp. Like many other young American Jews, he grew up with next to no religious tradition but with a strong sense of Jewish identity. He was potently aware of his membership in an oppressed people that, in both distant and painfully recent history, had been unable to defend itself. But Goldberg also believed in another identity -- between his Jewish heritage and his humanistic values of peace and equality, which he saw as being one and the same.
That sense of identity impelled Goldberg to move to Israel after college and, in 1990, to join its army. He ended up in the military police and did his mandatory army service as a guard at Ketziot, the vast, desolate prison camp that Israel set up in its southern desert to hold the Palestinian rebels of the first intifada, which broke out in 1987.
Unlike his native Israeli comrades, Goldberg felt compelled to speak to the men he helped keep incarcerated. He knew that they were the enemies of his people, many with Jewish blood on their hands. But he hoped that by talking he might come to understand them and bring them to understand Israel. One prisoner in particular caught his attention: Rafiq Hijazi, a Palestine Liberation Organization leader, college math teacher and devout Muslim from a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
"I soon discovered," Goldberg writes, "that he was the only Palestinian I could find in Ketziot who understood the moral justification for Zionism. For his part, I might have been the only soldier he met who didn't deny the existence of misfortune in Palestinian history." Unlike most of the other prisoners, Hijazi read widely and was able to think outside the box of the nationalist and Islamist ideologies preached, respectively, by the rival Fatah and Hamas factions. Goldberg, unlike many of the Israelis he met, was able to relate to this individual Palestinian as a human being, rather than as a specific instance of the deadly Arab enemy. Goldberg hoped -- and hoped that Hijazi shared the hope -- that if he and his prisoner could somehow agree on a way that Palestinians and Israelis could live together, side by side, in two states, then maybe, just maybe, their leaders could do the same.
Disillusioned by the harsh realities of Israel's struggles, Goldberg ultimately returned to live in the United States but continued to visit Israel and the occupied territories as a correspondent for the Forward, the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. Eventually, after considerable hesitation, he looked up Hijazi -- now released -- in Gaza. There, the tables were turned. "Are you frightened?" Hijazi asked when Goldberg balked at visiting the Hamas-dominated Islamic University of Gaza. "How do I know you're not setting me up?" Goldberg asked.
But fear soon gave way to a renewal of the friendship during that hopeful 1990s interlude when Israelis and Palestinians seemed to be heading toward peaceful coexistence within the framework of the Oslo peace process. Things were different later, when both men found themselves living in Washington -- Goldberg as a New Yorker correspondent, Hijazi as a PhD student at American University.
Goldberg's prose is sometimes unpolished, but he is at his best when he recounts the crisis that nearly ended the friendship. In the face of the bloody second intifada and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Hijazi moves toward fundamentalism. In the book's most telling pages, the two men read the Koran together and argue over passages that ostensibly vilify the Jews. In their prison conversations, Hijazi had told Goldberg that these verses were allegorical admonitions against arrogance. Now Hijazi thinks they predict God's coming punishment of the Jews and the destruction of their country. In the years after 9/11, Hijazi's anger seems to make any accommodation or mutual acceptance impossible.
Goldberg is also deft at portraying the huge dissimilarities in the two friends' lifestyles and cultures. His wife, Pamela, is a dynamic career woman who wears tank-tops and shorts on weekends; Hijazi's wife, Tahani, wears the hijab head-covering (and later, when they live in Abu Dhabi, adds a veil) and seldom leaves home.
Dialogue is indeed a first step but hardly a sufficient one. Goldberg and Hijazi are about as open to each other as two such men could be. Their friendship survives, but barely.
As such, Prisoners offers a modicum of hope but also a healthy dose of despair. These days, the work of bringing peace to Israel and Palestine often looks like an impossible mission. Still, as the Jewish sages taught, even if we cannot hope to complete the task, we are not allowed to shirk it.
Reviewed by Haim Watzman
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
THE THIEF OF MERCY
On the morning of the fine spring day, full of sunshine, that ended with my arrest in Gaza, I woke early from an uneven sleep, dressed, and pushed back to its proper place the desk meant to barricade the door of my hotel room. I unknotted the bedsheets I had tied together into an emergency escape ladder. Then I hid the knife I kept under my pillow, cleaned the dust from my shoes, and carefully unbolted the door. I searched the dark hall. There were no signs of imminent peril. Most people wouldn’t be so cautious, but I had my reasons, and not all of them were rooted in self-flattering paranoia.
I was staying at the al-Deira hotel, a fine hotel, one of Gaza’s main charms. On hot nights, which are most nights, it brimmed over with members of haute Palestine, that small clique of Gazans who earned more than negligible incomes. The men smoked apple-flavored tobacco from water pipes; the women, their heads covered, drank strong coffee and kept quiet.
By day the hotel was mostly empty. The hotels of Gaza had been full in the 1990s, during the long moment of false grace manufactured by the Oslo peace process. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, and it seemed as if the hate would melt away like wax. At that moment, even a pessimist could envision an orderly close to the one-hundred-year-long war between Arab and Jew. But this was now the spring of 2001, and we were six months inside the Palestinian Uprising, the Intifada, the second Intifada, this one far more grim than the last. The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan was once again steeped in blood: Arabs were killing Jews, and Jews were killing Arabs, and hope seemed to be in permanent eclipse. Optimists, and I included myself in this category, felt as if we had spent the previous decade as clueless Catherines, gazing dumbly from our carriages at the Potemkin village of Oslo.
So the Deira did negligible business, except after a noteworthy killing or a particularly sanguinary riot, which is the specialty of the heaving, thirsty demi-state of Gaza. Then, the press corps would colonize the Deira; reporters would come to catalogue the dead, and slot the deaths into whatever cleanly explicable narrative was in current favor.
The hallway was dim, and empty. I went downstairs to a veranda overlooking the Mediterranean, which shimmered in the early sunlight. Arab fishing boats spread their nets across the smooth water. An Israeli gunboat cast a more distant shadow. My breakfast companion was waiting for me. He rose, and we kissed on both cheeks. His nom de guerre was Abu Iyad, and he was an unhappy terrorist who I hoped would share with me illuminating gossip about Hamas—of which he was a member—and Palestine Islamic Jihad, two fundamentalist Muslim groups whose institutional focus is the murder of Jews. I bought him a plate of hummus and cucumbers.
Abu Iyad was a thin man, his face hollow and creased. His nails were yellow, and his hair was gray and thinning. I had known him for a dozen years. We weren’t friends. We were more like companionable acquaintances; I could not be a true friend of anyone in Hamas. He had been a bomb-maker earlier in his career, but he no longer submitted himself to the group’s hard line. His personality wasn’t that of the typical Hamas ultra. The average Hamas man tends toward narcis- sism and humorlessness, and projects the sort of preternatural calm organic to people who believe that what follows death is exponentially better than what precedes it. But Abu Iyad seemed, on occasion, free of certitude, taking a jaundiced view of some of his more strident colleagues. He only tentatively endorsed the notion, common among Hamas theologians, that the Jews live under a cloud of divine displeasure. He was well-educated—Soviet-educated, but still—and he was cultured, for Hamas. He was familiar with Camus and he was partial to Russian literature, though not to Russians. We often talked about books. Once, we spent an afternoon on the beach, near Nusseirat, his refugee camp, eating watermelon and talking about, of all things, the nihilism in Fathers and Sons.
It was a year before the second Intifada, our day at the beach. The strip of gray sand was the property, in essence, of Hamas; each political faction ruled a stretch of Mediterranean seaside. The Hamas cabanas were rude concrete slabs, topped with green flags that read, “There Is No God but Allah,” and “Muhammad Is the Messenger of God.” A crust of garbage lay over the beach, which was frequently used as a bathroom by donkey and man alike, but a breeze pushed the smell of shit away from us. The few women on the beach sat separate from the men. They wore black hijabs of thick cloth, head-to-foot, and they boiled inside them like eggs. Even when the women went to the water, they went in hijab. They waded in, up to their knees, splashed each other, and giggled. I could tell from the eyes, and the turn of their ankles, that they were pretty. I steered my own eyes away, though; even an innocent glance could have a terminal effect on me.
One of the men with us was a terrorist named Jihad Abu Swerah, a typically inflamed Hamas killer. He believed that the company of any women at all was an affront, even women who were serving us food. “Women by their presence pollute everything,” he said. A real killjoy. He reminded me of something the Ayatollah Khomeini once said: “There is no fun in Islam.”
Abu Swerah would eventually die at the hands of Israeli soldiers, who would find him in 2003 and cut him down in his Nusseirat hideout.
We tried to ignore him. Abu Iyad and I talked amiably on the beach that day with a few of his friends. The sky was soft blue and the water was gentle. It seemed to me an opportune time to throw an apple of discord into the circle. Just to make the day interesting, I accused Hamas—and the Muslim Brotherhood movement that gave birth to it—of succumbing to the temptations of nihilism.
ME: The Islamists believe in nothing except their own power. This frees them from the constraints of morality, allowing everything.
ABU IYAD: No, we believe in one surpassing truth, in tawhid, the cosmic Oneness of God. This is an overpowering belief. A nihilist, on the other hand, believes in nothing.
ME: This is true, in theory, the Islamist does believe in something. But that something is the supremacy of death, not the supremacy of God’s love. No one, not even Turgenev’s Bazarov is perfect in his nihilism. But Hamas comes close.
ABU IYAD: Jews fear death, Muslims don’t. Death isn’t even death. It’s a beginning. Love and death are both manifestations of God.
ME: You can’t murder people and say you’ve done them a favor.
ABU IYAD: Hamas does not target the innocent.
After the chastising Abu Swerah and his janissaries left, Abu Iyad allowed that the actions of Hamas bombers could be seen as nihilistic, which is why he said he opposed some of the more bestial manifestations of his group’s ideology. The men of Hamas, he said, sadly, were not his sort of Muslim. It was a victory for me, Abu Iyad ceding the point.
Sometimes, I couldn’t quite believe in his apostasy. His distaste for Hamas orthodoxy seemed real enough, but I sensed that it grew from some apolitical vendetta. Hamas, like any well-established terrorist group, is a bureaucracy, and, as in any bureaucracy, there are winners and losers, and I got the sense that he had lost—what, I didn’t know.
There was something else, too: Every so often, when we talked, he would pare off the edge of his words, speak in euphemism, even deny what I knew he felt. The Shi’ites call this taqiyya, the dissimulation of faith, the concealment of belief in the interest of self-preservation, or temporal political advantage. Sacramental lying, in other words. I worried that the face of Abu Iyad I saw was only one in a repertoire of faces. He did, after all, kill a man once.
The man was a Palestinian, his own blood, but a “collaborator” with Israel; Abu Iyad killed the man with a knife, in an alley in Nusseirat. Abu Iyad only remembered the man’s first name, which was Mustafa, and he remembered that he was taller than most Palestinians.
But then there were times when I stopped watching Abu Iyad through a veil of distrust, when I thought him to be a decent man, content to search for imperfect justice, not the world-ending justice sought by Hamas.
In the early 1990s, he favored, in principle, the murder of Israelis, in particular soldiers and settlers. But in November 2000, a group of Palestinians detonated a mortar shell near an armored bus traveling between two Jewish settlements, not far from Gaza City. Two settlers were killed, and three small children—all of the same family—lost limbs. This was unacceptable to Abu Iyad.
“It’s not the children who are at fault,” he said, an uncommon thing to say in Gaza, where children are both victim and perpetrator. Abu Iyad did not believe, for reasons both expedient and theological, that the slaughter of Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would be helpful to his cause, and he questioned whether God smiled on the self-immolating assassins of Hamas. “A person can’t be pure and admitted to Paradise if he kills himself, is my belief. There is a lot of debate about this among the scholars.”
He sensed, even then, at breakfast, that the second Uprising, which was just beginning, would end badly for the Palestinians.
“The Israelis are too strong, and they’re too ready to use violence against us,” he said.
Nonsense, I said. Things will end badly for the Arabs because it is the Ar...
