Yossi Klein Halevi

DATE February 6, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Raja Shehadeh discusses his political and personal
views on the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Israelis and Palestinians are living in fear as the cycle of violence
continues and the prospect of peace seems to be receding. We're going to hear
from a Palestinian and an Israeli who have each written reflective memoirs
that shed light on the larger conflict. Later, we'll hear from Yossi Klein
Halevi, who writes about Israel for The Jerusalem Report and the New Republic.

My first guest is Raja Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer in Ramallah on the West
Bank. He's a founder of the human rights organization al-Haq, an affiliate of
the International Commission of Jurists. His new memoir is called "Strangers
in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine." His family is from
Jaffa, the old Arab city adjoining Tel Aviv. In 1948 during fighting between
Arabs and Jews, the family fled the city and went to a summer home in
Ramallah. Three weeks later, the state of Israel was declared and Jaffa was
included in the new state. The Shehadeh family remained in Ramallah. Raja
was born in Ramallah three years after his family moved there. It was
occupied by Israeli forces after the 1967 War.

In Shehadeh's memoir, he writes about growing up with what he describes as the
incessant angry roar of people expelled from their homes.

Mr. RAJA SHEHADEH (Human Rights Lawyer): What made the expulsion more
difficult was the speed in which it happened, and the fact that they felt they
were taken by surprise and they were cheated out of their homes. For years we
lived with this feeling that they maybe should have stayed, maybe should have
fought more, maybe should have responded differently. The effect on me was
that I always felt that our reality was not Ramallah, it was Jaffa and the
people who held the keys to that reality, to that lost world, were my parents.
So to a large extent, I was a hostage to a world which I also felt was too
important to be taken for granted. It was held together by their words, their
description, their memories, their reminiscences. And so I wasn't free to
live in my own world. It was always that this world was not good enough.

One example of what this led to is it took me a very long time before I came
to appreciate the beauty of the surroundings in Ramallah. The Ramallah hills
are extremely attractive hills, but I always followed my father in his gaze
which went beyond the hills and looked to the horizon into Jaffa. So it
really was a very long time before I finally was able to look at my
surrounding and decide for myself where is my place, what are my feelings,
and rather than feel a hostage to the reality of others.

GROSS: Now your father was a lawyer who became politically active. When the
family moved to Ramallah, it was part of Jordan and remained that way till
1967. Your father got into trouble with the Jordanian government when he
represented three of the men accused of assassinating the king of Jordan. He
also ran for the Jordanian Parliament; he lost. He was imprisoned twice by
the Jordanian government. What taste did this leave in your mouth about
politics watching your father become, you know, an enemy--perceived as an
enemy of the government?

Mr. SHEHADEH: I grew up in two worlds. The world of my mother, which was
the world of the house, and the world of my father, which was the world of the
outside. And I was the weak child, so I was constantly pampered and stayed
home, and I was more comfortable in the world of the house, in the world of my
mother. And my father's world seemed an antagonistic world, a violent world,
and I grew up thinking the worst of politics. The book, of course, is a
memoir of my relationship with my father. And he was a person who could not
see something wrong and not do something about it. He was an activist who was
a man of principle, so he didn't calculate whether defending these people in
that assassination trial would be a good thing or a bad thing. He thought,
`I'm a lawyer. My duty is to defend criminals and I'm going to do it.' He
was that kind of a person.

The effect on me was not so much political, except to the extent that it made
me think the worst of politics; it was more emotional. So, for example, when
the army came knocking at our door to pick my father up and take him to
prison, that was a very frightening experience. And to this day, when people
knock at the door in a loud way, I get very rattled even when I know it's a
friendly caller.

GROSS: Your father said that he was considered a traitor by a lot of
Palestinians and other Arab leaders because he was challenging the accepted
wisdom of Arab leaders. What are some of the things he was challenging? How
did his politics depart...

Mr. SHEHADEH: Well, he was, I think, thought along with everybody else until
1967. He didn't really challenge the basic positions. And in 1967, he had a
great change. Just after the war, he felt very depressed and, in fact,
considered committing suicide. And my mother stopped him at the last minute.
And then immediately after the war, he had a change of mind about the whole
situation. He realized that the Arab states keep promising that they will
wage war and that they will do great things, and every time the time comes for
the war, we don't see any Arab soldiers and we have to fend for ourselves.
And I describe in the book the events of the 1967 War and how miserable it was
and how unprotected we felt. So in 1967, he thought enough is enough. And
Israel is a reality. He believed that it was in the interests of the Arab
countries to keep Israel as an abstraction, a monolithic enemy which is used
to quell people into submission and to keep them thinking about outside rather
than about what needs to be done within their own country.

GROSS: So in other words, that if Arab leaders could keep Israel as an
outside threat, it would keep the pressure off the Arab leaders to reform the
country from within...

Mr. SHEHADEH: Yes.

GROSS: ...because the dissidents would be arguing about Israel instead of
arguing with their own leaders.

Mr. SHEHADEH: Yeah. This he felt very strongly. And he also felt that
Israel, in fact, of course, has taken our land, has not compensated us and so
on, but it is a reality which we have to come to terms with. And he made a
proposal in 1967, which is very, very early on, where he proposed a two-state
solution. And he believed that there has to be a partition of geographic
Palestine between a Palestinian state and an Israeli state along with the '67
borders, which included, of course, East Jerusalem as the capital.

GROSS: Your father was denounced on a Palestinian broadcast from Damascus.
And you quote the broadcast. The people said about your father, "You are a
traitor, a despicable collaborator. You want to surrender and sell our
birthrights. We know how to deal with the likes of you. You shall pay for
your treason. We shall eliminate you, silence you forever, traitor,
collaborator." I'm wondering what it was like for you and for your father to
hear him denounced as the enemy when--I mean, he was denounced by Palestinians
as the enemy and he was Palestinian. You're from a Palestinian family, so
what was it like to be perceived by fellow Palestinians as the enemy?

Mr. SHEHADEH: It was a very difficult time for me. And it was difficult
because I was not a political person. I didn't really formulate my own
positions on any of these issues. I was taken along with my father from the
early days of the occupation to go into the '48 areas of Israel and to see for
myself Jaffa and to meet with his Israeli friends and get exposed in a way
that none of my colleagues and friends were exposed. And he, of course, was
constantly arguing that we have made mistakes, that we have to correct them,
and we should not continue to allow others to determine our fate. And as far
as my understanding went, I believed him and I thought he was saying
absolutely the right things. And then all of a sudden, I hear a strong
denunciation. Also amongst my friends, there is a lot of popularity for the
resistance movement outside. And as you can imagine, somebody--I was 16 at
that time--the attraction of guerrilla warfare and fighting the enemy rather
than accepting things or being so rational about it, was maybe more typical
for somebody of that age. So I was literally torn. But, again, I didn't take
political sides because I wasn't a political person. It was entirely
emotional.

GROSS: You went to college because you loved literature and wanted to study
literature, but you ended up studying law as well, and you became a lawyer.
When you, after your studies, returned to Ramallah in 1976, you were the first
Western educated lawyer to come back to the West Bank since 1948. Why did you
go back?

Mr. SHEHADEH: This is a very important question, really, because all my
life--and I suppose the culmination of this is this book--all my life I've
been trying to come to terms with my father, and he was the ideal which I
could not feel fulfilled or feel that I am living in reality if I avoid it. I
thought it would have been very easy for me to make an academic career. I was
very successful in my academic studies, but it would have felt a betrayal, it
would have felt that it is not real life. And my sense of what was real was
my father's life, just as my sense of what was real was Jaffa more than
Ramallah. I had to come back in a profession which my father would respect
and work with him and come to terms with him. So I wanted to be with him.

I wanted to come back, but I was sure I wasn't going to come back on his
terms. I was going to be my own lawyer, my own style of lawyer. I was going
to do human rights because I believed in the principle. I'm going to write,
and I continue to write all along. And, of course, all of this created great
conflict between us because he said, `Oh, you're too distracted between your
human rights work and your writing. You don't have enough time for the
office. You're not being a good lawyer,' and we had huge fights, which I
think were unfair on his part, but they were part of the tension between us.

GROSS: Now in 1987, you say you embraced the Intifadah and that you were
really changed by the Intifadah. Why did you embrace it? Because you had
been in your mind not political, certainly for human rights, but not
politically active, and you were always alienated by politics, living more in
your own mind, living more in literature than in that kind of political
activism.

Mr. SHEHADEH: You know, somebody of my personality and character can never
be a man of the people, can never really be a public person. I am too
individualistic to be anything of that sort. So when the Intifadah started,
it was my first experience of feeling that my struggle, my personal struggle
and the public struggle were at one. And it felt very good because for the
first time, I was working with everybody. Because, you know, the first
Intifadah was different from the present Intifadah in the sense that the whole
community was threatened by an occupying army who were right amongst us, not
in the peripheries, as is the case now. And so there was a lot of solidarity
work, there was a lot of coming together to work on collective things against
the occupation. And for a change, I felt myself--I was not withdrawing, I was
not holding back; I was going along and feeling at one, and feeling that this
time, we are going to win. And then, of course, some people will say, `But
how can we win against Israel?' And I would say, `If we believe in it, we
will win.' This is our war of liberation. And so it was an entirely new
experience, maybe more of a political experience than I've ever felt or ever
will feel.

GROSS: Now you describe that first Intifadah--the one that started in '87--as
the general rebellion of sons against their fathers. What do you mean by
that?

Mr. SHEHADEH: You know, it was a very optimistic, romantic maybe time, when
we felt that we were going to change the way things were. We're going to
change the educational system, create new legal system, create new
relationships. Of course, this meant great difficulties for the fathers
because the sons, the children, were feeling so empowered by this wave that
teachers at schools were finding it very difficult to control students.
Fathers at home were finding it very difficult to control their sons. But for
me as always, being the kind of person I am, there was also the sense that I
was finally proving my father wrong, because I was participating in a common
action which was going to get us somewhere and that was the way to do it. And
his cynicism about the possibility of something like this ever happening was
going to be proven wrong because it was happening.

GROSS: And that's another sense that you saw it as a rebellion of sons
against fathers.

Mr. SHEHADEH: Exactly. It was...

GROSS: Proving them wrong.

Mr. SHEHADEH: It was a general rebellion and also a personal rebellion.

GROSS: My guest is Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh. His new
memoir is called "Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied
Palestine." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Raja Shehadeh, and he's just
written a memoir called "Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied
Palestine." He's a human rights lawyer in Ramallah. His father was a very
political lawyer.

In 1991, you joined the Palestinians at the Middle East peace conferences as
the Palestinian legal adviser. So here you are going from human rights lawyer
to, really, entering the political process. That was over 10 years ago, and,
you know, things have just totally fallen apart. I'm wondering how your work
in the early '90s with the peace process left you feeling then, and then we'll
get to how you're feeling now.

Mr. SHEHADEH: Well, it didn't take very long for me, because I stayed for
one year with the negotiating team. And after the year, I decided that I'm
not going to have any ability to influence anything. I felt there was
something happening somewhere else. I didn't know what that was. I wasn't
sure of anything. But I was sure that I'm not going to be effective in
Washington, and I took myself and went back to Ramallah. It was exactly a
year after I had started.

And I stayed away. And then in 1993, sure enough, I discovered that there
were secret negotiations taking place while the negotiating delegation was in
Washington. And then I discovered that they had made an agreement between the
PLO and Israel, and my doubts were proven correct. There was something
cooking.

GROSS: Well, why did you feel like you had no influence?

Mr. SHEHADEH: Because I understood exactly the Israeli position. I had been
following since 1978 the Israeli changes in the occupied territories, which I
saw culminate in an agreement if Israel would have its way and culminate in an
agreement that would be bad for us, because it would confirm all the ills of
occupation without breaking through into something that would lead us to
peace.

And the main problem, of course, was the Israeli settlements. But, you know,
the Israeli settlements is a political issue, but it had translated into a
very definite legal arrangement, which gave two systems, legal and
administrative, to the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the Palestinians,
who lived side by side, subject to two different systems.

I saw that being established year after year, slowly being built up. I saw
it, I wrote about it, I tried to warn people that this is going to lead to
disaster. And when the negotiations began, I saw that it was my role to point
out that if we allow Israel to confirm this system, then we will have no peace
in the area. And when I realized that what I was talking about was not
accepted, was not being understood, much as I tried, however I tried, I
thought I cannot do anymore. I left.

GROSS: So the first intifada was a real turning point for you. It
politicized you. You felt for a first time a part of a larger movement. What
about the current intifada? Do you feel connected to that at all?

Mr. SHEHADEH: No, the current intifada is very different, because it's a
militarized intifada. And, you know, in the first intifada, we all felt we
had something to say. We were able to carry on with our narrative, so to
speak, that even if one was not political, you responded to what the political
statements said and you felt you--they were speaking for you. Whereas now,
the violence has silenced everybody. And interestingly enough--this is true
on both sides, Israeli side and the Palestinian side--the violence has just
silenced everybody.

GROSS: What do you mean it has silenced everybody?

Mr. SHEHADEH: Well, every time there is a violent action, one doesn't feel
able to say anything. You are so overwhelmed by the shock and the brutality
and the sadness that there's nothing to say.

GROSS: It seems that many, perhaps even most Israelis, have lost their faith
in Arafat as a partner for peace. I'm wondering if you think that
Palestinians have lost faith in Arafat.

Mr. SHEHADEH: Well, the Palestinians have been disappointed in many ways by
the Palestinian Authority, which came into being as a result of the Oslo--the
work of human organization, mine and others, and the work of people who work
on democracy issues, bore some fruit because people really were expecting that
once we get the chance, we will have a system which would have accountability,
which would have more equality, more of the Western-type democratic relations
that we had come to aspire for and interpret our struggle as leading us to.
They were disappointed on many such counts.

The problem, though, is that the Palestinian Authority and Arafat as an
elected leader of that authority came in as a result of a political process
and an agreement, which was signed between Israel and the PLO. What Israel is
trying to do in ousting Arafat is forgetting about, or unilaterally
destroying, the agreement. I, as a lawyer and as a Palestinian living there,
have great trepidation from the legal vacuum that will be created as a result.
If there is to be change, it has to be done properly and carefully rather than
unilaterally by Israel, otherwise I have great fear that we will be in a legal
vacuum. And a legal vacuum for the weaker side would be a disaster, because
then Israel would have a free hand to do what it would like.

GROSS: Raja Shehadeh is the author of the memoir "Strangers in the House:
Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine." We'll hear more from him, and from an
Israeli writer, in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

Announcer: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

GROSS: Coming up, we continue our conversation with Palestinian human rights
lawyer Raja Shehadeh, and we talk with Yossi Klein Halevi. He writes about
Israel for The New Republic and The Jerusalem Report. His written memoir is
subtitled "A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy
Land."

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Raja Shehadeh. He's
a human rights lawyer in Ramallah on the West Bank. His new memoir is
called "Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine."

As a human rights activist and lawyer, what are your reactions when there are
Palestinian attacks on civilians in Israel at shopping centers, a recent
attack at a girl's bas mitzvah, a religious ceremony? What do you think about
when that happens?

Mr. SHEHADEH: It's extremely shocking thing to happen. Extremely shocking
thing to happen. And I don't know in this country if you're showing the
details, but Israeli television are very explicit in what they show. It just
makes one's life miserable. But at the same time it makes my life miserable
to realize that there are people on my side, people who I see in the street
who have come to point of such despair about the future that they are willing
to shatter their body into a million pieces because they have no hope, no
future.

At the same time I was always alarmed by how Israeli missiles had hit
Palestinian children and Palestinians in a car, and their bodies also
shattered. And there were children who were shown on television, on one of
the satellite television, also picking the flesh off the shattered bodies.
And the next day there was an attack in Israel. So it's as though it's a
cycle, one tragedy leads to another. Whoever does it, it is unacceptable,
morally unacceptable and politically bringing us to disaster.

GROSS: You write in your memoir that you had heard all these things about
Israel and heard all these things about Jewish people but you'd never really
met anybody Jewish until I guess it was 1967, when the Israeli troops came in
during the occupation. And that was your first and, for a while, your only
exposure to people who were Jewish. I'm wondering if you've met a lot of
Jewish people from Israel or other parts of the world and, if so, what it's
been like for you to meet with or perhaps even to work with people who had
been really demonized from everything that you'd heard and you never had any
encounters of your own before?

Mr. SHEHADEH: You know, the assumption from the outside, from what all that
you see, is that the two societies are very separated. It may be true now
because of the present intifada and of the imposition of all these closures on
the Palestinian towns and villages, but the country was never divided, from
1967 until the early '90s. Anybody could take their car and drive anywhere in
Palestine, Israel. All kinds of people had relations. Businessmen had
relations. Workers had relations. Farmers had relations. Merchants had
relations. So many people. And, of course, there were these very unfortunate
situations of people who were taken into prison and learned Hebrew in prison
and got to know their jailers, one kind of experience, of course. Yet the
number of people who, for example, speak Hebrew, who seen and learned and had
an opportunity to intermingle with the Israeli society is tremendous. And, of
course, there are more similarities than there are differences.

So there were great possibilities for one to learn about the other. And had
the Israelis had the wisdom, the prudence, they could have used the
Palestinians, what they have learned about the Israelis, as a bridge to the
rest of the Arab world. Unfortunately, they were more interested in acquiring
this land and keeping it than in making bridges of peace. And people speak
about co-existence now between Palestinians. And they really can't have
co-existence when every day you look out of your window and you see a
settlement right next to your house which has been built on land that has been
taken from you, from your family or from your friend, and whose spring of
water is used by the settlers and you have to bring in your water in a tanker.
I mean, you can't possible have co-existence on such inequality.

GROSS: Raja Shehadeh, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. SHEHADEH: Thank you.

GROSS: Raja Shehadeh is the author of "Strangers in the House: Coming of Age
in Occupied Palestine." He's a human rights lawyer in Ramallah.

We'll hear from Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi after our break. This
is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Yossi Klein Halevi talks about his new book, "At the
Entrance to the Garden of Eden"
TERRY GROSS, host:

We just heard from Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh.

My guest, Yossi Klein Halevi, is the Israeli correspondent for The New
Republic and a senior writer for The Jerusalem Report. His latest book is
a memoir called "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for
God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land." He's also chairman of
Open House(ph), an Israeli-Arab dialogue group. But many years before he
began this kind of dialogue, he was a member of a Jewish extremist group.
Halevi grew up in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a Holocaust survivor. He
moved to Israel 20 years ago. I spoke with him yesterday. He was in a studio
in Jerusalem.

Right before we started this interview you told me you were hearing a lot of
ambulances going by. Is this typical, and what goes through your mind as you
are sitting in the studio talking with me listening to ambulances going by?

Mr. YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI (Israeli Correspondent, The New Republic): Well, I
feel like I'm listening to your question with one ear and counting ambulances
mentally with the other ear. And that's what--we have become a society here
that counts ambulances. One ambulance, we wait for the second. If there's a
second ambulance and then a third, we turn on the news. And especially these
days in Jerusalem I think we've now crossed that line from being a city that
occasionally is inflicted with terrorism to being a city at war, and that's
really what it feels like now.

GROSS: How has life in your neighborhood changed?

Mr. HALEVI: I live in a border neighborhood, which is to say at the very
edge of Jerusalem. In fact, my apartment is in the last row of houses before
the West Bank begins. From my porch I can, in effect, see three countries.
There's Israel. There's the West Bank. And then there's Jordan. And I'd say
that that sense of intimacy has become increasingly threatening in the last
year. What was once, for me at least, an exhilarating feeling of cultural,
even interreligious intimacy has now become a daily threat.

GROSS: Do you know any victims of the recent terrorist attacks in Israel?

Mr. HALEVI: Well, my 12-year-old son went to baseball camp--we have that
here, too--with a boy who was murdered and apparently by Palestinian shepherds
in the Judean Desert. And this boy was mutilated so badly that they
couldn't identify him except through his fingerprints. And I was trying to
shield the paper that morning from my son, and he found the paper and he looks
at the picture and he says, `Oh, my God. It's Kobe(ph).' And I was shielding
the paper from him not because I thought he knew Kobe. I didn't know he did.
I just didn't want him to start the day with that news. And then when it
turned out he actually knew the boy, it was just one of those devastating
moments that we've had more and more of here. And my own children--I have
three--have been in so many close calls in the last few months that my wife
and I have simply stopped counting.

GROSS: When you were a teen-ager in the 1970s growing up in Brooklyn, New
York, you were drawn to the Jewish Defense League, which was then headed by
Meir Kahane. This was a militant, ultra-Orthodox group that was extreme in
its hatred of all Palestinians, and violent as well. Your issue was freeing
Soviet Jewry, and you say your activism was limited to vandalism. But you had
friends who were indicted for bombings and shooting attacks on Soviet
institutions in America. Does that help you comprehend the Palestinian
terrorist attacks on Israel?

Mr. HALEVI: If you're asking me whether I understand the mentality of
terrorism, yes, I do understand it. I grew up in the Jewish ghetto in
Brooklyn, a child of Holocaust survivors. And my world view was formed, or I
should say deformed, by a sense of us vs. them. There was us and there was
the rest of the world, which was either actively or passively against the
Jews. It took me many years to learn to overcome that simplistic way of
looking at the world. Terrorism is an outgrowth of fear, of
self-righteousness, of being able to only understand or appreciate your own
pain and not the pain of others. To explain or understand Palestinian
terrorism today, to my mind, is no different than if I were sitting here now
and trying to justify the kinds of terrorism that my friends were involved in
and that Meir Kahane preached. Meir Kahane and Yasser Arafat belong in the
same boat.

GROSS: You've said that your group believed, in the '70s, that Jewish
victimization granted you moral immunity. Can you talk about that a little
bit?

Mr. HALEVI: You can't be a terrorist without believing that you have the
right, because of your pain, because of the trauma your people has gone
through, to inflict unlimited pain on others in the name of your own people's
cause. You're dealing here, in the Middle East conflict, with two traumatized
peoples, two peoples who've been victims of history. And on the Israeli side
the great success of Zionism, I would say, of Jewish sovereignty, has been to
largely free us--and here I certainly include myself in this--of a
victim-dominated identity.

It was only once I moved to Israel, in 1982--left Brooklyn, left the diaspora,
that I began to see myself in a more nuanced way and to see the Jewish
situation in Israel in a more nuanced way because we weren't victims. Jewish
sovereignty had empowered us. The tragedy on the Palestinian side is for
understandable reasons. They haven't yet experienced sovereignty. But they
haven't been able to take the opportunities that have repeatedly come their
way in the course of the last 50, 60 years, beginning with the Peal Commission
in 1937 through the UN Partition in 1947, to Camp David and Tabba(ph) in our
time. If you see yourself only as a victim, you don't feel the power to take
responsibility for making compromises. If I'm the victim, then my
responsibility is simply to sit back and wait for more concessions.

GROSS: Your father was a Holocaust survivor. And you grew up in Borough
Park, Brooklyn, which is a neighborhood that was mostly compressed of Orthodox
Jews, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. Was it that sense of being a
descendant from a Holocaust survivor that helped give you that sense of
victim?

Mr. HALEVI: Oh, absolutely. That's where it came from. And I was so
immersed in my victimization that I didn't realize that I was growing up in
the freest country in history, in the most secure Jewish community in history.
I lived with demons. I was, in some sense, trying to become a surrogate
contemporary of my father's. I was living out his life rather than living out
mine.

GROSS: Last year you had a book that was published called "At the Entrance to
the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God With Christians and Muslims in the
Holy Land." This book was the result of, I don't know, two or three years of
you traveling through the Middle East trying to understand Islam and
Christianity, going to a lot of churches and mosques, participating in
services there. What motivated that search?

Mr. HALEVI: By the time I began this journey in late 1998, by that time it
was clear that the Oslo process had failed. And one of the reasons I felt
that it had failed was because it was trying to create an artificial piece
between secularized elites on the Jewish side and on the Palestinian side,
ignoring the deep reservoir of religious sentiment among both peoples. I
wanted to do something that, so far as I know, had hardly been tried, and that
was to see whether we could pray and meditate together. That part of the
journey, I believe, succeeded. By the end of this journey, I felt thoroughly
at home in a church, in the presence of a cross, which is traumatic for
probably most Jews, whether they'd admit it or not, and in some ways, even
more important for me as an Israeli, I learned to feel at home in a mosque.

To overcome that primal dread that Israelis feel toward the mosque was one of
the main goals for me in this journey, a very simple goal, but very, very
difficult. And for me it happened in, of all places, a mosque in a Gaza
refugee camp; in fact, the same refugee camp where I had once patrolled as a
soldier eight years earlier and had been hit in the head with a rock; in fact,
almost adjacent to this mosque. And it so happened through a series of
connections that the sheikh there was willing to welcome me in, and I learned
Muslim prayer. I learned to get on my knees and to pray with my kipah, as a
religious Jew, but joining that Muslim prayer line, learning to truly love
Islam, to experience the total immersion of the body, that choreographed
prayer that's the genius of Islam and to experience that in Gaza.

So whether this book is a footnote or whether it's a promise for the future, I
don't know, but I can certainly say that since the outbreak of the second
intifada, that part of the journey feels very remote.

GROSS: You've written that the `journalist and the spiritual seeker within
you are at war.'

Mr. HALEVI: Hmm. Right. The job of the journalist is to chronicle what is,
what exists, and what exists at this point in the Middle East is despair. The
job of the spiritual seeker is to try to imagine what could be and what he
believes on some level actually is, which is human oneness, and to keep trying
to strive to that place of oneness. And I have to tell you in all honesty I
don't think I've done a very good job maintaining the balance. I think this
second intifada has been so devastating and so demoralizing in terms of what
it says about the ability of the Palestinian leadership to negotiate. For the
sake of peace, I would argue 70 percent of Israelis would have been prepared
to accept almost any compromise. What exists in Israel today, as the
hard-core, the hard-line, is not more than 30 percent, the settlers and their
supporters. But the tragedy of this intifada is that Arafat has pushed most
of us back right into the arms of the hard-liners and Israel today is a
society in despair.

GROSS: My guest is Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi. He's the Israeli
correspondent for The New Republic and a senior writer for The Jerusalem
Report. His latest book is a memoir called "At the Entrance to the Garden of
Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land."
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Yossi Klein Halevi, Israeli correspondent for The New
Republic and a senior writer for The Jerusalem Report.

Over 100 Israeli reservists have signed a petition saying that they refuse to
serve in the West Bank or Gaza because the Israeli army is systematically
humiliating the Palestinian population there. What was your reaction to this
petition? And I should mention here that you served in Gaza with the Israeli
military during the first intifada in the late '80s.

Mr. HALEVI: I did. And my experience in Gaza in the late '80s was of being
part of an occupation that could only enforce its will through a constant
series of petty humiliations; that is how an occupation works. And for many
years we Israelis were deluding ourselves by imagining that we could create
what we called a benign occupation. I imagine there are different kinds of
occupation. On the whole, I don't believe that we were guilty of atrocities,
but in some sense we were guilty of something worse, which is this constant
stream of humiliations and really falling into a pattern where humiliation
becomes part of one's reality, and that, in some ways, is the most destructive
pattern of all. So that I emerged from that first intifada, my experience as
a soldier in Gaza, convinced that we have to do everything we can to end the
occupation.

And that's why I came out of there, along with the Israeli mainstream, voted
for Yitzhak Rabin. The night he won the election, I wept with relief. I
said, `At least now this nightmare may be coming to an end.' But what we
discovered in the course of Oslo, which we initiated, we empowered Arafat, we
brought him back here, we put police uniforms on his terrorists and tried to
turn them into allies against terrorism--what we discovered was that sometimes
the cure is worse than the illness. And what the Oslo process has done is
empower an entity that is, in its essence, committed to terrorism and, worse
than that, to the destruction long term to undermining the legitimacy of
Israel.

And at this point what we need to do, as painful as it is to say this, is
simply wait Arafat out, protect ourselves as much as possible from the
terrorist war that's been declared against us and at the same time seek
alternative partners on the Palestinian side, which Sharon may be doing or may
not be doing now. No one knows exactly what these negotiations are really
about that Sharon has initiated with Abu Ala, Abu-Nasa and several others.

And what we're seeing now with the reservists is it's so insignificant
compared to the enormity of the ideological collapse of the Israeli left over
the past year that, to my mind, that's the real story. And to come out with
that kind of a declaration strikes most of us, and here I'm not only referring
to right-wing Israelis, I'm referring to Israelis like myself who are in the
center or even many Israelis on the left who are appalled at what the
reservists have done.

We are a country at war in exactly the way that you over there have been at
war since September 11th. And I imagine that American society would react
to--if you had a draft, would react to that kind of moral squeamishness, with
the same impatience and anger that most of us here have reacted to the
reservists.

GROSS: Well, one last question. Our interview started with you hearing a lot
of sirens going by and wondering what was happening, ambulance sirens. So
when the interview ends, what are you going to do?

Mr. HALEVI: First thing I'll do is make a call back to my wife and see if
she's heard any news, if everyone is home. I know that my son was wandering
around downtown, so that's the first thing on my mind.

And, you know, I wrote this book, I went on this journey and now I'm living in
a very different reality. And to tell you the truth, there are times when I
have to actually sit down and reread parts of my book to remember how
exhilarating it was to pray in a mosque, to meditate with nuns in a convent
and to connect with that sense of human oneness and human potential. And if
there's any message that I feel that I can still try to hold on to, and
admittedly it's very difficult for me, it's that we religious people have a
responsibility to continue to make sure that religion isn't abused and that
God's name isn't taken in vain for hatred, for violence.

And if I'm speaking this way, then I think, at this point, the onus is on the
Palestinian side to start rethinking some very basic premises. And the first
premise to rethink is the Palestinian tendency to dismiss any legitimacy for
Israel's existence. And what we learned in the first intifada, and I
certainly include myself in this, was that we, the Israeli side, had committed
injustice in this 100-year war and we learned that the Palestinian side has a
case. They have a legitimate case. In the second intifada, the onus is on
the Palestinians to learn the same lesson about us. We have a case. We are a
legitimate presence in the Middle East. We're not colonialists, we're not
invaders, we are native sons. We belong to the Middle East. And until the
Arab world--not just the Palestinians, until the Arab world makes its peace
with the legitimacy of our existence, then the tragedy in the Middle East is
just going to continue.

GROSS: Well, Yossi Klein Halevi, I want to thank you very much for talking
with us.

Mr. HALEVI: Thank you.

GROSS: Yossi Klein Halevi is the Israeli correspondent for The New Republic
and a senior writer for The Jerusalem Report. His recent memoir is called "At
the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians
and Muslims in the Holy Land."

Earlier, we heard from Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

On the next FRESH AIR: Greg Mortenson, founder of a group that organizes
schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And we call Andrew Meldrum,
who reports for The Guardian from Zimbabwe, where new laws restrict
journalists and outlaw criticism of the president, Robert Mugabe.

I'm Terry Gross. Join us for the next FRESH AIR.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.