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Weekend
Edition Pre-Packaged Opinions on Israel and PalestineJeffrey Goldberg's PrisonBy NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
Jeffrey Goldberg is the recipient of numerous journalism awards and currently writes on the Middle East for The New Yorker magazine. On its surface his book Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across The Middle East Divide interweaves the memoir of an American Jew's enchantment and subsequent disappointment with Israel, on the one hand, and the reportage of a knowing journalist covering the Israel-Palestine beat, on the other. Its main interest, however, is as a sophisticated work of ideology, one meriting more than passing attention. On a political level it registers the limits of what is currently permissible to acknowledge in enlightened liberal sectors of American Jewry, while on a personal level it registers the limits of what an enlightened believer in the faith can admit to himself. More broadly it signals the eclipse of liberal American Jewry's love affair with the Jewish state, itself integral of the beginnings of a larger American estrangement from Israel. Eschewing Thomas Friedman's formula in From Beirut to Jerusalem (a book to which Prisoners bears obvious comparison), Goldberg does not quote a Fouad Ajami here and a Rabbi Hartmann there to lend credence to his prepackaged opinions but rather seems to speak from the authority of intimate knowledge. And indeed, Goldberg made aliyah in the 1980s and lived on a leftwing kibbutz, served as a military policeman in the Palestinian detention center Ketziot (Ansar Three) during the first intifada, and reported from the Occupied Territories during the Oslo years and the second intifada. He attached himself to one Palestinian from Gaza in particular named Rafiq Hijazi, the odyssey of this personal friendship mirroring and humanizing in Prisoners the larger drama unfolding in the Holy Land. On a side note, Goldberg depicts as an extraordinary act his forging of a personal bond with a Palestinian, and commentators have reacted in tones of hushed awe. Yet, although such a relationship between Jew and Arab might have raised eyebrows a few decades ago, in the real world it is by now a commonplace. In the hermetically sealed ghetto of American Jewry, however, it is still cause for bewilderment. And yet it's precisely because Goldberg seems to know his subject, and knows how to convey its truth to the reader, that, depending on one's take, the cynicism of his bad faith and faux innocence or the thick-headedness of his refusal to see what's right before his eyes (probably both) not only rankles but enrages. For it must be said that this is a quite wretched book which, for all its willingness to acknowledge ugly realities about Israel's occupation, albeit realities which can no longer be concealed, nonetheless reiterates and, because of the seeming openness, revivifies the old pernicious myths and threadbare clichés sustaining the occupation, presenting them in a form less detached from reality yet processed to make them assimilable by his liberal American Jewish audience. The heart of Goldberg's book
is his stint during the first intifada (1987-1993) as a military
policeman in Ketziot (Ansar Three), an Israeli prison for Palestinian
detainees located in the Negev desert. It is in Ketziot that
Goldberg meets his Palestinian alter ego Rafiq, and Ketziot also
serves as the metaphor for his larger claim captured in the book's
title that Israelis and Palestinians are both prisoners of the
occupation. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, he reports, were
arrested during the first intifada for both violent and nonviolent
offenses. In an aside Goldberg observes that "habeas corpusis
not a cherished value of Arab security services", yet it
appears not to be much of an Israeli value either. He himself
"Ketziot was a kind of appalling joke," Goldberg writes, a miniature of the equally "absurd occupation". Palestinians were "allowed to organize their lives, even their political lives, more or less as they chose," he says, and "sometimes, it seemed as if we weren't running a prison, but a vast arts-and-crafts workshop". In its annual reports, however, Amnesty described conditions at Ketziot as "harsh" throughout the intifada although reporting some improvement in 1990, when Goldberg joined the prison staff. Goldberg does acknowledge that it wasn't all fun-and-games, noting the "systemic cruelty" of Israel's ban on family visits--"Some of these men, many with children, did not see their families for two and three years"--and that "the harsh climate was in itself a form of cruelty". Goldberg also alludes to Israeli prisons which had a meaner reputation than Ketziot such as Dahariya and Gaza Beach camp (Ansar Two). It is instructive to juxtapose Goldberg's description of Gaza Beach camp (Rafiq had been held there before Ketziot) with that of an Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, who served there:
Shavit rated Gaza Beach "one of the best" Israeli prisons for Palestinians. Goldberg treads gingerly on the subject of Israeli torture of Palestinian detainees. In accordance with recommendations of an Israeli state commission, he reports, "some of the prisonerswere, in some sort of limited way, subject to 'moderate physical pressure,'in pursuit of certain types of intelligence--ticking-bomb intelligence". Although recording the cruelty here and there of an aberrant Israeli soldier (almost always a Sephardic Jew ) or army unit, and occasionally quoting or paraphrasing a Palestinian detainee as alleging he was tortured, Goldberg prudently eschews use of the "t" word himself. Yet human rights organizations concluded that during the first intifada "Palestinians under interrogation were systematically tortured or ill-treated" (Amnesty International); "some eighty-five percent of persons interrogated by the [Shabak] were interrogated by methods constituting torture" (B'Tselem); and "the number of Palestinians tortured or severely ill-treated while interrogated during the intifada is in the tens of thousands--a number that becomes especially significant when it is remembered that the universe of adult and adolescent male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is under three-quarters of one million" (Human Rights Watch). One police unit "specialized in interrogating at night with methods including severe beatings with wooden sticks and electric shocks" (Amnesty). To his credit Goldberg notes that "nearly everyone was found guilty in the Gaza military court" and that "the defense lawyers were not allowed to see the evidence collected against their clients." He neglects to mention however that in "many" instances the "primary evidence" used to convict Palestinian defendants was confessions obtained by "torture, or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" (Amnesty). It appears that Goldberg doesn't consider the standard Israeli interrogation techniques torture. He is not at all averse, however, to deploring the identical Palestinian techniques as torture. Consider what he calls one of the "many creative methods of torture" used by Palestinian interrogators acting at the behest of the Palestinian Authority during the Oslo years: "In shabeh, a prisoner is bound in a kneeling position, his arms pulled back and tied to the ankles. The prisoner is then left hooded for hours. This torture causes hellish pain in the joints, and it stimulates an overwhelming desire to die". Can Goldberg possibly be unaware that shabeh was a routine Israeli form of torture repeatedly condemned in human rights reports? It was "no coincidence that the Palestinians tortured by the Palestinian Authority describe methods that are amazingly similar to the Shabak's interrogation methods," Israeli journalist Gideon Levy observed. "Like several other things, we have bequeathed to them the art of torture, together with the concept of detention without trial." On a couple of occasions Goldberg mentions that the punishment for even minor infractions at Ketziot was:
This Israeli method of torture was also repeatedly condemned in human rights reports. Although admitting that he personally sent prisoners to the zinzana, and although liberal in his outrage at the "cruelty" of the tortures Palestinians inflicted on each other, Golderg rejects (albeit indirectly) the insinuation that he himself might be an accessory to torture, if not a torturer himself. When the guards needed "someone to go solitary" for a minor infraction of prison rules, Goldberg recalls at one point , "twenty Arabs immediately volunteered." He processes this not as a demonstration of their solidarity and courage but rather as vindication that the "Arabs want to be our victim" and "the Geneva Conventionsaid nothing about prisoners who asked to be punished." A supreme failing of Palestinians during the first intifada, in Goldberg's view, is that they embraced violence and lacked appreciation of nonviolent resistance. He adverts to this theme at multiple junctures, it becoming a mantra of his book. Lamenting that he "had not yet seen" nonviolent resistance among Palestinians, Goldberg typically writes:
It is surely a curiosity that Goldberg witnessed first-hand the intifada yet "had not seen" any nonviolent resistance among the Palestinians. It seems that he managed to miss the ubiquitous boycotts of Israeli goods, tax and commercial strikes, and strike days brutally suppressed by the Israel Defense Forces; for example, the highly publicized nonviolent tax resistance of the town of Beit Sahour, and the ensuing six-week long Israeli siege and pillage of the town. (A Security Council resolution "strongly deploringthe ransacking of the homes of inhabitants" of Beit Sahour "and the illegal and arbitrary confiscation ofproperty and valuables" was blocked by a lone United States veto.) He also managed to miss the hundreds of grassroots mass organizations ("popular committees") displacing Israeli rule nonviolently that cropped up in every sphere of Palestinian life from health and education to agriculture and the judiciary. "They were extraordinarily resilient; whenever their members were arrested, others rose to fill their place," Israeli military correspondents Zeev Schiff and Ehud Yaari recounted. "The fact is that by the spring of 1988, a sprawling network of popular committees was functioning in one form or another in every city, village, and camp, spreading the web of the uprising's machinery to the farthest corners of the territories." Determined to crush these "seeds of self-government, scattered pockets of independence" on the pretext that they fomented violence, Israel "outlawed the popular committees and arrested hundreds of their members," and systematically wrecked the practical experiments in nonviolent civil disobedience; for example, "the campaign to encourage self-sufficiency by raising chickens, rabbits and vegetables fell apart when the [Israeli] Civil Administration closed the stations run by the agriculture committees." The administrative detainees held in Ketziot included "Palestinian leaders who openly support the peace talks with Israel and dialogue to promote Palestinian-Israeli understanding" (B'Tselem), while those convicted in military courts fell victim to draconian Israeli military orders that criminalized and made punishable "by up to 10 years' imprisonment every form of political expression in the Occupied Territories, including nonviolent forms of political activity" (Amnesty). One reason Goldberg didn't see any nonviolent resistance is perhaps that he suffered an optical impairment. "She had joined a group of foreigners, advocates of the Palestinian cause, who stood one day against a line of Israeli bulldozers," he writes of the death of Rachel Corrie during the second intifada. "She came too close to one and she was plowed under" (pp. 300-1). Just as the Twin Towers came too close to the airplanes and got plowed under. Goldberg is precise on the number of "suspected collaboratorskilled by their brother Palestinians" during the first intifadayet, he is strangely silent on the balance-sheet for fatalities between Israelis and Palestinians, except that, in his telling, Israelis only used "rubber bullets" or "fired live rounds in the air". Between December 1987 and September 1993, 1124 Palestinians were killed by Israelis as against 75 Israelis killed by Palestinians. In 1988 and again in 1989, for example, "over 260 unarmed Palestinian civilians, including children, were shot dead by Israeli forces, often in circumstances suggesting excessive use of force or deliberate killings" (Amnesty). To judge by these figures, Goldberg should perhaps have also preached to Israelis the virtue of nonviolence. During the intifada "it was illegal to fly th[e] flag," he reports, while "a Palestinian man holding a rifle would be shot and killed". In fact the official Israeli rules of engagement allowed for the killing of a Palestinian for hoisting the national flag or ignoring an order to halt while the unofficial or de facto rules of engagement were yet more lax. The few Israelis indicted in connection with Palestinian deaths were convicted on minor charges and received derisory punishments, whereas Palestinians convicted of throwing a stone were handed sentences of up to five years' imprisonment. Each year of the intifada thousands of Palestinians were "beaten by Israeli forces" and "many were punitively kicked or struck with clubs or rifle butts," according to human rights organizations. "The victims included people who refused to clear road-blocks or delete graffiti, or who were suspected of having thrown stones. Many suffered severe injuries, particularly fractures" (Amnesty). More than 50,000 Palestinian children required medical attention in the first years of the intifada due to "indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting" (Save the Children). In his distillation of these atrocities Goldberg simply reports that the daily routine of Israeli soldiers "consisted of chasing rock-throwing children". He recalls having sympathized with the "symbolic violence" of these diminutive stone-throwers until he himself was hit by a rock: "There was nothing symbolic about the pain, or the blood that ran down the back of my neck" --which no doubt justified "chasing" the perpetrators. Other Israeli measures similarly escaped Goldberg's notice. During the first intifada Israel demolished or sealed nearly nine hundred Palestinian homes. Although Israel was the only country in the world (except for Iraq under Saddam Hussein) that legally sanctioned house demolitions as a form of punishment, and although this practice was widely condemned (even a former Israeli Supreme Court justice called it "inhuman"), it merits not a single mention in Goldberg's book. He does, however, manage to devote several dramatic pages to his "shock" at the alleged rape of a Palestinian teenager in Ketziot, which "sent me back to a persistent question: If this is what they do to their own people" (pp. 164-6). Israel's indiscriminate killing, torture and beating of Palestinians and the demolition of their homes posed no such question in his mind, for the understandable reason that it never happened. It is an abiding conceit of Goldberg's book that, locked in mutual fear and suffering comparable deprivation, Israelis and Palestinians were equally prisoners of Ketziot, and accordingly the occupation: "we were both trapped in the same desert," "we were level with the Arabs in so many things--our food came off the same trucks, our tents were all antediluvian, we all coughed up the same desert dust," "we slept on the same kind of beds as the prisoners," "we all ate the same fruit, guards and prisoners alike". He even manages to fish out a former prisoner who is said to have proclaimed "You were our prisoners"; emphasis in original). So convinced was he of the mutuality of victimhood that it comes as a revelation to Goldberg when he is reminded that, unlike the prisoners, the guards "can go home on leave and then come back again". It can only be imagined his consternation were Goldberg capable of hearing and seeing the "hair-raising human screams," the "severe beatings with wooden sticks and electric shocks," the piles of human corpses, the countless homes demolished. A most peculiar juxtaposition of Goldberg's book is his singing the praises of gun Zionism to Jews on one page while singing the praises of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Palestinians on another. Like many an American Jew, Goldberg became enamored of Israel on account of its martial prowess. Recalling his first trip to the Holy Land, Goldberg emphasizes that what resonated for him most was Jews with guns, and not just .22s* but Uzis and M-16s and bigger guns than these, grenade-spitting guns, great barking machine guns. On a bus tour across the Galilee, we drove in the wake of a tank transport, a mammoth truck carrying a dead Jewish tank. A Jewish tank! And Jewish armored personnel carriers! It was a miracle. Enough of thinking and suffering. Let's do some shooting. His new-found hero is Ari Ben Canaan of Leon Uris's Exodus, a "Hebrew (not, somehow, Jewish) warrior, brave and cold-eyed, who defended Jewish honor." The "lesson of the Shoah," Goldberg comes to realize, is that "it is easy to kill a unilaterally disarmed Jew but much harder to kill one who is pointing a gun at your face," while during target practice at IDF boot camp he relishes the prospect of avenging the anti-Semites who had ravaged the Jewish people and humiliated him in his youth. None of these ruminations, however, prevents Goldberg from expressing revulsion at the teachings of Muslim fanatics, who "build self-esteem" through bloody vengeance and for whom the virtue of Islam was its being a "warrior religion" that rejected the Christian value of "passive surrender" because "Muhammad would never have allowed himself to be humiliated". It is hard to make out the difference between this warrior religion and the one Goldberg worshipped after discovering Israel. Although intermittently registering some second thoughts about his initial fascination with violence, Goldberg is far from a convert to passive resistance. When a pacifist interlocutor of his questions the utility of his rifle, Goldberg's not-very-Gandhian repartee is, "[I]t solves problems.It protects people from violence", and while ultimately disavowing force for its own sake, he reports being "still partial to fighting Jews". It is likewise cause for perplexity that Goldberg never preaches to Israelis (and their American "supporters") the wonders of pacifism. Surely he didn't forego the occasion for a lack of need. The IDF has occupied a "unique position" in Israeli society, writes Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, "comparable, if at all, only to the status the armed forces held in Germany from 1871 until 1945." Israel's founders set as their goal "creating a race of warrior-settlers"; in the state that emerged, the "greatest compliment anyone could receive was that he was a 'fighter'" and the "highest praise one could bestow on anything was to say that it was kmo mivsta tsvai (like a military operation)," while after the June 1967 war Israel "had become one huge military laboratory." This does not sound like King's "beloved community." In this connection it merits noticing an Israeli army "joke" apparently so hilarious that Goldberg couldn't resist including it in his book:
A real knee-slapper. Consider, finally, the tenets
of Israeli security doctrine. According to former head of the
Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies Zeev Maoz, the anchor of
this doctrine is periodic resort to disproportionate firepower.
Because key policymakers believe that "Arabs understand
only a language of force," he explains, Israel (in their
view) "must demonstrate every so often that it is strong
and able and willing to use force." On the other hand, Maoz
observes, "one almost never hears in Israeli strategic circles
that perhaps the reliance on military force as the principal
(or even the only) instrument of policy is fundamentally misconceived."
Echoing van Creveld, Maoz points to the IDF as the principal
instrument of national integration and social cohesion, the "matrix
of national identity." In order to preserve the army's centrality
in Israeli society, as well as to mobilize the population and
divert its attention from internal conflicts, Israeli leaders
have fostered a "siege mentality," promoted "militarism,"
and preferred war to peace. Indeed, Maoz reports that they have
utilized murderous reprisal raids for combat training and nurturing
esprit de corps, and the theater of war and targeted assassinations
for testing high-tech weaponry. "Israel's decision makers
tended to overwhelmingly and systematically rely on the use of
force," he concludes, But it is the undoing of Palestinians, according to Goldberg, that that they "see violence as a panacea" and have "let violence into every corner of their lives". If they would only emulate Israel. Were Palestinians to practice nonviolence, Goldberg contends, Israel would quickly enough be forced to negotiate. This is because, like Britons but unlike Germans, Israelis "could not sustain such one-sided violence, especially in front of television cameras." The basis of Goldberg's faith, however, is unclear. The first intifada was a "mass civil uprising," Schiff and Yaari recalled, "not a war fought with tanks, planes, and artillery or a border skirmish with armed men, but a challenge posed without weapons, a contest against bottles, stones, and firebombs." One of Israel's early acts of retaliation was to deport the Palestinian-American pacifist Mubarak Awad of the Center for the Study for Non-violence. Fully seventeen months into this popular civil resistance "without weapons," and notwithstanding the massive sustained force Israel had already brought to bear to break it, more than half of all Israelis supported the deployment of still "stronger measures" by the IDF while "an overwhelming 72 percentsaw no contradiction between the army's handling of the uprising and 'the nation's democratic values.'" It is of course possible that if Palestinians had found the inner wherewithal to stay the course yet longer in the face of the IDF's brutality, fissures would have opened up in Israeli society, just as, after years of acquiescence in anti-Jewish measures, Germans recoiled at the raw violence unleashed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht due to an alloy of revulsion and embarrassment. Thus, Israel's liberal, cosmopolitan milieus such as the High Court of Justice have occasionally proven to be sensitive to international opinion, the Court reversing its prior authorization of torture, for instance, after an outpouring of worldwide condemnation. For the nonviolent civil disobedience Goldberg counsels to succeed, its practice and the violence being used to crush it must be made widely known. It is a supreme irony lost on Goldberg that it is his manner of ignoring Palestinian civil disobedience and airbrushing Israeli violence that has doomed this tactic to failure. Goldberg's account of the rise of Hamas and the second intifada (2000-2006) conforms to the pattern already set. He repeatedly condemns Hamas, and concomitantly Palestinian society, for being "ravaged by a cult of death". The key manifestation of this death cult has been, of course, the suicide bombers. Although Goldberg makes passing reference to Palestinians killed during the second intifada, the dramatic core of his narrative is these suicide bombings, the deranged perpetrators and the decimated victims. Goldberg surely has title to his outrage at the "bestial manifestations" of Hamas's ideology. But shouldn't he have mentioned somewhere that "Israel's disproportionate response to what had started as a popular uprising with young unarmed men confronting Israeli soldiers armed with lethal weapons fuelled the intifada beyond control and turned it into an all-out war" (former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami); that the first Hamas suicide bombing during the second intifada didn't occur until five months into Israel's relentless bloodletting (Israeli forces fired one million rounds of ammunition just during the first few days, while the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed during the first weeks was 20:1); and that four times as many Palestinians as Israelis, overwhelmingly civilians on both sides, were killed during the second intifada (4046 as compared to 1017 persons)? In 2006 Israel restored its, as it were, cult of life ratio of killing 30 Palestinians for each Israeli killed (660 as compared to 23 persons). Goldberg is appalled by a Hamas
leader's "calm unperturbed by the thought of bleeding"
Israeli children. He might also have mentioned--but doesn't--the
widely reported counsel of Major General (subsequently Chief
of Staff) Dan Halutz to the Israeli pilots who dropped a one-ton
bomb on a densely populated civilian neighborhood killing nine
Palestinian children: "Guys, sleep well tonight. By the
way, I sleep well at night, too." Goldberg is shocked at
any imputation of similarity between the deaths of Palestinian
and Israeli children: "For God's sake, we don't try
to kill children". Fully 811 Palestinian children were killed
during the second intifada, which was more than the total number
of Israeli civilians killed (711, of whom 109 were children);
in 2006, 141 Palestinian children were killed as compared to
17 Israeli civilians of whom one was a child. For the want of
trying to kill Palestinian children it would seem that Israelis
were awfully good at it. In fact unarmed Palestinian demonstrators
killed by Israeli soldiers were "on many occasionsdeliberately
targeted" (Amnesty), while in other cases these unarmed
demonstrators, a large proportion of whom were children, fell
victim to reckless--i.e., "indiscriminate," "excessive,"
"disproportionate"--use of force. It further merits
notice that these latter deaths did not fundamentally differ
from intentional killings. "Indiscriminate attacks differ
from direct attacks against civilians," Israel's leading
authority on international law, Yoram Dinstein, observes Goldberg might also have mentioned--but doesn't--the notorious case of the Israeli captain who in October 2004 fired two bullets at point blank range into the head of a 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl while she was lying on the ground already injured, and then, after starting to walk away, turned back to riddle her body with at least 20 more bullets, including seven to her head. The officer was subsequently acquitted of all charges, received hefty monetary compensation from the State and a promotion in his rank--clearly because, for God's sake, he did not try to kill her. After reporting the horrific Hamas suicide bombing at Netanya in March 2002, Goldberg ridicules the "credulous members of the American Colony press corps" who, during Operation Defensive Shield that followed the bombing, "accused the [Israeli] army of committing a massacre" in Jenin: "This was the opposite of the truth: The army in Jenin killed the makers of massacres". He might have mentioned--but doesn't--that Israel did in fact commit "war crimes" (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty) during its incursion, including the flattening of large swaths of the refugee camp after the fighting was already over, leaving 4,000 Palestinians homeless. One of the "makers of massacres" killed by Israeli forces was "Kamal Zgheir, a fifty-seven-year-old wheelchair-bound man who was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the camp on April 10, even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair" (Human Rights Watch)--no doubt because he was en route to a suicide bombing. Goldberg heaps contempt on Palestinian political leaders who, he alleges, used civilians, including their own children and grandchildren, as human shields to deter Israeli attacks during the second intifada. Thus he ingeniously manages to invert Israel's policy of targeted assassinations, which constitute a "war crime" (Public Committee Against Torture in Israel), into instances of Palestinian pusillanimity. These Palestinian leaders were "unconstrained by Western notions of chivalric behavior," he continues, because it was "assumed, correctly, that Israel would respect" them. Unsurprisingly Goldberg doesn't mention that "scores of men, women and children bystanders have been killed and hundreds have been injured in the course of assassinations or attempted assassinations of Palestinians by the Israeli army.Claims that efforts are made not to harm bystanders are inconsistent with the practice of carrying out attacks on busy roads and densely populated areas" (Amnesty). One third of the 500 Palestinians killed in the course of targeted assassinations during the second intifada were civilian bystanders. What's more, Goldberg doesn't mention Israel's "systematically coercing Palestinian civilians" as human shields (Human Rights Watch), for example, chivalrously ordering Palestinian civilians to "walk in front of soldiers to shield them from gunfire, while the soldiers hold a gun behind their backs and sometimes fire over their shoulders" (B'Tselem). The difference between Palestinian
and Israeli violence during the second intifada, Goldberg explains,
"is the difference between action and reaction." Indeed,
he expresses indignation when a fellow journalist implies to
him that a Hamas suicide bombing might be retaliatory. According
to Maoz, however, Israel methodically used targeted assassinations
during the second intifada to provoke Palestinian retaliation,
thereby justifying massive resort to force against them: In addition to condemning the Palestinian death cult, Goldberg expresses extreme irritation at the Palestinians' sensitivity to their personal dignity: "Ah, yes, humiliation: the Arabs, and their insufferable egos, as fragmented as old bones"; "The smart officers [in Ketziot] understood the importance of providing their prisoners, who came to humiliation so easily, with the simulacrum of dignity". Yet, the prisoners in Ketziot, although having been degraded and tortured (including by Goldberg), although their relatives had been maimed and murdered, although their homes had been demolished and their lives wrecked--nonetheless these same prisoners, according to Goldberg, received him warmly during the Oslo years when he returned to the Occupied Territories, swapping stories with him about Ketziot "like old bunkmates from summer" and saying "all the things about peace and compromise that I hoped to hear". "We don't care what people did in the past," a Palestinian leader tells him. "We're not going back to the past". So smug is Goldberg in his disdain of Palestinians clinging to their di |
