Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "war"

Historic World War I cemeteries badly damaged in recent attacks.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

In Gaza, violence is so prevalent, even death doesn’t put you beyond its reach. Nor does a grave protect you from further insult to your dignity.

The fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas gunmen at the turn of the year damaged several hundred of the 3,500 gravestones in the World War I British military cemetery in Gaza City. A matter of months earlier, Palestinian Islamists entered another British war cemetery further south in the Gaza Strip at Deir el-Balah and blew up the 6-foot-high cross at the edge of the lawn where 727 soldiers — Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim — have lain since 1917.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is demanding $135,000 compensation from the Israeli government for the damage to the Gaza graves. The Israeli army at first said the damage was probably caused by an accidental explosion in a Palestinian weapons cache at the site, though it later added that its troops returned fire at Palestinians shooting from the vicinity of the graveyard.

Many people have forgotten the British campaign in Palestine of 1916-18, and few even know that there are British military cemeteries in Gaza.

But all this matters to me. I had two great-uncles who fought in Palestine, riding with the Imperial Camel Corps. One of them was still alive when I was a boy. He used to get drunk at Christmas and drop his pants to show us the scar where a Turkish bullet had wounded him in his backside, just before the British marched into Jerusalem.

I made the Deir el-Balah cemetery a key part of the plot of my second Palestinian crime novel “A Grave in Gaza” as a tribute to my great-uncles and the comrades who weren’t lucky enough to show off their wounds to kids like me.

That novel, whose plot involved the weapons smuggling and corruption that afflicts Gaza today, was published in February last year. Two months later, the cross in the graveyard was destroyed.

“The history of this region is complex. But the right of the dead to lie in peace and dignity is simple and should be respected by all,” the War Graves Commission said in a statement at the time. “We hope that the authorities in Gaza will make every effort to apprehend those responsible.”

Good luck.

As for the $100,000 cost of replacing the cross, Palestinians won’t be paying for that. Nowadays they have other things that need repairing more urgently.

Local residents say the cross was blown up by an Islamist group. It’s a shame because the cemetery includes sections for four major faiths. But in Gaza that kind of tolerance, even in death, is as outdated today as the terminology of the cemetery’s original plan, which designates its Muslim section as “Mohammedan.”

The Deir el-Balah cemetery is also a beautiful place. A green lawn and a neatly clipped hedge, its upkeep is paid for by the War Graves Commission and overseen by officials at the British consulate in Jerusalem.

Back in 1916, it was a place of carnage. The British launched an assault on the Turkish positions in Gaza that failed dismally. More than 6,000 British troops were cut down in a few days. It was the first time the British used the mustard gas that would become such a feature of trench warfare in Flanders. They failed to gauge the wind correctly and the gas blew back on their own soldiers.

The following year, with a more competent commander, the British returned and won. They left behind four cemeteries in the Gaza Strip: two in Gaza City, one in Deir el-Balah, and another in Rafah. All places devastated in the most recent fighting.
The War Graves Commission successfully pressed Israel for $150,000 compensation for damage to graves in one of the Gaza cemeteries after an army operation there in 2006.

That action was intended to rescue Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen from his post on the edge of the Gaza Strip and still captive somewhere in Gaza.

This time there are signs of shrapnel on many of the gravestones in Gaza City, but the commission might run into difficulty proving that it was caused by Israeli troops. Potential witnesses among the local population had all been forced to flee the intense fighting before it hit the cemetery.

That leaves only the dead as witnesses. They’d surely testify that, almost a century after their passing, Gaza continues to have a special relationship with killing.

War correspondent Matt McAllester fled into the fields of battle to escape an alcoholic, mentally ill mother. In his memoir, Bittersweet, he tries to make amends with her, in the kitchen. Read my interview with McAllester on The Daily Beast.

Michael Anthony is the author of MASS CASUALTIES: A Young Medic’s True Story of Death, Deception and Dishonor in Iraq (Adams Media, October 2009). His book is drawn from his personal journals during the first year he spent serving in Iraq. You can read my interview with him here. In this guest post, he highlights an issue we all ought to give more thought.

President Obama recently stated that sending more troops into harm’s way in Afghanistan is a solemn decision—one that he would not rush. As a veteran, I find the decision to send troops into harm’s way without an effective military mental health program in place beyond solemn. It’s deeply disturbing. Keeping soldiers mentally fit should be as important as keeping them physically fit.

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started, nearly 2,000 active-service soldiers have killed themselves, according to a report by the San Antonio Express-News earlier this year. Even more alarming is the fact that every day, five active-duty service members attempt suicide. In the past eight years, that means up to 14,000 have felt their life is not worth living.

The government doesn’t want you to know this. In spring of 2008, CBS news journalist Armen Keteyian exposed a Veterans Administration cover-up of suicide stats. The reporting revealed that every day, eighteen veterans kill themselves and roughly 1,000 attempt suicide each month. The VA’s head of Mental Health had claimed there were only 790 attempts in all of 2007, a far cry from the reality.

Among all veterans, over the eight years we’ve been at war in the Middle East, the statistics point that roughly 50,000 have committed suicide, with upwards of 44,000 attempting suicide. These figures only represent data gathered since 2001; this has been an ongoing and persistent problem since Vietnam—and the numbers go up each day.

Recently, the Army made a big deal about giving $50 million to fund a five-year research project on military suicide. In their book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, Linda J. Bilmes and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz figured the cost of the Iraq war at $12 billion a month. That means we spend more than $16 million an hour. If you do the math, the $50 million that went to suicide research is what we spend every three hours in Iraq.

The day after Christmas this year will mark our 3,000th day at war. At this point, we’ve heard a lot about suicide bombers, but what about suicide? Regardless of anyone’s feelings about our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, these soldiers deserve much more than three hours of our time.

I posted this on Global Post. JERUSALEM — There’s an old Arab aphorism: “A man with a plan takes action; a man with two plans gets confused.” Apply that to the Israelis and to the Palestinians, and the nonsensical sequence of recent events in the Middle East starts to fall into a comprehensible pattern.

It’s not a pleasant pattern, because it leads to war.

First, before we get to the fireworks, let’s recap all the nonsense.

The Palestinians refused to talk to the Israelis from December 2008, when a relatively centrist Israeli government made a peace offer the Palestinians rejected. Since then, small economic reforms and big U.S. security aid have made life in the West Bank fairly free of violence. Better, for sure, than life in Gaza, which is still a mess more than a year after the Hamas-Israel war there.

Israelis elected a center-right-dominated parliament a year ago, and Benjamin Netanyahu formed a rightist cabinet. He refused to halt building in Israel’s West Bank settlements, as President Barack Obama demanded. Even when forced by Washington to put a transparently fake freeze on construction he declined to include East Jerusalem.

The Palestinians wouldn’t restart direct peace talks until there was a freeze on the Israeli neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. So the Americans eventually persuaded them to have indirect talks. Without much enthusiasm, the Palestinians agreed.

Why no enthusiasm? Leading Palestinians, including chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, had already started to talk about a new failed round of talks leading quite simply to a “one-state solution.” That means, no division of the land, just a single state in what’s now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. One adult, one vote. Soon enough, of course, that means no Jewish majority and the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Meanwhile, Israel largely escaped the financial crisis of the last two years and its citizens spend little time fretting about the Palestinians. In Tel Aviv, the discovery of old bones by workers building an underground emergency room for a hospital led last month to an attempt by ultra-religious politicians to block the construction, and protests by locals who cried out against religious coercion.

No such mass protests against continued building in the settlements. That proceeds, even to the extent that during the last month announcements of new construction in East Jerusalem have caused a major crisis in relations with Washington. In one case, the planned building of a mere 20 apartments in an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem forced Obama to take time out of his undoubtedly busy day to discuss it with Netanyahu.

There’s more nonsense, but let this much suffice for now.

Back to the Arab aphorism. Who has a plan, and who’s confused?

It’s clear that most Israelis and most Palestinians are living in denial — a kind of confusion, because it takes the illusion of current calm for a sustainable and welcome period of peace.

Israelis know the settlements can’t go alongside a two-state solution, but they don’t choose one or the other.

Palestinians know that the way to stop the settlements eating up the hilltops around their towns is to strike a deal now and rule their own state, but they won’t do it so long as life is relatively good and the international pressure is all on Israel. Leaders of Fatah and Hamas have called for a “third intifada” several times in the last four months — not for renewed talks, only for renewed violence. But a mere handful of kids came out to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails.

With no sense of urgency on either side, Western diplomats shake their heads and try to nudge the two nations to the negotiating table. It’s time to realize that neither side wants talks.

While most Israelis live in denial, a sizeable minority pushes for more building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They’re not building so that they can later give up that land and see all the money they’ve pumped into their real estate wasted. The purpose is to make the West Bank inseparable from Israel. To kill the two-state solution.

In that scenario, either the Palestinians agree to be second-class inhabitants of the area -- fat chance -- or they leave. Well, with a little nudge.

On the Palestinian side, negotiations seem unlikely to lead to the satisfaction of every single demand. So the one-state solution starts to look good to them, too. However, second-class citizenship isn’t an option, and neither is leaving.

That’s the collision course Western diplomats refuse to countenance. When envoys talk about getting the “peace process on track,” it sounds good. But that process has been trucking along since the early 1990s. Peace has been getting further away. The “process” allows for a sense of activity, while all the time events — settlement construction, terror attacks — make it harder to draw lines on a map and make the populations secure.

It’s time to figure out a new diplomatic strategy to deal with the Israelis and Palestinians. One that’s based on the assumption that, in the longterm, they’re expecting war.

Machiavelli wrote that "Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please." That's certainly true of the Six-Day War of 1967. When fired upon in Jerusalem some months after the passage of those six days, Graham Greene commented that it was perhaps an inaccurate name for the conflict. Indeed the battle that Israel won continues to be waged, sometimes simmering, sometimes seemingly in a deep freeze, but never entirely settled. Which is why Abraham Rabinovich's book,The Battle for Jerusalem: An Unintended Conquest That Echoes Still, first published 40 years ago, is now available in an expanded e-book format. Here he chats about how he researched the book back in the late 1960s and now reissued it.

Would you recommend any books on writing?
The best books on writing are well-written books. Anything by Conrad, Naipaul’s ‘A Bend in the River’, Bruce Catton’s ‘A Stillness at Appomatox’.

How did you come to write The Battle for Jerusalem?
I was working at a newspaper on Long Island in May 1967 when things in the Middle East began to heat up. Egypt moved troops into Sinai, Israel mobilized its reserves. It reached a point where war seemed to me inevitable. I drove up from New York to the country on a Sunday and spent an hour walking back and forth on a dirt road to think out my options. I had been in Israel once before, in 1956, and had left the country just a week before the Sinai Campaign. I decided now that I wouldn’t miss the next war. The next day I went into the editor’s office and asked to take my two week’s annual leave as of the next day. I had started working at the paper just half a year before and wasn’t yet entitled to leave. But I put my request in such a way – “I’m planning to fly to Israel and would prefer that you consider this my leave” – that he agreed. We agreed that if there was a war I would file stories. But, war or no war, I was to be back in two weeks. I arrived in Israel five days before the war. I had a sister here, Malka, who was a copy editor at the Jerusalem Post so I fell right into a newspaper and social milieu.

Where were you during the war?
In Jerusalem. I spent most of the two days of fighting in the city roaming the border area. It was very exciting and I could say I 'covered' the war, in the sense of writing articles about it, but I had no idea what was going on. The last night I didn’t return to my sister’s apartment to sleep. I didn’t want to waste the time. I just laid down on the grass in a park and slept for a few hours when the Jordanian shelling had stopped. When I got up I wandered over to the Jerusalem Post. One of the editors said there were rumors that Israeli troops were inside the Old City. I suggested we try to get there. We walked to Mandelbaum Gate, the only crossing point between Israeli and Jordanian Jerusalem, to see if we could talk our way past the border guards. But there was no one there, no police, no soldiers. So we just crossed the intersection and found ourselves in Jordanian Jerusalem. There was no one visible but at one point we passed a truck with a dead Jordanian soldier at the wheel. It began to feel spooky but we soon saw Israeli soldiers. They told us to walk around the Old City wall and enter through Lion’s Gate. It was like walking into a particularly dramatic page of history. Unreal. The moment was so enormous you feel outside yourself. The Temple Mount was full of unshaven soldiers, men cheering, officers giving orders, rows of prisoners, planes flying low overhead and then circling over the Jericho road beyond the Mount of Olives. My colleague from the Post continued on to the Western Wall. I stayed behind to talk to half a dozen paratroopers who were drinking bottles of soda they had found in a small Jordanian army enclosure. When I asked them “what now?” one said we should give back all the territory captured in Sinai and the West Bank in exchange for peace (the fighting on the Golan hadn’t started yet), another said we won’t give up anything, another said give them everything except our holy city. The debate which has split Israel in the half century since had begun.

What did you do after the war?
I remember sitting in a café on Agron Street on the last day of the war, summing things up. I had arrived five days before the war. The war had lasted six days. That’s 11 days. I still had three days before I had to return, time enough even for a quick tour of the country. The air over the asphalt in the street was shimmering from the heat but it seemed to be from the excitement. I decided then that I can’t go back, at least not yet. I couldn’t leave this incredible drama at the center of the world for school board meetings and small town politics on Long Island. I sent a telex to the paper apologizing but saying I wouldn’t be returning. I just hung around. That was enough. Soaking everything up. Staying at my sister’s. After a few weeks I saw that I needed a cover story. People kept asking ‘what are you doing?’ what do you intend to do? I decided to say that I’m working on a book. That satisfied everybody. I had never written one and as far as I can remember I didn’t have a particular ambition to write one then. But I felt a need to legitimize myself. The only book I could think of writing was one on the battle for Jerusalem which I had witnessed but didn’t understand. The problem was that all the sharks in world journalism were here. Every one. From every major paper. I was certain there were several Big Names already at work on a new O Jerusalem. I didn’t have a chance against them so I decided that I would aim at the most modest niche I could think of – how civilians in the city had experienced the war.

How did you go about reporting that?
First, I enrolled in a Hebrew language course. There were mostly new immigrants there but also quite a few Arabs from east Jerusalem. The Jews and Arabs got along very nicely. My interviews with civilians began with people I knew through my sister. It didn’t take long to understand that this might add up to a newspaper article but not a book. I needed some input on the battle as well to give a shape to things. I began interviewing local men who had served in the Jerusalem Brigade, a sort of home guard. But there had been two other reservist brigades involved as well – an armored brigade and a paratroop brigade – and most of their men lived elsewhere in the country. They had done the hardest fighting. The story didn’t make sense if I didn’t include them. I began to gather anecdotal information about individuals and small units but this didn’t hang on any stout framework. I needed a broader picture. It wasn’t long before I forgot about a niche. Driven now by my own curiosity I decided to tell the story properly, from the top down and bottom up. It meant intensive traveling around the country. I visited 35 kibbutzim and farming villages, in addition to cities, mostly to speak to paratroopers. That was a great privilege. They were salt of the earth. All the men who fought in Jerusalem were reservists. Sometimes I would be told that the man I was looking for was in the fields and I would be guided to him by the sound of his tractor. I’d get out of the car and walk across the fields to him and fix a time to meet. In all, reporting for the book was one of the richest professional and personal experiences I’ve had. I did 300 interviews, mostly soldiers. I found after awhile that for all their integrity, the soldiers’ testimony could not be relied on blindly. The trauma of war distorts memories. People forget things that happened, sometimes remember things that didn’t happen. Time is often telescoped or reversed. The Rashomon effect. My object was to get overlap. When two men separately tell more or less the same story you can pretty much rely on it. I was putting the pieces of a giant puzzle together. It reached a point where I knew more than they knew – that is, I understood the context better than the person I was talking to because I had spoken to people above him and either side of him.

How long did the project take you?
About two years.

What did you do afterwards?
I married a Hebrew teacher (from another class) and started working as a reporter with The Jerusalem Post.

What kind of reception did your book get?
Almost none. The publisher was the Jewish Publication Society which is not a commercial organization. I don’t believe the book was reviewed by a single non-Jewish paper. There were two or three reviews in small Jewish papers, as I remember. Still, I don’t know how many copies they printed but it sold out. As the 20th anniversary approached, I suggested doing a second edition. They agreed. This time I could give officers’ second names and make corrections. The one problem was that they forgot to include the maps which had been included in the first edition, making the battle hard to follow.

Why did you decided to make still another edition now, 25 years later?
Well, the book was again out of print and I thought that a shame. When I began reading about eBooks I heard a click. This is the way to go. I found a company in England that would do it for a reasonable fee. I decided that this would not just be an electronic reprint. I would add what was missing from the earlier edition – a proper political context, which was not clear immediately after the Six Day War, and to describe the Arab side. I feel I have done the definitive account of a major event in modern Middle East history, not to mention Jewish history.

Did you ever think of writing fiction?
I’ve actually done one, a Middle East shoot-em-up with some archaeology and a bit of mysticism. It failed to interest the three or four people I sent it too. It’s now in my drawer, waiting for courage to return.

Perhaps as an ebook...?