Mideast Diaries

Centrale Bar, Beirut

I’m sitting in the house I’m renting in Tel Aviv. It’s in the middle of nowhere, a twenty minute drive from the center of the city where all my friends and the bars and restaurants are. It’s just me out here and two cats who scream all the time. Even when I’m petting them, if I lift my hand up too long, they scream at me. Meow. All the time. Yep, there they go. Screaming right now. I realize that it’s an adjustment, here. That time in Amman was so strange. Working like a maniac all day. Meeting Muslims who want to kill us, meeting sweet people who just want some peace, meeting these Iraqis who make me so sad. And then going out drinking and eating all night. Every day there were new reporters coming from Baghdad or from London or New York and every night was some other reporter’s last night. So this house feels empty, sad. Writing that, I just got up and took out my iPod so I could have some music. I found myself, today, excited that the war is coming. (more…)

Beirut. Wow. It is an explosion of life after Amman. It’s almost overwhelming. I realized, flying in last night, that I didn’t really know what to expect. I thought it would be quite European, I thought it would be reconstructed more than one might expect. I thought there would be lots of neon and fast food chains. Leaving Amman was almost a nightmare and entering Lebanon was similar. These Middle East airports have a constant series of lines you stand in. You go to one to pay some money and get a receipt, then you bring the receipt somewhere else to get a stamp, then somewhere else so someone can check that you got the stamp. Then there’s two other lines so other people can check your passport for no reason whatsoever. It’s so inefficient and it makes very clear why these economies are not the thriving powerhouses some wish they would be. It makes you realize just how well-functioning and efficient the US is. (more…)

I saw Saddam Hussein’s sister yesterday. It was chilling, it was scary. I was just standing in the lobby of my hotel with Arun. We were just talking, I was going to go up and write up some notes. I saw two big Mercedes pull up just outside the hotel in the miserable downpour of rain. A man walked out of the front Mercedes, a tall man, in his sixties, I’d say, with white hair and a white mustache, he looked distinguished in an expensive overcoat and he looked very serious and determined. (more…)

I haven’t been posting lately. I feel like I fell into a foggy place where nothing interesting has been happening. I devoted most of the last week to trying to get the Iraqi visa. It’s so ridiculous. There are two major fixers who are supposed to help us get a visa through the embassy. Most people went with one, a very dramatic woman who wears big furs and a lot of perfume and has dyed hair and provocative clothes. She’s not at all like most Jordanian women. She hasn’t gotten anyone in the two weeks I’ve been here, so I decided to go with the other fixer, a hunched-over young guy who skulks in and out of rooms and looks exactly like a sleazy, mysterious Mideast fixer. On Monday, he said no problem, he’ll definitely get me a visa that day. I got very excited, for some reason. (more…)

Driving around Tel Aviv is stomach-wrenchingly frustrating. Drivers are awful and obnoxious, of course. When you’re waiting at a red light and it turns green, the guy behind you will honk his horn so quickly, quicker than it would be humanly possible to get your car moving. And if you take an extra tenth of a second turning a corner, that same guy behind you will honk. People are honking at you so often and so obnoxiously, it’s actually worse than New York. I immediately took to driving very slowly when anyone honked at me, just to piss them off some more. I spoke with some Israelis who said, of course, that’s what everyone does. So it’s this great cycle of honking and slowing and more honking and even more slowing. But the other drivers aren’t the worst thing about Tel Aviv. The roads seem to be on a grid system, but they’re not. You’re going down Namir Street and you know it was parallel to Ibn Gvirol. But what you don’t realize is that they have been subtly diverging so that by the time you want to take the quick left and get on Ibn Gvirol that street is now several miles away, rather than the couple blocks you thought. It is so easy to get completely lost in Tel Aviv. Someone in the Tel Aviv municipality obviously got very excited about street signs. They made them huge and lit from inside, I guess to make them easier to read in the dark. (more…)

It feels so different, for me at least, to wake up in Tel Aviv . I’m in this nice house on a tree-lined street. In Amman, I’d wake up, shower, and would be off to my first interview in twenty minutes. Here I felt the lethargy fall all over me; which isn’t good, since I have to report stories from Israel and I’m going back to Jordan soon. Worse, it’s Friday morning, a sort of semi-weekend day here, so I couldn’t reach anyone on the phone to interview them. I spent the morning reading Israeli news sites and coming up with story ideas and calling people and getting no one. I didn’t even get voice mails. Finally, I decided to get up and get out of the house and just go find a story somewhere. (more…)

A couple nights ago, I was drinking with a bunch of reporters in the Hotel Intercontinental bar. Several of them were getting absolutely panicky. It was Tuesday night and Thursday is the beginning of Eid al-fitr, the end of Ramadan holiday that closes everything in the Arab World for five days. They all knew if they didn’t get their Iraqi visas by the next day, they weren’t going in for a while. That would mean missing the day Saddam is supposed to release his list of weapons of mass destruction. (more…)

Today was a good day to see how clearly the West and the Arab World clash in Jordan all the time. I spent the morning interviewing people for a story on the computer industry here. I was in these clean white offices with cubicles and white boards and mission statements on the walls. The woman wore business clothes on the sexy side of appropriate. The men had sculpted goatees and tiny, hipster eyeglasses. (more…)

I went to the engineer’s union this morning to meet its ex-presidents, Laith Shbaylat and Ali Abu-Sukr (I love both names, they sound particularly cool when Jordanians say them). I use their names because they proudly say whatever the hell they want to say right into my microphone, so writing this won’t get them in trouble. They are, perhaps, the leading opposition figures in Jordan. They are Islamists, pan-Arabists, anti-Israeli normalization. They are constantly getting arrested by the regime, including last week. In fact, last week the king ordered the engineering union’s ruling committee to be disbanded because he didn’t like their outspoken political work. See, there are no political parties in Jordan. The parliament was disbanded a year ago and elections were postponed. The leaders of what would be civil society in any other country–the intellectuals, independently wealthy, journalists–all sit under pictures of the king and spout platitudes about how great he is and how wonderful Jordan is. The only vocal opposition are the unions, oddly. They have actual democratic elections with real debate. They have liberals and secular nationalists and Islamists. Although these days the Islamists are winning by far. Liath Shbaylat created a special committee of the engineer’s, doctor’s, journalists and some other unions to oppose any peace or normalization with Israel. That’s what caused all the uproar last week. (more…)

The quest for an Iraqi visa is now at a fevered pitch. I went out with some reporters last night and we sat at this restaurant near some other reporters. We didn’t even say hi, we just turned to them and said “What have you heard about visas?” (more…)