Mideast Diaries

I haven’t left the hotel barely in two days. I was working so hard yesterday and today I’ve done nothing but watch DVDs of OZ and read Robert Parker. It’s amazingly nice to take a lazy day for the first time in a long time. I’m hoping to do the same tomorrow and then start traveling again: Yemen, I think, then Kuwait, Dubai. I don’t know. I’m hoping that taking a break will allow some thoughts to form and bubble up in the absence of constant work. (more…)

I’m getting sick again of hearing the endless anti-US, anti-Israel speeches. I’ve had a bunch of them the last few days. Particularly annoying are the conspiracy theories. It seems like every young adult in Jordan, at least almost every one I talk to, is 100% convinced the Mossad took down the World Trade Centers. (more…)

The reporters are coming back to Amman. I keep running in to people in the hotel who just came back yesterday or today. I’m getting emails that more are arriving soon. Everyone is getting ready for the war. The ones with Iraqi visas are making the difficult decision of when to go in. Most want to be there when the war starts, and since their visas are only good for 10 days, they want to wait until they’re reasonably sure the war is less than 10 days away. But who knows. We all consult every news source and website we can find (I like stratfor.com) to read the tea leaves. Yesterday, everyone thought Feb. 12 to 14 about. Today, people are thinking it might be more like March. One photographer I know is going to Iraq in a couple hours, taking a car. He’s sad about it, though, because he’ll clearly miss the war. I have no interest, by the way, in being there for the war. If I get a visa in the next few days (completely unlikely) than I’ll go in right away and get out before the inspectors do. There is a whole new procedure for getting visas. Nobody is going to the Iraqi embassy in Amman anymore. They’re clearly powerless and aren’t giving anyone anything. So, now we have to send emails directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad and are told that’s the only way. Who knows. (more…)

It’s strange how each border crossing is so different. Going in to Israel, they’re obsessed with security. They ask you a million questions about where you’ve come from, where you’re going. What you’re going to be doing there. They check your bags so thoroughly. It’s particularly annoying when you have a suitcase and a backpack filled with radio equipment and they want to check each piece. Going in to Jordan, it’s pretty much nothing. They just look at your passport, stamp it, and off you go. Lebanon is more or less the same, except three different guards check your passport to make sure there are no stamps from Israel (The Israeli border guards are willing to stamp this piece of paper instead of your passport for just this reason, and on top of that, I, like all reporters, carry a few American passports in case one gets stamped by mistake). They Syrian border is such an experience, going both ways. It takes forever. They read through your passport, check it with a million different other officers. They want to write down everything–even when I’m leaving. They wanted the license plate number of the cab I took and what make and model of car it was. It’s really intimidating. And I had it easy. There’s a line for Jordanians, another for Syrians, another for Arabs in general, and then one for foreigners. All the other lines were completely packed and chaotic. I was the only foreigner. I took a shared cab, and it actually took the Arabs much longer. There was an Iraqi couple in the car and it took them forever to get permission to leave Syria and then even longer to get permission to get into Jordan. (more…)

Last night I went for a walk around Damascus. I asked the guy at the hotel desk where I should go and he took out a map and pointed me to a particular street. He said, “It’s class. This street is class.” I asked if that meant that’s where the rich people live and he said yes. It was a long walk to get there, so I got to see a lot of Damascus. It’s such a strange city. It is these endless big gray concrete buildings. There are some neon lights, very few, and overall it feels like it could easily be Moscow 1955. (more…)

The Road to Damascus is well paved, in most places, but it’s a bit scary. It’s a wide road, with cars driving in both directions. And I’ve never seen a highway so long that has absolutely no painted lines. It’s just a wide slab of asphalt for an hour and a half. I guess it makes sense, since Lebanese drivers never observe any sort of traffic law like a lane, so why bother painting it. (more…)

I know I’ve written ad nauseum about how strange it is to cross the border from Israel to the Arab world and vice versa, but there it is, it’s just strange. I got up in Tel Aviv yesterday, packed, called a cab. The cab driver asked me where I was flying off to. I told him Beirut and he jerked his head back and then laughed and said, I’ve been to Beirut. He meant as a soldier, of course. I asked him how he liked it. He said he actually liked it a lot. The Israeli soldiers would get R&R in Beirut. He said they’d go to regular restaurants and everyone was very friendly to them. The food was good. He didn’t like how some of the Israeli soldiers treated the locals. Nothing violent, but they would try to cheat them. Like at one point during the war, Israel devalued the Shekel, so 500 shekels were suddenly just 5 shekels. The Israeli soldiers would give Lebanese money changers old 500 shekel bills (now worth 5) and tell them they were new 500 shekel bills. So, basically, they use a dollar to get $100. He said that was bad, but they had a great time, because they all were so rich in Lebanese money they’d go crazy, going to bars and clubs and stuff. (more…)

01/17/2003

I went out for drinks with some friends the other night. At one point, one of my friends said to me, apropos of nothing, “You know, journalists in Israel are not respected. It’s not considered a respected profession. It’s not like the US.”

Last night, I went to cover this politician, Tommy Lapid, who was doing a pub crawl to promote himself among young people in Tel Aviv before the elections at the end of the month. Lapid is the huge event of this election, he’s talked about much more in the papers and TV shows and by Israelis than Sharon or Mitzna. He was a famous journalist, himself, and he’s become the head of this party, Shinui, which means Change. There’s all these signs all over Tel Aviv “We need a Change in government.” His basic thing is to be against the religious Jews in Israel. Ever since Israel was founded, in 1948, there has never been a party with a majority of seats in the Knesset, the parliament. So every government–left wing, right wing, doesn’t matter–has included some of the religious parties. The deal used to be that the religious parties would let the head party–Labor or Likud or whatever–to do whatever they want in foreign policy so long as they gave the religious some perks. Basically, the religious parties wanted to run everything religious in the country. So, every marriage in Israel has to be an Orthodox marriage. (more…)

The funniest thing that happened to me this week happened on Friday. I was sitting in my hotel room in Amman working on a very important article that was due that day. I needed to finish it before 7 pm local time and it was around Noon and I was nervous. I had a lot more to do than seemed possible in 7 hours. I had done so many interviews that week that I was a bit overwhelmed by the material and was sorting through, trying to figure out which quotes to use. Anyway, around Noon, this guy calls me, I’ll name him Faisel. (more…)