been through too much together for me to approach betrayal lightly. But if he
had
gone off the deep end, maybe I would be doing him—and the world—a favor. Black, White, and Gray had offered little to back their suspicions. Their only hard information was a two-page bio, most of which I already knew. I had heard Omar’s life story firsthand, back in the wild days of ’88.
We never would have met if not for Hans Wolters, a big German with a generous laugh whose life mission was to save the entire Middle East, Jew by Jew, Arab by Arab. Hans had begun his hopeless quest as a twenty-year-old tourist, one of those earnest young backpackers in a sweaty bandanna who sleeps in hostels and rides the same teeming buses as the natives, subsisting on falafel by day and ramen noodles by night.
He had arrived in Jerusalem only months after the Six-Day War, and upon reaching the stone gates of the Old City he found himself in a moral quandary: With whom should he empathize more—the plucky survivors of the death camps or their downtrodden conquests, the West Bank Palestinians? As a descendant of Crusaders and Nazis, Hans felt deeply indebted to both sides. So he volunteered for a summer of labor on a kibbutz, and then enlisted in the UN’s effort to feed and clothe the children of the Jabaliya Refugee Camp in benighted Gaza.
Two decades of this evenhanded approach made Hans the perfect choice to run the show once UNRWA began organizing its human rights observer patrols in late ’87, shortly after the intifada uprising began.
He found it a trying experience, especially as Palestinian boys began to die in the streets. The hardest part, he told me later, after a fifth bottle of Maccabee beer at the UN’s Gaza Beach Club, was to keep from thinking of the harsher officers of the Israel Defense Force as latter-day storm troopers.
“It is the Star of David, not the swastika,” he slurred in his Bavarian accent, his face a study in tortured inebriation. “But to see those skinny boys just standing there, waiting for the tanks…”
I wondered if the recent legions of Palestinian suicide bombers had brought on another crisis in faith. Or maybe Hans had finally thrown in the towel, after discovering like the rest of us that neutrality only meant you ended up despising both sides.
Yet back then, he had never tired in his role as our matchmaker, pairing the bold young sons and daughters of the Palestinian elite with international partners for each of our daily patrol teams. At any one time, ten pairs were on duty—five in Gaza and five on the West Bank, from Jenin down to Hebron—working almost continuously in a three-day shift while the ten teams of the next shift cooled their heels.
Hans delighted in the matchups that clicked and sulked about the few that didn’t, although only one actually ended in divorce, famously so, when a roaring, bearded Belgian earned a quick flight to Brussels by throwing a full pot of steaming coffee at his stubbornly proud consort.
I met Hans in late ’87, just as he began rounding up volunteers. I, too, was working at Jabaliya at the time, helping supply a children’s clinic for a now-defunct NGO known rather grandiosely as Save the Planet, a mission it tackled largely on the strength of $300-a-week employees like me.
I’d already been knocking around in the aid business for seven years, long enough to realize that Hans offered my best shot yet at true adventure. It was also a way to get my foot in the door of the many-roomed mansion of the United Nations. Once its blue globe adorns your résumé, you’re welcome on almost any of the mansion’s floors. Play your cards right and you’ve got a career, as well as a lifetime badge of neutrality, a universal entrée into the wider world of strife.
I joined too late to make the original cast of observers. But in March I got the call, and Hans shipped me off to Vienna, of all places, for a crash course in training.
Five of us took the course
had
gone off the deep end, maybe I would be doing him—and the world—a favor. Black, White, and Gray had offered little to back their suspicions. Their only hard information was a two-page bio, most of which I already knew. I had heard Omar’s life story firsthand, back in the wild days of ’88.
We never would have met if not for Hans Wolters, a big German with a generous laugh whose life mission was to save the entire Middle East, Jew by Jew, Arab by Arab. Hans had begun his hopeless quest as a twenty-year-old tourist, one of those earnest young backpackers in a sweaty bandanna who sleeps in hostels and rides the same teeming buses as the natives, subsisting on falafel by day and ramen noodles by night.
He had arrived in Jerusalem only months after the Six-Day War, and upon reaching the stone gates of the Old City he found himself in a moral quandary: With whom should he empathize more—the plucky survivors of the death camps or their downtrodden conquests, the West Bank Palestinians? As a descendant of Crusaders and Nazis, Hans felt deeply indebted to both sides. So he volunteered for a summer of labor on a kibbutz, and then enlisted in the UN’s effort to feed and clothe the children of the Jabaliya Refugee Camp in benighted Gaza.
Two decades of this evenhanded approach made Hans the perfect choice to run the show once UNRWA began organizing its human rights observer patrols in late ’87, shortly after the intifada uprising began.
He found it a trying experience, especially as Palestinian boys began to die in the streets. The hardest part, he told me later, after a fifth bottle of Maccabee beer at the UN’s Gaza Beach Club, was to keep from thinking of the harsher officers of the Israel Defense Force as latter-day storm troopers.
“It is the Star of David, not the swastika,” he slurred in his Bavarian accent, his face a study in tortured inebriation. “But to see those skinny boys just standing there, waiting for the tanks…”
I wondered if the recent legions of Palestinian suicide bombers had brought on another crisis in faith. Or maybe Hans had finally thrown in the towel, after discovering like the rest of us that neutrality only meant you ended up despising both sides.
Yet back then, he had never tired in his role as our matchmaker, pairing the bold young sons and daughters of the Palestinian elite with international partners for each of our daily patrol teams. At any one time, ten pairs were on duty—five in Gaza and five on the West Bank, from Jenin down to Hebron—working almost continuously in a three-day shift while the ten teams of the next shift cooled their heels.
Hans delighted in the matchups that clicked and sulked about the few that didn’t, although only one actually ended in divorce, famously so, when a roaring, bearded Belgian earned a quick flight to Brussels by throwing a full pot of steaming coffee at his stubbornly proud consort.
I met Hans in late ’87, just as he began rounding up volunteers. I, too, was working at Jabaliya at the time, helping supply a children’s clinic for a now-defunct NGO known rather grandiosely as Save the Planet, a mission it tackled largely on the strength of $300-a-week employees like me.
I’d already been knocking around in the aid business for seven years, long enough to realize that Hans offered my best shot yet at true adventure. It was also a way to get my foot in the door of the many-roomed mansion of the United Nations. Once its blue globe adorns your résumé, you’re welcome on almost any of the mansion’s floors. Play your cards right and you’ve got a career, as well as a lifetime badge of neutrality, a universal entrée into the wider world of strife.
I joined too late to make the original cast of observers. But in March I got the call, and Hans shipped me off to Vienna, of all places, for a crash course in training.
Five of us took the course
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