together. We were an eclectic bunch: a pipe-smoking Danish military officer in his fifties, an Italian accountant around my age who was always impeccably dressed, a rather hot-looking nurse from London in her twenties with the unlikely name of Antoinette, and a New Zealand PR man who had dropped out of the rat race at age forty-two and was forever declaring that everything was “bloody brilliant,” in sincerity when he liked it, in sarcasm when he didn’t.
For three days we listened to management trainers spout platitudes about administrative skills and conflict resolution, in the bowels of the Vienna International Centre, a hideous ziggurat of concrete on the Danube. Then, only hours before our departure, our trainers flipped off the lights and said, “We’ve put together a fifteen-minute video of what a refugee affairs officer does.”
It was a horror show of blood, screams, gunshots, and flaming cars. Before we even stopped shaking they shoved us into cars for the airport, and as soon as the wheels left the ground I ordered my first of four martinis. By the time we touched down at Ben-Gurion I was seeing double.
Hans paired me first with Munira Mirza, a prim and proper young woman whose father lectured in history at Al-Quds University. For the Palestinians, the observer jobs offered a certain prestige, mostly because you had to be well connected to land one. And by local standards the pay wasn’t bad. That went for me, too. I was finally making enough money to rent a roomy new apartment in an Arab neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, a sunny place with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Old City.
But everyone figured the jobs would be short-lived because we assumed the intifada would soon spend its anger, burning out like a matchstick. Even the worst pessimists among us couldn’t imagine it would drag on for six years.
It was strange and stressful work. Much like a beat cop, we spent our days making a rough circuit of our territory. Sometimes the dispatcher called in an incident, and we raced to the scene. But usually we found trouble on our own, and then expended our energies trying to avert more of the same. We engaged daily in dozens of small negotiations, trying our tact on a bewildering variety of officers from the IDF. Some were high, some were scared, and others were alternately bored, angry, nice, brutal, and fair-minded. You had about fifteen seconds to get a read on their mood and motivation, and about fifteen more to establish enough rapport to defuse the situation.
Munira showed me the ropes. She had been on the job since December, and I learned more about what it meant to be a Palestinian in those first three months than I had in a year of working at Jabaliya. She also taught me the finely balanced etiquette of our pairings. None of the Palestinians ever wanted to be patted on the back or shown any sort of familiarity by an Israeli officer, which would brand them forever as a collaborator. None of the army officers ever wanted to lose face by having a Palestinian talk down to them or brandish one of our handheld radios in their presence.
In all our time together, I don’t think Munira once opened her mouth in the presence of a soldier, yet she almost always set the tone in our dealings with the vast, restive rabble of Palestinian teenaged boys known on the streets as the
shebab.
By the time June rolled around, I was beginning to think I knew all there was to know about our odd new profession. Then Hans paired me with a newcomer named Omar al-Baroody, and it was my turn to be the teacher.
Omar was twenty-seven then, a graduate in urban planning from Birzeit University whose father had achieved a certain status and wealth as the owner of a few hotels on the West Bank. Our first week was rocky, the second rockier. I kept having to remind him not to carry the radio when we left the car, and he kept taking it anyway. Whenever we watched the
shebab
creep within stone-throwing range of the
For three days we listened to management trainers spout platitudes about administrative skills and conflict resolution, in the bowels of the Vienna International Centre, a hideous ziggurat of concrete on the Danube. Then, only hours before our departure, our trainers flipped off the lights and said, “We’ve put together a fifteen-minute video of what a refugee affairs officer does.”
It was a horror show of blood, screams, gunshots, and flaming cars. Before we even stopped shaking they shoved us into cars for the airport, and as soon as the wheels left the ground I ordered my first of four martinis. By the time we touched down at Ben-Gurion I was seeing double.
Hans paired me first with Munira Mirza, a prim and proper young woman whose father lectured in history at Al-Quds University. For the Palestinians, the observer jobs offered a certain prestige, mostly because you had to be well connected to land one. And by local standards the pay wasn’t bad. That went for me, too. I was finally making enough money to rent a roomy new apartment in an Arab neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, a sunny place with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Old City.
But everyone figured the jobs would be short-lived because we assumed the intifada would soon spend its anger, burning out like a matchstick. Even the worst pessimists among us couldn’t imagine it would drag on for six years.
It was strange and stressful work. Much like a beat cop, we spent our days making a rough circuit of our territory. Sometimes the dispatcher called in an incident, and we raced to the scene. But usually we found trouble on our own, and then expended our energies trying to avert more of the same. We engaged daily in dozens of small negotiations, trying our tact on a bewildering variety of officers from the IDF. Some were high, some were scared, and others were alternately bored, angry, nice, brutal, and fair-minded. You had about fifteen seconds to get a read on their mood and motivation, and about fifteen more to establish enough rapport to defuse the situation.
Munira showed me the ropes. She had been on the job since December, and I learned more about what it meant to be a Palestinian in those first three months than I had in a year of working at Jabaliya. She also taught me the finely balanced etiquette of our pairings. None of the Palestinians ever wanted to be patted on the back or shown any sort of familiarity by an Israeli officer, which would brand them forever as a collaborator. None of the army officers ever wanted to lose face by having a Palestinian talk down to them or brandish one of our handheld radios in their presence.
In all our time together, I don’t think Munira once opened her mouth in the presence of a soldier, yet she almost always set the tone in our dealings with the vast, restive rabble of Palestinian teenaged boys known on the streets as the
shebab.
By the time June rolled around, I was beginning to think I knew all there was to know about our odd new profession. Then Hans paired me with a newcomer named Omar al-Baroody, and it was my turn to be the teacher.
Omar was twenty-seven then, a graduate in urban planning from Birzeit University whose father had achieved a certain status and wealth as the owner of a few hotels on the West Bank. Our first week was rocky, the second rockier. I kept having to remind him not to carry the radio when we left the car, and he kept taking it anyway. Whenever we watched the
shebab
creep within stone-throwing range of the
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