Kai Bird - Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978

Dani is an aliashe is highly reluctant to be named, so Ive changed some details of his story to protect his identity. I have also used pseudonyms for other members of his family.

A building in the Russian Compound later became the Moskobiya Detention Center, where to this day Palestinian detainees are interrogated by the Shin Bet, Israels domestic intelligence bureau.

Elite or not, the State Department trained very few Arabists. Between World War I and World War II the Department had only six qualified Arabists. Interestingly, in the spring of 2002, right after 9/11 and about a year before the Iraq War of 2003, the Department still had only six officers proficient in Arabic.

The leader of this strike, Nasser Said, was exiled to Beirut, where he formed a dissident group that called itself the Arabian Peninsula Peoples Union. A relatively minor thorn in the regimes side, Said was nevertheless kidnapped by Saudi intelligence agents in December 1979 and shipped to Riyadh in a crate. He languished in prison there for many years.

In the aftermath of the first great oil crisis of 1971-73, the CIAs resident station chief, Ray Close, another scion of an American missionary family in the Middle East, took early retirement and immediately went to work for a company owned by Prince Turki ibn Faisal al-Saud, the twenty-eight-year-old head of Saudi intelligence.

The Koran actually requires the four male witnesses to attest that they were not able to pass a string between the copulating couple.

The first television signals reached the Eastern Province from Bahrain. And in the 1950s, the U.S. air base briefly had a low-wattage station for their troops.

The author of the Economist story was none other than Kim Philbywho in early 1963 would defect to Moscow. The son of St. John Philby, the Arabian explorer and confidant of King Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, Kim had developed numerous contacts within Aramco and among Saudi expatriates living in Beirut.

Aramco was also avoiding U.S. taxes by calling the oil profits it paid to the Saudis a tax instead of a royalty. This allowed the company to deduct hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign tax from its U.S. tax bill.

Yamani himself was something of a reformer. He complained to U.S. Ambassador Herman Eilts of the slow pace of internal political and social reform which he acknowledged was embarrassing to him and which he thought the U.S. government should continue [to] push.

Hadramaut translates as Death Is Among Us, an apt name for a forbidding landscape of dry rocky desert gouged by deep wadis.

When Umm Kulthum died in 1975 at the age of seventy, some 4 million mourners filled the streets of Cairo. At one point, the mob seized her coffin and marched it to her favorite mosque. Her monthly concertsconsisting of two or three songs over a period of three to six hourswere broadcast the first Thursday of every month.

Rayyis means president or leader, but in colloquial Arabic, given a slightly different intonation, it means boss. Nassers inner circle, including his wife, affectionately called him boss.

Ironically, I later wrote a biography of McCloy, The Chairman: John J. McCloy; The Making of the American Establishment.

Said Ramadans son, Tariq Ramadan, is today a well-known and sometimes controversial scholar of modern Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence living in Geneva.

After it was all over, Dani persuaded his reluctant father to visit the house he had lost in West Jerusalems Katamon neighborhood in 1948. By then, his mother, Frieda, had no friends left in West Jerusalem, and she refused to come. So Dani and Abu Dani went alone and knocked on the door of the house. A Jewish Iraqi family had occupied the house. We sat in the garden, Dani recalled. I believe it was all very friendly, and I assume for my father, quite horrible.

Not only did Nasser give his unequivocal support to Resolution 242, he also later that year bluntly advised al-Fatahs chief, Yasir Arafat, to think about settling for a Palestinian state comprising solely the West Bank and Gaza. (Said K. Aburish, Nasser, p. 290.)

Kolker later joined the U.S. Foreign Service and rose to ambassadorial rank.

NACLA was an activist left-wing research group, founded in 1966.

The fedayeen apparently used about three-quarters of a kilo of plastic explosive for each of the cockpits. They reportedly off-loaded a stash of 2,400,000 British pounds from the Swissair plane before it was destroyed. (David Raab, Terror in Black September.)

A missionary child, Joy was taught to see things through the eyes of others. Shortly after her ordeal, Joys mother, Frances, wrote from India, How cruel and careless can we become? And what made these Arabs like that? Im sure somewhere we have failed them. (September 15, 1970.)

The future dictator of Pakistan, Brigadier General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, was then stationed in Jordan as head of the Pakistani military training mission; oddly, Zia was given command of the Jordanian Armys 2nd Division.

Later, he used part of it to hire a private security company, owned by the son of ex-president Gerald Ford, to protect his children at their American boarding school. See Nigel Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (2008), p. 190.

The four assassins were never brought to trial, and four months later President Anwar Sadat quietly let them board a flight to Damascus. A fifth accomplice, a female university student, had been standing by, ready to toss a grenade if the pistol shots had not felled Wasfi al-Tal. She disappeared.

The plight of European Jewryincluding the existence of deadly concentration camps in Polandwas widely known by early 1943. On December 13, 1942, Edward R. Murrow told his listeners on a CBS broadcast from London, What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered. The phrase concentration camp is obsolete. The basic, incredible facts were being reported in such august newspapers as the New York Times. But Washingtons officialdom still treated this information as just thatincredible. A special agency empowered to rescue Jews from Europe, the War Refugee Board, would not be established in Washington until January 1944.

Rabbi Judah Magnes, the president of the Hebrew University, said in 1947, If I do not want a Jewish state, it is because I do not want perpetual war with the Arabs.

Epilogue

As the years rolled by, Susan laid claim to little pieces of her Jewish identity. When we were in our early thirties, she embraced more of the tradition and annual rituals. She took me to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services every year. And, of course, when Joshua was born, it was her idea to employ a mohel. And when Joshua turned ten, she cast around for a synagogue to join so that he could begin to study for a proper bar mitzvah. We joined Temple Micah, a Reform temple on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, DC, and, much to Joshuas annoyance, he was compelled to attend both weekly Sabbath services and Hebrew classes. His resistance to this whole regimen was often formidable. But we slyly told him that this, too, was part of the tradition. On the appointed day, soon after his thirteenth birthday, he rose to the occasion and read in Hebrew a long passage from the Torah about Abraham. Standing on the bimah, I was moved to tears.

So my son will be Jewish. I will forever celebrate this fact. But as for his mother, this is only one aspect of his identity. Having lived in the same town house in downtown Washington for the first fifteen years of his life, he is also thoroughly American. He is well aware of his Jewish grandmothers survival story, and as a boy he spent many Passover Seders at the table of Aunt Frieda, who escaped Nazi Europe for America in 1940. He knows, too, that his other grandparents attend Episcopal services at St. Margarets Church in downtown Washington. So he is Jewish, but his