CARE Memories of Timothy Lavelle CARE Israel October 1969 January 1971 What peace can be found to grow between the hammer and the anvil? T.S. Eliot s Murder in the Cathedral And it was in Gaza that Sampson pulled the pillars of the city down upon the heads of the Philistines. Described in Judges 16:31 I arrived at Lod Airport near Tel Aviv on a TWA flight from Frankfort in mid-october 1969. The CARE Israel office was (if memory serves) in Hertzliya, part of the Tel Aviv District, named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Harold Sillcox was the CARE Director, George Menegay (spouse Anita) the Deputy Director, and Michael Viola the field rep. I was slated to soon replace the larger-than-life Viola. Ms. Alice Levinson was an independent shipping agent who served as the office fixer. Mike had a small apartment on Dizengoff Street in central Tel Aviv, named after Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, which I inherited upon Mike s transfer to the Philippines. At the time, Dizengoff was described as "the Champs- Élysées of Tel Aviv". One of our prominent neighbors (who lived in a modest walkup apartment building nearby) was the future Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin. Note. Across from my apartment building was a bakery which produced the most wonderful assortment of Jewish and Arab breads including bagels sprinkled with sesame seeds, hallah (a soft bread baked for Shabbat), and of course Matza (unleavened bread available during Passover) and the ever available pitta bread. This bakery opened each morning at 5:30 am and occasionally I would be in line waiting for the shop to open, and standing next to the charismatic Mr. Begin. ----------------------------------------------------------- Background: The Gaza Strip, the Sinai desert, the West Bank 1969-1971 ----------------------------------------------------------- Why did Moses have to lead the children of Israel to the one country in the Middle East that had no oil? Golda Meir The CARE programs were heavily focused on the Gaza Strip and the Sinai desert, and to a lesser extent on the West Bank, with the major component being U.S. Government supplied PL 480 Title II food assistance. In Israel proper, CARE provided in-kind material assistance for youth vocational training programs ( miftanim in Hebrew) both for immigrants and for the Druze community in the Galilee region. Wheat flour and butter oil were the principal food aid items. The Gaza Strip (where CARE had an office on Omar Al-Mukhtar Street in Gaza City and managed a large complex of food warehouses which stored U.S.-donated PL 480 food assistance) lies on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Egypt on the south-west and Israel on the south, east and north. It is about 25 miles long, and between 4-7.5 miles wide only some 139 square miles in total size. The Gaza Strip had been occupied by Egypt from 1948 67,
and then by Israel following the 1967 war. Refugees of the 1948 Palestinian exodus and their descendants made up 85 percent of the population. Gaza City is the principal residential area in the Strip; other localities include Deir al-balah, Khan Yunis, and Rafah at the time, CARE had permanent food aid distribution centers in each locality. CARE also conducted periodic mobile food-for-work distributions throughout northern (El Arish) and central Sinai regions. The Sinai, a vast area by the standards of the region, lies between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Red Sea to the south, forming a land bridge between Africa and Southwest Asia. Its area is about 60,000 square kilometers (which is about two and one-half times the size of pre-1967 Israel). The Sinai is in many parts barren and craggy, forbidding and inhospitable. The Sinai was inhabited at this time (before the Yom Kippur War of 1973) almost exclusively by Bedouin tribesmen. Note. Bedu, the Arabic word from which the name Bedouin is derived, means "inhabitant of the desert." The Bedouin of the Sinai wear the jalabiyya - a long, hooded robe; another recognized aspect of a Bedouin's attire is his headgear-which consists of the kufiyya-cloth and 'agal -rope. Note. In 1970, CARE provided logistical assistance to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which enabled it to produce a map of where the Bedouin tribes in the Sinai were clustered; and ICRC calculated that there were then approximately 70,000 Bedouin living in the Sinai. Note. Also at this time, commencing in 1969, Egypt initiated what was called a lowintensity War of Attrition, with the goal of eventually prompting Israel into leaving the Sinai Peninsula. With the death of then-egyptian President Nasser in September 1970, however, his successor Anwar al-sadat put the war of attrition on hold, while conducting the military buildup which ultimately resulted in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. So wandering around in the Sinai at this time, particularly along the Suez Canal region, was problematic. In the West Bank, CARE had an office in the Sheikh Jarrah quarter of East Jerusalem, managed by Samir Khoury (sp?). This office managed a number of food assistance-related interventions including food-for-work activities in Bethlehem. Note. Sheikh Jarrah was the personal physician of Saladin. I traveled around the West Bank and at one point went up onto the Golan to the city of Kuneitra (the major town of the Heights region). The view from the the Golan of Lake Tiberias and the Hula Valley of Israel s Upper Galilee is simply breathtaking. And also, on a clear day, from this parapet, you can almost see Damascus. -------------------------- The CARE Gaza/Sinai Office -------------------------- CARE Gaza/Sinai had a staff of 53 Arabs. The office manager was Mazen al-alami. Mohammed Sayd (sp?) was the warehousing manager for the sizable CARE food depots in Gaza. Hashim D. Saraj was another key staffer. Every work day at 10:00 am a large tray of humus and tahinah (a sesame paste), along with mounds of pita bread, was shared amongst our office staff. Qahwa (Turkish coffee) was always available no matter where you went, as was Shaay (tea). The CARE warehouses stored in excess of 10,000 metric tons and all off-loading was done by hand. CARE s shipping agent invariably arranged for direct offloading from either the port of Ashkelon or Ashdod and hence lorries would invariably arrive in large convoys. As
no Israeli lorry driver would consent (for personal security reasons) to stay overnight in Gaza, I often had to work our warehouse staff into the late evening, often beyond curfew time. I would then load up my Volkswagen Variant with workers and drive them to one of the Gaza City refugee camps: Jabalia, Shati (Beach), Bureij or Nuseirat which after dark were eerie places, as the only other vehicles allowed on the roads were either police or Israeli Defense Forces - IDF (in Hebrew Tzahal ). And at this time there was no electricity in any of the homes in the refugee camps. Note. Refugee shelters were constructed by UNRWA in units of 3 X 3 meters with concrete blocks and an asbestos or zinc slightly angled roof. One unit was authorized for a family of five; two units for a family of six to ten members; and so forth. There were no paved streets or sidewalks. ------------------- CARE s Counterparts ------------------- CARE s principal counterpart for the occupied territories was the Israeli Ministry of Social Welfare (MSW). Mrs. Ben-Shoshan was the office director, based in Tel Aviv. Egyptianborn Rafi Levy was my direct MSW counterpart in Gaza. For the Sinai I dealt directly with the IDF s Military Governor, one Colonel Ben-Zvi in Gaza City (based at the Israeli Gaza Battalion Headquarters), and with a Major Azreel (of Yemeni descent) based in the northern Sinai city of El-Arish. MSW also had a field officer named Haim (Shapiro, if memory serves) who traveled around with me on a number of food distribution inspections into the Sinai. I can vividly recall going into Major Azreel s office in El-Arish and noting that the only decoration in his Spartanlike office was a small sheet of paper framed in glass on the wall behind his desk. It was a captured insurgent s assassination list and Azreel s name was at the very top. With Haim, we were once touring near Kantera along the Suez Canal and drove into a a United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) Camp which was completely unguarded. We went up to a trailer and knocked. A very irate Canadian officer came out and (when we told him who we were) immediately ordered us off the compound, accusing us of violating UN space. Several days later I read in the Jerusalem Post where this very officer had been killed at an observation post on the Canal by errant artillery fire. --------------------------- CARE Programs in Gaza-Sinai --------------------------- In Gaza CARE managed a number of mother-child feeding interventions covering 30,000 non-refugee beneficiaries. Note. The then-several hundred thousand refugees in the Gaza Strip were the exclusive purview of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). In the Sinai, CARE under the rubric of food-for-work, conducted basically a humanitarian operation for most of the reachable Bedouin populations. Note. Before the Six-Day War, the Sinai was inter alia a smuggling route for gold, hashish and contraband coming out of the Fertile Crescent and headed for Egypt s capital Cairo. But, by 1969, the Israelis had effectively stopped all smuggling. Food-for-work was introduced, but, needless to say, as it was directed toward a nomadic, roving pastoralist population meant formidable challenges were at hand. CARE did its innovative best one project that stands out in my mind was Bedouin work crews sweeping
drifting sand off a number of the major trunk roads in northern Sinai. This was the classic rock of Sisyphus you swept the road and the desert (including at times Khamseen ) winds would proceed to drift the sand once more across the road. And once when I was inspecting one of these projects, one of the Bedouins, to demonstrate that the CARE food-for-work rations were not enough to quell hunger - proceeded to munch down a part of his sweepers straw broom. By the time of my arrival in late 1969, Israel, which had been flush with the unexpected magnitude of its decisive victory in the Six-Day War (June 1967), was just beginning to realize the enormity of the problems of occupation/administration of the territories and how to govern a fundamentally hostile population. Or said other way the first signs were emerging that all this acquired territory might just prove in the long-run to be more of a burden than an asset. Note. The Golan Heights and parts of the West Bank would prove to be immune, however, from this change of view. --------------------- A bit of Gaza history --------------------- Gaza (or Ghazza ) is what the Egyptians called for centuries Gazzat ( prized city ). In 322 BC, Alexander the Great occupied Gaza after a two-month siege. Mark Anthony married Cleopatra in Rafah, the southern most city in the Gaza Strip. The Roman Emperor Hadrian visited Gaza in 130 AD to attend Olympian Games organized in his honor. And Napoleon, in his 1799 campaign of Egyptian conquest, used Gaza as a cantonment area. And in 1917, British and Commonwealth troops suffered 4,000 casualties, who are buried at two magnificent memorial sites called the Commonwealth Gaza War Cemetery. ------------------------- Living in Gaza and Israel ------------------------- CARE had a modest flat in the Gaza Zeitoun ( Olive ) Quarter part of the city. The apartment building overlooked both the Mediterranean and the Zeitoun police headquarters. I would generally arrive in Gaza at 6:00 am on Sunday morning (the first day of the work week and remain until Friday afternoon ( erev-shabbat ) when I would drive to Netanya (a beach city north of Tel Aviv) where I had weekly Hebrew lessons at the home of a superb language teacher and scholar named Shmuel Zacher - who inter alia taught at the premier language school in Israel, Ulpan Akiva. Professor Zacher, a Polish Jew from Danzig, was the greatest teacher that I was ever privileged to have. Note. My Israeli friends were impressed with my progress in Hebrew and proceeded to invite me to an evening lecture series being given through the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I attended the first lecture given my then-defense Minister Moshe Dayan. How much did you understand? they asked afterward, knowing that Dayan spoke readily understandable colloquial Hebrew. About 50 percent was my proud response. Ok, they responded, your next test will be a lecture by then-israeli Foreign Minister (FM) Abba Eban, which was set for the following month. After the lecture, the same question. But my response was different I didn t understand a single word. Yes, my friends knew about Eban s preference for speaking in classical (Biblical) Hebrew.
------------------------------------------------------ Work-related touring in the Sinai and on the West Bank ------------------------------------------------------ My first extensive trip into the Sinai (about a fortnight after arrival) was on a food lorry delivering food assistance to southern Sinai. We departed from El Arish and drove over to Kantera and then down along the Suez Canal to Abu Rodeis (a port exporting both manganese and petrolium). As my Arabic was quickly exhausted after the initial salaams, I began counting Egyptian Russian-supplied T-54 and T-55 tanks that had been destroyed by the Israeli Air Force (under the command of Ezer Weismann) - after gaining air superiority on day one of the Six-Day War. I counted (until distraction set in) 765 tank remains which were caught either on the roads or in defensive positions by wave after wave of Israeli napalm-wielding A-4 Sky Hawks, Mirages, F-4 Phantom II(s), and more. Note. By flying out long before dawn on June 5, 1967, across the Mediterranean and coming into Egypt via Libyan air space ( the back door ), the Israelis baffled Egyptian radar, eluded the SAM missile defenses for the Cairo International airport and succeeded in destroying 95 percent of the Egyptian Air Force before it could get off the tarmac. From Abu Rodeis we went along to Sharm-el-Sheikh. Let me assure you that in 1969 there was nothing there except for a few fishing dhows and some Bedouin huts. Later trips were to take me to the central Sinai where I was invited to participate in a camel race (no I didn t match the standard set by T.E. Lawrence). The Sinai is a craggy, rocky inhospitable place and the camel there is truly the ship of the desert. I traveled to/through both the Mitla and Gidi passes towards the Suez Canal and I had the extraordinary good fortune to visit Saint Catherine s Monastery when it was truly far off the trodden path. ---------------------- Other travel in Israel ---------------------- In connection with the vocational training equipment project, I visited many sites in Israel proper but two stand out. The first is the timeless city of Akko, near the Lebanese border. Akko is the Acre of the Crusaders, a town of solid stone buildings, surrounded by a muscular sea wall. It was the capital of the Latinate Kingdom of Palestine. Among its honored visitors from the Middle Ages were St. Francis of Assisi and Marco Polo. The other was the town of Julis, in the Galilee region, the epicenter of the Druze community in Israel. In Israel, as in Lebanon and Syria, the Druze have official recognition as a separate religious community with its own religious court system. The Druze population has Israeli citizenship, and is prominent in the IDF, where they have a reputation not unlike the Gurkas in south Asia fierce and disciplined. I was invited on one occasion to lunch by Sheikh Kamal Tarif (a close associate of Sheikh Amin Tarif, a charismatic figure internationally known as the preeminent Druze religious leader of his time). As we sat on the floor of a beautifully paneled room in the middle of an olive orchard, a servant appeared with a huge tray of perhaps a thousand olives assembled into a pyramid, from which Sheikh Kamel and I (being the only guests) were to partake. And this was
only the appetizer. Then another huge tray this time filled with several kilos of rice and pieces of lamb called gidra appeared. Bon appétit! Note. On the walls of the Sheikh s study were a series of signed photographs: one the Tarifs at the White House with President Harry Truman; one with Dwight Eisenhower; one with John F. Kennedy; and one with Lyndon Baines Johnson. As Bob Dylan sang it: You don t need to be a weather man to know which way the wind blows. ----------------------------------------------- The Volkswagen Variant survives two close calls ----------------------------------------------- The CARE Volkswagen Variant 1600 mini-station wagon assigned to me came with no CARE markings, and with orange Israeli license plates with a background white border signifying international organization. But this differentiation (readily apparent to border officials, police, etc.) was not as evident to the general public in the occupied territories. Early one Sunday morning I arrived in Gaza to find black banners everywhere and tires burning on the streets. As I proceeded down Omar Al-Mukhtar street, a mob of youths (reacting to the shooting and death of a Palestinian insurgent named Abu Nimmer - nimmer is tiger in Arabic - the night before) armed with paving stones appeared at the approaching intersection and, as I looked in the rearview mirror, another group (equally armed) had formed behind me. I cradled my head against the steering wheel and put the pedal to the metal. As the crowd parted ahead of me, I saw one youth hurl a bowling ball size stone at the Volkswagen s windshield which shattered into a thousand shards. Albeit dazed, I was able to continue driving at this accelerated pace down to the CARE office. But every window in the car was broken out. Some months later, I was again driving this same Volkswagen again down Gaza s Omar Al-Mukhtar (named after an Arab dissident whom the Italian colonizers had killed in Libya in the 1930s), this time wedged between two IDF Dodge Power Wagons, when a solitary figure stepped out of a doorway and hurled a percussion grenade at my vehicle. Well-thrown it bounced on the street and directly under my Variant where it exploded. The car was literally lifted into the air and a number of windows blown out. But what saved me was the steel plate that Volkswagen in those days bolted underneath the chassis. Head bloodied but unbowed, I called CARE Tel Aviv to report the incident. Later that day, I received a personal call directly from Israel s Minister of Social Welfare, commending me for my dedication to duty. And, as for the Volkswagen Variant 1600, let me quote a line from the old Timex watch commercial: it takes a licking but keeps on ticking. --------------------------------------------------------- - zahav Jerusalem of Gold Yerushalayim shel ירושלים של זהב -------- ------------------------------------------------- I often went on weekends to Jerusalem (al-quds in Arabic), the city of David and the spiritual heart of three of the world s major religions. Jerusalem is mentioned well over 600 times in the Old Testament. In Hebrew the word for going to Jerusalem is aliyah ( going up into ) as you ascend into Jerusalem from whichever direction you attempt to arrive. Jerusalem s Old City is home to sites of key religious importance, among them the Haram As-Sharif (Temple Mount), the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Dome of the Rock and al-aqsa
Mosque. The whole of Jerusalem is surrounded by valleys and dry riverbeds (wadis). I had a number of close friends there including Ms. Tova Weiss who at the time was the Associated Press photographer in the Israeli Parliament (Knesset). Note. At this pre-cnn time, there were only a handful of press photographers with access to places like the Knesset. Through Tova s interventions, I was able to attend a number of functions which featured the prominent political movers and shakers of the day. Tova s father (who had barely managed to escape the Nazis in Vienna in 1937) had immigrated to Jerusalem and had filmed, over the years, hundreds of canisters of 16mm movies on the daily life and times of this glorious city. And it was from Tova that I came to know that photographers were instructed only to photograph Moshe Dayan s face (with the distinctive black eye patch) rather than any full profile shot, which would have revealed a pot-bellied unwarlike figure. I came to know well Jerusalem s streets: Agrippas, King George, Princess Mary, Queen Melisande but these names have now probably changed, perhaps more than once. Note. One name that has not changed is of course the Via Dolorosa the path of suffering. I would often go into the Armenian Quarter and the souks of the Old City and converse with the merchants and traders with more than an occasional free cup of Qahwa provided. There were two Arabic expressions from these conversations that remain with me to this day khudu balash take it for nothing; and beiti beitak my house is your house. I was in the Old City at the Prince Hotel (quite near the Damascus Gate) visiting a friend the night that Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser died September 28, 1970. The city had been alerted for several hours as Cairo Radio interrupted their programming with dirge-like music. We were walking on the flat roof of this small four story structure on a full moon-lit evening when the news of Nasser s death was finally announced at around 10:00 pm. The Old City suddenly went dark and tomb-like silent. Only one sound could be heard. A donkey had somehow been stranded on one of the ramparts and began braying uncontrollably into the eerily quiet Old City. Note. Optically at night I have never been in a place quite like Jerusalem. The moon and the stars sit so low in the sky that you feel you could almost reach up and touch them. --------- Afterword --------- In February 1971, as a bolt out of the blue, came a transfer order to CARE Colombia. As soon as my TWA flight took off from Tel Aviv s Lod Airport (which was renamed Ben Gurion International Airport in 1973 to honor Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion) on its way to Athens, I felt as though a thousand pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The strum und drang storm and stress of the 17-plus months left me as if by magic. I was leaving behind the terrible political tensions of the summer of 1970 which engulfed the entire region, the drama of the Black September hijackings, King Hussein s expulsion of the PLO, and more. And on to the land (Colombia) named after Christopher Columbus, perhaps the most famous of explorers, who, in all his global wanderings, never managed to arrive there.
Tim Lavelle Tim1940@hotmail.com December 20, 2009