oslo - lincoln center theater review
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Summer 2016, Issue No.67TRANSCRIPT
OSLO
Summer 2016 Issue No.67
The Art of Diplomacy: An Interview with Mona Juul
An Oslo Chronology
You in the Wrong Placeby Naama Goldstein
The Peace That Ended Peaceby Raja Shehadeh
The Love of Desert Landsby Milbry Polk
The Art of Negotiationby Chris Voss
A Cuisine of Collaboration: An Interview with Einat Admony
A Feast for Peace by Einat Admony
5
8
10
13
15
19
21
23
Back-cover artwork by Joyce Kozloff, Palestine, collage and digital archival inkjet print, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery.
The photo above is the room in which the negotiations between the P.L.O. and the Israelis took place, at Borregaard Manor, Norway.
3
Lincoln Center Theater ReviewA publication of Lincoln Center Theater Summer 2016, Issue Number 67Alexis Gargagliano, EditorJohn Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive EditorsTamar Cohen, Art Direction, DesignDavid Leopold, Picture EditorCarol Anderson, Copy Editor
The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, ChairmanEric M. Mindich, PresidentMarlene Hess, Brooke Garber Neidich, andLeonard Tow, Vice Chairmen
Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive CommitteeJohn W. Rowe, TreasurerElizabeth Peters, Secretary
André BishopProducing Artistic Director
Annette Tapert AllenJessica M. BibliowiczAllison M. BlinkenJames-Keith BrownR. Jeep BryantH. Rodgin CohenJonathan Z. CohenIda ColeDavid DiDomenicoCurtland E. FieldsDr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow,Chairman Emeritus
Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack
John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. SchulmanHonorary Trustees
Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman
The Rosenthal Family Foundation—Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal, and Nancy Stephens, Directors—is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.
Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.
This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by the David C. Horn Foundation.
Lincoln Center Theater is grateful to Louis Cullman and Louise Hirschfeld Cullman for their leadership challenge grant in support of the Lincoln Center Theater Review and to those friends of the Theater who made special contributions to meet the challenge, including the Arnhold Foundation, Sondra Gilman & Celso Gonzalez-Falla, Marlene Hess & James D. Zirin, Bill Zabel, and other generous donors.
Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at Lincoln Center Theater.
© 2016 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.
Kewsong LeeMemrie M. LewisNinah LynnePhyllis MailmanEllen R. MarramJohn MorningElyse NewhouseRobert PohlyStephanie ShumanJosh SilvermanDavid F. SolomonTracey TravisDavid WarrenRobert G. WilmersWilliam D. Zabel
Photograph © Terje Sten Johansen.
During the run of Lincoln Center Theater’s production of J. T. Rogers’s Blood and Gifts in 2011,
director Bartlett Sher introduced two Norwegian diplomats (a husband and wife) to the playwright.
In the lobby after the show, they told Rogers, “We have a tale, and we have been waiting twenty
years for the right person to tell it to.” Over drinks they revealed that they had played a major role
in secretly organizing the back-channel talks that led to the Oslo Accords—an agreement between Isra-
el and the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) that was signed in 1993. Thus a seed was planted,
starting Rogers on a road of reading and research that led to the writing of his next play Oslo, about
one of the most fraught political relationships of our time. At its heart, the play is about people—
Israelis, Palestinians, and Norwegians—struggling with their ambitions and passions, working to
overcome their fears and mistrust to forge an unheard-of peace.
In this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review we tried to capture the complexity of feelings,
history and culture that set the stage for the Oslo Accords. We interviewed one member of the couple
who orchestrated these historic talks, Mona Juul, now the Norwegian ambassador to the United
Kingdom, about how she and her husband, Terje Rød-Larsen, came to play such a key role. Naama
Goldstein, an Israeli-American writer, describes the culture shock she experienced after moving
to the United States and having to learn to see another point of view about the country that had
raised her. Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian writer and lawyer, recalls first learning that the Oslo Accords
had been signed. With her essay on Gertrude Bell—writer, traveler, representative of the British Empire
in Iraq in the early 1900s—Milbry Polk reminds us that Mona Juul is a member of the small tribe of
Western women who have worked for peace in the Middle East. The former F.B.I. international-kidnap-
ping negotiator Chris Voss teaches us the art of negotiation. And, finally, the celebrated Israeli chef
Einat Admony shares some treasured recipes and spoke to us about the power of food to connect
people—as it does in J. T. Rogers’s illuminating and compelling play. —Alexis Gargagliano
Chairman of the P.L.O.Yasser Arafat
Finance Minister of P.L.O. Ahmed Qurie (Abu Ala)
P.L.O. LiaisonHassan Asfour
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres
Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin
Director General of the Foreign Ministry Uri Savir
Legal Adviser to the Foreign Ministry Joel Singer
Professor Yair Hirschfeld
Professor Ron Pundak
Foreign Minister Johan Jorgen Holst
Deputy Foreign Minister Jan Egeland
Official in the Foreign Ministry Mona Juul
Fafo Institute Director Terje Rød-Larsen
Fafo Executive Marianne Heiberg, married to Foreign Minister Holst
HIERARCHY OF POWER IN THE PLAY
OSLO
The Art of Diplomacy: An Interview with Mona Juul
An Oslo Chronology
You in the Wrong Placeby Naama Goldstein
The Peace That Ended Peaceby Raja Shehadeh
The Love of Desert Landsby Milbry Polk
The Art of Negotiationby Chris Voss
A Cuisine of Collaboration: An Interview with Einat Admony
A Feast for Peace by Einat Admony
5
8
10
13
15
19
21
23
Back-cover artwork by Joyce Kozloff, Palestine, collage and digital archival inkjet print, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery.
The photo above is the room in which the negotiations between the P.L.O. and the Israelis took place, at Borregaard Manor, Norway.
3
Lincoln Center Theater ReviewA publication of Lincoln Center Theater Summer 2016, Issue Number 67Alexis Gargagliano, EditorJohn Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive EditorsTamar Cohen, Art Direction, DesignDavid Leopold, Picture EditorCarol Anderson, Copy Editor
The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, ChairmanEric M. Mindich, PresidentMarlene Hess, Brooke Garber Neidich, andLeonard Tow, Vice Chairmen
Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive CommitteeJohn W. Rowe, TreasurerElizabeth Peters, Secretary
André BishopProducing Artistic Director
Annette Tapert AllenJessica M. BibliowiczAllison M. BlinkenJames-Keith BrownR. Jeep BryantH. Rodgin CohenJonathan Z. CohenIda ColeDavid DiDomenicoCurtland E. FieldsDr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow,Chairman Emeritus
Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack
John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. SchulmanHonorary Trustees
Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman
The Rosenthal Family Foundation—Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal, and Nancy Stephens, Directors—is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.
Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.
This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by the David C. Horn Foundation.
Lincoln Center Theater is grateful to Louis Cullman and Louise Hirschfeld Cullman for their leadership challenge grant in support of the Lincoln Center Theater Review and to those friends of the Theater who made special contributions to meet the challenge, including the Arnhold Foundation, Sondra Gilman & Celso Gonzalez-Falla, Marlene Hess & James D. Zirin, Bill Zabel, and other generous donors.
Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at Lincoln Center Theater.
© 2016 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.
Kewsong LeeMemrie M. LewisNinah LynnePhyllis MailmanEllen R. MarramJohn MorningElyse NewhouseRobert PohlyStephanie ShumanJosh SilvermanDavid F. SolomonTracey TravisDavid WarrenRobert G. WilmersWilliam D. Zabel
Photograph © Terje Sten Johansen.
During the run of Lincoln Center Theater’s production of J. T. Rogers’s Blood and Gifts in 2011,
director Bartlett Sher introduced two Norwegian diplomats (a husband and wife) to the playwright.
In the lobby after the show, they told Rogers, “We have a tale, and we have been waiting twenty
years for the right person to tell it to.” Over drinks they revealed that they had played a major role
in secretly organizing the back-channel talks that led to the Oslo Accords—an agreement between Isra-
el and the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) that was signed in 1993. Thus a seed was planted,
starting Rogers on a road of reading and research that led to the writing of his next play Oslo, about
one of the most fraught political relationships of our time. At its heart, the play is about people—
Israelis, Palestinians, and Norwegians—struggling with their ambitions and passions, working to
overcome their fears and mistrust to forge an unheard-of peace.
In this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review we tried to capture the complexity of feelings,
history and culture that set the stage for the Oslo Accords. We interviewed one member of the couple
who orchestrated these historic talks, Mona Juul, now the Norwegian ambassador to the United
Kingdom, about how she and her husband, Terje Rød-Larsen, came to play such a key role. Naama
Goldstein, an Israeli-American writer, describes the culture shock she experienced after moving
to the United States and having to learn to see another point of view about the country that had
raised her. Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian writer and lawyer, recalls first learning that the Oslo Accords
had been signed. With her essay on Gertrude Bell—writer, traveler, representative of the British Empire
in Iraq in the early 1900s—Milbry Polk reminds us that Mona Juul is a member of the small tribe of
Western women who have worked for peace in the Middle East. The former F.B.I. international-kidnap-
ping negotiator Chris Voss teaches us the art of negotiation. And, finally, the celebrated Israeli chef
Einat Admony shares some treasured recipes and spoke to us about the power of food to connect
people—as it does in J. T. Rogers’s illuminating and compelling play. —Alexis Gargagliano
Chairman of the P.L.O.Yasser Arafat
Finance Minister of P.L.O. Ahmed Qurie (Abu Ala)
P.L.O. LiaisonHassan Asfour
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres
Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin
Director General of the Foreign Ministry Uri Savir
Legal Adviser to the Foreign Ministry Joel Singer
Professor Yair Hirschfeld
Professor Ron Pundak
Foreign Minister Johan Jorgen Holst
Deputy Foreign Minister Jan Egeland
Official in the Foreign Ministry Mona Juul
Fafo Institute Director Terje Rød-Larsen
Fafo Executive Marianne Heiberg, married to Foreign Minister Holst
HIERARCHY OF POWER IN THE PLAY
OSLO
5
The play is based on the experiences of Mona Juul and her husband, Terje Rød-Larsen, who orchestrated the Oslo Accords. She spoke to our editors from her post in London, where she is the Norwegian ambassador to the Unit-ed Kingdom.
Editor: How did the play emerge from your friendship with our director, Bart Sher?Mona Juul: I was serving as the Norwegian diplomat at the U.N., and my husband, Terje Rød-Larsen, who is still based in New York, worked for the U.N. and the International Peace Institute. It turned out that we had our daughters at the same school, and that we were also neighbors. When we started to talk, my husband and I told Bart about our involvement in what came to be known as the Oslo Agreement, which was signed on the White House lawn in 1993 with Clinton, Peres, Rabin, and Arafat. Ed: Did you meet with J. T. Rogers? MJ: We met with J.T. later. He came to Nor-way to speak with us, and we took him to a few places where we had been facilitating, or hosting, the negotiations. Ed: Is it strange for you to see your work, which was so behind-the-scenes, being por-trayed in such a public way? MJ: Absolutely. I have never sought atten-tion (Laughing) on what I’ve been doing, so it is a little strange. When Bart first started talking about making a play about this, I didn’t take him seriously. But I also see that the agreement was historic, and since then it has been impossible to get to the stage where the two sides today are able to agree on anything. So I think it’s also important, in order to restore hope a little in today’s world, to know that it is ac-tually possible to bring two sides that have so much animosity together and help them make compromise.Ed: How did you arrive at the point where
you were able to bring these two sides to the table?MJ: That is a very long story, because both my own involvement with the Middle East and my husband’s began when I took up my first post as a Norwegian diplomat in Cairo, in 1988. My husband took leave from his work in Norway; he’s a sociologist and was heading a research institute there. Through our contacts and our involvement and our travels there—we went from Egypt to Israel to Gaza to Jerusalem—we saw for ourselves what was going on. This was at the height of the First Intifada, the first Palestinian up-rising. When we went to Gaza, we saw young Palestinians throwing stones at Israeli sol-diers, which, most of the time, were met with rubber bullets. It was a very tense situation.
While living in Cairo we got to know the brother of Yasser Arafat, Fathi Arafat, who was heading a Palestinian hospital in Cairo. He talked a lot about the effects that the Intifada and the use of violence, and the environment that young people in Gaza and the West Bank were growing up in, would have on the whole generation of young Pal-estinians. He also talked about the very bad living conditions among the Palestinians in general. My husband had come to Egypt from an institute that specialized in doing studies of living conditions. Maybe, because he had taken leave from his work and didn’t have anything to do (Laughing), he got this crazy idea that he wanted to make a study of living conditions among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. In order to do so, he needed to get the blessings of both sides. He came in contact with a lot of interesting people—Yossi Beilin, who is a character in the play, and others on the Palestinian side. Then we went back to Norway, and I worked with the Norwegian foreign minister.
We had people who became envoys for Yasser Arafat, who was then in Tunis, in ex-ile; the P.L.O. was in exile, and came to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry for help setting up contacts with the Israelis in order to see if there was some possibility of having a dialogue. And, to make things even more complicated, the reason the P.L.O. wanted to have that kind of contact was that there
was actually an American-led peace process going on in Washington, which started in Madrid in 1991. The P.L.O. had been exclud-ed because it was considered a terrorist or-ganization by most of the world, and nobody wanted to have the members of this organi-zation integrated in any kind of peace pro-cess. But of course they were still the ones pulling the strings and making the decisions. So they wanted to be brought into the game. And that was what we were able to do.
This is how Terje and I became the only ones who were able to bring real Israelis and real P.L.O. people together. But the overall condition was that it was a hundred percent secret, because for the Israelis, at the time, it was illegal to meet with P.L.O. people. If what we were doing had been known, the people who made the contact would have been put in prison. The Palestinians as well, of course, had representatives negotiating in Washington, and they didn’t want anybody to know that they were secretly going behind these representatives’ backs and sitting in Oslo negotiating. So the secrecy was maybe the most important feature. We were able to keep it secret for almost a year, with thirteen or fourteen meetings—in Oslo and other places. I think that was very much the key to the success of it.Ed: Could you talk a little about the dif-ference between what you were doing and the negotiations that were taking place in Washington?MJ: They were very different, with a huge delegation, and a lot of media attention. Things were happening in the region, and both sides had to come out and condemn what was going on and attack the other side, then the negotiations would run into problems and they would have to stop. Actually, the original thinking for having these secret back-channel talks in Oslo was to solve some of the problems and then feed the solutions into the official negotia-tions. But the parties themselves felt that it was actually possible to go a lot further in the back-channel negotiations. They were afraid of folding their negotiations into the A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:
AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
Artist Taryn Simon re-created centerpieces from official signings of historic treaties, decrees, and accords that negotiated everything from nuclear armament to oil deals. This image (left) is “Bratislava Declaration. Bratislava, Slovakia, August 3, 1968, Paperwork and the Will of Cap-ital,” 2015.
© Taryn Sim
on. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
5
The play is based on the experiences of Mona Juul and her husband, Terje Rød-Larsen, who orchestrated the Oslo Accords. She spoke to our editors from her post in London, where she is the Norwegian ambassador to the Unit-ed Kingdom.
Editor: How did the play emerge from your friendship with our director, Bart Sher?Mona Juul: I was serving as the Norwegian diplomat at the U.N., and my husband, Terje Rød-Larsen, who is still based in New York, worked for the U.N. and the International Peace Institute. It turned out that we had our daughters at the same school, and that we were also neighbors. When we started to talk, my husband and I told Bart about our involvement in what came to be known as the Oslo Agreement, which was signed on the White House lawn in 1993 with Clinton, Peres, Rabin, and Arafat. Ed: Did you meet with J. T. Rogers? MJ: We met with J.T. later. He came to Nor-way to speak with us, and we took him to a few places where we had been facilitating, or hosting, the negotiations. Ed: Is it strange for you to see your work, which was so behind-the-scenes, being por-trayed in such a public way? MJ: Absolutely. I have never sought atten-tion (Laughing) on what I’ve been doing, so it is a little strange. When Bart first started talking about making a play about this, I didn’t take him seriously. But I also see that the agreement was historic, and since then it has been impossible to get to the stage where the two sides today are able to agree on anything. So I think it’s also important, in order to restore hope a little in today’s world, to know that it is ac-tually possible to bring two sides that have so much animosity together and help them make compromise.Ed: How did you arrive at the point where
you were able to bring these two sides to the table?MJ: That is a very long story, because both my own involvement with the Middle East and my husband’s began when I took up my first post as a Norwegian diplomat in Cairo, in 1988. My husband took leave from his work in Norway; he’s a sociologist and was heading a research institute there. Through our contacts and our involvement and our travels there—we went from Egypt to Israel to Gaza to Jerusalem—we saw for ourselves what was going on. This was at the height of the First Intifada, the first Palestinian up-rising. When we went to Gaza, we saw young Palestinians throwing stones at Israeli sol-diers, which, most of the time, were met with rubber bullets. It was a very tense situation.
While living in Cairo we got to know the brother of Yasser Arafat, Fathi Arafat, who was heading a Palestinian hospital in Cairo. He talked a lot about the effects that the Intifada and the use of violence, and the environment that young people in Gaza and the West Bank were growing up in, would have on the whole generation of young Pal-estinians. He also talked about the very bad living conditions among the Palestinians in general. My husband had come to Egypt from an institute that specialized in doing studies of living conditions. Maybe, because he had taken leave from his work and didn’t have anything to do (Laughing), he got this crazy idea that he wanted to make a study of living conditions among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. In order to do so, he needed to get the blessings of both sides. He came in contact with a lot of interesting people—Yossi Beilin, who is a character in the play, and others on the Palestinian side. Then we went back to Norway, and I worked with the Norwegian foreign minister.
We had people who became envoys for Yasser Arafat, who was then in Tunis, in ex-ile; the P.L.O. was in exile, and came to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry for help setting up contacts with the Israelis in order to see if there was some possibility of having a dialogue. And, to make things even more complicated, the reason the P.L.O. wanted to have that kind of contact was that there
was actually an American-led peace process going on in Washington, which started in Madrid in 1991. The P.L.O. had been exclud-ed because it was considered a terrorist or-ganization by most of the world, and nobody wanted to have the members of this organi-zation integrated in any kind of peace pro-cess. But of course they were still the ones pulling the strings and making the decisions. So they wanted to be brought into the game. And that was what we were able to do.
This is how Terje and I became the only ones who were able to bring real Israelis and real P.L.O. people together. But the overall condition was that it was a hundred percent secret, because for the Israelis, at the time, it was illegal to meet with P.L.O. people. If what we were doing had been known, the people who made the contact would have been put in prison. The Palestinians as well, of course, had representatives negotiating in Washington, and they didn’t want anybody to know that they were secretly going behind these representatives’ backs and sitting in Oslo negotiating. So the secrecy was maybe the most important feature. We were able to keep it secret for almost a year, with thirteen or fourteen meetings—in Oslo and other places. I think that was very much the key to the success of it.Ed: Could you talk a little about the dif-ference between what you were doing and the negotiations that were taking place in Washington?MJ: They were very different, with a huge delegation, and a lot of media attention. Things were happening in the region, and both sides had to come out and condemn what was going on and attack the other side, then the negotiations would run into problems and they would have to stop. Actually, the original thinking for having these secret back-channel talks in Oslo was to solve some of the problems and then feed the solutions into the official negotia-tions. But the parties themselves felt that it was actually possible to go a lot further in the back-channel negotiations. They were afraid of folding their negotiations into the A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:
AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
Artist Taryn Simon re-created centerpieces from official signings of historic treaties, decrees, and accords that negotiated everything from nuclear armament to oil deals. This image (left) is “Bratislava Declaration. Bratislava, Slovakia, August 3, 1968, Paperwork and the Will of Cap-ital,” 2015.
© Taryn Sim
on. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
76
more official one; they were afraid that sud-denly all their work would be ruined. Ed: I’m curious about where the line is between when you and your husband started working on this idea and how it became official.MJ: This is also a very long story. My hus-band worked through his contacts—he had the perfect cover of being a social scientist who was talking to both sides. And I and the deputy foreign minister, Jan Egeland, and also Foreign Minister Holst, of course, were working on it. The plan was backed by the Foreign Ministry, but that was also kind of a secret, so that we had deniability, as we called it. If it became known that these kinds of contacts were going on, we could say, “No, these are just some researchers, some social scientists, who are meeting. This has nothing to do with any kind of official negotiations.”
And that’s why the Israelis, in the be-ginning, or Yossi Beilin, mainly, and Shimon Peres, they also sent two non-officials—I mean, two academicians—Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, who were affiliated with univer-sities and with the N.G.O.s. They represented the Israelis, but they were not official rep-resentatives. That’s why, after a while, the P.L.O. representative, Abu Ala, made an ulti-matum and said that if the Israeli delegation wasn’t upgraded to some official Israelis he wouldn’t continue, because he wanted to be sure that they really represented the Israeli government. That’s why the Israelis upgrad-ed them. So we facilitated the talks between the two parties with a small group of Nor-wegians. It was done under the auspices of that research institute but supported and financed by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.Ed: In the play, much of your work happens offstage? MJ: It’s really important to know that our role as the Norwegian team was to facilitate the talks. I mean, we were making sure that they came to different locations in Norway; we arranged for all the practicalities, made sure that it wouldn’t be known that these representatives were coming, so we had a lot of cover-up operations in order to bring them safely to those places in Norway. This is very important—almost from the very be-ginning, even the first time they met, we brought them there; we brought them, af-ter a while, into the same room. We then
sat with them, and we told them that we were there only to facilitate—that they were the ones who were going to make an agree-ment, or see if it was possible to make an agreement. Norway was accepted in that role because we didn’t have any interest of our own at stake. We didn’t take ownership of the negotiations—we couldn’t—and we had no interest in doing that.
So the first time the representatives came to Oslo we put them in a room and we said, “We know that you can go on quarrel-ling about the past. You will never agree on the past. So what we think would be the best thing for you now is to agree to disagree about the past but try to look into the fu-ture and see what can you do in order to find a solution to your conflict.” And in order to be able to do that we made sure that there was an atmosphere around those talks where they could relax and feel free from having us listen in. None of us spoke Hebrew or Ara-bic, which I think was quite an advantage, because they could speak among themselves without us understanding. They felt very com-fortable having us around, but we always left them in the room, saying, “Now you start working, and we’re here if you need us, but this is up to you. Whatever you want us to do, please let us know, but it’s about the two of you.” This is how we did it throughout. We were sitting outside the room, making sure that they had what they needed and that there was a good atmosphere. And then, of course, we had social meals.
Of course, after every meeting they would disagree over something, and there was al-ways a big crisis. They said, “We will never come back, this is not going to work.” The Israelis went back to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the P.L.O. people went back to Tunis, and they said they would never come back. Then we had to start over again, and carry mes-sages between them, because of course they weren’t talking to each other. They couldn’t. So we were trying to send messages and try-ing to find a way to bring them back again, or to solve some of the problems in order for them to come back. We worked even more in between the meetings in Oslo. Ed: What was it like being the only woman dealing with these very macho men on both sides?MJ: There was a little sexism; I won’t deny that. But, at the same time, I really felt that
they also had quite a lot of respect for me. Because they knew that, first of all, I repre-sented the Norwegian minister in all this. I was the official representative from Norway, so they were quite dependent on us as a fa-cilitator. I think that they also trusted my judgment.
Funnily enough, the Israelis and the Palestinians have exactly the same kind of humor—especially the men, I think. They joked a lot, and they gave my husband quite a hard time. They were always saying this famous quote from the Palestinian negotia-tor, who told my husband, “You are nothing without your wife.” I really felt that I was there for a purpose, and the men respected that. Besides, I come from a family with four brothers, so I was used to being around men.Ed: You managed to wrangle a rather diffi-cult group? MJ: Absolutely, but I must say that my husband was quite good at that as well. Of course, we became very much the punch-ing bag. They took a lot out on each other, but they also needed a third party to take out all the aggression and frustration on. I mean, being part of such a unique and his-toric moment is a special thing to experi-ence in life. This kind of diplomacy is also a lot about acting. In the art of diplomacy, you have to play a role, and your own feel-ings aren’t so important, because you’re so focused on making others comfortable so they can do the right thing. You put your-self on hold a little. It was very tiring. Look-ing back, I don’t know how we survived it. We were working day and night for them. I mean, we were at their disposal all the time. We were in constant contact, even when they weren’t meeting in Norway. And if they asked us, “Can you come and see us in Paris?,” off we went. I mean, there was nothing else to do. It was a very special period that re-quired special skills.Ed: Since the Oslo Accords, other women have become well known in the diplomatic community. I’m thinking of Samantha Pow-er, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice. Do you feel that women have been able to move up in the diplomatic ranks? MJ: I come from a country where equal rights are very much a priority of our state. We have some of the highest percentages of female participation in the workforce; we have one-
year maternity leave, two and a half months’ paternity leave. We have all these arrange-ments that make it easier for women to have equal footing in the workforce. I see now, living here in England, how far along we are in Norway. This is also true in the Foreign Ministry. Over the years, we have been push-ing very hard to promote women diplomats. I have been very fortunate in my career; I think at almost all the posts I’ve had, I have been the first female. So I think there will be more and more women in positions like this. You know, now there is discussion that the next secretary-general of the U.N. should
be a woman. There are quite a few female candidates. I’m also part of a network, cre-ated among the Nordic countries, of women mediators and facilitators, because we think it’s extremely important to involve women in these processes, not only as facilitators but also as negotiators. Women represent half the population. All of us have to make sure that the women’s point of view is reflected when there are negotiations and discussions. So I think this is coming, and there will be more and more high-profile women. Ed: Finally, could you tell us the essential things we should know about the Oslo Accords?
MJ: The most important thing is that it was the first-ever agreement between the State of Israel and the P.L.O., the Palestine Liber-ation Organization, then headed by Yass-er Arafat. The Oslo Agreement, as such, is not a full-fledged peace agreement; it was called a Declaration of Principles on how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was the first such agreement between the two countries. Another key thing was that attached to that Oslo Agreement was an agreement called the Mutual Recognition between Israel and the P.L.O., which was also negotiated as part of the Declaration of Principles. That agreement is very historic, because it was the first time that the P.L.O. recognized Israel as a state, and the first time that Israel recognized the P.L.O. as the sole, legitimate representative of the Pal-estinian people. And, in order to make this happen, the Palestinians had to renounce the use of violence, which is something the two sides had been negotiating for years. Another consequence of the agreement was that it opened up the possibility for Jordan to enter into a peace agreement with Israel.
I actually spoke with Queen Noor at a recent Lincoln Center Theater opening, and we talked about that. She said that the Oslo Agreement made it possible for King Hus-sein, her husband, to enter a peace agree-ment with Israel. Until that point, all the Arab states had said that without an agree-ment, without solving the Israeli-Palestin-ian conflict, it would be impossible for the Arabs to have an agreement with Israel.
Also, the agreement established what lat-er became known as the Palestinian Authori-ty. It made it possible for Yasser Arafat to go from exile in Tunisia to establishing himself in Gaza and, later on, in the West Bank, and, of course, the rest is history. But it was quite a dramatic change from the P.L.O.’s being a terrorist organization that nobody wanted to deal with to having Arafat arrive in Gaza and establish his own authority. And then, of course, they didn’t stop quarreling about what kind of authority that should be.
The agreement was signed at the White House, but it was not as if the Palestinian State was there the day after, as we all know. The agreement was that that should be the end goal, but the Oslo Agreement described the way to get there.
But the overall condition was that it was a hundred percent secret, because for the Israelis, at the time, it was
illegal to meet with P.L.O. people. If what we were doing had been known, the people who made the
contact would have been put in prison.
© Taryn Sim
on. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
Image (left) by Taryn Simon, “Convention on Cluster Munitions. Oslo, Norway, December 3, 2008, Paperwork and the Will of Capital,” 2015.
76
more official one; they were afraid that sud-denly all their work would be ruined. Ed: I’m curious about where the line is between when you and your husband started working on this idea and how it became official.MJ: This is also a very long story. My hus-band worked through his contacts—he had the perfect cover of being a social scientist who was talking to both sides. And I and the deputy foreign minister, Jan Egeland, and also Foreign Minister Holst, of course, were working on it. The plan was backed by the Foreign Ministry, but that was also kind of a secret, so that we had deniability, as we called it. If it became known that these kinds of contacts were going on, we could say, “No, these are just some researchers, some social scientists, who are meeting. This has nothing to do with any kind of official negotiations.”
And that’s why the Israelis, in the be-ginning, or Yossi Beilin, mainly, and Shimon Peres, they also sent two non-officials—I mean, two academicians—Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, who were affiliated with univer-sities and with the N.G.O.s. They represented the Israelis, but they were not official rep-resentatives. That’s why, after a while, the P.L.O. representative, Abu Ala, made an ulti-matum and said that if the Israeli delegation wasn’t upgraded to some official Israelis he wouldn’t continue, because he wanted to be sure that they really represented the Israeli government. That’s why the Israelis upgrad-ed them. So we facilitated the talks between the two parties with a small group of Nor-wegians. It was done under the auspices of that research institute but supported and financed by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.Ed: In the play, much of your work happens offstage? MJ: It’s really important to know that our role as the Norwegian team was to facilitate the talks. I mean, we were making sure that they came to different locations in Norway; we arranged for all the practicalities, made sure that it wouldn’t be known that these representatives were coming, so we had a lot of cover-up operations in order to bring them safely to those places in Norway. This is very important—almost from the very be-ginning, even the first time they met, we brought them there; we brought them, af-ter a while, into the same room. We then
sat with them, and we told them that we were there only to facilitate—that they were the ones who were going to make an agree-ment, or see if it was possible to make an agreement. Norway was accepted in that role because we didn’t have any interest of our own at stake. We didn’t take ownership of the negotiations—we couldn’t—and we had no interest in doing that.
So the first time the representatives came to Oslo we put them in a room and we said, “We know that you can go on quarrel-ling about the past. You will never agree on the past. So what we think would be the best thing for you now is to agree to disagree about the past but try to look into the fu-ture and see what can you do in order to find a solution to your conflict.” And in order to be able to do that we made sure that there was an atmosphere around those talks where they could relax and feel free from having us listen in. None of us spoke Hebrew or Ara-bic, which I think was quite an advantage, because they could speak among themselves without us understanding. They felt very com-fortable having us around, but we always left them in the room, saying, “Now you start working, and we’re here if you need us, but this is up to you. Whatever you want us to do, please let us know, but it’s about the two of you.” This is how we did it throughout. We were sitting outside the room, making sure that they had what they needed and that there was a good atmosphere. And then, of course, we had social meals.
Of course, after every meeting they would disagree over something, and there was al-ways a big crisis. They said, “We will never come back, this is not going to work.” The Israelis went back to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the P.L.O. people went back to Tunis, and they said they would never come back. Then we had to start over again, and carry mes-sages between them, because of course they weren’t talking to each other. They couldn’t. So we were trying to send messages and try-ing to find a way to bring them back again, or to solve some of the problems in order for them to come back. We worked even more in between the meetings in Oslo. Ed: What was it like being the only woman dealing with these very macho men on both sides?MJ: There was a little sexism; I won’t deny that. But, at the same time, I really felt that
they also had quite a lot of respect for me. Because they knew that, first of all, I repre-sented the Norwegian minister in all this. I was the official representative from Norway, so they were quite dependent on us as a fa-cilitator. I think that they also trusted my judgment.
Funnily enough, the Israelis and the Palestinians have exactly the same kind of humor—especially the men, I think. They joked a lot, and they gave my husband quite a hard time. They were always saying this famous quote from the Palestinian negotia-tor, who told my husband, “You are nothing without your wife.” I really felt that I was there for a purpose, and the men respected that. Besides, I come from a family with four brothers, so I was used to being around men.Ed: You managed to wrangle a rather diffi-cult group? MJ: Absolutely, but I must say that my husband was quite good at that as well. Of course, we became very much the punch-ing bag. They took a lot out on each other, but they also needed a third party to take out all the aggression and frustration on. I mean, being part of such a unique and his-toric moment is a special thing to experi-ence in life. This kind of diplomacy is also a lot about acting. In the art of diplomacy, you have to play a role, and your own feel-ings aren’t so important, because you’re so focused on making others comfortable so they can do the right thing. You put your-self on hold a little. It was very tiring. Look-ing back, I don’t know how we survived it. We were working day and night for them. I mean, we were at their disposal all the time. We were in constant contact, even when they weren’t meeting in Norway. And if they asked us, “Can you come and see us in Paris?,” off we went. I mean, there was nothing else to do. It was a very special period that re-quired special skills.Ed: Since the Oslo Accords, other women have become well known in the diplomatic community. I’m thinking of Samantha Pow-er, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice. Do you feel that women have been able to move up in the diplomatic ranks? MJ: I come from a country where equal rights are very much a priority of our state. We have some of the highest percentages of female participation in the workforce; we have one-
year maternity leave, two and a half months’ paternity leave. We have all these arrange-ments that make it easier for women to have equal footing in the workforce. I see now, living here in England, how far along we are in Norway. This is also true in the Foreign Ministry. Over the years, we have been push-ing very hard to promote women diplomats. I have been very fortunate in my career; I think at almost all the posts I’ve had, I have been the first female. So I think there will be more and more women in positions like this. You know, now there is discussion that the next secretary-general of the U.N. should
be a woman. There are quite a few female candidates. I’m also part of a network, cre-ated among the Nordic countries, of women mediators and facilitators, because we think it’s extremely important to involve women in these processes, not only as facilitators but also as negotiators. Women represent half the population. All of us have to make sure that the women’s point of view is reflected when there are negotiations and discussions. So I think this is coming, and there will be more and more high-profile women. Ed: Finally, could you tell us the essential things we should know about the Oslo Accords?
MJ: The most important thing is that it was the first-ever agreement between the State of Israel and the P.L.O., the Palestine Liber-ation Organization, then headed by Yass-er Arafat. The Oslo Agreement, as such, is not a full-fledged peace agreement; it was called a Declaration of Principles on how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was the first such agreement between the two countries. Another key thing was that attached to that Oslo Agreement was an agreement called the Mutual Recognition between Israel and the P.L.O., which was also negotiated as part of the Declaration of Principles. That agreement is very historic, because it was the first time that the P.L.O. recognized Israel as a state, and the first time that Israel recognized the P.L.O. as the sole, legitimate representative of the Pal-estinian people. And, in order to make this happen, the Palestinians had to renounce the use of violence, which is something the two sides had been negotiating for years. Another consequence of the agreement was that it opened up the possibility for Jordan to enter into a peace agreement with Israel.
I actually spoke with Queen Noor at a recent Lincoln Center Theater opening, and we talked about that. She said that the Oslo Agreement made it possible for King Hus-sein, her husband, to enter a peace agree-ment with Israel. Until that point, all the Arab states had said that without an agree-ment, without solving the Israeli-Palestin-ian conflict, it would be impossible for the Arabs to have an agreement with Israel.
Also, the agreement established what lat-er became known as the Palestinian Authori-ty. It made it possible for Yasser Arafat to go from exile in Tunisia to establishing himself in Gaza and, later on, in the West Bank, and, of course, the rest is history. But it was quite a dramatic change from the P.L.O.’s being a terrorist organization that nobody wanted to deal with to having Arafat arrive in Gaza and establish his own authority. And then, of course, they didn’t stop quarreling about what kind of authority that should be.
The agreement was signed at the White House, but it was not as if the Palestinian State was there the day after, as we all know. The agreement was that that should be the end goal, but the Oslo Agreement described the way to get there.
But the overall condition was that it was a hundred percent secret, because for the Israelis, at the time, it was
illegal to meet with P.L.O. people. If what we were doing had been known, the people who made the
contact would have been put in prison. ©
Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
Image (left) by Taryn Simon, “Convention on Cluster Munitions. Oslo, Norway, December 3, 2008, Paperwork and the Will of Capital,” 2015.
8
Public bilateral peace talks reconvene in Washington after hiatus caused by earlier deportation of Palestinian militants.
In private meeting with Peres, Rabin authorizes that the secret talks with the P.L.O. in Oslo be upgraded to official level.
Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry Uri Savir joins the fourth round of talks in Oslo between Abu Ala and the Israeli professors.
Joel Singer, a former lawyer in the Israeli military and now a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, joins Savir in Oslo as negotiations delve into greater detail. Rabin authorizes Singer to draft a new D.O.P.
Seventh round of negotiations held in Oslo, with Savir and Singer leading negotiations on the Israeli side.
Israel launches week-long bombardment of southern Leb-anon known as Operation Accountability. P.L.O. in Tunis is running low on funds.
While Peres is visiting Stockholm, he conducts a secret midnight negotiation over the phone with Arafat and Abu Ala, who are in Tunis. The Norwegian members of the Oslo team serve as go-betweens for the Israeli negotiators and the P.L.O.
Israelis, Palestinians, and Norwegians initial the D.O.P. at a secret ceremony in Norway in the middle of the night.
With two abstentions, Israeli cabinet unanimously ap-proves the D.O.P. with no amendments allowed.
Foreign Minister Holst obtains signatures of Arafat and Rabin on letters of mutual recognition between Israel and the P.L.O.
Rabin and Arafat shake hands at signing ceremony on White House lawn.
Israeli settler kills thirty Palestinians. The P.L.O. suspends all participation in the Oslo Accord.
The P.L.O. becomes the Palestinian National Authority.
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.”
Rabin assassinated by an Israeli settler.
Second Intifada
Arafat dies.
1994
1995
2000-05
2004
Six-Day War
P.L.O. headquarters relocated to Tunis.
First Intifada
Middle East Peace Conference convenes in Madrid.
Public bilateral peace talks between Israelis and Arabs continue, after Madrid, in Washington. Representatives from the P.L.O. are not included.
Norwegian academic Terje Rød Larsen makes contact with Yossi Beilin, Labor member of the Israeli Knesset, and protégé of Shimon Peres. They discuss beginning secret Israeli-Palestinian talks in Oslo.
Larsen, Beilin, and Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini meet in Jerusalem to discuss the possibility of secret talks.
Labor Party wins the Israeli election. Yitzhak Rabin elect-ed prime minister.
Rabin’s government assumes power. Shimon Peres named foreign minister. Yossi Beilin is appointed deputy foreign minister. Rabin and Peres remain long-standing rivals.
Sixth round of public bilateral peace talks commences in Washington.
Jan Egeland, Norwegian deputy foreign minister, visits Israel, proposes back-channel Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Bill Clinton elected U.S. president.
Israeli academic Yair Hirschfeld sent to London by Yossi Beilin. He and P.L.O. Finance Minister Ahmed Qurie (also known as Abu Ala) meet there. They discuss opening a secret channel in Oslo.
Rabin deports approximately 415 suspected Palestinian militants (mostly from Hamas) to southern Lebanon in response to the killing of eight Israeli troops within a twelve-day period. Secret Oslo talks almost called off.
First round of secret talks held in Oslo between Abu Ala and Israeli academics Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak.
Second round of secret talks held in Oslo. The two sides begin drafting a Declaration of Principles (D.O.P.) for an interim Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
Third round of secret talks held in Oslo between Abu Ala and the two professors. Both sides continue to draft a D.O.P.
Rabin closes Gaza borders after fatal Palestinian stab-bings of Israelis.
1967
1982
1987-91
1991
1992
1993
World events in blue. Play events in bold.
AN CHRONOLOGY
OSLO
Painting by Paula Scher, Israel, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Bryce Wolkow
itz Gallery.
8
Public bilateral peace talks reconvene in Washington after hiatus caused by earlier deportation of Palestinian militants.
In private meeting with Peres, Rabin authorizes that the secret talks with the P.L.O. in Oslo be upgraded to official level.
Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry Uri Savir joins the fourth round of talks in Oslo between Abu Ala and the Israeli professors.
Joel Singer, a former lawyer in the Israeli military and now a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, joins Savir in Oslo as negotiations delve into greater detail. Rabin authorizes Singer to draft a new D.O.P.
Seventh round of negotiations held in Oslo, with Savir and Singer leading negotiations on the Israeli side.
Israel launches week-long bombardment of southern Leb-anon known as Operation Accountability. P.L.O. in Tunis is running low on funds.
While Peres is visiting Stockholm, he conducts a secret midnight negotiation over the phone with Arafat and Abu Ala, who are in Tunis. The Norwegian members of the Oslo team serve as go-betweens for the Israeli negotiators and the P.L.O.
Israelis, Palestinians, and Norwegians initial the D.O.P. at a secret ceremony in Norway in the middle of the night.
With two abstentions, Israeli cabinet unanimously ap-proves the D.O.P. with no amendments allowed.
Foreign Minister Holst obtains signatures of Arafat and Rabin on letters of mutual recognition between Israel and the P.L.O.
Rabin and Arafat shake hands at signing ceremony on White House lawn.
Israeli settler kills thirty Palestinians. The P.L.O. suspends all participation in the Oslo Accord.
The P.L.O. becomes the Palestinian National Authority.
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.”
Rabin assassinated by an Israeli settler.
Second Intifada
Arafat dies.
1994
1995
2000-05
2004
Six-Day War
P.L.O. headquarters relocated to Tunis.
First Intifada
Middle East Peace Conference convenes in Madrid.
Public bilateral peace talks between Israelis and Arabs continue, after Madrid, in Washington. Representatives from the P.L.O. are not included.
Norwegian academic Terje Rød Larsen makes contact with Yossi Beilin, Labor member of the Israeli Knesset, and protégé of Shimon Peres. They discuss beginning secret Israeli-Palestinian talks in Oslo.
Larsen, Beilin, and Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini meet in Jerusalem to discuss the possibility of secret talks.
Labor Party wins the Israeli election. Yitzhak Rabin elect-ed prime minister.
Rabin’s government assumes power. Shimon Peres named foreign minister. Yossi Beilin is appointed deputy foreign minister. Rabin and Peres remain long-standing rivals.
Sixth round of public bilateral peace talks commences in Washington.
Jan Egeland, Norwegian deputy foreign minister, visits Israel, proposes back-channel Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Bill Clinton elected U.S. president.
Israeli academic Yair Hirschfeld sent to London by Yossi Beilin. He and P.L.O. Finance Minister Ahmed Qurie (also known as Abu Ala) meet there. They discuss opening a secret channel in Oslo.
Rabin deports approximately 415 suspected Palestinian militants (mostly from Hamas) to southern Lebanon in response to the killing of eight Israeli troops within a twelve-day period. Secret Oslo talks almost called off.
First round of secret talks held in Oslo between Abu Ala and Israeli academics Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak.
Second round of secret talks held in Oslo. The two sides begin drafting a Declaration of Principles (D.O.P.) for an interim Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
Third round of secret talks held in Oslo between Abu Ala and the two professors. Both sides continue to draft a D.O.P.
Rabin closes Gaza borders after fatal Palestinian stab-bings of Israelis.
1967
1982
1987-91
1991
1992
1993
World events in blue. Play events in bold.
AN CHRONOLOGY
OSLO
Painting by Paula Scher, Israel, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Bryce Wolkow
itz Gallery.
11
Delmar Boulevard East, West, and Southward (c. 1988-92) In St. Louis on a sunny, mild day, I’m traversing a desolate stretch of a boulevard that spans nine miles. My walk began in
the neighboring town of University City, aspiring east to a job interview. The prospect represents a great shift, making use
of my new bachelor’s degree toward a step up in the world—work not involving the serving of food or the minding of
children. For that reason, I’m dressed against my style; instead of a T-shirt and cords, I’m wearing a short-sleeved sweater
and a black razor-pleated skirt, the fabric substantial, draping with gravity and swing. I’ve swapped out my Doc Martens
for conservative shoes, stubby heels that I believed I could manage but can’t. I’ve stopped walking and am awaiting a
bus. Across the street a man leans against the wall of a convenience store, holding a bottle through a paper bag. The sky
dazzles, dwarfing low commercial buildings and brick homes of vintage and gentility, charming except for their dejection,
stranded among overgrown lots, some buckling, apertures plugged with plywood. Soon the man resolves to cross over
and approaches me to say this:
“You in the wrong place.”
I have some idea of what he means but, balking, I say, “Why?”
With a reluctant air and curious superlatives, he describes parts of my body. “Your spring ass,” he says, and “your big
legs,” and adds some reference to my clothes, suggesting that these elements conspire, in that environment, against me.
I’m not frightened. Discomfited, yes. His words are intrusive yet irritating in their delicacy, for he is skirting the main issue:
not my legs or my ass or my clothing but, rather, my provenance, communicated by my skin, which, pale unlike his, marks
me as one who cannot possibly be from this place, and is therefore in the wrong place.
He’s way off-base, obviously. I am a great deal more and less misplaced than he can see. I am very new to these parts,
having relocated to the town just west of here in recent years from Israel, my family impelled by a conspiracy of vulnera-
bilities having to do with the effects of combat and the progress of disease, the aftershocks of a tour of duty in Lebanon,
the implications of invasive surgery. We are here for respite and follow-up care. Our devotion to our former homeland
remains searing, the relocation seen as temporary. In my disorientation, I’ve ventured into adulthood with a clear sense of
direction. I encounter this place just as I did my former place, on foot and with a measure of defiance, continuing to go as
I was told I shouldn’t.
A few miles west on the same boulevard, say a year earlier, in the neighboring town: an area named the Loop, though
it’s a strip, a buzzing mercantile district, winsome with preserved and cultivated character. I’m sitting at a street-side table
at a casual eatery, a burrito place, but to me there is nothing casual in an occasion that embodies my exploded world. I’m
savoring food that is new to me, eating as I wish rather than as admonished by religion, flouting all kosher codes except
those regarding shellfish, for now still too far out. I’m encircled by new friends, none of whom share my background,
drawn together by a comparable temperament, a cautious edge, a guarded idealism, and a thirst for hilarity and beer,
which this restaurant serves in plastic pitchers on the cheap, and without scrutinizing our ages.
I notice the lone patron at a neighboring table. He must bear some connection to the nearby college. He isn’t local. His
coloring, his clothes, his grooming combine to signify another origin, as does the courtly way he tips his head to convey
engagement when I address him. I anticipate his accent when he answers: Arabic. He welcomes our company, exchanges
pleasantries gladly. I inquire into his home turf: Bethlehem.
“Then we were neighbors,” I say, speaking nonliterally. My hometown doesn’t border his; he has never heard of it. I try
the name of the Arab village that once stood there, worrying that I’ll botch the accent. Sure enough I do, just as it’s foolish
of me to expect that he’ll be versed in the full index of his people’s lost places. To have evoked the forfeiture at all was in
bad taste, or else no phrase within my ken can salvage this encounter. He is the first Palestinian I’ve ever spoken to. Can
I presume that I am his first Israeli? For he lights into the opportunity as if admitted, finally, to the claims department of a
loathsome but effectual bureaucracy:
“You took our land.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you.”
“Me, personally? This person sitting here.”
“You.”
Then I must be well over a hundred years old, I could say, to have had a hand in the purchase. A legal acquisition, I could
add, of pestilent land, tended by a dwindled population of ghostly serfs, half-blind and yellow with malaria. How miserably
we were afflicted, too, at first, how dwindled we became, but then prevailed, improved the soil and survived. My city’s story
rolls like footage in my memory, as if I witnessed it, with grief and pride and flickers of omission, the serfs going—where?
That’s not addressed. As characters, they’re simply there and then they’re not.
❖
Photograph by Kathy Ryan, 12:06 p.m., June 12, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and H
oward Greenberg Gallery.
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE By Naama Goldstein
11
Delmar Boulevard East, West, and Southward (c. 1988-92) In St. Louis on a sunny, mild day, I’m traversing a desolate stretch of a boulevard that spans nine miles. My walk began in
the neighboring town of University City, aspiring east to a job interview. The prospect represents a great shift, making use
of my new bachelor’s degree toward a step up in the world—work not involving the serving of food or the minding of
children. For that reason, I’m dressed against my style; instead of a T-shirt and cords, I’m wearing a short-sleeved sweater
and a black razor-pleated skirt, the fabric substantial, draping with gravity and swing. I’ve swapped out my Doc Martens
for conservative shoes, stubby heels that I believed I could manage but can’t. I’ve stopped walking and am awaiting a
bus. Across the street a man leans against the wall of a convenience store, holding a bottle through a paper bag. The sky
dazzles, dwarfing low commercial buildings and brick homes of vintage and gentility, charming except for their dejection,
stranded among overgrown lots, some buckling, apertures plugged with plywood. Soon the man resolves to cross over
and approaches me to say this:
“You in the wrong place.”
I have some idea of what he means but, balking, I say, “Why?”
With a reluctant air and curious superlatives, he describes parts of my body. “Your spring ass,” he says, and “your big
legs,” and adds some reference to my clothes, suggesting that these elements conspire, in that environment, against me.
I’m not frightened. Discomfited, yes. His words are intrusive yet irritating in their delicacy, for he is skirting the main issue:
not my legs or my ass or my clothing but, rather, my provenance, communicated by my skin, which, pale unlike his, marks
me as one who cannot possibly be from this place, and is therefore in the wrong place.
He’s way off-base, obviously. I am a great deal more and less misplaced than he can see. I am very new to these parts,
having relocated to the town just west of here in recent years from Israel, my family impelled by a conspiracy of vulnera-
bilities having to do with the effects of combat and the progress of disease, the aftershocks of a tour of duty in Lebanon,
the implications of invasive surgery. We are here for respite and follow-up care. Our devotion to our former homeland
remains searing, the relocation seen as temporary. In my disorientation, I’ve ventured into adulthood with a clear sense of
direction. I encounter this place just as I did my former place, on foot and with a measure of defiance, continuing to go as
I was told I shouldn’t.
A few miles west on the same boulevard, say a year earlier, in the neighboring town: an area named the Loop, though
it’s a strip, a buzzing mercantile district, winsome with preserved and cultivated character. I’m sitting at a street-side table
at a casual eatery, a burrito place, but to me there is nothing casual in an occasion that embodies my exploded world. I’m
savoring food that is new to me, eating as I wish rather than as admonished by religion, flouting all kosher codes except
those regarding shellfish, for now still too far out. I’m encircled by new friends, none of whom share my background,
drawn together by a comparable temperament, a cautious edge, a guarded idealism, and a thirst for hilarity and beer,
which this restaurant serves in plastic pitchers on the cheap, and without scrutinizing our ages.
I notice the lone patron at a neighboring table. He must bear some connection to the nearby college. He isn’t local. His
coloring, his clothes, his grooming combine to signify another origin, as does the courtly way he tips his head to convey
engagement when I address him. I anticipate his accent when he answers: Arabic. He welcomes our company, exchanges
pleasantries gladly. I inquire into his home turf: Bethlehem.
“Then we were neighbors,” I say, speaking nonliterally. My hometown doesn’t border his; he has never heard of it. I try
the name of the Arab village that once stood there, worrying that I’ll botch the accent. Sure enough I do, just as it’s foolish
of me to expect that he’ll be versed in the full index of his people’s lost places. To have evoked the forfeiture at all was in
bad taste, or else no phrase within my ken can salvage this encounter. He is the first Palestinian I’ve ever spoken to. Can
I presume that I am his first Israeli? For he lights into the opportunity as if admitted, finally, to the claims department of a
loathsome but effectual bureaucracy:
“You took our land.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you.”
“Me, personally? This person sitting here.”
“You.”
Then I must be well over a hundred years old, I could say, to have had a hand in the purchase. A legal acquisition, I could
add, of pestilent land, tended by a dwindled population of ghostly serfs, half-blind and yellow with malaria. How miserably
we were afflicted, too, at first, how dwindled we became, but then prevailed, improved the soil and survived. My city’s story
rolls like footage in my memory, as if I witnessed it, with grief and pride and flickers of omission, the serfs going—where?
That’s not addressed. As characters, they’re simply there and then they’re not.
❖
Photograph by Kathy Ryan, 12:06 p.m., June 12, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and H
oward Greenberg Gallery.
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE By Naama Goldstein
1312
I don’t get into that. Today the two of us are going nowhere fast, mired in rage and sass and mortified foot-shuffling,
the latter by my friends, who will take no side but will effectively wish the scene away, turning inward, draining the beer.
The line between the tables is redrawn, the mood at ours killed. We revive it elsewhere. What becomes of the young man
from Bethlehem remains his business.
Ducking southward of the boulevard: a pedestrian cut-through, connecting the Loop to the heart of campus, a wooded
path divorced from its surroundings in the manner of a nature trail but possessed of its own peculiar character, running
along an access road at the rear of homes, overlooking fences, Dumpsters, and garages.
The seclusion is interwoven with fellow students. Faces become familiar, nods, names exchanged—a heartening pat-
tern first, then vexing. I have lost my anonymity to expectations of acknowledgment, mainly by men, in which I am illit-
erate. I’m newly sprung from an education and a way of life concerning itself with a separation of the genders and the
preordainment of their roles. Out in the public sphere, I am compelled to coverage and demureness, to serve as dampener
of male lusts far wilder than mine. I’ve written off these teachings. They nag anyway, exhorting about signals I couldn’t but
drop, invitations I was surely seen to extend, contracts sealed in being congenial and by wearing pants instead of skirts.
Now when I pass familiar figures I affect rapt introspection, perceiving disappointment in return, offense, perplexity—or
nothing? How should I know?
I am taking an anthropology course, an obvious starting point for guidance in the human scene. I focus on the Middle
East, embarking from home. Even a survey of the Jews of Israel beyond my sector would be charting territories I had only
started to toe, with adolescent stealth, before leaving. This course, anyway, deals with Arabs, toward whom I bear another
tenuous relationship, a neighboring experience, separate but felt.
I am a bit let down, therefore, when the professor emphasizes distance. She requires an objective language, strictly obser-
vational, and I accept the terms, until her zeal for objectivity proves specious. She cossets some groups just to trash another.
For we observe the Palestinians, so must look at the Israelis, and to my people she refers by—an obscenity! Colonialists.My blood boils. I brood at her audacity, the sanctimony of her tenured post in a higher institution of a society built by
the ruin of others. Still, I am less inclined toward confrontation than to going my own way, though there is a balance I can
strike here. The expository paper welcomes argument at a safe distance.
I’ll remember little of my paper. I’ll recall the sources. Those the professor has assigned are cheaply bound, like mani-
festos, skinny, stapled, covers papery, their colors, as I see them, baleful, militant: red, black, white, green. For balance, I
produce a salvage from my high-school book collection, mostly left behind, A Zionist Lexicon, thick and hardbound, the
dust cover a tribute to our flag and our men’s prayer shawls. I grab my prayer book.
The anthropologist won’t alter her position. My paper is slashed with disputations. My sources tickle her with dubiety.
The liturgy can’t ring in her with its euphonious bray. The Isaianic expectation that we “gather our scattered from among
the nations, and our dispersed from the hindparts of the earth,” doesn’t impress her as compelling, any more than our
unscattered part, the Jews fixed all along in our ancestral land, can lead her to the obvious conclusion: that an organ of a
body can’t be said to colonize it.
There is less at stake in the assignment than I judge, of course. Grade-wise, she credits me befitting my investment:
generously. Otherwise, her valuation doesn’t matter. That she classifies our replantation in our land as something other
than a blessed miracle cannot reverse the process.
Neither can my snapping into a familiar stance—defensive, filial—change the drift of my peregrination. I am away and
looking back to where that drift was under way.
The compulsory page count has impelled me past the question of nativity. I’ve weighed competing claims, including
but not limited to treatment of the land, its dereliction and development. Accounts don’t jibe; photographs clash. The
footage rolls in memory. At least the story of my small place on the controversial map manifests plainly, populated first by
ghostly characters, plagued by a soil they can’t tame, then by us, draining the swamps in order to prevail. The hour late, the
deadline nears, but I can’t wrap the damned thing up. Despite my loyal slant, I’m drawn inexorably another way, toward a
troubling gap: the faulty premise upon which this argument is built. Why not just point it out? You don’t decide a people’s
privilege to their soil based on your rating of their upkeep.
On this narrow point the anthropologist and I agree, leaving me thunderstruck. Of course, it’s lightning that strikes you.
Thunder remains distant. I’m alerted, anyway, to something not exactly here or now: the lagging grumble of a changing stance.
Naama Goldstein is the author of a short-story collection, The Place Will Comfort You. Born in in the U.S., she was brought up in the city of Petah Tikva, in Israel, and now lives in Boston with her husband and their son. She is at work on a novel.
I began keeping a journal when I was sixteen, with the beginning of
the Israeli occupation some fifty years ago. My world had collapsed.
It was filled with fear and uncertainty. In the West Bank, where I was
living, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War had resulted in few deaths and little
destruction of property, but it had shaken all certainties about my
present and my future. I wasn’t sure what sort of life would be pos-
sible under a military occupation. Keeping a diary helped me keep
pace with the tremendous changes under way and avoid being total-
ly bewildered. No less wrenching and confusing was the period after
the 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and
the P.L.O., known colloquially as the Oslo—for the Oslo Accords.
I’ve searched my journal entries for the period before the signing,
which took place on the White House lawn, but find no mention of
the Oslo negotiations. This is because these negotiations were carried
out under an unprecedented veil of secrecy. Instead, I was following
the earlier negotiations taking place in Washington, D.C. These had
started in 1991, with great jubilation, after the Madrid Peace Confer-
ence was followed by the bilateral negotiations in Washington be-
tween a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation and Israel. Like many
others, I believed that we were likely to see the end of occupation and
the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state next to Israel, and
that we were approaching a new era in which Palestinians would be
free from land confiscations, restrictions on movement, night raids,
and administrative detention. There was also a great sense of pride.
It was people’s sacrifice and resistance during the First Intifada, which
began at the end of 1987, that had brought Israel to the negotiation
table. Back then, I served as legal adviser to the Palestinian delega-
tion. I pursued this work with great enthusiasm. I felt confirmed in
my long-held belief that a negotiated settlement was the only path
to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, and that we could look
forward to a brighter future in which we would finally have the op-
portunity to develop our society and live in peace with our neighbors.
Unlike the negotiators in Oslo, who were all members of the P.L.O.
from outside the Occupied Territories, all the Palestinian delegates in
Washington were from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with advis-
ers from the diaspora. After every round of talks, they would report
to their compatriots everything that went on there. For three long
years, these negotiations proceeded without a word being mentioned
to the delegation that a separate avenue of negotiations was being
pursued in the Norwegian capital. The delegates were on their way
to Washington for another session when the news broke out that
a deal had been reached between Israel and the P.L.O. in Oslo. The
delegates, external advisers, the head of the delegation—all were as
surprised as the rest of the world, and felt terribly betrayed.
When the Oslo deal was announced in early September 1993
but before the terms of the agreement were known, I was in the
U.K. for the annual Edinburgh International Festival. I remember
my excitement when I opened the Guardian and learned that an
agreement had been reached. The paper published the text of the
Declaration of Principles in its entirety. I began reading the pream-
ble, which was like music to my ears: “The Government of the State
of Israel and the P.L.O. team...agree that it is time to put an end to
decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legit-
imate political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and
mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and com-
prehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the
agreed political process.”
❖
Gaza Strip, Rafah Refugee Camp, October 2003.
© Larry Tow
ell/Magnum
Photos.
A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
1312
I don’t get into that. Today the two of us are going nowhere fast, mired in rage and sass and mortified foot-shuffling,
the latter by my friends, who will take no side but will effectively wish the scene away, turning inward, draining the beer.
The line between the tables is redrawn, the mood at ours killed. We revive it elsewhere. What becomes of the young man
from Bethlehem remains his business.
Ducking southward of the boulevard: a pedestrian cut-through, connecting the Loop to the heart of campus, a wooded
path divorced from its surroundings in the manner of a nature trail but possessed of its own peculiar character, running
along an access road at the rear of homes, overlooking fences, Dumpsters, and garages.
The seclusion is interwoven with fellow students. Faces become familiar, nods, names exchanged—a heartening pat-
tern first, then vexing. I have lost my anonymity to expectations of acknowledgment, mainly by men, in which I am illit-
erate. I’m newly sprung from an education and a way of life concerning itself with a separation of the genders and the
preordainment of their roles. Out in the public sphere, I am compelled to coverage and demureness, to serve as dampener
of male lusts far wilder than mine. I’ve written off these teachings. They nag anyway, exhorting about signals I couldn’t but
drop, invitations I was surely seen to extend, contracts sealed in being congenial and by wearing pants instead of skirts.
Now when I pass familiar figures I affect rapt introspection, perceiving disappointment in return, offense, perplexity—or
nothing? How should I know?
I am taking an anthropology course, an obvious starting point for guidance in the human scene. I focus on the Middle
East, embarking from home. Even a survey of the Jews of Israel beyond my sector would be charting territories I had only
started to toe, with adolescent stealth, before leaving. This course, anyway, deals with Arabs, toward whom I bear another
tenuous relationship, a neighboring experience, separate but felt.
I am a bit let down, therefore, when the professor emphasizes distance. She requires an objective language, strictly obser-
vational, and I accept the terms, until her zeal for objectivity proves specious. She cossets some groups just to trash another.
For we observe the Palestinians, so must look at the Israelis, and to my people she refers by—an obscenity! Colonialists.My blood boils. I brood at her audacity, the sanctimony of her tenured post in a higher institution of a society built by
the ruin of others. Still, I am less inclined toward confrontation than to going my own way, though there is a balance I can
strike here. The expository paper welcomes argument at a safe distance.
I’ll remember little of my paper. I’ll recall the sources. Those the professor has assigned are cheaply bound, like mani-
festos, skinny, stapled, covers papery, their colors, as I see them, baleful, militant: red, black, white, green. For balance, I
produce a salvage from my high-school book collection, mostly left behind, A Zionist Lexicon, thick and hardbound, the
dust cover a tribute to our flag and our men’s prayer shawls. I grab my prayer book.
The anthropologist won’t alter her position. My paper is slashed with disputations. My sources tickle her with dubiety.
The liturgy can’t ring in her with its euphonious bray. The Isaianic expectation that we “gather our scattered from among
the nations, and our dispersed from the hindparts of the earth,” doesn’t impress her as compelling, any more than our
unscattered part, the Jews fixed all along in our ancestral land, can lead her to the obvious conclusion: that an organ of a
body can’t be said to colonize it.
There is less at stake in the assignment than I judge, of course. Grade-wise, she credits me befitting my investment:
generously. Otherwise, her valuation doesn’t matter. That she classifies our replantation in our land as something other
than a blessed miracle cannot reverse the process.
Neither can my snapping into a familiar stance—defensive, filial—change the drift of my peregrination. I am away and
looking back to where that drift was under way.
The compulsory page count has impelled me past the question of nativity. I’ve weighed competing claims, including
but not limited to treatment of the land, its dereliction and development. Accounts don’t jibe; photographs clash. The
footage rolls in memory. At least the story of my small place on the controversial map manifests plainly, populated first by
ghostly characters, plagued by a soil they can’t tame, then by us, draining the swamps in order to prevail. The hour late, the
deadline nears, but I can’t wrap the damned thing up. Despite my loyal slant, I’m drawn inexorably another way, toward a
troubling gap: the faulty premise upon which this argument is built. Why not just point it out? You don’t decide a people’s
privilege to their soil based on your rating of their upkeep.
On this narrow point the anthropologist and I agree, leaving me thunderstruck. Of course, it’s lightning that strikes you.
Thunder remains distant. I’m alerted, anyway, to something not exactly here or now: the lagging grumble of a changing stance.
Naama Goldstein is the author of a short-story collection, The Place Will Comfort You. Born in in the U.S., she was brought up in the city of Petah Tikva, in Israel, and now lives in Boston with her husband and their son. She is at work on a novel.
I began keeping a journal when I was sixteen, with the beginning of
the Israeli occupation some fifty years ago. My world had collapsed.
It was filled with fear and uncertainty. In the West Bank, where I was
living, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War had resulted in few deaths and little
destruction of property, but it had shaken all certainties about my
present and my future. I wasn’t sure what sort of life would be pos-
sible under a military occupation. Keeping a diary helped me keep
pace with the tremendous changes under way and avoid being total-
ly bewildered. No less wrenching and confusing was the period after
the 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and
the P.L.O., known colloquially as the Oslo—for the Oslo Accords.
I’ve searched my journal entries for the period before the signing,
which took place on the White House lawn, but find no mention of
the Oslo negotiations. This is because these negotiations were carried
out under an unprecedented veil of secrecy. Instead, I was following
the earlier negotiations taking place in Washington, D.C. These had
started in 1991, with great jubilation, after the Madrid Peace Confer-
ence was followed by the bilateral negotiations in Washington be-
tween a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation and Israel. Like many
others, I believed that we were likely to see the end of occupation and
the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state next to Israel, and
that we were approaching a new era in which Palestinians would be
free from land confiscations, restrictions on movement, night raids,
and administrative detention. There was also a great sense of pride.
It was people’s sacrifice and resistance during the First Intifada, which
began at the end of 1987, that had brought Israel to the negotiation
table. Back then, I served as legal adviser to the Palestinian delega-
tion. I pursued this work with great enthusiasm. I felt confirmed in
my long-held belief that a negotiated settlement was the only path
to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, and that we could look
forward to a brighter future in which we would finally have the op-
portunity to develop our society and live in peace with our neighbors.
Unlike the negotiators in Oslo, who were all members of the P.L.O.
from outside the Occupied Territories, all the Palestinian delegates in
Washington were from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with advis-
ers from the diaspora. After every round of talks, they would report
to their compatriots everything that went on there. For three long
years, these negotiations proceeded without a word being mentioned
to the delegation that a separate avenue of negotiations was being
pursued in the Norwegian capital. The delegates were on their way
to Washington for another session when the news broke out that
a deal had been reached between Israel and the P.L.O. in Oslo. The
delegates, external advisers, the head of the delegation—all were as
surprised as the rest of the world, and felt terribly betrayed.
When the Oslo deal was announced in early September 1993
but before the terms of the agreement were known, I was in the
U.K. for the annual Edinburgh International Festival. I remember
my excitement when I opened the Guardian and learned that an
agreement had been reached. The paper published the text of the
Declaration of Principles in its entirety. I began reading the pream-
ble, which was like music to my ears: “The Government of the State
of Israel and the P.L.O. team...agree that it is time to put an end to
decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legit-
imate political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and
mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and com-
prehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the
agreed political process.”
❖
Gaza Strip, Rafah Refugee Camp, October 2003.
© Larry Tow
ell/Magnum
Photos.
A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
1514
But everything that followed left me in despair. With my lawyer’s
mind, I tried to read through the articles of the Declaration to see
how they could possibly be interpreted as serving the interest of the
Palestinians. This gave me some hope. But when I reached the last
section, the Agreed Minutes, all hope dissipated. Every possible loop-
hole had been closed. As I found out later, this section was primarily
the work of the Israeli legal adviser, Joel Singer.
It was a fortunate happenstance that I was in Edinburgh and
could read the full text of the Declaration; the local Arabic newspa-
per in the Occupied Territories had published the Declaration minus
the Agreed Minutes. Four months after the Declaration was signed,
I took part in a conference on the various aspects—legal, political,
and economic—of the Oslo Accords in Jerusalem. When I quoted
from this section of the Declaration, the Palestinian attendees were
surprised and dismayed. They had not heard of the Agreed Minutes.
As time passed and more information began to trickle out about the
negotiations in Oslo, we were shocked to learn that the Palestinian
delegation did not employ the services of a legal adviser until the last
minute, at which point an Egyptian lawyer, Taher Shash, was flown
in from Cairo. He was shown a draft the night before the signing but
said that he couldn’t possibly offer his advice so quickly. The next day,
the signing took place.
At the airport, on my way back to Ramallah from the U.K., I met
Dr. Mamdouh Aker, one of the delegates returning from D.C. “Are
you not attending the signing ceremony?” I asked.
“Not at all,” he answered. “I am shocked and dismayed by the
Declaration and will not allow myself to be part of it.”
“What about Haidar Abdul-Shafi, the head of the delegation?” I
asked. “Will he be attending?”
“He’s gone home,” Mamdouh answered.
There was a different reaction among many of the young activ-
ists who had participated in the First Intifada, the largely nonviolent
resistance in which Palestinians, determined to bring an end to the
Israeli occupation, used stones and commercial strikes to drive the
soldiers out. One young man told a TV interviewer,“Yikhribit el Hijara”
(“Goddamn stones”), “we want peace.”
On October 31st, a month and a half after the Oslo was signed, I
reported to my journal: “Anger freezes, indignation freezes, self-righ-
teousness freezes, self-indulgence in pain and regret freezes. I don’t
want to be frozen.” I went on:
At times I cannot help myself. I burst off into a monologue in
which I rave at the stupidity of our leaders. Anyone observing what
the Israelis are doing could have anticipated what they were up to,
simply re-packaging rather than ending the occupation. Yesterday
I saw a photograph of Hassan Asfour sitting with General Amnon
Lipkin-Shahak [the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army] smiling
as though he was with a great lost friend. There is no dignity, nor
self-respect. But worst of all no likelihood that any aspect of our
future will be determined by us, because our leaders don’t have what
it takes.
The next day, a taxi driver with whom I was riding shared my
despair and, looking around, said, “Nothing has changed.”
The Palestinian delegation was composed of Palestinians from
the Occupied Territories who were not formal members of the P.L.O.
but whom the organization had approved. What I could not under-
stand was how the P.L.O. leadership in Tunis, where the organization
had established its headquarters after it was driven out of Lebanon in
1982, could sign the Declaration when it lacked the stipulation that
all settlement activities were to cease—and after having insisted to
the D.C. delegation that there could be no peace agreement without
such a condition. Only later did it become clear that the P.L.O. feared
that, with the growing popularity and the high profile of such mem-
bers as Hanan Ashrawi, the spokesperson of the delegation, and
Haidar Abdul-Shafi, the head of the delegation, a local leadership
might gain recognition and take control of the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip while the Tunis leadership, deemed “rejectionist,” was
sidestepped. The Israeli negotiators understood this very well and
exploited it to the full by extracting shameful concessions from the
P.L.O. leadership.
Today, thirty-five years later, little has changed. The occupation
has remained in place and the conflict has become ever more en-
trenched. With more than double the number of settlers we had
in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo negotiations, the viability
of the two-state solution—a Palestinian state alongside Israel—has
become questionable.
Euphoric from the Israelis’ victory in the 1967 War, Moshe Dayan,
Israel’s prime minister of defense, declared that Israel was now an
empire. It seemed that, even after twenty years, this conviction had
remained unshaken. The Israelis’ arrogance pervaded the negotia-
tions in the Norwegian capital. Instead of meeting the Palestinians
halfway in negotiating a peace settlement, the Israelis imposed a
document of surrender. But, in doing so, the Israeli negotiators and
their legal advisers failed to realize that what their country and their
people needed most was peace with its neighbors. The Oslo agree-
ment they helped negotiate never achieved this.
Perhaps the worst consequence of the Oslo Accord was that it
made the Palestinians ever more skeptical that negotiations with Is-
rael could lead to peace. It gave negotiations a bad name. It also led
the Israelis to believe that they could outsmart the Palestinians and
win a total victory over them. You only respect an enemy that stands
up and challenges your tactics. After the Oslo Accord, the Israelis
could live with the false illusion of having ultimately defeated the
Palestinians, leading Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister,
to declare, “At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be
a fence that spans it all. I’ll be told, ‘This is what you want, to protect
the villa?’ The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel
with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live
in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.”
Ramallah, April 2016
Raja Shehadeh is the author of the highly acclaimed Palestinian
Walks, A Rift in Time, Strangers in the House, and When the Birds
Stopped Singing. A Palestinian lawyer and writer who lives in Ra-
mallah, he is a founder of the pioneering human-rights organization
Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists.
“I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert
frontier of the Iraq.”
Scholar, mountaineer, photographer, writer, museum founder,
archaeologist, Arabist, explorer, linguist, poet, spy are all words
that describe Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell. But it is as a dip-
lomat in the difficult years during and after World War I, when
the Ottoman Empire was broken up and the British government
established its mandate in Mesopotamia, that Bell came into
her own. Serving as the Oriental secretary in Baghdad, she was
recognized as one of the most powerful women in the British
Empire. She was a friend to kings, nomads, and celebrities, in-
cluding T. E. Lawrence (the inspiration for the movie Lawrence of
Arabia), who had helped organize the Arab Revolt against the Ot-
toman Turks. She was a kingmaker, putting her friend Faisal on
the throne of Iraq and advising him on matters of governance.
She has been called the Mother of Iraq because of her, now con-
troversial, work drawing the borders of the country. The issues
Bell dealt with while “nation building” in Iraq would eerily be
repeated nearly a century later in the American debacle. In a
time and world where women did not hold positions of power
and could not travel freely, Gertrude Bell did both.
When I first read Bell’s book The Desert and the Sown, as a
teenager, I could see from the roof of my mud-brick house the
tents of the Egyptian Bedouin camped among the nearby fig
trees. I was mesmerized by the story of a woman from north-
ern England who had so completely embraced a foreign culture
and found a place on earth that spoke to her as no other place
did. I began to read about other women who journeyed far from
home and made important discoveries about the world as a re-
sult. Eventually I would write a book, Women of Discovery, about
women who often served as bridges between disparate worlds,
as Bell did. And, like Bell, I, too, would make journeys throughout
the Middle East, finding inspiration in life in the desert.
Gertrude Bell was born in 1874 to a wealthy English family
of industrialists and political leaders. Her grandfather Sir Isaac
Lowthian Bell owned iron factories and was a Liberal member
of Parliament. Her father, Sir Hugh, was a mayor, a justice of
the peace, and lord lieutenant of the North Riding in Yorkshire.
Bell, like most girls of her class, was tutored at home. But rather
than focus on making a good marriage, as most girls did then,
she persuaded her parents to let her attend college. At the age
of seventeen, she won one of the few spots reserved for women
at Oxford University, where she achieved a first in history in just
two years. In 1892, when she was twenty-three, she accepted
an invitation to journey to Persia to visit her uncle, who was
then the British ambassador in Tehran. This trip was a turning
point for her. Already facile in languages, speaking French, Ger-
man, and Italian, she now added Farsi. The publication of her
first books, Persian Pictures and The Garden of Heaven, a translation
of the poems of the medieval Persian poet Hafiz, marked the
beginning of her long association with the Levant. Before Bell re-
turned to the Middle East, she traveled around the world twice,
staying with diplomats and other influential friends of her par-
ents. She also became a noted mountaineer, making several first
summits in the Alps, where she learned to live rough—an ability
that would stand her in good stead on later desert expeditions.
Bell followed in the footsteps of a handful of earlier English-
women who fell in love with and wrote about the desert lands
and their peoples, among them Lady Anne Blunt, Freya Stark,
Isabel Burton, and Jane Digby. Traveling alone was never easy.
But when faced with a challenge these women were equal to
it. Bell declared once, having been told that travel in a region
was too dangerous, “British women are never afraid.” And she
went ahead. Freya Stark, an inveterate and witty traveler, once
remarked, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the
pleasantest sensations in the world.” I shared Bell’s feelings for
the desert when she wrote of Arabia, “What a world! The incred-
ible desolation…I think no one can travel here and come back
the same. It sets its seal upon you for good or ill.” It is important
for all of us to face the world with an open mind, to learn all we
can about what is there and come to terms with our own fears
in order to embrace difference.
Bell realized that if she was going to spend more time in the
Middle East she had to learn Arabic, so in 1899 she went to Jeru-
salem, which was then under the control of the Ottoman Turks.
When she wasn’t studying she traveled throughout Syria, spend-
ing some time with the Druze, an unusual ethnic group whose
teachings are a blend of Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Judaic, and
other religious beliefs, and visiting with nomads and sheikhs,
staying in tents and palaces. She became interested in archaeol-
ogy and made important discoveries, notably the ruined palace
of Ukhaidir. Her forays into Turkey, Syria, and Mesopotamia laid
the groundwork for her later political work. Forging a network
of relationships with Bedouin tribes throughout Mesopotamia
would become a vital asset.
In 1913, Bell set out on a dangerous expedition bound for the
interior of Arabia. Her goal was to meet the two rival sheikhs—
Ibn Rashid, in the remote desert fortress of Hail, and Ibn Saud,
in Riyadh—who had been battling for control of Arabia for years.
She had seventeen camels laden with gifts for all whom she en-
A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
1514
But everything that followed left me in despair. With my lawyer’s
mind, I tried to read through the articles of the Declaration to see
how they could possibly be interpreted as serving the interest of the
Palestinians. This gave me some hope. But when I reached the last
section, the Agreed Minutes, all hope dissipated. Every possible loop-
hole had been closed. As I found out later, this section was primarily
the work of the Israeli legal adviser, Joel Singer.
It was a fortunate happenstance that I was in Edinburgh and
could read the full text of the Declaration; the local Arabic newspa-
per in the Occupied Territories had published the Declaration minus
the Agreed Minutes. Four months after the Declaration was signed,
I took part in a conference on the various aspects—legal, political,
and economic—of the Oslo Accords in Jerusalem. When I quoted
from this section of the Declaration, the Palestinian attendees were
surprised and dismayed. They had not heard of the Agreed Minutes.
As time passed and more information began to trickle out about the
negotiations in Oslo, we were shocked to learn that the Palestinian
delegation did not employ the services of a legal adviser until the last
minute, at which point an Egyptian lawyer, Taher Shash, was flown
in from Cairo. He was shown a draft the night before the signing but
said that he couldn’t possibly offer his advice so quickly. The next day,
the signing took place.
At the airport, on my way back to Ramallah from the U.K., I met
Dr. Mamdouh Aker, one of the delegates returning from D.C. “Are
you not attending the signing ceremony?” I asked.
“Not at all,” he answered. “I am shocked and dismayed by the
Declaration and will not allow myself to be part of it.”
“What about Haidar Abdul-Shafi, the head of the delegation?” I
asked. “Will he be attending?”
“He’s gone home,” Mamdouh answered.
There was a different reaction among many of the young activ-
ists who had participated in the First Intifada, the largely nonviolent
resistance in which Palestinians, determined to bring an end to the
Israeli occupation, used stones and commercial strikes to drive the
soldiers out. One young man told a TV interviewer,“Yikhribit el Hijara”
(“Goddamn stones”), “we want peace.”
On October 31st, a month and a half after the Oslo was signed, I
reported to my journal: “Anger freezes, indignation freezes, self-righ-
teousness freezes, self-indulgence in pain and regret freezes. I don’t
want to be frozen.” I went on:
At times I cannot help myself. I burst off into a monologue in
which I rave at the stupidity of our leaders. Anyone observing what
the Israelis are doing could have anticipated what they were up to,
simply re-packaging rather than ending the occupation. Yesterday
I saw a photograph of Hassan Asfour sitting with General Amnon
Lipkin-Shahak [the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army] smiling
as though he was with a great lost friend. There is no dignity, nor
self-respect. But worst of all no likelihood that any aspect of our
future will be determined by us, because our leaders don’t have what
it takes.
The next day, a taxi driver with whom I was riding shared my
despair and, looking around, said, “Nothing has changed.”
The Palestinian delegation was composed of Palestinians from
the Occupied Territories who were not formal members of the P.L.O.
but whom the organization had approved. What I could not under-
stand was how the P.L.O. leadership in Tunis, where the organization
had established its headquarters after it was driven out of Lebanon in
1982, could sign the Declaration when it lacked the stipulation that
all settlement activities were to cease—and after having insisted to
the D.C. delegation that there could be no peace agreement without
such a condition. Only later did it become clear that the P.L.O. feared
that, with the growing popularity and the high profile of such mem-
bers as Hanan Ashrawi, the spokesperson of the delegation, and
Haidar Abdul-Shafi, the head of the delegation, a local leadership
might gain recognition and take control of the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip while the Tunis leadership, deemed “rejectionist,” was
sidestepped. The Israeli negotiators understood this very well and
exploited it to the full by extracting shameful concessions from the
P.L.O. leadership.
Today, thirty-five years later, little has changed. The occupation
has remained in place and the conflict has become ever more en-
trenched. With more than double the number of settlers we had
in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo negotiations, the viability
of the two-state solution—a Palestinian state alongside Israel—has
become questionable.
Euphoric from the Israelis’ victory in the 1967 War, Moshe Dayan,
Israel’s prime minister of defense, declared that Israel was now an
empire. It seemed that, even after twenty years, this conviction had
remained unshaken. The Israelis’ arrogance pervaded the negotia-
tions in the Norwegian capital. Instead of meeting the Palestinians
halfway in negotiating a peace settlement, the Israelis imposed a
document of surrender. But, in doing so, the Israeli negotiators and
their legal advisers failed to realize that what their country and their
people needed most was peace with its neighbors. The Oslo agree-
ment they helped negotiate never achieved this.
Perhaps the worst consequence of the Oslo Accord was that it
made the Palestinians ever more skeptical that negotiations with Is-
rael could lead to peace. It gave negotiations a bad name. It also led
the Israelis to believe that they could outsmart the Palestinians and
win a total victory over them. You only respect an enemy that stands
up and challenges your tactics. After the Oslo Accord, the Israelis
could live with the false illusion of having ultimately defeated the
Palestinians, leading Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister,
to declare, “At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be
a fence that spans it all. I’ll be told, ‘This is what you want, to protect
the villa?’ The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel
with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live
in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.”
Ramallah, April 2016
Raja Shehadeh is the author of the highly acclaimed Palestinian
Walks, A Rift in Time, Strangers in the House, and When the Birds
Stopped Singing. A Palestinian lawyer and writer who lives in Ra-
mallah, he is a founder of the pioneering human-rights organization
Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists.
“I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert
frontier of the Iraq.”
Scholar, mountaineer, photographer, writer, museum founder,
archaeologist, Arabist, explorer, linguist, poet, spy are all words
that describe Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell. But it is as a dip-
lomat in the difficult years during and after World War I, when
the Ottoman Empire was broken up and the British government
established its mandate in Mesopotamia, that Bell came into
her own. Serving as the Oriental secretary in Baghdad, she was
recognized as one of the most powerful women in the British
Empire. She was a friend to kings, nomads, and celebrities, in-
cluding T. E. Lawrence (the inspiration for the movie Lawrence of
Arabia), who had helped organize the Arab Revolt against the Ot-
toman Turks. She was a kingmaker, putting her friend Faisal on
the throne of Iraq and advising him on matters of governance.
She has been called the Mother of Iraq because of her, now con-
troversial, work drawing the borders of the country. The issues
Bell dealt with while “nation building” in Iraq would eerily be
repeated nearly a century later in the American debacle. In a
time and world where women did not hold positions of power
and could not travel freely, Gertrude Bell did both.
When I first read Bell’s book The Desert and the Sown, as a
teenager, I could see from the roof of my mud-brick house the
tents of the Egyptian Bedouin camped among the nearby fig
trees. I was mesmerized by the story of a woman from north-
ern England who had so completely embraced a foreign culture
and found a place on earth that spoke to her as no other place
did. I began to read about other women who journeyed far from
home and made important discoveries about the world as a re-
sult. Eventually I would write a book, Women of Discovery, about
women who often served as bridges between disparate worlds,
as Bell did. And, like Bell, I, too, would make journeys throughout
the Middle East, finding inspiration in life in the desert.
Gertrude Bell was born in 1874 to a wealthy English family
of industrialists and political leaders. Her grandfather Sir Isaac
Lowthian Bell owned iron factories and was a Liberal member
of Parliament. Her father, Sir Hugh, was a mayor, a justice of
the peace, and lord lieutenant of the North Riding in Yorkshire.
Bell, like most girls of her class, was tutored at home. But rather
than focus on making a good marriage, as most girls did then,
she persuaded her parents to let her attend college. At the age
of seventeen, she won one of the few spots reserved for women
at Oxford University, where she achieved a first in history in just
two years. In 1892, when she was twenty-three, she accepted
an invitation to journey to Persia to visit her uncle, who was
then the British ambassador in Tehran. This trip was a turning
point for her. Already facile in languages, speaking French, Ger-
man, and Italian, she now added Farsi. The publication of her
first books, Persian Pictures and The Garden of Heaven, a translation
of the poems of the medieval Persian poet Hafiz, marked the
beginning of her long association with the Levant. Before Bell re-
turned to the Middle East, she traveled around the world twice,
staying with diplomats and other influential friends of her par-
ents. She also became a noted mountaineer, making several first
summits in the Alps, where she learned to live rough—an ability
that would stand her in good stead on later desert expeditions.
Bell followed in the footsteps of a handful of earlier English-
women who fell in love with and wrote about the desert lands
and their peoples, among them Lady Anne Blunt, Freya Stark,
Isabel Burton, and Jane Digby. Traveling alone was never easy.
But when faced with a challenge these women were equal to
it. Bell declared once, having been told that travel in a region
was too dangerous, “British women are never afraid.” And she
went ahead. Freya Stark, an inveterate and witty traveler, once
remarked, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the
pleasantest sensations in the world.” I shared Bell’s feelings for
the desert when she wrote of Arabia, “What a world! The incred-
ible desolation…I think no one can travel here and come back
the same. It sets its seal upon you for good or ill.” It is important
for all of us to face the world with an open mind, to learn all we
can about what is there and come to terms with our own fears
in order to embrace difference.
Bell realized that if she was going to spend more time in the
Middle East she had to learn Arabic, so in 1899 she went to Jeru-
salem, which was then under the control of the Ottoman Turks.
When she wasn’t studying she traveled throughout Syria, spend-
ing some time with the Druze, an unusual ethnic group whose
teachings are a blend of Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Judaic, and
other religious beliefs, and visiting with nomads and sheikhs,
staying in tents and palaces. She became interested in archaeol-
ogy and made important discoveries, notably the ruined palace
of Ukhaidir. Her forays into Turkey, Syria, and Mesopotamia laid
the groundwork for her later political work. Forging a network
of relationships with Bedouin tribes throughout Mesopotamia
would become a vital asset.
In 1913, Bell set out on a dangerous expedition bound for the
interior of Arabia. Her goal was to meet the two rival sheikhs—
Ibn Rashid, in the remote desert fortress of Hail, and Ibn Saud,
in Riyadh—who had been battling for control of Arabia for years.
She had seventeen camels laden with gifts for all whom she en-
A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
1716
countered—French gowns, fur coats, crates of Wedgwood china,
crystal glassware, silverware, table linens, volumes of Shake-
speare, medical supplies, guns, cameras, and film. She loved the
desert and would in the coming years make more expeditions.
Returning to England, she brought back important intelligence
and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical So-
ciety.
World War I changed her life and brought her to the forefront
of statecraft. She was recruited for her first real job by the British
government, to serve as the liaison officer with the British forces
in Baghdad, reporting to the Arab Intelligence Bureau in Cairo. She
was the only female political officer in the British forces. As such,
she was actively involved in the British plans to instigate an Arab
revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which required her to travel
extensively, meeting with various tribal leaders to encourage their
resistance to the Turks. For her intelligence work, Bell was award-
ed the Commander of the Order of the British Empire medal.
In a situation oddly echoing that of the United States de-
cades later, when American troops entered Baghdad, overthrow-
ing Saddam Hussein, victorious British forces took Baghdad in
March of 1917, replacing the Ottoman Turks. The people of Mes-
opotamia were happy to throw off the yoke of the Turks but wary
of the British. Sir Percy Cox was charged with organizing the
newly acquired territories. He appointed Bell Oriental secretary
to the commissioner (himself) in Baghdad, a position that gave
her the power to direct local affairs. Because of her knowledge
of Arabic and her extensive contacts throughout Arabia, she was
well suited to the job.
In 1920, the people of the region revolted against the British.
Bell wrote to her mother, “We are now in the middle of a full-
blown jihad.” The situation was dire, and Bell recognized that
“the underlying truth of all criticism is...that we had promised
self-governing institutions and not only made no step towards
them but were busily setting up something entirely different.”
In 1921, in an effort to come to grips with a situation that was
rapidly descending into chaos, Winston Churchill convened a
select group of emissaries, including Bell, Sir Percy Cox, and T.
E. Lawrence in Cairo, to determine the future of the entire re-
gion, create the boundaries of the newly formed countries, and
appoint new leadership. Iraq was created from the former Ot-
toman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The new ruler
would be a king, and the British choice was Faisal, the son of
the sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, who had led the Arab Re-
volt against the Ottomans. Faisal had never been in Iraq prior to
his 1921 crowning and was heavily dependent on Bell to intro-
duce him to all the important people. She was instrumental in
establishing the new pro-British government, designing its flag,
drafting many of its laws, and, particularly, overseeing the cre-
ation of laws to ensure the education of women. Given her role
in helping Iraqi women, Bell, surprisingly for such an indepen-
dent woman, was active in the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage
League in London. Despite the fact that she wielded great power
in the Middle East, she did not believe that women should have
that ability at home.
The region, then as now, was unhappy with foreign control
over the king and the country, and there was infighting among
Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias. The people were resentful of the
Bristish who had arbitrarily established boundaries which cut
through tribal regions, installed a pro-Western foreign sovereign,
and drafted new laws. They were also angered by what was con-
sidered to be roughshod bombing by the Royal Air Force during
the 1920 rebellion. Bell wrote, “There’s no getting out of the con-
clusion that we have made an immense failure here. The system
must have been far more at fault than anything that I or anyone
else suspected. It will have to be fundamentally changed and
what that may mean exactly I don’t know...No one knows exact-
ly what they do want, least of all themselves, except that they
don’t want us.”
Some of her colleagues, including Lawrence, resigned in dis-
gust over British policies. Bell herself was sidelined as she sided
with Faisal, who wanted the British to leave. In 1923, because of
her knowledge of archaeological sites throughout the region, she
was appointed Iraq’s director of antiquities. She was in charge of
allocating permits to dig at sites, visited the excavations, made
reports, and, most important, ensured that half of all the collec-
tions remained in Iraq. One of her greatest accomplishments was
the creation of the Iraqi Archaeological Museum in Baghdad. Bell
was involved in every aspect of the museum’s construction, from
the design of the building to the cases that housed the collec-
tions; she also collected and restored artifacts. When she died,
she left fifty thousand pounds to the museum, a substantial sum
at the time, to ensure that the work would be continued.
The year 1926 was not a good one for Bell. She was lonely. As
a woman of authority in a male-dominated society, she faced
many challenges, and what suffered most was her personal life.
She never married. She had two suitors, both of whom had died.
One was deemed inadequate by her family; the other was mar-
ried and fell at the Battle of Gallipoli. She was disheartened by
the latest insurrection against the British-Iraqi regime, and ex-
hausted from the grueling hours spent organizing the museum.
Depressed, in the heavy heat of summer, Bell took her own life
with an overdose of sleeping pills. She was buried in Baghdad.
Her vast archive detailing this volatile period of emerging na-
tionhood in Mesopotamia consisted of numerous books, thou-
sands of letters and photographs, journals, and other papers.
Her prescient words should have been heeded by the leaders of
our own time, as we, too, tried to impose our will on Iraq: “We
are largely suffering from circumstances over which we couldn’t
have had any control. The wild drive of discontented national-
ism…and of discontented Islam…might have proved too much
for us however far-seeing we had been; but that doesn’t excuse
us for having been blind.”
Gertrude Bell’s legacy was her ability to immerse herself in a
foreign culture, to listen and understand the often complicated
situations that arose, and work toward solutions. She was brave
and relentless, accepting new challenges and forging ahead un-
til her death.
Milbry Polk co-founded and was the executive director of Wings World-
Quest, which is dedicated to supporting women on the cutting edge
of science and discovery. She is the curator of the World Exploration
Summit, and has been on expeditions in the Middle East, the Arctic,
and Asia. She has written several books, including Women of Dis-
covery, and edited many more. She is the recipient of the Captain J. E.
Bernier Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Anne
Morrow Lindbergh Award, and the Environmental Leadership Award
from Unity College; she is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical
Society, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Explorers Club, where
she serves on the board of directors.
Gertrude Bell in Egypt between Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. Faisal ibn Husayn, the first king of Iraq, and Gertrude Bell picnic in 1921 near Ctesiphon.
Photos courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.
Photo left: Pers_F_003. Photo right: Pers_B_018.
1716
countered—French gowns, fur coats, crates of Wedgwood china,
crystal glassware, silverware, table linens, volumes of Shake-
speare, medical supplies, guns, cameras, and film. She loved the
desert and would in the coming years make more expeditions.
Returning to England, she brought back important intelligence
and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical So-
ciety.
World War I changed her life and brought her to the forefront
of statecraft. She was recruited for her first real job by the British
government, to serve as the liaison officer with the British forces
in Baghdad, reporting to the Arab Intelligence Bureau in Cairo. She
was the only female political officer in the British forces. As such,
she was actively involved in the British plans to instigate an Arab
revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which required her to travel
extensively, meeting with various tribal leaders to encourage their
resistance to the Turks. For her intelligence work, Bell was award-
ed the Commander of the Order of the British Empire medal.
In a situation oddly echoing that of the United States de-
cades later, when American troops entered Baghdad, overthrow-
ing Saddam Hussein, victorious British forces took Baghdad in
March of 1917, replacing the Ottoman Turks. The people of Mes-
opotamia were happy to throw off the yoke of the Turks but wary
of the British. Sir Percy Cox was charged with organizing the
newly acquired territories. He appointed Bell Oriental secretary
to the commissioner (himself) in Baghdad, a position that gave
her the power to direct local affairs. Because of her knowledge
of Arabic and her extensive contacts throughout Arabia, she was
well suited to the job.
In 1920, the people of the region revolted against the British.
Bell wrote to her mother, “We are now in the middle of a full-
blown jihad.” The situation was dire, and Bell recognized that
“the underlying truth of all criticism is...that we had promised
self-governing institutions and not only made no step towards
them but were busily setting up something entirely different.”
In 1921, in an effort to come to grips with a situation that was
rapidly descending into chaos, Winston Churchill convened a
select group of emissaries, including Bell, Sir Percy Cox, and T.
E. Lawrence in Cairo, to determine the future of the entire re-
gion, create the boundaries of the newly formed countries, and
appoint new leadership. Iraq was created from the former Ot-
toman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The new ruler
would be a king, and the British choice was Faisal, the son of
the sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, who had led the Arab Re-
volt against the Ottomans. Faisal had never been in Iraq prior to
his 1921 crowning and was heavily dependent on Bell to intro-
duce him to all the important people. She was instrumental in
establishing the new pro-British government, designing its flag,
drafting many of its laws, and, particularly, overseeing the cre-
ation of laws to ensure the education of women. Given her role
in helping Iraqi women, Bell, surprisingly for such an indepen-
dent woman, was active in the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage
League in London. Despite the fact that she wielded great power
in the Middle East, she did not believe that women should have
that ability at home.
The region, then as now, was unhappy with foreign control
over the king and the country, and there was infighting among
Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias. The people were resentful of the
Bristish who had arbitrarily established boundaries which cut
through tribal regions, installed a pro-Western foreign sovereign,
and drafted new laws. They were also angered by what was con-
sidered to be roughshod bombing by the Royal Air Force during
the 1920 rebellion. Bell wrote, “There’s no getting out of the con-
clusion that we have made an immense failure here. The system
must have been far more at fault than anything that I or anyone
else suspected. It will have to be fundamentally changed and
what that may mean exactly I don’t know...No one knows exact-
ly what they do want, least of all themselves, except that they
don’t want us.”
Some of her colleagues, including Lawrence, resigned in dis-
gust over British policies. Bell herself was sidelined as she sided
with Faisal, who wanted the British to leave. In 1923, because of
her knowledge of archaeological sites throughout the region, she
was appointed Iraq’s director of antiquities. She was in charge of
allocating permits to dig at sites, visited the excavations, made
reports, and, most important, ensured that half of all the collec-
tions remained in Iraq. One of her greatest accomplishments was
the creation of the Iraqi Archaeological Museum in Baghdad. Bell
was involved in every aspect of the museum’s construction, from
the design of the building to the cases that housed the collec-
tions; she also collected and restored artifacts. When she died,
she left fifty thousand pounds to the museum, a substantial sum
at the time, to ensure that the work would be continued.
The year 1926 was not a good one for Bell. She was lonely. As
a woman of authority in a male-dominated society, she faced
many challenges, and what suffered most was her personal life.
She never married. She had two suitors, both of whom had died.
One was deemed inadequate by her family; the other was mar-
ried and fell at the Battle of Gallipoli. She was disheartened by
the latest insurrection against the British-Iraqi regime, and ex-
hausted from the grueling hours spent organizing the museum.
Depressed, in the heavy heat of summer, Bell took her own life
with an overdose of sleeping pills. She was buried in Baghdad.
Her vast archive detailing this volatile period of emerging na-
tionhood in Mesopotamia consisted of numerous books, thou-
sands of letters and photographs, journals, and other papers.
Her prescient words should have been heeded by the leaders of
our own time, as we, too, tried to impose our will on Iraq: “We
are largely suffering from circumstances over which we couldn’t
have had any control. The wild drive of discontented national-
ism…and of discontented Islam…might have proved too much
for us however far-seeing we had been; but that doesn’t excuse
us for having been blind.”
Gertrude Bell’s legacy was her ability to immerse herself in a
foreign culture, to listen and understand the often complicated
situations that arose, and work toward solutions. She was brave
and relentless, accepting new challenges and forging ahead un-
til her death.
Milbry Polk co-founded and was the executive director of Wings World-
Quest, which is dedicated to supporting women on the cutting edge
of science and discovery. She is the curator of the World Exploration
Summit, and has been on expeditions in the Middle East, the Arctic,
and Asia. She has written several books, including Women of Dis-
covery, and edited many more. She is the recipient of the Captain J. E.
Bernier Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Anne
Morrow Lindbergh Award, and the Environmental Leadership Award
from Unity College; she is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical
Society, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Explorers Club, where
she serves on the board of directors.
Gertrude Bell in Egypt between Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. Faisal ibn Husayn, the first king of Iraq, and Gertrude Bell picnic in 1921 near Ctesiphon.
Photos courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University.
Photo left: Pers_F_003. Photo right: Pers_B_018.
A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
19
People negotiate every day—with their children, their partners, their bosses, even with themselves. You were probably involved in five negotiations today. But you may not always recognize these inter-actions as negotiations. If the word “yes” is involved, you are in a negotiation. If you want someone to say “yes,” or someone is trying to get you to say “yes,” you are in a negotiation. If you want some-one to do something, or that person wants you to do something, you are in a negotiation.
Money isn’t the only commodity of a negotiation. The commod-ity that is always involved is time. And, to paraphrase the best line from the movie Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps, “Money is not the prime asset in life. Time is.”
So how do we become our own best guardians of this resource? By negotiating? And isn’t negotiation verbal conflict, and isn’t con-flict bad? We generally fear conflict. As a result, we forgo useful ar-guments out of fear that the tone will escalate into a personal attack that we can’t handle. People in close relationships often avoid mak-ing their own interests known and, instead, compromise across the board so that they will not be perceived as greedy or self-interested. We fold, we grow bitter, and we grow apart. We’ve all heard of mar-riages that ended in divorce even though the couple never fought.
Families are just an extreme version of all parts of humanity, from government to business. Almost everyone hates negotiation at first. Your hands sweat, your fight-or-flight response kicks in (with a strong emphasis on flight), and your thoughts trip drunkenly over themselves. For most of us, the natural impulse is to chicken out, throw in the towel, run. The mere idea of tossing out an anchor is traumatic. That’s why wimp-win deals are the norm both in the kitchen and in the boardroom.
But stop and think about that. Are we really afraid of the guy across the table? I can promise you that, with very few exceptions, he’s not going to reach over and slug you. No, our sweaty palms are just a physiological expression of fear, a few trigger-happy neurons firing because of something more primal: our innate human desire to get along with other members of the tribe. It’s not the guy across the table who scares us; it’s conflict itself.
I hope to get you over that fear of conflict and encourage you to navigate it with empathy. If you’re going to be great at anything—a great negotiator, a great manager, a great husband, a great wife–-you’re going to have to do that. You’re going to have to ignore that little genie who’s telling you to give up, to just get along, as well as that other genie who’s telling you to lash out and yell. You’re going to have to embrace regular, thoughtful conflict as the basis of effective negotiation—and of life. I view negotiation as an effort to uncover value, period. Not to strong-arm or to humiliate. The adver-sary is the situation, and the person you appear to be in conflict with is actually your partner.
More than a little research has shown that genuine, honest con-flict between people over their goals actually helps energize the problem-solving process in a collaborative way. Skilled negotiators have a talent for using conflict to keep the negotiation going with-out stumbling into a personal battle.
Remember, pushing hard for what you believe is not selfish. It is not bullying. It is not just helping you. Your amygdala, the part of
the brain that processes fear, will try to persuade you to give up, to flee, because the other guy is right, or you’re being cruel. But if you are an honest, decent person looking for a reasonable outcome, you can ignore the amygdala.
One of my all-time favorite negotiations was between a husband and his wife, over a Christmas tree. The husband wanted an artificial tree. He had marshaled all his logical reasons: you pay for it once; you know every year what it’s going to look like; you don’t have to go shopping for it year after year; it won’t catch fire; it will never be a safety hazard; no needles to clean up; no disposal problems when it’s time to take it down; and the dog won’t want to mark it.
His wife didn’t want to accept his reasoning and wouldn’t agree. He couldn’t get her to listen, no matter how he laid things out. As he was racking his brains wondering what she was thinking, he reverted to a skill I teach that is designed to uncover what’s making someone unreasonable, as opposed to trying to overcome the per-son’s unreasonableness.
“It seems like you must have had real trees growing up,” he said. The reply surged from her: “Yes! I want our kids to have the same family memories of Christmas happiness that I have. I can still feel the warmth and love of my family whenever I smell a real tree.”
They got a real tree.Negotiating, as I learned it as a hostage negotiator and as I teach
it for life, has discovery as a critical element. But, that’s not how most people approach a conflict. Most people approach it along the lines of how the great negotiator Herb Cohen defined it in his 1980 book You Can Negotiate Anything. Cohen defined negotiation as “the use of power and information to affect behavior within a web of ten-sion.” Note that this is “the use of information,” not the gathering of information.
People approach negotiation as if they have the relevant facts and the conclusions they’ve reached are rock solid. They tend to feel that anything they don’t know isn’t important or they would be aware of it.
Yet if we give this scenario any thought at all, we have to ac-knowledge that it’s pretty much impossible. Have you ever been involved in a negotiation when you didn’t have cards you were con-cealing? Were you ever involved in a negotiation in which there were no facts about the circumstances, or your personal situation, that would affect the outcome if your counterpart knew them? Well, if that’s true for you, it’s true for everyone you’ve ever faced. Everyone has cards they’re not showing.
There’s an evolved aspect to the empathy that I teach in my book Never Split the Difference. It’s different enough that I call it “tactical empathy,” and, instead of the verbal judo that appears to be in play, it’s really “listener’s judo.” Hostage negotiators instinctively learn to listen for certain things—the recent triggers, the positives and the negatives. If someone is talking to a hostage negotiator there is al-most always a recent strong trigger, and that trigger always involves loss. We come to learn that if we can defuse the impact of that loss people will often right themselves and begin to cooperate.
Armed with this tactical empathy and a knowledge of what to look for in business deals, I’ve found that the emotional reasons for
Photograph © Tam
ar Cohen.
A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
19
People negotiate every day—with their children, their partners, their bosses, even with themselves. You were probably involved in five negotiations today. But you may not always recognize these inter-actions as negotiations. If the word “yes” is involved, you are in a negotiation. If you want someone to say “yes,” or someone is trying to get you to say “yes,” you are in a negotiation. If you want some-one to do something, or that person wants you to do something, you are in a negotiation.
Money isn’t the only commodity of a negotiation. The commod-ity that is always involved is time. And, to paraphrase the best line from the movie Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps, “Money is not the prime asset in life. Time is.”
So how do we become our own best guardians of this resource? By negotiating? And isn’t negotiation verbal conflict, and isn’t con-flict bad? We generally fear conflict. As a result, we forgo useful ar-guments out of fear that the tone will escalate into a personal attack that we can’t handle. People in close relationships often avoid mak-ing their own interests known and, instead, compromise across the board so that they will not be perceived as greedy or self-interested. We fold, we grow bitter, and we grow apart. We’ve all heard of mar-riages that ended in divorce even though the couple never fought.
Families are just an extreme version of all parts of humanity, from government to business. Almost everyone hates negotiation at first. Your hands sweat, your fight-or-flight response kicks in (with a strong emphasis on flight), and your thoughts trip drunkenly over themselves. For most of us, the natural impulse is to chicken out, throw in the towel, run. The mere idea of tossing out an anchor is traumatic. That’s why wimp-win deals are the norm both in the kitchen and in the boardroom.
But stop and think about that. Are we really afraid of the guy across the table? I can promise you that, with very few exceptions, he’s not going to reach over and slug you. No, our sweaty palms are just a physiological expression of fear, a few trigger-happy neurons firing because of something more primal: our innate human desire to get along with other members of the tribe. It’s not the guy across the table who scares us; it’s conflict itself.
I hope to get you over that fear of conflict and encourage you to navigate it with empathy. If you’re going to be great at anything—a great negotiator, a great manager, a great husband, a great wife–-you’re going to have to do that. You’re going to have to ignore that little genie who’s telling you to give up, to just get along, as well as that other genie who’s telling you to lash out and yell. You’re going to have to embrace regular, thoughtful conflict as the basis of effective negotiation—and of life. I view negotiation as an effort to uncover value, period. Not to strong-arm or to humiliate. The adver-sary is the situation, and the person you appear to be in conflict with is actually your partner.
More than a little research has shown that genuine, honest con-flict between people over their goals actually helps energize the problem-solving process in a collaborative way. Skilled negotiators have a talent for using conflict to keep the negotiation going with-out stumbling into a personal battle.
Remember, pushing hard for what you believe is not selfish. It is not bullying. It is not just helping you. Your amygdala, the part of
the brain that processes fear, will try to persuade you to give up, to flee, because the other guy is right, or you’re being cruel. But if you are an honest, decent person looking for a reasonable outcome, you can ignore the amygdala.
One of my all-time favorite negotiations was between a husband and his wife, over a Christmas tree. The husband wanted an artificial tree. He had marshaled all his logical reasons: you pay for it once; you know every year what it’s going to look like; you don’t have to go shopping for it year after year; it won’t catch fire; it will never be a safety hazard; no needles to clean up; no disposal problems when it’s time to take it down; and the dog won’t want to mark it.
His wife didn’t want to accept his reasoning and wouldn’t agree. He couldn’t get her to listen, no matter how he laid things out. As he was racking his brains wondering what she was thinking, he reverted to a skill I teach that is designed to uncover what’s making someone unreasonable, as opposed to trying to overcome the per-son’s unreasonableness.
“It seems like you must have had real trees growing up,” he said. The reply surged from her: “Yes! I want our kids to have the same family memories of Christmas happiness that I have. I can still feel the warmth and love of my family whenever I smell a real tree.”
They got a real tree.Negotiating, as I learned it as a hostage negotiator and as I teach
it for life, has discovery as a critical element. But, that’s not how most people approach a conflict. Most people approach it along the lines of how the great negotiator Herb Cohen defined it in his 1980 book You Can Negotiate Anything. Cohen defined negotiation as “the use of power and information to affect behavior within a web of ten-sion.” Note that this is “the use of information,” not the gathering of information.
People approach negotiation as if they have the relevant facts and the conclusions they’ve reached are rock solid. They tend to feel that anything they don’t know isn’t important or they would be aware of it.
Yet if we give this scenario any thought at all, we have to ac-knowledge that it’s pretty much impossible. Have you ever been involved in a negotiation when you didn’t have cards you were con-cealing? Were you ever involved in a negotiation in which there were no facts about the circumstances, or your personal situation, that would affect the outcome if your counterpart knew them? Well, if that’s true for you, it’s true for everyone you’ve ever faced. Everyone has cards they’re not showing.
There’s an evolved aspect to the empathy that I teach in my book Never Split the Difference. It’s different enough that I call it “tactical empathy,” and, instead of the verbal judo that appears to be in play, it’s really “listener’s judo.” Hostage negotiators instinctively learn to listen for certain things—the recent triggers, the positives and the negatives. If someone is talking to a hostage negotiator there is al-most always a recent strong trigger, and that trigger always involves loss. We come to learn that if we can defuse the impact of that loss people will often right themselves and begin to cooperate.
Armed with this tactical empathy and a knowledge of what to look for in business deals, I’ve found that the emotional reasons for
Photograph © Tam
ar Cohen.
A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
2120
This spring Einat Admony, the chef and own-er of Balaboosta, Bar Bolonat, and the Taïm restaurants in New York City, sat down with our editor, Alexis Gargagliano, in Balaboosta, surrounded by happy people eating delicious Middle Eastern food, to talk about Israeli cui-sine and food as a bridge between people.
Alexis Gargagliano: Would you tell me a lit-tle about Israeli cuisine?Einat Admony: It’s a very young cuisine. We always debate if there is even really an Israeli cuisine, but apparently there is. (Laughs) Everybody talks about Israeli cui-sine now, and everybody’s so excited about it. But there are a lot of things that we cook that people say are not Israeli—ingredi-ents and dishes that we’ve adapted from a neighbor, or from the melting pot we have in Israel. Israel is a young country with so many different ethnicities, including Jews who come from all around the world.
So every Jewish family cooks different foods. For instance, my mom is Iranian. The Iranian Jews have different foods from most Iranians because of the kosher restrictions and not cooking on Shabbat. I’ve found that with Americans—and it’s changing today a little bit—what people think is Israeli cuisine or Jewish cuisine is Ashkenazi cuisine. And it doesn’t compare with the richness of Mid-dle Eastern cuisine—a Jewish cuisine, which was brought to Israel from Iraq and Morocco. So it’s nice that it’s changing, and I’m really happy to be one of the people in New York who have been changing it slowly, for years now—showing people what kibbe is (meat-stuffed dumplings), and a real couscous that I’m doing at Bar Bolonat, like, a three-hour couscous and not an instant, and all these kinds of things. It’s very exciting for me to move beyond what you know and expect. So, yes, Israel is a young country that’s still look-ing at itself—you know, still finding itself. But we have amazing food, I have to say. We
know a lot about ingredients. We know how to treat vegetables like nobody else. AG: Really? How so?EA: Oh, totally. Like the cauliflower—I’ve gotten so many customers who’ve said they never liked cauliflower until they came here. That’s because of the way we treat it. We have enough acid, we have balance. We have, sometimes, sweet. You have the tahini on top. I don’t do tahini here, but at Bolonat I’m doing peanuts, tahini, and Bamba, so it’s very different. I also cook broccoli, and what can you do with brocco-li? So we blanch it with the stems and we grill it, and then we do roasted-red-pepper tahini and pickled chili. It’s beautiful.
Israeli cuisine is a collaboration with a lot of different ethnicities and a lot of adap-tation from the Middle East. I used to put on the menu “Israeli hummus,” or whatever, and an Arab or Palestinian customer would say, “But that’s not yours. Since when have you
not doing business with someone will always block the gains that could be made. Defuse those negatives and the positives may just take over and clinch the deal for you.
One of my students, Ryan, was flying from Baltimore to Austin, Texas. Due to a lightning storm in the area, Baltimore–Washington International Airport was shut down for about five hours. It became apparent that Ryan would miss his connection at Dallas/Fort Worth.
He called American Airlines and was automatically rebooked on a 3 P.M. flight the following day. He knew that there was a later flight leaving Dallas/Fort Worth that evening, but the ticket agent said the flight was full and that the earliest he would be able to get into Austin was Friday.
After the delay, Ryan finally arrived at Dallas/Fort Worth a little after 8 P.M. He hustled to the gate where the final flight to Austin was departing. As he waited in line, he could hear a heated conversation between the couple in front of him and the gate agent. The agent told the couple that there was “nothing she could do.” The couple continued to yell for a while but finally gave up and moved on.
Ryan stepped up to the counter. “Hi, I’m Ryan,” he said. “It seems like they were pretty upset.”
The agent, whose nametag said Wendy, told him that the couple had missed their connection, and then said something along the lines of “We’ve had a fair amount of delays because of the weather.”
“The weather?” Ryan said.Wendy explained that multiple airports in the Northeast had ex-
perienced delays due to weather conditions. “It’s rippled through the system.”
“It seems like it’s been a hectic day.”She opened up, telling Ryan about all the irritated customers she
had to cope with. She said that a lot of people were trying to get to Texas for the two big college games and every flight into Austin had been booked solid.
“Booked solid?”She told Ryan that every flight was sold out through the week-
end, but that the weather was likely to “reroute a lot of people through a lot of different places.” Wendy finally got around to ask-ing, “So, how can I help you?”
“Look, it seems like you’ve been handling the rough day pret-ty well,” Ryan said. “I was also affected by the weather delays and missed my connecting flight. I realize this flight is likely booked solid. However, it also makes sense that someone affected by the weather might miss this connection. Is there any possibility that a seat will open up?”
Wendy said nothing, but she began typing on her computer. Ryan kept quiet. After about a minute, she printed a boarding pass and handed it to him, explaining that there were a few seats that were supposed to be filled by people who would now arrive much later than the flight’s scheduled departure. She also placed him in the Economy Plus class (which generally includes an upcharge), and mentioned that it was “all taken care of.”
Ryan’s tactical empathy was concise and relaxed. He used it to allow the possibilities of the situation to come to him by defusing the barriers. People often find themselves opening up in unexpect-ed ways to mirrors, or individuals who pick up the inflections or
wording of the person they are talking to. Often, the person doing the mirroring will repeat the last one to three words spoken by the person with whom he’s having a conversation.
At a Chase Bank in Brooklyn, in 1993, I mirrored a bank robber who was holding hostages. He blurted out details about a getaway driver whom we had no knowledge of at the time. That sponta-neous admission led to the driver’s conviction.
My negotiation approach is derived from the eight F.B.I. hostage- negotiation skills, or the F.B.I. 8. Every single hostage-negotiation team on the planet uses these skills. The hostage-negotiation team in Tokyo, Japan, the hostage negotiation team in Cape Town, South Africa, and the hostage negotiation team in Newark, New Jersey, all use them. These skills work across the planet because they’re de-signed to appeal to us as humans, and that’s what we are, first and foremost: human beings.
The diagnostic manuals used by mental-health professionals worldwide aren’t categorized by ethnicity, culture, or skin color. There isn’t a separate set of criteria for people from the United States versus people from Korea. That’s not to say that culture doesn’t come into play. But most people who are looking for cultural short-cuts—or “hacks,” according to common usage—are really seeking to stick to their own approach and get around the basic process of showing empathy and respect. With empathy and respect, you can overcome the cultural mistakes everyone is bound to make. And you don’t have to be from another country to make cultural mistakes. Just ask an IBM salesperson what it’s like to negotiate with an IBM computer programmer.
So these skills are fairly universal. The same set of skills can be applied whether you’re dealing with your neighbor or navigating peace in the Middle East. It’s even possible to negotiate with your kids, though there are obvious limitations when you consider, for example, that a toddler’s emotions are just being formed, and who knows what’s happening in the emotional life of a teenager?
I do know that the skill of mirroring has been used successfully with nine-year-olds. And I used tactical empathy with my eighteen-year-old football-playing son to get him to listen to me and make a critical change in how he was playing linebacker.
So I’m going to leave you with one request: whether it’s in the office or around the family dinner table, don’t avoid honest, clear conflict. Engaging in it will get you the best car price, the higher salary, and the largest donation. It will also save your marriage, your friendship, and your family.
One can be an exceptional negotiator, and a great person, only by both listening and speaking clearly and empathetically, by treat-ing one’s counterparts—and oneself—with dignity and respect, and, most of all, by being honest about what one wants and what one can—and cannot—do. Every negotiation, every conversation, every moment of life is a series of small conflicts that, managed well, can rise to creative beauty. Embrace them.
Chris Voss is the founder of the Black Swan Group, a negotiation advisory firm that has achieved marked success with hostage-nego-tiation strategies. He is a former F.B.I. lead international-kidnapping negotiator and the author of the book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It, which was recently pub-lished by HarperBusiness.
Drawing by Nicole Appel. LETC/LAND Gallery, Brooklyn, New
York.
A CUISINE OF COLLABORATION:AN INTERVIEW WITH EINAT ADMONY
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY:AN INTERVIEW WITH MONA JUUL
THE ART OF NEGOTIATION By Chris Voss
THE PEACE THATENDED PEACE By Raja Shehadeh
CHRONOLOGY
THE LOVE OFDESERT LANDS
A FEASTFOR PEACE
YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE: DELMAR BOULEVARD EAST, WEST,
AND SOUTHWARD By Naama Goldstein
By Milbry Polk
By Einat Admony
2120
This spring Einat Admony, the chef and own-er of Balaboosta, Bar Bolonat, and the Taïm restaurants in New York City, sat down with our editor, Alexis Gargagliano, in Balaboosta, surrounded by happy people eating delicious Middle Eastern food, to talk about Israeli cui-sine and food as a bridge between people.
Alexis Gargagliano: Would you tell me a lit-tle about Israeli cuisine?Einat Admony: It’s a very young cuisine. We always debate if there is even really an Israeli cuisine, but apparently there is. (Laughs) Everybody talks about Israeli cui-sine now, and everybody’s so excited about it. But there are a lot of things that we cook that people say are not Israeli—ingredi-ents and dishes that we’ve adapted from a neighbor, or from the melting pot we have in Israel. Israel is a young country with so many different ethnicities, including Jews who come from all around the world.
So every Jewish family cooks different foods. For instance, my mom is Iranian. The Iranian Jews have different foods from most Iranians because of the kosher restrictions and not cooking on Shabbat. I’ve found that with Americans—and it’s changing today a little bit—what people think is Israeli cuisine or Jewish cuisine is Ashkenazi cuisine. And it doesn’t compare with the richness of Mid-dle Eastern cuisine—a Jewish cuisine, which was brought to Israel from Iraq and Morocco. So it’s nice that it’s changing, and I’m really happy to be one of the people in New York who have been changing it slowly, for years now—showing people what kibbe is (meat-stuffed dumplings), and a real couscous that I’m doing at Bar Bolonat, like, a three-hour couscous and not an instant, and all these kinds of things. It’s very exciting for me to move beyond what you know and expect. So, yes, Israel is a young country that’s still look-ing at itself—you know, still finding itself. But we have amazing food, I have to say. We
know a lot about ingredients. We know how to treat vegetables like nobody else. AG: Really? How so?EA: Oh, totally. Like the cauliflower—I’ve gotten so many customers who’ve said they never liked cauliflower until they came here. That’s because of the way we treat it. We have enough acid, we have balance. We have, sometimes, sweet. You have the tahini on top. I don’t do tahini here, but at Bolonat I’m doing peanuts, tahini, and Bamba, so it’s very different. I also cook broccoli, and what can you do with brocco-li? So we blanch it with the stems and we grill it, and then we do roasted-red-pepper tahini and pickled chili. It’s beautiful.
Israeli cuisine is a collaboration with a lot of different ethnicities and a lot of adap-tation from the Middle East. I used to put on the menu “Israeli hummus,” or whatever, and an Arab or Palestinian customer would say, “But that’s not yours. Since when have you
not doing business with someone will always block the gains that could be made. Defuse those negatives and the positives may just take over and clinch the deal for you.
One of my students, Ryan, was flying from Baltimore to Austin, Texas. Due to a lightning storm in the area, Baltimore–Washington International Airport was shut down for about five hours. It became apparent that Ryan would miss his connection at Dallas/Fort Worth.
He called American Airlines and was automatically rebooked on a 3 P.M. flight the following day. He knew that there was a later flight leaving Dallas/Fort Worth that evening, but the ticket agent said the flight was full and that the earliest he would be able to get into Austin was Friday.
After the delay, Ryan finally arrived at Dallas/Fort Worth a little after 8 P.M. He hustled to the gate where the final flight to Austin was departing. As he waited in line, he could hear a heated conversation between the couple in front of him and the gate agent. The agent told the couple that there was “nothing she could do.” The couple continued to yell for a while but finally gave up and moved on.
Ryan stepped up to the counter. “Hi, I’m Ryan,” he said. “It seems like they were pretty upset.”
The agent, whose nametag said Wendy, told him that the couple had missed their connection, and then said something along the lines of “We’ve had a fair amount of delays because of the weather.”
“The weather?” Ryan said.Wendy explained that multiple airports in the Northeast had ex-
perienced delays due to weather conditions. “It’s rippled through the system.”
“It seems like it’s been a hectic day.”She opened up, telling Ryan about all the irritated customers she
had to cope with. She said that a lot of people were trying to get to Texas for the two big college games and every flight into Austin had been booked solid.
“Booked solid?”She told Ryan that every flight was sold out through the week-
end, but that the weather was likely to “reroute a lot of people through a lot of different places.” Wendy finally got around to ask-ing, “So, how can I help you?”
“Look, it seems like you’ve been handling the rough day pret-ty well,” Ryan said. “I was also affected by the weather delays and missed my connecting flight. I realize this flight is likely booked solid. However, it also makes sense that someone affected by the weather might miss this connection. Is there any possibility that a seat will open up?”
Wendy said nothing, but she began typing on her computer. Ryan kept quiet. After about a minute, she printed a boarding pass and handed it to him, explaining that there were a few seats that were supposed to be filled by people who would now arrive much later than the flight’s scheduled departure. She also placed him in the Economy Plus class (which generally includes an upcharge), and mentioned that it was “all taken care of.”
Ryan’s tactical empathy was concise and relaxed. He used it to allow the possibilities of the situation to come to him by defusing the barriers. People often find themselves opening up in unexpect-ed ways to mirrors, or individuals who pick up the inflections or
wording of the person they are talking to. Often, the person doing the mirroring will repeat the last one to three words spoken by the person with whom he’s having a conversation.
At a Chase Bank in Brooklyn, in 1993, I mirrored a bank robber who was holding hostages. He blurted out details about a getaway driver whom we had no knowledge of at the time. That sponta-neous admission led to the driver’s conviction.
My negotiation approach is derived from the eight F.B.I. hostage- negotiation skills, or the F.B.I. 8. Every single hostage-negotiation team on the planet uses these skills. The hostage-negotiation team in Tokyo, Japan, the hostage negotiation team in Cape Town, South Africa, and the hostage negotiation team in Newark, New Jersey, all use them. These skills work across the planet because they’re de-signed to appeal to us as humans, and that’s what we are, first and foremost: human beings.
The diagnostic manuals used by mental-health professionals worldwide aren’t categorized by ethnicity, culture, or skin color. There isn’t a separate set of criteria for people from the United States versus people from Korea. That’s not to say that culture doesn’t come into play. But most people who are looking for cultural short-cuts—or “hacks,” according to common usage—are really seeking to stick to their own approach and get around the basic process of showing empathy and respect. With empathy and respect, you can overcome the cultural mistakes everyone is bound to make. And you don’t have to be from another country to make cultural mistakes. Just ask an IBM salesperson what it’s like to negotiate with an IBM computer programmer.
So these skills are fairly universal. The same set of skills can be applied whether you’re dealing with your neighbor or navigating peace in the Middle East. It’s even possible to negotiate with your kids, though there are obvious limitations when you consider, for example, that a toddler’s emotions are just being formed, and who knows what’s happening in the emotional life of a teenager?
I do know that the skill of mirroring has been used successfully with nine-year-olds. And I used tactical empathy with my eighteen-year-old football-playing son to get him to listen to me and make a critical change in how he was playing linebacker.
So I’m going to leave you with one request: whether it’s in the office or around the family dinner table, don’t avoid honest, clear conflict. Engaging in it will get you the best car price, the higher salary, and the largest donation. It will also save your marriage, your friendship, and your family.
One can be an exceptional negotiator, and a great person, only by both listening and speaking clearly and empathetically, by treat-ing one’s counterparts—and oneself—with dignity and respect, and, most of all, by being honest about what one wants and what one can—and cannot—do. Every negotiation, every conversation, every moment of life is a series of small conflicts that, managed well, can rise to creative beauty. Embrace them.
Chris Voss is the founder of the Black Swan Group, a negotiation advisory firm that has achieved marked success with hostage-nego-tiation strategies. He is a former F.B.I. lead international-kidnapping negotiator and the author of the book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It, which was recently pub-lished by HarperBusiness.
Drawing by Nicole Appel. LETC/LAND Gallery, Brooklyn, New
York.
got the hummus?” I totally get it. I stopped using the word “Israeli” on the menu. AG: When you’re creating dishes for your restaurants, are you conscious of pulling ideas from other cultures? EA: Non-stop. All my life I have traveled. That’s part of who I am, so there is a lot of influence, not just from the Middle East. My comfort zone right now is the way I grew up. My Iranian mom grew up with an Iraqi family, so she has both of these cuisines—beautiful!And my dad was Yemenite, so I got a lot of that. My neighbor in Israel was like a second mom. She was Moroccan, so when I was eight years old I learned how to roll couscous.
In Israel we have chopped salad, or the chop-chop salad—we call it Arabic salad. But here an American would call it an Israeli salad. It’s kind of funny.AG: What would a Palestinian call it?EA: Salad. Just salad. They have a joke back home: What do the Chinese call Chinese food? Just food.AG: Is food political in Israel?EA: In Israel, I cannot answer that. But for me it’s not. Actually, if anything it’s some-thing that brings people together, and that’s what I always felt. I was in the military for two years, and I cooked there. Then I lived in Germany, and I always cooked for everybody. Even if I really, really dislike a person, if he tells me he’s hungry I like to feed him. AG: Do you have a story about someone you fed whom you didn’t like?EA: When I cook, I don’t see anything. Real-ly, I’m in a different mood. I remember two Palestinians who were upset that I’m Israeli. Horrible. The first and the last time. I had just opened, and two Palestinian students came in. They were excited, and then they asked, “Is the owner Arabic?” They were told no, Israeli. They got up and left. I was upset, because I’m such a lefty. So I always put the two things aside, politics and food. AG: That’s what happens in the play. The
22
Israelis and the Palestinians go into a room and negotiate, then they come out and eat dinner together, and at dinner they’re not allowed to talk politics. Have you ever served a dinner to people who didn’t get along and you wanted to bring them together?EA: Every day in my home. (Laughs) I have two kids, a boy and a girl—they’re always fighting, never get along. AG: Do they come together over the food?EA: They just enjoy the food, so they get quiet. I’ve cooked for a lot of different events, but nothing that would compare with the Palestinian-Israeli situation.AG: (Laughs) It could be your family and your husband’s family.EA: Yeah. My first husband. Forget about his family. My mom used to hate them. But I cooked for them all. AG: And did people put their differences aside when they were eating?EA: For food, yeah, always. Listen, I grew up with a mom who always cooked, but also an aunt who has five kids and now four of them have kids. The home is always open, the door is always open.
When I go there to visit, I sit there and I see people come and go, come and go, like a train station. Then, at Shabbat dinner, she cooks for all the family. She has two kids who don’t touch fish, so they sit in that corner of the table. One is vegetarian, and he sits in the middle. Then she has one child who only likes white Persian rice—so she has one pot of plain rice and one with the carrots and other things. At Rosh Hashanah this year, there were, I think, around thirty people at the table. It was crazy—it’s just funny to see. The fish people, you sit here. Those who don’t like the smell of lamb, you sit here. It was like groups and groups and groups. But the food is so insanely amazing and delicious. AG: What are you interested in doing next with food?EA: Wow, there are a lot of things. It’s end-less. My next thing, I think, is I want to do a food-and-music festival. So I’m working on that. It’s going to take time—at least a year. It was supposed to be in December, but things didn’t work out. So we’re going to try to do it next summer.AG: Here in New York?EA: Yeah, Brooklyn. We got the stage in Prospect Park, so it’s big. And I want to cre-ate a new organization that actually brings
Palestinians and Israelis together—young kids—through music and food. It’s pretty hard to bring the two sides together. I re-ally believe everything starts with the first generation. So when you put in the head of a five-year-old that Jews are the Devil...We grew up being told, “You can trust an Arab only when he’s six feet under.”AG: How did you overcome that?EA: I lived here for many years. I married a French guy and got out. And Israel is get-ting more and more crazy-fanatic. It’s pretty sad what’s going on there, and all around the world it’s getting like that. It’s just sad to see how people are attracted to the dark and not to the light. AG: If you were planning a dinner to bring Palestinians and Israelis together, what would you do?EA: I would do Middle Eastern food—the best of the best. One of my good friends, Janna Gur, is the owner and editor of Al Hashulchan, a major Israeli food magazine. They believe in coexistence with the Palestinians and are always trying to find Israeli-Arab chefs. It’s beautiful. She knows a woman called Nof, and she told us that we were going to fall in love with each other. Nof sent me one of her recipes for musakhan, and I went crazy. I put it on the special, and I wrote her name as well. On all social media, I said “Inspired by Nof.” It was beautiful.
It’s kind of a confit chicken. I changed the recipe a little. Arab-Palestinian cooks use a lot of lemon on everything, and I like acid a lot, but sometimes it’s just over-whelming, so I try to balance it a little bit. So, basically, it’s chicken thighs and legs with tons of onion sautéed in olive oil and all cooked together with some spices. And then I took laffa—it’s like pita. I take all the onion from the confit and paste it all around the laffa, and on top I put the chick-en and then pine nuts and almonds, all sau-téed with sumac and herbs. It was insane. Noor rolls it and makes cigars for the kids, but I left it flat, served it as a dish.
I would also do a really, really good tab-bouleh. I’ll give you some recipes.
Dip one side of each fillet into egg wash. Nestle fillets into falafel flour, egg-wash side down, pressing down to coat fillets completely.
Heat 1/2 cup olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Once oil is very hot, add fillets, flour side down, and fry over medium heat until crust sets and browns, 5 minutes. Flip and fry reverse side until golden, 3 minutes. Transfer fish, crust side up, to a baking tray and bake until cooked through, 7 minutes.
CHOPPED SALAD WITH MINT DRESSINGMakes about 1 quart
2 cups chopped tomato (1-inch dice)2 cups chopped cucumber (1-inch dice) 1/4 cup chopped parsley 1/2 bunch chopped scallions
Mix all ingredients in a large bowl and set aside. When ready to serve, combine salad with mint dressing (recipe below).
Note: Allow 4 ounces of dressing per 1 quart of salad.
MINT DRESSING 1/2 cup lemon juice1 teaspoon mustard1 tablespoon honey1/2 teaspoon salt1/2 tablespoon sugar1/2 shallot or 1 small garlic clove3/4 cup vegetable oil (or olive oil for a stronger flavor)15-20 large fresh mint leaves
Put lemon juice, mustard, honey, salt, sugar, and shallot (or garlic) into a blender and purée. With the blender on, slowly add the oil and blend until the mixture is emulsified. Add the mint leaves last, blending very briefly, just until they are incorporated into the mixture.
AMBA YOGURT1/4 cup amba sauce (a tangy mango pickle condiment)2 cups yogurt 1 teaspoon honey1 teaspoon salt2 tablespoons lemon juice
Mix all ingredients together.
To serve: Drizzle amba sauce around the plate, place chopped salad in the middle, and lay the fish on top. Garnish with microgreens.
A FEAST FOR PEACE
TABBOULEHServes 6 to 8
1 cup medium bulgur1 cup finely chopped fresh parsley1 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro4 finely chopped scallions 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh mint1/4 cup chopped toasted pistachios1/4 cup pomegranate seeds1 cup diced tomatoesGrated zest of 2 lemons1/3 cup fresh lemon juice3 tablespoons olive oil2 teaspoons kosher saltPinch of freshly ground black pepper
Pour enough hot water (from the tap is fine) over the bulgur, just enough to cover it, and soak for 10 minutes. The bulgur will absorb most of the water, and there should be a slight crunch when you bite into one of the grains. Drain excess water.
Meanwhile, toss the remaining ingredients together in a very large bowl. Add the bulgur and mix thoroughly. Allow the salad to soak in all the wonderful tangy flavors for 30 minutes before serving.
FALAFEL-CRUSTED GROUPER WITH CHOPPED SALAD, AMBA YOGURT
2 tablespoons cumin seeds2 tablespoons coriander seeds, plus 1 teaspoon ground2 tablespoons granulated onion2 tablespoons granulated garlic1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more for vinaigrette1/2 cup chickpea flour2 eggs2 tablespoons all-purpose flour1 (1-pound) boneless, skinless grouper fillet, cut into 4 pieces1/2 cup olive oil
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Make falafel flour: In a me-dium pan over medium heat, toast cumin and coriander seeds until fragrant, about 3 minutes. With a mortar and pestle or grinder, coarsely grind spices. Transfer ground spices to a bowl and stir in granulated onion and garlic, salt, and chickpea flour. Spread mixture out on a rimmed baking tray.
Make egg wash: In a shallow bowl, beat eggs with all-purpose flour.
By Einat Admony
Food is something that brings people together....
Even if I really, really dislike a person, if he tells
me he’s hungry I like to feed him.
got the hummus?” I totally get it. I stopped using the word “Israeli” on the menu. AG: When you’re creating dishes for your restaurants, are you conscious of pulling ideas from other cultures? EA: Non-stop. All my life I have traveled. That’s part of who I am, so there is a lot of influence, not just from the Middle East. My comfort zone right now is the way I grew up. My Iranian mom grew up with an Iraqi family, so she has both of these cuisines—beautiful!And my dad was Yemenite, so I got a lot of that. My neighbor in Israel was like a second mom. She was Moroccan, so when I was eight years old I learned how to roll couscous.
In Israel we have chopped salad, or the chop-chop salad—we call it Arabic salad. But here an American would call it an Israeli salad. It’s kind of funny.AG: What would a Palestinian call it?EA: Salad. Just salad. They have a joke back home: What do the Chinese call Chinese food? Just food.AG: Is food political in Israel?EA: In Israel, I cannot answer that. But for me it’s not. Actually, if anything it’s some-thing that brings people together, and that’s what I always felt. I was in the military for two years, and I cooked there. Then I lived in Germany, and I always cooked for everybody. Even if I really, really dislike a person, if he tells me he’s hungry I like to feed him. AG: Do you have a story about someone you fed whom you didn’t like?EA: When I cook, I don’t see anything. Real-ly, I’m in a different mood. I remember two Palestinians who were upset that I’m Israeli. Horrible. The first and the last time. I had just opened, and two Palestinian students came in. They were excited, and then they asked, “Is the owner Arabic?” They were told no, Israeli. They got up and left. I was upset, because I’m such a lefty. So I always put the two things aside, politics and food. AG: That’s what happens in the play. The
22
Israelis and the Palestinians go into a room and negotiate, then they come out and eat dinner together, and at dinner they’re not allowed to talk politics. Have you ever served a dinner to people who didn’t get along and you wanted to bring them together?EA: Every day in my home. (Laughs) I have two kids, a boy and a girl—they’re always fighting, never get along. AG: Do they come together over the food?EA: They just enjoy the food, so they get quiet. I’ve cooked for a lot of different events, but nothing that would compare with the Palestinian-Israeli situation.AG: (Laughs) It could be your family and your husband’s family.EA: Yeah. My first husband. Forget about his family. My mom used to hate them. But I cooked for them all. AG: And did people put their differences aside when they were eating?EA: For food, yeah, always. Listen, I grew up with a mom who always cooked, but also an aunt who has five kids and now four of them have kids. The home is always open, the door is always open.
When I go there to visit, I sit there and I see people come and go, come and go, like a train station. Then, at Shabbat dinner, she cooks for all the family. She has two kids who don’t touch fish, so they sit in that corner of the table. One is vegetarian, and he sits in the middle. Then she has one child who only likes white Persian rice—so she has one pot of plain rice and one with the carrots and other things. At Rosh Hashanah this year, there were, I think, around thirty people at the table. It was crazy—it’s just funny to see. The fish people, you sit here. Those who don’t like the smell of lamb, you sit here. It was like groups and groups and groups. But the food is so insanely amazing and delicious. AG: What are you interested in doing next with food?EA: Wow, there are a lot of things. It’s end-less. My next thing, I think, is I want to do a food-and-music festival. So I’m working on that. It’s going to take time—at least a year. It was supposed to be in December, but things didn’t work out. So we’re going to try to do it next summer.AG: Here in New York?EA: Yeah, Brooklyn. We got the stage in Prospect Park, so it’s big. And I want to cre-ate a new organization that actually brings
Palestinians and Israelis together—young kids—through music and food. It’s pretty hard to bring the two sides together. I re-ally believe everything starts with the first generation. So when you put in the head of a five-year-old that Jews are the Devil...We grew up being told, “You can trust an Arab only when he’s six feet under.”AG: How did you overcome that?EA: I lived here for many years. I married a French guy and got out. And Israel is get-ting more and more crazy-fanatic. It’s pretty sad what’s going on there, and all around the world it’s getting like that. It’s just sad to see how people are attracted to the dark and not to the light. AG: If you were planning a dinner to bring Palestinians and Israelis together, what would you do?EA: I would do Middle Eastern food—the best of the best. One of my good friends, Janna Gur, is the owner and editor of Al Hashulchan, a major Israeli food magazine. They believe in coexistence with the Palestinians and are always trying to find Israeli-Arab chefs. It’s beautiful. She knows a woman called Nof, and she told us that we were going to fall in love with each other. Nof sent me one of her recipes for musakhan, and I went crazy. I put it on the special, and I wrote her name as well. On all social media, I said “Inspired by Nof.” It was beautiful.
It’s kind of a confit chicken. I changed the recipe a little. Arab-Palestinian cooks use a lot of lemon on everything, and I like acid a lot, but sometimes it’s just over-whelming, so I try to balance it a little bit. So, basically, it’s chicken thighs and legs with tons of onion sautéed in olive oil and all cooked together with some spices. And then I took laffa—it’s like pita. I take all the onion from the confit and paste it all around the laffa, and on top I put the chick-en and then pine nuts and almonds, all sau-téed with sumac and herbs. It was insane. Noor rolls it and makes cigars for the kids, but I left it flat, served it as a dish.
I would also do a really, really good tab-bouleh. I’ll give you some recipes.
Dip one side of each fillet into egg wash. Nestle fillets into falafel flour, egg-wash side down, pressing down to coat fillets completely.
Heat 1/2 cup olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Once oil is very hot, add fillets, flour side down, and fry over medium heat until crust sets and browns, 5 minutes. Flip and fry reverse side until golden, 3 minutes. Transfer fish, crust side up, to a baking tray and bake until cooked through, 7 minutes.
CHOPPED SALAD WITH MINT DRESSINGMakes about 1 quart
2 cups chopped tomato (1-inch dice)2 cups chopped cucumber (1-inch dice) 1/4 cup chopped parsley 1/2 bunch chopped scallions
Mix all ingredients in a large bowl and set aside. When ready to serve, combine salad with mint dressing (recipe below).
Note: Allow 4 ounces of dressing per 1 quart of salad.
MINT DRESSING 1/2 cup lemon juice1 teaspoon mustard1 tablespoon honey1/2 teaspoon salt1/2 tablespoon sugar1/2 shallot or 1 small garlic clove3/4 cup vegetable oil (or olive oil for a stronger flavor)15-20 large fresh mint leaves
Put lemon juice, mustard, honey, salt, sugar, and shallot (or garlic) into a blender and purée. With the blender on, slowly add the oil and blend until the mixture is emulsified. Add the mint leaves last, blending very briefly, just until they are incorporated into the mixture.
AMBA YOGURT1/4 cup amba sauce (a tangy mango pickle condiment)2 cups yogurt 1 teaspoon honey1 teaspoon salt2 tablespoons lemon juice
Mix all ingredients together.
To serve: Drizzle amba sauce around the plate, place chopped salad in the middle, and lay the fish on top. Garnish with microgreens.
A FEAST FOR PEACE
TABBOULEHServes 6 to 8
1 cup medium bulgur1 cup finely chopped fresh parsley1 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro4 finely chopped scallions 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh mint1/4 cup chopped toasted pistachios1/4 cup pomegranate seeds1 cup diced tomatoesGrated zest of 2 lemons1/3 cup fresh lemon juice3 tablespoons olive oil2 teaspoons kosher saltPinch of freshly ground black pepper
Pour enough hot water (from the tap is fine) over the bulgur, just enough to cover it, and soak for 10 minutes. The bulgur will absorb most of the water, and there should be a slight crunch when you bite into one of the grains. Drain excess water.
Meanwhile, toss the remaining ingredients together in a very large bowl. Add the bulgur and mix thoroughly. Allow the salad to soak in all the wonderful tangy flavors for 30 minutes before serving.
FALAFEL-CRUSTED GROUPER WITH CHOPPED SALAD, AMBA YOGURT
2 tablespoons cumin seeds2 tablespoons coriander seeds, plus 1 teaspoon ground2 tablespoons granulated onion2 tablespoons granulated garlic1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more for vinaigrette1/2 cup chickpea flour2 eggs2 tablespoons all-purpose flour1 (1-pound) boneless, skinless grouper fillet, cut into 4 pieces1/2 cup olive oil
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Make falafel flour: In a me-dium pan over medium heat, toast cumin and coriander seeds until fragrant, about 3 minutes. With a mortar and pestle or grinder, coarsely grind spices. Transfer ground spices to a bowl and stir in granulated onion and garlic, salt, and chickpea flour. Spread mixture out on a rimmed baking tray.
Make egg wash: In a shallow bowl, beat eggs with all-purpose flour.
By Einat Admony
Food is something that brings people together....
Even if I really, really dislike a person, if he tells
me he’s hungry I like to feed him.
Lincoln Center Theater ReviewVivian Beaumont Theater, Inc.Lincoln Center Theater150 West 65 StreetNew York, New York 10023
NON PROFIT ORG U.S. POSTAGE PAID SMITHTOWN, NY PERMIT NO. 15
MONA JUULNAAMA GOLDSTEINRAJA SHEHADEHMILBRY POLKCHRIS VOSSEINAT ADMONYTARYN SIMONPAULA SCHERKATHY RYANLARRY TOWELLNICOLE APPELJOYCE KOZLOFF