Intifada Season in Israel

I was there for several weeks and was so struck with the life-going-on-as-usual-in-the-middle-of-what-the-rest-of-the-world-seemed-to-think-was-utter-chaos phenomenon that I kept entertaining a fantasy that the New York Times travel section might actually publish a piece I began writing in my head titled "Touring Israel at the Height of the Intifada Season." What a time to grab a travel bargain! Shops, restaurants and especially hotels are deserted; fleets of cruising cabdrivers whiz by ready to haggle on fares, and you hardly ever have to wait in lines.

Since I had a press card issued by the Israeli government, I was able to take advantage of the "journalists' special" offered at a ritzy four-star hotel in downtown Jerusalem: $80 a night at the Isrotel includes an "executive suite" (which basically seemed to mean that you got several telephones with data lines, one directly over the toilet, so you could send in your T Rowe Price trades or whatever whenever the inspiration hit you) and a huge buffet breakfast.

And in a mild, perfectly-scaled-for-tourists sort of way, it turned out the Isrotel was one of the country's more exciting places to be?Gaza or Ramallah would have been a little too exciting. The Israeli government had set up a well-appointed "press center" on the ground floor of the Isrotel, with booths manned 24/7 by representatives of the Israeli military (the Israel Defense Forces or IDF), the Israeli police and Israel's foreign ministry. An adjoining conference room was used for near-daily press briefings with top officials like Nahman Shai, Israel's newly deputized press commissar. (He is a kind of Mike McCurry for the state of Israel, but in the no-frills, no-bullshit, gruff, bullheaded press-obtuse Israeli way; he's the mega-spokesman who's triaged stuff like charm, humor and patience for newspeople who had parachuted in yesterday and aren't quite sure where, say, the Hezbollah fit into the package.)

Since most of the foreign press are generally not very interested in whatever the Israeli government or military has to say about anything, if you show even a remote interest in the Israeli side of things you can have a bunch of very smart, well-connected, not macho but sooo masculine Israeli men virtually at your private briefing disposal. When I admitted I'd never seen the infamous videotape copied from a Palestinian cable channel (the Palestinians say the Israelis have translated it incorrectly) showing Palestinian kids marching, training with rocks and chanting along as they are exhorted to "kill the Jews," a foreign ministry rep quickly whipped one into the VCR and projected it onto a big screen in the conference room for me alone.

More press amenities include a conference room full of computers with Internet access and free flowing espresso and cocoa and cake and fruit juice. The computer room became a kind of haven for the scruffy, cocky young freelance photographers who had flocked to the scene, piled into fleabag youth hostels in the Old City and were hanging around the computer room to check their e-mail. I am a romantic, and these guys?they are mostly guys?seemed one of the most poetic, poignant parts of the scene. They had a swaggering Island of Lost Boys quality, and I found myself channeling Time-esque phrases about them like "pirates of the electronic age" or "information age mercenaries looking for a war." They are creatures of the wired world, in that they hear stuff is happening?preferably bloody, violent stuff?somewhere on the globe and then sell their pictures in a matter of hours on the digital photo bazaar used by newsrooms around the planet. Mostly in their mid-to-late 20s, they buy their own equipment, pay their own way and then make a living and a name by throwing themselves into the places older, richer, less agile, married photographers won't go, like in between IDF soldiers and the people they are shooting at.

"I got one with a fucking IDF bloke pointing his rifle right into the middle of the frame. The Israelis don't really care what you do unless you get right into their face when they're trying to shoot," chortled a skinny 30-year-old from Singapore, who looked like an Arab but talked like a perfect public school Brit?just like everybody in Singapore, he pointed out with disgust when a typically ignorant, provincial American (me actually) asked him where he got his English. "This is my sixth war," he reported, "I'm not happy unless I'm in a war zone?I get all itchy-like."

Had he gotten good stuff so far? "Fuckin' great," he drawled, "so good I'm going home now. I got one of a fookin' dead guy?right up in his face I got, and, like, a wounded kid?whose bed I got right up to in a hospital, and a lot of ones of people shooting." And throwing stones? In that particular week, that was the big action in town. "'Course I got kids throwing stones," he said in the tone of you git. "I got the fucking youngest kid, this fucking kid is like fucking six."

Six was really good I said, but when you get one in diapers you'll have the front page. That kind of cynicism endeared me to the photogs, who then took me along for two-for-one beer night at a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar in the Old City, where one of the photogs was in love with a pretty, plump, red-haired Israeli bartender. But it made me a social pariah in gatherings of the older, more subdued press crews, who drank at the bar at the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem.

The Isrotel hotel wasn't bad, but if your boss really wanted to show he cared he put you up in the American Colony. It's not that it is so expensive (about $120 a night, at least at intifada season prices). The King David Hotel in central Jerusalem?the hotel that Paul Newman partially dynamited in the movie Exodus?is about $300 and just as classy in terms of architecture, but only old rich Jews and stout Christians on "Holy land tours" stay there, so it is far too bourgeois for the world press corps. The American Colony, which is across an important invisible border, in East Jerusalem, and operated by Palestinians, is far more politically correct and imbued with that living-on-the-edge foreign correspondent glamor.

The building is ancient, supposedly a palace where an Arab sultan housed his harem. When the bar isn't open people sit in a walled, stone courtyard at spindly wrought iron tables among palm and pomegranate trees and look up at the moon and the nearby steeple of a minaret. The nearness of the minaret means that twice a day your sleep or whatever is interrupted by the muezzin who climbs up the minaret spire and begins his Call to Prayer, a long sing-song recitation.

Wailing Arabic background music aside, and continuing in my "Israel in the Season of Intifada" travel piece vein, the bar at the American Colony should be tops on your list of places to visit! It is downstairs in the stone basement of the hotel?maybe the place the sultan put his harem girls when they were bad?a kind of low-ceilinged catacombs of rooms carved out of the rock that the hotel must be built upon. Groups of tables bathed in dim pools of light are hidden in the bends of the catacomb. Increasing the glamor if you're into this kind of thing is the fact that supposedly this is where Larry Collins (the fellow who wrote O Jerusalem) and Thomas Friedman (author of From Beirut to Jerusalem) and Christiane Amanpour, famous communist-Palestinian-apologist-tv personality, go when they're in town.

There is something Rick's Cafe-ish about the bar at the American Colony. It's something to do with the murmur of different languages. Also the look, a Star Wars interplanetary bar look, created when, for instance, a young black guy from Holland who wears tropical white pants and a Tracy Chapman-tarantula-on-my-head hairdo sits next to an expensively suited young turk of the Palestinian business community, who is sitting next to an expensively blue-jeaned and booted Jewish, female, New York-ish NBC producer. It's an all-the-species-come-down-to-the-waterhole (temporarily at peace) kind of thing. So if you add the quality of transience to the war-zone-physical-danger part (after all, in the last few weeks a CNN correspondent and an AP photographer have been badly wounded covering this story) and the way the ancient rocks glow white in the moonlight, a romantic like me becomes delirious with hardly any alcohol over the foreign-correspondent glamor of it all.

In fact, if you want to pick up girls or maybe fulfill a lifelong war correspondent fantasy, I recommend putting on a pair of dirty jeans, scuffed hiking boots and sweat-soaked neckerchief (for dust and tear gas) and carrying a cellphone, an expensive camera and a small notebook, and install yourself at the American Colony bar. On my last night in Jerusalem I found such an exotic creature at the bar (and I think he was the real thing), sitting directly to my left. He was a tanned, longhaired French reporter for some outfit whose name I gave up trying to make out. (The etiquette is you don't appear to care too much or to be impressed over which outfit somebody is working for, because they're all capitalist pigs.) On my right, however, was a very nice, urbane, 60ish Palestinian auto dealership owner who thought I'd sat down next to him and began buying drinks and giving me a tutorial about how Yasir Arafat is actually a very reasonable guy. The Rick's Cafe fantasy began to crumble. He was way too nice a guy to offend, and besides, I worried that everybody would start shooting at everybody else again if I spurned him for the Frenchman.