The Last Time I Was in Gaza
When peace was given a chance
The Frenchman was, at last, smiling. He was just ahead of me in the security line to enter the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Gaza. It was the winter of 1994. The Oslo Accords had recently been signed. Tentative peace had broken out. Patrice Barrat, whose father Robert, had been a champion for Algerians during the long Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s, was ecstatic. Like his father, Patrice had championed Arab causes and had fought for international recognition of Palestine. Oslo had seemed like the gateway to that possibility.
It was all very new to me. In spite of having the last name Greenberg, I’d never thought much about Israel, had never been there and certainly didn’t have any direct experience with the Middle East peace process. But I worked for an NGO at the time that had just received funding to train Palestinians to do television news. Since I’d done something similar in post-Soviet Russia I was flown in to Tel Aviv and driven down to Gaza with the idea that I could help.
“Hey Patrice,” I said tapping my colleague on the shoulder, “I bet I’m the first Jew to ever go into P.L.O. headquarters.”
“No, you’re not,” said Patrice, “and I’ll tell you why in a second.” He passed through the metal detector ahead of me and entered the building’s…
