Jamie Tarabay is NPR's Baghdad Bureau Chief. Her reports have been featured on Morning Edition and All Things Considered on Public Radio now for several years, a young woman speaking with an oddly indefinable accent (turns out she's Lebanese by birth but was raised in Australia), giving us our daily diet of humanity's cruelty and brutality. Before her assignment by NPR in Iraq, Tarabay was a reporter for the Associated Press, covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I heard her interviewed on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and she sounded remarkably normal and sane for someone who has thrust herself into the middle of intractable (and dangerous) Middle East politics. In that interview I learned that she had written a book, A Crazy Occupation: Eyewitness to the Intifada, and it sounded like a worthwhile read.
I regret to admit that I've always had a distaste for how much of our daily news coverage centers on the problems in the Middle East. NPR in particular--far and away my favorite source for news--devotes what seems like 25% of their total coverage to this part of the world. Of course, with our present war we have thrust ourselves in a perilous way deeply into the region, so that focus seems understandable now; but news coverage has always seemed to have its spotlight aimed at this part of the world. It's a part of the world where humanity is not functioning very well, to the extent that normal life is not possible for millions of people. I imagine the criticism can be made that my antipathy stems from the fact that I don't really understand the issues involved--I was going to say "except in broad strokes," but I'm not even sure I understand the broad strokes. This book seemed one way I might begin to get a grasp on things.
Now, at book's end, I don't think I understand any more than I did going in, except to have a more graphic picture of how deeply-ingrained a culture's hatred can be, and what life might be like without some kind of orienting sea-anchor of rationality to keep us civilized. But that's just the issue: when both sides of this conflict are nominally attached to, and motivated by, long-standing cultural maypoles (Christianity and Judaism, which some will want to argue have helped organize humanity into functioning societies), it makes the case that it wasn't these maypoles which brought us the peace and stability after all. Without some kind of rationality allowed to break the vise-like hold of people's beliefs on their cultures, these are insoluble problems. In one scene she talks about finding a Palestinian girl caught out on the street after curfew, terrified out of her skin and huddling in a doorway. Tarabay and her photographer escorted the girl home, and had to shield her from Israeli women out walking their children, who all searched for rocks to throw at the little girl. Hmmm, I wonder what kind of products such "cultures" will produce?
Tarabay was raised in a Catholic household but seems not particularly observant on her own, which struck me a couple times when she mentioned trying to get to a church service on certain days, not seeing as a journalist how these exact convictions lay at the root of the conflict. But in her writing Tarabay tries not to take sides. There is plenty of brutality on both sides, and she refrains from scrutinizing, or judging, the underlying philosophies of the two sides. I'm sure that if I found she had an angle to her writing, a favoritism to either side, I would find her a shill and reject her book as propaganda. But it all seems so pointless to talk about the intractability of the two sides and the irreconcilable demands they each place on the other if we cannot address whether there is something fundamentally rational at the root of either side's claims. So it's a conundrum: I'm skeptical at her impartiality, and I'd be much more skeptical if she weren't impartial.
She was only 25 when she published the book, and by her own admission she was very naive when she arrived in Jerusalem for her assignment. And the book reads at times like a college term paper, a bit choppy and with some occasional awkward slang. As a memoir, it seems fitting that she wanders between her current job and her personal life, the present and the past, but at times it seems like the book does not follow much of a plan. Her story begins appropriately with her assignment by the AP, but jumps ahead in chunks and ends arbitrarily. From her stories stemming from the Iraq war, one feels there are many more chapters to be added to her memoir.
In sum, I'm glad she wrote her book, and I'm glad I read it, even if I haven't been helped thru the thicket. One rather hopes at the end that a good, hot shower will wash away the pall of hopelessness that sticks to you after immersion in this morass; it's the same pall that hovers over the region, reminding us that civilization, left in these hands, would have been obliterated centuries ago.
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