Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

was a Middle East correspondent, that call had been as familiar to me as the beep of an alarm clock. Lying there, I reflected on how my years writing to Mishal—the surprise of finding more of a kindred spirit in him than in Cohen—had made it easier for me to take the Middle East job when it was offered. His letters had humanized the Arab world and taught me to look beneath the stereotypes and the scary headlines. He was the prototype for the many Arabs who had become my friends.

Outside, as the sun eased up, the honeycomb of buildings on the far hill turned from rose to gold to pearly white. A ray of sunshine glanced off the glass of a framed document on the bedroom wall—Mishal’s high school diploma. I studied his grades: they were excellent. I wondered why he hadn’t gone on to university.

At breakfast I steered the conversation around to a point where I could politely ask. Mishal’s reply was matter-of-fact. To go to university, he felt, would have pushed him up against a glass ceiling confronting Israeli Arabs. As an independent tradesman, he could make a good living. But if he had become, say, an engineer, he would have had to find work either with the Israeli government or with private firms that preferred Jews. Israeli Arabs are exempt from military service, which is a mixed blessing in a country where a good army record is a basic job credential.

Mishal explained all this with no apparent resentment. I probed for some, but nothing surfaced. I hadn’t mentioned my own conversion, so there was no reason for him to tailor his opinions to my sensibilities. “Jews are good people,” he said. “They want to live and this is the only place they’ve got.” He said he’d never experienced discrimination. “I’ve heard people say that in Tel Aviv someone’s yelled, ‘Dirty Arab’—but it’s never happened to me. This is the best place for an Arab, really. I don’t bother the Jews, they don’t bother me. The standard of living is high, and you are free to say whatever you like.”

“We get the brains from all over the world here,” his father added. “German doctors, Russian scientists. I don’t care if they’re Jews or not Jews. It’s Babel—we’re all speaking a different language but we’re building something together.”

I wished my dad was with me to hear all this. Mishal and his father inhabited the idealized Israel that Lawrie believed in, the place I’d come to think of as a propaganda myth. For years I had thought that the pro-Israeli views in Mishal’s letters to me were his tactful reaction to my own ardent, adolescent Zionism. But after spending time with him and his family it was clear to me that the views were, after all, his real beliefs.

It was Saturday, and Mishal wanted to use his day off taking me on a tour of his favorite sights. We drove to the Jordan River and circled the Sea of Galilee. As we gazed at the ancient monuments and the fertile farms, he was as proud of them as any Jewish Israeli. Even the new settlements earned praise from him, although more land under Jewish construction left less room for Arab towns to expand. Mishal had worked for the affluent professionals in one deluxe cluster of new villas, and with a word to the security guard we were waved inside the gated community. “No one is looking at what his neighbor is doing here,” Mishal said wistfully. “He has a drink, he sees a woman friend—they mind their own business.” He didn’t say it, but the contrast to his own unprivate life in the family compound and in Nazareth’s overgrown-village atmosphere was obvious.

He showed me the kibbutz where he worked for over a year as carpenter in residence, repairing locks, squaring wobbly tables, making doors close snugly. He enjoyed the communal meals in the dining hall. “Breakfast was nice,” he said, “good yogurt, fresh avocado and fruit, cheese and eggs.” He liked the way nobody fussed about the kibbutz girls in their thigh-high shorts. “Nobody’s looking at her—it’s a normal thing,” he said. By contrast, an Arab friend had refused to go with him to a hot-springs spa because they didn’t have separate hours for men and women, and the friend worried about people looking at his wife. “She’s not young, she’s had kids, nobody’s interested,” said Mishal. “But that’s the mentality.”

On the way back we picked up some food for dinner. Mishal liked to buy fresh milk and fruit from a particular Jewish moshav. Farther on, he turned up a winding dirt road where an old Bedouin in a Brooks Brothers shirt and crisply pressed pants lived amid scratching hens and rusty farm machinery. The old man poured us coffee from a long-spouted brass pot set on a brazier, and haggled with Mishal over the price of his wife’s fresh-made cheese.

“If my father was with us, he’d insist we go to Jenin for some bargain-price vegetables,” said Mishal, but he didn’t think the saving was worth the detour to the West Bank town.

Still, it was clear that Mishal moved easily between the three worlds of Jews, Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians. I thought of Cohen: anxious about Nazareth, an enemy in Jenin. Mishal’s Israel was a much bigger place.

Driving away from Nazareth later that night, I felt relaxed in a way I rarely had before on journeys to Israel. As a reporter there, my business had most often been the seeking of extremes. Reporters look for the quotable people, the articulate. Unsurprisingly, those people turn out to be the hotheads, the passionately committed. Meanwhile, real life is happening elsewhere, in the middle, among the Mishals and the Cohens, who care more about their families and jobs than ideology. These people are elusive to journalists precisely because they aren’t out wielding a placard or writing an op-ed or even all that ready with a fully formed opinion if