Press: The Road to Tel Aviv

...The trees made us want to laugh, planted as they were right up to the very edge of the border...

...This was a desperate and crudely conceived maneuver but, amazingly, it worked, thanks to the Syrians...

...In its fundamentals the struggle goes back at least to the 1920s...

...Let them save their pieties for the forthcoming funeral of Catholic newspapers...

...But on the day the scene was shot, the head had only emerged by half when the actuating mechanism failed and it settled back into the water again...

...It was easy to see why both places mattered to the military, but for some reason no one had mentioned the West Bank, and here we were on its edge, looking out at Tel Aviv and the sea and the most militarily intolerable situation it is possible to imagine...

...In fact it was hardly a road at all, the barest memory of a road...

...s . J . ~AMO Editor, Catholic Star Herald Camden, New Jersey Editors" Note As for Commonweal's editorial, no one denies that "each diocese is autonomous," that bishop-publisher and editor relationships vary from see to see, and that magazines answer to another drummer...

...The press, and the public life it reflects, both tend to be obsessional and single-minded and the story of the moment is not the Middle East, but the factors behind the current optimism can he picked up easily enough from Pages 2 through 90...

...It hadn't rained in weeks, there were half a dozen alternate dryand all-weather roads crossing the old West BankIsraeli border, the entire distance was 50 miles at most, so we allowed ourselves three or four hours and figured we'd have no difficulty...

...So little does the situation change...

...And as for true peace . . . well . . . one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry...

...Another example this film provides of Fellini's ability to be inspired by his own displeasure is found right in the opening scene...

...We had scaled the mountains by this time and were on a large, broad, gently rising plateau, a barren ground showing no sign of human life...

...In the last 18 months I have seen his name two or three times, buried deep in news stories--once after he'd been wounded in fighting with Syrian soldiers during the Lebanese civil war, later when he replaced Ahmed Jibreel as leader of the PFLP General Command, most recently after he escaped to Baghdad...

...Habash was asked how this would be possible...

...The main ones are three in number: m The Palestinians have lost their sanctuary in Lebanon, and with it much of the military power which gave them an extraordinary degree of political independence for a people without a country...

...the car groaned and pitched at five miles an hour, but it was far too late to turn back...

...If it were a chess game, dust would long since have settled thickly over pieces and players and the audience gone home...

...His new film, Fellini's Casanova, is a case in point, for Fellini claims he made the film only because he had signed the contract and in spite of finding Casanova himself "a stereotype . . . a meaningless universality...

...We were still in Jordan, and Tel Aviv was . . . r i g h t t h e r e . . . We had seen a good deal of Israel by this time...

...After an hour or so we got onto a roughly paved road which had to be the right one--the villages were in the right places, we passed side roads right where they should have been, we were at the right elevation, the sun was sinking directly ahead of us...

...And then beyond the rise the sky met a shimmering line and we saw the sea, astonishingly close...

...The great chess masters would have abandoned the problem as insoluble and not even the wire services would take note when a player moved a hand with a glacial slowness toward a piece, knowing that sooner or later he'd think better of it and return to his somnolent brooding...

...Habash talked for two hours without interruption, at the sustained pitch of a man under a spell...

...THE EDITORS The conflict of Arab and Jew in the Middle East has gone on for so long now g with so little essential change, that you would think everybody would have the outline at least firmly in mind...

...This is the charm of his movies, in fact, this revulsion he has for his own creations...

...We might almost have walked to Tel Aviv and still arrived in time for our appointment with Arie Eliav...

...We might have been standing on the edge of the Palisades in New Jersey, looking across the Hudson River at Manhattan...

...It requires death...

...American college students make far longer trips without thinking twice, but not even that gives you a proper notion of how intimately the belligerents are nestled together...

...In Cairo shortly before the meeting of the Palestinian National Council in March, George Habash, leader of the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), said he would never accept a West Bank state as final, or give up the struggle against Israel...

...in the alignment of forces to 1945-49...

...There were frequent forks with no signs, roads wound up mountains to tiny villages and then disappeared, the Arabs we passed along the way did not speak English and we found it all but impossible to pronounce the names of Arab towns marked on the map...

...The smallness of the contested territory is generally neglected, for one thing...

...And then we saw the grey towers of Tel Aviv...

...I could not understand more than a few words...

...We should give them one more chance," he said...

...But if they cause trouble again we should chase every last one of them across the Jordan River and right out into the desert...

...In April, 1975, the Christian Phalangists---caUed A1 Kataeb in Lebanonmprecipitated a military struggle with the Palestinians in the hope they would be crushed much as they had been in Jordan in September, 1970...

...Some of the roads were solid red on the map (marked "First class motor roads" on the legend), some red and white dashes ("Second class motor roads"), some in black outline ("Other roads, all weather"), some in black dashes ("Other roads dry weather...

...The road was all rock now...

...Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof...

...Why not go on fighting Israel from the new boundaries...

...His .own creations are what the grotesque characters and fabulous sets in his films are, after all...

...But with frequent false starts and reversals, moving as much by the sun as by the map, we slowly progressed up into the mountains in a generally westerly direction...

...There a great carved head was supposed to be pulled up by ropes from the Grand Canal in Venice as part of a pageant Casanova attends...

...How could Israel tolerate a hostile independent state in such a place, one with its own army and military alliances...

...I did not really understand this until one afternoon in June, 1975, when a friend and I drove a rented Fiat from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv...

...Israel and the West Bank are folded into each other as intimately as lovers...

...For the moment the rejection front is largely confined to Iraq, but it represents a powerful undercurrent of feeling in the Palestinian community, it is singleminded and well-organized, and it has proved its ability to carry out highly visible acts of terror of a sort which can poison relations between states...

...To Gerry Sherry: I love him too much to wound him any further...

...Each leg of the trip costs only a few dollars by Arab taxi...

...The stain spread to the center of his shirt, then to the sleeves and down the sleeves to the rolled-up cuffs...

...Ask yourself: what would be the prospects for peace then...

...in all but the most minor particulars to 1967...

...With other journalists we had gone on Army tours of the Golan Heights, and had flown out into the Sinai to the Gidi Pass, where we had looked at the Suez canal through binoculars...

...He has only one note: passionate harangue...

...I think of an Israeli military strategist who worked for a think tank in Jerusalem, a hard, intelligent man...

...For the first time the leaders of Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the oil states all favor the same policy at the same time...

...The right to information, for instance, is to be enjoyed "in accord with the circumstances in each case . . . within the bounds of justice and charity," and is to be communicated in manner that is "proper and decent...

...MSOR...

...has always supported) is the minimum demand of the Arabs...

...It was not as easy as it looked...

...he said...

...When I think of the Palestinians confined in such a state, curled into the body of Israel, I think of three things: I think of George Habash giving a speech in Beirut, surrounded by teenagers with machine guns, on the anniversary of Ma'alot, where Palestinian terrorists killed 20 Israeli school children...

...From his manner on the set, which is bluff and exasperated, to his movement of the camera, which is scurrying and evasive, he always gives the impression that he wishes he were somewhere else--that he finds wherever he is aggravating and distasteful...

...On March 16, during a town meeting in Clinton, Massachusetts, Carter said he supported "a homeland" for the Palestinians...

...The document paid the usual ecclesiastical lip-service to freedom of the press and the right to information, but at the same time characteristically restricted each with qualifying clauses...

...29 A p r i l 1977:276 But even that is only the beginning of the problem...

...On March 7, in remarks welcoming the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to the United States, Carter said Israel had a right to "defensible borders...

...But the city took our breath away...

...Freedom is not poetry," he said when I met him...

...Jimmy Carter has apparently adopted the compromise settlement which has slowly evolved in the international ether since 1967...

...A West Bank state would be an Israeli puppet, the "rejection front" of which the PFLP is a leading member would never surrender its right to all of Palestine, and the war would continue...

...As a number of reporters have pointed out, these changes in the situation really do constitute, together, about as hopeful a "climate for peace" as a reasonable man might ask...

...Dry brown grass grew between the tire tracks, which did not seem to have been disturbed in weeks...

...I think of Abu A1 Abbas, then a young officer of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, and now its leader...

...He was in favor of surrendering the West Bank, with suitable safeguards...

...Now, whenever I read about a "general settlement" of the Arab-Israeli conflict involving a West Bank Palestinian state, I think of that delicate neck of coastal plain joining the two halves of Israel...

...But an actual "settlement'--a piece of paper signed by all parties, whatever the precise details~will demand such fierce resolution on the part of the United States, Egypt and Syria...

...It is perhaps symptomatic of the problems of the Catholic Press that the weakest document to be promulgated by Paul VI at Vatican Council II was the Decree on Social Communications...

...The fact that he works this way suggests he always counts on making new material out of unforeseeable and untoward Commonweal: 277...

...And then, as we topped the rise and saw the high plateau begins its glide down and away to the sea, we saw the line of trees, as regular as a fence, marking the old border of Israel and Jordan...

...We learn about freedom through a long history of blood and sacrifice...

...And we are not death amateurs...

...The sweat soaked his waist, and his leather belt, turning it dark too, and then the sweat stain traveled down his trousers to his knees...

...I do not know Arabic...

...We were going to see Arie Eliav, a member of the Israeli parliament who favors returning the West Bank to the Palestinians so they might establish the homeland which Carter mentioned...

...The problem is not the seriousness and good faith of the immediately interested parties, who have probably never been more inclined toward a settlement, but the depth of the collision of two very different peoples over the same small piece of land...

...For two hostile, truly independent states to exist in such proximity is simply impossible...

...There is a certain cheap safety in pessimism, of course, but I'm not trying to be dyspeptic or eurmudgeonly here, or depending on the fundamental cussedness of things which sends so many hopefu ! initiatives awry...

...A West Bank Palestinian state would not find it easy to control the irredentists within its overcrowded population, no matter how efficient and ruthless its political police, and the Israelis for obvious domestic reasons would find it equally difficult to tolerate bloody border incidents...

...Call it "fine print" or not, there are enough "hobbling" words there to put any conscientious editor at a disadvantage, and to perpetuate the "controlled" state spoken of by the editorial, and by Msgr...

...They are like those hierarchs who preach social justice and the right to organize--until the union comes knocking on Church doors...

...It is a sense of this which seems to me to be missing from almost all reporting about the Middle East, as if every story were actually 10,000 words long, but only the first five hundred ever made it into print...

...So we got out our Survey o f I s r a e l map and charted a route north from Jerusalem to Ramallah, and then wesl along winding hill roads toward Tel Aviv...

...A good road leads west from Ramallah but after that things got sticky...

...Adamo...

...and our interest in Fellini comes from the wonderment we feel at a man who would go to such trouble to construct a world he hates...

...The usual route is by the Latrun salient, a trip which takes perhaps an hour, but we had already driven that way and decided to see something of the West Bank instead...

...The statesmen might get their settlement, and the PLO might get its West Bank state, but I'm not sure how long it would last...

...What Fellini originally planned to do with this scene is impossible to say since he works with no shooting script...

...If such a West Bank Palestinian state were to be somehow tinkered or hammered into existence, for how long could it keep the peace with Israel...

...But this autonomy is all relative, and does not obviate the fact that a cautionary mood predominates...

...This (along wtih the Israeli withdrawal which the U.S...

...The likely result, after a few years of bitter conflict, would be a new war ending in a new occupation of the West Bank b y Israel...

...THOMAS POWERS 'CASANOVA' CONCLUDED 0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN In the last issue I was explaining why I feel Fellini works best when he works by a kind of aversion...

...They are willing to accept an Israel "within the green lines"man Israeli phrase referring to the borders of June, 1967mand they are depending on the aid of the United States to force an Israeli withdrawal...

...The ecclesiastical leadership is as vigilant over publications as the encyclical Pascendi, the outdated early 20th-century preachment of Pope Pius X, instructed it to be...

...But it's not a chess game, the identity of several principal kibitzers has recently changed, and some reporters and commentators have been murmuring deep in their stories that the "climate for peace" has improved and "new initiatives" might now bring "a general settlement...

...This is an aspect of the Middle East conflict which has not achieved the attention it deserves, although there is plenty of evidence of it on Pages 2 through 90...

...It is an easy (although hairraising) day's drive from Beirut to Damascus, and then south from Damascus to Amman...

...At first there was more pavement than dirt rut, then more dirt than pavement, finally nothing but dirt...

...Israel would never tolerate the sort of sophisticated weaponry which the West Bank might acquire so close to her heart, and there must be some question whether the PLO, however desperate its situation or great the pressure from Arab allies, would ever accept the sort of limitations to her sovereignty which Israel would demand...

...This is the minimum Israeli demand for a settlement...

...But I watched the sweat from his body in the hot theater slowly soak the armpits of his light blue shirt, turning it dark...

...and would Commonweal: 275 have to override emotions of such depth and strength, that optimism seems an act of almost willful innocence...