Talking Location With author Howard Kaplan – Israel and Palestine

29th July 2018

The author at al-Amari refugee camp Ramallah

#TalkingLocationWith… Howard Kaplan, author of The Spy’s Gamble. Here he shares his thoughts on Israel and Palestine.

My friend, the East Jerusalem Palestinian journalist Rami Nazzal, has a business, Beyond Borders, where he takes groups and individuals to the West Bank, including the holy sites in Bethlehem and Hebron. In 2016, we spent a long day in Ramallah, the adjacent al-Amari refugee camp, Bethlehem and Hebron. On the Jewish side of the Separation wall between Israel and the West Bank, my longtime friend Avraham Infeld is an educator. No cadet can graduate officer’s training school in Israel until he attends one of Infeld’s lectures on plurality.  One of the places he lectures is the Israeli army base in Hebron, where an enclave of 400 Jewish settlers are surrounded by a quarter million Palestinians.  It requires an Israeli battalion to protect them.

I’m interested in humanizing the conflict, so The Spy’s Gamble is about reconciliation and people on both sides, how they live, their fears and hopes.  It’s easy to fling partisan blame but I’m exploring avenues on how to solve the pain and death.  So reading The Spy’s Gamble, you will see a bit of the underside of both worlds today and others who move through it.  In Jerusalem for example, Russian tour groups stay in the inexpensive luxury hotels on the Sinai Peninsula then fly to Jerusalem’s small airport.  They visit the magnificent multi-domed white stone Holy Trinity Cathedral in the Russian Compound, and then are bussed to the nearby Old City.  In the larger shops, just before the covered marketplace, enterprising Palestinian shopkeepers now stock gold Russian icons that these tourists buy with crisp 100 dollar bills of indeterminate origin.  It is entirely safe to walk through the Old City and a good rule of thumb is you can bargain down any shopkeeper a minimum of fifty percent.

On the Muslim holy day of Friday, much of the marketplace is closed. The Temple Mount is open to tourists Monday through Thursday between 8:30 am to 11:30 am and 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm. Due to occasional demonstrations on this broad stone plaza above the Western Wall, on Friday mornings dozens of Israeli Jerusalem police vans can be viewed below as armed soldiers flood up the ramp to discourage demonstrating or rock throwing. My characters are faced with a bomb threat at a café on the fashionable downtown Ben Yehuda walk street, reminiscent of European pedestrian areas and you’ll see how Israelis deal with these frequent alerts. My spies sip coffee on Emek Refaim Street, where old Ottoman mansions have been partitioned into apartments, as well walk along the narrow park planted over old train tracks that connects Jerusalem neighborhoods.

Bethlehem in the West Bank, though a mere nine kilometers south of Jerusalem is best visited with a group for security reasons.  There Palestinian street artists have painted protest over the 25 foot high concrete Separation Wall.  Pictured is a photograph of work by Banksy, the English graffiti artist and activist.  I’m told that slab of concrete with his work is worth millions. Banksy owns The Walled Off Hotel there but it’s small and advance booking advised.

Of great interest to me, is life in refugee camps so I spent a lot of time in al-Amari in Ramallah, 22 kilometers north of Jerusalem.  Periodically, as Rami and I walked through the camp I saw triangular stone monuments with the names on stone plaques of members of the camp killed in clashes with the soldiers.  Rami explained that sometimes small refrigerators are hurled from rooftops at the patrolling Israelis. I find these details fascinating and my novels are filled with them as well as the small details of daily life in the camp.

Hebron, 28 kilometers south of Jerusalem is home of the Cave of the Patriarchs, the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives and thus revered by the three great monotheistic religions.  A large stone building covers and protects the cave which can be visited.  To write this novel, I’m more interested in the settler enclave and how and why they choose to live there.  I attended a talk at a Los Angeles synagogue by a settler spokesman, who said about Hebron, “We’re surrounded by a juggernaut of jihadists.”  Settlers living in second story apartments throw trash out their windows into the Arab marketplace.  Israelis are not allowed to walk there but I asked Avraham Infeld how he would react if taken there by a high ranking Israeli intelligence officer, as a character in my novel is. Infeld was not shy about his condemnation of using trash to dehumanize people.

In all instances, I’m showing what things are like on the ground among two populations actually both eager for peace.

Thank you so much to Howard for such wonderful insights and tips. You can find Rami Nazzal’s Beyond Borders Tours on Facebook.

You can follow Howard on Twitter, Facebook and connect via his website (and don’t forget to look out for the film of his novel The Damascus Cover starring Johnathan Rhys-Myers, Jürgen Prochnow and Sir John Hurt – opening in 30 cinemas across the UK 3 August 2018)

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