Michael Totten: The Palestinians of 1967

Here is another one of the eye-opening interviews that Michael Totten is famous for. This time Totten' interviews center on the Palestinian Arabs who live in Jerusalem--a group that is often ignored by journalists.

Totten refers to these Arabs as The Palestinians of 1967:

Last time I visited Jerusalem I met an Arab who said he’s ready to die in a nuclear holocaust as long as the bomb destroys Israel.

Every time I visit the country I try to talk to Arabs so that I don’t hear only the Jewish perspective. Not that there’s only one Jewish perspective, of course. Anyone who pays even the slightest attention to Israel knows the politics there are famously fractious. The overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis agree on some things, however, and you either have to talk to people on the lunatic fringe of the spectrum, to radical foreign activists, or to Palestinians if you want to hear something different. A Palestinian man who asked me to quote him as “Ghazi” did not disappoint when I sought something different.


He sells jewelry in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, a place I like to go once in a while to talk politics with the shopkeepers. They’re unfailingly pleasant to sit with, and they’re interesting. They don’t always say what you’d expect. Ghazi certainly didn’t.

Some of them, though, don’t want to talk about politics whether or not I tell them I’m a journalist. It isn’t their job. That’s not what they’re there for.

The first man I talked to on my most recent trip shook his head when I asked if I could interview him. He sat on the steps outside his shop and had the posture of a man hunkering down while waiting for a storm to pass over.

“Can you at least tell me if the political situation is good or bad?” I said.

“It’s bad,” he said, but he wouldn’t elaborate. “Somebody around here will talk to you,” he said and gestured by flicking his eyes.

Perhaps he felt overwhelmed by Zionist-imperialist colonizers. Maybe he was dismayed by his fellow Palestinians and their eternal rejectionism. He may have had a different set of complaints altogether, a set of complaints that I can’t even imagine. I don’t know, but whatever it was, he did not want to tell me.

Ghazi, though, said I had come to the right place when I asked if we could talk politics. I made it clear, though, that I didn’t want him to tell me what he thought Americans wanted to hear. Every journalist worthy of the title eventually figures out that this sort of thing happens a lot in the Middle East and needs to be factored in. I wanted to know what Ghazi really thought, and I said so.

“Promise you won’t get mad at me,” he said.

Continue reading The Palestinians of 1967.

Hat tip: Challah Hu Akbar

Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestinians and Jerusalem.