A journalist’s legwork

Reporter Martin Fletcher takes a break from covering the news and gets some very different stories as he walks the length of Israel’s coast.

By LIAT COLLINS
Beach 311 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Beach 311
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
There’s an old joke that people who come to Israel for two weeks go home and write a book; those who come for three months go home and write an article; someone here for six months writes a letter to the editor; and a person who’s been here for more than a year writes nothing about it, because he realizes it’s too complicated to explain.
Martin Fletcher, who recently retired as NBC’s long-time bureau chief in Tel Aviv, has been here for three decades, but it was only after taking two weeks off from covering the hard news – or at least trying to – that he was able to write Walking Israel, whose subtitle “A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation” reflects both its style and its purpose.
Fletcher’s walk in the summer of 2008 is a two-week hike along the Mediterranean coast, from Rosh Hanikra on the border with Lebanon to the border with Gaza. On the way, he meets ordinary Israelis with extraordinary stories, both Jews and Arabs. These include a fanatically Zionist Arab former IDF officer and a soldier who details how to get discharged from the army; Holocaust survivors, terror victims and innovative kibbutzniks; the Sderot firefighter who responds to missiles fired from his former home in Gush Katif; and the Palestinian whose family fled Ashkelon in 1948 and whose house now lies first in the Israeli line of fire in Gaza.
“I’ve written Walking Israel not just because I believe that journalists should strive to report the whole story, but because I’m convinced that Israel and its people have long gotten a raw deal in the world’s eyes,” writes the award-winning foreign correspondent.
Incidentally, while he breaks many stereotypes, he cannot escape what seems like an obsession with settlers.
He’s done his legwork, both literally and metaphorically: Apart from the portraits from his trip, Fletcher did a year’s worth of follow-up interviews and research to add depth and context.
Fletcher did not invent the genre, of course – Amos Oz’s In the Land of Israel and Haim Watzman’s A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel’s Rift Valley immediately spring to mind – but his own style and choice of focusing on the coast make it a valuable addition. The decision to take the coastal path is not incidental; Fletcher sees this area as the key to the soul of the modern country. As one man he meets puts it, the hill people are hard because you have to dig for days through rock to plant a tree, while on the coast all you do is scoop out some sand and earth with your hand and plant it.
The idea for the book came during a near-death experience when a yacht he is sailing overturns. After hours struggling at sea, Fletcher and his two friends – one nearly naked and the other two in dripping rubber suits – finally manage to haul themselves onto Tel Aviv’s infamous Tel Baruch beach, where they are revived by the hookers who hang out there at night.
Fletcher later ponders on the reaction of one buxom lady who had hugged him to keep him warm: “‘What a country,’ she had said. ‘They came from the sea. They could have been terrorists and killed us. Or police and arrested us. And what do we do? We give ’em a cup of tea! But they are cute in rubber.’”
At the very outset of the trip, a bystander, concerned that Fletcher is taking notes close to an army base, warns the soldiers: “He’s not one of us.”
And it’s strangely true: The London-born journalist is the son of Holocaust survivors, married to an Israeli, the father of three sons born here and has lived in the country for 30 years, but he remains somehow an observer rather than a full-blown participant. Partly it is because his Hebrew is poor (a fact that becomes cringingly apparent at a couple of points in the book) and partly it is because Fletcher is one of the old-style correspondents – journalism is more his religion and way of life than Judaism.
The fact that it took Fletcher only two weeks to walk the entire coastal strip, that his wife joins him now and again and that he spends one night at home in Herzliya emphasizes how small the country is.
It also allows him to interview his sons’ soldier friends when they return home for Shabbat: “And there was Alon, whom I had known since he was four or five years old. It was bizarre to see him as a fighter; when you think of the fearsome Israeli soldier, you don’t think of the little boy you fished out of the pool because he couldn’t swim, or whose little black dog barked too loudly at night.”
The coast is only the length of Long Island, as he notes, but within these 110 miles Fletcher stumbles across not only interesting characters but reminders of history from the biblical, Roman, Phoenician, Crusader, Ottoman, Napoleonic and modern periods.
History carries on relentlessly as Fletcher writes this book and he sets up shop in Roger’s Cafe in Ashkelon as the war with Gaza rages during Operation Cast Lead.
Although he struggles to get away from the hard stories and news, they follow him everywhere. You can’t understand Israelis without appreciating the emotional baggage that they carry wherever they go. Israelis, like the country itself, are scarred by terrorism and war, but – as clearly comes across in this book – desperate for peace.
There are moments of disappointment – like discovering that a foul-smelling sewage channel is really the Na’aman River, on whose banks the Phoenicians discovered glass 5,000 years ago. At times, Fletcher suffers physical pain; and, no less painful, there are sad realizations that while the country enjoys prosperity and incredible technological and economic achievements, peace is not on the horizon, not even according to the well-educated Arabs he meets in Haifa (the “Cream Arabs” as the Palestinians accusingly call the them).
During his research Fletcher discusses the situation with his friend and Jerusalem Post Arab affairs reporter Khaled Abu Toameh in the latter’s home in Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood: “What am I, a settler occupying Arab land? Or an Arab reclaiming it? Or am I just a guy living in a house with his family? We live in a funny world,” Khaled sums up.
There are a few pictures (unfortunately only in black and white) and a detailed index and footnotes.
Toward the end of the book, Fletcher writes: “In short, basking in the sun, with the waves washing over me and sand sucking pleasurably across my body, I knew that tough as it is, I really do love this place.”
And that’s what comes across: the diversity and perversity, the sacred and the profane. Fletcher’s footsteps in the sand have long since disappeared. How fortunate he recorded his impressions in a book.