Palestinian girl holding a dove on the roof of her home in the Shati Refugee Camp in Gaza.
My book Windows of the Soul is divided into six chapters/locations. I decided it was better to go into depth in a few places than to skip superficially through twenty countries. So, lets start the chapters:
The Palestinians
I'll tell you a few things that aren't in my book for space reasons, from my time working on the story of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I first arrived in Israel in early 1988. My stepfather, the director John Hancock, and my mother the actress and screenwriter Dorothy Tristan, were making an HBO movie with Mariel Hemingway in the starring role. They invited me along long before the first Palestinian Intifada had broken out. But when I arrived it was under way, and as I arrived at a hotel in East Jerusalem, I knew I would not be seeing my family often. Such is my passion for my job while I am working.
Near sunset on my first day in Jerusalem, I dropped my bags in my room, hailed a cab driven by a middle-aged Palestinian man and said "Take me to the Intifada please." He drove me to Shuafat, a nearby refugee camp, and sure enough there was a riot under way. I worked for Time magazine that first trip--for over three months, each day documenting the extraordinary violence in the West Bank and Gaza between Israeli forces and settlers, and the "shabab", the young men of the streets, who were at that time using stones against the army. The first Arabic I learned--and quickly--was "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) and "Weyn jesh? Weyn mustashfa?" (Where are the soldiers? Where is the hospital?)
My mother asked me if I would take her to see the Intifada. I said no. It was so dangerous--bullets being fired by the army and journalists threatened by demonstrators. I couldn't risk her being harmed and I couldn't work while watching her. My stepfather put me in his movie as an extra because he needed a focal point for a scene--he made me a Kurdish rebel woman who gets blown up by Iraqi government forces. I hardly saw my family.
I returned again and again to the West Bank and Gaza for seven years, even while based in Moscow covering Perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union, working for Time Magazine (September 1990 - September 1992), and after working for them in Africa for nearly six months (October 1992 - May 1993). Over those seven years I also often photographed Yasser Arafat. It started as an assignment for the New York Times Magazine in the fall of 1988. They sent me to Tunis, where he was still in exile, to get exclusive access for a cover story about him written by Marie Colvin, who already knew him well. He was formidably cranky at times--hard-bitten guerillas and senior advisors were sometimes terrified to even approach him. Other times he was gentle, making me drink tea or eat watermelon with him. In his high voice he called me "troublemaker" and "dictator," but always gave me great access.
I traveled on his plane to Libya, Algiers, Washington DC for the signing of the Oslo Accords and Oslo when he received the Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzahk Rabin and Shimon Peres. I got to know his wife Suha. After they came to Gaza from exile in Tunis, we would often have lunch or tea. She lived on the top floor of their relatively modest villa: that was her domain. Arafat lived simply and mostly downstairs, which was the place for security, secretaries and others. But when there was an earthquake one morning Arafat shot upstairs in his pajamas and grabbed their tiny baby, rushing into the sandy streets with her. I write some more about him in the book.
► Read This Entire Post
