Monday, Jul. 23, 1990
From the Publisher
By Louis A. Weil III
How do you portray a people? For this week's cover story, senior writer Lance Morrow and Jerusalem bureau reporter Jamil Hamad avoided the politicians who regularly define the Palestinian cause. "Rhetoric in the Middle East has an elaborate life of its own," explains Morrow. "It tends to obscure the truth." Instead of gathering familiar slogans, the two constructed their group portrait from the personal tales of a wide array of ordinary Palestinians. Says Hamad: "We decided to let readers judge for themselves the fears and dreams that filled our notebooks."
For Hamad, a Palestinian, the project had special import. Born in Rafat, a now demolished Arab village located in what is Israel today, he says, "I am acutely aware that we Palestinians are misunderstood as a people." He tells of an elegant Palestinian woman, Hanan Bargouthi, who, having undergone a humiliating search at a London airport, observed bitterly, "I am Palestinian by birth, Jordanian by passport, Israeli because of the occupation and a terrorist according to security people."
Both Morrow and Hamad approached the story well briefed. Hamad, who studied law at Damascus University, has worked for Arab newspapers in Morocco, Lebanon and Jordan, and was a free-lance journalist in Jerusalem before joining TIME's bureau there in 1982. Morrow, who is based in New York City, has visited Israel six times in the past 2 1/2 years. He confesses to painfully divided sympathies: "The Israelis and the Palestinians," he says, "are a kind of moral-political double exposure, two universes set down in the same place."
As Hamad and Morrow collected their tales, they discovered that although the Palestinians are widely dispersed, their universe in some ways remains a village. Hamad was two hours into an interview with a family in the West Bank before he realized that he was related by marriage to one of its members. While he was interviewing students in Jordan, a teacher overheard that he lived in Bethlehem, the man's hometown. "And what is the news of Jamil Hamad?" asked the teacher. Hamad laughed and replied, "I am Jamil Hamad." The two had not seen each other in 20 years.