As a child of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, Kai Bird, an American Pultizer Prize-winning author and columnist, grew up between Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, and Cairo. He later married a Jewish woman, Susan, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. It’s no wonder he claims to have experienced both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Bird, a Medill alumus, spoke at the McCormick Tribune Forum Monday evening to a crowd of 50 on his latest book, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate. Part history, part memoir, the book is named after the former checkpoint that separated Israeli West Jerusalem and Jordanian East Jerusalem.
“The book is about the Middle East of my childhood,” Bird said.
Bird said writing on the Middle East was “an emotional black hole.” It was difficult to write without being attacked, so he choose to avoid the subject altogether and went on to write several award-winning books such as his Pulitzer Prize winning biography on Robert Oppenheimer.
By 2005, Bird said, he was ready to look past his reluctance: “I wanted to figure out what I didn’t realize [as a child] what was happening around me.”
Bird grew up playing “Israeli and Palestinians” instead of “Cowboy and Indians,” lived in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and attended school in West Jerusalem, meaning he had to cross the Mandelbaum Gate each morning to school in a very divided Jerusalem.
“Unlike my neighbors, my parents could only do this cause they had a green passport and I could go through the gate each day,” Bird said.
Bird recalled yelling at his father to stop the car once when they drove through an Israeli checkpoint because he had forgotten to take off his Gamel Abdel Nasser button.
“I remember being keenly aware of the borders and the divisions between these people,” Bird said.
His family evacuated from Jerusalem in 1956 before the October War.
In addition to his Arab exposure, Bird stressed the influence his in-laws had on him, especially his mother-in-law, who kept an empty closet in their house with only one item – a packed suitcase.
“She was ready to flee at any time,” Bird said.
Through his book Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, Bird tries to make sense of the connection between the Shoah, the Holocaust of the Jews, and the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe known as creation of the state of Israel.
“I don’t think it’s hard to understand what should happen and what eventually will happen between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Bird said.
Bird, an ardent two-state solution supporter calls for a return to the 1967 green-line boundaries, the recognition of the Palestinian Nakba by Israelis, a resolution to the refugee question, and a one-to-one compensation of land.
“If the Israeli [Supreme Court] can identify that the deeds from 1948 are legal [for the Israelis], then they’ll have to recognize the Palestinian deeds,” Kai said.
Though apprehensive of a potential “hafdara,” or separation spurred by “Netanyahu maintaining a status quo” in addition to the continual settlement building in East Jerusalem, Bird is hopeful of the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Plan laid out by Sari Nusseibeh, president of Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University, and Ami Ayalon, former head of the Israeli security agency. Both are childhood friends of Bird.
“It’s such a small place,” Bird said. “Eventually these people must live together in peace.”