ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
We're now in the second week of a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, one still marked by deadly violence. Earlier this week, a video of Hamas publicly executing eight Palestinian men, accusing them of working with Israel during the war, was circulating online. And on Friday, Israeli forces killed 11 members of a Palestinian family. Gaza civil defense authorities said the family, like many others, were inspecting the ruins of their home.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Israeli forces fired a tank round at their minibus. The Israeli military said that the family was behind the yellow line where its troops are positioned.
LIMBONG: That's NPR's Jane Arraf reporting on Weekend Edition this morning. She's covered the Middle East for 30 years.
ARRAF: It's sort of bookended by my first experience covering the Middle East, which was in the '90s, when I came here as a Reuters reporter. And it was a time when Jordan was secretly discussing a peace deal with Israel, when the Palestinians were discussing possible peace with Israel.
LIMBONG: At nearly every juncture since then, where peace was discussed or war flared up again, Jane was somewhere in the region, reporting for major outlets like CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera English and, for several years, for NPR on stories like these.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
ARRAF: They included two fighters being buried, plus an 11-year-old boy and a hospital orderly.
For millions of Syrians, this is a new beginning, long dreamed of during the years of killings and arrests and repression.
We've just landed in Gaza - not very far into Gaza, just a few hundred feet beyond the fence. It's part of the buffer zone that Israel has created. There is not another person in sight here.
LIMBONG: And now, a little more than a week into the current ceasefire, she's watching to see what might be different.
ARRAF: And so here we are decades later, and we're still talking about many of the same issues, which just drives home to me how much of a driver of instability this all is, the fact that Palestinians don't have a homeland.
LIMBONG: Cautious optimism is the phrase we in the news business have been using to describe people's reaction to the ceasefire. When I spoke to Jane on Friday, I wanted to know, is that how people there on the ground really feel? Is that how she really feels?
ARRAF: Cautious - I mean, certainly cautious. We are very cautious. Optimism - I struggle these days with the word optimism. I used to be - I swear, I used to be an optimistic person. That's kind of taken a beating in the last few years.
LIMBONG: Yeah, I can imagine. I wonder, what is it like to cover a story that stretches across borders - right? - 'cause - so you're based in Amman, Jordan. You know, what's happening now in Gaza kind of reverberates throughout so many different countries. And how do you sort of wrap your head around all of that?
ARRAF: Pretty much all the countries I go to are in the Arab world. They're linked. And when you travel to these countries - whether it's Lebanon or Syria or Iraq - you realize how interconnected they are. And also even though we're talking about historical issues that created the countries in this region, it's kind of as if it was yesterday.
I was in South Lebanon recently, for instance, and I was standing on the ruins of a demolished village that overlooks Israel, and it was demolished by the Israeli army after the ceasefire with Lebanon last year because they want to depopulate those border villages. But from that Lebanese village, you could see into Israel. You could see the part of Israel that used to be Palestinian land. In fact, some of the people we interviewed in Lebanon - their families had farmed that land.
You could see into the Golan Heights in Syria. And when you're in Jordan, for instance, now again, you can get in a taxi and you can go to Damascus for lunch, if you want. It's that close. I mean, everything is so interconnected here that it makes it both easier and more complicated to figure out solutions to things.
LIMBONG: When we present the news and copy, we always make sure to, like, tell the audience how close everything is. But I was just fiddling around from - like, on Google Maps this morning. I'd be like, oh, that is only 2 hours away (laughter). You know, that is only - that's...
ARRAF: It's wild...
LIMBONG: Yeah.
ARRAF: ...Isn't it?
LIMBONG: Yeah. And it is like - I mean, I guess this is an absurd question, but, like, is that scary, to be so close to it all?
ARRAF: No, no, it's exhilarating, particularly if you're a fan of history - right? - because in all of these places, you are in places that are deeply important to almost every major religion - where figures from the Bible walked, for instance, where some of the famous poets from history recited poetry in the streets. Everything is here, and it's such an old civilization in so many places. I mean, think of Iraq - right? - the cradle of civilization.
And, you know, for me, one of the most amazing things that even now makes me feel so lucky to be a journalist is that I can go to places that I only read about when I was a child, like places with magical names - like Babylon and Damascus - and they actually exist, right?
LIMBONG: There's a Babylon in Long Island, but it's not as...
ARRAF: (Laughter) You also have a lot of Lebanons (ph), right? Aren't there, like...
LIMBONG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of that, too.
ARRAF: ...Dozens of Lebanons?
LIMBONG: Yeah. Violence does do many things. It attracts attention. Assuming the ceasefire holds, I imagine people's interest might drift elsewhere, right? Here in the States, we've got a government shutdown. You know, there's plenty of, like, elections coming up and all of that. And so I'm curious, as people continue the hard work of figuring out what happens next in the region, what are you worried might get undercovered?
ARRAF: That's one of the pivotal questions - isn't it? - that we face as journalists because it's really easy to get people's attention during a war. I mean, it's not easy to sustain that attention, certainly, even when unbelievable things are happening. But what I would hope is that there's a momentum to this. And I think that, even though, yes, interests will definitely wane, but people are always interested in people.
You know, the other day in South Lebanon, we were going along one of these destroyed villages, and we saw this man who was dancing on the roof of his destroyed home to really loud music. There was no one else around for miles. So we stopped and talked to him, and you know, his life is kind of the wider story of what's happened in South Lebanon. But the draw is, here is this man who, despite everything, is dancing, and there will always be stories like that, that I think people will always be interested in because at the end of the day, people are interested in people.
LIMBONG: Having covered this story for a long time, I think I'm wondering what could go wrong here.
ARRAF: So many things could go wrong. We're now a week into the ceasefire, but all the other things that have to happen are not happening. Doesn't mean they won't happen - it just means they're not. For instance, famine has been spreading through Gaza. More than 90% of homes are damaged or destroyed. Winter is coming.
Israel has restricted aid for months, and as part of the ceasefire agreement, it has agreed to dramatically increase aid, but it has not given signs that it's going to do that. It has kept closed one of the main borders with Gaza that's used for aid shipments. It has deregistered major international aid organizations.
So one of the things people really need to focus on, I think, and that we need to focus on, is, how is this all going to work? You know, a ceasefire is wonderful news, and it's a moment of almost euphoria. But then for anything to actually happen takes so much work, so much organization, so much effort, and we are not yet seeing that on the ground.
LIMBONG: How are you doing?
ARRAF: How am I doing?
LIMBONG: Yeah, how are you doing?
ARRAF: Oh, such a nice question - thank you for asking. I think I'm doing like a lot of people are doing. You know, one of the stories I'm looking into is psychotherapists and psychiatrists who say they've been seeing an increase in, like, free-floating anxiety. Obviously, that's not a clinical term, but it's basically an increase in anxiety from all the horrible things that have been happening in the world and the inability to do anything about it. And it's really interesting to me that that is a phenomenon.
Now, as journalists, I mean, part of the reason we go into journalism - a lot of it is this is kind of a way to not do something about it, but a way to feel useful to explain what's happening, so that certainly keeps me going.
LIMBONG: It's funny. I asked you how you're doing, and then you went to a thing about a story that you're working on, which is a very...
(LAUGHTER)
LIMBONG: ...Journalism thing to do.
(LAUGHTER)
ARRAF: Ah, yes. Let me just say, when you ask anyone here these days - and these days being the past two years - how are you? - you instantly realize there's no answer to that, right? There's no short answer to that because the world has been falling apart, essentially. So when you ask people, how are you? - a lot of people find it hard to answer.
LIMBONG: That's NPR's Jane Arraf. Jane, thank you so much.
ARRAF: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
