Mideast Riptide Touches Newport

When you live on a 31-foot boat in the still waters of Newport Harbor, the world must look pretty sweet. Or, let’s just say you can come to count on certain things--almost all of them good.

Then there’s the world out there beyond the seas, out in places where it’s hard to count on anything--or, if you can, almost all of them are bad.

Beverly Anderson is talking about that other world, the one beyond the serene life she and her husband share aboard the Tansy Lee.

Earlier this month, Anderson, 43, spent two weeks in Israel on tour with the human rights organization Global Exchange. “This is how I spend my vacations,� she jokes, “going to areas of conflict and to places where people are not doing well.�

The group of 10 spent most of its time in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, talking both formally and informally with Israelis and Palestinians. What Anderson picked up from her conversations is that people on both sides of the political divide are living lives of not-so-quiet desperation.

“I talked to 63 people on my own,� says Anderson, who runs her own business consulting firm in Newport Beach. “I wanted to look at both sides of the situation, objectively. I’d go into shops, people would make coffee or tea and sit down and talk for hours, because they want to talk about it, because they want help.�

Even the most hawkish Israelis, she says, are wearying of the occupation. “They said they can’t go on like this,� she says. They lament military checkpoints in Israel that they too must pass through.

And, of course, she deplores the suicide bombings and the terror they cause in Israel. But it is the plight of Palestinians that predominates in her reflections. Their economy is ruined and life under occupation is a relentless submission to Israeli authority.

A typical day in an occupied town, she says, might begin with a loudspeaker announcement telling residents during which hours they may go to the grocery store or visit a relative. In one town, she says, mothers were feeding their infants sugar water because they couldn’t get milk. To counter that, members of Israel’s “peace movement� brought in formula and other food.

Anderson made a point of meeting with the father of a 17-year-old suicide bomber. The boy’s father is a math teacher who said his son killed only himself at a falafel stand when the bomb strapped to him apparently detonated prematurely.

“The father said he didn’t know his son was going to do it,� Anderson says. “He said he was a straight-A student, the town had been under curfew for 51 days and he was not allowed to go to school, and he had become more and more depressed and despondent.�

The father told her, Anderson says, that his son hadn’t been involved politically and wasn’t particularly religious.

As Anderson talked with the dead boy’s father, the family possessions were in a tent next to their home that had been destroyed by an Israeli offensive.

So it goes, day in and day out, in the occupied territories. Transposed to Orange County, it would be as though Garden Grove residents were confined to their homes, unable to go to work, school or grocery stores without permission. Or, would not be allowed to visit friends or relatives in neighboring Anaheim without being searched at gunpoint.

It’s a world of despair that seems much farther than a mere half-a-world away from the peaceful waters of Newport Harbor. “Another planet,� Anderson says.

“It’s a weird adjustment for the first few days when you come back,� she says, “not looking over your shoulder and just having a heightened awareness of your surroundings and wondering if there’s someone coming at you with guns.�

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons at (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at [email protected].