Henrique Cymerman did not want to write his autobiography. “I’m halfway through the film,” says the Portuguese-born Israeli journalist. However, he gave in. A veteran of the Middle East, he is one of those figures that every reporter gets to know when passing through the region. He worked for Israeli vehicles, such as the newspaper Maariv, and collaborated with the Portuguese Expresso, the British BBC and the Brazilian GloboNews.
A Jewish migrant from Porto, from a family with North African and Eastern European origins, Cymerman, 63, arrived in Israel in 1975, aged 16. He has watched the country transform, including the shift to the right after decades of left-wing governments. The book thus tells three stories: his, that of journalism and that of Israel. “It’s a Jewish narrative. Every one in Israel could be a Hollywood movie.”
But not everyone had the access that Cymerman had to key characters in the region’s political history. The journalist tells in his book, “Conversando com o Enemigo: From Porto to Abu Dhabi via Tel Aviv”, for example, how he met Golda Meir, prime minister from 1969 to 1974. Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres.
Of all these conversations, he says, the one that impressed him the most was the one he had with Yitzhak Rabin. The prime minister had signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, one of the moments when peace was closest. Cymerman claims she was with him hours before his murder in 1995. “I’m looking at the picture now,” she tells Sheet by phone. “It changed the history of the region, and it was extremely traumatic for me.”
Cymerman also met the Palestinian leadership and even interviewed Yasser Arafat —the other signatory of the Oslo Accords— during the siege of his government headquarters. The reporter also met Ahmed Yassin, founder of the radical faction Hamas, which today governs the Gaza Strip.
These are remarkable episodes, but the book is also delicious in the most casual encounters, in the coincidences that correspondents end up living as a by-product of their craft. The journalist says, for example, that in 1993 he urinated alongside Juan Carlos, now King Emeritus of Spain. “Emotion blocked me completely,” writes Cymerman in the biography. “The king understood what was happening to me and made a joke that if the protocol officer was there, he would probably have a heart attack.”
Although the narrative thread of “Conversation with the Enemy” is Cymerman’s life, the autobiography seems to have a political message as well. The journalist says he believes that the solution to resolve the high tension between Israel and Palestine — exacerbated by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank — has to be regional. That is, it needs to involve the other countries of the Middle East.
Hence his enthusiasm for the Abraham Accords, the name given to the rapprochement between Israel and some Middle Eastern countries in 2020. “There are governments, led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, that have a real interest in reducing tensions “, it says. “Today, I travel to Arab countries and see things that two or three years ago would have looked like science fiction.”
These are rapid changes, of which he has witnessed. But other things, she says, never seem to change. Cymerman narrates at the beginning of the book some episodes of anti-Semitism he experienced as a child.
“I had the illusion that when I was an adult and had children and grandchildren, it would all just be history,” he says. “I thought I was going to bury these memories. But as I see that anti-Semitism is alive, and more present, I felt the need to return to these stories.”
On Tuesday morning (7), he speaks at the club A Hebraica, in São Paulo. At night, he appears at Unibes Cultural. The trip is a partnership between Instituto Brasil-Israel and the publishing house Talu Cultural, which published the work.
