by Colum McCann
Mathematics: 68, Fair. Strong aptitude for high concepts but sorely lacking in principles of organization and discipline (is often seen fiddling with her Walkman).
Geography: 82, Very Good. An unusual sense of history gives Smadar’s geographic endeavors a twist, especially in relation to Greater Israel. Her paper on natural geographic features was the best in class.
Hebrew: 96, Excellent. Engages quickly. High aspirations. Exemplary paper on Elisha Porat.
Physical Education: 95, Excellent. Distractible, but excels in dance, particularly jazz and freestyle. (Credit also given for outside swim team participation.)
301
Smadar’s face was left perfectly intact. The shrapnel sprayed the lower part of her body, mostly her back and shoulders and legs. In forensic analysis it was determined that she was relatively close to the bomber when she was hit. Most likely, said the scientists, she had her back turned and she did not see his face, though it was also possible that she was already running away with her head bowed.
300
Bamboo shoots surrounded by gunpowder, known as thunderclap bombs, were developed in the eleventh century during the Song dynasty. The heated air inside the bamboo exploded and caused a thunderous racket.
Two hundred years later the Chinese began loading their bombs with tiny shards of broken porcelain and pieces of scrap iron, hooks and caltrops, that shot out in every direction: they were known as thundercrash bombs.
The technique was rediscovered in 1784 by Henry Shrapnel, a lieutenant in the British Royal Artillery, who filled a hollow cannonball with spheres of lead to wreak maximum damage.
The shrapnel method has been used down through the years with glass shards, razors, marbles, arrowheads, nails, screws, chain links, staples, pins, rivets, ball bearings and other sundry items.
During the Second Intifada, claims were made that Palestinian bombers laced their shrapnel with rat poison, or warfarin, to make the victims bleed out quicker, though the claim was ridiculed and later dismissed since, firstly, the amount of poison needed would be enormous; secondly, its effects would not be instantaneous; and lastly it would be rendered mostly ineffective by the tremendous heat of the blast.
299
After the bombing Rami took long and frequent showers so Nurit couldn’t hear the sound of his sobbing.
298
He was sure that Smadar would have been a member of the Machsom Watch, the Israeli women who monitored the checkpoints. She would have gone every Friday. To Qalandia. Or Checkpoint 300. Or Atara. He could imagine her walking around, hair in a short bob, black blouse, black jeans, black boots with deep red laces.
297
Women in Black, an Israeli human rights group, was founded in Jerusalem in 1988—nine years before Smadar was killed—following the outbreak of the First Intifada. The women stood at intersections and traffic lights and in central squares, wearing dark clothing head to toe, carrying black signs with the image of a white hand and lettering: Stop the Occupation.
296
Chromesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which sounds automatically evoke the experience of a color. For those with the condition, music is seen as much as it is heard. A high-pitched sound suggests brightness. A low-pitched sound suggests something of a darker tone.
The first recorded instance of chromesthesia comes from the English philosopher John Locke, who, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wrote about a blind man. When asked what the color scarlet was, the blind man replied that it was akin to the sound of a trumpet.
295
Abir tried to learn to play the oud when she was eight. She had found the instrument propped up against a garbage can near her school in Anata. She carried it home and brought it straight to her room. The neck of the oud was cracked and it gave out a low-pitched whine, but Bassam repaired it as best he could with glue and wood filler.
He installed his old record player in her room and gave her a 45-rpm record by Farid al-Atrash. When Abir first heard it she turned up her nose and said to him: Baba, that sounds like old people music.
294
Flower of my imagination, I guarded her in my heart.
293
Women in White, Las Damas de Blanco, were formed in 2003 to protest the imprisonment in Cuba of lawyers, students, journalists and intellectuals. The women met each Sunday at the Santa Rita de Casia church in Havana, with photographs of their jailed loved ones pinned to their chests. They were inspired, they said, by the mothers of the disappeared in Chile and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina too.
The Damas de Blanco group was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, given by the European parliament, in 2005, although their government prohibited them from attending the ceremony.
292
Smadar went to Paris Square in Jerusalem with Nurit to join the protesting women. Nine years old, she had no proper black shoes and wore, instead, a pair of ballet slippers which she darkened with polish. She stood at the intersection, alongside Judy Blanc, an older activist. Together they held a sign aloft: End the Occupation. Neither flinched when a car full of dark-hatted settlers threw a carton of popcorn at their feet.
291
Nurit was awarded the Sakharov Prize in 2001. She and Rami traveled to Strasbourg to receive the award for her writing. She wore a purple satin dress and carried, in her handbag, a picture of Smadar.
She was given the award alongside Izzat Ghazzawi, a Palestinian writer and teacher. Ghazzawi’s son—also named Rami—had been shot dead in his schoolyard by Israeli snipers at the age of sixteen.
290
On the eighth anniversary of his son’s death, Ghazzawi wrote in his diary: Only madness drove us to celebrate your 24th birthday. The cake was as big as the man who will not come. Nobody ate from it. As though it were a gift to silence.
289
When Nurit stood at the podium she asked them please not to applaud.
288
After winning the Sakharov Prize, Ghazzawi went about his teaching duties at Birzeit University, but was arrested numerous times for political incitement.
He was stopped several mornings a week at the Atara checkpoint where he underwent strip searches in front of his college students.
Two years after the award, Nurit heard that he had died of a broken spirit.
287
Forgive us our longing, Ghazzawi wrote, if it intensifies.
286
When Checkpoint 300 first went up, in 1994, it was a simple wooden hut with a couple of orange barrels placed in the middle of the road. The barrels were filled with stones. A radio played. A flag fluttered. A few soldiers stood guard.
Bassam could recall when a flock of birds could easily shadow the whole area.
After a year, the barrels were replaced with concrete blocks. A road barrier was added, then some fences, then some barbed wire, then a temporary structure, then a large steel tower.
In 2005 the area was incorporated into the Separation Barrier and the checkpoint became one of the largest in the West Bank, topped along its length with glass and razor wire.
285
In the winter of 2008, Dalia el-Fahum began cycling from Bethlehem to parts of the Kidron Valley, collecting sounds of the natural environment for her ongoing dissertation.
Dalia was an unusual sight in Bethlehem—six foot two, her dark hair drawn back in a tight chignon, a silver badger streak at her brow.
She traveled, in a headscarf and modest Western clothes, out from the edges of the city into the dry hills beyond the valley, often cycling twenty or more miles in a single day.
Dalia was sometimes stopped by patrols. When chatting with the police, she slightly bent her knees and stooped over so as not to appear too tall or intimidating. She explained she was taping sounds in the hills for a music project. The soldiers asked her
to hit the play button. A rush of water, the bark of a wild dog, the sound of wind through the natsch, the applause of birds flying overhead.
Twice the police dismantled her recorder and once it was taken from her altogether by an officer who sheepishly returned it to her father’s village home later that night, minus its batteries.
284
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Dalia’s project concerned the work of the composer Olivier Messiaen, a Parisian organist and friend of John Cage’s, who had incorporated birdsong into much of his music. In particular Dalia wanted to take Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux for solo piano and meld her own West Bank sounds with it, creating an electronic version that she would then extend into a slow eight-hour piece that she wanted to call Migration.
One morning, towards the middle of her project, in a village eight miles outside Bethlehem, Dalia heard pre-dawn bulldozers interrupting the quiet. She had noticed the machinery before, and had seen the strobe lights down near the main road, but never quite so close.
Through the bushes she could see the army plowing up a grove of olive trees. The sun caught the silvery sheen of the branches. They flashed as they were yanked from the ground.
Dalia crawled on her belly, moved closer to the sounds and—from a distance of fifty meters—held out the microphone of her Sony digital recorder, and began to tape.
282
Using laser-powered microphones, scientists in Germany determined that plants and trees release gases when they perceive themselves to be under attack. These gases, in turn, produce sound waves that register on a level inaudible to anything but the most sensitive machines.
The scientists, at the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn, suggested that flowers emit a whine when their leaves are cut, and that trees can warn each other of approaching swarms of insects, and that the scent of fresh-cut grass comes from a secretion system within the grass blades.
The team built on previous research findings that neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin can be found in plants, though there was no evidence of neurons or synapses within their sensory systems.
281
In the jargon of radio operators in the Israeli army, a flower is someone who has been seriously wounded in battle.
280
In a 1940 essay G. H. Hardy wrote: The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
279
At a conference in Greece, Bassam told the audience that they had to understand that the olive tree was everything to the Palestinian mind. Uprooting an ancient tree, he said to them, was tantamount to smashing a precious artifact in a museum. Take a Cézanne and put your fist through it. Allow a Brâncuși to melt under tremendous heat. Lift a Grecian urn and poke it full of holes.
278
His father had operated an olive press in a barn on the edge of the village of Sa’ir, near the cave where Bassam grew up. Inside, a white horse circled around and around by the light of an oil lamp. The horse—blindfolded so as not to grow dizzy—turned the wooden beam, causing a circular stone to grind against another stone, crushing the olives, releasing the oil.
What Bassam couldn’t understand, as a child, was how the horse could keep circling all day without falling down, exhausted. It wasn’t until he was six years old that he realized that there were three identical white horses rotating through.
Two years later, an electric press was introduced and the horses were put out into the stony field where they spent the rest of their days moving, still, in endless circles.
277
One of his favorite prison songs: Give my greetings to the olive and the family that brought me up.
276
When Dalia listened to her tapes later, alone in the recording studio at the university, she thought it a much softer sound than she recalled from the hillside. An animal purr to it, filtering upwards along the slope, nothing mechanical.
She was disappointed by its neutrality, having hoped that there would be something more brutal there, the rip of the earth, the tear of roots, the flop of the dirt: as if she might have been able to hear a ghostly groan from the trees themselves.
She went back and forth on the mixer controls, trying to isolate the harshest spots where the engines grew throatier. She tried to isolate the shout of a soldier, the wail of a siren, the beeping of the reversing bulldozers, but isolating the sounds made them particular, even comic. The music, when she tried to mix it, struck her as pathetic.
She went back to her raw recordings. The interlaced call of a cuckoo. The noise of a mouse in the underbrush. The sound, too, of her own movement through the grass.
Some music existed here, she felt. Perhaps she could use the sounds, punctuate them with some of the older birdsong she had taped, but the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that the sound was something to leave alone, that it was not the bulldozers nor the olive trees nor the buzzing strobe lights that needed attention, but the quietness itself.
275
She was also drawn to the sound of the rain clicking upon the olive leaves.
274
One of the things Rami’s son, Elik, learned early on in his training as a paratrooper was the special discipline needed to carry water. On long desert marches not even the slightest noise was permitted. His water canteen had to be filled to the very brim and covered with a small piece of plastic wrap before being sealed. If his canteen was even partly empty, the water would slosh around and possibly alert a nearby enemy.
When opened, the water had to be drunk in its entirety to prevent any further sound. Choosing the right moment to drink was key to avoiding dehydration. Elik knew that one early sign of dehydration was a very slight blurring of the vision.
The soldiers worked in tandem, but sometimes they were sent out alone on training exercises with just a single canteen for an eighteen-mile march.
Elik’s commander also insisted that food be taken with the water in case the liquid began to bounce against the walls of the stomach.
273
In times of drought it was the practice of the ancient water carriers to travel to distant sources and fill large containers made out of buffalo hide. They carried the supplies from the oases by ox-drawn cart.
Upon visiting a village or a town they went to the wealthy residents first, and filled the barrels in their basements and courtyards. Afterwards the poorer villagers lined up to fill up their clay jars.
The business was brisk and the carriers often became quite wealthy.
272
The Greek word clepsydra, given to ancient water clocks, comes from the amalgamation of the Greek words for water and to steal.
271
In the West Bank an arrangement was made by Mekorot, the Israeli national water company, to make the price for settlers as cheap as possible.
Palestinians paid up to four times the price. Privately the water executives called the deal the Swimming Pool Clause.
270
One afternoon on a visit to her publishers in Tel Aviv, Nurit had a fender bender at a traffic light on King George Street, near Meir Garden.
She had leaned across to adjust a briefcase full of papers in the passenger seat. She popped the clutch by mistake. Her car lurched forward and dented the bumper of a metallic blue Mercedes in front of her.
A tall middle-aged man stepped casually out. He wore a crisp white open-neck shirt and a slim blue suit. A curl of unlikely hair flopped down over his eyes.
He surprised her with a smile: Don’t worry about it, he said, I’ll take care of it.
—Not at all, it’s my fault.
—I can get it fixed, he said, don’t worry, seri
ously, here’s my card.
—No, no, that’s—
—Nothing to worry about, I’ll pay for it.
He bowed slightly. Nurit flipped the card over in her hand. She recognized the logo right away, the blue circle, the white background, the water tower: he was a vice president of Mekorot.
She watched him climb back into his car. He adjusted his rearview mirror and pulled out quickly into the traffic. Nurit stood there a moment until the other cars behind her blared their horns.
The following morning she wrote a check for six hundred shekels for the damage, then wrapped a copy of her book in plain paper, and sent both by messenger to his office.
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Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, by Nurit Peled-Elhanan (I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., London, New York, 2012). Introduction: A Jewish Ethnocracy in the Middle East. 1: The Representation of Palestinians in Israeli School Books. 2: The Geography of Hostility and Inclusion: A Multimodal Analysis. 3: Layout as Carrier of Meaning: Explicit and Implicit Messages Transmitted Through Layout. 4: Processes of Legitimation in Reports about Massacres. ISBN #: 978 1 78076 505 1. Reprinted 2013, 2015.