Israel was fighting for the retention of this land. We were fighting to end the occupation in accordance with international law, which gave us the right to resist. That was how I saw it. I knew I could potentially be drawn into a bitter fight that would cause further bloodshed and suffering. It would require more endurance than I had been capable of before. I could no longer be just an observer. My anger, my sense of duty and of justice, would not allow it.
And yet I felt that to fight in that way was not my role. I should write. It was good to take part in a common struggle, but I knew I should be careful of how far I allowed myself to get involved. I mistrusted my ability to remain restrained. I could not trust myself to face this cruelty and stay sane. By the end of each day I felt so exhausted. I would go home to my one-room flat and sit in the dark, then take a shower, put on my pyjamas and work on updating my book, Occupier’s Law, on the legal and human rights implications of the occupation.
The day after the one I’d spent agonising at my mother’s, I went to the headquarters of the Israeli Civil Administration for the West Bank at Beit El for two trademark objection cases. Working on intellectual property matters was part of our office’s commercial practice. As I approached the building, I thought how strange it must appear to those who do not live here that, even in such troubled times, work continues on such mundane problems as trademark registration. I had always wondered how my father had dealt with rental dispute cases at his office in Jaffa just a few weeks before the Nakba. But life goes on until disaster strikes. Law reports under the British Mandate show that the courts were hearing all kinds of disputes until the very end. How could people be so concerned about their petty squabbles when their lives were going to be turned upside down? But there again how could they have known what was coming?
At the gate a young soldier was listening to jazz. Around him were jazz magazines in English and Hebrew. He had the radio volume turned up high. There was another, older soldier there with a beard. He looked fierce and was pacing around, seemingly bored.
‘Close the door,’ the young soldier ordered.
I turned to the open door closest to me.
‘No, not that one. The one over there.’
‘It’s not my duty here to close doors,’ I said.
‘I said, “Close the door.”’
I stood my ground.
‘You don’t want to close the door?’
I shrugged my shoulders. I was calm on the surface but inside I was boiling with rage – rage at being ordered about in any way, at any time, for any reason, by any soldier, young or old, because he was a soldier with a gun and therefore had the authority. Or was it self-loathing for being afraid, weak, easily provoked?
‘I’ll close the door,’ the older soldier said.
The young soldier began looking in his book. He was checking whether I was on a black list. As he was doing this I began to cool down.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked.
I answered.
He ordered the fierce-looking soldier to search me. ‘Everywhere,’ he stressed, in Hebrew. ‘Thoroughly.’
I was taken behind the curtain. Usually my status as a lawyer spared me from this. I could have refused to be searched. I could have said that I was a lawyer and I had the books and files to prove it, that it was not appropriate for a lawyer to be searched every time he entered the building. But I decided it was not worth it. I wanted to go in and finish the cases that had been pending for two years because the officer in charge of legal affairs had been on military service.
Despite the orders of the young soldier I was given only a cursory search, which I endured with some dignity. I was wearing my coat with the velvet collar, a jacket and tie, an astrakhan hat and a burgundy cashmere scarf. I stood straight, spread my arms and gave the soldier the opportunity to do his job.
I returned to the counter. The young soldier was still looking through the book. A man carrying files entered, spoke some words in Hebrew and left the gatehouse. He had obviously not been asked for his identity card. The older soldier had thought that the rules applied to everyone and asked his younger colleague why this man was an exception.
‘Jews don’t need passes,’ the young soldier explained, stressing the word Jews.
I pretended that I did not understand Hebrew. I had insisted on speaking Arabic.
The young soldier had now flipped through all the pages of his book. He wrote down my details and gave me a pass. All this waiting, this anxiety, this emotion, this humiliation just to get to the officer, Jean Claude, a French Jew who was going to hear nothing more than an objection to the registration of a trademark for a deodorant.
I saw more uniformed soldiers than usual as I walked from the gatehouse through the wooded grounds leading to the main building. Who knows which of these people had shot and killed or maimed a fellow Palestinian? They are criminals, I kept reminding myself; I am walking among criminals. I remained calm, collected. Before coming here, I had told myself that I would do my work as necessary. I would smile at no one, remain distant and aloof.
When I entered his office, Jean Claude seemed so pleased to see me. I shook his hand but did not return his smile. Despite the great warmth in his office I decided to keep my coat and jacket on. This way I would be as formal as possible. After I finished my work I proceeded without delay to Al-Haq for our weekly Wednesday meeting.
In Ramallah, as in other towns and villages, the soldiers were manning roads and stopping people and cars. If there was a stone barricade blocking traffic or graffiti painted on a wall, they would order passengers to remove the stones and paint over the graffiti. One morning I left the house in a rush for an interview with the Christian Science Monitor at the Al-Haq office. When I arrived, I remembered that I had left my heater on so I asked the driver who had brought me to drive me back.
At the corner, just near the mayor’s house, we encountered soldiers. I had wanted the driver to take the turn before, but he had wisely refused. The soldiers would have suspected we were trying to avoid them, that we had something to hide.
A soldier told us to stop and get out of the car. ‘Now give me your IDs,’ one of them said – all this in a businesslike, matter-of-fact way.
After we did as we were told, we were ordered to go and pick up the stones.
I refused.
‘You don’t want to pick up the stones?’
‘No.’
The soldier called his commander, who promptly came over. To explain our behaviour, the driver said, ‘If we pick them up the boys will hit us.’
‘Then you don’t care about your IDs?’ the soldier asked.
I stood my ground. Another soldier approached me with his baton raised threateningly. I recalled what the veteran proponent of non-violent resistance Mubarak Awad had told soldiers when they had threatened to hit him: ‘You want to hit me. Go ahead.’ I wasn’t sure I could do the same.
I could see no easy way out of this. I was certain the soldiers would hit me. I looked at their faces – young, in their early twenties. One had a small, round face and ginger hair. The other, the commander, had a darker complexion and an untrustworthy look. Neither looked cruel. I observed them without any great emotion.
‘I am a lawyer,’ I said. ‘I know the law doesn’t require me to pick up stones from a barricade erected by other people.’
I didn’t believe this would have any effect, but since I was going to be hit anyway I said it for the record. I produced my lawyer’s card. My hands were trembling. The soldier with the baton looked at it and backed down. They conferred among themselves. ‘This seems to be an important man,’ I heard one of them say. They returned our documents and we drove off.
Further up the street we saw a young man picking up the stones. He was almost finished. This was why they hadn’t insisted. There were enough for the one man already there. They didn’t need us – certainly not if we were going to be difficult.
What was interesting to me was that before this incident I had mi
strusted myself. I thought I would be unable to control my anger and I would do something stupid. That was why I had, until then, avoided confrontation. I stayed home or took alternative routes or avoided making eye contact with soldiers. Now I trusted my ability to stay in control. Yet I still sometimes felt afraid, and fear works in mysterious ways. It was not so much fear of arrest or being brutalised that worried me. It was the fear of losing myself.
The first time I met Henry after the start of the intifada was in early March 1988 in Jerusalem, at the home of my friend Judy Blanc, a Jew originally from New York and one of a generation who had left their country to come to Israel. I had last seen Henry in the June before the intifada. I had agonised about meeting him, but once we met in her bright and cosy kitchen I realised I still cared for him, as one child cares for another, without thinking why. During the past few years we had communicated over the phone and written to each other but had met only sporadically.
In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Parfion Rogozhin tells Prince Myshkin, ‘When you’re not in front of me I start hating you at once. Over these three months when I haven’t seen you I’ve hated you every minute, honest to God. I felt like poisoning you. That’s how it was. Now you haven’t been with me a quarter of an hour and all my anger passes off, you’re as dear to me as ever you were.’ I felt the same towards Henry.
But once back in the loneliness of my house, I couldn’t forgive Henry for coming to Israel. He had reaffirmed the Zionist dream by doing so. Here was an educated Jew, with a doctorate from Yale, with good prospects for a career in the West, and he had left everything to settle in Israel and start a family here. His move, his happiness here, suggested to others that if they came they too would be happy.
At Judy’s Henry and I spoke about sumoud and how it had been replaced by other forms of civil resistance – commercial strikes, stone-throwing, mass demonstrations and refusal to cooperate with the military government administering the Occupied Territories – all intended to indicate that the population was fed up with the occupation and would do everything necessary to bring it to an end. We spoke of nothing else, nothing of my recent thoughts about him. Perhaps we would remain friends – friends from two very different worlds, rarely getting together but often on each other’s minds.
Later that afternoon I listened to Dvořák’s New World Symphony. I remembered how I had cried as I listened to it on my Walkman on a plane to Geneva, where I had gone to do human rights work. I cried because the music made me feel the weight of oppression. It was free and yet I wasn’t.
It was nearly Easter 1988. My friend and future wife, Penny Johnson, and I were looking forward to a performance of Bach’s St John’s Passion at the Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem and to spending the night there and waking up in the morning to the chiming of bells.
‘Why are you staying overnight?’ my mother asked. ‘Will it be a long concert?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and it’s safer to spend the night in Jerusalem than return late at night.’
Before we left Ramallah, I saw my neighbour in her garden. Her two sons, George and Issa, were helping her, though the handsome Issa, with a lock of hair hanging over his brow, seemed mostly to be standing by. When I asked what she was planting, she said tomatoes and peppers. In 1967, she added, her sister had planted eight tomato seedlings. They’d produced enough to feed two families and she sun-dried what was left for use later in winter. Meanwhile, her sons had invested $5,000 in setting up a new pizzeria. Two days after it opened the intifada erupted. Four months later they had to close their restaurant because the leaders of the intifada insisted – as part of the civil disobedience campaign – that the town close down at eleven every morning.
On our way to the Old City we stopped at the American Colony Hotel, where we met a journalist who told us that the Israeli army was going to make an announcement at six that evening. Just an hour later we heard that the Gaza Strip had been sealed off and was under curfew for three days, that telephone lines to Gaza had been cut and that journalists were not allowed to travel there except with a military convoy. The West Bank would also be sealed off from Israel for three days. I wondered how that was possible. The land was one.
We immediately realised that we could not stay overnight in the Old City. We feared that, if we did, we might not be allowed back to Ramallah. The thought occurred to me that perhaps it might be good to be in Jerusalem, where I would be able to contact the outside world should I need to. But then I dismissed the idea. I had to get home.
We left the car in the American Colony Hotel car park and entered the Old City through the Damascus Gate. The alleyways, lit by faint yellow street lights, were empty except for the occasional unit of eight soldiers lying down on a large piece of cardboard like squatters.
The concert was at eight thirty. It was still only five past seven when we arrived at the Lutheran Hostel, where we had booked a room for the night. On the way to the hostel we passed a row of new stone houses built for Israeli Jews. Next to them was an Arab house. A woman looked out of a window on the second floor and called for her son. Was there fear in her voice or was it my imagination?
How could the Israelis have expected us to take this lying down? To allow them to come and take our property even as the media reported it all? What of law, what of morality, what of common decency? I said this to Penny, but she did not respond. She was nervous.
After a quick dinner, we went to the Church of the Redeemer where the pastor had reserved two excellent seats for us. ‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ I told myself. ‘Let the music go through me, overwhelm me, relax me, make me forget the trials that are to come.’
I was not disappointed. We stayed to hear Peter’s denial of Christ and Christ’s suffering as he was taken. We left before the trial and the crucifixion.
We walked through the dark, empty streets. We talked to keep up our spirits, but we were both on edge. We remembered the stories we had heard of how soldiers stopped people, any young men they could find, and beat them up.
This war was different from other wars. This wasn’t a war between armies following the rules of engagement. This was a war between combatants and civilians. To the Israelis we were all potential terrorists against whom the worst behaviour was justified.
At the American Colony Hotel we looked for our friend Rita Giacaman, a professor of public health at Birzeit University. We had planned to meet her there and return together to Ramallah, but we couldn’t find her. Penny went to look for her.
I sat waiting. Clearly the Israelis were following the recommendations of their American supporters, who advised them to close off the Occupied Territories and do what they had to do – ruthlessly, quickly and without observation by journalists. I was offered a Cointreau and, as I drank it, I couldn’t take my mind off what we were returning to. It seemed as though everything we did and said was for the last time – before we vanished deep inside a dark hole, never to re-emerge.
Penny eventually found Rita and Rita, who was chain-smoking, spoke even faster than usual and was anxious that we did not linger. As we were leaving, we met the film-maker Michel Kleifeh, who had just returned from Gaza. ‘You can cut the tension there with a knife,’ he said. ‘It is terrible, terrible down there.’
The road to Ramallah was empty, except for several army jeeps. It felt like a war zone, yet we were not even stopped. On the radio was the news that Gaza had been completely shut down as of ten o’clock.
Next day at Al-Haq we discussed what we could do, how we would work under these new restrictions and what we would do if the telephone lines were cut as in Gaza. No one had an answer.
The closure applied only to Palestinians, not to Israeli settlers, who could still come and go as they pleased and terrorise the population. Many settlers used Tireh Road, where I lived. One day they stopped the mayor’s son, his wife and his child in their car. They pointed their guns at him, intending to kill him, but the baby began to cry. The settlers said they would have killed him if it hadn
’t been for the child.
Every week the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, a group of underground leaders representing the various Palestinian political factions, issued a bulletin that indicated the form of non-violent resistance that should take place each day of that week. The 22 March bulletin said that 30 March, Land Day, would be a day of protest followed by two days of planting tomatoes, chickpeas, broad beans and spring onions. On the other days of that week the town would open for only a few hours in the morning.
The morning after the bulletin was distributed the army came and closed the vegetable market. They turned over boxes of vegetables and threw the dough at the bakery on the ground. They then tried to force the shopkeepers to open their shops, but the whole town remained closed in solidarity.
The Israelis wanted to be sure that Land Day passed without protest. This was important to them because the US secretary of state, George Shultz, was coming and the government wanted to show him that the area was under control. A massive number of Israeli soldiers were deployed as a result, even as Israel suffered great financial losses by preventing 150,000 Palestinian labourers from working in Israel. During that week every single Palestinian in the street was stopped and had his or her identity card confiscated. The soldiers had orders to be as strict and brutal as possible.
Almost a year later, on 14 February 1989, I received a poem from Henry:
I miss you. I miss our friendship:
I want to reach out across the chaos, the abyss
But so often I feel there is too much blood which
Separates us; too many bullets, deaths and hates
That we cannot be walking the hills, with a distant
View of the Jaffa you never knew as a child
But we are as we prophesied consumed by our
Collective identities, you Palestinian, me Israeli,
You no longer submissive, me, brutalising, brutalised;
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