There was more futile discussion, then a tense silence as Shimon Peres entered the hall. He did not utter a single word and stayed for exactly four minutes before leaving to catch a plane. I wondered why he had come at all, but then I realised it was in order to allow the other attendees to say they had met him, along with dignitaries and thinkers from the Arab world. The meeting was a charade. We were not given the chance to present our ideas for future cultural projects. The objective was purely political.
Among the few writers who refused to come was the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. In response, the cultural adviser to Shimon Peres had said, ‘When Makhmoud [which is how she pronounced his name] Darwish left Israel to join the PLO, I wrote him a letter. Last night I went over the letter and wrote to him this addendum which I want to read to you: where are you, Makhmoud Darwish? Why have you not come to this conference? Now that there is peace and the two sides are getting together, where are you, Makhmoud Darwish?’ Her words echoed in my ears long after the event.
The great poet proved to be more astute than all of us in staying away, despite the tremendous pressure that the PLO must have placed on him.
I returned home feeling that I had lost direction. Powerful forces were bringing about quick and unwelcome changes. The question for me was where to go from here, but there seemed to be no like-minded people with whom I could discuss my doubts.
Moving between Jerusalem and Ramallah felt like moving between two utterly different worlds. Coming back to Ramallah, I was struck by the chaos and confusion there. Ramallah was being squeezed out of existence. The flatter lands to the south towards Jerusalem were being taken over by the Palestinian nouveau riche. What was left within the city limits were some hills to the north. They were still beautiful, but rather than being protected, they were now haphazardly scarred by all kinds of tall and ugly buildings that were unsuitable for the steep terrain. Everyone was clamouring for space, yet there was a tacit acceptance that all we had was the land within the city boundaries that the Israeli military government had established prior to the Oslo Accord. Everything outside these limits was not ours and would not be available for the future expansion of the city. That was reserved for Jewish settlements.
The streets of Ramallah were jammed with traffic. At the roundabout in the middle of the city, some tradesmen had parked their cars and draped them with colourful carpets for sale. Everywhere I looked, existing buildings were adding more floors, blocking out the sun. Many new buildings ignored the law that did not permit buildings to be built too close to each other. If they were forced to comply, the owners simply built a structure like an inverted pyramid, with the top floors wider than the lower floors.
How had we come to this?
One day, on the way to Ramallah, I drove through the Jewish settlement of Givat Ze’ev south of the city. I remembered how, during the negotiations leading up to the Oslo Accord, the US State Department was willing to take Israel at its word and believe that they had stopped expanding the settlements. At the time we reported that we had seen with our own eyes that the settlers were building across the road. But the State Department chose not to believe us.
Israeli society was full of itself. It was vibrant, active and self-assured. Plans were afoot for the celebration of Jerusalem’s 3,000-year ‘anniversary’. Musicians from around the world were commissioned to produce an opera about King David. The world’s finest cultural activities were brought to Israel while we lagged behind without a system, without clarity, without any sense of order. We lived in chaos.
One of the positive consequences of the Oslo Accords was that Israel allowed banks to open in the Palestinian Territories. My law office represented a number of them. One morning I drove to West Jerusalem to meet the Israeli inspector of Palestinian banks at the Bank of Israel to negotiate the terms of their opening.
I was caught off guard. When I used to visit the legal adviser at the Military Headquarters in Beit El for my work, the outside gate put me in the right frame of mind for what was to come. But now I went through West Jerusalem and I could drive to the gate – not park my car and walk up as I did before because I was not allowed to drive to the gatehouse. When I arrived at reception I no longer felt that I was going to meet the apparent enemy. But soon enough, on my first visit there, I was reminded of my status.
When an assistant asked what I would like to drink I only asked for water. The young man obviously resented serving me. When coffee was brought on a tray to the inspector, I tried to be helpful and pass the coffee to him, but he refused to accept it from me. Later he went to get it himself but tripped and spilled it. Serves him right, I thought. The official, originally from some Arab country, then used every means possible to belittle me and make me feel inadequate and uncomfortable, questioning my knowledge of the law and procedure. I looked at him, not sure of how to respond.
It was not easy to adjust to this new form of oppression. What made it worse was that there was so much talk of peace and celebrations even as the gulf between rhetoric and reality grew so wide. It was peace at our expense.
The signing of the peace accords had not brought an end to the human rights violations. Only a few months later the Israeli army killed a Birzeit University student from Gaza who had stabbed a soldier near French Hill in Jerusalem. The police pursued him into the fields by helicopter, where they killed him and left his bleeding body to show on TV. The three border guards responsible were honoured by the minister of police. The one who was interviewed on television was Druze and he described how he had performed this ‘heroic deed’. Then they showed the body. Nothing like this used to happen during the intifada. When the soldiers shot a Palestinian they put him in their jeep and drove him immediately to a hospital to get treatment.
Justice was now the prerogative of one side. A short time after a young Israeli lawyer was killed in Gaza, Israeli police announced they had killed his assailants. When a settler was murdered in the West Bank, we were told a few weeks later that justice had been meted out. Justice stood for Israeli power, for retribution. The message was that Israel was invincible and ready to exact vengeance. Bloodshed, abduction, murder, torture were not beyond the pale. The Palestinians were supposed to believe they could not win. It was futile to even try.
The new attitude to our surroundings started with the roads. I began to wonder how we could continue driving on roads with so many potholes. How did we get to the point of accepting this as part of our everyday reality? When did we resign ourselves to all the obstacles the Israeli army put along our roads and stop insisting on our right of passage. Even the potholes had become politicised. And it still hasn’t stopped. Years later, in January 2016, the Arab–Jewish group Ta’ayush were fixing a portion of the road leading to Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank when they were stopped by the Israeli army. They asked why and the soldier answered, ‘This is the State of Israel. This route does not need to change. This road needs to remain the way it is. With holes. Because this is the territory of the State of Israel.’
When winter came I also became aware of the discomfort of our rented flat – the many gaps in the window frames, the metal shutters that were difficult to close, the cold draughts. I had thought nothing of it before and enjoyed my life in this flat that Penny and I moved into after we got married in 1988. Now it was as though a veil had been removed and I saw things more starkly, without romanticism, and they appeared unendurable. We were able to withstand so much because we felt a great sense of mission, significance and dedication in our life in pursuit of a cause. Now that it had come to nothing we slumped back to earth with a bang and woke up with all the discomfort of the bruises and the aches from the long and painful fall.
Just after the Oslo Accords were signed, one of the PLO leaders wrote a condescending opinion piece in a local newspaper, Al Quods, in which he advised us, residents of the Occupied Territories, to take a rest and leave it to our leadership outside to carry on. But could we? Did we trust them? Had we the confidence t
hat it was right to abandon the fight?
It was distressing to realise that rather than encouraging back leading Palestinian cultural icons, artists and writers like Kamal Boullata, Mourid Barghouti and Samia Halaby – many of whom Israel actually refused to allow to return – Israel was instead allowing thousands of policemen to control us, quelling any dissent to the deal that they had signed with Arafat.
At the entrance to Ramallah was a banner raised above the road that welcomed our leaders, describing them as those who had brought ‘honour and glory’. It was painful to have to read this every time I entered the city when all around was evidence of disgrace and humiliation.
I was not in Ramallah when it was ‘liberated’. I had planned to be there when the ceremony was originally meant to take place, in January 1996, but perhaps so it could be closer to the anniversary of the founding of Fatah, which was led by Arafat, it was moved to 30 December 1995. I was in the Galilee at the time and so I missed it. This was a great disappointment for me, because I had wanted to be there to see the Israeli soldiers leaving our town. (I seem to have a knack for missing the most important occasions – I often get up to use the toilet while watching a film on television only to return and find I’ve missed the climax and the best part is over.)
I called my artist friend Vera Tamari, who lived nearby. She had seen it all from her balcony overlooking the street where the police station is. She excitedly told me how, as the soldiers packed up and left, they were pelted with stones.
When Bethlehem was ‘liberated’ four days before Christmas, I was riding in a shared taxi. The driver had the radio on and it was broadcasting Arafat’s speech live from Manger Square. In the car were Palestinian women in headscarves who did not seem to like what was being said and the pride he seemed to be expressing in the Church of Nativity, calling it ‘our church in our town’. But how, I wondered, was it ours? We lived among historic religious sites of great significance to a large number of people around the world, but what was our relationship to these places? I knew that this was the birthplace of Christianity and that Palestinian Christians were the original Christians. But what did these places mean to these Muslim women, who probably knew very little about Christianity? It didn’t give them a sense of pride, or possessiveness. We took our inheritance for granted. Would this change? I didn’t think so.
I was feeling what my father must have felt towards the end of his life, a sense of despair that much of his energy had been expended in a futile endeavour, betrayed by politicians who brought all that he had invested his time and energy into to naught. Could it have been different between our two nations had his appeal for peace been heeded, or were the Israelis determined to proceed on their course? I would like to think that the suffering we had endured could have been avoided.
What was becoming clear was that my sumoud was at an end. I was not the only one who felt this way. Many Palestinians were leaving, just as many had left at the beginning of the occupation. In the past the hardships were endurable because there was still hope that our perseverance would eventually bring an end to our suffering. Now, as I faced the incompetence and corruption of the emerging Palestinian administration over civilian life, I began to ask why I should go on with my life in occupied Palestine. Everywhere I went I saw young Palestinians acting as our liberators and glad to return to Palestine carrying guns and wearing army uniforms. How should I deal with this new and perplexing reality? I wondered if it would be best for me to just leave and start a new life elsewhere. I was free to go. I was no longer staying here for a cause.
In the end, what kept me here was my work, my friends and a feeling for the place – all selfish reasons. The hills, in their own way, were replacing politics as a subject of reflection for me. Perhaps it was good that I had the hills as an escape, because in the years after ‘the liberation’ I was also feeling more lonely than ever.
A number of my Palestinian acquaintances tried to position themselves within the new Palestinian Authority. Ministerial roles were lucrative and available to those who were willing to go along with the authority’s policies. I began to detect an unwillingness among some of my friends to criticise the leadership. Was it out of fear, I wondered, or just the politics of expediency? I suspected the answer was both. Many of those who had taken part in the struggle decided it was time to look after their own personal interests. They could not see any advantage to being in opposition. Intellectuals can often be among the most skilled accommodators. They can justify almost anything if they think it is to their benefit. Now, when we talked about politics, these people seemed not to see what to me was obvious, that we were heading towards disaster. They called me a rejectionist and criticised my pessimistic outlook. This inevitably strained our relationship.
Perhaps they had not changed, but the intense collaboration that in the past had produced such closeness was gone. Without the thrill that came from working for a cause greater than ourselves, what remained was lacklustre and opaque.
In my disappointment I had started once again to think of my friends on the other side. I had come to realise how much I missed them. Some, like Naomi, had emigrated to England. But others, like Henry, were still here. I now felt that I should like to renew our friendship.
Just a few days later I went to the Jerusalem Theatre in West Jerusalem to see The Dance of the Wind, a dreamy and lyrical Indian film. Afterwards, as I was climbing up the stairs from the basement, where the film was shown, I saw Henry and Iva. I was startled and happy to see Henry. He seemed to materialise on those stairs just as I was ready to resume our friendship. We agreed to meet again.
When I got home I received an email inviting Penny and me to come to his house for tea, but I answered that I would like to meet first, just the two of us, to talk. We met at the Cinematheque café, where we had so often met in the past, and then walked towards the Arab neighbourhood of Silwan, where we sat under a carob tree and talked some more.
I told him that I had missed our friendship and asked him why he thought we had been estranged for so long. He told me it may have been because of my identification with the Palestinian cause and my grief after my father’s murder. It had become difficult for me to sustain the friendship when he was not politically involved.
After a pause, he added that he believed I had gone further than my people in coming to terms with Israel and then I had doubled back. ‘You went ahead too quickly and could not sustain it,’ he said. ‘You were angry.’
I did not like this interpretation and told him so. He didn’t respond and changed the subject. We drifted from one topic to another, as we used to do when we last met, in 1989. It was as though there had been no ten-year gap in our friendship. I felt genuinely glad to see him, but after we left the café and I was driving back to Ramallah I had a change of heart. We had decided all too quickly not to dwell on our estrangement. Henry had been evasive and unwilling to confront what had made it difficult for us to continue to be friends – his refusal to actively protest against Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. It was true that he had written to me reporting that he had taken part in demonstrations, yet in view of the gravity of the situation this had not seemed at all adequate to me.
As I drove I thought further about Henry’s explanation for our estrangement, that it was due to my having gone further than my people. Was that Henry being kind and finding an excuse for me rather than blaming me for not staying in touch even when he had tried more than once to renew contact?
But there was more to it. Henry was putting all the blame on me. He had exonerated himself entirely. What did he mean when he said I did not want to see him because I was too angry? It was his way of explaining it all away as a flaw in my character. He had failed to take into consideration what had caused every Palestinian to be justifiably angry.
Back in Ramallah after meeting Henry, I was distracted by everything around me. I found there was something disconcerting about a people that swept the past under the rug and failed to censure the Pale
stinian leadership for failing its people during its negotiations with Israel. The people, I suppose, were focused on survival. We were experts at this.
Driving around Ramallah, certain buildings began to remind me of this town’s grim mysteries. The sight of a house just behind the Amari refugee camp reminded me of a man who was found hanging on a tree in a field in Kufr Akab in 1989, whose case we investigated at Al-Haq. We were never able to discover why he was hanged or who did it. I remembered going to his house in the course of our investigation and finding his dead body lying in the living room, his young wife standing over it in a state of shock. How could it be that he would commit suicide? she asked. And yet who murdered him and why? we at Al-Haq asked, but could not find an answer. If the Israeli army wanted him dead they would shoot him, not hang him from a tree. Could it have been the Israeli settlers? But why him? Was it in revenge for something a Palestinian had done to one of their own?
Further along the road on the right-hand side I saw the flat where a woman had been locked up by her father for some twenty years. She was found by the Israeli army during one of their incidental raids on the building. Her hair was long and unkempt. Her nails were monstrously long. She had not been in contact with any other human being except her father for all that time. She was taken to hospital, but before she could be treated and recover enough to speak, she was murdered. The Israeli police, who had authority over criminal matters, never properly investigated the murder. We never discovered why this young woman was imprisoned for two decades.
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