Where the Line is Drawn

by Raja Shehadeh

  Perhaps the thought crossed his mind that these people would not be too difficult to control. Why not take over the whole city and make it ours for ever? It couldn’t possibly be hard to keep such people under our rule.

  Having the Palestinian Territories under Israeli control made them imperious. I was reminded of Ya’akov Yehoshua, who became a government official after the occupation of East Jerusalem in June 1967. When Ishaq Musa al-Hussayni, a childhood friend from school and university, wrote asking for his help, Yehoshua wrote back, ‘It seems that you have not yet grasped the new concept of the Jew – the creature that you disdained in the past has become a brave warrior, a tank soldier, a pilot …’*

  So much happened so quickly and the Israelis saw what they could get away with. Less than a month after the war, when they annexed East Jerusalem, the world was tolerant of this breach of international law. They began to grab our land and to build settlements in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the world remained tolerant. And so began the de facto annexation of most of the occupied West Bank. They could reinterpret international legal conventions as they pleased, they could label all criticism as anti-Semitic, they could bomb Palestinians from the air, they could take their land and water, and they could get away with it. Because the world would be tolerant.

  Over thirty years ago, Henry and I sat at the crest of a hill overlooking Ramallah, talking about our friendship for an ITV television programme on friendships across political divides. We agreed to do the interview because we wanted to let the world know what was possible between the sons of our two nations and to warn against the settlement project that would destroy, if it were allowed to continue, all prospects of peace. A few years later, on that very spot where we had sat, settlers from nearby Dolev tried to establish Yad Yair. It was as though the hills we both loved and that had brought us together were becoming the curse that would separate us.

  Henry and I do not look alike. But many Arabs and Jews, especially Sephardic Jews, are very similar in looks to Palestinians and so the two can be confused. Indeed, in the early weeks of the current ‘outburst’, a number of Yemini Jews took to wearing T-shirts which read: ‘I’m a Yemini Jew’, to avoid being mistaken for Arabs and attacked. And at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem Arab workers were made to wear coloured tags to identify them. When Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor of criminology at the university, asked one of her colleagues whether he appreciated what this meant, making the Arabs wear yellow tags, he corrected her saying, ‘But they’re not yellow, they’re orange.’

  On a recent trip to Berlin I visited the Jewish Museum. Looking at the relics of Jewish families who had once lived in Berlin, the fine porcelain plates and silver cutlery and tableware, I felt I couldn’t go on with the visit. This was not only because of the sadness they inspired but also because the thought struck me that similar mementoes from Palestinians who had once lived in Jaffa and other Palestinian cities could fill many a similar museum. I stood there before these exhibits struggling to reject the comparison. The owners of these objects were killed in the most gruesome manner. The Nakba could not be equated with the Holocaust. For a start, many of the Jews who lived in Germany were annihilated, whereas most of the Palestinians went into exile. It is never right to conflate tragedies, but it is also wrong to use one tragedy to justify another, as Israeli propagandists have done.

  A friend of mine was having dinner at the house of his Israeli friends in the German Colony in West Jerusalem. He told his friends that he had just been to Germany and was impressed by the Stumble Stones that had been installed in 500 towns and cities across the country. These were brass plates identifying where Jews once lived and worked. His friends agreed that this was an excellent way to commemorate what had befallen the Jews in Germany. But then when he suggested that similar markers might be placed by houses where Palestinians once lived there was complete silence.

  The failure to acknowledge past atrocities is key to what is happening today, key to the crimes committed by the Jewish settlers. So worried is Israel by the memory of the Nakba that in March 2011 the Israeli Knesset passed the Nakba Law, depriving any state-funded body that commemorated the Nakba of its budget. In this way, Israel is attempting to erase the memory of the most traumatic event in Palestinian history.

  Memory is political in Israel and Palestine. What to remember? Who to remember? These questions should be asked by both sides, Israeli and Palestinian. The answers will determine our common future in this land and whether or not we will ever have peace.

  The Palestinians have to accept that after the Holocaust many countries refused to take in European Jews. For many, Palestine was their last refuge. Israelis have to remember the Nakba, withdraw from the Occupied Territories and acknowledge the brutality they have used against Palestinians struggling for self-determination and basic human rights.

  Yet even when we Palestinians have our sovereign state, and one day we will, and Israel recognises our right of return, lasting peace requires that the victims of the conflict rise above their hatred and their pain, and that they forgive. It will require forgiveness from those who were hit the hardest by the occupation and by the Nakba, from those who have spent decades of their lives in refugee camps, from those who lost relatives, who were orphaned, who were maimed, who were made into collaborators, who saw their children burned alive by Israeli extremists. And it will require forgiveness from Israeli Jews who had relatives or children killed in senseless acts of violence in cafés and schools.

  A lot has changed since my first meeting with Henry in Tel Aviv in 1977. I remember thinking then how Israel had character. I believed that Israel adhered to the rule of law and this was what made it strong. I then dedicated myself to promoting the rule of law in my own society and trying to hold Israel accountable for any violations of international law. All the work I did was based on my belief that international law would ultimately prevail.

  It was during this latest habeh that I came upon a photograph in the local press of Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, taking a tour of the controversial area east of Jerusalem known as E1. Israel was under pressure from the international community not to resume building settlements there and complete the encirclement of East Jerusalem and its total separation from the rest of the West Bank. She was present to support the resumption of building by settlers, which was illegal under international law, and to make sure that no Palestinian construction, which she called illegal, would be allowed to take place there. That very same day there was news of large numbers of illegal buildings newly constructed in Jewish settlements. There seemed to be a glint of triumph in Hotovely’s gaze.

  Meanwhile, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi declared that non-Jews should not be allowed to live in the land of Israel. It reminded me of Dov Baker, a yeshiva student from the illegal settlement of Gush Etzion near Hebron, who told the Guardian in November 2015, ‘This is our land. We need to be able to feel safe.’ I had heard something similar from the Dolev settler who also challenged my right to the land, saying, ‘I’m living here. Really living here.’ I will not dispute these two men’s attachment to the land, but that it should lead to exclusive possession and my eventual expulsion I cannot possibly accept. If the possession of land were based on religious feelings, the world would be in perpetual strife.

  I think back on my various crossings over the past four decades to meet Henry, whether in 1977 or during the first and second intifadas. Whenever Henry and I were together we bonded and enjoyed each other’s company, whether we were taking a walk or sipping a drink at the American Colony Hotel. It was as if in meeting we transcended our identities: he one of the oppressors and I one of the oppressed. When I went to Jerusalem to see him we met in a world of our own. We were simply two friends.

  At the same time, each crossing would remind me of what I tried to forget when we met and this often made me feel resentful and angry towards Henry and his obliviousness of what it took for me to meet him. But maybe he w
as not as oblivious as I thought. Perhaps he agonised more than I realised.

  In our small way, our friendship exposed the lie peddled by Netanyahu and his followers to Israeli people and to the world – that the Arab is the fundamental and eternal enemy of the Jew, that the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews cannot be resolved diplomatically and that the Israeli people have to live forever by the sword.

  It would be a fine thing if our friendship became the norm rather than the exception. One day this could happen, but until then I will not make its existence contingent on the elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

  Our lives are so intertwined with politics that I have all too often allowed myself to be defined by national affiliations. Seeing my friendship with Henry solely through the prism of the nation to which he belongs, I almost lost him for ever. I belong to my nation and have tried to play a role in moving its cause forward. Henry has never consented to the Israeli occupation and to Israel’s brutal behaviour towards the Palestinians. He tried to see the best in everyone. He saw Palestinians as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters. He also saw Jews as believers in tradition, as humane. Yet he is not a leader in his community, nor am I in mine.

  Henry and I will continue to disagree. I know there will be more times when I feel disappointed with him and he with me, and perhaps there will be some anger.

  I was tempted to ask him when we last met, ‘Now that you have seen what Israel has become, do you ever regret coming to live here?’ But this would have been the wrong question to ask. Despite the violence, the danger, the rise of extreme right-wing political parties and the racism, how could someone who has built his entire life here feel that it was all a mistake? How could he wish that he had never come here, that he had never met his wife, whom he loves dearly and only met because he came here?

  We cannot unpick our life or the history of our nation. If I care for my friend I have to accept his decision and what he has made of his life. Had he not come here we would not have met and I would never have had a friend who has enriched my life as Henry has done. Despite what separates us, I am proud to have a friend called Henry.

  Footnote

  * Quoted in Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron (Hurst & Co., London, 2014), p. 189.

  Acknowledgements

  Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,

  And say my glory was I had such friends.

  W. B. Yeats

  I wish first to acknowledge my debt to Henry Abramovitch for his friendship and for allowing me to use the letters and poems he sent me over the years. Some time ago we discussed the possibility of writing a book about our friendship. I hope this book fulfils that mutual dream we never managed to realise together. My warmest thanks as well to all those friends and acquaintances who inhabit this book and have enriched my life.

  Over the fifty years of the Israeli occupation I have kept a journal in which I reflected on the events taking place around me and my immediate responses to them. This has enabled me to trace my emotional journey over the years and write this book.

  I am grateful to my wife and life companion, Penny, for the many hours of discussion regarding this book and for being, as ever, my first reader and sternest critic. Her comments, suggestions and edits were crucial. Without her support and love throughout the many years we’ve been together I would not have been able to carry on with my writing.

  My thanks to my UK publisher and editor, Andrew Franklin, to Carl Bromley, editorial director at The New Press, and Ben Woodward, associate editor, who worked on this manuscript with great dedication and immeasurable skill, making helpful comments and suggestions and providing much-appreciated editorial assistance. I salute their commitment to the spirit of this book.

  My thanks to all the book designers, publicity directors and staff at Profile Books and The New Press for their hard work in producing and promoting this book.

  My thanks to my literary agent, Karolina Sutton, for her support and to George Lucas for putting me in touch with The New Press.

  As with several of my other books, Lesley Levene did the copy-editing with her usual amazing professionalism and sharp eye for inconsistencies and errors. I thank her warmly.

  I am also grateful to my uncle Fuad and cousins Nadeem and Kareem Shehadeh and other partners at the Shehadeh Law Office, who took over a heavy load of legal work and made it possible for me to find the time to write this book.

  OTHER TITLES FROM RAJA SHEHADEH

  Palestinian Walks

  Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2008.

  ISBN 978 1 86197 899 8

  eISBN 978 1 84765 129 7

  Occupation Diaries

  Life in Palestine today – what it is really like – day to day. Now shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2013.

  ISBN 978 1 78125 017 4

  eISBN 978 1 84765 852 4

  Strangers in the House

  An extraordinary and moving memoir by the award-winning author of Palestinian Walks.

  ISBN 978 1 84668 250 6

  eISBN 978 1 84765 412 0

  Language of War, Language of Peace

  A passionate and elegant reflection on the language of the Middle East conflict expanded from Raja Shehadeh’s Edward Said memorial lectures.

  ISBN 978 1 78125 376 2

  eISBN 978 1 78283 121 1