The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  There are also non-Jerusalemites in the camp. Since the wall went up, it became a sanctuary, a haven. I met people from Gaza, who cannot leave the square kilometer of the camp or they risk arrest, because it is illegal for Gazans to enter Israel or the occupied West Bank except with Israeli permission, which is almost never granted. I met a family of Brazilian Palestinians with long-expired passports who also cannot leave the camp, because they do not have West Bank green IDs or Jerusalem blue IDs.

  Shuafat camp is often depicted in the international media as the most dangerous place in Jerusalem, a crucible of crime, jihad, and trash fires. On the day that I arrived, garbage was indeed smoldering in great heaps just inside the checkpoint entrance, against the concrete separation wall, flames jumping thinly in the strong morning sun. I had been to countries that burn their trash; it is a smell you get used to. My main concern, over the weekend I spent in the camp, was not getting my foot run over by a car. If you are seriously hurt in the camp, there isn’t much help. Ill or injured people are carried through the checkpoint, on foot or by car, and put in ambulances on the other side of the wall. According to residents of the camp, several people have unnecessarily died in this manner.

  As we walked, I began to understand how to face the traffic without flinching, to expect that drivers are experienced at navigating such incredible human density. I asked Baha if people were ever run over by cars, assuming he would say no.

  “Yes, all the time,” he said. “A child was just killed this way,” he added. I hugged the walls of the apartment buildings as we strolled. Later that evening, I watched as a tiny boy riding a grown man’s bicycle was bumped by a car. He crashed in the road. I ran to help him. He was crying, holding out his abraded hands. I remembered how painful it is to scrape your palms, how many nerve endings there are in an open hand. A Palestinian man told the little boy he was OK and ruffled his hair.

  When I asked Baha if garbage was burned by the separation wall because it was safer—a way to contain a fire, like a giant fireplace—he shook his head. “It’s, aah, symbolic.” In other words, garbage is burned by the wall because the wall is Israeli. Drugs are sold along the wall by the Israeli checkpoint, not for symbolic reasons. The camp organizers, like Baha, cannot effectively control the drug trade in a zone patrolled by the Israeli police and monitored by security cameras. Dealers are safe there from the means of popular justice exacted inside the camp. The most heavily militarized area of the camp is perhaps its most lawless.

  The popular drug the dealers sell is called Mr. Nice Guy, which is sometimes categorized as a “synthetic cannabinoid”—a meaningless nomenclature. It is highly toxic, and its effects are nothing like cannabis. It can bring on psychosis. It damages brains and ruins lives. Baha told me that Mr. Nice Guy is popular with kids as young as eight. Empty packets of it sifted around at our feet as we crossed the large parking lot where buses pick up six thousand children daily and transport them through the checkpoint for school, because the camp has only one public school, for elementary students. Every afternoon, children stream back into camp, passing the dealers and users who cluster near the checkpoint.

  I didn’t see the dealers, but I doubt Baha would have pointed them out. What I mostly noticed were children working, being industrious, trying to find productive ways to live in a miserable environment and to survive. Across from Baha’s house, a group of kids run a car wash. We waved to them from Baha’s roof. Baha introduced me to a group of teenage boys who own their own moped-and-scooter-repair service. He took me to a barbershop, where kids in flawless outfits with high-side fades were hanging out, listening to music, while a boy of about thirteen gave a haircut to a boy of about five. A young teenager in a pristine white polo shirt and delicate gold neck chain flexed his baby potato of a biceps and announced his family name: “Alqam!”

  The children in the barbershop were all Alqam. They ran the shop. They were ecstatic to see Baha. We were all ecstatic. The language barrier between me and the boys only thickened our collective joy, as my interpreter Moriel was whisked into a barber chair for a playfully coerced beard trim, on the house. The boys and I shouldered up for selfies, put on our sunglasses and posed. Whenever men shook my hand after Baha introduced me, I sensed—especially after Moriel left that afternoon—that men and boys would not get so physically close to a Palestinian woman who was a stranger. But I was an American woman, and I was with Baha, which made me something like an honorary man.

  Later I told myself and everyone else how wonderful it was in the Shuafat camp. How safe I felt. How positive Baha was. All of that still feels true to me. But I also insisted, to myself and everyone else, that Baha never expressed any fears for his own safety. In looking at my notes, I see now that my insistence on this point was sheer will. A fiction. It’s right there in the notes. He said he was nervous. He said he’d been threatened.

  Also in my notes, this:

  Baha says, two types

  1. Those who want to help make a better life

  2. Those who want to destroy everything

  And in parentheses: (Arms trade. Drugs trade. Construction profits. No oversight wanted.)

  “I wanted you to meet the boys because they are nice people,” Baha said, after we left the barbershop. “But they do all carry guns.” It was only after I returned home to the United States that I learned, in the banal and cowardly way, with a few taps on my computer, that two Alqam boys, cousins who were twelve and fourteen, had been accused of stabbing, with a knife and scissors, an Israeli security guard on a tram in East Jerusalem. I still don’t know whether they were related to the boys in the barbershop. Several of the young assailants in what has been called the Knives Intifada have been from the Shuafat camp, which has also been the site of huge and violent protests in which Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. In 2015 three children from the Shu-afat Refugee Camp lost eyes from sponge bullets shot by Israeli forces.

  The other thing I suppressed, besides Baha’s admissions of fear, was his desire for police. I didn’t write that down. It wasn’t part of my hero narrative, because the police are not part of my hero narrative. “Even if they have to bring them from India,” he said several times, “we need police here. We cannot handle the disputes on our own. People take revenge. They murder.”

  A Middle East correspondent I met in the West Bank, hearing that I was going to spend the weekend in the Shuafat camp, asked me if I “planned to visit Shit Lake” while there. Apparently that was his single image of the place. I assumed he was referring to a sewage dump, but Baha never mentioned it, and after seeing Baha’s pleasure in showing me the community center, the roads his committee had built, the mall, which was the only open gathering space, all things that, for him, were hopeful, I wasn’t going to ask him for Shit Lake.

  That correspondent had never stepped foot in the camp. I hadn’t expected to, either, until I was invited on an extensive tour of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and was asked to choose a subject to write about, for a book to be published next year. With no previous experience in the region, and little knowledge, I gravitated instinctually to Shuafat camp. From my own time there, the sustaining image is shimmering white. The kids, dressed in white. The buildings, a baked tone of dusty, smoke-stained white. The minarets, all white. And there was the 1972 Volkswagen Beetle in gleaming white, meticulously restored. It was on the shop floor of a garage run by Baha’s friend Adel. A classic-car enthusiast and owner myself, I wanted to talk to Adel about the car. He showed me his garage, his compressor, his lift. Like the escalator in the mall, these were things you would never expect to find in a place without services.

  We sat, and Adel made coffee. He and Baha told me about the troubles with the drug Mr. Nice Guy. They said every family has an addict among its children and sometimes among the older people as well. A third of the population is strung out on it, they said. It makes people crazy, Adel and Baha agreed. Is there a link, I asked, between Mr. Nice Guy and the kids who decide, ess
entially, to end it all by running at an Israeli soldier with a knife? They each concurred that there was. Two years earlier, Baha said, by way of contrast, there was a man from the Shuafat camp who did a deadly car ramming. The Israelis came and blew up his house. He was older, Baha said, and out of work and he decided that he was finally ready to lose everything. With the kids, Baha said, it’s different. It’s an act of impulsive courage. The drug helps enormously with that.

  Adel kept making reference to his nine-year-old daughter, who is physically disabled and cannot attend school. I asked to meet her or Adel asked if I wanted to meet her. Either way we ended up in Adel’s large apartment, and his daughter Mira was wheeled out to the living room. Mira was burned over most of her body and is missing part of one arm and a kneecap. Her face and scalp are disfigured. A school bus filled with children from the Shuafat camp were on a trip to Ramallah when their bus collided with a truck on wet roads. The bus overturned and burst into flames. Five children and a teacher burned to death. Dozens were injured. Emergency services were delayed by confusion over who had jurisdiction. As a result, Mira and other children had to be taken in the cars of bystanders to the closest hospital. The accident took place between the Adam settlement and Qalandiya checkpoints, in what is called Area C of the West Bank, which is entirely under Israeli control. The likelihood of something like this occurring was well known. Later, a report from Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights group, established that the tragedy resulted from the multiple challenges of living beyond the separation barrier. Roads were substandard. There were too many children on the bus, the children had no access to education in their own communities, and there was no oversight.

  “When the accident happened, we didn’t know how to cope with it,” Baha told me. Someone got up on a loading dock in the camp and called out the names of the dead. Afterward, Baha and Adel cried all the time. They felt that the lives of Shuafat’s children were disposable. They decided to start their own volunteer emergency team, through WhatsApp, and it has eighty members, who are trained in first aid and in special skills they are ready to employ at a moment’s notice. They are saving up to purchase their own Shuafat camp ambulance, whose volunteer drivers will be trained medical professionals, like Baha’s wife, Hiba, who is a nurse.

  Baha, I noticed, seemed more optimistic about their emergency team, and about the future, than Adel did. At one point, Adel, who has a shattered and frantic but loving, warm energy, turned to me and said, “We are orphans here.”

  Mira, who had been transferred from her wheelchair to the couch, sat and fidgeted. She understood no English but was forced to quietly pretend she was listening. I kept smiling at her, and she smiled back. I was desperate to give her something, to promise something. It’s very difficult to see a child who has suffered so tremendously. It’s basically unbearable. I should give her the ring I was wearing, I thought. But then I saw that it would never fit her fingers, which were very swollen and large, despite her young age; her development, after the fire, was thwarted because her bones could not properly grow. I’ll give her my earrings, was my next idea, and then I realized that her ears had been burned off in the fire. I felt obscene. I sat and smiled as if my oversize teeth could beam a protective fiction over this poor child, blind us both to the truth, that no shallow gesture or petty generosity would make any lasting difference, and that her life was going to be difficult.

  The travel agency in the Shuafat mall is called Hope. There is a toy store in the mall called the Happy Child. The children I met were all Baha’s kids, part of his group, on his team, drafting off his energy, which was relentlessly upbeat.

  I have to re-create, with all the precision I can manage, to remember what I am able to about Baha. I see Baha in his pink polo shirt, tall and handsome, but with a soft belly that somehow reinforces his integrity, makes him imperfectly, perfectly human. Baha singing “Bella Ciao” in well-keyed Italian, a language he learned at nineteen, on the trip that changed his life, working with Vento di Terra, a community-development and human rights group based in Italy. Later, I sent a video of Baha singing to various Italian friends, leftists who were thrilled that a guy in a Palestinian refugee camp knew the words to “Bella Ciao.”

  Baha’s friends and relatives all hugging me and cheek-kissing me, the women bringing out boxes that contained their hand-embroidered wedding dresses, insisting I try on each dress, whose colors and designs specified where they were from: one in black with white stitching, from Ramallah. Cream with red, Jerusalem. In each case we took a photo, laughing, me in each dress, with the woman it belonged to on my arm.

  Everyone imploring me to come back, and to bring Remy, my eight-year-old, and I was sure that I would come back, and bring Remy, because I had fallen in love with these people.

  And in the background of the hugs and kisses, in almost every home where we spent time, the TV playing the Islamic channel, Palestine al-Yawm, a relentless montage of blood, smoke, fire, and kaffiyeh-wrapped fighters with M16s.

  The constant hospitality. Coffee, tea, mint lemonade, ice water, all the drinks I politely accepted. Drank and then sloshed along, past faded wheat-pasted posters of jihadist martyrs.

  Come back. Bring Remy. I will, I told them, and I meant it.

  Late at night, Baha and Hiba decided to show me their digital wedding photo book. It was midnight, their two young daughters asleep on couches around us. Hiba propped an iPad on a table—she was four months pregnant, expecting her third child, a boy—and we looked at every last image, hundreds of images, of her and Baha in highly curated poses and stiff wedding clothes, her fake-pearl-and-rhinestone tiara, her beautiful face neutralized by heavy makeup; but the makeup is part of the ritual, and the ritual is part of the glory. The two of them in a lush park in West Jerusalem. Every picture we looked at was, for them watching me see the images, a new delight: there were more and more and more. For me, they all started to run together, it was now one in the morning, I was exhausted, but I made myself regard each photograph as something unique, a vital integer in the stream of these people’s refusal to be reduced.

  I slept in what they called their Arabic room, on low cushions, a barred window above me issuing a cool breeze. I listened to roosters crow and the semiautomatic weapons being fired at a nearby wedding celebration, and eventually I drifted into the calmest, heaviest sleep I’d had in months.

  The next day, Baha had meetings to attend to try to solve the water problem. I spoke to Hiba about their kids. She asked me at what age Remy started his piano lessons. “I want music lessons for the girls,” she said. “I think it’s very good for their development.” As she said it, more machine-gun fire erupted from the roof of a nearby building. “I want them to know the feel, the smells, of a different environment. To be able to imagine other lives.”

  When I think of Hiba Nababta wanting what I want for my child, her rightful desire that her kids should have an equal chance, everything feels hopeless and more obscene, even, than my wanting to give earrings to a child without ears.

  I went with Hiba that morning to her mother’s house, where she and Hiba’s sisters were preparing an exquisite meal of stuffed grape leaves and stuffed squashes, the grape leaves and vegetables grown on her mother’s patio. We were all women, eating together in relaxed company. A sister-in-law came downstairs to join us, sleepy, beautiful, with long red nails and hair dyed honey-blond, in her pajamas and slippers. She said that she was leaving for New Jersey with her husband, Hiba’s brother, and their new baby. Relatives had arranged for them to immigrate. She would learn English and go to school.

  When it was time to say goodbye, a younger sister was appointed to walk me to the checkpoint. Halfway there, I assured her I could walk alone, and we said goodbye. On the main road, shopkeepers came out to wave and smile. Everyone seemed to know who I was: the American who had come to meet with Baha.

  At the checkpoint, the Palestinian boy in front of me was detained. I was next, and the soldiers were shocked to see an American, as the
y would have been shocked to see any non-Palestinian. There was much consternation in the reinforced station. My passport went from hand to hand. The commander approached the scratched window. “You’re a Jew, right?” he blurted into the microphone. For the context in which he asked, for its reasoning, I said no. But in fact, I’m ethnically half-Jewish, on my father’s side, although I was not raised with any religious or even a cultural connection to Judaism. My mother is a white Protestant from Tennessee. I might have said, “Yes, partly,” but I found the question unanswerable, on account of its conflation of Zionism and Jewish identity. My Yiddish-speaking Odessan great-grandfather was a clothing merchant on Orchard Street. My grandfather worked in his shop as a boy. That is classically Jewish, but my sense of self, of what it might mean to inherit some trace of that lineage, was not the kind of patrimony the soldier was asking after. I was eventually waved along.

  The day I left Shuafat camp was April 17. Fifteen days later, on May 2, Baha Nababta was murdered in the camp. An unknown person approached on a motorcycle as Baha worked with roughly a hundred fellow camp residents to pave a road. In front of this very large crowd of people, working together, the person on the motorcycle shot at Baha ten times and fled. Seven bullets hit him.

  It is now December. Baha’s wife, Hiba, has given birth to their son. His father is gone. His mother is widowed. But a baby—a baby can thrive no matter. A baby won’t even know, until it is told, that someone is missing.

  ALAN LIGHTMAN

  What Came Before the Big Bang?

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  On Wednesday, February 11, 1931, Albert Einstein met for more than an hour with a small group of American scientists in the cozy library of the Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California. The subject was cosmology, and Einstein was poised to make one of the more momentous statements in the history of science.