Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  “So, third option, let’s say I show this officer my ID.” From the billfold he now took out a bifold plastic case, dark green, and unfolded it to reveal his identity card behind its clear plastic window. It looked like a typical driver’s license or photo ID, thumbnail headshot of Sam, text printed Hebrew and Arabic characters, moiré of anticounterfeit security printing. “He opens the ID, what does he find? Arabic so we can understand, Hebrew so the issuer can understand. It has my place of birth, my date of birth, my religion—for some reason—and: what’s my cage.”

  Most of us understood that he was joking, but it seemed like an angry joke. After a pause, there was a chuckle or two around the table.

  “Actually it doesn’t say cage, it says place of residence. But there is no part of area A”—Sam was referring to the archipelago of major Palestinian population centers that has been strewn by Oslo II across the sea of occupation—“which is not an open-air cage, surrounded by fences, walls, checkpoints, military installations, et cetera. So I’m from the cage of Ramallah, actually it says the cage of al-Bireh, very precise. It means I can’t be in the cage of Gaza, but Gaza is just as occupied. I can’t be in the cage of East Jerusalem, but East Jerusalem is just as occupied. I can’t even be in forty percent of the Jordan Valley, which is off limits to anyone who doesn’t live in the Jordan Valley.

  “So there I am, in the office, with this new little stamp in my American passport. I can’t use the airport, I can’t go to Tel Aviv University, where I used to be a graduate student, even though as a US citizen, getting my MBA there, I had no problem going and coming. I went back to my car, and I thought, Do I take my car home? Or do I take a taxi? Why would I say that, right? It’s my car. It belongs to me, I paid for it with my money. Why? Because anyone that has one of these”—he pointed to the stamp again—“is not allowed to drive a yellow-plated car.

  “And now, all of a sudden, I start to feel what it’s like to be a full-scale Palestinian.”

  2.

  Two days later I met Sam at his house, in al-Bireh. In its present form it was a high, flat-topped box of pale gray stone, three stories tall, with nine arched windows—three per floor—stacked in a tic-tac-toe grid. It was the house that Sami Bahour, Sam’s father, had been born and grown up in, enlarged by the addition of the third story to accommodate the elder Bahours during their regular visits; the ground-floor tenants were Sam’s in-laws. I knew that traditional Arab houses, even those of wealthy families, often show a deliberately plain face to the world. Entering the home of a man who had been successful for a long time in a number of business ventures, I wondered if I were in for Levantine extravagance, or American-style glitz. But the interior of Sam’s home was no fancier than the exterior and not very different from the kind of thing I had seen in the homes of much less prosperous families in other parts of the West Bank: sparse stucco walls, rugs scattered on the tile floors, somber furniture, the surprising cool and shadow of vernacular houses in hot countries. I wondered if I ought to ascribe this relative austerity to local custom, personal modesty, or simply the relative nature of wealth in a culture of enforced scarcity where the readiest treasure is stored not in banks, but in black PVC cisterns on the roof.

  While we sat in a small enclosed porch overlooking the street, and I drank the coffee that seemed to serve as emblem, vehicle, and baseline of hospitality in every Palestinian home, Sam presented the day’s schedule. We would be driving to Nablus, where he had an appointment to meet the owner of a soap factory, and along the way would be paying a visit to a newly opened Bravo supermarket there. Sam apologized; he was afraid it didn’t sound like a very exciting day. I assured him, truthfully, that the most fascinating places to visit in foreign countries were often the ones, like supermarkets, that were superficially most similar to places at home, and that it was always interesting to see how common household objects were manufactured; but there was more to it than that. I was now sitting in a house, and soon I would be driving in a car, and then I would be standing in a supermarket, and after that touring a soap factory, in a country that was living under military occupation. Anything that we did today would partake of the novelty—to me—of that circumstance.

  Flushing a toilet, for example. Before we set off for what might, depending on the whim of IDF roadblocks, turn out to be a long drive, I thought I had better use the Bahours’ bathroom. When I pulled the handle I heard the water flowing down through the pipe from one of the cisterns on the roof. I considered the vulnerability and irregularity of the water supply in Palestine, and the disproportionate splurging of my fellow Jews, running their dishwashers and washing machines and lawn sprinklers, over in the hilltop settlement, amply furnished with water from confiscated wells and expropriated aquifers, that the Bahours were obliged to contemplate every time they looked out their back windows. We went downstairs and climbed into Sam’s car, a maroon 2008 Mazda, with its white plates.

  “We’ll see what happens,” Sam said. “Nablus is always an adventure. It could be almost a straight shot, it could be a lot of checkpoints, you never know. When I first relocated here, the telecommunications company I worked for was based in Nablus.” Sam had studied computer technology at Youngstown State University, and had been tempted to make the leap, in 1993, by provisions in the Oslo accords for some degree of Palestinian control over telecommunication operations. “That’s where the owners were, so that’s where we built the company. I made the drive every day, morning and night. So for me, Nablus is forty minutes away. It’s supposed to be a straight shot, this road we’re driving on is actually called the Nablus Road, it goes from here to Nablus. Only now it doesn’t, not directly. We have to make a detour to the east . . . passing through checkpoints. And it’s going to take longer than forty minutes. Or it might not. You never know.”

  I checked the time on my phone and saw that, thanks to the cellular tower in the settlement on the hilltop behind the Bahours’ house, I had a strong 4G signal through Cellcom, an Israeli carrier whose SIM card I had purchased on landing at Ben Gurion Airport. If I had been a law-abiding Palestinian I would have had only an Edge, or 2G, connection, since Israel would not allocate the electromagnetic spectrum necessary for Palestinian carriers to provide 4G or even 3G service.

  “They say what they always say,” Sam told me when I asked about Israeli restrictions on Palestinian bandwidth. “‘Security.’” If part of the business of tyranny is to bankrupt certain words of meaning, then in Israel and Palestine under occupation the most destitute word is probably security. Sam’s voice took on that Edgar Kennedy note of effortful forbearance. “Of course, any Palestinian can go to the store, buy an Israeli SIM card, plug it in, get a signal from a settlement. We have 3G, so what exactly is the security concern?”

  Sam explained that American presidents, envoys, and secretaries of state, from both parties, going back as far as Condoleezza Rice, had seen the absurdity of the argument against licensing the 3G spectrum because of “security” and had, one after the other—“Rice, Bush, Obama, Kerry, Mitchell, the whole nine yards”—waded into the weeds of the issue, to no effect. “Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving on to 5G now, here we are, still begging the Israeli side for 3G service. It’s almost embarrassing.”

  I wondered if the “security” at issue in this instance might not be the security of revenue flowing from Palestinian pockets to Israeli cellular providers, whose advantage in bandwidth, at least, was being protected by the Israeli government. Sam conceded that might be part of it. There is no question that the near-total dominance over Palestinian markets enjoyed by Israeli companies, like Israel’s control over the exploitation of Palestinian land, water, and mineral resources, is an important source of revenue for Israel. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been so incredibly expensive—in 2010, Newsweek magazine estimated the total cost since 1967 to be in the neighborhood of ninety billion dollars—that one could hardly blame the Israeli government, Sam observed dryly, for trying to make a little money off
it. But his next words made me think that from his point of view my cynicism came a little too easily, that it might, in its way, be as unearned as my liberty.

  “The politicians who are supposed to be solving the greater conflict have all, over time, been dragged into this, really, it’s a side discussion, with Israel,” he said. “‘Let the Palestinians have their 3G frequency.’ The Israelis, in their excellent strategizing, pulled the politicians away from the main topic, into something which is minor. Instead of . . . solving the conflict.”

  Despite the restrictions imposed on Palestinian providers and the unfair competitive advantage of unfettered Israeli companies, PALTEL, the telecom company that Sam set up after his arrival in Palestine, managed to grow and to thrive, becoming Palestine’s largest private-sector employer. “It became overly successful,” Sam said, and its success was actually one of the reasons for Sam’s decision, in 1997, to move on and try something new. He was as uncomfortable “making excessive profit on a people who are occupied” as his father had been forty years earlier, working Southern backroads and Appalachian hollers for the family business, getting twenty-five, thirty, or even forty dollars, on a good day, for a five-dollar Japanese wristwatch. “I didn’t come here to make a million dollars,” Sam told me. “Not every businessman or investor has that kind of mind-set.”

  3.

  The next stop on Sam Bahour’s pocket tour of his cage, after the Palestinian identity card and the stamp in his US passport that had put an end to his entering and leaving the occupied territories as an American citizen, turned out to be a slip of printed paper, heavily watermarked and intricately Spirographed, somewhere between an employee ID badge and a modern banknote.

  “I’m a business consultant, right?” he said, signaling to the young man working the counter at Rukab’s. We had finished our strangely malleable, taffy-like ice cream, all those colorful little scoops dyed in a mad Muppets palette. It was time for coffee. “I travel. For the work I do, I have a lot of business in Jerusalem. Obviously, I’m going to want to go to Jerusalem. But now I’m a full-scale Palestinian, right? I have to stay in my Ramallah cage, I’m not allowed to go into the Jerusalem cage. So what do I do?”

  The counterman approached, a certain deference unmistakable in his manner toward Sam. He leaned in with a soft Arabic word of inquiry and Sam softly ordered coffee around the table. Speaking English to his visitors—most of us Americans like him—Sam seemed entirely a businessman from Youngstown, Ohio, a perfect Rotarian, genial, expansive, eloquent, an unexpected touch of the professor about him. But ordering coffee in his soft-spoken Arabic, or striding on his long stems through the center of Ramallah, at least a head taller than all the men around him, many of whom had seemed to show him the same gentle deference as the counterman at Rukab’s, there was something princely about Sam Bahour. A prince in exile, I thought, then, No, that’s wrong, of course; he’s home, he’s not in exile. Yet somehow the word seemed to accord with his demeanor. He had left Youngstown behind him—the city of his birth and education, where he had first met his wife, where his parents and his sister still lived—to come and live in the house of his forefathers, in the neighborhood that had been the home of his imagination as a child. But did he really feel that he belonged in al-Bireh? More important, did he feel—could any “full-scale Palestinian” feel—that al-Bireh, ringed by Israeli settlements and checkpoints, belonged to him?

  “So I look around the Ramallah business community,” he told us, resuming the tour, “and look, I see people going to Jerusalem. I’m like, ‘How do you do that? I was told I could not go to Jerusalem.’ And they said, ‘No, Sam, there’s something called the permit system.’ What’s the permit system? You bring an invitation letter from someone in Jerusalem or Israel, fill out a stupid one-page application, go to the Israeli military, take your ID with you, and you apply, and either you get a permit, or you don’t.”

  He reached into the billfold again and took out a second note of the strange tender of his captivity. He took out another, and then a third. He dug around with his fingers and came out with a whole little pile of them, a jackpot of winning tickets in a bitter lottery, all of them expired.

  “These are all permits,” he said. “I have many more tens of them at home. I’ve promised my kids that I would wallpaper my office with permits.” It was a laugh line—probably an old one—but he didn’t sound like he really thought it was funny. We laughed at it nevertheless. “A permit is a single piece of paper issued by the same people that issued this.” He held up the green sleeve that held his identity card. “But a permit, usually, is only good for one day, from five o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock at night. I can use it to travel to Jerusalem, as long as I’m back by seven. If I don’t come back at seven p.m., they could arrest me. If I got caught coming in late, and the soldier who caught me wanted to arrest me, I would never get a permit again.”

  The counterman returned with a tray crowded with coffee in tiny cups. Sam watched approvingly as the counterman distributed them to everyone who had wanted coffee.

  “So I start getting permits. It’s a headache, and it takes a lot of time—the control of time is one of the biggest weapons of the occupation. It takes a day to apply, a day to get the answer. Imagine how hard it is to make an appointment for a business meeting when it takes two days to get the permit—and they might say no. And then a whole day for the trip to Jerusalem, because you have to go on foot. So I can never make an appointment for an exact time, I can’t make a two p.m. meeting. I have to say, ‘I’ll meet you between twelve and three.’

  “But it’s not like I go to Jerusalem often. I have diabetes, you know what that means, right? It means, guaranteed, you have to use the restroom! If I get stuck at the checkpoint and there’s fifty people behind me, and fifty people in front of me, I get frustrated, because when I have to use the restroom, I can’t go back the way I came, and of course I can’t go forward. You’re in an area that is as wide as this.” He held up his hands separated by a gap the width of his shoulders. “There’s a gate in front of you, a gate behind you. A fence all around you. You don’t turn around when you have fifty people behind you, waiting, one by one, and start pushing, saying, ‘Please, back up, I need to use the restroom.’ It doesn’t work like that. These are people who have to cross every day. I think I’m frustrated? They are frustrated to the nth degree.

  “So, I don’t go very often.” He slid the pile of expired permits back into the billfold. “I stay in my Ramallah cage, right? The way I’m supposed to.”

  If Youngstown, Ohio, had not felt like home because it was not al-Bireh, Palestine, al-Bireh could never feel like home as long as it was under occupation. Sam Bahour was an imposing man with a quietly arresting presence who towered over the people around him, but he was not a prince in exile. He was a giant in a cage.

  4.

  Not long after leaving PALTEL, Sam was approached by some investors who had purchased land in Ramallah and were looking to build a Western-style supermarket. It would be the first of its kind in Palestine. They wanted Sam’s help putting the project together.

  “The first thing I asked was, ‘Why me?’ They said, ‘We happen to have looked at your CV; the last thing on your CV before you came here is that you worked for ten years for your dad, and your dad is a grocer.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’” In his recounting of the moment the admission sounded reluctant. “That’s a good lesson,” he told me, in a rueful aside, “always delete the last thing on your CV.” I laughed and Sam, just barely, smiled. “They said, ‘It’s a year-and-a-half commitment, put it together, just be project manager for us.’”

  The property they had in mind was in al-Bireh. It was in a part of town called al-Balou that the municipality had slated for development as a commercial district. Land there was expensive. Sam realized that, given real estate costs, a supermarket alone could never be profitable. Palestinians bought their food in street markets and specialty shops, from butchers and bakers an
d fruiterers; one-stop shopping at a supermarket might take time to catch on. So he persuaded the investors to imagine something even more unprecedented: a shopping plaza, a minimall that would incorporate a number of separate retail outlets and restaurants of various kinds—a Cineplex, a consumer electronics shop, a Domino’s Pizza—anchored by the proposed new supermarket. There would be an indoor play area, a themed “fun zone” with climbing tubes and ball pits, where parents could amuse their children or safely park them while they shopped. In Sam’s vision, as he laid it out for the investors, this would be only the first of a half-dozen or more Plazas they might, in time, put up across the nation that seemed, after the intifada, to be imminent. As he re-created it for me so many years later, it was still possible, despite all the ensuing compromises, conflicts, heartbreaks, and disillusionments, to catch an echo of the audacity, the thrilling scope, the sheer hopefulness, inherent in Sam’s pitch to the investors.

  “We decided to call the supermarket ‘Bravo,’” Sam told me, his smile less weary now, more sly. “Because with what we went through to build it, we deserved some congratulations.”

  The architects’ original plan for the first proposed Plaza showed a U-shaped structure, but as the second intifada broke out and costs escalated—every nail and plank and length of rebar had to be imported from Israel, finessed through the labyrinth of checkpoints and regulations, with deliveries constantly subject to delay, diversion, cancellation—Sam was obliged to amputate one of the U’s legs, and settle for an L. Then there turned out not to be enough money to engineer the structure adequately to include the Cineplex; the Cineplex was dropped from the plan. The architects’ design called for the Plaza, like any self-respecting building in Ramallah, to be clad in the locally quarried limestone known as Jerusalem stone, but it was going to take a lot of limestone to cover so large a building (even after it had lost a leg)—more limestone, unfortunately, than the project could afford.