Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  The building site lay between two streets that had been laid out but not yet rezoned as commercial; one was set to be a main drag and the other a service road. Sam shocked the investors by suggesting that only the side of the Plaza facing the main thoroughfare needed to be stone-clad; nobody but teamsters and store employees was ever going to see the place from the back. After the investors had recovered from their shock, Sam went to the municipality to confirm which of the as-yet-unbuilt streets would be the principal thoroughfare. He oriented the unclad, plain-stucco rear of the structure accordingly. No sooner was the Plaza completed than, all along the alleged “service road,” glittery new office buildings and commercial spaces started to crop up. The municipality, it turned out, had misinformed Sam, or changed its mind; and so the first supermarket-anchored shopping plaza ever built in Palestine shows its naked backside to the world.

  It wasn’t just artificially inflated building costs and the contortions of a stunted and questionable bureaucracy; every aspect of getting the first Bravo store up and running was made harder by the occupation. A properly modern supermarket must have a modern point-of-sale system, and while internationally there were many vendors to choose among, none was willing to take on the challenge of providing long-distance after-sale support to the occupied territory, not in the thick of an armed uprising. Through his solid business contacts—he holds an MBA from Tel Aviv University—Sam found a “local” firm, Retalix, based in Ra’anana, Israel, that was prepared to commit to Bravo. When the time came to install the software, however, none of Retalix’s Israeli IT staff was permitted to travel to al-Bireh to perform the installation.

  “So, being an IT person, even though the GM of the company shouldn’t be doing this, I became the liaison by phone, by fax, by e-mail, between the supplier over there, and the technical people on my side. And we did it, it was the first retail bar code system in Palestine. The head of their company, a company with customers all around the world, he was so amazed that we could do something like that, in the middle of an armed uprising, they put it in their annual report; it said, ‘We have entered the Middle East.’”

  The memory tickled Sam, though he said that if he were to do it today, he would not use Israeli suppliers, as he also did for the store’s refrigeration systems. “Today I would go to NCR, in Texas. Because today I have a choice, given that intifada conditions have waned, and I understand what it means to be dependent on Israel. That’s a political decision. If you go with the business decision, by design of Israeli strategy, it will take you to their market, because they’ve created all these obstacles to going outside their market. And I actually think that’s part of the reason, for them, for continuing the occupation. Somebody’s benefiting from it, to the tune of five billion dollars a year.”

  As for the merchandise that was to be scanned and inventoried by the Retalix software, the same labyrinth of barriers—legal, military, and physical—that had driven up the price of construction also caused constant headaches with inventory. Shipments of goods from Israel or Israeli ports arrived late, spoiled, or not at all. Even when they showed up whole and on time they still arrived freighted with politics and tainted by the bitter flavor of occupation. Sometime before the first Ramallah Bravo opened for business, Sam was approached by “local activists in town” who wanted him to guarantee that the store would not carry any Israeli products.

  Sam—an activist himself, arrested for the first time in 1988, along with protesters who chained themselves to a fence outside the Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, headquarters of Federal Laboratories, which manufactured and sold the tear gas used by the Israeli army against Palestinian civilians—had been expecting a visit of this sort. Refraining from pointing out that, given the state of the Palestinian food industry, it would be impossible to stock a modern supermarket with only produce and foodstuffs manufactured in Palestine, Sam—who was the project manager, not the owner or operator—framed the matter to the activists as one of official Palestinian policy. He offered to accompany the activists to meet with the Palestinian Authority. Together, he suggested, perhaps they might persuade the PA to set a bold new policy prohibiting the sale by any Palestinian retailer of any Israeli products. They should in no way be discouraged, he further suggested, by the undeniable fact, in the unlikely event the PA were willing to take such a step, that it would be impossible to enforce.

  While his fellow activists chewed over this mildly disingenuous invitation, Sam said he could assure them, on behalf of the investors, that unlike other grocers throughout the occupied territories, Bravo would refuse to carry any goods grown or manufactured in the settlements. He also came up with an idea he thought might appeal to them: Bravo would strive, whenever possible, to offer a local Palestinian alternative to every Israeli or foreign item, and would highlight these local products by means of end-cap displays and signage, in particular the small, detachable “shelf talkers” that his father’s Youngstown grocery stores had used to draw shoppers’ attention to specials, new items, and the like.

  The activists went away reasonably satisfied, and the political pressure eased; construction proceeded. Costs were cut, frills discarded, workarounds found. The U became an L, the Plaza was left half-naked. Slowly, fitfully, the concrete-and-glass contours of Sam Bahour’s vision began to be discernible, a gleaming, air-conditioned foretaste of what the modern nation of Palestine might by and by become.

  Then Sharon went to the Temple Mount, and the second intifada erupted, vastly more brutal, more violent, more destabilizing, than the first.

  “That’s when it became not work, but a challenge,” Sam said. Given everything Sam had already told me about the reversals, obstacles, and difficulties he had faced on the Plaza project, this struck me as setting the bar awfully high for deeming something a challenge. The word must mean something different for him, I thought, at least in this context. It must have some more profound, or more personal, connotation. “So that’s when I told the owners, I will not leave this project until it’s up and running. And that took five years to do.”

  He paused, as if allowing himself to dwell again, for a moment, in that challenging time.

  “At one point,” he resumed, “the owners came to me and said, ‘Sam, we love you, but you’re ordering a glass facade for your mall, and if you haven’t noticed, there are F-16s bombing outside.’ So I made a deal with them, and I said, ‘I will not ask you for any more money. Let me take the investment you’ve made and try to make something out of it. You’re going to lose it, anyway.’”

  I wondered if Sam had actually offered such an openly pessimistic assessment to the investors, or if he were paraphrasing what he had felt, what they had all felt but were perhaps afraid to express, about the probable fate of the Plaza project, and the investors’ money, in that dark and violent hour. You’re going to lose it, anyway: I wondered if any project manager in the history of real estate development had ever provided his investors with a more bleak, even nihilistic argument in the hope of keeping his job and ensuring that his budget not be cut any further. It went beyond nihilism, I thought; it summed up, with perfect succinctness, the existential quest on which, because he’d never deleted that line in his CV, Sam Bahour had embarked. He wasn’t just trying to build a supermarket in what had become a war zone. He was making it out of glass. It made me think of Klaus Kinski’s character in Fitzcarraldo, dragging a steamboat over a mountain in order to bring opera to the Amazon jungle.

  “I think the investors just said to themselves, ‘Look, clearly he’s just a little off balance. Let him work.’ And yes, I cut corners in the project, big time. But the project opened. And they were shocked. The place we’re going to see today, in Nablus, I didn’t do that one, but I think it’s the ninth or tenth in the chain. To see it expand that way . . . there is a lot of pride in that.”

  It seemed a funny way to put it—the pride lay unclaimed in the middle of the sentence like property forgotten in a locker. He said it quietly, with a hint of something that s
ounded like doubt, or maybe it was wistfulness.

  After an hour and a half—slowing down for a few checkpoints, getting lost a few times—we came to the new Nablus Bravo. Built very much on the pattern of Sam’s innovations in Ramallah—minus the minimall; apart from the “fun zone” for kids, that part of the vision was never afterward repeated—it had been open only a week. In the middle of a Thursday afternoon it was almost completely deserted. The staff of the new store made a fuss over Sam, who towered over all of them. The store manager seemed to be in awe, and confessed that several years ago he had attended a presentation for young people that “Mister Sam” had given, aimed at energizing and inspiring future business leaders of Palestine. He said that he had been energized, and inspired. Everyone agreed that the new location was off to a fine start. The grand opening had been jammed, and the store got extremely busy three times a day: first thing in the morning, at the end of the workday right before dinnertime, and in the evenings, when entire families came down from the surrounding neighborhood, on the booming outskirts of Nablus, just to hang, to see and be seen.

  At the moment, however, Sam and I were almost the only nonemployees in the store. Sam showed me how to distinguish among Israel-, Palestine-, and foreign-sourced products, and he pointed out the shelf talkers all over the store drawing shoppers’ attention to locally made fare. The decor was Euro-minimalist, white paint and exposed air ducts, big primary-colored signage in simple geometric shapes, sans serif type. The merchandise on offer—cold cereal, packaged rice, processed meats, snacks and baked goods, yogurt and canned soups—was all but indistinguishable from what you would have seen in a supermarket in France or Italy. The air-conditioning was first-rate and it was beautifully cool. Arabic-language pop music drifted from speakers all over the store. It was, convincingly and indisputably, a modern, state-of-the-art supermarket.

  “Nice,” I told Sam.

  “Yeah,” he said, and I thought I heard that uncertain, wistful tone again. “Very nice.”

  Maybe he was just thinking about how long it had been, how distant the vision he had initially pitched to the investors in that time of relative peace and progress between intifadas. Maybe he was thinking about the darkest moment in the history of the project, in the first year of the second intifada, when the IDF, making a sweep, commandeered the construction site, confined Sam and his staff to the basement offices, and for three or four hours used the still-roofless, bare-concrete upper floor of the supermarket building to interrogate Palestinian detainees. Maybe he was reflecting on how he had devoted five years of his life, five years of near-constant struggle, negotiation, improvisation, and compromise in order to bring the convenience of one-stop-shopping and microwaveable suppers to Palestine. But, unlike Werner Herzog’s demented Fitzcarraldo, Sam had pulled the job off, without losing his sanity. He had kept his promise to the investors, to the people of the West Bank, to himself; there was a lot of pride in it. Or maybe Sam Bahour was thinking about how, after that first Bravo store with its Palestinian-pride shelf talkers and Israeli-made refrigerators had opened for business in 2003—finally, miraculously—he had gotten out of the supermarket-construction-and-management business, and had never gone back.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Soap factory.”

  5.

  “I love soap,” said Mr. Tbeleh. We were sitting in his office, up a flight of stairs in the main building of the Nablus Soap Company’s headquarters and manufacturing plant. “Really, this is the truth.”

  He said it very gravely, almost helplessly, like a uxorious man talking about his wife. He was a handsome guy in his mid-sixties, with Mastroianni cheekbones, a brush moustache, and a good head of dark hair. He had in general a sober and unsmiling demeanor, and yet he struck me as the happiest, or at least the most contented person, I had met over the course of a week in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. He was proud of his factory, a tidy compound of corrugated steel and cinder block structures behind a cinder block wall in Beit Furik, outside Nablus. He was proud of the machinery on his soap production line, the most advanced in all of Nablus, a town known since the early Middle Ages for the excellence of its soap. Most of all, he was proud of his soap. It was made, like all “nabulsi” soap, from three main ingredients: olive oil, water, and caustic soda (a mixture of lime and the refined ashes of the saltwort plant). Mr. Tbeleh’s oil, according to Mr. Tbeleh, was of the first quality, however, and organic, and his other ingredients were costly and pure. Traditional nabulsi soap, nearly odorless, is cut into small blocks, stamped with the soap makers’ trademarks on one side, and wrapped in crinkly paper, but Mr. Tbeleh had introduced fragrances and special ingredients into the recipe—mint, cumin, Dead Sea mud—and his product shipped in a bewildering variety of shapes and packages aimed at various markets around the world: Italy, Japan, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom.

  For the benefit of Sam Bahour, whose Palestinian American trade organization was considering whether it wanted to help fulfill Mr. Tbeleh’s dream of cracking the US market, Mr. Tbeleh went enthusiastically into considerable detail about his soap and its sale and manufacture, but I got the feeling he would have done the same if we had simply happened by. He really did seem to love soap, which was probably a good thing, I reflected, since he seemed to have had relatively little choice in the matter. His family has been in the soap business since 1611. They have been at it for so long that in Nablus, in the trade, a cutter—the man whose job it is to score and break the giant floor-sized slabs of poured and hardened soap into bars—is known as a tbeleh. Mr. Tbeleh’s destiny seemed to have perfectly converged with his predilection, which was probably the recipe for contentment, I thought—with or without Dead Sea mud. It made me happy just to sit sipping coffee with Mr. Tbeleh, in one of the leather-covered chairs in his dark-paneled office, listening to him go on, in rough but fluent English, about soap. Even when he and Sam got down to business in Arabic I enjoyed the contented rumble of their discussion, though I couldn’t follow a word. I had met a lot of brutalized people and heard a lot of awful stories over the course of the week. What they did was overshadowed, what they needed was denied, what they carried was encumbered by the occupation, and what they owned had been broken, diminished, or taken. All the everyday hardships and obstacles they faced were as much the fruit of the occupation as the extraordinary and terrible ones. But the obstacles Mr. Tbeleh complained about were mostly the kind of thing that any small manufacturer anywhere might face: quality control, competition, access to markets, espionage of the purely industrial variety (apparently there were soap Slugworths out to steal his recipes).

  Nothing seemed to have ever discouraged him or weakened his resolve, not even—especially not—the occupation. When, in the early days of his modernization plans, he could not obtain the machinery he needed, he designed and built his own. When settlers in nearby settlements seized wells and springs and cut off Mr. Tbeleh’s access to water—it takes a lot of water to make soap—he found new sources. He had a favorite English phrase, a kind of signature that he interjected liberally into conversation: Of course! Had he designed and built a soap-stamping machine himself, with his own two hands? Of course! Did the Israelis interfere with his supply chain, and his access to water? Of course! Didn’t it take a lot of water to make soap? Of course! Would they really pay thirty dollars in Japan for a bar of premium nabulsi soap in premium packaging? Of course! Everything, to Mr. Tbeleh, seemed to fall into its proper place—however disruptive or aggravating—in the course of things.

  As I listened to Mr. Tbeleh talk, and toured the factory floor, where thousands of soap bars stood not in the traditional stacked cones but on special racks, for the months of drying required, I found myself thinking the same thing I had thought while touring East Jerusalem, where well-financed settlers were attempting to drive out the residents of Silwan; or in Hebron, where the local Arab residents had been banned from their own shops and main street; or in Susiya, where the people were forced into makeshift tents after their
entire village was seized: These people aren’t going anywhere. Was the occupation a grievous injustice on a colossal scale, so brutal and unremitting that it would lead anyone to consider the appealing alternative of fleeing and never coming back? Of course! And yet here they still were, after fifty years of violence and deliberate degradation, listening to reggae music, shopping in their marketplaces, eating their sticky ice cream, and sending their children out to play. Of course.

  6.

  I had heard that Nablus, in addition to its soap, was known for its excellent kanafe. This is a traditional Ottoman pastry, similar to baklava but filled with cheese and wrapped in honey-soaked shredded wheat instead of phyllo. Before Sam and I returned to Ramallah, he said, he would take me to get some kanafe; he knew a good place. But before he could make the correct turn on the road coming back from the soap factory, we came upon a checkpoint that Sam had not been expecting.

  A couple of IDF soldiers stood at a fork in the road, squinting in the bright sun, pallid young men with Tavor assault rifles slung over their shoulders looking, like so many Israeli soldiers, as if they had gotten dressed in a dark room and put on someone else’s uniform by mistake. I had seen bored young men before—I had been a bored young man—but these guys took the gold. I was reasonably sure they were not going to shoot me or Sam, but if they did at least it would keep them awake. To get me to the promised kanafe, Sam wanted to take the right-hand fork; one of the soldiers—he looked to be about twenty, and the elder of the pair—told Sam, in Arabic, that he would have to take the left. The soldier’s tone was curt but not hostile. It bordered on rudeness but he was too bored, for the moment, at least, to step across that border.