Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  “I have a foreigner with me,” Sam said, in Youngstown-accented English. “Why can’t we go to the right?”

  I was oddly relieved that Sam didn’t mention the kanafe. Pastry did not seem like an adequate reason to irritate a heavily armed man. The soldier repeated, in Arabic, that Sam would have to go to the left and, in a more helpful tone of voice, he added something in Hebrew. After that he repeated the original dull formula, in Arabic: we would have to go to the left. Meanwhile a car with white plates was coming along the forbidden road from the other side of the checkpoint. The soldiers waved it and its Palestinian driver through without any show of interest, or even attention. That was when Sam did something that seemed to catch the older of the two soldiers by surprise: he asked why.

  “Why can’t we go to the right?” Sam said. “What is the reason?”

  The soldier roused himself from his torpor long enough to shrug one shoulder elaborately and give Sam Bahour a look in which were mingled contempt, incredulity, and suspicion about the state of Sam’s sanity. It appeared to have been the stupidest, most pointless, least answerable question anyone had ever asked the soldier. What kind of dumbass question is that, Shit-for-brains?, the look seemed to say. “Why?” How the fuck should I know?

  The soldier had no idea why he had been ordered to come stand with his gun and his somnolent young comrade at this particular fork in this particular road on this particular afternoon, and if he did, the last person with whom he would have shared this explanation was Sam. That was what the look said, in the instant before it vanished and the proper boredom was restored. We went left.

  “What did he say, in Hebrew?” I asked Sam, after we had been driving away from the checkpoint, in silence, for almost a minute. The silence on Sam’s side of the car endured for another few seconds after I ended mine. When Sam finally spoke, the strangulated Edgar Kennedy tone of restraint in his voice was more pronounced than ever.

  “He told me—such a helpful guy—that this road would take us to the very same place as the other way, to the road back to Ramallah. Which is true, except we’ll hit it much farther along, and we won’t go past where we can get you your kanafe.”

  I reassured Sam that I could live without kanafe. I tried to make a joke of it—my jones for kanafe, another victim of an unjust system—but Sam didn’t seem to be listening, or in the mood for laughing, just then. I had a sudden realization.

  “Wait,” I said, “is the other road blocked at the far end, too?”

  “Of course not,” Sam said. “You saw the car? They’re letting people through from that end.”

  “So we could, hold on, we could just take this road to the Ramallah road, then backtrack to that other road a little way, and then come back to where the kanafe is from that end?”

  “We could drive all the way back to the checkpoint on that road, and come up right behind those two guys, and then we could beep the horn, and say, ‘Look, here we are!’ And then turn around and go back. And it would be just like they had let us through the checkpoint. Except that it took forty-five minutes instead of ten.” He laughed. It was an irritated-sounding chuckle, and it was followed by another silence. The checkpoint and the soldiers had definitely spoiled Sam’s mood.

  There had been times, Sam said, at the end of the long pause, at other checkpoints, when he had actually enacted the above-mentioned scenario of circumvention, including the defiant beep, just to point out to soldiers manning a roadblock how useless, pointless, and arbitrary their service was. I wondered how much more irritated he had been on those days than he was right now. Irritated enough to give in, at that level, to futility.

  Because of course, I thought, pointlessness was the point of the roadblocks that forced you to make a stop at Z on your way from A to B. Pointlessness was the point of the regulations forbidding access to cellular bandwidth that everybody had access to, of the Byzantine application process to get a permit for a ten-mile journey that would take all day, even though everyone knew that the permit would automatically be granted, except on those days when, for no reason, it was denied. We tend to think of violence as the most naked expression of power but—of course!—at its purest, power is fundamentally arbitrary. It obliges you to confront the absurdity of your existence. Violence is just another way of doing that.

  I tried to return our conversation and the remainder of our time together to an earlier, less infuriating and humiliating portion of that time. I told Sam how much I had enjoyed meeting Mr. Tbeleh, how encouraging it was to see that a single-minded and determined individual could, through hard work and a touch of obsessiveness, overcome all the difficulties and indignities of the occupation, and find a way to thrive. I was talking about Mr. Tbeleh, but I was probably thinking of Sam, too. I shared with him the sense that had occurred to me, over and over again in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, that the Palestinians were not going anywhere. Listening to Mr. Tbeleh, I said, had aroused the same certainty in my mind. He and his soap factory were proof of and testimony to the resilience of the Palestinian people.

  “Yes,” Sam said gravely. “That’s our problem. We’re too resilient. We can adjust to anything. You put up a roadblock for a while, everybody complains, but then they get used to it. And then when you take it away, they say, ‘Ah! Progress!’ When all it is, they just got back what they always had a right to, and nobody should have ever been able to take it away from them. That isn’t progress at all.”

  I thought about that, about how much reassurance I had found in the soap factory and in Mr. Tbeleh. Obviously a Palestinian could find reassurance there, too. Look, the soap factory says, it’s bad, it’s even very bad, but it’s not all about administrative detention and collective punishment and bulldozed olive orchards and helpless, wounded men shot dead in the street. The soap factory said that if you just kept your head down and focused on soap, if you loved soap, you could just make soap; and it would be excellent soap. You would be able to sell it to the Italians and the Japanese. Maybe one day you might sell it at Whole Foods, the way Canaan Fair Trade, a firm in the city of Jenin, does with its olive oil. You could have 3G, or 4G, or 5G. You could have a nice place to drop your kids while you shopped for yogurt from Israel, Nablus, or Greece. You could get from point A to point B, as long as you were willing to go through point Z, forty-five minutes out of your way, for no reason other than it served Israel’s purpose to force you to accept a pointless forty-five-minute detour. As long as you were willing to accept, consciously and unconsciously, the arbitrariness that governed every aspect of your life, you could actually get something done.

  Suddenly I felt that I understood something that had puzzled me, so far, about the career of Sam Bahour. In objective terms, Sam had prospered at every business he had undertaken, and at every project he had put his hand to since coming to Palestine in 1993. And yet at key moments, it seemed, at the peak of success, at the moment of accomplishment, he had parted ways with his partners or investors. He had set the cup of triumph aside, stood up, and left the table. I had wondered about this all afternoon, but as we drove away from the pointless checkpoint, I thought I understood. In a Palestinian life there were checkpoints everywhere—crossroads, real and figurative, where you were obliged to confront the fundamental futility, under occupation, of any accomplishment, no matter how humble or how splendid, from opening a multimillion-dollar glass shopping plaza in the midst of a violent uprising to restoring your village’s access to its ancestral water to keeping your child alive long enough to graduate from Birzeit University.

  When Sam said that Palestinians’ problem was being too resilient, I saw that accomplishments of this nature—accomplishments like Sam’s—were not merely futile; secretly they served Israel’s strategic goals. They lent the color of “normal life” to an existence that every day deliberately confronted four and a half million people with the absurdity of their existence, which was determined and defined by the greatest sustained exercise of utterly arbitrary authority the world had ever seen.
Under occupation, every success was really a failure, every victory was a defeat, every apparent triumph of the ordinary was really a gesture empty of any significance apart from reinforcing the unlimited power of Israel to make it. That, more than any roadblock, checkpoint, border fence, or paper labyrinth of permits and identity cards, was the cage that Sam Bahour lived in. It was the limit of every reach, and the ceiling that he bumped against every time he tried to stretch himself to his full height.

  “He does love soap, though,” Sam Bahour conceded, thinking back to our meeting with Mr. Tbeleh, in his tidy little kingdom of olive oil and ashes. “He really, really does.”

  The Land in Winter

  Madeleine Thien

  If I tell you that the city towards which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop.

  —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

  Cities and Signs

  From a hilltop just beyond the checkpoint, I can see the southern boundary between Israel and Palestine. But, eyes moving between map and world, I can find no border, wall, checkpoint, or cut in the earth to mark the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the UN Security Council and the international community reaffirmed this line, which in 1948 had moved 78.5 percent of historic Palestine into Israeli possession, as the border to be maintained “for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every State in the area can live in security.”*

  There is nothing to be seen of it now, and certainly no sign of it here in the South Hebron Hills, where an Israeli traveler would never know he or she had passed the boundary into Palestine.

  A little more than an hour from the deep valleys and soaring hills of Jerusalem, this rocky, barren landscape seems to inhabit another time. Even the sky is austere, a pale blue cloth made entirely of heat.

  Days after my visit, as I thought aloud about the emotional pull of the South Hebron Hills, the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh reminded me, “Don’t forget, you’re seeing the land in summer. It will look completely different in the winter.” I was startled to realize that all I could see was one aspect of a harsh, inhospitable season. Raja could see this alongside its opposite: a floating green, both the withering and the generation of possibilities.

  Saturday, and the South Hebron Hills flowed out like deep waves on the sea, dipped in the colours of straw and dust. A shepherd was being detained, his flock alleged to have crossed into a military buffer zone. Six bulky soldiers stood with their hands draped over their rifles. The border of the closed military zone was a dirt path along the ridge; surrounded by hills, it appeared innocuous as a line of string. An Israeli settlement, Mitzpeh Avigayil, stood on the opposite hilltop, too distant to be clearly seen. The land, just rocks and slope and wind, seemingly bereft of everything but its longevity, made me feel at once insignificant and alive and ancient.

  The shepherd, Nael Abu Aram, a Palestinian, was thirty years old, of slender build, with close-cropped hair and a look of quiet containment. Under the blistering sun, we stood together, waiting to see what the soldiers and the police would do. The pages of our notebooks clapped in the wind, pens fell in the dust. Children, who had run up from a neighbouring village, spun around us.

  Nael described his life as a quiet and unremarkable one, which changed dramatically in 1998. Since then, the number of times he had been detained, arrested, and imprisoned was lost to him. Settlers had attacked his sheep with metal pipes. They shook bottles filled with rocks, which frightened the flock and caused them to disperse. He had been beaten by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers, border police, and settlers, had his mouth and skin burned by cigarettes, and his skin cut with knives. After one arrest, he was blindfolded and then released, disoriented, on the wrong side of a checkpoint in the middle of the night. Of this encounter, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published video footage of an army commander telling him, “You’re not allowed to be here, because this is Mitzpeh Avigayil. You’re not allowed to be here. There’s a Jewish community here, and you’re not allowed near it.”* He had been fined numerous times. In 2014, settlers cut down thirty mature olive trees belonging to his family. Last year, his family’s crops were burned. Citing security risks to the settlers, he had been warned against coming too close to the military buffer zone, which is not only adjacent to his land, but on land that once belonged to him.

  We watched the police officers drive away to their station, inside the settler outpost. The soldiers and the incessant sun remained. More time passed. Finally, having never been charged, Nael was free to go. “Please excuse me,” he said. “I’m very tired.” He counted the flock and set off, cutting a quick pace across the hills. We followed at a distance. A kilometer later, the sheep made riotous, guttural shouts as they arrived home to water and shade. They leaped comically high, like bouncing balls. It was midday now, the height of summer.

  In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, places are folded inside other places. Cities are not only what they appear to be, but also what they are subjected to: memory, history, desire, forgetfulness, dreams. The buildings, storehouses of emotion, are far more than mere edifices; they are the visible structures of the human condition. In Israel and Palestine, I thought often of Calvino’s seen and unseen places, where the horizontal and vertical axes of history and place bend into the space-time of memory and desire. Of cities, Calvino writes, “Everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.”

  Those words were on my mind when I came to Wadi a-Jheish (“Valley of the Little Donkey”), where the concrete rubble was a glaring white. Two weeks earlier, on June 19, 2016, the Israeli army had arrived in the afternoon and bulldozed two buildings. I was surprised to see that the home had not simply been pushed over; it had been carefully, even cleanly, buried under its own rubble. A boy was standing balanced on the loose stones, reminiscent of the Little Prince perched on a moonscape.

  Amir, eight years old, had lived here. When I asked him what had happened, he pointed to the rocks. “I lost my clothes. I lost my shoes and we lost our food.” The army had not let them retrieve their possessions, and along with their plates, cooking utensils, and personal objects, had buried the family’s flour, sugar, and rice underneath the rubble. The two structures had been home to twenty-one people, including fourteen children and teenagers. Bits of Tupperware and a torn, very small pair of pants were visible in the debris.

  Amir’s smile was troubled. He nonetheless offered up his memory of that day to me like a piece of bread on a plate, like a possession. He took me to see the family’s sheep. His three sisters were sitting underneath a truck, inside a slip of shade; the oldest, Wouroud (“Bouquet of Roses”), sixteen years old, joined us. With a video camera borrowed from an uncle, she had filmed the demolition. When I asked if she had been scared, she answered patiently, “Of course.”

  We talked about school and marriage and life while, beside us, the family’s twenty sheep swayed restlessly. I asked Amir what he liked best. “I like to graze,” he said. “I like to be with the flock because that’s how we make the milk and butter and cheese. I like them.” But when he grew up, he wanted to leave and go far away.

  “To live somewhere else,” I said, assuming that I understood.

  “To bring money for my family.”

  When I asked Wouroud what she liked best, she looked me straight in the eyes. “I just want to live,” she replied, shrugging.

  I asked what her mother had said to them, after the demolition.

  “She said we only had one house, we didn’t have an alternative. She was very sad. She said to us, we need help. We were in the sun since this moment, and it was Ramadan.”

  I was reminded of another Palestinian home I recently saw. Half concrete wall, half tent, yet the makeshift kitchen somehow pristine, under the strict care of two women who cooked the family’s meals while children leaped about thei
r skirts. As the temperature soared, women and children lay down on the cool concrete. Tucked away were the bedding, wash buckets, soap, pots and implements, cups and dishes, jars of flour, barley, and sugar, a coffee pot—the necessities for basic family life. It struck me that every demolition carried out by men with bulldozers and guns was a demolition of the world of women, whose lives, already precarious, already exhausting, were destroyed anew.

  “In three years, when I get married, I’ll need a home for my family,” Wouroud said. “What do they want from us? We have to live. We have to exist.”

  Their village, Wadi a-Jheish, is in Area C of the West Bank. According to the terms of the 1993 Oslo accords, Palestinian residents of Area C are under full Israeli control for security, zoning, and planning. Area C, containing most of the West Bank’s natural resources and open spaces, best exemplifies the policy known as “maximum land, minimum Arabs.”* Although the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has grown by 340,000 in the last forty years, and settlers have been provided with police and military protection as well as connected to Israel’s water, electricity, and sanitation services, Palestinian construction—even on land the Israeli courts have recognized as registered to Palestinians—has been curtailed. Area C comprises 60 percent of the land in the West Bank and is home to 300,000 Palestinians. In 2014 only one Palestinian building permit was approved; in 2015, the number was zero. A 2013 World Bank report found that potential revenue for Palestinians in Area C alone, of which 99 percent is currently off limits to Palestinian development, would be a staggering USD 3.4 billion, over a billion dollars more than Palestine’s entire current revenue.*