Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  In January 2016, after the remarkable success of Susiya’s international appeal, thirty riot police forced their way into Nasser’s home in the dead of night. M16s at the ready, they surrounded his elderly father, his wife, and three small children, forced Nasser to the floor, and shackled his hands together as his family watched in terror. This moment is seared into him: his own humiliation, the sick fear and shock, and the mirrored expressions on his children’s faces. They were punishing not just him, he understood, but his family.

  Nasser, who through all the years as a community leader and field worker for B’Tselem was well known to Israeli police and military, disappeared into the police’s interrogation rooms.

  “The interrogation is very tough,” he conceded. He did not divulge the following easily. “The pressure starts the second they arrest you, they are shouting, pulling you from one place to another. You sit in a room with two or three of them, they ask different questions in parallel, you get disoriented and confused, you don’t know who to answer. You sit on a chair facing the wall, you are not allowed to look up or down, your legs and hands are cuffed.” When he said this, he kept his hands, open and face down, on his knees. “When you’re not in interrogation, you are in a small room two metres by two metres, all you have is a metal table, and they keep the air conditioning on extremely cold. They put me in solitary confinement underground, a room without light.” His next words, spoken quietly, were followed by silence. “It was a difficult period. They said things about the [Jewish] activists in Ta’ayush, my Israeli friends.”

  The legal case that was later brought against Ta’ayush activists—and eventually nullified by the Jerusalem High Court—is complex, sensationalist and heartbreaking, and received wall to wall coverage in the Israeli media. Out of respect for the privacy and health of those involved, I have elected not to detail it here.

  The choice, by both Palestinians and Israeli Jews, to trust one another is perilous. Day after day, the mechanisms of life under occupation succeed in their aim: to disavow the possibility of commonality and coexistence. There is a profound loneliness to the Palestinian experience, a heavy irony given that the conflict has been a staple of international news for almost seventy years. Despite worldwide consensus that the Israeli settlement of the West Bank is a clear violation of international law, Palestinians are widely viewed, in North America at least, as the instigators and perpetrators of violence; indeed, as violence itself. Palestinian crimes of hijackings, knifings, suicide bombings, and murders have become, for many, the entirety of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the only tragedies to be mourned. At the same time, Palestinian suffering—more than 10,000 dead since the year 2000, including 1,977 children—is to some an acceptable form of collateral damage.

  I wondered if Nasser’s story served as both a microcosm and a warning, exposing the danger of collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians. Historical legacies—not only national but deeply, catastrophically personal—could shatter trust and friendships in an instant.

  To my surprise, Nasser disagreed. For him, the old question of how to exist endured. He was committed to the life he had chosen.

  But surely his arrest, I said, had changed something in him.

  He answered without hesitation. “I think this has given me more power to be active and nonviolent. If Israel wants to separate Palestinian and Israeli activists, my arrest is a sign that what we are doing is working in South Hebron.”

  Cities and the Living

  [The inferno of the living] is what is already here. . . . There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not the inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

  —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

  Before leaving Palestine and Israel in mid-July 2016, I made my way to Palestinian friends in Bethlehem, to a Jewish Israeli friend in Akko, and to Tel Aviv for a gathering of former IDF soldiers who had given testimony on the policies and practices of the army. As I climbed the staircases and walked the chambers of both the visible and invisible worlds, I refused to feel estranged from either the humanity or the despair around me.

  Earlier, I had asked Nasser if having children had given him hope or made him more fearful. He had laughed and shaken his head. “Yes, things changed. But I don’t know how to tell you this in English.”

  When I pushed him, he said, “My children live in this situation.” The smallness of the word situation and the sorrow of the word children struck me with a terrible force. “I tell them about my Jewish friends,” he continued. “I try to bring in my friends, like Yehuda. He wears a kippa and the children think he’s a settler, and I try to teach them no, he’s not a settler. Inshallah one day I will visit Yehuda in his country and he in my country.”

  Shulman writes, “To watch the destruction-self-destruction of an entire world, you need only ordinary eyes and the gift of not looking away.” I try to hold the invisible within the real. The occupation began before I was born, but this numbing of our souls and our reliance on the word intractable: surely this cannot be our apology and our answer.

  In the opening pages of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera considers the idea of eternal return. Would a horrific and bloody war, he wonders, if it recurred in the same way over and over again, be altered in any way? “It will: it will become a solid mass,” Kundera concludes, “permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.” But the world as we perceive it, where atrocities or violence occur and are then rinsed from our memories, has also led to its own “profound moral perversity . . . for in this world everything is pardoned in advance, and everything is cynically permitted.” This cynical relationship with history is one we embrace at our peril.

  On one of my last nights in the territory, I watched a group of seventy Jewish diaspora volunteers, Israeli activists, and Issa Amro and Youth Against Settlements, work side by side, attempting to clean up a disused Palestinian-owned warehouse in Hebron. Their aim was to lay the ground for what would be the only cinema for Hebron’s 150,000 Palestinians.

  Settlers and police instantly appeared, followed by soldiers, who would momentarily begin arresting the activists for disturbing the peace. Watching the scene unfold, which included the activists’ elated singing of African American spirituals and Hebrew traditional songs, the children of the settlers frowned. They asked aloud, again and again, They’re Jews? Through a translator, I spoke to them, wondering about their names and thoughts. A boy, no older than ten, looked me in the eyes and said, “Fuck you.” But behind him, others watched in consternation, with a pensive fascination. An older woman reminded them, “There were Jews who helped Hitler, too.” “Thank you for building Jewish property,” another called out.

  “What do their T-shirts say?” a boy asked.

  The words were occupation is not my judaism.

  One of the activists said to him, “Do you think that occupation can really continue like this?”

  The boy looked at us through the fence, his face open in surprise. His confusion was real and profound. “What occupation?”

  The very earth we stood on momentarily vanished, rendered invisible.

  Mr. Nice Guy

  Rachel Kushner

  Standing at an intersection in Shuafat Refugee Camp, in East Jerusalem, I watched as a small boy, sunk down behind the steering wheel of a beat-up sedan, zoomed through an intersection with his arm out the driver’s side window, signaling like a NASCAR driver pulling in for a pit stop. I was amazed. He looked about twelve years old.

  “No one cares here,” my host, Baha Nababta, said, laughing at my astonishment. “Anyone can do anything they want.”

  As Baha and I walked around the refugee camp this past spring, teenagers fell in behind us, forming a kind of retinue. Among them were cool kids who looked like
cool kids the world over, tuned in to that teen frequency, a dog whistle, with global reach. I did notice that white was a popular color, and that might have been regional, local to Shuafat camp. White slouchy but pegged jeans, and white polo shirts, white high-tops. Maybe white has extra status in a place where roads are unpaved and turn to mud, where garbage is everywhere, literally, and where water shortages make it exceedingly difficult to keep people and clothing clean.

  So few nonresidents enter Shuafat camp that my appearance there seemed like a highly unusual event, met with warm greetings verging on hysteria, crowds of kids following along. “Hello, America!” they called excitedly. I was a novelty, but also I was with Baha Nababta, a twenty-nine-year-old Palestinian community organizer beloved by the kids of Shuafat. Those who followed us wanted not just my attention, but his. Baha had a rare kind of charisma. Camp counselor charisma, you might call it. He was a natural leader of boys. Every kid we passed knew him, and either waved or stopped to speak to him. Baha had founded a community center so that older children would have a place to hang out, since there is no open space in Shuafat Refugee Camp, no park, not a single playground, nowhere for kids to go, not even a street, really, where they can play, since there is no place to stand, most of the narrow and unpaved roads barely fitting the cars that ramble down them. Littler kids tapped me on the arms and wanted to show me the mural they’d painted with Baha. The road they had helped pave with Baha, who had supervised its completion. The plants they’d planted with Baha along a narrow strip. Baha, Baha, Baha. It was like that with the adults too. They all wanted his attention. His phone was blowing up in his pocket as we walked. He finally answered. There was a dispute between a man whose baby had died at the clinic in the camp, and the doctor who had treated the baby. The man whose baby had died had tried to burn the doctor alive, and now the doctor was in critical condition, in a hospital in Jerusalem. Throughout the two days I spent with Baha, I heard stories like this that he was asked to help resolve. People relied on him. He had a vision for the Shuafat camp, where he was born and raised, that went beyond what could be imagined from within the very limited confines of the place.

  In an area of high-rise apartment buildings clustered around a mosque with spindly, futuristic minarets, a pudgy boy of ten or eleven called over to us. “My dad is trying to reach you,” he said to Baha. Baha told me the buildings in that part of the camp had no water, and that everyone was contacting him about it. He had not been answering his phone, he confessed, because he didn’t have any good news yet for the residents. I got the impression Baha was something like an informal mayor, a community leader on whom people depended to resolve disputes, build roads, put together volunteer committees, and attempt to make Shuafat camp safe for children. The building next to us was twelve stories. Next to it was another twelve-story building. High-rise apartments in the camp are built so close together that if a fire should happen, the result would be devastating. There would be no way to put it out. The buildings here were all built of stone blocks that featured, between blocks, wooden wedges that stuck out intermittently, as if the builders never returned to fill the gaps with mortar. I gazed up at a towering facade, the strange wooden wedges, which made the building look like a model of a structure, except that it was occupied. The pudgy boy turned to me as I craned my neck, looking up at the facade. “This building is stupidly built,” he said. “It’s junk.”

  “Do you live here?” I asked him, and he said yes.

  Shuafat Refugee Camp is inside Jerusalem proper, according to the municipal boundaries that Israel declared after the Six-Day War, in 1967. The Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction there: the camp is, according to Israeli law, inside Israel, and the people who live there are Jerusalem residents, but they are refugees in their own city. Camp residents pay taxes to Israel, but the camp is not serviced. There is very little legally supplied water, a barely functioning sewage system, essentially no garbage pickup, no road building, no mail service (the streets don’t even have names, much less addresses), virtually no infrastructure of any kind. There is no adequate school system. Israeli emergency fire and medical services never enter the camp. Israeli police only enter to make arrests, but provide no security for camp residents. There is chaotic land registration. While no one knows how many people really live in the Shuafat camp and its surrounding areas, which is roughly one square kilometer, it’s estimated that the population is between eighty and eighty-five thousand people. They live surrounded by a twenty-five-foot concrete wall, a wall interspersed by guard towers and trap doors that swing open when Israeli forces raid the camp, with reinforcements in the hundreds, or even, as in December 2015, over a thousand troops.

  Effectively, there are no laws in the Shuafat Refugee Camp, despite its geographical location inside Jerusalem. The Shuafat camp’s original citizens were moved from the Old City, where they had sought asylum in 1948, during the Arab-Israeli War, to the camp’s boundaries starting in 1965, with more arriving, in need of asylum, at the beginning of the war in 1967, when the camp was under the control of the Jordanian government. Now, fifty years after Israel’s new 1967 boundaries were drawn, even Israeli security experts don’t quite know why the Shuafat Refugee Camp was placed inside the Jerusalem municipal boundaries. The population was then much smaller, and surrounded by beautiful green open forestland, which stretched to land on which the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev was later built (the forestland is still there, visible beyond the separation wall, but inaccessible to camp residents, on account of the wall). Perhaps the Israelis were hoping the camp’s residents could be relocated, since they numbered in the mere hundreds. Instead, the population of the camp exploded in the following decades into the tens of thousands. In 1980, Israel declared Jerusalem the “complete and united” capital of Israel. In 2004, the concrete wall was erected around the camp, cutting inside Israel’s own declared boundaries, as if to stanch and cauterize the camp from “united” Jerusalem.

  If high-rise buildings are not typically conjured by the term refugee camp, a person may neither imagine an indoor shopping mall, but there is one in the Shuafat camp—two floors, and a third under construction, an escalator up, and down, and a store called “Fendi” that sells inexpensive women’s clothes. The mall owner greeted us with exuberance, and pulled Baha aside for advice of some kind. A kid who worked at a mall ice cream parlor, a hipster in lenseless eyeglasses and a hoodie, did a world class beatbox for me and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, a writer and organizer who had walked me into the camp in order to make introductions between me and Baha, and to serve as interpreter. Moriel and the kid from the ice cream shop took turns. Moriel’s own beatbox was good but not quite up to the Shuafat Refugee Camp beatbox standard. We met an accountant named Fahed who had just opened his shop in the mall, to prepare taxes for residents. He was stunned to hear English being spoken and eager to use his own. The tax forms are in Hebrew, he explained, so most people in the camp must hire a bilingual accountant to complete them.

  Before the separation wall was constructed, the mall was bulldozed twice by the Israeli authorities, but the owner rebuilt both times. Since the wall has gone up, the Israelis have not attempted to demolish any large buildings in Shufat, though they have destroyed individual homes. Meanwhile, the population has exploded. The Israelis could come in and raze the entire place at any time. Armed Palestinian gangsters could take away someone’s land or apartment. A fire or earthquake would be catastrophic. There are multiple risks to buying property in the Shuafat camp, but the cost of an apartment there is less than one-tenth of what an apartment would cost on the other side of the separation wall, in East Jerusalem. And living in the Shuafat camp is a way to try to hold on to Jerusalem residency status. Jerusalem residents have a coveted blue ID card, meaning they can enter Israel in order to work, and support their families, without going through the military checkpoint at Qalandiya, which is for Palestinians with green, or West Bank, ID cards, who must wait in hours-long predawn lines with many supporting
documents, in order to enter Israel. Jerusalem residency is, quite simply, a lifeline to employment, a matter of survival. There are also non-Jerusalemites in the Shuafat 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 will be arrested, since the military occupation and its limits on freedom of movement have made it illegal for Gazans to enter Israel or the 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, nor 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 before 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 get 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 are ever run over by cars, assuming he’d 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 okay and ruffled his hair.