Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  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, ah, 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 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 thus 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 damages brains and ruins lives. Mr. Nice Guy is popular with kids as young as age eight, and it can bring on psychosis. Empty packets of it sifted around our feet as we crossed the large parking lot where buses pick up six thousand children daily and transport them through the checkpoint, into East Jerusalem for school, since the camp has only a few public schools, 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 kids 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 ran 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 barber shop, 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 teen 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 kids 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. I sensed with them, and, especially after Moriel left that afternoon, and I was the lone visitor for the weekend, that whenever men shook my hand after Baha introduced me, that men and boys would not get so physically close to a Palestinian woman who was a stranger. I was an American female, 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 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 the notes, this:

  Baha says, two types

  Those who want to help make a better life

  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 barber shop. “But they do all carry guns.” It was only after I returned home to the US that I learned in the banal and cowardly way, with a few taps on my computer, that two Alqam boys, cousins who were eleven and fourteen, had been accused of stabbing, with a knife and scissors, a 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’s been called the Knives Intifada, if it is an 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 Shuafat 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 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’d met in the West Bank, hearing that I was going to spend the weekend in the Shuafat camp, had 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 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 the older people as well. A third of the population of the camp 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, essentially, to end it all, by running at a soldier with a knife? They both concurred that there was. Two years earlier, Baha said, by way of contrast, there had been a man from the Shuafat camp who did a ramming operation. The Israelis came and blew up his house. He was older, Baha said, he was 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 references to his nine-year-old daughter, who is physically disabled and cannot attend school. Perhaps 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 one arm and a kneecap. Her face and scalp are disfigured. A school bus filled with children from the Shuafat camp was on a trip to Ramallah when it collided with a truck on a wet, rainy road. 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 NGO, established that the tragedy resulted from the multiple challenges of living beyond the separation barrier. Roads were substandard. The bus was unsafe, 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 both 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 now has eighty members, who are trained in first aid, each with 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 the 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.”

  Adel’s daughter 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.

  The travel agency in the Shuafat Refugee Camp 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 recreate 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’d learned at age nineteen, on the trip that changed his life, working with Vento di Terra, a community development and human rights NGO 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 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 keffiyeh-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 wheatpastes of jihad martyrs.

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

  Late at night, Baha and his wife, Hiba, decided to show me their digital wedding photobook. It was midnight, their two young daughters asleep on couches around us. Hiba propped her iPad on her belly—she was five 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 part of the ritual, and the ritual 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 had 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 Hiba’s mother and her sisters were preparing an exquisite meal of stuffed grape leaves and stuffed squashes, the grape leaves and vegetables grown on her mother’s patio in the camp. We were all women, eating together in relaxed company. A sister-in-law came downstairs to join us, sleepy, beautiful, thin, with long red nails and hair dyed honey blond, in her pajamas and slippers. She said that she was leaving for New Jersey, in just a few days, 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.

  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 they would have been shocked to see any non-Palestinian. There was much consternation in the reinforced checkpoint station. My passport went from hand to hand. Finally, 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 November. 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.

  Sami

  Raja Shehadeh

  Every conflict has its unsung heroes. In Palestine they’re the taxi drivers. After living for half a century under occupation, my nerves are strained. I can no longer endure the anxiety of what might appear on the road, whether it is angry drivers converging into long bottlenecks as they jostle to get in place at the more than five hundred checkpoints scattered in the small area of the West Bank, or the pathetic boys who throw themselves at your car pretending to clean the windshield, asking for money. Every time I see a scrawny kid clinging to the car, I am torn between giving him a few coins and encouragin
g begging, or driving on and possibly injuring him. The plight of these boys invariably makes me hate myself, forcing me to confront the extent to which my society has failed.

  Then there is the indignity of having to wait on the whim of a teenage soldier to motion me to pass or to prevent me from passing and ordering me to “get out of your car, leave the keys in, and stand against the wall,” or whatever other insult pops into his or her head.

  But perhaps the main reason why I stopped driving out of Ramallah is that the roads Israel built to link the Jewish settlements with Israel have replaced the familiar old roads, making the whole network so complicated and confusing that I often get lost. And this is the greatest indignity of all, getting lost in your own country.

  This is why I began asking Sami to drive me in his taxi. Patient, considerate, well tempered and kind, he also possesses the other signal virtue of punctuality. I’m just amazed at how he manages always to arrive on time when there are so many imponderables. Short, well built with cropped hair, he looks sturdy but unthreatening, with a pleasant smile that rarely leaves his face. I never cease to wonder how he can remain so even tempered despite the tragedies his family has endured and the difficulties he experiences on the road. Besides, gentle Sami, with his slight lisp, is such a good storyteller.

  I realized how truly outstanding he is when he sent a colleague of his, Abed, in his stead. That day Sami could not drive me, because his wife was going to see an Israeli doctor and he needed to be with her to act as an interpreter. I could immediately see how different Sami with his calm manner was from Abed, who, perturbed and anxious, kept thanking God every time we passed through a checkpoint. Abed managed to arrive at my house on time, but he immediately announced that he had had a hard time getting from Jerusalem to Ramallah.