Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  “It’s easier to go to Tel Aviv than to come to Ramallah,” he said in an aggrieved fashion. “I went to Qalandiya and it was totally clogged so I risked going to al-Jeeb. Yesterday a friend of mine used that checkpoint. After he went through he found that the soldiers had placed another barrier some distance away. So he was stuck. He could neither go forward into Ramallah nor back to Jerusalem. But today, thank God, it was open and I made it on time.

  “Which road should I take now?” Abed asked me forlornly.

  “No idea,” I said. “It’s up to you.”

  Abed breathed deeply. “I’ll try Qalandiya. It’s Monday, you know. That’s the worst day. Schools are open and everyone’s at work. Then we have to pass through the bridge at Sheikh Jarrah and this tends to be clogged. I don’t know how long it will take me to get to Jerusalem.”

  Fortunately, last Thursday, it was Sami and not Abed who had driven me to the airport.

  I was going to London for only a week and my flight was at five in the afternoon. The drive from Ramallah to the airport used to take fifty minutes. With so many checkpoints on the way, I left the house at noon, five hours before the flight.

  I held my breath when we passed the first checkpoint. Sami does not lie: not only is he kind and considerate, but he is also honest, perhaps far too honest for our situation. Unlike other drivers I’ve used to get to the airport, Sami’s honesty extends to telling the truth even to soldiers. Though he’s fluent in Hebrew and could easily pass for a Jew, he never lies and says he lives in one of the East Jerusalem neighborhoods that are really Jewish settlements. Nor does he ever place a Hebrew newspaper on the dashboard or play Israeli music so that the soldiers will wave him through, thinking he’s one of them.

  The spring weather was pleasant and refreshing as we drove through the Palestinian village of Ayn Arik, which sits in a valley famed for its pomegranate trees. The village has a mixed Christian and Muslim population. The hills on both sides of the road were covered with olive trees. In the course of his long experience of driving in the country, Sami had witnessed the extensive transformation of the landscape and was often able to correct my misconceptions about the basis of Israeli planning. We were heading to Bethlehem, driving through the beautiful hills south of Jerusalem. It was not possible to use the road that connects the two cities, which are only seven kilometers apart, because Israel does not allow taxis through the Bethlehem checkpoint. We had to circle around, go through the tunnels to Beit Jala and from there to Bethlehem.

  My eyes wandered from the Palestinian villages spread out on the hills to the fortresslike Jewish settlements on top. I noticed that there was no separation wall here. It seemed to me anyone could cross over by walking down the hill. But when I suggested this to Sami, he said the guards at the settlement on top of the hill would immediately spot someone. He was right, of course. I could see they plan the settlements to act as buffers that allow for the surveillance of the entire valley.

  As we drove through Jerusalem, we had to stop for the recently built light rail to pass. Sami said: “If Israel had built a line connecting Ramallah to Jerusalem, how different it would have been between us.”

  From the valley of the pomegranate trees we drove up a steep and dangerous road, passing through the village of Deir Ibzi, then descended again into another valley only to climb up another hill. It was like riding the waves of a turbulent sea. Or was it my troubled mind that made me think of this image for these familiar hills?

  On one solitary hill stood the Jewish settlement of Dolev, a mere nine kilometers away from where I live in Ramallah. But the road from Ramallah to Dolev has long been closed to Palestinian traffic. Our detour took about forty-five minutes. We continued driving down a winding, single-lane road to get to the motorway linking the settlements together. But as soon as we got to the crossroads we found that the Israeli army had placed concrete barrier blocks there, preventing Palestinian access to this road. Israel planned this new road network three decades ago, to enable the military to block Palestinian traffic on a whim, without affecting Israeli settlement traffic.

  As we stood there wondering what to do, we could see the settlers’ cars and buses zooming by along the double-lane, well-designed road, unaware of our miserable fate. Sami muttered: “Just when we find a possible road to the airport, the army closes it.” He then picked up his mobile phone and began calling a colleague to find out how it was at the Qalandiya crossing, at least an hour away.

  “It’s very bad,” he was told. His friend said he had been held up for two hours. “Don’t come here. It’s a trap,” the friend said. Sami was also informed that the checkpoint we were heading to, near the village of Ni’leen, had also been closed to nonsettler traffic.

  He now turned to me with a look of desperation and said: “We have no other choice but to try going through the Rantis checkpoint.” The only problem is that only Israeli citizens are allowed through and neither Sami nor I is an Israeli citizen. “If we’re stopped I could get in trouble for attempting to smuggle you through, and you might end up being detained. Or, if they want to be kind, they might simply send us back. But then there would be no possibility that you’ll make it in time for your flight. What do you say? Shall we risk it?”

  “Not much choice,” I said calmly and with as much confidence as I could muster, though I was feeling utterly nervous and uncertain. “We’ve already spent forty-five minutes and I must be at the airport three hours before my flight or they will not let me fly.”

  “I know,” said Sami, “I’ll do what I can to get you there in time.”

  “Let’s risk it.” I said this knowing that I was not only taking an individual risk but also one on behalf of Sami, because both of us are not Israeli citizens, and a driver trying to smuggle someone who doesn’t qualify would also be guilty of an offence.

  Now we had to figure out how to find a different access point to get on the main road. Sami began dialing to find another driver who might have an idea where we could find this when a taxi drove by. He saw that the road was closed and began turning back. Sami flashed his lights. The taxi stopped.

  The two drivers consulted, and Sami learned that the other driver knew another way we could take to get to the settlers’ road. We proceeded to follow him. I have always admired the camaraderie among taxi drivers, who look after each other and try their best to help one another endure these tiresome and frustrating times.

  We drove through narrow roads, passing many more Palestinian villages along the way. They all seemed crammed in contrast to the settlements, which were spread out, with lots of green areas between the rows of mostly red-tile-roofed houses. A wall or a barbed wire fence surrounded each settlement, and the entry was through a well-guarded gate. I thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t driving. I would not have been able to find my way. I confessed to Sami that I was totally lost.

  Kind Sami said: “You’re not the only one who gets confused by the new roads and changes to the land. During the last al-Adha feast I was driving a man who finally got a permit to visit Jerusalem. It was the first time after an absence of many years that he was allowed into the city, though he lives just fifteen kilometers away. When he saw the new road grid and the settlements surrounding East Jerusalem he turned to me and confessed that ‘except for the white sculpture [which the Israelis erected as a symbol for peace] I would not have realized we were in the Jerusalem I thought I knew.’”

  We continued driving for another forty-five minutes, wandering from one Palestinian village to another. We finally found an opening on the side of the road that had not been blocked by the army. It was not a proper entry to the main road, which meant that we had to drive over unpaved ground, then risk being hit by speeding cars coming the other way.

  How I wish I were fatalistic, someone who tells himself I did all I could, and now will leave my destiny to fate. But I’m not like that. I start eating myself up, even blaming myself for the occupation and the bad behavior of its soldiers. I tried to assure mysel
f that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I didn’t get on the flight. I was only going on a short trip to London to do a series of talks on human rights. Was it worth it to go through all this for just one week? Perhaps I should not have accepted this invitation. Perhaps I should stay put in my house and give up on traveling altogether, rather than subject myself to this agony. But though of short duration, my schedule at my destination was utterly packed. Every single day—almost every hour—was filled with meetings and events at which I was speaking. So much had gone into the planning of this week, so many people were involved. I had to do my very best and take every risk in order not to disappoint my hosts by failing to arrive at the airport on time. The more I thought in these terms, the more anxious and fretful I became. Would they understand if I didn’t make it? I would assure them that I had allowed enough time for getting to the airport. But would they appreciate the complications of our life under occupation? I know it is not easy for those who are used to roads being accessible to appreciate that passage on the roads of my country is a privilege that is not afforded to everyone. I hate to have to keep excusing myself because of the occupation, and yet this is the reality I live under and that I’ve had to endure now for half a century.

  Pondering the possibility of having to go back home in defeat and emptying the bag that I had so carefully packed made me realize how the occupation has rid me of the most simple joys. There were times when I felt excitement about traveling abroad. Now all the fun is gone. I no longer find pleasure in driving through our lovely hills, not even in springtime when they look their best.

  The occupation has been like a dark, heavy cloud hovering over the land, a lump in the throat. Sometimes it descends and threatens to completely asphyxiate. Then it lifts temporarily but never entirely. No one living under its shadow ever forgets the oppressive occupation.

  Once, when we were stopped for hours waiting at a checkpoint to be allowed through, I heard Sami say: “Sometimes I cannot endure it, but I have a family to feed. If I stop, who will take care of them? This is the only thing that keeps me going.”

  The closer we got to Rantis, the more anxious I felt. Much as I tried to relax, it was no use. I know myself and know that I cannot help fretting over passing through checkpoints. Fretting, in turn, makes me look guilty, as though I were smuggling a bomb or going on a violent mission. Just thinking of how I look when I fret made me more anxious and more likely to be stopped.

  I kept on telling myself I had to try to relax: otherwise, by the time we got to Rantis, I would be in such a state that would alarm the soldiers at the checkpoint, then we would surely be stopped and I’d be found out as someone crossing at a checkpoint reserved only for Israeli citizens. Yet how could I relax? The next half hour or so, I knew, was going to be a real challenge.

  After having driven me for so long, Sami knew me well. He could read my mood. He could see how tense I was. But he was too polite to refer to my agitated state and tell me to take it easy. Instead, as he drove, he tried to distract me and help me pass the time by telling me one story after another. He was a good raconteur; still, most of the stories he told me were about checkpoints, a Palestinian vein of narrative that is almost inescapable. The more I heard from him, the more anxious I became.

  Usually when Sami drives me, we talk for a bit and then drive on in silence. He knows how much I like silence, how I try to enjoy looking around at the landscape and dreaming. Most often I think about how much I’d rather be walking in the hills we are passing than driving by them. But this time Sami was going from one story to another, hardly stopping. Could he also be tense, I wondered? Sami was and is the calmest man I know.

  “Imagine this,” he said. “Once, I was going to the Allenby Bridge. It was very hot and there was a long wait at a checkpoint. When my turn finally came, an Israeli soldier came over and asked whether I often came this way. I answered that I did.

  “‘Will you be coming back this way?’ he asked.

  “I said I would.

  “‘Don’t stand in line. Come straight through, because I want to speak to you.’

  “‘On the way back I didn’t jump the long queue as he had told me to do. When I got to where he was standing he asked me, ‘Why didn’t you do as I told you?’ I said I always wait in line. He then asked for my telephone number, saying he wanted to talk to me. I gave him a number. He called it immediately and heard no ring tone. ‘You gave me a wrong number,’ he said. I explained that I have two numbers, one for work and one for use on Fridays, my day off. ‘Then give me your work number,’ he demanded. I had to give it to him. He tried it, and it rang. Satisfied, he said: ‘I’ll call you later.’

  “And indeed, when I got home he called and proposed that I meet with him. I knew what he wanted and told him I was not that sort of man. He said he could help me so I wouldn’t have to wait in line anymore, but would be able to go straight through. In return, he wanted me to tell him who the troublemakers were in the Jerusalem neighborhood where I live, and he’d reward me. I told him I didn’t need his help and hung up.”

  Sami’s storytelling was often interrupted by phone calls from his customers, which he promptly answered. What a huge difference the mobile phone has made for drivers like him. For many years, Israel would not allow car phones. Now the phone made it possible for drivers to check on the state of the roads and checkpoints. There is even a special app that updates drivers about the roads and congestion at the checkpoints. Sami’s car was like his office. He handled his schedule so competently.

  I had always wondered why intelligent Sami had not pursued his studies. Once, when I asked him, he told me that in school, he was good at science and his teacher had great hopes for him. He applied and was accepted to a university in Jordan and was preparing to go to start his studies when his older brother Majid was killed by an American settler. Posing as a passenger, the settler asked to be driven to the Holy Land Hotel. Before they arrived, he put a bullet in Majid’s head, left him to die in the car, and escaped.

  Sami’s father urged him to leave for university anyway, but Sami would not. He said, “I could see how distressed my father was, and I did not want to leave him. I decided to stay and become a full-time driver.”

  For twelve years, the police failed to investigate the murder. Worse, they insinuated that it was Sami who had killed his brother. I was with Sami in the car when he finally got the news that he’d been waiting a decade for: they had found the culprit. I was impressed at how restrained Sami was. He did not even flinch, just kept on driving. Most Palestinians have learned to keep their anger down, to control their emotions, to spare themselves for the long haul, a lifetime of hardship and difficulties of life at the top of a volcano ready to erupt at any moment. How I wished I were like that.

  Now, in the car, Sami began another story. He told me how once he was driving a young disabled woman through the Jordan Valley and they were stopped at a checkpoint. The guards there gave this young woman a very hard time. They wanted Sami to take her heavy wheelchair out of the trunk. But Sami, who is no wimp, told them that his job was to drive, and if they wanted to search the chair they could take it out themselves. “We Arabs are forgiving,” he commented. “We are willing so quickly to forget and forgive. But they are different.”

  Every time Sami dropped me off at home, I would think about how for me, my anxiety was over, while Sami still had to pass through the Qalandiya checkpoint again on his way back home to Jerusalem. It was worse when his sons would call asking how long would it be before their father got home. This made me feel very guilty.

  During another drive, I asked him why he didn’t find a place outside the city in one of the suburbs on the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. He told me that he already had a house in Kufr Aqab. It has a garden. He bought it when the area was within the boundaries of Greater Jerusalem. “Then one day,” he said, “I saw a man painting a big X on my fence. I asked him what he was doing and he said this is to indicate that the house has been moved o
utside the area of Jerusalem. Overnight I was chucked out of the city. I found a flat in At-Tur in an area that is so congested that one person complained that his neighbor’s alarm clock woke him up.”

  Sami started again with another story aimed at distracting me.

  “The other day,” he began, “I was taking my two sons to Jerusalem from our home in Kufr Aqab. When we reached Qalandiya I got a call from a client for a job. I dropped off my two sons at the checkpoint and called my brother to pick them up on the other side. As I waited to see them going through on foot I saw a soldier beating one of them. I went over. I asked the soldier why he had done this.

  “‘Your son lied to me. He told me he has no identification card.’

  “‘But it’s true. This is why he’s carrying his birth certificate. Here it is. You can see he’s not yet sixteen and not qualified to be issued an ID card.’” To me Sami commented: “They want to crush the spirit of the young. That’s what they’re after.”

  While I was trying to absorb the sinister behavior of the army, Sami, with hardly a pause, resumed his storytelling. “Imagine what I saw the other day when I went to fill up gas in Ramallah at the station near the Beit El settlement. Nearby, huge numbers of Palestinian police were standing in formation. I asked them why, and they said Abu Mazen, the Palestinian president, was planning to have lunch at Darna restaurant and they were waiting for him. Just as we were speaking, an Israeli tank rolled into the station, followed by a military jeep and an army personnel carrier. They parked at the station and several soldiers went to the upper floor above the station. They came down with a young man in handcuffs. They blindfolded him, threw him in the jeep, and drove away. The Palestinian police just looked the other way, waiting to take their president, their rais, to lunch.