Stones are defensive, not offensive.
Yet again one and the same object is split in two by words, in light and shadow. He who throws it feels threatened. She who is hit knows she is under attack.
Bassem Tamimi, who went on the barricades and is as convinced about the Palestinian cause as ever, although these days with a resigned intransigence, says: The two-state solution is an illusion. There is no solution. What will become of us? What will become of the Palestinian refugees around the world? There is no place for us. We feel alone.
Alone? I’m taken aback. Because the whole world thinks about the Palestinians all the time, more or less. The whole world talks about them, demonstrates for them, boycotts for them, and goes on strike for them. Ever since that meeting of the debating society in 1971, the world has cared about the Palestinians. People have been passionately devoted to their plight. People have been intransigent on their behalf. People have made the Palestinian cause into a lifestyle. People even dress like them. It is an absolute, superficial identification. And it hasn’t really helped. On the contrary, things are getting worse. Idealism suffers defeat when the battle lines are drawn between all or nothing; that is, between good and evil. Maybe that’s what Bassem Tamimi means with the loneliness of the Palestinians. With European idealism, everyone ends up lonely. Suddenly he starts talking about Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. When a middle-aged activist who spent years in Israeli prisons does that, then what you hear is a resigned human being. There is a kind of weary grief in his voice when he talks about peace. Peace isn’t the same as peace either. This peace is a different condition in his language: corruption, limitations, delays, bureaucracy. This peace is a peace without justice. The Norwegian author and nation-builder Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote: “Peace is not the best there is, but that you set your mind to something.” I’ve always thought, what nonsense. And I still think so. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility that Bassem Tamimi may be right. He emphasizes that all he wants is a normal life, just as most other Palestinians want normal lives.
And isn’t that what Israelis want, too?
A thought, or rather a suspicion, strikes me: they don’t know about one another anymore.
The house we’re visiting is at risk of being demolished. For administrative reasons, according to the Israelis. And if not for administrative reasons, then for security reasons. Almost everything is for security reasons, apparently. If one person loves another it’s probably for security reasons. I think Bassem Tamimi and his family could easily have put their signatures to the lines of Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian poet living in New York, and sent them to the prospective expeller:
you don’t want peace
you want pieces*
But what kind of peace apostle is Bassem Tamimi? He speaks up for his, the Palestinians’, cause, which obviously can’t be faulted, but for an outside observer, like me, he nevertheless appears ambiguous.
His language is carefully tailored, just as the photographs may be. What you see isn’t necessarily true, but it’s easily believable. All of it is easily believable. The table is set. It’s the true propaganda.
Therefore, there’s a darkness between the lines when Bassem Tamimi says that the third intifada must come and it must become global, and later, when I ask him how this global intifada will unfold, he answers: peacefully.
A few days before my departure from Norway, I saw an item in the papers: A small-town grocer had got himself into hot water. He had placed a crate of oranges outside his shop and put up a sign which just read israel. That was clearly wrong of him. The grocer shouldn’t just remove these imperialist oranges, but also the sign; he should quite simply remove Israel. But shouldn’t the people who insist on boycotting Israel be grateful instead? At the very least, here they could learn what tempting oranges they weren’t supposed to eat. However, reason is not what counts in this matter. Apparently, the word Israel itself, the name of a democratic state, is enough to arouse anger, disgust, passion. You can talk matter-of-factly about ISIS. You can even show some understanding: ISIS is a monster created by the West. It is flagellation, European style. It is our bad conscience. ISIS warriors returning from Syria should get a second chance. They are good at heart. They should be pitied. It’s a Norwegian article of faith: talk with someone for a long time, preferably in a hushed voice, and they’ll become like us, eventually. But as soon as you talk about Israel, the tone is different, implacable, loud. Comparisons are made with South Africa. Comparisons are made with the Nazis. Anything can be said about Israel. And there’s a lack of proportion, or a blind spot, in this increasingly hateful language, in which anti-Semitism appears as a shadow, a trace, a rumour being spread.
In the schoolyards in Oslo, Jew has become a term of abuse.
In the sixties, Israel was a role model. Radical youth went there to work on the kibbutzim. It was the new socialism. What has happened to language since then? Is it just a result of Israeli policies? It can’t be that simple. We live in extreme times. Our language is being conquered by extremists. And when our language is occupied, attitudes change too, and sometimes the distance from attitude to action is short. The front lines move quicker than the thought. We can’t keep up. Slowly but surely our views change, as when authors change the point of view in their novels without the reader noticing. It’s a drama unfolding almost in secret. It’s a drama which is met by a shrug of the shoulders, to the extent that it is recognised at all. It is the riddle of history: how brutalization and indifference go hand in hand.
The synagogue in Oslo, which is situated on the steep Bergstien near the beautiful and lush Saint Hanshaugen Park, was attacked by an Islamist in 2006. Thirteen rounds from an assault rifle. The court found that it wasn’t terror. The Islamist was convicted of criminal damage. It is the new language, tailored, partisan, ideological: the true propaganda. Today the synagogue is under twenty-four-hour police protection.
By the way, I’m beginning to like my new clothes. The shirt is comfortable in the heat and the colour doesn’t bother me anymore. After all, it’s just a colour.
And then maybe I understand what Bassem Tamimi meant by the bureaucracy of peace: at Qalandiya checkpoint, which thousands of Palestinians must pass through to get to work in Jerusalem. It is five thirty. Hanna Barag, eighty-one years old, from the Israeli activist group Machsom Watch (“Checkpoint Watch”) who is there to help, uses this expression: “the bureaucracy of the devil.” This queue, mostly men, makes such a strong impression on me that I have to sort out my own vocabulary: occupation is queue. I know that this also has to do with Israeli security. I know that Israel has good reasons, better than most countries, to be on the alert. I know that there are two sides to every issue. But this apparently endless queue is one tragic side of two issues: Israel and Palestine. Here they are clear and distinct: power and powerlessness. Why does this queue affect me so strongly that I, too, must resort to the starkest of words? Queuing is something I can relate to. I hate queues. Queues are a waste of time. Queues are humiliation. Queues are the beginning of death. Queues are occupation. The column of men inches forwards, surprisingly disciplined, then the first gate closes, they wait, they don’t know how long they have to wait, then they can proceed, but instead the men run, grown men run twenty metres to the next sluice, it is yet another humiliating race, as if they can recover everything they have lost during this stretch, time, money, land, honour. No one forces them to run, but they’re nonetheless driven to it. Humiliation is the deepest wound you can inflict on people without taking their life. They have to live with something that’s impossible to live with. Qalandiya checkpoint is like an everlasting airport: every morning Palestinians must stand in line to check in for work and board their life. Life here is delayed. You may carry only hand luggage. What I see is a society, the Palestinian society, put on hold. It is lost opportunities. It is waste. It is a tired tragedy in which Hanna Barag is a conciliatory figure. She relates that a soldier called her, this small, slight woman, “
Arafat’s whore.” She couldn’t get out of bed for a week. But Hanna Barag refused to be a victim of the war of words. She came back and has been standing here as a witness for the last sixteen years.
Another gate: the Humanitarian Gate. It’s the checkpoint’s fast track, for the sick, children, disabled people, and others in need of assistance. It doesn’t open before six o’clock. By then the flight has already departed. I do know that it has to do with security. If someone in Israel says they want a divorce, it’s probably for security reasons. Four hundred thousand Palestinians are blacklisted. But it is also a means of attrition. Attrition is a tactic: a slow, soundless war.
Israel is a triumph. In the course of a few decades, just a blink of history’s eye, it has created a democracy, an army, science, a language, literature. Israel has managed this despite an almost impossible starting point, despite the hostility of the neighbouring countries, despite terror, which must have strengthened an Israeli habit of thought: to take nothing for granted, not even your own country. But is it nevertheless possible to say that Israel has become reckless? I think it is possible. Israel forgot about the resentment of the loser. Israel forgot the bitter memories of the Palestinians. Instead, Israel reminds them of their loss every single day. No one remembers better than the loser. To forget about it is playing with fire. I think: Can security become so extensive that it jeopardises security? Can security eventually become a security risk? One thing is certain: there aren’t any certainties left.
When I return to my hotel room, I trip over something that wasn’t there last time and take a tumble in the dark, hit my forehead against the bed and lie flat out on the wall-to-wall carpet. Is my nose broken? Something warm trickles into my mouth. Finally I manage to switch on the light. It’s my suitcase. A greeting from the airline is attached to the handle. Thank you for your patience. I curse my luggage. I try and I try, but I can’t get rid of it. My yellow shirt is flecked with blood. I throw it away with the other clothes. Then I shower, open the suitcase, and take out clean socks, underwear, light trousers, sandals, and a white shirt. I stand in front of the mirror. I don’t recognise myself now either. Have I turned into a but person? Have I turned into the kind of person I despise, he who always says: I’m in favour of absolute freedom of speech, but. I’m categorically opposed to terror, but. I recognise Israel’s right to exist, but. I don’t want to be a but person, still attending the debating society in 1971, saying that the end justifies the means.
In Haaretz I read that the support among Palestinians for stabbing attacks on Israelis have sunk from 58 to 51 percent the last month. That’s what you might call both good and bad news.
The day before I travel home to write this we drive to Hebron. Graffiti scrawled on a yellow barrier shutting the Palestinians out from Road 60 so that they can only use the old, neglected roads, grabs my attention: A gift from Oslo. So this is the local thanks for the Oslo accords: scorn. And later, inside Hebron itself, in what is known as Ghost Town, the most desolate streetscape I’ve ever seen, the settlers for their part have put up a sign in one of the closed-down shops, where the lock has rusted shut long ago and the dust drifting past recalls the violence and the sorrow: These stores were closed by the IDF for security reasons after Arabs began the “Oslo War” [a.k.a. the second intifada] in September 2000, attacking, wounding, and murdering Jews on this road.
The Oslo War?
Oslo, my hometown, is under attack from all sides. None of the parties is satisfied with Oslo. Oslo, the city of my birth, the setting of my stories, and the subject of my songs, is gradually being occupied. Language itself is being occupied. Oslo isn’t a name anymore, but a rotten agreement, a conflict, a lost peace.
Is this the luggage I’m losing: My starting point, the only ground under my feet?
Then I take a closer look. It doesn’t say Oslo, but Olso. Olso doesn’t exist. It is an orthography of rage, an ideological misprint: the Olso War. I try to recapture my starting point, Oslo, here in these deserted streets of Hebron, where I’m suddenly reminded of a few lines by the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. I don’t know why, but maybe it is because poetry is a language that approaches the world from a different angle than all the assessments, statistics, speeches, and slogans, and with a different emotional reason than the passions of the moment, and which accordingly has its own purpose and agency, shining through the discreet beauty of these words:
Sandals are the skeleton of a whole shoe,
the skeleton, and its only true spirit
. . . .
Sandals are the youth of the shoe
and a memory of walking in the wilderness
Between 2000 and 2007, five Israeli civilians, including an eleven-month-old baby, and seventeen members of the Israeli security forces were killed in Hebron. During this same period, Israeli security forces killed nearly ninety Palestinians. Walking on Shuhada Street, the main street of Hebron, has been illegal for Palestinians since 2000. And the few Palestinian families who still live here can’t use their own entrance doors. They live in houses under lockdown. Now the settlers are here instead. They’ve built their own houses. They are, as they see it, back where they belong. It’s their conviction. Israeli soldiers are protecting them. It looks like a war zone. A settler screams abuse. May you get cancer in your hearts. Another one approaches us to argue his cause, loud, rude and obstinate, his index finger dancing in front of our faces, closer and closer, but never too close. It is the same passion the young boy showed on Jerusalem Day, just in a different manner. An Israeli soldier intervenes. He is barely twenty and already tired and sad looking. Is this how he’s supposed to spend his youth? I imagine he has his doubts at times: Who is he really protecting? We go to yet another checkpoint and are let through to the Palestinian area. The shopping street here is narrow and shadowy; only the colourful fruit in the stalls shed some light. I wonder: above us there’s a stretch of wire netting, and in some places plastic. The carpet seller explains: the settlers living on the upper floors often throw garbage down at them; sometimes they even pour urine. I can understand the hotheaded settler. He is convinced he’s right. It is his right to be wrong. But this? This isn’t politics. This isn’t ideology. This is evil. This is passion.
If you want to lose your faith, just go to Hebron.
Later that night I read in Haaretz about a terror attack in Tel Aviv. At least four people are killed at the Sarona Market by two Palestinians from the Hebron area. Soon Hamas praises the atrocity: this is only the first of many surprises we have in store. Time hasn’t come to a halt. It has reversed, to 1967, just before the war, when Fatah said that every terror attack against Israel would remind the world about the word Palestine. The Palestinian leaders aren’t just old. They are dead too. I can quote the same lines again: you don’t want peace / you want pieces. The preliminary Israeli response: the entry permits of eighty-three thousand Palestinians to enter Israel during Ramadan are revoked. As a novelist, I’m obsessed with the sequence of things. The sequence gives the actions their meaning and shares out responsibility. Politics is a sequence as well. It’s as simple as the logic of a child: you started it! Now they’re losing count. It’s as if the sequence is discarded and actions blend into one another. They lose their time and space. Israel points to the blood still flowing at the Sarona Market, June 9, 2016. Palestine turns to 1967, points to the occupation. The sequence, which is the arithmetic of possibilities, the geometry of hope, has become a vicious cycle instead.
I can’t envisage anything but what I would call “a peace of the discontented.” A two-state solution, if that’s the way forward, would necessarily entail painful compromises. Compromise, a word blackened by European idealists, because it’s too puny for them, is the most important tool of political craftsmanship. Big words rarely keep their word. And heroes are a dime a dozen. They come and go. Compromise, on the other hand, demands visionary leaders. Compromise is boring. What’s boring is what’s true: meals, work, sleep, repetitions, in short—every
day life.
How easy it was to think this.
How easy it is to write it down.
Something else must be mentioned: What about the advance of Islamic fundamentalism, not just in Arab countries, but even in Europe? In this context Israel isn’t Goliath anymore, but David. What about ISIS ravaging the neighbourhood, raising passionate zealotry to a new, historic level? What does that do to a conflict over an area the size of, let’s say a Norwegian county? It makes compromise an alien concept in our occupied language.
Words bludgeon one another to death.
Two tracks cross in my story: Rakel, my mother’s friend, who was sent to the concentration camp, and Ivan Osiier, who fled from Copenhagen to Sweden in 1943 and thus saved his life. He was born in 1888, married my paternal grandfather’s sister, and was a beloved physician in Vesterbro. But above all, Ivan Osiier was a famous sportsman. As a fencer he holds the record for most appearances at the Olympic Games. He participated seven times: London 1908, Stockholm 1912, Antwerp 1920, Paris 1924, Amsterdam 1928, Los Angeles 1932, and, at the age of sixty, in London 1948, when he was part of the Danish épée team. His main fencing strengths were his precision and his effective parries. In addition, his powers of concentration allowed him to wait for his opponent to make a mistake. However, his most important Olympics were Berlin 1936. He didn’t participate. On his own initiative he boycotted Hitler’s games. Ivan Osiier said, “Fencing is a noble form of attack, but in defending myself I use all weapons.” In 1986, twenty-one years after his death, he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation Page 13