Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  Only now do I remember something odd about my passing through the Erez gate. After the teenage fry cook denied my entry, and after the second officer led me to a green-glass building, I waited for a customs agent to process me. Like every other Israeli involved in every aspect of enforcement, she was very young, no more than twenty-five, wearing a crisp blue uniform. Sitting in a high glass box, she processed me efficiently, and I thanked her and moved on, into a vast second lobby. I was alone, and there was no clear indication of where to go next. I turned back to her glass box, and she pointed me to a nondescript door on the far wall. I expected this door to lead to some security check, but it led only to a strange hallway smelling strongly of the sheep that graze nearby. There were no guards or other travelers visible. This hallway led outside, where the smell of sheep and pigeon feces was overwhelming. I walked through an outdoor hallway, covered with a roof and fenced in on either side. It twisted left and right for a kilometer, and all the while I assumed at some point I would arrive at a security area, where my bags and person would be X-rayed and examined. But this never happened. I was not stopped at either the Palestinian Authority or the Hamas checkpoint. When the hallway ended, there were only a handful of Gazan taxi drivers, smoking and waiting to take passengers across the buffer zone and into Gaza.

  Trying to sleep, my mind conjures the masked faces of the soldiers I’d seen on the street that day, members of the al-Qassam Brigade. They were on the central turnabout of al-Rasheed Street, standing with legs wide, hands on their semiautomatics. Their uniforms were a swimming pool blue, their boots black, and on their faces they wore what looked like black ski masks. In the middle of the day, amid the rush of traffic, they had an appearance both nightmarish and routine.

  The music outside continues. The thumping drums. The car horns. The whoops of young men. There is no reason to think it will end. But then it does. At the stroke of ten o’clock, it all ends and the street is quiet again. It is miraculous and strange, and the only logical explanation is Hamas.

  Finally I drift into a jet lag–deep sleep, but soon I have a strange sense that someone is jiggling the doorknob of my hotel door. For a full minute the rattling of the knob is incorporated into a vague dream of mice scampering behind a shallow wall.

  Now there is scratching at the keyhole. I’m still half-asleep, and still disbelieving that someone would actually be trying to get into the room. I listen, and picture the al-Qassam on the other side of the door. It makes no sense.

  But now the person on the other side of the door is trying to work the lock. The sound before was an aimless scratching, a key trying to fit into a narrow hole. Now there is the determined sound of metal on metal.

  Now I’m awake. There’s actually someone trying to open my door. I remember that when I went to bed, I couldn’t pull the deadbolt over; it was stuck. So the door has no lock. All I could do was attach the chain.

  The moment I remember this, the door swings open four inches and stops with a bang. The chain holds. “Huh?” I yell, because I can’t think of anything else to say.

  The door closes. Whoever it was who was trying to get in says nothing. I get up, go to the door, and finally get the bolt to work. I pull it right and it clicks into place. Now the door has a deadbolt and a chain, and I go back to bed. And, because everything here adheres to a logic all its own, I don’t call the front desk. I don’t call anyone. I immediately go back to bed and sleep the sleep of the dead.

  “We’re very angry. Very disappointed. Very desperate. We just want to go and sing.” These are the words of Basilah, one of the journalists I saw the night before at the Sol Band concert. We’re sitting in the restaurant of the al-Deira Hotel, which overlooks the sea, and the day is sunny, the sky a brilliant blue, and the beach below looks peaceful and calm.

  Basilah and I have mutual acquaintances in the United States, and they’d told me to bring her little luxuries that are hard to find, like lip gloss. I hand her a half-dozen containers of various looks and flavors, and her eyes grow bright.

  Basilah is twenty-nine years old, and has been writing for various media outlets in the Arabic and Western worlds for the last five years. Because she’s fluent in English, and is a skilled writer, her articles about Gaza have garnered an international audience. She is determined to make sure the world knows that there is a semblance of normalcy in Gaza. That there are malls, weddings, concerts.

  “That doesn’t mean that we’re happy,” she says. “We’re not happy at all being in Gaza. Most of the people I saw at the concert, they are applying for student visas, they are losing their scholarships. They are thinking their chances are very, very limited. We are stuck in Gaza and we can do nothing about it.”

  With a median age of just over eighteen, Gaza has one of the youngest populations in the world. But though education is prized, there are few jobs for university graduates. And since the arrival of Hamas and its dismal relations with Israel, getting a visa to leave the country is exceedingly difficult. Because Gaza has no airport—its airspace has been controlled by Israel since 1967—Gazans wanting to study abroad must pass through Egypt or Israel, and because tensions are high between Hamas and both Egypt and Israel, neither country is currently inclined to allow Gazans student visas. And they can’t see family members in the West Bank and Israel. In Gaza, they can scarcely find work. And every few years, it seems, Hamas engages in a disastrous fight with its infinitely more powerful Israeli neighbors, and this further limits Gazan civilians’ ability to move in and out of Gaza, and curtails their access to goods, clean water, electricity, and opportunities.

  Basilah and many other Gazans I met refer to Gaza as an “open-air prison,” and it’s difficult to argue with the description. On Gaza’s northern border there is a twenty-five-foot wall separating Gaza from Israel. This barrier is forty miles long, and long stretches of it are thirteen feet higher than the Berlin Wall, and far more heavily fortified. On its eastern border there is a moat, then a low wall, and on top of it an electrified fence, dotted with guard towers manned by Israeli soldiers and patrolled by Israeli tanks. On Gaza’s southern border there is another wall, separating Gaza from Egypt. This wall is ten miles long, and is much like the northern border with Israel. It is twenty-five-feet high and has fifteen guard towers.

  On the last side of Gaza, the western side, there is the Mediterranean Sea. This is perhaps the most deadly and impenetrable border. Two navies, the Israeli and Egyptian, monitor the water with patrol boats, ready to sink any vessel attempting to go north to Israel, south to Egypt, or further than six nautical miles from shore.

  So Gaza is a prison, and about 1.8 million people live inside this prison. They live in Gaza City, a bustling and cosmopolitan seaside city of more than half a million souls, and they live on farms and grow asparagus and almonds and cucumbers, and they go about life as best they can. There are nine universities and colleges. There are thirty-two hospitals. There are malls and galleries. There is Internet access, and wealthier people have cable television. The quality of water is substandard for some and terrible for others, and the electricity is not reliable; all but the elite can count on no more than eight hours a day. There are good restaurants. There are dinner parties, weddings, celebrations, births, parties by the seaside. But it is a prison.

  We look down at the waterfront, and only then do I realize this is the beach where, in July 2014, an Israeli air force missile killed four boys in the middle of the day, in full view of dozens of observers, including a number of Western journalists. Four boys, aged nine to eleven, all of them unarmed and wearing shorts, were members of a fishing family called the Bakrs. They were playing in and around a small shipping container where their father kept his boat and nets. The IAF missile destroyed the container and killed them all. After an investigation, no Israeli soldiers were charged with wrongdoing; it was considered an honest enough mistake of war. Now as then, the waterfront looks as tranquil as would an Italian seaside village.

  Basilah talks about the c
oncert the night before. “I see the same people at all the concerts. The same four hundred people from Gaza City come to every show,” she says. Often the concerts feature patriotic music, she says, bands singing about Palestine and the day when Gazans will return to their villages. “People shout ‘Yeah, yeah!’ and I’m like . . .” Basilah rolls her eyes. Basilah prefers the bands who are trying something new. I ask if a concert like the one last night, with its more secular focus, is evidence of an easing of restrictions placed on Gazans’ social life.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Basilah says. “Probably someone in the band has a relative in Hamas, and they got a permit. Hamas is not motivated to do any cultural event. They don’t want these events, but they can’t say no all the time.”

  If Gaza is a prison, it’s a prison with three jailors: Israel, Egypt, and Hamas. For young people looking to place blame for their situation, “it’s Israel first, Hamas second,” Basilah says. The restrictions on their cultural life are oppressive and random. And widespread charges of corruption and graft have drained away any remaining goodwill the party had. They harass their own citizens on religious grounds, and, because the government is strapped for cash, they impose crippling fines for dubious violations. Last week, Basilah says, a taxi driver was stopped and made to pay fifty shekels—half a day’s pay. When he refused, they impounded his taxi.

  “Hamas, for god’s sake,” Basilah says. “You spend all these years in power and you do nothing. Your relations with other countries are like shit. People are committing suicide every single day.”

  She mentions a man who killed himself the week before. He had gone to the hospital and incurred a bill of two hundred dollars. But he couldn’t pay it—he’d lost his job after the blockade—so Hamas took his identity card.

  “They kept his card for two months,” Basilah says, “and you can’t live in Gaza without an identity card. Everywhere you go, they ask, where is your card?” The man was caught coming and going. The same party who took his card asked for it wherever he went. So he set himself on fire in front of the hospital.

  “And no one cares anymore,” Basilah says. “Even if you want attention, now there’s no point to kill yourself. Too many people are doing it, so it has no effect anymore.”

  Basilah finishes her tea and looks out at the water.

  “But we say, Okay, let’s do something that breaks the routine of being always depressed, knowing that we’re stuck in a prison. We’re stuck in a prison, so let’s sing and dance inside this prison.”

  The coast of Gaza, all the way north to Egypt, is ravishing—the sea is bright blue, the white sand almost untouched. Hazem and I speed along the coast, a gentle breeze coming over the Mediterranean as we pass an endless succession of empty beachside restaurants. Before Hamas, the coast was used as a weekend getaway for Gazans, and before the first Intifada, the entire coastline was crowded with beachgoers.

  But now it’s empty. The conservative version of Islam favored by Hamas forbids women from wearing bathing suits, and frowns on men swimming shirtless, too. And because there are no tourists, we drive forty kilometers, from Gaza City to the Rafah Meena, and we see no more than a half-dozen humans on the uninterrupted white sand shore.

  At the Rafah wharf, we find a long line of wooden fishing boats, pulled up onshore, painted in primary colors. Facing the boats is a row of storage lockers, used by fishermen to store nets and lights. In one of them, a group of men is sitting on overturned buckets, having lunch. They invite Hazem and me to join them, but we decline. We ask around for the leader of the wharf, and are directed to a large man named Bashir.

  Barrel-chested, with a grizzled beard, sunburned skin, and a mouth full of broken teeth, Bashir is commanding but approachable. He wears a red-and-black plaid keffiyah over a faded peach button-down, its short sleeves revealing his deeply tanned arms. He has been fishing in the Mediterranean for decades. In the eighties he operated out of Haifa, and says “there were too many fish. We had to return them by the boatload.” After the Oslo accords, he was relocated to Gaza, and began fishing from Rafah. Every few years since then, the restrictions on fishermen have grown tighter, and now, he says, is the most difficult time yet.

  “The blockade is attacking all parts of life,” he says. “People have no jobs, no work. They are desperate. Palestinian society used to be productive, farming and fishing. Now we are a consuming society, relying on others.”

  For centuries, Palestinians were fishermen, and until 1948 they were free to fish wherever they saw fit in the Mediterranean. In the decades after the creation of Israel, their freedom of movement has been increasingly curtailed. In 1994, the Oslo accords gave fishermen permission to fish twenty nautical miles west in pursuit of their livelihood. In 2006, Hamas captured and held an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit. In retaliation, Israel instituted a naval blockade, restricting the movement of any vessels to and from Gaza; the area in which fishermen were allowed was reduced to six nautical miles from shore. Now, depending on relations between Hamas and Israel, and depending on the mood of the IDF soldiers on the patrol boats, that six miles can be five, or three. Ostensibly, the IDF is guarding against the import or export of weapons, and against Gazan ships making their way to Israeli shores.

  As we talk, there are about ten other fishermen around us, listening to Bashir. The day is breezy and clear. The sand on the wide beach is white and clean. Bashir points out to the sea, where we can see an Israeli patrol boat cutting across the horizon.

  When IDF boats see a Gazan fisherman coming too close to the barrier, they are supposed to issue a warning via loudspeaker. If a verbal command to turn back is not heard or obeyed, the IDF is authorized to spray machine gun fire in the vicinity of the fishing boats—usually in the direction of the bow. When misunderstandings occur, things can escalate.

  Gazan fishermen have been shot and killed. They have been detained and interrogated. Their boats have been impounded and stripped of vital equipment. Often their boats are sunk. According to the al-Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza, in the first half of 2016, Israeli ships targeted Palestinian fishermen seventy-one times, arrested eighty-three fishermen in twenty separate incidents, and wounded eleven fishermen. The Israelis have confiscated twenty-eight fishing boats in sixteen separate incidents, and destroyed fishing equipment in eleven separate incidents.

  “It’s not their right to put limits on us,” Bashir says. “It’s still our sea.” Even so, given the lack of jobs elsewhere in Gaza, men come from all over looking for work. “There are more fishermen now,” he says, “but fewer fish.”

  Bashir has had his vessels shot at and seized. His crew has been arrested, handcuffed, detained, and questioned at sea. Worse than the IDF, though, he says, are the Egyptians. Since the Muslim Brotherhood was thrown out, things have gotten far worse. The new government in place, led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, assumes that Hamas has been supporting uprisings and terrorism in Egypt, and treats every Gazan vessel as a possible terrorist conveyance. The Israelis will shoot in the direction of their boats, but “The Egyptians will shoot at us directly,” Bashir says. Some interaction with one or the other navy happens every day, he says.

  Gazan fishermen are not allowed to use sonar or radar, standard equipment for most fishermen around the world. And because their fishing grounds are so limited, Gazans catch far fewer fish, and now, though Gaza has forty-two kilometers of coastline, they import more fish than they harvest themselves. Over 90 percent of Gazan fishermen live in poverty and rely on international aid to subsist.

  By now all of the other fishermen have left us. We are alone, and the wind is picking up. Bashir appears tired, and seems more interested in talking about the effect of the blockade on everyday family life than he is the dual navies that patrol the coast.

  “When there is no work,” he says, “it affects the social life, the family life. We can’t go visit friends, we can’t buy a gift for an occasion.” Feeling this pressure, closed in on all sides and responsible for his fa
mily, he says, “A man might go a bad way.”

  Amir was a fisherman, and his father was a fisherman, too. His people were fishermen as far as he can remember, but not anymore. We are sitting in his living room, sipping tea provided by his son Abed, a tanned, light-haired man in his late thirties.

  Amir is wearing a gray thobe and moves with difficulty. He sits down against the wall and sets his cane on the floor in front of us. His face is oval, his chin narrow, his eyes tired. His skin is darkened by the sun, and the lines of his face are carved deep.

  “Now I am an old person,” he says, smiling grimly. At his next birthday, he will be eighty-one.

  Periodically a girl of three or four peeks into the room. She is blond, as are a few of the other children in the village, which is strangely appropriate, given this place is called Swedish Village. In all of Gaza, there is perhaps no more fascinating and distressing place.

  Amir was there when it was built. He was born in 1937, in a village of five thousand people called Hamama—the Arabic word for dove. Hamama was on the coast of the Mediterranean, about twenty-four kilometers north of what is now the Gaza-Israel border. He was eleven when Israeli troops overtook his village and drove its people into Gaza.

  “It was maybe October or November,” he says. “I was in the fourth grade of school, but school was off for that day. There were some Arab forces, troops from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and from Sudan, and they were guarding the area. A month later they said, ‘The Jews are coming. You have to escape.’ We left and came here and we didn’t go back.”

  When they arrived in Gaza, the United Nations gave the Hamaman refugees tents, and they lived near the beach for the next four years, fishing and doing some light farming. Eventually they moved inland, creating a village of mud and brick huts. In 1965, a storm flooded the village, destroying most of the homes. UN troops, led by Swedes, helped them rebuild just off the beach, a few hundred yards from the Egyptian border.