Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  The village is a desperately poor place, but Amir’s home is clean and his sitting room comfortable and cool. We can hear the waves crash against the white sands of the beach outside. When the tea is gone, Abed brings orange soda and presents it with great ceremony.

  “He has six kids,” Amir says about Abed. “But he barely works. He makes twenty shekels a day from farming, but that’s not enough. When the tunnels to Egypt were open, he could make two hundred shekels a day loading and unloading.” But the tunnels were closed six months ago, and now things for this small village—no more than a thousand souls—are as desperate as they’ve ever been.

  As is the case throughout Gaza, there is little work for the men. And then there is the troubling drop in fertility. Something has been preventing the young couples from having kids—it’s been years since a new baby was born, though Amir says twelve young couples, all newly married, have been trying. And the kids there are, are getting sick. Amir thinks it has something to do with the sewage that pumps from Rafah into the ocean immediately next to the village. Or it could be the salinization of the well water.

  “The closest clinic is Rafah,” he says. But it costs money to get to Rafah, money they don’t have in the village, so often the sick children stay sick.

  Up to 2005, there was an Israeli settlement just east of Swedish Village, and I ask Amir what life was like with them so near. Because I’d spent time with my Israeli guide in the West Bank, and because the settlers of Hebron seemed so violent and unreasonable, I’m surprised by Amir’s answer.

  “When the settlements were here, it was good,” he says. There was decent access to water and electricity, and Swedish Village was surviving. Abed was one of the young men employed by the settler-farmers. He became an irrigation expert. Then the settlers left. Then Hamas arrived. The water went bad. The blockade began, and jobs disappeared. Abed’s job disappeared.

  “I have six daughters,” Abed says. He’s giving us a tour of the village, and his eyes are worried. He shows us the site where there used to be a cemetery, but this was bulldozed some time ago by the Israelis. There is a boat on stilts that he says was being repaired but some of the materials they need to finish it are not available now, given the blockade.

  In an alleyway, partially hidden by laundry drying on a line, there is a plaque that declares Swedish Village to be “a donation from the Swedes in the homeland and Swedish battalions of UNEF 25G and 27G. 1965.”

  A few yards from the plaque, across an expanse of garbage and a dirt road patrolled by the Gazan military, is the Egyptian border and the twenty-five-foot wall. Where the wall meets the shore, rising high above the beach, an Egyptian guard tower stands, cylindrical and sturdy. On the Gazan side is the Hamas version of a military installation, a makeshift wooden box on stilts that resembles a lifeguard shack.

  The day is clear, and the sea is a bright cerulean. The beach is interrupted by a large pipe, set on rocks and directed like a cannon into the surf. We balance on the rocks until we can see the pipe’s exit point. The smell is overpowering. This is raw sewage from Rafah being dumped into the sea.

  “The smell,” Abed says, “is far worse in the summer.” Then, there is no place in the village to avoid the smell, and the flies and mosquitoes that come with it.

  As part of the Oslo accords, a body known as the Joint Water Committee was created, to manage water resources in the occupied territories. But because of ongoing bickering, and not helped by the 2014 conflict, there are no effective long-term solutions to water treatment and the disposal of sewage in Gaza. Equipment that could help mitigate the problems has not been allowed into Gaza, for fear that it would be used by Hamas for military purposes. Ironically, the dumping of raw sewage into the sea affects the coastlines of Israel and Egypt, too. A desalination plant in Israel recently was closed apparently because the pollution from Gaza made the intake too dirty to desalinate. And of course the dumping of any freshwater into the sea is a breathtaking act of shortsightedness. This water, if treated, could replenish aquifers and be directed to agriculture and myriad other uses.

  And even ambitious and well-intentioned plans are crippled by the wider context of dysfunction. The World Bank recently built a $73 million sewage treatment plant, but there is not enough electricity in Gaza to provide it with a reliable power source. It has yet to process any sewage at all.

  We leave Abed on the beach and we drive back toward Gaza City. I look in the rearview mirror, where Abed is still standing at the waterfront. Earlier, Amir had said there was an era when you could tell the time in Swedish Village by the movement of the working men. You could tell the working day had begun when the men went off fishing or into the fields to farm. You could tell when it was five o’clock, with the men coming home for dinner.

  “Now,” Amir said, “because there is no work, the men go to the beach and just sit there.”

  Among all the people I’ve met in Gaza thus far, there is a certain grim resignation. People like Amir and Bashir have virtually no means of leaving the strip, and though they are outraged and heartbroken, and worry for their families and friends, they have come to terms with it. Basilah and Hazem, on the other hand, can more or less readily come and go into Gaza, and they are of the tiniest minority. Still, they are committed to staying in Gaza, perhaps out of a sense of loyalty to the people there, perhaps out of a sense of duty to make sure what happens in Gaza is duly reported, that the world knows what has happened and what will happen.

  Talib and Amna are different. They are like Basilah in that they are young—Talib and Amna are both twenty-four—and well educated, but whereas Basilah is committed to staying, they badly want out. They have been trying for years to leave Gaza, and when we met were fighting fiercely to be allowed to pass through the Erez crossing to reach the American consulate in Jerusalem. And more so than anyone I’ve met in Gaza, they do not look like they belong here.

  They walk into the al-Deira like a fashionable young couple in any contemporary metropolis—Paris, New York, Berlin. Talib, tall and bearded, is wearing jeans and an orange sweatshirt, nothing too noticeable, while Amna is comparatively the radical. Delicately beautiful, she strides into the restaurant wearing leggings, a loose sweater, and instead of a hijab, a wool cap. I ask if the restaurant is okay, if they’d like to go anywhere else, and they say no, they come here often. In fact, it’s one of the few places in Gaza they can go, looking as they do. Because she rarely wears a hijab, and prefers pants to an abaya, Amna attracts attention everywhere she goes. Women glower and men hiss. “Are you proud of yourself?” is among the gentler things said in her direction.

  She and Talib are harassed on the street by their countrymen and harassed by Hamas, too. Within seconds of sitting down and ordering lunch, Talib tells the story of when he and three friends were held for fifteen hours at the police station, interrogated and intimidated. It started when one of them was caught spray-painting lyrics on a wall. The lyrics were to a song by Mashrou Laila, a Lebanese rock band.

  The four young men were kept overnight. Police took their phones and scanned them for contacts and evidence of forbidden acts. They were questioned until six a.m. and finally allowed to sleep. “Then my friend wakes up to someone holding a pistol to his head. Telling him, ‘Wake up!’ And making fun of him.”

  Another friend of Talib and Amna’s, who works for a children’s charity, was detained for six hours. Hamas, they say, has a particular suspicion of organizations that work with children.

  “They took his Facebook account, asking him all these questions,” Talib says. “‘Why aren’t you married?’ If you have salary and are not married surely there is something wrong with you.”

  Talib and Amna were married a few years ago—not that they believe so much in the institution. “Marriage in Gaza, it’s required,” Talib says. “We were in a relationship, and we really suffered because of the culture and society. For three years we could not even be together, we could not sit in a restaurant in a public place. We can’
t have our own time. It’s not love, it’s acting for society. This is how it was. Unless we got married.”

  So they got married, and can now live together, but the expectations of family and society continue.

  “Our families are pressuring us to have babies,” Amna says. “A married couple is supposed to immediately have a baby in the first year.”

  “They’re saying we have problems in our bodies,” Talib says, laughing. “That there is something wrong.”

  Amna adds, “We say to them, ‘We don’t have a future here. To raise a baby in this prison? And what if there’s another war? We would lose another soul.’”

  During the 2014 siege of Gaza City, Talib and Amna live-streamed the Israeli air strikes from the eleventh-floor balcony of their downtown apartment. They were passionate about documenting the war, and speaking for Gazan civilians affected by a fight not their own. But the 2014 conflict solidified their commitment to leaving Gaza. Not just Gaza. They want to leave Palestine, Israel, all of it.

  They have repeatedly applied for visas to leave, to no avail. In the last few years, Talib was invited to Poland, and tried to get there through Egypt, but was rejected by the Egyptians. He was invited to Ramallah, but his application for a permit was rejected by the Israelis. The last time Amna left Gaza was four years ago, when she was able to go to Jordan to visit family and celebrate a cousin’s university graduation. For Talib, it’s been eight years since he’s left. That was January 2008, when Hamas activists destroyed a large part of the wall that divides Rafah between Gaza and Egypt. Thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt. They bought chocolate, sheep, anything they couldn’t get in Gaza. After two weeks, the wall was repaired and the Gazans were sent back. That was the last time Talib set foot outside the limits of Gaza.

  But now there is a new hope. Talib and Amna were recently granted a permit to come to the American consulate in Jerusalem to discuss a visa application to visit the United States. They have been invited to New York by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a nonprofit that provides journalists with information about Palestine and the Palestinians. So in two weeks’ time, if all goes according to plan, they will pass through the Erez gate and make their way to Jerusalem for an interview with an official at the US consulate. Then they have to turn around quickly; their permit states they have to be back in Gaza by six p.m.

  The chances that they will be granted visas to come to the United States are exceedingly slim. From the American perspective, Talib and Amna, traveling together, would be a clear asylum risk. That is, the Americans would assume that once they arrived on US shores, they would apply for asylum. And Talib has another strike against him. He is a young Palestinian man, and his father is a well-known member of Hamas, who has for the last sixteen years been jailed inside Israel. His father’s prominence helps Talib contend with Hamas harassment—it helped him the night he and his friends were held at the police station—but it has greatly limited his ability to leave Gaza. Will the Americans hear him when he says he has no allegiance to his father’s politics, to Hamas, to Gaza, to even the larger Palestinian cause?

  “I’m sorry,” Talib says, “but this place is not Palestine.” About residents of the West Bank, he says, “For sure if they tried to live here one year they would forget about any shit about Palestine.”

  He has never been to the West Bank and feels no connection to the people there. Hamas has been in power during most of his and Amna’s formative years, and they have no allegiance to it and know they have no power to remove it from power. But they have occasionally joined in demonstrations meant to encourage cooperation between Hamas and Fatah. A few years ago there was a demonstration of young people hoping for better and more productive relations between the two parties. Hamsawis were everywhere, and the demonstrators were followed, photographed, videotaped, and intimidated.

  Now Talib and Amna live in a state of surveillance and paranoia. This is why they are so content to be at the al-Deira, the rare haven in Gaza City where there is a semblance of sophistication and respite from being observed and judged. Here Amna can be something closer to the self she is at home, where she can dress as she wishes, and do as she wishes.

  On her phone, Amna shows me some paintings she’s made. In one, a self-portrait, she stands on the balcony of an apartment building while Gaza City burns all around her. In another, a bald woman looks out from the frame.

  “My mother has breast cancer,” Amna says. “Stage three. She’s in chemotherapy. It’s up and down.”

  It’s at this moment that I make a mistake. Because Amna is a painter, and because I want to spend more time with Talib and Amna, I suggest we go to a gallery I’d been reading about. They politely agree, and we leave the hotel.

  As we walk across al-Rasheed Road, though, something happens to Amna. She seems to shrink into herself. Already a wisp of a person, her shoulders now contract, as if hoping she could fold herself up and disappear. We walk up Ebn Seena Street, and already it’s obvious the pressure she meets in public. Taxi drivers slow down to stare. Men standing in front of shops glare. As we walk, Amna positions herself between Talib and me, hiding, her head down. Finally, after a walk that seems interminable—it couldn’t be more than ten minutes—we find the gallery, but it’s closed. We decide to go back to the waterfront, to a seaside restaurant next to the al-Deira, and as we make our way to it, with every step, Amna relaxes a bit, until we are on the sand. When we’re near, she smiles again. I tell her ten times how sorry I am.

  This time we sit outside, in a crowded outdoor café on the sand. The tables are shaded by wide umbrellas in bright primary colors. When we sit, and people see Amna, the other patrons take notice and whisper among themselves, but soon look the other way. Though the patrons of this restaurant are among the liberal elite, Talib and Amna are still radically different from them. And sitting with me, the only Westerner here, seems like an invitation to trouble. But they are unfazed. They order fruit drinks, and Amna orders a hooka. She is the only woman there who does so.

  “You ask about being isolated from the world,” Amna says. “Here people are feeling pressure. There are no jobs. Young people study, they graduate, and they sit in their houses.”

  Amna and Talib recently visited a young woman who had doused herself with gasoline and lit herself on fire. The woman was in the hospital with third-degree burns all over her body.

  “All her face was burned,” Talib says. “Only her eyes were visible. She couldn’t speak, so her mother was speaking for her. She wouldn’t admit it was a suicide attempt.”

  “Suicide is shameful and forbidden in Islam,” Amna adds.

  “Also, Hamas doesn’t want people to know that people are burning themselves,” Talib says. “The stories we know in the media, these are people who suicide themselves in front of people.” He cites the case of the man who climbed the highest building in Gaza, insisting he would jump unless the Palestinian Authority increased his salary.

  “In the end, they convinced him that they would give him a salary, that it’s okay to go down,” Amna adds.

  “He got fucked afterwards for sure,” Talib says.

  “There is another way of committing suicide,” Amna says. “People are taking tramadol [an opioid]. They smuggle it into Gaza and there is addiction to it.”

  “Before Hamas,” Talib says, “no one had heard about tramadol. When Hamas started to take over Gaza, now everyone can get tramadol.”

  The widespread assumption is that Hamas has a hand in smuggling tramadol in, and that the Hamsawis benefit from the drug trade. For many years people have assumed that Hamas knows about and benefits from the smuggling of hash, too. Though alcohol is hard to find in Gaza, hash is ubiquitous.

  “Hamas likes to sell a lot of hash and get a lot of money for it,” Talib says.

  As they explain the connection between hash and Hamas, I look around, worried for them. We are surrounded by adults eating at tables no further than five feet from us.

  “No one und
erstands English here,” Talib says.

  “If they could understand what we are saying, we’re fucked,” Amna says, though without any apparent concern.

  We talk about the two-state solution, the possibility that the West Bank and Gaza might somehow be connected.

  “Of course for Gazans, if they open up this way, yeah this is good,” Amna says. “They will have freedom of movement. But if you look at it, it’s not freedom of movement. You just widened the prison more.”

  I ask if Hamas makes promises that things will get better.

  “For ten years they have been saying that,” Amna says. “Every war they say we will end this. And we will have an airport. And then the war ended and nothing happened.”

  Talib looks around to his fellow Gazans, their faces blue and red and yellow under their festive beach umbrellas, the bright Mediterranean beyond. “We’re just animals in a cage. They’re just feeding us to keep us alive.”

  There is a music school in Gaza City, tucked amid a neighborhood of apartments and storefronts. Hazem has arranged to meet members of Sol Band, the act we’d seen a few nights earlier. We’re led into a comfortable practice studio on the second floor. The walls, painted teal, are covered in instruments—ouds and keyboards and tambourines. There is a drum set in one corner and an array of school desks and chairs all over the room. Against one wall is a roll of Styrofoam insulation, not yet installed.

  Three members of Sol Band are here. Wasim Ali, the band’s clarinetist, is twenty years old, a college student studying business administration. His hair is cut short and gelled, and he wears a sky-blue button-down and gray pants. On the night of the concert, he played the clarinet, but that’s not his first instrument. At age twelve, he started on the bagpipes, and after that picked up anything vaguely similar—the accordion, any woodwinds that were handy. A month ago, he found a clarinet in the music school, and decided to teach himself how to play it. As far as he knows, his is the only clarinet in Gaza, and he is the only clarinetist.