Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  Fares Anbar, the band’s percussionist, is tall and thin, with a shrub of black hair growing high and rightward from his face. He is wearing a vest over a white shirt and jeans and, while sitting in a classroom chair, tends to sit with his legs akimbo, as if there were a drum there. He is nineteen and is also studying business. He and Wasim can think of only one man in all of Gaza who makes a living as a musician, so they’re hedging their bets. Especially given that Hamas shut down their concert after one hour.

  Majd Antar, the band’s manager and promoter, sits next to them, slump shouldered and wary, like a teenager at the back of a classroom. A young man with a boy’s face and a shock of black hair, he has just gotten back from the police station, where he’d been questioned about the concert.

  “We made a mistake,” Majd says. “At first we had paper invitations, and we distributed those. But then, twelve hours before the concert, we also announced it on Facebook, and too many people came.”

  The concert had been months in the planning. At first, Majd and the band had arranged to hold the concert in a venue called Roots, which had offered its space for free. But Roots had also recently hosted a fashion show that had, in the end, been seen as controversial in the eyes of Hamas. So Hamas officials suggested that the band have the concert at the Red Crescent building. The band members pooled their money to cover the cost to rent the new venue, $1,300, an amount equal to what any one of them could earn in a year. Majd and the band decided that the show would be free to attendees—it would be a showcase, a way to promote the band’s name. It was a high-priced gamble.

  “We hoped NGO people could come to the show, see what we do,” Majd explains. “Maybe they want to organize something with us in the future.”

  After securing the venue that met Hamas’s approval, the band had to submit an exact set list. The songs they proposed for the concert leaned, that night, slightly more toward romantic music popular elsewhere in the Arab world. After the election of Hamas, public musical performances have been greatly limited, and when they have occurred, the music has been limited to patriotic songs that celebrate Hamas and Palestine. Hoping for a temporary easing of these restrictions, Majd and the band expanded the scope of the set list a bit, and were surprised to see their application approved.

  “I don’t think the songs were the problem,” Majd says.

  The problem was the size of the crowd. The venue they rented could fit five hundred. Eight hundred people showed up. With so many people, even with Majd fretting and patrolling, they couldn’t control the behavior of all the young people there. Sol Band’s agreement with Hamas stated that men and women would be segregated from each other, that there would be no dancing or suggestive moving in their seats. But the audience began to mix, and to clap too enthusiastically, and move too much in their seats.

  “At one point,” Majd said, “a random woman got up on stage and took the microphone. We didn’t know her, we didn’t know what she wanted to say. She faced the crowd and told the people to calm down and be quiet. She’d seen some movements in the audience, and she didn’t want the concert to be shut down.”

  But an hour into the show, Majd’s phone rang. “It was a private number. He told me to stop the concert. I tried to explain to him, ask him why, what’s wrong. ‘It’s immoral behavior, there is no segregation between men and women,’ he said.” Majd hung up. The band was still playing. The crowd was still electric. The event was an unqualified success so far, but he was about to have to shut it down.

  He thought of how long they’d spent planning the show, how much money they’d invested. They would not get that money back. “Emotions were high,” he says now. “Some relatives of the band members were sick or dead. The mother of one member had recently died. Another had a mother who went into the hospital that day for surgery. Another had a sister in the hospital.” The fourteen members of the band had collectively worked so hard and sacrificed so much, and now, an hour into the show they’d planned for a year, it was over.

  “I wanted to defy the call,” he says, “but there were police there in civilian clothing, and they told me we had to stop. They were at the entrance, and they came, and we stopped.

  “They called me today,” Majd continues, “and they asked me to go to the office. I went there. They wanted to explain what happened. They were polite, actually. They respected me. They asked me to sign a pledge to not organize any party without a permit in advance.”

  Despite Hamas approving their permit in the first place, Majd sees no easing of cultural restrictions in Gaza. “It’s not changing at all,” he says. And there is no guarantee the band will be granted another permit to play in public. In the meantime, they can practice here, in this little room, and they can post preapproved songs online. Most of their fans are located outside Gaza, but the chances that any of these talented young people will perform outside the strip are very slim.

  When I leave, Majd gives me a business card and a flyer, the one that advertised the show.

  “The band works with own personal efforts to accomplish their goal,” the flyer says, “and be what we are now, four years of work and still we have many of things in our bag, and that’s a great proof of our determination to send our home, love, peace message covered with tunes of hope.”

  Talib does not have a valid driver’s license, and he and Amna think it too attention-grabbing for an uncovered woman to be driving a car, so they decide that I should drive the car they’ve borrowed from a friend. Driving in Gaza is not easy—the intersections have no lights, no stop signs, no signs at all, so at every intersection it’s a matter of bluffing your way through four lanes of traffic. The most confident driver at any crossing wins the day.

  We make our way through Gaza City and then speed along the interior highway—funded by the Qatari government—until we get to a small concrete village, where we turn east. For a few miles we drive directly toward Israel, past the last village and into farmland. We are a few hundred yards from the heavily fortified border, which should be unnerving, but because Talib and Amna are calm, and the day is bright and blue, it feels like a pleasure drive through the country. But soon we can see the low barrier up ahead, a few guard towers, the black stripe where the moat is, the barbed wire.

  The dirt road we’re traveling on ends, and we turn left, heading north along a dusty road, cutting through farmland on either side. Ahead there is a Hamas guard tower. “Put your camera down,” Talib tells me. It’s the first time he or Amna has seemed at all concerned about Hamas since we met. We stop at the checkpoint and Talib gets out, explains ourselves to the soldiers, and we move on.

  A half mile later, we stop at a ramshackle compound, overgrown with weeds and littered with broken machinery. A deeply tanned, diminutive, and wiry man emerges from the house. This is Jamal. He couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds. A floppy hat with red and white horizontal stripes gives some shade to his tanned, heavily lined face, his sardonic eyes. He is wearing a secondhand T-shirt, created by and for settlers in the West Bank, bearing the cartoon image of a Hasidic Jew, with the words “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in Hebrew. It’s a souvenir shirt from a settlement called Otniel. Jamal acknowledges the irony of a Gazan farmer wearing a shirt from an Israeli settlement, and he does not care.

  We sit on folding chairs in his courtyard, and he points out three tiny chicks, born the day before. They’re being kept in a box at the foot of my chair, and over the next thirty minutes continually step over each other to get at the water dispenser he’s placed at the ridge of the box. A few feet from the baby chicks is a large monument, looking like a tomb, covered with plastic bottles, buckets, and pieces of machinery.

  “How do you like your tea?” Jamal asks us.

  He disappears into the darkness of his low-slung home, and I ask Talib if he knows what the monument is.

  “That’s for his Italian friend,” Talib says. “Vittorio Arrigoni. He was killed by radicals.” Arrigoni, an Italian reporter and activist
, had come to Gaza in 2008 to work with the Palestinian International Solidarity Movement. With the Arabic word for resistance tattooed on his right arm, he was on the first humanitarian boat to break the Israeli blockade, and later was injured by broken glass while serving as a human shield on a Gazan fishing boat. He spent many weeks living with Jamal, advocating for him and other farmers.

  In April 2011, Arrigoni was kidnapped by a heretofore unknown group called the Brigade of the Gallant Companion of the Prophet Mohammed bin Muslima. They demanded a prisoner swap with Walid al-Maqdasi, a Salafi radical being held by the Gazan government. During the negotiations, though, and before the captors’ stated deadline, Arrigoni was killed. Two Gazan men were charged with the murder and are still in prison. The killing was denounced by Hamas and by Islamic groups around Palestine and all over the world.

  Jamal returns with a tray, and we drink hot tea in the cool shade of his courtyard as he tells us a short version of his life. He is fifty-seven and was born on a farm. His father lived to be ninety, he says, so between them there is a hundred and fifty years of agricultural knowledge. When his father was a child, the family cultivated ten thousand dunams—a dunam being about one thousand square meters—a swath of land extending from where we are sitting far into what is now Israel. When his father was young, he was in the fields with one of the family’s donkeys when there was suddenly yelling, confusion. This was the War of 1948. His family was driven into Gaza and they lost most of their land. Now Jamal owns ten dunams and rents another three hundred. He grows zucchini, grapes, watermelon, almonds, green peppers, tomatoes, and wheat.

  We ask him about the IDF incursions. He shrugs. He has no problem with them. “The media are liars,” he says. The bulldozers haven’t violated anything, he says. He takes my notebook and draws a picture. “Here’s the border,” he says, and draws a straight line across the page. Next to it, he draws the one hundred–meter buffer zone. The bulldozers, he says, come into the buffer zone to clear debris and vegetation. He says their presence there is not new and not a problem—it has been agreed to between both governments. “It’s fine. We see them, they go back. No problem.”

  He does take issue with the Israelis’ new policy of spraying herbicides on his wheat to stunt its growth. We walk the fields, stepping between rows of zucchini and over a vast network of black irrigation tubes that Jamal can activate on his smartphone. When we get to the wheat, he shows us the stalks, which are about half the height as normal at harvest time. They should be one hundred centimeters, he explains, but the herbicides limit their height to forty.

  “They don’t want anything to grow high,” he says about the Israelis. “No trees, no crops.” They started spraying his land about eighteen months earlier. He’s complained to everyone he can, including the International Red Cross, but has gotten no relief. We stand among his stunted wheat and look toward the border. Between us and the barrier is a field of yellow flowers. Jamal has been sifting wheat kernels in his hand, and now throws them on the ground.

  The border’s proximity makes his life fraught. He regularly hears gunshots—Israeli soldiers warning those who approach the barrier. Jamal can’t go outside, by foot or by car, after dark. At night, the Israeli border guards are likely to perceive any movement as a threat, so he and the other farmers in the area stay inside. This is why he needs to be able to activate the irrigation by phone—manually turning on the water at night would be extremely dangerous.

  Still, he has somehow made a life here, has in fact raised fourteen children here, some still in grammar school. Of his grown children, he says three of his sons are currently in college, and three of his daughters are married and have moved out. And, he says, “I have two stupid sons who are not educated.”

  This is Jamal’s sense of humor, brusque and sardonic. Because he has equal disdain for just about everyone, Jamal is strangely likable and endearing. In the course of a few hours on his farm, he has equally dismissive words for the Israelis, for President Obama and President Carter, for the US Congress, for China, Russia, and anyone else purportedly working for peace in the region. He has the sarcasm of a man who has seen everything and has been let down by everyone. He is perhaps most dismissive of Hamas. “They do nothing. They’re not our government.” When I ask if they assist farmers in any way, through subsidies or tariffs or equipment, he scoffs. “No. Hamas, they are slaughtering us.”

  On our way back to his home, we pass a broken-down tractor with a smattering of bullet casings on its seat. Spent shells litter the ground of the compound, and bullet holes dot the border-facing side of his home. In the 2014 conflict, his farm was overrun by Israeli tanks and soldiers. His crops were flattened, his livestock killed. “It was like Hiroshima,” he says. After the war ended, for three months there was no water or electricity. Gazan troops had to scour the land to be sure there was no unexploded matériel. Jamal lost the season.

  We walk back toward the house, and pass a small field of corn. It’s grown much higher than the stunted wheat. I ask Jamal what the Israelis think of this.

  “Fuck them if they don’t like it,” he says. “If they had their way we wouldn’t grow anything at all.”

  Walking alone on the streets of Gaza City is a test of the soul’s capacity to trust. One morning I leave the al-Deira and head to the marina. I walk by the empty lot, where this morning a group of sanitation workers is cleaning it of debris, old tires, and garbage. On al-Rasheed Road, workers are cleaning up horse dung and candy wrappers. Somewhere there is the clop-clop of a donkey pulling a cart. The city is still asleep.

  The night before had been another celebratory scene, full of joy and chaos. There had been wedding processions. There had been a group of seven men on horseback, perhaps going to one of the wedding halls. There had been crowds of young men, women in tight groups, older couples on romantic strolls. There had been the usual buzzing tuk-tuks and motorcycles. The adolescent boys on dirt bikes. The wild neon nightlife of weekend Gaza City.

  And then there had been the bus. From my bed I heard a commotion and went to the window, and saw a tour bus stopped in front of the vacant lot. In front of it, there was a small car. Behind the bus, traffic was stopped because in the street, spilling over into the median, there was an argument. First it seemed to be between the bus driver and the driver of the vehicle—it was obvious there’d been an accident. But soon it was five men, pushing and arguing. Then ten men in a whirling circle, something like a human hurricane that kept growing. Now twenty men. Fifty. They spilled over from the northbound lanes into the southbound. Traffic on that side of the highway stopped, and the northbound resumed. Now the fifty men were on the far sidewalk, the scrum traveling far quicker than would seem possible. I watched for twenty minutes, until the mass of men finally cooled and dispersed. No one was hurt.

  Then the fireworks began. At first it sounded like mortar fire. Then strafing bullets. But no, it was fireworks. Fireworks in the middle of Gaza City. They were loud and red. It seemed insane. They lit up the sky above the Love Boat and above the waterfront that had been shelled two years earlier.

  But again, like the night before, and like every night, at the stroke of ten o’clock, all went quiet. Never could there have been a city that so quickly and dutifully observed a curfew—if there were an official curfew. More likely this was an unspoken thing, an understanding between the youthful population of Gaza, dancing and singing in their prison, and their disapproving, incompetent parents, Hamas.

  The morning continues to awaken. Shopkeepers sweep their sidewalks. A pair of boys throw rocks at each other. I walk a few blocks down al-Rasheed and up ahead I see a group of police officers and al-Qassam soldiers. To get to the marina, I will have to pass them all. I count twelve officers in blue fatigues, black boots, and blue caps. They are gathered loosely, a few sitting on a bench. Nearby are two soldiers in masks, carrying AK-47s. I walk past them all, pretending to be a resident, one deeply preoccupied. I don’t know if I should be more concerned or less.

>   I make it to the marina, where I find a spot near the dry docks. I watch the fishermen, most in sweatpants and sandals, as they work on their vessels. There is the sound of distant hammers working on repairs, the hoarse shushing of someone sanding a hull. In the harbor, there is the low buzz of outboard motors. Vessels leave the marina and head into the Mediterranean, to risk strafing and injury, detention and even death, for a few fish. The day is gray and indistinct. Beyond the marina, the horizon line is unclear.

  On the way to Talib and Amna’s home that night, the subject is just what to bring. Wine is out, and there is nowhere near that we can buy a dessert. I am with two new acquaintances, the British journalist named Don McIntyre, and Silvia Ostberg Morales, the Swedish-Guatemalan head of the Norwegian People’s Aid office in the Gaza Strip. Don, a gentlemanly man in his sixties, has been coming to Gaza for more than ten years. We decide on flowers.

  But first we have to stop at Silvia’s apartment. She lives in a high-rise on al-Rasheed Road, with a magnificent view of the shoreline and the marina. Her apartment is spacious and well-designed, looking like the kind of place a successful executive might have in any prosperous city. This building and others like it were built in another, more optimistic time. Now electricity is uncertain and the running water is unfit for human consumption. Far below, we can see the vendors and walkers of the promenade I’d seen the first day with Hazem. From this vantage point, the possibility of Gaza City as an oceanfront vacation destination is strangely clear. The sea is beautiful, the day ending, the sunset a wash of oranges and reds.

  The elevator worked on the way up to her apartment, but now, when we need to go down, it’s out. The electricity has stopped. We walk down the five flights, unsure whether there will be power when we get to Talib and Amna’s, whether they have been able to cook.