Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  That seemed an odd word choice to apply to the territory of Susiya. The village gave off an air of impermanence, like a refugee camp or a site fabricated after a natural disaster, reminding me a little of the tent city I’d visited ten years before under an overpass in New Orleans, its population made homeless by Hurricane Katrina. In the past thirty years the village has been displaced multiple times, making it an international symbol for pro-Palestinian activists of how Israel maintains brutal control over much of the West Bank by confiscating land. Susiya falls under the designation of Area C, as does over 60 percent of the West Bank since the 1995 Oslo II accords—disputed land overseen not by the Palestinian Authority but by Israel’s military. In a larger conversation comparing Israeli expansionism to Manifest Destiny in the United States, Tamar described Area C to me as “lawless like the Wild West.”

  Susiya has existed since at least 1830, but its Palestinian residents have been locked in a legal battle over land ownership since 1986. That’s when archaeologists unearthed a sixth-century synagogue nearby with Hebrew lettering on its mosaic floor. The Palestinian villagers were evicted, their land expropriated, and the site turned into an Israeli national park run by settlers. Palestinians are prohibited from entering the park even though its grounds also include the remains of a mosque and the caves that people from Susiya once called home. When Susiyans relocated too close for the comfort of the expanding Israeli settlement (confusingly named Susya, as if to reclaim Susiya), they were again expelled. In the early 1990s Susiya’s Palestinian villagers were herded into trucks by Israeli soldiers and deposited fifteen kilometers to the north under cover of darkness. Though some families scattered after being exiled, other stalwarts returned to their land, prompting escalating settler violence.

  Susiya’s residents were ousted yet again during the second intifada in 2001, in retaliation for the murder of a Jewish settler from a nearby outpost—this time under the pretext that the village posed a security threat. It didn’t matter that the victim’s killer didn’t come from Susiya. Susiya’s caves were packed with rock, its sheds demolished, its cisterns filled with rubble and debris, its olive orchards uprooted, its fields scorched, its livestock buried alive in bulldozed pens, to say nothing of the shepherds beaten and killed while tending their flocks. Many families fled to the nearby town of Yatta. What had once been a community of about eighty families dwindled to thirty, leaving Susiya even more vulnerable to attack. Under international pressure, Israel’s High Court of Justice stopped the demolitions but never ordered the Civil Administration to concede Susiya’s reconstruction.

  These days, the State of Israel claims that the roughly 350 Palestinians who persist in the area of Susiya are trespassers because they’ve erected their tents without the required permits. And yet when villagers have submitted master plans to rebuild, their requests are systematically denied, as happens throughout Area C—meaning the people of Susiya live both hand to mouth and at the edge of ruin.

  “This entire region is under stress,” Ahmad put it, while grinding out his cigarette with his heel. “You don’t sleep well if you spend each night dreaming of how to get through the next day when the soldiers may arrive to crush your house.”

  How could he call this nightmare calm?

  We followed a line of laundry strung from one of the stilts below the water tank to one of the poles supporting a nearby tent. The tent walls were held down with tires; its floor was poured concrete. Inside, Ahmad greeted a middle-aged woman who served us tiny glasses of bitter coffee while three barefoot children looked on shyly from behind a stack of thin mattresses swarming with flies. I handed each of them a ballpoint pen.

  “I hope those are magic pens that can write in English,” their mother said dryly in Arabic. I loved her for offering that chestnut. It suggested this place wasn’t a dead end. A clutch of chicks skittered about at our feet. Outside: the cry of a rooster, the bleating of a lamb, the blowing of saffron-hued wind.

  Ahmad knelt by the water filter in the kitchen area and filled a test tube to check for contaminants while chattering good-naturedly about pH balance, microbes, chlorine tablets, and the generally high quality of this water. If all was consistently well maintained, he said, the product was as pure as what you would find in the municipalities. “As pure as what they drink in the Jewish settlements?” I asked.

  “Just as pure,” Ahmad said with pride.

  I was struck by the mundane way he went about his job, as if it wasn’t forbidden by Israeli authorities. I was also struck by the coziness of the tent and how readily it would buckle under the force of a bulldozer. It was made out of Styrofoam, plywood, nothing, and brick. A sheet divided the home in half. Its few possessions were impeccably ordered. A handful of tin pots and a two-burner gas stove. A broom. An argileh pipe. An electric fan. And most surprising of all, given the basic conditions, a box TV set blaring an al-Jazeera tribute to Mohammed Ali.

  The boxer’s young face filled the screen with dazzling braggadocio. He had died the day before. Ali seemed simultaneously out of place and precisely at home in the West Bank. June 1967 is a watershed moment you hear referenced all the time in Israel-Palestine. It’s when Israel captured the West Bank, expanding its territory. It’s also when a US court found Mohammed Ali guilty of draft evasion for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War, stripped him of his WBA title, and barred him from boxing. He had concluded that the US government was more his enemy than the Vietcong, who “never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father.” The TV special on al-Jazeera didn’t go into all that history, but encountering Mohammed Ali in that tent made me think of his struggle for the rights of full citizenship in direct relation to this woman’s.

  “Ask her what she will do when they come to destroy her home,” I begged Ahmad before we left. The woman adjusted her head covering and gestured through the tent opening into the glare of daylight at an unlikely rosebush I hadn’t noticed growing in the rocky soil, bedecked with bright pink blooms. Ahmad translated her answer casually on our way out, as if it should have been obvious:

  “She says she will stay right here and rebuild.” In fact, the word she’d used for her perseverance was sumud. It means steadfastness, but it’s also a political ideology that’s developed in resistance to the occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War. An icon of sumud often portrayed in Palestinian artwork is the figure of the mother. With the image of Ali flashing on the screen, I liked the idea of the mother as a similar source of strength.

  The temperature mounted as the morning wore on. We traveled from tent to tent, hounded by a pink-eyed desert dog that Ahmad suspected had rabies. In each tent we were graced by the specter of Mohammed Ali on a Comet-powered television set. Nobody was watching, per se. As at my mother-in-law’s house in Jamaica, Queens, the TV was largely just background noise. I’m the most recognized and loved man that ever lived cuz there weren’t no satellites when Jesus and Moses were around, so people far away in the villages didn’t know about them. . . .

  Ahmad went about checking the water meters to estimate daily use. The water crisis is rising for the entire Middle East due to increasing desertification, but here, in the poorest communities, the problem is most pronounced. Ahmad spoke in liters and cubic meters, throwing out statistics like the scientist he was. The daily allowance for domestic use by a family of five to ten people was no more than 200 liters, he explained, though the World Health Organization recommends 100 liters for just one person.

  Even without a grasp of the metric system, I did understand that Ahmad’s figures adhered to a stark and troubling scale that measured not just water consumption but relative human worth. In the remote communities of the South Hebron Hills, the average person has recourse to as little as 20 liters of water a day. That’s far less than your average Palestinian, who (according to the Palestinian Water Authority) consumes 73, which is in turn less than half of the 183 daily liters consum
ed by your average Israeli. In fact, the Israeli settlements of the West Bank receive almost limitless supplies of water through Mekorot, Israel’s government-owned water company. Haaretz reported in 2012 that Israel’s 450,000 settlers used as much or more water than the total Palestinian population of about 2.3 million.

  “It is not only that they have more water than us, but that they have stolen our water,” Azzam Nawaja insisted when we visited his tent. Azzam was a shepherd in his fifties with a sophisticated understanding of the area’s inequitable water use and a sense of outrage about its political leverage. He wore a red-and-white checked keffiyeh. His sun-creased eyes blazed when he spoke. The walls of his tent and the water tank outside it were decorated with Palestinian flags. One of Azzam’s wives served me a glass of very sweet tea as Ahmad tested their water. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the grandeur of her hospitality—how many precious milliliters did the glass contain?

  “Have you seen how green it is up there by their nice villas?” the shepherd asked me, pointing out of the tent’s mouth to the Jewish neighborhood about a kilometer away, one of five satellite neighborhoods comprising the settlement of Susya. Its greenery made it easy to spot, as did the red rooftops of its homes, its cell phone tower, and the utility poles connecting its overhead power lines. Azzam described its amenities. “They have lush gardens, watered lawns, and irrigated farms.” He guessed they might even have a swimming pool. I agreed that it looked like an oasis.

  “Have you seen our garden?” Azzam asked by way of contrast. He pointed first at a rosemary bush inside a car tire and then downhill at a stand of parched olive trees growing at strange angles from the rind of the earth. “They get water from an Israeli pipe that is prohibited for us to use. We don’t have water to irrigate our crops. We’re forbidden access to over twenty of our cisterns since they took our land, and we’re forbidden to build new ones.”

  Azzam explained through Ahmad that in Susiya they reuse the water for cooking, then washing, then watering plants—not a single drop is wasted. Most years are so dry that there’s not enough rainfall to fill the few accessible cisterns and the community must supplement its supply by buying water from Israel at a high price. A tanker truck that delivers this water requires a permit and is forced to take long detours to avoid Israeli military checkpoints and roads off-limits to Palestinians, resulting in further hikes to the cost of water. “Water eats up a third of our income,” Azzam lamented.

  Ironically, the water Azzam must buy from Israel comes from within the West Bank. Shared water sources in the slowly depleting Western Aquifer Basin have been under Israel’s complete control since 1967. The mountain aquifer is the main source of underground water in both Israel and the Palestinian territories, but how Israel distributes that water is grossly imbalanced. This is what Azzam meant when he said they were stealing the water—not just on a small scale, but on a staggering one. A recent Amnesty International report revealed that Israel restricted Palestinian access to the aquifer’s water while siphoning nearly all of it for itself. A recent inventory by the United Nations indicated that Israel’s extraction from the Western Aquifer Basin was at 94 percent, leaving the Palestinians with a mere 6 percent.

  The pink-eyed desert dog trailed Ahmad and me on our walk to the neighboring tent.

  “We feel despair,” Nasser Nawaja told me inside. He sat cross-legged on an unraveling floor mat and invited me to sit. “I hope we’ll find some measure of justice through your pen.”

  Nasser is Susiya’s unofficial spokesperson, an activist accustomed to talking about the local conflict to the international press. He was born over thirty years ago in one of the caves claimed by Israel as part of the archaeological park. Like Azzam Nawaja (the two men share a surname as part of the same extended tribe), he was consumed by the subject of water. Our meandering discussion of life under the occupation kept running back to it, like a river to the sea. Nasser still mourned the cisterns destroyed in 2001 with fresh hurt, detailing how they were packed with bulldozed dirt, poisoned with rusty scrap metal, “raped” by excavator drills operated by the IDF. He spoke about the shameful lopsidedness in the basic quality of life.

  “For one thousand liters of water, we pay five times what they pay in Israel. Meanwhile, their water supply company funnels a pipe straight to the settlements through our land,” Nasser said. “We asked Mekorot to give us an opening in the water pipe. We told them we’d pay for it, even though it’s ours. They said, ‘No. You’re an illegal village.’ They have all the water and electricity they want, even though it’s they who are illegal. Let’s put aside the international community that says so. Even according to Israel, some of these outposts are illegal.” Nasser referred to the agreement reached twenty years earlier in the Oslo accords, after which there were to be no new settlements built. The number of settlers has tripled since that time. “It’s illegal for Mekorot and the Israel Electric Corporation to supply outposts like this, and yet they do it all the time.”

  I asked Nasser how access to clean water and electricity through Comet had affected his family. He gushed about how it had made life easier, but still emphasized the differences in Susiya (the Palestinian village) versus Susya (the Israeli settlement). “The revolution of electricity is like a river that can’t be stopped. This has given our dark life more light. Our children can study later, we have electric outlets to charge our cell phones, and it’s made a small revolution in the lives of the women. For example, they no longer have to carry water or shake a goat’s gut full of milk for four hours to make cheese. We have electric butter churns now, and the Internet.

  “But there’s no way to even compare what kind of power we have here versus what they have there. They’re on an electric grid. We’re still begging for permission to crawl out of our caves and work our land when it’s clear they’ll never give us permits to live here. I’m asking for the right to live in the twenty-first century, where people have already been to the moon and sent satellites to other planets.”

  “What do you do with your anger?” I asked Nasser.

  The man looked thrown from his script. “It’s hard to keep it swallowed up inside. For some people it spills out,” was all he could say.

  Outside Nasser’s tent the desert dog had curled up inside a rusted-out car body, biting at the fleas on his bony back. Ahmad scooped up a rock to hurl if it pursued us. I must have appeared concerned for the animal. “It’s part of our culture to throw stones to protect ourselves when we feel afraid,” said Ahmad, apologetically. His work was done for the day. As we passed the toddler’s monument on our walk back to the truck I forced myself to confront the child’s face. His name was Ali Dawabshah. “My son started talking at eighteen months,” I said. I remembered when signifier joined signified on my son’s tongue, the charm when babble became “ba” became “bus.” It slayed me that this child would never speak in sentences, that his mother would never learn what he had to say.

  Ahmad hung back. He attended the movement of the dog as it slinked toward us with a growl in its throat. Ahmad threw the stone in self defense. I flinched when it struck the animal’s hindquarter, prompting the dog to limp off behind a pile of tires. The man’s shoulders sank. He admitted to feeling a little low, not because of the conflict in Susiya and throughout the West Bank, though that was cause enough for depression, but because tomorrow he’d start a month of fasting. The fatigue he knew to expect during Ramadan exhausted him already. Impertinently, I asked Ahmad how his body could take it. This was a question I would ask in many different ways of many different Arabs that week in Palestine—though by “it” I meant more than Ramadan.

  Ahmad chose his words carefully. “We have resources deep within ourselves like a hidden spring. We draw from this to keep going even when we have no fuel.”

  Then, because he could see I was dehydrated, he pulled out a peach, seemingly from thin air, and told me to eat.

  3. East Jerusalem

  Later that Sunday, I went to the Jerusalem Day parade
. Tamar, a longtime resident of Jerusalem and a secular Jew, had zero interest in joining me for the festivities. “Try not to get trampled by the mob,” she warned. She stayed at home to plan an upcoming iftar meal at Comet, where her Palestinian and Israeli coworkers could break the Ramadan fast together with some of the folks from the villages they empowered. Her activist boyfriend, Guy Butavia, escorted me instead, walking fast as a rabbit along King David Street toward the Old City with his video camera in hand.

  We were going to witness the parade wherein thousands of ultranationalist Jewish celebrants proceed through Jerusalem, ending with a dramatic push through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. The city was divided after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, with the west controlled by Israel and the east (including the Old City) by Jordan. Jerusalem Day commemorates the city’s “reunification” in 1967, when Israel conquered East Jerusalem, but it’s as much a provocation against Arabs as a celebration of unity. Over a third of Jerusalem’s population is Palestinian, but they’re not invited to the party. Most of them know to stay inside or risk getting beaten up or harassed. This year they marked the same date as the naksa, or “setback,” commemorating their displacement after Israel’s victory.

  Guy referred to the annual tradition of “the March of Flags” as “the March of Hate.” He’s an activist with Ta’ayush (it means “living together” in Arabic), a group that uses nonviolent direct action to fight for Palestinian rights. Earlier this year he was arrested in connection with his activity, and spent some time in jail. As with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, filming unethical behavior is one of Ta’ayush’s most effective tactics in battling state-sanctioned violence.