Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  2.

  “Israel’s biggest problem is the settlements in the West Bank, that is to say, the occupied Palestinian territories,” Yehuda Shaul tells me. “I think that there is a solution and that I will see it in place before I die.”

  I tell my Israeli friend that one has to be very optimistic to believe that anytime soon the 377,900 settlers on these invaded lands—who have created Bantustans, fencing in the 2.9 million inhabitants of the Palestinian cities and keeping them isolated from each other—will withdraw in the name of peace and peaceful coexistence. But Yehuda, who works tirelessly to highlight what the majority of his compatriots refuse to see—the tragic situation in which Palestinians live in the West Bank—tells me that I might be less skeptical after the journey that we will make together, tomorrow, to the Palestinian villages in the mountains south of Hebron.

  He and I were in those mountains, almost the furthermost border of the West Bank, six years ago. Back then, the village of Susiya had about 300 inhabitants and seemed destined to disappear, like others in the region. Now there are about 450 inhabitants because, despite all the misfortunes they have suffered, a number of families that had fled have now returned. It seems that they, like Yehuda, are optimistic, inured to the atrocities.

  The harassment that Susiya and the neighboring villages have suffered for many years has not ended. Quite the reverse. I am shown the recently demolished houses, the water wells blocked by rocks and rubbish, the trees cut down by the settlers, and even videos of settlers attacking the inhabitants with metal bars and clubs, as well as of the arrests and mistreatment meted out by the Israeli Defense Forces. In the community center, one of the few buildings left standing, Nasser Nawaja, a leading community organizer, shows me the demolition orders that, like swords of Damocles, hang over the buildings not yet destroyed by the bulldozers of the occupiers. The pretext for demolition is that the fragile dwellings are illegal because they do not have building permits. “It’s madness,” Nasser says. “When we ask permission to build or to reopen the water wells, they refuse us and then they demolish the houses for having been built without authorization.” For this reason, in this village, like others in the region, the farmers and shepherds do not live in houses but in tents and lean-tos made of canvas and tin, or in the caves that the soldiers have not yet blocked by filling them with stones and rubbish.

  Despite everything, the residents of Susiya and Jinba, the two villages I visit, are still there, resisting the siege, supported by some NGOs and Israeli solidarity groups such as Breaking the Silence, to which Yehuda, who has invited me here, belongs. In Susiya I meet a very pleasant young man, Max Schindler. He has come here for a few months as a volunteer, and he teaches English to the children in Susiya. Why does he do it? “So that they can see that not all Jews are the same.” In fact there are many like him—these righteous ones—who help the Palestinians present their claims in court, who provide medical aid and build alternative energy systems, who protest against the abuses. Amongst them are writers like David Grossman and Amos Oz, who sign manifestos and demand that human and civil rights violations stop, and that these villages be left in peace.

  Though at least fifteen homes in the ancient village of Jinba were destroyed, solidarity efforts helped stave off complete destruction. Now Jinba’s existence depends on a final ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court. In Jinba is an enormous cave, as yet untouched, which, I am told, dates back to Roman times. It is today under threat of demolition because, along with twelve other villages, it is in an area that the Israeli government has declared a firing zone. As in Susiya, in Jinba I am surrounded by barefoot, skinny children who have not, however, lost their joy. One girl in particular, with large, mischievous eyes, falls about laughing when she sees that I cannot pronounce her Arabic name.

  You need only to study a map of the occupied territories to understand the rationale behind the Israeli settlements: they surround the large Palestinian cities and obstruct their contact with each other, impeding free movement. At the same time, they expand the Israeli presence and split up and fracture the territory that, supposedly, would constitute a future Palestinian state, making this proposition impracticable. This proliferation of settlements seems designed intentionally to make the two-state solution unworkable, despite the fact that every Israeli government says it accepts the idea. Why else would all Israeli governments, of center, left, and right, the only exception being the last Sharon government, which removed the Israeli settlements in Gaza, have permitted and still permit the existence and systematic growth of illegal settlements—some secular but many more ultrareligious—which are a constant source of friction and make the Palestinians feel that the already reduced space they inhabit on the West Bank is being continuously stripped away?

  I don’t pretend to read the secret mind of the Israeli political elite. But it is enough to follow on the map the way in which the illegal settlements have encroached on Palestinian territories over the past few decades to see a tacit or explicit policy to encourage and protect them. This is not just a cause of constant friction with the Palestinians. It is a reality that every day makes the establishment of two sovereign states more difficult, perhaps already impossible, a reality that makes the proclamations of the Israeli authorities in support of a two-state solution sound like empty utterances, devoid of truth, pure noise.

  There is probably no more dramatic case of such disruption than the five settlements established in the heart of Hebron. Approximately eight hundred Israeli settlers in the heart of a Palestinian city of two hundred thousand! To protect them, approximately six hundred and fifty Israeli soldiers mount guard over the old city that they have sealed off, “sterilizing” its streets—closing all the shops, the main entrances to houses and businesses—to such an extent that walking there is like traveling through a ghost city, without people and without a soul. I wandered through these dead streets eleven years ago; the only thing that has changed is that the racist insults against Arabs, which used to adorn its walls, have nearly disappeared. But everywhere there are the same checkpoints manned by soldiers, and there is still the ban on Arabs walking on the main market street, or driving through the other streets of the center, which means that they have to make an enormous detour across town to get from one neighborhood to another. The Israelis traveling with me—there are four of them—tell me that the worst thing of all is that now nobody even speaks of the horror that is Hebron and the tremendous injustices committed there against two hundred thousand inhabitants in order, apparently, to protect eight hundred invaders.

  3.

  Unlike other neighborhoods in Jerusalem that are as immaculately clean as those to be found in a Swiss or Scandinavian city, the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, in the east, close to the Old City and the al-Aqsa mosque, seethes with rubbish, foul-smelling puddles, and all kinds of waste materials. I wonder if such filth is not a matter of coincidence but rather part of a long-term plan to remove the fifty thousand Palestinians who still live here and replace them with Israelis.

  The settlers began infiltrating the Silwan neighborhood of Batan al-Hawa in 2004, when they managed to build one of the tallest buildings in the neighborhood. The settlers who have moved into various Silwan neighborhoods come from two settler organizations: Elad and Ateret Cohanin. There are not many settlers: some seven hundred spread across seventy-five houses. But they have established a beachhead which can keep expanding.

  If you want to know where the settlements are, you just have to look upwards. The Israeli flags fluttering in the gentle morning breeze indicate that they have been encircling the area, as in the mountains south of Hebron, isolating and entrapping the entire neighborhood. According to Israeli NGO reports, there are different ways in which these settler groups have managed to take over houses: claiming to possess old documents showing that the previous owners were Jewish; buying properties through Arab front men; going through the courts to have properties seized through the absentee property law or, in extreme cases,
waiting for the owners or tenants of disputed houses to go on a trip or simply leave the house, then forcing their way in. Once the settlers are inside, the Israeli government sends the police to protect them, because of course this trickle of settlers in the ocean of Palestinians would be in danger. The trickle will become pools, lakes, seas. The religious settlers who have put down roots here are not in any hurry: eternity is on their side. This is how Israeli enclaves have spread across the West Bank, turning it into a gruyère cheese; this is how they are growing in Arab Jerusalem also.

  Appearances are maintained, as in the rest of the nation: Israel is a very civilized country. In Batan al-Hawa there are fifty-one Palestinian families threatened with expulsion because they live in houses that the settlers claim were owned by Jews in the 1800s.

  When I ask Zuheir Rajabi, a resident who defends Palestinian rights in the neighborhood and who is my guide on this visit, if he has faith in the honor and neutrality of the judges who must make these rulings, he looks at me as if I were more idiotic than my question. “Do we have any other option?” he replies. And he continues his explanation. He is a sober man who has been in prison several times. He has three sons, aged seven, nine, and thirteen, each of whom has been arrested at some point, and a little daughter, Darín, who is six, who clings to one of his legs. His house is surrounded by two settlements and he has received various offers to sell it for much more than it is worth. But he says that he will never sell and that he will die in the neighborhood; he is not afraid of the threats he receives from his neighbors.

  I ask him if the settlers in Silwan have children. Yes, many, but they rarely go out, and if they do, they are escorted by police or the private security forces that protect the settlements. I think about the terrible cloistered lives of these children, locked up in these houses, and I think about the lives of their parents and grandparents who are convinced that by perpetrating this injustice, they are carrying out a divine plan and will earn their place in Paradise. Of course, religious fanaticism is not exclusive to a minority of Jews. There are also Palestinian fanatics who blow themselves up, setting off bombs in buses or restaurants, who aim missiles at kibbutzim in the south of the country, or who try to knife soldiers or innocent passersby, crimes that serve only to widen the gulf, which is already vast, that separates both communities and puts them at odds with each other.

  On our walk around Silwan, Zuheir Rajabi points out a building several stories high. The entire place has been taken over by settlers save for one apartment which is occupied, against all odds, by a Palestinian family of seven. Up to now they have stayed on, despite having their water and electricity cut off, and, Rajabi tells me, needing to knock on the front door to have the settlers let them in.

  While we are talking, without my noticing, we have been surrounded by small children. I ask whether any of them has been arrested at any time. A boy with a cheeky, naughty look puts his hand up: “Me, four times.” Each time he was held for just a day and a night. He was accused of throwing stones at the police, but he kept on denying and denying, and they did not take him to court. His last name is Sirhan, and his father, Samir Sirhan, had an incident with a settlement security guard, who shot him and left him to die in the street.

  I am telling these sad stories because, I think, they give a fair idea of the burning problem facing Israel: the problem of the settlements, the increasing occupation of Palestinian territories which has turned Israel into a colonial, overbearing country and which has done so much damage to the positive, almost exemplary, image that it had for a long time throughout the world.

  From the first time I came to Israel, I felt an enormous affection for this country. I still believe that it is the only place in the world where I feel a man of the left, because among the Israeli left there is still an idealism and a love of freedom that has disappeared from the left in many parts of the world. I have been saddened to see how, in recent years, local public opinion has become more reactionary, which explains why Israel now has the most ultrareligious and nationalist government in its history and why its policies are becoming daily less democratic. To denounce and criticize these policies is therefore not just a moral duty; it is also, in my case, at the same time, an act of love.

  4.

  Yehuda Shaul is thirty-three but he looks fifty. He has lived and still lives with such intensity that he eats up the years the way marathon runners eat up the miles. He was born in Jerusalem, into a very religious family, and he is one of ten children. When I first knew him, eleven years ago, he still wore the kippa. After completing his military service and returning to civilian life, he took stock and thought that since his compatriots were unaware of the ugly things that the army was doing in the occupied territories, it was his moral duty to make them known.

  To this end on June 1, 2004, Yehuda and other soldiers founded Breaking the Silence, an organization dedicated to collecting testimonies from ex-soldiers and current soldiers. In exhibitions and publications aimed at informing the public in Israel and abroad, they display the truth about what is happening in the Palestinian territories that were occupied after the 1967 war. (This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the occupation.) Before they are distributed or exhibited, texts and videos go through military censors, because Yehuda and his coworkers do not want to break the law. They now have over a thousand testimonies.

  Until relatively recently, thanks to the democratic safeguards in the country for Israeli citizens, Breaking the Silence could operate without problems, although it was strongly criticized by nationalist and religious sectors. But since the most recent government, the most reactionary in the history of Israel, came to power, a very strong campaign has been waged against the directors of the organization and its activists both in Parliament, with statements from ministers and political leaders, and in the press, accusing them of being traitors and seeking to outlaw the organization. There have also been many insults and threats on social media aimed at the activists. Yehuda Shaul does not feel intimidated. He says that he is a patriot and a Zionist and that he is committed to what he does.

  There is in Jewish history an uninterrupted millennia-old tradition: the tradition of the righteous ones, men and women who emerge at moments of transition or crisis and make their voices heard, against the tide, indifferent to unpopularity or to the risks they run by acting in this way, to expose a truth or to defend a cause that the majority, blinded by propaganda, passion, or ignorance, refuses to accept. Yehuda Shaul is one of these people, in our times. And, fortunately, he is not the only one.

  The imperturbable journalist Amira Hass is still there. She went to live in Gaza to document firsthand the experiences of Palestinians, day by day, in her chronicles in Haaretz. Thanks to her, some years back, I spent an unforgettable night in the cramped and asphyxiating warren that is the Gaza Strip, in the house of a Palestinian couple involved in social action. And her colleague Gideon Levy, a tireless writer, whom I meet again after a long time, still fighting for justice, pen in hand, but less optimistic than before because all around him, every day, the numbers who defend rationality, coexistence, and peace are shrinking, and there is a relentless rise of fanatics embracing single truths and a Greater Israel which would have nothing less than God on its side.

  But on this journey I have got to know other people, equally pure and brave. Like Hanna Barag, who, at five in the morning, at the Qalandiya checkpoint, choked with fencing, cameras, and soldiers, showed me the suffering of the Palestinian workers who, despite having permits to work in Jerusalem, have to wait hour after hour before they can get through to earn their living. Hanna and a group of Israeli women position themselves every morning in front of these wire fences to denounce the unjustified delays and protest against the abuses being committed. “We try to get to the ones in charge,” she tells me, pointing to the soldiers, “because these people don’t even listen to us.” She is a diminutive old woman, full of wrinkles, but her clear eyes shine with a blinding light and decency.

 
; Salwa Duaibis and Gerard Horton, two lawyers—she is a Palestinian, he is half-British, half-Australian—are members of a humanitarian organization that monitors the trials in military tribunals of young Palestinians between the ages of twelve and seventeen who are accused of threatening the country’s security. Salwa and Gerard devote their days to documenting injustices perpetrated against these children.

  Yes, there are many righteous ones, though not enough to win elections. The fact is that for a number of years now, they have been losing elections, one after another. But they are not bowed by these defeats. They are doctors and lawyers who go to work in half-abandoned villages and defend victims of abuse in the courts, or journalists and human rights campaigners who record violations and crimes and bring them to public attention. There is ActiveStills, an association of photographers made up of very young men and women, who capture for eternity, in images, all the horrors of the occupation. Although the official press does not publish their photos, they exhibit them in small galleries, on street billboards, in semiunderground publications.

  How many are the righteous? Thousands, but not enough to rectify the shift in public opinion that is pushing Israel more and more towards intransigence, as if being the leading military power in the Middle East—and, seemingly the sixth-largest in the world—were the best guarantee of its security. The righteous know that this is not the case, that, quite the reverse, by becoming a colonial power that does not listen, that does not want to negotiate or make concessions, that believes only in force, Israel has lost the prestige and honor it once had, and that the number of its opponents and critics is not diminishing but rather growing by the day.

  Two days before leaving, I have dinner with two other righteous men: Amos Oz and David Grossman. They are magnificent writers, old friends and both tireless defenders of dialogue and peace with the Palestinians. The times they face are difficult but they are not disheartened. They joke, argue, tell stories. They say that, all things considered, neither of them could live outside Israel. Gideon Levy and Yehuda Shaul, who are there as well, both agree. In all the days I have been here, this is the first time that a group of Israelis has been in total agreement about something.