Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  As I settle down on the plane back, to the now almost unbearable freedom of my life, and start drinking the strongest drink I can find, I realise I don’t know how to begin understanding, never mind writing about, what I’ve seen and heard. I can liken it only to witnessing a people trapped in the mouth of a machine and knowing that, very soon, it’s going to clamp its jaws shut. I think of the terrible courage of the people I have left behind. The Israeli peace activists who choose it, in spite of the social, political, and legal toll it takes, and the Palestinians, who are forced to live their every moment bravely because they have no choice. I fear what life holds for all of them and I know enough now to fear for their lives. And I fear the impossibility, even if one day the occupation ends, of their shared, or separate, future capacity to overcome this past.

  Then I think of the car journey back from the Jordan Valley, when we had already passed through Jericho again. In the front seat the young girl opened her laptop up, and tried to find some signal, to prove to me that Arabic really does contain twenty-six synonyms for the word love. As we drove she found them listed on a website somewhere and, all the way back to Jerusalem then, one after another, she slowly read them out loud.

  High Places

  Hari Kunzru

  Jerusalem was first established on the hill on which you are now standing, almost 4000 years ago, during the Canaanite period (Middle Bronze Age II). . . . A journey to the City of David is a journey to the source. The City of David was the first capital of the tribes of Israel and the spiritual and political center of the Jewish nation. Many of the books of the Bible were written here and from the small mound of the City of David came forth the belief in one God and the basic human values taught by the prophets that have inspired the entire world.

  The City of David is the place where Jerusalem was born—the place where it all began.*

  What more meaningful place on earth could there be than this? It seems extraordinary that archaeologists have pinpointed the site and a modern tourist facility has been built on it, so visitors can stand on the very spot where much of the Bible was composed, where David danced in ecstasy before the Lord, and the powerful idea of monotheism first made its way into world history. Yet here I am in East Jerusalem, reading a wall text, standing on a windy platform built out over a maze of ancient stone foundations clinging to the side of a hill. I have returned to the source.

  The City of David is an archaeological brand. In the gift store you can buy City of David mugs, bags, jigsaw puzzles, coloring books, a T-shirt with city of david: dig it! written in a fun, funky font. The City of David lyre logo (1 Samuel 16:23, “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand”) is everywhere, on the uniform polo shirts of the guides, on signs that hang from houses on the route of a history walk that takes visitors through the streets near the site. The location of a new dig is enclosed by boards with imagery of happy, smiling people, boys on lyre-adorned Segways, friendly archaeologists in lyre caps helping elated white children sieve and wash soil to recover fragments of their Middle Eastern cultural heritage.

  Monotheism’s ground zero is just outside the so-called Dung Gate of the old city of Jerusalem, near the Western Wall. Charities pay for young diaspora Jews to come here, so they can learn about their past. The government pays for soldiers to come here, so they can learn about why they fight. From the lookout you can see the necropolis on the side of Jabal al-Zaytun (otherwise known as the Mount of Olives) and, on the hill opposite, a slightly down-at-the-heels-looking neighborhood, with washing lines strung over flat roofs and trash tumbling down a steep slope behind the houses. After a while you may notice the minaret of a mosque. If you are there at prayer time something startling flows over these stones, so saturated with Jewish history and culture. Muezzins call from all around, their keening voices instructing the Muslim faithful: Hasten to prayer, hasten to success, prayer is better than sleep. . . . It becomes apparent that there are mosques in several nearby locations, not just on the opposite side of the hill.

  Competing with the muezzins’ amplified call, the tour guide raises his voice. “David says, you know what? I feel so bad. I live in a great palace here, made out of cedar. But the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest thing imaginable, is just sitting in a tent. . . .” He’s wearing a kippa and carrying a red clothbound book of scripture, a prop that seems unnecessary, for he narrates his story fluently, giving his ancient kings and courtiers a folksy American-accented patter. As we listen, I can feel Yoni Mizrachi fidgeting beside me.

  “What are they actually looking at?” he whispers. “This place he’s calling the palace of King David? Some stones, and a man telling a story. How do they know if he’s telling the truth?” Mizrachi is an archaeologist who has spent his career working on excavations around Israel. While there is nothing to absolutely disprove their claims, in Mizrachi’s opinion, “There is nothing here to tell them where they really are. Nothing to say what the purpose of all this is.”

  Nadav Weiman is a brooding, dark-haired thirty-year-old who served as a sniper’s spotter in an elite reconnaissance unit of the IDF. He came, he says, from a military family. It was expected that he would serve “at the tip of the spear.” One of his jobs was to conduct so-called straw widow operations, taking over Palestinian homes all over the West Bank for use as temporary military posts. His team had the authority to choose any house that seemed suitable to them. Under cover of darkness, they would enter as quickly as possible, waking the family and concentrating them in one of the smaller rooms, usually a bathroom or one of the children’s bedrooms. While one soldier stood guard, the others would open a tripod near the largest window, hang camouflage nets, and set up a sniper rifle and observation equipment. Their role was to provide cover for other units operating in the city. A straw widow could last overnight, or for two or three days. During that time, the family could not leave.

  Nadav did this three or four times a week. He estimates that on any given night in the West Bank, there are probably ten units doing the same thing. Forty or fifty families a week. More than two thousand families a year, having the same experience, the soldiers breaking in, adrenalized and violent because they have no idea about what could be waiting for them in your house, perhaps smashing the lock on your front door, taking the window out of its frame, breaking things as they move your furniture. Your children terrified, having to ask permission to go to the toilet. Hours, even days, unable to go to work or to school. The rage that comes from helplessness, of being unable to protect those dearest to you, of seeing your parents deferring to the young conscripts, eighteen or nineteen years old, who are lounging about in your home.

  The logic of the occupation doesn’t see this metastasis of resentment as a negative. It is part of a tactic, the creation of “a sense of persecution” among the Palestinian population. I hear the phrase used several times by former soldiers. It is, it appears, an IDF term of art.

  So what am I looking at?

  A deep hole, beneath what was once a parking lot. I can see some walls, a few fragmentary columns, a mosaic floor. It’s by far the most visually impressive part of the City of David site. I assume that I’m looking at the remains of ancient Judean houses.

  —It’s a Roman villa, says Yoni. From about the third-century CE. It was probably destroyed in an earthquake.

  —So this isn’t anything to do with David?

  —No.

  We walk back to the place where the tour guide was telling his breathless story about the ancient king.

  —Well, says Yoni. We can say that’s a wall. He pauses. In my admittedly limited dealings with archaeologists, I have come to know what that pause means. It is the scrupulous hesitation that signifies As for the rest, we don’t know.

  —A wall. A palace wall? The wall of the palace of King David?

  —I would be inclined to say it dated to the twelfth or eleventh centuries BCE, and was constructed by the inhabitants we call Canaan
ites. It’s possible that it dates to the tenth century BCE, which biblical tradition marks as the beginning of the House of David.

  —But a palace wall.

  —You can see it’s a thick wall. Perhaps it had a defensive function.

  Little by little, Yoni dismantles the origin story being retailed to the tourists by their guide. There is, in Yoni’s opinion, no archaeological evidence to link this place to the biblical King David. No artifacts, no inscriptions. The site is a jumble of ruins from every period from the early bronze age to the Ottoman period. They don’t exist in neat strata, but are jumbled together in ways that make assigning dates to individual features very difficult. There were, for example, significant remains from the period of the Umayyad Caliphate, but those have been removed, so that the focus of the site falls solely on the people whom modern Israelis are taught to claim as their ancestors. As for monotheism, there’s the small matter of the female votive figurines, thousands of them, made of clay and found in strata from the times of the Kings of Judea. They have heavy breasts. They are assumed to have a religious function.

  —Mother goddesses? From the time of David?

  Yoni’s pause seems to stretch out forever.

  Five a.m. There’s a fierce February chill in the air. Men are climbing out of minivans and running to get in line at the checkpoint, jostling as they enter a large, metal-roofed shed. They have their hoods pulled up, their hands jammed into their pockets. They smoke cigarettes and carry plastic bags containing their lunch. Thousands of Palestinians must pass through this place every morning, workers entering Jerusalem from the West Bank.

  If the checkpoints and the so-called separation wall did not exist, the journey from Ramallah to Jerusalem would take around twenty minutes. As it is, for Palestinians it lasts several hours. For those requiring emergency medical care, the delay can be much more than an inconvenience. Down the road is another checkpoint, used by Jewish settlers, who can drive through freely, rarely having to stop for inspection. When erecting the wall, the Israeli planners made special environmental provisions, carefully moving a population of rare irises and creating tiny passages for animals. Many Palestinians were, on the other hand, cut off from their farmland or their water supply, or simply had their homes and businesses demolished. What traces of all this will archaeologists find a thousand years from now? What will they understand to have been the function of this structure?

  So David dwelt in the fort, and called it the city of David. And David built round about from Millo and inward.

  2 Samuel 5:9

  Once you’ve seen the ruins and perused the trinkets in the gift shop, you can walk out of the main site of the City of David, taking what appears to be an official trail down a street of picturesque stone houses. Sign boards bearing the ubiquitous lyre logo give their names: the Tirah House, the Tamar House. They have the feeling of landmarks, pieces of heritage. They also have prominent security features. Intercoms, heavy doors, high fences, multiple security cameras.

  Once you’ve got used to the pleasing honeyed stone, the security cameras are the most prominent features of the streetscape, at least until you turn a corner and see that on the roof of one house is a guard post, manned by a sour-looking young security man with a semiautomatic weapon.

  Why are all these precautions necessary, in a place where tourists are being encouraged to wander? The answer lies in the lyre. Before it was the logo of the City of David, the lyre was the logo of the organization that runs it, the Ir David Foundation, commonly known as Elad. Its founder, David Be’eri, is a former special forces commander who got to know the area during the first intifada, when his men conducted operations across the West Bank. Archaeology is not Elad’s primary concern; or rather, archaeology is only a means to a political end. As the group puts it on its website:

  The Ir David Foundation is committed to continuing King David’s legacy as well as revealing and connecting people to Ancient Jerusalem’s glorious past through four key initiatives: archaeological excavation, tourism development, educational programming and residential revitalization.

  What is King David’s legacy? Music? Smiting Philistines? It’s a phrase with a feel-good ring but little content, except that it clearly has something to do with Jewish tradition. Behind the anodyne phrase residential revitalization hides Elad’s primary agenda. The ruins that it has branded as the Ursprung of the Israelite people were found beneath Silwan, a Palestinian village that was annexed into Jerusalem in 1967. An Elad board member, Adi Mintz, told Haaretz in 2006 that the organization’s goal was “to get a foothold in East Jerusalem and to create an irreversible situation in the holy basin around the Old City.” That is to say, Elad’s purpose (as another spokesman put it, in conversation with a reporter for the New York Times) is to “Judaize” Silwan, acquiring homes and property by a variety of means and placing ideologically committed settlers in them to create a “Jewish presence.” Coupled with the archaeological invocation of a primal Jewish past, the hope is that this will bind Silwan to Israel, so that in any future territorial negotiation it will appear to be a “natural” part of the Jewish state. The tendentious “educational programming” offered by the City of David, “geared towards Israeli students, adults and soldiers” to “reconnect them to their history and heritage” reinforces this message. Our history. Our land. Elad is a political project conceived by a trained military strategist, an apparatus for capturing territory.

  Duvdevan is one of Israel’s most mythologized military units. The nickname means “cherry,” the fruit that goes on top of “the cream,” as the IDF special forces like to term themselves. Established in 1986, shortly before the outbreak of the first intifada, Duvdevan was formed to infiltrate Palestinian urban areas undercover with the objective of identifying, locating, and then capturing or killing terrorists. Be’eri, who is a former student at yeshivas associated with the far right of the Israeli settler movement, became the unit’s deputy commander. This is how he got to know Silwan, a neighborhood where his teams operated.

  According to Shady Dealings in Silwan, a report commissioned by the Israeli NGO Ir Amim* about settlement activities in Silwan, after he left the military, Be’eri continued to move through the urban terrain of Silwan, sometimes posing as a tour guide. He looked for houses and land that had been passed back and forth in relatively recent history, land that had some documentary history of Jewish ownership. It was a feat of historical research that relied on two primary sources—records of a purchase made by Baron Edmond de Rothschild in the early twentieth century on behalf of the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, and records of land that had belonged to a community of Yemeni Jews that had formed in the late nineteenth century and been violently dispersed in the wake of Arab rioting in 1929.

  According to Ir Amim’s research, Be’eri got to know the terrain inch by inch, meticulously recording any property he felt he could plausibly claim as Jewish. He secured a quasi-official role as a locator of Jewish property for the Jewish National Fund, the group that flyers American neighborhoods with pictures of happy folk planting trees, and which has a deep involvement in evictions and forced displacement. Be’eri also cultivated contacts in the Ministry of Housing, the Office of the Custodian of Absentee Property, and the contractors overseeing the redevelopment of East Jerusalem. While he was identifying his target houses, Be’eri secured financial support to “Judaize” additional parts of the historic basin of East Jerusalem. When he was ready, he acted systematically, petitioning various authorities to have Palestinian residents removed from their homes.

  Many houses, many lawsuits. Litigation lasting years. The Ir Amim report describes the practices used by the settler groups: Palestinians cajoled into selling, shabby houses in Silwan bought by Palestinian front men or anonymous front companies, companies with neutral names and pockets deep enough to pay extravagant sums, many times what those houses would otherwise be worth.

  Gradually Elad has become almost inseparable from the Israeli state in
Silwan. The Jewish National Fund signed over its absentee interests to the settlers for a nominal sum, and the legal and planning systems worked in concert to grow the City of David inside the community. One house, five houses, a dozen houses, family homes suddenly declared vacant, or their owners absentees. The letter of the law, always backed up by force. They would arrive and take possession of the expropriated houses under the protection of guards, who stood watch as they mounted the cameras and welded heavy security doors onto their new forward operating bases.

  For Elad, the cherry on top is control of the past. Of the urgency of the historian’s task, Walter Benjamin famously wrote that one must be convinced that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy” if that enemy is victorious. In 1997, over the initial cautions of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Elad took over responsibility for the archaeological ruins in Silwan from the Israel Land Authority. Eventually, however, the Israel Antiquities Authority came on board with the transfer of a supposedly important site to a private nonprofit organization, which, in the eyes of some, had little or no credibility in the world of academic archaeology, and in 2008 the director stated that he couldn’t see a problem with Jews discovering more about their heritage and “didn’t like bringing politics into archaeology.” Elad was now the law in Silwan, a law always tending in one direction, towards the erosion of the Palestinian presence on its hillsides.

  There are facts and there are facts on the ground. Ancient history grows out of the barrel of a gun, and reportedly out of offshore accounts in Panama. Between 2006 and 2013, Elad took in $115 million in donations. At the opening of the City of David visitor’s center, the guests included Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, Lev Leviev, who made his fortune processing and mining diamonds in Angola and apartheid-era South Africa, and the former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel served as chair of Elad’s International Advisory Council.