Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  Palestinians find it almost impossible to get building permits in East Jerusalem, but in Silwan Ateret Cohanim, another settler group operating in Silwan, has thrown up a six-storey tower, far taller than anything around it. It is a fortress, with metal bars on the windows and a huge Israeli flag draped down the facade. The reality of life for its inhabitants is grim, surrounded by people who hate them and whom they seem to yearn to displace. They have named the place Beit Yonatan, after the imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. One afternoon I watch the children returning from preschool, in a van with wire mesh over the windows, spattered with paint and dented by stones. A border police patrol waits outside the house, alongside a team of private security guards. A father emerges from the house and welcomes his little son with a tender kiss. I have a boy that age. I kiss him just like that. I cannot help but ask what sort of man would choose to put his family in such a situation. A dozen armed guards to get you in and out of your home? Only a fanatic would make his child endure such a life. In justification, the settlers point to the historical presence of Yemeni Jews in Silwan, Zionists who arrived in the 1880s and were expelled in the upheavals of the early twentieth century. The Palestinians of Silwan tell stories of settlers attacking their children, of police personnel who have orders only to discipline them, never their Jewish antagonists. Their own violence is clearly visible on the bodywork of a settlers’ school bus, the strain on the wan little faces peering out from behind the mesh.

  In 2010 David Be’eri was filmed running over two children from Silwan with his car. Elad claimed its director had been surrounded by a stone-throwing lynch mob. The video showed four boys with stones, two of whom were hit and injured. An investigation cleared Be’eri of wrongdoing.

  A Palestinian is never innocent. The technical term used in the Israeli military is uninvolved. A Palestinian is either involved or uninvolved. But in this place, who can really say they are uninvolved? I meet Palestinians. I listen to them discuss politics. All I can do is record, scribble down fragments of a conversation that has been going on for half a century.

  —We need a Palestinian Gandhi.

  —Are you joking? The Gandhi times have gone. How can you have Gandhi with these settlers?

  —Gandhi took thirty years.

  —Thirty years! We don’t have the luxury of time.

  Conversations in cafés, in a Ramallah conference room, a chopped-down olive grove, a Red Cross tent on farmland in the South Hebron Hills.

  —If it’s an occupation, it needs to end so we can build our state. If we’re too weak to make a state then it’s a civil rights movement and we need to gain our civil rights. Our right to freedom of movement, our water rights. . . .

  Conversations. Burning cigarettes. Sipping tea.

  —Once we were part of the General Union of Palestinian Women. We were one of the founding organizations of the PLO. Women participated in all forms of struggle. After Oslo we were very optimistic. We thought we were heading towards the end of the occupation. The implementation of the two-state solution. We were aiming very high. We were looking for secular laws in which the rights of women are respected. But the role of women has been deteriorating since Oslo. I maintain we had much more democracy under armed struggle than we do now. We were activists. Now we are NGO employees. Before Oslo, these organizations were the government of the Palestinian people, giving services, mobilizing people. With the arrival of the donor community they became more professional, they became the agents of the donors. Now I spend my time writing reports and arguing about where I put the donor’s logo.

  Smoking, looking out the window at a communications antenna, a line of red-roofed settlement houses on a hill. Her eyes moving back and forth, as if looking for a place to put her bitterness.

  —I have only one child. I had to wait a long time. Fifteen years. I had to have a lot of operations. And I am not ready for him to die because of some stupid Israeli soldier. So sometimes I keep him inside. But I cannot keep him inside. He is a teenage boy. He wants to go. What can I do? The settlers are running Israel now. They want to kick us out of the country. I see it coming very soon. Now the world is concerned with Syria and the Israelis are showing their true face. They are savages. They will kick us out. I bet none of these human rights defenders in Europe will say a word. The least we can do, we are doing. Which is to stay here.

  Conversations, cigarettes, sipping bitter tea.

  [Speakers: Ala Hlehel and Lama Hourani, Sam Bahour, Lama Hourani]

  I am in Hebron, standing in the “sterilized zone” of Shuhada Street. It is a ghost town, the bustling market emptied of people, the shops sealed. This is my house, shouts the settler at my colleague, the sardonic Palestinian journalist. I have better papers than you do. I have title to my house. I bet you don’t have papers.

  I ask the settler if he was born in Hebron. No, he says. Brookline, Massachusetts.

  Ah, papers. Look out over this unholy land and think of papers. Deeds, assignments, documents with signatures and seals. It is early spring. The valleys are green, but the hilltops are barren and rocky. Look out over this land and think of law. How do you take the land, if you believe it is yours by right? You need to do it by law. You need papers. Throughout the West Bank, almost every relevant agency of government collaborates to create or perpetuate insecurity for Palestinian landowners. Elad is far from the only organization that solicits money from sentimental diaspora Jews and uses it to research and fight court cases, dunam of land by dunam of land, house by house. This is not your house. Before it was your house it was my house. Now it will be my house again. My house, our house, my people’s house, my father’s house, with its tiled red roof and its guard post and its security camera.

  But there is more land. Land that is cultivated by Palestinian fellaheen, grazed by Bedouin herders. To take it you need papers, so you look back further in time, until you find older laws that will justify what you want to do. Look back to Ottoman times, to the Land Code of 1858. For the Ottomans, to own land meant to exploit it, to cultivate it. All uncultivated land reverted to the state. Look again at the land. At the green below, the rocky hilltops. Those hilltops are not cultivated land. Invoke the old Ottoman laws and, at a stroke, all those high places now belong to the state. The state can now give it to those who will make use of it, who will build red-roofed houses to look down on the old fellaheen villages.

  The land belongs to the cultivator. Who cultivates the land? Come down from your new red-roofed house, with your automatic rifle slung on your back. Come down and ask to see the farmer’s papers. Does he have title? Does the shepherd have a paper to prove his right to the pasture? He says he has always been here. Before his always comes your always. Before it was his house it was your house. Come down from your red-roofed house and bring a court case. While the case is in progress, the farmer can’t carry on cultivating the land. That wouldn’t be just. It wouldn’t be right to let him farm land that might not even be his. If he tries, you chase him off with your gun. Perhaps the state decides this unfarmed land is vacant and reassigns it to you. Perhaps you begin to cultivate it yourself. You can cultivate it by planting a seedling in a rusty barrel and placing it on the ground you wish to claim. You don’t have to water it, or do anything much at all. In the eyes of the law you are a cultivator, making the land bloom.

  Ali is a shepherd. I meet him in the South Hebron Hills, a middle-aged man with a flock of twenty or thirty goats. He grazes them by the roadside, a narrow strip of green. He can’t go up the hill, because he will be trespassing. He can’t graze them in the field with the stunted seedlings in the rusty barrels. Once that was his village’s pasture, but not anymore. It belongs to the settlers, who are making it bloom. There is good pasture near the settlement, but he constitutes a security risk, and he fears they would shoot him if he went there. So he uses the strip by the roadside, where the trucks thunder past, bringing produce from the settlements to sell in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

  This is not Ali’s land.
Maybe it never was. The land always belonged to the men from Brooklyn and Melbourne and Johannesburg and Kiev. All those years that his father and grandfather roamed these hills grazing their goats, and they never realized that the real owners had yet to arrive.

  Two Orthodox boys, wearing kippas and black trousers and drip-dry shirts and scuffed thick-soled shoes. They stand on the wall at the viewpoint at the top of Mount Scopus, surveying the Jordan Valley far below. In the distance lies the Dead Sea, just a sliver of hazy gray blue. Nearer you can see a black ribbon of road, and the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. One of the boys laughs and begins to stride down the hill. The other, shivering slightly in the cold, slips on a green New York Jets sweatshirt.

  —Hey, he says, turning to us. Is one of you a tour guide?

  He speaks English with an American accent. Hagit asks him what he wants to know.

  —My buddy is walking down to the highway. How long will that take? He says he can do it in five minutes.

  —It will surely take him longer than that. Maybe twenty minutes, half an hour? I’ve never done it.

  —Okay. Thanks.

  He stands and watches. After a while he takes out his phone and begins to shoot video, talking to his friend, the hands-free wire dangling down by his waist.

  —I’m looking right at you! Yes, I am. Pose! That’s right.

  This is what mastery looks like. Two carefree boys, surveying the terrain. Who gets to survey the land from high places? Who gets to walk down to the highway, ignoring paths or boundaries? Who gets to walk just as far as he wishes to go?

  This is why that [sic] we opted for the methodology of walking through walls . . . like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner.

  The speaker is an Israeli paratroop commander called Aviv Kochavi, interviewed by the architectural theorist Eyal Weizman in 2004. During the 2002 attack on Nablus, Brigadier General Kochavi’s troops advanced into the city through aboveground “tunnels” which they blasted through the dense urban fabric of houses, shops, and workshops. The soldiers avoided the streets and alleys of the city, moving horizontally through party walls and vertically through holes blasted in floors and ceilings. Thermal imaging technologies allowed them to “see” adversaries on the other side of solid barriers, and 7.62 mm rounds could penetrate to kill on the other side. Much fighting took place in private homes, and the civilian population was profoundly traumatized.

  A retired brigadier general called Shimon Naveh, who taught at the IDF’s Operational Theory Research Institute, told Weizman of the IDF’s interest in the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space:

  In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. We try to produce the operational space in such a manner that borders do not affect us.

  Elad’s multidimensional project to smooth out the Palestinian space of Silwan seems entirely continuous with these French-theoretical military tactics. They are an organization that has grown out of war, a very modern full-spectrum war in which the distinction between combatants and the civilian population is blurred, and the battlefield could potentially be everywhere, including inside civilian homes. Elad’s attack is slow, but it is happening. It is unfolding at the pace of spades and excavators, the pace of planning hearings and court dates and fundraising galas, an assault on an urban area slowed down to the speed of archaeology.

  Elad’s latest tactic in Silwan is burrowing. It has already built a tunnel (billed as “the pilgrims’ route”) to connect the City of David to the Temple Mount, and the highlight of their tourist offerings is the chance to walk underground along part of an ancient aqueduct system, through which water still flows. Other tunnels are confidently identified as the work of King Herod, or as hiding places for Jewish rebels against the Romans. The new tunnels (no doubt supplied with their own attractive biblical backstories) are worming in all directions under Palestinian Silwan. Part of their routes are secret. Residents complain that they are seeing cracks in their walls, in the foundations of their houses. They wonder whether it is because of the tunnels that in several places the streets have collapsed.

  In the tourist shops in Jerusalem’s Old City you can buy pictures of Temple Mount with al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock airbrushed out. You can buy pictures of the Temple itself, coming down over the Western Wall like a returning UFO, a structure made of Hebrew text, of scripture.

  In Silwan there is—or was—a wall, the front wall of a house on which a muralist had carefully painted, in English, a famous line of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. My homeland is not a suitcase and I am no traveler. The worm soon arrived in the guise of municipal workers, sent to erase the “graffiti.” Local people prevented them. So the mural stayed, at least for a while.

  —June 2016

  Storyland

  Lorraine Adams

  O little town of Bethlehem,

  How still we see thee lie;

  Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

  The silent stars go by:

  Yet in thy dark streets shineth

  The everlasting Light;

  The hopes and fears of all the years

  Are met in thee tonight.

  I’m a child, and this carol is my favorite. I want to sink into its dreamless sleep beneath its silent stars. Also, it’s about me in a way “Joy to the World” isn’t, because Bethlehem is about a bambino born in an inch of a town, just like I was in a miner’s hospital in a Pennsylvania coal patch. The story implies that insignificant beginnings aren’t determinative. It’s outlandish but possibly true: yes, even a child swaddled in a feeding trough for animals can embody the hopes and fears of all the years.

  I visit the actual Bethlehem in 2011. I arrive during the day, so there aren’t any stars. The only everlasting light I can locate is the sun bleaching out the mundane sprawl of asphalt roads. I squint under its broiling heat, walking across Manger Square to the Church of the Nativity. Inside, tourists are queued to kiss the spot where the holy manger is believed to have been—a dubiously authentic location at best, seeing that it was chosen out of several caves rumored to be the birthplace of Christ three hundred years later by the frail and confused eighty-year-old mother of Emperor Constantine.

  I never make it to the manger. The church itself, divided into quarters by quarreling Christian denominations, lacks the beneficent mystery I’d hoped to find. Their centuries-old antipathy reaches a risible donnybrook a few months after my visit when a Greek Orthodox monk inadvertently pokes his broom into the Armenian Apostolic part of the church floor, prompting a mop brawl between sixty clergymen that Palestinian police have to break up with batons.

  After the church, I take a five-minute walk down passageways lined with souvenir shops selling Baby Jesus T-shirts and crèches made in China. Skeevy men try to hustle me to buy rosaries. To avoid them, I hurry out of the kitsch toward open air.

  There I find the sublime. I’m in awe. I’d heard about it. Now I see it. It’s a wall. It’s so high, made of sequoia-big panels of concrete, that I feel like I’m a toddler all over again. At thirty feet, it’s roughly the same height as the walls I saw as a kid around Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, the prison that my mom told me housed Al Capone. Only now I’m on the inside, smack up against it—my hand touches it from time to time—this rough, matte gray, articulated python of irrepressible power. I can’t stop walking along it. It’s fourteen miles long around two-thirds of Bethlehem, but I want to do the whole thing. Plus, it’s covered with the most opulent graffiti I’ve ever seen, far better stuff than the subway cars of my teenage days in 1970s Manhattan. I come upon a clever reversal: the artist Banksy has painted a girl in a pink dress and
pigtails frisking an Israeli soldier. I look above them and see four feet of electrified wire on the crest of this whale of a wall. Every so often I pass a guard tower where young soldiers from Israel look out through small, dirty windows.

  Bethlehem is dangerous. That’s what the Wall says. It says terrorists live in Bethlehem. Before the Wall, they got in their cars and blew themselves up on buses in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Everything about that is awful. But even worse, they incinerate children with these suicide vests. One of them is a girl named Hodaya Asraf. You can find her life story on YouTube. Here’s Hodaya as an infant, a pumpkin of adorability. Here are her little brothers holding her hands while she toddles in a pink-trimmed onesie on an outdoor deck. Here’s her grandma from Greece in a scarf bobby-pinned to her head, nuzzling precious Hodaya. Here’s her mother and father bussing her at her birthday parties, here’s balloons, here’s bad cake, here’s dancing. Here’s her bedroom with the purple beanbag chair. Little Hodaya, dead at thirteen, her killer, twenty-two, a Jew-hating madman, who came from Bethlehem.

  All you can say is build the Wall. All you can think is that Hodaya’s story about Bethlehem is the new Bethlehem. The Bethlehem of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” is gone. The guy who wrote it came to Bethlehem on a horse in 1865. It took him two hours to ride the six miles from Jerusalem that now takes twenty minutes. Never mind that it takes Palestinians four times that long to cross checkpoints and take circuitous routes along the Wall.

  You should listen to another story about Bethlehem. It’s from the Torah. It’s about Rachel. She went into labor on the way from Jerusalem. “Rachel died and was buried on the way to Efrat, which is Bethlehem.” (Genesis 35:19) But the midwife told her she’d given birth to a son right before her soul left her, so that was a consolation. Not much of a story? There’s more. There’s an ancient commentary called a midrash that embroiders on the story, adding that her other son Yosef prayed by her grave when he was on his way to slavery in Egypt. “Mother, my mother who gave birth to me, wake up, arise and see my suffering.” Rachel replied, “Do not fear. Go with them, and God will be with you.”