Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  I imagine fourteen-year-old Elad, living in Har Gilo, Row Two, in a three-bedroom honeycomb. But right now his favorite place is Hebron, the historic city where he has relatives. I imagine that Elad’s mother isn’t happy about that, though the relatives are her own brother and his sons. She’s constantly worried. And so Elad doesn’t tell her about his heroic exploits with his cousins. There are certain things mothers don’t understand; for instance, that the demands of patriotism are directly dependent on where you live. In boring old Har Gilo you have time to play Game Boy, but in Hebron you have to struggle, even if you’re just a boy.

  After school the kids in Hebron hang around near the holy places, where the tour busses arrive, Jews from all over the world, chirpy Taiwanese Christians wearing pink baseball caps so they don’t lose sight of each other (as though that were even possible), and timid Germans with roughly carved wooden crosses dangling over their checkered bellies. The enemy busses, the left-wing snakes with their followers from Central Blue-White, are smaller and less conspicuous. But the main actors in this play have known each other for years, so it takes just a few minutes before the teenage boys identify a bus full of critics, and the game begins.

  Like all games, it has clearly defined rules: get in their way however you can, spoil their tour of the city. Only touching is off limits. So these teenagers silently stretch out their arms and spread their fingers, almost a welcoming gesture, but in fact meaning just the opposite. As human barriers they stand in front of the guides of the small groups that come not to pray at Abraham’s grave, but to show this brutally divided city, this witches’ cauldron whose lid is held down with tremendous effort by the Blue-White military. They come because many of this doubled country’s problems come to a head in the Old Town of Hebron: religious fanaticism, military intransigency, and the resulting radicalization of the oppressed Red-Green majority. But the few hundred settlers who see themselves as a bastion of religion don’t appreciate this sort of human rights tourism. And their children don’t appreciate it either.

  And so the settlement kids plant themselves in front of the hulking guide who used to be their protector in a previous life, when he was stationed here as a soldier.

  The great Israeli writer Amos Oz, who threw stones at British soldiers himself as a child and yelled “British go home,” describes himself as a “cured fanatic,” writing: “Traitor, in the eyes of the fanatic, is anyone who changes.”

  The guide, the ex-soldier, is one of those changed people. He hasn’t become a pacifist. But he was unable to bear what his army, his country, was doing day after day as an occupying power. And every week he takes other interested citizens to Hebron to show it to them.

  That is why these kids are blocking the path of the traitor, their own soldier. He has to zigzag around grinning children. Whenever he holds up a photo or a map, they crowd up and hold their hands in front of it, hiding the illustrative material by becoming an illustration themselves.

  Now this gets the attention of the active soldiers, who are lurking everywhere in small groups. They approach unobtrusively, as though gliding on tracks. The guide raises his voice (“Here you can see that the front doors are welded shut, the occupants can leave their houses only out the back way, or from the roof”), realizing that the group’s attention is slipping away from him. The boys grin at each other. They raise their arms with the outspread fingers, like windmills, a ballet of arms. The members of the tour group shake their heads. I imagine that the boys consider it a good day if at some point one of these out-of-town voyeurs loses his cool. Some jerk from Haifa, Netanya, or Brooklyn will yell at the kids, tell them to behave themselves, in the end he might even grab one of them by the arm and push him aside, but they can always count on the group’s cameraman, the littlest one, a ten-year-old, he always films everything with his cell phone. And then they call the police.

  I imagine that at first Elad was afraid to play along. But the worst thing that can happen is that the soldiers might drag you away. Once Elad’s cousin yelled, “Are you grabbing me like an Arab?” Elad remembered that. Now he always yells, “I’m not a filthy Arab, arrest these left-wing traitors here instead.”

  The best thing is when Oded, Elad’s uncle, comes—and he almost always comes when people in Western clothing start taking pictures of the concrete blocks, as tall as a man, that chop up the alleys of the Old Town, with Death to Arabs spray-painted on them.

  “Talk to us,” Uncle Oded demands, “listen to the other side! They’re lying to you, they’re hiding the truth from you,” he shouts. “That guy over there, your Arab friend, he’s from a family that shot one of our babies. Do people like that get to have human rights?”

  And the coolest one of all is Moshe, ancient and pious, a great-uncle or great-granduncle. He’s so old, no one’s going to do him any harm, and he’s so angry that his sidelocks nearly stand on end. He dashes outside as soon as he sees one of those left-wing snakes with their groups, and every time he has to pull himself together not to snatch at their T-shirts. But he yells and rages, he knows all about them; for instance, that the mother of one of the activists committed suicide. “If you end up with a kid like that, all you can do is kill yourself!” Sometimes Elad almost worries that one of these days it might make them stop coming.

  When there’s nothing happening, no activist busses, the Hebron kids bombard the marketplace. The buildings in the Old Town are divided horizontally, one group upstairs, the other downstairs, with entrances on different sides. The stairwells are cemented shut. With their surveillance cameras, the Blue-Whites keep an eye on everything from above. The Red-Greens still have a few scattered shops down in their narrow alleyways, and they put up gratings, nets, chicken wire over them to protect them from stones and rubbish from above. That doesn’t matter. The right projectile can sometimes get through the nets, and big stones can at least shake them so that the people below duck and hold their hands over their heads. In some places it’s starting to get dark down there, dark forever. Elad, who likes to tinker, thinks a lot about what kind of objects block the most light. Water canisters, flattened boxes, tarps, old cloth. Square yard by square yard. At some point you people down there will be living in endless night. And then you won’t even be able to see those colorful sweets of yours.

  Of course the boys don’t join in the girls’ games, that’s an international norm. But they go and watch on Saturdays, when they don’t have school but the others do. These big boys’ little sisters stand outside the Red-Green girls’ school and wait for the other girls to come out. And then they push and throw stones, and human rights freaks from Europe, big pale or salmon-pink grown-ups from the north, awkwardly throw themselves between the two groups and try to protect the little girls with the headscarves. And the soldiers stand by and watch, because they have an unambiguous mission in this sick, ambiguous city: to prevent violence against the eight hundred Blue-Whites. The violence committed by the few Blue-Whites against the two hundred thousand Red-Greens is none of their business, none whatsoever. Certainly not when little girls are beating up little girls. Then the soldiers daydream about their next cigarette break and shrug their shoulders, every single damned Saturday afternoon, when the little Red-Green girls’ school lets out and the chase begins.

  In Walajeh, the village that will soon be enclosed by a wall and a fence the way a stone is held by a fist, one Red-Green has pulled off a spectacular, absurdist victory against the occupiers. Let’s call him Abu Mustafa. He has three children and a couple of goats. And his house is the only one outside the line along which the fence will be built. Walajeh is a peaceful village, not a hotbed of terrorism, and the people don’t demonstrate every week, like people do in other places. But one reason all these walls and fences are being built is so that if there is a new uprising, the Red-Greens can be shut out quickly and effectively. Picture an enormous crane truck piled high with cement blocks. In the event of an alarm, it will trundle through the occupied territories and dump several of the blocks o
utside the entrance to each village. And everything is shut tight.

  At any rate, Allah lent his aid, Abu Mustafa successfully fought off all orders to tear down his family’s house and resettle them, and now, believe it or not, the soldiers have built him a tunnel under the fence. Soon he’ll get a gate and a key to go along with it. So that, walled out twice over, he can go into the village, for example if he wants to do some shopping or pay a visit. Or if he wants to leave Walajeh. You see, that he must do via the official exit. Anyway, from his house he could do nothing but clamber up the steep slopes.

  And so Walajeh, this village of 2,500 people, will be shut in a coffin just as West Berlin once was. With the distinction that the Berlin Wall was meant to keep the shut-out East Berliners from fleeing into the fenced-off freedom of the West. Whereas here the farmers are being kept from their fields, which even now they can reach only with great effort, by taking detours, and soon, if the whole green valley is turned into a nature park, will no longer be allowed to tend them. But Walajeh has yet another problem, compared with which Abu Mustafa’s private tunnel is just a grotesque escapade.

  If we picture the fence around Walajeh as a circle with just one opening, and Abu Mustafa’s house as a little bulge, there’s also a line cutting straight through the circle. It is the Jerusalem municipal boundary. Part of the village belongs to the capital, part to the occupied territories. In other words, this village, which has already hopped over one border, the Green Line, has been saddled with an additional border. A lot depends on whether or not a house is located on the territory of the capital. Red-Green inhabitants of Jerusalem are able to work anywhere in Blue-White, which means far higher wages. It means that their license plates (yellow) and their ID cards (blue) are the “right” colors. It means that they don’t have to stand in iron pens at five a.m., worrying day after day that for “security reasons” the computer will refuse to let them go to work. It means access to the Blue-White social security and health care system. Let us say a fictitious Mahmoud is injured when his house is declared illegal and torn down. Because from 1967 onwards the demolished house stood in the right location, Mahmoud, with his blue ID card, can be treated in a Blue-White hospital. Only he’s unlikely to win his case against the soldier who injured him.

  It is easy to see what that means for a small community, when one person is able to reach for the lifesaver that the vagaries of the border have put within his reach, while his next-door neighbor cannot. Some take advantage of it, some refuse on principle. And others don’t even have that choice.

  And we haven’t even spoken of the true tests of solidarity faced by the families in all the little Walajehs in this carved-up country. The ten-year-old boys who are arrested for throwing stones and beaten up in prison, who then “confess” to something, incriminate someone else, and forever after are the school cowards, the traitors. Or the other children like the pretty little girl who angrily shook her fist at a soldier, became famous when the picture went viral, and got a medal from President Erdogan of Turkey. One is a traitor, one is a star. In all the little Walajehs there may be a dramatic lack of water, proper garbage disposal, legal security, justice, freedom of movement. But there’s Internet everywhere.

  When I first came here, I thought I knew about borders. In Vienna, where I grew up, very near the Iron Curtain, it was a harsh but clear-cut affair: watch towers, barbed wire, us over here, them over there. As children, we were afraid that “they” might attack us, might cease to respect the border. The moment a siren howled, six-year-olds said to each other with serious faces: “The Russians are coming.” But the Communists cared about that border even more than we did—they had cooped up their own people behind it. Just as the Iron Curtain fell, seemingly without warning, I was growing up. My coming of age coincided with an infinitely blissful sense of liberation, of setting out into the world that once again had other directions beside west. Borders have fascinated me ever since. How they suddenly vanish, and sometimes linger all the same. In the Thuringian Forest, along the former border between East and West Germany, the mouflon still keep to their old sides, a quarter of a century after the fall of the Wall. No one told them that the land mines and spring guns have been removed, and so they avoid the former death strip.

  In the West Bank, which some call Palestine and others call Judea and Samaria, the concept of the border as I knew it has lost all validity. It has less to do with Here and There than with Above and Below, with In Front and Behind—a tangle of two different-colored threads that the reckless construction of settlements tangles more and more inextricably. These borders are much more dangerous than borders elsewhere, for they are constantly in motion. And that means that they are everywhere—above all, to cite an old saying, “in people’s heads.”

  I wonder whether one of those kids from Hebron with their sense of infinite strength might wake up one morning, at the age of forty-five, say, as a businessman in a hotel room in Atlanta or Tokyo, in Moscow or Tel Aviv. Whether he might glance at something or smell something that reminds him of those days. Might look at it differently for the first time in decades, that summer of dares, when the world was so splendidly black and white, when it was hilarious to see old women flinch as he and his friends tossed trash and stones onto the grating over their heads, and when his pretty little cousins made girls of the same age fear for their lives.

  I wonder whether children like Aya, dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because the army has come to bulldoze their houses, will ever forget that moment. Or whether these children will relate differently than I to a tattered sofa lying in the rubble, simply because they’ve seen them so often. Whether only I, coming from a peaceful world, think that a wrecked sofa looks so human, so distressingly intimate.

  But even as I try to think of the future, the military-green present just goes marching on. For six years no more houses were torn down in Walajeh, just south of Jerusalem. Then, suddenly, three were torn down in one night. And now the order has come for twenty more to be torn down. Twenty Ayas. Most families have four or five children. Twenty times five.

  (Translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole)

  Visible, Invisible: Two Worlds

  Anita Desai

  The Invisible Village

  We have arrived, we are told, at the village Susiya. The dust stirred by our vehicle settles. We look around—and see nothing. Where is the village Susiya? Here is only dust, stone, rubble, and the white heat of the sun.

  Blink, and you will see the caves where people once lived but have been bulldozed, smashed, their entrances blocked with rocks. So now there is only a blue tarpaulin or two, held up by sticks. Once there had been a cistern to collect sparse rainwater, but someone has driven the rusty chassis of a defunct car into it. So now they must buy a tanker of water to fill a container for them; they are waiting. Once they grew a little wheat by hand, having no implements, harvested and stacked it. Then the settlers came and set fire to it, so now there are only ashes. (If they fail to cultivate the land for a few years, whether based on fear or for other reasons, “Ottoman law” can be invoked and the land taken over.) They had once owned the land but then the authorities arrived with sheets of corrugated tin and built a shed in front of which they erected a sign: archaeological site. So now their land is taken and archaeologists will come to dig for their remains. The people who live here still have been given their sign: they are considered dead, gone.

  But a spot on the lunar landscape reveals itself as a tree: the lone tree of the village. Under it is seated a group of dark shapes: women sheltering from the noonday sun. From their folds a little girl emerges, a pretty child with a face like a flower. She extends her hand, offering the small hard green fruit in it to us, the visitors. Then, from under a tarpaulin, a boy, her brother, comes out with a tray—tea for the visitors.

  Where have they come from—this small hard green fruit, this tray of glasses with hot sweet mint tea? These are ghosts of a past in which hospitality was gracio
us, a tradition. Is it what the archaeologists will find on the site of their excavation?

  The Visible Settlement

  These are the settlements lately built, of great blocks of pale limestone, one piled on top of another on a raised outcropping of rock, ringed by walls of concrete topped with barbed wire. Each house with an air-conditioner attached to its facade like a watchful eye. These are fortresses and the settlers inside it are safe. Sometimes the children of the fortress come to the wall and lean over it to spit on the ghost children of the invisible village below, then depart with shouts of laughter.

  The Invisible City

  Shuhada Street in Hebron once had a short wall built along part of its length—the broader half was where Israelis might drive, the narrower half where Palestinians might walk. Now the wall is gone but the entrance to the market is sealed, the shops shuttered. The residents of the apartments above the shops had cages installed over their balconies to protect them from the rocks hurled by settlers. Then the entrances were sealed. To exit, they had to climb down ladders at the back. Curfew could be declared for days, and had been for months in the earlier parts of the Second Intifada. A long, circuitous route would have to be traversed on foot to bring back a carton of milk, bread, or perhaps medicines. Slowly the number of residents dwindled.

  Among the abandoned houses on Shuhada Street you may find just three or four that are still inhabited—by residents who refuse to leave, instead living the lives of ghosts who will not go away.

  Witnesses then, these ghosts.

  Two brothers, seated on an upholstered sofa that might once have furnished a grander house, now stranded. Once they had gone out to attend to businesses, to work. Now they go nowhere. One brother had his back broken in a beating by soldiers. He traveled to Jordan to have four vertebrae in his spine replaced, so now he is back, with a record on film of the surgery. His brother had had rocks flung at his head by settlers; he had lost his teeth; the dentures pinched but he was not complaining. He removed the dentures to reveal his toothless gums: evidence.