Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  Muzi looks around wistfully as he smokes. He is on his way to a new life, moving to Berlin to work with refugees on their music, in the coming months. His day job is construction work, but he’s aiming to set up a music production company.

  The easy grin and goofy style is misleading—he grew up a troublemaker, he says, fighting a lot, and was arrested numerous times. He has seven brothers, one of them his twin, whose idea it was to perform hip-hop to begin with.

  In 2006, his first album, My Town, came out, followed by a second in 2009 called The Beautiful Life. “The first one was an issue as it had racist raps against Israelis, so for the second we shifted the focus to the military.” His third album, Who Are You, is due out at the end of 2016. “It’s about police in the Old City and the relationship between police and guns,” he says.

  Like Tamer, Muzi was influenced by rappers like Tupac, Biggie, Eminem, and Kanye, but in the new album, he says, there are dubstep and techno elements too. Muzi has played for raves (including one, in 2011, with an audience of forty-five thousand) and he is into unlikely fans and scenes overlapping with his.

  In 2014, he and his twin performed on a TV show called Best Talent of Palestine, and won second place, which put him on the radar of a broader audience. He wasn’t just a local kid anymore. While he raps mostly in Arabic, he’s open to doing more in English, and he’s now learning Hebrew too.

  When I ask Muzi if he is an activist, he grows serious, even tough, nodding emphatically. “Before, no,” he says. “Now, hell yeah. For sure.”

  Then there’s the “first lady of Arabic hip-hop.” Shadia Mansour was born in 1985, her parents both Christian Palestinians originally from Haifa and Nazareth. She performs in a traditional Palestinian embroidered thobe that covers the whole body. Every song is political. Her first single, “Al Keffiyeh Arabiya” (“The Keffiyeh Is Arab”), featured rapper M-1 of Dead Prez and was something she felt she had to write when she discovered an American-made blue-and-white-colored Arab scarf with Stars of David on it. Mansour introduced her song onstage in New York by saying, “You can take my falafel and hummus, but don’t fucking touch my keffiyeh.”

  Mansour is a natural lyricist and storyteller. “I got into hip-hop in the mid-nineties,” she says. “I was an Arab Palestinian, born in the West, searching for a language that demarginalized or uncategorized me. Hip-hop gave me a head start to speak up for myself and in my own voice. It was the realness and audacity that made it easy for me to relate to and a great way to fight cultural exile that was often unnoticed, unobserved, and unchallenged.”

  She has broken many glass ceilings—the Arab one, the Palestinian one, and of course the female one. “I think that Arabic hip-hop has come a long way in terms of solidifying its place as a legitimate genre in music. When I came on the scene, Palestinian hip-hop was fairly new, you could say it was an introduction to this new addition to Arabic hip-hop (after Moroccan and Algerian hip-hop). I’m of the generation that put Arabic hip-hop on the map. I came on the scene with the intention to represent Arabic hip-hop, to create the foundation for and transforming it to a genre where women, whether they choose to be lyricists or not, can feel Arabic hip-hop represents them.”

  When I ask her if she thinks she’s an activist, her answer is eloquent. “I personally see activism as an art form in itself, from the way that people express themselves, bringing political, social, or economic issues to people’s attention, to the way that action itself can unite, impact, and inspire different people and build bridges among them in the same way that music does.”

  The first time I saw the slogan Hip-hop is not dead; it lives in Palestine was in New York, many years and lives ago, when I was a young hip-hop journalist. The show was Wu-Tang Clan’s, and I can’t remember what the person wearing the T-shirt looked like, just those words.

  Back at the airport after a week in Israel-Palestine, I see the shirt on a teenager who passes by quickly. As I wait for my plane, I think of the strangeness and beauty of being in a region where it’s so easy to meet the first and best of their kind, where no matter how famous they are, people are eager to share their stories. A place where to be seen and heard is not something you take for granted, a land where everyone is a storyteller, a world where anything good that happens is a blessing never to be taken for granted. I think of how I stopped writing about hip-hop in the 2000s, when radio rap became more and more about wealth, about luxuries like mansions and fancy cars, and less and less about community troubles and life on the streets. In Palestine, every rapper has a subject, every human has a theme. It is strong, impossible to ignore. Their topics are so urgent, their content so substantial, their message so clear. Injustice doesn’t get much clearer than that.

  On the way out, my interrogation was smoother, the only hold-up a disagreement about just how many ounces of liquid were in the bottle of face oil in my carry-on. On the plane, I think about the young street kids in Hebron, trying to sell me bracelets and tugging at my purse. I think about the settlers just steps away with their curses and the hot spit they aimed at me, but that landed on their own sidewalk. I think about a Palestinian teenage poet I met, who was planning to study in America for a summer, and who lives with his parents and family—and a group of strangers: one day Israeli settlers showed up at their door with furniture, moving in, claiming half the space as their own. I think about floating in the Dead Sea and looking across to Jordan, so close. I think about the guns I saw, the barbed wire, about the constant threat of violence. I wonder how Muzi’s new record is doing, if Tamer’s film will be well received in the United States, and whether, for Shadia, being a female or Arab constitutes more of a barrier to success.

  As we take off into the sky, I think of my Iranian-ness and my American-ness, and how the two sides of my hyphen challenge each other continually, how so much of my identity has not just been “a problem” in Ben Gurion Airport but pretty much everywhere. I wonder if there will be a time that I can exist outside of those identifiers, what it even means to put those in words. Every thought I have is met with the echo of Tamer’s lyrics from his song “Letter from Prison”: “I wish bravery was a choice we make and not something we’re forced to be.”

  Occupation’s Untold Story

  Fida Jiryis

  “I’ll take it!” I said, as I glanced around the empty apartment.

  The lady did not smile or show any sign of agreement. I was beginning to feel uneasy. She’d looked up at me questioningly as I knocked on the open door of her office a few minutes earlier. “Yes?” she’d enquired, cautiously. Something about me must have given me away.

  “Good morning!” I said, as brightly as I could. The group of new buildings was in a perfect location, halfway between my village and Nahariyya, a small, seaside town in the Galilee. I’d be close to my parents, my work, and the beach at the same time. I’d driven past many times as they were under construction, and, as soon as they were advertised for rent, I couldn’t wait to try my luck. I’d finish work every day and go jogging on the beach . . .

  “Can I help you?” the lady asked, still measuring me up.

  “Yes, I’d like to see one of the apartments you’ve advertised for rent.”

  My accent gave me away; I was an Arab. She looked uncomfortable. I was used to this kind of reticence, though. I’d just smile and pretend I didn’t notice.

  She fiddled around with a bunch of keys and escorted me out of the office, toward one of the buildings. “We have one here . . .” she said.

  One? Lady, the complex is still almost empty, I thought.

  I was a little disappointed when she opened the door. The apartment was bright and new, but it was very small. “Do you have anything larger?” I enquired.

  “No, this is all that’s available.”

  “Okay.” One couldn’t argue with the system. Well, I could, but it was unlikely I’d get anywhere. So I tried to put a smile on instead. “I’ll take it. How much is the rent?” I asked, brightly.

  “Uh, I need
to ask you something first. Where are you from?”

  This being Israel, I didn’t pause to think of the inappropriateness of the question. “Fassouta. It’s a village about twenty minutes from here. Near Ma’alot,” I ventured, in reference to a Jewish town near my village, for referencing other Arab towns would have been useless.

  “Right . . .” She nodded, frowning. “I’ll need to ask you, then, to bring two references with your application, then I’d need to check with the neighbors.”

  “The neighbors?”

  “Yes. I need to ask them if it’s okay for you to live here, because, well, no apartments have been given to Arabs here. But if the neighbors are okay with it, we can proceed. I’ll just put the application through, quietly,” she added, lowering her voice, to imply that she would have to invoke an exception.

  I swallowed, thanked her, and left. That was the end of it. I wasn’t about to get permission from the neighbors to rent an apartment. It was also one of the many reasons that I found myself, not so long after, moving to Ramallah in the West Bank, part of the occupied Palestinian territory.

  The attitude expressed by the woman is a standard illustration of how I and more than one and a half million other Palestinians living in Israel are treated by the state. We do not live in the West Bank and Gaza, but in Israel itself, in the Galilee in the north, the Triangle in the center, and the Naqab (Negev) in the south, all areas of Palestine that were attacked by Jewish militias in 1948 and that subsequently became Israel. We are the Palestinians and their descendants who remained in our country after this initial onslaught. After the wiping out of Palestine, the new state of Israel, created on its remains, had to contend with about 15 percent of the Palestinian population whom it did not manage to drive out with the others. Instead, it imposed Israeli citizenship on them and put them under harsh, military rule for eighteen years, until 1966, to try to squash any Palestinian identity or calls for justice, and to prevent any Palestinians it had ousted from returning. Israel abolished this military rule before its 1967 war and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, after which it imposed its military rule on those territories. Meanwhile, it figured that it was stuck with the Palestinians living inside its borders and that it had to start “integrating” them into Israeli society. Fifty years later, this effort has failed dismally, and we are now twenty percent of Israel’s population.

  Most people living outside Israel, and even Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, don’t know much about Palestinian citizens of Israel. We are assumed to be the same as citizens of any other country and to be able to live normal lives. On the surface, we are far more “privileged” than our brethren in the West Bank and Gaza; with our Israeli citizenship and passport, we can vote, we have access to good education, public health care, and social benefits, and we can easily travel around the world, except for some Arab countries. We do not live in militarily occupied zones shredded by checkpoints, under the constant threat of clashes, Israeli army incursions, and Jewish settler violence. We are free to study almost anything we choose, with the knowledge that we live in a large job market that should absorb our skills.

  But, in reality, this is only the facade of a system of rampant, structural, and institutionalized discrimination.

  As Palestinians—on whichever side of the Green Line we live—we spend every minute of our lives in the country paying for the fact that we are not Jewish.

  Whether in Israel or the West Bank (I’m prohibited by Israel from reaching Gaza, an hour’s drive away, while Jewish Israelis are prohibited from entering Gaza or parts of the West Bank by Israeli law), I open my eyes each morning to remember the reality of my being a second-, or maybe a third-class citizen, unwanted, oppressed, discriminated against, and inferior—the ugly duckling in a murky pond. I am tolerated, at best, allowed to live here because, well, Israel hasn’t figured out a way to get rid of me yet.

  When I lived in my family’s village of Fassouta, in the Galilee, I was reminded every morning as I drove to work of my people’s dispossession at the hands of the state. First, I had to drive through the remains of Suhmata and Dayr El-Qasi, two Palestinian villages that used to lie next to mine and that were depopulated and destroyed in 1948. Suhmata is a mass of shrubs today, with some stones jutting out that survived the Israeli bulldozers’ ploughing the village into the ground at the time. Dayr El-Qasi has, in the miracle of Israel’s creation, turned into Elqosh, a Jewish community, some of whose residents live in a few of its houses that were not destroyed, perhaps because these residents immigrated from Yemen and Kurdistan and appreciated the Arab architecture that the Palestinian owners who fled left behind—an irony that is a cause for reflection in itself. The Palestinians of Dayr El-Qasi and their descendants have lived in refugee camps in Lebanon ever since. They’re stateless refugees about an hour’s drive away from what used to be their home. Meanwhile, the people of Elqosh graze their cows, keep chicken coops, grow vegetables, and cultivate fruit orchards, with far more banal cares. They even pop in to Fassouta to do some petty trade and see a doctor or a dentist.

  The Palestinians of Suhmata were also driven out, though some managed to remain and became internally displaced persons, that is, refugees in their own country. Some of them live in Fassouta and other nearby villages that survived. They flock to the site of Suhmata once a year, on Nakba Day, to commemorate their village that used to be. One has to wonder what is more painful—being totally removed and far away, or having to drive by one’s village every day and see its ruins, while not being allowed to return to it.

  Tens of other villages in the Galilee and hundreds more throughout Palestine suffered the same fate. I thought of their people, knowing that it was only through a fluke of fate that I wasn’t in some miserable refugee camp with them, just one or two hours away, where millions of Palestinians suffer with no hope of coming home. My village is very close to the Lebanese border, and each time I looked over the hills into Lebanon, I would have the surreal feeling of them being so close, yet so far away. Meanwhile, the people who blatantly took their homes and lands lived right next to me, and I had to see them every day going about their business as usual. There doesn’t seem to be much security for the Palestinians remaining, either; some members of the Israeli government and of various academic and intellectual circles in Israel have regularly called for the expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens through “demographic transfer”—code for forced displacement—and other notions, the ultimate aim being to achieve the “purity” of “the Jewish state.” This is done publicly with no shame or reprisal.

  After passing Dayr al-Qasi and Suhmata, I drove by Kfar Vradim, an opulent Jewish community boasting rows of neat villas, lush gardens, fountains, and wide pavements, contrasting sharply with our narrow streets full of potholes and our village completely lacking such amenities. In fact, the differences between Arab villages and Jewish communities in Israel, often lying right next to each other, are so marked that one can immediately tell which is which, just at a glance.

  There are two, equally painful reasons for this. The first is that Palestinian villages evolved organically over hundreds of years, before modern zoning and municipal planning. Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries were never about mass construction of tidy neighborhoods. Their communities and dwellings evolved out of a slower, more organic, deeper connection to the land. These new Jewish communities, by contrast, were built in a planned, methodical way, their homes neat copies of each other, like recently built communities in the West. They seem to have fallen from the sky, in place of the destroyed Palestinian villages, and I see only ugliness in all this beauty and order, because I am reminded when I look at these communities of their unnatural incursion on this land. My mind unwittingly turns to how they came about—by military force and land grabs, and at the cost of ousting another people and taking their place.

  Second, the Israeli state budget allocated for infrastructure and economic development in Arab towns and villages is a fraction of that allo
tted to Jewish ones. So are budgets for health, education, housing, and employment; the list goes on. There is a caveat that the state uses to propagate this practice: government budgets are allocated to each local authority based on the amount of tax revenue collected by that authority, including business and property taxes. With the number of employment initiatives and businesses in Arab municipalities being a bare minimum, the taxes collected are also small, compared with those collected in government-aided Jewish communities. Thus, rather than funding economic development projects in Arab areas, the government allocates smaller budgets to them—in proportion to their economic output—and the vicious cycle continues.

  Palestinian citizens of Israel are in a sorry state, the perpetual underdogs of the system. In 1966, my father, Sabri Jiryis, wrote The Arabs in Israel, a book that became a landmark document about the Palestinians in Israel and their systematic oppression by the state. Sadly, the core message of the book still applies today, fifty years later. Israel’s military regime inside the state itself has long ended, but its attitudes toward its Palestinian citizens are largely the same. We are seen as the enemy, a fifth column, a demographic threat. Our supposed equality enshrined by law translates to a system of institutionalized discrimination against us that spreads its tentacles into every aspect of our lives. Few in Israel question this discrimination, and only the long-battered civil society organizations put together one report after another. For me, it was another fact of life that I swallowed, and drove on.

  By the time I got to work, I’d already sunk into that deep state of alienation that marks every breath I take in this country. My work interactions added to the mix. I could never overcome my intimidation at working with Israelis, no matter how hard I tried. I was the only Arab among thirty or so Jewish employees, but it wasn’t this that intimidated me: it was the feeling I had every day that I was “lucky,” somehow singled out, to be there—as though I had no right to such a job. Although many Palestinians, all Israeli citizens like myself, hold professional jobs in Israel, the majority are systematically poorer, forced, for generations, through practices of the state, to survive through menial or marginal work. Construction, for example, is one of the largest industries to employ Palestinians in Israel, as is manufacturing. Palestinians are largely excluded from senior or well-paying positions in private corporations or public institutions; few Arab engineers are hired, for example, into the Electricity Authority or the telecommunications companies, and they are completely excluded from the defense and aviation industries, among others. I had been so conditioned to the near impossibility of finding a good job as a Palestinian that, when it happened, I could hardly believe it. My family and friends were astounded when they asked about my salary; what was normal by Jewish standards was considered a fortune in our community.