Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  “Ten?” she said, hazarding a guess.

  I was aghast. “Ten? Is that common?”

  “In this village?” she said. “Yes.”

  Mahmoud lives in a village called Beit Fajjar, a center of production for a type of limestone known as meleke or Jerusalem stone, depending on whether you’re Palestinian or Israeli (in Israel-Palestine, even the rocks are political). His father, like most of the men in the village, is employed as a stonecutter. The village is close to Kibbutz Migdal Oz, part of a cluster of Israeli settlements known as Gush Etzion, so close in fact that the young Israeli peace activist who had accompanied me to Beit Fajjar stopped on Mahmoud’s family’s doorstep, shaking his head in surprise.

  He pointed at a nearby hillside. The building we saw belonged to a women’s seminary on the kibbutz where his wife, a human rights attorney, had studied when she was younger.

  “I had no idea that it was so close,” he said.

  Curious to see how far apart the two villages were, I input their names into Google Maps. I judged the distance as no more than a couple of kilometers apart, and I could see clearly the road that connected the two. Google, however, was stumped. Sorry, we could not calculate driving directions from Migdal Oz to Beit Fajjar. Nor could it calculate walking distance, though I could have set out across the paths and fields and reached the kibbutz in less than half an hour.

  We turned back to the house. Parked in front of the house was a beat-up old car. On the bumper was a Hebrew sticker: jews love jews.

  “It’s a right-wing Israeli Jewish unity thing,” my friend told me.

  “But why is it on a car in a Palestinian village?”

  He shrugged. “His family must have bought a used car from someone in one of the settlements.”

  Before I began interviewing arrested children and the lawyers who represent them, I assumed that the arrests were merely military responses to criminal behavior like rock throwing and stabbings. What I came to understand was that the arrest of children like Mahmoud is more than a series of responses to specific incidents. It’s an integral part of the system through which the IDF ensures the safety of the settlers.

  About four hundred thousand Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, a conflict zone. They have built houses and schools, opened shopping malls, and founded tech companies, all the while surrounded by approximately 2.9 million Palestinians, who consider them to be invaders and enemies. Over the last seven years of occupation, the average number of settlers killed each year has been less than five. When one stops to consider both the closeness of these communities and the extent of the enmity, what’s striking is not the fact that there have been occasional outbreaks of violence, but that more Israelis have not been killed.

  The relative safety of the four hundred thousand settlers (and the two hundred thousand more in East Jerusalem) represents a remarkable Israeli military achievement, one accomplished by means of a two-pronged system of control: collective punishment and mass intimidation. The arrest of children like Karim and Mahmoud serves both ends.

  The majority of the Palestinian children arrested or detained by the IDF every year live in villages that are, like Beit Fajjar, within two kilometers of an Israeli settlement. It is in these villages where the IDF must be most proactive in order to protect the surrounding settlers. It must come down hard on any infraction in order to intimidate the population as a whole. To do so, it has at its disposal a wide variety of restrictive laws. In the West Bank, any gathering of more than ten people is considered a protest, and all protests are forbidden.

  The IDF discourages resistance by responding firmly to each incident, be it stone throwing or, in Mahmoud’s case, the attempt to set fire to a field that the IDF has co-opted as a firing range. When an incident occurs, the not unreasonable assumption is made that the guilty party or parties are boys and young men between the ages of twelve and thirty. The Israel Security Agency, also known as Shin Bet or Shabak, possesses a wealth of information about every Palestinian village within the close proximity of a settlement. Shabak officers know who the residents are, what their political affiliations are, who has an arrest record or has been previously detained. More important, the Shabak has a stable of informants, including children, recruited either through inducements like the proffering of work permits to their fathers, or through threats. Shabak officers have been known to threaten the arrest of sisters and mothers if their targets hesitate to become informants. Estimates are that there are tens of thousands if not more informants in the West Bank. This vast informant network not only provides information, but also disempowers resistance by sowing distrust within communities. It is difficult for people to organize when they do not know whom to trust.

  Mahmoud’s name was likely given to the Shabak by an informant. The Shabak officer then added it, along with others, to an arrest list. It was the local IDF commander’s job to find and arrest Mahmoud and the other boys on the list.

  Mahmoud dropped out of school when he was young. He is thus easy to find: he is almost always at home. Nonetheless, the IDF arrested him and the other boys on their list in the middle of the night.

  Night raids are terrifying, especially to children. Moreover, continual sleep deprivation causes tremendous psychological harm. For these reasons, in 2013, UNICEF recommended that arrests of minors be carried out during the day. In response, the Israeli military introduced a pilot program in which minors would receive written summons to appear in court rather than arrested in the middle of the night. The program was suspended within half a year and appears now to be discontinued, though even during the period when it was in effect, these summonses, meant to alleviate the trauma of middle-of-the-night raids, were often issued in a way that made a mockery of the program. For example, Military Court Watch documented a case in March 2015 in which a military unit banged on a family’s door at two in the morning to issue a verbal summons to their fourteen-year-old son. Nearly half of the arrests of Palestinian children continue to be made in the middle of the night, inspiring fear and terror, especially among children.

  The IDF engages in night raids in part because they are safer. If soldiers roll into a village when people are sleeping, they are less likely to encounter resistance. But equally important is the fact that night raids degrade the fabric of society and subdue the population. Being woken again and again in the middle of the night is exhausting and demoralizing for the entire family and for their neighbors, not merely for the child arrested. Exhausted and demoralized people are incapable of organizing a trip to the grocery store, let alone a campaign of resistance.

  On the night of Mahmoud’s arrest, after his father opened the door, soldiers, as many as ten of them, streamed into the house. Lights attached to the ends of their weapons lit up the room, dazzling the eyes of the nine children, whom they dragged from their beds. The soldiers were masked, their faces covered in black cloth. These masks, part of an IDF soldier’s military-issued kit, have become a feature of Israeli raids, as soldiers seek both to terrify and to avoid being recognized on social media.

  Mahmoud’s family is poor. Eleven people live crammed into a few small rooms. At night some of the children sleep on the worn and faded foam couches flanking the walls of the bare front room. In a cage hanging from the ceiling are two small birds, which chirped throughout my interview with Mahmoud and his family. Listening to the birds, I wondered if they were struck silent when the soldiers dragged the family from their beds and gathered them in this room or whether they’d continued their merry chirping. During our interview, Mahmoud’s older sister served me bitter coffee, and then when she noticed that I took only the smallest of sips, a glass of pink juice so sweet that it made my teeth ache. As we spoke, Mahmoud’s mother dandled his infant brother on her knee. The baby was shy, but when Mahmoud leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek, he smiled and patted his brother’s face with a plump, sticky hand.

  When the soldiers burst into the house, the baby began wailing frantically. Mahmoud’s parent
s, panicked at the prospect of one or more of their children being arrested, shouted at the soldiers, adding to the cacophony. Over the hubbub, the commander read Mahmoud’s name from a scrap of paper.

  Like Karim, Mahmoud’s hands were zip tied, in his case so tightly that for three days his wrists were bruised and red. He and another boy from the village, a twelve-year-old, were loaded into a troop carrier and taken to a nearby police station. In a strange way it was a comfort to Mahmoud to be with the frightened young boy. It forced him to take on the role of older brother, to comfort and reassure.

  For days Mahmoud was interrogated. He was given very little water and food. He was blindfolded and yelled at, slapped and pushed. The interrogators demanded that he confess to attempting to set fire to the field, to throwing stones, and to a variety of other crimes. Beit Fajjar is a town notorious to the IDF. The young men and boys of Beit Fajjar not only throw stones at passing cars, but they have fired weapons at them, and have even set pipe bombs. They make these pipe bombs using gunpowder gleaned from spent Israeli shells that they collect on firing ranges like the field Mahmoud was accused of setting alight. The interrogators asked Mahmoud if he had ever made or thrown a pipe bomb.

  Though Mahmoud insisted to me that he remained stoic in the face of interrogation, I could not help but wonder if he was blustering. It is a rare adult who can withstand interrogation for long, and Mahmoud is only seventeen, and illiterate. Though interrogators are required to inform minors of their right to silence, only a small minority of minors report hearing a warning. Moreover, even when they are informed of their right to silence, it’s often in a way that precludes exercising it. In one case, a child told Military Court Watch that after one interrogator told him he had a right to remain silent, another told him that he would be raped if he did not confess. On his own with the interrogator, it’s likely that Mahmoud, like the vast majority of arrested children, made an incriminating statement.

  Eventually, Mahmoud was taken to Ofer Prison and brought before a military judge. The Israeli military provides no legal services to detainees in the West Bank, not even to children. Representation thus falls to the Palestinian Authority or to NGOs supported by contributions from the United States and Europe, and to private Palestinian attorneys who eke out a living ushering children like Mahmoud through the military court system. The lawyer Mahmoud’s parents hired, whom he did not see until he arrived at court for the first time, told him to “confess and apologize.” He would pay a fine and serve a minimum sentence. Fighting the charge would only result in a much longer sentence, a larger fine, and increased attorneys’ fees. Eventually, the family managed to scrounge together enough to pay the lawyer and the fine, and Mahmoud was released.

  When he got out, however, there was no one waiting for him. The village had been closed by the IDF. The closing of shops and roads after an arrest, the imposition of what amounts to house arrest on an entire village, has proved effective at controlling the population. With their livelihood threatened, shop owners and others turn on families they suspect of engaging in acts of resistance. Whether those accused in fact committed the offenses is less important than the creation of a general climate of fear, anger, and distrust that quashes rebellion. That this type of collective punishment is a war crime has not dissuaded the IDF from frequently engaging in it.

  Mahmoud thus made his way home from Ofer Prison alone. In the wake of his arrest, his mother tells me that Mahmoud was initially quiet. He stayed in bed, sleeping. He avoided his friends and family. But eventually he began arguing with his parents. He told them that he was angry at them for paying his bail, but the anger seemed to his family more an expression of power than a specific complaint. To this younger son, having been arrested felt like a rite of passage. Since his arrest he has begun feeling and acting like a man with the right to control his family, especially his older sister.

  Though Mahmoud’s sister laughed when she described his behavior, she was clearly frustrated by it. “He practices his authority on me!” she said. “He refuses to let me out of the house. He won’t let me use my phone. He says my friends are a bad influence.”

  To these complaints Mahmoud replied with a smile and a shrug.

  Karim, younger than Mahmoud and with Issa’s example to guide him, would never attempt this kind of control over his own older sister, herself a political activist. If anything, he is deferential to her. Both boys are quiet, but Karim’s silence feels to me like a boy’s shyness, rather than a teenager’s surliness.

  My conversation with Karim in Issa’s garden is interrupted by a squad of Israeli soldiers. Somehow alerted to my presence in the garden—perhaps by Baruch Marzel or one of the members of his household, who seem perpetually to be perched in their windows, glaring down at the community center—the soldiers demand to see my papers and the papers of the young peace activist who accompanies me. We were careful to verify ahead of time that our presence was permitted, and our familiarity with the various orders regarding military secure zones seems to annoy the commander.

  While they rifle through our documents, Issa shows the soldiers how the electrical wires to his home had been cut the night before. The commander initially gives him an argument. Perhaps the wire frayed? Issa shows him the clean slice. Perhaps Issa did it himself, the commander says. By then I have taken out my phone and am taping the interaction. A young soldier tells me not to record his face, and I apologize but continue. He turns his back to me and shrugs his shoulders up to his chin, as if to hide within his own body. I feel a flash of pity for this young man, very nearly a boy himself. For most IDF draftees, service in Hebron is a function of bad luck, not choice. Perhaps this young man, like the one escorting me, will be so infuriated and horrified by his experience in Hebron that he will become a peace activist himself.

  Eventually, Karim and I leave the garden and walk through the high brush to his house. He lives very close to Issa, but the road between the two houses is blocked by settlers, so to get from one to the other we must navigate a circuitous path, up and down and around until I’m no longer even sure where we started. When we reach his home, he introduces me to his mother and his lively older sister, who take me into their main room, and sit with me on large foam couches like the ones in Mahmoud’s family’s house. It is Karim who goes into the kitchen to prepare coffee and juice, not his sister, even Karim who rushes into the bathroom to prepare a bucket of water for me to use to flush the toilet. Baruch Marzel, in his house perched directly above, can turn on his taps any time of the day or night, but Karim’s family’s water runs only a couple of hours a day. I use as little as possible, to spare them having to haul more.

  After a while Karim and I take leave of his mother and sister and head down the hill, where Issa has met up with the group of writers with whom I came to Hebron. Karim and Issa lead us on a walking tour of their beleaguered city that begins at one checkpoint, at which Issa is stopped, trapped for nearly a quarter of an hour in the turnstile like an animal in a cage, while the soldiers laugh and make a show of ignoring our pleas for his release, and ends in another, where Karim is pulled aside.

  “What are you doing?” I ask the police officers, themselves young men only a few years older than Karim. “Why are you stopping him?”

  They refuse to answer my questions, just continue to search and question Karim. Issa begins arguing with the police officers, to no avail.

  “Are they arresting Karim?” I ask Issa. “He hasn’t done anything!”

  Issa kindly refrains from stating the obvious. Instead he says, “I think it’s best if you go.”

  “You want us to leave?” I ask. “But won’t it be safer for Karim if we stay?”

  “I think they will hold him until you leave. And then they will let him go.”

  I look back at Karim, whose expression bears the same implacable stoicism I saw on Issa when he was trapped in the turnstile.

  “Good-bye, Karim!” I call out.

  He smiles and waves.

  Two
Stories, So Many Stories

  Colum McCann

  “What is the source of our first suffering?” It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. . . . It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.

  —Gaston Bachelard

  Come now. Quietly. Along this suspenseful street. It is early evening and there is a November chill. Two or three stars hang perilously over Beit Jala. The lights of Bethlehem seep yellow in the distance, fading into the dark hills. Tighten yourself a little against the cold. Watch your breath make a little argument against the gathering dark. Up the hill. The shops are closed. The day draws itself into silence: no church bells, no call of the muezzin. A couple of cars and a motorbike are parked outside a four-storey apartment building. Come now, past a building site, around the side of the apartments, up the outside stairwell. Careful. It is not well lit. A hint of light reflects from the white brickwork. Nothing fancy. Nothing ruined either. The walls are bare. A place you could find just about anywhere. The fluorescents flicker in the ground-floor stairwell. You take in the smell of stale smoke. The sharp tang of coffee. No elevator here. You climb the stairs. One flight, two. Your footsteps echo. The sign on the door reads parents circle. You step inside. More colour here. More brightness. Music from the radio. Posters on the wall. Inside, at the head of a long table, sit two middle-aged men. One dark skinned, one pale. One thin, the other robust. They sit close to each other, shoulders almost touching. Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. They lean forward to speak. Gather around. Come now. Listen. The darkness outside is descending.