Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  “My name is Rami Elhanan. I’m a sixty-six-year-old graphic designer, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite. My mother was born in the Old City of Jerusalem, from an ultra-Jewish, ultraorthodox family. My father came here in 1946, after spending one year in Auschwitz. He was a quiet man. He tried to make a life here. He was very badly wounded in the ’48 war in the Old City. My mother was the nurse who took care of him. They fell in love and had a family. Things were straightforward enough, I suppose. I grew up, an ordinary kid, a Jew, an Israeli, a human being.

  “The story I want to tell you starts, and ends, on one particular day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. For us Jews this is the day when we ask forgiveness for our sins. On this very day forty-two years ago I was a very young soldier fighting the October ’73 war in Sinai. Like any war, it was a horrible thing. I eventually fought in three wars. No good thing comes from any war. But in ’73 we started it with a company of eleven tanks—and finished it with only three. My job included bringing in ammunition and taking out the dead and wounded. I lost some of my very close friends. I saw their stretchers turn red. I emerged from the war angry and bitter, a disappointed young man with one determination: to detach myself from any kind of involvement or commitment.

  “I got out of the army and finished my studies at Bezalel Academy of Art. I got married and I had four kids. One of these children was my daughter, Smadar. She was born on the eve of Yom Kippur, in September 1983, in a hospital in Jerusalem. Her name is taken from the Bible, from the Song of Solomon, grape of the vine, the opening of the flower. A sparkling, vivid, and joyful little girl. Very beautiful. An excellent student, a swimmer, a dancer too. An amazing child; we used to call her ‘the Princess.’

  “My three boys and this little princess, we lived what seemed to be a perfect, sheltered, secured life in Jerusalem with our house in the Rehavia neighbourhood. My wife, Nurit, taught in the Hebrew University. In a way, you could say that we lived inside a bubble, completely detached from the outside world. I was doing graphic design—posters and ads—for the right wing, for the left wing, whoever paid money. Life was good. There weren’t many complications.

  “And this went on, until about eighteen years ago, on the fourth of September, 1997, when this bubble of ours was shattered into millions of pieces by three Palestinian suicide bombers, who blew themselves up in the middle of Ben Yehuda Street, in the center of Jerusalem.

  “I have told this story so many times, but there is always something new. Memories hit you all the time. A butterfly. A book that is opened. A door that is closed, a beeping sound. Anything at all.

  “They killed five people that day, including three little girls. One of these girls was my Smadari. It was a Thursday afternoon. She was out buying books.

  “At first when you hear about an explosion, any explosion, you keep hoping that maybe this time the finger of fate will not turn towards you. Then gradually you find yourself running in the streets trying to find your daughter, your child, your Princess—but she has completely vanished. You go from hospital to hospital, from police station to police station. You do this for many long and frustrating hours until eventually, very late at night, you and your wife find yourselves in the morgue. This finger, it points at you, right between your eyes, and you see this sight which you will never be able to forget for the rest of your life. Your daughter. On a steel tray. Your daughter. Fourteen years old.

  “The funeral was held in Kibbutz Nachshon. Smadar was buried next to her grandfather, General Matti Peled, a true fighter for peace, a professor, a Knesset member. People came from everywhere in this mosaic of a country, Jews and Arabs, representatives of the settlers, representatives from the parliament, representatives of Arafat, from abroad, everywhere.

  “And then she is buried. Your daughter. Smadar. Grape of the vine.

  “You come back home, the house is filled with thousands and thousands of people coming to pay respect to you, offering condolences. These are the seven days of shivah. You are enveloped by these thousands of people in a very clever, traditional way of easing your way back to the new life. On the eighth day, everybody goes back to their normal, everyday businesses, and suddenly you’re left alone. Without your daughter. She is not there. She is just not there.

  “You need to wake up, to stand up and face yourself. You have to make a decision. What are you going to do now, with this new, unbearable burden on your shoulders? What are you going to do with this new personality of yours, which you never thought could have existed? What are you going to do with this anger, that eats you alive from within?

  “There are only two ways to choose; the first one is obvious. When someone kills your fourteen-year-old girl, you are so angry that you want to get even. This is natural. This is human. And this is the way most people choose to go—the way of revenge and retaliation. This way creates this endless cycle of violence which never stops. A bullet leads to another bullet. A suicide bomber to a rocket-propelled grenade.

  “But then after a while you start thinking and asking yourself questions, you know: We are human beings, we are not animals, we can use our brains. And you ask yourself, Will killing anyone bring my daughter back? Will killing the whole world bring her back? Will causing pain to someone ease the unbearable pain that you are suffering? Well, the answer is easy. Dust returns to dust. That is all.

  “Foolishly, at the beginning, I thought I could go on with my life, pretending as if nothing had happened. I tried to lead a normal life, go back to my studio. But nothing was normal anymore. I wasn’t the same person.

  “She was gone.

  “So in a very gradual, complicated process, you come to the other option, which is the much more difficult option: trying to understand what happened to your daughter. Why did it happen? How could such a horrible thing take place? What could cause someone to be that angry, that mad, that desperate, that hopeless, that he is willing to blow himself up alongside a fourteen-year-old girl? How can you possibly understand that instinct? And then, the most important question of them all: What can you do, personally, in order to prevent this unbearable pain for other people, other families? Well it’s not easy, it takes time.

  “About a year later, I met a man who changed my life completely. His name was Yitzhak Frankenthal, a religious Jew, you know, with a kippa on his head. And, you know, we tend to put people into drawers, stigmatize people? We tend to judge people by the way they dress, and I was certain that this guy was a fascist, a right-winger, that he eats Arabs for breakfast. I prepared myself to fight him, to argue with him, but we started talking and he told me about his son Arik, a soldier who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994. And then he told me about this organization that he created—people who lost their loved ones, but still wanted peace. And I remembered that Yitzhak had been among those thousands and thousands of people who came to my house a year before during those seven days of shivah, and I went crazy. I was so angry with him, I asked him, How could you do it? How could you step into someone’s house who just lost a loved one, and talk about peace? How dare you?

  “And he—being the great man that he is—was not insulted by my rage. He just invited me over to watch a meeting of these crazy people, and I got curious. I said okay. I went to see. I stood outside. Very detached, very cynical. As I always am. And I watched those people coming down from the buses.

  “The first group to come down from the buses were, for me—as an Israeli—living legends. People I used to look up to, admire. I had read about them in the newspapers. They had lost loved ones and were searching for ways of peace. And I never thought that one day I would be one of them. I saw peace activists, Holocaust survivors, so many others.

  “This took the lids from my eyes.

  “But then I saw something else, something completely new to me, to my eyes and to my mind, to my heart, to my brain. I was standing there, and suddenly I saw some Palestinian bereaved families walking towards me. This flabbergasted me. The enemy. They were shaking my hand for peace, huggi
ng me, crying with me. I was so deeply touched, so deeply moved. It was like a hammer on my head cracking me open.

  “This was extraordinary. An organization of the bereaved. But even more extraordinary, they were both Israeli and Palestinian. Together. In one room. Sharing their sorrow. What sort of madness is this?

  “I remember seeing this old Arab lady coming down from the bus, in this black, traditional Palestinian dress. And she had a picture of her six-year-old kid clutched to her chest, exactly like my wife carrying the name of our daughter, Smadari, on hers.

  “You see, I was forty-seven years old at the time, and I’m ashamed to admit it was the first time in my life, to that point, that I’d met Palestinians as human beings. Not just workers in the streets, not just caricatures in the newspapers, not just human transparencies, not just terrorists, but human beings—human beings—people who carry the same burden that I carry, people that suffer exactly as I suffer. An equality of pain. I’m not a religious person—I have no way of explaining what happened to me back then. All I can tell you is that from that moment until today, I have devoted my life to going everywhere possible, to talk to anyone possible, people who want to listen, even people who will not listen, to convey this very basic and very simple message, which says, We are not doomed.

  “And you can quote me on that.”

  The world presents its ironies at the oddest times: from outside, the sound of a police siren ripping along Virgin Mary Street.

  “They’ve come to get you,” smiles Bassam, glancing at Rami.

  “Oh they can have me,” says Rami, his face moving wide into a grin.

  It is not entirely out of the realm of possibility, since Rami, as an Israeli, is here illegally: he is not allowed to travel into this part of Beit Jala. He doesn’t care. He gets here on his motorbike, taking backroads if he must. There are always ways around the checkpoints. All the walls—even that Wall, a few hundred yards away, snaking its way towards Bethlehem—are breachable. Bassam, too, needs a special permit to enter Israel.

  The siren fades away and we are left with the fluorescent hum of the lights above.

  On the table there is coffee, some small pastries, a number of green napkins. Rami and Bassam have sat by each other thousands of times, telling the same story to anyone open enough to listen.

  Most stories eventually die by repetition, but not theirs. Their stories are kept alive by the brutal reality that people are still dying outside the windows. The only way they know how to confront this is to share their experience—and so they do so over and over again. They have learned that the art of the story is getting others to listen: schoolchildren, dignitaries, teachers, army officers, fighters, politicians, you, me. It is unthinkable to them that they could live without the ability to tell their stories. They are, in a way, learning how to restore themselves at the same time. They braid in and out of each other, woven on a loom of possibility. They have found something beyond grief. And so they somehow vault death. It is as if they have stepped forward from the pages of the Mu’allaqat: Is there any hope that this desolation can bring me solace?

  The two men glance at each other. One can’t help but feel that there is someone else telling their story too. One child went out for books. The other—as you will soon discover—went out for candy.

  “My name is Bassam Aramin. I’m a terrorist. Just kidding. Or maybe I’m not kidding, that’s how many people see me, many people want it to be true. When I was a kid, I thought it was a punishment from God to be a Palestinian, or a Muslim or an Arab, because it’s very difficult to grow up under occupation. People you don’t understand, in a language you don’t understand, they come to your village and occupy. Suddenly you become a fighter or a warrior, which is not your dream, not your mission.

  “It’s a tragedy that as Palestinians, we need to prove that we are human beings. Not only to the Israelis, unfortunately it’s also for the Arabs, for our brothers and sisters. To the Americans, to the Europeans too. We have to prove that we are human beings. Why is that?

  “When I was a kid in Hebron I fought the occupation by raising the Palestinian flag in our playground. To make the Israelis crazy. They hated us raising our flag. We never felt safe. We were always running from jeeps to avoid the soldiers beating us. Our homes were invaded and children I knew were killed. At the age of twelve I joined a demonstration where a boy was shot by a soldier. I watched this boy die in front of me.

  “From that moment I developed a deep need for revenge. I became part of a group whose mission was to get rid of the catastrophe that had come to our town. We called ourselves freedom fighters, but the outside world called us terrorists. At first we just threw stones and empty bottles, but when we came across some discarded hand grenades in a cave, we decided to hurl them at the Israeli jeeps. Two of them exploded. Luckily no one was injured, because we didn’t know how to use them properly, but we were caught and in 1985, at the age of seventeen, I received a seven-year prison sentence. It’s a long story; a long seven years.

  “We had a mission in jail, because the Israelis had a mission too. Their purpose was to kill our humanity. Our mission was to survive and to protect our humanity because we are human beings. On October 1, 1987, over a hundred of us—all teenage boys—were waiting to go into the dining room when the alarms suddenly went off. About a hundred heavily armed soldiers suddenly appeared and ordered us to strip naked. A very embarrassing thing, to be stripped of everything, first our dignity, then everything else. They beat us until we could hardly stand. I was held the longest and beaten the hardest.

  “What struck me was that the soldiers were beating us without hatred, because for them this was just a training exercise and they saw us as objects. We were not human.

  “As I was being beaten, I remembered a movie I’d seen the year before about the Holocaust. At the time I’d been happy that Hitler had killed six million Jews. I remember wishing that he’d killed them all, because then I would never have been sent to prison. But after a few minutes, I found myself secretly crying in sympathy with those people, naked people. I’m a very simple man. I tried to convince myself that it was just a movie; there are no human beings that would do this to other human beings. It seemed impossible.

  “It is always very difficult to recognize that pain of your enemy—in our case, the Palestinians, to recognize the pain of the Israelis, or the Jews who occupied us. For us the Holocaust was a big lie. So we chose not to know, and to deny it. But this movie, it pushed me to understand them. I found myself crying and feeling angry that the Jews were being herded into gas chambers without fighting back. If they knew they were going to die, why didn’t they scream out? I tried to hide my tears from the other prisoners: they wouldn’t have understood why I was crying about the pain of my oppressors. It was the first time I felt empathy.

  “But now—as I was being beaten a year later—I remembered the movie and I started screaming out at them: ‘Murderers! Nazis! Oppressors!’ And as a consequence, I felt no pain.

  “This beating made me realize that we had to preserve our humanity—our right to laugh and our right to cry—in order to save ourselves. I also slowly realized that much of the Israeli oppression was because of the Holocaust, and I decided to try to understand who the Jews were. This led to a conversation with a prison guard. The guards all thought of us as terrorists and we hated them, but this guard asked me, ‘How can someone quiet like you become a terrorist?’ I replied, ‘No, you’re the terrorist. I’m a freedom fighter.’

  “He was from a settler family, but he really believed that we, the Palestinians, were the settlers, not the Israelis. I said, ‘If you can convince me that we are the settlers, then I’ll declare this in front of all the prisoners.’ He was shocked. He said he never met anyone like me before.

  “It was the start of a dialogue and a friendship. The start of a discovery. Some months later the guard came back and sat down to talk to me. His face was changed somehow. He said he understood now that we were not the sett
lers. We were the oppressed. He had not recognized this before. He even became a supporter of the Palestinian struggle. From then on he always treated us with respect. He allowed me to drink tea from a glass, not plastic, and once even smuggled in two big bottles of Coca-Cola, which I shared with the other prisoners. And he protected me from the other soldiers when they went to beat me, shouting, ‘He has a weak heart! If he dies it will be on your heads.’

  “Seeing how this happened without force—through simple dialogue—made me understand that the only way to achieve peace was through nonviolence. Our dialogue enabled us both to see each other’s purity of heart and our good intent.

  “Does this sound impossible? I don’t care. Nothing is impossible.

  “I got released in 1992 and I still believed in our armed struggle. It was the time of the Oslo accords and there was a great feeling of hope for a two-state solution. But it never happened because the politicians said we weren’t ready for it. I think if I hadn’t had such strong beliefs and principles, anger and hatred would have taken over again. There was no conflict like our conflict. We would never solve it, we would continue hating each other forever, even if it’s not written in the Quran and in the Bible.

  “In 1994, I had my first child. When you think as a father it’s a different issue, because you have more responsibility. Not because you became a coward. But sometimes you go to the other side, because for your kids you want to sacrifice yourself in a different way. I saw Palestinian kids throwing flowers instead of stones when the Israeli troops were leaving Jenin. All of this led me to totally change my mind. I decided that peace would only work if we could begin to make a connection with the Israelis. Because for more than one hundred years we have tried to kill each other, defeat each other, tear each other apart. And what do we have? Israel is not safe, and Palestine is not free. And every day, every week, every year, more blood, more pain, more victims, and we don’t even think about it.