Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  “So I decided my son will never go to the Israeli jails, and he will never throw stones. Then I started to be active in my society, on the Palestinian side, saying that we need to change our way to try to achieve our goal.

  “Don’t get me wrong. It’s the same goal: it’s to end the Israeli occupation. We’ll never accept it. We will never accept it even after one thousand years. But we have to do it differently. We have to use the force of our humanity. A new sort of strength.

  “It wasn’t until 2005 that some of us who believed in nonviolence started meeting in secret with former Israeli soldiers, the refuseniks. I was among four Palestinian representatives. You can’t imagine the first meeting. Here, in another part of Beit Jala. For us they were criminals, killers, enemies. And for them, we were the same. We were meeting as true enemies who now—somehow—wanted to speak.

  “One of them, in fact, was Rami’s son, Elik. That’s how our families met.

  “These young Israelis were refusing to fight, not for the sake of the Palestinian people, but for the sake of their own society, their own morality. We too were not acting to save Israeli lives, but to prevent our society from suffering even more. It was only later that we both came to feel a responsibility for each other’s people.

  “Essentially we discovered that we were the same. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing—peace and security! Of course, each one has a different point of view: they are occupiers; we are under the occupation. We have the right to resist, and to use our struggle. But in the end we are dying, we are killing each other. We had to find another way to survive together.

  “This took time. It took dialogue. We needed to know one another. As I have always said, it’s a disaster to discover the humanity and the nobility of your enemy—because then he is not your enemy anymore.

  “It didn’t happen from the first meeting. It took more than a year of meetings. We started an organization called Combatants for Peace. In the first year we had three hundred members, now we have more than six hundred. Maybe the story could have ended there.

  “But my story has a much darker side to it. On January 16, 2007—two years after Combatants for Peace was founded—my ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was shot and killed in cold blood by a member of the Israeli border police while standing outside her school with some classmates. She was shot with a rubber bullet. An American-made rubber bullet. An American-made M16. There were no demonstrations or violence or intifada going on. She was just shot.

  “The world was appalled by the details of what happened, not least that she had just bought candy at the store. Some details are awful, but sometimes I think that she hadn’t had time to eat it. Just that. She did not have time to eat the candy.

  “Ten years old. A bullet to the back of the head. She fell flat on her face.

  “It took me four and a half years to prove in the civil court that my daughter had been killed with a rubber bullet. My goal has been to bring the soldier responsible to trial, but the Supreme Court decided after four and a half years there was no evidence, so they closed the file for the fourth time. I believe in justice, and many hundreds of my Israeli brothers and Jewish brothers around the world support me. I want to bring this man to justice because he killed my ten-year-old daughter; not because he’s an Israeli and I’m a Palestinian but because my child was not a fighter. She was not a Fatah or Hamas member. She was out buying candy. For there to be reconciliation, and for me to consider forgiveness, Israel has to recognize such crimes.

  “Abir’s murder could have led me down the easy path of hatred and vengeance, but for me there was no return from dialogue and nonviolence. It eventually pushed me to finish my master’s degree in 2011 on the Holocaust in a program in England. And to do this work for peace. After all, it was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter, but one hundred former Israeli soldiers who built a garden in her name at the school where she was murdered.”

  In 1993 the Algerian poet Tahar Djaout was gunned down because—in the language of his attackers—he wielded a fearsome pen. Shortly before he was killed he wrote: “If you keep quiet, you die. If you speak, you die. So, speak and die.”

  The Algerian knew what all men and women finally know: that stories can pry open our rib cages and twist our heart backwards a notch. They can aim a punch at the back of your brain. They can dolphin themselves up out of nowhere and connect us. They are a foothold against despair. They can make the silence breathe.

  Djaout was aware—like Bassam, like Rami—that speaking up and telling stories can make the world a wider place: we become alive in a body, a time, a feeling, a culture, an adventure that is not our own. We get dragged out of our stupor. We speak of experience, however bitter or lacerating. In telling our stories we oppose the awful cruelties of the times and present to the world the profoundest evidence of being alive. At the same time, most of us know that the suffering of the present and the evil of the past are unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness, but that doesn’t take away the need to listen. And to be listened to.

  One story is so many stories.

  So, speak and live—at least until you don’t.

  “It is not our destiny to keep killing each other in this holy land of ours forever,” says Rami, looking across at Bassam, shaking his shoulder. “Even me and this terrorist here.”

  Bassam grins back at the man he calls his brother.

  “The thing I had to learn to understand,” continues Rami, “is that the killer of my daughter is a victim too. He is a victim in many ways, even a victim of himself.”

  “There is nothing worse than losing a child,” says Bassam. “Especially because Abir and Smadar were not fighters. They did not know anything about the war. But you discover that there is no revenge, no point in revenge, because you will never meet your daughter again, not on this earth anyway. It’s ongoing pain, forever, twenty-four hours, every single day of the year. You need to learn how to live with your pain. We don’t want revenge; we want justice.”

  “Most of us Israelis sit in the coffeehouses in Tel Aviv, and we don’t look two hundred meters under our noses what is going on,” says Rami. “The ordinary Israeli needs to know that occupation pays a price. The Palestinians know the price. There is not a single Palestinian house—not a single one—without a dead, without a person wounded, without a prisoner. They live it every instant of their lives. But we Israelis, we don’t want to know. We turn away. We go to the beach. We go to our discos. And in the meantime, the occupation is on, atrocities are on, checkpoints are on, and the settlements—there are more and more and more of them. This is the aim of the occupation: to prevent any possibility of a solution. This is the main purpose of the settlements, and sometimes I’m afraid they have won. I’m afraid that today, to dismantle this war will be difficult, and we will have to think about new ways how to deal with it.”

  “We want to spread a very simple message,” says Bassam, “that we need to share this land with the enemy, as one state or two states or five states or five hundred, otherwise we will share the same lands to dig graves for our kids and our people. The Israelis will never give up their safe place, and we Palestinians will never give up our freedom and our dream to create our own state.”

  “I am speaking as a son of an Auschwitz graduate,” says Rami. “Seventy years ago they took my grandparents to the ovens in Europe. And the world did not lift a finger. And today, seventy years later, while we are massacring each other, the world keeps standing aside. This is a crime! I cannot say it loud enough. This war is a crime against humanity. And standing aside while this crime is being committed is also a crime. Now I don’t ask of people to be pro-Israeli, or to be pro-Palestinian. I demand of them to be pro-peace, to be against injustice, and against this ongoing situation in which one people is dominating another. My personal message is that as a Jew—a Jew with the utmost respect for my people, for my tradition, for my history—ruling and oppressing, and humiliating, and occupyin
g millions and millions of people for so many years, without any democratic right, is not Jewish. Period. And being against the war is not anti-Semitism of any shape or form.”

  The electricity continues to shoot between the two men, their voices helixing together.

  “We need to learn how to live side by side. The main word—the most important word—is the ability to respect the other side. Respect. There is no other alternative. All the others are technical issues: how to prepare a life that will enable you to get up in the morning, send your kid to school, and get him back in one piece.”

  “Don’t call us naive. Don’t call us sentimental. We can change it; we can break, once and for all, this endless cycle of violence and revenge and retaliation. And the only way to do it is simply by talking to each other. Because it will not stop unless we talk. I believe deeply that you can teach yourself to listen. I believe deeply that once you listen to the pain of the other, that you can expect the other to listen to your pain. And then, only then, together we start this very long journey, towards reconciliation, and maybe some kind of peace at the end. This is a very long, bumpy road—no shortcuts—but this is the only way possible, because the other way leads nowhere. The price of the other way is really too horrible.”

  “So this is what we are trying to do, my dear brother beside me, here, and the seven hundred family members of this unique organization of ours, Parents Circle. We bang our heads against this very high wall of hatred and fear that divides these two nations today, and we put cracks in it. Cracks of hope. Small cracks. Tiny ones even. A spiderweb of them. There is no alternative, the alternative is really too horrible. Do we get disappointed? Yes, every day we are disappointed. But the deeper the engagement, the greater the ability for disappointment. This is a simple truth. We must. We absolutely must.”

  “We need to meet each other on the ground, to enjoy this land, otherwise we will meet each other under the ground. In the graves. In the dirt.”

  “I always quote Martin Luther King: ‘In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.’”

  “We need to tell stories.”

  “We need to hear stories.”

  “Listen to one another.”

  “Not underground.”

  “Up here . . .”

  “You can’t overcome hatred with more hatred.”

  “We refuse to be enemies.”

  “You must understand: there is no difference between me and my brother here. We are not talking two different narratives.”

  “What makes us so close is the price we both paid.”

  “We have an enormous ally on our side, which is the power of our pain.”

  “And in the end we will win them over with our humanity.”

  “You can quote us on that.”

  “Both of us.”

  Outside the darkness has descended. Nighttime in Beit Jala. You reach for a green napkin on the table. A souvenir on which both men have signed their names. On it they have written their names and the words Harness the power of pain.

  You walk out of the office and down the apartment block stairs. The sky is fierce with stars. Rami and Bassam stand together. They kiss four times on the cheek. Rami gets on his motorbike. He will have to negotiate the checkpoints and pass the Wall on the way home to Jerusalem. It doesn’t worry him: he will have no trouble, he knows the way.

  “There are only two types of people who can get past that Wall—the peacemakers and the terrorists.”

  He pulls on his helmet and waves good-bye to Bassam.

  Bassam lights a cigarette and walks up the hilly portion of the street towards his car. He too will drive to Jerusalem. He will take a different road, the only one he is allowed to take back to his home in Anata, driving south at first, forced, for a while, in the wrong direction. He has a slight limp. You think for a moment that it might have something to do with the way he was beaten in prison, but you find out later that he contracted polio as a child. He was given a shorter prison sentence for his attack as a juvenile because he only posed as a lookout. He was unable to run fast. He might have spent twice as long in prison but for that.

  Another irony, another siren on Virgin Mary Street.

  Bassam bends down to the car door, inserts the key, climbs in. The rear lights of Rami’s motorbike top the hill.

  The two men go in opposite directions, the lights of their vehicles spraying in the dark. They will be back again in a few days, to tell their stories again. Again and again and again. Until their dying days. Or until the days themselves are dead.

  You can probably quote them on that, but for now they are gone.

  H2

  Maylis de Kerangal

  Leaping over, slipping along, climbing up. Nour hurries through the night and I follow close behind. She cuts across the fields, reaches a stone enclosure, and pushes open a metal door to reveal a messy courtyard surrounding a house with dark windows, finds an opening in the wall opposite, and climbs a mound of dirt and rocks that turns into a path. I can’t see a thing, and I am careful not to let her get too far ahead, to keep the pale glimmer of her pink headscarf in sight. A hole to be jumped over, then a slope of stones and roots to fumble down, trying to find handholds. Nour turns around, takes my hand to help me down—her own, delicate as a child’s, is impressively strong. This leads us to a second rear courtyard, identical to the first—same cement floor, same darkness pierced by cold light, same beat-up, broken-down objects scattered randomly about—and again the same diagonal route, again the gap in a wall, again the dirt track. Nour turns on the flashlight on her cell phone, a glowing Samsung, and now the beam of light cuts a trail for us, makes the black beetles scuttle away and reveals the dust on the leaves of the bushes. The vegetation has become thicker. Nour protects her face, ducks her head so as not to catch her scarf in the branches, and I watch my step too. Finally the thickets become sparser, the grass reappears in the moonlight, these are the last few yards, somewhere very near a dog unleashes a fit of furious barking and I sense the young girl speeding up. She races up a staircase and jumps into a third rear courtyard, the door of the house is open, we go inside.

  Nour. She is a young girl of twenty-two who looks sixteen. Our eyes met for the first time in front of the building that houses the facilities of the Youth Against Settlements organization on the heights of Hebron. An expressive face framed by a pale pink headscarf, dark eyes, doe-like lashes, pearly skin, delicate hands with polished nails, an upright, proud figure. What immediately strikes me is the restrained intensity she possesses, the determination and wisdom apparent in her every gesture, in her every word, spoken in her slow and perfect English. She is someone who, for example, will always pause before responding, for a while, two or three seconds, and this pause, borne of a desire to nuance or from a sense of reserve, imbues her words with resolve. It is with her, in her family home, that I have come to spend these three days.

  Wi-Fi. Inside the house is bare, basic, tiled, and spacious. Nour’s parents, Hisham and Fatima, are in the living room with her little sister Aisha. Big armchairs are placed side by side against the walls all the way around the room. The father has folded up his long legs and is sitting cross-legged, his computer on his knees; the mother is braiding her little girl’s hair, who is fidgeting at her feet. Nour goes over to kiss them. She has taken off her scarf and her long dress and appears now as a teenager, her hair in a bob, dressed in long shorts and a gray cotton T-shirt. The evening stretches out in familial intimacy; it is quiet, the boys aren’t home yet. Times are difficult here: Hisham, the father, whom Nour affectionately calls Baba—daddy in the local Arabic dialect—rolls his r’s and mops his brow, his eyes weary, his skin pallid, his smile sad. I notice his lifeless hand. Learning that I am French, he tries a Skype call with one of his cousins who lives just outside Toulouse while Nour sends WhatsApp messages and Aisha, curious as a cat, circles around me. At around eleven o’clock the mother serves us tea and cakes, then we look at photos of
the eldest daughter, who lives in Jordan, in Amman. It gets later; the little girl is sent to bed, but she drags her feet, returns, demands that we take photos using a homemade selfie stick. I like how she seizes the slightest opportunity to play, laugh, have fun, stay with us, and with me, the main attraction for this evening. The boys are late, it seems. The parents cannot go to sleep without knowing they are home, they are anxious, it is dangerous outside. Outside is the Tel Rumeida district in the H2 zone of Hebron, and it is not a particularly safe place for young Palestinian boys.

  Enclave. Hebron is the largest city in the West Bank. Since the ratification of the Hebron agreement in January 1997, the city has been split into two separate yet twinned sectors. The first, named H1, covers 80 percent of the agglomeration and contains more than 160,000 Palestinians; it is under the control of the Palestinian Authority. The second, H2, comprises 20 percent of the city’s territory, with around 40,000 Palestinian inhabitants and around 800 Israeli Jewish settlers living in several settlements; it is controlled by Israel which, according to the agreement “will retain all powers and responsibilities for internal security and public order. . . . In addition, Israel will continue to carry the responsibility for overall security of Israelis.” In fact, zone H2, although located in the heart of Hebron, is today under the sole jurisdiction of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces. It is an enclave.

  Map legend. I open the map. Area H2 comprises the eastern limit of the city of Hebron, forming a spike to the west that suddenly jabs into the city to enclose the Jewish cemetery. Its perimeter includes the Old Town of Hebron, the Cave of the Patriarchs, and the Casbah, as well as the different Jewish settlements (excluding the large settlement of Kiryat Arba to the east), and other smaller establishments located in the historical center. These include Beit Hadassah, Beit Romano, Admot Yishai (the Tel Rumeida settlement), and Avraham Avinu, colonies inhabited primarily by religious Zionists in favor of the annexation of the Palestinian territories. The area thus delineated comprises different zones, crosshatched with lines and dotted with symbols explained by a large map legend—the abundance of icons is yet another indication of this complexity. I focus on movement within this space, on the regulation of access to public roads which in themselves give an indication of the tension that prevails here: there are “sterilized” roads, like an exsanguinated body, or, rather, like the sterile field established around the body of a patient in an operating room: closed shops, empty houses, Palestinian vehicles banned; there are the roads where no Palestinian vehicles are permitted but that Palestinians can still use on foot; and finally, there are the roads barred to all Palestinians, whether by vehicle or on foot. To these restrictions are added the zones around Jewish settlements where Palestinians are forbidden to enter, as well as the twenty or so checkpoints, mobile and otherwise, the roadblocks, the watchtowers, and all the other boundaries that cover the area. These blocked, restricted, monitored routes concern only the Palestinian population of H2. As for the Jewish settlers, they can travel freely around the sector, whether by car or on foot. The soldiers ensure their safety. As I examine the map, the title of a famous essay by the geographer Yves Lacoste comes to mind: Geography serves, first and foremost, to wage war.