Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

by Michael Chabon

  Cameras. Nour first became involved with B’Tselem, an Israeli organization opposed to the occupation, one of whose protest activities involves giving cameras to Palestinians to allow them to film the abuses they are subject to in the occupied territories, then bear witness to them on social media.

  Hand. Nour’s family was given a camera but, as the young girl explains, filming the assaults turned out to be difficult: by the time they were alerted, grabbed the camera, and got to the location, the attack was already over. Nour recalled the story of how Hisham, her father, was injured during the first intifada. On that day some Israeli soldiers summoned her father to go and take down a Palestinian flag at the top of an electrical pole, threatening to kill him if he didn’t obey. Then that nightmarish scenario: the father first refuses, then finally climbs, gets electrocuted, falls, his left hand useless from then on, to such an extent that he can no longer work as a joiner.

  Nonviolence. Later on, at around sixteen years of age, Nour joined Youth Against Settlements, a nonviolent association founded by Issa Amro and based in Tel Rumeida. Issa is a major figure in the resistance to the occupation and a close friend of Nour’s family, to whom he was a great help after Hisham was injured. Today we’re celebrating: the association’s center has once again opened after having been forced to close for six months by the army, and the activities are starting up again. They are preparing a demonstration to support the reopening of Shuhada Street, an intervention to protect a Palestinian home, and, as always, seeking to counteract, to ward off, to anticipate the insidious process of colonization spreading little by little all over the sector. The young boys who are present have all had dealings with the occupying army. Nonviolence is not the most obvious form of resistance, and it is also a form of education.

  Evening. The sun goes down over Hebron, a golden light gilds the olive trees of Tel Rumeida, and the voice of the muezzin rises, floats over the city, and amplifies the sky. The countryside is so peaceful that it tears you apart, and the thought that it could be the site of such unending violence seems unreal to me. We smoke a shisha pipe on the central terrace of the association. Aisha is there, acting the clown, Nour is looking at photos of the demonstration for the reopening of Shuhada Street, while at the end of the little concrete alleyway that leads to the center two Israeli soldiers are stationed in a watchtower. Some young boys have gone down to the field below the house and are improvising a hockey match using brushwood collected from the bushes as sticks. They run, chase after one another, overtake each other, play, laugh, shove each other, having a great time, free, like escaped horses.

  Post. The day after I leave Hebron, two Palestinians from the southern districts of the city open fire on the terrace of a café in Tel Aviv, killing four people and injuring eight others. The Israeli government cancels eighty-three thousand travel permits for Palestinians at the beginning of Ramadan. Violent, explosive, and fragile, Hebron, its hills, its districts, its ghettos, are under pressure. The town seems to be at the epicenter of Palestinian uprisings. I leave a message for Nour on WhatsApp. Everyone is here, it’s okay, don’t worry.

  (Translated from the French by Dúnlaith Bird)

  Afterword

  Breaking the Silence is made up of Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories. We are the combatants who carried out Israeli government policies in the occupied territories over the past fifty years. We implemented aggressive military mechanisms of control. We strong-armed millions of human beings into submission. We stripped people of their basic rights, their freedom, their ability to determine their own fates.

  Our act of speaking out—of “breaking the silence”—is an inevitable reaction to the violence and immorality we witnessed and carried out. It is a personal moral outcry, and a civic outcry. Breaking the silence, for us, entails taking responsibility for our actions, and demanding that the situation be changed. It is an expression of love for our homeland, and of our deep fear for its future.

  Our fight began in June 2004, when more than sixty former soldiers organized an exhibition of photographs and testimonies detailing their service in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, mostly from the city of Hebron. The exhibition ignited a political storm in Israel, and led to the creation of our organization Breaking the Silence. From that first exhibition and to this day, we have endeavored to fight against the Israeli occupation by publicizing testimonies of the very Israeli soldiers sent to carry it out. Our testimonies are published in the first person: We describe the things that we saw, the things we took part in, and the daily realities we witnessed; realities that include the grievous and ongoing violation of the human rights and freedom of the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza.

  Over the past dozen years, Breaking the Silence has interviewed and published the testimonies of more than 1,000 soldiers who served in the occupied territories.*

  Silence in regard to the inherent immorality of the regime of occupation—which both oppresses Palestinian society and corrupts Israeli society—is rampant in Israeli society and, to a certain degree, in the international community. Through this book, authors from around the world joined hands and hearts with Breaking the Silence in the act of bearing witness, from a place of shared commitment to values of justice, morality, equality, and human rights. The essays in this volume can thus be seen as a collection of testimonies, stories about the realities of occupation by those who witnessed it firsthand, and who have chosen not to be silent.

  The testimonies of these authors and of the people they met during their visits to the occupied territories are, of course, quite different than those usually publicized by Breaking the Silence.

  Breaking the Silence’s project of testimony-gathering over the years and the motif of testimony-sharing spread throughout the pages of this book come from opposite directions: the testifiers of Breaking the Silence describe first and foremost the personal experiences of soldiers sent to maintain and carry out the occupation. Through such testimonies, we highlight the IDF’s methods of enacting Israeli government policies in the occupied territories. In our book, Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000–2010, we compiled a wide range of testimonies, alongside an analysis of the IDF’s mechanisms for upholding and entrenching the occupation.

  The essays in this book were written by authors most of whom reside outside of the region and many of whom had spent little or no time in the occupied territories before this visit. Further, during their time here, the authors focused primarily on the stories of people living under occupation, rather than those sent to maintain occupation. Yet these essays and Breaking the Silence’s testimonies ultimately share the goal of telling the truth about what is happening in the occupied territories, and of confronting the occupation by exposing—through direct and personal narrative—the injustices taking place there.

  Similar to the testimonies gathered by Breaking the Silence, we hold that the stories gathered in these pages are not simply reports, but are rather actions in and of themselves, actions that have the potential to change political realities.

  We are not naive: We are aware that the Israeli occupation is almost as well-documented as it is old, and that the information—including the thousands of testimonies given by testifiers in our organization—is available to anyone with access to the Internet. Still, we are hopeful that this book and the act of testimony-gathering undertaken in its pages will disturb and mobilize its readers, in Israeli society and all around the world, to do what must be done to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. We hope it will spark a public discourse both inside Israel and out, and inspire others to speak out.

  We are beyond grateful to the editors of this book, Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, for their dedication, vision, and brilliance; to Mario Vargas Llosa, who lent his support to the project in its nascent stages; to the book’s associate editor, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, for his invaluable work on this project; to all of the authors who took part i
n this project, and to the scores of people—Palestinians and Israelis—who contributed to this project, some of whom are mentioned in the essays themselves or in the acknowledgments, and others who are not. We are grateful to everyone who has taken it upon themselves to witness this reality, from up close and from afar, and to break the silence with us, to confront the occupation, and to fight for a better future for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

  —Breaking the Silence

  Acknowledgments

  We want to thank Baha Nababta, a generous, huge-hearted person whose optimism that the occupation would certainly come to an end and whose commitment to his community and to justice inspired us, and so many lucky enough to meet him. Baha was killed on May 2, 2016.

  This book would have been impossible to create without the help of the following individuals:

  Jawad Abu Aisha, Nael Abu Aram, Thawra Abu Khdeir, Kifah Abu Khdeir, Mahmoud Aburahma, Fiaz Abu-Rmeleh, Uri Agnon, Ra’anan Alexandrovich, Arafat Alian Omar Aljafari, Munthar Amirah, Ahmed Amro, Issa Amro, Arab Aramin, Bassam Aramin, Ahmed Azza, Sundus Azza, Sam Bahour, Daphna Banai, Hanna Barag, Tia Barak, Jennifer Barth, Leon Barzarar, Bashir Bashir, Nadav Bigelman, Mia Bengel, Frima Bubis, Jonathan Burnham, Guy Butavia, Sonya Cheuse, Hillel Cohen, Tamar Cohen, Efrat Cohen-Bar, Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, Maggie Doyle, Salwa Duaibis, Bob Edelman, Eila Eitan, Rami Elhanan, Yigal Elhanan, Ori Erez, Dror Etkes, Mary Evans, Ido Even Paz, John Gall, Mary Gaule, Amos Goldberg, Michael Goldberg, David Goldblatt, Shiraz Greenbaum, David Grossman, Avner Gvaryahu, Amira Hass, Nir Hasson, Nirit Haviv, Gerard Horton, Lama Hourani, Eid Hthaleen, Mustafa Jaber, Penny Johnson, Julia Kardon, Shareef Khaled, Mohammad Khatib, Miki Kratzman, Talia Krevsky, Gaby Lasky, Uri Levy, Dana Lotan, Yoni Mandel, Keren Manor, Shadia Mansour, Tali Mayer, Yaniv Mazor, Ilai Melzer, Yehuda Melzer, Omri Metzer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, Yoni Mizrachi, Salah Mohsen, Avi Mughrabi, Hiba Nababta, Azzam Nawaja, Fatmeh Nawaja, Nasser Nawaja, Yuli Novak, Orly Noy, Hagit Ofran, Yudith Oppenheimer, Jonathan Pollack, Fadi Quran, Yotam Ronen, Yaqub Rajabi, Zuheir Rajabi, Eyal Raz, Kate Rosenberg, Kayla Rothman-Zecher, Alon Sahar, Abdul-Hakim Salah, Kela Sappir, Achiya Schatz, Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, Ronit Sela, Michael Sfard, Ishay Shneydor, Murad Shtawi, Jawad Siyam, Yehuda Shaul, Pnina Steiner, Bassem Tamimi, Nariman Tamimi, Aviv Tatarsky, Mojtaba Tbeleh, Leah Tsemel, Amiel Vardi, Sahar Vardi, Shira Vizel, Nadav Weiman, Erin Wicks, Noa Yammer, Raya Yaron, Roy Yellin, Cesar Yeudkin, Shlomy Zaharia, Ron Zeidel, Oren Ziv.

  And the following groups and organizations:

  ActiveStills, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Batan al-Hawa Popular Committee, Bil’in Popular Committee, Bimkom, B’Tselem, Budrus Popular Committee, Comet-ME, Emek Shaveh, HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, Gisha: Legal Center for the Freedom of Movement, Ir Amim, Jinba Popular Committee, Kerem Navot, Kufr Qaddum Popular Committee, MachsomWatch, Military Court Watch, Nabi Saleh Popular Committee, the Parents Circle: Bereaved Families Forum, Peace Now Settlement Watch, Susiya Popular Committee, Ta’yaush, Umm al-Khair Popular Committee, Wadi Hilweh Information Center, Wallajeh Popular Committee, Youth Against Settlements, Zbeidat Women’s Committee.

  Contributors

  LORRAINE ADAMS is a novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Her first novel, Harbor, on North African Muslims, won the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. Her second novel, The Room and the Chair, took her to Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010 and the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1992. She worked for the Washington Post for eleven years, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

  GERALDINE BROOKS is the author of five novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning March and the international bestseller People of the Book. She was the Wall Street Journal Mideast correspondent and is the author of a nonfiction work on Muslim women, Nine Parts of Desire, which was translated into more than twenty languages. In 2016 she was named an officer of the Order of Australia.

  MICHAEL CHABON is the author of numerous novels, among them Moonglow, Telegraph Avenue, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, with whom he edited the present volume.

  LARS SAABYE CHRISTENSEN made his literary debut in 1976 with Historien om Gly. His breakthrough novel was Beatles, which is one of the greatest literary successes in Norway and which continues to speak to new generations. He received both the Bookseller’s Prize and the Nordic Council’s Literary Award for the novel Halvbroren in 2001. This novel also marked his breakthrough to the international market. His works have been translated into thirty-five languages.

  MAYLIS DE KERANGAL is the author of several novels and short stories, all published by Gallimard/Verticales. She received the Prix Médicis for Birth of a Bridge (Talonbooks, 2010). Réparer les vivants came out in France in January 2014 and received rave reviews for its intimate look at the realities and philosophical questions around organ donation. It has been published under the title Mend the Living (Maclehose and Talonbooks, 2016) and The Heart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2016.

  ANITA DESAI was born and raised in India. She is the author of several novels of which three—Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting—were short-listed for the Booker Prize. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Games at Twilight and Diamond Dust. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a professor emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  DAVE EGGERS is the author of ten books, among them Heroes of the Frontier, The Circle, and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco. He is also the cofounder of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. In 2014, Voice of Witness published Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation. Eggers is the cofounder of 826 National, a network of eight tutoring centers around the country, and of ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization designed to connect students with resources, schools, and donors to make college possible. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, and Guardian.

  ASSAF GAVRON is an acclaimed Israeli writer who has published five novels: Ice, Moving, Almost Dead, Hydromania, and The Hilltop; a collection of short stories, Sex in the Cemetery; and a nonfiction collection of Jerusalem falafel-joint reviews, Eating Standing Up. His fiction has been adapted for the stage in Israel’s national theater, and optioned for movies. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Bernstein Prize for The Hilltop, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Creative Award for Authors, and the Prix Courrier International in France for Almost Dead. Gavron’s latest novel in English, The Hilltop, was published by Scribner in the United States in October 2014.

  ARNON GRUNBERG was born in Amsterdam in 1971. He lives and works in New York City. He started his own publishing company called Kasimir, specializing in non-Aryan German literature, at the age of nineteen, and has acted and written plays. When he was twenty-three years old, his first novel, Blue Mondays, became a bestseller in Europe and won the Anton Wachter Prize. It has been translated into thirteen languages.

  HELON HABILA is an associate professor of creative writing at George Mason University, USA. His novels include Waiting for an Angel (2002), Measuring Time (2007), and Oil on Water (2010). He is the editor of the Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011). Habila’s novels, poems, and short stories have won many honors and awards, including the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel (Africa Section), the Caine Prize, and most recently the Windham-Campbell Prize. Habila has been a contributing editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2004, and he is a regular re
viewer for the Guardian. He lives in Virginia with his wife and three children.

  ALA HLEHEL is a Palestinian author, screenwriter, and playwright. He has received several awards for his work, among them A. M. Qattan Foundation Competition awards, the “39 Beirut,” and the Ghassan Kanafani short stories award. His last novel, Au revoir Acre, was published in 2014, and the Hebrew and English translations are in process.

  FIDA JIRYIS is a Palestinian from the Galilee based in Ramallah. She is a writer, editor, and freelance business consultant. Fida has contributed short stories and articles to various publications including This Week in Palestine, Mondoweiss, The Palestine Chronicle, and +972 Magazine, and is the author of Hayatuna Elsagheera (Our Small Life) and Al-Khawaja (The Gentleman), two Arabic books of short stories on village life in the Galilee. Her third book, Al-Qafas (The Cage), will be published in 2017. She has also completed an English women’s novel, Forty-Six Pounds, which she is seeking to publish, and is currently working on My Return to the Galilee, a memoir of her return to Israel after the Oslo accords.