This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  Fate has not permitted PalFest or this book to be placed before Edward Said. But Said’s all-encompassing humanism, his intellectual standards, political astuteness and moral rigour have been our guide and our example. One of Said’s recurring themes was the issue of personal responsibility in the face of world events and directions. In The Reith Lectures (1993) he says, ‘Certainly in writing and speaking, one’s aim is . . . trying to induce a change in the moral climate whereby aggression is seen as such, the unjust punishment of peoples or individuals is either prevented or given up, and the recognition of rights and democratic freedoms is established as a norm for everyone, not invidiously for a select few.’

  We hope that it is to such a change in the moral climate that This Is Not a Border might contribute.

  Cairo, December 2016

  WELCOME

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Dear Friends,

  I regret that I cannot be here today, to receive you personally.

  Welcome to this sorrowing land, whose literary image is so much more beautiful than its present reality. Your courageous visit of solidarity is more than just a passing greeting to a people deprived of freedom and of a normal life; it is an expression of what Palestine has come to mean to the living human conscience that you represent. It is an expression of the writer’s awareness of his role: a role directly engaged with issues of justice and freedom. The search for truth, which is one of a writer’s duties, takes on – in this land – the form of a confrontation with the lies and the usurpation that besiege Palestine’s contemporary history; with the attempts to erase our people from the memory of history and from the map of this place.

  We are now in the sixtieth year of the Nakba. There are now those who are dancing on the graves of our dead, and who consider our Nakba their festival. But the Nakba is not a memory; it is an ongoing uprooting, filling Palestinians with dread for their very existence. The Nakba continues because the occupation continues. And the continued occupation means a continued war. This war that Israel wages against us is not a war to defend its existence, but a war to obliterate ours.

  The conflict is not between two existences, as the Israeli discourse claims. The Arabs have unanimously offered Israel a collective peace proposal in return for Israel’s recognition of the Palestinians’ right to an independent state. But Israel refuses.

  Dear friends, in your visit here you will see the naked truth. Yesterday, we celebrated the end of apartheid in South Africa. Today, you see apartheid blossoming here most efficiently. Yesterday, we celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, you see the wall rising again, coiling itself like a giant snake around our necks. A wall not to separate Palestinians from Israelis, but to separate Palestinians from themselves and from any view of the horizon. Not to separate history from myth, but to weld together history and myth with a racist ingenuity.

  Life here, as you see, is not a given, it’s a daily miracle. Military barriers separate everything from everything. And everything – even the landscape – is temporary and vulnerable. Life here is less than life, it is an approaching death. And how ironic that the stepping-up of oppression, of closures, of settlement expansion, of daily killings that have become routine – that all this takes place in the context of what is called the ‘peace process’, a process revolving in an empty circle, threatening to kill the very idea of peace in our suffering hearts.

  Peace has two parents: Freedom and Justice. And occupation is the natural begetter of violence. Here, on this slice of historic Palestine, two generations of Palestinians have been born and raised under occupation. They have never known another – normal – life. Their memories are filled with images of hell. They see their tomorrows slipping out of their reach. And though it seems to them that everything outside this reality is heaven, yet they do not want to go to that heaven. They stay because they are afflicted with hope.

  In this difficult condition of history, Palestinian writers live. Nothing distinguishes them from their countrymen, nothing except one thing: that writers try to gather the fragments of this life and of this place in a literary text, a text they try to make whole.

  I have spoken before of how difficult it is to be Palestinian, and how difficult it is for a Palestinian to be a writer or a poet. On the one hand you have to be true to your reality, and on the other you have to be faithful to your literary profession. In this zone of tension between the long ‘State of Emergency’ and his literary imagination, the language of the poet moves. He has to use the word to resist the military occupation. And he has to resist – on behalf of the word – the danger of the banal and the repetitive. How can he achieve literary freedom in such slavish conditions? And how can he preserve the literariness of literature in such brutal times?

  The questions are difficult. But each poet or writer has their own way of writing about themselves and their reality. The one historical condition does not produce the one text – or even similar texts, for the writing selves are many and different. Palestinian literature does not fit into ready-made moulds.

  Being Palestinian is not a slogan, it is not a profession. The Palestinian is a human being, a tormented human being who has daily questions, national and existential, who has a love story, who contemplates a flower and a window open to the unknown. Who has a metaphysical fear and an inner world utterly resistant to occupation.

  A literature born of a defined reality is able to create a reality that transcends reality – an alternative, imagined reality. Not a search for a myth of happiness to flee from a brutal history, but an attempt to make history less mythological, to place the myth in its proper, metaphorical place, and to transform us from victims of history into partners in humanising history.

  My friends and colleagues, thank you for your noble act of solidarity. Thank you for your brave initiative to break the psychological siege inflicted upon us. Thank you for resisting the invitation to dance on our graves. Know that we are still here, that we still live.

  8 May 2008

  WHERE DOES PALESTINE BEGIN?

  Yasmin El-Rifae

  I’m sitting in my office in New York, lingering over the draft of an email I need to send to the staff.

  It explains my complicated trip through Saudi Arabia and Germany and Egypt, finally to Palestine for the festival. I feel that I am not straightforward enough for these colleagues, most of whom are three or four hours away from home, their families a city or a state away instead of scattered across continents.

  But I know that this is not exactly the source of my hesitation. It’s the word Palestine. But what else could I call it? The Territories? The West Bank? Do I need to hide it, the way I hide it at the Allenby Bridge crossing? Do I need to soften it for this audience by placing it next to the word Israel? Can a word be made so absent without people becoming alarmed when it does appear?

  What else are we hiding when we hide Palestine?

  I send the email. Two people mention it to me, in separate conversations, before I leave. One registers her surprise, calls it brave. Another is excited because he has found an ally in a cause he has not been able to express his passion for to any other colleague.

  This is a press-freedom organisation.

  A manager, whom I respect and am friendly with, crosses her arms in front of her chest and keeps them there, hurries me out of her office when I come in to say goodbye.

  The political choices that we make about language, about names, are more than tools for use in a broader effort. They are the effort, and the battle.

  Can you have a literature festival in Palestine without including Israel? Without inviting Israeli writers, without going to Israeli audiences?

  There is often confusion when talking about Palestine as a geographical place. Most people don’t know that Gaza and the West Bank are as unreachable from one another as two places can be. You cannot reach either one without going through a border or a checkpoint controlled by Israel. Sometimes you can reach Gaza by going through Egypt, Israel’s ally in its siege
.

  You cannot be in Palestine without saying your grandfather’s name to Israeli officials at the border or the airport. You cannot eat in Palestine without buying or dodging Israeli products. You cannot buy anything at all without using Israeli currency.

  In Palestine, Israel is everywhere.

  We drive through Ramallah, capital of politics and finance for the would-be Palestinian state. Here you buy your Jawwal or Wataniya SIM card for use in the West Bank. Palestinian phone operators have not been allowed to provide 3G, although we hear that might change now.

  Some people manage to buy Israeli SIM cards, either in Israeli cities or from rough neighbourhoods near the separation wall, where they are on sale along with other contraband such as drugs and weapons. Communication is a serious offence. The options are Cellcom and Partner, which used to be called Orange until Orange pulled out after campaigning by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

  These SIM cards will pick up 3G from settlement communication towers sometimes, especially in the hillier parts of Nablus and Ramallah, near land with the densest settlements. If you are looking for a West Bank settlement, look for a tower. They go up first, poking out of the hills like flagpoles, and the settlers follow.

  We go to shattered, buried Palestine in the old city of Hebron. We look up, and Israel lives above the wire mesh which catches its rocks, its garbage, although not its urine. Israel is in the upper floors of houses taken over and occupied by settler families, or turned into watchtowers for the soldiers who protect them. Palestine on the ground floor, on the street level, and Israel between the wire mesh and the sky.

  We drive north to look for Palestine in Haifa. We have hidden our Palestinian friend in the back of the bus. Hidden is too strong a word here perhaps. She sits in plain sight, sunglasses on, flanked by white writers on either side.

  The bus is stopped at a checkpoint. A man with a machine gun and a baby-blue shirt gets on the bus, a woman in khaki behind him.

  He asks for the group leader. Omar gets off the bus with him. They are gone for about twenty minutes, standing nearby, talking. On the bus the writers are filled with questions; some are worried. Our Palestinian friend is calm.

  They come back on the bus, angry that one of the writers had been taking photographs out of the window. The man with the machine gun asks to see the phone, and to delete the photos. The offending writer wants to know what authority he has to see his phone or his passport.

  The man tells us he is a civilian. He shows us a card to prove it. His machine gun is the width of the aisle between the seats.

  Eventually the writer backs down. He knows that he can recover the photos instantly.

  We continue our drive. The traffic had grown worse during our hold-up at the checkpoint, and we will be late to Haifa. But we are late to Haifa every year; one year we were so late that the writers had to be hurried into borrowed bathrooms in which to collect themselves after the three-hour drive before going immediately on stage half an hour late.

  The road to Haifa becomes coastal, and it is poster-perfect: designed landscapes, the plumper, softer light of the seaside, the sky paler near the water. The wall is far from here.

  When we reach Haifa the bus makes two stops. We have split the group between the only two Palestinian-owned hotels in the city. At the first hotel I call out the names of the people who should disembark now, tell them to get their bags and check in, tell them where and when the next meeting point will be. It is now the fourth day of the festival, and I can feel them getting annoyed, wanting to break free and have a beer by the sea and walk around this pretty town and not have to deal with the slowness of a group splitting between hotels, one of which doesn’t provide breakfast. Can’t we just stay in the Marriott?

  At night our audience finds us. Young and cool, arty and multilingual. After the event we go to Masada Street, where the cafes and bars are open to a mixed crowd of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in the daytime. At night the socialising is segregated. We stick to Eleka and a couple of other Arab-owned bars.

  A week after the festival has wrapped a drunk man in Ramallah says, Don’t be enchanted by Haifa. Haifa is corrupt, her beauty is a cheap mask. Go to the abandoned villages, go to the Muthallath, go to Um el-Fahm; there you will find Palestine.

  So then where are we now?

  He orders another Heineken.

  What of the Palestine of camps, of exile, of statelessness?

  When a house gets demolished in East Jerusalem, does it stop being Palestine? When, in which moment? When the first brick drops or when the last is cleared?

  When the Palestinian Authority arrests teenagers days after the Israelis have released them, do they leave the same absence? Where does Israel stop and Palestine begin in the network of incarceration?

  When you are driving into Ramallah, there is a sign that warns you are entering Area A. It is forbidden by Israeli law, and it is unsafe, the sign says. On the other side of the checkpoint children sell cassette tapes, pillows, kitchenwear.

  There is no security check for those going in to Ramallah. Anyone can drive in or walk through. Going the other way, leaving Area A and going into Jerusalem, is a different story.

  So we go through areas A, B and C, a rambling bus of privileged-passport holders, popping up with events which we can only run with the help of patient friends who show us their Palestine and share their stage.

  We do not schedule ways to engage with Israel, because Israel is everywhere in Palestine. It may not be the version that Israeli officials and cultural actors would like seen. But perhaps the role of literature and art should be to look for what is hidden, what is obscured, what is made harder and harder to reach.

  There is a point when you are entering Bethlehem where you can see the wall’s curve through a field of olive trees. The scene has it all: the idyllic beauty of the land, the concrete abruptness of its severance, the two together surreal. Every year I try to snap a photo at the right moment as the bus drives by but it always appears too suddenly, and blurs.

  THE GAZA SUITE: GAZA

  Suheir Hammad

  a great miracle happened here

  a festival of lights

  a casting of lead upon children

  an army feasting on epiphany

  i know nothing under the sun over the wall no one mentions

  some must die wrapped in floral petroleum blanket

  no coverage

  i have come to every day armageddon

  a ladder left unattended

  six candles burn down a house

  a horse tied to smoke

  some must die to send a signal

  flat line scream live stream river a memory longer than life spans

  the living want to die in their country

  no open doors no open seas no open

  hands full of heart five daughters wrapped in white

  each day jihad

  each day faith over fear

  each day a mirror of fire

  the living want to die with their families

  the girl loses limbs her brother gathers arms

  some must die for not dying

  children on hospital floor mother beside

  them the father in shock this is my family

  i have failed them this is my family i did

  not raise their heads i have buried them

  my family what will i do now my family is bread

  one fish one people cut into pieces

  JERUSALEM

  Ahdaf Soueif

  I was not prepared. Who could have been?

  Remission Gate. There were two Israeli soldiers in the gateway. It was December 2000 and the second Intifada was in full swing and there were soldiers everywhere. At least here they were on foot; at Damascus Gate they’d been mounted. I walked through the gateway into the Sacred Sanctuary of al-Aqsa – and a few enclosed acres became a world. At my back the city behind the walls, but in the great sweep ahead there were tall, dark pines, broad steps risi
ng to slender white columns and, beyond them, a golden dome and the biggest sky I had ever been under.

  A sanctuary on a hilltop. Around it the earth fell away.

  Palestinians are masters of terracing; they built Jerusalem on a hill and the old city slopes gently towards the south-east, towards the Sanctuary, and there the central and biggest of twenty-six terraces is for the Dome of the Rock. From the south twenty steps lead up to it, from the north just nine. You can see the Dome from the surrounding hills, but you cannot see it from the city. Only when you come very close to one of the great gateways, when you are almost through it, is the Dome revealed: light, almost floating, framed by necklaces of slim colonnaded arches and attended by other domes and pulpits and fountains each of which, alone, would have commandeered your attention. But in the Sanctuary they are modest, demanding nothing, content to be here.

  From the gateways behind me, through the trees and across the grass, women were coming in from the city for sunset prayers. They crossed the white piazza and passed through the canopied doorway in the blue-tiled wall. Girls paused to slip simple white cotton skirts on over their jeans. I followed: up the wide stone steps and under the laced archway and stopped. Right there, in front of me, was the blue octagon, and across the gold of its dome birds dipped and swooped and wheeled low in their last flight of the day. At the far end of the Sanctuary a reticent wide building under an austere grey dome was the Southern Mosque. And in between and all around I seemed to recognise the scattered, smaller pieces of architecture. I sat down on a low wall of white stone; I was at home, among friends.

  I kept going back, that first week. It was the first time I’d come right up close to the story I’d been following all my life, the first time its pieces had come together. The women befriended me, took me to their nearby homes. I realised that the north and west walls of al-Aqsa are not walls at all; they are a porous urban border that houses people, schools, libraries and archives. And all these institutions, and the Aqsa itself, were charities supported by a vast waqf system; a system of trusts and endowments. The Sanctuary has for thirteen centuries been a charitable Islamic waqf at the centre of a matrix of endowments and funding. In 1948, many of the lands and properties and businesses supporting the al-Aqsa Waqf fell under Israeli control. The administration of the waqf was assumed by Jordan.