This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  r/b/t to tie. rabata nafsahu: to tie oneself to a place and a pledge.

  Study-circles multiply in the gardens and on the terraces of the Sanctuary. These are the murabitoun; people who have pledged themselves to protect al-Aqsa. They are civilians, self-organising and unarmed. Since Israel forbids men under the age of forty-five to enter al-Aqsa, the murabitoun circles are made up of elderly men, women and children. When Moroccan Gate is open they are on high alert.

  At Lions’ Gate, standing between the soldiers with the guns and the open gateway, our friend from the Waqf was helpless. We turned and hurried through the Old City, past the great gates, through the streets and through the Israeli checkpoint. We hurried over the ruins of the Moroccan Quarter hidden under the granite tiles of the plaza. In front of the metal detectors at the foot of the caterpillar we queued, but the soldiers at Lions’ Gate had called the soldiers at Moroccan Gate. They ushered settlers in past us until visiting hours were over and the door was closed.

  Every day Israel kills at least one Palestinian. Every day it arrests and detains and interrogates and demolishes. Every day at Damascus Gate you see Israeli soldiers push young Palestinian men up against the walls to search them. Every day the settlers and soldiers stroll through Moroccan Gate into the Sanctuary. Every day the language of the authorities shades further into settler Third Temple language.

  Sometimes a young Palestinian wakes up in the morning and takes a knife from her mother’s kitchen and goes out to mount a solitary, hopeless attack on Israeli soldiers. Sometimes Israeli soldiers kill a young Palestinian and toss a knife onto the ground next to him. The language of justice and decency is no longer relevant. The language of human rights is bitter. The language of red heifers and crimson worms and red heifers and cable cars and crimson worms and holy package tours is swelling. Here. Here in the heart of the world that will burst. Soon.

  January 2017

  DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS

  J.M. Coetzee

  I was born and brought up in South Africa, so naturally people ask me what I see of South Africa in the present situation in Palestine. Using the word apartheid to describe the way things are here I’ve never found to be a productive step. Like using the word genocide to describe what happened in Turkey around 1915, using the word apartheid diverts one into an inflamed semantic wrangle which cuts short opportunities of analysis.

  Apartheid was a system of enforced segregation based on race or ethnicity put in place by an exclusive, self-defined group in order to consolidate colonial conquest, in particular to cement its hold on the land and on natural resources. To speak of Jerusalem and the West Bank, we see a system of enforced segregation based on religion and ethnicity put in place by an exclusive self-defined group to consolidate a colonial conquest, in particular to maintain, and indeed extend, its hold on the land and its natural resources. Draw your own conclusions.

  Ramallah, 2016

  THREE ENCOUNTERS ON THE WEST BANK

  Mercedes Kemp

  I travelled to the West Bank in 2010 as a guest of PalFest, and then again in 2013, spending time in Nablus and its adjacent refugee camps. I am left with fragments of what I’ve seen with the eyes of the heart.

  THREE LADIES FROM OLD ASKAR CAMP

  affirm life.

  affirm life.

  we got to carry each other now.

  you are either with life, or against it.

  affirm life.

  Suheir Hammad

  In Old Askar Camp there is a small yard where flowers grow out of old tin cans: jasmine, bougainvillea and a small lemon tree. I am invited into the home of three ladies. The eldest, reclining on a divan, dressed in white, has been a refugee here for more than sixty years. The room is decorated with mementos and festooned with plastic oranges draped in greenery, as if to remind her of her home village Abu Kishk, the scent of blossom and warm sea breezes. She remembers the Nakba. Running through the citrus groves, stalked by death. Her children were all born here, in this hive of sorrows, but her daughters look after her with tenderness, and there is much laughter, gossip and affectionate banter. Old Askar looks after its own.

  THE GIRL FROM JAFFA

  I come from there and I have memories

  Born as mortals are, I have a mother

  And a house with many windows.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  My friend Wadi takes me to his mother’s home, where I have been invited to have lunch.

  Old Askar Camp was built in 1950 on a limited parcel of land. Its population has grown to vastly exceed dwelling capacity. Every nook and cranny has been used up. There is much ingenuity and very canny use of space. But natural light is scarce. In Maleka’s home its source is a narrow slit framed by breeze blocks in a corner of her tiny kitchen. The corner is occupied by a cage in which two lovebirds are kissing. I wonder at the generosity in allowing the birds this privileged position.

  Maleka’s hands chop, slice and stir, and as she works she tells me about the house in Jaffa, and her grandmother who, as she fed her children with rijla (purslane), which grew in the rocky crevices of the long road to exile, dreamed of crabs stuffed with red chilli, stingray soup doused with lemon, squid with golden rice, sea bass, sardines and everything that swam in the clear waters that bathe Jaffa, the bride of the sea!

  She dishes up the rice and chicken and says, ‘I wish that I could offer you such a banquet, but I have never seen the sea. So I offer what I have.’

  The rituals of hospitality are accomplished with elegance and generosity. As I take my leave Maleka says, ‘I am a simple woman, but my daughters will study and grow wise. We’ll go back to our land, inshallah. And if not us, then our children.’

  A BOY

  And it’s a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can’t catch you.

  George Orwell

  I meet Mohammad at New Askar Camp.

  He is a young man of perhaps eighteen, tall and athletic, a footballer. He is wearing the Palestinian selection strip with a number 19 on the back. He is surrounded by a group of younger boys, pulling at his shirt, laughing, chattering and raising dust. Here at New Askar they take care of their own too. Older boys and girls look after the younger, teach them skills and resilience.

  I want to see more of the camp, the overspill from Old Askar, equally strapped for space but with even fewer resources. Mohammad and his mates offer to take me for a tour. We walk the narrow, jerry-built alleys. The boys greet neighbours sitting on doorsteps, kick the ball for children playing in the street.

  High on a wall there is the faded photograph of a young boy. I can see that the same poster has been covered by a new, clean version of the same image every time an earlier one faded. Now the tattered remains are ruffled by the breeze, like a palimpsest of grief. All my companions stand and look at the poster. Mohammad speaks. ‘It’s Odai, my friend. He was killed by Israeli soldiers.’

  I look at the dates on the poster. It was seven years ago.

  ‘We were children when it happened.’

  ‘We were twelve.’

  ‘Odai and I, we were friends since we knew life.’

  ‘We lived very near to each other. Both in the same street.’

  ‘We played football in the street every day.’

  ‘We were good. One day, when we were playing on our street, we heard the army coming. We ran through the streets. All the children in the camp ran towards the olive field on the hillside. I will show you.’

  We walk through the alleys until we reach the edge of the camp. A few olive trees cling to the remains of a terraced hillside. A road below. On the other side, the telltale cubic forms of an illegal Israeli settlement.

  ‘We ran through the streets and we could hear the tanks coming. They were always coming. We could hear the gunfire. We reached the hilltop.’

  ‘We could see the army coming, shooting tear gas and real bullets at us.’

  ‘We were throwing stones at the army.’

  ‘We shouted, This is our
land! You can’t come here!’

  ‘We were only children.’

  ‘The army were coming, shooting at us.’

  ‘We all ran back, all of us, but not Odai. He was alone, facing the army.’

  ‘We were hiding behind the cactus. We shouted, Come back, Odai! Come and hide!’

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  As the story unfolds, my companions enact the moment: hiding in rocky crevices and behind the cacti clumps. They show me the rocks eroded by many bullet holes. Their eyes are a little wild as they remember.

  Mohammad is very still.

  ‘And then Odai was shot.’

  ‘We wanted to help him, but the army were still shooting.’

  ‘We couldn’t reach him.’

  ‘When the army retreated, we ran towards Odai.’

  ‘We asked some people to call an ambulance, but the ambulance didn’t come.’

  ‘I went to Odai. When I reached him, he breathed his last breath.’

  ‘We carried his body through the field.’

  Mohammad leads the way, tracing the steps of his wretched journey, this Via Dolorosa for a twelve-year-old boy.

  ‘We reached the pharmacy. The pharmacist tried to help him, but he couldn’t.’

  ‘A neighbour brought his car and took him to the hospital in Nablus.’

  ‘I went to his house. I had to tell his family he had been shot.’

  ‘Afterwards, I was broken. I was angry.’

  ‘I had two choices: to become a martyr or to live.’

  ‘I chose football.’

  ‘My life had changed. I had to learn to do everything without him, Odai.’

  ‘My friends helped me.’

  ‘My family helped me.’

  ‘But most of all, playing football helped me.’

  ‘I came to this field to play every day.’

  ‘And every week I came to visit his grave, my friend Odai.’

  At Odai’s grave, in a small cemetery at the edge of the camp, an extraordinary transposal occurs. I am frozen to the spot, crying. Mohammad puts his arms around me and consoles me. ‘I understand your grief, you are somebody’s mother.’

  ‘I became very good at football. I joined the Palestinian team.’

  ‘I wanted to do this for two reasons.’

  ‘One, for myself, and for my talent.’

  ‘The other one, for Odai.’

  We reach our journey’s end. From a ramshackle back yard a young boy lifts his hand in a victory sign. Mohammad responds, smiling. They both shout.

  ‘For a better future!’

  THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

  Adam Foulds

  A few weeks ago I stood by the tomb of Abraham in Hebron hearing the recitation of the Amidah, the rhythm of those familiar words of prayer suddenly accompanied by those of a Jewish poet that came to my mind in that moment. I felt moved and connected in ways I had not foreseen. The last time I was in that part of the world I was in my gap year, an eighteen-year-old enjoying the life of a secular kibbutznik before heading on to Oxford. This time I had arrived at Hebron after a very different journey, one that took me both deeply into my Jewish culture and showed it to me from the other side of the mirror, so to speak, challenging many of my previous assumptions.

  The beginning of the journey was calm enough. We flew into Jordan, arriving late for a preliminary night at the Hotel InterContinental, Amman, a frictionless environment where the twenty or so international writers of the touring literary festival met and introduced themselves. By chance I found myself with the two other Jewish members of the group. Our conversation quickly turned to what possible consequences might follow from that identity when we travelled into Palestine. Sensibly, rationally, we reassured one another, a moment that reminded me of the reassurances I had offered my parents back in north-east London. On both occasions I had been calming my own anxieties too. All the voices of my education and all the years of news footage – charred car bodies, masked gunmen, wailing crowds, photographers pushed back to allow stretchers to be rushed into ambulances – told me to be frightened. Nevertheless I’d been sure then that I wanted to seize the opportunity to go and see inside the situation for myself. It is so much at the heart of contemporary Jewish life as well as our geopolitical weather that I couldn’t resist the offer of first-hand experience.

  The following morning we crossed into Palestine at the Allenby Bridge, a border under Israeli jurisdiction. The experience felt far removed from my memories of entering via the grandly appointed front door of Ben Gurion Airport. As we were being briefed on the bus as to how to be accurate and economical when answering questions, we pulled up at the low militarised building to see a line of Palestinians, men, women and children, waiting to pass through, blown on by a large swivelling fan, patrolled by a soldier in jeans and T-shirt with impressively muscled arms and a machine gun. The atmosphere seemed tense, businesslike, stoical, with no one wanting any trouble, but also from inside the bus the whole thing looked strangely theatrical. Several times during the trip the quality of the psychological power exerted by the structures and procedures of checkpoints reminded me of immersive works of art, installations or promenade theatre pieces designed to have a strong emotional effect, to make manifest the conceptual relations of power, of individual and state. It is an odd thought, perhaps, one that attests to my struggle to integrate the reality of what I was seeing with the world as I had understood it up till then.

  This first checkpoint experience lasted a while, six hours from start to finish. Several members of our group, three Palestinian Americans and a British Asian from Manchester, were held for questioning. The most experienced of them conjectured afterwards that they were being toyed with, pointlessly discomfited, on the basis that a background check does not take that long to perform. Still, we were not turned away there, as we feared might happen during that lengthy delay and as Noam Chomsky was a couple of weeks later. The worst that occurred was the theft from one of our group’s luggage of a pair of shoes and some jewellery. Later it seemed a useful introductory experience, a half-day immersion in powerlessness at the hands of an unpredictable military bureaucracy. I remember sitting there with the word wasting dilating in my mind: wasting time, wasting away, a terrible waste, the waste places.

  The first day or so in Palestine was marked for me, however, by a great happiness, a sense of liberation. We stayed in East Jerusalem. I’d last been in that city in my year off before university, when I had been working and studying Hebrew on a kibbutz half an hour away. I was eighteen then and fearful. That Palestinians were violent, that a trip into East Jerusalem could be fatal, were axiomatic among the people I met. I had no reason to doubt it. In my days off I drifted in West Jerusalem, visiting an English-language bookshop, sitting with my new copy of Nabokov’s Bend Sinister in a cafe before returning to the kibbutz at dusk. Now I found myself in the east, a grown adult meeting many Palestinians, and felt in that environment no sense of threat whatsoever. The fear that I was carrying melted away; my body relaxed, my breathing slowed and deepened. The sensation was of lightness and elation; it was born from a revelation that’s so obvious, so bound to be true, I’m almost ashamed to admit it: Palestinians are normal people – friendly, intelligent, rational people. Not only that, their warmth and openness, given their situation, was very striking. All the Palestinians we met were extraordinarily hospitable and pleased to see us. Movement is all but impossible for Palestinians, and the presence of outsiders seemed to bring oxygen to their enclosed world. Everyone apparently welcomed the stationary travel of our visit, and those who came to the literary events expressed pleasure at being able to spend an evening enjoying the passing illusion that they had a normal cultural life. To explain a little more: identity cards issued by the Israelis are colour-coded according to the individual’s home town, which is not always accurately recorded. To travel from one to another is extremely difficult. Jerusalem and Bethlehem, for example, are six miles apart and as attached to one another as
, say, Richmond and London. Unsurprisingly many families (and, formerly, working lives) are divided between the two places. A Palestinian from Bethlehem must now apply for a permit to visit East Jerusalem at least a month in advance. The permit can be refused without reason. It can be granted and then access denied without reason at the checkpoint. Of course this makes it very easy to miss a relative’s visit or death or the birth of a child, and so on. More than a generation of West Bank Palestinians now exist who have never seen the sea. I learned this in Bethlehem, where the experience of being in Palestine started to intensify, to cause pain.

  But first, to get there, the checkpoint. You approach a low building or complex of buildings (it is hard to tell at first) with squat towers and machine-gun nests masked with camouflage netting. Next you find yourself walking down a system of channels that suddenly turn at right angles into narrower channels not much wider than your shoulders. These are fenced with heavy horizontal scaffolding poles. At a certain point you find yourself under a low roof, completely enclosed and at a floor-to-ceiling turnstile made of the same scaffolding poles, rather like those in the New York subway. There are lights on the top of it, red and green. If the light is green you go through, although how many do so at one time varies so it is easy in a moment of entirely humourless slapstick to walk into a locked gate. Now you are in the centre of a checkpoint which contains an X-ray machine for your possessions, a reinforced airport-style metal-detector portal and a brightly lit office of toughened glass typically containing, it seemed, two bored, languid Israeli teenagers doing their national service. They ask to see ID and may have further questions. There is a disconcerting disconnection between their mouths in front of you on the other side of the glass and their voices, which blast at near-distortion volume from a number of speakers above your head. During this time you are between two sets of turnstiles, completely shut in. If your answers satisfy them, they release you through the second turnstile. The whole time you’re passing through you can be seen and heard but, unlike with CCTV, you don’t know where from because you can’t see the cameras or microphones. The effect is to make you introject the observing authority: you are helpless and feel entirely exposed. We had little trouble getting through the checkpoints, although there are obvious challenges for anyone claustrophobic, frail, hearing- or sight-impaired, or elderly: you can be standing there for a very long time. Stories we heard from Palestinians reflected different experiences, more brutalising, humiliating and capricious. At Hawara, the most notorious of the checkpoints, a number of deaths have been recorded of people waiting to get through for medical treatment. For those Palestinians who work inside Israel the checkpoint experience (one which in its mildest form I wouldn’t wish on anyone I loved) is a twice-daily occurrence. Sometimes, without warning, the checkpoints are closed, and they can’t get to their jobs at all.