This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  Having said that it was easier for us, the first time one of our party got stuck in a turnstile and spent ten minutes trying to remain calm before someone came to release her, and the one member of the group with an identifiably Jewish name was, on every occasion, questioned with noticeable aggression as to who she was and what she was doing there. Why that was the case remains unclear, although the obvious inference is that the authorities have a particular dislike of Jewish people seeing inside the West Bank. Certainly it is almost impossible for Israelis to get in unless they’re currently serving in the army or are settlers.

  And what was it we saw in Bethlehem? We saw the separation wall and, crucially, where it is. From that physical fact about the world you know that the security rationale for its existence cannot account for its placement. The nine-metre-high wall, well beyond the 1967 Green Line, is wrapped so tightly around Bethlehem, rising up just beyond the last house on the perimeter, that the little town has been severed from the landscape and has no room to expand. Natural population growth can be expected to produce conditions of intense overcrowding. From certain vantage points you can look over the wall and see the extensive olive groves that used to support many Bethlehemites, which they now cannot reach to tend. There is an Israeli law that land ‘abandoned’ for seven years becomes the property of the state. The inhabitants of Bethlehem wait powerlessly for the land they have farmed continuously for centuries to be taken from them. You wonder what it does to the children who are growing up behind that wall, which exists, they are told, because they are so dangerous, and who see the only real power in the town wielded by visiting soldiers with machine guns. If the wall were for security alone it would follow the proposed border of the Palestinian state. It would also be continuous. It isn’t at present. If you walk far and knowledgeably enough you can get around it. A number of impoverished migrant workers do so to find work as manual labourers within Israel.

  The illegal settlements are the other great lesson of the occupied territories. There are a huge number of them, instantly recognisable by their bare, prefabricated ugliness and position, placed and fortified on the tops of hills, disfiguring the landscape their inhabitants claim to love with all the aesthetic indifference of true religious fundamentalism. Or have I strayed into rhetoric there? Do they claim to love the land? Does love come into it? Surely it’s enough for them that their god has instructed them to take possession of it with whatever force necessary. I find that the settlers’ Judaism is both very difficult and worryingly easy to understand. It bears very little relation to the tolerant, intellectual, profoundly moral Judaism I am proud to have grown up in, a tradition that is acutely aware of its outsider status and therefore highly sensitive to the vulnerabilities of other communities. Settler Judaism is something else altogether: messianic, fundamentalist, indifferent to pain, soaked in violence. But it arises from tropes well within the Jewish tradition. Its claim on the land is there in the Torah, a land that, after all, is promised to the Israelites rather than being their place of origin. The Tanakh tells a story of bloody warfare waged by the Israelites to take possession of it. The perversity of settler Judaism is to privilege this of all parts of the Jewish inheritance, to pursue the one commandment to settle the land at the expense of the other 612.

  If you haven’t spotted a settlement looking down on you, you might guess it’s there by the vandalism of multilingual road signs. The settlers erase the Arabic place names. Some of the settlements, those that form a ring around Nablus, for example, are so far inside the territory necessary (and promised) for a viable Palestinian state as to make Israeli talk of a two-state solution seem in bad faith. They clearly could not exist without the active support of the Israeli state and military. They have prospered with the collusion of successively more right-wing administrations. Since the much-publicised withdrawal of settlements from within Gaza, more than 20,000 new settlers have moved into the West Bank.

  This is the great reward for making it through the checkpoints to see the place for yourself. In the wider world the arguments about what is going on there are so fierce and fiercely contested as to produce, it often seems, a kind of stalemate of competing narratives; you choose which one you believe, finally, according to temperament and tribal affiliation. Being there springs you from that trap. The physical configuration of wall and checkpoints and settlements tells the real story. Visiting Bethlehem, you see that the wall is a land grab. Visiting Nablus, you know that a possible Palestinian state is already vitiated by the presence of heavily armed religious fundamentalists who will kill rather than move. You know that areas of Palestinian habitation are so divided as to produce disconnected enclaves rather than the beginnings of a country. The result for me was an excruciating combination of sadness, anger and sense of betrayal. An Israeli voice came to mind, the imperturbable reasonableness of government spokesman Mark Regev, often heard on Radio 4’s Today programme. It is a voice I’d empathised with and wanted to trust. Seeing the flatly contradictory facts on the ground, its even tone was revealed to me as the sound of a propaganda machine. I felt great anguish at the unnecessary suffering of the Palestinians and anger on my own behalf, but also on behalf of all the loving, reasonable, humane Jews I know and love in the diaspora who have been beguiled by understandable fear for Jewish survival and an admirable solidarity with the people of Israel into supporting the insupportable.

  Hebron provided the trip’s most shocking encounter with the insupportable fundamentalism that is ruining lives and our chances of peace. It was the place where I saw most vividly what the star of David, the Israeli flag – those symbols that to me have always meant home and familiarity – must look like to those on the other side of the power structures and cultural edifices they represent. The challenge afterwards, my challenge at the moment, is to integrate those perspectives and contradictory stories to form the whole that comes closest to encompassing the complex reality of the situation.

  The city remains the largest population centre in the West Bank. It is divided into two sectors, H1 and H2, the new town and old city, under Palestinian and Israeli control respectively. The old city is the cultural heart of Hebron, an ancient market centre where Jews, Muslims and Christians lived and worked together for many centuries. It is now a ghost town. Its economy is dead, its busy arcades shuttered and silent apart from a final few shops that are hanging on. In all Hebron more than 700 shops have closed. The remaining Palestinians live with sixteen checkpoints and frequent curfews. Walking through the empty arcades felt a bit like being in a point-and-shoot video game – that same eerie stage-set feel, that latent violence. The Palestinians now live beside 400 or so settlers and 1,500 Israeli soldiers. The settlers are paid by various supporting organisations to be there, which means that they have nothing to do except pray and harass the local inhabitants. I can’t speak for the former, but certainly the evidence was clear that they set about the latter with great energy. We walked down a narrow street directly above which settlers have built homes. A net is hung at first-floor height to catch the rubbish the settlers throw down on the Palestinians below, although obviously it can’t prevent the dirty water, urine and occasional bottle of acid that is emptied over their heads. There is no flowing water in the old city; there is a system of wells and roof-top water tanks. Settlers vandalise the Palestinians’ water tanks so that their water supply empties down through their ceilings and is gone until a new tank can be installed. Outside three Palestinian shops caught on the far side of a barrier between them and the very edge of the settlers’ new conurbation, a van has been parked for many months playing loud settler anthems. It was playing them when we visited. I was told that they were doing it less than they used to. It had been playing them twenty-four hours a day for months.

  Hebron is one place we saw the infamous division of different roads into those for settler usage and Palestinian usage that gives rise to talk of apartheid. Whether you agree with the use of that term or not, there is a technical sense in which it is v
ery hard to disavow. Illegal settlers living in Palestinian territory do so under Israeli civil law. Palestinians in the same territory live under an accumulation of more than 1,500 military orders. Two populations in the same place under two different legal systems determined by their ethnicity. Clearly this fulfils the very definition of apartheid. From afar I had thought the deployment of that term crude and obfuscatory rhetoric. Now it seems an accurate description of the legal situation in the West Bank.

  The reason Hebron is so important to settlers and Palestinians alike is that it contains the tombs of the patriarchs in the Ibrahimi Mosque. It is there that during my first visit to Israel in 1994 Dr Baruch Goldstein, now celebrated as a saint and martyr by the settlers, massacred twenty-nine worshippers at Friday prayers during Ramadan. Part of the Israeli response was to divide the mosque, turning 65 per cent of it into a synagogue. Muslim pilgrims pass through a checkpoint of turnstiles and metal detectors to get in.

  As I wandered around the mosque I stopped beside Abraham’s tomb. It was an awesome experience to be in that place at the very wellspring of the Jewish tradition, to stand by Abraham, the first Jew and father of all three heavenly faiths, all of their genius, beauty and unending violence. I noticed that there was one position from which you could look through and glimpse the synagogue. In a moment that encapsulated for me the strangeness of seeing the world through the prism of this journey, I lingered there, staring across, in my socks with my head uncovered and, as I’ve said, heard the Amidah being chanted. I felt intensely connected to those words, to that world I was now seeing from outside, but also deeply upset and disturbed by all I had seen it could mean. What came to mind was the Jewish poet Paul Celan, in particular a poem of his I have by heart. I started reciting it to myself. It contains the mysterious line ‘How many dumb ones? Seventeen.’ One critical conjecture is that seventeen falls just short of the formerly eighteen sections of the Amidah, the central prayer of Jewish liturgy still commonly referred to as the Eighteen. The poem, suffused for that moment with all I now knew of the erasure of the Palestinian landscape and the disappearance of a plausibly hopeful Palestinian future, seems to refer to the erasure of ancient Jewish culture in the Shoah, or Holocaust. The poem ends with a devastating effect: the same line is repeated three times with letters removed until only the vowels remain. Those, you realise, are the letters that are not written down in Hebrew; all that is left on the page finally is the invisible, the absent. From memory it goes like this:

  No more sand art, no sand books, no masters.

  Nothing on the dice.

  How many dumb ones? Seventeen.

  Your question, your answer.

  Your song, what does it know?

  Deep in snow.

  eepinow

  ee-i-o

  Many years after that historical tragedy we are beset by questions of how the wider population could have tolerated the actions of its government or the minority of ideological extremists, how complicit they were, why they didn’t say anything, how much they knew and how possible it was not to know. I am hugely grateful that such questions regarding the Palestinian situation have been settled for me. I have seen and I know. Now, like many thousands of other Jews in Israel and around the world, I protest.

  July 2016

  SLEEPING IN GAZA

  Najwan Darwish

  Fado, I’ll sleep like people do

  when shells are falling

  and the sky is torn like living flesh.

  I’ll dream, then, like people do

  when shells are falling:

  I’ll dream of betrayals.

  I’ll wake at noon and ask the radio

  the questions people ask of it:

  Is the shelling over?

  How many were killed?

  But my tragedy, Fado,

  is that there are two types of people:

  those who cast their suffering and sins

  into the streets so they can sleep,

  and those who collect the people’s suffering and sins,

  mould them into crosses, and parade them

  through the streets of Babylon and Gaza and Beirut,

  all the while crying:

  Are there any more to come?

  Are there any more to come?

  Two years ago I walked through the streets

  of Dahieh, in southern Beirut,

  and dragged a cross

  as large as the wrecked buildings.

  But who today will lift a cross

  from the back of a weary man in Jerusalem?

  The earth is three nails

  and mercy a hammer:

  Strike, Lord.

  Strike with the planes.

  Are there any more to come?

  Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

  ONCE UPON A JERUSALEM

  Susan Abulhawa

  After eight years of higher education in science and medicine, and nearly ten years in medical research, I left that career to become a storyteller, because someone stole my story and retold the truth of me as a lie. Because that lie was an eraser, making me disappear, rootless and irrelevant. Because I needed words for the anguish of it all. Then, in language and story, I found a lonely and mesmerising truth of a land and her people, my family, whose passions, transgressions and faith form the terrain of an unredeemed history. This is a story of Deir el-Hawa, my namesake, and a few of her children.

  Deir el-Hawa was once a village atop a breezy mountain overlooking the Surar Valley west of Jerusalem, where the villagers could watch the sun rise daily over Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock. Tradition has it that Deir el-Hawa was established by someone from the entourage of Caliph Omar who captured Jerusalem in AD 638. Others claim Deir el-Hawa had been a Christian village since the first century. In Arabic ‘deir’ means monastery, so villages whose names begin with that word tend to be Christian villages, lending credence to the latter theory. El-Hawa means the wind. So our original village was the ‘Monastery of the Wind’.

  Whether dating to the first or seventh century, Deir el-Hawa lost one of her sons in the seventeenth, around the year 1680. A man named Hasan was cast out by his family and forced to leave the village. No one is sure why, but stories abound. Some say he was a Christian who converted to Islam to marry a Muslim woman against his family’s wishes. Others claim he murdered a man and expulsion from the village was his punishment. To be disinherited of home, land and family was perhaps a fate worse than death.

  Whatever the reason, Hasan left Deir el-Hawa, but he did not go far. He settled in el-Tur, a village east of Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, where he could now watch the sun set behind, rather than rise over, Jerusalem’s golden dome.

  As he was disowned, Hasan could not divulge his last name in this new town, and would simply answer that he was from Deir el-Hawa. So, locals took to calling him Abu el-Hawa. Thus the surname Abulhawa was born from Hasan, my ancestor six generations ago in the East Jerusalem village of el-Tur.

  The Abulhawas were not from the high-born, educated or merchant class. My forebears were fellaheen, people of the land, who lived close to the natural world, even though Jerusalem was a centre of culture, libraries, education and the grand homes of sophisticates. In Palestine my ancestors were farmers who cultivated and harvested wheat and barley over approximately 400 acres on the Mount of Olives. They raised sheep and goats, tended orchards and nurtured ancient olive groves. They plucked thyme, which grows wild on Palestine’s stony hills, and passed the time on Fridays eating pomegranates, oranges and all else the land had to offer in different seasons.

  Among Hasan’s grandchildren was a man named Mohammad Khalil, my paternal great-grandfather (also my maternal great-uncle, because my parents were cousins), who briefly gained international fame in 1957 when he celebrated his 136th birthday. Associated Press digital archives online has ninety-eight seconds of silent footage of Mohammad Khalil with his birth certificate, issued by the Ottomans in the year 1821. He credited his long life to the d
aily consumption of olive oil, pressed from his own harvest, and to the company of women. He had five wives, outlived them all and fathered twenty-six children, among them my paternal grandfather, Atiyeh.

  For the fellaheen, it was not unusual for first or second cousins to marry. In fact, it was preferred, because staying within the family ensured the protection of daughters. But both of my grandfathers, who were first cousins, married outside the family – to strangers, as they were called. Atiyeh fell in love with a city girl from a family that had lived for centuries within the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. When Atiyeh went to ask for her hand in marriage, what he got was an offer to wed her older, unattractive sister, a teenager named Soraya who would become my paternal grandmother. Together they had six children, but Atiyeh never loved his wife. I spent a summer with Sitti Soraya when I was a child. By then our family had already been expelled from Palestine by Zionist invaders, and my widowed grandmother was living in Jordan in a small refugees’ shack, consisting of one room and a small outhouse. She was short, like me, and moved very slowly. What I recall most from that summer were the mosquitoes that feasted on me and left enough red weal on my arms and legs to make people wonder if I had chickenpox. She and I watched whatever appeared on a small television, a grainy black and white screen with only one channel. She told me stories I have long forgotten, and we survived on a daily diet of olive oil, crushed thyme, strained yogurt, bread and fried eggs. The best part was her turtles, five prehistoric creatures that crawled around in the tiled space by her front door and constantly nibbled on lettuce. She loved those turtles, and so did I. Years later, I learned that people believed she used the turtles for magic spells and love potions, which was how she earned a living. Sitti Soraya died a refugee, alone in that small shack. The ancient stone home inside the Old City walls where she was born and where her family had lived for generations is claimed now by foreigners who insist that the Bible is a property deed to her home.