by Ahdaf Soueif
That summer with Sitti Soraya was all I ever knew of her. But my maternal grandmother Sarah would have a longer presence in my life. Teta Sarah was an imposing matriarch, with equal measures of sass, defiance, cunning, severity, gossip and love. She was an illiterate, badass hijabi. She was subversive. A Muslim Arab widow who refused to be put in her place and would trample the lives of men and women who dared try. She was a hajjeh who made the pilgrimage to Mecca several times, and she was a feminist who’d never heard of the concept. I feared her, and I loved her. And I was her favourite grandchild. She told me so.
I lived with Teta Sarah for much of my youth in Kuwait, and she’s the one who sneaked me into Palestine, right under Israeli noses, with no passport or travel papers. There I lived for three years in a Jerusalem orphanage, where I got to know Palestine’s hills. Jerusalem’s daily calls to prayer mixed with church bells and embedded themselves in my skin. Until I was made to leave. According to the new foreign rulers of the land I was illegal. An ‘infiltrator’.
But somehow, I never really left. Because Palestine is the landscape of my DNA. My lineage sings in her rivers. Her soil holds the bones and prayers of the family that came before me. She is the keeper of secrets and anguish whispered from the beds of my foremothers. Palestine is the body of all our stories, the place where we begin and return. Her olive trees, her ancient stone homes, her pomegranates and oranges, wild thyme, green valleys and sun-bleached hills are the stuff of our ballads and our books.
Like most Palestinians, we all became dispossessed, disinherited and exiled in one way or another. For a while I could return as a visitor, using my American passport, always enduring long hours of interrogation, searches, waiting and humiliation at entry and exit points. But it was worth it just to go back. In 2009 one of the interrogators advised me not to come back again because I probably wouldn’t get in. ‘Why would we let you into our country when you incite terrorism like this?’ she said, pointing to a 2001 op-ed I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer on her screen. I wanted to correct her that I was coming to my country. That she was a foreign occupier. I wanted to cry or scream or throw something at her. But I only sat silently and waited.
The next year I was invited to participate in PalFest, the Palestine Festival of Literature. I thought being with a large group of international writers would make it easier to get through Israeli border control. Most Westerners, with Western names, were allowed through relatively quickly. I was held back with a smaller group, all with Western passports but with Arab or Muslim names, who were released one by one over a period of about six hours, leaving me alone on one side, as the others loaded their things into the bus, waiting for me. It was getting late, and the programme that evening would start soon. Ahdaf Soueif, founder of PalFest, sent through a message that she was going to send everyone off to the venue but would wait for me herself. At the last minute, as the bus was about to depart, I was granted permission to go through, seven and a half hours after we had all arrived at the border.
I was able to go back twice more after that. The third time I was turned away, my passport stamped ‘Denied Entry’ with two heavy red marks.
I watch now from afar, from those two heavy red marks, as foreigners with massive guns continue to claim the terrain of my ancestral home. An American-born man of Polish ancestry whose family changed its name from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu sits at the helm as prime minister. A former Russian bar bouncer named Avigdor Lieberman oversees the oppression of four million Palestinians trapped in isolated, heavily surveilled ghettos. Naftali Bennett, whose family came from San Francisco, is a high-ranking politician and minister of education committed to the destruction of Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque.
These foreigners, with absolutely no identifiable ancestry in the land, believe it is their right to remove us and take our place. To erase us and make our heritage their own. To destroy our monuments, cemeteries and history. To live in my grandmother’s ancient home and pretend that the stories of those like Mohammad Khalil are their own.
Because God chose them.
Because God loves them more.
PERMISSION TO ENTER
Jeremy Harding
In 1967, after the Six Day War, many Palestinians who’d been driven east over the Jordan River tried desperately to return to their homes by slipping back across. The bridges, including the Allenby Bridge, had been damaged, but the patched-up remains were serviceable. The Allenby Bridge crossing was closely guarded and used by the soldiers on Israel’s newest frontier to put people out, rather than allow them in. Palestinian refugees trying to get home, as well as groups of fedayeen, preferred to ford the shallow river at dead of night, although fifty Israel Defence Forces ambush parties were stationed along the West Bank, ordered to fire on shadows in the water. By September more than a hundred people had been shot dead trying to return and a thousand had been deported back to Jordan.
On the Jordanian side of the river journalists were counting up to 80,000 refugees in tents, with more being driven in from the West Bank as Israeli soldiers fired over their heads to hurry them along. To avoid an international scandal, the Israeli government decided to stage the televised return of several thousand Palestinians. There was disagreement between the ministries about how to select the fortunate few. A Foreign Ministry official argued that the key point was demographic – children and women of childbearing age should be kept to a minimum – but according to the view that prevailed, the older refugees of 1948 were far more undesirable. Operation Refugee allowed for an intake of 20,000; in the event only 14,000 got in. ‘And so,’ Tom Segev writes in 1967, his study of the Six Day War, ‘Israel missed the great opportunity offered by the victory’ to heal ‘the malignant wound . . . left by the War of Independence.’
The original bridge, built of wood and iron, was completed in 1918 by the Royal Engineers (Allenby had conquered Palestine in 1917) and destroyed in 1946 by a few well-trained Palmach men laying explosives. The Night of the Bridges was a Haganah exercise designed to cut Palestine off from its neighbours and keep the British on the run. The bridge was repaired after the attack and survived for about twenty years, but after 1967 a new if similar structure was built. It’s visible today in aerial photographs, standing idly to the side of the four-lane blacktop that spans the (much-depleted) river, courtesy of Nippon Koei consulting engineers and the Japanese government.
The crossing remains a place of uncertainty for Palestinians. Nowadays, in the vast set of hangars at Israeli border control, people puzzle over why they were allowed through in April, say, but not in May. Last month I entered Palestine from Jordan as a guest of PalFest. We got an intimation of these difficulties once we’d crossed the bridge and joined the thick press of people waiting to be dealt with by Israeli border security, the great majority Jordanian-based or West Bank Palestinians. Most of the festival guests with security-friendly names or neutral birthplaces got through in an hour or more. Others with dubious names (Gurnah, Mahjoub, Ghappour! Vassanji? Hammad!) were held up and questioned for three or four hours. ‘What is the plot of your novel?’ Robin Yassin-Kassab, the author of The Road from Damascus, was asked. Had it not been names, it might have been clothing or colour of eyes. In 2003, Ahdaf Soueif records in Mezzaterra, hundreds of students at Birzeit were prevented from entering the university until, in the end, a checkpoint officer decided that only the ones with gel in their hair would go through. ‘Today,’ he announced, ‘gel will buy you an education.’
Like the refugees trying to get back from Jordan, the poet Mourid Barghouti became homeless in 1967. Unlike most of them, he was already out of the country, enrolled as a student in Cairo University and then, suddenly, unable to go home to Ramallah. In 1996 he was allowed to return. He was overwhelmed by the extent of the change and the scars of occupation, at a loss to find points of continuity between the Palestine he remembered and the one before his eyes. Occupation, he wrote, ‘interferes in every aspect of life and of death; it interferes
with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going anywhere and coming back, with going to market, the emergency hospital, the beach, the bedroom, or a distant capital.’ He had re-entered via the Allenby Bridge crossing. He was elated and nervous, a panicky list-maker, invoking the many names this transit point had acquired over the years – the Bridge of Return, the King Hussein Bridge, Al-Karama, Allenby. Yet for all its associations, he felt it in the end as the ‘boundary between two histories, two faiths, two tragedies’ in a landscape with few consolations: ‘The scene is of rock. Chalk. Military. Desert. Painful as a toothache.’ That’s about how it feels today, if you add the buses backed up at Israeli barriers and the lines of people shuffling slowly through layers of Israeli security.
2009
PRIVATISING ALLENBY
Suad Amiry
‘Dear Suad take the full board VIP, you pay $150 and you will NOT leave your car from Amman to Jericho . . . yalla (hurry up) come quickly. Love Islah.’
This was the SMS I received from a close friend encouraging me across the nightmarish Allenby Bridge on a hot July day. I had come from NYC to Amman and was on my way home to Ramallah. I must admit that learning about a new private initiative between Israel and Jordan (not yet Palestine) succeeded in reducing my anxiety about this trip. For crossing the Allenby Bridge, the sole designated entry/exit point for West Bank Palestinians, is one of the most exasperating experiences. If anything, Israel should be given a prize for putting in place and in practice one of the most Byzantine systems of control ever.
In normal places (certainly not in the Holy Land) crossing the fifteen-yard-long bridge, over a diverted hence dried-up non-existent Jordan River, should take two minutes maximum by car and five minutes on foot. However Israel’s claimed mania for ‘security’ has ingeniously transformed the two-minute crossing into a four-hour journey in winter and an eight-hour trip during the hot summer months. The journey cannot but remind Muslims and Jews alike of the fourteen Stations along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem.
Having lost access to the pre-1967 Qalandia Airport, located in the vicinity of Ramallah, as well as being deprived access to Tel Aviv Airport (since 2000, when Ariel Sharon gave orders that none of the four and a half million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip could use Tel Aviv Airport), all West Bank Palestinians like myself are obliged to cross the Allenby Bridge in order to use Amman Airport. Such a long detour not only means four extra days of travelling with two overnights in Amman, but it also augments the cost of crossing the border by $100–300 per person. And now, with the new VIP service, for those who want to bring the eight-hour trip down to one, the cost has come close to $600 per person, which is equivalent to a one-week excursion to Cyprus! This makes the crossing of the Allenby Bridge by far the most expensive border crossing on this planet. For one of the poorest of its populations.
Realising the lucrative nature of this private initiative, Israel has recently cancelled all travel privileges given to Palestinian businessmen in the past. It has also suspended the Israel–Palestine coordination that expedited the crossing for high-ranking Palestinian officials. The new arrangements mean that all MBC (magnetic business card) holders, high-ranking officials and desperate Palestinians like myself will pay $150 to cross the bridge in a bit of comfort and dignity.
Considering that 900 out of the 14,000 passengers who crossed the bridge daily during the month of July used the VIP service, one concludes that Palestinians like myself are contributing close to $50 million annually to the financing of our own occupation!
Having experienced the VIP service first-hand myself, I have to admit that it was by far the fastest crossing I ever had. Unlike for the thousands of the non-VIP passengers, gone for us – for now – were the long hours of waiting in a sweltering bus, waiting for the divine sign to proceed to the Second Station of the Via Dolorosa, the searching for one’s suitcase thrown recklessly on the melting asphalt, the screaming and moaning of exhausted Palestinian children, the fussing of Arab porters trying to get a tip behind the backs of their Israeli bosses.
More significantly though, this was the most friendly – overfriendly, awkwardly friendly – encounter I have ever had with Israelis, anywhere, in the long decades I’ve lived under occupation. It is hard to explain the unease and the discomfort my husband and I felt on being treated respectfully and humanely by Israelis.
A miraculous $150 changed the dynamics between Israel and Palestine. Where were the deafening shrieks of the Israeli soldiers as they boss around every Palestinian in sight in their distorted Arabic – La wagha, la wagha (Go back, go back), Wakhad wakhad bi saf (One by one in line), Hajjeh hajjeh, uskut ta’al houn (Old lady/old man, shut up and come here) – those pidgin commands, familiar not only from the bridge but from the 670 checkpoints punctuating the West Bank. Like everywhere else in Israel, spoken and written Arabic are massacred on the Allenby Bridge.
Having crossed the fourteen stations in less than an hour in an air-conditioned VIP car, I think of the 13,000 other passengers who have spent the entire day dragging themselves, their children and their elderly from one station to another. How I wished I could pay $150 for each one of them. Not only to end the humiliation and the never-ending saga of the bridge, but more importantly to transform the occupier–occupied dynamics between Israelis and Palestinians even if just for half an hour.
One last thought comes to mind: if the Israeli Border Authorities can take pride in handling sixteen million passengers a year at Tel Aviv Airport, why can’t they handle one tenth of that number on the Allenby Bridge? I can only come to one conclusion.
ALLENBY BORDER CROSSING
Sabrina Mahfouz
Stop, take a minute, breathe
stop, take a step back, name
stop, tell them again
where you’ve been
waiting
how long you’ve been
waiting
waiting to hear your name
in the mouths that made it
not on the tastebuds of tongues
that baulk at its flavour.
Forgive me for giving my name a flavour
but sometimes a writer must give things
to words that don’t work
because to give them nothing is worse.
Maybe not.
Perhaps it is worse to load them with something
that is sold in asymmetric lines
layered with all the stickiness of unstuck empires
and as we wait
we wait
stopped
stop
we consider this history
rewritten to find our landscape dominated
by white walls wishing to blind us
scrapyards of metal vans
that never carried us to familiar roads
stop take a minute, breathe.
QALANDIA
Gillian Slovo
Of the fragments of my memories of that fractured land, this one – of the poet in the turnstile – is the one that keeps coming back.
The poet was one of our group and he was in the West Bank for the first time, as most of us also were. We were trying to pass through the Qalandia checkpoint on our way from Ramallah to Jerusalem. By virtue of our non-Palestinian-ness, we could have stayed on our coach and been waved through to the other side, but PalFest wanted us to experience some of what Palestinians endure, and so we took hold of our suitcases and began to walk. It was mid-afternoon and hot. We walked down the enclosed narrow corridor, metal bars all around us, leading to the turnstile and soldiers. Apart from our group there were few people around. I was behind the poet as he led the way down the corridor. We moved slowly, partly because while the rest of us were pushing compact wheelies, his brown case was too big for the corridor and he had to work hard to jolt it forward.
I had time to notice how I kept brushing against the bars on either side and to wonder why a people whose past suffering was so much part of their pre
sent had built such a hard-edged chicken coop of a corridor for the use of human beings. I couldn’t help imagining what it must be like when more people pushed down this corridor so they could move from one part of a piece of land that was supposed to be theirs to its adjacent other. I thought about the rules and regulations we’d been told about, which I was struggling to keep track of. A blue ID card, I reminded myself, was an East Jerusalem ID. A green ID was a West Bank ID. So far so good. But what happens if a blue ID marries a green ID? The green can’t live in Jerusalem, and the blue could lose their right to live in Jerusalem if they move to the West Bank. What happens if the blue has a business and an old and sick mother in East Jerusalem but has to live in the West Bank because the blue loves a green? As I was trying to work my way through this ludicrous and labyrinthine logic keeping my hypothetical lovers with sick mothers and different IDs apart, it dawned on me that I could go no further because the poet was blocking my way.