by Ahdaf Soueif
He hadn’t meant to. All he had done was the logical next step of getting to the end of the metallic funnel and stepping into the turnstile that clearly led to the other side. To do this, he had to lift his arms and hold his suitcase over his head, this being the only way both he and it could fit in. But once he got into the turnstile it failed to turn, so that he ended up trapped in the embrace of its spindles. He tried using his body to push forward like you do when you’re in a turnstile and holding a case above your head. The turnstile would not budge. Standing impatiently behind him I couldn’t understand what was going wrong – I was on the point of instructing him in the art of using a turnstile – when I realised that somewhere, out of sight, some soldier in a glass cubicle who was able to watch us on his monitor must have deliberately applied the brakes. Not because of the press of people because there wasn’t one. Not because the poet and his oversize suitcase could, in any universe, have represented a threat. Because . . . who knows? Perhaps the soldier was looking for something to assuage the boredom of being made to sit there for hours on end. Perhaps he had gone to the toilet or was taking a slug of tea or even an illicit snooze, or perhaps he just felt like punishing someone who had the temerity to want to pass through. Whatever the reason, all we could do was wait as we backed up behind the poet.
When he twisted round, briefly, to look at our group, I caught a glimpse of his expression. What I saw was an already pale face bled white by humiliation: that somebody could halt you in your tracks for no apparent reason; that there could be no way you could tell them that you meant no harm or persuade them out of their misbehaviour; that you could end up caught in those unyielding arms hefting a cumbersome suitcase above your head, which you realised as the minutes ticked by and your arms grew tired, was far too big for purpose. When his eyes met mine, he looked away. He was a poet drained of words to describe what he was feeling. He stood, suitcase aloft, no longer trying to get out of there, until at long last a loudspeaker coughed and the turnstile was released, spewing him out so suddenly that he staggered forward. While behind him I thought, what has just happened is not about security. The soldier had frozen the turnstile not because he needed to but because he could. What I had witnessed was the petty exercise of power.
I have thought about this moment many times since the end of our trip. I know Palestinians get shot at these checkpoints, that women end up giving birth while waiting to pass through, that breadwinners lose their jobs because of their arbitrary closure and that people travel, sometimes for hours, to get to the other side of their street. I know that in order to get to the hospital they badly need, patients are made to get out of one ambulance which has green – or was it blue? – licence plates, allowing it to drive on West Bank roads only, and stagger across into a different ambulance with blue – or was it green? – licence plates which mean that it can drive on other roads.
So I try and figure out why this comparatively petty pain I witnessed has stuck so hard. And I realise that what it reminded me of was my childhood in South Africa. At that daily sight of black men and women made to produce their green pass or their blue one, to prove their right to occupy the space in which they were. The expression on the poet’s face that I glimpsed was an echo of so many other similar expressions I had noticed as a child. Those downcast eyes and the guilt in them: that they had done something wrong – were pushing a suitcase too big for purpose perhaps – and that is why they ended up being trapped. It is this that stayed with me.
When you are away from the West Bank it’s possible to keep in touch with news of the big incursions. Of the children shot dead. Of so many lives lost. What is less easy to remember is the steady drip of humiliation that affects a people because of their race, their religion or their ID card. What becomes less immediate when you are far away from the turnstiles and the teenage soldiers with their guns and braces is remembering the rage that flows from being so regularly trapped and humiliated, and being powerless to do anything to make it stop.
AFTER TEN YEARS
John Horner
Many years ago I attempted to write a book about the Lebanese civil war. It came to nothing, but the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps really opened my eyes to the Palestinian plight. When I was asked to become a trustee of Engaged Events – and its offspring PalFest – it was something I had to do. But, in spite of my earlier researches, which taught me a lot about the horrors of the Israeli occupation, nothing could have prepared me for the inhumanity and brutalism I came to witness when I visited the West Bank.
After nearly ten years and many visits to Palestine, it is the anecdotal evidence that haunts me, not the statistics and political rhetoric.
In Hebron I met a young boy who worked in the town. He lived on the wrong side of Shuhada Street, which Palestinians are forbidden to cross (just a simple road), and he pointed to his house up the hill on the other side. It used to take him fifteen minutes to walk home, now it takes over two hours, each way.
I met him again, two years later. His problem was solved, he said: they had bulldozed his home and replaced it with the Israeli watchtower he now pointed out.
I was with Jillian Edelstein, a renowned photographer and one of our PalFest visitors. We had met an old man and his wife and were on the roof of their home, in the Aida refugee camp, in Bethlehem. He pointed to the monstrous wall that surrounds them and showed us the land that has been cut off. Palestinians aren’t allowed on it and, after seven years, it will be confiscated as the current owners are effectively absentee landlords. The hideous, soulless Israeli settlement sprawls slowly down the hill soon to encapsulate and steal it.
The same man, in his eighties, pointed to the shell holes in his wall. Bullets fired as target practice. He took us to his basement and showed us his now defunct weaving machines. He’d moved them here twelve years ago having been given one week to do so. The Israelis were closing a section of the camp – a terrorist threat they had pronounced. He used to employ seventeen people, but overnight the Israelis issued an embargo on his produce – towels and flannels. The factory closed and the threads are still there in a ghostly fashion, where the looms suddenly stopped, with dust gathering. A tomb he said, like the place in which he lived. Was he angry, did he hate Balfour and his declaration, the British, or Binyamin Netanyahu? No, not angry nor full of hate – but for one man: Tony Blair, the hypocritical Middle East Peace Envoy. Peace, the man asked, what peace?
I went to a market in Nablus and found an old lady selling bric-a-brac. I picked up a couple of large, rusted old keys. ‘You may keep them,’ a young English-speaking boy translated. ‘They were from my family home. I will never return, I have no family left here.’ I still have those keys and I often wonder where her stolen home lies, probably replaced by a settlement.
I met a barber and his apprentice son in Jerusalem. He usually washes his customers’ hair. Not today, in fact not for several days. The Israelis take limitless supplies of water for the settlements where the grass is sprinkled daily, a verdant green. He has tanks on the roof to preserve the water, but the supply is only provided a maximum of three days a week. You can always tell a Palestinian home by the water tanks on the roofs. Israelis don’t need them. The settlers consume an average 350 litres a day, the Palestinians just 60 litres.
Then there is Gaza.
The West Bank is about the ‘enemy within’. Turn 360 degrees and you will see the omnipresence of Israel in Palestine. A watchtower, the dreaded wall, a barbed-wire fence, a settlement, soldiers, tanks, hideous little flags and whatever other affront they impose. Gaza is the ‘enemy without’; unseen. It’s the biggest concentration camp in the world, where no one has any freedom of movement in or out of the country and unemployment approaches 50 per cent.
There were the fishermen we met, whose catch for the day was two small crates of tiny sardines. Because the big fish have all gone – overfished in the small, Israeli-imposed, three-mile restriction zone. Fishermen tell me that gunboats decide if they hav
e crossed the invisible border in the sea. They then arbitrarily circle the fishermen, swamping their boats and ruining their catch. Some men are washed overboard and have to be dragged back onto the boats. The soldiers board the boats in search of non-existent weapons. Occasionally, they fire their guns just to show who’s boss. Often boats are deliberately sunk, under some false pretext, and livelihoods lost.
We went to a school to run a workshop with a group of young boys (segregated by Hamas dogma from the girls), and they were asked to express their feelings in writing. One, a lad of about fourteen, wrote a poem about waiting, waiting for what? Electricity, of which the Strip has virtually none, the generators targeted and bombed by the Israelis. Why electricity? we wondered. Because it was his metaphor for light and, therein, for freedom.
We visited the tunnels, no secret because they were huge, twenty feet across. But irrespective of the need for them, the Israelis stop the import of sanitary towels and sanitary pads. Why? Because, as one young schoolgirl told us, they like to humiliate women and deprive them of their dignity. An entire lorry-load appeared, no cement, no weapons, just the necessities of everyday life of which the people are robbed. The tunnels are now closed and the deprivation continues.
The sewage. The water is blocked, turned off, and the electricity shut down, deliberately. The sewage cannot be treated. Then suddenly the sluice gates open, and the raw sewage floods into the fields, destroying everything before it and spreading disease. It’s impossible to imagine that some government department actually works out deliberately how to do these dreadful things to other human beings.
I had to leave early one year and took a taxi from Ramallah to the Allenby crossing. It usually closes at midday. Why? This day was a bank holiday and my driver made excellent time as we raced towards the Dead Sea, the Arabic place names graffiti’d out of the signs, leaving just Israeli and English. Then suddenly we encountered a snake of hundreds of cars, Palestinians trying to cross into Jordan to see their loved ones or visit the sick. Some even attempting to get themselves to hospital. The driver raced past everyone and, near the front of the queue, bundled me into a car of very confused Palestinians. It was the only way I would cross the border in time.
As we approached, we were blockaded and a side road opened for maybe twenty minutes to let through just two Israeli coaches. And so it went on. Ours was nearly the last vehicle allowed through.
There are so many stories that they begin to appear unbelievable. They should be. When I return home after just one week I am emotionally drained. When I try to describe the situation and what I have seen and heard, I cry. The Palestinians do not cry. This is their life, and they lead it with courage, dignity and hope.
One day, waiting at the Qalandia checkpoint, I watched a little bird hopping either side of a barbed-wire fence, eventually to fly off to its own freedom. What a thought.
DIARY
Brigid Keenan
I was twenty in 1960 when Otto Preminger’s blockbuster film Exodus hit the cinema screens and a whole generation (of Westerners) swooned over Paul Newman and his struggle for the state of Israel in the face of dastardly British and Palestinian machinations. A year later I became a fashion writer and, still star-struck, admired Vidal Sassoon as much for fighting for Israel in the 1948 war as for his revolutionary hair cutting. Then, in 1962, I was invited to the first Israeli Fashion Fair. I met Ariel Sharon (young and handsome then), watched catwalk shows in Tel Aviv, went to the parties and never thought for a moment that perhaps I wasn’t seeing the whole picture or hearing the whole story. I don’t recall Palestine or Palestinians being mentioned at all.
With the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, doubts began to surface, and then I married a man who spoke Arabic, knew the Middle East and had Palestinian friends. And I began to learn about what was really happening in Israel/Palestine. By the time we were posted to Syria in the 1990s, where the huge Palestinian refugee camp at Yarmuk housed people I came to know, there was absolutely no doubt about which side I was on.
In 2001 various of us who felt passionately about this issue came together for a fundraising event at the Royal Geographical Society in London. We had distinguished speakers: William Dalrymple and Colin Thubron, whom I knew, and Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian/British writer whose novel The Map of Love had not long before been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I had never met her, but she and I chatted in the ladies’ room while nervously combing our hair before we went on stage and eventually became good friends. Once we were both invited to a literature festival in Jordan; we discussed whether we would accept or not (in fact, the festival never happened). ‘The only festival I’d really like to go to’, said Ahdaf, ‘would be one in Palestine.’
Time went by, and I was invited to a literature festival in Paris. It was small-scale, fun and beautifully arranged – partly by a young woman called Eleanor O’Keefe (who subsequently invented the 5x15 literary events). I was impressed, and when I saw her at a party in London a few weeks later rushed up to tell her how much I had enjoyed Paris. But weirdly and mysteriously the words that came out of my mouth were: ‘Eleanor, why don’t we start a literature festival in Palestine?’ We were both struck with astonishment at what I had said and hurriedly left the party to telephone Ahdaf.
And that is why, two years later, a motley crew of writers, poets and helpers from around the world gathered at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, and clambered on to the coach that would take us to the Allenby crossing for our very first Palestine Festival of Literature. We took with us messages of support from Patrons John Berger and Chinua Achebe (filmed by my nephew Perry Ogden) and from Mahmoud Darwish. We were missing playwright David Hare, whose wife had been mugged in London, but we’d gained Esther Freud, who had cancelled when her daughter got chickenpox but changed her mind and decided to come. And we’d added a last-minute rendezvous to our schedule – a meeting in Ramallah with Raja Shehadeh, whose book Palestinian Walks had just won the Orwell Prize.
Not knowing what to expect, I took with me my pillow, a cafetière and a pack of real coffee, a bottle of gin and my notebook – from which I quote here.
JERUSALEM, 7 MAY 2008
The first thing I noticed on the coach to the Allenby Bridge this morning was that Esther Freud was reading Dip Bag . . . a good omen I think. (My book Diplomatic Baggage had just been published.)
Everyone was chatty and friendly. There is an American woman with us who heard that Roddy Doyle (one of our group) is a Chelsea fan, and thought that meant Chelsea Clinton, which caused some secret hilarity.
Laughter ceased at the Allenby crossing. All the people in our party with Arab names were stopped – in spite of holding US or British passports – and escorted away for questioning. The Israelis said they were checking with the British Council to make sure they were all writers, but tonight we discovered they hadn’t been in touch with the BC at all, it was just a show of power. It was four hours before our friends were released.
The drive to Jerusalem was a total shock: I had been imagining ‘settlements’ as small beleaguered outposts on the tops of some hills – but in fact they are huge towns with high-rise buildings that cover every single hilltop, all running into each other to make one vast urban sprawl dominating the country. Why don’t we all know this? It seems like an incredibly well-guarded secret – I wish everyone could come here and see what is going on. As for the idea of demolishing any of them – dream on. No one is going to be able to dismantle any of these illegal towns. Maybe the most alien thing about them is their greenery: the trees of the Holy Land are umbrella pines, cypress and olive, but the settlers go in for plantations of Christmas trees so they have not only taken over the land, but the landscape as well.
I was already feeling nervous because I was to be part of our opening event in Jerusalem tonight, along with Esther Freud and Willie Dalrymple and moderated by Hanan Ashrawi. But after our experience at the Allenby crossing and seeing the settlements, I got into a real panic because I thought my contribution would
be too lightweight and flippant. I needn’t have worried: a Palestinian lady came up to Esther and me after the talk and said that it was the first time she had laughed in three years.
RAMALLAH, 8 MAY 2008
This morning we came face to face with the hideous grey cement wall (higher and uglier than we’d imagined) that we’d seen in the distance, snaking its sinister way round the landscape, and we went through our first checkpoint at Qalandia en route to Ramallah – and here’s another thing: I’d always imagined the checkpoints to be sheds manned by a couple of Israeli soldiers, but they are more like airport terminal buildings. Soldiers you can’t see yell at you through megaphones; you queue to go through tightly revolving barred gates, drag your suitcase across concrete for miles, and everything is fear, ugliness, hostility, hate. The only light relief was Banksy’s paintings on the wall at the checkpoint; he immediately became a hero to us all.
BETHLEHEM, 9 MAY 2008
Back to the Qalandia checkpoint this morning (en route to Hebron and then Bethlehem). We were made to queue up and go through twice, once by ourselves and the second time with all our heavy luggage from the bus. I don’t know why we had to do this, but you very quickly learn not to ask questions because things will get worse if you do. As we were queuing to go through the gate for the second time, a Palestinian couple with a toddler hobbled slowly towards us: they’d obviously been turned back at the checkpoint. The husband was young but clearly very ill – there was a tube with blood in it coming out from his clothes, and his wife was practically carrying him. Her face was shiny with tears and the toddler was clinging to her legs as she walked.