by Ahdaf Soueif
I can’t get the image of the couple out of my head.
Later. A new image has lodged in my mind. As we drove through the outskirts of Jerusalem we saw, sauntering along the pavement, a young hippy in T-shirt and jeans with shoulder-length blond hair and a semi-automatic rifle on a strap slung over his shoulder. ‘Who is that?’ we asked our driver. ‘Why is he carrying a gun?’ This is when we learned that all settlers are allowed to carry guns wherever they go.
Hebron has been a terrible shock to all of us. This city, which used to be the busiest on the West Bank, where 160,000 Palestinians lived and where once there was a huge market serving the surrounding area, is like a ghost town. There are 500 Israeli settlers here, in the centre of town, and they have 2,000 soldiers to guard them. The market has been closed, the shops are closed, the roads are mostly closed to Palestinians, and on rooftops you can see Israeli soldiers with their guns pointing down at you. We walked along one of the few streets that Palestinians are allowed to use, but even here they have to keep behind a barrier at the side, while macho Israeli settlers jog down the centre of the road carrying guns.
One of the settlements in Hebron is above a narrow street in the old part of town still used by Palestinians. They have had to put wire netting over the top of the street to catch the missiles that the settlers throw down on them: you can see the big things caught in the net: bricks, bottles, rubbish – but of course it doesn’t prevent poo or pee – or acid – coming through. We walked through, warily, on our way to the Mosque of Abraham, which was accessible to everyone until in 1994 an armed settler walked into it and shot dead twenty-nine Muslims at prayer, and injured over a hundred. Now it is divided in two, with a synagogue in one half. We joined Muslims going to pray in the mosque: we had to pass through three Israeli checkpoints in the space of a hundred yards before we could enter.
None of us had experienced anything like Hebron before, and we grew more and more appalled as the day went on.
BETHLEHEM, 10 MAY 2008
This morning we were taken on a bus tour to see the wall that nearly encircles Bethlehem now. We were as shocked as we had been in Hebron. Bethlehem is on a hill with carefully tended olive groves on terraces down the sides. The route of the wall is not at the bottom of the hill – no, it presses against the last houses in the town, it is the view at the end of the street, its watchtowers loom over the houses. When it is complete it will cut the land off from its owners, and here is the catch: there is an Israeli law which says that if land lies untended for seven years it can be confiscated by the Israeli government. Everyone knows in advance their land will be taken because, when the wall is finished, no one will be able to get through it. We passed an old monastery where for centuries monks have been making communion wine from their vineyards for the churches of Bethlehem; when the wall is finished it will lie on the Israeli side, what will happen to them?
JERUSALEM, 11 MAY 2008
We had a few free hours today so Hanan al-Shaykh and Esther and I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with one of our Palestinian volunteer guides, Hamada Attalah, who is a theatrical costume designer. As we went into the church I said to Hamada, ‘I feel so moved that I am going to pray by the body of Jesus.’ He gave me a funny look, and said, ‘What do you mean? Of course the body isn’t here!’ I had just forgotten the whole central tenet of my Catholic faith, which is the Resurrection . . .
I left them to go and prepare the speech I had to give tonight. Esther and Hanan took what they thought was a short cut back to the hotel across some wasteland and stumbled straight into an Israeli military post. The soldiers who surrounded them said they were lucky not to have been shot on sight.
Tottenham Hotspur beat Chelsea in the English Premier League yesterday – Roddy Doyle told us that he was woken in the middle of the night by a call from a distraught friend in Ireland yelling, ‘Chelsea lost – for God’s sake get to the Wailing Wall.’
This evening was our last event. There were speeches of thanks and then the writers read out passages from their favourite books. I read from the love story Ali and Nino. Then we all went to dinner in a nearby restaurant and danced. Arabs are genetically programmed to be able to shimmy their hips; Brits are definitely not – I was so conscious of looking like a cartoon of an English person doing Arabic dancing that I gave up. To think that only a few days ago we were all at the Allenby Bridge full of fear and trepidation and worrying about all the things that could go wrong, and none have – but our hearts are heavy with the scenes of oppression we have witnessed.
AMMAN, 12 MAY 2008
When I was packing in Jerusalem this morning I realised that though I’d used my pillow every night, I had never had time to make coffee with the cafetière or even drink my gin, so I gave them to a Palestinian friend.
ENDINGS . . .
A camaraderie grows in the bus as the days go by: it starts at the Allenby Bridge crossing when every year our guests see the authors with Arab names being taken away for questioning despite their American or British nationalities. Then, with every ugly checkpoint, every true and terrible story we hear, with every bullying settler or soldier, every Israeli act of callousness or cruelty or just blatant rudeness, we witnesses in the bus get closer to each other. And it’s not all grim – we bond over jokes and silly incidents and shared falafel sandwiches and Arab sweets until in the end we can’t bear to part from each other. To have been on PalFest together forges friendships – I feel a lasting kinship with anyone who has ever sat on our bus.
INDIA AND ISRAEL: AN IDEOLOGICAL CONVERGENCE
Pankaj Mishra
Literary festivals, for most writers, are a release from prolonged and solitary labour. The few obligations of authors – solo talks or panel discussions – are lightened by the thrill of being recognised, even lauded; and any enforced sociability with prickly compatriots is sweetened by free alcohol and adoring groupies. PalFest, which I accompanied in its very first incarnation, may be the world’s only literary festival that broadens the mind and deepens the heart.
I certainly cannot overestimate its revelatory quality. I grew up among fervent Zionists, who were either ignorant or disdainful of Palestinians. One of the first books that I read in English was Ninety Minutes at Entebbe, the account of a daring Israeli raid in Uganda to free hostages captured by Palestinian militants; and one of my earliest heroes was the Israeli general Moshe Dayan. I was introduced to both in the 1970s by my grandfather, an upper-caste Hindu nationalist. He recounted keenly how Dayan had outmanoeuvred numerically superior Arab armies in 1967; how he had snatched the Golan Heights from Syria at the last minute.
India did not have diplomatic relations with Israel until the 1990s. My grandfather was among many high-caste Hindus who idolised Israel because it possessed, like European nations, a proud and clear self-image; it had an ideology, Zionism, that inculcated love of the nation in each of its citizens. Most importantly, Israel was a superb example of how to deal with Muslims in the only language they understood: that of force and more force. India, in comparison, was a pitiably incoherent and timid nation-state; its leaders, such as Gandhi, had chosen to appease a traitorous Muslim population.
This is what I also believed as a curious child. I remember that when news of Dayan’s secret visit to India in 1978 as Israel’s foreign minister leaked, and pictures of him appeared in the Indian newspapers, I was transfixed by his black eyepatch and mischievous grin.
As I grew older, I became aware of the plight of Israel’s victims. There were Palestinians in small Indian cities, mostly students at engineering and medical colleges, and their dispossession was often discussed in the left-wing circles I fell into at university. But even then Palestine signified to me a tragically unresolved dispute, in the same way that Kashmir did, between parties that had somehow failed to see reason.
In 2000 I went on a reporting trip to Kashmir, where tens of thousands of people had died in an anti-Indian insurgency and counter-insurgency raging since 1989. Hindu nationalists
have long vended an image of Indian Muslims as fifth columnists breeding demographic and other vast anti-national conspiracies in their urban ghettos. In fact, Muslims are the most depressed and vulnerable community in India, worse off than even low-caste Hindus in the realms of education, health and employment, frequently exposed to bigoted and trigger-happy policemen. Their condition has deteriorated in recent decades. After dying disproportionately in many Hindu–Muslim riots, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed and many more displaced in a pogrom in 2002 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, then ruled by a hard-line Hindu nationalist called Narendra Modi. But, as I discovered in 2000, India, in the eyes of Kashmiri Muslims, had never been less than a Hindu majoritarian state despite its claims to secularism and democracy.
Seven years later, the trip to the West Bank with PalFest brought me face to face with the brutality, squalor and absurdity of the occupation. Far from being embroiled in a mere boundary ‘dispute’ with its neighbours, Israel, it became clear, is the world’s last active colonialist project of European origin, sustained by high-tech armoury and the fervour and guilt of many powerful white people in the West. I also realised, like many visitors to the region, how much Israel’s claim to represent the victims of the Holocaust serves to hide the cruelties it inflicts on its captives in the West Bank and Gaza. For me, however, PalFest also unveiled another way of looking at India: together with Israel, another ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ country.
It has made it easier for me to understand the extraordinary ideological convergence, so much hoped for by my grandfather and others and now accomplished, between countries that had started out as formally democratic and economically left wing. Their cosmopolitan founding fathers – Nehru, Gandhi, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann – and egalitarian ideals helped give the new nation-states, both created within months of each other, their glow of heroic virtue. It mattered little during their early years that both countries were born of imperialist skulduggery and nationalist opportunism, of clumsy partition, war and frenzied ethnic cleansing, or that, in the case of Israel, the inferior status of Arabs was formalised in citizenship rules.
As it happened, a mere decade – between 1977 and 1989 – separated their political transformations, when hard-line right-wing groups long deemed marginal – Likud, the BJP – began to change the political culture of the two countries. Unrest in occupied territories (the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000, and Pakistan-aided insurgency in Kashmir from 1989) helped give the post-colonial nationalisms of India and Israel a hard millenarian edge. In the 1990s both countries embarked on a deeper economic and ideological makeover, rejecting ideals of inclusive growth and egalitarianism in favour of neo-liberal notions about private wealth creation.
That process is now complete. Narendra Modi is now India’s most powerful prime minister in decades while tens of thousands of his Muslim victims in Gujarat still languish in refugee camps, too afraid to return to their homes. A portrait of the Hindu nationalist icon V.D. Savarkar, one of the conspirators in Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, now hangs in the Indian parliament. When Netanyahu won re-election in 2015, Modi tweeted his congratulations to his ‘friend’ in Hebrew (Israel is now one of India’s biggest arms suppliers). The two prime ministers, both allied with big business, flourish in the ideological and emotional climate of globalisation, in which, backed by popular consent, violence and cruelty enjoy a new legitimacy.
Kashmir has for years been subject to a draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which grants security forces broad-ranging powers to arrest, shoot to kill, and occupy or destroy property. The summer of 2016 witnessed, in addition to the routine killing of scores of protestors, a sinister escalation: mass blindings, including of children, by pellet cartridges that explode to scatter hundreds of metal pieces across a wide area. Right-wing demagogues in both India and Israel seek to forge a new national identity – a new people, no less – by stigmatising particular religious and secular groups. And, as though emboldened by them, security forces in Kashmir this summer attacked hospitals and doctors in a display of impunity that was worthy of the Israel Defence Force.
Indeed, fanatical Hindu organisations that assault Muslim males marrying Hindu women seem to mimic Lehava (Flame), an association of religious extremists in Israel which tries to break up weddings between Muslims and Jews. A lynch-mob hysteria in significant parts of the public sphere – traditional as well as social media – fully backs the atrocities of security forces in Kashmir and Palestine. More importantly, bigotry is now amplified in both countries from people placed on the commanding heights of government.
A senior minister in Narendra Modi’s cabinet last year described Indian Muslims and Christians in India as ‘bastards’. Staffing educational and cultural institutions with zealots, both governments seem obsessed with moral and patriotic indoctrination, reverence for national symbols and icons (mostly far right), and the uniqueness of (a largely invented) national history. The supremacism of these ethno-nationalists goes with a loathing of dissenters who seem to be undermining collective unity and purpose. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the upsurge of fanaticism in India and Israel is mob fury, sanctioned by their ruling classes and stoked by the media, against anyone who expresses the slightest sympathy with the plight of their victims.
Lost in a moral wilderness, India and Israel make one ponder, even more than the unviable and fragmenting states of the Middle East, the paths not taken, the missed turning points, in the history of the post-colonial world. But it is hard not to suspect that figures like Modi or Avigdor Lieberman are the clearest consummation of the European-style nationalism that my grandfather so admired. Murdered by a Hindu fanatic who accused him of being soft on Muslims, Gandhi was an early victim to its deadly logic. It is now manifest in the brutal occupations of both India and Israel – nation-states that are, as PalFest first revealed to me, committed to not resolving their foundational disputes.
IN THE COMPANY OF WRITERS
Kamila Shamsie
Entering the West Bank with PalFest in 2014 was the second occasion on which I had come to Palestine in the company of writers. The first time had been in the 1990s, when I was a student in America, and my friend, teacher and guide to and through the intersection of politics and aesthetics was the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. It was Shahid who gave me a copy of the journal Poetry East which he had guest-edited in 1989, and to which he wrote an introductory essay entitled ‘Dismantling Some Silences’. In this introduction he quotes Gregory Oraela writing about the assassination of the Palestinian poet Kamal Nasser. He ‘was sitting at his desk at home on 10 April 1973 when a commando unit of Israelis burst into the room, killing him and two others. One Israeli shot him in the mouth because he was a poet: a legend among Palestinians . . .’
I opened that copy of Poetry East yesterday for the first time since my university days, when it was among the handful of books that I kept on my desk as I wrote, and which served in various moods as talisman or yardstick or reprimand. When I read those words about Nasser I had to put the book down, stand up and physically walk away from it for a while. Or rather, walk around it, able neither to leave nor return to it. I may well have responded exactly so when I first read those sentences, but I wouldn’t, in the mid-90s, have thought to do what I did yesterday: go online to find what else I could discover about Kamal Nasser’s assassination. And so I wouldn’t have known then that the commando unit was led by Ehud Barak, or that Kamal Nasser – poet and PLO spokesman – was shot in the mouth and also in his right hand, the writing hand.
What to do with such images in your head except seek out other images that give utterance to grief and injustice? And so I turned the pages of Poetry East to find the lines further in which played an even greater role than the story of Nasser’s assassination in first taking me to Palestine by making it a place I learnt to imagine, though it would be twenty years before I would visit it: the lines, pages and pages of them, written by Mahmoud Darwish.
We did not come to this
country from a country
we came from pomegranates, from the glue of memory
from the fragments of an idea
and
You will say: no. And you will rip apart the words and the slow-moving river. You will curse this bad time, and you will vanish into the shade. No – to the theatre of words. No – to the limits of this dream. No – to the impossible.
Translated by Lena Jayyusi and W.S. Merwin
And so much more beside.
It was not just the poems, but the company they kept which drew me to them. In that journal the Darwish poems end and Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems (translated by Shahid) begin; it is as if a baton is passed between those two great poets of exile and broken dreams, both writing with that expansiveness of expression that can be found in Arabic and in Urdu. Although I had grown up in Pakistan and knew of Faiz’s reputation (and knew also my mother’s tears the day he died), I didn’t know his poetry, which was too anti-authoritarian for the school lessons, which were the only way in which Urdu poetry came to me in those days in the strangely cut-off anglophone world in which I grew up. It was Shahid who told me, in America, that it was unacceptable for a Pakistani to be unversed in Faiz. Handing me his translations of Faiz’s work, which also had the Urdu text alongside the English versions, he said, ‘Take this and don’t come back until you’ve read it.’ I fell headlong in love with Faiz – with his poetry, his humanity, his internationalism. And Faiz, I knew, had spent some years in Beirut while exiled from Pakistan. Many of his closest companions were exiled Palestinians, so later, when he was asked what Palestine meant to him, he replied, ‘After all these years that I spent with the Palestinians, I became one of them.’ Faiz and Darwish knew each other in Beirut – as friends, though not without their differences. But most significantly, to me, Faiz wrote about Palestine, explicitly so in several poems.