This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  So in spite of the way that images can be disseminated ahead of state censorship, the situation today – with enhanced awareness both of the power of photography as an instrument of war and of how to neutralise that power – can induce a resignation deeper than that described by Berger. I became conscious of the result or paradox of impotent solidarity while watching 5 Broken Cameras about a Palestinian who filmed his village’s resistance to occupation and to the ever-encroaching settlements. It is a record of endless defeat and setbacks. How, I kept wondering, do Palestinians avoid sinking into despair? The answer might be found in another essay by Berger, about the Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi, where he invites us to suppose

  that we are not living in a world in which it is possible to construct something approaching heaven-on-earth, but, on the contrary, are living in a world whose nature is far closer to that of hell; what difference would this make to any single one of our political or moral choices? We would be obliged to accept the same obligations and participate in the same struggle as we are already engaged in; perhaps even our sense of solidarity with the exploited and suffering would be more single-minded. All that would have changed would be the enormity of our hopes and finally the bitterness of our disappointments.

  There is one crucial difference between the Gaza picture and McCullin’s: whereas the eyes of the Vietnamese child are turned imploringly towards us, neither the Palestinian man nor the girl pay us any mind. Could it be that, in spite of everything – in a situation that seems hopeless, when Palestinians are dependent on the political intervention of others – we are left looking to them, to the powerless, for hope?

  POETRY AND PROTEST

  Maath Musleh

  The Palestinian political scene has changed drastically since the launch of the first Palestine Festival of Literature ten years ago, in 2008, just one year into the Hamas–Fatah civil war.

  The launching of PalFest coincided with a shift in the political dynamics of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Seven months after the first edition, the Israeli army launched Operation Cast Lead, a brutal attack on the besieged Gaza Strip which left more than 1,400 Palestinians dead, 30 per cent of whom were children. This began a new phase in the Palestinian struggle. Even though there had been inter-Palestinian conflicts in the past, 2007 could be seen as an unprecedented era of Palestinian division. Voices within the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank came out in support of the Israeli military operation in the hope that this would result in the reinstatement of Fatah control of the Gaza Strip. These voices were echoed by several neighbouring Arab regimes. There is evidence that points towards these regimes even providing logistical support to the Israeli army.

  New political facts were instated on the ground, a new Palestinian political dynamic was created. Palestinian groups were no longer fighting in unison. Palestinian citizens no longer had a voice. A new era in the relationship between the Arab countries and the Palestinians began. As a new generation of Palestinians emerged from the rubble of the Aqsa Intifada and the devastation of Cast Lead, Palestinian tactics in the battle against Zionist hegemony were called into question.

  Many turned to alternative methods of resistance and so began the rising influence of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement worldwide. There was born the hope that public pressure could be brought to bear on Israel, that Israel could then be forced to abide by the dozens of UN resolutions it had ignored for the past seven decades. This approach was not spared the cynicism of those who believed that – at a time when the state of Israel receives $3 billion of American military support per annum – boycott strategies were ineffective.

  Organisers of PalFest believed that the first-hand experience of cultural figures brought in every year can make a difference. One cannot ignore the influence of these figures and how they contribute to undermining the propaganda that Zionism relies on.

  I have been part of the PalFest team since 2013, joining the tour around historic Palestine as poets and writers got the chance to experience the cruel realities of the old city in Hebron. I have seen their shock at the unimaginable apartheid wall eating the land, and I have watched them speak to devastated citizens losing their homes and livelihoods to settlement expansion and the deepening control of Palestine. The jolt was no less when they saw the suffering of the Palestinians living in the areas occupied in 1948.

  These cultural figures have written and spoken out about what they experienced and saw. Many came to understand that describing the state of Israel as an apartheid regime was not inaccurate. Some were left speechless as they came to encounter settlers face to face in Hebron, the settlers’ arguments bringing to mind the racist discourse of the KKK or apartheid gurus of South Africa. The experience clearly touched most of the participants in PalFest – twinned as it was with such a clear appetite for culture at each evening’s events.

  Although I could see the importance and influence of the festival, I also listened to the scepticism of my Palestinian peers. Many viewed the festival as a pointless cultural activity that in some aspects undermined the boycott. The scepticism still echoes in some discussions despite the fact that PalFest is a signatory to BDS, and that large numbers of participants have gone on to become active proponents of the boycott. Some activists believe that the very act of entering Palestine through the Allenby Bridge is no different from visits through Ben Gurion Airport. Getting an entry visa from the Israeli authorities is seen as an act of acceptance and submission. One question kept coming up: why can they enter Palestine and move freely around while we are deprived of that right?

  These discussions and arguments were part of larger debates emerging over the visits of several Arab artists and literary and political figures to Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth and other cities in the past decade. Many viewed these visits as crucial to building bridges between Palestinians – especially those living in areas occupied in 1948 – and the Arab world. They saw them as a way to break the siege imposed on Palestinians by the Israeli regime. But for many activists this is not enough; there are only ‘minimal’ advantages to such visits, which are then exploited by the Israeli government as good PR, bolstering the deceit that Jerusalem – for example – is an open city where people of all faiths are free to move and reside.

  I was out with friends from Tulkarem the other day, friends who feel that they are locked up in a big prison in the West Bank. They are apolitical, just regular citizens aspiring to live as normal a life as possible. The protests against the visits of artists to Palestine came up. A young woman burst out, ‘Should we just be sad all the time? We need some joy in our lives.’ She had come to lose faith in any overall strategy. She does not feel that she has any role or word in the future of Palestine.

  And this is the unfortunate reality. The Zionist regime has systematically worked to break the will of the people. We, as people, have also lost empathy towards one another. Everyone speaks from their own podium. The loss of a unified and effective strategy means that urban professionals can be dismissive of stone-throwing and daily protests while someone from a village that regularly protests is critical of those living more stable city lives. We are losing the fabric of our society.

  Do we put a hold on culture, on joy? Or on protests and confrontations? No. Events like PalFest keep us going. They add much-needed colour to our lives. We need to have them, just as we need the confrontations without which we would slide into oblivion faster than we would think. The reality is that PalFest and boycott movements and confrontations don’t play as lone strikers and do not seek to monopolise the struggle. There need to be midfield players, defenders holding the back lines – everyone has to find their role in the collective effort if we’re to have results. We need a holistic strategy that will get us back in the game as a harmonious team.

  COLD VIOLENCE

  Teju Cole

  Not all violence is hot. There’s cold violence too, which takes its time and finally gets its way. Children going to school and coming home are exposed to
it. Fathers and mothers listen to politicians on television calling for their extermination. Grandmothers have no expectation that even their aged bodies are safe: any young man may lay a hand on them with no consequence. The police could arrive at night and drag a family out into the street. Putting a people into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life, over years and decades, is a form of cold violence. Through an accumulation of laws rather than by military means, a particular misery is intensified and entrenched. This slow violence, this cold violence, no less than the other kind, ought to be looked at and understood.

  Near the slopes of Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem is the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Most of the people who live here are Palestinian Arabs, and the area itself has an ancient history that features both Jews and Arabs. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are in a special legal category under modern Israeli law. Most of them are not Israeli citizens, nor are they classified the same way as people in Gaza or the West Bank; they are permanent residents. There are old Palestinian families here, but in a neighbourhood like Sheikh Jarrah many of the people are refugees who were settled here after the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948. They left their original homes behind, fleeing places such as Haifa and Sarafand al-Amar, and they came to Sheikh Jarrah, which then became their home. Many of them were given houses constructed on a previously uninhabited parcel of land by the Jordanian government and by the UN Relief and Works Agency. East Jerusalem came under Israeli control in 1967, and since then, but at an increasing tempo in recent years, these families are being rendered homeless a second or third time.

  There are many things about Palestine that are not easily seen from a distance. The beauty of the land, for instance, is not at all obvious. Scripture and travellers’ reports describe a harsh terrain of stone and rocks, a place in which it is difficult to find water or to shelter from the sun. Why would anyone want this land? But then you visit and you understand the attenuated intensity of what you see. You get the sense that there are no wasted gestures, that this is an economical landscape, and that there is great beauty in this economy. The sky is full of clouds that are like flecks of white paint. The olive trees, the leaves of which have silvered undersides, are like an apparition. And even the stones and rocks speak of history, of deep time and of the consolation that comes with all old places. This is a land of tombs, mountains and mysterious valleys. All this one can only really see at close range.

  Another thing one sees, obscured by distance but vivid up close, is that the Israeli oppression of Palestinian people is not necessarily – or at least not always – as crude as Western media can make it seem. It is in fact extremely refined, and involves a dizzying assemblage of laws and by-laws, contracts, ancient documents, force, amendments, customs, religion, conventions and sudden irrational moves, all mixed together and imposed with the greatest care.

  The impression this insistence on legality confers, from the Israeli side, is of an infinitely patient due process that will eventually pacify the enemy and guarantee security. The reality, from the Palestinian side, is of a suffocating viciousness. The fate of Palestinian Arabs since the Nakba has been to be scattered and oppressed by different means: in the West Bank, in Gaza, inside the 1948 borders, in Jerusalem, in refugee camps abroad, in Jordan, in the distant diaspora. In all these places Palestinians experience restrictions on their freedom and on their movement. To be Palestinian is to be hemmed in. Some of this is done by brute military force from the Israel Defense Forces – killing for which no later accounting is possible – or on an individual basis in the secret chambers of the Shin Bet. But a lot of it is done according to Israeli law, argued in and approved by Israeli courts, and technically legal, even when the laws in question are bad laws and in clear contravention of international standards and conventions.

  The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor. You have to be what you are not, what it is not possible for you to be, in order not to be slowly strangled by the laws arrayed against you. In Israel there is no pretence that the opposing parties in these cases are equal before the law; or, rather, such a pretence exists, but no one on either side takes it seriously. This has certainly been the reality for the Palestinian families living in Sheikh Jarrah, whose homes, built mostly in 1956, inhabited by three or four generations of people, are being taken from them by legal means.

  As in other neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem – Har Homa, the Old City, Mount Scopus, Jaffa Gate – there is a policy at work in Sheikh Jarrah. This policy is twofold. The first is the systematic removal of Palestinian Arabs, either by banishing individuals on the basis of paperwork, or by taking over or destroying their homes by court order. Thousands of people have had their residency revoked on a variety of flimsy pretexts: time spent living abroad, time spent living elsewhere in occupied Palestine, and so on. The permanent residency of a Palestinian in East Jerusalem is anything but permanent, and once it is revoked is almost impossible to recover.

  The second aspect of the policy is the systematic increase of the Jewish populations of these neighbourhoods. This latter goal is driven both by national and municipal legislation (under the official rubric of ‘demographic balance’) and is sponsored in part by wealthy Zionist activists, who unlike some of their defenders in the Western world are proud to embrace the word Zionist. However, it is not the wealthy Zionists who move into these homes or claim these lands; it is ideologically and religiously extreme Israeli Jews, some of whom are poor Jewish immigrants to the state of Israel. And when they move in – when they raise the Israeli flag over a house that, until yesterday, was someone else’s ancestral home, or when they begin new constructions on the rubble of other people’s homes – they act as anyone would who was above the law: callously, unfeelingly, unconcerned about the humiliation of their neighbours. This twofold policy, of pushing out Palestinian Arabs and filling the land with Israeli Jews, is recognised by all the parties involved. And for such a policy the term ethnic cleansing is not too strong; it is in fact the only accurate description.

  Each Palestinian family that is evicted in Sheikh Jarrah is evicted for different reasons. But the fundamental principle at work is usually similar: an activist Jewish organisation makes a claim that the land on which the house was built was in Jewish hands before 1948. There is sometimes paperwork that supports this claim (there is a lot of citation of nineteenth-century Ottoman land law), and sometimes the paperwork is forged, but the court will hear and, through eccentric interpretations of these old laws, often agree to the claim. The violence this legality contains is precisely that no Israeli court will hear a corresponding claim from a Palestinian family. What Israeli law supports, de facto, is the right of return for Jews into East Jerusalem. What it cannot countenance is the right of return of Palestinians into the innumerable towns, villages and neighbourhoods all over Palestine from which war, violence and law have expelled them.

  History moves at great speed, as does politics, and Zionists understand this. The pressure to continue the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem is already met with pressure from the other side to stop this clear violation of international norms. So Zionist lawyers and lawmakers move with corresponding speed, making new laws, pushing through new interpretations, all in order to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinian presence. And though Palestinians make their own case and though many young Jews, beginning to wake up to the crimes of their nation, have marched in support of the families evicted or under threat in Sheikh Jarrah, the law and its innovative interpretations evolve at a speed that makes self-defence all but impossible.

  This cannot go on. The example of Sheikh Jarrah, the cold violence of it, is echoed all over Palestine. Side by side with this cold violence is, of course, the hot violence that dominates the news: Israel’s periodic wars on Gaza, its blockades of places such as Nablus, the rando
m unanswerable acts of murder in places such as Hebron. In no sane future of humanity should the deaths of hundreds of children continue to be accounted collateral damage, as Israel did in the summer of 2014.

  In the world’s assessment of the situation in Palestine, in coming to understand why the Palestinian situation is urgent, the viciousness of law must be taken as seriously as the cruelties of war. As in other instances in which world opinion forced a large-scale systemic oppression to come to an end, we must begin by calling things by their proper names. Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab. No one is fooled by this. Nor is anyone fooled by the accusation, common to many of Israel’s defenders, that any criticism of Israeli policies amounts to anti-Semitism. The historical suffering of Jewish people is real, but it is no less real than, and does not in any way justify, the present oppression of Palestinians by Israeli Jews.

  A neighbourhood like Sheikh Jarrah is an X-ray of Israel at the present moment: a limited view showing a single set of features, but significant to the entire body politic. The case that is being made, and that must continue to be made to all people of conscience, is that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is criminal. Nothing can justify either anti-Semitism or the racist persecution of Arabs, and the current use of the law in Israel is a part of the grave ongoing offence to the human dignity of both Palestinians and Jews.

  THE CITY OF DAVID

  Ghada Karmi