by Ahdaf Soueif
Silwan is a village that lies on the outskirts of East Jerusalem immediately to the south of the Old City walls. Until the war of 1967 it had been a quiet, rural place, unremarkable and much like any other in its vicinity. But when the victorious Israelis took over East Jerusalem in that war, Silwan’s fortunes took a dramatic turn. It became the pivot and focus of an impassioned Israeli archaeological hunt for the biblical past. Religious Jewish settlers had associated it with the biblical King David, and from then on it was doomed. Israelis viewed archaeology as less a scholarly pursuit for its own sake than a battleground in which to promote Jewish history as they saw it, at the expense of any other kind. The imperative was to find proof of an ancient Jewish presence in Palestine’s modern land that would show the world how justified, indeed how natural, was the modern Jewish desire to reconnect with those imagined Israelite ancestors the Bible spoke of in such realistic and concrete terms. If the evidence could be found, it would give their presence in Palestine a legitimacy they still felt they lacked.
Unluckily for Silwan, Hebrew legend identified it with the original site of Jerusalem at the time of King David. It was accordingly dubbed the City of David – Ir David in Hebrew. A particular focus of this Jewish settlement was the Bustan area at the northern end of the village, allegedly the site of the biblical Garden of the King, where supposedly David and Solomon walked. Israeli religious organisations, headed by the especially fanatical Elad, offered generous funding, thought to be from American sources, and spurred forward the archaeological excavations designed to validate the biblical claims to Silwan. The Israeli Department of Antiquities and the Jerusalem municipality gave these groups free rein with the aim of clearing Palestinian housing from village land up to the southern wall of the Old City to make room for a massive National Biblical Park for Jewish visitors and tourists. At the time of my visit a demolition order had been issued for eighty-eight Palestinian houses standing in the area designated for the national park. Their owners, desperate to have the order withdrawn, had managed to delay the decision for the time being. But it remained an imminent threat hovering over them like an executioner’s sword. Israeli soldiers harassed them constantly with night raids and hold-ups at impromptu military checkpoints and, along with the settlers, kept up an unrelenting campaign of intimidation and attack.
Silwan is a hilly place with a deep central valley, its traditional white flat-roofed houses built picturesquely into the hillsides. Looking at them from above one could see in and amongst them the settler houses flying the blue and white Israeli flag, incongruous enclaves pointedly fenced off from their neighbours. To the right was a huge gash in the ground like a giant bomb crater. This was the major archaeological excavation site, where the search for biblical authenticity was conducted. It was massive, stretching over an area of more than one acre and sinking to a depth of twenty metres; to my mind, the ground exposed by the excavation looked violated, as if it had been forced to yield up its entrails for inspection. The heat of the day having subsided, I could see several men at the bottom of the shaft working with chisels and hammers. Thick plastic sheeting roofed over parts of the site, and steps went down into it. My companion and I climbed down, led by an elderly Palestinian who offered us coffee. He greeted a thickset, fair-haired European-looking man, an Israeli archaeologist I presumed, overseeing the Palestinian workers chiselling into the walls. Not a single Palestinian archaeologist was in sight, but I did not mention it and the Israeli obviously took me for a sympathetic visitor. I asked him what they were excavating.
‘We’re doing some important work on the Jewish heritage here,’ he explained. His manner was pleasant and friendly, and he seemed to assume that I shared his views. ‘You see these stone structures,’ he said, blithely pointing to the largest which, according to what I had read, dated from the Roman period, ‘they’re almost certainly from the biblical age.’ He must have known better, but chose to conceal it. ‘We’re connecting this dig with the tunnels under the southern end of the Temple Mount.’ Israeli archaeologists had excavated a network of deep tunnels, which they found under the Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) in the area of the western wall and extending to the Via Dolorosa, against strong international protestations that such digs could undermine the foundations of the eighth-century Islamic buildings and the fourth-century Church of the Holy Sepulchre above; if not halted, they could ultimately lead to their collapse, they warned. A year or so earlier an UNRWA school in Silwan had partially fallen down because of the damage to its foundations caused by the digging. But nothing could be allowed to stop the archaeological search for the Jewish past.
As the excavations continued, any layers of history that came after the biblical age were demolished in the process of reaching back to it. Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic remains were cut through and forever lost to archaeology. The remnants of an eighth- to ninth-century Abbasid building were dismantled in this manner, and the tunnels uncovered by the excavations under the Old City walls passed beneath Roman, Crusader and Mamluk historical layers that no longer existed as a result. I pointed this out to the archaeologist. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that, but the search for truth must go on,’ he said firmly. I pressed him further, making much the same point. But he remained confident of his position and serenely indifferent to what I had to say.
It was the same with the Israeli guide in the City of David tourist centre above ground, which had been built in the open area opposite to the excavation site and close to Silwan’s ancient cistern, a source of water the villagers had used for centuries, but now renamed Jeremiah’s Cistern. The guide, who was eager to tell us about the biblical marvels that had been unearthed, pointed to a structure labelled bathsheba’s bath. Did he really believe it was Bathsheba’s bath? I asked. He nodded vigorously and indicated the tourist shop behind him with a broad sweep of his arm, as if the historical proof lay there; it contained a rich collection of biblical pamphlets, books on ancient Israel and posters of how the biblical park would look, once completed. ‘This is where it all began,’ he proclaimed proudly, ‘from King David, all down the ages, and on to us today! Isn’t it wonderful? When the digging is finished and the tunnels are all connected up, visitors will be able to go down and walk underground all the way from here to the Mount of Olives and to Mount Zion.’ From his enthusiastic description, it seemed that an entire underground city was in the making to create the ‘biblical experience’, as he called it, and I had no doubt that, when completed, it would feel more real to the Jewish faithful who flocked there than the concrete Islamic structures on top. And perhaps that was the aim of the project.
Near to the Israeli tourist centre and standing bravely on its own was a small Arab shop, selling what it advertised as antiquities from the archaeological site. The shopkeeper showed me Roman coins with the emperor’s head on one side, and claimed they were genuine. To my untrained eye they looked authentic enough; some had been mounted on gold frames to make tasteful articles of jewellery which he tried to sell me. There were cracked glass jars and broken pottery, all allegedly from the excavation site too, though how they had come into his possession was not clear. I felt sorry for him in his dusty, empty shop, and I doubted he did much business there. What did the local people who watched their village being torn up and reshaped according to this historical Jewish fantasy think about it all? I wondered. From what I could see they had got used to it and went resignedly about their business, their main anxiety that the houses they lived in should escape demolition. Before leaving Silwan, I was taken to see a place in which just such a calamity had occurred, a rubble-strewn patch of ground where the house that had previously stood was bulldozed by the army. Groups of international volunteers sympathetic to Palestinian suffering were working to clear the area prior to helping the owner rebuild his house, although there was the constant danger that the authorities would demolish it again, as had happened repeatedly after many such brave endeavours. The owners of houses thus destroyed were usually required to pay the
authorities for the costs of demolition.
Sometimes, driving along a beautiful road like the one going north from Ramallah as the sun was setting on the horizon, I would gaze at the long shadows of ancient trees slanting down onto the quiet hillsides and imagine how it must have been before anyone was here, before modern Israel and its soldiers and bulldozers arrived, before its settlers, religious zealots and military checkpoints disrupted that gentle harmony. In these imaginings I knew I was not alone; I had a rival in every religious Jew who saw the same landscape and fancied it came straight out of the Hebrew Bible, just as the Christian travellers who came to what they called the Holy Land thought themselves to be walking ‘in the footsteps of Jesus’. It was Palestine’s great misfortune that it fed so many fantasies and answered to so many emotional needs. For centuries people had pinned their dreams and delusions on its land, seen it as their salvation, and tried to make it exclusively their own. If only it had been an ordinary place, without a special history or a sacred geography, without religion or scripture, then perhaps we, its people, might have been left in peace.
THE WRITER’S JOB
William Sutcliffe
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of the truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours.
Arnold Bennett
In my study, within arm’s reach, is a well-thumbed notebook, every page covered with spidery, almost illegible handwriting. I filled it during PalFest 2010, jotting down as many observations, quotes and ideas as I had time to set down. But since the subject of this essay is memory, I shall leave it where it sits. I want to examine not what I experienced during that fortnight, six years in the past, but what stays with me now, and why some experiences can be shrugged off while others pinion themselves to your heart.
As anyone who has ever helped a child with homework will attest: we remember what we understand, we forget what confuses us. I knew immediately that PalFest had given me a revelatory, epiphanic understanding of a complex situation, but I only grasped why it had affected me so deeply several years later, when I stumbled across the above quotation from Arnold Bennett. My thoughts had been far from the topic of Palestine at the time I sat down to read, but those two sentences immediately sent me back to spring 2010, to the West Bank. A profound ‘YES!’ surged through me. This was a perfect description of the impact PalFest had made on me. I instantly wrote it down and tried to commit the words to memory, savouring the sensation of a half-thought, half-grasped idea popping into focus, sharpened into acuity by another writer’s wisdom.
This illustrates just one of the unique aspects of PalFest. Other literary festivals may be enjoyable or interesting but are unlikely to leave a lasting impact. After PalFest you can be sitting in a comfortable British living room, years after the event, reading about a Victorian writer, and a single line of prose will shoot you back in time and space to the visceral never-forgotten experience that only seconds earlier seemed a distant memory.
The word unforgettable has become a cliché we attach to any event that seems stirring or powerful, but much of what we describe as unforgettable is soon forgotten. Experiences that genuinely stick do so not simply because they have excited or moved us, but by touching something even deeper. The moments in life that sow the deepest roots are those which transform our understanding of the world or of ourselves. PalFest did both those things to me.
I thought I had a good understanding of the West Bank wall before flying out to Amman to join the PalFest 2010 group. The first draft of my novel The Wall, which at that point in time I intended to be loosely based on the barrier in the West Bank, was already well under way. I had researched the subject in depth, reading several books on the history of that vast structure, which has a different name for every opinion you have of it, from ‘separation barrier’ to ‘apartheid wall’. I knew the statistics. I could reel off quickly that it was 525 kilometres long; that 85 per cent of it was inside Palestinian territory; that the concrete sections were 8 metres high, twice the height of the Berlin Wall; that it had cost $2.6 billion to build; that 35,000 Palestinians were trapped between the barrier and the Green Line. I had researched it in the way that novelists research things, which I thought gave me a decent understanding. I was pleased to be going, knowing this would give me access to deeper visual and atmospheric detail with which to describe a wall of this kind, but I had not accounted for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called ‘unknown unknowns’. (It has always seemed strange to me that he was mocked for this statement, which may in fact have been the only intelligent thing he ever said. The pursuit of known unknowns, during which you stumble across unknown unknowns, is the very essence of research.)
Arnold Bennett’s formulation crystallises precisely the ‘unknown unknown’ which was to strike me with such force that those ten days in Palestine would remain embedded permanently within me. In the simplest terms, I was to discover the difference between intellectual understanding and emotional understanding. I was to learn that when the latter crashes over you, the former splinters like a beach hut in a tsunami.
For a novelist in the middle of a researched novel to have his understanding of his subject shattered is no small thing, but the destruction of everything I thought I knew about my novel-in-progress was nothing compared to grasping for the first time a simple but devastatingly stark truth about the nature of oppression.
Nothing I had read about the injustices and cruelties of partitioned Hebron prepared me for the physical, emotional and intellectual impact of walking down the shuttered and abandoned high street of the old town under the gaze of Israeli soldiers and crowing settlers. No statistic gave me even a fraction of the understanding I took from standing in the narrow gap between eight metres of concrete and a dark, overshadowed Bethlehem home. No account of passing through a checkpoint compared to the experience of physically doing it myself. No words on any page or screen could come close to finding myself in a cafe chatting to a man describing what happened to him in an Israeli cell when he was arrested aged sixteen for stone-throwing. And when everyone you meet greets you with warmth and hospitality, before, if elicited, relating some other comparable tale of injustice, brutality and humiliation, the cumulative effect is overwhelming.
By the end, I knew my first draft of The Wall was destined for the dustbin, and I knew this was only a small part of the effect PalFest was to have on me. As a British citizen who could return to the comforts and privileges of a free society after what was only a short visit, I knew that my new-found comprehension of what it means to live under military occupation was sketchy and superficial compared to the reality of living an entire life under those conditions. I also knew it was infinitely deeper than everything I had gleaned from books and journalism. As Bennett puts it, ‘there can be no knowledge without emotion’. You cannot truly know anything until you also feel it. PalFest gave me that emotional understanding, an understanding that has made a permanent imprint on my mental landscape.
One of the many spurious defences of Israel is that at any given time some other country (currently Syria, in 2010 it was Sri Lanka) is ‘worse’, and that if you are attacking Israel, instead of this other more egregiously unjust country, you must have picked Israel due to anti-Semitism.
My personal defence against this nonsensical but often-repeated argument, where being Jewish fails to prove the point, is that I feel impelled to think and talk and write about Israel because, in among all the other brutal injustices on our planet, this is one that I understand. Moreover, I can measure my limited comprehension of every other injustice by recognising how even the best journalism taught me only a fraction of what I needed to know to truly grasp the nature of the occupation.
To be invited to PalFest is a great blessing, one from which it took me many years to recover. PalFest was a humbling and viscerally memorable experience because in opening up new realms of knowledge and understanding to me, it also taught me how little we can really comprehend in one lifetime. It may well be th
at nothing is worth knowing quite so much as the knowledge of how little we can know. As a novelist, having the connection between emotion and understanding seared into my imagination was like an unplanned mid-career apprenticeship. I had to rethink everything. And that, after all, is the writer’s job.
August 2016
GAZA, FROM THE DIASPORA – PART TWO
Jehan Bseiso
I
Today in Jabaliya, Khan Younis, in Rafah and Shujaiya,
we are still burying the dead we find, but the living ask:
wayn nrouh?
(where to now)
shu nsawwi?
(what to do now)
samidoun, which means we last.
II
Habeebi, today you reminded me we are under the same sky.
But nowhere refuge. Only refugees.
Skip breakfast with militias in Benghazi, have lunch in Homs under the rubble.
Leave your house in Mosul.
Leave your house in Mosul.
Leave your house in Mosul.
Three times in one week.
Take your body to Beirut, your heart still beating in Aleppo.
Take your body to Amman, your heart still beating in Gaza.
Escape.
Take the death boats from Egypt and Libya to Italy, leave your children on the shore.
III
Arab Offspring forecast is cloudy
with prospects of unseasonal paradigm shift.
I don’t know politics but something about this brand of terror tastes like Burger King.
Take back your jihadis for hire.
Take back your F16s, your drones, your bombs from the sky in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen.
IV
Dear Diaspora,
Maybe you have a good job.
You’re happy.
You work with Pepsi.
You work at Memac and Ogilvy.