This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  You don’t know if they will close the Novartis head office in Beirut tomorrow because

  another bomb went off.

  You don’t take cabs in Cairo anyway.

  You don’t want to move to Dubai like everybody.

  V

  Dear Diaspora,

  boycott.

  Don’t sponsor occupation with your Jordanian dinars, dirhams, dollars and pounds sterling.

  VI

  Habeebi, I thought you lost my number, turns out you lost your legs

  on the way to the hospital from Khan Younis to Jabaliya to Rafah.

  The border is closed, but my heart tunnels.

  EQUALITY, SUPREMACY AND SECURITY

  Ed Pavlić

  Since returning from the West Bank I’ve been tuned into the news, the news that stays news, and the news that isn’t news at all. The top story in the New York Times one Wednesday in 2015 begins ‘Israel and Hamas escalated their military confrontation on Tuesday . . .’ Inches away, the World Cup story allows, ‘The final score was Germany 7, Brazil 1. It felt like Germany 70, Brazil 1.’ The juxtaposition of balance on the one hand and the exaggeration of how unbalanced the World Cup rout felt on the other is too close to ignore. It’s worth tracing its contours in our media, in our minds and in our lives.

  I know. It’s the oldest of old hats to note the distended shapes American journalism creates to preserve the Israel-first false impression of some symmetry or parity between interests and powers in the contested territory split, shared and struggled over by people known as Palestinians and Israelis. Even the names are disputed. Many Palestinians would refute the idea of Israelis and simply say Jews. Many Israelis have contended that, in fact, there is no Palestinian people. It’s territory – rhetorical, ethical, religious, ethnic and geographic – so complexly, at times hideously contested that many people in the West, certainly in the US, simply look away. As a person who, since childhood, has lived a life athwart American racial codes and territories, I’ve always kept an eye on Israel/Palestine for the focused, if challenging, clarity it can offer one’s perspective on American experience. That might sound strange. But it’s true. In a recent tour with the Palestine Festival of Literature, in fact I found much clarified.

  This clarity is not complete, of course. It’s based on my own observations as well as conversations with people such as Ray Dolphin from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), Dr Tawfiq Nasser, director of the Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, and Omar Barghouti, founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (BDS). While touring the region, I was also reading, widely and variously and, at times, all night long (jet lag), James Baldwin’s letters (one from Israel) published in Harper’s in 1963, Etel Adnan’s incomparable two-volume To look at the sea is to find what one is (2014), Sarah Schulman’s great memoir of (Jewish-American) political re-awakening Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (2012), the report East Jerusalem: Key Humanitarian Concerns (2011) and the Humanitarian Atlas (2012) put out by the UNOCHA, and the Legal Unit Annual Report (2013) from the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee. The HRC recorded over 600 violations of Palestinian human rights during the calendar year 2013. They’re very thorough. The report contains month-by-month charts in which each violation has its entry. Incidents are tabulated by category: against people, against property, by settlers, by Israeli soldiers. This daily array of violence presents, for one, a background I’ve yet to see appear in the American media reporting the abduction and murder near Hebron (in Arabic al-Khalil) of three Jewish teenagers in June 2015.

  There’s active and latent anger and violence everywhere in the region. But, according to these sources, even in so-called Palestinian territory (occupied by and often under the control of Israeli military personnel), there’s absolutely no parity in the legal, military and social contests between Israeli power and Palestinian struggle. One is a contemporary bureaucratic state whose legal system vigorously operates to sustain and increase its hold on geographic territory and is possessed of a cornucopia of surveillance and weapons systems to back it up. The other is a disparate array of factionalised, anti-colonial resistance that uses smuggled and home-built weapons when not employing such high-tech systems as slingshots and cutlasses or simply throwing stones. Simply put, there’s no contest here.

  Looking around, say, at the closed-off, shut-down and vacant business district in Hebron, Shuhada Street, or at the scorched guard tower and murals of martyred and imprisoned Palestinian leaders at the Qalandia checkpoint in East Jerusalem, Baby Suggs’ comment from Toni Morrison’s Beloved rang in my ears: ‘Lay down your sword. This ain’t a battle; it’s a rout.’ Staring at children at play in the Hebron streets under the shadow of iron bars and barbed wire and under the watch of Israeli guards with machine guns, or, just down the street from there, staring at armed soldiers, near-children themselves, deep in so-called Palestinian territory at yet another checkpoint, this one stencilled with a mural: FREE ISRAEL, I heard June Jordan’s visions in ‘Requiem for the Champ’ of Brownsville, Brooklyn in the 1980s: ‘This is what it means to fight and really win or really lose. War means you hurt somebody, or something, until there’s nothing soft or sensible left.’

  Let’s stipulate that the Palestinian Authority does its best. But the reality is that the PA is, at best, superintendent to Israel’s occupation. The people know it; many resent it. At bottom they work for the landlord. They’re in dialogue with Baby Suggs. Hamas, meanwhile, newly beset again now by el-Sisi’s rule in Egypt and contested within Gaza by even more militant factions, seems to be playing out the gambit June Jordan observed in the blasted-out Brooklyn blocks of the 1980s. At the core of the Palestinian struggle, however, is the fundamental – not to say universal – urge that the Israeli/Jewish people – from their point of view, the oppressor – will not lead normal lives while Palestinians live in cages of restrictions made of law, concrete and razor wire, and very often watched over by men with machine guns.

  That Palestinian aim, in fact, isn’t foreign to an American sensibility, not at all; it’s incoherently twisted deep in the core of what America is supposed to afford people (‘freedom’) while at the same time it’s there at the crux of what the United States has inflicted on subordinate, mostly non-white, populations of people, within and beyond its borders since before it existed and until today.

  This is the basis of the disturbing power of clarity the situation in Palestine/Israel confronts an American viewer with. When and if, that is, one is allowed a glimpse. This is why the American media operate in the way they do, and it’s at the heart of why most Americans look away. In order to admit the most basic, blatant facts in the one situation – and exactly to the degree one finds a home in the American ‘mainstream’ (itself an incoherently contested mythology), or ‘dream’ – people would need to give up or radically adjust primary illusions about the country in which they live: ‘individual achievement’, ‘equality of opportunity’, ‘an open society’, etc. In short, clarity about Palestine destroys the mainframe illusions of American whiteness, no matter the colour of the person who aspires to it. No wonder Palestinians identify to the extent that they do, and they do, with the African-American freedom struggle and with the history of American Indian quarantine and displacement in the US.

  Back from Palestine, I found myself re-engaged with the psychological gymnastics of contemporary life wherein media images of LeBron James’ free agency and Neymar’s fractured vertebra butt up against gruesome political and social intensities – massacres in Coastal Kenya, eighty-two shootings and fourteen dead in Chicago over 4 July and, of course, renewed warfare in the West Bank and Gaza – as well as duties such as teaching my five-year-old to ride a bike in the parking lot across the street. The struggle is to keep some semblance of perspective and proportion.

  So it was on Wednesday morning that I found myself reading aloud to my wife Stacey from front-page stories in th
e New York Times as she got ready for work. One story frankly depicts Germany’s rout of Brazil, 7–1, from Tuesday 8 July plain enough. Another though, just inches apart on the page, frames conflict between forces in Gaza and Israel as a ‘military’ contest of some plausible parity. ISRAEL AND HAMAS TRADE ATTACKS AS TENSION RISES reads the headline over a photo of a sizeable explosion in an urban era. The silent suggestion in the headline being that the photo could be from either an Israeli or Hamas attack. Is that really possible? Is it plausible? Do Palestinians have a ‘military’ at all? One report in the article ominously held that one Hamas-launched rocket made it almost seventy miles into Israeli territory. No mention was made of exactly what kind of navigation/aiming system those rockets use and what kind of explosives are attached. The previous evening, CNN’s Erin Burnett interviewed Israel’s Ambassador to the US, who described the near-total precision of Israeli strategic capabilities. His description served at once as assurance about limited ‘collateral damage’ and also as a bold declaration of unassailable Israeli power. The ambassador’s interview stood alone as CNN’s report on the increasing violence that evening. The scorekeeping continued. In the war.

  After the jump to page 8 in the Times, about the ‘military confrontation’, we’re told, ‘Israeli military said . . . that more than 150 rockets had been fired at Israel.’ Meanwhile, the military reports that ‘Israel hit some 150 targets’ in Gaza. So, at a glance, it’s a tie?

  No scorecard was offered for how many targets, if any, in Israel were actually hit. One guesses that, had there been hits, we’d know. Later in the story, confirming the ambassador’s comments as to Israeli accuracy or not, we’re told that targets hit in Gaza included, ‘five senior Hamas officials, ten smuggling tunnels, 90 concealed rocket launchers, and 18 weapons storage and manufacturing sites’. That’s 123. No mention of the other 27 hits in Gaza. No mention of how many firings were required to hit 123 targets. Elsewhere in the article the tie score diverges – ‘Palestinian officials said that at least 23 people were killed in Gaza on Tuesday’ – while Israel reports ‘two people were wounded in rocket attacks on Monday’ though it doesn’t say exactly how these injuries occurred or note their severity. If you’re willing to actually follow the news out of the region in American media, these are the kinds of feigned attempts at balance that portray an evenly matched ‘military’ struggle on the one hand and, on the other, assure that one side has the unassailable upper hand and, of course, the unquestioned right to secure its territory.

  So it is that equality, supremacy and security all go together. Just don’t try it at home, these are trained professionals at work. Even so, exactly the same thing is happening at home, which is the whole point. Middle- and upper-class Americans are assured that everyone’s equal in the eyes of the system; meanwhile they insist that their privileges and comforts (supremacy) are secure and that their right to safety is ensured.

  When it comes to sports we’re free to feel the elasticity of the facts in pursuit of deeper truths – 7 to 1 felt like 70 to 1, we say, adding that ‘it wasn’t as close as the score suggests’. Such elasticity is delightful. No wonder why ESPN is what it’s become. Inches away, however, a story about an occupying power (one in violation of scores of international laws and accepted rules controlling political occupations) is told in ways that pre-empt and even invert a reader’s freedom to extend the facts into coherent feelings in order to understand the world. That elasticity is dangerous.

  When it comes to Israel and Palestine, for Americans it doesn’t matter if the careful phrases contradict the most basic facts or if numerical equivalences depict ‘military’ parity in one paragraph and describe unassailable supremacy in the next all the while affirming a people’s (one can’t but think, ‘all people’s’?) unquestionable right to security. No one’s looking that closely. They can’t. Close examination of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians under their control, its quest for simultaneous supremacy, security and the semblance of democracy or equality, would reveal more than Americans are willing to admit about our own towns, schools, states and the filmy mythology that coats – whether with security or numbness no one investigates too far – our experiences of our own and each other’s lives.

  A GIFT FOR PALFEST

  Alice Walker

  On my website alicewalkersgarden.com, where this poem appears, there is a picture of a small child’s smashed and bloody shoe. Beneath the poem there are photographs of children who were murdered by Israeli soldiers, one of them in a church. Also there is a picture of Chief Joseph, the Native American holy man and wisdom carrier of his people who were massacred by the US military and forced from their homes and lands so that immigrants from they knew not where could ‘settle’ the beloved valleys and hills where they had lived for hundreds of years. There is also a photograph of Emmett Till, a black boy brutally murdered when he was fourteen years old by grown white men who then threw his mutilated body into a river. The killing of children is especially heinous, hard to bear, difficult to fathom. It is occurring now in rates so astonishing as to make all of us wonder who so-called ‘humans’ actually are.

  One thing is certain: the one who murders a child may be called many things, including ‘patriot’, but he or she will never be called beautiful.

  THEY WILL ALWAYS BE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU

  They will always be

  More beautiful

  Than you

  The people you are killing.

  You think it is hatred

  That you feel

  But it is really envy.

  You imagine if you destroy them

  We will forget

  How tall they stood

  How level

  Their gaze

  How straight their backs.

  How even the littlest ones

  Stood their little ground.

  Meanwhile

  You stand

  Hunched as a cobbler

  In your absurd

  Killer’s Gear

  Yelling

  Like a crazy person,

  Your face contorted

  Dripping sweat

  From what would be

  With or without

  Your lethal weapons

  A bullying brow

  And feral chin.

  Killing everyone

  but especially children,

  For sport.

  Looking cool

  In your own mind;

  As you crunch bones

  Beneath your boot

  That are still

  Forming.

  Conquering.

  II

  Don’t forget the entertainment value

  Of your daily work

  For the folks back home.

  Who witness from the hillsides

  In their lounge chairs.

  What beautiful fun!

  We are not like

  Those people being broken

  Over there

  They tell each other. And for this moment

  They are right.

  They are not.

  But what does this mean

  For broken humanity?

  Selfie this.

  SILENCE IS A LANGUAGE

  Jeremy Harding

  A bunch of (mainly) British writers, guests of PalFest, have been asked to run workshops for the students at Birzeit University. I’m paired up with Robin Yassin-Kassab. Our workshop title is ‘The role of writing in creating new political realities’. OK. Something about change then. Yassin-Kassab is a novelist; he knows what it is to ring the changes. I’m a journalist; I know how to change an inkjet cartridge. We both agree that polemic tends to lock ‘old’ political realities in place, so why not turn this into an experiment about making a point without banging a drum?

  The majority of our students, between twenty or thirty people, are enrolled in the English Department. (The political science students have opted for other workshops, among them a packed session on Guantánamo.) All except one ar
e women. Many are wearing hijab. Soon it emerges that most speak good English. We introduce ourselves and Robin says a few words about stories, lyrics, film scripts, rap and YouTube. About speed of transmission, low costs, ubiquity of access. About the way that anyone can have a hearing; all they need to do is to get the content right.

  The students divide into groups and prepare a piece about the situation in Gaza since Operation Cast Lead (2008–9): a text, a song, a scenario, a poem, a dialogue, an outline for a story, anything. No opinion about the assault, or open condemnation of it, is allowed. I’ve already steeled myself for the question ‘You mean like the BBC?’ and the terse laughter that’s sure to follow, but it turns out the students are too polite for that, and before we know it one of the groups has sailed out of the lecture theatre to rehearse in the corridor. Another asks if they can perform a mime. This is about language, I say. ‘We believe that silence is a language,’ a young woman replies.

  Another group has come up with an ambitious draft for an epic movie: they’ve already packed scores of refugees from around the world onto a bus – this could soon need David Lean or Richard Attenborough. It’s a global perspective – no polemic! – that casts the plight of the Palestinians as part of a bigger story. ‘Uzbekis too!’ says a young woman in a fawn headscarf, determined not to use the P-word. They’re jolting along a mountain pass somewhere in northern Anatolia, and we’re looking at our watches. They’ve got five more minutes.

  When time’s called, each of the seven groups presents its work to the others. The mime group is intriguing. Three students are on stage. A rucksack is hurled onto the ground in front of them. They study it, withdraw, approach again with care; they look as if they’re about to sing to it but instead all three kneel and start to write on it, gingerly at first, and then with more confidence; they’re scrawling frenetically when the rucksack detonates.