by Ahdaf Soueif
and cry quietly
no words, no poetry
before Internet and
dialled-up emotions
before black and
white ideologies
before a person
I called friend
defended massacres
before the victims
were laid to rest
before chemical weapons
ravaged insides
before refugee
meant grandmother
suffering 2.0
keyboard clicks
like bombs so effortlessly
dropping
all damage collateral
never personal
voyeurs hop on and off
like carnival rides
death becomes
exciting
until it isn’t
until boredom sets in
and desensitisation begins
until the next ride emerges
somewhere else
more captivating
SIGHT
Ru Freeman
It takes seven hours to cross a few hundred yards into occupied Palestine. We are the last ones left in the empty waiting room tiled so smooth it turns my mind to dance. Someone finds music on his iPhone and I stand up, defying the odds.
In Ramallah we sit under a slivered new moon, a venue so open it holds everybody and no late arrival disturbs. Our readers speak of Guantánamo and Palestine. A child peers down over a high wall, holding his father’s safe-keeping hand, listening.
There is an American-city edge to the bar we sit in, late. Arrack, licoriced, slightly sweet, intoxication growing within, undetected, like the place itself. ‘Fever’ plays on the sound system, chosen by a man who designs T-shirts. I buy one for twenty dollars, black, its red declaration: I AM A CITIZEN OF THE EARTH, THOUGH I HAVE NO COUNTRY.
A Palestinian friend says, ‘Ramallah has three bars, but we Bethlehemites can pretend we aren’t occupied.’ Enigma: Bethlehem lies broken into pieces like candied brittle. We have learned to navigate shards.
Time is made of elasticity and imagination. Will I ever forget dancing to ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in the waiting room of the Allenby Bridge crossing, risking everything for an act of defiance? That, instead of speaking of hunger and fear, we spoke of how my seventy-year-old partner did not want to dance without proper heels in front of the handsome older man in our group?
O Palestine. How quickly we learned to wrest joy out of denial. How swift, this transformation from righteous indignation to acknowledging the euphoria of the allowable moment.
In Qalandia, between steel bars, funnelled like consumer products off to the next destination for packaging and bar codes, we suppress everything except our laughter at the discombobulated voice floating down from the manacled watchtower: ‘No pictures! I saw one picture!’ I hand out mints on the other side and celebrate us, we who have taken more than two hundred pictures in that crossing.
Armed soldiers idle outside the oldest library in Jerusalem, where the Khalidi family patriarch speaks proudly of his ancestors. He omits nothing.
Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre we place palms over the stone where Jesus is said to have been embalmed. Around us, doors, crosses, an extravagance of windows above beckoning stone paths.
At night the streets fall silent. An eerie lustre pervades this sacred place. The pink and yellow walls rise, containing.
In the old city of al-Khalil/Hebron the occupation is relentlessly evident. New plaques on renamed streets announce fictions that permit desecration. Checkpoints are as ordinary as red lights. We examine this new normal: to require a permit for any journey; to have your home demolished and then be forced to pay the demolisher to remove the debris; to rebuild, then, in anticipation of demolition, take a hammer to your own roof and salvage the possible; to circumnavigate a wall for seven miles to make a half-mile trip; to have filth thrown on your head as you walk down romantic cobbled streets that in any European town would be where bright cafes spring up.
Safe passage means quiescence. So you take pictures: of vine leaves in bunches, pickled vegetables; children jostling to see themselves on your camera; the curved road of shuttered shops with their pretty green and blue doors – now sealed with chains, wrought-iron balconies in disrepair; four American teenagers on a ‘birthright’ trip, sipping Coke and laughing on the porch that once belonged to a Palestinian, while soldiers patrol, and settlers with machine guns drive too fast or pace the silent roads.
The call to prayer rises over the heads of soldiers and barricades, cuts through checkpoints, fills every trench and barrel, slips through the bars of rusty gates and coils of barbed wire that are supposed to block and exclude, wraps around the rubble and ruins of pale pink rock, collects each shard of glass in its embrace.
You think of God.
Al-Khalil/Hebron. Fifteen hundred soldiers guard four hundred illegal settlers. Watchtowers point in four directions above Palestinian homes, the muzzles of cocked rifles. Water barrels on Palestinians’ roofs riddled from the gunfire of settlers. Ahead, a road carves through the home of a Palestinian family. ‘We did not destroy it,’ the soldiers say. ‘See, it is still intact.’
Everywhere the twenty-five-foot-high wall stretches, hooded in sharp angles over roads, bridges, tunnels. I imagine setting fire at one end. Like an incendiary Andy Goldsworthy installation of land art, I want to watch its 650 kilometres implode in orderly flames. The left ash would settle into the earth releasing us to grieve.
The stage in Haifa is set up like an open-air political podium, bare and stark. A rostrum and mike. Beyond it an amphitheatre. A table on the side with food and drink. A young woman sings ballads in Arabic, which are always about love, longing, home and freedom. I listen in translation: ‘The stabs of daggers are better than the rule of the treacherous.’
Despite missing pages, a replacement translator and lights so blinding I cannot see the words before me, I read of recognisable things: family and revolution. We make the best of whatever remains.
There is a comic madness to the term present absentee, coined to define 335,204 Palestinians who live in what is called Israel but not in their original homes, which have been confiscated. If numbers are measured by Israeli textbooks – whose maps omit Gaza and the West Bank – that number would be five million. Palestinians return the favour: they pretend not to see the settlers and soldiers, denying the oppressor his validity.
There are ghosts who walk among ghosts here, and we are visitors wading through the thicknesses of fiercely held history.
Like this: the Hilton Hotel rises above Palestinian graves in the Abd al-Nabi Cemetery in Jaffa, and the Wadi Hunayn Mosque in Ramla is now a synagogue. Israel’s Museum of Tolerance is being built over Palestine’s Mamilla Cemetery. Those claiming there were no people on a barren land preserve the home of the Abu Kaheel family in Sheikh Muwannis; it is the club house now for the faculty at Tel Aviv University.
On the bus someone recalls meeting Arafat and how much regard she had for an unsophisticated man who, despite his failures, gave his life to Palestine.
The mountains en route to Nablus are deformed by settlements that fall and fall and fall into verdant valleys. Palestinians exist in the crevices left to them and yet, around the most basic shelters, flowers and plants are cultivated. Colour wrested from thin air.
At the souk in the old city we buy za’tar, star anise, saffron, olive soap. In a thin perfumery I stop. The owner and I smell essences and talk of books, life, his young child. His private collection of bottles, tiny and expensive, he refuses to sell, but before I leave he applies a dot of his favourite, a white musk, on my wrist. It lasts all day and through the night.
Every shop is like this, a portal into a world where nothing hostile awaits. Every turn reveals slopes climbing into other realms in these intimate centres of town that recall communal life. Cars creep down stairways built shallow, resilient enough to carry more than they were meant
to.
A man gifts me a keffiyeh for my father. He makes me photograph his name and address. ‘Remember me,’ he says.
Our evening programme is in a space decorated with small Palestinian flags and traffic lights. Birds interrupt the first reader, and at one point we stop for the adhan. Around us fat felines wander, but on the way back through streets surfeit with secrets I see a skinny cat leaping over a high roof, sure-footed against the skies.
In Nablus the wheels of cars break the quiet as though they are fleeing, tyres squealing.
Late, I look for cardboard to protect the maps I’ve been carrying on and off our bus, visual proof of a brutal occupation whose specificities may escape my memory and voice. A.J., the hostel receptionist, finds construction paper, twine. During the second Intifada A.J., trapped in Ramallah, forfeited his education to work in film and media until the company could no longer pay after a year of Israel seizing tax revenues belonging to Palestinians. Movies from ISIS have begun to be released, and we talk about the cost involved in producing such things. They are similar to Israeli propaganda films, he tells me. Has anybody followed the money?
Social media changed perceptions of America, he says. ‘The hashtags showed American advocacy for Palestine, people marching. Things will change.’
Outside, gunshots. He translates the rhythms: a family member returned from jail . . . mourning the dead.
On Facebook a friend request from a boy in Gaza: ‘Welcome to my country. You will be changed forever.’
Palestine is desiccated by settlements.
The first outpost is the Orange mobile tower on a hillside. Mobile homes follow, often spaced across some distance. The government deems roads necessary to connect these homes. Then that the roads must be protected from Palestinians. In these incremental ways land is annexed.
Al-Walaja is being split to connect Gilo – the oldest, largest settlement in the area – to West Jerusalem. Israel’s wall will confiscate the last green space left in Bethlehem District and prevent farmers from accessing their land.
The Israeli government is intent on forcing Palestinians into the service sector; the settlers’ sprawl effectively carries out government policy. Forced unemployment in the West Bank means 100,000 Palestinians withstand the misery of checkpoints every day, starting as early as 2 a.m. to labour in Israel.
The word settlement evokes temporariness. The permanence of these structures devastates.
The Catholic university in Bethlehem observes the call to prayer on Friday. In its gardens memorials to students killed by the Israelis.
Our readings cover the Nakba, American life, the Egyptian revolution, Palestine, Grenada, Guyana, London. The discussion after is electric.
At a falafel joint in Bethlehem I talk with students who travel from Dheisheh refugee camp. Our conversation is easy: clothes, boyfriends, families, what led each to choose to wear the hijab, their preferred breakfast – hummus made by their mothers – their future, the possibility of attending Bard University in Jerusalem, how to take a better selfie.
Later, a taxi driver defies the law and races us to the church of the newly canonised nun – the first Palestinian – at the Carmelite convent. We are six, perched on laps, sometimes breaking into hysterical laughter along with the driver, giddiness born of getting away with bad behaviour, other times solemn as we pass memorial after memorial to the war dead.
Around the corner from the church I buy a piece of luggage. When I go to pay, the young shop-owner stops me from mistakenly offering the price in Jordanian dinars, the sixth most valuable currency in the world, ranked far higher than the Israeli shekels we must use inside Palestine. He offers to change it for me, and disappears with all my money. I feel a sense of panic, but someone offers me coffee and laughs at my concern: you don’t have to worry, he says, Palestinians don’t steal. The boy returns quickly, bearing my change.
The Church of the Nativity, being renovated by the Palestinian Authority, contains the spot where Jesus is said to have been born. I kneel and pray for the believers in my life.
Aida, the largest of 59 camps, contains people from 41 of the 543 villages depopulated by Israel in 1948, 61 per cent below the age of 24. Graffiti on the apartheid wall exemplifies the Palestinian concept of sumoud – steadfastness, perseverance. One says: FERGUSON, PALESTINE. A half back-bend is required to see the top. The beauty of the movement juxtaposes with the unassailable atrocity of this wall, its existence stains the life and spirit I celebrate in dance. I weep.
Unlike the elegance of old Palestinian architecture, camps are rudimentary. There beauty was visible, though the occupation wove through with the virulence of weeds, choking life out of orchards, homes, people. Here survival dictates everything. What were originally tents became sheds became rubble became brick became homes.
From the roof of the Alrowwad Cultural Centre we see the wall jag around three sides of a single home that has resisted demolition, imprisoning it in a sharp U that reminds me of Hebrew script. Inside the centre a nineteen-year-old boy dances like his very life could take flight. A fourteen-year-old girl sings ‘We Shall Overcome’ and my heart clenches. I hear the anthem ‘Mawtini’. ‘Will I see you in your eminence? Reaching to the stars. My homeland, my homeland.’ Her voice around the Arabic is suffused with longing.
The al-Aqsa Mosque stands in the most disfigured and militarised holy ground in the world, the approach barred by a checkpoint barbellate with ordnance. To reach the mosque, Palestinians must first pass settlers coming to celebrate mizvahs amid raucous singing and drums, the guards joining them in dance, guns and fists in the air. After that more security and through a long caged tunnel lined with riot gear. There is no escape.
Inside, Palestinian women take turns to sit in a circle and read audibly from the Qur’an. A group of settlers comes threateningly close and the women raise their voices: ‘God is great!’ Palestinian guards tell the settlers they must leave. The threat of tragedy and political disaster is the norm; all that the Palestinians can do is attempt to avoid it.
It is beautiful here. Pale walls built in time long past, the skill apparent in the details, the sheer scale. It is hard not to compare monument to monstrosity, that other wall that grinds itself into the earth.
A Palestinian man sweeps the long narrow floors of the checkpoint.
The climb through Ramallah’s hills leads through furrowed fields, grooved like the outside of walnuts. The trees are small, the spacing between each enough to allow travel, the leaves silvery in the light. Along each path there are shrubs: nettles, pungent farrow, the blood of Jesus (a dark pink flower that is the last to die), thyme, sage, other herbs. We climb on unsteady rocks all the way to a qasr used by the farmers during the harvests. It is made of the creamy peach rock that I associate with this country. Stairs ascend to the open roof from the cool interior with its uneven floor. I imagine weathered men and women working here, their children running wild, unwatched for a day.
The light falls yellow-gold as we leave, gilding the thin grasses.
Our closing event is at the Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah. There is a chill in the air, and we shiver as we sit in the gardens. The last reading begins with lines from Darwish. At dinner I walk a bartender through making me a drink I’ve come to know, rum enfolded in sambuca and Yellow Chartreuse. They call it Palestine Libre.
THE END OF APARTHEID
Henning Mankell
About a week ago I visited Israel and Palestine. I was part of a delegation of authors with representatives from different parts of the world. We came to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature. The opening ceremony was supposed to take place at the Palestinian National Theatre in Jerusalem. We had just gathered when heavily armed Israeli military and policemen walked in and announced that they were going to stop the ceremony. When we asked why, they answered, You are a security risk.
To claim that we at that moment posed a viable terroristic threat to Israel is absolute nonsense. But at the same time they
were right. We pose a threat when we come to Israel and speak our minds about the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian population. It can be compared to the threat that I and thousands of others once were to the apartheid system in South Africa. Words are dangerous.
That was also what I said when those who organised the conference had managed to move the whole opening ceremony to the French Cultural Centre: What we are now experiencing is a repetition of the despicable apartheid system that once treated Africans and coloured as second-class citizens in their own country. But let us not forget: that apartheid system no longer exists. That system was overthrown by human force at the beginning of the 1990s. There is a straight line between Soweto, Sharpeville and what recently happened in Gaza.
During the days that followed we visited Hebron, Bethlehem, Jenin and Ramallah. One day we were walking in the mountains along with the Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh, who showed us how Israeli settlements are spreading, confiscating Palestinian land, destroying roads and building new ones which only settlers are allowed to use. At the different checkpoints harassments were commonplace. For my wife Eva and I it was of course easier to get through. Those in the delegation with Syrian passports or of Palestinian origin were more exposed. Take out the bag from the bus, unpack it, put it back in again, take it out once more . . .
In the West Bank aggravation is a matter of degrees. Worst of all was Hebron. In the middle of a town with a population of 40,000 Palestinians, 400 Jewish settlers have confiscated parts of the town centre. The settlers are brutal and they do not hesitate to attack their Palestinian neighbours. Why not urinate on them from highly situated windows? We saw photographs of settler women, along with their children, kicking and punching Palestinian women. The Israeli soldiers watching did nothing to stop it. That is the reason why there are people in Hebron who, in the name of solidarity, volunteer to walk Palestinian children to school and back. Fifteen hundred Israeli soldiers are guarding these four hundred settlers, day and night. Each settler is being constantly watched over by a team of bodyguards of four to five people.