This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  With PalFest I taught a creative writing workshop in Ramallah. Ramallah was full of entrepreneurs and people who hated them. The place meant for the writer-in-residence wasn’t ready yet so I was hosted above a newly opened posh cafe and bar. It really was posh; some weeks they had Spanish nights. What time do you close? I asked the owner and my host. Half an hour after the last client leaves. The young man had chucked his flourishing career in New York to bring a taste of the world to Ramallah. Some nights there was confusion if I was the last client – would he wait for half an hour after I went upstairs?

  It turned out that the workshop that I was teaching consisted entirely of girls. There was one boy who had registered. He came on the first day and then disappeared. The students, despite their forced isolation from the outside world, were worldly-wise, sharp and keen. And wanted to learn. I had a feeling that I was faking it. I tried to encourage them to write about what they knew. In our writing exercises an F16 would appear outside an apartment window, a woman baking a cake would get shot in the head by a stray bullet, an olive grove would get sprayed with acid. They weren’t trying their hands at magical realism. They were writing about their family lives. In most writing exercises a family elder was humiliated, sometimes stripped, sometimes slapped by the Israeli kid soldiers as the family watched. They wanted to write and get published. Their stories started out about love and sibling rivalry but bullets would start flying. Or someone would get slapped by a kid soldier. After the first few days I didn’t feel too fake. I have started countless stories set in Pakistan promising myself to keep it happy and shiny, and by page six someone has died a horrible death. We kept returning to basic questions. Should one write what one knows? What if nobody wants to read what I know? What if I hate what I know? There was anger over occupation, but more anger over why we must always be telling this story.

  Many of my students had a family elder who had studied in Pakistan in the 70s. They had heard good things about Pakistan. What is wrong with it now? they would ask me. Why so many bomb blasts? Why was Pakistan always in the news, always for the wrong reasons? I felt defensive. I tried hard to explain that we were better off in an understated kind of way. We don’t live under occupation; in fact parts of Pakistan claim that we are the occupiers, we have a democracy of sorts, we have voters’ lists and elections and we have a free press although we routinely kill journalists for exercising that freedom. You don’t need an Israel to mess you up, you can be your own Israel. You can kill your own children, you can build your own ugly walls.

  One of the students had been lucky, the only one in the class to have travelled to Europe. ‘When we travel abroad they ask us where are you from. We say Palestine and they say what – Pakistan? Easy mistake to make, I know. But then they subject us to extra checks; they have started treating us like Pakistanis.’ I wasn’t sure if I should be pleased that in the crazed-out world of airport security Pakistanis have beaten Palestinians. Or was there something deeper going on?

  I was travelling in a Palestinian minibus from Bethlehem to Ramallah. An Israeli traffic police car chased us and stopped us. They fined the driver and all the passengers for not wearing safety belts. None of us were wearing safety belts, I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to wear safety belts in a minibus. All the passengers chipped in to pay the fine. They refused to take my contribution as I was a stranger from Pakistan, how was I supposed to know? We all wore our safety belts. As the minibus resumed its journey and the Israeli traffic police car receded, all the passengers without looking at each other removed their safety belts. I waited for a few seconds and then I did too.

  HEBRON

  Sabrina Mahfouz

  In Hebron, once-heaving streets of silent shops

  shadow our path with shuttered rust,

  we walk quiet, throats full of unanswered bulldozers.

  Soldiers block off neighbourhoods

  to those whose bones have carbonised the ground.

  Children playing chicken over machine-gun motorways

  the size of two pairs of khaki-covered conscripted teenage thighs.

  The price for their game might be a sigh

  or a slap or a shout or perhaps one day

  a bloom from the stem of the gun

  held by hands that haven’t yet learned their lines.

  We scatter ourselves around on tarmac

  two shades darker than the overcast sky,

  lean against concrete blocks to take in

  the scaffolding of dismantled existence.

  A settler approaches with a video camera

  (the kind that used to be called handy before they actually were).

  We ask if he’s filming because he appreciates our dress sense

  or if he’s making a documentary

  about the few who come to Hebron to witness the apartheid,

  tell of it what they can to the outside, and he says,

  with spit spinning around the hooves of his words,

  ‘I’m filming you for god’.

  He won’t elaborate, I guess that says it all really.

  In the middle of that now-sunlit midnight street

  I began to daydream about god

  watching our group of writers on a flatscreen TV –

  once the settler sends it via courier or however it is

  they do this kind of thing.

  I wonder if god would have HD or even 3D?

  Would this supreme being need

  those rubbish blue and red cardboard glasses?

  Would god have a remote or would it all work via mind control?

  Would the back of the TV get dusty all the way up there?

  Would god watch it alone? With popcorn?

  With pick-and-mix sweets that send torrential downpours

  of eaten-too-much-too-quick

  sick down to the ground a few hours after,

  the world having no idea what caused this

  strangely coloured sticky covering to tumble down in lumps one morning.

  Then I was wondering

  what else would be included on this exclusive home video for god?

  Would it show certain settlers filling plastic bags with bleach,

  throwing it down onto the Arab marketplace to mark clothes unsellable?

  Or how about a little cameo from the settler school

  built on top of the Palestinian one,

  literally crushing its core,

  which now requires a 1.5-hour detoured walk

  to get to and from every day,

  since the army blocked the entrance alleyway

  that used to get the local kids there in ten minutes?

  I’m sure that would make for scintillating TV.

  But the really juicy stuff, I assume the filmmaker settler,

  who directs movies for god,

  will leave until last.

  Close-ups on the roads Palestinians can’t drive on

  but are certainly encouraged to die on,

  ambulances included in the ban

  so stretchers held in hands that have outlived their lives

  rush people to what care they can get.

  Sunken canvas pulsing muscles

  doing what wheels were invented for.

  Perhaps a fitting finale

  would be the six-year-olds arrested

  for allegedly

  throwing stones against thunder.

  Held under military law until fines take them home

  to a place that’s allowed a lock

  only because light has been forced to languish

  under metal permissions and permits.

  Here they will count their tears to the age of twelve –

  The legal age for pebbles they touch

  to become army slabs of rock they will be tied to,

  pecked like Prometheus

  but before they grow old enough to give fiery gifts.

  And the credits for this movie?

  A disturbing number of worldwide names

  ma
inly American and European.

  It’s doubtful god would be able to watch all the credits roll,

  as being god requires strict time management, I imagine.

  In conclusion, we turned our own cameras on the settler, saying;

  ‘We’ll be sending this to you once god’s had a preview.

  You won’t be invited to the cinema screening,

  but we have a feeling you’ll steal someone else’s seat anyway.

  Good day.’

  THE STRANGLEHOLD

  Victoria Brittain

  GAZA CITY, APRIL 2016

  A breakfast invitation in Gaza brought us to a table laden with warm cheese and spinach pastries, laban, za’tar, olive oil, cheeses, eggs, fruit, juice, mint tea, after the scent of coffee led us up the stairs to a smiling hostess. We had parked in her small garden under flowering trees, next to a few old roses and a sleepy cat stretched out in the sun. Gazans can lull visitors into a recognisable normality as when eating a relaxed huge breakfast and listening to a teenager’s everyday preoccupations with music, friends, teachers, exams, clothes, selfies and social media. You could be anywhere in the world.

  Except that you couldn’t. Every detail of life is unpredictable. Choices can only be hopes.

  Within minutes we heard that the smiling mother – a medical technician – had an offer of a short training course in Jordan which would radically change her career prospects. But she was worried that she would not get an Israeli permit to leave through the Eretz crossing; the Rafah crossing into Egypt was closed; and even Jordanian permits for Gazans to transit through Jordan to catch a flight were being refused. She was braced for disappointment. (Months later I heard she had not been allowed to go.)

  Her cheerful teenager told the story of her recent first visit to the West Bank. She had set off early in the morning in a minibus of business studies students invited by the US embassy to a conference in Ramallah with successful Palestinian businesswomen. At Eretz everyone on the US embassy list passed through except her. The Israeli border official told her they had read her tweets and she could not enter. After much phoning to the US embassy by her teacher, and a very long wait, she was finally allowed to join the others, but by then they were so late that they only had half an hour in Ramallah and saw nothing of the conference. They had to turn back for Gaza before Eretz closed. ‘It was really disappointing – all I saw was how nowhere is like Gaza,’ she said.

  Eretz with its turnstiles, steel gates, disembodied voices ordering you where to stand with your arms up to be scanned, and its half-mile walk through a fenced-in tunnel across a no-man’s-land of scrub into the almost empty $60 million ten-year-old border terminal is a glaring symbol of the inhumanity of the Gaza blockade. Twenty years ago the crossing was just a walk to an armoured watchtower where a soldier examined a foreigner’s passport without much interest.

  Nowhere is like Gaza now – the young woman was right. It is not just the UN reports which detail how Gaza will be unliveable by 2020, or the twenty-hour power cuts, the lack of drinking water, the sewage lakes, the blackened precarious shells of bombed tower blocks, the miles of rubble that were houses, the Israeli surveillance balloon hovering constantly, the regular shelling of fishermen and farmers or the living in constant fear. Nowhere but in Gaza is the entire population living in prison. Only foreigners know they can leave.

  In just one day I met a prize-winning poet/professor, a surgeon, a doctor, a would-be graduate student, a journalist, all with professional invitations from prestigious institutions in Europe or the US which they, like my breakfast hostess, could not take up because Israel refused them permission to leave Gaza.

  Life is lived here in an intellectual and psychological stranglehold. But it is part of the will to survive of Gazans that so many of them make their voices resonate so far outside.

  One of these men with a stream of invitations was Ziad Medoukh, head of the French Department at al-Aqsa University, a poet with degrees from universities in Algiers and Paris, the first Palestinian to be honoured as a chevalier de l’ordre des palmes académiques de la République Française (2011) and the coordinator of a peace centre in Gaza. In April Medoukh should have been in France to speak at two universities. He had the necessary Jordanian and French visas and the French consulate in Jerusalem made every effort to get him the Israeli permit to go through Eretz. There was no response – as had been the case for three years. But his situation, as he put it, ‘is nothing compared with patients who are in danger of losing their lives, the hundreds of students in Gaza who have lost their scholarships and places in universities abroad, and the dozens of university lecturers who cannot participate in conferences and scientific meetings abroad because of this blockade which violates international law with the complicit silence of the international community’.

  Another was Mohammad, a soft-spoken idealistic student with perfect English learned on the Internet. ‘Where is my human right to study, to live my life in the wide world, to know other people? What do they think will happen for me here, where they know there is no work, no future?’ he asked. A friend broke in with the story of one of their friends who had recently tried to commit suicide because he thought he would never have a chance of a job so would never be able to marry the girl he loved. ‘His sister found him hanging and screamed, so her mother came and he was saved.’ But there was no saving him from his despair.

  The statistics back such new stories of suicide which have accelerated fast in the last year, though no one knows how many go unreported. The general attitude to suicide, as to mental illness, is one of shame. At a conference in April to discuss psychological needs in an unprecedentedly hard time, Gaza’s doctors, psychologists, researchers and social workers presented a bleak picture of anger, depression, anxiety, violence against women, hopelessness in the face of international complicity with the crushing siege. Teachers spoke gloomily of new levels of aggression among schoolboys, and doctors of patients with out-of-control violent demands for instant attention. ‘I don’t recognise this generation, I don’t recognise our society,’ said one experienced teacher. And a professor said flatly, ‘Our whole psychological being has been destroyed.’

  One young doctor told me, ‘I don’t want to hear any more about Gazans’ special resilience – why should our children have to be especially resilient in this way; psychological exhibits? They are normal children with all the normal needs for love and safety and life’s chances. Gaza is made abnormal.’

  On this frontline of Gaza’s despair is Dr Yasser Abu Jamei, a gentle soft-spoken psychiatrist. He is head of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, which organised the conference I was attending. The German, Swiss, Swedish and Norwegian governments helped GCMHP to host 800 people, including a dozen old associates of GCMHP from the US, Europe and South Africa given permits to enter at Eretz. Mainly it was an all-Gazan affair, and a rare meeting on this scale that was not a funeral. Guests from all over Gaza listened and discussed the sombre assessments of their society all day. But in the evenings, in the brand-new Qatar-built hotel, where the electricity does not fail and the taps run clean water, people relaxed and chatted overlooking a moonlit sea, and one evening the young men danced a dabke. Hundreds of selfies were taken on phones and circulated on social media, showing the world that Gazans were something different from the tragic victims of a thousand UN and charity reports.

  Everyone in Gaza knows that Dr Abu Jamei himself lost twenty-eight people in his family to an Israeli missile strike in 2014. When he spoke to the conference of his vision of keeping the hope of peace alive he moved even the most depressed and cynical among his listeners. ‘Mental health means mothers who can see their children sleep, farmers who can plant, fishermen who can sail, youth who can study abroad, people who can plan, detainees who are free . . . it means breaking the siege, ending the occupation,’ he said. ‘Planting hope is our main duty.’

  Many of the next generation keep hope alive day to day in a multitude of modest, vibrant pr
ojects, not waiting for the breaking of the siege by politicians at home or abroad. In a kindergarten in Nuseirat camp young graduates lead the Afaq Jadeeda programme with storytelling, dance and relaxation games, as a young psychologist watches carefully and picks out the most traumatised children who may be referred to GCMHP or the Palestine Trauma Centre for treatment. This cheerful, outgoing group, on tiny salaries, has gone from one camp and one kindergarten to another every day for years.

  Meanwhile Professor Medoukh’s French language and literature students regularly go into schools for play sessions with small children, helping them to relax from the war traumas which are such a big part of their little lives. They lead discussions with adolescent girls in school about family and societal problems special to them; some join villagers to work in ruined farm areas. Every Sunday some of them do a live TV discussion in French, which can be watched on a computer. They are living in the world well beyond Gaza.

  And there are others. In a small neat office in Gaza City an impressive team of young researchers, many still at university, are part of the independent Geneva-based Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights network, an initiative of Palestinian youth in Europe. They live on the Internet. Their most recently published report is Strangulation Twice: Oppressive Practices of Palestinian Security Services. It well illustrates the independence of thought that lives on in this many-faceted society under unimaginable pressures. Another of their initiatives, called We Are Not Numbers, is for young writers. Here are the words of one, Doaa Mohaisen.

  APOLOGY FOR BEING ALIVE

  I feared I wouldn’t be able to go back to my former life after the war ended, but I did.

  It felt so awkward. Everything was normal and people were acting as usual.

  How did I go back to my life, loaded with the guilt of being alive, of breathing?

  I apologise for being alive. I apologise to the son who asked his dad to bring him some chocolate, but he got neither chocolate nor his dad. I apologise to the boy who wanted to see the sky, but it was the last thing he saw. I apologise to the people who went to an UNRWA school believing it was safer, a haven, but it was their graveyard.