This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  I apologise to the girl who thought her father had abandoned her when her mother couldn’t tell her they didn’t find the body.

  I apologise to Gaza, my love. I apologise that it must carry such a burden.

  Young people in Gaza, like these writers or Mohammad or the bouncy teenager at breakfast, are living an unprecedented experiment – and some of them wonder aloud about its results. Where is people’s breaking-point from relentless fear, stress and deprivation? From eight years blockaded in a tiny, crowded enclave, where whole neighbourhoods and infrastructure were destroyed by three wars in just six years?

  Walking the devastated streets of Shujaiyya, where sixty people died in Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge, then standing in a home where half the building is rubble and half the family died in the Israeli onslaught, was to see life without hope. No normality was recognisable in the world of Namer Monsabah in Shujaiyya. Here, in a house with half its rooms yawning open into heaps of rubble, Namer lived with his eight-year-old son Mohammed, his ten-year-old daughter, his cousin and his wife and their three-year-old, Nisreen. Namer’s wife supported them all, he said, with a stall selling chocolate in the playground of a nearby school. He took out of his pocket a two-month-old slip of paper stamped by a French aid group – the latest foreigners to see his living conditions and promise to return, but who never did. ‘We have talked so much – all in vain. People came and gave promises, and nothing happened . . . we tried to apply to Qatar, to Kuwait, to the government, to anyone, for materials to rebuild the house.’

  Namer hesitated before talking to us. He was thirty-eight and seemed decades older, worn and angry, his eyes dark pools without expression. The four rooms the household used were on the first and second floors, with gaping holes in the walls, showing the ground floor below filled with rubble from the collapsed other half of the house. His cousin’s wife Fadwa was twenty-three. She spoke of her constant anxiety for little Nisreen, who had twice recently fallen through the open walls into the rubble. Fadwa cooked for the household what little food they had on an old black stove using wood the two unemployed men collected among the broken homes; their water was in a blue plastic barrel on the stairs filled from a neighbour’s roof tank; their toilet was behind a sack curtain by the stairs.

  This is what life without hope looks like.

  THE SOUND OF A FESTIVAL

  Chinua Achebe

  I was deeply moved to learn of the initiative of those writers who decided to do something about the world in which we live; to replace the sounds of war with the sound of a festival – even for a short while. To switch off, even for a moment, the noise of violence and death and bring back the voices of literature and of peaceful conversation.

  I am deeply honoured to be a patron of the Palestine Literary Festival [sic]. May this quiet event grow and resound with peace in Gaza, the West Bank, in Palestine, in the Middle East and around the world.

  April 2008

  SOUTH AFRICA AND ISRAEL: A FAMILIAR GEOGRAPHY

  Rachel Holmes

  ‘I’ve never met a nice South African.’ So rang the chorus of a famous musical sketch featured in the 1980s British satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image. A mirthful popular political intervention, it went on to be released as the B-side of the chart-topping ‘Chicken Song’. So I, like all my fellow English schoolkids, was exposed to its campaigning message. But unlike them I was half South African, had grown up there during the 1970s and now spent half the year there with my South African mother and extended family. From the perspective of most of my British peers and teachers, I was a racist and fascist. From my own perspective, I was confused.

  British television was one of the great revelations. Apartheid South Africa suppressed the introduction of – fully state-controlled – TV until 1976. Thanks to state propaganda, everyone knew that this new technology was the divil’s own black box for disseminating communism and immorality. Unlike the rest of the world, no one at the southernmost tip of Africa – which has some of the most spectacular night skies on the planet – was able to watch the moon landing live. Responding to popular demand at the time, the government arranged some restricted viewings of the landing, showing fifteen minutes of edited footage. When those few grown-ups and older cousins who had the opportunity to see one of those screenings told us about it, it sounded like movie folklore. No wonder a generation of children grew up, like me, extremely dubious about the truth of reports that men had in fact landed on the moon back in 1969.

  Somewhere along the equator that marked the geographical division of my life by my parents into perpetual crossings north and south, scepticism flared and dissent smouldered. There were many, many reasons, but two stand out starkly. Firstly, my boy cousins, who I’d grown up with as brothers, going off to do their military conscription for the SADF, returning with quiet, distracted stories about bush wars we weren’t supposed to be fighting over borders we weren’t supposed to be crossing. Secondly, the rows over the rebel English cricket tours in the early 1980s. In white South Africa there was fevered excitement at the unexpected news of the arrival of an English team captained by Graham Gooch, scheduled to make a one-month tour of our republic. The government and press celebrated the return of official international cricket. Springbok colours flew; three one-day internationals were met with the excitement of an Olympics. Crossing the equator to visit my father, I discovered that these self-same England cricketers were decried as ‘the Dirty Dozen’ and regarded as pocket-filling mercenaries and a national disgrace. Around the same time I was beginning to wonder why interesting British TV series and period historical dramas were never available to us back home in South Africa, where the only international programming imports were shows from America about wildly rich white Texan oil barons or professional black families living in huge houses with lives unlike any of the black people we knew.

  In those years of increasing isolation in the 1970s and 80s, Israel was our only trusted international friend. When I was eleven, the apartheid government’s yearbook reminded us, ‘Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.’ Family friends went to work in government jobs in Israel, taking with them the children I had played with. In whispered conversations I self-importantly advised on the pleasures and pitfalls of going to school abroad, reassuring them that it would not be freezing cold like England. I was fairly certain of this advice, imagining as I did that Israel was situated somewhere between Mozambique and Kenya, since I had seen a picture of my mother on a beach in Tel Aviv that looked very much like Durban.

  These were some of the memories that surfaced, randomly, while we were held up at the King Hussein/Allenby Bridge border crossing on my first PalFest. Divided and separated by name and supposed race – whatever our passport or citizenship – we were held at the unhurried pleasure of the IDF for over six hours. I realised that I was returning to somewhere I had never been before. I knew exactly where I was. The recognition was instinctive, intimate and sickening. We traced the familiar irrational geography of the separation wall, filed through cattle-pen checkpoints, were physically ejected from theatre venues by military units of armed IDF soldiers, or grasped tightly on to raw onions to try and alleviate the tear-gassing and intimidation deemed proportionate to the threat posed by a group of young rappers performing in a tent.

  In 1937 Nancy Cunard sent a questionnaire to 200 writers, inviting them to state their position on the civil war in Spain. Cunard’s call required writers to take a stand in a struggle between fascism and democracy: ‘It is clear to many of us throughout the whole world that now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do.’ The responses were overwhelmingly in support of the Spanish Republic, demonstrating strong anti-fascist sentiment. A few, like T. S. Eliot, did not agree with being forced to ‘take sides’.

  In
April 2016 Nathan Linial, professor of computer science and engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, son of an immigrant from Nazi Germany and a Holocaust survivor, gave a speech on receipt of a Rothschild Prize.

  I’m sorry, I am going to darken your mood a bit . . . But I hope that you will see what I am saying . . . In every historical text one reads about fascism, one finds this one insight repeated time and time again. Fascism succeeded exactly in those places where decent people did not find it within themselves to stand up against it – be it from laziness, weakness or just cowardice . . . As Dante taught us, there is a special place in hell for those people who, at times of a deep moral catastrophe choose a neutral stance. I swear I would have preferred a thousand-fold to share the joys of science with you today, to praise the good teachers from whom I have had the privilege to learn . . . I could have told you all about the happiness to be found in daily work alongside brilliant, enthusiastic young students and about the things I provide them with that no one can take away. But during times like these one cannot fall silent. It is the duty of every decent person to stand forth proudly and say in a loud clear voice what the anti-fascist fighters said during the Spanish Civil War, No pasaran. ‘They shall not pass.’

  Linial’s speech, in Hebrew, was posted widely on social networks and political blogs in Israel. The speech did get a mention in Haaretz, but in no other local news sources. It became available to the wider world only recently thanks to a translation by Breaking the Silence posted on their YouTube feed.

  A few months later, in July 2016, celebrated Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Keshua refused an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University. Keshua left Israel after the Gaza incursion in 2014 but still maintains a large persona in Israeli cultural life and writes for the Israeli press. ‘I don’t support a boycott of Israeli academia. But Ben-Gurion University’s decision not to honour Breaking the Silence, an NGO whose crime is to remind people of the occupation, leaves me no choice but to decline the honorary doctorate it has offered me.’

  Sajid Javid, while British minister for culture, media and sport, ignored the call by Palestinians and Israelis for an international cultural and academic boycott of Israel; instead he celebrated the current state of Israel as a nation offering the ‘warm embrace of freedom and liberty’.

  The Israeli government is turning anti-occupation activists into dissidents. In 2016 the Knesset passed the so-called NGO Transparency Law, legislation targeting ‘left-wing’ NGOs and human rights organisations as agents of foreign powers. The law requires NGOs that rely on funding from foreign governments to plaster FOREIGN AGENT next to their name on every report, website, document or publication. It also requires NGO representatives to wear special identifying tags when meeting with state officials or attending sessions in the Knesset.

  Culture Minister Miri Regev has been working hard to suppress political dissent in the arts, culture and sport. Israeli artists received questionnaires asking them to declare whether they perform in West Bank settlements. Regev explained that ‘institutions that delegitimise the State of Israel will not receive funding’. The questionnaire prepared the ground for what Regev calls her ‘cultural loyalty’ law, which, she stated, aims ‘for the first time, to make support for a cultural institution dependent on its loyalty to the State of Israel’. She plays heavily on inter-ethnic relations between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews. In a recent initiative she released ‘modesty’ guidelines for appropriate dress for women appearing at government-funded events, a decision taken following the Celebrate August Festival in Ashdod, in which a female singer dressed in shorts, a bikini top and open shirt was removed from the stage. ‘Festivals and events funded by public money will respect the general public, which includes different communities,’ a ministry official said, adding the further helpful clarification, ‘this is exactly the difference between freedom of expression and freedom of funding. Therefore, a proper directive to all production bodies working through the Culture Ministry will be issued to ensure that this policy is implemented in all events.’

  In 2015, Israel’s Education Ministry rewrote the teachers’ guide for high-school civics, and issued new guidelines warning teachers to beware the ‘dogmatism of democracy’ and to stress the ‘Jewish nation state’. According to the guide, ‘An ethnic-cultural nation state is a basis for strong solidarity among a majority of citizens because of the national connection between them.’ A democratic political culture, the guide goes on to state, ‘does not exist to an equal extent in all democracies and is not a necessary condition for defining a state as democratic’. Moreover, pupils should be taught that there is ‘tension between the values of pluralism, which encourages multiple opinions, and the value of agreeing, which strengthens unity’.

  The Israeli State Attorney’s Cyber Division has sent numerous take-down requests to Twitter and other media platforms in recent months, demanding that they remove certain content or block all Israeli-based users from being able to view it. In August 2016, for example, Twitter’s legal department notified American blogger Richard Silverstein that the Israeli State Attorney claimed a tweet of his, published in May, violated Israeli law. Silverstein breaks stories that Israeli journalists are unable to publish due to internal gagging orders. Two days later the California-based company announced, ‘In accordance with applicable law and our policies, Twitter is now withholding the following tweet(s) in Israel.’

  Today, BDS features almost daily in the Israeli news and is referred to as ‘the new anti-Semitism’. Yet some of the most anti-Semitic cartoons that I have seen in recent times come from an extremely surprising source. A German called Herr Stürmer is masked by a newspaper parodying Haaretz headlines. At periodic intervals the voice of a housekeeper shrieks that a character referred to as ‘ze Jew’ has arrived at the door. A hideous racist stereotype of a man with a hooked nose appears and reappears to be tossed shiny gold euros by Stürmer in exchange for stories critical of Israeli policy: BOYCOTT ISRAEL! KILLING INNOCENT TWENTY-YEAR-OLD PALESTINIAN BABIES! IDF ABUSES HAMAS’S HUMAN RIGHTS; GAZILLION PALESTINIANS STUCK IN ISRAELI BORDER CHECKPOINT. At the end, when Herr Stürmer has no further use for him, ‘ze Jew’ obligingly hangs himself. This animation was not produced by a far-right group in Europe, where an increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes is a real cause for concern. No, it was made and promoted by the Samaria Settler Council, an organisation representing Israeli settlements in the northern West Bank.

  Unsurprising that the girl who could once only communicate with one parent or the other by letter grew up to be a writer. Unsurprising too that the white South African learned to listen out for the dissident voice. Such people can be seen as oppressors by unknowing strangers and branded as self-loathing traitors by their own. Yet if we do not allow them to be heard no country on earth can become its better self, democracy is stifled and the wars go on and on.

  PalFest enabled me to hear these voices.

  September 2016

  THE GAZA SUITE: RAFAH

  Suheir Hammad

  there is a music to this all

  the din has an order of orders

  a human touch behind all arms

  all of it manufactured stars above all

  something melting a dove molting mourning through dusk

  one child after another gathered if possible

  washed where possible wrapped there is always cloth

  all the while prayed on then pried from the women

  always the women in the hot houses of a winter’s war

  the cameras leave with the men and the bodies always

  the women somehow somehow putting tea on fire

  gathering the living children if possible

  washing them when possible praying on them

  through their hair into their palms onto dear life

  something fusing into dawn feathers shed eyes

  people in a high valence state

  that’s when breathing feeds burns

  that’s where settlers tak
e high ground

  that’s how villages bulldozed betwixt

  holidays before your eyes

  high violence holy children lamb

  an experience no longer inherited

  actual

  earth in scorched concrete

  heart in smoking beat

  SHUJAIYYA DUST

  Molly Crabapple

  ‘We accepted the sorrow, but the sorrow didn’t accept us.’

  Ibtisam sat in the dust, laughing, her witty broad face framed by her flowered hijab. In her forty-five years living in Gaza she’d seen so much sorrow that laughing was the only real response.

  Her husband had died during the second Intifada from a stress-induced asthma attack she believes was triggered by the sound of a tank firing. He’d left her with four children to raise, which she did in a four-family home surrounded by olive trees, chicken coops and a garden where she grew thyme.

  That home is gone now – along with the rest of the Shujaiyya neighbourhood – due to Israeli shells and bulldozers during Operation Protective Edge, which hit Gaza in the summer of 2014.

  Operation Protective Edge was Israel’s third full-scale military incursion into the Strip since Hamas took control in 2007. During their bombing campaign and ground invasion Israeli forces killed over 2,100 Palestinians, according to the United Nations, 70 per cent of them civilians, including nearly 500 children; 11,000 more were injured. A June 2015 UN report found evidence of war crimes.

  While all Gaza suffered during the war, Shujaiyya endured a unique decimation. One Gazan translator, a thin sarcastic man in his thirties, struggled for words to describe what he’d seen there. He finally settled on one: ‘Hell.’ Will I die here? he remembered wondering during Protective Edge. Will I be left in the sun, swelling like a balloon, with no one able to pick up my corpse?