by Ahdaf Soueif
She is almost content: Mona, or at least a small part of her, is home at last, or not too far. Her grandmother was born in Jaffa, by the sea. The young woman would have wished, ideally, to scatter this small portion of her ashes there, over the water; but – as with the others’ family photographs – the place where her grandmother was born is no longer. This place – this vast sky in its naked light, this earth, this sandy road, these rocks, these bent trees, this hidden village above – will serve.
As she turns to climb back to join the others – they will fly back to New York tomorrow – she is stayed by the music of a bird close by. The rock thrush sings in the olive trees. For a few moments she listens, eyes closed. The air feels different then, gentler: perhaps she has granted Mona the unreachable wish. Swiftly she bends and grasps between her fingers a handful of the pebbled soil, releasing it into the empty plastic bag. She wipes her hand on her pants, seals the bag, wraps it in the napkin, slides the napkin back into her pocket. Her own name is Nadine, which in another language means hope.
It is time to go. She can hear the others coming down the hill. The rock thrush sings in the olive trees.
HOW TO SURVIVE EXILE
Sabrina Mahfouz
‘Keep your heart warm and your body won’t rust’,
trust that things will get better, you will not be bitter.
Accept that bits of you won’t ever look the same again,
when they were how they were you just complained anyway, so let it go.
With each change reshape your name with your tongue,
find that syllables don’t only soar through falling leaves when you’re young.
Rummage through the luggage of your life,
pull the treasures out by their hands and hold them tight,
dance around the storage boxes you’ve blocked your veins with,
sieve the heavy grains away,
feel the lightness of lace light up the places you’ve yet to go.
Because it’s far from over,
even if it can’t be lived over.
It’s knowing it can be lived until it’s gone and you’ve become something else,
touching the air in a new form, but before that –
find a morning that spreads butter on your toes,
let the sauce of a storm levitate whatever hair you have left,
ride the wind’s broken tracks to a triangle of glass you’ve never slid on before,
sunbathe your core until your insides are so nicely heated they could be eaten,
then lay your star-warmed body down,
your origamied skin meeting what it once was
and now
close your bruised eyelids,
let the masks make their own way,
give your liver to the birds,
they will sing to us all the things you’ve heard.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT PALESTINE
Jamal Mahjoub
Surreal is the word that springs to mind when I fly into Tel Aviv late at night, surrounded by a planeload of excited tourists returning from their holiday in Spain. An hour later I am in a taxi driving along a narrow strip of motorway that cuts deep into the surrounding darkness. Rows of sodium lights stand sentinel over the deserted road. A high chain-link fence topped by scrolls of razor wire runs along each side. It is not so much a road as a charmed corridor, a magical path through hostile territory. Against the glare you cannot see what lies beyond the glow of the lights.
Palestinian vehicles are not allowed on these smooth, modern roads. The West Bank proper begins beyond the penumbra. Once you leave the highway, skirting concrete barriers, the road begins to wind, rising and falling, as it passes along unlit roads that thread their way between dark, silent villages. It is as if you have fallen off the edge of the known world and passed into another dimension.
So much of what is now said is merely the regurgitation of established tropes. Time, like the accumulation of sediment at the bottom of a river, has made movement so sluggish as to be imperceptible. Progress of any kind has become intractable. We are bogged down by the very weight of history the issue has accreted over the years.
It’s an issue that raises hackles, brings out furious, irrational responses, often founded on nothing less than a personal sense of moral outrage, an ill-perceived duty towards righteousness, a repressed, unspoken disgust. Palestine has become a metaphor, a postmodern deconstruction of past episodes of annihilation. Unlike the Holocaust, whose memory has been sanctified by time and the knowledge that what the Nazis did was a crude expression of the disdain that Europe as a whole felt towards its Jewish population, for Europeans the suffering of the Palestinians is seen as remote and disconnected from the notion of our history.
To most it is simply an awkward inconvenience. Nobody wants to think too hard about the fate of a people who appear to be doing their best to undermine their own cause. Suicide bombs, rocket attacks, stabbings. None of it plays well on the global media stage. And history has a habit of fading, allowing us to forget the parallels between this relentless process of destruction and the persecution of the Jews. The deception is aided by the fact that this is happening not in an instant but in slow motion. Palestine is being dismantled, turned into a jigsaw puzzle so complex that eventually it will be impossible to see the pieces for the lines between them.
For Israel what is at stake is the national conscience, the moral compass of the people. Putting aside the civilian casualties for a moment, a fraction of those whom the Palestinians have lost, what Israel has lost in the past forty years, since 1967, is the innocence it believed it had, best symbolised perhaps by the sun-bronzed kibbutzer that Amos Oz holds up in admiration in his memoirs. Today that is a fond memory, a dangerous delusion. Violence corrupts the violent, and it does so absolutely.
As a child growing up in Khartoum in the 1970s I was familiar with the heroic Palestinian images that appeared on television every night: of fedayeen, freedom fighters, leaping over trenches or crawling under barbed wire to a stirring soundtrack of martial music. It told us that there was a battle going on somewhere. Where exactly, we could not say, but it was a struggle between good and evil, justice and injustice. For decades martyrdom has been the role of Palestinians in the Arab world, their suffering a cover for all its failings – nationalism, despotism, corruption. We watched the pictures of refugees: forlorn, ragged people, the world’s conscience. And we saw them, the women who gathered around our garden gate asking for help. We would give food and clothes, leftovers, cast-offs, to a people who had nothing left to lose.
Once when I refused to eat the peanut soup that was set before me I was lectured about children starving in camps. I can recall the shame I felt but also the resentment at being made an example of, at the absurdity of the idea that my not eating this soup somehow dishonoured the suffering of those people. I knew my soup would never reach them, and so it wasn’t about that; it was about reconciling this life of privilege I had, where there was food on the table and clothes on my back, where I slept peacefully in my bed, with a world in which children just like me were starving and had no home to give them shelter. I resented being reminded of their existence.
The persecution of the Jews in Europe still exists in living memory. The Nazis marched through the city where I now live. Some eighty thousand were deported to the camps. Sixty thousand never returned. What do we learn from that history? Surely the only lesson we can take away is that such persecution, humiliation and destruction should never happen again? At times it seems as if we are not seeing the world clearly, but looking at it through a two-way mirror. The people on the inside see only themselves; from the outside you see them watching their own reflection but not seeing you.
How many times have I made the mistake of speaking my mind? Once, in Sarajevo, over dinner with an expert on Céline, the conversation took a turn and I got into an argument about Amos Oz. I made the observation that I didn’t understand his support for the security wall, or separati
on barrier, as it is also called. For most of its length the barrier is a barbed-wire fence with surveillance cameras and towers; in built-up areas it rises into a concrete wall, eight metres high. As a security measure it fails miserably. There are so many weak points that a determined suicide bomber or terrorist would have no difficulty walking across it. Oz had quoted from Robert Frost: ‘Good fences make good neighbours,’ he’d said. It had struck me as paradoxical that a writer seen as a voice of reason, a voice for peace, would defend the idea of segregation. And besides, as he must have known, the wall is not about security; it is, like so much else, about seizing land. You see that when you watch Israeli soldiers uprooting olive trees, cutting off farmers from their crops, from their water.
The wall also has a symbolic role. It tells Palestinians that they cannot even touch their own land, draw water from their wells. In this way their Palestine has already ceased to exist. The physical separation is about deprivation, prising away contact between a people and the land they hold dear. The issue here is not security but the prevention of contact. It carries with it the idea of contamination, so clearly and casually depicted by Hollywood in the zombie movie World War Z – the notion that Palestinians are not human beings at all, not even animals, but germs or a virus that must be isolated and destroyed.
Aside from the land it seizes, the real impact of the wall is psychological. Eight-metre-high walls turn the West Bank into a gigantic prison. It makes residents into inmates, their crime being their existence. It is a logical extension of the checkpoints around Bethlehem and Jerusalem, which are an exercise in humiliation. People pass along cattle runnels, separated from one another by high metal bars. Soldiers bark commands in Hebrew. Keep moving. Stop. Start. Go. Do not go. The humiliation is reinforced by the fact that the guards are kids barely out of their teens. To live with such monstrosity would be unbearable for most.
Why is none of this alarming or familiar to the world? How can rational, intelligent, educated people look at this and feel it is justified. By what twisted algorithm have they arrived at this conclusion? How is it that we accept this irrational fear of an entire people, a minority most of whom are not violent but oppressed, not fanatical but resigned, not the aggressor but the aggrieved? Yet to speak this aloud is, in many quarters, considered an obscenity. Gentle, sensitive souls become apoplectic when speaking of the clumsy, pathetic rockets launched by Hamas, the children dressed up as jihadis, the young women who dream of martyrdom. It is a rationale based on incomprehension, on fear of the other taken to the extreme. In Sarajevo it wasn’t even an argument, just an awkward silence. The blank stare, the shake of the head, the silent, unforgiving look which says, How can you possibly feel sympathy?
The context has changed, of course. When I was a child the struggle of Palestinians was regarded as a war of liberation. PLO stood for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, with the emphasis being on liberation. On freedom. In those far-off days terror had a finite, political aim. There was an ideology which argued that the use of violence was justified in the pursuit of the final outcome: freedom for the homeland. Looking back now, that kind of thinking seems almost quaint. Time. Betrayal. Deception. It all adds up. One could argue that there are no ideologies today, only faith and sacrifice. The perversion of politics means that the scope for negotiation has been whittled down to nothing. The limits of what is achievable have been eroded to the point where all that remains is martyrdom or the belief that one’s actions are guided by a divine hand.
Meanwhile, the outside world looks on, numbed by guilt and prejudice, bowing to self-interest and the will of partisan lobbyists. Where does this passivity stem from? In Europe a blend of tolerance and guilt gives rise to a plea for parity; the plight of Israelis and Palestinians must be understood as equal in order to avoid any accusation of anti-Semitism. This discomfort is a moral one. It is produced by the awareness that the line drawn between the genocide suffered by the Jews in Europe and the fate of Israel today is not as straightforward as it might seem. It also acts as a blindfold. Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining the difference in attitude between those brought up in Europe and those, like myself, whose experience on the outside allows them a different perspective.
In the West the conviction persists that sympathy for the Palestinian cause is synonymous with anti-Semitism, as if the two were bound together by a simple equation that is not only unquestionable but almost sacred. Yet as long as we refuse to distinguish criticism of the Israeli state from racial hatred we will continue to labour under the deception that we understand what is actually happening. And perhaps the point is that this is no longer about Israel and Palestine, it is about who we are and what kind of world we want to live in. The 9/11 attacks broke a taboo, they crossed a line, touching American bodies on American soil. And the actions of a handful of men unleashed cataclysm on the entire region: from Iraq and Afghanistan through Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib to drone strikes and civil war, societies have been shattered and the region devastated in ways that we are only just beginning to comprehend. The world is drifting further apart and yet, of course, we have nowhere else to go.
Perhaps the conflict works best at the metaphorical level. Without a belief in a unifying common humanity, in something that can allow us to rise above our differences and bring us together, we are left with nothing more and nothing less than a world that is a gated community. This is what lies ahead: a world in which we all live in fear of difference, of the other, of those whose appearance and beliefs differ from ours. That is what apartheid was and that is what the separation wall is today. It is a symbol of what the future holds for all of us, unless we change course.
Once we let go of our belief in the greater good that holds mankind together we become prisoners of fear, the same rabid delusion that propelled the Nazis to become an ugly footnote in history. This is what you see when you pass through the Israeli checkpoints, when you look into the eyes of the Israeli soldiers on patrol in Hebron, the protective nets the Palestinians have strung over their market, the Israeli settlers stoning schoolchildren, Israeli joggers bearing M16s, Israeli watchtowers sprouting cameras like cactus spines, the ruins of Gaza City, the dusty, desolate landscape around the tunnel lifeline, the Klieg lights marking the open sea with fishing limits, the buzz of drones overhead, the despair of hunger strikers, the concrete noose thrown around Rachel’s Tomb, the golden Menorah surveilling al-Aqsa Mosque, the apartment buildings crumpled like accordions, the names and faces of the martyrs that turn refugee camps into memorials for the dead.
PalFest gave me the chance to see all of this and more. It gave me the opportunity to talk to people, to students and civilians, ordinary people trying to live their lives in the midst of this imposition of insanity. Not only to live, but to dream, to work towards something. What struck me was the sense that I would not have survived had I been born in Palestine. The anger, frustration, humiliation. There are of course those who succumb, who feel that violence is the only possible response, even when that has to take the hopeless form of suicide. This is not a surprise. To live under such conditions year in, year out, generation after generation, would be enough for most people. It would be enough for me. And yet it is not. The wonder is that there is not more violence. The remarkable thing is to see that there are many who still believe in working towards a peaceful outcome through unarmed protest, through theatre, art, poetry. Lawyers and civil rights workers, farmers and students, NGOs, actors, writers, booksellers and singers, all those who have chosen not to take up the gun but to believe, against all the odds, that peace with justice is still possible. This is the true miracle of Palestine. This is the real miracle. For all our sakes, we should believe in it.
THE GAZA SUITE: TEL EL HAWA
Suheir Hammad
what day is it
alkaline of neck alley base
of musk alcohol top note
what the night was like
blooming sky white smoke black out
a dawn flami
ng life
so long this winter
so cold this shadow
what day is it
a woman dreams a baby years
embroiders wishes names angels
a future onto cloth the people carry her
child shelled streets shaheed
what day is it
a father works hours to bone to feed
seed dress them bless them buries them
his pain a sonic collapse
who can imagine
today the first day
last night the worst night
EXIT STRATEGY
China Miéville
So we should ask Mohammed al-Durra. He isn’t dead again.
Recall his face. Even from a government one of the chief exports of which is images of screaming children, his was particularly choice, tucked behind his desperate father, pinned by fire. Until Israeli bullets visit them and they both go limp. He for good. Pour encourager les autres.
Now though, thirteen years after he was shot on camera – one year more than he lived – he has been brought back to life. But wait before you celebrate: there are no very clear protocols for this strange paper resurrection. Mohammed al-Durra is a bureaucratic Lazarus. After a long official investigation, by the power vested in it the Israeli government has declared him not dead. He did not die.
There was another boy at the hospital, there were no injuries, it was a trick. A blood libel to suggest he was killed by Israelis, the same day as were Nizar Eida and Khaled al-Bazyan, one day before Muhammad al-Abbasi and Sara Hasan and Samer Tabanja and Sami al-Taramsi and Hussam Bakhit and Iyad al-Khashashi, two before Wael Qattawi and Aseel Asleh, three before Hussam al-Hamshari and Amr al-Rifai, but stop because listing killed children takes a long time. Keep his name out of that file.