by Ahdaf Soueif
Jamal al-Durra will open his son’s grave. Is that enough? he asks with a unique exhaustion. To prove that this thing we saw happen happened, that the boy we saw die died?
The task is complete. Wheels are spinning. A new pass law. The IDF has been sent, a checkpoint set up at the border of the land of the dead. And Mohammed al-Durra has been hard-stopped by the guards because he does not carry the right papers.
Undesirable life is ended, and unauthorised death is banned. Where is Mohammed to go now, the victim of this necrocide, this murder of the killed?
Between wire runnels, tangled chains, cages, again. Again, again. Maybe that’s where the shot-again newly unkilled boy will kick his heels. A purgatory not for the unshriven but for the troublesomely Arab, for the death-contested.
In Jerusalem the government decrees that Palestinian deceased sublimate after seven years, to be absent, to go to the nothingness that their recalcitrant bodies, living then dead, resist. They absent themselves finally from the real estate they hog, and at last it can be where a cable car touches down. It can be a foundation for engines.
Peace is a corrupt business in Palestine, he says.
Driving in from Allenby, the rock gorge has been hacked ruthlessly out of the mountains, and protruding from one part is a jagged fringe of metal where some once-submerged and hidden corridor has been exposed and left to weather and dangle from its housing.
Yes, we know the Holy Land is now a land of holes, and lines, a freak show of topography gone utterly mad, that the war against Palestinians is also a war against everyday life, against human space, a war waged with all expected hardware, with violent weaponised absurdism, with tons and tons of concrete and girders. This is a truism, and/but true.
Settler is an odd term for these vectors of the unsettling, government-sponsored agents of government-desired permanent crisis, for whom stability and everyday life are anathemata to be fought unstintingly, with bullets and beatdowns and strategies of berserker spite.
The low mesh sky of al-Khalil market is pelted with its own grotesque microclimate. Hebron. These low clouds are piss bottles, concrete slabs, storms of trash, a suspended weather of race hate. Stand between stallholders whose dogged sales patter become heroics in the shadows of bags of shit, stand by a ledge where a ginger kitten picks intrepidly through razor wire and look up. There’s something brewing.
They used to play games, she explains. She and her friends were told to behave or else the settler would come and get them. They knew his name, they knew he had a wooden leg, they convinced each other and themselves that they could hear him coming. Clack drag clack drag clack. They knew the scary rhythms and covered their mouths. Those sounds he made. They pantomimed the terrible things he would do if he caught them. Much later she read a newspaper, and of course he had been real.
In Jerusalem the flags on the stolen house metastasise. They jut vertically, and horizontally, but then they protrude at all ludicrous angles in between, as if any sough of Palestinian air unruffled by the white and blue is an outrage. They must not leave a breath unclaimed.
There is a mannequin in al-Khalil, in the market, a plastic woman with very pale skin and outdated hair, modelling a long black dress with red trim. She stares stupidly ahead, as if she would like you to join her in ignoring the hole in her forehead, almost exactly in the centre, only a little to the right, where her eyebrow ends. It is just like the hole a bullet would make if this placid woman were targeted by a sniper. Move to the side: the right rear of her head is gone. Yes, that’s where the exit wound would be, and it would pass through much like that, yes, leaving a hole like that one, shaped, I swear to God, like that one, like something big and familiar.
The young Jewish woman turns and gasps as you follow her into Qalandia, through steel runs that are too narrow. She says, ‘I can’t believe this was designed by people with these memories.’ An entrance to discourage entrance in the first place, but, like a pitcher plant, to make it impossible, once entered, to change your mind.
There’s a place where the wall incorporates a house. If you hang a picture up you decorate the inside of that dorsal ridge, the scales of that rising concrete animal.
And in its wedge of shadow the long stupid zigzag of the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem is indicated with a sign, there on the Bethlehem side. ENTRANCE, it says, white on green, and points to the cattle run. Inside are all the ranks of places to wait, the revolving grinder doors, green lights that may or may not mean a thing, the conveyor belts and metal detectors and soldiers and more doors, more metal striae, more gates.
Finally, for those who emerge on the city side, who come out in the sun and go on, there is a sign they, you, we have seen before. White on green, pointing back the way just come.
ENTRANCE, it says. Just like its counterpart on the other side of a line of division, a non-place.
No exit is marked.
The arrows both point in. Straight towards each other. The logic of the worst dream. They beckon. They are for those who will always be outside, and they point the way to go. Enter to discover you’ve gone the only way, exactly the wrong way.
ENTRANCE: a serious injunction. A demand. Their pointing is the pull of a black hole. Their directions meet at a horizon. Was it ever a gateway between? A checkpoint become its own end.
This is the plan. The arrows point force at each other like the walls of a trash compactor. Obey them and people will slowly approach each other and edge closer and closer from each side and meet at last, head on like women and men walking into their own reflections, but mashed instead into each other, crushed into a mass.
ENTRANCE, ENTRANCE. These directions are peremptory, their signwriters voracious, insisting on obedience everywhere, impatient for the whole of Palestine to take its turn, the turn demanded, until every woman and man and child is waiting on one side or the other in long long lines, snaking across their land like the wall, shuffling into Israel’s eternal and undivided capital, CheckPointVille, at which all compasses point, towards which winds go, and there at the end of the metal run the huge, docile, cow-like crowds will, in this fond, politicidal, necrocidal, psychecidal fantasy, meet and keep taking tiny steps forward held up by the narrowness of the walls until they press into each other’s substance and their skins breach and their bones mix and they fall into gravity one with the next. Palestine as plasma. Amorphous. Amoebal. Condensed. Women and men at point zero. Shrunken by weight, eaten and not digested. An infinite mass in an infinitely small space.
In the bowels of that hangar where the lines of those arrows meet are advertisements. ISRAEL, one says in that no-place, on the line in the sand, WHERE IT’S VACATION ALL YEAR ROUND.
Please understand that there is nothing unthinking about that joke, that these are exactly the posters a Palestinian is supposed to see at this point, that this is information she needs, now move on, keep going on this time out of time, time off, this vacation you have been given on the sand. You are beached. Get out.
There is no out. The signs are very clear. Everything is an entrance, and it all leads here.
In Hebrew, Arabic and English, in black on yellow: PREPARE YOUR DOCUMENTS FOR INSPECTION. And below that another of the posters. Under the smiling, piggy-backing couple: ISRAEL: FOR THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE.
It’s not intended to be a surprise. So that is the plan, and there it is. Here is time, and your life. Have everyone shuffle forward for all time on this bad, bad holiday, into this eternity.
You are supposed to follow the signs. Here is the idea. It will be explained again, as often as it takes. The end is not to be three strangers in a room alone but a nation, two near-unending lines of broken living and the authorised dead, ordered forward and pushing and pushed and becoming nothing. What is lawfully inscribed here is not NO EXIT; it is ENTRANCE–ENTRANCE.
THE GAZA SUITE: ZEITOUN
Suheir Hammad
where from here
a ribbon of land smoking
within the girl’s
hair smoking
wire wood word smoking
there are bodies here
micro mosaic children
a triptych exile against wall
my dead are rescued
a closing of crossings
a scatter vapor of earth
a trance of metal
where from here
i am all tunnel
THE END OF ART IS PEACE
Omar Robert Hamilton
The bus stops outside Bethlehem. The reverend lifts the microphone. We are returning from the Cremasin Monastery, a palazzo of elegant stonework standing above a terraced valley of vineyards. The monastery’s Salesian monks make the best wine in Palestine. ‘See the wall?’ the reverend says, and the group looks out the window to see the concrete future coming down the hill. ‘And see it on the other hill there?’ Heads turn, eyes follow the bulldozer’s tracks. ‘The wall is coming. This might be the last time we ever drive down this road.’
‘They are digging underneath the houses.’ Youssef, our host, is calm; he’s told this story before. The sun presses down on the Jerusalem streets, but the air is cooler in his Mameluke atrium. ‘A settler broke through my kitchen wall last year. They are tireless, the Jerusalem settlers. They are digging.’ I translate for the authors, the transmitters to the outside world. Some take notes.
We sit on our balcony in Cairo, my mother, Yasmin and I, and we plan the coming festival’s route. Will we try a new city this year? Or are we fixed with the regulars? Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, al-Khalil, Haifa and Nablus. Should we drop Haifa and go to Lydd this year? But we have such a strong audience in Haifa. Maybe this is the year we perform in Jaffa? But there are no Palestinian hotels in the city. Can we go to Qalqilya, Tulkarem, Jenin? We only have five days – what would we drop? And what about the Golan, the Bedouin, the border with Gaza? How can you understand Palestine without them? Five days is so little time.
Cement blocks sever the road, a grey town in the distance of this scrubland of bowed heads and silences and soldiers’ large guns hanging heavy off their shoulders. The second Intifada still smoulders. Sunglasses keep all possible violences alive. We show our passports. The soldier doesn’t move. We walk on. Years later I come to know that they call this place Qalandia.
Get on the bus. Our annual catchphrase. Every day our festival troupe packs its bags, changes city, changes hotel, checks in, unpacks, listens, performs. Five days, seven cities, twenty-two authors, five public events, five walking tours, twenty-nine hotel rooms, two universities, two thousand posters, thirty-six flights, two checkpoints, no free time.
Get on the bus. Get off the bus.
The bus drives up from the Dead Sea. The festival begins at the lowest point on earth. The bus drives up into the mountains to Ramallah, the Heights of God, away from the border and the long wait for the Arab names to be waved through. The audience waits in Ramallah. Nowhere to go but up.
The first time I breathed tear gas was in al-Khalil. We were sitting in Hajj Yahya al-Ja’bari’s garden behind the Ibrahimi Mosque. The gas arrived invisible, and when our eyes began to burn our host cut up onions and told us to breathe them in. I didn’t ask any questions. I think it helped.
Each year has its standout moments, its public triumphs and private crises. Scenes hold close to me: scouring downtown Ramallah for a fax machine, Mahmoud Darwish’s letter of welcome in my hand, the Guardian’s phone number written out on the back; the spotlight on Suheir Hammad, the brutal electricity of her suite of Gaza poems, tonight five short months after Operation Cast Lead; the crowds hanging off the rooftop of the Qassem Palace to get a view of the night’s poets; our logo on a bag hanging off a random shoulder in London; the timbre of Mohammed Bakri’s baritone reading China Miéville’s words; our first poster by Muiz; Maya Khalidi’s soprano soaring in improvised perfection in the beats of Gillian Slovo’s breaths; Najwan Darwish’s poetry in the dark of Silwan:
The earth is three nails
and mercy a hammer:
Strike, Lord.
Strike with the planes.
It’s dark and tear gas hangs low in the air and a dumpster is burning in the middle of the road. The bus pulls to a stop. I get out. The houses in the valley above are all shuttered. The skirmish – the Jerusalem kids with rocks and Israeli soldiers with assault rifles – has moved up the hill. Our venue is up the hill. The tear gas stings. We have no onions. I stand looking at the blazing trash, no idea what to do, when I hear my mother, the Boss, declare that she’s walking. She marches past the smoking trash-fire into the darkness and for a moment I think she’s insane, but then someone else starts walking behind her, and another person, and soon the whole troupe is marching up the hill and into the tear gas and up to our venue, and before long the mics are plugged in and Gary Younge is reading and Najwan is performing and DAM are booming their bass lines out at the soldiers watching us in silence from the darkness of the hills.
The settlers in al-Khalil watch us from above too. One drops a cement block from four storeys up. It misses, destroys itself on the ground. We carry on into the city. The deeper you go the older it becomes, the walls of houses binding to one another: no endings and no beginnings, an interconnected hive of shared space and mutual fortification. Each step takes you deeper inside, deeper into the city’s physical memory, into its trauma. House by house this battle is fought. Some have fallen, the flags of the victor plunged deep in their chests. The Palestinian colours are nowhere to be seen, long outlawed by the martial government. The streets are nearly silent. Shop after shop is shuttered. Again and again graffiti – stars of David, graffiti in Hebrew: gas the arabs. The settlers are above, watching, building a new network of watchtowers and sight lines and access points. Another people, another history taking shape above, pressing down on those below, working, waiting, watching.
When we stand in the Ibrahimi Mosque I point out the bullet holes. I say the word massacre. Some stop to look at them, some authors understand what that word, that fracture in the marble, really means. I can do no more than point.
They are digging underneath the houses, they are watching from above.
Another language is forming above us, around us. A settlement is a civilian community, a village, an expression of Israel’s natural growth, a fact on the ground, a negotiable asset, a military outpost, a political provocation, a colonial expansion.
It’s not a wall. It’s a security barrier, a separation fence, an immigration control, a complex collection of cement and barbed wire and ditches and patrol roads, it’s an apartheid wall of racial segregation.
Words are important in Palestine. Nowhere is it more important to call a wall a wall. To call apartheid, apartheid.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls it an apartheid state. What more should anyone need to know? Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls it an apartheid state. Repeat it like a mantra.
Get on the bus. Each day you will understand more. Each day we cross lines drawn by soldiers in the sand, cross lines that millions of others cannot. Tomorrow we will go to Jerusalem. Tomorrow we will go through Qalandia. Tomorrow we will walk through the razor wire and the cattle runnels and the steel gates that they call Qalandia. That first time I was forced through the metal humiliation I was so angry I cried. It was the first festival. Suheir Hammad squeezed my hand. Sometimes I think that was the first time I felt that I was an Arab. But I had an EU passport in my pocket. I drove on to Jerusalem.
We cross Qalandia and drive along the long wall towards Jerusalem. On the other side is al-Ram, once a suburb of the capital, now a smuggler backwoods cast out of the demographic fold. The wall stretches on. It’s not a wall, it’s the cumulative effort of dozens of international corporations earning billions of dollars for cement from Ireland and barbed wire from South Africa and construction vehicles from Caterpillar, JCB, Volvo and Bobcat and patrol vehicles from Humvee and General Motors and dogs from K-9 Solutions and biometric IDs from Hewlett-Packard and X-ray machines from Rapiscan and guards from G4S. The w
all stretches on.
We arrive in Jerusalem, a city of soldiers’ guns and victors’ flags and intricate alleyways, French tourists carrying replica crosses along Jesus’ footsteps and sweating white soldiers and armed settlers in sunglasses carrying provisions up to their urban fortresses above the simmering, taciturn population, who have held on to their houses through fifty years of military dictatorship and night patrols and arbitrary arrests and increasing taxes and municipal neglect and brutalised children and administrative detentions and destruction orders and travel restrictions and offers of millions of dollars and passports to those who will leave quietly in the night.
They are digging underneath the houses, they are laying siege with new settlements, they are choking you with the wall.
When you enter the gardens of al-Aqsa decades of pressure fall away. Families sit under the trees, children kick footballs around the ancient arches, the elegant but firm stonework of the city rises to protect you from what lies beyond, to hold you in contemplation and calm togetherness. The Dome of the Rock stands in magnificence at its centre. This is the grand prize. This is the eye of the storm.
In the Jerusalem of 2003 a small shop stands in the Jewish Quarter with a strange architectural model in the window. A settler with an M16 dangling off his shoulder hurries past me. I lean in to read the label: THE THIRD TEMPLE. There is a fringe millenarian movement who believe the Third Temple must be raised in the place of the Dome of the Rock to help bring us to the End of Days.
In the Jerusalem of 1966 650 people lived in the Moroccan Quarter, the Wailing Wall the neighbourhood’s boundary to the east, the Golden Dome high above it.