by Ahdaf Soueif
In the Jerusalem of 1967 the Moroccan Quarter is no more. What had stood for 770 years is bulldozed in a moment by the occupying Israeli army. Three days after the invasion the Wailing Wall Plaza stands in its place: 120 square metres of prayer area becomes 20,000.
In the Jerusalem of 2013 every gift shop in the Jewish Quarter sells images of the Third Temple, a tourist attraction features an enormous architectural model of the Dome of the Rock cracking open as the temple births itself from the mosque’s ruins. The Jerusalem of 2013 is a hyper-segregated city of techno-piety, of rabbinically blessed metal detectors and biometric databases of God’s preferred people. Red cows are genetically engineered to fulfil ancient prophecies. Priests who can prove a patriarchal bloodline from Aaron should apply for jobs at [email protected]. Every day armed settlers march into the gardens of al-Aqsa demanding ‘equal prayer rights’.
They are digging under the houses, they are digging under al-Aqsa, they are digging for the End of Days. You can feel it, feel the rumblings underneath, underground, the new city being hewn, unseen and unheard, a city of secret tunnels and sinister archaeologies, an underground city for a fanatical few. The settlers, the government, the City of David Corporation, the Temple Institute, the Jerusalem Municipality – tunnelling and digging and pulling away the foundations of the old city, waiting, working, praying for a collapse, for a war, a purging, a new beginning for their new history of archaeological parks, education centres, historical tours, school trips, PhDs and Lonely Planets – a new mythology being carved out of the foundations of the old, an underground city that will yawn and swallow the upper world. The keepers of al-Aqsa Mosque sit by the doors of their charge, waiting. For houses to crumble, for a tunnel to appear, for a wing of the ancient mosque to collapse into the valley. For the spark. We are all waiting for the spark. The End Times are being built for. The siege grows deeper. The Red Cow must be sacrificed. The Third Temple must be raised. The people must be purified.
Lead must be cast.
The spotlight is cold on Suheir Hammad:
a bell fired in jericho rings through blasted windows a woman
carries bones in bags under eyes disbelieving becoming
numb dumbed by numbers front and back gaza onto gaza
for gaza am sorry gaza am sorry she sings for the whole
powerless world her notes pitch perfect the bell a death toll
Richard Ford pauses to catch his breath. The poem is by Seamus Heaney. The lights are down, the audience holds its breath with him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. He was friends with Heaney, he says. He reads on:
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
I have been nervous around him all week. But, in this moment, I think I understand him.
In Cairo I cut an onion in two halves, wrap them in newspaper and put them in my bag. When the tear gas is too much I take them out, offer one half to a boy choking next to me. He looks at me incredulously. ‘It’s what the Palestinians do,’ I say. He breathes it in. I think, for a moment, of al-Ja’bari and his garden.
Get on the bus.
I spend the evening in the cool comfort of Ramallah, in a garden bar shaded by azkadenya trees. Friends are thirsty for stories from the revolution, keen to tell me how they stayed up all night watching Al Jazeera, willing the barricades to hold, how they took to the streets in tears when Mubarak fell. They tell me their plans for Palestine, for the spark, the start, the next revolution, the continuation of what Bouazizi started.
Two hundred people crowd into the top floor of the hotel to sing along to Eskenderella’s pop-up concert. The chief of police of Gaza City is sitting downstairs with a man in fatigues. A man they call the Butcher. The Butcher does not look happy. The Butcher looks furious. He stares coldly ahead as the chief of police apologises for our event being shut down. It was a misunderstanding, he says. It’s 2012, and this year’s festival is mostly Egyptian writers and activists and we’ve forced the stuttering post-revolution government to open the border and have brought daily antagonisms of the newly liberated with us: incendiary words are spoken on television, there are calls for revolution on the local radio, teenage audiences are left unsegregated, we keep shaking our security detail. The Butcher clicks through his prayer beads, staring ahead.
Six months later I watch the bombs fall on streets I now know. I check the lists of the dead for the names of new friends. Friends I have abandoned to Israel’s bombs, to the Butcher’s blades. I have an EU passport. I cross the borderlines. I do not return to Gaza.
The wall can be cruised through. The wall is incomplete. There is still more money to be made. The wall waits above the Cremasin Monastery.
The festival finishes, and we collapse with exhaustion and we sit and debrief in a cafe in Ramallah and we take notes on what to change and in September we begin again: the annual report, the emails to funders, the invitations to new authors, the bus climbs from the Dead Sea, the audience waits in Ramallah.
I have an EU passport. I hand it to the border guard at Allenby. I hold it up for the soldiers in Qalandia. I feel it in my pocket when I am taken into an interrogation room.
J.M. Coetzee strides up to the stage. The audience is full to overflowing, not even standing room at the back. The world holds its breath. Will he say it? In the moment nothing matters more. It is the final night of the festival. He has seen all we have to show him. Will he call it apartheid or not?
Words are important here.
Words tell you who’s on your side, tell you who understands and show you who wants to hide. Words can cling on to a reality slipping out of comprehension. Disrupt the language and you disrupt reality. If you have no word for it, how can anyone understand? How can anyone even listen?
The bus pulls away from al-Khalil. We are all in silence. There are no words for the things being done here. We drive north. That night Nancy Kricorian reads from a passage about the Armenian genocide.
My grandfather trailed behind us, hobbling along with a cane. My mother called back to him, ‘We’ll see you at the resting place.’ He would arrive after dark and fall down to sleep without even eating. One morning he didn’t wake up. My grandmother slapped her face and called out to God in a loud voice. She sat in the dust and wouldn’t get up until my mother pulled her to her feet. The next day Grandmother sat down in the dirt by the side of the road and begged us to leave her. She said she couldn’t take another step. My mother kissed my grandmother’s hands and said a prayer. Then she wrapped a scarf over my head so I couldn’t look back.
When she wipes away a tear the audience cries with her.
They are digging underneath the houses, they are watching from above, they are building a new language, a new reality.
How can anyone understand it all? How can anyone, in one week, understand the segregated roads and the weaponised agriculture and the stolen aquifer and the tactical topography and the five different legal systems and the psychology of the oppressor and the medieval history and the economics of blood diamonds and their own complicity and the Holocaust industry and the EU trade deals and settlement profiteering and the Soviet diaspora and the Oslo Accords and Sabra and Shatila and the tunnel industry and the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and ID cards and Camp David and the collaboration of the PA and the one-state solution?
The bus climbs from the Dead Sea. The audience waits in Ramallah. Get on the bus.
Years pass.
The land changes as you drive out of the West Bank. The lands conquered in 1948 are subjugated again with six-lane highways. Israel does not go round the mountain, it goes through it. The message is clear. The fertility is breathtaking. The sea is a perfect blue. They chose a beautiful place to conquer.
From Haifa we drive east, back into the West Bank. One day, in 2014, I understand it. The low coastal plain falls away behind us as we start our ascent back up into the mountain, up towards Nablus. Up, up, the
fields disappear and the brown rocks and olive terraces begin. It’s 1948 and the villages are ablaze, the Hagganah are coming, more massacres are coming, everyone is fleeing the militias, their guns and grenades chasing relentless through the lands of Raml Zayta and Khirbat Zalafa, through the ruins of Qaqun there is only flight, only running – until the mountain. The mountain breaks the assault. The villagers have gathered themselves, they hold the elevated position. The Zionist militia cannot penetrate the mountain. A line is drawn. A land is divided.
And now?
If Israel can’t go through the mountain, it will grip into it with settlements. They dig and tunnel and build. Every day they grow, every day a little more mountain is conquered. If Israel can’t go through the mountain, it will dig into it. Every day people arrive, new settlers, new lives. They arrive from Russia, Ukraine, France – 150,000 new settlers since the festival began ten years ago.
Thirty-nine per cent of the Russian settlers in Palestine do not read Hebrew.
A fifty-year plan is unfolding, built brick by settlement brick, body by colonist’s body the mountain is subdued, the elevated position is usurped for the coming war.
They are always watching us. One year they shut us down in Jerusalem. The rest, they just watch. The wall still looms over the road to the Cremasin Monastery. It’s been ten years now. Why don’t they finish it? What are they waiting for? Is something slowing them down? Or is this part of the plan?
They don’t google me. Every time at the border it’s the same questions. What’s your father’s name? Have you ever been to Syria? What is a writing workshop? If they googled me they’d see I’m not telling them the whole truth. But they don’t. Or they do, and they don’t care. Or they do, and they like what they see. Maybe a little literature festival once a year is good for their image. Don’t they know that words are important?
Coetzee calls it apartheid. He doesn’t say ‘this is apartheid’ but he says this is apartheid. Another battle won in the culture war. We send the press release to our mailing lists. J.M. Coetzee, South African Nobel laureate, talks about apartheid in Palestine. Surely the world will pay attention?
Culture might be a weapon, but is it a gun?
The BBC refuses to carry an emergency appeal for Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.
There are Mustangs in Ramallah now. Red convertibles without licence plates and rumoured to be stolen from a Romanian cargo ship. The banks grow stronger. Everyone can get a line of credit. The land belongs to the last century.
‘On your right’ – the microphone, in 2016, is heavy in my hand; the group looks to the right – ‘is the Beitar Illit settlement. Those lower structures – the trailer-park containers – they’re new. If you come back next year they’ll have turned into full houses.’
It is a certainty.
Inch by inch, the land is conquered. House by house, Jerusalem is surrounded.
‘Underneath us is the West Bank aquifer. Israel takes 80 per cent of the aquifer’s water each year to fill the swimming pools of settlers.’
Drop by drop, the underland is conquered. The elevated position is parched. Wells are sealed with cement.
‘On your left was a field of trees. Olive trees. You can see the stumps. They were hundreds of years old. They’ll likely replace them with northern pines.’
Tree by tree nature is conquered. Divinity is engineered. The Red Cow must first be born if it is to die.
So many have died since we started doing this. Harold Pinter, Chinua Achebe, Seamus Heaney, Mahmoud Darwish, John Berger – our festival patrons who never got a chance to come with us. Taha Muhammad Ali, Henning Mankell, Radwa Ashour, Rawda Bishara Atallah – who will take your places?
Edward Said. Incredible how much that still hurts.
They are digging underneath the houses, they are watching from above, they are building a new language, they are draining the mountain, they are breeding the Red Cow, they are building for the coming war.
I see a name I know on a list of the dead. Al-Batsh. See it repeated again and again. Twenty-one times. The Gaza police chief’s name. His entire family are killed in a targeted strike. Except him. He was only wounded. They found a fate worse than death for him.
Targeted strike.
We need new words.
Familicide. Mass murder. War crimes.
We need new words if we are to feel again. The bus climbs from the Dead Sea. The audience waits in Ramallah. Our host in al-Khalil is dead. I don’t cry going through Qalandia any more. I don’t feel anything.
I stand at a bar in Ramallah. We don’t talk much. Just some heavy words about where it went wrong, the things we failed to see, the reasons all revolutions fail.
The bus climbs. A bullet punctures a lung on Mount Calvary.
We have seen this all before.
The bus climbs. A body hangs limp from a tree above Abraham’s tomb.
Strange fruit.
The fire burned the inside of his lungs.
A mother buries her child in Jerusalem.
They made him swallow the gasoline.
Mohammed Abu Khdeir was sixteen years old.
Get on the bus.
The Maghrebi Quarter was razed in three days – 120 square metres of prayer area became 20,000. We need new words. And to remember old ones.
Lebensraum.
KKK.
They are digging underneath the houses.
They are building for the coming war.
Get on the bus. We will drive to Qalandia. The horror they have named Qalandia. The name they have stolen for the new horror. Qalandia – a land, an idea, a land dies here.
Cast
Lead
They are watching from above.
You listen for them in the night, for the scratch of metal against rock, for the night-vision goggles and the click of a flashlight standing over your bed, they are watching, building, every day.
White
Phosphorus
An incendiary gas, a highly efficient smoke-producing agent, burns fiercely and can ignite cloth, fuel, ammunition and other combustibles.
And flesh.
White phosphorus.
The night lights with a flare and six burning stars fall to the ground and one lands on you, you’re running but it’s on you and your skin and you smell it burning smell your flesh singeing and water won’t help water won’t put it out it just burns and burns deeper burns through you.
No.
We need a new language. The old one has been corrupted.
They have engineered the Red Cow.
Burning gas falls from the sky.
They are building.
We need a new language.
Negotiated settlement, natural expansion, security barrier, internal refugees, defence forces, seam zone, blockade, conflict, humanity, democracy, dialogue, peace.
Peace.
We need –
Peace. Peace Now. Seeds of Peace. A Lasting Peace. Children of Peace. Comedy for Peace. Peace Oil. Combatants for Peace. Peres Centre for Peace.
We need a new language.
Peace.
Peace?
I hate the word.
Give me justice.
Get on the bus.
Justice.
They are digging underneath the houses.
Get on the bus.
They are building for the coming war.
Get on the bus.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Susan Abulhawa is a novelist, poet and political writer. She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children’s non-profit organisation dedicated to upholding the right to play.
Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) was among the most influential authors of the twentieth century and a key figure of post-colonial literature. He was the author of over twenty books, most notably Things Fall Apart, which became an international best-seller and a modern classic. He received numerous honours and honorary doctorates, including the Nigerian National Merit Award and the Man Booker Internatio
nal Prize for Fiction. In 2008 he became a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature in its inaugural year.
Suad Amiry is a Palestinian writer, an architect and a social activist. She is the author of numerous architectural and non-fiction books. Her acclaimed Sharon and My Mother-in-Law was translated into twenty languages and won the prestigious Italian Premio Viareggio in 2004. Amiry is also the author of Nothing to Lose But Your Life and Golda Slept Here which won the Premio Nonnino in 2014. My Damascus (2016) is Amiry’s most recent book. Amiry is the founder of RIWAQ, the Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah. She and RIWAQ are winners of many international awards including the Prince Claus Award (2011), the Curry Stone Design Prize (2012) and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2013). She has served on the board of PalFest.
Victoria Brittain is a journalist and author and a founding member of PalFest. She has lived and worked in Saigon, Algiers, Nairobi, Washington and London, and travelled frequently in the Middle East and Central America. She worked at the Guardian for twenty years and writes for several French- and English-language publications. Her books include Death of Dignity: Angola’s Civil War and Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror. She is on the Council of the Institute of Race Relations and a trustee of the annual Palestine Book Awards.
Jehan Bseiso is a Palestinian poet, researcher and aid worker. Her poetry has been published in Warscapes, the Electronic Intifada, Mada Masr and the Palestine Chronicle among others. Her book I Remember My Name (2016) was the creative category winner of the Palestine Book Awards. Bseiso is co-editing Making Mirrors, a new anthology by, for and about refugees. Bseiso has been working with Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders since 2008.
J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. He is the author of sixteen works of fiction, as well as of memoirs, essays in criticism and translations. Among awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and in 2003 the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Australia, where he is professor of literature at the University of Adelaide.