Kingdom of Olives and Ash

by Michael Chabon

  The officer was angry at the refusal and promised to make life uncomfortable for them. Most seam zone communities are separated from their farms and water wells, which they can then only access through special gates called “agricultural gates.” For that, they need to apply for special permits, which are always temporary, and which can be denied with no explanation. In her book, Time in the Shadows, the Palestinian academic and author Laleh Khalili describes the byzantine nature of the permit system in the seam zones:

  A quarter of all applications are denied, and the appeal process is profoundly complex and differs across different permit regimes. Access is granted only through the sole gate recorded on the permit, and nighttime access requires additional permissions. Permits expire after varying periods. Donkeys, automobiles, and work vehicles may or may not be allowed in the seam zone, depending on specificities, although this is also arbitrary. Some gates allow entry by villagers for farming their lands, whereas other gates allow only merchandise to pass to and from Israel. Some gates open two or three times a day; others are closed randomly and without any previous notice. The hours of operation of the gates are erratic. More recently, privatization of some of these crossing points has meant that “civilian security guards” are in charge of some crossing points alongside or instead of soldiers or border police. The dizzying complexity and arbitrariness of the measures create disorientation, confusion, and uncertainty, excellent techniques for maintaining control over civilians.

  From al-Janubi, Alon took me to a farm in Jayyus to demonstrate the problem of the “agricultural gates.” We wandered about a bit before a young man pointed us in the direction of the farm, and we found the owner and two young men plucking loquat fruits off the trees and arranging them in cartons.

  “Where do the fruits go?” I asked the owner, Sharif Khaled.

  “Ramallah,” he said. All around were orchards belonging to Palestinian families who lived across the wall in Jayyus and Qalqilya. There were olive trees and orange trees. Alon told me the farms here were among the most fertile in all of Israel-Palestine. Khaled plucked a bunch of fruits and handed them to us. “Eat, please.”

  He was happy to see Alon, who told me he used to bring his children here to help Khaled with the harvest. Alon was one of a handful of Israelis I had met who continue to build bridges between Jews and Palestinians despite the Israeli government’s efforts to dissuade such actions. For instance, Israelis are forbidden by law to visit most Palestinian urbanized areas, and many Palestinian peace activists are denied permits to enter Israel, all under the guise of “security.”

  “How old do you think I am?” Khaled asked. Seventy-three, it turned out. This farm had been in his family before he was born; he had two farms on this side of the wall, totaling forty dunams (One dunam is 0.24 acres). He was one of a lucky few whose farms were mostly on the Palestinian side of the wall, in Jayyus—four farms, in Khaled’s case. To visit this farm on the Israeli side, he needed to have a permit. Which was why he was in a good mood today, his agricultural permit had just been renewed, following the Israeli military’s recognition of his ownership of the land. He took it out and showed us. A long piece of paper, with his biographical data on it. Valid from February 2016 to February 2018.

  “This is very good. A whole two years,” he said.

  Before the Israeli military recognized Abu Azzam’s ownership of the farms, he had been granted a permit for only three months. The permit stated the gate he must use, which was open only during three slots—6:30 to 7:00 a.m., 1:30 to 2:00 p.m., and 5:00 to 5:30 p.m.—seven days a week. Was it hard to get the permit? Oh yes. He had to prove this was his family land with an Israeli “land ownership document” which costs thirty-eight shekels, then he had to prove that he was one of the heirs of the land with a valid inheritance order, and that the land was on the other side of the wall—this was done by showing a current map of the farm. Finally, he attached to his application for permit a certificate from the Jayyus municipality to prove that he still uses the land and that he did not sell it.

  Two of his sons had applied and were denied permits to visit the farm. Khaled was one of five brothers, and he was the only one still living in Jayyus. The others had left—one currently lived in San Diego.

  “Why is the whole permit system so hard?” I asked Alon later. That was the whole point, he told me. To discourage these farmers from using their lands, because any land unused for a period of three years could be taken over by the government. Legally.

  “Why are you against the wall?” I asked him.

  “Walls are not the answer,” he said. “Walls can never solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem.” Bimkom, he said, was against all barriers, including gated communities, because they violated people’s freedom of movement and caused untold suffering. The route between Qalqilya and Jayyus used to be only five kilometers long, using agricultural paths, before the barrier was erected, making the use of these paths impossible. Now a Palestinian must travel an average of fifteen kilometers to get between the two places.

  But still, Jayyus was one of the few Palestinian villages that had been able to challenge the expropriation of its land by the separation barrier. They took the Israeli government to court and were able to have the course of the wall altered. Jayyus, along with other villages and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, won two decisions: in 2009 Jayyus recovered 2,488 dunams of land, including land belonging to Abu Azzam, and one water well, after the course of the wall was altered.

  Organizations like Bimkom and individuals, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been challenging Israeli government policies in the West Bank. Some of these challenges have borne fruit. In some areas, the building of the barrier has been suspended since 2014 due to court cases brought by Palestinian communities. In Qalqilya and Jayyus, about three thousand dunams of land was returned to the community. But the poster child for successful struggle against the incursion of the wall into community lands remains the town of Budrus.

  The story of this tiny town’s resistance to the wall is captured in the documentary film Budrus, by the director Julia Bacha and the organization Just Vision. The movie tells the story of the peaceful resistance to the encroachment of the wall into the village’s land. If the wall had continued as planned, it would have taken 1,200 dunams of land, including three thousand olive trees. The wall would have cut in half the village cemetery, and would have passed right in front of the village school, hemming in the already tiny, claustrophobic village. In 2003, residents of Budrus, led by Ayed Morrar, decided to protest, peacefully. Women lay in front of bulldozers, children sang, men marched, and soon foreign and Israeli civil rights activists joined their ranks. International media took notice as Budrus carried out fifty-five demonstrations against the wall, lasting over eleven months, and won. Their peaceful marches and shrewd use of the media to publicize their struggle became a model for other towns like Bil’in and Nabi Saleh.

  The Israeli government stopped building the parts of the wall, Alon said, “because they know they’ll lose in court, and they don’t want that. Many cases show them they cannot do what they like.”

  “So, is that the end of the barrier?” I asked.

  “No. They are waiting, thinking what can we do? It happened in 2004, in the South Hebron Hills, the route was changed entirely after such challenge. They changed tactics and said, okay, we’ll build only along the Green Line; then in 2004 they said, oh, but we need to protect the roads, so they set up barriers along the roads, cutting off Palestinian access to farmlands and grazing ground.”

  But the important thing was that a precedent had been set. The wall can be challenged. Activists like Ayed Morrar, like Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, like the residents of Bil’in and Ni’leen and international organizations and volunteers, continue to pressure Israel to live up to its democratic ideals. Israel faces an existential threat, by its very location in the midst of enemy countries, but building walls is never going to solve the Israel-Palestine question. When you buil
d a wall between yourself and others, you are basically saying that you have stopped listening and seeing. You have cut off contact. And how can there be understanding without contact?

  A Hundred Children

  Eva Menasse

  I imagine the child Aya*, eight years old, lying in bed between her siblings, dreaming of a rumbling, grinding monster. The monster crosses over from the dream to rage outside the window, and she wakes up. Women’s screams stab her ears, harsh light pierces her squeezed-together eyelids. A strong arm grabs Aya and carries her away; from the smell of soap and coffee she knows it’s her mother. In a frantic gallop she flies through the air, out from the brightness into the night, where a few harsh lights glare like cruel white suns. Her father, her uncle, her big brother, and her cousins are lying facedown on the ground, a thicket of gun barrels aimed at them. They don’t move, but somehow Aya knows they’re alive.

  The motherly arm sets her down, and then it’s Aya who hurries after her mother, tugging at her clothes and trying to drag her away from the soldier she’s clinging to, pleading. The soldier laughs, another soldier extricates him. He shakes off Aya’s mother like some kind of insect. Now the bellowing monster looms like a gigantic scorpion, stinger raised. From up above it hacks away at the house where a few minutes before Aya was sleeping between the warm bodies of her siblings. There’s a crashing, a crunching and smashing, and merciful white dust rises, veiling the scene. The mother screams, the father and brothers are lying on the ground, the aunt with the kohl-rimmed eyes stands off to the side, holding up her iPhone as tears run down her cheeks. But she’s filmed everything bravely; for the rest of their lives they’ll be able to watch their house being razed. Their first house being razed. Others have lost still more, first and second and third houses, then the corrugated iron shacks that they built themselves, God knows how, and finally even the tents of the international aid organizations. But that’s not here, that’s in the Jordan Valley, far removed from the Green Line, where no one is watching at all and they can do as they please. But whether here or there, they always come at three in the morning.

  We’ll build a new house, Aya’s father will say the next morning to the strangers with the cameras, raising his fist. By then he will have changed his shirt; the other one was all dirty and wet in front. The strangers will nod, looking concerned, and meanwhile Aya’s cheeky brothers will tug at their trousers and say “whatsyourname” “whatsyourname?” giggling whenever one of the strangers bends down, shakes their hands, and says “Tom” or “Steven” or “Karen.” Aya’s little sister has climbed into the black cistern that once stood on the roof and now lies demolished in the rubble. She stands inside it, drumming her fists on the plastic and shrieking with delight. Three of the strangers hold up their cell phones between themselves and Aya’s sister, their faces stony.

  Aya lives in a village called Walajeh. The first village, Old Walajeh, once stood on the opposite hill. But in 1948, the year of the catastrophe, Walajeh was forced to move, the whole village, with bag and baggage. The Green Line was drawn down the valley between Old Walajeh and Walajeh, a line that has been fought over heatedly for decades in faraway countries where different laws apply. But that hasn’t changed anything over here, hasn’t made even a blade of grass grow in a different direction. Here the Green Line doesn’t mean a thing, it’s just an obligatory stroke on all the maps.

  The relocation of the village of Walajeh back in 1948 ought not to be pictured as an orderly affair. War was raging; the survivors fled far into Jordan. Later, the ones who dared to return built the new village on the opposite hill. There they watched as bulldozers came and collapsed the abandoned village to a heap of stones, as their olive and pomegranate orchards, their almond, apricot, and lemon trees were seized. But there was enough land left for them on their side of the hill.

  Nineteen years later, in the next war, the Blue-Whites overran the invisible Green Line and occupied the entire country. The people of Walajeh, who are “Red-Greens,” cursed their own leaders, calling them incompetent and corrupt, but in the end farmers are just happy if they can work their fields again without getting shot.

  Since time immemorial, the Red-Greens have built their villages to embrace the hills, not to ride them. The Blue-Whites, by contrast, “took the hilltops, their houses are a honeycomb, with the buildings marshaled next to each other in a rigid plan,” writes the great Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh. That changes everything; the biblical landscape is now crowned with beige cement like dabs of icing, and the highways cut imperious swathes in between.

  One of these honeycombs looms right above Walajeh. It’s called “Har Gilo.” The inhabitants aren’t bad people, just people whose many privileges include not having to think about them. They aren’t the kind of fanatics who lodge themselves right in the middle of the Old Town of Hebron, spinning barbed wire around their homes and schools like militant caterpillars. In this clean-cut settlement with the clean-shaven, heavily-armed security man at the entrance, they have IT jobs and children and comfy station wagons. They’re young, modern, and thrifty; compared with Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, Har Gilo is reasonably priced. The air is even better than the view. These well-educated young people aren’t even exactly aware that they’re living in a settlement.

  This country, you see, is made up of two different countries. They are superimposed on the same place like two noncongruous maps, and for fifty years, it must be said, the Red-Greens have been on the bottom, with much less air to breathe. There are two systems for everything: different roads, different license plates, different-color identity cards. Different jurisdictions. Different checkpoints for people with very different privileges: at one checkpoint the ones with the “right” license plates are waved through almost as casually as though this were Europe’s Schengen zone; at the other one the men with the wrong-colored ID cards stand in a pen several yards long, made of iron bars and ringed by barbed wire, so they can’t climb out. In this humiliating position, caged like wild animals, they wait patient and helpless like Kafka’s surveyor to learn whether they’ll make it to the Castle this time. But even if they succeed, all their Castle means is that after an endless wait they can go to their badly paid job in a bakery or a restaurant kitchen, or the construction workers can erect the Wall with their own hands, or build new honeycomb houses on the land that once belonged to them.

  And there are even two kinds of roofs in this country: on shoddy flat roofs black cisterns clump together like aphids, while the others have tidy red tiles evoking Europe. These roofs don’t need water tanks; here, as in other civilized parts of the world, the water pressure is adequate.

  And not just the languages are different, the terminology differs as well: when the Blue-Whites build houses in the occupied territories, they’re called settlements, and when not even their own government has authorized them, they’re called outposts. Still, the same government sends soldiers quickly if they need protection. Meanwhile, the Red-Greens live in old-fashioned villages, cities, and towns.

  There is just one common feature: almost everything built since the beginning of the occupation is illegal, either by international law or by Blue-White law, because an occupation is normally a temporary state. In a provisional arrangement, by its very definition, no construction permits are given to the Red-Greens. People need houses all the same. So they build them, with their bare hands and the help of their neighbors, using everything they can find. But all of them, with a few anomalous exceptions, are illegal, and have been illegal for the past fifty years. But only the houses of the Red-Greens get torn down. By the month, by the week, sometimes several each night. Whereas the settlers’ houses are torn down so rarely that whenever they are, it makes headlines. And it may goad Blue-White fanatics into carrying on their “Price Tag” campaign. The “Price Tag” campaign is a threat ostensibly aimed at their own government, the message being: Go ahead and tear down our houses, the houses of the true patriots. You’ll see the price you have to pay. Many wondered if th
e July 2015 arson attack in Duma was one of those retaliatory actions: at dawn, when it’s usually the scorpion-like bulldozers that come, a Molotov cocktail was tossed into a Red-Green house, and a couple and their eighteen-month-old baby died in the fire. The four-year-old survived, an orphan with no siblings, and will need a lifetime to recover from the injuries.

  Back to the friendly young families of Har Gilo. They don’t even think this is a settlement, they think it’s a suburb of Jerusalem. As for Walajeh, the little village growing wild half below and half behind them—they probably think it’s a slum, if they notice it at all. All those heaps of rubble everywhere! Next to one of the fresh heaps, where the dust still gleams white, Aya and her siblings play in the sun.

  Soon there’s going to be a big nature park down in the valley. All that needs to happen first is for a bit more of Walajeh’s inhabitants’ land to be expropriated. For decades the fields of Walajeh have systematically been taken away from the owners, using such a colorful bunch of rationales that one has to admire the Blue-White lawyers’ creativity: pre-1917 Ottoman laws, military firing zones, fields left unused for too long. Also: deed registrations that are unclear, or have vanished, or been declared invalid; security concerns far too classified to be explained, or, again, almost a sardonic touch: a nature park. What objections could anyone have to that? Plenty, if all you have left is that one olive grove.

  But the young families from Har Gilo are looking forward to the park! Soon they’ll be picnicking amid natural splendor with their friends from the capital. Meanwhile, the people of Walajeh, halfway down the hill, will be cooped up behind a fence several yards high, staring from a safe distance at what used to be their fields.

  I imagine fourteen-year-old Elad, living in Har Gilo, Row Two, in a three-bedroom honeycomb. But right now his favorite place is Hebron, the historic city where he has relatives. I imagine that Elad’s mother isn’t happy about that, though the relatives are her own brother and his sons. She’s constantly worried. And so Elad doesn’t tell her about his heroic exploits with his cousins. There are certain things mothers don’t understand; for instance, that the demands of patriotism are directly dependent on where you live. In boring old Har Gilo you have time to play Game Boy, but in Hebron you have to struggle, even if you’re just a boy.