Kingdom of Olives and Ash

by Michael Chabon

  As I listen to Barag talk, looking at the seemingly endless line of waiting men and thinking about the lists on which one can end up quite mysteriously and never—or only with great difficulty—get off again, it occurs to me that this is indeed the subtlest weapon for repression, but a substantial one at that. The bureaucratic monster, barely in need of violence anymore to effectively bend others to its will. The demand for prisons and military trials that remains is at most an indication that the bureaucracy has not yet achieved 100 percent effectiveness.

  A little more than a month later I call Barag to ask whether anything has changed since our visit. “Not much,” she says. “There have been fifty-eight thousand work permits rescinded. That’s new. It doesn’t have all that much to do with the attacks. It’s the work of the new Israeli defense minister, Lieberman. He’s a strong believer in the efficacy of collective sanctions.”

  She tells me about the fourth “security list,” a fairly recent invention. That list is composed, according to Barag, of Palestinians who are being collectively punished. No attempt is made to uphold even the pretense of guilt or of having committed an offense.

  “But I don’t think that fourth list will be too long lived; Israeli employers are protesting against it. They can’t do without the cheap labor,” Barag adds.

  Economic interests are sometimes, but unfortunately not always, at loggerheads with the fundamentalist faith in the efficacy of collective punishment. Barag reminds me of my mother; the same slenderness, the same fervor, she is just as small as my mother was, but my mother would never have stood at a checkpoint trying to protect Palestinian workers against injustice. Or to document that injustice at the very least, to be a witness to the evil of the bureaucracy of occupation, as Barag puts it.

  “There is one major Catch-22,” Barag had said on that Tuesday in June, standing at the center of a little group of writers. “If you want to get a work permit, you need an Israeli employer. But how do you find an Israeli employer if you’re not allowed to enter Israel? There’s a huge black market in work permits, people who know people. Machers is the Yiddish word for them.”

  The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit draws a distinction between witnesses and moral witnesses. The moral witness must not only perceive the injustice, but also have suffered under it himself or be willing to actively oppose it. Am I a moral witness? I doubt it. Does writing make me a moral witness? Not nearly enough. I feel, in fact, more like a sightseer at the scene of a disaster than a moral witness. A distasteful feeling.

  Barag says that the checkpoints often open late, so that the workers once again arrive too late for work. When Machsom Watch observers see that, they call the checkpoint commander, and sometimes that helps. “We started Machsom Watch in February 2001,” Barag says. “I find it hard to say exactly what we’ve achieved. At first, a normal wait in line took three or four hours; it’s down to an average of ninety minutes now, but that’s also because the system has been computerized. At first the gates opened at six, now they open at four. Does that mean you’ve achieved something? You haven’t changed the system, but you have made the situation more livable.”

  Her organization has also helped dozens of Palestinians get their names off the list of those who supposedly pose a terrorist threat or who have been denied a work permit for some other reason.

  Caprice, the byproduct of unbridled power.

  There is a separate gate for women and children. “They call this the humanitarian gate,” Barag says, “but I don’t know what’s humanitarian about it. This gate is open only from six to six forty-five, but they usually don’t open until a quarter past six.”

  A female soldier—“I know her,” Barag says, and her intonation makes it clear: this young woman seems to revel in the power and the arbitrariness—is parleying with a Palestinian woman from behind the bars of her counter.

  “We’re not changing the system,” Barag says, “but I think the system is going to collapse. That’s my personal opinion. Something’s brewing, a new crisis. We already have a former president and a former prime minister in prison, and that didn’t bring down the system. But one day it will fall. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but you need hope in order not to let this system crush you.”

  An hour or two later we leave the checkpoint. We’ve seen enough. There is still a long line of Palestinian workers.

  In 2007 I wrote a feature article about the Israeli army. I was given a tour along a section of the wall that the Ariel Sharon government had started building at the time of the second intifada. A helpful press officer explained to me how successful the wall was in the fight against terrorism. I can’t escape the impression now that the wall was also built to more effectively control a population, and to provide Israeli employers with cheap labor. Closing borders will often result in all kinds of refugees crossing the border in the hope of a better life and work. And the illegal employee is the cheapest and easiest to exploit. As Barag put it: “When Gaza was shut off, we had to bring in Chinese workers, but lots of Israeli employers prefer Palestinians.”

  Back at the car, I start wondering how we can distinguish terrorism from legitimate acts of resistance. According to some Bnei Akiva adherents—and I’m afraid they’re not the only ones—no single Palestinian act of resistance against the state of Israel is legitimate, not even the most peaceful one.

  And can we still go on believing that the occupation is the problem, that the problem will go away when the settlers go away, that the evil bureaucracy will disappear then too? The faith in the two-state solution is seeming to me more and more like a ritual devoid of all meaning.

  I was already skeptical in 2007 while doing that feature article about the Israeli army, but at the Qalandiya checkpoint the skepticism gels into a question: Is this the Zionist dream for which my sister left the Netherlands in 1982? More like a Zionist nightmare. Barag says: “You have to do something, especially at my age, because otherwise you just sit around thinking about your little aches and pains and your next doctor’s appointment.”

  The next evening, at a restaurant in Tel Aviv, the Israeli writer Nir Baram will tell me: “For as long as I can remember, people have been shouting that the status quo cannot be maintained, but I fear the status quo can be maintained for decades still.”

  Decades. Barag sees that differently; in view of her age, though, she’s in more of a hurry.

  Is Qalandiya worse than other checkpoints in other countries where people are repressed and exploited? Is the Israeli system worse than the comparable systems still rife on this planet? Are these questions even relevant?

  Is it true what Bertolt Brecht said, that everyone should speak about his own disgrace? And even though I don’t live in this country, is this my disgrace?

  4.

  I’m sitting in the hotel lobby, across from Gerard Horton and Salwa Duaibis of Military Court Watch. They are going to accompany me to Ofer, a military court and detention center in the West Bank, close to the border between Palestinian territory and the territory claimed by Israel.

  Before we leave, though, Horton explains what their organization does. Military Court Watch documents the treatment given to minors in Israeli military detention. “The things minors are subjected to in the military detention system are more or less the same things undergone by defendants who are of age.”

  Minors from the age of twelve on can be considered criminally culpable, both in Israel and before the Israeli military courts in the Palestinian territories, and be subjected to sentencing and sanctions.

  Horton says that many minors report being subjected to ill treatment upon arrest. Most are blindfolded and handcuffed, and many are made to lie down on the floor of military vehicles, thereby increasing the chance of injuries. Many are threatened and intimidated during interrogation. People fail to tell the underage prisoners that they have the right to remain silent in the overwhelming majority of cases.

  I’m reminded of Hannah Barag. When they know they are being observed, those i
n power have the tendency to act with a little less capriciousness.

  Horton, an Australian corporate lawyer—he came here almost eight years ago to do volunteer work—says: “If you want to maintain control over a population the size of that in the occupied territories, you have three possibilities: kill them all, drive them away, or repress them. Israel has chosen for the least terrible of the three.”

  I wait to see if something else is coming, I study Horton’s expression but detect no trace of irony.

  “When it comes to taking Israel to court at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, people often talk about the Gaza War, but that would be a fairly complicated and rather unclear case. However, under the fourth Geneva Convention, Palestinians from the occupied territories are not to be locked up in prisons in Israel. In fact, however, this has been taking place on a large scale for nearly 50 years.”

  “But do you think Israel will ever be taken to court in the Hague?” I ask.

  Horton shrugs. “Israel isn’t a party to the Rome Statute of the ICC, but Palestine is. The prosecutor is working right now on a preliminary investigation considering multiple issues. You can’t rule anything out.”

  Horton says the military trials don’t correspond in many respects with what is considered a fair and impartial hearing. More than 99 percent of all defendants are convicted. When Palestinian lawyers attempt to organize boycotts of the courts, the prosecution seeks much tougher sentences.

  We take the car to Ofer. In a sort of courtyard there, Palestinians are waiting to sit in on the trial of a family member. It is Ramadan, so the Palestinians there are not eating or drinking.

  After half an hour we are let in to attend a hearing.

  Three defendants, men who look to me to be somewhere in their twenties, are sitting next to each other on a bench. There is a guard beside them. He looks bored. His tzitzit is hanging out of his uniform. Could he have once been a member of Bnei Akiva?

  The prosecutor, interpreter, and judge are all soldiers. A Palestinian lawyer wearing a white shirt is discussing something with his clients. The prosecutor is a woman. Salwa Duaibis says: “The interpreter is a Druze, I can tell by the way he speaks Arabic.”

  One of the defendants is said to have thrown rocks at soldiers, but he says he was only in the area when rocks were thrown. The average sentence for throwing rocks is six months. A female defense lawyer comes in. The judge starts joking with the prosecutor. The female lawyer says it is inappropriate for the judge to laugh. The judge defends his right to laugh.

  The other lawyer is preparing a document for signing. The defendants sit there, uninterested, almost bored. As though they’ve already given up on the whole thing. After half an hour, we give up too. We walk around, trying to find a trial with an underage defendant, but there aren’t any at the moment. It is lunchtime.

  5.

  On Friday morning I pay a surprise visit to my sister in Dolev. She has seven children and, these days, six grandchildren; all Bnei Akiva members, each a little more fanatical than the next. When my father died in 1991, my sister was in an advanced state of pregnancy. She wasn’t allowed to fly, she was living in Kfar Darom, a settlement in Gaza. That is why my father is buried in Jerusalem. My mother wanted to be buried close to my father, so she has been in Jerusalem too since 2015. That is how my parents happen to be buried in a graveyard in Israel without ever having lived here.

  My father, born in Berlin in 1912, survived the war by going into hiding at a number of addresses. My mother, born in Berlin in 1927, survived the war in a number of camps. Unconditional loyalty toward Israel went without speaking for them, but they never seriously considered emigrating. My father always said it was too hot in Israel, and my mother said she would go there when she was very old.

  In the end, she went there as a corpse.

  When I cross the threshold at my sister’s—the house never fails to remind me of the Bnei Akiva clubhouse in Amsterdam—she hugs me. She doesn’t ask what I’m doing here. I don’t tell her either. That seems better to me. We go to the garden and play Ping-Pong.

  Outside the house, a Palestinian taxi driver is waiting for me. He says he drives to Dolev fairly often, to pick up nurses who work at a hospital in Jerusalem.

  “Have you been to visit Mama?” my sister asks.

  “Not yet,” I reply.

  Are the Jews safer because Israel exists, the way my parents thought? I have my doubts. Is living in Israel a religious duty for a Jew, the way my sister thinks? Aren’t such duties, religious or no, the start of all intolerance?

  While we’re playing, I think about Hebron. On Wednesday I went there with a couple of other writers. There was nothing about the town that reminded me of the place I visited with my mother in 1982, where I caught my first conscious glimpse of a Palestinian at a glassworks.

  As we were walking through the ghost town, a settler approached us; he had recognized Yehuda Shaul, the settlers’ Antichrist. The man began screaming and cursing. I don’t know whether he spit as well. Israeli soldiers came to stand between us and the settler. For a moment the man reminded me of that glassblower back in 1982, but even angrier, even more enraged.

  In his book The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., which the author refused to have published in Germany, George Steiner writes about a fictional Adolf H. who is put on trial in Brazil after the war. Adolf H. claims that he brought the Jews home, that Zionism only became truly viable thanks to him, the Messiah.

  A gruesome thought. But however speculative it may be, the question remains: Without the Nazis, would there have been a state of Israel? In his book My Promised Land, the Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit also writes: “But at the end of the 19th century the Jews realized that however much they loved Europe, Europe did not love them.”

  If the Europeans had hated the Jews a little less, Hanna Barag would not have had to stand at a checkpoint at four in the morning and document the evil bureaucracy. At the same time, I realize that Barag is living proof that the real, existent Zionism is more than that evil bureaucracy alone.

  Maybe Barag is right when she says that the system will collapse, even sooner than we may think; nevertheless, playing Ping-Pong with my sister, I know that the collapse of one system does not necessarily mean that the system that takes its place will be that much better.

  (Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett)

  Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue

  Ayelet Waldman

  It’s pleasantly cool in the shade beneath the wizened cypress tree in the bedraggled front garden of the Youth Against Settlements community center, on a hill in Tel Rumeida, in the city of Hebron. A boy of sixteen, whom I’ll call Karim, serves me a glass of Arabic coffee from a battered tin tray. I’ve come to interview him about his arrest and incarceration in Ofer Prison six months ago, but for a few moments we sip our coffee, make jokes about how much sugar I take (a lot), and enjoy the view. Amid the stone houses in the distance is a ribbon of empty white: Shuhada Street, on which Karim is forbidden to tread, because he is Palestinian and the once bustling market street is reserved for Israelis and those with international documents.

  With me as I talk to Karim is Issa Amro, a community organizer who has turned his home into this community center. Issa holds youth meetings and teaches lessons here at the center, at least when he’s permitted to. Issa’s unwavering commitment to nonviolent resistance drives Israeli military officials crazy, and for years they have waged a campaign against him and his community center.

  In a conversation with US officials that was revealed by WikiLeaks, Amos Gilad, the director of the Political-Military Affairs Bureau at Israel’s Defense Ministry, said, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.” Shooting a person in a suicide vest, a person with a gun, even a child with a knife, is easily justified as self-defense. But a man whose weapon are his words, who can convince a young person to put down her gun or her blade and resist with tools learned from the example of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and, yes indeed, from
Gandhi—what do you do with him? Issa has been arrested and detained so many times that when I asked him the number, he could only shrug and smile. Periodically, the military declares his home a “military zone” and prevents anyone other than Issa himself from entering. But whenever they are allowed, the young people of Hebron come to listen to Issa’s lessons about the pointlessness of stone throwing and knife attacks and the power of his alternative path.

  The community center, Issa’s home, sits right above an army checkpoint and right below the house of Baruch Marzel, an American-born settler with views so extreme that even among the right wing of Hebron he can fairly be deemed a fanatic. Marzel has called for targeted assassinations not only of Palestinian terrorists, but of left-wing Israeli Jews. He has railed against gay people and against Jews who marry non-Jews. His arrest record rivals that of Issa, though unlike Issa’s his arrests have been for assaults: attacks on Palestinians, on leftist Jews, on reporters, on Israeli police officers. In 2013 Marzel broke into Issa’s home and violently attacked him. Only two years later was Marzel finally charged for the crime. Unlike Issa, however, Marzel did not face military prosecution. In the areas of occupation, Israeli citizens and Palestinians, even those who reside in the same West Bank cities, even those charged with identical crimes, are subject to two different legal systems. Palestinians are governed by strict military law and prosecuted in military courts, yet Israelis experience the broad protections of the country’s civilian judicial system. As the US State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 2015, published in April 2016, noted, the imposition of these two separate but unequal systems of law to people based on identity gives rise to discrimination and injustice.