In this book, I try to tell the story of the semester I spent at Al-Quds. It is a story about the particular students and colleagues I encountered and is not intended as a general account of life in Palestine or at the university. I rely on anecdotes drawn from memory or adapted from a diary I kept while I was living in the West Bank. I said to a student during the semester that the worst kind of class is one in which the teacher knows how the discussion will end. I suspect the same is true for a book, and I hope that the reader can interpret these anecdotes in his or her own way.
However, any book about Israel and Palestine involves engaging with a complex political reality, so I will begin by saying something about the experiences and perspectives that inform this account. My father, David, was born in London in 1948, the same year that the state of Israel was founded. His parents, Tibor and Lisl Sperlinger, had fled Vienna in 1938. They were Jewish and throughout their adult lives they were committed Zionists. I will occasionally draw on an interview which my father recorded with Lisl in the late 1990s, in which she talked about her life.
Zionism emerged as a political force in the late nineteenth century. There were suggestions early on that a state in Palestine might be shared between Jews and other faiths, or that a Jewish homeland might be created elsewhere. In the early 1900s, the British Government had explored whether the Zionists could be offered a portion of British East Africa, an idea called ‘The Uganda Scheme’. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration, written by the-then Foreign Secretary, committed the British Government to ‘view with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, which was then under British rule. Balfour noted equivocally that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’.
The urgency of the Zionist cause quickened in the 1930s and 1940s. Israel’s narratives about itself are inextricably linked with the Holocaust, as are the stories of those people, like my grandparents, who supported the cause for a Jewish homeland while being persecuted by the Nazis. In May 1942, when Zionist leaders met at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, they wanted to offer ‘a message of hope and encouragement to their fellow Jews in the Ghettos and concentration-camps.’ The conference was the first time that the Zionist movement clearly defined its aim ‘that Palestine be established as a Jewish commonwealth.’ In 1944, the American Zionist Organisation went further, calling for a commonwealth that would ‘embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.’ Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish thinker who had fled to the States, wrote that this was ‘a turning point in Zionist history’: ‘[It] goes even a step further than the Biltmore Programme, in which the Jewish minority had granted minority rights to the Arab majority. This time the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.’
Haytham was 23 in 2013. He and the other students I taught at Al-Quds were born under occupation. When they were still toddlers, the Oslo Accords, which were seen in the West as a hopeful development, divided the West Bank into three different areas (A, B, and C), dramatically restricting the movement of Palestinians within the occupied territories, including their right to live where they chose. For this reason, some have compared Oslo to the founding of apartheid in South Africa rather than its conclusion. The West Bank lies to the east of Israel, with Gaza to its west. These two strips of land were occupied by Israel in 1967, during the war that Woroud dramatised in her version of Romeo and Juliet. The occupation was not only all that my students had known; it had been the backdrop to their parents’ whole lives as well. If you live in an occupied land, you do not have many of the rights associated with being a citizen, including the right to property, a fair trial, or to travel unhindered. This is the context in which children in the West Bank can be imprisoned for, among other things, throwing stones.
Since 1967, divisions have been created between groups of Palestinians, a process that was embedded after Oslo. On a small scale, I could pick up tensions between those students with a West Bank ID card and those with a Jerusalem ID, since the latter had more freedom of movement and a slightly wider range of opportunities after graduating. These different IDs were introduced in the late 1960s, but since the 1990s the cards have been issued by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA was established in 1994, as a step towards creating the government for a Palestinian state. While I was in the West Bank, disillusionment with the PA ran very deep. Many openly compared it to administrations in former British and French colonies, in which local people were enlisted to enforce imperial rule. In Gaza, similar frustrations led to Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic organisation, winning a majority in parliamentary elections in 2006. Hamas was a visible presence in the West Bank too, although the more moderate faction of Fatah was dominant.
The split between the two factions is, in part, a division between generations. Sari Nusseibeh, a philosopher and former Fatah politician who was president of Al-Quds while I was there, was born in 1949. He too was born without a country, at a time when Jerusalem and the West Bank were part of Jordan. Sari came to prominence in the first intifada, which lasted from 1987 to the early 1990s, and which was characterised by a mass civil disobedience movement. He wrote the Fourteen Demands, which were published in January 1988. The first Demand was that Israel should abide by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which was established to protect civilians during wartime, following the Nazi atrocities. It includes specific provision for the treatment of those living under an occupying power, preventing collective punishment and individual or mass forced transfers.
When they were teenagers, my students’ lives had been overshadowed by the second intifada (the Arabic word means ‘shaking off’), which was the setting for Qais’s re-writing of Shakespeare’s play. The uprising began in 2000 and included several years of extraordinary violence. There was a series of suicide bombings by Palestinians in Israel and the military regime in the West Bank and Gaza became increasingly brutal. My students recalled that their schools were closed for long periods. When I was in the West Bank, there was ongoing speculation that a third intifada might erupt. But the Palestinian political leadership was divided and many young men had been imprisoned or killed, so it was not clear who would lead any mass resistance.
If you listen to the news in the UK, you will probably hear about Israel/Palestine as an intractable conflict and it may sound as though it is between two equal sides, each with a claim to the same land. The only possible solution you will hear discussed is for there to be two states. During my time in the West Bank, I didn’t hear anyone claim that two states was a plausible way forward. The West Bank is a relatively small strip of land (about a quarter of the size of Wales), with little strategic capacity to defend itself, and it now has around 515,000 Israeli settlers living in it, according to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem. This includes East Jerusalem, which is recognised as occupied under international law, but which is on the Israeli side of the Wall. Many of the Palestinians I spoke to were in favour of one democratic state in the whole of Israel/Palestine, for all of the people who live there. They saw this as the only possible solution, in an area where the Christian, Jewish and Muslim populations are intertwined and where until recently they lived in relatively peaceful co-existence. The case for one state has been made by Sari Nusseibeh in What is a Palestinian State Worth?, as well as by the journalist Ali Abunimah in One Country and the Israeli activist Jeff Halper in An Israeli in Palestine.
The two-state solution resembles in some respects the proposal made by the United Nations in 1947 for the partition of Palestine. The Israeli and Palestinian accounts of what happened in 1948 have always diverged. The Zionist movement accepted the proposal but the Muslim and Christian populations did not. A war ensued, and the Israeli state was established in an area of land larger than the UN had agreed. In Israel, the events of 1948 are celebrated as a struggle for independence. For Palestinians, wh
at happened in 1948 is referred to as the ‘nakba’ or the ‘catastrophe’. When the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was founded in 1951, to deal with the Palestinian refugee crisis, there were about 750,000 refugees. Today, more than five million people, scattered across different continents, are registered as eligible for UNRWA’s services. They have not been offered the right to return to their land or compensation for their loss.
In 2006, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe produced a controversial account of 1948, which was closer to the Palestinian narrative. He argued that there was a planned and forced expulsion of the Arab and Christian populations by Zionist forces:
When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants. The [Zionist] plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity.
2
No such place
‘Are you Jewish?’
‘My father’s Jewish.’
‘And your mother?’
As we spoke, he turned slightly away, writing with his left hand on a clipboard. When he had finished writing, his hand would twitch up automatically to adjust his glasses.
‘She’s Christian,’ I replied.
‘Where is she from?’
‘Belfast.’
‘Why did your father marry her?’
I didn’t think this was a question I could answer.
‘Do you know any Hebrew?’
‘I learnt a little at university.’
He asked me a question I did not understand.
‘I didn’t learn that much.’
‘Do you want to take it up again?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Who will you be visiting in Israel?’
I gave the names of my relatives and, in a routine I remembered from family holidays, I tried to work out how I was related to my grandmother’s first cousin and his descendants.
He interrupted me: ‘Have you met them before?’
‘Yes, in London.’
‘When were you last in Israel?’
‘This is my first visit.’
Until now, the security guard had looked at me with a practiced intensity. Now he grinned, and his arms opened.
‘You’re so lucky!’
On the morning of my first visit to Al-Quds University, in 2011, I couldn’t find it on a map. I was due to give a paper in the English Department. I established that I would be visiting the campus in the West Bank, but my guidebook made only passing mention of Abu Dis. I was staying in Jerusalem and I picked up a taxi just outside the Old City. We took a looping route through villages and side roads, to avoid any checkpoints, before eventually circling the university about forty minutes later. For a minute or two, just before campus, the road curved and the Wall seemed to cling to it, so that it was all I could see on the horizon.
I was met by Jalal, a graduate of the university in his 20s, who spoke with a hint of a Sheffield accent. He had spent a year studying in England. The campus was decorated with dozens of flags for Fatah, Hamas and other student factions. Jalal explained that they were in the run-up to a student election. There was a rally in progress, and before I could see it, I heard it: a young man’s voice was booming out over a microphone.
I was given a tour of the university’s Abu Jihad museum. The building is designed to resemble a prison. You enter through a metal revolving door; there is also a representation of the Wall outside, to symbolise that the West Bank and Gaza are also prisons. The displays included artworks and posters about the prisoners’ movement, letters, information on international law, and an exhibition about the experiences of women, children and families affected by the prison experience. Salam Fayyad, who was then Prime Minister of the PA, stated in 2012 that 800,000 Palestinians had been imprisoned since 1967, which is about 20% of the total population and 40% of the male population. Jalal pulled me aside, to show me his favourite poster. It was a white canvas, with the silhouette of an empty glass bottle running vertically down the left-hand side. Nestled in the bottom of the bottle was a man, sitting in a crouched position with his arms locked around his knees. The man’s face was in shadow. The caption read: ‘Thirst for freedom’. An academic I met later that day told me that the museum had been consciously modelled on how the Holocaust is memorialised.
I had sent the university a list of possible topics I could give a paper on. When it was time, I was placed at the end of a long table, with about thirty staff and students crowded into the room. The academic who was to introduce me explained to me quietly, before we started, that he was not a literature professor. He said a few words, cribbed from my university webpage at home, and concluded: ‘I am sure this will be a very interesting talk. I don’t know anything about George Eliot, but I do know she was a Zionist.’
Ahmed wanted to talk to me about my paper before he took me to sit in on his class. He explained that he had read some of Eliot’s works while writing his PhD thesis on D.H. Lawrence, at a university in India. Ahmed was in his late 30s. He was tall and neatly dressed. Later, a colleague would describe him as thick-skinned, because students playing up rarely fazed him. Even when I saw Ahmed moved to anger, it still seemed encased inside this attitude of restraint, as if it did not come naturally to him. He spoke in a measured and precise English. I asked him how he had got interested in Lawrence. ‘Sons and Lovers,’ he said crisply, through cigarette smoke.
There were about thirty students in Ahmed’s American Literature class. They were sitting in rows, and each chair had a flat wooden table attached to its armrest. The young men in the class were mostly dressed in jeans and loose-fitting sweatshirts. The women were divided between a small number, also in jeans and with their hair hanging down over their shoulders, and the majority whom wore dresses, long cardigans or a loose robe with long sleeves, and most of who wore the hijab. Ahmed had to work to keep the students’ attention, and there were bursts of chattering and whispered asides. They had been reading Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison […] Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength.
Ahmed guided the students through the passage, clarifying some of the language and prompting them about the argument. I could not tell whether the students were following. I was sitting to the side, by the window, and Ahmed had left a pile of marking on the table in front of me, ready to return to the students. I glanced through the paper on the top. The handwriting was small and neat, but the sentences seemed disconnected and the sheet was decorated with red circles and corrections.
About ten minutes before the end of class, Ahmed turned to me: ‘Now our visitor will address you,’ he said. On an impulse, I asked the students to tell me why they were at university. There was a short silence. A young man spoke and told me that his name was Tariq. He was leaning back in his chair, so that its front legs tilted slightly off the ground. He said, with a slight smile: ‘It’s all a waste of time.’
I knew this was a challenge and I weighed my answer carefully so that it did not seem dismissive. ‘So why are you wasting your time here?’
One woman said that she was at university because she liked studying; a male student said, more equivocally, that he was there because of his parents. One of the women said she wanted to learn English so as to get a good job, and there were a few murmurs of assent. ‘There are no jobs,’ Tariq countered.
The next class was on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ahmed spent the first half of it sketching out a brief history of the sonnet form, explaining how Shakespeare had transformed it from its Italian origins. This time when h
e asked me to speak at the end, I felt better prepared. ‘I want you to imagine that I am a musician,’ I said. ‘I’m visiting from England, and I have brought this new kind of song with me, which everyone in England is playing. You’re a group of musicians too. But you haven’t heard of this song, and when I play it, you want to start making your own version in Arabic. How would the song change?’
The students told me a little about how Arabic and English were different and how the song might change to accommodate new rhymes, but also to reflect different experiences. Ahmed chipped in, to explain that when sonnet 18 is translated into Arabic it is altered, from ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ to ‘Shall I compare thee to a spring day?’ In the Middle East, spring is the more pleasant season, he said, so that to ask ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ would be almost an insult (‘You make me sweaty and uncomfortable’). We were running out of time. I asked one more question, which I said the students should think about before their next class: ‘Shakespeare was a very successful playwright by the time he started writing sonnets. Why did he start to write poems instead?’ We touched briefly on the fact that the playhouses were closed because of plague in the 1590s, and that this may have been one reason why Shakespeare turned to a different form.
As Ahmed and I were leaving, Tariq chased after us in the corridor. He had been sitting at the back of the Shakespeare class, but he had not spoken. I was slightly unnerved, as he dashed towards us, and his face gave nothing away. He was gesturing at the textbook he was holding. ‘Do you think Shakespeare wanted to say something personal, which he could not say in a play?’ he asked me. ‘Was he in love?’
Ahmed left me in one of the department offices, while he went off to a meeting. The room was full of cigarette smoke. I sat there for a while, as students came and went, listening to the rhythms of the conversations in Arabic and smiling at the familiarity of the ones in English.
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine Page 2