We started reading Julius Caesar that morning and the play seemed more difficult at first: the language more dense, and the situation less accessible than in Romeo and Juliet. But it was also as if we were missing our familiarity with the other play. I started by asking the students about some new Arabic words I had learned. One was ‘wasta.’ I asked the students why there was no directly equivalent word in English. ‘Because our language is richer,’ one student said, smiling. The other word I asked them about was ‘fasaad,’ meaning corruption.
We talked about some of the conventions governing Rome at the time of Caesar’s rule. Shakespeare’s play opens with Caesar in full pomp. One of the debates in the play is about the power he has accumulated as an individual, threatening the democratic institutions on which Rome had previously relied. A conspiracy develops against him, led by Brutus, who is goaded on by Cassius. Caesar is assassinated in Act III and the rest of the play chronicles the downfall of the conspiracy. Mark Antony’s famous speech at Caesar’s funeral turns the crowd against the conspirators, although his deft oratory makes him appear to be supporting them at first: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’
We read an early scene, in which Cassius tries to persuade Brutus into leading the conspiracy. ‘Why does Cassius not just take power himself?’ Qais asked. ‘He’s in MI6, isn’t he? He works like the intelligence services, always undermining governments to get their own person into power.’ The conspirators think of themselves as heroes and, after Caesar’s death, they imagine that this is how history will view them. Brutus urges the others to walk to the market-place, with their hands stained with Caesar’s blood: ‘Let’s all cry, “Peace, freedom and liberty!”’ I pointed out that some of the historical sources that Shakespeare used were more sympathetic to Brutus and Cassius. Several students said that the evidence suggested Caesar was a good man and that the conspirators hated the common people.
I knew that Basilah read the play very differently, encouraging students to imagine it from the point of view of the conspirators, as a story about resisting tyranny. This reading has historical precedents. In 1937, Orson Welles put on a stage version subtitled ‘Death of a Dictator’, in which Antony’s oratory—and the violent street scenes that follow it—had a new, and brutal, resonance.
At the time that we were reading the play, there was an emotional response in the West Bank to the death of the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez. He had been an outspoken supporter of the Palestinians. An American I had met, who worked for an NGO in Ramallah, put up a heartfelt plea on Facebook:
The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. While his friend Bashar Al Assad slaughtered his people and your fellow Palestinians, Chavez expressed support for his rule. Chavez was very good to his supporters but equally bad to his opponents. To take just one example, when millions of his people signed a petition to try to end his rule, he published their names and directed his government to deny them jobs and basic services like passport renewal. I always wanted to believe that what Chavez said about helping the poor and standing up for human rights was true, but when I looked into it more deeply, though he did some very positive things for the poor, I saw that on the whole he was personally corrupt and did tremendous damage to his entire economy. I’m not disputing that he won elections. He was indeed a very special kind of despot, one who uses the system to put himself into power and then proceeds to dismantle that system.
One afternoon, when I got back to Ramallah, I ran into Qais near Yasser Arafat Square. He was talking to another man, introduced to me as Sami, who I knew from their Facebook discussions. Sami was doing an MA at Birzeit and told me he had been writing an essay about Northern Ireland. We went for a coffee. The café we were in was showing music videos on a series of screens. Sami pointed out that the Egyptian channel put up subtitles in Arabic that were ‘quite philosophical.’ He said they had explained Gangnam Style as being a song about Korean culture.
It was a few weeks before Obama was due to visit the West Bank, and there were posters everywhere telling him not to bring his mobile phone, because you could not get 3G in the West Bank. I had been sceptical about the campaign, because it seemed to focus on a narrow example of how the occupation functioned. But Sami was more positive, saying it showed how the Palestinians were cut off from the rest of the world. There was noise from the street outside as we were talking. Sami stuck his head out of the window and reported that it was a protest at the death of a man who had been killed by a colleague in a village just outside Ramallah.
‘It’s full of Ramallah hipsters,’ Sami said.
I asked how I could spot a hipster.
‘They wear a scarf, even when it’s warm, and dark glasses inside.’
Sami and Qais were the first students to ask me directly what I thought about the political situation. Sami said that he was in favour of one democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis. He said that he had met an Israeli during a summer camp in Greece, who was in the right-wing party Likud. This young man had contacted Sami subsequently, saying he wanted to start a party for Palestinians and Israelis arguing for one state.
‘Is he sincere?’ I asked.
The young man in the photograph stands at the window and leans out. To his left, there is a fragment of broken glass at the bottom of the window frame, which has the jagged shape of an iceberg. The man is shouting towards the crowd that has gathered beneath him. In the foreground of the picture, you can see the back of three heads, and three pairs of hands raised in the air. The man has raised his arms with his palms facing outwards. They are covered in blood. There are three other hands visible in the window frame, emerging from the room inside, but there are no other faces. One is the right hand of someone unseen, who is waving or signalling in another direction. The other two hands are close together at the top of the picture and they are also bloodied.
The photograph was taken in October 2000, in the midst of the second intifada. Two Israeli soldiers, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami, had driven into Palestinian-controlled areas of the city by mistake. They were detained by Palestinian Authority police officers and then a crowd stormed the police station.
Abdel Aziz Salha, the man in the photograph, spoke to the Electronic Intifada in 2013: ‘Earlier on that day, one Palestinian from Ramallah was murdered by Israeli settlers from a settlement neighbouring Ramallah. After they had killed him, they cut his ears and threw his body. This is the reason there were thousands of protestors across Ramallah on that day. Accidentally, we got word that there were two Israeli soldiers held in one Ramallah police station.’ After the photograph was published, Salha became the most wanted man in the West Bank. He was released from prison 11 years later and went to live in Gaza.
In the two weeks before the incident in Ramallah in 2000, 85 Palestinians had been killed during unarmed protests, and five Israelis had died. But the rumour that reached the crowd that day, about the murder of a man from Ramallah, turned out to be false. According to the Electronic Intifada: ‘A forensic investigation by Physicians for Human Rights later found that the man was most likely killed in a car accident.’
I had wondered, as I looked at the photograph, what the room was like behind Salha. It was almost as though the third pair of hands belonged to someone who was standing on the ceiling. Slowly, I realised that these were the bloodied wrists of one of the victims, who must be hanging upside down.
H.G. Wells’s short story ‘The Star’, published in 1897, tells of a star entering the solar system and ultimately causing devastation as it passes close to Earth.
And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. ‘It is larger,’ they cried. ‘It is brighter!’
Wells�
�s story lacks the consoling human adventure that is at the centre of many disaster movies. Instead, as one student pointed out, the star is the hero. There is a brutal sense of perspective. Earth is seen from Mars at the end, and the near-destruction of the planet is thus summed up from an external viewpoint. Yet there is also the perspective of one character, who is a mathematician: ‘He looked at [the star] as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. “You may kill me,” he said after a silence. “But I can hold you—and all the universe for that matter—in the grip of this little brain. I would not change. Even now.”’
I had started to become impatient with the students who were not doing the reading. When we got to this story, I refused to do the work for them. ‘What happens in the story?’ I asked, to near silence. ‘What happens at the start?’ At the end of the class, I managed to say something, keeping my temper even, but hoping to be firm. I felt that I needed to be stricter. But I hated the thought of the students doing the reading only because I told them to do it. I said that I was not going to police them, but that it would limit the kinds of discussion we could have if they did not read. ‘If you’re not going to put the effort in, then I will put less effort in too. You have the right not to read, as we’ve talked about. But it’s up to you to take responsibility for what you get out of the course now.’ One student said quickly that he’d had several exams. There was an uneasy silence. I was trying to gauge how they were taking what I had said and how well I really understood their reasons for not doing the reading.
Just when I thought the discussion had fizzled out, Haytham spoke. ‘I’ve been at the university for five years. I’ve never been asked to do this before—to come and have opinions, to do the reading only if I want to. It’s usually just learning for the exam.’
‘Is that a complaint?’ I asked.
‘It’s just a big change.’
As I was preparing to leave, the student who had said he’d had exams rushed up with his phone held out in his hand: ‘Did you see this, doctor?’ He set the phone to play a video for me. It was a YouTube clip, shot in Chelyabinsk a few weeks earlier, showing a meteor shower on the horizon amid an explosion of light.
We had started reading Julius Caesar straight after the strike. In the first class back, I gave the students Michael Longley’s poem ‘Ceasefire’, which was published in the Irish Times in 1994, shortly ahead of a ceasefire in Northern Ireland. The poem borrows from The Iliad, telling the story of Priam going to meet with his enemy Achilles, to ask for the body of his son, Hector, who has been killed in the war. Priam speaks in the final couplet:
I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.
The students did not know the term ‘ceasefire,’ so I explained it. We talked about the simple language (‘do what must be done’) and the order of events. The poem concludes with Priam on his knees, kissing Achilles’ hand, but this must precede the opening, in which the two men weep together. I told the students that I had chosen the poem because they had said they found the ending of Romeo and Juliet difficult to imagine if the play was set in Palestine, but also because Longley turns to an old story to illustrate contemporary concerns. Perhaps, I suggested, Shakespeare had done the same in Julius Caesar.
Later, I posted the poem on the Facebook group, with a link to Longley reading it. Basilah pointed out that, initially, Achilles refuses to release Hector’s body, and that he speaks to Priam not as an equal but as the representative of a conquering force. She asked: ‘So, bottom line, the ceasefire is simply a ruse—or a magnanimous gesture on the part of the victor?’ Ahmed replied: ‘Widows, widowers, orphans might kiss the hands of self-appointed murderers and torturers. This can be applied to our situation. Ceasefire, here in Palestine, gives the Israelis more time to swallow whatever land is left. The maimed are made to forgive before they are ready to forgive.’
10
Hamlet’s dangerous state
‘Would you like to join us?’
I had started to wilt in the heat. It was a hot afternoon in April, and there was a long wait for a servees back to Ramallah. Abd spotted me and asked if I wanted to get a ride with his friends: ‘Then we are six.’ I stood in one of the few sections of shade with Zahrah, who Abd had told me used to be his fiancée. Abd wandered around, trying to bargain with the drivers. Most of the servees were yellow, but there were also a few white ones at the edge of the yard, and eventually we got into one of those. Abd insisted that I sit in the front, next to the driver. As we edged down the hill, my seatbelt popped out of its holder.
According to a 2011 article in the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, there are about seven or eight hundred white Ford Transits in the area around Al Eizariya, Abu Dis and Sawahera. Most are more than ten years old, and they are not insured. Palestinians in the West Bank are not allowed to drive Israeli cars without a permit, and they cannot buy used cars from Israel if they are more than four years old. The Wall has cut the towns off from the public transport in Jerusalem, prompting this black market in older vehicles.
When we reached the motorway beneath Ma’ale Adummin, there were traffic lights about fifty yards ahead of us. There were two Israeli cars queueing to the right, on a road leading from the settlement, waiting to cross the motorway in front of us and join it in the other direction. As the lights started to turn red, our driver sped up to get through, then slowed, and then sped up again. I watched the two cars to the right pulling out. We tore through the lights and skidded between the two cars, and I heard a scream. I was unsure whether it was from within the servees or from outside. By the time we came to a halt, I had slid down in my seat, with my feet braced against the floor, holding on to the handle above the window.
When we re-started, several people lit cigarettes and someone handed one to me. Abd lent forward in his seat and asked me if I was alright. As we approached Ramallah, the driver slowed down by the side of the road several times and called out questions to passers-by. When we pulled into the city, Zahrah and I were the last off. She said that she always got freshly-baked bread from a shop round the corner. We bought some and ate it as we walked. Zahrah said that students were not supposed to get the white servees and that the driver had been slowing down near Ramallah to ask if there were police, because he wasn’t meant to be there. I asked if he had sped up because the cars were Israeli. She shook her head. ‘He was insane,’ she said.
Zahrah told me that her mother was from Iraq and that her father was from Syria. They had not been to Iraq since 2003.
‘Is it very beautiful?’ I asked.
‘Like heaven,’ she said.
At around this time, I was asked to cover some classes at Al-Quds Bard for a lecturer who had returned to the States for a few weeks. The students were reading Hamlet, as part of a first-year liberal arts course. I struggled with the new names and faces, and attendance was poor at the first class—the usual perils of being a supply teacher. One man, called Hamdi, spoke more confidently in the first class, with a slight Texan accent. The next day, I found myself sitting next to him at lunchtime on the servees from Ramallah. Hamdi explained that he was running late because his father was away and he’d been called in to speak to a teacher at his younger brother’s school. He said that he was surprised at what his brother had been up to: ‘I’m going to have to kick his ass.’ Hamdi told me his family had lived in the US until he was 11, but their father had not wanted his daughters growing up in America. ‘I’m taking beginners’ Arabic here,’ Hamdi explained. ‘But my English vocabulary hasn’t progressed at all. I mean, I talk to my friends in the States, and I don’t know shit.’ Hamdi asked me what sports I liked to watch, and told me he was a big fan of American football. ‘I took a ball into school in Al-Bireh, and my friends were like: what is that?’
As we neared Abu Dis, Hamdi told me that, when he was at school, he used to tell his mother he was going to a friend’s house to do homework, and he would go to Qalandia or to Ofer prison and t
hrow rocks. ‘Once I came face-to-face with a soldier, and I was still holding a rock. We both just stood there for about ten seconds. I guess he was shitting himself too. So I threw this rock—it just went thud, it hit him right in the chest. He stood there, looking at me, like he couldn’t believe I threw it.’ On another occasion, Hamdi had been shot by a rubber bullet. He told me he could fairly easily get a permit to go into Israel. ‘But I’ve pretty much stopped going. I went to this mall once, and the soldiers were like, “It’s closed.” And I laughed: “But, look, I can see all these other folks going in.” So I tried just walking past, and….’ He raised his arms to mimic the soldiers raising their guns.
The dynamics in the classroom felt subtly different at Bard. The classes were smaller, normally about 15 students. Bard was the only university in the West Bank to offer scholarships to students from refugee camps. It also attracted the Palestinian elite, a number of whom were American-born and educated. The students mixed well socially and many were very bright. Yet there was a tinge of apathy in the atmosphere that felt more like teaching classes at home. For the first time, I had to send a student who was being disruptive out of the class.
In one of the Hamlet classes, we started with a quotation from early on in the play in which a minor character, Marcellus, says there is ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark.’ I asked what ‘rotten’ meant and the students described how bread goes rotten: that it changes in colour, texture and appearance; that it will smell and become inedible. Then we discussed the different meanings of the word ‘state,’ including as a condition that can change (e.g. ‘Hamlet is in a bad mental state’) or a country, and variants on this, including the question of whether Palestine had become a state following the declaration at the UN. We talked about what it would mean for any of these states to be rotten and the students had good answers: that a state could be rotten economically, politically, through corruption, war or civil war. One woman said there could be a difference between appearance and reality. We talked too about the fact that Hamlet embodies the kingdom, so that his ‘state of mind’ at the start of the play mirrors the political state’s corruption.
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine Page 10