This was why we jammed a taxi full in Beirut and drove through Syria to Jordan. The following day we were hoping to get into Israel through the generally lax border point at the Allenby Bridge. I pictured myself faced with a strict customs official—me with my satellite telephone, gas mask, ten thousand dollars, and a passport full of stamps from sinister countries. Mr. Bin Laden, I presume?
The first hiccup was the Syrian border. Dutch tourists can buy visas there but not if they are journalists, and unfortunately my passport contained an expired press visa for Syria.
“Transit visa?” I asked as despairingly as possible.
“You need to get permission from the ministry and the ministry’s closed.”
“Twenty dollars?” I let my driver suggest.
“We’ll see what we can do.”
Forty dollars poorer and four hours later, but in possession of one transit visa, we drove to the real customs post. It was a tense moment because officially they are supposed to estimate the value of your possessions and take this amount in insurance. At the Jordanian border we’d get the money back. Yeah, right—as if they’d have sums like that lying around and would ever hand them out. We addressed the situation in an alternative manner, and a little while afterwards we were driving un-inspected but a hundred dollars lighter, past the snow-topped mountains of the Golan Heights. Getting out of Syria cost another hundred dollars, and then we could finally breathe because Jordan is a relatively decent country. Next, an argument with the driver over his fee, someone in the car behind us driving crazily and almost sending us into a ravine, and then the border was closed. Two Palestinian infiltrators had been caught. We were about to turn around when the border suddenly opened again.
In East Jerusalem a further setback awaited us. The Palestinian painters, plumbers, and carpenters who were supposed to do up my house hadn’t been able to leave their villages for a week. We dumped all the stuff at a friend’s house and returned to Beirut the following morning: Taxi to the border, thirty dollars Israeli exit tax, an hour and a half waiting for a bus, eight dollars for the Jordanian government, haggling with a new driver in order to get to the airport which had flights to Beirut. It was cold and we were hungry. You know what, we thought, if we go through Amman we can stop for a bowl of delicious, piping hot soup. We’ll have earned it.12
Having left my Lebanese lodgings, I could no longer distance myself from the situation. This realization didn’t dawn on me instantly, for right after my move I was happiness personified. Life in East Jerusalem seemed the most interesting thing ever. There I was in the queue at IKEA behind a Jewish settler with a huge beard, a gaggle of kids, a cradle under his right arm, and an automatic rifle on his left shoulder. In Israel, settlers are allowed to carry heavy weaponry. East Jerusalem was occupied territory, and there was no postal service, so I had to get a post box in the Jewish settlement close by. The Israeli telecommunications company didn’t want to come and install an ISDN line; it was too dangerous amongst all those terrorists.
This was the eye of the storm, and I noticed it in the jokes. The chief rabbi is visiting the pope in Rome and needs to make a phone call to God. The pope gives him the telephone and says, “If you write down your address, we’ll send you the bill later.” A month later, a huge bill arrives, which the rabbi pays with a sigh. Then the pope pays a return visit to Jerusalem; he needs to call God, too. It’s a long conversation and, after he hangs up, the pope asks the rabbi if he needs his contact details for the bill. The rabbi hesitates and then shrugs his shoulders: “Don’t worry about it, pal. It’s local rates here.”
The main Palestinian bookshop in Jerusalem’s Saladin Street had stuck up a cartoon: On the first picture, an angry Eskimo is saying, “My name is Menachim, and Jerusalem is MINE!” Next, an angry black man: “My name is David, and Jerusalem is MINE!” An American in a cowboy hat stamping his feet: “My name is Shimon, and Jerusalem is MINE!” A furious Russian: “My name is Shlomo, and Jerusalem is MINE!” An irate Indian: “My name is Benjamin, and Jerusalem is MINE!” The final picture has a confused-looking Palestinian: “My name is Mohammed, and I was born in Jerusalem, but it must have been some kind of mistake.”
People in the Holy Land could make fun of themselves, but when did you ever see that on the news? My Israeli technician, a big Ajax fan, once complained that his dog had fleas. “I need to buy some pesticide, German stuff. They’re good at that, the Germans—stamping out vermin.” He also told me this one: An American, a Russian, and an Israeli are standing in front of a sign that says APOLOGIES, NO MEAT TODAY DUE TO SHORTAGES. The American asks, “What are shortages?” The Russian asks, “What’s meat?” The Israeli asks, “What are apologies?”
It was a whole new world, and I was so happy there that I threw a house-warming party. Amongst the guests were my landlord and his sister, our neighbor. A Dutch diplomat from Tel Aviv was present, too, along with a Swedish colleague, Sven. Sven came over to me, looking quite upset. “That landlord of yours and his sister, they’re ... nice!” I raised my glass. What did he expect? “Well. Yeah. It’s probably nothing, but they’re ... you know.” It had been Sven’s first conversation with ordinary Palestinians. Tel Aviv to East Jerusalem is a fifty-nine-kilometer drive, and there’s no border crossing point because Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and considers it as part of the country; but in his three years in Tel Aviv, Sven had never come here. Instead, he’d swallowed the Israeli PR stories whole.
The landlord and his sister opened my eyes about what occupation was like, too. That was the end of my happiness. My neighbor taught me the most. She was a Catholic spinster who’d been born in Haifa in 1948. When Israel was founded, the family had fled to East Jerusalem and had never been able to go back. East Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands at the time, but in 1967 it was taken by Israel—so the neighbor ended up being ruled over by the country that had previously robbed her family of everything.
And still there was no peace for her. She received phone calls at three o“clock in the morning; each time she answered there’d be a few seconds’ silence, and then they’d hang up. This went on for days until my neighbor was exhausted. Burglars? She avoided my question as to why she didn’t go to the police. “I’m a helpless old lady,” she kept saying. It was driving me crazy. I extended the cable so that I could answer the phone, hoping that the caller would be intimidated by a male voice. That night, the phone did indeed ring; when I picked it up, there was silence. Five minutes later, it went again; more silence, so I said the nastiest thing I could think of in English. During the third phone call, the caller suddenly began to speak in heavily punctuated English. He didn’t want to say who he was or why he was calling, but introduced himself as ”a friend of the family from the Jordan.” He hung up after that, and I realized that he hadn’t pronounced Jordan with an Arabic “r,” but with a throaty Hebrew one. He was an Israeli! The phone calls stopped.
“We get a lot of phone calls like that,” the landlord told me when I was paying him my rent. He was a respectable, nervous doctor in his late fifties. “Settlers intimidate elderly Palestinians, and then the frontmen come and make an offer on your house, two or three times what it’s worth, and you can stay there until you die. But afterwards it becomes a settlers’ house. They also offer Israeli passports, which proves that they are in cahoots with the government.”
So this was the “Judaization policy” with which Israel tried to get rid of all the non-Jews living in East Jerusalem. The landlord maintained that he hadn’t considered the night-callers’ offers for a second. However, an Israeli passport would allow him to travel abroad. His children would be able to study in America and find partners. How many Catholic Palestinians were there still in Jerusalem? Israel was going to win the battle for my house—that much was clear.
Take the example of the time my neighbor rang my doorbell in a panic. There was a curfew that evening. Israel was celebrating its independence, and all Palestinians had to stay in—those in East Jerusalem, too, for the fi
rst time—as a “security measure.” The neighbor was trembling all over; she was convinced that the same thing was going to happen as occurred in 1948. I cancelled my date (“Sorry, I’m not allowed to leave my house tomorrow”), and went to fetch food from the local supermarket. Unfortunately, a lot of people had got there first. I looked at the clock—was there still time to go to a big supermarket? But what if I went, and got stuck there? I’d have to sleep in a hotel. So I had to take my passport with me, and my computer, too, because I had a deadline to meet.
I stayed home, and an hour later the neighbor was at my door again. She’d heard that there were going to be house searches, and warned me to hide all my valuables. She had a point—try proving that a soldier has taken your jewellery at gunpoint. The curfew began, and a car screeched past outside. Was this a Palestinian daredevil or a settler? There was no curfew for Jews. Then I heard explosions, and for a second I worried about my neighbor. But it was only the fire-works display for Israel’s anniversary.
Then, some time later, we were burgled. The car was stolen, the house was emptied, and the neighbor was in a state. A trip to the police station? “I want to help you,” the landlord said, “but then you’d better make the report.” I was very annoyed, so he reluctantly explained that, if he went to the police, there was a risk that the officer would say: “You live there? That’s a neighborhood we’re interested in. You don’t want to tell us anything? Perhaps we should check your driving license, your medical practice permit, and other paperwork. It might take a while. Report back every afternoon for the next month, and we’ll go for a walk through your neighborhood—let everyone see what good friends you are with the Israeli police.”
I went alone to the police station in the nearby settlement, Neve Yaqov. No one could or wanted to speak English, and I was sent over to a policeman who spoke Arabic. He was busy with a Palestinian who lived just past a checkpoint and had to queue every day to get through, two hours out and two hours in. The Palestinian had come to get a pass so that he could use the special road for Jews. It was bizarre how quickly I got used to that kind of expression—“the special road for Jews.”
“Come back tomorrow,” I heard the policeman bark.
“But you said that yesterday, and the day before. I’ve been here ten times now.”
“Then come ten times more.”
What was it to be more afraid of the police than burglars? Was this occupation? I decided to ask what it was like every time I interviewed anyone, and out came the stories:It was before the peace process. I was sixteen and in love like you only experience once in your life, with my neighbor. Then anti-Israeli slogans were daubed on our house, and a PLO flag. The next day soldiers forced my father to scrub off the graffiti. I lost my cool and got arrested. Six months later I was released, but my name was known to the Jews and I could forget about getting a work permit for Israel. I had no future, and she got married to someone else.
My eight-year-old son is deaf. We live in Jerusalem, and the only special school for the deaf is in Ramallah. But I need a special pass for those ten kilometers to Ramallah. Of course, the Jews wanted something in return. My cousin’s in Hamas, and I didn’t want to betray him. Now my son has to stay in lodgings in Ramallah, and I travel secretly cross-country each weekend to fetch him and bring him back. He’s an anxious kid, but because of his deafness we can’t even reassure him by telephoning in the evenings.
My dad’s the mayor, and we had enough money for me to study in Paris. Wine, literature, protests ... but there was always a cloud hanging over my head—if I lost my original ID card Israel would never let me back in. I was messing around with a girl once and got overcome by total panic. I had to run to my room to check whether my ID card was still where I’d put it.
It was before the peace process. My brother had a business conflict with a powerful family who were linked to the PLO. One day they enticed him out to the countryside and murdered him. After that, they wrote on all the walls that he’d collaborated with Israel. What could we do?
My father had a heart defect that they couldn’t treat in Gaza. We asked for a permit to travel to Jordan, but didn’t get it. We’d filled in a form incorrectly, and now my father is dead.
I had a terrible row with my youngest son yesterday. I asked him what he wanted to be when he was older, and he said “martyr.” I said that a repressed people needs soldiers, but it also needs thinkers, inventors, scientists. He laughed at me. Why should he work hard at school if he can never leave Nablus to go to a good university? And he’s right.
These were haunting stories, precisely because they weren’t told by angry, bearded men, by incompetent spokesmen, or by theatrically weeping victims. These were calm men and women; father and mothers trying to keep their families together; grandparents who realized that the next generation could expect a life just like theirs. The only conclusion possible was that occupation is tantamount to terrorism—only it’s permanent, and enforced by soldiers and secret services rather than terrorists. An occupation is like a dictatorship because you don’t have any rights. The Israeli “security services” could burst into your home at any moment and take you or a family member away, and they could torture you or lock you up for years without trial. At any moment, a bulldozer could flatten your house, as collective punishment or for a new Jewish settlement.
This is how Palestinians have lived since 1967, and the peace process hasn’t changed anything significant. The “Palestinian Authority” is, in fact, a layer that has been pushed between the Israeli occupiers and the population. Before the peace process, Palestinians had to ask the Israelis permission for everything; after it, they had to go the Palestinian Authority, which then had to ask permission from Israel.
Until it was stolen, I drove an imported car with a Greek number plate. Every few hours, I’d be pulled over by special anti-terrorist units—sometimes in civvies, sometimes in uniform. “From where this car?” There were often heart-stopping moments when I thanked God for my white skin because I didn’t speak any Hebrew and didn’t know if they were shouting “Get out of the car or we’ll shoot!” or “Don’t move a muscle or we’ll shoot!” The policemen were extremely nervous, too: A terrorist would wait until they approached, and ... boom. But that feeling of powerlessness when I had to raise my hands and walk towards one of those nineteen-year-old soldiers ...
Soldiers would sometimes set up a checkpoint in front of my house, and get every Palestinian male between eighteen and forty out of his vehicle. They had to stand in the burning sun while their papers were studied and checked, sometimes for hours, and anyone who complained got a whack around the head. Unless I, with my white skin, went along to spectate—at which point they nearly always stopped hitting.
This was what Israeli peace activists meant about occupation. When I reflected on how to portray it, I understood why so few people got what the activists were talking about. The same forces were at play in occupied countries as in Arab dictatorships. There weren’t any newsworthy developments to report on, which meant that, at the most, correspondents could only put something about daily life in a background feature. The news stream was always shaped by incidents. Put another way, the occupation itself was never news, but each new attack was. This meant that I could mention occupation in cross-talks or in analysis, but only as an abstraction. How would my audience in their home country—with its customer complaint lines, ombudsmen, and hardship clauses—be able to picture this? You’d have to show occupation on television with concrete examples, but that was very hard to do.
For instance, before the second intifadah, many Palestinian homosexuals used to secretly visit Tel Aviv bars. The Israeli secret service took photos of them, and then threatened to distribute them around the Palestinians’ home villages if they didn’t go to work for them. A story like this illustrates how ruthlessly an occupying force crushes people—but just try capturing this on film. The homosexual won’t appear on television because, if his proclivities or collaboration come out,
he’s in for it; and the secret services will always deny everything or refer to “state secrets.” At the most, you’ll get an Israeli human rights activist to talk about it. Hardly gripping.
For every bomb, you had one image that gave the essence of the situation according to Israel. The image of a burned-out bus or blackened restaurant could be endlessly repeated, and each time the message was clear within two seconds—this is terror. But occupation ... it didn’t get any further than shots of tanks, soldiers checking papers, and long queues of civilians. How could correspondents portray the misery, repression, and injustice behind such scenes? You could only recount this and, as we know, the most you can do with words is get something into your viewer’s heads; if you’ve got images of an attack, you can get them in the guts.
In the first three years of the second intifadah, more than three times as many Palestinian civilians died from Israeli violence than vice versa—and still the talk was of “the bloody attacks,” rarely of the “bloody occupation.” After a Palestinian attack with six Israeli victims, “tensions were rising” in the Middle East; but a week in which fifteen Palestinian civilians died due to Israeli violence was brushed aside as “a period of relative calm.” The Palestinian Authority had to continually explain whether it was “doing enough against terrorism.” Israeli politicians never had to explain if they were “doing enough against the occupation.” On the BBC website, surfers discussed “how to stop terror”; there was no forum on “how to stop the occupation.”
If you compared terror with occupation, things were so skewed that you couldn’t straighten them out, not even in the newspapers. I could write “humiliation,” but a word like that didn’t mean anything—at least it hadn’t to me until I experienced it firsthand. When I did experience it, I wrote the following article. A reader wrote in angrily that I’d crossed “journalistic boundaries.” He was right, because “humiliation” isn’t something you can explain within journalistic boundaries:I was kneeling before a full toilet bowl when a hand passed me a fork and I had to pick turds out of the water and eat them, to much hilarity. I’d had this nightmare last year and I’d forgotten it, as is typical with dreams, but yesterday I was at a roadblock and the dream came back in full detail.
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