Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  I inched forward through my cage then grabbed the bars of a revolving steel gate and pushed through. Elsewhere, full-height turnstiles are nicknamed iron maidens after the supposed medieval torture devices they resemble. According to Barghouti, Palestinians call them milking stalls. “I have seen a better setup for managing herds of cows,” he writes. I emerged into another security zone with three rooms separated from each other by a concrete half-wall topped with a pane of bulletproof glass. Each room had a remotely controlled turnstile at one end with a light that was supposed to turn from red to green when the turnstile unlocked.

  The lights didn’t work. The fifty or so Palestinians crowded in the room had to listen for the soft metallic clunk that indicated the turnstile had been opened. Then everyone pressed forward. Those at the front had only a few seconds to navigate through before the gate locked again. People at the back shouted for them to move faster. I ended up huddled and compressed alongside a family with three young boys. The surging crowd terrified the boys into tears each time the assembled mass of bodies started to push and shout. Crossing Qalandiya means offering up your flesh—your body’s fragility, as Barghouti would say. Bodily humiliation is the price of passage.

  Almost an hour had passed by the time I managed to squeeze my way to the front of the crowd and clank through the rotating steel. A soldier on the other side regarded my passport with bored disinterest, seemingly oblivious to the compacted pilgrims waiting to pass. Then she waved me through.

  I crossed through Qalandiya because I wanted to meet Palestinian writers living in what most of the world calls Israel and what most Palestinians call 48—shorthand for the territory belonging to Palestine before the 1948 war. Palestinians make up more than a fifth of Israel’s population, numbering about 1.8 million. I wondered what it meant to be an urban Palestinian living as a minority citizen of the State of Israel, far from both the architecture of the occupation—the checkpoints, the settlements, the roadblocks—and the hills and villages of the Palestinian imagination. I decided to travel north to Haifa, Nazareth, and Acre and meet the writers there. First, I paused in East Jerusalem to meet poet Mohammed El-Kurd.

  Mohammed’s mother used to write poems for a Jerusalem newspaper. She would read them aloud to her husband in their house in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, seeking his feedback before sending them to her editor. When Mohammed was a child, he woke each morning to the sound of these tentative verses filtering into his bedroom from the kitchen. “That is how I became familiar with the way rhythm and rhyme float in a poem,” he said.

  Mohammed was still a child when, in 2009, a group of radical Israeli settlers stormed his home and took over half the house. In 1956, the United Nations had designated the property for Palestinian refugees, and the el-Kurds had lived there legally for more than fifty years. This did not dissuade the settlers. They came armed with a 1970 Israeli law that allows Jews to reclaim any property in Jerusalem that belonged to Jewish families before 1948. According to the settlers, the front half of the el-Kurd house occupied land once owned by Jews and was built without an Israeli-issued building permit. Under the protection of Israeli police, the settlers entered the house and tossed the el-Kurds’ furniture and possessions into the front garden. Mohammed watched as settlers then set his three-year-old sister’s bed on fire and warmed themselves around the flames.

  Eight members of Mohammed’s extended family now live in the extension at the back of the house built after 1948 and therefore safe from reclamation. A rotating group of six settlers occupies the rest. The settlers have spat on the el-Kurds. They hurl trash into the family’s side of the property and kept a dog in the yard so vicious Mohammed’s little sister wet herself in fear every time she saw it.

  The el-Kurds’ eviction attracted international attention and became the subject of a documentary narrated by Mohammed, then eleven years old, called My Neighbourhood. In the film Mohammed’s face bears a sort of bewildered grimace. He expresses astonishment both at the settlers’ actions and at the Israeli and foreign activists who rallied in support of his family. Six years later, Mohammed recalled the chaos of the eviction, especially the role of the women of Sheikh Jarrah who “weaved the first battle cry”:

  [It] was my aunt Nadia, 70-something then, and the rest of the neighborhood’s women who protested with chanting and drumming on pots and pans, who tried to heal the pain and suffocation caused by tear gas with onions and yogurt, and who hid young Palestinian men and American activists escaping persecution and arrest. I will never forget the sight of my nineteen-year-old neighbor, freshly homeless, as she spray-painted the words “TREES DIE STANDING” on the gate of her stolen home, and on what remains of her tainted childhood. I will never forget my grandmother pushing the Israeli settler out of her jasmine garden with whatever body strength a 90-year-old might possess.

  Mohammed met me on the corner near where my bus from Ramallah stopped. He’d grown into a slender young man of seventeen since the documentary aired, with a face darkened by a struggling teenage beard. His wet cough made him seem frail, and I suggested moving our meeting to a day he was feeling better. He assured me he was fine. We walked up the street toward the posh American Colony Hotel before turning down a cracked side street to his family’s home. Around the same time as Mohammed’s family was evicted, settlers took over four other Sheikh Jarrah homes, including the house across the street from the el-Kurds. In 2010, journalists filmed these neighbors singing praises to Baruch Goldstein, the American-born settler terrorist who massacred twenty-nine praying Palestinians at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994:

  He took aim at the terrorists’ heads and squeezed the trigger tight.

  And shot bullets and shot bullets, and shot and shot bullets.

  Dr. Goldstein, Dr. Goldstein, there is none like you in the world.

  Dr. Goldstein, Dr. Goldstein, everyone loves you.

  When we reached Mohammed’s house, we stepped past the front entrance where settlers had spray-painted a black Star of David over the door and passed his grandmother’s jasmine tree on the way to the back of the house. Blankets hung on a line strung between the back door and one of the windows in the front of the house. Mohammed told me the blankets acted as a curtain to block their view of the settlers, who often stand naked in the windows and make obscene gestures at Mohammed’s mother and sisters. Then he led me inside to the salon where a small monitor displayed the feed from a security camera mounted outside. A collection of books, in both English and Arabic, filled a small cane bookshelf in the corner. Soon after we sat, his mother delivered a tray of mint tea.

  Before Mohammed was born, Israeli doctors told his mother that Mohammed—but not his twin sister, Muna—would be born with Down syndrome. They advised her to abort. Mohammed believes that Israeli doctors often tell pregnant Palestinian women their sons-to-be will have some sort of serious illness or disability and encourage them to end the pregnancy. “It is a demographic strategy,” he said, to limit the population of male Palestinian children.

  This conspiracy theory made me uncomfortable. I had trouble accepting the idea that Israeli doctors would be involved in a nefarious government plot to abort Palestinian babies. Still, the fact that this plot is believable to Mohammed and others was evidence of the dark chasm of mistrust that separates Palestinians from Israelis. Could peace ever blossom between people who believe such things of each other?

  Mohammed and Muna were born in 1998 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba. Mohammed didn’t have Down syndrome, but he had a hole in his heart that healed itself over time. He was also born with a preordained Palestinian future. “What do you do when your destiny is already embroidered in the womb?” he wrote in one of his poems. I asked Mohammed about this. “According to Islam, this is true,” he explained. “Everything is written for you already. You are just following God’s plan. There are two kinds of life in Palestine. You’re either the martyr or just the person who is insulated away from politics—as if pol
itics is not in your living room.”

  Unlike the other writers I’d meet, Mohammed wasn’t a great reader when he was a small child. When he turned eleven, around the time the documentary about his eviction was filmed, Mohammed started to wonder about topics considered taboo by Palestinian culture. He struggled with questions about spirituality, atheism, and sexuality that he felt uncomfortable asking his parents. Mohammed sought answers in the public library. He wrote his first poem around this time, too. “It was about an Israeli policeman, and I was basically cursing him in a poetic way.” His proud parents made him recite the poem to their Arab neighbors. Mohammed remembers the poem less fondly. “It was trash,” he said. “Seriously terrible. I would kill someone if it was published.”

  Mohammed’s writing eventually drew the attention of the teachers at his all-boys school. He wrote such compelling and mature essays in his eighth-grade English and Arabic literature classes that his teachers accused him of plagiarism. When they realized that he had indeed written them, his teachers urged him to recite the essays in front of the other classes. The following year, a paper Mohammed wrote about respecting women caused a minor storm at the school. “All of the other kids wrote about their mothers and sisters, and how we should respect women because they give birth to men,” Mohammed said. His essay, though, suggested women have human rights that should be honored whether or not they decide to become mothers. “I wrote that respecting women had nothing to do with charity or sympathy. It was a responsibility.” The paper criticized traditional Palestinian society for disrespecting women who divorce, those who choose not to have children, and those who decide to work outside the home. Mohammed’s teacher accused him of blasphemy and advised him to direct such thoughts somewhere other than on the page.

  Mohammed never heeded this advice. Much of his writing dares to tackle the problems he sees as inherent in traditional Palestinian society. His poems celebrate feminism and women’s rights. He describes his first poetry collection, which he named after his grandmother Rifqa, as an ode to “Palestinian women, women of color, and women in general who are often dismissed and underrepresented in the narrative of struggle and resistance.” Mohammed’s poems also challenge Palestinian masculine ideals. “There is a definition of a man in Palestine that no one can refuse,” he told me. “People have internal ideas of what they expect when they see a man. For example, the way I am sitting is not the way men sit here.” He gestured to his legs, which he had crossed above the knee. “All the boys at school played soccer. I didn’t. They all dreamed of getting married. I don’t dream of that.”

  Mohammed suggested that everything that came to Palestine from elsewhere—the British Mandate, say, or the occupation—turned into disaster for Palestinians. As a result, they distrust Western concepts like feminism and equality. “I understand that I come from a society that is backward in some ways,” Mohammed said. “But I am also saying that this society is undeveloped for a reason. We have a defense mechanism against anything that is foreign to us.” His society will applaud and respect him for standing on a stage and reciting verses about Palestinian resistance. “But I will be seen as a deviant, as a threat that comes from the West, if I recite a poem about the liberation of women,” he said.

  “We have lost our land. We have lost our children. We have lost our future. The only thing my society can hold on to are the cultural habits and heritage,” Mohammed said. “And some of our cultural habits are great. Some of them are disgusting. But we hold on to them.” He paused then quickly added, “And, yes, I am blaming our social backwardness on the Israeli occupation.”

  Mohammed wants his poetry to make people feel guilty about their role in society’s ills. “Some poetry has this real positive vibe that makes you want to go out and do something in the world,” Mohammed said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have that way with words. It’s really hard for me to cheer myself up. To me poetry is truth, and I cannot just sugarcoat things. You can ignore and neglect any kind of power that comes from the outside, and you can become oblivious to whatever force is talking to you. And you won’t care if you don’t want to care. But if the provocative force is coming from inside you, it itches your soul. It goes into your veins. It is in our skin. You cannot ignore it. You will submit to it.” Comments like this made me forget that Mohammed was a teenager.

  Despite his poetic efforts, Mohammed finds Palestinians difficult to inspire. The reality in which they live is the only reality they’ve ever known. Their world is small, and their lack of liberty has come to feel normal. Mohammed traveled to the United States with the filmmakers of My Neighbourhood in 2012. “I was astonished by the fact that the train from Washington, DC, to New York didn’t stop every fifteen minutes for me to be searched by police,” he said. “We grow up on songs of liberation. But do we really know how occupied we are? Do we really know how imprisoned we are? Do we really know that we’ve never tasted freedom?”

  Mohammed takes his own inspiration from the writers he reads, like Ghassan Kanafani and Fadwa Tuqan, a fiery female poet from Nablus who died in 2003. “And I just started reading Mahmoud Darwish,” he said. “I used to think he was overrated, but his stuff is really amazing.” Mohammed also admires the Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi, whose 1969 book Women and Sex was banned for criticizing female genital mutilation. She is now in her eighties, and her writings and lectures continue to challenge religious and political elites. “That to me was so amazing, how words can be so powerful, and women writers are so impressive to me. Especially Arab women.”

  But the woman who has influenced Mohammed most, his favorite aunt, Maysa, was not a writer at all. Mohammed had little in common with Aunt Maysa, but he admired her fierce self-confidence and individuality. After she died of cancer in 2014, Mohammed wrote:

  She was a goddess, hiding and covering every fragile piece of her soul beneath thundery laughs, red lipstick, pearls, and sassiness. No outer power was able to touch her; not divorce, not notoriety, and not whispers from covered women on the Anata bus. I used to think of her as a superwoman: the woman who taught me everything I know about confidence and self-love. Indestructible and astonishingly careless, she seemed. The closest to freedom one could get in an occupied country. . . . The way she loved was generous. The way I loved was ordinary.

  In the days following our meeting, Mohammed would write his high school finals and exams from the education ministry. The Savannah College of Art and Design in the United States had already accepted Mohammed into its creative writing program, so he simply needed to pass those last high school tests. Still, he wanted to do well. Palestinian newspapers publish the results of the government exams, and students feel enormous pressure to make their families proud. “My family isn’t that happy that I’ve been accepted into college, but they are going to be thrilled when I pass my exams,” Mohammed said. “It is a cultural thing.”

  I asked him if he would miss Jerusalem. “I have this love-hate relationship with Jerusalem,” he said. “But it is mostly hate.” He will be sad to leave his friends and family, to be sure, but he yearns to escape the plural occupations he endures here: the Israeli occupation, and also the occupation of religion, of gender norms, and of the oppressive traditions his poetry rails against. “Everywhere you go there is an enemy. We pick our battles in Palestine. You can either advocate against the occupation, or advocate against the cultural norms that are repressive, but you can’t really be against both of them.” Mohammed is only seventeen years old, but of all the Palestinians I met, he seemed the most weary.

  When Mohammed first visited the United States in 2012, he wept on the day he returned to Jerusalem. He didn’t want to come back. And yet, after only a few months at college in Savannah, Mohammed posted an entry on his blog titled “On Missing Jerusalem.” He describes the birds and bus stops. His grandmother’s jasmine, his father’s stubbornness, and his little sister’s dance in front of the mirror. He misses every “picturesque tragedy” and “every combination of the
bizarre and just-about-right.” Then, in another poem, Mohammed wrote:

  sing me a song of home:

  throw a stone or two

  because the screams make me nostalgic

  and now I almost don’t fear the sirens.

  I boarded a bus north to Acre, the city Ghassan Kanafani fled during the Nakba, and met with author Ala Hlehel in a seaside café overlooking the Bay of Haifa. He told me the first thing he ever wrote was a love letter to a girl named Isoris who sat near him in his grade two class. Ala’s mother found the letter before he had a chance to deliver it. “She was so excited. She let all the village read it,” Ala said. Mortified, Ala destroyed the letter and never gave it to Isoris. “But she had already heard all about it.” Aside from such maternal embarrassments, Ala enjoyed a happy and safe upbringing. “I always joke that I am not lucky. Each writer wants a very bad childhood for his first novel.”

  Ala was born in Jish, a village close to the border with Lebanon—had the British drawn the line one millimeter south in 1916, Ala would have been Lebanese. His parents were from Qadita, a village of stone houses, grain fields, and pomegranate orchards that was lost in the Nakba. His parents were not enthusiastic readers, Ala said, and he did not inherit his love of literature from them. “Writing and reading was a very personal passion for me.” When he was a boy, Ala used to read and imitate the poems of a Syrian writer named Nizar Qabbani, who wrote of love, women, and eroticism. “There were dirty things to read. I used to hide the book in secret places.”

  Qabbani made Ala want to write poetry, but he discovered early in his career that he was a terrible poet. Ala decided, instead, to become a visual artist. He studied drawing, painting, and sculpture at the University of Haifa, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in mass communications and fine arts. Three months after completing his degree, Ala sat on the floor of his rented apartment drinking beer and smoking hashish with his friends. He looked up at the paintings he’d done and announced, “Guys, this is bullshit. I’m not an artist. I don’t know how to paint.” This was the moment he decided to become a writer. When he was twenty-six years old, the Qattan Foundation awarded Ala a writing prize and gave him the opportunity to read his work onstage in front of a crowd in Ramallah. The prize and the applause convinced Ala that he could be a successful novelist.