Losing Israel

by Jasmine Donahaye

  My uncle David had been afraid, too. He had travelled a great deal – to Nepal, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Vietnam, as a consultant specialist in insect control in grain storage. When he visited us in England during my childhood, he used to bring exotic conditions – dysentery, malaria – and beautiful gifts: bracelets from India, carvings from east Africa. He had a Monty Python humour, a crude schoolboy repartee. David was politically and socially liberal in most areas except where Arabs were concerned. With ‘the Arabs’, gradually, he had given up, and late in his life, ill and in pain, he began to indulge his fear, his credulity, and his wife’s deeply-held prejudices. Their tiny house was fitted with burglar alarms and motion sensors. The sliding door into the back yard was secured with a metal shutter. The front windows were protected by heavy metal grilles.

  In the summer of 2007, when I visited with my younger daughter, David was already very ill, and vulnerable. He described the shoddy work on the house done by Arab builders – how the workers had stolen building materials; how they had deliberately mis-measured a doorway, so that the door didn’t fit; how they had laid floor tiles incorrectly, so that they were coming loose. Never again, he and Myriam said: now they’d not hire Arab workers. Their neighbours had been broken into. They said that Palestinians came from the Territories and stole – cars, mostly, as well as taking anything to hand, but they organised targeted thefts, too, of expensive items, specialised technology: robbery to order, a kind of criminal commissioning.

  My daughter and I were heading to Ramallah to visit Ghaith, my friend who was a student at Cardiff University, and David didn’t think we should go. It wasn’t safe, he said. He was concerned about physical danger, but also concerned that I might be used.

  ‘Used how?’ I asked.

  ‘How well do you know these people?’ he said.

  ‘Well enough,’ I said, ‘to trust them.’

  My unvoiced outrage did not entirely displace a niggling moment of doubt – was I being naive? I thought of Ghaith, of his mass of curly black hair, his piercings, his splay-footed walk, and it was laughable to doubt. Nevertheless, it did not seem a good idea to mention that his parents had been members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. I didn’t in fact know them at all.

  ‘Why should you go there?’ Myriam said. ‘Can’t your friend come here?’

  ‘It’s hard for him to get a permit: he’s the wrong age,’ I told her.

  ‘Good, I’m glad,’ she said. ‘Why should they come here? If they want to go somewhere they can go to Jordan, to Saudi…’

  My aunt had welcomed me; she had embraced my daughter. She had said, ‘This is your home: please feel completely at home.’ I was her guest. I could not engage with the enormity of what she’d just said. When she made such a pronouncement, as her guest I could not say anything that was in my mind. To have said it would have been an abuse of hospitality, and for my Moroccan aunt, hospitality was close to something sacred.

  Instead I picked up plates and bowls and took them outside to the table in the back yard where we would eat. We were getting ready for a family gathering – one of my cousins was coming over with his wife and children to see us. The adobe walls of the house and yard were painted an orange ochre, and the shutters and gate and woodwork were cobalt blue. All the woodwork had been made by my uncle years before: outside, the window frames and shutters and fence; inside, the furniture and the stairs and banisters, and, hanging on the walls, some of the ouds and guitars he’d made before he’d cut off the top joint of his thumb with a saw. He’d put his piece of thumb in a bag of ice and driven to hospital, but the doctors had been unable to reattach it.

  My uncle lifted the edge of the tablecloth. ‘Look,’ he said, bending over and showing me the hole in the end of the hollow frame of the metal trestle-table. There in the opening floated a tiny face of poison and danger, black-patterned, with yellow antennae. Another appeared behind it, jostling to come out, and delicately, lightly, the first one climbed to the edge and floated off towards me, trailing long, finely jointed black and yellow legs. I backed away from it. Those wasp colours of alarm and patterns of attack were my deepest childhood fear, fear on an irrational scale – a phobia.

  Around my bare legs another had arrived, waiting, floating, wanting to go in. There was a little crust of mud in the entryway. ‘They’re building a nest there,’ my uncle said, smiling at them. ‘They’re mud wasps. Aren’t they wonderful?’ Seeing my reaction, he tried to reassure me. ‘They’re not like the common wasp,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they even sting,’ but to me that didn’t matter – the colour scheme, and that arbitrary movement, whose meaning I could not interpret as anything but threat, meant only imminent attack.

  Knowing so deep inside you danger, violent danger, can you react as if it were otherwise? Can you ever undo the way the angry face, those terrible mandibles and that bisected abdomen, those violently contrasting colours, have burned into you the knowledge – often mistaken, but knowledge nevertheless – of attack? Perhaps you can change it, if you want to: you can study the habits, the meanings of its movements; you can watch it build its complicated nest, and observe its delicate communications. Gradually increasing exposure is one method for trying to overcome a phobia. But I didn’t want to understand, and in some fundamental way I did not want to lose my fear, either, to feel better about wasps, because what I felt was also a kind of hatred: when I saw a wasp, what I wanted unequivocally was for it to die. Even when I had killed them en masse with ant-powder in a ground nest near my house, and had come the next day to find the dead heaped in the entryway – piles of bodies, multiples, a horror of waspness – it had made little difference that they were dead. In stasis they still carried with them the reminder of that insistent weaving attack movement, and I wanted them not so much dead, as never to have existed.

  Despite the doubts my uncle had voiced, I went with my daughter to Ramallah anyway, on the way south to Eilat, smug in my own liberalism, repudiating what I dismissed as his ignorant mistrust, my aunt’s prejudice and fear, and it started to go wrong before we even left Holon. My phone ran out of credit and I could not find any way to top it up: it was Shabbat and everything was shut. I had told Ghaith approximately what time we’d get to the Qalandia checkpoint, where he’d meet us at the other side, but we got there earlier than I’d estimated, and I could not contact him to say we’d arrived.

  This was 2007, the first occasion in years that I had spent any extended time in Israel, apart from a week’s visit to family the previous year, and this was the first time I was visiting the West Bank since before the start of the Intifada in 1987. Though I had seen the high, heavy separation fence from the top of Mount Gilboa, the approach to Qalandia gave me my first sight of the notorious wall section of the barrier. It had settled into the land, concrete and cement weathering quickly in the heat. The checkpoint was in a barren landscape of waste ground, with rubbish caught in the low scrub. I felt it ought to have been somehow momentous, the first time passing through, as though we’d entered a war zone, but the brutality of the wall and its watchtowers had, through over-exposure to its image, become normalised and unremarkable. It was only remarkable in its ordinariness.

  There was no other traffic going through, and we were waved straight on without being stopped. The Qalandia checkpoint was frequently violent, and it was the one place I did not want to wait. Ours was the only car in the wide empty lot on the far side of the barrier. Though there was little traffic coming from the Israeli side, there were plenty of people trying to cross the other way. Heavy traffic crawled on the road towards and past the checkpoint in a blare of horns. A military jeep sped by, blue lights flashing.

  Sitting alone and conspicuous in the empty car park, waiting for Ghaith to arrive, we were soon enough targeted by a ragged streetseller, who leaned towards the window, gesturing to me to open it. He held up bags of spices – green za’tar, and powdered red sumac – and knocked on the window. British politeness, fear of causing offence, m
ade me open it, and he thrust a bag of sumac at me. ‘Only ten shekels,’ he said.

  When I refused, and began closing the window, he asked, ‘How much you pay?’ and when I shook my head he began to get angry. ‘Take it, take it, I give it to you,’ he said, and he reached through the window and put the bag of sumac in my lap. I handed it back, closed the window and looked away, kicking myself, frightened. Not three minutes across the border and I had been a foolish tourist, and now an angry streetseller was shambling off to – to what, exactly? I told myself the fears were absurd, but they had proliferated and grown ugly by the time Ghaith stepped out of a taxi in front of us.

  The centre of Ramallah was the way I remembered much of Israel as a child – full of diesel fumes and ruinous buses, crowded and noisy. But in the stillness of the middle-class residential neighbourhoods, with their rose gardens and pale stone houses, Israel seemed a long way away – until we walked to the Quaker school, and looked out over the valley at the mass of white Jewish settlement buildings clustered on the crest of the hill opposite. After lunch in a quiet shaded restaurant, Ghaith refused to let me pay, or contribute. ‘You’re my guests,’ he said.

  Getting through the checkpoint late that afternoon was more complicated than coming the other way. We inched forward in a crush of cars, all trying to cut across one another. Boys squeezed sideways between wing mirrors, knocking on car windows and gesturing with their goods – packs of cigarettes and bags of sumac, kites in the shape of military jets. I couldn’t make out the frequent loudspeaker announcements from the soldiers’ booths. In Ramallah itself I had not felt afraid, but at the Qalandia checkpoint the atmosphere was tense and angry.

  My anxiety increased as we were searched and questioned: the pressure to get out was building behind me, and building in me, reinforced by the watchtowers, the booths, the heavy, ominous mass of the wall. Now its concrete physicality and power became real and felt, as we were suspended, exposed, caught on the cusp between inside and outside, waiting to be allowed to exit, or enter.

  When, at last, we were waved through, I drove off in the wrong direction, and with my attention not fully on the road I hit the curb hard, and shortly after felt with sickening certainty the lopsided sagging crunch of a punctured tyre. We were out of sight of the checkpoint, round the bend from it, and there was nothing but the great blind expanse of the wall on one side, and waste ground on the other. I had no way to make a phone-call and we had to walk back to the checkpoint to ask a soldier if I could borrow a phone.

  The soldiers laughed among themselves, gesturing towards us with their chins. One of the bus drivers came over and pointed out a man who, he said, would be happy to change the tyre. The man was tall and silent. He walked back with us and got to work without saying a word. By the time he had finished changing the tyre it was getting dark. He wouldn’t accept any payment for his work. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said – ‘bevakasha,’ and walked off slowly back towards the checkpoint.

  In the deepening dusk I soon got lost. With what was always my unreliable sense of direction, and that ever-changing layout of roads, it was impossible not to. Roads marked on the map were closed; other roads did not appear on the map. Two that we took came to an end in piles of boulders and heaps of earth, and a third in a high fence and closed gate, heavily guarded by soldiers and jeeps. In the end, we followed the direction of the rest of the traffic, and were soon stopped at a roadblock. Ahead of us, a man was ordered out of his car. Soldiers turned him against the side of the barrier kiosk; with two guns trained on him, he was roughly searched, his pockets emptied.

  The other soldiers gestured us through impatiently. I drove on, looking for some sign, any sign of a familiar name or landmark or direction. We were in volatile Arab East Jerusalem and its constellation of villages. We were in the West Bank, in the dark, without access to a phone, utterly lost. I’d taken my fourteen-year-old daughter into danger, and I was terrified.

  I wondered what I had done in my reactive, would-be liberal naivety. I remembered getting lost in East Oakland in California in the mid-1990s, at the height of the crack-fuelled gang wars, when the city had the highest homicide rate in the US. I was in a part of the inner city, the ghetto, where to show that you were lost, to stop and ask for help, or even to stop and look at the map was a reckless invitation to become another murder statistic. Now, as then, all veneer of liberality peeled away. I was in Arab territory and I was therefore in danger. I had forgotten the man who had helped me just a short while before – an Arab, a Palestinian; I had forgotten the man who had been my host, a man who was considerate, critical, funny, protective – an Arab, a Palestinian. I had forgotten my friend Mohamed in Cardiff, who always insisted I phone as soon as I got home, no matter how late, so that he would know I had arrived safely – an Arab, a Palestinian. I was a Jew, I was in hostile Arab territory, and I was in danger, so when I saw a sign for the Jewish settlement bloc of Ma’ale Adumim, and then that symbol of settler ideology itself rose up glimmering, white and pure on the hillside like some kind of heavenly offer of refuge, I was flooded, irradiated with relief. A Jewish settlement. A Jewish settlement city! My staggering, agitated heart steadied into a painful, hopeful pounding. Never mind that I hated what it was, the ideology it represented: it was Jewish, and we were safe…

  I was not able, afterwards, to work out where we had gone, or why, or what kind of detour we had taken. It may have been a mere ten minutes, or an hour of driving, lost and afraid. When, later, I told Myriam the story of the puncture, rendering it comic, gliding over my stupidity, grateful for the kindness of a stranger who would accept nothing more than a thank you, she said grudgingly: ‘Nu, so there are some good Arabs.’

  Now, a year and a half later, Myriam is more afraid than when David was alive, more intemperate in her characterisation of Arabs. I tell her I’m going to Ramallah to meet Ghaith’s mother, who might be able to help me find out where refugees from Al Murassas and Yubla ended up, and again she thinks I should not go. She reminds me how I got lost last time, what could have happened, though nothing happened. She is afraid for me: the West Bank is dangerous, and Arabs are not to be trusted. For Myriam, ‘Arabs’ are an undifferentiated mass that includes Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and the populations of the surrounding countries. She has welcomed me as she always does – with food, with heaps of food, with warmth and humour. And as always I am caught between some liberal imperative to challenge her prejudice, and my moral obligations as her guest. In the face of hers, my own fears and prejudices seem almost benign, but I don’t challenge her; I swallow my outrage at her statements about Arabs. Instead we talk, in our usual mixture of Hebrew and French and English, about safer subjects – my uncle’s death; my cousins’ difficulties; my sister’s death; how my parents are managing in their retirement in Australia; my own daughters coming and going between Wales and America.

  From Tel Aviv I take the bus to Jerusalem, and another to Ramallah, where, over a lunch of chicken, pita and cold lemonade, Randa, Ghaith’s mother, agrees to try to help put me in touch with refugees from Al Murassas and Yubla, if she can find them. She works in economic development with refugee groups. ‘Look, yani, it’s important that the story is told,’ she says. ‘I can help you, of course. But, yani,’ she adds, ‘you should keep in mind what the situation is. I’ve been in the camps here, and in Lebanon. You have three or four generations in one room, and all they have, all they have is their memories, and a wall painting of the village they came from. Jewish, Israeli… it makes no difference. For them a Jew, a Zionist, an Israeli – it’s all the same. Yani, you should not say you’re Jewish, that you have any connection with the kibbutz, with the place. Say, at the start, only that you’re British…’

  She asks me to write something for her, on letterhead, something formal to show my credentials and institutional affiliation, but I can’t do that: this is a private quest, a personal search. I’m not an academic, a university employee – I work for
the Welsh Books Council, and my search is no part of my job. I have nothing to give her, to explain my intentions, to legitimise me, to show my trustworthiness and authenticity. Nevertheless I need her, or someone like her. I can’t just take a bus across the border to Amman or Irbid or some other Jordanian city, ask for directions to the refugee camp, and go wandering through alleys, gazing at graffiti and martyrdom posters, hoping for an accidental meeting with the granddaughter or grandson of someone from Yubla or Al Murassas. I need intermediaries, with their particular judgements and opinions, and my intermediary will always need some evidence with which to reassure people who would rightly be mistrustful. Between me and Abu Omar there was my uncle. Between me and some possible refugees, Randa, or someone else – an UNRWA official, an academic, a peace worker, a political activist; some introducer or stringer, some fixer or interpreter. But after meeting Abu Omar’s grandson I am not sure about my intentions anymore. His after-image smiles at me, ironic, dimpled. Precisely why I am interested in meeting refugees from Al Murassas or Yubla, and precisely what I hope for, isn’t something I want to dwell on anymore, is not something I am comfortable examining too closely.

  Randa is interested in what I want to do, but my explan-ation of how I came to know about the villages so late upsets her. ‘It’s a crime to steal a people’s history,’ she says. ‘My grandmother, in Jaffa, was the first in all of Palestine to own a piano. How can you say there was no one here, that there was no culture, just a few Bedouin?’

  Before the first Intifada, Randa still used to be able to drive with her father from Jaffa to Gaza. Along the way he would point out all the sites of empty or destroyed Palestinian settlements, identifying them by their sabra thickets – the names, and who had lived there, and what had happened there. Soon, she says, that memory will be gone.