Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

  Then I turn towards the synagogues and minarets one last time while the driver puts my old suitcase in the boot of the taxi. Yehuda Amichai writes in a poem:

  The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams

  like the air over industrial cities

  It’s hard to breathe

  Epilogue

  By the way, I had an appointment with an optimist in Ramallah, but he never showed up.

  (Translated from the Norwegian by Dana Caspi)

  Prison Visit

  Dave Eggers

  We have arrived at Erez border crossing with all the necessary permits and stamps and approvals to get me into Gaza. But the young Israeli man at the gate flatly refuses. He is sitting in a gatehouse, a structure no bigger than a backyard shed, and in every way he resembles a fast-food fry cook. He is thin and impossibly young, with just a few stray hairs on his upper lip and chin. He is wearing a black baseball cap with the letters dea—the Drug Enforcement Agency, an American law enforcement arm—in large white letters. After he explains that I can’t enter Gaza this day, he goes back to the work in front of him. Through his window we can see that he’s drawing pictures of an idealized woman on a legal pad.

  I’m with an Israeli guide, an ex-IDF soldier, and we have been traveling much of the day, looking at settlements and outposts in the West Bank. All day, using maps and talking very loudly, my guide has been making a good case for the theory that much of what we’ve seen is not the work of isolated settlers, zealots, and radicals, but rather a systematic plan, conceived and funded by the Israeli government, to encircle and cut off Palestinians from their land and their own people.

  This is unsettling enough, but the enforcement of the myriad and byzantine rules and boundaries that make modern Israel and Palestine possible is equally or more troubling. All over the West Bank we have encountered checkpoints on roads, our car has been searched, and we have seen the refugee camps, and enforcing it all, and wearing the Israeli uniform are, invariably, soldiers who seem to be only months beyond adolescence. Scarcely filling out their fatigues, they appear alternatively blasé and terrified. And, like most nineteen- or twenty-year-olds, they are given to irrationality, caprice, and diffidence. In too many instances of IDF abuses, there is both the more rule-oriented systemic underpinning—the inherently inhumane essence of any occupation—and the capricious: very young soldiers making bad decisions.

  This teenager in the gatehouse is one of these young people given too much unchecked power. When we ask him why I can’t enter Gaza, even though I have every necessary permit and approval, he tells us that visitors aren’t allowed to spend the weekend in Gaza.

  “Never heard that one before,” my guide says.

  There is in fact no regulation that states that visitors can’t visit Gaza on a weekend.

  All week long in the West Bank, members of our group of writers have witnessed and heard testimony about the countless ways the occupation has made life less than human for millions of Palestinians—and, it’s worth noting, for the Israelis who have to enforce the occupation. When laws are irrational, and paranoia is rampant, and ancient hatreds undergird both, life becomes a series of frustrations and humiliations, and humiliated people are either broken spiritless or, with nothing left to lose, are driven to acts of violent desperation. The young people tasked with enforcing these dehumanizing laws and regulations become, too, less human—they become callous, irrational, finding perverse pleasure in the wilful exercise of power.

  Now, at the gate, we are experiencing just the smallest taste of this. Beyond the gate is the wall separating Gaza from Israel. It is twenty-eight feet tall and impenetrable. In front of us, visible about five hundred yards away, is a formidable guard tower, the same kind seen in the West Bank, threatening and impersonal, intended to intimidate. The wall is interrupted by a large modern building, looking like an airport terminal. Its facade is primarily glass, and it has an incongruously welcoming disposition. On its western side, the wall continues, and runs all the way to the Mediterranean.

  I have been in a number of American prisons, and in most ways the entrance to Gaza resembles the entrance to a large maximum-security facility. There are the gatehouses, the walls, the guard towers, the changing and nonsensical rules for visitation, and now, as my guide and I look around for someone to appeal to besides the teenager in the gatehouse drawing pictures of women, I notice for the first time that there is a man pointing a semiautomatic rifle at us.

  He is an Israeli soldier in a low guard tower, just beyond the gatehouse, no more than fifty feet away. He is pointing his Galil at us. He is wearing sunglasses, and has his cheek pressed against the gun in a way that means, or is meant to imply, that he is ready to use it. I point him out to my guide, and the ex-soldier shrugs.

  “It probably isn’t even loaded,” he says. But this seems unlikely.

  It is three thirty now, and the one actual regulation applicable here is that the Gaza border closes at four o’clock.

  “If you don’t get in today, we can try again Sunday,” my guide says.

  And though we argue with the young man in the gatehouse, he seems to be the only human at the border gate, and seems to have full and unchallengeable authority. My guide makes a flurry of phone calls to Israeli officials and journalists. No one he speaks to has ever heard of any regulation prohibiting weekend visits to Gaza. Finally he reaches higher-ups inside the glass building.

  Ten minutes before four o’clock, a different Israeli soldier appears. He is some kind of military press officer, and he’s as friendly as a small-town pharmacist. “Hello!” he says. He waves to my guide and ushers me through the gate. As we walk to the glass building that separates Gaza from Israel, he asks if I’ve been waiting long, if I’ve ever been to Gaza, if I’ve enjoyed my stay in Israel so far.

  Minutes later I’m sitting at an oceanside promenade in Gaza City. The sun is bright and the sky is cloudless and blue. Hundreds of families are out, enjoying the day. Balloon vendors, followed by children and ignored by parents, carry great bursts of color pulling upward on tiny strings. Extravagantly painted fishing boats rock in the gentle current. Kites hover above.

  I am with a man named Hazem, a fixer who guides visiting journalists through Gaza. Hazem is in his late thirties, with a wife and young children. Though the day is in the high seventies, he is wearing a sport coat over a sweater, and because he has worked frequently with British media, he speaks with a posh and lugubrious accent. We sit and watch the crowded waterfront, and I try to get Hazem to understand just how unexpected this is, this happy scene, these happy families, these children sitting on the sand eating ice cream, these groups of young men shyly eyeing groups of young women, this scene of idyllic normalcy in a region known globally only for its conflict, poverty, deprivation, and isolation. No one knows this side of Gaza, because no one can visit.

  Since the election of Hamas in 2005, a political party considered far more radical than Fatah, its counterpart in the West Bank, Gaza has lived through three wars with Israel and the imposition, in 2007, of a blockade that prevents materials, from cement to fiberglass to fertilizer, from entering. Once, tens of thousands of Gazans were employed in Israel and the West Bank, but after the Second Intifada in 2000, the majority lost their work permits. When Hamas took control of Gaza, any remaining work permits were revoked. In the wake of the 2014 cease fire, a handful—five thousand—work permits have been issued, but still, unemployment has soared.

  “The feeling is really bad,” Hazem says. “It touches the soul in a bad way. The feeling that you can’t leave. That no one can come here.” Though Gaza has forty-two kilometers of white-sand coastline, and at one time was a destination for beachgoers—it even had a casino—Hazem can’t remember the last time he saw a tourist in the Gaza Strip. “We are friendly people,” he says, “but it’s out of our hands.”

  In the days before entering Gaza, I’d met dozens of Palestinians in the West Bank, and not one of them had been to Ga
za. Very few even knew anyone in Gaza. But invariably the perception of the place was one of privation and tragedy. And certainly, when I visited, in March 2016, Gaza was only two years past a brutal conflict with Israel. In that war, Israel fired tens of thousands of shells into Gaza, destroying 12,620 housing units and severely damaging another 6,455. Twenty-two hundred Gazans were killed, approximately 1,400 of them civilians. In the media, Gaza has long been depicted as a hellish place, a vast outdoor prison.

  But then there is this waterfront. Jangly music grows louder from the promenade in front of us, and we see it’s coming from tiny cars, built for children and bejeweled in gold and red and blue. For a few shekels children can get a ride on the cars, can be pushed around the pavement for a few minutes by surly teenaged men trying to make a living on a sunny afternoon.

  An older man approaches, trying to sell us knives. They are kitchen knives with pastel-colored handles, and the salesman spreads them out like playing cards. Hazem waves the vendor off, but I make the mistake of showing the faintest curiosity, so the man remains in front of us. He takes out a piece of paper and in a fluid motion slices it in half. He offers this knife for the equivalent of one dollar. Hazem declines. The man offers two knives for the same price. After being rebuffed again, the man lowers the price to a dollar for all the knives he’s carrying. For a moment, I consider buying them, just to appease him, and then think of the absurdity in trying to carry ten knives from Gaza through Israeli security. Hazem declines, and the vendor’s hands drop to his sides. He looks away from us, scanning the promenade for the remote possibility of a sale.

  Hazem and I have heard about this concert, a rarity in Gaza, featuring a new musical act. For months the group, called Sol Band, had been placing flyers around town, and had barraged social media with news of this concert, which was to be free to all. Since taking power in 2007, Hamas has not looked kindly on cultural gatherings like this, but there is some indication that its restrictions are loosening. In 2016, it has allowed a handful of films to be shown, though the movies are heavily censored and their showings closely monitored by what Gazans call the Hamsawis, the shadowy army of plainclothes spies and religious police affiliated with Hamas.

  Concerts are rarer. To hold any concert in Gaza, permits from Hamas are required, and the Hamsawis are reluctant to issue permits, given the risk of inappropriate mixing between men and women. In any public gathering, especially a concert, women are to sit on one side, men on the other. No one is allowed to stand, in large part because standing might lead to swaying to the music, and this in turn might lead to dancing. And dancing is strictly prohibited. As is any kind of lewd comingling between the sexes, which of course would be facilitated by the dancing.

  In the early evening, we enter the Red Crescent building, the second-floor ballroom of which has been converted this night to a concert hall. The muffled sound of amplified music fills the lobby. Hazem and I climb the polished steps to the mezzanine and see dozens of young Gazans socializing, their faces gray behind cigarette smoke. People taking a break from the show huddle in groups, male and female and mixed. The men wear skinny jeans, the women wear sparkly hijabs and new boots. Beyond them are double doors, and beyond the double doors are the thumping sounds of an amplified band in full swing.

  At the doors, there is a jumble of young men serving as gatekeepers. Two are standing behind a card table, each of them holding what looks to be a guest list. Hazem says something about press credentials, and we’re ushered in. The room is dark and packed with young Gazans. The mood is electric, even though the audience, four hundred or so men and women under thirty, are firmly planted in their seats. Ballroom chairs have been arranged in two sections, one male and one female. Hazem and I find the last few remaining empty seats, in the back row of the male section. Instantly a young woman carrying a baby slides into our section, a few rows ahead. She wears no hijab and sits between two men, their hips touching. Soon we see more women in the men’s section, and men in the women’s section.

  Still in their seats, the audience sways to the music—recent popular tunes from Egypt and Lebanon. Onstage, the band is arranged like a tableau, well composed but unmoving. There is a keyboard player, a clarinetist, a drummer, and a conservatively dressed woman playing the oud. The lead singer takes a tentative few steps left to right, but the rest of the band plays with feet firmly planted. Certain songs elicit loud cheers, and the audience sings every word. They raise their phones to capture the concert, their blue screens high over their heads, and when a new song begins, they whoop and sing along. It all seems far removed, and far more liberalized, than one would expect to be permitted under the conservative rule of Hamas. For the single young men and women in the room, this is clearly the event of the month—maybe of the year. People continue to arrive and the hall grows more crowded. Friends look for friends. People get up, make room, sit down. Soon there are dozens of people standing behind us, and new people flow into the hall continuously.

  Meanwhile, a blur of a man, wearing jeans and a sport coat, is at loose ends, darting through the room, looking like a concert promoter anywhere in the world. He’s young and slick and nervous, walking up and down the center aisle, moving chairs, carrying new chairs, directing traffic, trying to find seating for everyone, checking his phone.

  Because we’ve seen enough of the show, and because more and more people continue to stream into the hall, Hazem and I cede our seats to two women who have just arrived, and we leave. In the mezzanine, we run into two young women, both journalists. Because the circle of Gazan journalists and fixers is small, Hazem knows them both. One is Basilah*, with whom I have some American friends in common. In the haze of cigarette smoke and the buzz of the event of the season, we talk for a few minutes before the journalists want to go back inside to see the rest of the show.

  Outside, the sky is pink and the air is cooling with the setting sun. The sound of drums overtakes the street, and when Hazem pulls his aging sedan onto the main drag, we find ourselves behind a wedding parade. A large open-backed cargo truck carries a dozen men—musicians playing drums and horns, issuing into the evening sky a rhythmic and delirious dirge. Following the truck is a caravan of six cars decorated with balloons and streamers. They swerve through traffic, honking, pink balloons flying off caravan cars and drifting to the dusty roadside.

  We follow the wedding parade up al-Rasheed Road as it hugs the coast and then turns east and inland. The road is abuzz with tuk-tuks and motorcycles and taxis. Barefoot children play on the rubble-laden sidewalks. Groups of teenage boys walk in the middle of the street, against traffic, defiantly causing cars to swerve around them. Old men on horse-drawn carts hug the curb. White lights from open shops line the streets. As we’re following one wedding parade, another passes us going the other way. Like the one we’re following, it features a truck filled with drums and horns, and is followed by a caravan of celebrants in sedans and trucks.

  For a few hours this Thursday night, Gaza City is full of life and celebration, a coastal town electric with possibility. As confounding as was the idyllic waterfront earlier in the day, al-Rasheed Road on a Thursday night has an exuberant bustle to it that defies all the assumptions we make about Gaza.

  It happens all weekend, Hazem says. The wedding parties drive up and down al-Rasheed, and end up at one of the many banquet halls on the waterfront. Marriage is expected of the young people of Gaza, and meeting this expectation, even though so few young people are employed, is difficult. Couples will spend upward of twenty thousand dollars on their wedding, and will live under the burden of this debt for many years. Children should come soon thereafter—children that again they have little means to support.

  My hotel, the al-Deira, is located on the waterfront, and when Hazem drops me off, at nine o’clock, the celebrations continue. My room has a view of al-Rasheed’s neon strip to the east and the black shimmer of the Mediterranean to the west. Just below me is an empty lot, where a steady string of men walking on al-Rasheed’s
sidewalk slip in and urinate against the wall. Next to the vacant lot is a restaurant calling itself the Love Boat, the words in English and set against a pair of red hearts. I’d seen the building earlier in the day, and at the time, I couldn’t fathom what kind of business a sign like that would indicate, other than some kind of hourly hotel.

  But now it makes sense.

  It’s one of the many banquet halls where the wedding parades end. From my hotel room, two stories up, I can see into the Love Boat’s courtyard, and soon one of the wedding processions slows down and a flatbed truck full of musicians and drums, seven or eight cars following closely, enters. Thirty or more men in formal wear—the parties are segregated, male and female—unpack themselves from their cars and whoop into the hall. There are more songs, more drums, and soon the groom is led around the courtyard on a horse. Where did the horse come from? It is loud, even in the hotel room, even with the windows closed, and I assume I’m in for a long night.

  I lie in bed, exhausted from the day, trying to square everything that had happened in the last twelve hours. I listen to the whooping of the celebrants, the rumble of the road, the bleating horns, the insistent drums. I had been led to believe Gaza was a place of limitless sorrow, but now there is this. There is music, there are too many weddings to count. There are stylish young people smoking in the lobby of a concert hall. And there is the noise of a city that does not seem likely to sleep.