Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

  Near Silvia’s apartment building, we stop in a small shop, something like a year-round Valentine’s store, looking for a bouquet. The palette inside is all reds and whites and pinks, flowers and cards and teddy bears. We buy a small bouquet of white roses, and on the steps outside the shop, an elderly woman dressed in ancient, worn clothes, rags really, pushes a small bouquet of herbs in Don’s face. She wants one shekel, about twenty-five cents, for the entire bunch. Don pays her and we get into Silvia’s car.

  Silvia is that rare NGO head who drives herself and travels with no security. Staff members from the UN, NGOs, and diplomatic missions usually operate within a strict cone of security—darting quickly between cars and compounds, seeing themselves as perpetual targets. But it remains unclear if there is any real danger here for people like us. There are the types of radicals, unbound and unpredictable, who killed Vittorio Arrigoni. Anyway, Silvia drives like she’s back in Sweden—confident and unbowed.

  Murad, Talib’s brother, is a handsome young man of twenty-five. Don and Silvia and I are all sitting on the floor of Talib and Amna’s apartment while Murad looks on his computer for a video of the time, during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, when he saved the life of an old man, a Catholic, while Murad was out of his mind on hash.

  “I was so high,” Murad says.

  The apartment is spacious and clean, located eight stories up, in a building dominated by the offices of media companies. After a dinner of sausage, stuffed zucchini, and rice, we look out the windows, where Talib and Amna watched the 2014 bombing, and Amna shows us her paintings, the ones I’d seen on her phone. In person, her painting of the siege is more vivid than any photos of the bombing.

  Now Murad, wide eyed and quick to laughter, is trying to find footage of the time he ended up on the local news. The bombing of Gaza City had been going on for weeks, and Murad, like many other Gazans, lived with the perpetual expectation that he would die. The Israelis were targeting hard military installations, but they were also flattening buildings where Hamas operatives were known to live.

  The Israelis have extensive intelligence networks in Gaza, so it’s not difficult for them to know where a senior Hamas official might dwell. During the 2014 conflict, the Israelis would often choose to reduce such a building to rubble. In most cases, the Hamas official lived in an apartment building housing hundreds of other people, too, but the Israelis, to punish the Hamas official, would also leave hundreds of other people homeless.

  When they flatten such a home, they’re usually not intending to kill the Hamas official. In fact, the most recent IDF practice is to give residents of the building a courtesy call before the bombing, or drop a small signal bomb, a practice known as roof-knocking. This was a new Israeli policy, instituted during the 2014 conflict, meant to reduce collateral damage. They would call a resident of the building, informing that resident to leave their homes as soon as they could, and to tell everyone else who lived there. Then, fifteen minutes later, a missile would strike and the building would fall.

  One night in 2014, Murad was sitting at a friend’s house, high as a kite, when he got a phone call from a friend. A nearby apartment building was about to be leveled. Murad thought of an old man he knew who lived next door to the building about to be flattened. This man, Murad knew, would not be able to make it out in time. (Though the Israelis told the residents of the building, those who lived in other, nearby buildings were given no such courtesy call.)

  So Murad got up, still high, almost numb, and ran to the building. He checked the time on his phone. He probably had six minutes before the air strike would hit. He ran into the building, flew up eight flights of stairs, and knocked furiously on the man’s door. The man finally emerged, dazed, with no clue that his building would be rubble in minutes. Murad rushed him down the stairs and into the street.

  We are sitting on the floor of Talib and Amna’s apartment, looking at his laptop, and Murad finally finds the news footage. There is a video of fire, and ambulances and Gaza’s Civil Defense firefighters. And then there’s Murad, walking down the street, his face bright in the glare of the camera’s light, and next to him is a tiny man, bald and no more than a hundred pounds, looking bewildered, terrified. In the footage, Murad does not look high. He looks very present, very much awake and aware, guiding the man down the street as flames bloom behind Gaza City’s urban silhouette.

  “But Gazans elected Hamas,” Silvia reminds our hosts. She makes it clear that according to several international observers, the elections were fair and transparent, and that Gazans made their choice. She comes just short of saying “I told you so.”

  But, Talib says, he and Amna and Murad did not vote for Hamas. They did not ask to be raised here. They did not ask to grow up inside a prison, where the people grew so desperate they would elect a radical party like Hamas. They have no allegiance to any of it—not this party, not this city, not this country.

  “Good night,” the three of us, Silvia, Don, and I, say to Amna and Talib and Murad. “The meal was delicious. You were perfect hosts.”

  In the morning, Silvia and I will both be crossing the Erez border, heading back to Israel, where we will pass freely and continue on to Tel Aviv. From there, with our Swedish and American passports, we can go anywhere in the world.

  In the morning Talib and Amna insist on driving me to the Erez gate. I had tried to take a taxi, but they wouldn’t allow it. Today it is Talib driving, and we take the waterfront route, passing an endless array of buildings shelled during the 2014 conflict. Most are apartment buildings, and most are largely empty. But in many of these buildings, people still dwell, without windows, their laundry hung on the line, rubble to rubble, satellite dishes on the roof. A few have been painted in pastel colors, a recent project of an international NGO to beautify the waterfront.

  We park near the Erez gate. We are early, so we talk about their upcoming visa interview. I don’t know what to tell them. I explain what I know of asylum law, and tell them to call me if they need any help, any advice. But their situation is dire, and without parallel in the modern world. Though there are people around the world fervently wanting to move from oppressive governments, from poverty and terrorism and tyranny, it’s only the Gazans who have absolutely no options to do so. As dangerous as it may be for North Africans to cross the sea to Sicily, or Syrians to cross the desert to Jordan, or Mexicans to cross to Texas, there are no walls that make those journeys impossible. There is always a chance. Even the Cubans of the Cold War—whose plight in some ways mirrored that of the Gazans, being victimized by a blockade and caught in geopolitics beyond their control or interest—had the option of the sea. If not Florida, there was the Dominican Republic, Haiti, elsewhere in the Caribbean.

  The Gazans, though, are caught in a prison that has been perfected. It is impassable. They have no options but to ask permission and to wait.

  Oddly, right in front of us is an outdoor mural, depicting a Gazan and an Israeli sitting at a desk. The Gazan is being interviewed by the Israeli, and the Israeli is attempting to get the Gazan to become an Israeli informant. The mural is strangely colorful, festive even. The dialogue coming from the Israeli spy recruiter unspools from his mouth in a flowing wave of words, and the Gazan, sitting defiantly across the desk, is refusing to become a traitor.

  Amna is with us, and I turn around to see that she’s taken off her wool hat, revealing hair streaked with red. Her clothing and uncovered and dyed hair would attract too much attention among so many guards and Hamsawis, so she is sunk deep into her seat, almost invisible in the darkness of the backseat. Today she didn’t drive, couldn’t drive here, but yesterday she was a phenom. After we visited Jamal’s farm, Amna had insisted on driving home. It was a long trip, over an hour, almost the length of Gaza, and she endured withering stares, children in the villages pointing at her, male drivers yelling at her and at Talib. All along, she stared straight ahead, never responding, never flinching.

  I say good-bye to Amna, who stays in
the car as Talib walks me through the first checkpoint. There is a line of Western aid workers waiting to go through customs. I see Silvia and two members of her staff, and I wave, and when I do, I drop the handle of my rollerbag, and its long handle makes a loud cracking sound on the linoleum floor. All the aid workers jump, startled, and then glare at me. To them the sound could have been gunfire, a bomb, anything.

  Talib doesn’t react. We say good-bye. I offer him money for gas, for photographic equipment. “No fucking way,” he says, smiling. We lie about seeing each other again, and he turns to drive home with Amna.

  After customs, Silvia asks me to accompany a German young woman, traveling alone. She has asthma and the heat is affecting her. We walk together through the kilometer-long fenced-in corridor through the buffer zone, and she tells me how she’s working on a photographic series about circus groups. She’s been to Afghanistan and Pakistan, too, and has just spent a week in Gaza, documenting a circus group whose members learned all they know by watching videos on the Internet.

  Finally we arrive at the green-glass building, and go through security, through customs, and are in Israel. And I’m thinking about how exhausting it must be. To be Talib and Amna, living in a place that does not accept you, a place to which you have no loyalty or affection—everything you want in life is beyond the walls—and yet you cannot leave.

  When we’d first met, at the al-Deira, we’d talked about meeting new friends, eventually saying good-bye. “We meet many internationals,” Amna said then. “It’s difficult every time to say good-bye to these people. We are always limited. We cannot see the real world outside. We cannot cross with you.”

  (Names have been changed to protect the speakers.)

  EPILOGUE

  I stayed in touch with Talib and Amna after I left. I introduced them to an asylum lawyer in San Francisco, who advised them as best she could from 7,000 miles away. They updated me many times about their status, but their prospects looked grim. Finally they received a visa from the United States, but still couldn’t get a permit from the Israelis or Egyptians to leave Gaza. It was maddening. The barriers seemed insurmountable.

  Then one day in October, I got an email. “We’re in Brooklyn!!” Talib wrote. They’d bribed an Egyptian guard at the Rafah gate. It cost them $5000 but they were out. They traveled fourteen hours through the Sinai Peninsula and were finally free. With their Palestinian passports and their American visas, they flew to New York.

  I was heading to Washington, DC, in November, and asked them if they wanted to meet in the capitol. They agreed, and we planned to meet on a Wednesday at the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture. It happened to be the Wednesday after the election of Donald Trump, who had proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

  They had either come just in time, or at the very worst time.

  Sumud

  Emily Raboteau

  1. Tel Aviv

  I expected trouble getting through border inspection when I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport. In part this was because I’d had difficulty the first time I traveled to Israel, in the run-up to the second intifada. The problem then had to do with my middle name: Ishem. Evidently, it sounded vaguely Arabic. I was ignorant of my name’s origin and strip-searched at the airport as a result. I’d since learned that it’s likely a German Jewish surname. I was ready to share this information if I were questioned again about my identity. I’d also popped a half a Xanax. Like most airport agents, this poor woman looked like she suffered from hemorrhoids and would rather be anywhere else. I’m not sure what I looked like to her. An activist? A journalist? A threat? She examined my US passport. What was the purpose of my travel in Israel? she inquired.

  My hosts had prepared me to be vague about this. I wasn’t to volunteer I’d been invited here to write about the occupation on the occasion of its upcoming fiftieth anniversary, but rather to say I was writing about life in Israel and Palestine in general. The bulk of my trip would be spent in the occupied Palestinian territories, but I’d taken care to scrawl ISRAEL on the cover of my blank notebook above the date—June 2016—in the event my suitcase was searched. “I’m here to visit an old friend,” I told the agent, which was equally true. I wanted to know how Tamar was coping with her girls in this fucked-up realm, and, if I’m honest, to process with her how I was coping in mine, which was fucked in parallel ways.

  “It’s a long journey for just one week,” the agent observed. “Why so short a time?” I wasn’t fooled by the woman’s conversational tone. I assumed the grilling was about to begin. I told her a week was as long as I could bear spending away from my two young children. Another truth, though I also felt giddy to be free, for a spell, of my son and daughter, and my country. Her face softened as she asked me their ages. “They’re three and five,” I answered. Just like that, she stamped my passport and let me through. “Have fun in Israel!” she called. I felt I’d been bestowed a magic cape with two contradictory but mutually advantageous traits: invisibility and power. I was a mother.

  2. Susiya

  It was unusually hot for June, and the heat was dry at the desert’s edge. The semiarid South Hebron Hills were stubbled with scrub and thistles, and strewn with bone-colored rock. Though it was not quite summer and not yet noon, my guide, Ahmad S., estimated the temperature had climbed to 37 degrees, or as my mind translated it, almost 100. “Drink,” the water lab technician reminded me. I lifted my bottle to my lips and without thinking, drained it. A first-world privilege, this—to be thoughtless about water. We were at the ankles of the West Bank, far off the grid, in the cab of Ahmad’s dusty truck.

  Ahmad, twenty-nine, Palestinian, comes from a town northwest of Hebron called Halhul. With his light-brown skin, gelled hair, gold chain, slim-fitting jeans, and Nikes, he could pass for one of the Dominican guys in my neighborhood back home in New York City. Apart from Ahmad’s slick look, I found hardly anything familiar in the desolate landscape. We may as well have been driving on an asteroid. Judea, the right-wing Zionists call it. The apostle Mark called it “the wilderness.” It was hard for me as an outsider to comprehend how such barren hills could sustain life. I’d been to Brazil’s sertão, the steppes of New Mexico, and to Andalusia in Spain, where the spaghetti Westerns were filmed. None of those deserts was as dry as this. Yet to the north of us grew the vineyards of Mount Hebron, famed for its grapes since biblical times. The foothills to the west extended into Israel. To the east dropped the Jordan Valley, where the storied river (that the Israelites crossed) bottoms out into the Dead Sea. In Israeli settler parlance, and according to the Torah, God granted this land to the Jews.

  We continued south, drawing closer to the area where the separation barrier peters out like the tail of an undulating snake. From the passenger’s side window I saw an Israeli settlement spread out on a hilltop like a green mirage. According to the international community, the settlement is illegal.

  “Throughout history, people always gravitate to the same places, wherever there is water,” Ahmad said. “We have limited water here. This, as much as the rest of it, is the root of the conflict.”

  In close range, just off Road 317, lay our destination—the Palestinian shantytown of Khirbet Susiya, a ramshackle batch of tents, shacks, sheep pens, outhouses, a sad looking swing set donated by the EU, a lopsided dovecote, a solar panel array, and a stone monument to an eighteen-month-old allegedly burned alive in the West Bank town of Duma the previous summer when a group of masked Israeli extremists lobbed a firebomb into his parents’ dwelling. According to Israel, the village of Susiya is illegal. All of its structures are under threat of demolition by the Israeli Civil Administration, the military arm meant to oversee daily life in Palestine.

  Because I wasn’t ready to look at the picture of the toddler’s face inlaid in the monument as we rolled past it, I turned my attention to one of the most prominent of the village’s “illegal” structures—a big white water tank on stilts. Along with the solar panels, the tank
was supplied to the people of Susiya by the nonprofit Palestinian-Israeli organization Community Energy Technology in the Middle East (Comet-ME). Comet employs Ahmad, who holds a degree in laboratory science from al-Quds University. Its mission is to supply renewable energy and clean water services to some of the most impoverished and marginalized people in the occupied Palestinian territories.

  Including Susiya, Comet currently serves about thirty villages in the South Hebron Hills. These small hamlets are mostly composed of clans of shepherds and farmers who dwell in caves and tents, living much as their ancestors have for centuries, separating the wheat from the chaff, except that in recent history they’ve had the bulk of their land grabbed. More recently, thanks to Comet, they’ve enjoyed a taste of electricity.

  I knew about Comet because my best friend from childhood, Tamar, works there in development. She’s the sole woman in a small team of quixotic physicist, electrician, and environmental-engineer cowboys who throw up wind turbines, water tanks, and solar panel minigrids in the face of a military occupation that has discriminated against Palestinians for the past fifty years. In addition to reconnecting with Tamar, I wanted to better understand the imbalance of power that would make such an organization vital. So here I was, shadowing my friend’s colleague in the Holy Land. Ahmad parked on the unpaved road. We climbed out of the truck.

  Today’s task in Susiya was to test the purity of the water drawn by electric pump from a cistern of harvested rain into the tanks and then out through a network of pipes that snaked along the rocky ground, leading to taps and slow sand filters in the various tents. This system saves the village women the hours of labor it previously cost them to haul the water by hand. Before Ahmad got to work he took a long drag from his cigarette—one of the last allowed him during daylight hours before Ramadan, which was to begin the next day, or the day after that, depending on the fickleness of the moon. “In the spring, this is the most beautiful place in the world,” Ahmad said. He must have read the look of misapprehension on my face. The most beautiful in the world, this place? “It’s so calm,” he said.