Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

  Also, they had computers on which to show films of the violence around them: one of a woman who had gone to stop soldiers from beating her son and was flung to the ground. Another, recently taken, of young settlers climbing into an apartment from the roof and seizing and flinging the furniture they found—tables, chairs, beds—into the street below, to cheers from the watching settlers. Calls to the police had gone unanswered. The broken wood would come in use: the festival of Lag Ba’Omer was coming up, huge bonfires would be lit. Many gathered to watch.

  A boy, eleven years old, stick thin with a face as white as a sheet and eyes deep sunk and dark, brings the two men, his father and his uncle, cigarettes. It had taken a long time to persuade him to go out for them, after the time he had the bicycle he was riding in the street knocked down by soldiers who demanded, “Why do you have a knife? Why are you throwing stones?” He had neither a knife nor a stone on him, but they took him to their post, blindfolded him, and tied him to a chair and held him for two hours. When they tired of his crying and sniveling, they let him go, shouting, “You are not allowed on the street again today. If we see you, we will lock you up.” He had come home weeping, then had hidden in his room and refused to come out.

  His father had pulled him to his feet and told him, “Come with me. We will go out on the street and we will walk. Never be afraid to be free. Come,” and he had led him down onto the street to teach him to be free.

  In the apartment next door is a young man who goes to college, studies literature. From his open face, lively eyes, and ready laughter, it is clear he remains free. In a way. He loves the literature he reads, would like to go abroad for graduate studies. But he will not, because his mother and sisters cannot be left to fend for themselves. So physically he is not free, no, but his face and his eyes are lit with another kind of freedom. The kind the settlers must fear.

  At regular intervals these residents have a visitor. They know him well. Each time he asks them, “When will you leave? Here, I promise you a million dollars. An American visa. American citizenship guaranteed. Take it, and leave. Why won’t you leave?”

  The remaining residents stare at him, silently. Some others have accepted his offers and gone, but they continue to refuse. All he can find in their faces, their silence, is their refusal.

  At the Jerusalem Writers Festival, a conversation between Colum McCann and David Grossman.

  McCann: “So why don’t you leave?”

  Grossman: “Because here I am relevant.”

  The Visible City

  Not far from Shuhada Street, the Visible City, a settlement. Not so much a fortress, this one, as a sleek city suburb. The apartments have balconies with flowers, the yards have trees. There are cypress trees, there is bougainvillea. Cars come out of the gates, they are driven to shops and schools, they take people to work. The sun shines. How normal it all is.

  But the apartments must have windows and out of those windows the residents can look across the street to the old city, the ghost city. When they do, what do they think? Or do they not think, just hope that it will disappear in a cloud of dust, like a ghost?

  From the Invisible to the Visible World

  One must go through a checkpoint. One must have a pass, an entry permit, a work permit, ID. One must be there at four a.m. if one needs to be at work, or at school, by seven a.m. One must pass through turnstiles guarded by soldiers who might do their best to bar entry or at least delay it. Men must remove belts, shoes, women must prove they have a doctor’s appointment or there is a family crisis or it is a day or an hour when it is permitted to visit the mosque. It cannot be on any day or at any time. Nowhere is time and the calendar observed with greater ferocity.

  Out on the land it is fences that separate farmers from their fields. There are gates that will be opened at certain times, for a certain period, so the farmers may tend to their crops, their vines, and their flocks. If a farmer misses the time allotted to him, he will find the gate closed. If it is open, he will find it is not a direct crossing to his land; the route devised for him is the longest one possible to make. So gradually his vines and crops will wither, his flocks disappear, and the land become fallow. Then, by “Ottoman law” it can be appropriated—and “settled.”

  Don’t these people understand that they are not meant to be? That they are ghosts, without lives, without a future? So why do they insist on continuing to exist? And suffer?

  Hip-Hop Is Not Dead

  Porochista Khakpour

  My trip to Israel-Palestine was my first journey back to the Middle East after thirty-four years. My family, Iranian refugees, left Iran just before I turned four, shortly after the revolution. The Iran-Iraq War was well under way. I had not properly been in the region since, other than a dizzying stopover at the Dubai airport en route to Australia, which really could have been any travel hub in the First World.

  The night before my flight to Tel Aviv I was restless in my bed in New York City’s Harlem. For months I’d felt equally agonized and excited about this trip. Just six months before, I’d gone to the first Muslim country I’ve been in since Iran: Indonesia, and I’d found myself mesmerized by the sound of Islamic prayers over loudspeakers, streets full of women in colorful veils, and people who not only were interested in but delighted by my background. The last time I’d been surrounded by women in veils and heard the sound of the call to prayer was when I was a toddler in Iran. My memories of that time are tense and turbulent and, in the context of my new home in America, even shameful. Indonesia somehow made me feel more Iranian, in the best way. But just weeks after I left, the Sarinah shopping mall in Jakarta, right across from my arty boutique hotel, was attacked by terrorists. In the months that followed, I read about one terrorist attack after another, all over the globe. Every week it felt like I had a new country to hashtag with “#PrayFor.”

  Israel-Palestine, of course, seemed menacing well before all this. I had long argued the issue with people I barely knew on Facebook; I fought about Gaza without understanding much about the region. And as the only Middle Easterner from a Muslim culture flying in from abroad for this trip—and one who was outspoken on all issues involving the Middle East online—it frightened me that my hosts took my fears about safety seriously.

  At several points I considered not going.

  Still, in another way, this trip felt like a homecoming. My assignment was to cover Palestinian hip-hop. It had been fourteen years since I had covered the hip-hop beat, my first area of interest as a journalist. As a young writer in Manhattan, I lived for shows and did CD reviews and feature interviews for all sorts of music publications, concentrating on hip-hop. Now I longed to learn more about the hip-hop scene in a region where people looked like me and my family.

  Meanwhile, my hosts were fixated on the fact that my US passport listed Iran as my birthplace. This will likely be a problem, my liaison said to me over e-mail several weeks before. My hosts arranged a VIP escort for me at Ben Gurion Airport, in hope that this would get me through without harassment. This felt strange to me: It had been fifteen years since I’d become an American citizen, just two months after 9/11. Certainly the American portion of my hyphenated identity could protect me from the Iranian?

  At the airport, a wisecracking older woman in a suit and badge approaches—she is my escort, and she helps me with my bags, and seems delighted that I am from New York. “Good city!” she says, but when she looks at my passport, she frowns.

  “Iran?!” she says.

  I nod.

  “Oh dear. This could be a”—and here comes the word everyone uses—“problem.”

  I nod. I am prepared.

  But I am not quite prepared for the three and a half hours that I am detained in a holding area in the airport, with half a dozen other Arab-looking people. Inexplicably, a group of Midwestern women who are part of a school trip are detained too.

  “No idea why we would be here!” one of them declares to no one in particular, laughing nervously. Within half an hour
, they are on their way.

  The rest of us wait silently, staring at the ground. There is a television monitor blasting the news, but I am lost in other thoughts. When I finally look up at the screen, I see footage of Syrian refugees waiting at some border.

  My escort, the only Israeli in the holding area, paces back and forth.

  “Iran is a problem here,” she repeats, with a shrug.

  I am questioned not once, not twice, but three times by three different agents in cramped offices. They look things up on their computer as they ask me questions, and I wonder if they are googling my name.

  “What are your parents’ names?”

  I tell them.

  “What about your father’s father?”

  I pause. I never met the man. He died in the 1950s, when my father was seven. His is the most Muslim-sounding name in my family history: Assadolah. I almost feel like they know this. I realize it’s a name I’ve never said out loud, and when I do it’s almost a whisper.

  They ask me to repeat it.

  I say it again.

  Their nods feel knowing.

  Two out of the three interrogators ask me why I am here. As instructed by my hosts, I tell them I’m working on a book. I do not discuss my itinerary, which includes stops at checkpoints, settlements, and refugee camps. I realize too late that the printed-out e-mail I am holding in my hand contains these very instructions.

  “Why does it say not to tell us of your itinerary?” he asks, eyes fixed on the papers in my hands.

  I panic but try to seem calm: “Because it’s not set. They keep changing it. We wouldn’t want to tell you the wrong thing.”

  He looks at me skeptically and I will myself not to look away. He returns to his computer. I am amazed he could make out the print.

  Back in the holding area, I ask my escort what would be the worst-case scenario. She says she is not sure, but she has seen many people put back on a plane and returned.

  Eventually without much explanation I am released. My hosts meet me, and give me a nice tour of Jerusalem. I fall in love with the Old City. There is a beautiful white dustiness to the city, a gentle, aged quality: the ruins come to life. I try to forget about my hours at the airport, though when I see the Israeli soldiers and police officers, many of them young women with full makeup, giving off an aura of both boredom and toughness, I feel anxious again.

  Back in my room, I try to go to sleep early, but outside there is noise. For a moment I wonder if I am hearing the call to prayer, but I soon realize it’s another sound: celebration. On the terrace below my balcony, there is a wedding party going on. Women in jeweled and embroidered veils, wedding cakes, children running around, and that sound: the elated wails of a full-throated singer belting love ballads. In the secondhand joy of these moments, I soon forget my airport experience entirely.

  After many days of emotionally taxing visits to areas under occupation, I return to Tel Aviv—this time for hip-hop. Tamer Nafar, arguably the first Palestinian rapper, invites me to a screening of his and Udi Aloni’s film Junction 48, playing at a Tel Aviv movie theatre. He tells us to pick him up for breakfast before the showing. I am thrilled at the prospect of a fancy Tel Aviv breakfast with a Palestinian hip-hop celebrity.

  But Tamer, who barely says hello to us when we pick him up, does not want to go to some fancy Tel Aviv restaurant. Instead, he takes us to the heart of Lod, twenty minutes from downtown Tel Aviv, where he grew up. Lod is a mixed Palestinian and Jewish city inside Israel, rough around the edges, the way Brooklyn used to be. The café he suggests is a bare-bones greasy spoon, empty but for us. The waiters know him well. They bring us a no-nonsense breakfast of bread and hummus and coffee and we chat.

  Tamer Nafar, thirty-seven, turns heads everywhere he goes—he is well-known to everyone, it seems, in Israel-Palestine. He is also hard to miss: very tall, somewhat chic, and a bit goofy, but still with that hip-hop swagger, in the Jay-Z urban-nerd sort of way. He scans the room, as if on the lookout for something. He is nervous about his film, almost a biopic, in which he stars.

  He is more at ease reminiscing about the 1980s and his introduction to hip-hop. “We all watched Fresh Prince. And everyone was a Michael Jackson fan. For me he was the first gangster rapper before NWA.” He recalls asking his Ethiopian Jewish friends what lyrics meant, stopping any black person on the street for guidance with American rap. He became hooked on Tupac, which, in turn, helped him improve his English. Ultimately it was Slim Shady–era Eminem that became his favorite.

  In the late 1990s, after seeing Jewish rappers perform in Tel Aviv, Tamer started writing lyrics in Hebrew. Shortly after that, he started rapping in Arabic too. He formed the group DAM with his brother Suhell and their friend Mahmoud Jreri. The name means, in Arabic, “lasting forever” or “eternity” and in Hebrew it’s the word for “blood.” It’s also an acronym for “Da Arabian MCs.” DAM’s music caught on. For two weeks, one of their songs was number one on Haifa radio, the first time local rappers were on the charts. The music, at that point, was essentially mixtapes, since Tamer and DAM had no access to producers. By 2000, he was performing in front of both Jewish and Palestinian crowds.

  His biggest hit came in 2001, when he wrote a song called “Who’s the Terrorist.” In it, he argued that the Israeli military and the state were the primary perpetrators of terrorism, not Palestinians. The song was downloaded one million times in a single month, and it led to offers from record companies. DAM signed with Red Circle and EMI Arabia, and started touring and earning real money for the first time.

  DAM was a family affair. Tamer and Suhell’s father came to their shows, even though he was a devout Muslim and was confined to a wheelchair. In 2013, while Tamer and Suhell were away on tour, their father died. Tamer’s first child was born the month before. These two events happening at almost the same time changed Tamer. “I wanted to quit music—I wasn’t inspired anymore,” Tamer says. He wanted to be with his family in Lod.

  Lod, Tamer tells me, as we drive through the nicer part of town where he now lives, not far from the other, rougher side of town where he grew up, was and is a center for the Israel-Palestine drug trade. Tamer himself was never involved in drugs—never even smoked weed, though he hung out with drug dealers and drank a lot. He never smoked, because, he tells me, “a lot of my friends who smoked a cigarette ended up with a needle in their arm, so I didn’t want that.”

  His music is full of clever observations, tongue twisters, and unpredictable slant rhymes, like early Jay-Z meets early Kanye. There is always humor and there is always politics, sometimes deep ironies tucked in the dark comedy. For instance, in “Mama I Fell in Love with a Jew” the hook goes “Her skin is white, my skin is brown / She was going up, I was going down.” In “Who’s the Terrorist” the rhythm feels very Eminem, and Tamer’s rhymes feel like a manifesto: “Who is a terrorist? I am a terrorist? / How can I be a terrorist if I live in my homeland? / Who is a terrorist? You are a terrorist / You have taken everything I own in my land.”

  I realize that not long ago, I’d seen a very funny music video of his single “Scarlett Johansson Has Gas.” In 2014, Johansson had attracted worldwide criticism for appearing in an ad campaign for SodaStream, which was then produced in an Israeli settlement. Tamer’s response came in his hit song: “Saving the world from all them boring details / Whatever she sells, count me in on presales / Even if it’s in a settlement, do we care? / About reality, my reality / First they moved me here and now they wanna move me there.”

  Even with all the international and mainstream success, a project as personal as Junction 48 was a big step for Tamer. It’s described as “a love story of two young Palestinian hip-hop artists who use their music to fight against both the external oppression of Israeli society and the internal repression of their own crime-ridden, conservative community.” In it, Tamer plays Kareem, who lives in the ghetto of Lod and dreams of becoming a rapper. This is, in many ways, Tamer’s 8 Mile—he nods at the comparison. For two years
, he wrote the script with a partner, the Israeli-American filmmaker Oren Moverman, and trained for months for his role. He still feels a bit uneasy with it all: “You imagine things and suddenly the cast has nothing to do with your imagination.”

  But he is happy that most of the cast is made up of nonactors. He is also proud of the film’s early success—it debuted at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the “Best International Feature Narrative” award. At Berlinale, it won an Audience Award. He is excited for it to be released in the United States.

  He identifies as a “Palestinian artist and activist—don’t ask me which is more.” His goals are clear: “I wanted to build myself as a cultural figure who can do political activism and write scripts and act and rap and write music.”

  A few days later, I meet him again, at a benefit event in the garden of a museum in Jaffa. The audience of elderly wealthy people is not prepared for Tamer. Though he seems to me less than enthusiastic as he goes to the stage, he is a professional. There is no DJ, and he sets up the sound via a laptop himself. But once the beat kicks in, Tamer is all star, giving the music everything he has. Even a few white-haired heads manage to bob along.

  Back in the Old City of Jerusalem, I meet Muzi Raps. He’s a heavyset young man wearing a Dr. Seuss T-shirt that says good to the last drop, with a black cap with gold block print spelling out bad. One might consider him the Busta Rhymes of Palestinian hip-hop, a sort of easy-smiling trickster. His name is Mustafa Jaber, and he’s performed under a variety of stage names, including We Are from Here.