Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation Read online

  “Go upstairs! Close the door!” she told him, and ran out into the road towards the shopping area. A terrified Orlev ran to her. She grasped his hand as he pulled her to the candy store where his older brother Na’or, thirteen, lay sprawled on the sidewalk. Ruti threw herself down beside her son and called his name, begging him to open his eyes. Within minutes, paramedics were at her shoulder, yelling at her to move.

  “No!” she said. “I’m his mother!”

  “Do you want us to save him? Then get out of the way.”

  She stood back as they worked on her unconscious son. Pulse: weak. Blood pressure: plunging. What was evident to the paramedics was that Na’or had been knifed three times, from behind his shoulder. But the amount of blood on the sidewalk didn’t account for his plummeting vital signs. What was not evident: the deadliest of the wounds had punctured his jugular. Internally, invisibly, he was bleeding to death.

  A few blocks away, Hassan Manasra was already dead, shot at close range by police officers as he’d rushed at them with his knife. Farther down the tram tracks, his cousin Ahmed lay where a car had struck him. The impact had sent him sprawling, his lower legs twisted up on either side of his body in a grotesque and unnatural shape, like an action figure cast aside by a careless child. Blood pooled around his skull, fractured by the blow from a club wielded by a storekeeper who’d chased him down.

  Despite his head injury, he had not lost consciousness. A cell phone video showed his face, contorted, as a mob gathered around him. A voice yelled: “Die, you son of a whore!”

  Within hours, that cell phone footage went viral and Ahmed Manasra became a Rorschach blot; a scrim onto which each side of the conflict could project its own narrative.

  The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was the first to use the boy, erroneously claiming in a televised address that Israelis had summarily executed him. In answer, the Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu released footage of Ahmed in Hadassah Medical Center, head bandaged, being fed pureed food. Palestinians were quick to point out that it was not Israelis offering this succor, but the boy’s Palestinian lawyer, who had noticed the untouched food and realized that Ahmed might not manage to eat it, since his hand was shackled to the bed. On the video, Ahmed is seen raising his free hand, perhaps to shoo the videographer away. An Israeli commentator described the gesture as “an ISIS salute.” Meanwhile, Physicians for Human Rights released a statement decrying the release of the footage as an illegal exposure of the identity of a minor and an unethical violation of patient privacy.

  But in this explosive case, privacy didn’t seem respected by either side. A few weeks later, Palestinian television screened a lengthy video of Ahmed’s interrogation. It remains unclear who leaked it. Ahmed sat hunched at a corner of a desk in what appeared to be an Israeli police station, surrounded by three plainclothes officers. The lead interrogator, a brawny man with sunglasses pushed back on top of his knitted kippa, attempted to extract a confession to two counts of attempted murder.

  At first, as the interrogator screamed in Arabic and waved his finger in Ahmed’s face, the boy repeatedly hit his injured head.

  “I swear by God I can’t remember,” he whimpered.

  “You swear by God? Who is this shit God?” Looming over the boy, the interrogator demanded to know why he helped his cousin.

  “I don’t know,” Ahmed cried, once again hitting at his head. “Take me to the doctor.”

  “Shut up!” yelled the interrogator. “Sit up straight. Put your hands down!”

  The film as aired had been edited, so it is impossible to know how long all this went on. But in the end, the boy was sobbing convulsively. “Everything you say is true!” he wailed. “Just stop!”

  Since the Manasras live on the Israeli side of the separation barrier, Ahmed Manasra was tried in a civil court rather than under the military justice system, where the conviction rate is 99.74 percent. In Israeli courts, no minor under the age of fourteen at the time of conviction may be sent to prison.

  But it was evident from the outset that Ahmed’s case would strain public opinion regarding the protections extended to him. Minors are required to have a parent or an attorney present during questioning. But Ahmed did not. In fact, his parents had difficulty even finding an attorney both qualified and prepared to take his case to trial. One lawyer agreed, and then called the next day to apologize, saying he’d been warned that the case would be a career ender for him. The family finally chose Leah Tsemel, a veteran civil rights attorney who has practiced in Israel’s civil and military courts for over forty-five years.

  Tsemel is an Israeli-born Jew whose parents migrated to Israel from Russia and Poland in the 1930s. Raised in Haifa, she served in the army and was studying at university when the Six-Day War broke out, threatening Israel’s survival. During intense fighting in East Jerusalem, she volunteered with the army, evacuating Jewish civilians from the most threatened neighborhoods. When combat was over, the soldiers took her to the newly occupied territory of the West Bank, the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria that had been off limits to Jews during the years of Jordanian rule. The trip was supposed to be a reward, a treat. But the sight of columns of Palestinian refugees trudging down the roadside sickened her, evoking her parents’ stories of European persecutions and the resonance of the homeless, wandering Jew. She was, she said, “naive and apolitical” at that time. “I thought it was a war for peace, that we would use the victory to make peace with our neighbors.” Instead, she soon realized that what she had witnessed was the beginning of occupation, and that even key leaders in the Labor Party had no intention of giving back the land. So, she embraced the far left, and when she graduated from law school went to work in defense of Palestinians. “What I am doing is in Israel’s interest,” she asserts, “even if Israelis don’t realize it.”

  Na’or’s mother, Ruti Ben Ezra, is one such Israeli. “Some people will do anything for money, even sell their soul to the devil,” she says. “I hope her own children will be injured or killed by a terrorist.”

  Even though Na’or has recovered physically, his parents say his mental scars are far from healed. “The street is his worst enemy,” says his father, Shai, a forty-six-year-old electrician. He says Na’or can’t concentrate at school. His temper has become explosive. “Everything bothers him. He and his brother fight much more than they used to. Orlev feels guilty he ran away and didn’t help his brother.” Shai has had to give up his job because he needs to be with Na’or night and day. He opens his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “We are crushed,” he says.

  Ruti, a kindergarten assistant, also has stopped working, afraid to leave her children alone. Two days after the attack on Na’or, her youngest child, age seven, took a knife to school. “The teacher called to tell me,” recalls Ruti. “I didn’t see. I didn’t see that he’d taken it. A seven-year-old shouldn’t have to be so afraid.” And she, too, lives with fear. “Every time I hear a siren, I think, ‘Where are my children?’ In this, they succeeded,” she says. “They want us to be afraid. I’m afraid.”

  And that, Ahmed Manasra told his lawyer, Leah Tsemel, when he was finally allowed to see her, was indeed what he had intended. “His cousin said, ‘Let’s go scare them, as they scare us.’ The maximum they intended was to wound. That was the scenario, as they saw it.” Tacitly acknowledging how implausible this version will seem, she shrugs. “They are children,” she says. “But what they did understand, even as children: lifting a knife, they’d probably be killed.”

  Ahmed told Tsemel that Hassan had proclaimed he was ready to die, to join the so-called martyrs whose tattered portraits peel off the walls of many Palestinian buildings. But Ahmed says he didn’t feel that way at all. He can’t say why he went along with his older cousin, but once he saw the blood of the first victim, he was terrified. As that man outran them, he saw Hassan glance towards a woman with children. He told Tsemel that he cried out: “Don’t even look at her!” Then Hassan spotted Na’or coming out of the candy s
tore on his bicycle and moved in on him. Ahmed told Tsemel that he cried out “Haram!”—the Arabic word for something unholy, forbidden—“We decided not to!” But Hassan stabbed the boy anyway. Bystanders and storekeepers rushed them, and within a minute or two Hassan was shot dead and Ahmed was bleeding on the tram tracks.

  Before Ahmed first appeared in court, he faced a difficult choice. Since he was below the age of criminal responsibility, if he pled guilty to attempted murder at his first hearing, the case would be closed and he could not be sent to prison. But had this happened, Tsemel believed, the Israeli outcry would have been such that the law would have been changed. “They would have found a way to detain him,” she asserts. In any case, Ahmed’s family would not allow a guilty plea. He had not touched either of the victims in the attacks. Forensics confirmed that his knife had not been used, and he maintained that he never had intent to kill. So Tsemel took the case to trial, knowing that on January 20, 2016, Ahmed’s fourteenth birthday, his protections as a minor would expire. He would be sentenced as an adult and face up to twenty years in prison. As Ahmed was brought, handcuffed, into the courthouse for the first day of his trial, two other Palestinian cousins, aged fourteen and twelve, from Beit Hanina and the nearby Shuafat refugee camp, stabbed and wounded an Israeli security guard. Media reports began to refer to the wave of violence as “the children’s intifada.”

  “The children are doing it because the older ones don’t do it. That’s the feeling,” says Tsemel. “If the adults acted—if only there was some political movement—they would not feel this way.”

  During the trial, Tsemel argued that no Jewish boy in the same circumstances would be charged with attempted murder for attacking Arabs on nationalistic grounds. “They will always face a lesser charge—manslaughter, grievous bodily harm,” she said. Settlers who injure Palestinians often are released from custody on payment of a small fine.

  On April 18, 2016, the day Ahmed’s verdict was expected, his family gathered nervously at Jerusalem’s Central Court. His thirty-two-year-old mother, Maysoon, sat rigidly on a bench, meticulously dressed in a gray headscarf, a long navy skirt, and a turmeric-yellow jacket. As she waited for the guards to bring her son, she said she was still in a state of disbelief that Ahmed could have been involved in the stabbings. “I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t. I can’t. The first video, it shocked me. He’s a small, small kid. Shy. Always with me in the kitchen, or playing with his pet doves.” She gave a wan smile. “He always wanted to bring them inside, to fly around the house. I would complain to him, ‘They make a mess!’ but he would just smile and say, ‘Mama, you know I always clean it up.’” She inclined her head to a nearby bench where Ahmed’s cousins waited to catch a word with him on his way into the courtroom, since they were not allowed to visit him in detention. “They want to tell him that they are taking care of his birds,” his mother says. “They know how much he cares about them.”

  Ahmed, small and delicately built, arrived flanked by two juvenile justice counselors. He looked overwhelmed and near tears when he saw his family. He tugged nervously at his green hoodie as his mother embraced him, and managed a brief grin for his cousins. Tsemel, her black attorney’s gown slipping casually off one shoulder, ruffled his hair. “How are you, kid?” she asked in Arabic, before his counselors ushered him away, into the courtroom.

  Inside, the three judges who had heard the case confirmed a postponement in their verdict and ordered Ahmed returned to the juvenile facility while they deliberated further. Tsemel emerged from the closed hearing taking some small measure of optimism from the delay. “I hope they have debates. I hope they have doubts. I hope we had a strong enough argument to make them hesitate.” On the other hand, she said, Israeli public opinion remained overwhelmingly against any hint of leniency. Newspaper reports referred to Ahmed “the terrorist” and “the stabber” even though he had not used his knife. “At the trial, the cross-examination and the witnesses were very hostile.” The prosecution had asked for the maximum twenty-year sentence.

  But Ahmed’s family was relieved that he would remain at the juvenile facility, where he could attend class and have regular visits with his parents, for at least a few more weeks. They said good-bye in the courthouse hallway as the counselors escorted him away.

  At the Manasra compound, the family still struggles to understand how the two cousins became so radicalized. Because he is now a law student at al-Quds University, the boys’ uncle Ahmed has become the family’s spokesman during his nephew’s court proceedings. But very often, he admits, he is at a loss for words. “They did normal things kids do,” he says. “Of course, we don’t know what they see on the computer, what they read on the Internet.”

  His brothers, he says, are no more or less radical than most Palestinians of their generation: “Every family has an activist.” As a young man, he took part in demonstrations and was jailed for seven years for throwing a Molotov cocktail at soldiers. Two others among the fourteen Manasra brothers also were jailed for throwing stones during the first intifada in 1987. “But we were men when we did these things,” he said. “It’s painful that we’ve reached this point—that children are involved. This is not the business of children. Not one Palestinian parent wants this. Not one. The only people who benefit are the greedy, rotten politicians who want to stay in their chairs. Calm isn’t in their interest.”

  He gazes through the fluttering curtains at the view of his divided city and recalls a time when Jerusalem’s children did not encounter one another as enemies. “There was a park in West Jerusalem—the Bell Garden,” he says. “At Ahmed’s age, I would go there all the time, to play with my Israeli friends.”

  Now that is impossible. Even as an adult, he feels insecure in Jewish neighborhoods. “Before, if an extremist tried to assault you, other Israelis would step in and break it up. Now, if something happens—a car accident, anything—it will be misunderstood. Everyone will attack you, because you are an Arab.”

  He says every child in the family has been traumatized. Hassan’s seventeen-year-old brother Ibrahim was beaten and arrested the day of the stabbing, when heavily armed police swarmed the compound. A policeman claimed Ibrahim tried to grab his weapon. Since the police shattered the security camera that would have shown what occurred, Ibrahim had no way to prove his assertion that he had not. He was struck repeatedly with the butt of a rifle and suffered broken ribs and facial contusions and returned home only after almost five months in prison. Though he has returned to classes at his technical school, he can’t concentrate. His younger sister, who is ten, witnessed the beating and did not speak for weeks after. Another of the cousins, age five, didn’t leave the house for more than four months.

  It was three weeks, Ahmed said, since Israeli authorities had finally offered to return Hassan’s body to his family. Both Jewish and Islamic custom demands the swift burial of the dead, but the Israeli police have recently made a practice of retaining the corpses of Palestinians killed while committing terror attacks. They had retained Hassan’s corpse for four months before offering the return of the body under stringent conditions: a night burial with only uncles and cemetery staff present; everyone to submit to a thorough security check beforehand. Hassan’s family accepted. But they asked that, since the Muslim custom is to carry the body from the home to the grave wrapped only in a shroud and often with the face visible, Hassan’s body not be brought home frozen.

  On the appointed date, the Israeli authorities arrived with the body at midnight. “When he arrived, he was stiff as that table,” said his uncle, tapping the mahogany surface in front of him. “His face was blue. How do you say good-bye to an ice cube?” The family refused to accept Hassan in that condition. The police took his body back to the freezer.

  “Hassan’s soul rests in peace, and may God forgive him,” Ahmed said. “A body is a body. At the end of the day, what’s left is the pain of those around him.”

 
; Endnote

  On December 17, 2015, at Jerusalem’s Kotel, Na’or Ben Ezra was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah.

  On May 10, 2016, Ahmed Manasra was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison and fined 180,000 shekels to be paid directly to the victim.

  Hassan Manasra’s thawed body was finally returned to his family for burial seven months after his death.

  One’s Own People

  Jacqueline Woodson

  In America, brown bodies were falling so hard and so fast it was hard to look away. The faces of young brown men popping up on social media platforms, beautiful brown women sending selfies into the universe long after they had been taken from it at the hands of those badged to protect them, little brown boys looking innocently at us from middle school photos. In the heat and energy of this, I boarded a plane. For Israel-Palestine.

  For many weeks before I was to travel, I came to tears often. I was afraid not only because of the daily horrors moving across my computer screen, but because my partner, a physician, had visited Hebron four years before and I had been terrified that she wouldn’t return to us, that I would be left not only with two young children but having to live a life without her. That I would be left raising a beautiful brown boy in a country that hated its brown boys. A brown girl in a world that didn’t see her. I cried because years after my partner’s journey, we would be traveling to Palestine together, our children at a summer camp in New Hampshire, miles away from family, and, I would come to understand, a world away from anything they could even begin to comprehend at this point in their lives. Because even while we caution our brown boy about his behavior when addressing cops (eyes up, hands visible, never run), and our brown girl about how to walk into a room with her brown body (cover it, please!), I know now that there are mothers in Hebron who are waiting for their children to come home. I was in Hebron and watched soldiers close all checkpoints as two small boys sharing a bicycle stood outside, crying that their mothers didn’t know where they were. Please let us go home, they said again and again, their words falling into the dust. I was with a Palestinian activist named Issa Amro and my partner, Juliet. The soldiers, no more than young people themselves, their guns slung across their torsos, looked on or away, their young faces set into the work they were drafted to do for three years. The children, still holding tight to their bicycle, continued to beg. There was nothing we could do.