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

  We trekked past Prime Minister Netanyahu’s residence on Balfour Street, winding our way through the thickening crowd toward the nerve center of the Old City. We pushed through people beating drums and waving Israeli flags. They were mostly adolescents. Zionist youth groups, yeshiva boys, settlers, settler sympathizers, and messianic types bussed in from across the country. Riled-up children. They passed out stickers that said kahane was right, in reference to the late, infamous orthodox rabbi Meir Kahane, a member of the Knesset who endorsed annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip while expelling the Palestinians, along with a lot of other anti-Arab ideas that brought Israel to outlaw his political groups. In spirit, he reminded me of Donald Trump, who was scapegoating immigrants and agitating for a wall in an effort to “make America great again” back home. Although Kahane fell from grace thirty years ago, his writings have carried on as foundational texts for most of today’s militant and extreme-right political groups in Israel. Some of Kahane’s manifestos were on sale at the parade, including They Must Go, a screed whose title pretty much speaks for itself. Many parade-goers wore T-shirts silk-screened with images of a rebuilt Jewish temple, prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel as the eternal dwelling place of the God of Israel on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

  The site of the Temple Mount, or Haram a-Sharif (“the Noble Sanctuary”) as it is known in Islam, was not far off. It was just through the Damascus Gate, inside the Old City, conquered by Israel on this day in 1967. There lies the holiest site in Judaism, the Foundation Stone, where some Jewish traditions hold that Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac and where Jacob laid his head and dreamed—the pillow of stone where heaven joins the earth. This rock is just as sacred to Muslims for being the place where the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended into heaven, enshrined by the eye-catching gold Dome of the Rock that sits on the ruins of the first two temples, like Susya on Susiya. The atmosphere grew more charged as we approached that mighty power source. The March of Flags would start at the gate and culminate at the last remnant of the Second Temple—the Western Wall. The masses sang and chanted so loudly their voices grew hoarse. The eternal people do not fear a long journey, they belted. Jerusalem of Gold.

  I remarked that it felt like a pep rally, one where everyone really believed in the team. “They’re brainwashed,” Guy said with great pity. Then he directed his lens at a unit of armed Israeli border police who’d blocked off a street entrance to an Arab neighborhood with a tank that would use its cannon to spray their bodies and homes with “skunk water” if they dared try exiting to protest the march. Skunk water is a putrid-smelling form of nonlethal crowd control developed in Israel to keep demonstrations in check. (Several police departments in US cities, including Saint Louis, are reported to have recently bought it in the wake of protests organized by the Black Lives Matter movement.)

  “That’s the smell of the occupation,” said Guy. “It’s worse than a skunk. It stinks like raw sewage and rotting corpses. It doesn’t go away for days. It can make you sick. The term Israel uses for this is sanitize.”

  I thought of the fire hoses police targeted on nonviolent protestors, including children, in Birmingham in 1963. The pressure from their jets was strong enough to peel bark from a tree. “Why don’t they just use water?” I asked Guy.

  “Not cruel enough.”

  One of the police noticed Guy filming and put his hand on his assault rifle. We moved on, weaving into that amped crowd. “Get ready. It’s about to turn ugly,” said Guy. He braced himself to record the slogans, jeers, and acts of vandalism he’d witnessed at past parades: Mohammed is dead; The third temple will be built and the [al-Aqsa] mosque will be burned; Death to Arabs, and so on.

  “Imagine they are storming through your neighborhood and you aren’t allowed on the street, or to run your shop, or leave your house and they are chanting death to you and your prophet,” Guy said. I acknowledged it would be hard for me, in that scenario, to turn the other cheek. Someone shouldered him, hard. A teenage girl.

  “Why don’t you point your camera at the Arabs throwing stones?” she spat at Guy, though the only Arabs in sight were shop owners being roughly steered out of the Muslim Quarter’s market by Israeli police, to clear the way for the March of Flags. Guy thought it unsafe for me to be at his side, and directed me toward what looked like a secure perch from which to watch. Suddenly he was gone, swallowed up in the throng. Now I knew why Tamar warned me not to get trampled. There were 30,0000 people and two thousand police officers in attendance at this evening’s parade. I climbed onto the post to the side of the steps leading down into the swarming plaza of Damascus Gate.

  The revelers rode on each other’s shoulders. Packs of boys dancing in horas. The next generation. They seemed like their voices had only just changed, and yet in no time at all they’d be required to serve in the army. The air was suffused with testosterone and great potential, enough voltage to power a city. “What are they singing?” I asked a sympathetic Hebrew speaker below my perch. Worship God with happiness, he translated. The air was electric. Their chorus reached a fever pitch. God will defend us, they sang, pumping their fists. I was touched by their expressions of faith and terrified of their zeal. We will win. It sounded to me like a battle cry.

  As a mother I wanted to shake those boys by the shoulders for behaving like bullies. Such misguided ardor. They surged into the mouth of Damascus Gate. It felt like a desecration—not merely because they believed Jerusalem belonged to them alone but because their fanaticism was so close a surrogate for actual joy. I thought of Ali Dawabshah, and of my own children, whom I tell that the most important thing in life is kindness, to use their words and not their fists; who are black in the United States and therefore also endangered. An armed policeman stared me down with bloodshot eyes. I realized I was crying. I turned my face from his because I felt afraid.

  4. Iftar at the Electric Company

  On Wednesday, I went with Tamar to the Comet headquarters for the iftar meal she’d helped plan. It was just a dozen coworkers sitting down to supper at sundown in the desert at a table covered by a cheap plastic cloth. Arab and Israeli guys alike, who share the belief that power is a basic human right. Compared with the despair of Susiya and the furor of Jerusalem Day, I found this to be the truest expression of accord I’d seen my whole time here.

  The festive mood swelled in the countdown to nightfall. The cool air was perfumed by the lavender shrubs growing beyond the veranda where the table was set. Our shadows grew elongated like figures in an El Greco painting, and then our shadows were gone. Twilight, the magic hour. “Is it time yet? Can we eat now?” asked twelve-year-old Yusef. He sat at the table next to his father, Ali A., a shepherd from one of the off-grid communities Comet services, a place called Tuba. Ahmad S. consulted his watch, and then the slip of the moon in the indigo sky. He clapped his hands. He looked so much more energized than he had on our depressing day in Susiya. His eyes twinkled like the stars that were starting to show. It was time.

  Ahmad uncovered the dishes of mouthwatering Arabic salad with tahini, grape leaves, soup, kibbe, and roasted chicken. Like a maître d’, he brought out a platter of lamb and served it with flair. The other project managers and technicians were in equally high spirits as they broke their fast to dig into the feast, to make toasts and joke with each other in Arabic and Hebrew. Habibi, they called one another. Is there another word on earth as tender as this? My darling. Even as an outsider, I felt inside their circle, just as I’d often felt as a girl when invited to Shabbat dinner at Tamar’s house. Yusef felt at ease enough to joke that by my age I should have five sons at home, not just the one. Through Tamar, I ribbed the boy back. “Why? So I could have four more like you to smack in the head for telling me how to live?” I tugged that rascal’s earlobe and he grinned.

  Comet’s Israeli cofounders, the physicists Elad O. and Noam D., were smiling, too. There was cause for their organization to celebrate, though it wasn’t the express reason for tonight’s iftar. In th
e eight years since Comet first electrified Susiya, it had largely succeeded in its mission to electrify the South Hebron Hills. That is, most of the so-called cave dwellers in this part of the West Bank were now connected to an alternative energy source—the wind or the sun. Since 2008 Comet has erected 10 small wind turbines, 569 solar panels, and over 100 household water systems like the ones I’d gone to check with Ahmad, serving approximately 2,500 Palestinians in its effort to help them remain on their land. While continuing to keep up these existing systems, Comet’s next stage will be to expand its reach beyond the South Hebron Hills and establish new ones. This expansion offers an alternative to the State of Israel’s. It strives not to take but to give, not to extinguish but to illuminate.

  Earlier that day I’d sat in on a planning session to serve a previously unserved community. Tamar asked me to keep its name a secret, off the Civil Administration’s radar. Elad showed the team a slideshow graphing peak electric consumption loads, and they discussed how many kilowatt hours per family per day they could realistically provide. The community in question is semiurban, different from the rural cave and tent dwellers traditionally served by Comet. Working there brings with it a set of new challenges—most notably, higher expectations from their minigrid. The people will likely want more power than Comet can supply. Comet provides modest energy services on average of 2 to 2.5 kilowatt hours per family per day. (The average American household uses 30.)

  For all the prosaic nuts and bolts about generators, hard stops, and photovoltaic arrays, it was hard not to consider this conversation’s biblical overtones. We were in the Holy Land, after all, and these guys were deciding how much power to bestow. That level of responsibility seemed to me almost supernatural. The underlying question was, how should power be put to use? Maybe because I felt a little lost in all the kilowatt talk, or because of the dreaminess of the landscape, my mind wandered to Genesis. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

  The engineers seated at the table weren’t gods, of course, but men. Men having a philosophical and practical argument. For the moment they disagreed about how the money for the electric service in the new community should be collected. Comet is a unique NGO in that it is also, sort of, a utility company. The people Comet serves pay electric bills, and the money is deposited into a savings account, to be used ten years or so down the line to replace the batteries. “It’s to prevent a swamp of donor dependency,” Tamar explained. “And it gives people a stake in their energy grid.”

  Whereas Noam felt a local committee should be established for collecting the funds, Elad believed the people would consider Comet more of an authority if each family paid Comet directly, the way they’d always done it, with Wasseem A., Comet’s maintenance manager, going door to door or tent to tent every other month to give each household a prepaid meter card in exchange for fifty to one hundred shekels. I wondered, was the organization becoming more faceless as a function of its growth?

  “I don’t see Comet as an electric company but as a social project,” Noam insisted. He was a contemplative man in his sixties with a short gray beard, wire-rimmed glasses, and a hand-rolled cigarette. Elad said they were the closest thing to an electric company these people were going to get. He was twenty years younger than Noam, and wore a Groucho Marx T-shirt that read “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others” in Spanish. (One of his principles is that we who take electricity for granted have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.) The men seemed to reach a compromise. There would be a community committee, but Wasseem would be on it, and Comet would have a stake.

  Noam felt satisfied by this arrangement but stressed, “If you want to empower somebody, you give them the power.” After dinner his tone grew more wistful out on the veranda as he reminisced about Comet’s early days. Having cheerfully inhaled the meal, the Muslims in the group had left the table to bow toward Mecca in prayer. They used trash bags as makeshift prayer mats. Among them: Ahmad, Wasseem, and Moatasem H., a young technician clutching the Quran, who sometimes awakens to the sound of bulldozers rolling up to demolish parts of his village before coming to work in the morning. It was quiet now. Not the sound of a muezzin, or TV, or traffic, or gunfire, or anything but the wind turning the blades of the tall white Comet turbine standing nearby.

  Noam rolled a cigarette. Above us gleamed the waxing crescent moon. Before us on the horizon a string of faraway Ramadan lights blinked in the growing dark. They sparked a warm feeling in me. I felt grateful to be reunited with my old friend in this faraway place, liberated from the responsibilities and anxieties of parenthood in uncertain times. The Ramadan lights sparked a fuzzy feeling in Noam, too. He spoke to me and Tamar about the first time he saw Susiya lit up in the night almost ten years before, the fatherly joy he’d felt at having helped supply its first light.

  “Susiya is completely different today than it was ten years ago. At that time they were very vulnerable. Activists would stay the night to protect them from getting beat up or evicted. They were at the bottom of the barrel, looked upon as uneducated. Now they’re building their position in life. They’ve learned how to sell their story. Usually, after you install energy, the first thing they’ll do is buy a TV. It doesn’t matter that I’m not in favor of that choice, or that I dislike when they squabble over who’ll get hooked up first, who gets the first fridge, or the eventual air conditioner. It’s their choice how to develop themselves. This is our belief. On this point, Elad and I agree.”

  Tamar added that Comet didn’t get into issues of gender inequality. As a woman, this was sometimes hard for her—she smiled awkwardly at me, for example, when Moatasem wouldn’t shake my hand on meeting me, but she also knew it wasn’t her job to make him accept it. “Empowerment means letting people live their lives as they choose to live them,” Noam repeated, “even when giving people tools to argue means they may argue with you.” I understood we were no longer just talking about electricity, infrastructure, or social justice. We were talking about free will and its brightest corollary—hope.

  Elad had somehow ripped his trousers. “The occupation did it,” he cracked, and everybody burst out laughing. The Muslims returned loose-limbed to the table. It was time for dessert. We stuffed ourselves silly with qatayef, coffee, and dates until at last we were full. I gazed up at the sky, now punched through with a thousand stars, and streaked with meteors. Its perfect clarity made me gasp. That night felt free in part because no veil of light pollution obscured it. We were at the edge of the world, in the Milky Way. We were that far off the grid.

  Journey to the West Bank

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  1.

  In the 1970s I was quite active in the defense of Israel, getting myself involved in many polemical exchanges. At that time in Latin America it was fashionable, not only amongst the far left but also the moderate left and a great number of centrist and right-wing organizations, to attack Israel. Israel was accused of being a “pawn of US imperialism,” an instrument used by the United States to destabilize “progressive governments” in the Middle East and counteract the influence of the USSR in the region (which was very strong, especially in Egypt).

  I don’t know how many articles I wrote, lectures I gave, and manifestos I signed in those years opposing this caricatured vision of Israel, and affirming that it was a pluralistic and democratic society, the only state in the Middle East where there was freedom of expression, freedom for political parties, and truly free elections. I pointed out that what had made Israel’s existence possible, apart from Zionism, was not “US imperialism” but rather European anti-Semitism, with its long and bloody history leading up to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews perpetrated by the Nazis.

  From that time I have often been to Israel—on one occasion to receive the Jerusalem Prize, which I am very proud to have been awarded—and my ideas about the need to defend its existence, with secure borders, have not changed one iota. I have many friends there, and
generally we share the same views about Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. I am very critical of this policy not only because it seems to me right to be so, but also because I feel that the ever more colonialist bias of recent governments—I am referring to the governments of Sharon and Netanyahu—may be terribly prejudicial to Israeli democracy and the future of the country. Nothing degrades the political life of a nation more than sliding down a nationalist or colonialist path.

  My opinions on Israeli policy towards the Palestinians have subjected me to many attacks, of course, especially from Jews living outside Israel; Israelis, in general, seem less intolerant and have a less narrow outlook than their supporters abroad. But I want to point out that my criticisms of the Israeli government’s Palestine policy are the same as those voiced, in Israel, by tens of thousands of Israelis themselves. It is true that these internal critics are not sufficiently numerous to win a general election. But they exist, they are there, sometimes demoralized, but always active, and they—I call them the righteous ones—are for me the best guarantee of a different future for Israel, of peace and friendship with their neighbors and of coexistence and cooperation with the Palestinians.

  I am and will always be against the “academic boycott” that threatens Israel. I will always be against “collective punishment” in which the righteous ones often pay for the misdeeds of the sinners. More so in this case, because it is absurd to penalize universities in Israel for the excesses of their government. Universities are often the best foci of resistance to the policies of Netanyahu, the places where the most constructive ideas and initiatives are developed in favor of a just and sensible agreement between Palestinians and Israelis.