This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

by J.M. Coetzee

the majority of the barriers – the wall and the checkpoints in their varied manifestations – are not in fact borders; they do not separate ‘Palestine’ from ‘Israel’; mostly they cut through occupied Palestinian land, separating communities from each other, from their land, from their markets, their universities, their schools.

This war that Israel wages against us is not a war to defend its existence, but a war to obliterate ours.

We can deal with them living here alongside us, they say, but they want to live here instead of us.

The multiple narratives of Jerusalem are accommodated here, made room for, honoured.

Israel uses Bible stories to destroy Palestinian lives.

Every day Israel kills at least one Palestinian.

These foreigners, with absolutely no identifiable ancestry in the land, believe it is their right to remove us and take our place.

While behind him I thought, what has just happened is not about security. The soldier had frozen the turnstile not because he needed to but because he could. What I had witnessed was the petty exercise of power.

When you are away from the West Bank it’s possible to keep in touch with news of the big incursions. Of the children shot dead. Of so many lives lost. What is less easy to remember is the steady drip of humiliation that affects a people because of their race, their religion or their ID card. What becomes less immediate when you are far away from the turnstiles and the teenage soldiers with their guns and braces is remembering the rage that flows from being so regularly trapped and humiliated, and being powerless to do anything to make it stop.

everything is fear, ugliness, hostility, hate. The

When you grow up in Gaza you know that that invitation is only a question in your high-school exam, just a language exercise, something you train to do but never practise.

There’s more blood than water today in Gaza.

‘You sure this is how you want to represent Palestinians on a London stage?’ The implication was clear. The burden of representation was a dramaturgical weight that could now be strategically deployed to tie down artists.

Could it be that, in spite of everything – in a situation that seems hopeless, when Palestinians are dependent on the political intervention of others – we are left looking to them, to the powerless, for hope?

In no sane future of humanity should the deaths of hundreds of children continue to be accounted collateral damage, as Israel did in the summer of 2014.

The historical suffering of Jewish people is real, but it is no less real than, and does not in any way justify, the present oppression of Palestinians by Israeli Jews.

It was Palestine’s great misfortune that it fed so many fantasies and answered to so many emotional needs.

If only it had been an ordinary place, without a special history or a sacred geography, without religion or scripture, then perhaps we, its people, might have been left in peace.

‘unknown unknowns’.

‘there can be no knowledge without emotion’.

In short, clarity about Palestine destroys the mainframe illusions of American whiteness, no matter the colour of the person who aspires to it.

You think it is hatred That you feel But it is really envy.

‘the power of culture over the culture of power’.

She told us how time is measured by curfews and checkpoints, themselves so arbitrary that people are constantly disorientated and can rely on nothing.

Then I stop. Beauty is a scar. History is a room. Longing is a gale.

From the perspective of most of my British peers and teachers, I was a racist and fascist. From my own perspective, I was confused.

I realised that I was returning to somewhere I had never been before.

‘It is clear to many of us throughout the whole world that now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do.’

Fascism succeeded exactly in those places where decent people did not find it within themselves to stand up against it – be it from laziness, weakness or just cowardice

. . As Dante taught us, there is a special place in hell for those people who, at times of a deep moral catastrophe choose a neutral stance.

The Israeli government is turning anti-occupation activists into dissidents. In

Everywhere homes lay collapsed like ruined layer cakes, the fillings composed of the flotsam of daily life: blankets,

Each tree had been watered by hand for generations, but now the great Jordan is being drained to water thirsty Israel and the life-giving trees are shrivelling. There are a thousand ways to genocide.

Once when I refused to eat the peanut soup that was set before me I was lectured about children starving in camps. I can recall the shame I felt but also the resentment at being made an example of, at the absurdity of the idea that my not eating this soup somehow dishonoured the suffering of those people. I knew my soup would never reach them, and so it wasn’t about that; it was about reconciling this life of privilege I had, where there was food on the table and clothes on my back, where I slept peacefully in my bed, with a world in which children just like me were starving and had no home to give them shelter. I resented being reminded of their existence.

The issue here is not security but the prevention of contact.

The wonder is that there is not more violence.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls it an apartheid state. What more should anyone need to know? Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls it an apartheid state. Repeat it like a mantra.

Words are important here.

Israel does not go round the mountain, it goes through it. The message is clear. The fertility is breathtaking. The sea is a perfect blue. They chose a beautiful place to conquer.

‘Underneath us is the West Bank aquifer. Israel takes 80 per cent of the aquifer’s water each year to fill the swimming pools of settlers.’

I see a name I know on a list of the dead. Al-Batsh. See it repeated again and again. Twenty-one times. The Gaza police chief’s name. His entire family are killed in a targeted strike. Except him. He was only wounded. They found a fate worse than death for him.

Targeted strike. We need new words. Familicide. Mass murder. War crimes.

Peace? I hate the word. Give me justice.