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

by Ahdaf Soueif

In this dark rain, be faithful, Phantom heart, this is your pain. Feel it. You must feel it.

Israeli politicians are more concerned with Hamas as a PR construct, one that lets them recast aggression as self-defence. Israel invokes Hamas to justify its hundreds of ceasefire violations, its restrictions on Gazans’ movement and the blockade that devastates Gaza’s economy, grinding the residents’ futures as fine as Shujaiyya’s dust.

I gave the authors the best clue to recognise Israeli from Palestinian housing. The former can do without water tanks on the roof because they are assured a constant and steady supply of running water. Not so the Palestinians, who need to store water in the tanks that identify every Palestinian house.

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.

We were surrounded by turrets and guns and razor-wire fences very like the Nazi death camps, and that is not the image Israel wants to project. A people walled in, without rights, without freedom to move, without protection of the law, are prisoners. The guns and turrets belong to the jailors as usual.

Nobody wants to think too hard about the fate of a people who appear to be doing their best to undermine their own cause. Suicide bombs, rocket attacks, stabbings. None of it plays well on the global media stage. And history has a habit of fading, allowing us to forget the parallels between this relentless process of destruction and the persecution of the Jews. The deception is aided by the fact that this is happening not in an instant but in slow motion. Palestine is being dismantled, turned into a jigsaw puzzle so complex that eventually it will be impossible to see the pieces for the lines between them.

How is it that we accept this irrational fear of an entire people, a minority most of whom are not violent but oppressed, not fanatical but resigned, not the aggressor but the aggrieved? Yet to speak this aloud is, in many quarters, considered an obscenity.

Words are important in Palestine. Nowhere is it more important to call a wall a wall. To call apartheid, apartheid.

It’s not a wall, it’s the cumulative effort of dozens of international corporations earning billions of dollars for cement from Ireland and barbed wire from South Africa and construction vehicles from Caterpillar, JCB, Volvo and Bobcat and patrol vehicles from Humvee and General Motors and dogs from K-9 Solutions and biometric IDs from Hewlett-Packard and X-ray machines from Rapiscan and guards from G4S. The wall stretches on.

The end of art is peace

‘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.’