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

by Ahdaf Soueif

India did not have diplomatic relations with Israel until the 1990s. My grandfather was among many high-caste Hindus who idolised Israel because it possessed, like European nations, a proud and clear self-image; it had an ideology, Zionism, that inculcated love of the nation in each of its citizens. Most importantly, Israel was a superb example of how to deal with Muslims in the only language they understood: that of force and more force. India, in comparison, was a pitiably incoherent and timid nation-state; its leaders, such as Gandhi, had chosen to appease a traitorous Muslim population.

In fact, Muslims are the most depressed and vulnerable community in India, worse off than even low-caste Hindus in the realms of education, health and employment, frequently exposed to bigoted and trigger-happy policemen. Their condition has deteriorated in recent decades. After dying disproportionately in many Hindu–Muslim riots, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed and many more displaced in a pogrom in 2002 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, then ruled by a hard-line Hindu nationalist called Narendra Modi. But, as I discovered in 2000, India, in the eyes of Kashmiri Muslims, had never been less than a Hindu majoritarian state despite its claims to secularism and democracy.

A portrait of the Hindu nationalist icon V.D. Savarkar, one of the conspirators in Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, now hangs in the Indian parliament. When Netanyahu won re-election in 2015, Modi tweeted his congratulations to his ‘friend’ in Hebrew (Israel is now one of India’s biggest arms suppliers).

Indeed, the most striking aspect of the upsurge of fanaticism in India and Israel is mob fury, sanctioned by their ruling classes and stoked by the media, against anyone who expresses the slightest sympathy with the plight of their victims.

We did not come to this country from a country we came from pomegranates, from the glue of memory from the fragments of an idea

You will say: no. And you will rip apart the words and the slow-moving river. You will curse this bad time, and you will vanish into the shade. No – to the theatre of words. No – to the limits of this dream. No – to the impossible.

though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed in rooms where lovers are destined to meet they cannot snuff out the moon

LULLABY TO A PALESTINIAN CHILD Don’t cry, child Your mother has only just cried herself to sleep Your father has only just taken leave of grief Don’t cry, child Your brother chasing dreams as if butterflies has wandered into a faraway land Your sister’s bridal palanquin has entered a foreign land Don’t cry child In your courtyard they have bathed the sun’s corpse they have buried the moon Don’t cry child For if you cry parents, siblings, moon and sun will make you shed more tears But if you smile, perhaps one day they’ll cast off their sorrows they’ll turn to you and play.

But when it comes to history, it depends where you’re reading history from and according to whose narration.

I can confirm this: international law is clearly for internationals only. By now, a seven-year-old in Gaza has survived three wars already, and you’re still talking about talks, and sending John Kerry to the Middle East, and thanking Egypt for facilitating nothing. There’s more blood than water today in Gaza.

THIS POEM WILL NOT END APARTHEID Remi Kanazi

Shortly after O’Reilly’s picture was published Israel announced that it was ‘investigating’ the accusation that it was responsible for the school shelling. This was to be expected. No government will readily admit that it bombed a school if this is in any way deniable – or even postponable. The calculation is that by the time responsibility is conceded the degree of blame or temperature of outrage – and the attendant political consequences – will have somewhat diminished.

that we are not living in a world in which it is possible to construct something approaching heaven-on-earth, but, on the contrary, are living in a world whose nature is far closer to that of hell; what difference would this make to any single one of our political or moral choices? We would be obliged to accept the same obligations and participate in the same struggle as we are already engaged in; perhaps even our sense of solidarity with the exploited and suffering would be more single-minded. All that would have changed would be the enormity of our hopes and finally the bitterness of our disappointments.

this is the unfortunate reality. The Zionist regime has systematically worked to break the will of the people. We, as people, have also lost empathy towards one another. Everyone speaks from their own podium. The loss of a unified and effective strategy means that urban professionals can be dismissive of stone-throwing and daily protests while someone from a village that regularly protests is critical of those living more stable city lives. We are losing the fabric of our society.

To be Palestinian is to be hemmed in.

History moves at great speed, as does politics, and Zionists understand this. The pressure to continue the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem is already met with pressure from the other side to stop this clear violation of international norms. So Zionist lawyers and lawmakers move with corresponding speed, making new laws, pushing through new interpretations, all in order to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinian presence. And though Palestinians make their own case and though many young Jews, beginning to wake up to the crimes of their nation, have marched in support of the families evicted or under threat in Sheikh Jarrah, the law and its innovative interpretations evolve at a speed that makes self-defence all but impossible.

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.

One of the many spurious defences of Israel is that at any given time some other country (currently Syria, in 2010 it was Sri Lanka) is ‘worse’, and that if you are attacking Israel, instead of this other more egregiously unjust country, you must have picked Israel due to anti-Semitism.

The top story in the New York Times one Wednesday in 2015 begins ‘Israel and Hamas escalated their military confrontation on Tuesday . . .’ Inches away, the World Cup story allows, ‘The final score was Germany 7, Brazil 1. It felt like Germany 70, Brazil 1.’ The juxtaposition of balance on the one hand and the exaggeration of how unbalanced the World Cup rout felt on the other is too close to ignore. It’s worth tracing its contours in our media, in our minds and in our lives.

THEY WILL ALWAYS BE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU

These raw presentations were worked up in roughly fifteen minutes; some contained the kind of detail you’d only expect to come with the finishing touches. What if we’d had more time? But time in the West Bank is eaten up by the Byzantine demands of the occupation, which interfere with everything, including sitting final exams – any moment now. The rucksack, I notice, as the owner shrugs it onto her back, is full to capacity.

The next evening, in Ramallah, we listened to Suad Amiry. She’s an architect but has written a hilarious best-seller called Sharon and My Mother-in-law, about the absurdities of everyday life in the occupied territories.

She talked most eloquently about the disconnections of time and geography in a place where the journey to Nablus, which should take an hour, can take all day. She told us how time is measured by curfews and checkpoints, themselves so arbitrary that people are constantly disorientated and can rely on nothing. Where roads are constantly blocked, disappeared and reinvented. Where everything conspires to obliterate certainties and instil a low thrum of fear and humiliation. Where you can never, ever, simply get on with your life. (If you want to see this thrilling woman in action, log on to her TED talk.) The only way to cope, she says, is through laughter; it’s the only thing left.

One memorable afternoon Raja Shehadeh, whose book Palestinian Walks is an elegy to a lost landscape, took us for a walk through the Ramallah hills, now designated Zone C, which meant we all could be

In the past, we were told, there was more interaction between Israelis and Palestinians, but now they are so separated that it has become easier for the occupied population to be demonised – faceless people can so quickly become the enemy.

Our last visit was to Hebron, an ancient and beautiful town where Israeli settlers have actually moved into the centre, taking over the upper floors of the buildings above the bazaar, which over the past few years has slowly been throttled by intimidation and lack of access. There were 101 checkpoints in the city, and many places are now unreachable due to roadblocks. Outside the mosque only two Palestinian shops remained. In one the old man burst into tears when talking to us. ‘I shall never leave,’ he said, while the Settler Centre opposite blared out nationalist Zionist songs, drowning out the call to prayer from the mosque. An old and enduring way of life is slowly being exterminated by this ethnic cleansing.

UNTIL IT ISN’T Remi Kanazi

‘The stabs of daggers are better than the rule of the treacherous.’

There is a comic madness to the term present absentee, coined to define 335,204 Palestinians who live in what is called Israel but not in their original homes, which have been confiscated. If numbers are measured by Israeli textbooks – whose maps omit Gaza and the West Bank – that number would be five million. Palestinians return the favour: they pretend not to see the settlers and soldiers, denying the oppressor his validity.

Is it strange that some of them in pure desperation, when they cannot see any other way out, decide to become suicide bombers? Not really. Maybe it is strange that there are not more of them.

When change is coming, each Israeli has to decide for him- or herself if he or she is prepared to give up their privileges and live in a Palestinian state. During my trip I met no anti-Semitism. What I did see was a hatred of the occupiers that is completely normal and understandable. To keep these two things separate is crucial.

The state of Israel can only expect to be defeated like all occupying powers. The Israelis are destroying lives. But they are not destroying dreams. The fall of this disgraceful apartheid system is the only thing conceivable, because it must be. The question, therefore, is not if but when it will happen. And in what way.

It’s summer 2014. The third Israeli war on Gaza in six years is going on.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Jewish diaspora divided along Indian–Pakistani lines. Some of us might go to the promised land but we are bringing our enemies with us.

The irrepressible urge to slap an Israeli teenager in uniform waving a gun at your head is only repressed by seeing his or her finger on the trigger. I had encountered them at every border crossing, at every checkpoint. The first thing you want to ask them is why aren’t they in school. But then you look at their baby fat and their automatic weapons and keep your inquiries to yourself.

We kept returning to basic questions. Should one write what one knows? What if nobody wants to read what I know? What if I hate what I know? There was anger over occupation, but more anger over why we must always be telling this story.

Many of my students had a family elder who had studied in Pakistan in the 70s. They had heard good things about Pakistan. What is wrong with it now? they would ask me. Why so many bomb blasts? Why was Pakistan always in the news, always for the wrong reasons? I felt defensive. I tried hard to explain that we were better off in an understated kind of way. We don’t live under occupation; in fact parts of Pakistan claim that we are the occupiers, we have a democracy of sorts, we have voters’ lists and elections and we have a free press although we routinely kill journalists for exercising that freedom. You don’t need an Israel to mess you up, you can be your own Israel. You can kill your own children, you can build your own ugly walls.

Nowhere is like Gaza now – the young woman was right. It is not just the UN reports which detail how Gaza will be unliveable by 2020, or the twenty-hour power cuts, the lack of drinking water, the sewage lakes, the blackened precarious shells of bombed tower blocks, the miles of rubble that were houses, the Israeli surveillance balloon hovering constantly, the regular shelling of fishermen and farmers or the living in constant fear. Nowhere but in Gaza is the entire population living in prison. Only foreigners know they can leave.

One young doctor told me, ‘I don’t want to hear any more about Gazans’ special resilience – why should our children have to be especially resilient in this way; psychological exhibits? They are normal children with all the normal needs for love and safety and life’s chances. Gaza is made abnormal.’

Everyone in Gaza knows that Dr Abu Jamei himself lost twenty-eight people in his family to an Israeli missile strike in 2014. When he spoke to the conference of his vision of keeping the hope of peace alive he moved even the most depressed and cynical among his listeners. ‘Mental health means mothers who can see their children sleep, farmers who can plant, fishermen who can sail, youth who can study abroad, people who can plan, detainees who are free . . . it means breaking the siege, ending the occupation,’ he said. ‘Planting hope is our main duty.’

APOLOGY FOR BEING ALIVE I feared I wouldn’t be able to go back to my former life after the war ended, but I did. It felt so awkward. Everything was normal and people were acting as usual. How did I go back to my life, loaded with the guilt of being alive, of breathing? I apologise for being alive. I apologise to the son who asked his dad to bring him some chocolate, but he got neither chocolate nor his dad. I apologise to the boy who wanted to see the sky, but it was the last thing he saw. I apologise to the people who went to an UNRWA school believing it was safer, a haven, but it was their graveyard. I apologise to the girl who thought her father had abandoned her when her mother couldn’t tell her they didn’t find the body. I apologise to Gaza, my love. I apologise that it must carry such a burden.

In those years of increasing isolation in the 1970s and 80s, Israel was our only trusted international friend. When I was eleven, the apartheid government’s yearbook reminded us, ‘Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.’

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. I swear I would have preferred a thousand-fold to share the joys of science with you today, to praise the good teachers from whom I have had the privilege to learn . . . I could have told you all about the happiness to be found in daily work alongside brilliant, enthusiastic young students and about the things I provide them with that no one can take away. But during times like these one cannot fall silent. It is the duty of every decent person to stand forth proudly and say in a loud clear voice what the anti-fascist fighters said during the Spanish Civil War, No pasaran. ‘They shall not pass.’

Meanwhile, Israel maintains its blockade on building materials coming into Gaza, claiming that it wants to prevent them from being used by Hamas to create tunnels. According to Israeli human rights group Gisha, Israel has only allowed into Gaza about a fifth of the amount of construction materials experts estimate are needed to repair the war’s damage. This trickle is so inadequate that Oxfam has estimated it will take a hundred years to rebuild the Strip, assuming Israel doesn’t invade it again in the intervening century.

For Israel what is at stake is the national conscience, the moral compass of the people. Putting aside the civilian casualties for a moment, a fraction of those whom the Palestinians have lost, what Israel has lost in the past forty years, since 1967, is the innocence it believed it had, best symbolised perhaps by the sun-bronzed kibbutzer that Amos Oz holds up in admiration in his memoirs. Today that is a fond memory, a dangerous delusion. Violence corrupts the violent, and it does so absolutely.

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

The end of art is peace Could be the motto of this frail device That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—

Words tell you who’s on your side, tell you who understands and show you who wants to hide. Words can cling on to a reality slipping out of comprehension. Disrupt the language and you disrupt reality. If you have no word for it, how can anyone understand? How can anyone even listen?

Targeted strike. We need new words. Familicide. Mass murder. War crimes. We need new words if we are to feel again.

We need a new language. Peace. Peace? I hate the word. Give me justice. Get on the bus. Justice. They are digging underneath the houses. Get on the bus. They are building for the coming war. Get on the bus.