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

by Ahdaf Soueif

In Palestine almost every situation you can be in is layered. Nothing, not a single thing, is free of the occupation, its instruments, its outcomes.

In Palestine almost every situation you can be in is layered. Nothing, not a single thing, is free of the occupation, its instruments, its outcomes.

Israel uses Bible stories to destroy Palestinian lives.

Israel uses Bible stories to destroy Palestinian lives.

When Baruch Goldstein, a settler, went into the Ibrahimi Mosque in al-Khalil/Hebron on 25 February 1994 and killed twenty-nine Muslim men at prayer – then was himself killed by the congregation, Israel divided the mosque and made the larger half of it over to the settlers for Jewish prayers. A shrine for the ‘martyr’ Dr Goldstein was established near it, and Israel’s military presence in the heart of the city and around the mosque was permanently intensified.

When Baruch Goldstein, a settler, went into the Ibrahimi Mosque in al-Khalil/Hebron on 25 February 1994 and killed twenty-nine Muslim men at prayer – then was himself killed by the congregation, Israel divided the mosque and made the larger half of it over to the settlers for Jewish prayers. A shrine for the ‘martyr’ Dr Goldstein was established near it, and Israel’s military presence in the heart of the city and around the mosque was permanently intensified.

Every day Israel kills at least one Palestinian. Every day it arrests and detains and interrogates and demolishes. Every day at Damascus Gate you see Israeli soldiers push young Palestinian men up against the walls to search them. Every day the settlers and soldiers stroll through Moroccan Gate into the Sanctuary. Every day the language of the authorities shades further into settler Third Temple language. Sometimes a young Palestinian wakes up in the morning and takes a knife from her mother’s kitchen and goes out to mount a solitary, hopeless attack on Israeli soldiers. Sometimes Israeli soldiers kill a young Palestinian and toss a knife onto the ground next to him. The language of justice and decency is no longer relevant. The language of human rights is bitter. The language of red heifers and crimson worms and red heifers and cable cars and crimson worms and holy package tours is swelling. Here. Here in the heart of the world that will burst. Soon.

Every day Israel kills at least one Palestinian. Every day it arrests and detains and interrogates and demolishes. Every day at Damascus Gate you see Israeli soldiers push young Palestinian men up against the walls to search them. Every day the settlers and soldiers stroll through Moroccan Gate into the Sanctuary. Every day the language of the authorities shades further into settler Third Temple language. Sometimes a young Palestinian wakes up in the morning and takes a knife from her mother’s kitchen and goes out to mount a solitary, hopeless attack on Israeli soldiers. Sometimes Israeli soldiers kill a young Palestinian and toss a knife onto the ground next to him. The language of justice and decency is no longer relevant. The language of human rights is bitter. The language of red heifers and crimson worms and red heifers and cable cars and crimson worms and holy package tours is swelling. Here. Here in the heart of the world that will burst. Soon.

To explain a little more: identity cards issued by the Israelis are colour-coded according to the individual’s home town, which is not always accurately recorded. To travel from one to another is extremely difficult. Jerusalem and Bethlehem, for example, are six miles apart and as attached to one another as, say, Richmond and London. Unsurprisingly many families (and, formerly, working lives) are divided between the two places. A Palestinian from Bethlehem must now apply for a permit to visit East Jerusalem at least a month in advance. The permit can be refused without reason. It can be granted and then access denied without reason at the checkpoint. Of course this makes it very easy to miss a relative’s visit or death or the birth of a child, and so on. More than a generation of West Bank Palestinians now exist who have never seen the sea.

Hebron provided the trip’s most shocking encounter with the insupportable fundamentalism that is ruining lives and our chances of peace. It was the place where I saw most vividly what the star of David, the Israeli flag – those symbols that to me have always meant home and familiarity – must look like to those on the other side of the power structures and cultural edifices they represent.

Sitti Soraya died a refugee, alone in that small shack. The ancient stone home inside the Old City walls where she was born and where her family had lived for generations is claimed now by foreigners who insist that the Bible is a property deed to her home.

These foreigners, with absolutely no identifiable ancestry in the land, believe it is their right to remove us and take our place. To erase us and make our heritage their own. To destroy our monuments, cemeteries and history. To live in my grandmother’s ancient home and pretend that the stories of those like Mohammad Khalil are their own. Because God chose them. Because God loves them more.

Considering that 900 out of the 14,000 passengers who crossed the bridge daily during the month of July used the VIP service, one concludes that Palestinians like myself are contributing close to $50 million annually to the financing of our own occupation!

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.

The idea of God and religion was created after the Palestinians had made this piece of the earth their homeland.

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.

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.

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.

One thing is certain: the one who murders a child may be called many things, including ‘patriot’, but he or she will never be called beautiful.

Next December when nativity scenes swamp school halls and high street corners, ripped bedsheets strung around children’s shoulder bones as they play three kings, I will think of the shop where the Palestinian let me charge my mobile phone for free. Coaches were parked nearby full of t-shirt tourists eager to touch the city where Jesus was born. They are told before they arrive ‘the Christians here are hounded by the Muslims, made to feel unwelcome’. The Christian in the shop where my iPhone charges says; ‘but of course not, we are the same, it is Israel who hounds us all. Israel covers itself with paper angels, shepherding a concrete wall around us who live where Jesus did. Mystery exists here, a virgin birth etcetera, those buildings that appear overnight so magical, so monstrous’. O little town of Bethlehem. My phone charged now, I tweet a picture of an old man hunched over a walking stick, carrying white cheese and watermelon as the unemployed smoke along the street looking up at an illegal sky clangorous church bells reminding everyone that there is no such thing as wise men.

Jesus was born here. But I haven’t seen Jesus for a while, something to do with not having a permit.

While they pray the systematic and discriminatory policy of revoking the residency of Palestinians in Jerusalem will continue. While they pray writers will warn. Hearts will hurt. Rivers will be ruins. Words will be wounds. While they pray love will ask the Song of Songs for love. While they pray the daily, painful execution will continue. While they pray.

The bus climbs. A body hangs limp from a tree above Abraham’s tomb. Strange fruit. The fire burned the inside of his lungs. A mother buries her child in Jerusalem. They made him swallow the gasoline. Mohammed Abu Khdeir was sixteen years old.