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

by Ahdaf Soueif

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.