The situation changed when Ariel Sharon came to power. On February 6, 2001, he was elected by a landslide, with a margin of twenty percentage points over Barak. There was no school that day so I took a large group of children, aided by a Christian evangelical nanny loaned by other parents, to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. There we wandered happily through the display of animals: zebra, gazelle, various forms of sheep, more gazelle. A long elevated walkway made of wood swept us over the animals toward the ark at the end of the trail. The animals roamed in huge enclosures; it was we humans who were penned in. At the ark the children sat riveted by an animation screened for them in English; delivered by Noah, it was a call to environmental sensitivity.
Other families were taking advantage of the holiday. A group of Orthodox families walked by as we stared at a group of chimpanzees. The chimps were putting on an enthusiastic display of copulation, coprophagia, and masturbation. The children demanded explanations. But behind us the Orthodox party suddenly panicked: one of their toddlers had stopped breathing. There were screams and shouts, someone ran for help. I stepped forward and offered mine. The child, lying limp in a man’s arms, was turning blue. “I’m a doctor, I can help,” I said. One of the women looked grateful and urged me on, but the others, the men mainly, ignored me. I just wasn’t there. I tried again: the child needed resuscitation urgently. No reaction from the adults. And then the child came round, turned pink, and they moved away, leaving me wondering what had happened.
Back in the reality of the elections, there was bleak resignation among Israelis and Palestinians we knew. Some Palestinians claimed to be positive about Sharon being elected; they could deal with him because there was no pretending—they said they knew what he was and where he stood and all about his intentions. Most, however, were full of foreboding. Those Israelis who detested Sharon and everything he represented were angrily blaming the Palestinians and their violence for bringing him in.
“Oh right, like we’d vote in the National Front because of an IRA bombing campaign,” said a British journalist to some Israeli liberals. We were having a drink in a Russian bar near the school and the vodka was loosening opinions. “You Israelis voted in the bastard,” he went on, “it’s your own fault you’ve got him.”
One of the Israelis, with years as a peacenik behind him, had taken Sharon’s victory especially hard. “He betrayed us,” he said bitterly.
“Who?” asked another, “Sharon?”
“No. Arafat, of course. He betrayed us. We told our people to trust him, and look what he did. He’s made us a laughing stock. He’s lost us our credibility, the left. It’s gone.”
Many Israelis were bitter about their new government, and even found Sharon’s accession to power alarming. Some did their best to persuade themselves that the man who had spent much of his career trying to erase Palestinian claims and building more settlements would become a man of peace, real peace, overnight. One Jewish friend, René, on the phone from Paris, tried to explain to me and perhaps convince himself, that there would now be a new Sharon, not the old Sharon, he said—just as Maha had said—of Qibya, Gaza in 1971, Sabra and Shatila, the godfather of the settlements. This would be Sharon the strong, not just Sharon the hard.
“He evacuated the settlers in the Sinai, he can do the same in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank. You will see,” said René, “I am not wrong.” Sharon, he insisted, and as many others claimed, was “the only man who could evacuate the settlements and bring peace.”* “As to that,” an Israeli commentator told me derisively, “there is only one Sharon, and that’s the old Sharon.”
Old or new, Sharon had been elected to deliver security to the Israeli people. The Intifada had run for four months and Israelis were full of fear. The occupation was not sustainable after all: far from running it for them, the PA had joined in the revolt. Arafat had broken the deal; he was not their partner for peace. But for those who saw ending the occupation as the key to peace, the question remained: how to get out of here? The occupied land had been colonized, and those settlers who didn’t want to leave were vocal, powerful, and determined. Israeli commentators were confronting the issue of the settlements, pointing out the irony of Sharon, who had been partly responsible for the colonization campaign (for example, as Agriculture Minister in the Likud government), arriving in the premiership at the moment when it had all come to a head. “Sort it out,” they challenged him.1 Whereas Labor’s settlement program had been to install security areas, Sharon’s enduring aim had been to forge a situation in the Occupied Territories that was totally irreversible, so that no Israeli government would ever be able to withdraw.2
First to feel the effects of Sharon’s premiership were the ongoing negotiations at Taba in Egypt, on the border with Israel, that were bringing the two sides to the brink of a workable peace. Sharon put a stop to them. The new Prime Minister declared that he would not divide Jerusalem, give up any settlements, or offer as much land as Barak had offered. I sat listening to the despair of an American who had worked at Taba. Like many others, he was glum about the prospects for peace under Sharon, mourning the wasted opportunity Taba had presented. “With Sharon in power, Israel stopped cooperating with George Mitchell.* But Taba was a real chance. It was the first decent negotiation the parties had. There could have been an agreement.”
“Wasn’t it all too last minute?”
“No. For once it was for real. It may have been like two lovers on a sinking ship who throw away the condoms, but, oh yes, it was serious. Dead serious. And of course there was time. The discussions began in Washington last September [2000], there were more in December, and finally at Taba just now.”
“But it was too late to wind them up, no?”
“Of course they could have concluded. Sharon has just shut them down and made a demand for seven days of quiet before any negotiations will take place. He wanted to pull the rug out from all negotiations that were not on his terms.”
When Sharon was sworn in, he brought with him a huge cabinet, a unity government that included Shimon Peres, with eight seats each for Labor and Likud, five for Shas, and a few others (Likud had only nineteen seats in the Knesset).
Mohammed’s comment, when he came to wire in the video, echoed many others: “There is no opposition.”
“And Natan Sharansky,” added Mohammed, “is one of the worst.” Sharansky was given the portfolio of building and construction. “An immigrant from Russia who thinks there’s nothing wrong with telling Palestinians we can’t build anything on our land, anywhere, and that in any case the land isn’t ours and the Israelis are going to build on it instead.” For Mohammed and many like him, Sharansky embodied the discrimination that had led many to accuse Israel of “racism”: the 1950 Law of Return giving anyone with a Jewish grandparent the right to “return” and settle on land in Israel, and yet any Palestinian, Muslim, or Christian, was forbidden that right even though they owned the land in question.
Mohammed was saying, “Andrew told me he used to write to the Soviet authorities asking for the release of Natan Sharansky.”
“Yes,” I replied. Andrew headed an Amnesty group while at school in the eighties, and he and his colleagues had adopted the cause of a number of political prisoners.
“I bet he was surprised at what Sharansky did next, the minute he was freed,” said Mohammed. “Refusing another people’s rights and calling for them to be even more oppressed than they were already.”
“Er, just a little.”
It was not long before Palestinian violence began again: two days after the election, to be exact.3 Their violence, which many thought Arafat had been encouraging in the belief that it would persuade Israel to offer more at Taba, was instead to lose Palestinians much sympathy. On February 8, 2001, driving back from a music lesson in East Talpiot, a Jerusalem suburb, we heard a thudding boom over Jerusalem. We were well aware that just before Christmas three IDF soldiers had been injured in a suicide-bomb attack at a roadside café in the northern Jordan Valley, and that on New Year’s Day a car bomb had exploded in the center of Netanya, injuring 60 people. Now was this another bomb? We drove on, wanting to get home.
Andrew was in Gaza, and within minutes he rang to say he had been having trouble getting hold of me. We soon grew accustomed to the authorities shutting down the mobile phone networks immediately after a bomb; it became one of the signs that a bang had been a bomb. I turned on the car radio and heard the BBC World Service reporting a bomb in Jerusalem only minutes before. A correspondent had happened to be there. What we had heard driving along was the powerful car bomb exploding in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Beit Yisrael: a frightening noise for us, a disaster for those involved. Four people were injured.
While waiting for the inevitable retaliation, we would pretend things were normal. The children carried on with their homework and games and I carried on with plans to go to Aida refugee camp.
Maha, a social worker by training, wanted to show me the camps. As I drove her through the Forest of Peace, she told me her children were still unable to sleep. After the outbreak of the Intifada the three girls, who shared one room, had woken throughout the night with nightmares, shouting and crying for their parents and grandmother. There had been one night when a group of armed settlers had made their way to the village in an ugly mood and the children had picked up the defenselessness their parents felt. This was nothing, she said, to what those families in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were suffering.
She also said, “It can’t be easy for those settlements in the line of Palestinian fire, like Gilo.” She explained that although she saw the settlements as legitimate targets, she didn’t like the thought of the Israeli children suffering any more than the Palestinians.
We made it through the checkpoint in our by now customary silence and headed for the center of town. Once again, the IDF had rearranged the internal roadblocks that turned towns into a daily-changing maze. The main road runs past Rachel’s Tomb. Rachel, co-wife of Jacob with her sister Leah, and mother of Joseph and Benjamin, is a matriarch of the Jewish faith and revered by Muslims. Her tomb, once a pillar raised by her bereaved husband, is now a fortress. Inside, behind the slab-gray concrete defenses, there is a tiny synagogue, a veiled tomb, and a small army to guard it. The tomb, holy to Muslims but out of bounds to them, was a flashpoint. Demonstrations in Bethlehem frequently began at Rachel’s Tomb, and it was becoming impossible to drive anywhere near it. The main road had long been blocked to traffic, but now the IDF were moving the blockades further and further away, diverting vehicles through small residential streets before they, too, were blocked off.
As we wound our way through the latest variation of road-blocks within the city, I realized I had begun to dislike going to Bethlehem, and to dislike the anger I felt every time I went through the checkpoint. Confronting the checkpoints and the barriers to normal life for every Palestinian made it impossible to be in denial about the closures. And yet it seemed that many Israelis must either be in denial or ignorance: to them the siege of whole towns a few miles away was a non-subject.
We drove on, through the gloomy city, its shop fronts shuttered and their courtyards emptied. Inside Aida refugee camp, in the middle of Bethlehem, people were miserable. The silent shooting, bombing, sniping—silent because others rarely heard about it—had gone on and on since the early days of the Intifada, adding another stratum of unhappiness to refugee life.
The camps are so well integrated into Bethlehem that their presence is barely noticeable. There is no perimeter fence or other demarcation, you just arrive there, all of a sudden, across a narrow road or down a small street. On either side the buildings had grown, unplanned, built on, and up, and over. The sense of spacelessness was sharpened by their look of instability. Maha explained to me that often families had to build on top of existing buildings, or hard against another, with a resulting clash of structures.
There were now holes in many of the structures, signs of bombardment. We entered one building and picked our way through the debris up the stairs. A family living there was assembled on a landing, the cold wind coming through the blown-out windows, sliced by the hanging shards of glass. They shook hands and smiled in greeting before showing us the remnants of their apartment. “This is where we were sitting when the rocket came in last night,” explained one of the sons, pointing around the edges of the room. “My mother was just here. My nephew—that’s him—was sitting on her knee. We were watching the news when the rocket came in. Thanks God”—always thanks God— “no one was killed.” “Al-Hamdil’allah,”* said Maha, nodding. The room was not just bombed; it was blackened. The blackness was everywhere. A thread of lamp wire hung down from the charred ceiling, swinging. My shoes crunched glass as I avoided the wire.
One of the sons ushered me away from the glass toward the open window. “There is the IDF tower. That’s where it came from.
But we have this so many nights. They shoot, so of course our time would come.” I looked across the dance of roofs, and saw a tattered fortress-tower. And another, further round. They had all the angles on the camp, which was in Area A, part of the 18 percent of the West Bank where the PA had been granted “full” authority.
We retreated. Maha explained that the family had wanted to
“welcome” us—to give us coffee—but had no means of heating the water, and were ashamed by their failure to be hospitable. I
asked her how many had been made homeless. Four families in that building, “But they will cope,” said Maha.
As we left she pointed toward Gilo. “Over there are the children on the edge of Gilo I was telling you about. They aren’t getting any sleep either.” Maha was wry: “The Gilo settlement was built on land belonging to Beit Jala. Beit Jala fires on Gilo, and what does the world see?—only ‘terrorism.’” She went on: “And of course, when you fire bullets at Gilo, you get fired on by tanks and helicopter missiles in return.”
We went on to another bombed building. On the ground floor were two airless rooms piled with thin foam mattresses, patched with color and shabby. This building had been bombed some nights before, so gas canisters with cooking rings had already been installed in one corner. The air carried wafts of staleness, old rice and gas. We climbed upstairs again, following a tired man who had started to show us the damage. He was an engineer, unemployed and too demoralized to care that he couldn’t be hospitable. His corduroy trousers had the hang of having been owned before. At the top of the stairs he led us over the fallen beams toward the gash in the side of the building, a flap of roof hanging down precariously over the missing wall. There were three families—sixteen children—sleeping in these two rooms, to ride out the repeated attacks and their damage. Two missiles had hit the building that night, showering the refugee families with glass, four of the children ending up in hospital. “How do you explain to your children?” he asked. “What do I say to them when they ask me why the Israelis try to kill them? There is nothing I can say.”
The engineer said, wearily, in anticipation of the usual question put to Palestinian refugees, “Yes, we have the keys to our house—it’s in Beit Jibril,” a village in what was now Israel. He also had the deeds to the house, he said, given to him by his grandfather who in turn had been given them by the Turks during Ottoman rule. He brightened a little: “My grandfather used to tell us Balfour* was a bloody fool. Always, until he died, and we would laugh every time he said it.” He turned around, and interrupted himself—he had made this speech once too often.
“You know, there were journalists here this morning, and other people will come later. None of them do anything—none of you. What you can do? You all say this is terrible, and how can it be happening, and I believe you all believe what you say. But you listen, and then you go. Still nothing changes. I showed them my father who still talks of his village and how he ran away in 1948 from the Israeli army. He told them his story then, and he tells them his story now, his grandchildren also tell the story, but we are still here, we are still refugees. What we can do, ya’ani? It’s cold. I have to keep my children warm. I have to feed them. How I can do this? How?”
And he trailed off, sensing the futility. Maha said afterward that perhaps he felt that, compared to those refugees stuck in Lebanese and Syrian camps, where Palestinians were treated—by their Arab “brothers”—like lepers, denied all rights, all jobs, citizenship, help, hope, or future, he was lucky.
We emerged from the cold building into the street. A couple of children were playing with one of the chunks of ragged glass that had dropped from the top floor where we had stood looking down. It bent pleasingly because of the lamination. Their uncle took the shard from them and threw it away with a shrug of despair.
Maha and I went home later and each settled into the usual round of preparing food and sweeping plastic toys off the floor. The phone rang. It was the young Canadian I had taken on to replace Dina and help out with the slough of domesticity. When we had met she’d come across as an enviably independent world-traveling 24-year-old, but now her voice had changed: “I’ve spoken to my mother and she wants me to come home and she’s going to pay for my ticket and my college fees and so does my dad and I don’t think it’s fair on you if you want a commitment if I can’t deliver on that and I’m really confused.” She was already halfway gone. I wished her luck.
Small leaves in brilliant green unfurled on the fig trees. The little farm was full of birth: a batch of puppies sprawled and tussled. The long-eared goats had kids, silken-coated and skittish, in the paddock. There were always kittens, most of them with thin, hungry mothers. Maha liked the cats; they killed snakes. And now there was a foal. We arrived home just as Basil was scooping the placenta and membranes into a bucket, and the damp foal was lurching from skinny leg to skinny leg, nudging his mother’s belly rudely, impatiently, to persuade the milk to let down.
Normality: we learned to avoid the danger zones, the shopping areas favored by bombers, the movies, theaters, and malls—all out of bounds. Parking by the school in Mea Sharim was always a risk—there had been attacks in the area—but we had no choice. Parking in a safer place would have meant a longer walk through a high-risk area; it was more dangerous to walk than to drive and run. The Anglican school along the street was less exposed, and British consulate children arrived there in an armored vehicle every morning. The Anglican school also offered a large sweep of off-road parking so that no one need park outside. The French school had no such safety area, but it was protected within the compound it shared with a convent of nuns, so once inside school the children were safe. Each set of parents developed a route, and a parking area, which they hoped lowered the likelihood of being bombed.
None of the ruses made much sense—one father favored a U-turn across three lanes of oncoming commuter traffic in order to avoid a road vulnerable to bombers—but taking some control of safety, making decisions about security, however faulty, helped.
Early on the morning of February 13, 2001, Israeli helicopter gunships took out a vehicle in Gaza, killing the occupant. It was an airborne death-squad. There was no debate about the legality, logic, or likely effects of extrajudicial killing. Instead people asked only whether or not the dead man qualified as a terrorist. The PA denied that he was involved in any militant organization, the Israelis claimed that he certainly was. Andrew called just afterward to say that rockets had been fired uncomfortably near the UN compound, at least they weren’t sure if they were rockets or bombs—in fact there were endless conflicting reports—but he was fine, so not to worry. Of course not. As he spoke I thought back to the refugees in Bethlehem and wondered what I would do if we were forced into evacuation, how it would feel to hear him describe how close the bombs had been in Gaza if I were sitting in London. I could hear a helicopter above the noise of the dishwasher. It was on its way to bomb Beit Jala, just over the hill.
The following morning Maha asked her husband, Mohammed, to take me to Talpiot, a semi-industrial Israeli shopping zone in southern Jerusalem, to help me with my application for a better satellite connection. He had worked with the company in the past, and was close to the other employees, his former colleagues, who were all Israeli. They made a big fuss of him when we arrived: “Mohammed, where’ve you been? It’s been a long time!”
They were more natural chatting away in Hebrew, rather than in English for my benefit—I was the alien—so I sat while the young Israeli girl behind the desk filled in the forms. I watched two of them, Mohammed and his particular friend, and found myself counting off the similarities as they talked: the deep dark color and the short blunt cut of their hair, the shape and texture of their clothes, the blue sweaters with close-fitting T-shirts, the depth of the brown in their eyes, the pigment in their skin. How fraternal they seemed. As I watched, I became aware that people were taking an interest in the TV monitor over our heads: the news in Hebrew. I could see scenes of Israeli police milling about and that people had been killed. There were body bags on the ground. I asked Mohammed what was going on. He muttered into the space between us, and waited until there was a buzz of Hebrew conversation to drown ours. “A Palestinian has driven into a crowd of soldiers waiting for a bus.” The man, a regular bus employee, had decided to use the bus he drove as a fatal weapon, killing eight people and injuring twenty-five. Many of the victims were young soldiers heading for Tel Aviv to report for duty.
I waited for an outcry, for some reaction to the killings. Mohammed was the only Palestinian present, and much as he might look similar, the divisions were up there, vivid on the screen. But there was no reaction, no rancor, just a quiet sorrow clinging to them all. If anything, it was me who was the excluded outsider, staring dumbly at the Hebrew literature in their office, listening deafly to their questions about me. Mohammed filled in the details of where I lived and how to get there to install the satellite receiver. No one said anything about the killings.
Later that day, outside the boys’ school, I talked to a Palestinian parent, Robert. He had promised to give me a bar of olive oil soap from his estate near Nablus, and now he handed me a small parcel. As everyone always did, we talked about the day’s events. Catriona was taking a nap in the back of the Land Rover, and Robert, in his expensive tweed coat and shirt and tie, was leaning in through the window. At one point he looked at the approaching cars and said, “I keep thinking they’re going to run me down in revenge.” I changed the subject. The soap was rich and yellow, wrapped in tissue paper and smelling of ripe oily fruit. He explained how best to use it, how to work up a good lather, how it is hard at first, and also about the farm where the soap was made. “I’m still hoping that one day we’ll get back the house my family built in West Jerusalem; it was expropriated in 1948 and now it’s valued at $3 million.”
On the way to Talpiot, Mohammed had told me he wanted to build a sitting room to improve their home. It was windowless and “underground” because our house had been built in front of it, and when his uncle had decided to expand he had simply built on top of Mohammed’s house. Now Mohammed and Maha, their three daughters, and Mohammed’s mother, Naimi, lived in two dark bedrooms with a third room that served as their living room. Mohammed’s brother-in-law had started building a small house on their land, a terrace below the village. The Israeli authorities, whose policy was almost always to deny permits for new Palestinian housing, were bound to object. All these families were expanding, Mohammed said; growing sons take on young wives, and they can’t keep squeezing yet more families into the same buildings. Meanwhile there were new houses and incentives for Israelis; I remembered seeing in the paper that week news of a Knesset bill giving financial rewards to Jewish families who bought houses in Jerusalem.
When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, it redefined “Jerusalem” (see map, x). The newly demarcated terrain was not only the ancient city, but also a tract of land swallowing a third of the West Bank. Until 1967, East Jerusalem had covered only 6.5 square kilometers. Most of the land annexed by Israel as “East Jerusalem” belonged to 28 Palestinian villages in the West Bank which, all of a sudden, found themselves part of an “indivisible” Jewish city. Maha and her family—and we—lived in one of the many Palestinian areas where planning restrictions and expanding concentric bands of colonies built to encircle the new Jerusalem had prevented any Palestinian growth.4
But Jerusalem is not simply a religious site of unquestionable importance to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike; it is the center of Palestinian life and the focus of 40 percent of the Palestinian economy. It had been so for generations, and now they were being walled out. It was, one Palestinian said, “like walling the English out of London, the French out of Paris, or the Spanish out of Madrid.” Many Israelis have described the Palestinians’ strong attachment to their land.5 Some of those who worked in the Occupied Territories said this was self-evident: only a profound connection to the soil and color and contours of a place, let alone its history and memories and meaning, would keep a people from quitting under such pressure. There were other Israelis, however, who held that this connection was fabricated, even part of a conspiracy to thwart Israeli dreams. What was more surprising was another question I heard more than once: “Why do the Arab refugees keep their keys, why do they hold on to them year after year? What does it mean to them?” An expatriate nurse, listening in disbelief to one of these conversations, blurted out, “But surely the Jewish people, of all people, understand the strength of connection to a place?” That, she was told, was different.
One morning when Amer, a neighbor from the next village, had dropped by on his way to work to bring us warm bread baked with thyme he had picked from his hillside, and was standing at the door, Maha telephoned to ask if I would come have coffee. Naimi let me in, and I found Maha in her kitchen, the oldest part of their house. We were underground. There were no windows, and there was no door, just an opening in the wall, its hewn mouth painted in shining white emulsion. It was a cave, albeit white-washed and with all the electric appliances and worktops of a kitchen: nevertheless, a cave. Maha smiled as I looked at the roughness of the walls that she had turned into a feature: “I told you it was a cave,” she said.
We sat with our cups of coffee in the living room. She wanted to tell me that the planning department had, as feared, visited her brother to tell him he was building illegally and must apply for a permit. “They want him to wait for one of those permits that are never granted, so people end up building anyway, and then either watch the building pulled down or pay a huge fine to the ministry.” Maha’s brother also faced a fine for employing a Palestinian from the West Bank. “The West Bank and East Jerusalem are like the body and the heart that beats inside it,” said
Maha, “but the Israeli administration wants to amputate them, cut the one off from the other.”
I listened: listening with frustration and injustice sitting like a block, as they did so often in conversations with both sides, all sides. My frustration was making me intolerant of the victims. There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry. There’s nothing anyone can do. I wanted to hide away, pretend none of it was happening, that it would all turn out okay, somehow. So I went to work. Having more or less settled the children, war permitting, I wanted more regular work than just writing occasional articles.
I had been given an introduction to a doctor on the faculty of al-Quds University, and through her I began research work in the university’s school of public health at al-Bireh near Ramallah. On some days I went to the main campus in Abu Dis, driving the short distance from home to the Old City, around the Mount of Olives and through the checkpoint: the route that would later be cut in half by the Security Barrier. The minute you leave West Jerusalem the roads become dilapidated and tangled; there are few signs, not much in the way of road markings, and an air of imminent road anarchy. I would go past the gatehouse and into the university, to where olive groves and fields, part of the agriculture department’s water-treatment trials, edged the campus. The campus breathed a rural space, with views across the valleys and down toward the Dead Sea. On the other side of the road were blanks in the fields, marked out for sports stadiums, but stalled as large half-finished squares of sand.
The Abu Dis campus was lively with groups of male and female medical students, who would become the first homegrown Palestinian doctors. One day, as I was heading off to a meeting, the students were homing in on the large auditorium to hear a panel discuss depleted uranium, focusing heavily on its chemistry rather than its politics (Arafat had recently lashed out, accusing the IDF of using depleted uranium against Palestinians).* Since the discussion was in Arabic, I was given a brief translation. One of the students, bearded, tall and disarming, grinned down at me and apologized that he could not, on account of his religion, shake my hand. I withdrew it and changed to the “hand on heart” gesture I had learned in Pakistan.
My meeting was with a group of researchers from the school of public health. We sat in a small conference room and talked about the department’s projects. The researchers were cheerful and full of plans despite the situation and its effects on their lives. Each of them had, that morning, as every morning, faced the humiliation and irritation of the checkpoints. One had been ordered to stand aside for questioning, and challenged by an eighteen-year-old soldier to prove her credentials. She had told him about her under-graduate and post-graduate degrees, and the universities where she had studied, and he had let her go. “He was just a kid,” she said, “I think he’d have liked to go to London University too.”
I had found my morning’s checkpoint experience infuriating, and commented on their resilience. “It’s been getting steadily worse for years,” said one. “We know what we are facing, and we know we just have to keep going whatever happens.” Education, she explained, was their most important weapon. She said that, as occupiers, the Israelis had gone to some lengths to promote Palestinian educational institutions, and yet they threatened them in so many other ways—physically closing them down, censorship, confiscating documents, and arresting participants. “But we refuse to be deprived of our education and our academic freedoms.” She told me about the research she was already doing, and other projects that she was planning, and said, “Come on, come as much as you can, we have too much to do.”
To be free to do this I needed more domestic help. Once Dina had quit, Delal and Naimi had started helping me out with the cleaning on an ad hoc basis, in return for groceries rather than cash so as to bypass the social veto on working in another man’s house. One morning they had been reduced to ducking below the windowsill to avoid Abu Anis and his disapproval, when he had come to the house to return some coffee cups and a tray. An arrangement with Delal and Naimi would have suited everyone involved, but it was impossible. Knowing I needed more help, a Palestinian friend at the lycée reintroduced me to Samia, a Christian Palestinian I had met before the Intifada began; she suggested we meet at the boys’ school.
I didn’t recognize Samia; she was a changed woman. We said hello inside the walled compound of the schoolyard, but Samia’s eyes were elsewhere, everywhere, scanning, arcs of white under her black lashes. Children ran with the excitement of release from class, and picked on her as cats pick on people who fear them. They jostled, bumping her and spinning her until she lost her thinly held control and whirled about. I led her out of the throng and drove her to the quiet of our house where we could talk. She asked repeatedly if where we lived was safe: “Are we safe here?” I tried to tell her that we were quite safe, insulated even, but she wouldn’t be convinced. It wasn’t only people she feared; it was noise, movement, anything sudden.
She let go of her hesitation and spewed out that she no longer had a house, it had been bombed, and she was living in a church, eating food handed out by charities, and that “Every night the shooting starts, so my people shut up their houses and wait, wait for the retaliation that they know will come,” from the IDF, “from their tanks and missiles,” she said, “and they hit us and destroy, destroy, destroy.” She had a strange numbness: everyone had become an enemy, bar the Christian inhabitants of Beit Jala. In her eyes the Israelis were a greater enemy than “the Muslims,” but the Muslims were their enemy too: “Nothing will stop them from shooting at Gilo, nothing we can do, even when we die.” She had stopped thinking about anything beyond the grind of day into night and out again: “It gets dark, they start to shoot, they come closer and shoot again, we move out to escape, and then the tanks and helicopters start. We have no work, we have no food, we have no sleep.” Nothing mattered except being able to see the next day begin.
I had installed Catriona in a preschool in Jerusalem and the boys were happy enough at the lycée. Taking on Samia would give me more freedom, and I thought a live-in job might give Samia a break from her fear, and allow her to wind down from her state of constant vigilance. We agreed to try one another, and I showed her the ropes. As we walked down the hill to drop off the garbage in the community dumpster (there is minimal garbage collection in East Jerusalem) we met Amer, on his way home to the lower village. I introduced them and he welcomed her with his usual grin. But she stiffened, accusing him of not being Palestinian because he didn’t roll his Rs properly.
“She thinks I’m Israeli,” he laughed. “That’s okay.” He thought it funny, perhaps a little irritating. His mind was full of his daughter’s problems. The little girl had been born with a shortened left arm and only two digits on her left hand, and was being treated at the Israeli hospital next to the French school. Her next surgical step in the long schedule of operations had been delayed yet again because she had a chest infection, and he was unhappy that she was losing time in the program to rebuild her arm. While we talked, Samia jumped, and I rewound the sounds in our ears. Something large had dropped in the valley below, which must have sounded to her like a gunshot.
I hoped she would feel more secure once she started work. There were times when I found her sitting silent in the house, staring at nothing, but in general she seemed to be calmer. It wasn’t because she slept well at night: she insisted on going home to Beit Jala every afternoon. “Home” was where her nephew was, somewhere in Beit Jala, perhaps in the church, but she didn’t say; she simply said she had to be with him at night. Then one day she admitted that they had applied for visas to get out: “We are leaving Palestine. It is finished,” she said.
When she made her announcement, Mohammed was connecting a new phone line for the satellite installation. He looked at her but said nothing. He turned instead to a lithograph of a castle built by Saladin on an island in the Red Sea just beyond the southern tip of Israel, and began examining it closely. Samia finished talking about Palestine’s doom, and Mohammed said: ‘I want to take Maha and the girls away for a couple of days.” Then looking closer at the lithograph, he said, “That isn’t there any more, right?” pointing to the castle. I admitted that it was, and that we had taken our children there during a recent long weekend.
Without passports, Mohammed and his family had few opportunities to travel. We now viewed our freedom of movement, which we had always taken for granted, differently. We were also keen to explore Israel and went north during the next long weekend, overcoming our war-induced apathy and our disgruntlement at the wetness of the weather. Green again: the Galilee was lush and verdant, brimmingly fertile and lovely to look on. We visited Armageddon on the way north, a benign, ruin-strewn hillock with a heavy name. Capernaum, where Jesus picked his fishers of men, fed 5,000 with five loaves and two fishes and preached the Sermon on the Mount, hovered on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, a pale expanse of quiet water. Up in the foothills of Mount Hermon rises the spring—at Banias—where the Romans had worshipped Bacchus and contemplated fertility in temples whose scattered columns remain, tumbled about. We could escape, the strains of Jerusalem falling away during our tour of Israel’s northern attractions.
Back in Jerusalem again, work was a struggle. On many days even attempting to get to the school of public health in al-Bireh was out of the question, either because of the intensified IDF closures, or because of overnight or threatened bombings. When I did try, I could spend so much time held up at the checkpoints that when I finally made it to work I had to turn around and start for home again.
The process was wearying: beginning the day in the dark to get everything ready and on the road for the boys’ school, Catriona’s preschool, and then my work, the pressure of rush-hour traffic through Jerusalem, where roads were white-lined and orderly, but aggression was not. Then through the Palestinian areas of Shuafat and Beit Hanina, with signs to the settlements on both sides, construction everywhere for the new roads to serve those settlements and the Palestinian roads disintegrating. Toward Ramallah, beyond a-Ram checkpoint, which could strangle the traffic for any length of time, and into an area without white lines, where roads were gravel, dust prevailed, and traffic lights had lost their colors, so you look for red with your foot on the brake and see only white and hear people hooting from behind. Then you realize the white light dangling on a wire that swings into view when the wind permits is the green-for-go sign but it’s missing its colored filter. Through the lights, the traffic forms itself into lanes across the road in the dust, or mud if it’s raining, according to speed and the drivers’ daring. Yellow taxis race by, 4x4s get the upper hand in the mud, trucks grind remorselessly, and everyone slams on the brakes before the sleeping policemen—huge hillocks in the road laid by locals—throw the unsuspecting into the air.
Then all drivers are funneled into one arena—Qalandia. The Palestinians’ simple, now-bombed, airport lies to the left. Ahead are the soldiers, unseen because of the thronging mass of cars and jostling trucks. There is usually an unspoken “in-the-same-boat” mentality that dampens argument. Frequently the edging forward creates a logjam, in which case people appear from the sidelines to direct the mess into flow again. Boys squeeze between vehicles carrying decorative jugs of drinks, hawkers sell oddments, tea-merchants pour long spouts of hot liquid from jugs. But the hours spent lined up in a funnel—this is not a border checkpoint—are still angry ones. In one direction your work is waiting, colleagues looking at watches, understanding. In the other direction your children are waiting, alone in the schoolyard, thinking of arrests and shootings because they hear about them every day. Your friends will step in for the children, but maybe they’ve been held up too. The situation is organizing you: it wants you to give up work and retreat.
I was often angry: it was not only the difficulty of getting to work. Amer had been making a little sleigh-bed for Catriona and had had to go to Ramallah to find a mattress to fit. He admitted later that he had been forced to pull down his trousers at the checkpoint on the way back. I felt responsible for his humiliation, and for such a trivial cause—a mattress. He brushed it off, saying he understood why the soldiers did these things and didn’t hold it against them, but nor would he let the humiliation get to him. He smiled broadly, “You just have to keep smiling and not minding whatever they do—that really pisses them off.”
One day, Karen, a Jewish-American friend from New York came to stay, bringing luminous stars for the children. They lay in their beds with their glowing stars stuck to the walls beside them. Karen and I talked about the next day’s plans for a “day of rage” in protest at the total closure of the villages around Ramallah. People were saying it would be real rage this time, the frustrations beyond controllable. Only that morning a colleague, bleary-eyed and now bitter, had told me of her daughters’ fears the night before, lying on the bathroom floor yet again as the gunfire rained down from the settlement above, strafing their home, and nothing they could do about it. The settlers complained about the same problem; Palestinian gunmen firing up at them so that they were unsafe in their homes too, their children too terrified to sleep. Everyone living in fear.
We joined friends for dinner in West Jerusalem. The situation dominated: there was worried talk about the brutality and where it might lead. The group was upset by recent reports in the papers: for example, that soldiers had shot unarmed, handcuffed Palestinians. One talked about a letter from an ex-IDF officer who had been shocked at the sight of soldiers dragging a bleeding young Palestinian through the streets of Hebron.6 We talked about what life must be like under Closure, and about all the dead children and the mentality of suicide bombers and of snipers picking children out. “What goes on inside a bomber’s head as he looks at the people he’s about to kill?” and “What makes a sniper target children and children’s eyes?”
“There is massive denial among Israelis,” said one friend, Joni, “about the existence of the brutality, never mind where it’s taking us.” He assigned this denial partly to Israelis’ understandable fears, and partly to manipulation. “If you want to hold on to the territories, you can’t have people understanding the link between the violence and the occupation. You have to manipulate and break that link. So you push two basic lines: Arabs are intrinsically violent, and the territories are vital for Israel’s security.”
“And where are we heading—where are the negotiations?” Karen asked. “How can we get peace without negotiating?” Many people bemoaned the blocks on getting back to the table since the Taba talks; there was the now-familiar grumble, that the Palestinians weren’t serious about peace so what was the point in trying to negotiate. But one said there was an old pattern of stonewalling.
This pattern, said another, was typical. By prompting Palestinian attacks, either steadily by closures and collective punishment, or more dramatically by assassinating their leaders, it was easy to maintain that it was all Arafat’s fault. Never Israel’s fault: “Israel wants only peace,”—he was hamming up the delivery—then added, “on Israel’s terms.”
The denial Joni talked about was pervasive. One afternoon I took my two younger children to a playground while Archie had a cello lesson. I was just aware of strange construction noises, I thought, or could it be thunder—the weather had grown very hazy through the day and the dust hung heavy in the air. Then it sank in that the noises were tank shells landing on Beit Jala. I began to listen properly, realizing that the thuds were shells because the shelling was interspersed with machine-gun fire. They grew louder as the wind changed. There I was in a playground— some would point out on expropriated land—with my two children, while just across the valley other children were cowering in a theater of war.
There were other parents with children playing, but the parents were ignoring the noises. I had seen a couple of the mothers before; one was a friendly American with a hairy dog. We had talked over the children and done the playground exchange in the past, but as we lined up for an ‘afurch at the tiny coffee shop on the corner I broke the situation taboo and said: “You hear the bombing? It must be terrifying for them.” She looked at me. “No, I don’t hear anything. Nothing.” And turned away.
I saw and heard denial everywhere. I applied it myself. My mother visited against the advice of her husband: I said he was being too cautious. She had a list of Holy Land sites she wanted to see but gave up after Bethlehem, in disbelief. I tried to say that the closures weren’t so bad; she said, “Fine, let’s try some other places.” She wanted to go to Hebron, Nablus, Jericho, and the monastery of Mar Saba. Blocked at every one of them, we went to the Old City and bought lithographs of these places instead. David Roberts lithographs, from Yasser Barakat.
“Don’t you see the guns anymore?” she asked as we walked through the alleyways of the Old City, passed more Israeli soldiers, all hung about with weapons.
“Of course...”
“Doesn’t it make you want to scream when they stop you at the checkpoints every time?”
“But there’s nothing you can do. The soldiers at the checkpoint have absolute power, there’s no point to getting angry. And are you going to scream every day, twice a day?”
Later we were at another checkpoint, and a middle-aged man in a suit was being pulled out of a taxi on the other side of the road. “No, no, that can’t happen,” she said, as the police began to rough him up.
I drove her away, saying, again, there’s nothing you can do. No point. When I did get angry I’d had soldiers shouting at me: “I am the law here, you obey me,” and it was true. They were the law, even if they were breaking international laws in the process, and I did have to obey. “This happens all over the world, not just in Israel.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s right,” she said.
“And you can go back to London and forget how angry you feel now. It’s a good thing you have to leave,” I said, looking at the disgust written on her face.
Before she left, Maha and Naimi laid out a special feast for my mother and gave her presents of ceramics and embroidery from the Old City. They knew where to buy from local artisans, rather than the ubiquitous Chinese tourist products and sparkly Indian fabrics. My mother was touched by their thoughtfulness. At the airport she was interrogated: who had she seen, who had she met, why had she come, what were the names of the Palestinians she had seen and why had she met them. All reasonable questions given the circumstances; Israel had to control the Palestinian uprising after all, she said. But it was the attitude that was so painful. A few hours before she had sat as a guest in Maha’s house, then at the airport this friendship had been criminalized, and she had felt obliged to deny it existed. When she returned to London and told the story she was asked why she had associated with Palestinians. The word was used as a pejorative, like barbarian or savage, in a menu of ignorance. My mother turned away.
* René apologized two years later for the apparent error of his prediction. Then, in August 2005, hundreds of lives later, Sharon pulled all the Israeli settlers out of the Gaza Strip, and from four settlements in the northern West Bank.
* Former US Senator George Mitchell arrived in Israel in December 2000 as a result of the meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh in October.
* Praise be to God.
* The Balfour Declaration, 1917: in a letter to Lord Rothschild, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The document, hailed by the Zionist movement, has been criticized for failing to clarify how it is possible to provide a national home for one people without prejudicing the rights of the majority people—95 percent of the population—already there.
* Depleted uranium: a radioactive heavy metal used in armor-piercing munitions and in enhanced armor protection for some tanks. Taken into the body via metal fragments or dust-like particles, depleted uranium can pose a long-term health hazard. No evidence was produced to back up Arafat’s accusation.