Читать книгу Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation - Colm Toibin, Ayelet Waldman - Страница 17

From a hilltop just beyond the checkpoint, I can see the southern boundary between Israel and Palestine. But, eyes moving between map and world, I can find no border, wall, checkpoint, or cut in the earth to mark the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the UN Security Council and the international community reaffirmed this line, which in 1948 had moved 78.5 percent of historic Palestine into Israeli possession, as the border to be maintained “for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every State in the area can live in security.”^fn1

There is nothing to be seen of it now, and certainly no sign of it here in the South Hebron Hills, where an Israeli traveler would never know he or she had passed the boundary into Palestine.

A little more than an hour from the deep valleys and soaring hills of Jerusalem, this rocky, barren landscape seems to inhabit another time. Even the sky is austere, a pale blue cloth made entirely of heat.

Days after my visit, as I thought aloud about the emotional pull of the South Hebron Hills, the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh reminded me, “Don’t forget, you’re seeing the land in summer. It will look completely different in the winter.” I was startled to realize that all I could see was one aspect of a harsh, inhospitable season. Raja could see this alongside its opposite: a floating green, both the withering and the generation of possibilities.

SATURDAY, AND THE SOUTH HEBRON HILLS FLOWED OUT LIKE DEEP waves on the sea, dipped in the colours of straw and dust. A shepherd was being detained, his flock alleged to have crossed into a military buffer zone. Six bulky soldiers stood with their hands draped over their rifles. The border of the closed military zone was a dirt path along the ridge; surrounded by hills, it appeared innocuous as a line of string. An Israeli settlement, Mitzpeh Avigayil, stood on the opposite hilltop, too distant to be clearly seen. The land, just rocks and slope and wind, seemingly bereft of everything but its longevity, made me feel at once insignificant and alive and ancient.

The shepherd, Nael Abu Aram, a Palestinian, was thirty years old, of slender build, with close-cropped hair and a look of quiet containment. Under the blistering sun, we stood together, waiting to see what the soldiers and the police would do. The pages of our notebooks clapped in the wind, pens fell in the dust. Children, who had run up from a neighbouring village, spun around us.

Nael described his life as a quiet and unremarkable one, which changed dramatically in 1998. Since then, the number of times he had been detained, arrested, and imprisoned was lost to him. Settlers had attacked his sheep with metal pipes. They shook bottles filled with rocks, which frightened the flock and caused them to disperse. He had been beaten by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers, border police, and settlers, had his mouth and skin burned by cigarettes, and his skin cut with knives. After one arrest, he was blindfolded and then released, disoriented, on the wrong side of a checkpoint in the middle of the night. Of this encounter, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published video footage of an army commander telling him, “You’re not allowed to be here, because this is Mitzpeh Avigayil. You’re not allowed to be here. There’s a Jewish community here, and you’re not allowed near it.”^fn2 He had been fined numerous times. In 2014, settlers cut down thirty mature olive trees belonging to his family. Last year, his family’s crops were burned. Citing security risks to the settlers, he had been warned against coming too close to the military buffer zone, which is not only adjacent to his land, but on land that once belonged to him.

We watched the police officers drive away to their station, inside the settler outpost. The soldiers and the incessant sun remained. More time passed. Finally, having never been charged, Nael was free to go. “Please excuse me,” he said. “I’m very tired.” He counted the flock and set off, cutting a quick pace across the hills. We followed at a distance. A kilometer later, the sheep made riotous, guttural shouts as they arrived home to water and shade. They leaped comically high, like bouncing balls. It was midday now, the height of summer.

IN ITALO CALVINO’S INVISIBLE CITIES, PLACES ARE FOLDED INSIDE OTHER places. Cities are not only what they appear to be, but also what they are subjected to: memory, history, desire, forgetfulness, dreams. The buildings, storehouses of emotion, are far more than mere edifices; they are the visible structures of the human condition. In Israel and Palestine, I thought often of Calvino’s seen and unseen places, where the horizontal and vertical axes of history and place bend into the space-time of memory and desire. Of cities, Calvino writes, “Everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.”

Those words were on my mind when I came to Wadi a-Jheish (“Valley of the Little Donkey”), where the concrete rubble was a glaring white. Two weeks earlier, on June 19, 2016, the Israeli army had arrived in the afternoon and bulldozed two buildings. I was surprised to see that the home had not simply been pushed over; it had been carefully, even cleanly, buried under its own rubble. A boy was standing balanced on the loose stones, reminiscent of the Little Prince perched on a moonscape.

Amir, eight years old, had lived here. When I asked him what had happened, he pointed to the rocks. “I lost my clothes. I lost my shoes and we lost our food.” The army had not let them retrieve their possessions, and along with their plates, cooking utensils, and personal objects, had buried the family’s flour, sugar, and rice underneath the rubble. The two structures had been home to twenty-one people, including fourteen children and teenagers. Bits of Tupperware and a torn, very small pair of pants were visible in the debris.

Amir’s smile was troubled. He nonetheless offered up his memory of that day to me like a piece of bread on a plate, like a possession. He took me to see the family’s sheep. His three sisters were sitting underneath a truck, inside a slip of shade; the oldest, Wouroud (“Bouquet of Roses”), sixteen years old, joined us. With a video camera borrowed from an uncle, she had filmed the demolition. When I asked if she had been scared, she answered patiently, “Of course.”

We talked about school and marriage and life while, beside us, the family’s twenty sheep swayed restlessly. I asked Amir what he liked best. “I like to graze,” he said. “I like to be with the flock because that’s how we make the milk and butter and cheese. I like them.” But when he grew up, he wanted to leave and go far away.

“To live somewhere else,” I said, assuming that I understood.

“To bring money for my family.”

When I asked Wouroud what she liked best, she looked me straight in the eyes. “I just want to live,” she replied, shrugging.

I asked what her mother had said to them, after the demolition.

“She said we only had one house, we didn’t have an alternative. She was very sad. She said to us, we need help. We were in the sun since this moment, and it was Ramadan.”

I was reminded of another Palestinian home I recently saw. Half concrete wall, half tent, yet the makeshift kitchen somehow pristine, under the strict care of two women who cooked the family’s meals while children leaped about their skirts. As the temperature soared, women and children lay down on the cool concrete. Tucked away were the bedding, wash buckets, soap, pots and implements, cups and dishes, jars of flour, barley, and sugar, a coffee pot—the necessities for basic family life. It struck me that every demolition carried out by men with bulldozers and guns was a demolition of the world of women, whose lives, already precarious, already exhausting, were destroyed anew.

“In three years, when I get married, I’ll need a home for my family,” Wouroud said. “What do they want from us? We have to live. We have to exist.”

Their village, Wadi a-Jheish, is in Area C of the West Bank. According to the terms of the 1993 Oslo accords, Palestinian residents of Area C are under full Israeli control for security, zoning, and planning. Area C, containing most of the West Bank’s natural resources and open spaces, best exemplifies the policy known as “maximum land, minimum Arabs.”^fn3 Although the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has grown by 340,000 in the last forty years, and settlers have been provided with police and military protection as well as connected to Israel’s water, electricity, and sanitation services, Palestinian construction—even on land the Israeli courts have recognized as registered to Palestinians—has been curtailed. Area C comprises 60 percent of the land in the West Bank and is home to 300,000 Palestinians. In 2014 only one Palestinian building permit was approved; in 2015, the number was zero. A 2013 World Bank report found that potential revenue for Palestinians in Area C alone, of which 99 percent is currently off limits to Palestinian development, would be a staggering USD 3.4 billion, over a billion dollars more than Palestine’s entire current revenue.^fn4

My eyes saw what was before me, but it was so confounding, my mind resisted its credibility.

The question that solidified in my mind was this one: Are the Palestinian people fated to disappear, and does Israel’s interaction with this land inevitably rely on the physical control and consequent disappearance of the Palestinians? Is it true that the state of Israel cannot exist if the state of Palestine does? What does it mean, in our contemporary world, to have a promised land?

Yigal Bronner, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, answered it this way: “Susiya against Susya, this is the whole story.”