Where the Line is Drawn

by Raja Shehadeh

  He made it clear that his refusal was not intended to prompt more soldiers to dodge the draft. After all, he came from a family whose members had all served in the Israeli army. When he was asked whether he was disappointed that few Israelis were following his example, he replied:

  Throughout, my actions have been dictated solely by my conscience. My refusal is not intended to get more soldiers to do the same but to emphasise that, as an Israeli citizen, I acted according to my conscience. The fact that I am alone just now in thinking this way and acting on it is also fine. I am disappointed to some extent in Israeli society − the fact that much of it does not agree about the actions that need to be taken to stop the occupation and our rule over another nation.

  We showered him with questions about his experiences in prison, where he had worked in the kitchen. ‘The hardest part was not knowing when it would be over,’ he said. When we asked how the other prisoners reacted to him, he told us, ‘I was able to make friends with some of them. They were curious to hear from me because they had never encountered someone with ideas and positions like mine. But by the end I was glad it was over.’

  As Natan spoke, his grandmother looked at him, her face full of pride – not because he shared her politics but because he clearly showed that he had a mind of his own. He had also probably inherited from her his stubbornness and singularity. At no point did Judy stop visiting her Palestinian friends in the West Bank. Neither the intifada nor any red sign posted at the checkpoint forbidding Israelis from going into Palestinian areas ever deterred her. She was ready, as few Israelis were, to break the law because she didn’t believe in it. She also helped wherever she could by using her car to transport Palestinian children who needed dialysis at Israeli hospitals and who could not cross the checkpoint because their mothers would not be allowed through. She was always there for her friends, and it made no difference whether they were Palestinian or Israeli.

  I first met Judy in 1982 after the publication of my book The Third Way and we have been friends ever since. At her dinner parties she introduced me to other like-minded friends, among them Reuven Kaminer, whose granddaughter Tair was another conscientious objector. Tair spent more than 100 days in military prison in 2016.

  Judy had a dancer’s poise and a great deal of charm. She graciously attended to everyone, and always managed to find out what other people were interested in, asking them questions and deflecting the conversation away from herself.

  We always discussed politics, not only what was taking place but what action was needed. Sometimes we fought bitterly. After the Oslo Accords, some of her friends – former members of the Communist Party – argued passionately in favour of the deal. I disagreed. On other occasions I would find myself furiously venting my anger at the Israelis for what their military were doing. I knew I was being unfair and that Judy certainly was against the army’s actions, yet she never became visibly angry. She listened patiently – she was always a good listener – and sometimes she made comments which only later, when I had cooled down, did I understand. But she never stopped me or took offence.

  At lunch I found myself wondering for the first time to what extent immigrants from North America like Judy become Israeli after moving there. Judy was from an assimilated New York family that was not Zionist. She once told me that coming to Israel was for her like a shot in the dark. ‘I was twenty-five. I met Haim Blanc at Harvard and he asked me if I would go to Palestine with him. I refused. So he went alone and then he came back and asked me again. This time I decided to risk it and join him. I arrived in Israel six years after the state was established.’

  At the beginning she felt at sea. ‘But I survived,’ she said, which I interpreted to mean she had stuck to her own beliefs and ways. She did it by raising a family and cultivating Israeli and Palestinian friends. She did not mingle with Palestinians for selfish reasons, to clear her conscience. She was like Henry in that regard, but unlike him she was always eager to be politically involved. She wanted to change the status quo. It was in the Blanc home that the Committee for Solidarity with Birzeit University and the Committee Against the War in Lebanon were formed. Sharp and full of vitality, Judy was one of the women who in December 1988 started Women in Black, holding vigils every Friday at which they carried ‘Stop the Occupation’ posters in Hagar Square in Jerusalem and endured the hostility of passers-by.

  She had met Henry and knew about our friendship. She sometimes invited us together to her house, but the two of them were not close. Both possessed strong personalities and were independent. Judy never stopped being an American in Israel and Henry never stopped being Canadian. But their children will be Israeli, even if they do become dissidents.

  At the Everest Restaurant gathering, we soon left Natan alone. Khalil Mahshi, who worked for UNESCO in Paris, was there with his wife, Suhair Azouni. He described how as a child he would come here with his uncle, who played the oud. It used to be a happy, peaceful place. So many wonderful parties had been held here under the pine trees.

  Even at these tense times, the place was tranquillity itself, with a slight breeze passing through the pine needles – a natural canopy over the long table that Rita Giacaman, an old, close friend of Judy’s and ours, had insisted on having the waiters place outside on the porch. A dog – it was Judy’s son Jeremiah’s – sniffed around happily as the group took their seats around the long lunch table. We drank to Judy’s health. Penny stood up and read an ode she had composed for Judy:

  A poet I am not, more’s the pity,

  My ode to Judy is more like a ditty,

  But from a friend’s heart if not a bard’s brain,

  Even if for each rhyme I must strain.

  I celebrate here a friendship in verse –

  Judy, Penny and Rita in good times and worse.

  During Gulf War I, Judy would telephone:

  Dears, sirens sounding, there may be trouble.

  Sirenless, Ramallah was then not a bubble!

  Early second intifada, Judy listened to Mozart.

  Irritated at his cheerfulness, she had to part

  For a while, but who can resist him for long?

  Even Rita, a Bach fan, got swept by his song.

  Remembering the past with Judy is a pleasure,

  But our present moment here is something to

  treasure.

  And for more words, I turn to the rest

  Of you here, with one last word on the past

  Before Judy takes a bow

  Sung by old B. Dylan, his guitar ablast:

  We were so much older then,

  We’re younger than that now.

  Khalil spoke about the special relationship he’d always had with Judy and how close to her he felt. He mentioned how, during his time as a professor at Birzeit University when the military would not allow mail to reach him, Judy let him use her West Jerusalem mailbox to receive books he had ordered from abroad. He also spoke of their struggle to have the university opened after it had been closed by the military during the first intifada.

  I spoke of touring Europe with Judy and Reuven Kaminer in the early 1980s to speak about the danger of continued settlement building. I told our audiences how Reuven kept saying that the Jews were escaping from a house on fire by throwing themselves out of the windows and falling on the shoulders of the Palestinians. Standing next to Reuven, I was the Palestinian who had to describe to our European audiences what the consequences of this were, on me and on my people. This experience strengthened our relationship and helped it to endure.

  In retrospect, even the most traumatic times yield good stories. Some even brought tears of laughter to our eyes. We remembered the thrill of more hopeful times when we were certain we would succeed and the long years of despair that followed. We laughed at how Rita could not survive without the Israeli soured cream shamenet and how Judy had to slip through checkpoints to keep her well stocked. Some of those friends who used to gather at Judy’s West Jerusalem flat to discuss politics are sadly
no longer with us, but those of us who remained had a wealth of memories. On this joyful occasion we tried to concentrate on the happy ones. Then, striking a more serious note, Rita said, ‘People sometimes praise Judy and me for coming together from our two different sides – but we are on the same side.’

  Now it was the turn of Sarah, Judy’s only daughter, to speak. As she drew to the end, she paused and then added in a thoughtful tone of voice, ‘I was not aware that I have two sisters, Penny and Rita.’ After she said this I looked around at Judy’s children, especially at Sarah, who seemed the worrying type. I thought about how much I enjoyed Judy as a friend but how different it must be for her children, especially for Sarah as a daughter. It can’t be easy to have a mother who takes such risks, who is always breaking the law and going to where many think it is too dangerous to go, especially for a woman at her advanced age.

  Henry was not with us that day, but he and I had been meeting since. He had suffered terribly from the lymphoma, but he survived. During our meeting on 10 November 2015 he told me that, despite the fear of a recurrence, he felt more alive than ever. We spent several hours talking, exchanging news and catching up. As we talked, we walked in the green valley that overlooked the Arab neighbourhood of Silwan, where the most extreme Israeli Jews had tried to take over Palestinian homes one at a time to rebuild the ancient City of David. As I looked over the valley, I wondered whether it would have been possible for the Israeli people to create a presence and a history for themselves here without negating ours. All evidence indicated they couldn’t. But until they accept that the land must be shared and that both peoples have the right to self-determination, peace will remain elusive.

  Naomi and I continued to meet whenever she came to Israel to see her mother and brother in the Galilee. And I would see her when I travelled to the UK. In 2015 I was attending a literary festival in London and Naomi came from her university in Warwick to hear me speak. It was lovely to see her. Afterwards we continued chatting to the very last minute before we had to go our separate ways. When she got back she wrote:

  Someone once said to me that when one meets old, real friends one is reminded of, and feels in touch with, who one really is. That is how it felt for me, not just from our all too brief chat, but from what you said, and how, on stage. Ran to catch my train (which I did, just) feeling hugely uplifted.

  At our last meeting Henry gave me his book on siblings, Brothers and Sisters. In it he uses his vast knowledge of the Bible to write about these relationships. These days, what with messianic Zionism being used to justify all sorts of land theft, racism and even murder, and with Islam used to justify the most gruesome killings, I was curious to know where Henry stood on religion. His answer comforted me: ‘I’m not a believer but I have a deep interest in tradition. That’s why, for example, I light a Shabbat candle. This is usually done by the woman in the house, but Iva comes from such an anti-religious home that she refuses to do it, so I do it and I offer a prayer for peace – not to God, because I don’t believe, but just generally for peace in Jerusalem.’

  I relished the time I spent with Henry. I would hate to lose him. Over the years our friendship had gone through many trials but the important thing was that it had endured.

  After the joy of Judy’s birthday celebrations, a series of atrocities and wars have followed each other in unholy succession. We then found ourselves once again embroiled in a third uprising, this time called a habeh, which began in October 2015.

  Penny had just returned from a brief visit to Cairo. Together we hired a taxi to drive us to Jerusalem, where we were launching an anthology that we had both edited called Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East. It was supported by the Edinburgh Book Festival and had come out of five panels presented there a year earlier. Nick Barley, the festival’s director, had travelled here for the occasion, but we were unsure whether we would be able to make it to Jerusalem and whether we would have an audience. The Israeli army had placed concrete blocks at the entrance to many of the streets leading to the Palestinian quarters. I would have liked to invite Henry to the launch, but it was taking place at the Kenyon Institute in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and it would not have been safe for him to come.

  The taxi driver had turned on the local Palestinian radio station, which broadcast poems and songs urging protest and encouraging resistance. The mood was reminiscent of the first intifada, in which both Penny and I had enthusiastically participated. It reminded me how eloquent and creative our people became whenever their spirit of resistance was revived. But this uprising was different. There was no unified leadership guiding these young men and women, most of them born after the Oslo Accords. The mainly young Palestinians were staging demonstrations at checkpoints, but they had no political platform or concrete demands. They simply improvised ways of resisting. Some of these were non-violent, others violent, involving the stabbing of not only soldiers but also innocent Israelis. They protested and they threw stones at the soldiers. The Israeli government responded with violence, defining all resistance as terrorism. They shot back at the stone throwers, wounding and killing a number of them. Many were detained, including children in their early teens. The military took yet more measures to make our lives in the Occupied Territories more restrictive, increasing the number of road obstacles and making the crossing to and from Israel ever more difficult. This time the world, which once showed an interest, was distracted by its own problems, with the terror and criminality of the so-called Islamic State. If, in the first intifada, the media had helped place some restraints on the Israeli army, this was not the case now.

  Cabinet ministers and law enforcement officials in Israel openly encouraged ordinary citizens to carry weapons and use them to kill attackers or those suspected of attacking Israelis rather than make arrests. The Palestinians who were shot were often left to bleed to death.

  By Easter week 2016, six months after the habeh began, thirty Israelis had lost their lives and over 200 Palestinians had lost theirs. Thousands were imprisoned, including over 400 children. Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, twenty-one, from the occupied old city of Hebron, lay on the ground shot after he allegedly tried to stab an Israeli soldier. Sergeant Elor Azaria, eighteen, from the mixed Palestinian-Israeli city of Ramle, arrived at the scene. A member of the Israeli army’s medical corps, instead of administering first aid to the bleeding Palestinian, he cocked his rifle and shot him point blank in the head.

  I looked at a photograph of al-Sharif’s body covered with a black cloth, the blood pooling under him, while soldiers and settlers milled around unconcerned. I could not bring myself to watch the video taken by a brave Palestinian of what had happened. Yet ever since this killing I could not stop thinking about the twisted ideology that had turned a young man into someone capable of killing a wounded man only a few years older than himself. His words: ‘This terrorist must die.’ What brutality and fear had blunted his humanity to such a degree that he had shown no compassion or hesitation. After the killing, he was so unrattled that he had the wherewithal to send a text message to his father informing him of his action.

  I kept looking at this young man’s face, searching for clues. His large black eyes had an inquisitive look, but there was a superiority, an arrogance, an imperviousness to his expression. From the way his family hugged him, there was no indication that they had any doubt about the morality of their son’s action, sparing no thought for the parents of the murdered young man, his family or friends. Nor did the majority of the Israeli public, who considered him a hero. Thousands went on to the streets to demonstrate on his behalf. Sixty per cent of young people expressed their belief that he had done the right thing by killing the Palestinian. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called his family to express his support. Who, then, would help this young soldier to regain his humanity? What would it take to rehumanise the tens of thousands of desensitised Israelis like him?

  To this turmoil, the fear-mongering Netanyahu had only one soluti
on. He said, ‘At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence that spans it all. I’ll be told, “This is what you want, to protect the villa?” The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.’

  By ‘the State of Israel’ Netanyahu meant all of Greater Israel, including the occupied West Bank.

  As the habeh continued, it became more and more difficult to make the crossing between Israel and the West Bank.

  When Penny and I had a late-night event in Jerusalem on a balmy evening in 2015 we decided to sleep over. We made sure to get to Jerusalem by twilight. I enjoy watching the night sky after the sun sets and before it gets dark, when the sky turns the most exquisite colour, a deep blue-green that we don’t see in Ramallah. I have often argued with Penny over this. My belief is that the combination of the desert air from the east and the slightly humid air from the west produces this special effect in Jerusalem.

  I woke up early the next morning and stood on the balcony of our room at the Ambassador Hotel overlooking the walled Old City. For a number of years after the occupation, the Israeli army had commandeered this hotel building and turned it into their headquarters. The view was superb. It looked deceptively peaceful, the light reflecting off the limestone buildings, the greenery between the low houses. It had a pastoral air to it that seemed at odds with the tension and hardship the people here had to endure.

  I remembered what an Israeli acquaintance of my father from the time of the British Mandate once told him. It was just a few days after the end of the 1967 war and he was standing perhaps at the exact spot where I stood now and saw an Arab man coming down the street carrying a white umbrella. This Israeli could hardly believe his eyes. He must have been excited, tired and anxious so soon after the war and there in front of him was a member of the vanquished nation ambling along, carrying an umbrella because he was concerned about the effect of the sun on his skin. The Israeli chuckled at the incongruous sight.