Romeo and Juliet in Palestine

by Tom Sperlinger

  It seems to me cruel that white men, whose governments are armed with the most murderous weapons known to science, should amaze and confound their fellow creatures with a doctrine of salvation imperfectly understood by themselves and a code of ethics foreign to the climate and instincts of those races whose most cherished customs they outrage and whose gods they insult.

  We read a paragraph that describes Lispeth as a ‘savage’ and the chaplain’s wife as ‘a good Christian’ and talked about irony. When we read the end of the story, the students noted that Lispeth seems more upset about the lie than about her lost husband. ‘How can what he and you said be untrue?’ she asks the chaplain’s wife, who replies: ‘We said it as an excuse to keep you quiet, child.’

  ‘Will you read the part, doctor?’

  Only a few students had shown up to the rehearsal, so Dunia asked me to read the second conversation, which is set in the aftermath of the Second World War and which includes this section:

  Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her uncles and me

  Tell her her uncles died

  Don’t tell her they were killed

  Tell her they were killed

  Don’t frighten her.

  In each scene in ‘Seven Jewish Children’, a group of adults debates what a child should be told about an event that is unfolding, from the Nazi Holocaust to the 2008 bombing of Gaza. Most of the lines begin ‘Tell her’ or ‘Don’t tell her.’

  There was a debate among the students about how many speakers the lines I had read should be divided between and whether the photograph would be projected on a screen behind the actors, so that the audience could see it. Ruqaya suggested that the students should write an additional scene, set in Gaza or the West Bank, which they could add on to the end of the play. ‘I want to show that we tell the truth to our children,’ she said. ‘We don’t lie.’ I was going to ask why someone might soften the truth for a child. But I could not find the right words and the moment passed.

  Churchill’s play was controversial when it was first performed. The lawyer Anthony Julius’s reading of it is similar to Ruqaya’s. He sees it as part of a revival of anti-Semitism in England, and he characterises the message of the play as: ‘These Jews are liars. They abuse their own children by lying to them, in order to conceal their greater, more lethal abuse of Palestinian children.’ I had not read the play before, but I thought there was more to it than that.

  The dilemma that is faced by the adults in the second conversation was a real one for my grandparents. Tibor and Lisl were able to leave Vienna in 1938 because Tibor had worked for a British firm and obtained a work permit to come to London. But Lisl’s mother, father and stepparents all died in concentration camps, along with many of their other relatives and friends. My father, growing up in the 1950s, knew that the Germans had killed members of his family, but it was rarely spoken about. There are accounts of a similar reluctance to talk about the Holocaust in other families. After the war, many survivors were traumatised by their experiences and some felt shame that the Jewish community had ‘allowed’ these events to happen. There was also no larger narrative: ‘the Holocaust’ only emerged as a recognised description in the 1960s (and today many in the Jewish community still use the biblical term shoah, meaning ‘the calamity’).

  The philosopher Stanley Cavell has written about the difficulty of knowing, with any certainty, that I am in pain or that you are. He suggests that knowing someone is in pain is not a matter of certainty, but of sympathy:

  But why is sympathy expressed in this way? Because your suffering makes a claim upon me. It is not enough that I know (am certain) that you suffer—I must do or reveal something (whatever can be done). In a word, I must acknowledge it, otherwise I do not know what “(you or his) being in pain” means.

  Sometimes ‘don’t tell her’ is an attempt to shield either a child (or the speaking adult) from pain. At such times, it signals a limit in what it is possible to say. The adults in ‘Seven Jewish Children’ are not lying. They are trying to find words to acknowledge what has happened: ‘tell her this’; ‘no, that’s not quite right, tell her this’; ‘don’t tell her that….’ How could one tell a child about events of this kind?

  I had been warned that it would be a bad idea to tell my students that I was Jewish. I had spoken to Khalid about it when we met up in the UK and he had said that most people at Al-Quds would not mind. But he advised me to wait until I knew people before telling them; he thought that a few students might react badly. I do not routinely identify as Jewish in England—my mother is Christian, and Jewish identity is often seen as passing through the maternal line—so it did not feel like a deception. In fact, I thought that telling my students I was Jewish might be more of an act than concealing the fact. But when I read the scene from ‘Seven Jewish Children’, I came uncomfortably close to speaking about my own family history, without acknowledging the connection.

  Here is another extract from my father’s interview with Lisl:

  David: So were you very aware of being Jewish, even at quite a young age?

  Lisl: Yes, one couldn’t help that in Vienna. Our neighbour, next door, in the Nedergasse—the father was an architect, so they were educated people—and the boy, who was a year or two younger, ran after me in the street and shouted ‘Jewish girl,’ but meant as an insult. He still lives there I hear. (D: The boy?) The boy! It’s a funny thought, he’s eighty too probably—some boy! [Laughs]

  D: So what did you feel about being Jewish at that time?

  L: I didn’t have any special feelings. This sort of minor incident was….

  D: Was it something your family talked much about?

  L: My grandfather still was keeping… I mean they didn’t keep kosher but he had a Seder there and on Friday evenings we always had a meal with the grandparents, a special one, with candles. He must have gone to synagogue too, but of that I’m not sure.

  D: So you never went to synagogue?

  L: No.

  Lisl’s experiences were not unusual. Many of those who were killed by the Nazis had been secular or did not think of themselves as Jewish. Yet being Jewish was of crucial importance to Lisl. My father has told me that he found himself reluctant to tell people that he was Jewish until well into his fifties. It may be that he (and I) had learnt unconsciously that it could be a dangerous thing to reveal.

  I did not know how my students might react, but I knew that it would change my relationship to them if I announced that my father was Jewish. I thought it would mean making a claim on them—asking them to acknowledge my family’s history, for example—before I had understood or acknowledged their situation, before I knew them. Given that I was in a position of relative power (not only as their teacher), I did not think I had a claim on their sympathies. I also could not connect Israel’s behaviour with the Jewish traditions I knew well, which emphasise social justice and doing whatever one can to alleviate the suffering of others. There were uncomfortable parallels, for example, between Lisl’s experiences and the stories that my Palestinian friends shared with me. Several told me where their grandparents had lived before 1948; they recalled old neighbours and they could name the Israeli families who had moved into their former homes.

  The final conversation in Churchill’s play is set during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008.

  Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed

  Tell her they’re terrorists

  Tell her they’re filth

  Don’t

  Don’t tell her about the family of dead girls

  Tell her you can’t believe what you see on television

  Tell her we killed the babies by mistake

  Here the situation is almost too much for one of the speakers (‘Don’t’). These parents are not lying. But they are refusing to acknowledge their own pain about what is happening (‘Don’t’) or the suffering of others: ‘you can’t believe what you see on television.’ The humanity of the Palestinians is disso
lved in a series of insults: ‘Tell her they’re terrorists / Tell her they’re filth.’ I can see why this scene might seem exaggerated.

  While I was writing this book, in the summer of 2014, Israel again launched an assault on Gaza. The UN estimated that 2,104 Palestinians died, including 495 children. I got into an altercation on Facebook with an old school friend, who was defending Israel’s actions and who blamed the Palestinians for putting all of their money into funding terrorism. ‘There is no peace process on earth that would satisfy these extremists,’ he wrote.

  It was starting to grow dark when we reached Ramallah after the rehearsal. I walked with Omar, one of the other actors, while Dunia and Ruqaya chatted behind us. Omar was tall and handsome, and he was at ease with himself in a way that was unusual among the men I taught, many of whom were restless. Omar asked me if Dunia had been talking about Tel Aviv again, and said that her attitude towards going there was a kind of innocence. He told me that he was engaged but that he had a West Bank ID and his fiancée had a Jerusalem one, which meant he could not move to live with her or build a house there. ‘I know where my family home was,’ he said, giving the name of a town in Israel. ‘But I was born in Hebron and I live in Ramallah. These are my homes now. Israelis my age were born there, it’s their home. It’s not that we want them to leave,’ he said. ‘We just want to live.’

  8

  When I was out

  After the fight on the afternoon we finished reading Romeo and Juliet, the university was closed for a few days. Then payday came and went, without our salaries arriving, and the union called a strike. Almost all of the staff belonged to the union, so the university closed. I knew that Lynn was struggling, and I heard that students had collected money and taken it to her house. When I texted her, she replied: ‘I’ll be ok, I think, for a bit. My landlord let the rent slide and gave me 800 shekels because he knew I was flat broke. Somehow the people here find a way.’

  A couple of days into the strike, Basilah, one of the lecturers in the English Department, posted a picture of a student called Yousuf on Facebook. I remembered him from the exam I had invigilated in January. He had been making jokes to catch my attention. In the other pictures I had seen of him on the students’ Facebook group, he was always smiling. He had a small neat mouth and both his half-grown moustache and his thick eyebrows were often arched, as if his whole face was smirking. But in Basilah’s picture, his face was marked with bruises and he was looking away from the camera. Basilah wrote that Yousuf had come to see her a week before, to explain why he had missed an exam. He lived in Anata refugee camp. He and some friends had been throwing stones at soldiers, because a camp resident had been seized that morning. Yousuf had been caught and beaten by the soldiers.

  The story was brutal, but it had a further twist. Yousuf had an American passport, which had expired in 2009 and no other citizenship papers. When he showed the soldiers his passport, he was taken to a hospital in Jerusalem for treatment. The irony was that Yousuf was normally unable to enter the city, even though his parents both had Jerusalem IDs; Israel refused to confer that identity on Yousuf and his siblings. Basilah had asked him why he did not renew his American passport. ‘Because then they’ll deport me,’ he said.

  Ahmed drove us out into the fields beyond the village to buy milk for his mother. He stopped the car by the road, and we walked up a track towards a shack, built out of tarpaulin, torn bits of wood, and corrugated iron. There were two mattresses on the roof, held in place by rocks. Inside, there was a large brown- and-white cow, and a man was milking her. To his left, propped up on a couple of old car tyres, was a piece of wood with a few Hebrew letters on it. The man had a neat white beard and a gentle smile. As we tiptoed around his land, it felt like we were poking about inside his house. ‘He sleeps out here,’ Ahmed said. Ahmed gestured for me to follow him, and we peered into a shed, where there were about a dozen black, white and grey puppies, clambering over one another. There was a crate with old Coke bottles, full of milk, on the back of a truck.

  We had spent the day with Ahmed’s family. After we had collected the milk, we drove up to a hill above the village. ‘If anyone waves to you,’ Ahmed said in the car, ‘wave back, or they’ll think you’re arrogant.’ As we drove slowly through the centre of Ni’lin, each of the men we passed on the street raised his hand or smiled. Ahmed laughed: ‘You might as well just keep your hand in the air.’ He told me that there are around 6,000 people in Ni’lin, but only about six families.

  From the hill, we could see Ni’lin to the right below us, spread out in circles around the minaret at the centre of town. The village gradually folded out into farmland and its borders were marked loosely by a series of hills which were disappearing in the dusk. To the left we could see Israel. In the middle-distance, there was a settlement, recognisable from its mixture of chalk-white houses and a few high-rise buildings. In the foreground there was a cluster of houses with red roofs, a more recent settlement, which plunged down in a V-shape towards Ni’lin, like the tip of a landslide that had stopped just short of the village.

  When we had arrived in the morning, Ahmed’s father had spoken to me in Hebrew and Ahmed explained that he assumed any visitors were Israeli. Now, as we drove down the hill, Ahmed pointed out Hebrew text on some of the shops. He said that settlers came into the village, especially on the Jewish Sabbath, because goods were cheaper than in the settlements. Ni’lin is next to the Wall, and there had been protests every Friday as it was built. Some estimates suggested that the village had lost up to 30% of its land.

  While I had been hanging out with Ahmed, his wife Sana and their children had spent their time with Ahmed’s mother and his sisters. We reunited for the journey home. About halfway back to Ramallah, which is a forty-minute drive from Ni’lin, we stopped and walked into a small field set back from the road. Ahmed had been talking throughout the day about where he might buy land to build a house. He wanted enough space that his sons could build there too. As we stood in the vacant plot, Ahmed and his wife, Sana, circled one another, while their sons ran about. Sana cupped her pregnant belly. They both smiled but did not speak. As we got back into the car, Ahmed said that he wanted to buy in Ni’lin and he was quiet for a few minutes. ‘But I would have to stay in Abu Dis during the week, and return home at weekends.’ He explained that there was a highway intersecting the West Bank, which could get him to campus more quickly, but that only Israelis were permitted to use it.

  The servees journey from Ramallah to Nablus, which I visited a few days after we went to Ni’lin, had none of the manic intensity of the ride to Abu Dis. The road was mostly through hills, but at one point the land to the right flattened out and there were farmers scattered across it. The fields were divided between strips that were a deep green and those where people were working, which were a rich brown, the colour of earth newly exposed to the sun.

  Nablus felt more like a city, whereas Ramallah was an overgrown town. The city centre was flat but it was overlooked by houses perched on all sides. There was a central street full of shops selling toys, shoes and electrical items. There was also a banal shopping mall and a cinema, which was showing the new James Bond film. Behind the main street was the old city, which was full of fruit sellers, herb shops, and narrow alleyways. As I tried to get my bearings, the sun passed a high building to my left. It lit an open-fronted shop, where a man was beating the sole of a shoe. Two women sat waiting, illuminated in profile, on either side of him.

  Naseer Arafat, an architect, has commented:

  I would say that Nablus, at the time that it was built as an Islamic city, during the Mamluk Ottoman period, it was the center of everything. It was the capital of trade […] In modern history, before the Israeli occupation, there were four buses leaving Nablus every morning—one to Beirut, one to Damascus, one to Jerusalem, and one to Amman. Every morning. My father used to say he would arrive in Damascus before shops opened.

  As the servees was leaving the city, we moved slowly through traf
fic. At one point, we stopped beside a bus stop, where a small crowd of Israeli teenagers was waiting. Their shirts hung over their trousers and one young man had a guitar slung over his shoulder.

  I had started reading some poems by Walid Khazendar, in translations by the Northern Irish poet, Tom Paulin. The first stanza of one poem, ‘Belongings’, reads:

  Who entered my room when I was out

  and moved the vase on the mantelpiece just a tad?

  who skewed that print—a Crusader—on the far wall?

  and those pages loose on my desk

  they’re a shade dishevelled aren’t they?

  I put the poem up on the Facebook group, and asked the students what they made of it. One student said she thought it was about someone who had been away from home for a long time, who did not recognise his surroundings; another that it was about an intruder; someone else that it was about a forgetful person. I explained the ambiguity in the title—that it might mean possessions or ‘belonging’ to a place—and somebody said it was ‘definitely a Palestinian poem.’ It captured the mixture of paranoia and suspicion that one often felt in the West Bank.

  A week into the strike, Ahmed wrote to Lynn and me: ‘The union says that the university hasn’t tried even to negotiate or to offer whatever money it has. No one knows when and how much we will get paid. The situation is very bad, and I am afraid it will get worse.’ The university was dependent on student fees, which had been slow to arrive because so many families were short of money. There were rumours that if the university gave up its campus in Jerusalem and its name, it would get more funding from the Israeli Council for Higher Education. It could thus become one of the ‘foreign’ universities in the West Bank. For now, we were told that a senior administrator had been dispatched to one of the Gulf countries in search of short-term funds.