Romeo and Juliet in Palestine

by Tom Sperlinger

  Ahmed said that he blamed the occupation for the university’s plight but also the surrounding Arab countries for their indifference. ‘They want to choke us to death and close the university.’ Lynn wrote back: ‘Who is “they”? I don’t know who is who anymore, who is a friend and who is an enemy.’

  A few days later, there was a debate on the Facebook group, started by a boy called Sami, who seemed to be friends with Qais and Haytham. Sami put up a post suggesting that ‘if Edward Said was a Muslim he would have never achieved what he had achieved regarding Orientalism.’ His point seemed to be that although many Muslims were capable of the kind of thinking that Said exemplified, most ‘aren’t capable and sometimes not willing to liberate their thoughts from the life-long teachings that made them only act as a mirror of the Western projection of thoughts about the orient.’ He credited various shifts in his own perspectives to the American and American-educated teachers he’d had. One of those tutors, a Palestinian-American who had now returned to Detroit, was one of the first to reply:

  On Edward W. Said, let me say that he broke new ground. However, let’s not idealize too much. He had his own blindnesses and limitations. He is mostly a product of the West, regardless of how much he emotionally affiliated with ‘Palestine,’ and while he defended Palestine and also Islam, he fell into some thought traps…. Your ‘American’ teachers may have provided you with a more open thought perspective, but how much did they analyze or make you analyze their own system? Let’s not go from an extreme of fundamentalist freezing of thought to the self-colonizing admiration of the West. It’s the West that has caused many of our difficulties today, as it still does. We should liberate our minds on our own and produce our own system.

  There were various replies. I said that I wondered whether there was a general issue about letting go of assumptions. Sami replied:

  I agree that everyone faces difficulties in letting go of assumptions and even knowing they were assumptions but the reason I was very specific and mentioned the Islamic-mentality as an example is because I’ve been following news about the Muslim Brotherhood and the ‘Salafi’ Egyptians and in most of the debates nothing they say or stand up for seems of this age but rather 300 or 400 years old. They hold debates with secular scholars or renovating Muslim researchers but not in any of the debates they accepted or agreed to any point that goes against their views. That was a case of fundamentalists, I want to also point to the case of normal people which I’m more interested in. Students of our department rarely receive the analysis tools needed for spotting an assumption and studying it unless they take courses with professors who studied abroad and I’m not saying this because of my admiration of America (I love Hollywood though!) but because I admire the quality of education there nothing more. Not idealizing them at all! I chose to refer to the US because of my American tutors as you helped me go through the journey of discovering self-colonizing things within me. If it weren’t for you, God knows which branch of the Palestinian security forces I’d be working for as a blindfolded soldier following orders from uneducated officers!

  I was struck by the complexity of the debates the students were having on Facebook. I also knew that, although Sami was praising his teachers from abroad, I lacked the local insights that his Palestinian-American tutor had drawn on.

  It often took me a while to work out who students were on Facebook, as they sometimes used a pseudonym or a variation of their name. And whereas the men posted frequent photographs of themselves, posing singly or with one another, the women used generic images—usually of flowers, or a fashion shoot—as their profile picture.

  A student called Ameera, who I did not know, posted a link to an article in the Daily Mail:

  Dozens of Palestinians protesting against British policy have tried to attack a senior British diplomat while on a visit to a university today. The hostile demonstration forced the British consul general, Sir Vincent Fean, to cancel a speech at the Birzeit University near Ramallah. He was not hurt, although one demonstrator was seen kicking him in the shins. Student activists said they were protesting against decades of British policy supporting Israel over Palestinians.

  Haytham was the first to post a comment:

  I’ve been arguing this point with lots of my friends because they’re seeing what Birzeit students have done [as] heroic, I’m pretty much sad because of what they did because this is not the right way to deal with things even though the British government were the main reason we’re occupied, things will never be solved this way. We better learn how to deal with things in a civilized way.

  Ameera had challenged him, saying she saw little that was ‘uncivilised’ about the protest: ‘I’d rather hear honest, open and totally justified anger being expressed than mealy-mouthed diplomatic speeches. We’ve had enough of the latter.’ Haytham suggested that it might have been better to debate with the diplomat openly (‘and he would start blushing on TV’), but Ameera was unconvinced. Haytham concluded:

  Then according to what you’re suggesting this is the best way things will get accomplished and this is the exact way our voices are going to be heard! Ain’t that what they need in order for them to complete their theory that we Palestinians are terrorists?!

  When I went to Tel Aviv, to get a visa from the Jordanian embassy, it was my first time outside the West Bank since I had arrived, and the journey was disarmingly quick. It was a hot day and, within a few hours of leaving Ramallah, I was sitting on a crowded beach in Tel Aviv. It was about 4pm and the sea was full of people. I went for a pizza, and then I spent an aimless evening watching football. Lionel Messi scored two goals for Barcelona, and I knew that the coffee shops in Ramallah would be full of people watching the game. Everyone in the West Bank followed the Spanish league, which was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. I got a little drunk, which was lucky, as when I got back to the hotel, there was loud music seeping into my room from a nearby club.

  On the way to Tel Aviv, I had stopped in Jerusalem. I poked my head into the post office, hoping to find a passport photo machine, and a security guard directed me to a shop around the corner. The woman spoke little English. She gestured for me to sit on a stool, with a deep sigh, then lined up the camera. She started to tut and walked away, returning with a clutch of tissues and pointing to my sweaty forehead. I wiped my brow and she went on with the photographs. As I was paying, I asked her where I could find the sheroot stop. The sheroot is the Israeli equivalent of the servees and it was a quick and cheap way of travelling between cities. The woman sighed, rolled her eyes and made a vague gesture with her hand. I wasn’t sure if she was pointing the way I should go, or dispensing with me.

  While I was waiting for the visa, I walked a mile or so to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. I skimmed through a room full of early twentieth-century European artists like Picasso and Braque, which would normally have absorbed me. In the basement, there was an installation by Douglas Gordon. Two enormous screens were set at right angles to one another. They depicted two Israeli musicians of Polish descent, who were filmed travelling to Poland and then performing there. The film was about fifty minutes long, on a loop. They were performing Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat Major K.364. The camera angles caught the two players, in different kinds of intensity. One had a shaggy fringe; the other was bald. They both smiled occasionally, with satisfaction, and glanced at one another to judge timing or phrasing. When the film looped back to the start, I found that I couldn’t stay with it. I wandered out of the gallery, and back into the street. I kept thinking that the installation had a ‘palpable design upon us,’ as Keats said of poetry of a similar kind. It felt like the story was being used as propaganda. But I knew too that my own sense of alienation was putting everything I encountered at a distance.

  I had started to find it difficult to leave the West Bank. When I left for good, at the end of May, it was a painful experience. I know this is a common occurrence for expats, what one might call the difficulties of re-entry. But there is also a particular
intensity to life in Palestine. The ‘situation,’ as it is called, becomes all-pervasive. When I met friends in Ramallah, we often started by exchanging the latest news: ‘Have you heard about what happened at Qalandia?’, ‘There’s a rumour that a prisoner died’, ‘Did you hear about the teacher who was refused entry?’ The situation binds itself into one’s day-to-day experience. For several months after I came home, I found myself either inserting anecdotes from my time in the West Bank into any space I could find in a conversation or feeling it hover out of reach as though it was too large an experience to integrate into my reality at ‘home’. (I also saw my university in England from a disconcerting new angle. Just after I got home, there was a strike about pay, which only a smattering of staff observed. ‘You call this a strike?’ I wanted to ask.)

  I could still see that there were different perspectives within Israel/Palestine. But while I was living in the West Bank it felt like I wasn’t crossing a border if I travelled into Jerusalem, but moving from one country’s unconscious into its ego—moving between two parts of a whole that lived in constant tension with one another. Whereas in the West Bank, the occupation permeates everything, in Israel what was striking was the denial about what was happening just a few miles away. At around the time I went to Tel Aviv, Lily, one of my friends in Ramallah, had some friends from England staying with her. She had taken them on various trips across the West Bank, and one of the girls said just before she left: ‘I just feel like I need to see the other side now.’ Lily had lost it, half to her own surprise. ‘This isn’t a war,’ she shouted. ‘There isn’t another side.’

  I left my suitcase in the cupboard, and packed a large sports bag with as many clothes as I could carry. I pushed some suntan lotion I had not used into one of the side pockets, alongside my Kindle and a few books. I left my laptop behind, because it now had Arabic letters superimposed on the keyboard, and I tidied all of my teaching materials away in a cupboard.

  As a visiting academic in the West Bank, it is difficult to obtain a working visa. I had arrived on a tourist visa and I had to leave the country after three months in order to renew it. I had decided to go to Jordan for a few days. So I packed a bag that could have belonged to someone who had been travelling around Israel for a few months. I knew it was possible I would be refused entry or given a week’s visa on my return, just long enough to get my stuff.

  On the way back from Jordan, I travelled via Eilat—a tourist resort at the very southern tip of Israel—and then I started the long journey by bus back up the east coast to Jerusalem. It was hot in Eilat, and the bus station was cramped, with people sprawled in every corner of the small building. When I got on to the bus, it was nearly full and the only spare seat was next to mine. Soon after we set out, a young woman in her 20s, with bleached-blonde hair and a wild look in her eye, stood by my seat and started shouting at me in Hebrew, claiming that I was in her seat. She had a tired and jaded look. She also spoke to two women in front of me, who had curly black hair and who looked as if they were sisters. One of the women, who was agitated, eventually went and sat at the front. The blonde woman came back and shouted at me again, and I eventually worked out that she wanted my seat and the one next to it because she and her son were separated.

  The journey takes about ten hours and, halfway through, the bus stops at a service station. I went to buy some food, and when I came back to the coach the two women who had been in front of me were sitting on the curb. One of them sat shyly to the side and did not make eye contact, but the other looked up at me under her fringe.

  ‘I’m sorry about the crazy woman,’ she said. She asked me what I was doing in Israel and I said that I was a tourist.

  I asked her where she was from.

  ‘We’re from Jerusalem.’

  There was a pause, and we caught one another’s eye.

  ‘We are Palestinians,’ she said.

  ‘I live in Ramallah,’ I replied. Her name was Dalia and she explained that she did not understand Hebrew. ‘I wanted to help you,’ she said. About five minutes before the bus was due to leave, its engine suddenly revved on. ‘They can be quite impatient,’ Dalia said.

  As the bus made its way along the coast of the Dead Sea, I found myself daydreaming about being back in Ramallah, even about staying there for good. When we got near Jerusalem, I darted off the bus, relieved to be nearly home, and started looking around for a taxi. I saw that Dalia and her sister had got off too, and that they were making their way towards me. ‘Our brother lives in Ramallah, he’s coming to collect us. Would you like a lift?’

  When I got home in the evenings, I would sometimes sit in the lobby of my apartment building, chatting to a young man named Qusay, who worked for my landlord doing odd jobs. He told me he had trained as an accountant, but that he could not get a job because he did not have ‘wasta’ or ‘vitamin w.’ He said that ‘wasta’ meant having access to power or social clout; in Palestine, I was told, you needed to know someone in power in order to get on. Qusay told me that he thought everything had changed in Ramallah after Yasser Arafat had died. He said that one of his school friends was now a low-ranking Palestinian Authority employee, but he had three cars, a motorbike, and a constant stream of money. ‘Before, with Arafat, people like my father felt they knew him. If they had problems, they could see him in person. But with Abbas….’

  Qusay spoke an easy, colloquial English. He told me that, when he was growing up, he would speak to tourists, to learn the language. Qusay told me this account of how he learned English, several times. Then the story changed. One evening, after offering me a cigarette, he told me that he had been picked up by the intelligence service a few years before, and that they did not believe he had never been abroad, because he spoke such good English. He told me that he had been tortured and forced to sign a false confession. Qusay lamented that he was now not allowed to leave the West Bank, in spite of the fact that he had not been convicted of anything. Only slowly did I understand that it was the Palestinian security forces who had interrogated him, not the Israelis.

  One evening, when I came in, Qusay started to tell me the whole story of a film he had seen, which turned out to be Life of Pi. He was laughing and acting it out in the lobby and he went to his room and retrieved his laptop. He skipped through a few scenes of Pi’s childhood and then we watched about twenty minutes, in which the ship Pi is travelling on is destroyed in a storm. We were standing in parallel, leaning in to the screen which he had placed on the reception desk in the foyer. Qusay told me again that he could not leave the country and said that he was looking for a lawyer. Pi, meanwhile, was clambering on to a small lifeboat, which was also boarded by a zebra, a wolf and a tiger, all survivors from the wrecked ship. I asked Qusay where he would like to go. ‘I want to see the world,’ he said.

  9

  You may kill me

  I asked Qais to repeat his question, so the others could hear it. We had just finished reading the assassination of Julius Caesar and the confusion that follows it, during which the conspirators bathe themselves in Caesar’s blood. At the start of the class, I had assigned the ten or so speaking parts. Then I told all 35 students to stand up and push the tables back. There was a pause. ‘We’re going to do some acting,’ I said.

  The scene begins with a crowd pressing in on Caesar, before he enters the Capitol. I got the actors who were reading Artemidorus and the Soothsayer, who both petition Caesar, to stand on one side of the classroom amid a group, while the rest of the students made up a crowd on the other side. We read through the dialogue, acting it out as a street scene, with individuals emerging out of the crowd, to speak to Caesar. As the students positioned themselves, it became clear that the conspirators, who are poised to kill Caesar, stand nearest to him. ‘Where are the guards?’ Qais asked.

  As Caesar enters the Capitol, the crowd is left outside and I told most of the students to sit down. Once the senators and other notables are inside, Metellus asks ‘for the repealing of my banished brother’ and o
thers echo his plea. Caesar refuses, saying: ‘I am as constant as the northern star.’ The students were still working out the meaning, so I mimed that they should each kneel before Caesar as they spoke. We started to form a circle around him. ‘Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?’ Caesar asks. The woman who was reading Brutus’s part stood in front of Caesar. We debated whether Brutus would play a part in the assassination or whether he looks on cold-eyed.

  Afterwards, Tamam, with a mischievous lilt to his voice, asked: ‘Is he really dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘But is he really dead?’

  ‘He’s really, definitely dead.’

  ‘We burned our books!’ Tariq was smiling. ‘That’s it, Al-Quds University is closed for good.’ It was our first class back after the strike, and I had asked the students why they hadn’t read the story for that class, a Sherlock Holmes mystery called ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’. I ended up acting it out. The story is about Helen Stoner, a 32-year-old woman who is about to marry. Her stepfather insists that she sleep in the room where her twin sister, Julia, died two years earlier. Julia’s dying words were: ‘The band! The speckled band!’ I paused, just before I got to the end, to see if anyone could guess how the mystery was resolved. ‘We have a detective in the class,’ one woman said, when I gave Holmes’s explanation. She told me that her friend had solved it, but that she had been too shy to say.

  I had got to the servees stop in Ramallah at 7am that morning, expecting to miss the rush hour. But there were hardly any vehicles travelling to Abu Dis and a large crowd quickly developed. The atmosphere was frenzied and chaotic, with groups of students trying to mob each servees as it arrived. It was as if some of the tension that had been bottled up during the strike had spilled over. As I edged near to one servees, the driver said he could only take one more person. Angham, one of my students, was standing just in front of me. She pulled her friend out of the way and insisted that I take the space. I was too relieved to refuse, and I managed to say a garbled thank-you in Arabic.