“That’s not where they put the Palestinians,” I said. I had driven past the tents out in the desert, tried to get permission to pay a reporting visit and been denied.
“No,” Miri said. “That’s for regular prisoners. Criminals. Not the Palestinians.”
I watched for another minute. Men were prancing onstage.
“It looks very nice,” I said.
“They try to be humane,” she agreed.
On the map, Nablus was right up the road. It seemed all you had to do was drive to the Israeli town of Kfar Saba, hang a right, and cruise to Nablus. The trouble with the geography of the occupied Palestinian territories, however, is that maps are misleading. Space yawns and vanishes. Checkpoints and closures crop up and disappear again. There are some roads for settlers and other roads for Arabs, and woe unto the unlucky driver who confuses his way. But on this day, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I wanted to visit a family in Nablus, and I was going by the map.
I’d met this family back in 2002, when Nablus was under Israeli closure and we’d had to drive a twisting, dusty path through the olive groves, hiding from the Israeli tanks, to reach their house. I hadn’t seen the family since then, and I had no particular errand with them now. But I wanted to visit this town, whose name Palestinians spoke with soft smiles, asking if you’d tried the honey-dripping kanafeh, if you’d visited the olive oil soap factories.
And now I found myself in Kfar Saba, spinning around grassy traffic circles and trolling the back streets, sense of direction scrambled, in the absurd position of looking for the West Bank in Israel. Understand: Kfar Saba is right next to the West Bank. Imagine driving around El Paso discovering that nobody knows where Mexico is. It seems logically impossible, except you keep slamming into it, this blank unknowing. I pulled over and asked some kids on bikes. Empty stares. Suspicious frowns. An old man at the roadside shook his head. The mechanics at the gas station weren’t really certain, either. If you lived in Israel and weren’t a settler, you could block the West Bank out of your mind. You’d have no business going there, and so you could simply remove it from consideration. Looking for the crossing in this sleepy Israeli community was like hunting for a gap in time and space, the gateway to another dimension. In the end, somehow, I found the checkpoint that marked the line between Israel and the West Bank. The soldiers let the armored car through. Except the road didn’t go the way the map suggested. And soon I hit another checkpoint.
By now I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields of dead grass. I let the car shudder to a stop and took in the scene before me. About twenty Palestinians stood listlessly in a neat line, waiting their turn to be searched and interrogated so that they could continue along the country road. They stood on a line to nowhere, all spiffed up because they had someplace to be. They were mostly old men, their patched polyester blazers and stiff shoes coated in dust from walking the dirt trails out of their villages and scrambling over sand berms. They stood there like something out of an absurdist painting, as if they were queued up at a turnstile or ticket office. As if they’d been cut out of a city block and pasted over these golden fields.
A small cluster of Israeli soldiers in olive fatigues administered the checkpoint. They were in their teens or just out of them; they sneered at the Palestinians and horsed around among themselves. One of them sauntered over to the car, gun in hand. I shoved open the heavy, armored door; the shatterproof windows didn’t roll down. The soldier looked like a child to me.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I’m a journalist. I’m trying to get to Nablus.”
“You can’t go down this road.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t go.”
“Is it a closed military zone? Because if it’s not a closed military zone, I can go.”
He just stood there and smirked.
I felt like informing him that I was an American taxpayer, that my family and I had been compelled to pay for his guns and tanks and jeeps, for his salary, to the detriment of schools and homeless shelters and other miscellaneous things for our own country. That his country would surely have been overrun by hostile Arabs long ago without the billions of U.S. tax dollars pumped into the Israeli military. That I understood that’s what we’d collectively chosen to do with our money and I didn’t expect him to thank me. But that he could at least wipe the smirk off his teenaged face. Because every time I went to Gaza or the West Bank and saw his colleagues harassing old, sickly Palestinians with the same youthful vigor with which old, sickly Jews had been tormented in Europe, I wanted to burn my notebooks and join a Buddhist monastery someplace. That I didn’t want to be staring at him and thinking these acutely uncomfortable thoughts. All I wanted was a small and theoretically simple experience: to drive down the miserable road and pay a visit to a miserable family a few miserable miles away.
But I didn’t say any of that. I just glared, feeling anger boil in my face.
The soldier did not let me through. I had to turn around and drive back the other way, plunge off into the West Bank and lose myself in the maze of roads. By the time I reached Adeeb’s* house, a cold dusk was gathering in the streets. I’d have to drive back after dark. I was tired, my bones ached from jouncing over the broken roads, dust matted my hair and streaked my face. I drank the tea his wife brought, struggling for small talk. They hadn’t been out of Nablus in months. They smiled strained smiles and had almost nothing to say. Had I heard that the Israelis destroyed some of the famous soap factories? Yes, I’d heard. Well then. Well. My family is fine, thank you. It was like a prison visit. Less than an hour later, I was headed back to Jerusalem. I got on a settler highway back, and the ride was smooth and fast.
It was dark, late, and cold when I got back to my little stone apartment in the old Israeli artist colony. Lying in bed, I felt the heaviness of melancholy inside my chest like a small spot of deadness, a Palestinian cancer. The entire West Bank was withering away, choked off by occupation. It was nothing but roads you couldn’t take, checkpoints you couldn’t pass, the spots of troubled Arab turf laced into the network of settler roads and settler towns like flies tangled in a spider’s web. Who was everybody kidding—where was a Palestinian state going to come from? There was no solid piece of land.
The maps around here didn’t mean a thing.
I loved living in Israel. That was the hardest part. I loved it every time I climbed the dry heights of Masada and felt the desert wind and saw the Dead Sea gleam below like spilled ink. I remember restaurants in Tel Aviv; the cliffs of Jaffa; a few sticky summer mornings when I woke up with the sun and drove to the shore to swim, watching the old white men splash their flabby forearms, opening themselves to the Mediterranean like wary bears come out from winter hiding. I loved the music that dripped from the clubs on gritty summer nights in Tel Aviv, the darkened streets and young bodies and the sexiness of it all, the intensity of youth and desire against a backdrop of war.
But you went to the West Bank or Gaza and saw the way the Palestinians lived, and it ruined everything. You realized it was rotten underneath; it was impossible. I could be in Herzliya, eating buttery sea bream and drinking mojitos on a terrace over the beach, watching the sun set the Mediterranean skies on fire and the children kick at the edge of blackening waters, hearing the voices of mothers, the shush of waves, the pulse of music playing somewhere. But inside of me was the corruption of memory, knowing the underbelly of the state, thinking about what all of the people around me were determined to ignore. It made everything filthy.
The bombings were huge and awful, but the suffering of the Palestinians was chronic, dripping through the days like acid. All the small horrors that get washed away from a distance, that never make the news but are the grains of earth in that place—the Palestinian cancer patients who are not allowed to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment; the Palestinian mothers who gave birth at checkpoints; the people who hadn’t seen their families for years; the shepherds who led t
heir flocks accidentally into the wrong spot and got blown away; the Palestinian-American woman who came to visit her family one summer and got stuck because the Israelis wouldn’t give her a permit to drive back to the airport, because even Palestinians with American passports are treated like plain old Palestinians once they set foot inside Israel; the settlers who ransacked the olive groves; the market stalls and greenhouses torn down. The occupation was a cloud of punishment that raged in times of suicide bombings and in times of quiet, a few miles away, invisible.
At the time the Palestinians drew my attention most of all, because their culture was the most foreign; because they were killed far more often and yet their slaughter was treated more casually, packing lower news value; because they were trapped both by Israel and by their own leaders, their own killers.
But I am haunted now by Israelis. By the overlay of realities, the way they knew, and didn’t know. Like the people in Kfar Saba, they lived right next door, there and not there. They ignored it, or they told themselves stories that made it all right, horrible stories, and worst of all the stories were true—the injustice and blood of Jewish history.
And yes, Israel has a reason for everything, and there is a national myth that theirs is the most humane army in the world. But in Jerusalem I learned that good intentions and lofty ideals are among the most dangerous tools of all in a war, because they blind people to what they are doing, to the blood on their hands.
One morning I got to work early, and found nobody there except Abby, the office manager. Abby was hyperactive and giggly and screechy. She wore crazy socks and wild clothes in orange, purple, and lime green, and she bought us little treats like chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter. She had three kids at home but she never seemed tired or down. At least, she hadn’t until today.
Abby had seen a documentary on Israeli television the night before. It was about impoverished Palestinian children who picked a living out of a garbage dump near Hebron, waiting for trucks to haul in the trash of Israeli settlers. The kids combed the settlers’ garbage, looking for scraps of edible food, foraging for clothes, hunting for a living. The settler garbage was the best, the kids said, because the Palestinians don’t have much to throw away. Abby had tears in her eyes. Abby had never been in the territories, and she seldom talked about politics, but now she wanted to know if what she had seen was true.
“It was just like the ghetto,” she said quietly. “Is this true? Is this what we’ve come to? Our families left Poland because of these things, and now we are doing the same to other people?”
“Well,” I said uncomfortably. “I’ve never seen that place, but I’ve heard about it. The situation is not good there.”
“I know, I know,” she said, swiping at her eyes. “Oh my God. What’s going to happen to us?”
After September 11, many Israelis said to the Americans, now you know what terror means. And soon the United States, too, had an occupation of its own, and then a second occupation. We lived even farther away from our wars. Israel built a fence; we had an ocean. But the comparison was there. Some Israelis wanted badly to believe they could be all right one day in spite of the anguish in their backyard, others were hardened beyond caring. They ignored it as best they could, sealed themselves into Israel, but it was always there. As the intifada grew more violent, the use of sedatives rose and more Israeli husbands battered and killed their wives. Soon a spike of suicide and rapes among American soldiers would tell the statistical story of our own trauma. You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done.
Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don’t die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do. You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can’t leave your actions over there. You can’t build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of that poison seeps back into our soil.
And it makes us lie to ourselves, precisely because we want to believe that we are good, we do not want to interrupt a noble national narrative. But there are things we try to obscure by talking about terrorism: things we do to others, and to ourselves. Only the most hawkish Israelis say that they are oppressing people in order to take away their land. There are other stories to tell; other ways to frame and explain military campaigns. Israelis are looking for security; they are fighting terror; it is ugly but they have no choice. Every nation needs its stories, never more so than in times of war. And so the Israelis tell themselves they are making the desert bloom, that they are the only democracy in the Middle East, a humane land that is sometimes forced to behave inhumanely, and we Americans tell ourselves that we are fighting tyranny and toppling dictators. And we say this word, terrorism, because it has become the best excuse of all. We push into other lands, we chase the ghosts of a concept, because it is too hard to admit that evil is already in our own hearts and blood is on our hands.
* “Adeeb” is a pseudonym.
FIVE
FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
Quite a few things happen only because we’ve written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about. I know you don’t want to stand in the way of our being modern.
—Orhan Pamuk
And then the war came that would tangle America in time and blood, and make us forget, for a time, the other wars, Afghanistan and Israel. In the corpus of the Arab world, Iraq is a nerve center and a soul. Baghdad was magnificent at a time when Arabs were glorious and powerful, and so it is a place that still matters; its history and legends are cherished by millions. The ancient Babylonians developed mathematics and split the day into twenty-four hours centuries before Christ; the Abbasids built their round city in the eighth century; the Shiite scholars at Najaf still interpret Islam for millions of followers. If you invaded Iraq, you invaded all of the history and meaning, too—you plunged into the heart of how a people sees itself, its complexes of defeat and dictatorship, the whiff of dissipated, dusted-over greatness. The United States was determined to take Baghdad, and they did it fast. Just twenty days after the war began, American tanks had churned into Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s statue was off the pedestal, and the dictator himself had fled.
I would leave Amman in the middle of the night to reach Iraq at first light. The hotel phone screeched and the driver announced in broken English that he had come to take me to Baghdad. Night was coming unspooled in the lobby. Wilting wedding guests dragged themselves over the floors, old men muttered into cigarettes, and late-night playboys in dark suits chased their own laughter into the darkness. I walked into the cold night and climbed into the backseat of an SUV. The bellhops in their monkey suits slid the door shut behind me. I was being escorted off to war.
“Okay?” the driver asked.
“Okay.”
The hours flew past like billboards on the black, dull road east. The driver slurped at a thermos of hot tea. A truck stop, the sharp smell of diesel, the drone of cassette-tape Koran. More darkness then, drawing close to the border. A hand takes my passport and melts into night. We inch along, from one administrative building to the next, out of Jordan and into Iraq. The border offices loom frozen in the dimness, painted against the velvet screen of a coming dawn. A figure materializes from the night and swings himself into the passenger seat.
“My cousin,” the driver says.
“Okay.” This wasn’t part of the deal.
“Hello,” says the cousin, twisting around. Street lamps on their stalks waver in his pupils.
“Hello.” He is a young man and suddenly I want him there. He looks too health
y to get hurt.
Darkness thinned and faded as we rolled through the desert of western Iraq, desperately awake. Delivered into something we could not control, we hurtled along in a machine; wheels ate the highway, and I was comfortable knowing that I was just a passenger, I was not responsible for what might come. I closed my eyes and watched waking dreams like movies. The road disappeared behind us. We spat it out and hurtled forward.
A hot dawn came, the air in the car tight and edged with body smells. The dust storm smelled, too, stirring in the yellow sky. In the desert you learn that dust has a smell, a little like washed cotton sheets or baking bread with the texture of scratchy silk in the back of the throat. Arab springs always bring winds and the smell of dust. We were almost to Baghdad now. I played with the name like a small charm, jingling it in my palm like a jack. A mystical, shadowy city. Babylon, the House of Wisdom, One Thousand and One Nights. As we drew closer through the desert, little shards of wonder spiked through the slur of my thoughts. I sat up and looked out the window. Everything was mustard and ocher, weary and wilted. A landscape so unremarkable you forgot it before you stopped looking; stretches of sand and dust without the startling scale of a great desert. This was a petty desert, mean and brown, spotted with rotting structures, the listless monuments of disinterested men.
Cars packed the roads on the edge of town, inching along. Nobody bothered with the confines of lanes, and every bit of pavement was packed tight with humans and their machines. The cars lurched, staggering elephants lashed with marauded booty—embroidered sofas, farm animals, paintings. Looters hauled their stashes. Families fled toward the city and away from it. The cars braided the intersections like pick-up sticks; nobody gave the right of way and so they were all locked into place, paralyzed by the mute jam of collective stubbornness. A man with a swinging potbelly hopped from his car to holler at another driver. The faces of women were framed in the glass, sour and small. Horns squalled. There was no power in Iraq. No electricity and nobody in charge. All the traffic lights were dead. Without the commands from the dangling lights, the Iraqi drivers got themselves stuck in deadlocks and quarrels.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 6
