As soon as the wall rose, artists from around the world came to the West Bank to use it as a canvas. Graffiti art covers the gray concrete throughout the West Bank but most famously in Bethlehem, where ironic murals by reclusive graffiti artist Banksy are a boon to local taxi drivers who offer “Banksy tours” to visitors. In 2017, Banksy opened the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, which includes a shop—called Wall Mart—that rents ladders, sells spray paint, and offers stencil tutorials. “Your one-stop shop for decorating the wall,” the website declares. Most of the Palestinians I spoke to, however, despise the decorations. They feel the art lends permanence to a structure they hope will one day come down. More than this, though, they don’t want anyone to make the wall beautiful.
In his collected diaries, A River Dies of Thirst, Mahmoud Darwish describes the wall as a “snake eager to lay its eggs between our inhalations and exhalations so that we say, for once, because we are nearly choking to death, ‘We are the strangers.’” But the wall is not a place for metaphors, I don’t think, compelling as they are. Just as Barghouti’s glance across the bridge transformed Palestine from an argument and a metaphor into something “touchable,” the wall casts the idea of the occupation into a literal concrete reality. For the Palestinians who live in the wall’s shadow—those the wall was built to enclose and exclude—the wall is not a snake or a symbol. The wall is a wall.
Barghouti knew this. He describes seeing the wall for the first time in I Was Born There, I Was Born Here and rages against the barrier in a single continuous paragraph that spans more than two pages. He writes:
This wall disfigures the sky itself. It disfigures the clouds that pass above it. It disfigures the rain that falls upon it. It disfigures the moonlight that touches it and the rays of the sun that fall next to it. . . . This wall has been designed to imprison an entire human community. To imprison a morning greeting between neighbors. To imprison a grandfather’s dancing at his grandson’s wedding. To imprison the handshakes exchanged at a ceremony of mourning for the death of a relative. To imprison the hand of a mother and prevent it from holding her daughter’s when she gives birth. To separate the olive tree from the one who planted it, the student from his school, the patient from his doctor, the believer from his prayers at the mosque. It imprisons dates between teenagers. The Wall makes you long for colors. It makes you feel that you are living in a stage set, not in real life. It imprisons time within place.
The wall cuts such a compelling line across the landscape that I felt tempted to define the hills of Palestine by their desecration rather than their beauty. I wanted to see more than this, so I went to see Raja Shehadeh. I learned about Raja after reading his remarkable book Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. The book recounts his hikes through the hills of Palestine and reveals how the land has changed over decades of occupation and the rapid expansion of Israeli settlements. “It was as though the tectonic movements that had occurred over thousands of years were now happening in a matter of months, entirely redrawing the map,” Raja writes. “The Palestine I knew, the land I thought of as mine, was quickly being transformed before my eyes.”
I wanted Raja to take me on one of these walks, but he said he hikes very little these days. He used to be able to descend into the valley from his house and quickly escape the city. Now Ramallah has spread so wide there are no nearby trailheads, and Raja has to drive in order to find a place to walk. The settlements and security apparatus also make it difficult to locate an easy route. And there are wild boars. Over the last few years, boars have wandered down the valley from the Galilee. Raja thinks the garbage created by the city attracts them. They are not dangerous, he insists, “but they are off-putting for hikers.” So instead of walking we sat in his garden amid olive trees, lavender, and hibiscus. We drank Shepherds beer and ate pistachios from a tray his wife, Penny, brought out to us.
Raja’s father’s family fled Jaffa in 1948. When his family used to stand on Ramallah’s hills and look west toward Jaffa, they never even glanced at the landscape that stood between them and the coastal city they’d lost. In his memoir, Strangers in the House, Raja wrote: “My life then was shaped by the contrast between the meagerness of life in Ramallah and the opulence of life in the city across the hills. There were daily reminders of that cataclysmic fall from grace.” His grandmother would show young Raja the son of a rich landowner who now peddled used clothes from a cart. Or the Salman brothers, once owners of a prestigious women’s clothing store in Jaffa, reduced to hawking needles and thread. The primacy of Jaffa rings out in one of the most heartbreaking passages in Stranger. For years, his family would point at the lights along the distant Mediterranean and say, with longing, “There is Jaffa.” Years later, they realized that the lights were actually from Tel Aviv and that they could not see Jaffa at all.
Raja’s father, Aziz Shehadeh, worked as a lawyer in an office in Ramallah. In the wake of the 1967 war, Aziz worked out a detailed peace plan that would establish a Palestinian state next to Israel. The memorandum, which a young Raja typed out for his father on a manual typewriter, countered the view of most Arab leaders that there should be no compromise with Israel. Aziz, though, did not see any value in continuing a policy that had failed Palestinians since 1948. “My father dared to utter the unspeakable: recognition of Israel,” Raja wrote. The reaction to Aziz’s transgression was swift. In 1968, Raja heard a message broadcast from a Palestinian radio station in Damascus that addressed Aziz directly:
A.S., you are a traitor, a despicable collaborator. You want to surrender and sell our birthright. We know how to deal with the likes of you. A.S., you will pay for your treason. We shall eliminate you. Silence you forever. Make an example of you for others. Traitor. Collaborator. Quisling.
Raja realized that referring to Aziz only by his initials was significant. His revolutionary brethren in Damascus refused to acknowledge his existence in the same way they refused to use the word Israel. His father had become a pariah, but he continued his legal practice in spite of the threats.
By way of heartbreaking irony, a Palestinian informant working for the Israeli security services—an actual collaborator—stabbed Aziz to death in 1985. The killer was never punished for the crime but died of gunshot wounds in a drive-by shooting in 1994. Raja would have to wait until 2006 before receiving confirmation this man was indeed his father’s murderer. A British historian friend of Raja’s heard it from an Israeli cabinet minister who had access to the security service’s secret files.
While a student at Birzeit junior college, Raja sent stories to the Jerusalem Post, an English-language Israeli newspaper that had a youth page. “I saw that people my own age were sending writing, so I thought I might as well try.” Aziz praised Raja’s writing but showed little enthusiasm for his literary ambitions. Raja’s grandfather had been a poet, and the last thing his father wanted was for Raja to take after him. “He wanted to make me a man of the world,” Raja wrote. “That meant being a lawyer, not a writer.”
Aziz succeeded in convincing Raja to enroll in law school after he’d graduated from an English literature program at the American University of Beirut. Raja traveled to London to devote himself to two pursuits. The first was to fulfill his father’s wishes and study law. The second was to embrace his belief in “personal freedom, in free love, in living outside society” and become a “nonconformist in the world of letters.” When he returned to Ramallah in 1976, he was the first Western-educated lawyer to come back to the West Bank since 1948.
Raja spent the first two and a half years learning about the legal situation of Palestinians under the first decade of the Israeli occupation. He spent his days in the courts, in his father’s law office, and, eventually, in the offices of Al-Haq, a non-governmental organization devoted to protecting human rights and the rule of law that Raja cofounded in 1979. In his role as lawyer, Raja came into regular contact with the suffering of his fellow Palestinians. He knew militants who endured torture and prison sent
ences and activists who were denied visas and work permits. Most Palestinians, though, suffered chronic but less acute indignities like “underdevelopment, land confiscation, collective punishment, and general despair that made life so intolerable.”
All that Raja witnessed lay heavily on him. What saved him from his own despair was what he called his “divided allegiance: lawyer by day, writer by night.” Writing forced Raja to remain aloof and not be completely absorbed by the darkness of his daylight hours. His father did not understand this detachment from the law, but Raja believes it protected him from misery.
Raja spent a month in the United States at the end of 1979. He recalls an evening in Houston when his American Palestinian friends, after much food and drink, asked him about the situation in the homeland. Raja knew what they wanted to hear: “an inflamed passionate denunciation of the Zionist enemy as the source of all our troubles.” Raja, though, could not oblige. “Only later did I realize that to do so would have been a betrayal of my own existence. To simplify my life and paint it in black-and-white terms was to deny my own reality, which I mainly experienced in tones of gray,” Raja wrote. “If my countrymen really cared about me they had to see me as a human being, one who did not exist only in those heroic moments of struggle against the occupation, as they liked to imagine. They had to realize that I was like them; my society had an integrity of its own that was not derived from the negation of the Zionist enemy.” While his colleagues listened politely for a while, this was not what they wanted to hear from him. “I almost felt that I needed to apologize for the lack of tragedy in my life,” Raja wrote.
His listeners wanted tales of Palestinian heroism, and they wanted them in the shape of daring acts against the oppressor. Grand gestures of bravery. They did not understand, as Raja did, that for the majority of Palestinians heroism is a synonym for perseverance. The Palestinians have a word for this: sumud, or steadfastness. To wake each day and endure the small harassments and obstructions without flinching. “Our heroism lay in our determination to stay, not in our acts of daring or even in military operations taken in resistance to the occupation,” Raja wrote. “The majority was resisting through staying put. This was the truth about life under occupation and this did not make for very exciting news or a narrative that could hold the attention even of the most ardent listeners.”
Raja found, too, that his friends’ view of Israel was one-dimensional. “In their view everything about Israel was evil. There were no gradations, no exceptions. All the Israelis were wicked people. But of course this is not true. There were aspects of Israel that I admired. But the moment I opened my mouth to speak of these, I was silenced. My listener would look at me with pity. I could imagine him thinking that the occupation forces must have terrorized me into losing my senses.”
I suspect this is why I so enjoy speaking with Raja and reading his books. Even though the bulk of Raja’s life’s work, whether in the courts or on the page, serves to both reveal and challenge the injustices of the occupation, he expresses nuance beyond the ideas of good-versus-evil and us-versus-them. And he sees, just as his father did, the folly of pretending Israel does not exist or that the occupation will suddenly vanish. I would meet other Palestinians who believed that the end of the occupation, and of the State of Israel itself, was both inevitable and impending. They believed a century of political Zionism would conclude as if such a project had a natural hundred-year expiry date. “There will always be Jews here,” one man would tell me, “but there will be no Israel anymore.”
Such conversations always troubled me. I didn’t want to argue about Palestine with Palestinians, but talk of the end of Israel was truly absurd. Nothing I’d seen during my travels suggested anything temporary about the State of Israel. Nothing I learned would support the idea that the Palestinians could simply run out the clock on the occupation. This felt completely unrealistic to me and, I think, to Raja, too. He finds reasons to be optimistic for Palestine. He sees potential in the actions of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which calls on the world to put economic pressure on Israel to end the occupation, and he envisions a time when world leaders “stop allowing Israel to do what it pleases.” He also believes Israelis may finally “learn what sort of nation they’d become.”
Israel, though, will remain. At the end of his book Language of War, Language of Peace, Raja writes what some Palestinians might consider sacrilege. “If there is to be peace in our region the Palestinians also need to come to terms with the existence of Israel and accept that its people are here to stay. What we should seek is not the destruction of Israeli society, but ways to forge a new relationship that would make it possible for both of us to have a full life based on justice and equality in this beautiful but tortured land which we share, for both of us—Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews—live here.”
In the meantime, Raja believes Palestinians should actually experience the land at the heart of the struggle. Al-Haq’s work on cases against the Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land led Raja into the hills and fields to map and measure thousands of square kilometers. Seeing the land in nature rather than as an entry in a court document—or a line on a map—revealed the beauty of the place to Raja. He believes the best way for Palestinians to counter the claustrophobia they feel in the shadow of checkpoints and borders and walls is to focus on the physical expanse of land. “There is a particular point after you leave Jerusalem and you are approaching Jericho when you see the Dead Sea for the first time,” he said. “And you enter into that area where there is a wall of hills on one side and another wall on the other side, and an expanse between. This is the only place you can really extend your view. Here one can imagine the land extending all the way from southern Turkey, where the Rift Valley begins, to Lake Tiberius, the Dead Sea and beyond.”
West Bank Palestinians cross this space all the time on their way to and from Jerusalem and the border post at the Allenby Bridge. But because of the “nastiness of crossing the bridge, and the complications and worries,” they do not appreciate the long view of the valley. “And I think of the difference between what the Israelis are trying to make us feel, and what we can feel if we forget all of that and just look with that vision,” Raja said. “It is so liberating. And it always does this to me.” Not all Palestinians make the effort to see this. “You have to learn to see. Everybody had passed through this expanse into the Jordan Valley. But if you don’t look, you don’t see it.”
Raja believes that most Palestinians don’t perceive the land this way. Each March, Palestinians commemorate Land Day, the anniversary of a 1976 protest against Israeli plans to expropriate Palestinian land. “Every year, you have all these posters of farmers digging into the land,” Raja said. “In the past, every villager knew about the land, about cultivation, planting, and so on. Now they have no idea.” Many rural Palestinians have left their fields to become laborers in Palestinian cities. “This idealized, romanticized image is so unrealistic.” And those who do not view the land through the prism of an idealized rural past see it instead through the impassive lens of real estate. When his next-door neighbor speaks about his land, he speaks only in terms of its monetary value. “There is no point in which he tries to preserve the land. You see this all around Ramallah: the complete destruction of the land because there is no longer any feeling for it. It is just property. A means of making money.” The hills of Palestine, then, represent either a lost romantic past or a future investment. The land lacks a present tense.
Raja believes that this emotional disconnect between Palestinians and their land led to a bizarre incident a few days before our meeting. Three young men who shared a flat in Ramallah phoned their families to tell them they were going away for a while. They tore up their ID cards, pitched their mobile phones in the trash, and disappeared. Their parents panicked and called the Palestinian police, who, in turn, alerted their contacts in Israel. The Israelis feared a terrorist plot had been set in motion. “Everyone started looking for
them,” Raja said. “Finally, they were found camping near a spring in a very nice area called Ein Lamun.” They had backpacks filled with camping gear and a tent.
The police arrested and handcuffed the men then brought them into custody where, according to their lawyer, they were tortured by interrogators. Hamas agents in the West Bank were worried that the men planned to volunteer as informants for the Israelis. “Nobody cared to know why they had gone into the hills,” Raja said. “Maybe it was an innocent thing. Maybe they just wanted to be alone in the woods.”
Raja discussed the episode with his barber during a haircut. The barber told Raja he had already argued with his son, who thought the men simply wanted to be left alone for a little while. This infuriated the barber, who hoped that their arrest and beatings would act as a deterrent to his own son. “We are not in the West. We are in Palestine. These things cannot happen. They must not happen.”
“Nobody I talked to about it was sympathetic with the idea you might want to be in the hills and hike and enjoy yourself and be rid of the identity card and all of it,” Raja said. “No one saw it as a heroic thing or a romantic thing. I think this is very telling.”
“Don’t you think that destroying their IDs and leaving their phones behind sounds suspicious?” I asked.
“Why?” Raja asked. “Why not say that we’ve been so tied to these things, our phones and IDs, that we just want to leave them and go away? But the idea that anyone would dare to do that here seems so dangerous. It is preposterous. There is so much fear about the present that it is not lived.”
Pay No Heed to the Rockets Page 8
