Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  After talking to Raja, I wanted to see the land as he saw it, not as a collage of plots to be bought, sold, or fought over but as a place of beauty and solace. Besides, I’d spent so much time drinking coffee and smoking nargileh with poets in Ramallah’s cafés that I could feel my body starting to revolt. I joined a hiking group headed by a man named Suhail Hijazi, who led weekly excursions into the countryside. On one of these trips, the group followed Suhail into the hills of the northern West Bank near Jenin. We began at the white stone church at Burqin where Jesus had paused to heal lepers on his own journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem, and then we continued into the Hashmiyet Mountains.

  The land is generous with its loveliness. We passed pomegranate trees ablaze with scarlet blossoms and old olive trees bearing new fruit as small and green as peppercorns. Wild mustard grew on the roadside along with an herb called fejum that wards off both mosquitoes and djinn. Tender chickpeas grew in wide fields near lentils, tobacco, and Egyptian cucumber. We climbed al-Barud mountain, which overlooks the Jezreel Valley, rested in the shade of a carob tree, and drank tea made from za’atar baladi, the wild thyme our guide plucked en route. Then we chased the tea’s medicinal bitterness with cups of sweet coffee.

  On another hike, Suhail brought us to Wadi Qana. Thorny weeds pricked my ankles through my socks. The occasional turtle crossed our path, seeming out of place in the dryness. We descended into the valley, where wild mint grew on the banks of a thin stream. Palestinians have long tended olive and citrus trees in the wadi. We passed through an orange grove where branches full of fruit shaded the previous autumn’s fallen oranges lying soft on the ground. We stopped for tea at a small stone farmhouse owned by the family of our guide, then continued along the valley floor. Palestinian families from the nearby village of Deir Istiya laid picnic blankets under the fig trees.

  The pastoral ideal withers, though, when one raises one’s eyes to the Israeli settlements that top each of the bulldozer-flattened hills surrounding the wadi: Yaqir and Nofim to the south, Immanuel and the sprawling Karnei Shomron to the north, and Alonei Shilo, El Matan, and Yair Farm. Palestinians have always lacked the equipment, wealth, and permission to build on the hilltops. In Palestinian Walks, Raja wrote: “Only the Israeli side had the means to turn a hill into a plain.” So, unlike the settlers, who could restructure the land, the Palestinians “had to follow its contours, build along the lines of the hills. Their villages and their gardens were in harmony with the land, organic outgrowths that pleased the eye.” Now the hilltops are beheaded, their gentle curves gouged and sliced. “Ideology and the bulldozers are the bane of this land,” Raja wrote.

  But the settlements are more than an aesthetic insult. Here in Wadi Qana, the settlers commandeer the bulk of the valley’s water resources, reducing the output of the wadi’s seven natural springs to a mere trickle. And until 2006, the settlements discharged their waste water directly into the wadi itself. The pollution forced fifty Palestinian families living in the wadi to abandon their homes in the 1990s. Now Palestinians face further pressure as the Israeli government attempts to transform the wadi, declared a nature reserve back in 1983, into a tourism site. The government claims that Palestinian farming damages the natural splendor of the area. In 2010, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority destroyed irrigation channels that fed the fruit trees. The INPA allows Palestinian farmers to tend their old orchards but forbids them from planting new trees. Since 2011, it’s uprooted around a thousand saplings and issued orders for the destruction of thousands more. Suhail believes this will lead to the eventual exclusion of all Palestinians from the wadi and the conversion of the land from an agricultural valley into what a settlement council official once called “the front yard of Karnei Shomron.”

  Raja had told me about the difference between how the Palestinians and Israeli settlers see the land. During one of his walks he came across a group of settlers on a guided nature hike. Their leader pointed out the various plants and trees in an attempt to increase their knowledge of the place they were laying claim to. Raja realized that, for them, the land was something to be fetishized. “It is like pornography,” he said. They have to learn to embrace the hills, valleys, and springs that are foreign to them.

  Darwish wrote about this in “A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips” as a conversation with a young Israeli soldier at the end of the 1967 war:

  And the land? I don’t know the land, he said.

  I don’t feel it in my flesh and blood, as they say in the poems.

  Suddenly I saw the land as one sees a grocery store, a street, newspapers.

  I asked him, but don’t you love the land? My love is a picnic, he said, a glass of wine, a love affair.

  – Would you die for the land?

  – No!

  All my attachment to the land is no more than a story or a fiery speech!

  They taught me to love it, but I never felt it in my heart.

  I never knew its roots and branches, or the scent of its grass.

  – And what about its love? Did it burn like suns and desire?

  He looked straight at me and said: I love it with my gun.

  The poem angered Palestinians and Israelis both. Palestinians criticized Darwish for portraying an enemy soldier with sympathy, while Israelis were offended that Darwish depicted the soldier as disillusioned by his role in Israel’s victory. At the end of the poem, the soldier abandons the land altogether. He tells the poet that, for him, homeland “is to drink my mother’s coffee, to return, safely at nightfall”:

  I dream of white tulips, streets of song, a house of light.

  I need a kind heart, not a bullet.

  I need a bright day, not a mad fascist moment of triumph.

  I need a child to cherish a day of laughter, not a weapon of war.

  I came to live for rising suns, not to witness their setting.

  The poem reveals an optimism that feels naive in the shadows of those fortified hilltop settlements. And yet, Ghassan Zaqtan doubled down on Darwish’s hopefulness decades later, in a 2003 poem titled “An Enemy Comes Down the Hill.” Ghassan also writes of the settlers’ fragile and tepid commitment to the lands they seized. The only place where “their feet will leave a print in the rocks, mud and water,” is on the main roads where the soldiers stand at the checkpoints. The rest of the land will eventually be “abandoned without effort.” Ghassan writes: “From the mountain edges, all the caves will appear peaceful / and the road will seem as it were.”

  On another hike I visited Mar Saba. The monastery clings to the cliffs of the Kidron Valley midway between Jerusalem and the salt-encrusted shore of the Dead Sea. A forty-two-year-old Russian monk with a long beard and dark robes waited for us in a small courtyard at the bottom of a flight of narrow stone stairs. We could smell the lingering aroma of fried potatoes from the monks’ breakfast. Our man led us to a chapel where chandeliers and incense burners hung from a ceiling covered with painted icons, and where Saint Sabas’s embalmed corpse lay in a glass box. The monk offered us coffee and candy and postcards. “No one wants to be a monk anymore,” he told us with the tone of a clockmaker mourning the death of his profession. When I asked him how long he’d stay at the monastery, he shrugged and said, “Until the end.” We left him to his study and prayer and descended into the valley, a bleak landscape colored only by the purple flowers of Syrian thistle, before climbing Tel Omar.

  As the Kidron Valley snakes northward toward Jerusalem, it passes another valley, Wadi Abu Hindi. I’d read about a Bedouin girl who writes fairy tales in Wadi Abu Hindi, and I set out to find her a few weeks later. No public vehicles travel to the Bedouin encampment, so I took a service taxi from Ramallah to the nearby town of Abu Dis. Such taxis, usually seven-passenger minivans, ply the Palestinian highways that link the towns and villages of the West Bank. They are not permitted to travel along the highways the Israelis have constructed for the settlers. Raja had told me that the service taxis were the Facebook of the 1980s, full of g
ossip, laughter, sly jokes, and loud music. “Now they are silent,” Raja said. “Nobody speaks to each other.” The music and the small talk have been lost, and the radio is often tuned to recitations of the Koran. According to Raja, this is not out of piety but out of a sense of hopelessness.

  The journey to Abu Dis took nearly an hour because IDF soldiers were deployed along the roadways to stop cars and check IDs. Earlier that morning, two Palestinian women carrying a knife, a syringe, and a suicide note approached IDF soldiers at a checkpoint near Ramallah. According to IDF sources, the women asked the soldiers for water before one lunged at them with a knife. She was shot and injured. The other woman fled and was quickly captured.

  Once in Abu Dis, I waited for a car to be sent by Wadi Abu Hindi’s mukhtar. We turned off the highway onto a gravel road into the wadi. Our car passed through a graffiti-adorned tunnel beneath a settler-only highway linking the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, which overlooks the wadi from the north, to the Keidar settlement, which overlooks the wadi from the south. The Bedouin camp of Wadi Abu Hindi occupies the barren valley between the two hilltop Israeli settlements.

  The Bedouin archetype of nomads perched upon tall camels, living among dunes in black tents laid with rugs and fetching water from isolated desert wells, is mere Orientalist romance. In reality, the gravel road to Wadi Abu Hindi leads past a catchment pool full of sewage from nearby Abu Dis. The camp itself is a scattering of dwellings made of tents and repurposed shipping containers. Old tires stand in heaps. A broken car sat inert on cinder blocks next to a bulldozer with flattened tires. The Bedouin here live in dwellings more like sheds than proper houses. Most are repurposed zinc shipping containers with doors and windows cut into them. Drying laundry hangs from lines strung between leaning posts, while sagging chicken-wire fences catch wind-blown plastic bags and other trash. Goats and sheep crowd pens fashioned from scraps of metal, wood, and wire gathered from building sites and dumps.

  Wadi Abu Hindi is one of Oslo’s victims. The accords divided West Bank territory into three distinct administrative categories: Areas A, B, and C. The Palestinian Authority administers land designated as Area A and shares the management of Area B territory with Israeli officials. More than 60 percent of the West Bank, though, is deemed Area C and under complete Israeli control. Although the wadi’s Bedouins have lived in the valley and grazed sheep and goats on the hillside since the 1950s, Israel has declared the wadi as part of Area C and forbids residents to build anything permanent here, hence the shipping-container houses and ad hoc animal pens. Even the primary school, constructed with the help of an Italian NGO in 2010, is a shipping container retrofitted with soil bricks and bamboo. The army demolished two previous schools because they were built to last out of concrete and stone.

  For all its roughness, the camp inspired fantasy in a fourteen-year-old Bedouin girl named Salha Hamdeen. In 2012, she wrote a fairy tale about another Salha, a fictional version of herself, who also lived in Wadi Abu Hindi. In the story, Salha wakes to the sound of Israeli army target practice and yearns to flee the clamor of bullets. “I do not have a bicycle, I do not have a car, I do not have a plane either, but I have something to run away by,” Salma says. “I have a flying sheep. His name is Hantoush; he is black with long ears and two wings that he hides under his fleece.”

  Salha flies atop Hantoush to Barcelona, where she meets the great Argentine soccer hero and Barcelona forward Lionel Messi. Salha and Messi play football together while Hantoush keeps goal, and Salha’s soccer prowess so impresses Messi he invites her to join the Barcelona team. Salha declines: “We want to go back to Abu Hindi valley, for my ewes were waiting for me to milk them. There is nobody but me to take care of them because my father has been in jail for six years, and he has another nineteen years more to go.” Messi goes to Abu Hindi with Salha. The two of them clear the valley of landmines and then build the world’s largest stadium to host the 2014 World Cup. The story, titled Hantoush, won the international Hans Christian Andersen prize for best new fairy tale in 2012.

  I wanted to meet Salha, but before I was introduced to her I sat with the camp mukhtar—and Salha’s uncle—Mohammed Hamdeen. He was born in 1969, and he and his family are refugees from Beer Sheva. We sat on carpets in a shipping-container dwelling set up as a sort of community center while a teenage Bedouin boy brought us coffee and mint tea. Mohammed sprawled on cushions, black cords holding his white turban in place, and rubbed his bare feet while we spoke. In his role as mukhtar, Mohammed acts as the tribe’s connection to the outside world. He moderates discussions between tribe members and the Palestinian Authority or the Israelis. Mohammed also mediates disagreements among the Bedouin themselves. “Clashes. Disputes about territory and water. Or something about women and honor. It could be anything.” Mohammed does not receive any compensation for this role. “I have sheep,” he said. “And my sons work.”

  “How many sons do you have?” I asked him.

  “Thirteen. I have twenty-three children altogether. From two wives.” Mohammed laughed at my shocked expression. “Most Bedouins have two, three, or even four wives,” he said. “We believe if you love women then keep marrying them instead of going after them unmarried.”

  Mohammed told me about the challenges of living in Area C. “If someone’s son wants to get married, he cannot build a house. He would receive an order from Israel stopping him from building. This creates a lot of stress.” In addition to the prohibition on building permanent dwellings, the Bedouin of Abu Hindi are forbidden from connecting to the local power grid or the water system. The only electricity comes from generators, and drinking water must be trucked in from elsewhere.

  The Israelis are currently discussing the possibility of relocating these Bedouin out of the wadi and into Area A territory, which the Palestinian Authority administers. Mohammed does not oppose relocation as a matter of principle. “We wouldn’t mind if they suggested to relocate us to a place in the wilderness where we would be free,” he said. “But they are offering us lands near big cities and towns on land that already belongs to other people. We don’t want to live on other people’s lands just because the state ordered us. We want to avoid all that.” Besides, the territory offered to them thus far has been too small for the Bedouin to graze their sheep and goats. Mohammed soon grew weary of speaking. “I have diabetes and I am tired,” he said and pointed toward another caravan where I was to wait to speak to Salha. This caravan was a donation from a European NGO and featured zinc walls filled with Styrofoam. A photograph of Salha receiving a medal from Mahmoud Abbas hung on the wall next to tapestries embroidered by Salha’s mother.

  Salha came in accompanied by her brother. She was eighteen and hardly resembled the picture on the wall. She’d covered her head with a burgundy headscarf, and a tangle of rubber bracelets circled each of her wrists. I recognized the colors of the Barcelona football club on one of them. Her dark skin and bright eyes reminded me of the girl in the green dress.

  I asked Salha about Hantoush. “I got the idea from the reality Palestinians live in. Especially here. And I wanted to transmit this message,” she said. “I wrote it for children but also for older people who could identify and understand what the Palestinians are living through here. The story is about reality.”

  “But it is also a fantasy, right? A fairy tale?”

  “I used fantasy because there are things that are impossible for Palestinian children.”

  “Like flying sheep.”

  “I mean it is impossible for us to leave Palestine at all. To leave the country. To see the world and meet Messi.” Israel controls all West Bank entry and exit points and, for the most part, only allows Palestinians to use the border crossing at the Allenby Bridge. But Israel prohibits many West Bank residents from using Allenby at all. Border soldiers refuse some travelers for ambiguous “security reasons” and often give no explanations. Many Palestinians don’t learn they are on a travel ban until they arrive at the border. Furthermore, PA-iss
ued travel documents are poorly received by foreign governments. Few countries allow Palestinians to visit without a visa and, as Ghassan Zaqtan learned, obtaining visas can be difficult. As a result, most West Bank Palestinians apply for temporary Jordanian passports from Amman. Poor Bedouins like Salha and her family can scarcely afford international travel anyway, even with all the proper documents. For them, leaving Palestine is as fantastical a notion as a sheep that can fly.

  Salha was studying to finish her last year of high school. Each day she walks three kilometers to the highway where she catches a service taxi to her school. She spends most of her days on her schoolwork, but she still writes stories in her free time. “I don’t like to share them,” she said. “I keep them to myself.” She plans on attending university in either Abu Dis or Ramallah and is considering studying creative writing. “It depends on my final high school scores,” she said. “If I get good grades, I will study law. If not, I will become a writer.”

  I laughed and told her this was a wise plan. “Why do you want to be a lawyer?”

  “Because the occupation makes the situation here so unstable. Because I want to make a change. And because my father is in jail.”

  Just like the father in Hantoush, Salha’s own father is serving time in an Israeli prison. The court originally gave him a twenty-five-year sentence but recently increased the punishment to life. “The Israelis were unhappy with the original sentence,” Salha explained.

  “What was his crime?”

  “They think he organized resistance groups and things like that,” she said, not willing to give me any more details.

  “Can you visit him?”

  “Yes. We must leave here at four in the morning and don’t return until eight or nine at night. He is in Ramla.”

  Our conversation quickly stalled. Salha started replying to my questions with disinterested one-word answers, and her brother occasionally stepped in to elaborate. At first I judged her sideways glances and fiddling with her bracelets as evidence of Salha’s shyness and modesty, but quickly realized I was wasting her time. Salha felt proud of winning the Hans Christian Andersen prize—“It showed that Palestinians can be achievers,” she said—but four years’ worth of attention from people like me earned her nothing. “The story became popular around the world. I expected something to change. I expected things to get better. But nothing really changed here.” To Salha, I was just another foreigner taking advantage of her story with nothing to offer in return.