Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  In the mid-1990s, Ala began writing for a communist newspaper in Haifa called Al-Ittihad (The Union). He wrote about the experiences of daily life, and readers were happy to find such stories in a serious and formal newspaper. “I wrote about making falafel,” Ala said. Like Darwish and Zaqtan, Ala considers writing about the banalities of ordinary Palestinian lives to be a political act. “I want so much to write about the small details that make us human beings, because even us Palestinians write about ourselves as one-dimensional people. Either we are shahids or future shahids.”

  Palestine’s intellectual elite, those most equipped to write the Palestinian narrative, fled en masse after 1948. “We were left with two hundred thousand fellaheen—peasant farmers—with no voice,” Ala said. “There was no one left to tell the story.” The authors and poets who remained wrote overtly political texts that focused on the heroic struggle of the nation but were artistically and emotionally unsophisticated. “As a writer, you were basically a soldier. You gave people texts in order to shape their identity. You wanted to be the voice of the people.” The collective mattered more than the individual.

  Just as Mahmoud Abu Hashhash had suggested in Ramallah, Ala believes the focus shifted after Oslo. “We were under the illusion that the struggle was over,” Ala said. “We thought, we can have a Palestinian state now, so let’s stop writing about Palestine. Let’s start writing about sex.” Ala was part of the generation of authors that began to write about Palestinians as individual human beings—whether in or out of the bedroom. “We stopped writing about Palestinians as a placard or a political poster. Suddenly we had feelings. It was not so bad if you cry.”

  The world outside Palestine was also changing. The internet granted Palestinians access to foreign literature and authors elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking world. Palestinian writers connected with their diaspora colleagues in Cairo and Beirut. The availability of so many new texts changed the perception of what it meant to be an Arab, especially for writers like Ala who lived in 48. “The internet was crucial for us as Arabs in Israel. We are surrounded. We are Israeli citizens, but we are not complete citizens because we are Arabs and not Jews.” At the same time, the rest of the Arab world was suspicious of Palestinian-Israelis, with their Israeli passports and citizenship. The internet allowed writers to connect with each other beyond the confines of political borders and fraught nationalities.

  The appearance of satellite television channels launched another “revolution.” Broadcasters like Al Jazeera started interviewing Arabs living in Haifa and Nazareth. Palestinians in 48 edged closer to the rest of the Arabic-speaking world, and to the world in general. “You had a wider perspective of what literature is and what life is about,” Ala said. “Not just the struggle in Gaza, or Nablus, or the Galilee.”

  Ala recalls writing only two stories set in the West Bank. He felt both were fraudulent. “If I want to write a novel about Ramallah, I should go there for a year,” he said. “And, for me, Gaza is a myth. It is a place that does not exist in my real life. Just in headlines. If I want to write about the immediate Palestinian that I am, I will write about Haifa and Akka,” he said, using the Arabic word for Acre. “This is the material that I know.” Ala’s stories center on Palestinian characters living in 48 and are often colored with ironic humor and frequent dashes of the erotic. The protagonist in Ala’s story “My Husband Is a Bus Driver” looks forward to the travel she will do with her new bus-driving husband, but all she does is clean the trash and vomit out of his bus when he returns from a trip. “The Tent” gives a strained and complex portrait of a family living in the close quarters of a leaky refugee tent. In “The Passport,” a Palestinian author desperately tries to retrieve his passport in time for a publicity trip to London.

  Ala has endured his own passport problems. In 2010, he was named one of thirty-nine rising Arab writers and invited to a literary festival in Beirut. But the Israeli government considers Lebanon an enemy state and forbids citizens, including Arabs like Ala, from traveling there. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself released a statement declaring he would not allow Ala’s trip. Adalah, a legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, decided to petition the Israeli High Court of Justice on Ala’s behalf. Adalah felt the law was worth challenging out of principle, but it didn’t believe it harbored any chance of winning. Neither did Ala, so he decided to attend a different literary event in the United Kingdom while his lawyers argued the case.

  The High Court was in session while Ala flew to London. “When I landed, I had four hundred messages on my phone. They said, ‘Mabrouk! You are going to Beirut!’” Inconceivably, the court had rejected arguments by the government’s lawyers and overturned the travel ban. Israel’s interior minister himself signed the order. The decision was groundbreaking. Ala would be the first Israeli citizen since 1948 permitted by Israel to visit an enemy state.

  Ala told the newspaper Haaretz, “It is almost impossible to describe the joy that I feel right now.” But his happiness was short-lived. He had been so certain his court challenge would fail that he hadn’t bothered to arrange his attendance with the Beirut festival organizers. Now Ala faced another problem: Lebanon enforces a parallel law that forbids anyone from entering the country on an Israeli passport. “It was a disaster because I hadn’t planned anything with the guys in Beirut. I spent three days in London trying to convince them to have me. They said, ‘You didn’t apply. You have no Palestinian passport. We have a law.’” Ala finally convinced the Lebanese embassy in London to issue him a laissez-passer that would allow his trip. He booked a flight to Beirut for the following Friday.

  Then, on Thursday, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted and thwarted Ala’s plans. Volcanic ash filled the skies around northern Europe and grounded all commercial aircraft. Ala never made it to Beirut. He joked that the eruption was an Israeli conspiracy. Iceland’s first lady at the time was Dorrit Moussaieff, an Israeli Jew born in Jerusalem. “She caused the volcano,” he said.

  Kidding aside, the prohibition against traveling to Lebanon struck against Ala’s Arab identity. Beirut has always been a center of an Arab culture that has long included Palestinians. For generations, Palestinians in Jerusalem and the Galilee pursued university degrees in Beirut. They listened to Lebanese music, watched Lebanese films, and read Lebanese books. Beirut stands as a capital of the Arab nation that Palestinians have belonged to for centuries. “So why does Israel want us to forget this history?” Ala asked. “I write in Arabic. I dream in Arabic. I make love in Arabic. It is my immediate culture. And you want me to think Beirut is not a part of my personality? Why? I don’t recognize your security discourse. This is my nation. This is my people. This is my language, for god’s sake.”

  Perhaps Ala’s greatest contribution to the wider Arab nation is Qadita, an Arabic cultural website named for his family’s lost village. The site includes short stories and poems as well as sections for politics, cinema, theater, and other arts. Ala founded Qadita in 2010, and the site quickly became popular with the Arab cultural elite and creative classes. The section dedicated to gay literature attracted the most attention. This was the first inclusion of queer lit in a general culture website anywhere in the Arab world. “It caused a shock,” Ala said. Furious readers called to tell him there was no gay scene in Palestine or that queer culture was “an Israeli thing.” The harsh reaction lasted for only two or three months, and people stopped complaining altogether after a year. Ala eventually liberated Qadita’s queer section from “the ghetto,” and now gay literature appears throughout the site.

  Most gay Palestinian writers live in 48, where organizations exist that advocate for homosexual issues. Ala said he couldn’t run a site with queer literature from the West Bank. “This is one of the benefits of being in Israel,” he said. “We don’t like to admit it. It’s not nice to say, but in Israel there are positives. You are not supposed to say good things about your enemy.” Ala wants all Palestinians to enjoy the s
ame freedoms Israelis do.

  Half of Qadita’s content comes from Palestinian writers, the rest from elsewhere in the Arab world. “We have no real lines. No taboos. You can write about gay issues, about politics—Arafat or Abu Mazen. Qatar or the Saudis. There are no limits.” The site receives material that cannot be published in the Arab states it comes from. Qadita even welcomes stories about atheism, a provocative idea in the Arab world and an actual crime in some countries. “If someone wants to write his deep and honest thoughts about God, we will publish it, too.” Quality is Ala’s only concern.

  There are only two basic rules for writing, Ala said. Honor your reader, and love your characters. The latter rule holds particular relevance for Palestinian authors writing from 48. “I can’t be a professional writer if I write a one-dimensional Jew,” Ala said. When he teaches creative writing, he tells his students that if they lack “the power and the willingness to write about Herzl as a human, then don’t write about him.” Jewish characters in Palestinian fiction should be complete and well-shaped and not included as poorly drawn targets of hate. “Otherwise it is political bullshit.”

  This is another advantage writers in 48 have over their colleagues on the other side of the Green Line. The only Jews West Bank Palestinians ever see are soldiers or settlers. Mourid Barghouti wrote: “our problem with the Jew . . . is that all three or four generations of Palestinians have seen of him is his helmet. They’ve seen the Jew only in khaki, with his finger on the rifle’s trigger.” Palestinians in 48, on the other hand, live among Jews. Half of the residents of Ala’s building are Jewish, and everyone wishes each other good morning. Ala even writes the occasional article in Hebrew and once signed a contract with an Israeli publisher to write a Hebrew novel. (He quit after only a thousand words, though, and paid back his advance. “I was young and foolish and wanted to be popular and written about,” he explained.) Just like his Jewish neighbors, Ala is an Israeli citizen. “I am paying taxes for this country,” Ala said, though this fact riles him. He hates knowing that his tax dollars fund settlements and help equip the Israeli military. “I am buying the bullets they are shooting at Palestinians,” he said.

  Ala doesn’t like to admit it, but he realizes there is a cultural divide between Palestinians in the West Bank and Palestinians living in the 48. “The Israelis succeeded in separating us. Through borders, checkpoints, and military actions. And walls.” West Bank Palestinians call those living in Israel shamenet, or Cream Arabs. The term comes from an Israeli epithet for someone who is spoiled from birth. “We are the rudest Arabs in the Arab world,” Ala said. Palestinians in the 48 also earn more than those in the West Bank. “We tend to go to Jenin and Nablus to shop,” he said. “With our five hundred shekels we are rich. The Palestinians there tend to look at us in our pockets.”

  But holding the same blue ID card as his Jewish neighbors does not mean Ala lives the same life. In 2012, an Israeli housing development called Nes Ammim, or Banner of the Nations, decided to expand into a multicultural community for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The community’s website promised a “unique, high-quality community based on the principles of openness to all religions, tolerance and acceptance of the other.” This philosophy appealed to Ala and his wife, human rights lawyer Abeer Baker, who support the ideal of a secular democratic state for both Israelis and Palestinians. Besides, the community itself was beautiful. “Surrounded by trees,” Ala said. He and Abeer felt Nes Ammim would make a good home for their two young children.

  They applied to purchase a home there in 2014. In addition to arranging the relevant financing, Ala and Abeer had to be approved by the committee overseeing the community. They completed a four-hour computerized exam with “hundreds of questions meant to analyze our personality,” Ala said. Near the end of their application process, they sat for an interview with a selection panel. Ala and Abeer considered the interview a mere formality. After all, by then they had already signed a contract, chosen a plot, and paid their deposit. “But the interview did not go well,” Ala said. Nes Ammim’s managers asked Ala and Abeer about their work and political leanings. Then they asked whether or not Ala and Abeer would accept an invitation to attend a community barbecue to celebrate Israeli Independence Day. Ala told them no. “It’s not our day,” he said.

  This was not the answer the committee wanted to hear. When they called Ala and Abeer in for a second interview, the atmosphere was tense. One of the committee members, a man from Holland, told Ala and Abeer he found their political positions problematic. He objected to a column Ala once wrote comparing the Israeli Knesset to a garbage dump. The committee felt that this was vulgar and rude. The man said, “Ala writes as if he is shouting.” Ala replied that, as a minority, sometimes you have to shout to be heard. The man said that wasn’t polite. Ala told him that was a typical white answer. Another manager said that while he could see that Ala and Abeer were “very clever” people, he worried they would cause clashes in the community. By then Ala knew the committee was going to reject his application, so he asked if it would rather accept a stupid Jewish person than a clever Arab. Nes Ammim returned Ala and Abeer’s deposit. “They wanted good Arabs,” Ala shrugged.

  In spite of the frustrations of being a Palestinian in Israel—the travel restrictions, the conflict with Nes Ammim—life in the 48 grants Ala a wealth of material to write about. “For a writer, it is a fortune,” he said. Years ago, he decided to move to London. He lasted only a week. A promised newspaper job never materialized, and he quickly ran out of money. “I was lonely and terrified,” he said. “It was the shortest immigration ever.” Ala’s quick return infuriated and embarrassed his mother, who had boasted to everyone in Jish that Ala had moved to London. She demanded Ala hide out in Haifa for a little while before showing up in Jish, just so she could save face with her fellow villagers.

  Ala told me he won’t leave again. “I don’t want to give up on this place,” he said.

  In Raji Bathish’s ironic short story “Nakba Lite,” five young men decide to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba by collecting their families’ stories for inclusion on a “Nakba Blog.” They become disappointed, though, when they realize their stories lack sufficient tragedy. One man tells of how Israeli soldiers considered using his family’s home as a command center, but never did. Another explains how his family fled the fighting in Haifa and ended up settling comfortably near Nazareth— hardly a desperate fate. A third speaks of his aunt, a spinster “who is expected to die of cancer at any moment because of the trauma she has been suffering for more than sixty years.” She suffered nightmares of being raped by soldiers even though she was never actually raped. Finally, the fourth blogger tells the story of his mother’s uncle, who kept the key to the house he fled in 1948, only to have it stolen during his wife’s funeral. “And so, five years later, my mother’s uncle died from grief over his key.” The blog coordinator loved this story, and asked the man how he knew for sure that the uncle died out of grief for his lost key. The man replied: “Is there anything more tragic to die for?”

  Raji is not unlike the men in the story. His personal history also lacks a compelling Nakba tragedy. “All of us Palestinians are melancholic figures. All of us are looking for sadness to write about, because it is not interesting for a Palestinian to write happy things,” Raji told me as we sat at a pricey café in Nazareth near the gaudy Basilica of the Annunciation. “But I am not a refugee,” Raji continued. “My melancholy is related to something different.” Each Palestinian author writes about the occupation somehow, Raji said, but his work challenges collective symbols like lost orange groves or the sanctity of keys for stolen homes. Raji has set stories in Tel Aviv, “the capital of the enemy,” which rarely appears in Palestinian literature. His characters are more vulnerable than heroic. And instead of patriotic clichés, Raji—like Ala Hlehel—would rather write about sex.

  When he was a boy, Raji used to steal books and magazines his uncle left behind in his mother’s fami
ly home. “It was like a passion for me. I wanted to read all the time. I read everything.” Many of the titles came from Lebanon and Syria, and Raji realized later on how rare these books were. The books were illegal under Israeli law and likely smuggled in. Young Raji most enjoyed reading a Lebanese health magazine called Your Doctor, which always included a sex advice column. “I read about sexual problems and penis size,” Raji said. The magazine taught young Raji the blunt carnal vocabulary he would later use in his work.

  The sacred attracted Raji just as much as the sexual. He used to accompany his Catholic mother to church on Sundays. Raji was not particularly religious: even at nine years old he questioned why Catholics knelt before statues of stone saints and found little inspiration in the lessons of the Bible. But Raji loved listening to the priest recite religious texts during the Mass. He heard a beautiful music in the words of faith. In 2016, he told an interviewer, “At age six, when you discover words like batul (virgin) or shafi’a (patron saint), or the rest of the vocabulary of sin and sinfulness and sacrifice without understanding its meaning, an extremely rich lexicon opens up to you.” Just as Your Doctor introduced Raji to the language of sex, his Sunday morning ceremonies taught him the language of purity and transgression.