Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  He remembers, too, learning of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982. Raji was twelve years old when one hundred and fifty Lebanese Christian militiamen, allied with Israel, entered the Shatila refugee camp and the adjacent neighborhood of Sabra in Beirut. For three days the militia raped, murdered, and dismembered the residents. Israeli soldiers positioned around the camp did not stop the rampage. Instead, the IDF sent flares into the sky to illuminate the darkness for the militiamen. Mahmoud Darwish wrote of the massacre in his memoir In the Presence of Absence: “The night of Sabra and Shatila was all lit up so that the killers could peer into the eyes of their victims and not miss a moment of ecstasy on the slaughtering table.” The Israelis also allowed reinforcements to enter the camp and provided bulldozers to dispose of the bodies. Between eight hundred and 3,500 Palestinians died in the massacre—the numbers, as in all such grisly accounting, remain disputed. Many of the victims were children.

  “It was the first time that I smelled the odor of something horrible that happened to kids,” Raji said. “The invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982 was something very violent that showed people my age that the world is not as good and simple as we children thought.” The massacre coincided with trauma within Raji’s home. His eighteen-year-old sister suffered a psychological breakdown that same week. Raji didn’t want to tell me the details, saying only that it was a “a traumatic thing” that made him lose the “feeling of safety in the house.” The two episodes, opposite in scale and intimacy, deeply affected young Raji. “That week changed the world around me,” Raji said.

  Raji started writing his own stories as a teenager, about the same time he started to have sexual experiences with older men. “I loved the feeling of sin,” he said. “I started to write about my feelings in prose and in poems.” When he graduated from high school, Raji left Nazareth to study chemical engineering at a university in Tel Aviv. He took lovers from among the other Arabs in his dormitory, and he continued to attract the affections of older men. He dabbled briefly with politics, but activism and nationalism quickly bored him. Raji was far more interested in writing. One of his first published stories was about a victim of child sexual abuse. As he continued to write, his work became more and more explicitly homoerotic.

  “Yesterday I thought about what makes me write about sexuality,” Raji said. “I thought about what makes me want to be penetrated by another man. I think it gives me the feeling that I am alive. That I am made of real material.” I found this fascinating in light of what I’d already learned. Like Ala Hlehel, Raji belongs to the new generation of Palestinian writers that has jettisoned nationalistic flag-waving for domestic narratives. The focus tightened from the nation to the home. But Raji’s work represents an even further and more intimate shift. Raji’s explicit sexuality narrows in on the body itself.

  Raji also dispenses with the common trope of heroic masculinity. “I like to write about vulnerable manhood,” he said. His characters all share the illusion that they control the world in which they live. For Raji, much of this sense of vulnerability stems from his experiences as a sexually active gay man during the height of the AIDS crisis. “I remember when I started having sex in public places. I always used protection, but every time I started to feel symptoms—if I was sweating or something—I believed that I was HIV positive. It was something that ruled my life.” Then he told me, with startling nonchalance, about an encounter with a man in a Haifa park when he was in his twenties. Raji was giving oral sex to the man, and he ejaculated without warning. “I was crazy for months. I thought I was going to die. And not just die, but die with shame.”

  Raji paused then asked me, “Do I make you uncomfortable when I talk like this?”

  “No. I am just surprised,” I said. “I’ve never met anyone who speaks so explicitly about these things.”

  “My work is explicit,” Raji said. “I wrote a story about intercourse between me and a colleague in my office. It was fiction, of course, but the story was very pornographic. When I published it on the internet, people were very angry. I asked myself, what is the problem with writing pornographic stories? Why should they have less value?”

  “What do your readers think?” I asked him.

  Raji shrugged. “I live in my own bubble here,” he said. “Nazareth is a small town. People don’t have anything to say.” The crowd Raji draws when he travels to give readings and lectures always surprises him. “I realize I am a very well-known name in queer writing.” Raji is not a typical gay rights activist. He doesn’t encourage people to come out of the closet, and he doesn’t march in the Tel Aviv Pride Parade. “I don’t know what to be proud of,” he said. But Raji often speaks out against what he considers Israeli pinkwashing. He rejects the idea that Israel’s accommodation of the LGBTQ community stands as evidence of the country’s humanitarian virtue. “You cannot be a fascistic state, with apartheid and occupation, and be proud of your gay integration.”

  Especially when Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, blackmails gay Palestinians into becoming informants. In 2014, the Guardian printed the testimony of a Shin Bet refusenik. “If you’re homosexual and know someone who knows a wanted person—and we need to know about it—Israel will make your life miserable,” the man said. “Any such case, in which you ‘fish out’ an innocent person from whom information might be squeezed or who could be recruited as a collaborator, was like striking gold for us and for Israel’s entire intelligence community.” He went on to suggest that this practice was Shin Bet policy. “During my training course in preparation for my service in this assigned role, we actually learned to memorize different words for ‘gay’ in Arabic.”

  For its part, the Palestinian Authority is hardly innocent of such crimes. Reports surfaced in 2013 about PA policemen threatening to out gay Palestinians in Ramallah unless they informed on political activists. In either case, outed Palestinians in the West Bank—where homosexuality is not illegal but often considered sinful—face humiliation, shame, and violence.

  I asked Raji if he could write such explicit homoerotic stories if he lived in the West Bank or Gaza instead of in 48. His long pause before answering surprised me; I’d thought my question was rhetorical. Raji said he never thought about it. “I know people in the West Bank who write openly queer stories. Some of the villages are very conservative, but I could live in Ramallah and write.” He feels queer writing occupies such a small niche in Palestinian culture that few would even notice his work. “I think that I can write everything I want everywhere,” he said. “But I told you I live in a bubble. I don’t know what people say about me.”

  “Are you happy in your bubble?”

  “I am protecting myself,” he said.

  He’s protecting not just himself. Raji has a son. A few years earlier, one of Raji’s female friends told him she wanted to have a baby and planned on going to what Raji called “the bank of sperm.” Raji stepped up. “I wanted to fulfill my biological potential,” he said. “My thinking was very scientific. I produce millions of sperm every day. If one of them meets an egg, the right egg, it would be a human being. And I wanted that.”

  I laughed. “That is the least emotional reason for having a child I’ve ever heard.”

  He shrugged again. “It is a fact.”

  Raji was living in Tel Aviv at the time, and his friend lived in Haifa. When she gave birth to their son, Raji moved to Nazareth—a short drive from Haifa—so he could be close to his child while also caring for his dementia-stricken mother. She passed away in 2016. Raji sees his son, Habib, four times a week, and the boy spends every second weekend with Raji in Nazareth. Unlike a lot of Palestinian fathers, who “don’t get involved in the Pampers things and want the child very clean and clothed,” Raji embraced the muck of parenthood. “I got involved in the liquids,” he said. Raji dealt with the long illnesses and deaths of his parents, both of whom needed his constant care in their final years. Then he tended to his infant son’s vulnerabilities. “It is
the real life,” he said. “This is very tough. You have another human being. You should protect him. And you can’t always protect yourself.”

  In 2014, playwright Bashar Murkus decided to develop a play about Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. “The issue of prisoners is important,” Bashar told me as he chased an espresso with a ginger ale at a restaurant called Fattoush in Haifa. “Palestinians see them as heroes. Israelis see them as terrorists. But neither a hero nor a terrorist is a human being.” Bashar began by conducting general research about political prisoners around the world before training his focus on prisoners in Israel. He learned about Walid Daka, a PFLP operative serving a thirty-seven-year sentence for his involvement in the 1984 kidnapping and murder of an Israeli soldier named Moshe Tamam. Bashar was drawn to Daka after reading a letter he wrote to his unborn son. “I loved the letter,” Bashar said. “I loved how well he wrote it.”

  Daka is undeniably an evocative author. In 2005, Haaretz published another of his letters. He wrote:

  Here we are not allowed to use a paper and pen during the visits. Memory is our only means. I forget to look at the lines that began years ago to be etched in the face of my mother, forget to look at her hair, which she started to dye with henna to conceal the white, so I won’t ask her real age. And what is her real age? I don’t know how old my mother is. My mother has two ages: her chronological age, which I know, and the age of my imprisonment, the parallel age, which is 19 years.

  I am writing to you from the parallel time. We don’t use your ordinary units of time, like minutes or hours, except during the moments when our time meets your time next to the visitors’ window. Then we are forced to pay attention to those same units of time.

  The letters motivated Bashar to learn more about Daka. He met with Daka’s wife, lawyer and human rights activist Sana Salameh-Daka. The two married in prison in 1999 but had never consummated their marriage. Bashar also met with Daka’s lawyer, his mother, and his brothers. And he began to exchange letters with Daka in prison.

  Bashar wrote a play inspired by Daka’s life in prison. He titled it A Parallel Time, based on Daka’s letter, but the play is not a biography. Daka is not named and does not appear as a character. The killing of the Israeli soldier is not mentioned. Instead, the story centers on the life of five fictional political prisoners. As the play opens, one of the inmates is planning on marrying his girlfriend. Another prisoner arrives, an oud player, and his fellow inmates try to find a way to secretly build an oud so he can perform at the groom-to-be’s prison wedding. “The play is about how the prisoners fight time inside the jail,” Bashar said.

  Al-Midan Theater, a Palestinian company based in Haifa, staged the play in Arabic several times over the course of two years without incident. In 2014, though, Midan included Hebrew supertitles for Jewish audiences. “Then the storm started,” Bashar said. Protesters accused Bashar’s play of showing sympathy for a convicted terrorist. Tamam’s family was outraged. Israel’s education minister, Naftali Bennett, removed the play from a list of performances available to Israel’s schools. The Ministry of Culture and Sport, led by minister Limor Livnat, abruptly suspended funding for al-Midan. So did the Haifa Municipality. Bashar said he wasn’t surprised by the response. “But the strange thing is that not one of these people actually saw the show or read the play.”

  Walid Daka read it. According to a story in Haaretz, Sana brought a copy of the play to Daka at Hadarim Prison during one of her biweekly forty-minute visits. “Doesn’t Israel have any other problems? Such as the Palestinian problem, or Iran? Only the play about Walid Daka?” Daka asked her. “Did anyone among all those who are now on the attack actually see the play?”

  Later that same year, Bennett and Livnat railed against another Palestinian artist living in Haifa, filmmaker Suha Arraf. Arraf’s film Villa Touma was set in Ramallah, filmed almost entirely in Arabic, and included no Jewish-Israeli characters. The Israeli ministers, though, were outraged that Arraf listed the film as Palestinian at the Venice Film Festival. The film had received a $353,000 grant from the Israel Film Fund, the Ministry of Economy, and the Mifal Hapais lottery commission—all Israeli public entities. Arraf defended herself in a newspaper op-ed, saying, “Films belong to those who create them. They never belong to the foundations that helped fund them, and they certainly never belong to countries. I define my film as a Palestinian film because I am first of all a Palestinian.” Arraf also reminded her detractors that while Palestinians make up a fifth of Israel’s population, Arab-Palestinian cultural institutions receive less than 2 percent of Israel’s budget for culture, and less than 1 percent of cinema funding. “If anyone should be complaining,” Arraf wrote, “we are the ones who should be doing so.”

  Arraf failed to convince the ministers. They wanted the grant money back. Livnat demanded that the Israel Film Fund return Arraf’s grant to the Ministry of Culture and Sport, which provided the money, and the Ministry of Economy wanted Arraf to pay the money back herself. In the end, the Israel Film Fund returned the funding. Since the controversy, both the Israel Film Fund and the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, the only cultural organizations in Israel to fund feature-length films with government money, require their grant recipients to declare their films Israeli. Now Arraf describes Villa Touma as stateless. Her movie has become another sort of Palestinian refugee.

  The Villa Touma and A Parallel Time controversies revealed to Bashar that the only way for a Palestinian artist living in Israel to ensure autonomy over his or her own work is to be untethered from government funding bodies. “It is really important for all artists here to remember that we are living inside an occupation,” Bashar said. “I am making art to save my identity. It is why I am working. It is crazy to believe that the occupation will give me money to make this.”

  Bashar’s own theater company, Khashabi Theatre, remains independent. Bashar and four of his theater school colleagues formed the Khashabi ensemble in 2011. They spent three years producing shows at various theaters in Israel and the West Bank before building themselves a permanent home in an Ottoman-era building in Haifa’s Wadi Salib neighborhood. The building was a Palestinian family home before 1948. For a while it housed a carpenter’s workshop, then a nightclub, but it had been shuttered for a decade like most of the buildings in Wadi Salib. Bashar and his friends took possession of the building in 2015 and renovated the space into a theater. “We didn’t take money from Israel to make the renovations,” Bashar said. “Not from the municipality or the Ministry of Culture. We chose to make the theater truly independent.”

  Khashabi Theatre’s inaugural season focused around the theme of Haifa. They opened with Sitt bil Ouffeh, a play named after a Palestinian dish of bulgur and rice. The play centered on the idea of inherited memory. Bashar told me that Palestinians have vivid memories of events they did not experience firsthand, especially of the Nakba and the tumultuous years that followed. “We took these stories from our fathers or grandfathers. And we believe that they are our memories. But they are not our memories at all, because we didn’t live it.” The first generation of post-Nakba Palestinians, those whose parents endured the traumas of 1948, often suffer a sort of inherited PTSD.

  But for Palestinians of Bashar’s generation, the second after the Nakba, this inherited trauma has faded—especially for those living in Israel and away from the daily pressures of occupation. “My grandfather lived through the Nakba, and he lived in fear until he died. My father took this fear from his father, and he lives with it, too. But our generation did not take it.” Bashar told me a story about one of the ensemble members who lives in her grandmother’s house in Nazareth. Each time she travels to Haifa for rehearsals, her grandmother calls to make sure she arrives safely. “Her grandmother still believes that it is really dangerous to go from Nazareth to Haifa. She still has this fear, even though now it is just a half-hour bus ride.” This enduring anxiety and the despair for all they’d lost paralyzed his father’s and
grandfather’s generations. They didn’t create anything new while looking fearfully backward.

  The absence of inherited fear gives Palestinian artists like Bashar the psychological space to build something for themselves. Palestinians in the West Bank continue to struggle with the daily pressures of a military occupation. “But in Haifa, our war is not about geography,” Bashar said. “We are working to save our identity and determine how we want to live.” Bashar understands his experience as a Palestinian in Haifa differs from those living elsewhere. “It is different from what is happening in Jerusalem, for example, where the war is still about whether you exist or not.” Instead of facing death, Palestinians in Haifa and elsewhere in Israel face questions about the life they want to live. “Here it is about how to exist.” The Palestinian struggle in Haifa, then, is to create a life for themselves. “The Palestinian people are building their own Haifa,” Bashar said.

  The center of this new blossoming of Palestinian culture in Haifa is Masada Street. I walked to Masada after my time with Bashar. Dreadlocked Palestinians walked their dogs past afternoon beer drinkers. I eavesdropped as a man in a backward-facing yellow baseball cap rolled up his sleeve to show off his new tattoo to a pair of women at a café, and I wondered if he’d gotten inked at the tattoo parlor named Oops a little up the street. I browsed the antique shops and vinyl record stores, passed the tiny bars that can scarcely hold a dozen drinkers at a time, and took a coffee at Elika café. If Masada Street existed in my hometown, I would spend all my time there.

  It would be easy to dismiss what is happening on and around Masada Street as simple gentrification. The phenomenon of creative young people transforming a low-rent neighborhood into a popular bar-and-café scene is hardly unique. But there is a political edge to what is happening on Masada. The Palestinians in Haifa are building themselves a cultural life in a city where they are a minority. Jewish Israelis are welcome here, and I heard almost as much Hebrew as Arabic coming from the café tables, but this is undeniably Palestinian space. The scene is also undeniably hip. None of these places resemble the dusty old-fashioned coffee shops in the West Bank where I smoked away my hours with gray-haired men in tweed blazers. Masada is where the young writers and artists gather. Here the hairstyles are modern and the music on the stereo current. Contemporary artworks rather than photos of Jerusalem hang on the walls. I found it ironic that one of the places where I found modern Palestinian culture manifested so clearly was in an Israeli city.