Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  Dear Arab guy:

  We don’t want you to get hurt!

  Our daughters are valuable to us,

  and just as you would not want a Jew to date your sister

  we are also unwilling for an Arab to date a girl from among our people.

  Just as you would do anything to stop a Jew from dating your sister—

  so would we!

  If you are thinking of visiting Jerusalem malls or the pedestrian street

  with the intention of dating Jewish girls—this isn’t the place for you.

  You may walk around in your own village freely and find girlfriends

  there, not here!

  Last week an Arab who thought he might find Jewish girls got hurt.

  We don’t wish for you to get hurt,

  So respect our daughters’ honor

  As we mind it dearly.

  In the eyes of his assailants, Ibrahim had not heeded this warning, and so they broke his leg. Police promptly arrested five of Ibrahim’s attackers, three of whom admitted to the beating. Ibrahim recovered from his injuries. Still, khulud couldn’t get him out of her mind. “He just kept coming back somehow. He kept bugging me at breakfast.” Eventually she wrote a fictional account of the incident, moving it from Jerusalem to Haifa and focusing on the days before the attack. “The story is ten pages long, but the lynch is only a paragraph. I went back two weeks before the lynch and imagined the daily life of this person. He is a regular person. Why would you want to beat him up?”

  Another real-life attack, this one a 2003 suicide bombing, inspires a scene in Haifa Fragments. Ziyad boards Haifa’s number 37 bus with two schoolgirls, a teenage boy eating a McDonald’s ice cream cone, and a young man he pegs as a university student by “the bulging backpack on his shoulder, the bloodshot eyes and the haggard body.” The student is Mahmoud Kawasme, and his backpack does not contain textbooks. Khulud wrote:

  There was one thing [Ziyad] would strain to forget but which kept creeping back into his mind. Those numbered seconds Mahmoud had his eyes locked on his. The small dark eyes spelt death. But they were also telling him to get the hell off the bus—immediately. That is, if he wanted to live. Ziyad’s brain stopped working. The only thing it did was send rapid instructions down his legs to get off the bus. And he did. Seconds later, the earth shook.

  Khulud often uses the real names of both the attackers and their victims in her stories and poems. In Haifa Fragments, she names both Kawasme and thirteen-year-old Qamar Abu Hamad, the only Palestinian killed in the bus attack whose death haunts Ziyad. In a story based on the 2003 attack on Haifa’s Maxim restaurant, khulud names both the bomber and Arab restaurant staff killed in the explosion. Khulud’s poem “Set My Body on Fire” describes the 2016 murder of a nineteen-year-old Palestinian, Raneen Rahal, at the hands of her brother.

  Khulud’s decision to render incidents like these in her work, and to use the victims’ real names, made me uneasy. I wondered if mining other people’s tragedies for art was a kind of exploitation, an appropriation of personal trauma. “This is part of my reality here in Haifa,” she said. “The bus I wrote about, the number 37, is the bus that my daughter used to take to school back then. Michelle could have been Qamar. I am writing from my perspective as a citizen of Israel.”

  Palestinian victims of violence—whether at the hands of bombers, mobs, or their own family members—are too often rendered invisible. “The media would always focus on the Israeli victims, running the stories of their lives, interviewing family members and friends, while the Palestinian victims like Qamar are all but ignored,” khulud said. “Same with murdered women. Palestinian murdered women rarely make it to the news, and when they do, the coverage is lacking and portrays the Palestinian society as a violent society.” By putting their names in her writing and telling their stories within her own stories, khulud grants these victims an identity they’ve been denied.

  Even though her Slovakian passport allows her to live anywhere in the EU, khulud remains here. “I’m in love with Haifa. Totally,” she said. “As much as I feel that I don’t belong here, I don’t feel that I can belong anywhere else in the world.” She loves Haifa’s topography. Using the mountain and the sea as markers, “you can always orient yourself,” she said. And she’s fascinated by the geographies of identity, the invisible borders of language and culture, that a mixed city like Haifa creates—especially in regard to her own fragmented self. “The way I am perceived in different parts of Haifa is different,” she said. “If I walk in Carmel Center, a Jewish area, and I talk on the phone in Arabic, I might get looks.” I thought of Maya Abu-Alhayyat’s Bloodtype character answering her phone in English on the Jerusalem train.

  As we talked, Michelle walked into the living room from her bedroom. She snuggled up to khulud on the couch and placed her head on khulud’s shoulder. Khulud sensed a con. “You want money, don’t you?” she asked. Michelle giggled and nodded. “I was wondering why you were cuddling with me.” Khulud pointed to my voice recorder on the coffee table. “You are being recorded. Say ‘Mommy, I love you.’”

  “Mommy, I love you,” she obliged. “Now give me money.” Khulud sighed and pulled a few banknotes from her wallet and handed them to Michelle, who said goodbye and bounded out the door.

  Khulud and Michelle live an exclusively urban life. They don’t have a village in the hills or a centuries-old olive grove that they consider their ancestral home. I wondered if khulud felt any attachment to the archetypical Palestinian landscape I hiked through in the West Bank. “I don’t have a personal relationship to that land,” khulud said. “For Palestinians in the West Bank, their land is under constant threat. Mine isn’t. My future is not shrunk and obscured. I know where I am going to be tomorrow.” The absence of this particular anxiety means she doesn’t address issues of land and territory in her work—the same reason Maya avoids writing about Israelis and why Ala doesn’t set his stories in Ramallah. “I have solid ground under my feet, you know? That’s the thing. When you have certainty, then it becomes less urgent for you to talk about it that much. I don’t worry that I need a permit to pick my olives.”

  Khulud experiences a different brand of anxiety, though: that of a minority Arab living in Israel. She worries about wearing a shirt with Arabic writing on it, or using her laptop on the train when it is covered with Arabic stickers that say “Free Gaza.” This anxiety intensifies during times of conflict. “When my daughter was younger—I can’t remember which war we were going through—I called her on the phone and told her not to speak Arabic on the bus.”

  These concerns peaked during the 2014 summer war in Gaza. Khulud and a group of fellow feminist activists, Jews and Arabs both, wrote the word Enough in Arabic, Hebrew, and English on their hands and traveled to Carmel Center to join a peaceful protest against the war. In the days leading up to the demonstration, social networks had lit up with incitement against the planned demonstration. “Even the mayor of Haifa wrote on his Facebook page that radical elements were coming to Haifa to disturb the city’s peaceful coexistence,” khulud said. When she and about two hundred of her fellow demonstrators arrived at the start of the march, at least two thousand extreme right-wing activists were waiting for them. “They had huge flags of Israel. They were chanting ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘Death to Leftists.’ I knew it was going to get violent.”

  Khulud had planned to take a few photos of the demonstration then quietly return home before the march was over. “I don’t like to be on the front lines. I don’t need to be arrested,” she said. “All these kids, these twenty-two-year-old protesters, they don’t care. They don’t have any children. They want to show that they are big heroes. I don’t need to be on the front page.”

  When the demonstration ended, most of the marchers boarded buses and the police started to disperse. Khulud found herself among about forty or fifty remaining protesters, most from Haifa, who just wanted to walk home. But counterprotesters blocked all the streets le
ading away from the demonstration. “They were spread in groups in all the alleys surrounding us, behind bushes at the entrances to buildings, everywhere. They were ambushing protestors trying to leave,” khulud said. She and about a half dozen of her friends tried to escape through a backyard, but a group of angry protesters chased them back to the main group. Later, khulud learned that five of her friends managed to sneak away. Two of them were attacked and one ended up in the hospital with a concussion.

  Khulud and the rest of the protesters decided they were safer if they stayed together, so they moved away from the march venue as a group. The counterprotesters tailed and harassed them. The dozen or so police officers remaining at the scene did little to deter the extremists, who continued their chants. Then they began to hurl stones. The demonstrators crouched on the street, held their hands over their heads, and shouted at the police to do something. “I actually feared for my life,” khulud said. “These people had death in their eyes. I saw it.”

  Eventually, officers in riot gear arrived and escorted the protesters along a road to a nearby junction. The mob behind them continued to throw stones. “The police told us to sit down. They started talking to each other, trying to decide what to do.” When a city bus came up the road, one of the officers signaled the driver to stop. The officer then ordered all the passengers to get off the bus and all the protesters to get on. Once aboard, the protesters updated their Facebook pages to let their friends know what was going on. Khulud’s friends asked where the bus was taking them. “I don’t know. Maybe to Gaza,” she joked.

  The commandeered city bus stopped at Maxim restaurant, of all places, where a battalion of armed riot police, a water cannon, and a private bus were waiting. The demonstrators switched buses. “We still had no idea what was happening or where we were going,” khulud said, but as soon as the second bus started moving, they all began to relax. “Then suddenly, all the windows shattered.” Broken glass littered the floor of the bus as the protesters cowered and shouted at the driver to keep going. The extremists had been tailing the demonstrators in their cars, and waited for them to pass before launching a coordinated assault. “I guess they had military tactics,” khulud said. She was shaken, but after this final attack, the extremists left them alone.

  The bus dropped everyone off in Wadi Nisnas. “That is the first moment I felt safe,” khulud said. But comfort quickly morphed into anger. “I felt like I was home. And why? Because I am in my own ghetto. I am angry that this is the only place in Haifa where I can feel completely safe.” Khulud believes that if the protesters had demonstrated in Wadi Nisnas, or in another Arab neighborhood, there would have been no such violence. Israeli riot police occasionally disperse demonstrations in Wadi Nisnas and in the Arab villages of the Galilee, but marches there rarely fuel such hatred and violence. “We demonstrated in Carmel Center. It is not a Palestinian area. We invaded the Jewish public space. This is why they came after us.”

  Khulud leaned back on the sofa, weary from retelling this particular story. Then she glanced at my coffee cup. “Do you want more coffee?” I told her I didn’t. “Can you please eat something, then? I don’t want you writing that you went to khulud’s house and she is such a terrible host. I’m really bad at these kinds of things.” She pointed at a bowl of fruit on the table. “Have an apple.” I grabbed one, and khulud said, “I need a cigarette.”

  I followed her outside into her garden, where she lit a Pall Mall. From her garden we had a clear view into the green valley below. “You can hear coyotes at night. And we have wild boars,” she said. Khulud lives in a conservative Jewish neighborhood that is the territorial and cultural opposite of Wadi Nisnas. “I have right-wing neighbors,” she said. “My friends laugh at me. They ask how I can live here. I’m playing it dumb. I am not getting into any political arguments or discussions with anybody. I don’t need that in my life, because I know that these are not people I can convince.”

  When we went back inside, khulud mixed me a cup of Nescafé—“I never developed a taste for Arabic coffee,” she said—then led me back to the living room. I told her about the photograph of the girl in the green dress. “These are the sorts of pictures we need to reach the West,” she said. “Not pictures of bloody bodies. We are good at showing the world pictures of bloody bodies. But they shut it out. They don’t see it. It’s too difficult to see. In my writing, I have to talk about everyday things. This is what I do. I talk about the daily realities. A bus being bombed is one of them, but it is not the only one.”

  5

  If You Can Hear the Rockets, Then You Are Alive

  I wanted to go to Gaza because of something Mahmoud Abu Hashhash in Ramallah told me about the writers there. The honesty of their work—what he called “the poetry of destruction”—astonishes him. “When you go through a frightful experience of war, and you see death with your eyes, and you lose some people close to you, it is a real experience,” he said. “And you want to reveal that experience in those texts.” Nowhere in Palestine did literature, and art in general, seem so vital. “Art is the only way to keep their balance and humanity.”

  More than this, I wanted to visit because all I knew of Gaza came from reports of cruelty, death, and destruction. Gaza is one of the world’s most overcrowded places. The 2016 birth of a boy named Waleed Shaath bumped the population of this tiny finger of land—forty kilometers long and only six kilometers wide at its narrowest point—to two million souls. But Gaza is more often defined by tragedy than the statistics of geography. The territory stands as a physical embodiment of despair. Gaza is where rockets fly and buildings fall and children die. There is no word imbued with less beauty than Gaza. No word less poetic. Gaza is the buzz of fighter jets tearing the sky. Gaza is the drone of a drone.

  Plutarch, though, named Gaza aromatophora—the dispenser of perfumes. Darwish wrote that Gaza “is the most beautiful among us, the purest, the richest, and most worthy of love.” Gaza lies along the Mediterranean Sea, after all. There must be more to this ancient sliver of coastline than rubble and ruin. Surely I could find something beautiful.

  “I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers,” the Israeli driver said as she reached back and moved some boxes aside to clear a place for me in her backseat. “Especially with all that is going on. But I heard your voice and could tell you are not an Arab.”

  What was going on was a wave of violence that some observers called the Third Intifada or, luridly, the Intifada of the Knives. It was autumn 2015, and the attacks had been going on for a few weeks. Already Palestinians had killed seventeen Israelis and injured many more. One man stabbed four civilians and a soldier with a screwdriver in Tel Aviv. Another killed a rabbi by running over him with his car. Most chilling was how young some of the attackers were. A boy pretending to sell candy tried to knife a security guard. A thirteen-year-old Palestinian stabbed and nearly killed a thirteen-year-old Israeli riding past on his bicycle. None of the attackers appeared to be affiliated with any particular militant group. Israeli security forces killed many of the terrorists at the scene, sometimes well after the assailants posed any danger. The practice angered observers in Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere, who accused police and soldiers of summarily executing attackers on the street instead of arresting them.

  The randomness and gruesome intimacy of the attacks left me shaken. Blood had puddled in the streets near my hotel in East Jerusalem the day I arrived. Police stood behind barricades everywhere, and a white surveillance blimp hovered lazily over Jerusalem’s Old City. One night, after indulging in my triptych ritual of Palestinian vice—Arabic coffee, nargileh pipe, and Taybeh Beer—I realized I’d forgotten my wallet at my hotel two streets away. The fifteen-minute walk to fetch my wallet, bring it to the restaurant, and then return to my hotel terrified me. What if one of these young stabbers chooses me? What if I accidentally stumble into a fracas of blades and bullets? The fear was illogical, no doubt. Most fear is. But in all my travels to Jerusalem over the years my chest had neve
r felt so tight.

  I’d planned on entering Gaza a few days earlier, but an Israeli jet had bombed an apartment building there, killing a pregnant woman and her three-year-old daughter. I feared this attack would mark the beginning of another war, so I opted to stay in Jerusalem to see if the situation escalated. My decision frustrated Nedal, my fixer in Gaza, who considered my hesitation unwarranted. “There are no problems here,” he wrote to me in an email. I hung back anyway, passing a couple of nervous days in Jerusalem reading the news, listening to the sirens outside my window, and wondering if I was in over my head.

  The Israeli airstrike turned out to be an isolated incident rather than the opening salvo in a larger conflict. So I took a bus to Asqalan, the closest city of any size to Gaza, where I figured I could find a bus to Gaza’s Erez Crossing. This was foolish. Israel’s public bus company does not offer service to Gaza, a territory Israelis are forbidden to enter. I decided to walk the four kilometers to Erez and had made it about halfway when the Israeli woman picked me up. She dropped me at the checkpoint, where a crowd of about a dozen people waited for the Israeli border guards to open the gate. Most of those waiting were elderly and infirm Palestinians returning from hospital appointments in Israel. They sat in wheelchairs or hobbled along on crutches. I waited on a metal bench for two hours before the gate clanged open, but only Palestinians were allowed to enter. “There are too many boys at the border fence throwing stones,” a young soldier said from her glassed-in booth. “It is not safe for you.” She suspected the demonstrations along the fence would not end until sundown and suggested I return the next day. “Come early. Before the stone-throwers wake up.”