How is it I am still alive? I’ll tell you I’m alive because
there’s a temporary shortage of death. This is said with a grin, which is on
the far side of a longing for normalcy, for an ordinary life.
Everywhere one goes in Palestine—even in rural areas—one
finds oneself amongst rubble, picking a way through, around, and over it. At a
checkpoint, around some greenhouses that lorries can no longer reach, along any
street, going to any rendezvous.
The rubble is of houses, roads, and the debris of daily
lives. There’s scarcely a Palestinian family that has not been forced during
the last half century to flee from somewhere, just as there’s scarcely a town
in which buildings are not regularly bulldozed by the occupying army.
There’s also the rubble of words—the rubble of words that
house nothing any more, whose sense has been destroyed. Notoriously, the
I.D.F.—the Israeli Defence Force, as the Israeli army is called—has become, de
facto, an army of conquest. As Sergio Yahni, one of the inspiringly courageous
Israeli refusniks (they refuse to serve in the Army) writes: “This army does
not exist to bring security to the citizens of Israel: it exists to guarantee
the continuation of the theft of Palestinian land.”
There is the rubble too of sober and principled words that
are being ignored. U.N. resolutions and the International Court of Justice in
the Hague have condemned the building of Israeli settlements on Palestinian
territory (there are now nearly half a million such settlers) and the
construction of the “separation fence,” which is an approximately
twenty‐five‐feet‐high concrete wall, as illegal. The occupation and wall
nevertheless continue. Every month the I.D.F.’s stranglehold across the
territories is tightened. The stranglehold is geographic, economic, civic, and
military.
All this is clear; it is not happening in some remote,
war‐locked corner of the globe, every Foreign Office of every rich nation is
watching, and not one takes measures to discourage the illegalities. “For us,”
a Palestinian mother says at a checkpoint after an I.D.F. soldier has lobbed a
tear gas bomb behind her, “for us the silence of the West is worse”—she nods
towards the armored car—“than their bullets.”
A gap between declared principles and realpolitik may be a
constant throughout history. Often the declarations are grandiloquent. Here,
however, it’s the opposite. The words are far smaller than the events. What is
happening is the careful destruction of a people and a promised nation. And
around this destruction there are small words and evasive silence.
For the Palestinians one word remains undiminished: Nakbah, meaning
“catastrophe” and referring to the forced exodus of 700,000 Palestinians in
1948. “Ours is a country of words. Talk. Talk. Let me rest my road against a
stone,” wrote the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Nakbahhas become a name
that four generations share, and it endures so persistently because the
operation of ethnic cleansing it names is still largely unacknowledged by Israel
and the West. The brave work of the upstanding (and persecuted) new Israeli
historians—like Ilan Pappe—is of the utmost importance in this context, for it
may lead eventually to such an official acknowledgement, and this would change
the fatal name back into a word, however tragic that word.
A familiarity here with every sort of rubble, including the
rubble of words.
One tends to forget the geographical scale of the tragedy in
question; its scale has become part of the tragedy. The whole of the West Bank plus
the Gaza Strip is smaller than Crete (the island from which Palestinians may
have originally come in prehistory). Three and one‐half million people, six
times as many as in Crete, live here. And systematically each day the area is
being rendered smaller. The towns are becoming more and more overcrowded, the
countryside more fenced in and inaccessible.
The settlements extend or new ones begin. Special highways
for settlers, forbidden to Palestinians, transform old roads into dead ends.
The checkpoints and tortuous ID controls have seriously reduced for most
Palestinians the possibility of travelling or even planning to travel within
what remains of their own territories. Many can go no further than twenty
kilometers in any direction.
The wall cuts off corners (when finished it will have
filched nearly 10 percent of what remains of Palestinian land), fragments the
countryside, and separates Palestinians from Palestinians. Its aim is to break
up Crete into a dozen little islands. The aim of a sledgehammer carried out by
bulldozers.
Darwish: “There is nothing left of us in the wilderness save
what the wilderness kept for itself.”
Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense
of defeat, makes for a stance towards the world here such as I have never seen
before. It may be expressed in one way by a young man joining the Islamic
jihad, in another by an old woman remembering and murmuring through the gaps
between her few teeth, and in yet another by a smiling eleven‐year‐old girl who
wraps up a promise to hide it in the despair.…
This stance, as you call it, how does it work?
Listen. . . .
Three boys squatting and playing marbles in the corner of an
alley in a refugee camp. In this camp many of the refugees originally came from
Haifa. The dexterity with which the boys flick a marble with one thumb, the
rest of the body motionless, is not unconnected with the familiarity of very
cramped spaces.
Three meters down the alleyway, which is narrower than any
hotel corridor, is a shop selling secondhand bicycle parts. All the handlebars
are arranged on one hanger, all the back wheels on another, the saddles on a
third. If it wasn’t for their arrangement, the pieces would look like
unsellable scrap. As it is, they sell.
On the wall of a low building with a metal door, opposite
the shop, is written: “From the womb of the camp a revolution is born every
day.” A schoolteacher lives with his sister in the two rooms behind the metal
door. He indicates the floor of another room that was the size of two bathtubs.
The ceiling and walls have fallen down. “That’s the room where I was born,” he
says.
Return to his present living room. He points to a photo in a
gilded frame that is hanging on the wall beside an official portrait of Arafat
wearing his keffiyeh. “The framed photo there is my father as a young man, it
was taken in Haifa! A colleague told me once he looks like Pasternak, the
Russian poet, what do you think? [He does.] He had a heart complaint and
the nakbah killed him. He died in this very room when I was
twelve.”
At the far end of the building with the metal door, opposite
the shop of bicycle parts, eight paces away from where the boys are playing
marbles in the corner, there’s a square meter of open earth where a jasmine
bush is growing. It has only two white flowers, for it’s November. Around its
root, chucked there from the alley, are a dozen empty plastic mineral water
bottles. At least 60 percent of the camp inhabitants are unemployed. The camps
are shantytowns.
When somebody has the opportunity to leave a camp and cross
the rubble to slightly better accommodations, it can happen that they turn it
down and choose to stay. In the camp they are a member, like a finger, of an
endless body. Moving out would be an amputation. The stance of undefeated
despair works like this.
Listen. . . .
The olive trees on the topmost terrace look tousled; the
silver undersides of their leaves are far more visible than usual. This is
because yesterday their olives were picked. Last year the crop was poor, the
trees tired. This year is better. According to their girth, the trees must be
around three or four centuries old. The terraces of dry limestone are probably
older. A couple of kilometers away to the west and south are two recently built
settlements. Regular, compact, urban (the settlers commute each day to work in
Israel), impenetrable. Neither looks like a village; they are more like huge
jeeps, large enough on the ground to house comfortably two hundred settlers
with guns. Both are illegal, both are built on hills, both have lookout towers
slender as a mosque’s minaret. Their virtual message to the surrounding
countryside is: Hands above the head, above the head I told you, and walk
slowly backwards.
Building the settlement towards the west and the road
leading to it involved the cutting down of several hundred olive trees. The men
working on the site were mostly out‐of‐work Palestinians. The stance of
undefeated despair works like this.
The families, who picked their olives yesterday, come from
the straggling village in the valley between the two settlements, with a
population of about 3,000. Twenty men from the village are in Israeli prisons.
One was released two days ago. Several of the young have recently joined Hamas.
Many more will vote for Hamas next January. All the kids have toy pistols. All
the young grandmothers, while wondering what became of the promises they once
wrapped, nod in approval at their sons, daughters‐in‐law, nephews, and worry
every night. The stance of undefeated despair works like this.
The Muqata, Arafat’s headquarters in the Palestinian capital
of Ramallah, was a gigantic heap of rubble three years ago when he was held
hostage there by the I.D.F.’s tanks and artillery. Now, one year after his
death, the Palestinians have cleared the rubble—some argued that it should have
been left as a historic monument—and the inner quadrangle today is as bare as a
drill ground. On its western side at ground level an austere plinth marks
Arafat’s grave. Above it, a roof like the roof above the platform of a small
railway station.
Anybody can find their way there, passing by scarred walls
and under garlands of barbed wire. Two sentinels stand guard over the plinth.
Apart from them, there is no more reticent last resting place for a head of a
(promised) state; it simply declares itself to be there against all odds!
If you happen to be standing by his feet when the sun sets,
its radiance is that of a silence. He was nicknamed the Walking Catastrophe.
Are loved leaders ever pure? Aren’t they always full of faults—not weaknesses,
flagrant faults? Is this maybe a condition for being a loved leader? Under his
leadership the Palestinian Liberation Organization also contributed, on occasion,
to the rubble of words. Yet into Arafat’s faults were stuffed, like notes into
a pocket, the daily wrongs his country suffered. Like this he assumed and
carried those wrongs, and their pain found a home, a painful home, in his
faults. It’s neither purity nor strength that wins such undying loyalty, but
something flawed—as each one of us is flawed. The stance of undefeated despair
works like this.
The northwest town of Qalqilya (population 50,000) is
totally surrounded by seventeen kilometers of the wall with only one exit. The
once‐bustling main street now ends in the wall’s wasteland. The town’s meager
economy is consequently in ruins. A market gardener trundles a wheelbarrow of
sand to distribute round some plants before the coming winter. Until the wall
he employed twelve workers. (Ninety‐five percent of Palestinian businesses have
fewer than five employees.) Today he employs nobody. The sales of his
plants—because the town has been cut off—have been reduced by nine‐tenths. He
throws away instead of collects the seeds from a heap of lychnis flowers. His
large hands are heavy with the admission that henceforth, here, they have
nothing to do.
Difficult to convey the sight of the wall where it crosses
the land where there is nobody. It’s the opposite of rubble. It is
bureaucratic—carefully planned on electronic maps, prefabricated and
preemptive. Its purpose is to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. The
aim of the sledgehammer. Since it began to be built three years ago, there has
been no significant reduction in the number of kamikaze attacks. Standing
before it, you feel as short as a cigarette butt. (Except during Ramadan, most
Palestinians smoke a lot.) Yet, oddly, it doesn’t look final—only
insurmountable.
When it’s finished, it will be the 640‐kilometer‐long
expressionless face of an inequality. At the moment it’s 210 kilometers long.
The inequality is between those who have the full arsenal of the latest
military technology to defend what they believe to be their interest (Apache
helicopters, Merkava tanks, F16s, and so on) and those who have nothing, save
their names and a shared belief that justice is axiomatic. The stance of
undefeated despair works like this.
It could be that the wall belongs to the same shortsighted
repressive logic as the “sonic boom bombing” that the inhabitants of Gaza are
being subjected to every night as I write. Jet fighters dive very low at full
speed to break the sound barrier and the nerves of those huddling sleepless
below with their axiom. And it won’t work.
Such a superiority of firepower discourages intelligent
strategy; to think strategically one must imagine oneself in one’s opponent’s
place, and a habitual sense of superiority precludes this.
Climb one of the jabals and look down at
the wall, way below winding its geometric divider’s course towards the southern
horizon. Did you see the hoopoe bird? In the long‐term view the wall looks
makeshift.
There are 8,000 political prisoners in Israeli jails, 350 of
them under eighteen years old. A period in prison has become a normal phase to
be undergone, once or several times, in a man’s life. Throwing stones can lead
to a sentence of two and one‐half years or more.
“Prison for us is a sort of education, a strange sort of
university.” The man speaking has glasses, is about fifty, and is wearing a
business‐lunch suit. “You learn how to learn there.” He’s the youngest of five
brothers and imports coffee machines.
You learn how to struggle together and become inseparable.
Certain conditions have improved over the last forty years—improved thanks to
us and our hunger strikes. The most I did was twenty days. We won a quarter of
an hour more exercise time each day. In the long‐sentence prisons they used to
mask the windows so there was no sunshine in the cells. We won back some
sunshine. We got one body search removed from the daily routine. Otherwise we
read and discuss what we read, teach each other different languages. And come
to know certain soldiers and some of the guards. In the streets it’s the
language of bullets and stones between us. Inside it’s different. They’re in
prison just as we are. The difference is we believe in what’s got us there, and
they mostly don’t, because they’re just there to earn a living. I know of some
friendships that began like that.
The stance of undefeated despair works like this.
The Judean desert between Jerusalem and Jericho is of
sandstone, not sand, and is precipitous, not flat. In the spring parts of it
are covered with wild grasses and the goats of Bedouins can feed off it. Later
in the year there are only clumps of boxthorn.
If you contemplate this desert you quickly discover that
it’s a landscape whose gaze is totally directed towards the sky. A question of
geology, not biblical history. It hangs there beneath the sky like a hammock.
And when it’s windy it twists like a winding sheet. As a result the sky appears
to be more substantial, more urgent, than the land. A porcupine quill blown by
the wind lands at your feet. It’s not surprising that hundreds of prophets,
including the greatest, nurtured their visions here.
The light is fading, and a herd of two hundred goats, with a
Bedouin shepherd on a mule with his dog, is making its evening zigzag descent
down to the camp where there’s water to drink and some extra grain to eat. The
thistles and rhizome roots give little nourishment at this time of year.
The difficulty with prophets and their final prophesies is
that they tend to ignore what immediately follows an action, ignore
consequences. Actions for them, instead of being instrumental, become symbolic.
It can happen that prophesies cause people not to see what time contains.
The Bedouin family below is living in two abandoned
buildings, not far from a Roman aqueduct. At this time of day the mother will
be cooking flat bread, daily bread, on a heated stone. Seven of her sons, who
were born here, work with the herd. The family has recently been informed by
the I.D.F. that they will have to leave before next spring. Hands above the
head and walk backwards! All the female goats are pregnant. Five months
gestation period. We’ll face that when we get there, says one of the sons. The
stance of undefeated despair works like this.
A refusal to see immediate consequences. For example, the
wall and the annexation of still more Palestinian land cannot promise security
for the state of Israel; it recruits martyrs.
For example, if a kamikaze martyr could see with his or her
own eyes, before dying, the immediate consequences of their explosion, they
might well reconsider the appropriateness of their steadfast decision.
The goddamned future of prophesies that ignores all but the
final moment.
In the stance I keep referring to, there is something
special, a quality that no postmodern or political vocabulary today can find a
word for. The quality of a way of sharing that disarms the leading question:
why was one born into this life?
This way of sharing disarms and answers the question not
with a promise, or a consolation, or an oath of vengeance—these forms of
rhetoric are for the small or large leaders who make History—and this way
disarmingly answers the question despite history. Its answer is brief, brief
but perpetual. One was born into this life to share the time that repeatedly
exists between moments: the time of Becoming, before Being risks to confront one
yet again with undefeated despair.
© 2006 John Berger / International Socialist Review.
__
De CRITICAL
INQUIRY (Universidad de Chicago), 2017
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