LAST MONTH I published a piece in the TLS about a recent trip I took to the Jerusalem Writers Festival. Print being print, I had to keep to certain space constraints; but Israel, I find, is not a country that lends itself well to brevity in contemplation, and so there was a certain amount of surrounding material that had to go. Now LARB is kindly offering that material a home. Below is an unexpurgated version of my original TLS piece: an account of an edifying, depressing, convivial, and politically charged few days spent at a very unique literary event.
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“We are not pacifists. I’m willing to die for my country. We just believe the Occupation is morally indefensible.”
We’re in a minibus heading south from Jerusalem. Our guide is Yehuda Shaul, a bearded and thickset 33-year-old former commander in the Israeli army. Our destination is Hebron in the West Bank — ancient city of the Canaanites, sacred resting ground of the Patriarchs. My biblical history is sketchy but my Bar Mitzvah portion — Genesis 23, verses 1–20 — happens to concern Abraham’s purchase of a plot of land there, including the cave of Machpelah, in which he and his family are buried. Today Machpelah stands in the center of H2: the section of the city administered by Israel and studded with Jewish settlements. The largest of these, on Hebron’s outskirts, is Kiryat Arba, with a population of between seven and eight thousand; the smallest and newest, established in 2014, shelters just three families. 850 soldiers are permanently stationed to protect the settlers.
In 1994 the religious extremist Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in Machpelah — a site holy to both Jews and Muslims. In the Arab rioting that followed several so-called “sterile zones” were established around the Jewish settlements to keep the two communities apart. During the Second Intifada (2000–2005) these zones were extended. The story will be familiar to anyone with the least interest in the conflict: Palestinians are forbidden to drive down certain streets, or to walk down others; they are cut off from their neighbors, their local amenities; their markets have been closed. Many have moved away. This section of the city is, in the words of Shaul, a “ghost town.”
Our first stop is to a municipal park which houses Goldstein’s grave. The sun has come out and we wander around the scrubby, arid grounds squinting at the dubious attractions. Some of the more fanatical settlers have provided a plaque commemorating this “saint” who “gave his life for the people of Israel” (Goldstein was eventually beaten to death by the guards of Machpelah). Nearby is a statue honouring Meir Kahane, the ultra-nationalist rabbi of whom Goldstein was a disciple. Kahane was himself assassinated in New York in 1990. One of our party — the novelist Gary Shteyngart — shows great interest in the statue: “So that’s Kahane. When my parents emigrated from Russia to America we had no money. But my father gave the first hundred dollars he earned to that jerk.”
I’m not in Israel to write about Hebron or the occupation, but the lure of what Israelis euphemistically refer to as the Hamatzav (the Situation) is irresistible. It isn’t just a matter of prurience or preconception: it pervades every aspect of the Jerusalem Writers Festival at which I am a guest. Our host, Uri Dromi — the charming director general of the Jerusalem Press Club and the former press spokesman for the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres — seems especially keen for us to engage with the conflict. He explains to me that foreign visitors always want to ask about it anyway and so he deliberately puts the subject at the top of the agenda. After that his mission is to demonstrate that Israel is about so much more.
Our itinerary for the week is helpfully marked out with events we are “expected” to attend. Revealingly few of these concern the festival itself. There is a tour of the ancient city; a visit to the National Library; a trip to Yad Vashem. In Old Jerusalem our guide points out instances of “fascist” anti-Palestinian graffiti stickered to the walls. Arabic street signs have been scrubbed out and the nose on King David’s statue is broken — “idolatry” being, to the religious Jews who live here, even more unacceptable than the presence of the Palestinians. We are led through the winding streets and across a schoolyard game of football to a view of the infamous separation wall (or “security fence,” depending on your politics). It is, says our guide, a necessary evil: “The wall is bad. Terrorism is worse.”
Near the entrance to the city’s Armenian quarter there are posters commemorating the centenary of the Armenian genocide — an atrocity unrecognized by the Israeli Government, which has shrewd political reasons for keeping good relations with both Turkey (the perpetrators) and Azerbaijan (a country that has its own dispute with Armenia over the contested area of Nagorno-Karabakh). Before descending to the base of the Western Wall, where Jewish tourists cram paper scraps of prayer into the overloaded cracks, only meters away from Muslim visitors to the Dome of the Rock above, we take in the view of this many-layered city, storeyed and storied, seemingly every yellowed hunk of Jerusalem stone drenched in history, mythology, blood. The Christian population here has dwindled to less than two percent but the Muslim one is on the rise — a fact the official demographers do their best to fudge. The total official population here is 850,000, but in reality, says our guide, it’s more than one million.
At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre we are provided with a meticulous description of the six warring Christian denominations that control the building. The bickering is so great, and so petty, that nobody can agree on who should change the light bulbs outside the Edicule of Christ’s tomb (an Israeli security guard tends to do the job). As with seemingly everything in this country, the anecdote has a wider resonance: “So you can see, it isn’t just the Israelis and Palestinians who can’t agree,” says our guide. On the subject of a two-state solution he is broadly positive but unable to see past certain obstacles: “I’m in favor of the division of Jerusalem. But how?”
The following day, at the National Library, we are shown a series of atlases drawn by visitors to the Holy Land over the past half-millennium — a reminder of just how long people have been coming here and recording their impressions, often with scant regard for scale and perspective. Dr. Raquel Ukeles, the curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection, describes the current project to digitize the library’s copious Arabic material. The library, we are told, used to be located atop Mount Scopus. When the site was cut off from Israel by the Jordanians during the 1948 war, the books had to be smuggled out. Another survivor put before us is a trampled novel by the great Hebrew author S. Y. Agnon, the damage sustained during Kristallnacht. We are shown the suicide note of Stefan Zweig.
The next morning we are taken to Yad Vashem. There is an uncomfortable moment when our guide takes us to the section on the Łódź Ghetto and one of our party pipes up: “It’s just like Gaza.” Most of our party see that the comment does a disservice to both the victims of the Holocaust and to today’s Gazans, whose suffering has its own unique character and cause. Our guide — a retirement-age historian — declares himself deeply offended, and the Muslim woman who made the comment apologizes. The Holocaust equivalence game is never very edifying, and yet I can see where the outburst has come from, can sense the frustration behind it. I have never been to an arts festival that so insistently attempts to sell the host nation to its visitors. The propaganda isn’t sinister, perhaps not even unwarranted. It betrays a justifiable anxiety: an anxiety from the left-wing organizers to demonstrate to the visitors that Israel isn’t what they think it is; that Israel, despite its faults, is a thriving democracy and regional necessity.
Many of the events are in Hebrew but some are in English and all that I attend address the Hamatzav. At the festival opener even President Reuven Rivlin is at it, introducing the theme of “international collaboration” with an admirably loaded warning about the “danger” of only having one story to tell. It is a refrain that will crop up time and again throughout the week. As the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez will later comment: “Good writing is always saying the world is more complicated than you think.”
The speakers at this opener are David Grossman and Colum McCann. Grossman is a national hero in Israel, and the marquee — set against the Judean hills, the horizon framed by the wall — is packed. The two discuss the parallels between separatism in Ireland and in Israel. Reacting to Grossman’s despair about his country’s lurch to the political right, McCann provocatively asks him: “So, why don’t you leave?” His interlocutor patiently explains that running away from Israel’s problems is not the answer.
McCann’s question is a paraphrase of one asked earlier in the week by J. M. Coetzee — a writer who willingly abandoned his own divided nation. A few miles up the road in Ramallah, Coetzee has been attending the rival PalFest, a literary festival timed to compete with the Jerusalem one, at which his final address will include a comparison between South African apartheid and the Israeli occupation. The Nobel laureate was once invited to the Jerusalem Writers Festival but politely declined. “When there’s peace call me,” he told Dromi. There is no collaboration between PalFest and the JWF — a result of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) campaign against Israel. I can see the point of BDS, even in this context: the playing field isn’t level and thus any cooperation between the two sides will be tainted from the start. And yet I can’t help thinking how a partnership between the two festivals might be fruitful, that such division can only maintain the status quo. Later, at a private author briefing, Grossman will agree. The simple matter, he says, is that BDS “won’t help.”
The author briefings are perhaps the most enjoyable and edifying parts of the week. Grossman chats to us for an hour about his life, his work, and, of course, the Hamatzav. So does Etgar Keret, who tells an illustrative anecdote about the public response to a short story he once wrote. The tale describes an assault by an Israeli soldier on a Palestinian fighter: “Someone wrote in to attack me for being a left-wing liberal. Someone else accused me of being a fascist.” Another author, Meir Shalev, claims not to like “political” literature. But we still end up talking politics. Shalev was serving as a soldier when Israel “liberated” the Golan Heights in 1967. He describes himself as being on the left but seems less despairing than Grossman and Keret. When he finds out the rest of the program he jokes with Dromi: “Didn’t you have any right-wing authors to talk to them?”
A. B. Yehoshua is not a right-wing author but he is a hardliner when it comes to Jewishness. “Diaspora Judaism is masturbation,” he has said, declaring that a “full Jewish life” can only be had in Israel. At the author briefing he repeats this claim and I object.
“Are you American?” he asks.
“British.”
“And you’re not Jewish?”
“I am.”
He looks mildly taken aback, and I realize he was expecting me to say no.
I wonder how his argument might differ if I were a gentile. But I am not a gentile and I thus find myself, time and again, overcome by a heightened sense of involvement in the debates we are engaged in: about Israeli security, Israeli history, Israeli demography. My perceived stake in this country is equivocal (I tell Yehoshua that ambivalence is central to my own experience of a “full Jewish life”) and not always comfortable. I have mixed feelings about the fact that I, a UK passport holder, have a right to live in a land, based on my ethnicity, from which several hundred thousand former inhabitants are barred, based on theirs. And yet the pull is also irresistible. My grandfather was a Zionist who helped to build the roads in 1920s Tel Aviv, and, despite my disdain for many elements of early settler mythology, I find it hard not to be seduced by what Grossman’s calls the “miracle” of Israel. “But are we loyal to that miracle?” Grossman asks. “I’m less and less sure.”
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There is little that is miraculous about Hebron. And as we make our way on foot through the “ghost town” of H2, Yehuda points out, street by street, the intricate daily indignities faced by its remaining Arab citizens. You can see it all around you: the emptiness, the lack of life. Shops are shuttered up, houses abandoned. There is a lone water seller, near the cave of Machpelah, and when we approach his children rush to help. A few kids play football in the streets, watched on benignly by soldiers, who occasionally punt a stray ball back. An imaginary line, at the intersection of a street leading to a Jewish settlement, demarcates where the kids are not allowed to pass. On another residential road, barred to access by Palestinians (but not to settlers or tourists) some of the front doors have been sealed. Five Arab families remain inside the homes. They must come and go via the roofs.
Yehuda points up the valley to a school building perched over a cliff. Fifteen years ago, during the Second Intifada, he was stationed in the building from where his task was to send “preemptive” fire from a grenade machine gun into the Palestinian neighborhood below. The fire was largely “indiscriminate”, he tells us. “At first it was very difficult. I’d pull the trigger and hope nobody was harmed. By day five it had become like a computer game.”
Experiences such as this led Yehuda to question the nature of his service — and of the occupation. He went on to form, with several fellow comrades, the charity Breaking the Silence. The charity’s main function is to collect confidential testimonies from soldiers who are serving in the Occupied Territories (OT). For this work, it was recently awarded the prestigious Berelson Prize for Jewish-Arab Understanding by the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University. The prize was rescinded only days later, however, by the university’s president, Professor Rivka Carmi, who concluded that the charity’s aims do not belong to “the national consensus.” This followed what the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz called “a vicious incitement campaign against the organization,” waged for its ability to undermine the Israeli military occupation — something the current government seems more than capable of doing all by itself.
The charity’s reach is long — and getting longer. Four years ago it brought out a book of these soldier testimonies — Our Harsh Logic — in English. To mark 50 years of occupation, another Anglophone book will be published next year, made up of over 30 firsthand reports from authors who have been taken by Yehuda and his colleagues on visits similar to this one. The contributors will include Mario Vargas Llosa, Colm Tóibin, and Eimear McBride. It was McBride who put me on to Yehuda in the first place. My visit to Hebron has nothing to do with the festival but when I mention it to Dromi he tells me he is in favor of invitees seeing the “other side.”
As well as its various restrictions, Palestinian life on this “other side” involves rather more invasive measures. Yehuda describes the army’s tactics of “making your presence felt” and “showing sovereignty.” This may involve random domestic searches in the middle of the night, or many other forms of basic intimidation. Outside of direct conflict, however, it is not the soldiers whom the Palestinians have to fear. They are frequently attacked by their Jewish neighbors; the settlers loot their homes and seize empty properties in the area, necessitating further “sterile zones.”
The night before our visit, a group of settlers celebrating the “bonfire” festival of Lag B’Omer raided a Palestinian house, stealing furniture for the flames. The owner was inside. It is, says Yehuda, a fairly common occurrence, and the soldiers are impotent to intervene. “They are here to protect the settlers,” he comments, and military law makes it illegal for the IDF to come to the Palestinians’ aid. All they can do is call the municipal police, by which time it is often too late. We get a taste of the tensions when a settler approaches us. “It’s all lies,” he shouts at us in English. Behind him are the deserted remains of H2’s once-thriving vegetable market. He stands on a street adorned with pristine signs in Hebrew — the location’s Arabic name fast fading into memory.
On the way out of Hebron I arrange for a taxi to transport me to a moshav near Beersheba where I will be having dinner with my cousins and aunt. My aunt is in her late 80s and made aliyah to Israel in the 1950s; unlike anyone at the Jerusalem Writers Festival she steadfastly refuses to discuss politics. Leaving the West Bank we are stopped at a checkpoint. “Where have you come from?” an Israeli officer asks me. I tell him and he gestures for us pull into a clearing. My taxi driver, an Arab Israeli, looks a little weary. “It is best in these situations not to say you’ve just been to Hebron,” he tells me. I sheepishly apologize but I’m secretly rather pleased. I’ve been keen to see how checkpoints around here operate — even if my experience will have little in common with that of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories seeking entry into Israel.
A group of affable Arab Israelis is in front of me and we strike up conversation. The atmosphere is relaxed, despite the setting. Eventually it is my turn. My bag is searched and I’m questioned. To save time and avoid further irritating my ride I lie and say I’ve just been to visit Machpelah. “And where are you going to now?” the soldier asks. “To Beersheba,” I reply. And then: “I’ve been invited by my aunt to Shabbat dinner.”
I could pretend to myself that I’m just being friendly, conversational, but really there’s something else at play. I want her to know that I am Jewish. I could also pretend that this is a matter of expediency, a way of smoothing my passage, but really it’s something more. I seem to want to emphasize my tie to this land: I who have just strolled through an Arab town denuded of its Palestinian residents because of the actions of a group of illegal Jewish settlers and their protection by the IDF.
The soldier remains impassive. Eventually she waves me through.