Losing Israel (11 page)

In the deepening dusk I soon got lost. With what was always my unreliable sense of direction, and that ever-changing layout of roads, it was impossible not to. Roads marked on the map were closed; other roads did not appear on the map. Two that we took came to an end in piles of boulders and heaps of earth, and a third in a high fence and closed gate, heavily guarded by soldiers and jeeps. In the end, we followed the direction of the rest of the traffic, and were soon stopped at a roadblock. Ahead of us, a man was ordered out of his car. Soldiers turned him against the side of the barrier kiosk; with two guns trained on him, he was roughly searched, his pockets emptied.

The other soldiers gestured us through impatiently. I drove on, looking for some sign, any sign of a familiar name or landmark or direction. We were in volatile Arab East Jerusalem and its constellation of villages. We were in the West Bank, in the dark, without access to a phone, utterly lost. I’d taken my fourteen-year-old daughter into danger, and I was terrified.

I wondered what I had done in my reactive, would-be liberal naivety. I remembered getting lost in East Oakland in California in the mid-1990s, at the height of the crack-fuelled gang wars, when the city had the highest homicide rate in the US. I was in a part of the inner city, the ghetto, where to show that you were lost, to stop and ask for help, or even to stop and look at the map was a reckless invitation to become another murder statistic. Now, as then, all veneer of liberality peeled away. I was in Arab territory and I was therefore in danger. I had forgotten the man who had helped me just a short while before – an Arab, a Palestinian; I had forgotten the man who had been my host, a man who was considerate, critical, funny, protective – an Arab, a Palestinian. I had forgotten my friend Mohamed in Cardiff, who always insisted I phone as soon as I got home, no matter how late, so that he would know I had arrived safely – an Arab, a Palestinian. I was a Jew, I was in hostile Arab territory, and I was in danger, so when I saw a sign for the Jewish settlement bloc of Ma’ale Adumim, and then that symbol of settler ideology itself rose up glimmering, white and pure on the hillside like some kind of heavenly offer of refuge, I was flooded, irradiated with relief. A Jewish settlement. A Jewish settlement city! My staggering, agitated heart steadied into a painful, hopeful pounding. Never mind that I hated what it was, the ideology it represented: it was
Jewish
, and we were safe…

I was not able, afterwards, to work out where we had gone, or why, or what kind of detour we had taken. It may have been a mere ten minutes, or an hour of driving, lost and afraid. When, later, I told Myriam the story of the puncture, rendering it comic, gliding over my stupidity, grateful for the kindness of a stranger who would accept nothing more than a thank you, she said grudgingly: ‘Nu, so there are some good Arabs.’

Now, a year and a half later, Myriam is more afraid than when David was alive, more intemperate in her characterisation of Arabs. I tell her I’m going to Ramallah to meet Ghaith’s mother, who might be able to help me find out where refugees from Al Murassas and Yubla ended up, and again she thinks I should not go. She reminds me how I got lost last time, what could have happened, though nothing happened. She is afraid for me: the West Bank is dangerous, and Arabs are not to be trusted. For Myriam, ‘Arabs’ are an undifferentiated mass that includes Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and the populations of the surrounding countries. She has welcomed me as she always does – with food, with heaps of food, with warmth and humour. And as always I am caught between some liberal imperative to challenge her prejudice, and my moral obligations as her guest. In the face of hers, my own fears and prejudices seem almost benign, but I don’t challenge her; I swallow my outrage at her statements about Arabs. Instead we talk, in our usual mixture of Hebrew and French and English, about safer subjects – my uncle’s death; my cousins’ difficulties; my sister’s death; how my parents are managing in their retirement in Australia; my own daughters coming and going between Wales and America.

From Tel Aviv I take the bus to Jerusalem, and another to Ramallah, where, over a lunch of chicken, pita and cold lemonade, Randa, Ghaith’s mother, agrees to try to help put me in touch with refugees from Al Murassas and Yubla, if she can find them. She works in economic development with refugee groups. ‘Look,
yani
, it’s important that the story is told,’ she says. ‘I can help you, of course. But,
yani
,’ she adds, ‘you should keep in mind what the situation is. I’ve been in the camps here, and in Lebanon. You have three or four generations in one room, and all they have,
all
they have is their memories, and a wall painting of the village they came from. Jewish, Israeli… it makes no difference. For them a Jew, a Zionist, an Israeli – it’s all the same.
Yani
, you should not say you’re Jewish, that you have any connection with the kibbutz, with the place. Say, at the start, only that you’re British…’

She asks me to write something for her, on letterhead, something formal to show my credentials and institutional affiliation, but I can’t do that: this is a private quest, a personal search. I’m not an academic, a university employee – I work for the Welsh Books Council, and my search is no part of my job. I have nothing to give her, to explain my intentions, to legitimise me, to show my trustworthiness and authenticity. Nevertheless I need her, or someone like her. I can’t just take a bus across the border to Amman or Irbid or some other Jordanian city, ask for directions to the refugee camp, and go wandering through alleys, gazing at graffiti and martyrdom posters, hoping for an accidental meeting with the granddaughter or grandson of someone from Yubla or Al Murassas. I need intermediaries, with their particular judgements and opinions, and my intermediary will always need some evidence with which to reassure people who would rightly be mistrustful. Between me and Abu Omar there was my uncle. Between me and some possible refugees, Randa, or someone else – an UNRWA official, an academic, a peace worker, a political activist; some introducer or stringer, some fixer or interpreter. But after meeting Abu Omar’s grandson I am not sure about my intentions anymore. His after-image smiles at me, ironic, dimpled. Precisely why I am interested in meeting refugees from Al Murassas or Yubla, and precisely what I hope for, isn’t something I want to dwell on anymore, is not something I am comfortable examining too closely.

Randa is interested in what I want to do, but my explan-ation of how I came to know about the villages so late upsets her. ‘It’s a crime to steal a people’s history,’ she says. ‘My grandmother, in Jaffa, was the first in all of Palestine to own a piano. How can you say there was no one here, that there was no culture, just a few Bedouin?’

Before the first Intifada, Randa still used to be able to drive with her father from Jaffa to Gaza. Along the way he would point out all the sites of empty or destroyed Palestinian settlements, identifying them by their sabra thickets – the names, and who had lived there, and what had happened there. Soon, she says, that memory will be gone.

‘How was it, then?’ Myriam asks when I come back from a few days in the West Bank and Jerusalem. ‘What’s Ramallah like?’ My cousin Eyal is also interested: he has only been there as a soldier, never as a visitor.

I think about the new Ramallah house where Ghaith’s family lives, its five sleek storeys with a bathroom on every floor, a hot-tub downstairs, and bright, blocky designer furniture. They have their own swimming pool in the garden. I think about a bus I took from Bethlehem; its front bumper was hanging off, and the gearstick was wrapped in yellow electrical tape. A pregnant woman near me retched repeatedly into a pink plastic bag, and behind me two sick children were crying; one kept coughing and choking, and his drink splattered over the stained, sticky floor and ran down under the seats. At the checkpoint all but the woman with the children were asked to get out. As we waited for the soldiers to check us against our IDs, the pregnant woman leant her head on a concrete barrier post and moaned.

My aunt is watching me. ‘It’s complicated,’ I say carefully.

On the bus back to Jerusalem from Ramallah, in the seats across from me, I watched a girl painting her mother’s nails a deep maroon. When the bus reached the Qalandiya checkpoint, all of the men and most of the women rose from their seats and walked to the front and down the steps. They straggled along towards the processing hall, with its turnstiles and steel barriers. The bus driver waited while two soldiers conversed outside the open door. Eventually one of the soldiers turned to the bus, put a foot on the bottom step and heaved up her weight to lean in through the door, calling ‘
te’udot
’. The remaining passengers held up their blue East Jerusalem identity cards, and I, redundantly, my maroon passport.

On the far side of the checkpoint, the bus stopped again. The girl was tightening the lid on her nail varnish, and the women gathering their bags. The driver explained that he had to wait for the others, and pointed out a nearby bus that would leave sooner. I followed the other women to the new bus. In the seat in front of me, the woman held out a hand to her daughter again. For a short way the road was smooth, and the girl painted with a concentrated speed. Once we left the bit of even road by the separation wall, the drive became too rough and the mother turned away from the girl to look out the window.

Casually and implacably, despite the mundane brutality and banal oppressiveness of that architecture of power, small, irritable, human needs continued. The individual and the nation had shrugged a little, uncomfortable in this new concrete and razor-wire outfit, and then adjusted, and now it is out of sight for most Israeli Jews, and genuinely out of mind. Israeli citizens are not supposed to go to Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. But now my aunt is reluctantly curious. ‘What do they say about us, then?’ she asks. ‘Do they hate Israel? What do they think of us, your friends?’

I think of the Sno Bar, where I met Ghaith, out near a new Ramallah neighbourhood being built on the hillside. We drank Taybeh beer; our chips were served with plastic packets of ketchup and mayonnaise. ‘I see the boycott of Israeli goods is in full swing here,’ I’d said, turning over the mayonnaise packets. They were made by the Israeli company Ossem, which owned the factory at Kibbutz Beit Hashita.

The Sno Bar was full of ‘internationals’. Ghaith and his father complained about there being more internationals than Palestinians in Ramallah. The employees of NGOs and the UN, Ghaith said, earned two or three times the wage of local people, although it was local people who trained them and did the real work. His father had snorted with disgust. In one way, in the matter of restricted visas, he said, he was in agreement with the Israeli government. If people worked here, they should spend their money here, instead of buggering off to relax on the beach in Tel Aviv.

The peace process was a lucrative business, the Palestinian Authority a sham. ‘We should dismantle the whole thing,’ Ghaith said. ‘The PA is doing Israel’s dirty work; the whole thing is corrupt.’

I am not sure how to present this to Myriam. Whatever I tell her will reinforce what she already thinks. ‘They have their own attitudes,’ I say, hedging. I don’t tell her about the divisions of wealth and poverty, about the tension in East Jerusalem; I don’t mention going to Bethlehem, or getting lost in Hebron. ‘Ramallah is full of internationals,’ I say. ‘UN, NGOs – it’s very safe, very quiet.’ I intended to reassure her, to say something neutral, but the word ‘internationals’ acts as a trigger.

‘Why do they all go there?’ she exclaims angrily. ‘Aren’t there other places? Why do so many people go to help the Palestinians? Why not Darfur, Somalia?’ This leads her to the newer unhappiness over African asylum seekers. Every day hundreds cross into Israel, she tells me. ‘And they’re not really refugees. They just hear Israel is easy, and they come here for work.’

I hesitate, yawing at the edge of the gulf that we pretend isn’t there, but which lies split open between us. Whether I keep silent or speak, neither will close it up. As always, as her guest, I struggle with my obligation to respect her hospitality. I understand what has sparked her reactions. My cousin has just been laid off, and he and his wife have three children to support. My other cousin is barely holding on to a part-time job in an old people’s home. She is a single parent with three children. Myriam is trying to help with what little she has left of her pension – making mortgage payments, buying them a car, and providing frequent childcare. Of course she resents resources going to others; of course she wants to protect jobs, even though migrant workers and refugees are not taking jobs that Israelis want to do: they are taking the low-paid work that Palestinians used to do before the Intifada, before the closure of the border with the West Bank.

Myriam is afraid, and angry, and alone. She is in pain, and anxious about my cousins, and still grieving over my uncle David’s death. My simultaneous feeling of outrage and sympathy settles into a leaden helplessness. It doesn’t matter what I say – it doesn’t make any difference. Why point out that Jews have been refugees, too, and migrant workers, and economic migrants; that migrant workers and asylum seekers are the same the world over? What purpose would it serve to tell her about the settlers’ rubbish thrown down on the market in Hebron, or the pregnant woman leaning her forehead on a concrete post, groaning, while soldiers examined ID cards at the checkpoint? And why tell her what the security guard said to me at the central bus station when I got back to Tel Aviv? She might have said the same thing. He was young, Ethiopian, wearing a kippa. I waited till last to go through, as there was no X-ray machine and I thought I might need to unwrap and show him things I’d bought in Jerusalem. I explained that I had been shopping in the shuk.

‘Any weapons?’ he asked, taking me for a resident.

‘No, no weapons,’ I said.

‘There have been a lot of Arabs today,’ he said, giving my bag a cursory poke and handing it back. ‘
Loads
of Arabs.’