People Like Us (20 page)

Having left my Lebanese lodgings, I could no longer distance myself from the situation. This realization didn’t dawn on me instantly, for right after my move I was happiness personified. Life in East Jerusalem seemed the most interesting thing ever. There I was in the queue at IKEA behind a Jewish settler with a huge beard, a gaggle of kids, a cradle under his right arm, and an automatic rifle on his left shoulder. In Israel, settlers are allowed to carry heavy weaponry. East Jerusalem was occupied territory, and there was no postal service, so I had to get a post box in the Jewish settlement close by. The Israeli telecommunications company didn’t want to come and install an ISDN line; it was too dangerous amongst all those terrorists.

This was the eye of the storm, and I noticed it in the jokes. The chief rabbi is visiting the pope in Rome and needs to make a phone call to God. The pope gives him the telephone and says, “If you write down your address, we’ll send you the bill later.” A month later, a huge bill arrives, which the rabbi pays with a sigh. Then the pope pays a return visit to Jerusalem; he needs to call God, too. It’s a long conversation and, after he hangs up, the pope asks the rabbi if he needs his
contact details for the bill. The rabbi hesitates and then shrugs his shoulders: “Don’t worry about it, pal. It’s local rates here.”

The main Palestinian bookshop in Jerusalem’s Saladin Street had stuck up a cartoon: On the first picture, an angry Eskimo is saying, “My name is Menachim, and Jerusalem is MINE!” Next, an angry black man: “My name is David, and Jerusalem is MINE!” An American in a cowboy hat stamping his feet: “My name is Shimon, and Jerusalem is MINE!” A furious Russian: “My name is Shlomo, and Jerusalem is MINE!” An irate Indian: “My name is Benjamin, and Jerusalem is MINE!” The final picture has a confused-looking Palestinian: “My name is Mohammed, and I was born in Jerusalem, but it must have been some kind of mistake.”

People in the Holy Land could make fun of themselves, but when did you ever see that on the news? My Israeli technician, a big Ajax fan, once complained that his dog had fleas. “I need to buy some pesticide, German stuff. They’re good at that, the Germans—stamping out vermin.” He also told me this one: An American, a Russian, and an Israeli are standing in front of a sign that says APOLOGIES, NO MEAT TODAY DUE TO SHORTAGES. The American asks, “What are shortages?” The Russian asks, “What’s meat?” The Israeli asks, “What are apologies?”

I
t was a whole new world, and I was so happy there that I threw a house-warming party. Amongst the guests were my landlord and his sister, our neighbor. A Dutch diplomat from Tel Aviv was present, too, along with a Swedish colleague, Sven. Sven came over to me, looking quite upset. “That landlord of yours and his sister, they’re ... nice!” I
raised my glass. What did he expect? “Well. Yeah. It’s probably nothing, but they’re ... you know.” It had been Sven’s first conversation with ordinary Palestinians. Tel Aviv to East Jerusalem is a fifty-nine-kilometer drive, and there’s no border crossing point because Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and considers it as part of the country; but in his three years in Tel Aviv, Sven had never come here. Instead, he’d swallowed the Israeli PR stories whole.

The landlord and his sister opened my eyes about what occupation was like, too. That was the end of my happiness. My neighbor taught me the most. She was a Catholic spinster who’d been born in Haifa in 1948. When Israel was founded, the family had fled to East Jerusalem and had never been able to go back. East Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands at the time, but in 1967 it was taken by Israel—so the neighbor ended up being ruled over by the country that had previously robbed her family of everything.

And still there was no peace for her. She received phone calls at three o“clock in the morning; each time she answered there’d be a few seconds’ silence, and then they’d hang up. This went on for days until my neighbor was exhausted. Burglars? She avoided my question as to why she didn’t go to the police. “I’m a helpless old lady,” she kept saying. It was driving me crazy. I extended the cable so that I could answer the phone, hoping that the caller would be intimidated by a male voice. That night, the phone did indeed ring; when I picked it up, there was silence. Five minutes later, it went again; more silence, so I said the nastiest thing I could think of in English. During the third phone call, the caller suddenly began to speak in heavily punctuated English. He didn’t want to say who he was or why he was calling, but introduced himself as ”a friend of the family from the Jordan.” He hung
up after that, and I realized that he hadn’t pronounced Jordan with an Arabic “r,” but with a throaty Hebrew one. He was an Israeli! The phone calls stopped.

“We get a lot of phone calls like that,” the landlord told me when I was paying him my rent. He was a respectable, nervous doctor in his late fifties. “Settlers intimidate elderly Palestinians, and then the frontmen come and make an offer on your house, two or three times what it’s worth, and you can stay there until you die. But afterwards it becomes a settlers’ house. They also offer Israeli passports, which proves that they are in cahoots with the government.”

So this was the “Judaization policy” with which Israel tried to get rid of all the non-Jews living in East Jerusalem. The landlord maintained that he hadn’t considered the night-callers’ offers for a second. However, an Israeli passport would allow him to travel abroad. His children would be able to study in America and find partners. How many Catholic Palestinians were there still in Jerusalem? Israel was going to win the battle for my house—that much was clear.

Take the example of the time my neighbor rang my doorbell in a panic. There was a curfew that evening. Israel was celebrating its independence, and all Palestinians had to stay in—those in East Jerusalem, too, for the first time—as a “security measure.” The neighbor was trembling all over; she was convinced that the same thing was going to happen as occurred in 1948. I cancelled my date (“Sorry, I’m not allowed to leave my house tomorrow”), and went to fetch food from the local supermarket. Unfortunately, a lot of people had got there first. I looked at the clock—was there still time to go to a big supermarket? But what if I went, and got stuck there? I’d have to sleep in a hotel. So I had to take my passport with me, and my computer, too, because I had a deadline to meet.

I stayed home, and an hour later the neighbor was at my door again. She’d heard that there were going to be house searches, and warned me to hide all my valuables. She had a point—try proving that a soldier has taken your jewellery at gunpoint. The curfew began, and a car screeched past outside. Was this a Palestinian daredevil or a settler? There was no curfew for Jews. Then I heard explosions, and for a second I worried about my neighbor. But it was only the fire-works display for Israel’s anniversary.

Then, some time later, we were burgled. The car was stolen, the house was emptied, and the neighbor was in a state. A trip to the police station? “I want to help you,” the landlord said, “but then you’d better make the report.” I was very annoyed, so he reluctantly explained that, if he went to the police, there was a risk that the officer would say: “You live there? That’s a neighborhood we’re interested in. You don’t want to tell us anything? Perhaps we should check your driving license, your medical practice permit, and other paperwork. It might take a while. Report back every afternoon for the next month, and we’ll go for a walk through your neighborhood—let everyone see what good friends you are with the Israeli police.”

I went alone to the police station in the nearby settlement, Neve Yaqov. No one could or wanted to speak English, and I was sent over to a policeman who spoke Arabic. He was busy with a Palestinian who lived just past a checkpoint and had to queue every day to get through, two hours out and two hours in. The Palestinian had come to get a pass so that he could use the special road for Jews. It was bizarre how quickly I got used to that kind of expression—“the special road for Jews.”

“Come back tomorrow,” I heard the policeman bark.

“But you said that yesterday, and the day before. I’ve been here ten times now.”

“Then come ten times more.”

What was it to be more afraid of the police than burglars? Was this occupation? I decided to ask what it was like every time I interviewed anyone, and out came the stories:

These were haunting stories, precisely because they weren’t told by angry, bearded men, by incompetent spokesmen, or by theatrically weeping victims. These were calm men and women; father and mothers trying to keep their families together; grandparents who realized that the next generation could expect a life just like theirs. The only conclusion possible was that occupation is tantamount to terrorism—only it’s permanent, and enforced by soldiers and secret services rather than terrorists. An occupation is like a dictatorship because you don’t have any rights. The Israeli “security services” could burst into your home at any
moment and take you or a family member away, and they could torture you or lock you up for years without trial. At any moment, a bulldozer could flatten your house, as collective punishment or for a new Jewish settlement.

This is how Palestinians have lived since 1967, and the peace process hasn’t changed anything significant. The “Palestinian Authority” is, in fact, a layer that has been pushed between the Israeli occupiers and the population. Before the peace process, Palestinians had to ask the Israelis permission for everything; after it, they had to go the Palestinian Authority, which then had to ask permission from Israel.

Until it was stolen, I drove an imported car with a Greek number plate. Every few hours, I’d be pulled over by special anti-terrorist units—sometimes in civvies, sometimes in uniform. “From where this car?” There were often heart-stopping moments when I thanked God for my white skin because I didn’t speak any Hebrew and didn’t know if they were shouting “Get out of the car or we’ll shoot!” or “Don’t move a muscle or we’ll shoot!” The policemen were extremely nervous, too: A terrorist would wait until they approached, and ... boom. But that feeling of powerlessness when I had to raise my hands and walk towards one of those nineteen-year-old soldiers ...

Soldiers would sometimes set up a checkpoint in front of my house, and get every Palestinian male between eighteen and forty out of his vehicle. They had to stand in the burning sun while their papers were studied and checked, sometimes for hours, and anyone who complained got a whack around the head. Unless I, with my white skin, went along to spectate—at which point they nearly always stopped hitting.

 

 

T
his was what Israeli peace activists meant about occupation. When I reflected on how to portray it, I understood why so few people got what the activists were talking about. The same forces were at play in occupied countries as in Arab dictatorships. There weren’t any newsworthy developments to report on, which meant that, at the most, correspondents could only put something about daily life in a background feature. The news stream was always shaped by incidents. Put another way, the occupation itself was never news, but each new attack was. This meant that I could mention occupation in cross-talks or in analysis, but only as an abstraction. How would my audience in their home country—with its customer complaint lines, ombudsmen, and hardship clauses—be able to picture this? You’d have to show occupation on television with concrete examples, but that was very hard to do.