Oded, born in Jerusalem and a lawyer by profession, came to Efrat in 1994 after he married. His Messianic reason? They couldn’t afford to buy a house in Jerusalem. Their four-bedroom Efrat apartment with a garden would have been double the price in Jerusalem. So if it’s not his political connections that won Efrat the right to expand, if it’s not to fulfill a biblical yearning for Judea Samaria, what is it? “Because we didn’t build for a long time, there were a lot of building plans that had passed the preliminary stages that were already to be implemented to be built immediately.
“So when you came from Jerusalem,” he’s saying, “you saw on the left-hand side the most remarkable, outstanding candidate for many architectural awards, the security fence. It’s there. You can’t not notice.” The Wall. He calls it a security fence. But still, he’s going right to the heart of the matter.
“It was supposed to be built over here,” he says, pointing to the map. “They never completed it. This was the first place where Arabs and Jews united together against building the fence under the belief that you don’t need high fences to create good neighbors.”
It’s hard not to like Oded and his pragmatic belief in his own essential goodness. I want to jostle along buoyantly with him, partaking of the brotherhood between him and his Palestinian neighbors. See, Efrat has olive groves inside city limits that their Palestinian owners are free to tend. Of course, Efrat’s doctors treat Palestinian villagers in their state-of-the-art ER. Please understand, Efrat’s expansion is legit because Jews owned land here prior to 1948. Look, Efrat has a forested park where village kids can play.
He drives me over to the park. I can reach out and touch the Palestinian village of Wadi an Nis. “When I bring tourists over here and I show them the proximity, they usually faint,” he relates. “Because when President Obama talks about a two-state solution and I invite him over to come and see the reality, you have to see the proximity in order to understand the complexity.”
Complexity.
About those olive groves—what about my working stiff, stoned by Efrat settlers at Solomon’s Pools?
About Wadi an Nis—of Efrat’s total 538 acres, 423 were confiscated from the village. What’s left of it is water-deprived (thirty-two liters of water a day, when the World Health Organization says the minimum should be one hundred) and has an unemployment rate of 55 percent.
About that park—there’s barbed wire around it.
So I ask Oded, Why does he think he has a claim to this land where Efrat’s outstandingly poised to expand? “Because I’m in the shoes of the Jordanians who have been here in the past, of the British who have been here in the past, of the Ottomans who were here in the past, they were all sovereign countries to rule this land.” He sees my face, maybe it’s not as jollied along anymore. “So now Israel is here,” he says. “You are right. It’s been fifty years of vagueness of not making decisions. But that’s at least a legal argument that was decided to determine—”
I have to interrupt. “I get the legal argument . . . now I ask you, just Lorraine to Oded, just you and me, what do you think about that? Do you have any doubts or troubles about it?”
“I might have doubts. I might have trouble. I don’t think that’s the level of the question. The level of the question is how can we live, one beside another, and build a relationship that we can determine the use of this land. Plus, settlements only constitute four percent of the West Bank. That’s it. There’s plenty of land for everyone.”
One of the mayor’s neighbors is Mazen Faraj. He sees Efrat illuminated with its swan neck streetlights from his cinder block home in Bethlehem’s Duheisha refugee camp, the tough one that was home to the rough kid who shamed thirteen-year-old Moayyad into joining the march to Rachel’s Tomb.
It’s pitch black at four a.m. when Mazen rises for the day. He needs that much time to get through the Israeli checkpoints in time for work. He slips on his Docksider shoes, lights up a cigarette. He’s striking enough to pass for a Marlboro man, the brand he chain-smokes.
His job is to tell his story. His destination most days is Israeli high schools. None of them are in Efrat. Settlements are excluded from the work he does—by mutual agreement with the Israelis who partner with him, who want their children to consider the complexity.
So he waits in the long lines moving Palestinians through rows of narrow cattle yard pens at checkpoints. He sees the way Israelis live well. He understands how Duheisha’s schools can’t compare with the ones in Israel where he talks to distracted teenagers.
He tells them how he was born in Duheisha in 1975, how his mother died of cancer when he was six months old, how his father, “a man with a beautiful heart,” took over his mothering. How when he was eight, he started asking his father why his family of thirteen lived in a steel-roofed shack thirty-four square feet. Why they didn’t have water all the time in the summer or electricity most of the time in the winter. His father explained it all started when he was only six and ran from his village because of the war and found himself in Duheisha. He was supposed to be there a couple of years at most. But two years stretched into ten, twenty, thirty, and forty. By then, Mazen was thirteen, and he started throwing stones at Israeli soldiers with other Duheisha kids, “to say that we exist, that we are still alive. And we want our life back. We want our freedom. And we want to live a normal life like anyone around the world.”
The day Mazen turned fifteen, Israeli soldiers captured him. “That first day they just put me in a small place: less than three feet. . . . They shouted at me and beat me. They sometimes let me stand for days without eating or drinking, without a bathroom, without many things.
“I believe in myself. I can do it. It’s okay. It’s amazing to be there especially when you are fifteen years old. They put handcuffs on you. You stand. Sometimes I did not know what the time was, whether it was day or night. I did not know if it was morning or afternoon. You are far away from the world. I was in this situation the first time for more than one month.
“They just wanted me to say ‘I am a dangerous one and I want to do something against them.’ I am not. I can’t believe that. What is the maximum they can do? They can kill me. That is it. To suffer? I am already suffering in the refugee camp. To be hungry? I am already hungry. It is the same.”
He spends his high school years in Israeli prisons, getting captured and released five times between the age of fifteen and eighteen. “So when they finished the first intifada in 1993, they have a peace agreement, Oslo agreement, and it was signed on the balcony of the White House by Arafat and Rabin, and when they announce it they just say that after a few years you will have your new Palestinian state. But again a few years has become more than twenty years.”
Peace talks sputter out in 2000 and again boys and young men take to the streets. Mazen isn’t interested anymore. His father, his brothers, none of them take part. “Too many people get killed. You can smell the blood in the streets. Just killing, killing and the revenge, the revenge and the settler violence without mercy.”
One night in 2002, in the middle of curfew during Israel’s thirty-nine-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Mazen, who’s twenty-seven at the time, gets a call. “The body of our father is in the hospital. We want to go to the hospital and they just say, ‘It’s not allowed. You have to wait until the morning.’” The body of his sixty-two-year-old father arrives by truck the next morning. The soldier who killed him used a tank-mounted Browning .50 caliber machine gun. The bullets are a half-inch thick. The soldier fired so many into his father’s torso it was little more than mush.
In Efrat, Oded pulls his car into one of his elementary schools and guides me to a wide hall with floor-to-ceiling windows. Against them are nine enormous glass tanks filled with—I’m guessing confetti. School’s in session and kids are bouncing and jostling around us.
The glass tanks are the brainchild of a history teacher. She wanted to teach kids about the Shoah without the sickening newsreel images. “
She came up with an idea to have the kids collect one and a half million buttons. Why a million and a half?” Oded asks, raising his voice above girls whooping in navy pleated skirts down a flight of stairs. “Because a million and a half kids were murdered in the Holocaust.”
Buttons are better than the movie Paper Clips, he says, because these buttons are all different, like a million and a half snowflakes, or fingerprints. The kids found a lot of them, but eventually, buttons started pouring in from all over once the project made it to YouTube. It took over the hearts of millions of people. The consummate power of the Wall, the way it paralyzed me, gives way. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was just reacting. No, these vitrines of buttons constitute the most sacred site in my Bethlehem.
A memory flashes inside me. I’m in Bethlehem five years ago, sitting in a café. A literary reading is over and it’s time for questions and discussion. At first everyone is polite, then less so and soon it’s a free-for-all, everyone arguing and commiserating the way oppressed people do when they’re together, just them. They’re thinking out loud about why the world doesn’t feel obligated to help them when it sees the Wall and the checkpoints and the lopsided kill ratios showing ten times as many Palestinians are killed as Israelis. Where is the unshakeable international consensus? Where is the Palestinian state? It’s been more than fifty years, what are we doing wrong? I’ll never forget someone standing up, she looked like she was just out of college, and saying, “We just don’t have as good a story as they do. What’s better than the Holocaust?”
Mazen is the coexecutive director of a group of storytellers called the Parents Circle Families Forum of the Bereaved Palestinian and Israeli Families for Peace and Reconciliation. It’s a gallimaufry of a name, and won’t ever fit on a bumper sticker. Yet like Efrat’s button project, people from all over have contributed to keep it going, even if so far the group has been able to recruit only seven hundred Israeli and Palestinian families who’ve paid the ultimate price—losing their Hodaya, their Moayyad, or their father, as Mazen did back when he was twenty-seven. Their latest promotional spot asks: If we’ve paid the ultimate price and can believe peace is the only answer, why can’t you?
Now forty-one, and a father himself, Mazen invites me to his house in Duheisha camp. There’s no water the day we meet. I go to the kitchen sink with his wife, turn the faucet, and three or four drops leak out, then nothing. She reminds me of my aunt Marge, whom we all used to call “crazy clean.” Marge scrubbed every scintilla of her coal patch house because she knew the Welsh hated on Lithuanians for being dirty. Mazen’s wife knows Israelis feel the same about her. So water or not, the cinder block house I’m standing in is immaculate. They’ve been waiting for water since Monday. Today is Friday. If you look out the window, you can see Efrat’s carrot-top roofs in the sun. At the touch of a hand, water flows through their sprinklers, dishwashers, washing machines, Jacuzzis, and swimming pools.
She doesn’t mention any of that. She’s preoccupied with her daughters back in the living room, which she’s decorated with striped pillows, sectional sofas, and family photographs. She’s resisted the bling most Arab homes I’ve visited tend to pile on.
Here’s Alma, eighteen months, stumbling around barefoot in a floral jumpsuit. Here’s Salma, eight, named after Mazen’s mother. Her shirt has a nerdy girl with big glasses on it. Each knee has a Band-Aid, each foot pink socks. Zuhra, who will be ten in August, has the same nerdy-girl shirt and a cascade of Rapunzel hair. Mazen wants me to know they’re going to a Christian school far better than the one he went to. This house, it’s double the size of his father’s UN shed. Zuhra is learning English, and French. She’s seated quietly. I can tell she’s old enough to be shy.
We continue to talk about the night his father was killed and the Israelis forbade him from seeing his father’s body. “‘Forbidden,’ this word. ‘Not allowed.’ In Arabic it’s muharram. As a Palestinian and as an Arab and as a Muslim I have two muharrams in my life. The first one comes from the religion, traditional culture—‘not allowed’ to have a girlfriend, ‘not allowed’ to drink alcohol, ‘not allowed’ to be free and do whatever you dream about or think about. And the other ‘not allowed’ and ‘forbidden’ was from the Israeli occupation. Not allowed to live, not allowed to exist, not allowed to have your state, your rights, your freedom. And the most important thing—‘not allowed’ to have your respect as a human being.”
He thought about revenge after that night. Instead he went to a bereavement group meeting and heard Rami Elhanan talk about losing his fourteen-year-old daughter to a suicide bomber in 1997. He learned that Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose nineteen-year-old son was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994, had started the group. After some time Mazen started to see Israelis who lost their children were more like him than unlike him. He has made it his life’s work to join them and argue publicly that their common grief can be the basis for peace.
It’s important. But Zuhra, the oldest, has other things on her mind. I can see her across the room, eyeing my iPad. Zuhra, I call. She shrugs. Zuhra, I call again, determined not to be an idiot this time. She comes over. But she’s only a little interested in the iPad. After a few selfie videos, she’s hankering for something else. What is it?
“Will you come to my room?” she whispers in my ear.
We go.
The first thing I see is a twin bed. The spread boasts cherries, hearts, strawberries, and butterflies. Now I see two other twin beds. The spreads all match. Three to a room. Better than thirteen, as Mazen had. He’s followed us in, but he’s letting Zuhra have center stage. Then I see what she wanted to show me. What she can’t believe exists.
The far wall of the bedroom is papered over in its entirety with a scene from Walt Disney’s Cinderella. The motherless young lady isn’t dusty and worn, as the Brothers Grimm would have it. She’s life-size and radiant in a cerulean chiffon ball gown with opera-length gloves. Other young princesses with hair flowing a lot like Zuhra’s are wearing medieval dresses the color of emeralds and rubies. One of them is black. One is Arab. One is either Ashkenazi or a daughter of Pennsylvania; it’s hard to tell exactly which. They waltz across Zuhra’s wall, powerfully saccharine, utterly commercialized, the unhip rejoinder to Banksy’s graffiti on the Wall inside the little town of sweet baby Jesus.
Zuhra is holding her hands together below her chin, she’s looking down at her feet, but her smile isn’t shy. She knows this is the holiest site in all Bethlehem.
The Separation Wall
Helon Habila
1. The Wall
In history and in literature, walls have always appealed to the popular imagination. In his short story “The Great Wall of China,” Kafka shows this abiding popularity of walls using the example of the building of the wall in China. The wall was ostensibly built as protection against “raiders from the north.” It took many generations over many dynasties to build, and it involved the entire Chinese nation, making the people who actually engaged in the building into popular heroes. They were protecting the fatherland, devoting their time and skill and resources to saving children and the women from depredating “others.” Kafka’s narrator describes how the people celebrate the builders as they travel to their stations: “Every countryman was a brother for whom they were building a protective wall and who would thank him with everything he had and was for all his life. Unity! Unity!”
This passage, with its careful register referencing “unity,” and “countryman,” and “brother,” captures the nationalist and populist ideology behind the building of security walls. There is nothing new or original about walls; they have always been there, from the Wall of Jericho to Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall to Donald Trump’s imaginary wall on the Mexican border. There is something visceral and primeval in us that yearns for the protective presence of a wall. But walls aren’t always solely for the protection of citizens; they serve a variety of other functions. They have been used as militaristic symbols of impregnability, and per
manence.
In the movie Avenge but One of My Two Eyes, director Avi Mograbi tells the story of the siege of Masada by the Romans in 73 CE, and how the Romans, unable to penetrate the fortified settlement, decided to build dykes and a circumvolution wall around the settlement. Their message: We are not going anywhere. Today, Mograbi is trying to show, Israel is behaving like the Romans did, and the Palestinians can be compared to the besieged Jews of Masada. With the separation barrier, which was initially presented to the public as a temporary measure against Palestinian attacks, Israel is telling its Palestinian and Arab neighbors (in concrete terms, if you will), “We are going nowhere.”
I sensed that overwhelming message of permanence the first time I stood under the wall. I felt overwhelmed and diminished, like an ant. Where I stood, near the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem, the wall towered over twenty-six-feet high. The dimensions and the materials of the separation barrier vary from place to place, but they are usually tallest and sturdiest in the urban areas, like here in East Jerusalem. Thick slabs of concrete shot out of the ground and into the sky, running in a meandering curve around the camp. I was on the Israeli side of the wall, meaning inside the wall—though at times it was hard to say what side was inside and which outside. The Shuafat refugee camp, like other Palestinian refugee camps, is among the oldest such camps in the world, with a population of about eighty thousand uprooted Palestinians. I imagined what it’d feel like to live under the shadow of this giant concrete slab, waking up to its concrete view every morning, and going to sleep at night to the same view. “It is all right,” a resident I asked this question said. He looked at the wall as if seeing it for the first time. “We get used to it.”