Grim voices of experience
A collection of writing about occupied Palestine is patchy but often powerful.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War and the beginning of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. Many writers have confronted the stultifying certainties of this crime with formidable courage and tenacity.
In Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, editors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman attempt to continue this tradition, bringing together a lengthy cast of well-known authors, including Hari Kunzru, Anita Desai and Colm Tóibín, and sending them to Israel-Palestine with the aid of the ex-Israeli Defense Forces rights group Breaking the Silence.
Across the sprawling collection, a consensus of images emerges. But you get the distinct impression of cardiganed types parachuted in to make a tourist trip of atrocity.
Grim voices of experience resound forcefully. Palestinian playwright Ala Hlehel addresses his essay to the reader, directly to “you”, where most others wallow in the first person. Somewhat surprisingly, the Irish novelist Eimear McBride contributes one of the best pieces in the collection, her Joyce-ian prose and hot indignation a welcome corrective to the dirges and duds elsewhere. “What I don’t understand,” she writes, “is the choice settlers make and the certainty with which they seem able to choose for others what they would never choose for themselves.”