West Bank story
After living in the West Bank, Ben Ehrenreich writes with an avowedly Palestinian voice.
As I read The Way to the Spring, storm clouds are gathering over Washington DC. One ray of light shines through: Donald Trump is helping the US media discover two facts about themselves. They still have a problem with “false balance”, and they laugh long after a joke stops being funny. The first term describes the media’s habit of finding two opposing extremes in any given debate so they can wedge their opinion warmly in the centre. As the Czech satirist Jaroslav Hašek wrote, “Lurid black and white must perforce give way to reputable grey.”
The same “reputable” shade is often cast over Israel and Palestine to the same disreputable effect. One easy way to avoid the false-balance trap, as Ben Ehrenreich does, is to do away with objectivity: “I aspire here to something more modest than objectivity, which is truth.”
The author – son of “veteran muckraker” Barbara Ehrenreich – travelled to and lived in the West Bank in Palestine for three years. The result is a collection of stories about “resistance, and about people who resist”, which are written in an avowedly Palestinian voice.
The narrative flows from the village of Nabi Saleh to Hebron, Bethlehem and onwards, and we encounter Palestinians of all ages engaged in non-violent resistance (if you exclude stone throwing)
against Israeli occupation.
Ehrenreich focuses in part on the Tamimi family of Nabi Saleh. The villagers’ weekly protest marches to a nearby spring attract the attention of both the Israel Defence Forces and the international media, and are nearly always cut short by tear gas, rubber bullets or worse.
Punctuating this narrative is what Ehrenreich calls an “Occupation Cabinet of Curiosities”. One home in the small village of Mas’ha stood in the way of Israel’s separation wall. It’s now “The Nation of
[Mr] Hani Amer”, a land cut off from the rest of the village by the great concrete wall, barbedwire-topped fences and its own padlocked yellow gate.
Ehrenreich has an eye for detail. Through his observations, the realities of Palestinian life are illuminated: a bread oven destroyed by soldiers for its lack of a building permit; the checkpoint “humiliation machine” that steals not only Palestinian space but time; the burgeoning pomegranate trees with spent tear gas canisters and cigarette butts strewn underneath.
With the creeping settlement, zealous settlers and senseless acts of violence against Palestinians and Israelis, Nabi
Saleh appears like a microcosm of the greater conflict. And at the edge of Ehrenreich’s view – for reasons of “affinity and access” – are Islamist terrorists and other violent protesters: in 2001, a young Tamimi relative led a suicide bomber into Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, killing 13 Israelis and two foreigners.
Ehrenreich is at his least potent when taking the long view on Israel and Palestine, but the force of the book when describing the undying resistance of the Palestinian people is breathtaking. By letting their stories speak for themselves, The Way to the Spring speaks a truth of its own.
THE WAY TO THE SPRING: LIFE AND DEATH IN PALESTINE, by Ben Ehrenreich (Granta, $36.99)