How half-a-century of hostility has pushed away peace
Where the Line is Drawn A Land Without Borders
Profile, £14.99 Text Publishing, £12.99 Reviewed by David J Goldberg
READ SEPARATELY, both these books cover welltrodden ground about life under military occupation for Palestinians and Israelis on the West Bank. Read in conjunction, they reinforce the bleak conviction that both peoples, with few exceptions, fear and wilfully misunderstand each other. After 50 years of mutual hostility, they have neither the will nor the encouragement of their political leaders to think afresh and try to rub along together in a semblance of live-and-let-live.
It so happens that both authors know and respect each other. Shehadeh, the older man, is a human-rights lawyer as well as a writer, with a touching faith in the integrity of the law, despite numerous failed attempts to seek redress in the Israeli courts for Palestinian clients who have been dispossessed of their land for ubiquitous Contrasting commemorations. Celebration, Jerusalem June 2011. Protest, Women in Black, Jerusalem June 2015
“security reasons”. He writes wistfully of pre-1967 Palestine and visiting, after the Six-Day War, his father’s family home in Jaffa, from which they had been expelled in 1948. Having grown up in land-locked Ramallah, being able to see the blue sliver of sea on the horizon represented escape and the dream of return. Shehadeh is still puzzled by the unsolved assassination of his father, a prominent politician. There was no shortage of Palestinian or Israeli suspects.
He is also wryly perplexed by the
anomalies and humiliations of living under military rule. Bank Leumi, despite having a large number of Arab customers, avoids using a single word of Arabic in any of its statements and letters. Running through the book and linking its vignettes is Shehadeh’s long, often fractious friendship with Henry, a liberal, Canadian-born Israeli who can empathise, but only so far, with the tragedy of the Palestinians.
Nir Baram comes from a left-wing political family. Both his grandfather and father were ministers in Labourled
governments. The starting point for his tour of the West Bank was the realisation that the vast majority of Israelis know next to nothing about life there and have never been to the occupied territories other than as part of their military service.
So Baram visits settler outposts, affluent dormitory suburbs, teeming refugee camps and the dystopian squalor of Ras Khamis, separated from the rest of Jerusalem by the so-called security fence. He has a sharp eye for detail and is perceptively observant, emphasising that most Israelis and Palestinians were born after 1967 and, for them, the occupation is a given:
“Today, everyone seems to understand that the occupation has indeed seeped into the foundation of our lives… Whether we like it or not, we live in a society moulded by its influence.”
From their different perspectives, both writers come to a similar, pessimistic conclusion. Shehadeh looks out over the Arab neighbourhood of Silwan, where ultra-Orthodox Jews hoped to rebuild the ancient city of David, and wonders whether it would ever have been possible for the Israelis “to create a presence and a history for themselves here without negating ours.” He fears not, which is why “peace will remain elusive”.
Baram is less circumspect. For him, the fundamental discord between the two peoples is because all peace initiatives address the post-’67 occupation but fail to confront the Palestinian exodus of 1948. Until Israel recognises the historical linkage for Palestinians between the two dates, the Nakba, leading inevitably to the occupation, there can be no possible resolution of the conflict.
David J. Goldberg’s books include ‘To the Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought’ (Faber Finds)