‘Look where we’ve got to – defeated and dominated’: my generation’s failure to liberate Palestine
It must already be 8am, I think, as I listen to the national anthem blasting out of St George’s school near my house in Ramallah. I am standing at the bathroom sink, manoeuvring the razor around the deep folds in my face that have formed over the past few years.
I look in the mirror. It is all there in front of me: the bags under my eyes, the furrowed forehead, the corners of my mouth that used to be mobile but have now descended into a permanently sad expression. I try to convince myself that I am as old as my face, which is not at all how I feel. Mine is already the face of an older man, sombre and serious, with thin lips and wrinkles. I have aged with the years and with the occupation. This day, 5 June 2017, marks its 50th anniversary.
Past anniversaries of the occupation used to arouse strong feelings in me. I would try to ward them off by taking a long walk in the hills. It used to be possible to leave the city behind me. This was preferable to staying at home and brooding. Today, I will walk to my law office, taking my time. My first meeting is not until 1.30pm. Perhaps more will be happening than I expect.
I stand in front of the shirts and coats from different periods of my life. I am tempted to believe that, like my city, my wardrobe – the various shirts, suits, hats or ties – is a repository of what I have tried to be. My different lives are
have worn, as by the homes located in different parts of the city where I have lived. To this day, I have my writerly clothes and my lawyerly ones, some from when I started my career 37 years ago – shirts, belts, trousers and jackets.
Like our bodies, our houses and our clothing are but sparks of our existence, our self, which we inhabit for a while and make our own. Then we leave them and the connection is severed. Clothes wear out and houses are sold to other people or fall into ruin, and the city continues as if we were never there. Until the city itself ceases to exist, whether through war or natural disasters, and then it is as though it never was.
Barring some political or natural calamity, my wife, Penny, and I hope to spend the rest of our days in this house. And yet, despite this long-standing attachment, I continue to be troubled by a recurring dream in which, for what feels to be an agonisingly long time, I search for but cannot find my home. For someone who has lived most of his life in the same small city, and owns a property in it, to feel in my subconscious that I am bereft of a home is a strange affliction.
These are my thoughts on this morning, a little after 9am, as I prepare to leave my house, dressed in a clean, well ironed, black-and-white striped shirt and dark trousers (my lawyerly clothes), to walk to my office in the centre of town.
Leaving the house, I turn the corner and walk uphill along Tireh Road. Up the street is a petrol station owned by a man with many sons, judging by the large number of commercial ventures that keep popping up there: a drive-in cafe, a hardware shop, a grocers. I can imagine that the head of this large family feels he has to find employment for his children. Where there is no government to take care of its citizens, the father has to provide.
In other years, I had passed this anniversary hiking in the nearby hills. After a short walk, I would leave the town behind me. That is no longer possible. The hills have been invaded. My only option is an urban walk. I have a few hours before my afternoon meeting. I will take the longer route to my office, which is normally only a 45minute walk from my house; this will make it four hours.
For many years, I was too involved in politics to notice my surroundings. I felt my very survival was at stake, and this was distracting enough. Now that I realise the limits of my abilities to make any effective change in the way the struggle is conducted, I no longer feel like this, and have more leisure to think of myself in the world, of my body in time.
This morning, I had read that there are negotiations with Israel to allow buses to leave Ramallah through the Beitunia checkpoint, now called Ofer, to take worshippers to pray at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, 12 miles (20km) south of Ramallah, during Ramadan. My first reaction was happiness. Then I realised I have become so used to the decade-long closure of the outlet from Beitunia to Palestinian traffic, and have so internalised the new geography that Israel has succeeded in imposing, that this sounded extraordinary to me. How readily we accept the outrageous terms of our confinement: residents of East Jerusalem may not live in the West Bank, and those of the West Bank and Gaza Strip may not change their place of residence even if they get married to someone from another area in Palestine.
I used to drive to Jerusalem through Beitunia all the time before this prohibition. It was there, on that narrow, quiet road, that I learned to drive, before Israel constructed the six-lane settler road that connects the northwestern Jewish settlements to the coastal region, bisecting the road on which I used to drive. At this time of year, the end of spring, the pond formed by the runoff water in the low plain would have shrunk, and all around it farmers would have planted cucumbers – of the ordinary and Armenian kinds – and tomato seedlings. Soon we would be driving there to buy those utterly delicious ba’li (unirrigated) organic vegetables. But how changed and inaccessible the area has become. The cultivated plain has vanished and been replaced by an army barracks and the Ofer military court and prison.
The landscape familiar to me as I was growing up is no more; it has changed, as has the cast of characters, both Israeli and Palestinian. The legal strategies we employed to resist the occupation, believing they would bring it to an end, have dismally failed. The changes brought about over the past half-century have created a new overwhelming reality that calls for a different approach and a new kind of leadership. For us who have aged with the struggle, it is time we recognise our defeat, step aside, hand over the reins to the young, and place our hope in them.
It was after the false peace ushered in by the Oslo accord of 1995 that economic development, held back for many years by Israeli-imposed restrictions, began to be fostered and financed by EU and US aid programmes. The change in the law made it possible for investors to build high-rise blocks and sell the individual flats.
With the scarcity of land available for Palestinians, inappropriately high buildings were piled up on the hills, with little space in between. Every plot had to be exploited to the maximum, to make up for the high price paid to acquire it. Houses with gardens became a luxury that only a few could afford. Every city needs open green areas – breathing spaces between the dense construction. Our city cannot have those, because the land left for its development and expansion is restricted. The settlements all around have the larger share of land. The settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, sits on an area roughly the same size as Tel Aviv.
They have vast swathes in which to establish green open spaces, whereas we in Ramallah have to live in a confined space. On Fridays, the nearby hills – which lie in what is called Area C under Israeli jurisdiction, where building is not allowed – fill up with families taking their grills and sitting under the olive trees to enjoy the outdoors. The rules imposed by Israel prevent us from turning these into proper parks.
The area where I used to live at the edge of town, which used to be pastoral, has been invaded by developments and become a busy, crowded place. The end of the street where the meandering path once began has become a crossroads, connecting roads that extend in every direction. At all times of day and night, innumerable cars pass by my old one-storey, semi-detached house, heading to the various tall buildings around it. So many roads have been opened through the once-lovely hills. The terraces and olive trees are gone. The hills on the periphery, where it used to be possible to ramble, have become blocked by landslides of rubble from the nearby construction work.
The young here have no notion of what Ramallah was like before the massive developments that have taken place over the past two decades. They relish its Americanisation, and many come from the nearby villages to eat out at the KFC and Pizza Hut across the street from where I stand. These two places are always crowded. Sometimes, I wonder where I am. This does not feel like the city I knew.
With all my nostalgia for the way things were, life in modern Ramallah is much more exciting and culturally diverse than was ever the case in the past. I might sometimes feel like a stranger here, and despondent about the future, yet the young have many more opportunities than my generation did at their age – naive and unconnected as we were to the rest of the world. They will forge ahead; they might even be more successful than we were in achieving liberation.
Halfway along Irsal Street are the newly constructed headquarters of the president of the Palestinian Authority, built on the site of the demolished Tegart building, or Muqata’a, as we now call it. In 2002, when the compound served as Yasser Arafat’s headquarters, it was bombed by the Israeli army after the re-invasion of Ramallah. Two years later, it remained unrepaired. I can still remember how it looked on a misty winter’s morning in 2004 when I went to check whether any work had been done there. I could see the ruins behind a milky-white foreground. The pine trees were still standing, as was the facade of what had once served as the Israeli civil administration, where one went for permits and, when summoned, for interrogation.
Remarkably, also still standing were the four steps leading up to the small balcony of the stone building next to the cement Tegart structure. Beyond, through the windows of the facade, one could see piles of earth, demolished cement structures, twisted iron and aluminium. Columns that had been severed from the bottom hung from the crumpled, collapsed roof over the courtyard like giant icicles. A few tattered Palestinian flags fluttered forlornly here and there over the ruins.
This place, where Arafat had lived and worked, remained in its decrepit state after he died. This was not without design. There, in the middle of the ruins, the man of symbols lived as the most potent symbol of steadfastness, far superior to any we could ever claim. How could we possibly voice any grievance against his style of leadership, or the consequences of his decisions, or the fact that little remained of Palestine except symbols, when he had endured such hardship on our behalf? I remember thinking that the luxury of moving forward and consigning the horrors of the past to a building that is turned into a museum was not ours. Perhaps it cannot be, not until the occupation ends.
The new headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, which I am now passing, built next to the old Muqata’a, are a sharp contrast to those where Arafat worked. Mahmoud Abbas, the present head of the authority, operates out of headquarters built with clean, chiselled white limestone fronted by well trimmed grass, suggesting a sombre, organised and orderly organisation, not one leading a struggle for independence from the occupier.
As I pass this gleaming structure, I wonder whether the point of removing all remnants of the old Muqata’a was to make us forget the travails of the past and believe that a new, post-struggle era has begun. After the levelling of the old Tegart, there is no place where the young can experience what our generation endured. My nephew Aziz and his contemporaries can no longer visit the window in the small porch of what was called the civil administration, behind which we crammed, day in, day out, waiting for one or another of the many permits needed for all sorts of activities, whether travel, driving or getting a telephone line; or see for themselves in the next part of the building the tiny cells where the prisoners were held in solitary confinement, sometimes for weeks and months; or see the torture chambers where the heroic fighters of my generation suffered, or read what they scribbled on the walls, or see at first-hand the conditions of their incarceration. Likewise, the Ottoman building that served as the Ramallah police station, where so many suffered, was also destroyed by a large bomb dropped by an Israeli helicopter gunship. It is as if the Israeli authorities and the Palestinian officials have worked together to obliterate these sites of great suffering, stopping the young from experiencing what it was like under full Israeli rule.
I decide to visit the Arafat Museum and Mausoleum, which have been built on the ruin of the old Tegart. A gleaming white walkway led to Arafat’s grave. There were pink and red sweet williams and a well-maintained lawn. The landscaping was good, with large boulders to break the level ground. A tower is topped with a gadget that is supposed to send a ray of light towards Jerusalem, the city that he failed to liberate. Perhaps it is meant to symbolise the unrealised hope of reaching it some day.
The museum, which is next to the mausoleum, is well designed, but tells the Palestinian story through a selective presentation of material that is remarkable for what is left out. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Palestinian history is presented as beginning with the British mandate, as if we had no history prior to that. Totally missing is any representation of the sumoud (steadfastness) of those of us living under occupation for half a century, or the solidarity and struggle of Palestinians living in Israel.
The curator (who, I am told, is Egyptian) could have easily chosen to highlight the life story of one of the heroic symbols of sumoud, such as Sabri Ghraib, who struggled from 1979 until his death in 2012 against the Jewish settlement of Giv’on HaHadasha, established on his land and that of his village. Despite years of harassment and assiduous efforts to evict him from his house, he managed to hold on to some of his land and continued to live in his house, which the settlement eventually encircled. Or Muhammad Abdeh, who has held on to his house in Gush Etzion. Or Sa’deah Al Bakri, who managed for years to live in her house next to the settlement of Kiryat Arba, despite continuous attacks by the settlers on her, her children and their house. Surely these and many more heroes of sumoud deserve recognition.
The main story is the doomed armed struggle. And yet the presentation is neither self-congratulatory nor valorous. So much so that the couple behind me, especially the woman, kept repeating: “Hasrah alena wain kuna u wain surna” (“For pity’s sake! Look where we were, and where we are now”). There are photographs of numerous leaders assassinated by Israel over the many years of struggle. The negotiations leading to the signing of the Oslo accords on the White House lawn are presented as a victory for the Palestinians, with endless photographs of Arafat’s travels to the capitals of the world, where he was met as a head of state. The fact that this encouraged countries that had previously refused to have any relations with Israel, such as India, to establish them, is not mentioned.
Seeing the museum and how it portrays the struggle without giving due credit to the sumoud of those living in the occupied territories dampened my spirits. There is absolutely no recognition here of past mistakes. But then a national museum is hardly the place for that. It is generally the case that when a people’s struggle is over, one group represents how it was won. But in our case, the struggle is neither over nor won, and what keeps it going is nothing other than our sumoud.
There is no doubt that Arafat’s endurance of the bombardment in those last six months of his life was heroic. He presents an apt symbol for Palestinians under threat. But what is one to make of this symbol? Had the struggle succeeded, it would have been right to showcase it. But it didn’t. It is ongoing. What, then, is the point of overshadowing the ongoing endurance of the rest of the population, who are still suffering? Or is Arafat’s story meant to produce some form of catharsis in a long-lasting tragedy?
His tragedy (or rather ours) – his legacy – is that he failed to leave behind a democratic system, a process by which the top man seeks and receives counsel and decisions are taken collectively. The Palestinian Authority he left behind pays no heed to advisers who could help it build a more effective strategy in the face of the massive Israeli challenges. And look where we have got to: we are totally subservient, defeated and dominated by Israel.
My first impression upon leaving the well groomed gardens of the museum and returning to Irsal Street is that the city is no longer involved in a collective struggle against the occupation. Each of us is on our own. I can see no posters of shuhada (martyrs) on the walls – they are removed as soon as they appear. The only posters are for banks, advertising “How to Win a Million”.
The city has aged and changed almost beyond recognition from the time I was growing up. In these past 50 years, it has suffered two major invasions, in 1967 and 2002. It survived both and flourished and is now claimed by the young. The Arafat Museum, built on the ruins of the Tegart, represents the past. It is the story of one aspect of our struggle leading to no heroic end, no climax. That phase of the struggle is over. Yet by no means is the struggle itself over. The words of Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach come to mind:
I have now walked to the end of Irsal. At one corner, the road going east leads to the boulevard that dignitaries visiting the Palestinian Authority
drive along after crossing the Israeli checkpoint called DCO, in reference to the District Coordination Office there. The government spent a lot of money to make the road leading into the city from that checkpoint as impressive as possible, following the practice of most impoverished countries in making every effort to keep out of sight any evidence of poverty from the main artery leading from the airport to the posh hotels where they stay.
After Oslo, we had high hopes that Palestine would have an airport of its own. The DCO is all we got. When dignitaries come to visit our president in Ramallah, Palestinian soldiers can be seen with their armoured cars parked at the corner leading to the checkpoint, unable to venture any further, as if they are waiting at a proper border of their state, when in fact it is a border that isn’t a border. The DCO separates Palestinian territory from other Palestinian territory within the West Bank. When the dignitaries arrive, these soldiers accompany them in an impressive parade, while other foot soldiers line the streets of Ramallah all the way to their hotel.
To my left as I face the road leading downhill to Birzeit, north of Ramallah, is a grand building in the shape of a ship, hence its name, Al Safineh. It is narrow in front and tilted up like a bow, with round windows on the side and a chimney on top flying the national flag. In this ship is a Caribbean restaurant flying the Jolly Roger with its skull and crossbones.
The front is directed towards the horizon and the Mediterranean Sea, as if ready to sail. It made me think of TS Eliot’s Gerontion: “Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’” This strange structure confirms my impression of Ramallah as a city of illusions, inhabited by aspirants, poised to take off but prevented by the forces of circumstance and misfortune.
This is an edited extract from Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation by Raja Shehadeh, published by Profile and available at guardianbookshop.com