I read David Hare's "monologue" on the Wall on the train just now, and I can't say enough good things about it. First of all, it's great that the New York Review of Books is publishing a forceful piece from Israel/Palestine and making the Wall iconic. Especially after the publication went AWOL for Gaza. Second, the tone and manner of the piece are odd/lovely/original. Sort of an oral performance piece as journalism. Ragged but very real-feeling, you are there.
The best thing about the piece, though, is the way it contrasts high-minded discussions that journalists always have with authors and intellectuals in cafes and backyards in Israel, with very vivid experiences of the occupied territories. Hare is truly interested here not in ideas but in experience, of knowing for a little while what occupation is like. What a great thing this journalism is, what potential it has to actually wake people up. Hare:
the next one, and then the one beyond that, and there aren't even
houses, just trailers, the trailers arriving to plant a new community,
and then no sooner planted than they move on to plant another. They're
called settlements, but in fact they're plantations.
And that's what I feel in Jerusalem as well. Jerusalem used to be
the spiritual capital—after all, that's what the argument was about.
You could feel it, on every street corner, you could feel the history,
but now with the hideous wall and the overbuilding and desecration of
the landscape—I mean, what is going on? Aren't they destroying the very
quality for which the city was meant to be precious? Aren't they
killing the thing they love? …
So—look again, look to the hills, and you can see why the
Palestinians consider the settlements not a religious phenomenon but a
network of control. Because that's what they look like. Watching over
us….
Nablus, the town of Joseph's tomb and Jacob's well;
a city with 180,000 residents, surrounded by six Israeli checkpoints,
fourteen Jewish settlements, and twenty-six settlement outposts which
are illegal even under Israeli law. Nablus, the city that everyone says
will be the crucial testing ground for the future of the Palestinian
Authority on the West Bank: once a home to the Fatah-based al-Aqsa
Martyrs Brigade, but now with a mayor, Adly Yaish, a graduate of
Liverpool University, who, though not a member of Hamas, nevertheless
ran on their ticket and got 73 percent of the vote in 2005. Since then
he has spent fifteen months of his term as mayor in Israeli jails,
without ever being charged with anything. Nine times Israeli judges
have ordered his release.
Nablus, a trading center which is no longer allowed to trade
because—problem for a trading center—nobody's allowed to go there. …Up to 80 percent of the citizens of this town are
unemployed. So there are few customers, and the prices are half what
they are in Jerusalem. In the corner, a biblical hammam, up a short
alley, nothing but steam and stones.
happy. You can lose yourself. Now we've come upon what seems to be the
most famous café, at the center of the market, looking like one of the
greenhouses at Kew. Before renovation, of course. Flat-planed walls of
cracked glass and rotting timber, giving out onto a sunny courtyard.
The Sheikh Qasim Café used to be the fashionable place, the hub, where
everyone went. Now with just five of its four hundred wooden chairs
occupied, it looks like a film set, a stage play, maybe at the Glasgow
Citizens, peeling paint, the wild romanticism of abandonment and decay.
Unless something happens soon, unless the Israelis relax their grip,
unless peace comes to the Middle East, the soil will reclaim this
place.
