BY AMIR KHOUZAM
“Passports,” barked the soldier. He seemed small, smaller than the gun he held in front of him like a shield, with the muzzle pointing at the floor so he could move down the aisle of the bus. Each of us held our booklets out. The soldier glanced quickly at a few of them, thumbed through others.
We were stopped at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, the main point of entry for Palestinians into East Jerusalem. I had been in the country for nearly a week already, but the reality of occupation? takes time to sink in. Israel and Palestine are a strange hybrid police-state with two peoples living in the same place, sometimes existing in worlds so far apart it can feel like they have never touched. It was a place that had dominated my imagination ever since I was a child, when my father and I started to engage in long debates about the occupation in a land I only knew because of the names it shared with the stories in the bible.
My father is Egyptian. He left his country when he was 21 years old, in large part to avoid mandatory service in an army that from 1947 to 1979 was either at war with Israel or expecting to be. He resents the toll the conflict took on his country, the drain it placed on its resources and its people.
He considered the conflict a profound struggle between the aspirations of millions of Arabs, on one side, and on the other the hypocritical alliance of Israel and the West. Western politicians spoke publicly of human rights and democracy, yet they ignored Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and provided material support to Middle Eastern dictators. It must have been difficult to reconcile this apparent hypocrisy, especially as a young man in Nasser’s Egypt, where state messaging was strident in its critiques of the West and condemnation of Israel.
“Obviously growing up in Egypt, you are impacted and influenced by the Egyptian state’s propaganda,” he told me, but he considers himself objective. He stressed to me that Egypt’s vibrant university life and his own travels as a teenager to Canada, the United States, and Europe had exposed him to alternative narratives about Israel and Palestine. And he sees his life, as a Christian Egyptian who has grown up and been educated in both Egypt and Canada, as having allowed him a privileged perspective on the conflict, a kind of embedded-observer status.
Still, Israel and Palestine strike a particular nerve in my father. The issue is personal. Over time, as we talked more about it, it became personal to me too. I started reading about it on my own and bringing it up in high school history class. When I was sixteen I asked the keynote speaker at a high school model UN conference why the world didn’t intervene on behalf of the Palestinians. His curt one-sentence answer brought a round of laughter from the six hundred teenagers in the hall. The treatment was embarrassing and humbling; I was shocked by how easily he dismissed the issue.
As I thought more about Palestine and the occupation, my views began to diverge from my father’s. I became particularly frustrated in university when I started to situate the conflict in a broader framework, and began to question my father’s perspective. Why devote so much energy to this conflict, of all the others in the region and the world? Why couldn’t my father see that American protection of Israel was not some unique hypocrisy, but a natural outgrowth of strategic, social, and historical ties between the countries, similar examples of which can be found all over the world? What about the Palestinians, what blame do they carry?
Over time our conversations grew heated. They became real arguments, in which I would scoff at the near-cosmic importance he attached to the conflict. H e would grow angry at my ignorance, my detachment, my upbringing away from the occupation and its consequences–my foreigness.
And this was his Trump card. I didn’t understand because I couldn’t understand, growing up in the West, what this all really meant. It was a good card, a winner, because up until this January, neither of us had ever actually been.
Although my father didn’t come with me on the trip-I had in fact asked him, but for personal reasons he declined-he was never far from my mind, including as we cleared Qalandia and carried on through Jerusalem traffic, into the hills that form the West Bank’s spine. I was traveling with a group of fellow graduate students on an eight day trip to Palestine, and we were en route from Ramallah to Hebron, in the southern West Bank.
When we arrived in Hebron it was late afternoon. The bus wove a delicate path through the old city, descending in fits and starts through ever narrower lanes. At one point the driver negotiated a three-point turn only to double back a few metres down a little lane. Eventually the bus could go no further, and we disembarked, walking through a series of small streets and alleys straight into Hebron’s heart.
Hebron is where Israel and Palestine’s twin worlds brusquely touch. Israeli settlers live in fortified compounds above heavily-policed Palestinian shopping arcades. On Shuhada street, once the heart of Palestinian Hebron, stores lie empty.Thirty years ago it was a vibrant retail strip. Then Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians in the mosque above Abraham’s resting place, and in response to the ensuing riots the army shut the street down. Now it’s a mausoleum. Residents in the apartments above can look down on the street through cages, but must exit their homes through windows and backdoors. The street’s only patrons are soldiers. An escort of three kept close to our group.
They said they were there to to protect us. But their presence throughout this city is one of the key ingredients in its combustible cocktail of violence. Hebron is a unique study in urban disintegration, extreme policing, and inter-communal violence. It is also a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict– a conflict that, the more I saw of it, looked ever more alien to the one my father and I had debated all those times back home.
We used to talk about the history that got us to this deadlocked state in the conflict, the missed opportunities for the West to act out of principal rather than interest, the apparent impunity with which Israel exercised its occupation of Palestine. History screams at you in Hebron, but the conflict I witnessed there was neither abstract nor ancient. As our guide briefed us, I looked across the small park where we were gathered. Past strolling Israeli settlers, the nominal winners at this point in the story, whose triumph seems to consist of the right to live in fortress-like compounds behind armed soldiers keeping watch over their far away neighbours. On the other side of the park was a fence separating the city’s Palestinian residents from its Israeli ones. A little girl pressed her face against the fence looking back at us.
When I got home, I asked my father if, after all those years of debate, he believes that he understands the conflict. He thinks he does, thanks to his unique position, not totally involved but intimately affected. I asked him if he thought I understand it.
“I think you do and have a different perspective than mine and that is good”, he said. This was generous of him, and I believed him when he said it. But the truth is that neither of us do. None of the things I have read match the reality of Hebron. No theory of settler-colonial systems can accurately describe the absurdity of the city. And perhaps they do matter, these gaping world-historical questions about the moral bankruptcy of the West and the regional drain of this conflict, but standing on Shuhada street, they seem very far away.
Perhaps it is not for me and my father to project ourselves on this place that neither of us knows, not for us to claim even if it stirs feelings of moral indignity and intimate discontent. This conflict is about the girl behind the fence, and her neighbours next door, walled off, far away. Perhaps it is time for those who hope to solve this conflict, and I count my father and I among them, to realize this.
Israel and Palestine deserves its integrity. Its people deserve respect on their own terms, and to be seen as they are, not as we believe them to be. It should not be that we set on them an additional, impossible demand, of propping up the countless political programs that coopt this conflict’s symbols.
My father and I are in the company of millions debating the conflict ad nauseam. A couple of hours in Hebron are all it takes to be dispelled of the notion that we are arguing from a position of truth. Maybe some humility in the face of it all might help. God knows not much has.