When I walk out of the airport, my friend Nabil is right outside on the pick-up bay in his olive-coloured jeep – the kind of vehicle fit for extreme terrain that sometimes also passes as a “settler car”. It will later take us to the wilderness of the West Bank, across numerous permanent and temporary security barriers, bypassing settlements, along settler roads and tunnels. If you drive a big car and have a brazen look (such as not wearing a hijab), the checkpoint soldiers will normally just wave you on, without having to show your ID.
Over the next week, we won’t always be lucky enough to pass as presumed Jewish settlers on the occupied land that constitutes 22 per cent of historic Palestine pre-1948. During my last visit, it was a society at war, but now, a month since the 7 October attack by Hamas, the reality of war has penetrated deep into the consciousness of both sides. The Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road is now busier, the sirens are less frequent and people have become used to the war and its daily toll. As I write, this is now exclusively on the Palestinian side, with the enclave of Gaza seeing killings on a genocidal scale: nearly 14,000 dead in Israeli strikes, half of them children.
Nabil drives along Highway 1 toward Jerusalem and tells me that Israel and the Palestinians had already embarked on a hundred-year war early in the last century. The first East Jerusalemite graduate of the faculty of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Nabil is well-versed in the specifics of the century-old conflict. He says stoically: “Your Balfour signed away my country.” That’s why he became a corporate lawyer and not one to deal with real estate disputes.
I want this journey to be around Christianity’s holy places, starting with Bethlehem – the birthplace of the religion. But Nabil will show me that history here cannot be isolated from the collective narrative of the three religions and their followers, who’ve been engaged in an intimate enmity since time immemorial.
The eastbound Highway 1 saw some of the fiercest battles between Jewish nationalist militant groups and Arab militias in Mandatory Palestine for control of the city of Jerusalem. Most of the historic Palestinian villages were erased following Israel’s victory in the 1948 war (which followed the state’s founding) and the violent expulsion of Arab villagers by the Israeli army.
We ascend the Burma Road, and the post-war novella Khirbet Khizeh, by Israeli author S Yizhar, comes to mind. It’s set around a fictitious village where the IDF drives out the Arabs in a humiliating campaign of forced dispossession. As we leave the Tel Aviv plain, we notice the familiar signs on both sides of the road – hidden stone terraces of expunged villages, the ubiquitous planting of pine where once stood indigenous Levantine trees, under a European Jewish nationalist scheme. It reminds me of the precariousness of the nature around us, which hides a secret and a national trauma. The secret belongs to the Israeli nationalist narrative of maximalism and evasions, and the trauma to the chronicle of the displaced, dispossessed and dispersed.
The highway here is already the start of the Judaean landscape – undulating and ravishing. When I lived here, there used to be on display some of the war-era armoured military vehicles involved in breaking the siege of Jerusalem in 1948. In 2013, they were moved to a national park – itself built on a flattened Palestinian village that had been at the forefront of the resistance.
“You want a Christian journey,” says Nabil, “so why not start here?” He takes a steep turn. “Each journey is how you want to define it, Christian, Muslim, Jewish – you can take any one strand, or all of them.” We climb for a short while before the road descends towards one Arab village that remained intact after the 1948 war when surrounding dwellings were erased, remaining only in remembrance and folklore and in the pamphlets of Palestinian resistance.
We enter the Israeli-Arab village of Abu Ghosh. At its entrance stands a Benedictine monastery with a Crusader church from the twelfth century, the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller order until 1291. It was built on the Roman ruins of a village called Fontenoid. Centuries later it was renamed Abu Gosh after the dominant clan, who are almost completely Muslim. Nabil says we’re going to see one of the villagers, former mayor Issa Abu Gosh, who is the custodian of the church. Issa is not a Christian. “Everyone is a Palestinian in Palestine… then whatever religious identity you want to identify as,” he says, when I ask if there are any Christians here. We’ve parked our car in the courtyard, under a mature vine, its strands reaching forward like an old person’s outstretched hand. Perhaps its shrivelled stalk and branches are what links the past to the present. We sit underneath it, around a long table, and Issa produces strong shots of Arabic coffee from a brass pot. “When the Crusaders arrived here in the twelfth century, they decided to build a church on the first-century Roman ruins because it was the place of Emmaus – the location where Jesus was seen going around with two of his students three days after he was crucified and buried in Jerusalem. In 1187, when the Crusaders were defeated by the Muslim army of Salaheddin [Saladin], they used this location as a guesthouse, or what we call in Arabic khan, an inn. Pilgrims who arrived from Europe stopped here before heading to the holy sites of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Later on, this was a stopover for pilgrims of other denominations, on their way to Mecca. “You can’t separate religions here. They’re interlayered into our DNA. Everyone was welcomed here and everyone was ejected when their time was out.” Issa tells me this has been a frontier city since those times. That, although today there are no Christians, the city still welcomes pilgrims on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. “The church was built where the Ark of Covenant used to be,” he continues. “Close to the church we also have our ancient mosque. When the Muslims came, they wanted to prove this was no longer a Christian village. They called it Eleazar mosque – going back to its Jewish roots!” As I would learn over the course of my journey, through the cycle of arrivals, settlements and departures of religious hegemony in this land, the incumbent usually skips the most recent history because it hides the remembered acts of transgression.
Beyond that it’s ruins and recollections. The story of the Ark of the Covenant, told in the Book of Samuel, says the Israelites saw this area as a holy place because the ark – said to have contained sacred relics of the first Israelites, including two tablets of the Ten Commandments – had been kept here for twenty years after it was removed from a nearby village. It was brought here by a victorious Israelite army after retrieving it from the vanquished Philistines who had stolen it and had been cursed as a result. The biblical name for Abu Gosh was Kiriath Jearim, or Village of Forests. “King David, when he occupied Jerusalem from the Arab Canaanite tribe, the first thing he did was come to Kiriath Jearim to take the ark to the holy city,” says Issa. “The legend goes that the king used to dance and pray around the ark.” Issa is the custodian of all the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic monuments of this village. He chuckles as he narrates the history of claims and counterclaims over the land of his ancestors: the land that since prehistory has witnessed conqueror after conqueror settle, be defeated, win, fail and retaliate, in a perpetual cycle enacting their quest for identity. It’s a cycle that extends far beyond the hundred years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Listening to this history of the intertwined fates of the three Abrahamic followers, I ask Issa: “What does it make you feel, now the communities are entangled in the latest and probably most visceral war in our time?” As we speak, Issa has been glancing at the large television screen in the room, where an Arab channel is streaming live graphic footage of Israeli strikes and wounded Gazan children being taken on makeshift stretchers to overcrowded hospital wards – the hospital itself is under intense bombardment. Some of the footage is being replayed on a loop until it becomes impossible to remove from your mind. That is the purpose, I think, as I listen to what Issa says next. “I was born here, in this town. We have neighbours of three faiths. These days, with the war in Gaza, we cannot isolate our feelings from what’s going on there. If we speak about the communal relationship under the war circumstances, there’s a kind of tension between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. We have two million Arabs as Israeli citizens.
According to the Israeli basic laws, we’re supposed to be equal. But there’s discrimination and tension. We’re citizens but we’re part of the Palestinian people, we cannot detach ourselves from our nations, the Palestinians elsewhere – we share the same history, same religion, tradition, language, we have relatives on the other side. In Israel’s war on Gaza, five or six members of my family have been killed.” “It seems every Palestinian has lost a relative or a loved one in Gaza,” I say. “You have to remember, most of the people in Gaza are refugees. We left during the first war of 1948. Then again pushed out after the 1967 war. Now they’re facing again the tragedy of displacement, being moved off their land…”
As I sit with Issa, Israel is carrying out a massive, combined aerial and ground invasion into Gaza. Since the brutal, macabre attack by Hamas on southern Israel in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 240 people taken hostage, the Israeli military has responded violently. Although it says it’s aiming to eliminate Hamas from Gaza, the United Nations says Israel’s war on the Strip is “wiping out whole families and entire neighbourhoods”. The number of dead on the Gazan side is already more than ten times that of civilians murdered by Hamas on 7 October.
One after another, Abu Gosh residents come and tell me they’ve lost relatives and friends in Gaza. “We all have survivor’s guilt,” some say. No one is enjoying life. The cafes and restaurants, which the village is known for and are visited in normal times not only by the locals but also by Israeli Jews and tourists from far and near, are soulless. Most of the places have been closed since the start of the war.
Nabil remains quiet during the ten-kilometre drive to Jerusalem. For now, he won’t tell me why and we take the new Highway 16 which forks off Highway 1 toward West Jerusalem, making the journey from Tel Aviv much shorter. We emerge from a long tunnel into the Katamon neighbourhood, near to where I’ll be staying with Hami, who teaches philosophy of religion at Tel Aviv University, and her partner, Shlomo, a human rights lawyer.
The last section of the drive passes along the street known as Emek Rafaim – the Valley of Ghosts. Issa’s last comments linger in my mind as we drive. Among the refugees in Gaza there are those whose families once lived in what is today’s Israel, including in some of the majestic houses that line this street in which my friends live.
Nabil’s face is noncommittal as he says goodbye. Behind the dispassionate mask I guess he’s thinking of the cancelled Palestinian map. “The Hebrew map of Israel constitutes one stratum in my consciousness, underlaid by another stratum of the previous Arab map,” writes Meron Benvenisti in Conflicts and Contradictions, as he reflects on the irony of his mapmaker Zionist father’s mission to “establish a claim”, which was “based on the simple feeling of belonging in the land, of being there.”
My friends’ home is a typical old stately Palestinian house that has new occupiers. For Shlomo, it hasn’t been an easy choice. “You see, Palestinian memory is tugging at left-wing Israelis sense of justice,” he tells me as he takes me for a walk through Emek Rafaim in the morning, recounting the history of the past occupiers and their “phantom” relationship with today’s Israelis.
I ask him if he feels guilty, particularly as a human rights lawyer, to live in a house whose former occupants are among the Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza and dispersed around the world? I asked him this question once before, when I made a film on his work for Palestinian land rights and his legal campaign in court against Israel’s extension of the security wall across the West Bank. His answer remains the same today: for him, Israel of 1948 is where he lives, and his house, although an absentee property, falls within the “legal” boundary of the state. The perspective of guilt arising from appropriation without reparation is tangible, but Shlomo says: “I have to draw a line somewhere.”
That guilt, the denial by Israel of the Palestinian right of return, has appeared as a recurrent theme in the literature – both fiction and non-fiction – of the Israeli Left. Quoting from their narrative, Shlomo tells me that Palestinian memory is buried in the subliminal fear of Israeli society, and every time there’s a conflict it unburies itself and points to the blatant unfairness and shortsightedness of the state. Here, says Shlomo, inequity and complacency – justified and guilt-ridden – are juxtaposed in everyday life.
“In the west of Jerusalem, there were many villages – you can see that there were buildings and they were demolished,” he says. “There are no signs of what happened or what was there before. And if there is a sign, it’ll be a blue plaque of the history of the place before the Muslims came. Before Muslims it was probably Christian, before Christian maybe it was Jewish. The Jewish remains are negligible ones. But they’ll establish it was a Jewish town. The fact that it was Muslim for a thousand years, and most – well, 90 per cent – of the remains are of the Islamic period, you won’t find it mentioned anywhere, except in a handful of books by left-wing Israelis.”
A we walk deeper into the alleyways of the German Colony, Shlomo tells me in his quiet, decisive voice how the history of many Palestinian villages goes back to the Jewish time – 2,000 years ago. The archaeology in Jerusalem and the rest of historic Palestine is political, state-sponsored and heavily funded to find as many Jewish remains as possible, bypassing the most recent Islamic history. Listening to Shlomo, I take in the familiar streets with new curiosity. The state kept all the German names of the streets here. (It was named after German Templers, near the Greek Colony, named after Greek Orthodox Christians – both settled here under Mandatory Palestine.) As you enter, a huge road sign displaying Hamoshava Hagermanit, the German Colony, welcomes you. But a hundred metres north, the old street names have been changed to Jewish ones, Shlomo says: Talbiyeh is the old Palestinian neighbourhood around which grew what is today’s city centre in Jewish West Jerusalem.
We wander around looking at the tall arched windows of the palatial old Arab houses, intersected by more humble two-storey “typical Bavarian” dwellings. They’re known as Templer houses after the Lutheran Christians who settled here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“The Templers were arrested during World War II by the British, because they supported the Nazis, and they were expelled to Australia,” Shomo tells me. There are no remains of the Templers in today’s German Colony. The British had confiscated the houses, followed by the same act by Israel when it was founded. But when Jewish rulers of the state of Israel took over they kept the German names of the streets, despite the inhabitants” Nazi sympathies. “And they erased the old Arabic names of the ‘confiscated’ Palestinian houses, even though they had nothing to do with the Jewish holocaust.” Shlomo says that changing place names was considered a sacred task by the early Zionists. The trauma of holocaust survivors, of feeling unsafe amid hostile neighbours, was passed on to future generations as Israel’s national narrative.
“It all has to do with the Nakba [the Catastrophe] memory, of what was here before 1948,” he continues. Immediately before 1948 was the history that Israeli governments have been intent on erasing. But in their efforts to, as their claim goes, populate “a land without people” with Jews, they are in fact cancelling the history of one of the most continuously inhabited places on earth.
Germany pays billions of dollars in compensation to Israel, which explains today’s prominent German street names in Emek Rafaim pasted on the walls of Palestinian houses whose former owners have no right to return or to reparations. And some of those absentees’ children’s children, facing Israel’s fierce bombardment of Gaza, are displaced and dispersed once again, 75 years on. They walk along the north-south road, ironically named after the Muslim conqueror of Jerusalem, Salaheddin, to cross the Wadi Gaza river to the south of the enclave, to makeshift refugee camps. In 1948, 700,000 were displaced and dispersed. In recent weeks, more than a million have already left north Gaza under Israeli order, for the south. Palestinian and Arab media are full of reports of suspected population transfer; the fear that, as the humanitarian situation worsens, those freshly turned into refugees from north Gaza will be ejected into Sinai in Egypt, never to return. And who would want to return to a place already flattened by Israeli bombs and tanks, and which may remain under siege for an unforeseeable future?
Bethlehem lies south of Emek Rafaim, which used to be only a twenty-minute drive from my house, through the wall checkpoint. With my foreign passport, I could go in and out with a minimum of hassle. But that is now fully blocked off since the start of the Israel-Gaza war. The only entry and exit point to the holiest of cities for Christians is via the so-called Tunnel checkpoint in Beit Jala, in the northwest of Bethlehem. It’s the main checkpoint for settlers entering Jerusalem from the southern West Bank settlements of Gush Etzion. But it’s also used by East Jerusalemite Palestinians and foreigners, and, in peacetime, the lucky West Bankers who have work permits for Israel.
I am back with Nabil. This time the journey takes considerably longer – more than an hour – as we have to travel many kilometres to the Beit Jala entrance and wait behind a long line of cars. Once we get through, we pass hilltop outposts, with emboldened settlers in large cars with their guns deliberately pointed at the passing cars. The main road to Bethlehem used to be congested with pilgrims, but it is now eerily peopleless. The young boys who used to descend upon tourists, trying to sell chewing gum and paper tissues, are nowhere to be seen. It takes another 40 minutes to arrive at the same point on the Bethlehem side of the wall, to where we’d been on the Jerusalem side.
Against the eight-metre-high, concrete separation wall and beneath the watchtower of the main checkpoint, now closed due to the war, we are meeting the founder of Wi’am, a Palestinian centre for conflict transformation via peaceful mediation.
A large man with a warm smile welcomes us. “My father ran out of names after eleven children. You can call me by either name – first or the second!” says Zoughbi Zoughbi. We’re offered strong shots of Arabic coffee in tiny cups. These shots seem to be the Palestinian lifeline amid war and barriers, checkpoints and security walls. “Our roots go back to the sixth century. But the name Zoughbi came from the sixteenth century. We’re natives of Bethlehem. When people ask me when my ancestors became Christians, I tell them, my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was the babysitter of Jesus.”
We laugh as Zoughbi continues: “We’re Jebusite Canaanites, before becoming Christians – converted by the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ. Many of my relatives had emigrated to Latin America because of the persecution of the Ottoman rule, then of the British Mandate, and then of the Israeli rule. We witnessed three occupations as local Palestinians since the time of Christ. And I hope Israel’s will be the last one.”
I ask him if he saw the Israeli occupation as the same as others who ruled this land since even before modern history began. Zoughbi first tells me that the Crusaders, although of the same faith, carried out mass killings of eastern Christians, then adds, “For me Israel is a colonial, expansionist, racist, apartheid government.” He looks at me accusingly, saying Britain should correct the mistake it made at the time of the Balfour Declaration of not specifying a sovereign Arab state alongside a homeland for Jews; that Britain had failed to fulfil its obligation. “I am very inclusive, I believe everyone should live here whose families had already been here before 1917.”
In between our conversations and more shots of black coffee, we hear snippets of news of fresh bloodshed in Gaza. Al-Shifa hospital is under intense strikes and premature babies are without incubators, wrapped in green and placed on a blanket in the arms of medical professionals; others are running around, many bloodstained, some with their limbs blown off, and being moved about on stretchers by panicking doctors and volunteers. These are graphic images that I didn’t see or hear about in the cafes or houses on Emek Rafaim. We pause our conversation as Zoughbi picks up a call and talks about the situation in Gaza. When he stops, his voice is somewhat drier and without the wisecracking spirit.
“Three days ago, my friend Ilham – she’s Gazan, in her eighties – Ilham Farah, a music teacher… She left the church to go to her apartment to take a shower. She was shot in the leg. For hours, she was bleeding. No one came to help. I don’t know how she died but according to some reports, a tank drove over her. I don’t know.” Zoughbi’s voice trembles, it trails off and he can’t continue. The rest of the story of how Elham died I find in various newspapers, including the Catholic press. They mostly tally with Zoughbi’s account. The daughter of Hanna Farah, a well-known Palestinian poet, lived in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza all her life. She came under Israeli fire on 12 November, outside the Holy Family Church in Gaza City. No one from the church could come to her help because of the intensity of the bombing.
When Zoughbi regains his voice, he is angrier. The earlier comic self has vanished in the helpless and, to some extent, hopeless tone of indignation. He looks me directly into the eye: “If holy places are not protected, if hospitals are not protected…where is your democracy? Where is your international law? Where is your humanitarian law? Where are all of these values you preach?”
Zoughbi tells me that it’s the political and economic instability caused by the “colonial power” that has caused most Christians to leave Bethlehem for the West, and not oppression by Palestinian Muslims as the West likes to report. “[But] I am not leaving this city, this is my home, I’m not leaving it,” Zoughbi repeats several times, as if to convince himself. He has an American wife, but he will not live in America, he tells me. “I am not a minority, I belong to the land. This is my home.”
Outside Zoughbi’s beautiful home, with its arched windows and ornate staircase, is a yard with an ancient walnut tree. “Will this walnut tree drive the wall nuts?” says a white plaque at its base. Before the wall was built after the Second Intifada, 2000-2005, Zoughbi could see the holy site of Rachel’s tomb. Now it’s walled in for Jewish pilgrims. The view from the front door and all the windows is blocked by the concrete separation barrier, and observation towers where Israeli soldiers are on duty day and night. A quarter of Zoughbi’s land has been taken by the “apartheid and annexation wall”. His face darkens again, as he says: “How would the Jews feel if we built a high concrete wall at the entrance to their holy city? They would call us anti-Semitic, right? But here, they built an eight-metre-high wall with watchtowers and the most rigorous checkpoint in the West Bank, at the gateway to the most sacred city to Christians. And the world is silent.”
Zoughbi walks me outside to say goodbye, telling me stories of his childhood. “One day we’ll live together, one state or two state, but until then I want to celebrate my life in the city of my ancestors.” He inspects the old walnut tree. Many of its newer offshoots are pushing against the barrier, as if in collective resentment. I try to imagine the open fields with many more indigenous trees where the wall now stands, in which this self-proclaimed descendant of sixth-century Christians from Bethlehem played as a boy.
All the businesses are shut. Not even a single tourist bus is in sight in the vast car park in Manger Square, outside the Church of the Nativity. We enter the majestic church through its dwarf door and down to the manger site, the spot where Christians believe Jesus was born. Two policemen are sitting on the raised chapel at the back. They look at us without curiosity. Nabil and I walk around the dark and ancient quarters of various Christian denominations. We hear a nun speak Arabic. Nabil says from her accent she must be an Egyptian. A Copt? The veiled nun smiles beatifically. We walk on and crisscross between Catholic, Armenian, Greek Orthodox and other quarters of Christianity’s branches, along the old cloisters, and then back into the main church. Still no tourists, and now the two policemen have gone for lunch.
I meet a group of people, the staff, in the only cafe that is open, just across Manger Square. After buying some souvenirs – two conjoined hearts made of olive wood, typical of Bethlehem craft, and a bottle of Cremisan red from the local winery – I ask how they felt about 7 October. Their silence is that of resignation. I follow their gaze out over the vast patio with empty tables devoid of pilgrims or tourists to the oversize statue of baby Jesus in a glass box, surrounded by little donkeys and other miniature nativity figures.
Just one replies. “Every day is 7 October for us Palestinians, it has been so for 75 years. We’ve got used to daily violence and systematic decimation of our collective self,” says the voice. It belongs to a Superior of one of the Christian denominations.
Nabil suggests we head back, in case something happens and the soldiers close the sole open checkpoint to Jerusalem and we’re stuck here. It’s late afternoon and there might be rush-hour traffic and delay. But on the way we decide to eat the renowned eclairs from Patisserie Handal, run by an old Christian family, and visit Shepherds Field church, which commemorates the announcement of Jesus’s birth, in Beit Sahour. We find the once buzzing Christian-majority village under lockdown and empty.
From Beit Sahour we see the road to Jerusalem. But we can’t get onto it – a heap of building rubble has blocked the route. People get out of their cars, climb and walk to the other side and take another car on the other side. Occupation realities, says Nabil. He stops the car and walks to the other side of the road, as I take photos of the rubble blockade, with its waiting cars.
Rejoining Nabil a few minutes later, I’m surprised to find him photographing some rock formations in an excavated building site. He takes his time, aiming his phone camera from various angles, while I wait, look at the white rows of high-rise, sprawling buildings of the Jewish settlement of Har Homa, built on land annexed by the Jerusalem municipality after the 1967 Six-Day War.
Back at the Tunnel checkpoint in Beit Jala, we’re let through without having to show our IDs. They think we’re settlers. On the other side, Jerusalem’s wider avenues jump into view, as if we’d never gone to the West Bank.
The following morning, after coffee in the garden, Shlomo says: “The Israeli state built these tunnels on the green line, so the settlers don’t have to feel the reality of occupation, as if it’s all uninterrupted Israel.”
Then I see a BBC newsflash on my phone: Four wounded after gunmen attack checkpoint near Jerusalem. Three gunmen attacked the Tunnel checkpoint between Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.” Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, later claim responsibility for the shooting. One Israeli soldier was killed, and five others injured when the gunmen aboard a car opened fire. The shooters were all “neutralised”, according to Israeli police. Police also said the car the men were shooting from was full of weapons, ammunition and axes and knives. The rumour spread that they were coming to carry out an impromptu attack on West Jerusalem. That explains why when I was walking back to the German Colony neighbourhood there was not a soul around. And it wasn’t Shabbat.
I look at the beautiful bougainvillea in Shlomo and Hami’s back garden. It’s vibrant, multicoloured shades seem to symbolise the multitude of voices I’ve heard here, on the Israeli side, and earlier, in barricaded Bethlehem.
“Feeling unsafe is Israel’s national trauma.”
“Every day is 7 October here.”
When I arrived in Jerusalem in 2005 and moved to my first house on Emek Rafaim, Valley of Ghosts, I remember trying to tell myself that the ghosts wouldn’t be upset seeing me, because as a South Asian I was not a party to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – neither historically nor emotionally. It seems the ghosts are also not upset seeing Hami, Shlomo’s partner, who teaches philosophy of religion at Tel Aviv university. She tells me they pass her by every day, looking at her as if she were their guest – as if she were in an old khan, an inn from the bygone times, which is this magnificent house, left behind by Palestinian refugees: “I like the three voices of all the religions that have lived here, hearing the Muslim muezzin’s call to pray, Jewish prayers, church bells. For me it feels like Jerusalem is beyond its inhabitants, beyond religion and politics. Somehow this city ridicules all of us. We’re just guests, guests coming and staying here for a while then we go away. It has seen everything, and it’ll see many more things after we go. I feel that it’s a place that renders my existence very temporary.”
Hami says that over the millennia this place has absorbed lots of secrets – such as flattened villages reintroduced as “national parks” and lots of “poison” of different kinds and yet it has remained “holy” in its own right. Jerusalem’s holiness transcends any historical or communal locality.
I ask now what do the ghosts say to her? “I hear them, Muslim ghosts, Jewish ghosts, Christian ghosts,” she says. “They say ‘Don’t take your stay too seriously. It’s not really your territory. It doesn’t belong to you.’”
Hami tells me that the perspective of time passing “renders all of our claims to belonging futile”. But for those who live under both a physical and mental state of siege, time is now at a standstill. Generations are caught in the vortex of time, waiting for the long occupation, the hundred years of war to end.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi seems to be the bestselling book in the Educational Bookshop on Salaheddin Street in East Jerusalem. I sit in the cafe’s study area upstairs and watch the customers and their choices of books. What do people buy when their country is engaged in a fratricidal war? Can we even call it that? Are Israeli Jews the metaphorical brothers of the Palestinians? Like the quarrelling biblical brothers, Jacob and Esau? One stole the other’s birthright, and twenty years on, despite reunion, the brothers could not return home together. Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a civil war or a war between civilians?
I put these questions to the proprietor of the bookshop, Ahmad Muna. He tells me that Palestinians and Jews are at a turning point: “This is not the first time we’re at war, but this time it is unlike any other previous wars,” he says. “This time there are clear objectives on the Israeli part. They want to (a) completely destroy Hamas – which was never an objective in the past, (b) prolonged ground invasion, and (c) with previous wars we could have seen an end by now after so much bloodshed and destruction, displacement of two million people, [but] this time despite 40 days of fighting [at the time of writing] we do not see an end.”
“Israel will call off the occupation when it has lost a considerable amount, which means when the citizens will not tolerate any more body bags of soldiers.” The young son of the founder of the bookshop goes to the window and to sell another copy of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It’s probably the last copy, because he then puts in the window instead The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction.
He gleefully sells me a copy. The collection of short stories paints the writers’ lives on “a remorseless stretch of land” and their “hemmed-in horizons”, in spite of which they “do not tire of loving life” – a remarkable trait that is often referred to as the Palestinian sumud, steadfastness.
After 7 October, the war has spilled over to every corner of the Palestinian territory, everyone is involved, everyone has a say. Neutrality is not an option when everyone I meet has lost a family member or a friend. With the number of dead in Gaza reaching nearly 14,000 and half of them are children, the overwhelming grief has made even the most apolitical person – Muslim or Christian – get politically involved.
Neshan Balian is a respectable member of the Armenian Christian community in the old city of Jerusalem. His family fled Turkey in the 1920s after what is known as the Armenian genocide. They found a safe home in the Armenian quarter in Mandatory Palestine. Despite multiple changes of governments and nationalities in the family’s long diasporic history, Balians established themselves as the owners of an exclusive Armenian pottery business, with a busy kiln and factory in an affluent district of East Jerusalem, opposite the old American consulate. For his family’s success story, he says, he is grateful to the Israeli government. Israel has recognised the Armenian art that his family brought to Jerusalem. Neshan shows me a 2003 commemorative postage stamp dedicated to his mother, Marie, by the Israeli postal authority. But he says he’s not going to stay silent and watch the killing of thousands of children in the name of “Israel has the right to defend itself” – the rhetoric Western leaders have been parroting to allow Israel to continue its bombing campaign in Gaza.
“Genocide is being done in the name of the Torah,” Neshan says when I visit him in his shop. He shows me some Israeli TikTok videos where rabbis appear to be citing biblical references to exonerate Israel for the killing of Gazan children.
Neshan takes me on a history tour to Tantour, Der Yassin, Castel or al-Qastal, Kfar Qassem… the places Israel had ravaged in past wars. “This is not the first time we’re facing a war,” he says. “But it was never on this scale and with a double, parallel war on social media to justify a full-scale genocide in Gaza.” He becomes emotional and, like many other Palestinians I meet on this trip, demonstrates a sense of powerlessness. He says: “I suffered very little under Israel as an Armenian. But my gratitude to Israel shouldn’t stop me from being vocal about this atrocious war.”
Neshan says the new generation of Israelis see this as God against the Palestinians. “Why should we pay the price for European holocaust? Why is Germany a blind supporter of a state that is murdering thousands of civilians in the name of retaliation for 7 October? And what about the displaced? Will Germany take a million and a half Gazan refugees in? It gives billions to Israel to make up for the crime of the holocaust. Perhaps it should make good the destruction of Palestinian displacement in the same way? After all, without the European holocaust there wouldn’t have been the hundred years war on Palestine.”
Neshan compares the collective punishment of the Palestinian people to the slaughtering by the soldiers of Herod, king of Judaea, of countless innocent children in an attempt to be rid of the infant Jesus. He is inconsolable. The war has also come to his front door. He says a Zionist Australian-Israeli tycoon struck a dark real estate deal with an Armenian priest who sold 25 per cent of the Armenian land in the old city for a Jewish building project. “The building will house – who else? – ultra-right-wing Jewish settlers,” says Neshan. “They’re taking Gaza by bullets and bombs, and the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem with real estate sharks with a Zionist agenda.”
Menachem Lorberbaum is a fifth-generation Jerusalemite Jewish philosopher, poet and theologian. His poems memorialise erased Palestinian villages, which lie beneath so many Israeli “national parks”; they reintroduce the Israeli nation in denial to “the Nakba memory”. “It’s impossible to live without a narrative,” he says. “We’re storytelling creatures. We’re constantly making sense of lives with stories. Outside our life, stories or time have no meaning. But how do we go about telling the story?” He tells me that his father as a young soldier was sent to clean up Deir Yassin, which was razed after a massacre by Jewish paramilitary groups of more than a hundred Arab villagers in April 1948. Today, in bizarre irony, an Israeli public psychiatric hospital stands where the village used to be. Menachem recites one of his favourite poems, Kfar Hazé, In This Village, to me, in Hebrew, a verse of which, with his help, I translate:
“Today the insane sleep in the village,
Blood and screams disrupt their rest.
They hallucinate homeowners long gone;
And drivers of convoys long passed.”
What am I supposed to think? Is this a metaphor for the times past or the times to come? The former homeowners may show up any time and disrupt Israel’s rest?
Finally, Nabil takes me to Ramallah – which has seen a number of violent demonstrations since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, and the borders have been frequently closed by Israel’s military. The main Kallandia checkpoint is still closed but, as always with West Bank cities, there’ll always be some settler passageways open, so we decide to take the sole entry point to Ramallah via a Palestinian village called Hezmi and the circuitous Route 437.
At a height of nearly 900 metres, Ramallah was once a Crusader abode and had a prominent Christian lineage, including the establishment of the modern city in the sixteenth century by the descendants of an Arab Christian clan, the Ghassanids. It is today the administrative capital of Palestine. Like elsewhere in the West Bank, it is physically a ghost town, with few cars, and cafes and restaurants empty. The beautifully kept, tree-lined mausoleum of Yasser Arafat, which we pass on our way to Al-Bireh neighbourhood, cannot paste over the tears and blood that have been shed over decades of negotiations, without a glimmer of hope. There is only a forced state, that is Israel, and a forever failed state, that is Palestine.
I want to break Nabil’s silence. So we go to 99 Cafe in Al-Bireh, one of only two restaurants open in a beautiful new development. We order a narghile, or shisha, a traditional hookah pipe with lemon-mint-flavoured tobacco.
“Do they have beer, Nabil?” I ask. “Maybe you’ll then explain to me why you’ve been so quiet during the whole journey?”
He laughs and says: “There’s no beer in Al-Bireh!”
I realise this is a more conservative district and alcohol is not on sale. He settles for a “Spanish latte”. I wait for him to speak as I smoke my shisha, and watch young, fashionably dressed men and women around two tables smoking and watching Gaza footage on television.
Then I hear Nabil’s voice through the thick, mint-scented smoke cloud between us: “What will you do if you’re told that sixteen of your family members are killed in one bomb attack, 2 November, on Bureij refugee camp?”
The line from Menachem’s poem jumps up and unsettles me: “Blood and screams disrupt their rest.”
Lipika Pelham is a historian, journalist, filmmaker and the author of “Passing: An Alternative History of Identity” (2021), “Jerusalem on the Amstel: The Quest for Zion in the Dutch Republic” (2019), “Conversations Across Place” (2021), and “The Unlikely Settler” (2014)
