Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. Colm Toibin

be almost a straight shot, it could be a lot of checkpoints, you never know. When I first relocated here, the telecommunications company I worked for was based in Nablus.” Sam had studied computer technology at Youngstown State University, and had been tempted to make the leap, in 1993, by provisions in the Oslo accords for some degree of Palestinian control over telecommunication operations. “That’s where the owners were, so that’s where we built the company. I made the drive every day, morning and night. So for me, Nablus is forty minutes away. It’s supposed to be a straight shot, this road we’re driving on is actually called the Nablus Road, it goes from here to Nablus. Only now it doesn’t, not directly. We have to make a detour to the east … passing through checkpoints. And it’s going to take longer than forty minutes. Or it might not. You never know.”

      I checked the time on my phone and saw that, thanks to the cellular tower in the settlement on the hilltop behind the Bahours’ house, I had a strong 4G signal through Cellcom, an Israeli carrier whose SIM card I had purchased on landing at Ben Gurion Airport. If I had been a law-abiding Palestinian I would have had only an Edge, or 2G, connection, since Israel would not allocate the electromagnetic spectrum necessary for Palestinian carriers to provide 4G or even 3G service.

      “They say what they always say,” Sam told me when I asked about Israeli restrictions on Palestinian bandwidth. “‘Security.’” If part of the business of tyranny is to bankrupt certain words of meaning, then in Israel and Palestine under occupation the most destitute word is probably security. Sam’s voice took on that Edgar Kennedy note of effortful forbearance. “Of course, any Palestinian can go to the store, buy an Israeli SIM card, plug it in, get a signal from a settlement. We have 3G, so what exactly is the security concern?”

      Sam explained that American presidents, envoys, and secretaries of state, from both parties, going back as far as Condoleezza Rice, had seen the absurdity of the argument against licensing the 3G spectrum because of “security” and had, one after the other—“Rice, Bush, Obama, Kerry, Mitchell, the whole nine yards”—waded into the weeds of the issue, to no effect. “Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving on to 5G now, here we are, still begging the Israeli side for 3G service. It’s almost embarrassing.”

      I wondered if the “security” at issue in this instance might not be the security of revenue flowing from Palestinian pockets to Israeli cellular providers, whose advantage in bandwidth, at least, was being protected by the Israeli government. Sam conceded that might be part of it. There is no question that the near-total dominance over Palestinian markets enjoyed by Israeli companies, like Israel’s control over the exploitation of Palestinian land, water, and mineral resources, is an important source of revenue for Israel. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been so incredibly expensive—in 2010, Newsweek magazine estimated the total cost since 1967 to be in the neighborhood of ninety billion dollars—that one could hardly blame the Israeli government, Sam observed dryly, for trying to make a little money off it. But his next words made me think that from his point of view my cynicism came a little too easily, that it might, in its way, be as unearned as my liberty.

      “The politicians who are supposed to be solving the greater conflict have all, over time, been dragged into this, really, it’s a side discussion, with Israel,” he said. “‘Let the Palestinians have their 3G frequency.’ The Israelis, in their excellent strategizing, pulled the politicians away from the main topic, into something which is minor. Instead of … solving the conflict.”

      Despite the restrictions imposed on Palestinian providers and the unfair competitive advantage of unfettered Israeli companies, PALTEL, the telecom company that Sam set up after his arrival in Palestine, managed to grow and to thrive, becoming Palestine’s largest private-sector employer. “It became overly successful,” Sam said, and its success was actually one of the reasons for Sam’s decision, in 1997, to move on and try something new. He was as uncomfortable “making excessive profit on a people who are occupied” as his father had been forty years earlier, working Southern backroads and Appalachian hollers for the family business, getting twenty-five, thirty, or even forty dollars, on a good day, for a five-dollar Japanese wristwatch. “I didn’t come here to make a million dollars,” Sam told me. “Not every businessman or investor has that kind of mind-set.”

       3.

      The next stop on Sam Bahour’s pocket tour of his cage, after the Palestinian identity card and the stamp in his US passport that had put an end to his entering and leaving the occupied territories as an American citizen, turned out to be a slip of printed paper, heavily watermarked and intricately Spirographed, somewhere between an employee ID badge and a modern banknote.

      “I’m a business consultant, right?” he said, signaling to the young man working the counter at Rukab’s. We had finished our strangely malleable, taffy-like ice cream, all those colorful little scoops dyed in a mad Muppets palette. It was time for coffee. “I travel. For the work I do, I have a lot of business in Jerusalem. Obviously, I’m going to want to go to Jerusalem. But now I’m a full-scale Palestinian, right? I have to stay in my Ramallah cage, I’m not allowed to go into the Jerusalem cage. So what do I do?”

      The counterman approached, a certain deference unmistakable in his manner toward Sam. He leaned in with a soft Arabic word of inquiry and Sam softly ordered coffee around the table. Speaking English to his visitors—most of us Americans like him—Sam seemed entirely a businessman from Youngstown, Ohio, a perfect Rotarian, genial, expansive, eloquent, an unexpected touch of the professor about him. But ordering coffee in his soft-spoken Arabic, or striding on his long stems through the center of Ramallah, at least a head taller than all the men around him, many of whom had seemed to show him the same gentle deference as the counterman at Rukab’s, there was something princely about Sam Bahour. A prince in exile, I thought, then, No, that’s wrong, of course; he’s home, he’s not in exile. Yet somehow the word seemed to accord with his demeanor. He had left Youngstown behind him—the city of his birth and education, where he had first met his wife, where his parents and his sister still lived—to come and live in the house of his forefathers, in the neighborhood that had been the home of his imagination as a child. But did he really feel that he belonged in al-Bireh? More important, did he feel—could any “full-scale Palestinian” feel—that al-Bireh, ringed by Israeli settlements and checkpoints, belonged to him?

      “So I look around the Ramallah business community,” he told us, resuming the tour, “and look, I see people going to Jerusalem. I’m like, ‘How do you do that? I was told I could not go to Jerusalem.’ And they said, ‘No, Sam, there’s something called the permit system.’ What’s the permit system? You bring an invitation letter from someone in Jerusalem or Israel, fill out a stupid one-page application, go to the Israeli military, take your ID with you, and you apply, and either you get a permit, or you don’t.”

      He reached into the billfold again and took out a second note of the strange tender of his captivity. He took out another, and then a third. He dug around with his fingers and came out with a whole little pile of them, a jackpot of winning tickets in a bitter lottery, all of them expired.

      “These are all permits,” he said. “I have many more tens of them at home. I’ve promised my kids that I would wallpaper my office with permits.” It was a laugh line—probably an old one—but he didn’t sound like he really thought it was funny. We laughed at it nevertheless. “A permit is a single piece of paper issued by the same people that issued this.” He held up the green sleeve that held his identity card. “But a permit, usually, is only good for one day, from five o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock at night. I can use it to travel to Jerusalem, as long as I’m back by seven. If I don’t come back at seven p.m., they could arrest me. If I got caught coming in late, and the soldier who caught me wanted to arrest me, I would never get a permit again.”

      The counterman returned with a tray crowded with coffee in tiny cups. Sam watched approvingly as the counterman distributed them to everyone who had wanted coffee.

      “So I start getting permits. It’s a headache, and it takes a lot of time—the control of time is one of the biggest weapons of the occupation.