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

no. And then a whole day for the trip to Jerusalem, because you have to go on foot. So I can never make an appointment for an exact time, I can’t make a two p.m. meeting. I have to say, ‘I’ll meet you between twelve and three.’

      “But it’s not like I go to Jerusalem often. I have diabetes, you know what that means, right? It means, guaranteed, you have to use the restroom! If I get stuck at the checkpoint and there’s fifty people behind me, and fifty people in front of me, I get frustrated, because when I have to use the restroom, I can’t go back the way I came, and of course I can’t go forward. You’re in an area that is as wide as this.” He held up his hands separated by a gap the width of his shoulders. “There’s a gate in front of you, a gate behind you. A fence all around you. You don’t turn around when you have fifty people behind you, waiting, one by one, and start pushing, saying, ‘Please, back up, I need to use the restroom.’ It doesn’t work like that. These are people who have to cross every day. I think I’m frustrated? They are frustrated to the nth degree.

      “So, I don’t go very often.” He slid the pile of expired permits back into the billfold. “I stay in my Ramallah cage, right? The way I’m supposed to.”

      If Youngstown, Ohio, had not felt like home because it was not al-Bireh, Palestine, al-Bireh could never feel like home as long as it was under occupation. Sam Bahour was an imposing man with a quietly arresting presence who towered over the people around him, but he was not a prince in exile. He was a giant in a cage.

       4.

      Not long after leaving PALTEL, Sam was approached by some investors who had purchased land in Ramallah and were looking to build a Western-style supermarket. It would be the first of its kind in Palestine. They wanted Sam’s help putting the project together.

      “The first thing I asked was, ‘Why me?’ They said, ‘We happen to have looked at your CV; the last thing on your CV before you came here is that you worked for ten years for your dad, and your dad is a grocer.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’” In his recounting of the moment the admission sounded reluctant. “That’s a good lesson,” he told me, in a rueful aside, “always delete the last thing on your CV.” I laughed and Sam, just barely, smiled. “They said, ‘It’s a year-and-a-half commitment, put it together, just be project manager for us.’”

      The property they had in mind was in al-Bireh. It was in a part of town called al-Balou that the municipality had slated for development as a commercial district. Land there was expensive. Sam realized that, given real estate costs, a supermarket alone could never be profitable. Palestinians bought their food in street markets and specialty shops, from butchers and bakers and fruiterers; one-stop shopping at a supermarket might take time to catch on. So he persuaded the investors to imagine something even more unprecedented: a shopping plaza, a minimall that would incorporate a number of separate retail outlets and restaurants of various kinds—a Cineplex, a consumer electronics shop, a Domino’s Pizza—anchored by the proposed new supermarket. There would be an indoor play area, a themed “fun zone” with climbing tubes and ball pits, where parents could amuse their children or safely park them while they shopped. In Sam’s vision, as he laid it out for the investors, this would be only the first of a half-dozen or more Plazas they might, in time, put up across the nation that seemed, after the intifada, to be imminent. As he re-created it for me so many years later, it was still possible, despite all the ensuing compromises, conflicts, heartbreaks, and disillusionments, to catch an echo of the audacity, the thrilling scope, the sheer hopefulness, inherent in Sam’s pitch to the investors.

      “We decided to call the supermarket ‘Bravo,’” Sam told me, his smile less weary now, more sly. “Because with what we went through to build it, we deserved some congratulations.”

      The architects’ original plan for the first proposed Plaza showed a U-shaped structure, but as the second intifada broke out and costs escalated—every nail and plank and length of rebar had to be imported from Israel, finessed through the labyrinth of checkpoints and regulations, with deliveries constantly subject to delay, diversion, cancellation—Sam was obliged to amputate one of the U’s legs, and settle for an L. Then there turned out not to be enough money to engineer the structure adequately to include the Cineplex; the Cineplex was dropped from the plan. The architects’ design called for the Plaza, like any self-respecting building in Ramallah, to be clad in the locally quarried limestone known as Jerusalem stone, but it was going to take a lot of limestone to cover so large a building (even after it had lost a leg)—more limestone, unfortunately, than the project could afford.

      The building site lay between two streets that had been laid out but not yet rezoned as commercial; one was set to be a main drag and the other a service road. Sam shocked the investors by suggesting that only the side of the Plaza facing the main thoroughfare needed to be stone-clad; nobody but teamsters and store employees was ever going to see the place from the back. After the investors had recovered from their shock, Sam went to the municipality to confirm which of the as-yet-unbuilt streets would be the principal thoroughfare. He oriented the unclad, plain-stucco rear of the structure accordingly. No sooner was the Plaza completed than, all along the alleged “service road,” glittery new office buildings and commercial spaces started to crop up. The municipality, it turned out, had misinformed Sam, or changed its mind; and so the first supermarket-anchored shopping plaza ever built in Palestine shows its naked backside to the world.

      It wasn’t just artificially inflated building costs and the contortions of a stunted and questionable bureaucracy; every aspect of getting the first Bravo store up and running was made harder by the occupation. A properly modern supermarket must have a modern point-of-sale system, and while internationally there were many vendors to choose among, none was willing to take on the challenge of providing long-distance after-sale support to the occupied territory, not in the thick of an armed uprising. Through his solid business contacts—he holds an MBA from Tel Aviv University—Sam found a “local” firm, Retalix, based in Ra’anana, Israel, that was prepared to commit to Bravo. When the time came to install the software, however, none of Retalix’s Israeli IT staff was permitted to travel to al-Bireh to perform the installation.

      “So, being an IT person, even though the GM of the company shouldn’t be doing this, I became the liaison by phone, by fax, by e-mail, between the supplier over there, and the technical people on my side. And we did it, it was the first retail bar code system in Palestine. The head of their company, a company with customers all around the world, he was so amazed that we could do something like that, in the middle of an armed uprising, they put it in their annual report; it said, ‘We have entered the Middle East.’”

      The memory tickled Sam, though he said that if he were to do it today, he would not use Israeli suppliers, as he also did for the store’s refrigeration systems. “Today I would go to NCR, in Texas. Because today I have a choice, given that intifada conditions have waned, and I understand what it means to be dependent on Israel. That’s a political decision. If you go with the business decision, by design of Israeli strategy, it will take you to their market, because they’ve created all these obstacles to going outside their market. And I actually think that’s part of the reason, for them, for continuing the occupation. Somebody’s benefiting from it, to the tune of five billion dollars a year.”

      As for the merchandise that was to be scanned and inventoried by the Retalix software, the same labyrinth of barriers—legal, military, and physical—that had driven up the price of construction also caused constant headaches with inventory. Shipments of goods from Israel or Israeli ports arrived late, spoiled, or not at all. Even when they showed up whole and on time they still arrived freighted with politics and tainted by the bitter flavor of occupation. Sometime before the first Ramallah Bravo opened for business, Sam was approached by “local activists in town” who wanted him to guarantee that the store would not carry any Israeli products.

      Sam—an activist himself, arrested for the first time in 1988, along with protesters who chained themselves to a fence outside the Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, headquarters of Federal Laboratories, which manufactured and sold the tear gas used by the Israeli army against Palestinian civilians—had been expecting a visit