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

Middle Ages for the excellence of its soap. Most of all, he was proud of his soap. It was made, like all “nabulsi” soap, from three main ingredients: olive oil, water, and caustic soda (a mixture of lime and the refined ashes of the saltwort plant). Mr. Tbeleh’s oil, according to Mr. Tbeleh, was of the first quality, however, and organic, and his other ingredients were costly and pure. Traditional nabulsi soap, nearly odorless, is cut into small blocks, stamped with the soap makers’ trademarks on one side, and wrapped in crinkly paper, but Mr. Tbeleh had introduced fragrances and special ingredients into the recipe—mint, cumin, Dead Sea mud—and his product shipped in a bewildering variety of shapes and packages aimed at various markets around the world: Italy, Japan, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom.

      For the benefit of Sam Bahour, whose Palestinian American trade organization was considering whether it wanted to help fulfill Mr. Tbeleh’s dream of cracking the US market, Mr. Tbeleh went enthusiastically into considerable detail about his soap and its sale and manufacture, but I got the feeling he would have done the same if we had simply happened by. He really did seem to love soap, which was probably a good thing, I reflected, since he seemed to have had relatively little choice in the matter. His family has been in the soap business since 1611. They have been at it for so long that in Nablus, in the trade, a cutter—the man whose job it is to score and break the giant floor-sized slabs of poured and hardened soap into bars—is known as a tbeleh. Mr. Tbeleh’s destiny seemed to have perfectly converged with his predilection, which was probably the recipe for contentment, I thought—with or without Dead Sea mud. It made me happy just to sit sipping coffee with Mr. Tbeleh, in one of the leather-covered chairs in his dark-paneled office, listening to him go on, in rough but fluent English, about soap. Even when he and Sam got down to business in Arabic I enjoyed the contented rumble of their discussion, though I couldn’t follow a word. I had met a lot of brutalized people and heard a lot of awful stories over the course of the week. What they did was overshadowed, what they needed was denied, what they carried was encumbered by the occupation, and what they owned had been broken, diminished, or taken. All the everyday hardships and obstacles they faced were as much the fruit of the occupation as the extraordinary and terrible ones. But the obstacles Mr. Tbeleh complained about were mostly the kind of thing that any small manufacturer anywhere might face: quality control, competition, access to markets, espionage of the purely industrial variety (apparently there were soap Slugworths out to steal his recipes).

      Nothing seemed to have ever discouraged him or weakened his resolve, not even—especially not—the occupation. When, in the early days of his modernization plans, he could not obtain the machinery he needed, he designed and built his own. When settlers in nearby settlements seized wells and springs and cut off Mr. Tbeleh’s access to water—it takes a lot of water to make soap—he found new sources. He had a favorite English phrase, a kind of signature that he interjected liberally into conversation: Of course! Had he designed and built a soap-stamping machine himself, with his own two hands? Of course! Did the Israelis interfere with his supply chain, and his access to water? Of course! Didn’t it take a lot of water to make soap? Of course! Would they really pay thirty dollars in Japan for a bar of premium nabulsi soap in premium packaging? Of course! Everything, to Mr. Tbeleh, seemed to fall into its proper place—however disruptive or aggravating—in the course of things.

      As I listened to Mr. Tbeleh talk, and toured the factory floor, where thousands of soap bars stood not in the traditional stacked cones but on special racks, for the months of drying required, I found myself thinking the same thing I had thought while touring East Jerusalem, where well-financed settlers were attempting to drive out the residents of Silwan; or in Hebron, where the local Arab residents had been banned from their own shops and main street; or in Susiya, where the people were forced into makeshift tents after their entire village was seized: These people aren’t going anywhere. Was the occupation a grievous injustice on a colossal scale, so brutal and unremitting that it would lead anyone to consider the appealing alternative of fleeing and never coming back? Of course! And yet here they still were, after fifty years of violence and deliberate degradation, listening to reggae music, shopping in their marketplaces, eating their sticky ice cream, and sending their children out to play. Of course.

       6.

      I had heard that Nablus, in addition to its soap, was known for its excellent kanafe. This is a traditional Ottoman pastry, similar to baklava but filled with cheese and wrapped in honey-soaked shredded wheat instead of phyllo. Before Sam and I returned to Ramallah, he said, he would take me to get some kanafe; he knew a good place. But before he could make the correct turn on the road coming back from the soap factory, we came upon a checkpoint that Sam had not been expecting.

      A couple of IDF soldiers stood at a fork in the road, squinting in the bright sun, pallid young men with Tavor assault rifles slung over their shoulders looking, like so many Israeli soldiers, as if they had gotten dressed in a dark room and put on someone else’s uniform by mistake. I had seen bored young men before—I had been a bored young man—but these guys took the gold. I was reasonably sure they were not going to shoot me or Sam, but if they did at least it would keep them awake. To get me to the promised kanafe, Sam wanted to take the right-hand fork; one of the soldiers—he looked to be about twenty, and the elder of the pair—told Sam, in Arabic, that he would have to take the left. The soldier’s tone was curt but not hostile. It bordered on rudeness but he was too bored, for the moment, at least, to step across that border.

      “I have a foreigner with me,” Sam said, in Youngstown-accented English. “Why can’t we go to the right?”

      I was oddly relieved that Sam didn’t mention the kanafe. Pastry did not seem like an adequate reason to irritate a heavily armed man. The soldier repeated, in Arabic, that Sam would have to go to the left and, in a more helpful tone of voice, he added something in Hebrew. After that he repeated the original dull formula, in Arabic: we would have to go to the left. Meanwhile a car with white plates was coming along the forbidden road from the other side of the checkpoint. The soldiers waved it and its Palestinian driver through without any show of interest, or even attention. That was when Sam did something that seemed to catch the older of the two soldiers by surprise: he asked why.

      “Why can’t we go to the right?” Sam said. “What is the reason?”

      The soldier roused himself from his torpor long enough to shrug one shoulder elaborately and give Sam Bahour a look in which were mingled contempt, incredulity, and suspicion about the state of Sam’s sanity. It appeared to have been the stupidest, most pointless, least answerable question anyone had ever asked the soldier. What kind of dumbass question is that, Shit-for-brains?, the look seemed to say. “Why?” How the fuck should I know?

      The soldier had no idea why he had been ordered to come stand with his gun and his somnolent young comrade at this particular fork in this particular road on this particular afternoon, and if he did, the last person with whom he would have shared this explanation was Sam. That was what the look said, in the instant before it vanished and the proper boredom was restored. We went left.

      “What did he say, in Hebrew?” I asked Sam, after we had been driving away from the checkpoint, in silence, for almost a minute. The silence on Sam’s side of the car endured for another few seconds after I ended mine. When Sam finally spoke, the strangulated Edgar Kennedy tone of restraint in his voice was more pronounced than ever.

      “He told me—such a helpful guy—that this road would take us to the very same place as the other way, to the road back to Ramallah. Which is true, except we’ll hit it much farther along, and we won’t go past where we can get you your kanafe.”

      I reassured Sam that I could live without kanafe. I tried to make a joke of it—my jones for kanafe, another victim of an unjust system—but Sam didn’t seem to be listening, or in the mood for laughing, just then. I had a sudden realization.

      “Wait,” I said, “is the other road blocked at the far end, too?”

      “Of course not,” Sam said. “You saw the car? They’re letting people through from that end.”

      “So