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

its future prospects. The government has offered Palestinian Susiya a piece of land near the boundaries of Yatta (population sixty-four thousand), which would effectively move them into Area A, where more than 90 percent of Palestinians live. I have written earlier about the difficulty of aligning what one reads on a map and what one observes on the land and roads themselves, but there is one important detail in which both suddenly cohere: the highly populated Areas A and B are the cramped spaces of Palestinian life. Home to more than two-and-a-half million Palestinians, and including the cities of Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus, Yatta, and others, it has been subdivided into 166 separate units that have no territorial contiguity. In other words, they are like shattered glass. Encircling each shard are long lines of Israeli settlements. Where the shape of Palestine, according to the Green Line, once appeared like a broad river, now it is a handful of pools, cut off from one another, slowly evaporating. Palestinian Susiya is a droplet being diverted into the nearest pool.

      I spent a night in Palestinian Susiya, gazing up at Israeli Susya. I had some childish idea that, from this holy and beautiful landscape, I would see the immensity of the sky and the blanket of stars. As night fell, I sat on the rocky escarpment with Nasser’s son, Ahmed, who attempted to teach me to count to ten in Arabic. His father scrolled idly on his phone. The two places, Susya and Susiya, are literally one above the other. I could walk uphill and be in Israeli Susya within five minutes. Around us, dogs barked. The voices of women came and went. The evening sun diminished and was gone.

      All night, Israeli Susya glowed. Its houses, perimeter roads, and guard stations, connected to the electricity grid, were powerfully, warmly lit. Palestinian Susiya, meanwhile, deemed illegal, was barred from connecting to the power supply. Its electricity came from solar panels donated by a German NGO and installed by an Israeli NGO, its water filters from Ireland, also installed by an Israeli NGO, its medical clinic from Australia, and its school from Spain, resulting in an unlikely cosmopolitanism. Prior to the solar panels, villagers would go to the town of Yatta to charge their phones. The visual contrast was crushing: light above, dark below. The future, the past. Safety, the wild. I couldn’t make out the stars. The sky was too well lit, as if we were on the outskirts of a bustling American town.

      I fell asleep reading Calvino by the light of my phone—“It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin”—and his description of the city of Berenice, whose just and unjust cities germinate secretly, ad infinitum, inside one another: “all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other.”

      Earlier in the day, when I asked Nasser’s father what he hoped for, the elderly man had answered, “I wish not to be woken in the night to have my home demolished.” Unsurprisingly, I slept fitfully. I curled up as small as I could on my mat, in the room I shared with the elderly man and Nasser’s two small sons. All night, the dogs of Palestinian Susiya howled and barked, as if to warn something off, or as if perplexed by their own existence. My dreams clung to this broken sound. I opened my eyes, exhausted, to the sound of Nasser’s wife, Hiam, going out to tend the chickens and the sheep, and to bake the daily bread in the communal taboon, the earth oven.

      I got up. On our knees, we mixed feed for the sheep. My notebook fell into the dirt, fluttering stupidly, and my pen rolled away. My grandparents, too, had been villagers. They fled war and poverty, but my grandfather could not escape, and was executed by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. My father had been five years old, but he survived this devastation that claimed thirty-six million lives in Asia alone. The things I tried to see here seemed cloaked from my eyes, as if I walked in a hall of mirrors, surrounded by conjoined cities with the same destiny. As the morning wore on, Nasser’s son led me through the chores, including the milking. Ahmed was so full of goodwill and curiosity it broke my heart. Here, he would say, using every bit of English he possessed. Come here. He smiled as I photographed him holding fast to a sheep. Eat, he said to me. He brought me bread, sheep’s milk, a little hummus, an egg. I learned another word, baladi. The taste of the village and the earth.

      Above us, the high-wattage security lights of Israeli Susya were dimming. Here, in the other Susiya, the solar panels were not functioning, and there would be no electricity this morning, but in the crisp morning light, everything could be seen. All the invisibilities were laid bare.

       CITIES AND DESIRE

      In 2001, as he stood at the crossroads of his life, Nasser met a small group of Jewish activists who offered solidarity to Susiya. It was confounding: Jewish soldiers were demolishing his home and protecting the settlers, and Jewish individuals were volunteering to work beside him, but Nasser wanted to be neither the target of violence nor the recipient of charity. The questions he asked himself were philosophical: How to exist freely in a place where he was not free? Violent resistance showed him how to die, but what if nonviolence led only to the slow death of capitulation? How could he change his conditions? I thought of sixteen-year-old Wouroud and her searching smile. “I just want to live.” For Nasser, the histories of civil rights movements allowed him to glimpse a possible future.

      “I think nonviolent action is the way to change,” he said, as we looked out at his family’s small orchard. “This is the only way.” Injustice persisted, he reasoned, because the world did not know, therefore he would make visible what was happening to them.

      The ensuing years of activism led to cooperation with B’Tselem and coordination with other activist groups, including Ta’ayush.^fn6 Nasser learned fluent Hebrew and later English. Solidarity work in Susiya became organized, flexible, and creative. Israeli and Palestinian activists are treated unequally before the law, which makes their cooperation all the more potent: Israeli citizens, protected by Israel’s Basic Laws, have civil rights, including freedom of assembly. Israeli citizens can move through all parts of Area C without any restrictions whatsoever; Palestinians are barred from entering vast areas surrounding settlements without prior coordination with the Israeli Civil Administration, even to cultivate their own land.

      Volunteers from Ta’ayush began escorting shepherds to their grazing lands. During planting and harvesting windows, they came singly and sometimes en masse. A small but dedicated group of volunteers hoped their presence would forestall settler attacks, but when it didn’t, they documented the encounters and, most important, put their bodies in the way. The video evidence of violent attacks on shepherds, activists, and Palestinian schoolchildren is horrifying and disturbing—but even video proof did not convince the police to apply the law. Meanwhile, Susiya was mired in a desperate legal battle to save its homes from demolition. Year by year, Nasser’s day-to-day work—with lawyers, activists, and peacemakers—not only strengthened but humanized the ties of Palestinian and Israeli civil society: acts of solidarity became acts of friendship. By 2015, the relentless paper and video documentation by Jewish and Palestinian activists would culminate in stunning international diplomatic and media attention on Susiya, as the village became emblematic of Israel’s policies of land seizure. In June 2015, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Administration had the right to demolish the village. A month later, the Israeli Defense Ministry concluded that Susiya sat on private Palestinian land and that local people had the 1881 Ottoman documents to prove it. Diplomats from twenty-eight European member states traveled to Susiya to protest Israel’s decision, and the US State Department spoke up in Susiya’s defense.^fn7

      The conceptual, legal, and physical infrastructure of occupation aims to entrench separation, disaffiliation, and, most profoundly, estrangement. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish descendants of Israel-Palestine, if they come from the same land, will inevitably carry shared physical attributes and cultural norms. Physical separation is key if one population is deemed to have a different destiny than another. Something as innocuous as friendship, therefore, goes against the totality of the barriers, the checkpoints, outposts, ID cards, sterile streets, the “fabric of life,” and the separation wall. Friendship, such a seemingly flimsy thing, seemed almost a joke in a world of continuous violence.

      IN JANUARY 2016, AFTER THE REMARKABLE SUCCESS OF SUSIYA’S INTERNATIONAL appeal, thirty riot police forced their way into Nasser’s home in the