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

and shackled his hands together as his family watched in terror. This moment is seared into him: his own humiliation, the sick fear and shock, and the mirrored expressions on his children’s faces. They were punishing not just him, he understood, but his family.

      Nasser, who through all the years as a community leader and field worker for B’Tselem was well known to Israeli police and military, disappeared into the police’s interrogation rooms.

      “The interrogation is very tough,” he conceded. He did not divulge the following easily. “The pressure starts the second they arrest you, they are shouting, pulling you from one place to another. You sit in a room with two or three of them, they ask different questions in parallel, you get disoriented and confused, you don’t know who to answer. You sit on a chair facing the wall, you are not allowed to look up or down, your legs and hands are cuffed.” When he said this, he kept his hands, open and face down, on his knees. “When you’re not in interrogation, you are in a small room two metres by two metres, all you have is a metal table, and they keep the air conditioning on extremely cold. They put me in solitary confinement underground, a room without light.” His next words, spoken quietly, were followed by silence. “It was a difficult period. They said things about the [Jewish] activists in Ta’ayush, my Israeli friends.”

      The legal case that was later brought against Ta’ayush activists—and eventually nullified by the Jerusalem High Court—is complex, sensationalist and heartbreaking, and received wall to wall coverage in the Israeli media. Out of respect for the privacy and health of those involved, I have elected not to detail it here.

      THE CHOICE, BY BOTH PALESTINIANS AND ISRAELI JEWS, TO TRUST ONE another is perilous. Day after day, the mechanisms of life under occupation succeed in their aim: to disavow the possibility of commonality and coexistence. There is a profound loneliness to the Palestinian experience, a heavy irony given that the conflict has been a staple of international news for almost seventy years. Despite worldwide consensus that the Israeli settlement of the West Bank is a clear violation of international law, Palestinians are widely viewed, in North America at least, as the instigators and perpetrators of violence; indeed, as violence itself. Palestinian crimes of hijackings, knifings, suicide bombings, and murders have become, for many, the entirety of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the only tragedies to be mourned. At the same time, Palestinian suffering—more than 10,000 dead since the year 2000, including 1,977 children—is to some an acceptable form of collateral damage.

      I wondered if Nasser’s story served as both a microcosm and a warning, exposing the danger of collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians. Historical legacies—not only national but deeply, catastrophically personal—could shatter trust and friendships in an instant.

      To my surprise, Nasser disagreed. For him, the old question of how to exist endured. He was committed to the life he had chosen.

      But surely his arrest, I said, had changed something in him.

      He answered without hesitation. “I think this has given me more power to be active and nonviolent. If Israel wants to separate Palestinian and Israeli activists, my arrest is a sign that what we are doing is working in South Hebron.”

       CITIES AND THE LIVING

       [The inferno of the living] is what is already here … There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not the inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

      —ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities

      Before leaving Palestine and Israel in mid-July 2016, I made my way to Palestinian friends in Bethlehem, to a Jewish Israeli friend in Akko, and to Tel Aviv for a gathering of former IDF soldiers who had given testimony on the policies and practices of the army. As I climbed the staircases and walked the chambers of both the visible and invisible worlds, I refused to feel estranged from either the humanity or the despair around me.

      Earlier, I had asked Nasser if having children had given him hope or made him more fearful. He had laughed and shaken his head. “Yes, things changed. But I don’t know how to tell you this in English.”

      When I pushed him, he said, “My children live in this situation.” The smallness of the word situation and the sorrow of the word children struck me with a terrible force. “I tell them about my Jewish friends,” he continued. “I try to bring in my friends, like Yehuda. He wears a kippa and the children think he’s a settler, and I try to teach them no, he’s not a settler. Inshallah one day I will visit Yehuda in his country and he in my country.”

      Shulman writes, “To watch the destruction-self-destruction of an entire world, you need only ordinary eyes and the gift of not looking away.” I try to hold the invisible within the real. The occupation began before I was born, but this numbing of our souls and our reliance on the word intractable: surely this cannot be our apology and our answer.

      IN THE OPENING PAGES OF THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, MILAN Kundera considers the idea of eternal return. Would a horrific and bloody war, he wonders, if it recurred in the same way over and over again, be altered in any way? “It will: it will become a solid mass,” Kundera concludes, “permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.” But the world as we perceive it, where atrocities or violence occur and are then rinsed from our memories, has also led to its own “profound moral perversity … for in this world everything is pardoned in advance, and everything is cynically permitted.” This cynical relationship with history is one we embrace at our peril.

      On one of my last nights in the territory, I watched a group of seventy Jewish diaspora volunteers, Israeli activists, and Issa Amro and Youth Against Settlements, work side by side, attempting to clean up a disused Palestinian-owned warehouse in Hebron. Their aim was to lay the ground for what would be the only cinema for Hebron’s 150,000 Palestinians.

      Settlers and police instantly appeared, followed by soldiers, who would momentarily begin arresting the activists for disturbing the peace. Watching the scene unfold, which included the activists’ elated singing of African American spirituals and Hebrew traditional songs, the children of the settlers frowned. They asked aloud, again and again, They’re Jews? Through a translator, I spoke to them, wondering about their names and thoughts. A boy, no older than ten, looked me in the eyes and said, “Fuck you.” But behind him, others watched in consternation, with a pensive fascination. An older woman reminded them, “There were Jews who helped Hitler, too.” “Thank you for building Jewish property,” another called out.

      “What do their T-shirts say?” a boy asked.

      The words were OCCUPATION IS NOT MY JUDAISM.

      One of the activists said to him, “Do you think that occupation can really continue like this?”

      The boy looked at us through the fence, his face open in surprise. His confusion was real and profound. “What occupation?”

      The very earth we stood on momentarily vanished, rendered invisible.

       MR. NICE GUY

       RACHEL KUSHNER

      STANDING AT AN INTERSECTION IN SHUAFAT REFUGEE CAMP, IN East Jerusalem, I watched as a small boy, sunk down behind the steering wheel of a beat-up sedan, zoomed through an intersection with his arm out the driver’s side window, signaling like a NASCAR driver pulling in for a pit stop. I was amazed. He looked about twelve years old.

      “No one cares here,” my host, Baha Nababta, said, laughing at my astonishment. “Anyone can do anything they want.”

      As