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

teenagers fell in behind us, forming a kind of retinue. Among them were cool kids who looked like cool kids the world over, tuned in to that teen frequency, a dog whistle, with global reach. I did notice that white was a popular color, and that might have been regional, local to Shuafat camp. White slouchy but pegged jeans, and white polo shirts, white high-tops. Maybe white has extra status in a place where roads are unpaved and turn to mud, where garbage is everywhere, literally, and where water shortages make it exceedingly difficult to keep people and clothing clean.

      So few nonresidents enter Shuafat camp that my appearance there seemed like a highly unusual event, met with warm greetings verging on hysteria, crowds of kids following along. “Hello, America!” they called excitedly. I was a novelty, but also I was with Baha Nababta, a twenty-nine-year-old Palestinian community organizer beloved by the kids of Shuafat. Those who followed us wanted not just my attention, but his. Baha had a rare kind of charisma. Camp counselor charisma, you might call it. He was a natural leader of boys. Every kid we passed knew him, and either waved or stopped to speak to him. Baha had founded a community center so that older children would have a place to hang out, since there is no open space in Shuafat Refugee Camp, no park, not a single playground, nowhere for kids to go, not even a street, really, where they can play, since there is no place to stand, most of the narrow and unpaved roads barely fitting the cars that ramble down them. Littler kids tapped me on the arms and wanted to show me the mural they’d painted with Baha. The road they had helped pave with Baha, who had supervised its completion. The plants they’d planted with Baha along a narrow strip. Baha, Baha, Baha. It was like that with the adults too. They all wanted his attention. His phone was blowing up in his pocket as we walked. He finally answered. There was a dispute between a man whose baby had died at the clinic in the camp, and the doctor who had treated the baby. The man whose baby had died had tried to burn the doctor alive, and now the doctor was in critical condition, in a hospital in Jerusalem. Throughout the two days I spent with Baha, I heard stories like this that he was asked to help resolve. People relied on him. He had a vision for the Shuafat camp, where he was born and raised, that went beyond what could be imagined from within the very limited confines of the place.

      In an area of high-rise apartment buildings clustered around a mosque with spindly, futuristic minarets, a pudgy boy of ten or eleven called over to us. “My dad is trying to reach you,” he said to Baha. Baha told me the buildings in that part of the camp had no water, and that everyone was contacting him about it. He had not been answering his phone, he confessed, because he didn’t have any good news yet for the residents. I got the impression Baha was something like an informal mayor, a community leader on whom people depended to resolve disputes, build roads, put together volunteer committees, and attempt to make Shuafat camp safe for children. The building next to us was twelve stories. Next to it was another twelve-story building. High-rise apartments in the camp are built so close together that if a fire should happen, the result would be devastating. There would be no way to put it out. The buildings here were all built of stone blocks that featured, between blocks, wooden wedges that stuck out intermittently, as if the builders never returned to fill the gaps with mortar. I gazed up at a towering facade, the strange wooden wedges, which made the building look like a model of a structure, except that it was occupied. The pudgy boy turned to me as I craned my neck, looking up at the facade. “This building is stupidly built,” he said. “It’s junk.”

      “Do you live here?” I asked him, and he said yes.

      SHUAFAT REFUGEE CAMP IS INSIDE JERUSALEM PROPER, ACCORDING TO the municipal boundaries that Israel declared after the Six-Day War, in 1967. The Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction there: the camp is, according to Israeli law, inside Israel, and the people who live there are Jerusalem residents, but they are refugees in their own city. Camp residents pay taxes to Israel, but the camp is not serviced. There is very little legally supplied water, a barely functioning sewage system, essentially no garbage pickup, no road building, no mail service (the streets don’t even have names, much less addresses), virtually no infrastructure of any kind. There is no adequate school system. Israeli emergency fire and medical services never enter the camp. Israeli police only enter to make arrests, but provide no security for camp residents. There is chaotic land registration. While no one knows how many people really live in the Shuafat camp and its surrounding areas, which is roughly one square kilometer, it’s estimated that the population is between eighty and eighty-five thousand people. They live surrounded by a twenty-five-foot concrete wall, a wall interspersed by guard towers and trap doors that swing open when Israeli forces raid the camp, with reinforcements in the hundreds, or even, as in December 2015, over a thousand troops.

      Effectively, there are no laws in the Shuafat Refugee Camp, despite its geographical location inside Jerusalem. The Shuafat camp’s original citizens were moved from the Old City, where they had sought asylum in 1948, during the Arab-Israeli War, to the camp’s boundaries starting in 1965, with more arriving, in need of asylum, at the beginning of the war in 1967, when the camp was under the control of the Jordanian government. Now, fifty years after Israel’s new 1967 boundaries were drawn, even Israeli security experts don’t quite know why the Shuafat Refugee Camp was placed inside the Jerusalem municipal boundaries. The population was then much smaller, and surrounded by beautiful green open forestland, which stretched to land on which the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev was later built (the forestland is still there, visible beyond the separation wall, but inaccessible to camp residents, on account of the wall). Perhaps the Israelis were hoping the camp’s residents could be relocated, since they numbered in the mere hundreds. Instead, the population of the camp exploded in the following decades into the tens of thousands. In 1980, Israel declared Jerusalem the “complete and united” capital of Israel. In 2004, the concrete wall was erected around the camp, cutting inside Israel’s own declared boundaries, as if to stanch and cauterize the camp from “united” Jerusalem.

      IF HIGH-RISE BUILDINGS ARE NOT TYPICALLY CONJURED BY THE TERM REFUGEE camp, a person may neither imagine an indoor shopping mall, but there is one in the Shuafat camp—two floors, and a third under construction, an escalator up, and down, and a store called “Fendi” that sells inexpensive women’s clothes. The mall owner greeted us with exuberance, and pulled Baha aside for advice of some kind. A kid who worked at a mall ice cream parlor, a hipster in lenseless eyeglasses and a hoodie, did a world class beatbox for me and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, a writer and organizer who had walked me into the camp in order to make introductions between me and Baha, and to serve as interpreter. Moriel and the kid from the ice cream shop took turns. Moriel’s own beatbox was good but not quite up to the Shuafat Refugee Camp beatbox standard. We met an accountant named Fahed who had just opened his shop in the mall, to prepare taxes for residents. He was stunned to hear English being spoken and eager to use his own. The tax forms are in Hebrew, he explained, so most people in the camp must hire a bilingual accountant to complete them.

      Before the separation wall was constructed, the mall was bulldozed twice by the Israeli authorities, but the owner rebuilt both times. Since the wall has gone up, the Israelis have not attempted to demolish any large buildings in Shufat, though they have destroyed individual homes. Meanwhile, the population has exploded. The Israelis could come in and raze the entire place at any time. Armed Palestinian gangsters could take away someone’s land or apartment. A fire or earthquake would be catastrophic. There are multiple risks to buying property in the Shuafat camp, but the cost of an apartment there is less than one-tenth of what an apartment would cost on the other side of the separation wall, in East Jerusalem. And living in the Shuafat camp is a way to try to hold on to Jerusalem residency status. Jerusalem residents have a coveted blue ID card, meaning they can enter Israel in order to work, and support their families, without going through the military checkpoint at Qalandiya, which is for Palestinians with green, or West Bank, ID cards, who must wait in hours-long predawn lines with many supporting documents, in order to enter Israel. Jerusalem residency is, quite simply, a lifeline to employment, a matter of survival. There are also non-Jerusalemites in the Shuafat camp. Since the wall went up, it became a sanctuary, a haven. I met people from Gaza, who cannot leave the square kilometer of the camp or they will be arrested, since the military occupation and its limits on freedom of movement have made it illegal for Gazans to enter Israel or the West Bank except with Israeli permission, which is almost never granted. I met a family of Brazilian Palestinians with long-expired passports who also cannot leave the camp, because