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

CAMP IS OFTEN DEPICTED IN THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIA AS THE most dangerous place in Jerusalem, a crucible of crime, jihad, and trash fires. On the day that I arrived, garbage was indeed smoldering in great heaps just inside the checkpoint entrance, against the concrete separation wall, flames jumping thinly in the strong morning sun. I had been to countries before that burn their trash; it is a smell you get used to. My main concern, over the weekend I spent in the camp, was not getting my foot run over by a car. If you get seriously hurt in the camp, there isn’t much help. Ill or injured people are carried through the checkpoint, on foot or by car, and put in ambulances on the other side of the wall. According to residents of the camp, several people have unnecessarily died in this manner. As we walked, I began to understand how to face the traffic without flinching, to expect that drivers are experienced at navigating such incredible human density. I asked Baha if people are ever run over by cars, assuming he’d say no.

      “Yes, all the time,” he said. “A child was just killed this way,” he added. I hugged the walls of the apartment buildings as we strolled. Later that evening, I watched as a tiny boy riding a grown man’s bicycle was bumped by a car. He crashed in the road. I ran to help him. He was crying, holding out his abraded hands. I remembered how painful it is to scrape your palms, how many nerve endings there are in an open hand. A Palestinian man told the little boy he was okay and ruffled his hair.

      When I asked Baha if garbage was burned by the separation wall because it was safer—a way to contain a fire, like a giant fireplace—he shook his head. “It’s, ah, symbolic.” In other words, garbage is burned by the wall because the wall is Israeli. Drugs are sold along the wall by the Israeli checkpoint, not for symbolic reasons. The camp organizers, like Baha, cannot control the drug trade in a zone patrolled by the Israeli police and monitored by security cameras. Dealers are safe there from the means of popular justice exacted inside the camp. The most heavily militarized area of the camp is thus its most lawless.

      The popular drug the dealers sell is called Mr. Nice Guy, which is sometimes categorized as a “synthetic cannabinoid”—a meaningless nomenclature. It is highly toxic, and its effects are nothing like cannabis. It damages brains and ruins lives. Mr. Nice Guy is popular with kids as young as age eight, and it can bring on psychosis. Empty packets of it sifted around our feet as we crossed the large parking lot where buses pick up six thousand children daily and transport them through the checkpoint, into East Jerusalem for school, since the camp has only a few public schools, for elementary students. Every afternoon, children stream back into camp, passing the dealers and users who cluster near the checkpoint.

      I didn’t see the dealers, but I doubt Baha would have pointed them out. What I mostly noticed were kids working, being industrious, trying to find productive ways to live in a miserable environment, and to survive. Across from Baha’s house, a group of kids ran a car wash. We waved to them from Baha’s roof. Baha introduced me to a group of teenage boys who own their own moped- and scooter-repair service. He took me to a barber shop, where kids in flawless outfits with high-side fades were hanging out, listening to music, while a boy of about thirteen gave a haircut to a boy of about five. A young teen in a pristine white polo shirt and delicate gold neck chain flexed his baby potato of a biceps and announced his family name, “Alqam!” The kids in the barbershop were all Alqam. They ran the shop. They were ecstatic to see Baha. We were all ecstatic. The language barrier between me and the boys only thickened our collective joy, as my interpreter Moriel was whisked into a barber chair for a playfully coerced beard trim, on the house. The boys and I shouldered up for selfies, put on our sunglasses, and posed. I sensed with them, and, especially after Moriel left that afternoon, and I was the lone visitor for the weekend, that whenever men shook my hand after Baha introduced me, that men and boys would not get so physically close to a Palestinian woman who was a stranger. I was an American female, and I was with Baha, which made me something like an honorary man.

      Later I told myself and everyone else how wonderful it was in the Shuafat camp. How safe I felt. How positive Baha was. All that still feels true to me. But I also insisted, to myself and everyone else, that Baha never expressed any fears for his own safety. In looking at my notes, I see now that my insistence on this point was sheer will. A fiction. It’s right there in the notes. He said he was nervous. He said he’d been threatened.

      Also in the notes, this:

       Baha says, two types

      1 THOSE WHO WANT TO HELP MAKE A BETTER LIFE

      2 THOSE WHO WANT TO DESTROY EVERYTHING

      And in parentheses: Arms trade. Drugs trade. Construction profits. No oversight wanted.

      “I wanted you to meet the boys because they are nice people,” Baha said, after we left the barber shop. “But they do all carry guns.” It was only after I returned home to the US that I learned in the banal and cowardly way, with a few taps on my computer, that two Alqam boys, cousins who were eleven and fourteen, had been accused of stabbing, with a knife and scissors, a security guard on a tram in East Jerusalem. I still don’t know whether they were related to the boys in the barbershop. Several of the young assailants in what’s been called the Knives Intifada, if it is an intifada, have been from the Shuafat camp, which has also been the site of huge and violent protests, in which Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. In 2015, three children from the Shuafat Refugee Camp lost eyes from sponge bullets shot by Israeli forces.

      The other thing I suppressed, besides Baha’s admissions of fear, was his desire for police. I didn’t write that down. It wasn’t part of my hero narrative, because police are not part of my hero narrative. “Even if they have to bring them from India,” he said several times, “we need police here. We cannot handle the disputes on our own. People take revenge. They murder.”

      A MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT I’D MET IN THE WEST BANK, HEARING that I was going to spend the weekend in the Shuafat camp, had asked me if I planned to visit Shit Lake while there. Apparently that was his single image of the place. I assumed he was referring to a sewage dump, but Baha never mentioned it, and after seeing Baha’s pleasure in showing me the community center, the roads his committee had built, the mall, which was the only open gathering space, all things that, for him, were hopeful, I wasn’t going to ask him for Shit Lake.

      That correspondent had never stepped foot in the Shuafat camp. From my own time there, the sustaining image is shimmering white. The kids, dressed in white. The buildings, a baked tone of dusty, smoke-stained white. The minarets, all white. And there was the 1972 Volkswagen beetle in gleaming white, meticulously restored. It was on the shop floor of a garage run by Baha’s friend Adel. A classic car enthusiast and owner myself, I wanted to talk to Adel about the car. He showed me his garage, his compressor, his lift. Like the escalator in the mall, these were things you would never expect to find in a place without services.

      We sat, and Adel made coffee. He and Baha told me about the troubles with the drug Mr. Nice Guy. They said every family has an addict among its children, and sometimes the older people as well. A third of the population of the camp is strung out on it, they said. It makes people crazy, Adel and Baha agreed. Is there a link, I asked, between Mr. Nice Guy, and the kids who decide, essentially, to end it all, by running at a soldier with a knife? They both concurred that there was. Two years earlier, Baha said, by way of contrast, there had been a man from the Shuafat camp who did a ramming operation. The Israelis came and blew up his house. He was older, Baha said, he was out of work, and he decided that he was finally ready to lose everything. With the kids, Baha said, it’s different. It’s an act of impulsive courage. The drug helps enormously with that.

      Adel kept making references to his nine-year-old daughter, who is physically disabled and cannot attend school. Perhaps I asked to meet her, or Adel asked if I wanted to meet her. Either way, we ended up in Adel’s large apartment, and his daughter Mira was wheeled out to the living room. Mira was burned over most of her body and is missing one arm and a kneecap. Her face and scalp are disfigured. A school bus filled with children from the Shuafat camp was on a trip to Ramallah when it collided with a truck on a wet, rainy road. The bus overturned and burst into flames. Five children and a teacher burned to death. Dozens were injured. Emergency services were delayed by confusion over who had jurisdiction. As a result, Mira and other