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

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Название Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
Автор произведения Colm Toibin
Жанр Историческая литература
Серия
Издательство Историческая литература
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008229207



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she said. “I’m his mother!”

      “Do you want us to save him? Then get out of the way.”

      She stood back as they worked on her unconscious son. Pulse: weak. Blood pressure: plunging. What was evident to the paramedics was that Na’or had been knifed three times, from behind his shoulder. But the amount of blood on the sidewalk didn’t account for his plummeting vital signs. What was not evident: the deadliest of the wounds had punctured his jugular. Internally, invisibly, he was bleeding to death.

      A few blocks away, Hassan Manasra was already dead, shot at close range by police officers as he’d rushed at them with his knife. Farther down the tram tracks, his cousin Ahmed lay where a car had struck him. The impact had sent him sprawling, his lower legs twisted up on either side of his body in a grotesque and unnatural shape, like an action figure cast aside by a careless child. Blood pooled around his skull, fractured by the blow from a club wielded by a storekeeper who’d chased him down.

      Despite his head injury, he had not lost consciousness. A cell phone video showed his face, contorted, as a mob gathered around him. A voice yelled: “Die, you son of a whore!”

      Within hours, that cell phone footage went viral and Ahmed Manasra became a Rorschach blot; a scrim onto which each side of the conflict could project its own narrative.

      The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was the first to use the boy, erroneously claiming in a televised address that Israelis had summarily executed him. In answer, the Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu released footage of Ahmed in Hadassah Medical Center, head bandaged, being fed pureed food. Palestinians were quick to point out that it was not Israelis offering this succor, but the boy’s Palestinian lawyer, who had noticed the untouched food and realized that Ahmed might not manage to eat it, since his hand was shackled to the bed. On the video, Ahmed is seen raising his free hand, perhaps to shoo the videographer away. An Israeli commentator described the gesture as “an ISIS salute.” Meanwhile, Physicians for Human Rights released a statement decrying the release of the footage as an illegal exposure of the identity of a minor and an unethical violation of patient privacy.

      But in this explosive case, privacy didn’t seem respected by either side. A few weeks later, Palestinian television screened a lengthy video of Ahmed’s interrogation. It remains unclear who leaked it. Ahmed sat hunched at a corner of a desk in what appeared to be an Israeli police station, surrounded by three plainclothes officers. The lead interrogator, a brawny man with sunglasses pushed back on top of his knitted kippa, attempted to extract a confession to two counts of attempted murder.

      At first, as the interrogator screamed in Arabic and waved his finger in Ahmed’s face, the boy repeatedly hit his injured head.

      “I swear by God I can’t remember,” he whimpered.

      “You swear by God? Who is this shit God?” Looming over the boy, the interrogator demanded to know why he helped his cousin.

      “I don’t know,” Ahmed cried, once again hitting at his head. “Take me to the doctor.”

      “Shut up!” yelled the interrogator. “Sit up straight. Put your hands down!”

      The film as aired had been edited, so it is impossible to know how long all this went on. But in the end, the boy was sobbing convulsively. “Everything you say is true!” he wailed. “Just stop!”

      Since the Manasras live on the Israeli side of the separation barrier, Ahmed Manasra was tried in a civil court rather than under the military justice system, where the conviction rate is 99.74 percent. In Israeli courts, no minor under the age of fourteen at the time of conviction may be sent to prison.

      But it was evident from the outset that Ahmed’s case would strain public opinion regarding the protections extended to him. Minors are required to have a parent or an attorney present during questioning. But Ahmed did not. In fact, his parents had difficulty even finding an attorney both qualified and prepared to take his case to trial. One lawyer agreed, and then called the next day to apologize, saying he’d been warned that the case would be a career ender for him. The family finally chose Leah Tsemel, a veteran civil rights attorney who has practiced in Israel’s civil and military courts for over forty-five years.

      Tsemel is an Israeli-born Jew whose parents migrated to Israel from Russia and Poland in the 1930s. Raised in Haifa, she served in the army and was studying at university when the Six-Day War broke out, threatening Israel’s survival. During intense fighting in East Jerusalem, she volunteered with the army, evacuating Jewish civilians from the most threatened neighborhoods. When combat was over, the soldiers took her to the newly occupied territory of the West Bank, the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria that had been off limits to Jews during the years of Jordanian rule. The trip was supposed to be a reward, a treat. But the sight of columns of Palestinian refugees trudging down the roadside sickened her, evoking her parents’ stories of European persecutions and the resonance of the homeless, wandering Jew. She was, she said, “naive and apolitical” at that time. “I thought it was a war for peace, that we would use the victory to make peace with our neighbors.” Instead, she soon realized that what she had witnessed was the beginning of occupation, and that even key leaders in the Labor Party had no intention of giving back the land. So, she embraced the far left, and when she graduated from law school went to work in defense of Palestinians. “What I am doing is in Israel’s interest,” she asserts, “even if Israelis don’t realize it.”

      Na’or’s mother, Ruti Ben Ezra, is one such Israeli. “Some people will do anything for money, even sell their soul to the devil,” she says. “I hope her own children will be injured or killed by a terrorist.”

      Even though Na’or has recovered physically, his parents say his mental scars are far from healed. “The street is his worst enemy,” says his father, Shai, a forty-six-year-old electrician. He says Na’or can’t concentrate at school. His temper has become explosive. “Everything bothers him. He and his brother fight much more than they used to. Orlev feels guilty he ran away and didn’t help his brother.” Shai has had to give up his job because he needs to be with Na’or night and day. He opens his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “We are crushed,” he says.

      Ruti, a kindergarten assistant, also has stopped working, afraid to leave her children alone. Two days after the attack on Na’or, her youngest child, age seven, took a knife to school. “The teacher called to tell me,” recalls Ruti. “I didn’t see. I didn’t see that he’d taken it. A seven-year-old shouldn’t have to be so afraid.” And she, too, lives with fear. “Every time I hear a siren, I think, ‘Where are my children?’ In this, they succeeded,” she says. “They want us to be afraid. I’m afraid.”

      And that, Ahmed Manasra told his lawyer, Leah Tsemel, when he was finally allowed to see her, was indeed what he had intended. “His cousin said, ‘Let’s go scare them, as they scare us.’ The maximum they intended was to wound. That was the scenario, as they saw it.” Tacitly acknowledging how implausible this version will seem, she shrugs. “They are children,” she says. “But what they did understand, even as children: lifting a knife, they’d probably be killed.”

      Ahmed told Tsemel that Hassan had proclaimed he was ready to die, to join the so-called martyrs whose tattered portraits peel off the walls of many Palestinian buildings. But Ahmed says he didn’t feel that way at all. He can’t say why he went along with his older cousin, but once he saw the blood of the first victim, he was terrified. As that man outran them, he saw Hassan glance towards a woman with children. He told Tsemel that he cried out: “Don’t even look at her!” Then Hassan spotted Na’or coming out of the candy store on his bicycle and moved in on him. Ahmed told Tsemel that he cried out “Haram!”—the Arabic word for something unholy, forbidden—“We decided not to!” But Hassan stabbed the boy anyway. Bystanders and storekeepers rushed them, and within a minute or two Hassan was shot dead and Ahmed was bleeding on the tram tracks.

      Before Ahmed first appeared in court, he faced a difficult choice. Since he was below the age of criminal responsibility, if he pled guilty to attempted murder at his first hearing, the case would be closed and he could not be