Palestine notebooks

FIRST NOTEBOOK
From Netanya to Ramallah

by Juan Goytisolo (Spain)

To return to the occupied territories of Palestine after a long absence is to find eloquent proof of the cruel repetitions of history. In June 1988 I visited the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a Spanish Television crew to film the First Intifada and in 1995, as special correspondent of El País, in the disconcerting period of phoney peace which followed the half-baked Oslo Agreement: the Israeli army had evacuated some areas which it held in an iron grip and the disillusion among the Palestinian population confirmed my pessimistic prognosis as to the future of the region. Seven years on, the situation is much worse than it was in 1988. The popular uprising of the First Intifada was followed by the harshest repression. From the moment Sharon walked the Esplanade of the Mosques we have had not war between two States, but war between a State equipped with an ultra-modern, efficient army and a nation that is fragmented, without frontiers, with few weapons and subject to daily collective humiliation and punishment which itself originates an endless trickle of ‘martyrs’ ready to self-sacrifice themselves in deadly attacks, both against the military might of the occupier and against innocent civilians within the internationally recognised frontiers of the Jewish state.

The coach taking the International Parliament of Writers’ delegation from Tel Aviv airport to Ramallah turns left off the motorway halfway to Jerusalem and continues along one of the well-surfaced roads linking Israeli settlements in the territories occupied during the Six Days War. Traffic on the road between Jerusalem and Ramallah has been halted - hundreds of Palestinians on foot, residing or working in Jerusalem, silently wait for their documents to be checked - and we must take a long detour through the spider’s web of roads enveloping the besieged towns and cities of Palestine.

As I pointed out years ago, the landscape of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been ripped and torn like cloth made from strips of different materials. Barbed wire surround Israeli settlements and military posts and the areas theoretically controlled by the Palestinian Authority: it protects and excludes, unites separated zones and separates adjacent territories, weaves in between a labyrinth of islands that are mutually repelled and attracted. A complex circulatory system of capillary veins demonstrates the occupier’s desire to split the territory into slices, remnants, tracts that seemingly impact on each other yet remain mutually unaware.

Night has fallen by the time we finally reach the Israeli control, far from the infamous ghetto of Khalandia. After waiting several minutes we are allowed to enter Ramallah and, guided by a Palestinian police car, we reach one of the hotels built in the euphoria after the Oslo Agreement. Mahmoud Darwish and other representatives of the cultural world are there. Naturally, our delegation and the journalists accompanying us are the only guests. Who would decide to holiday or do business in a city under siege and attack, that is healing recent wounds with difficulty and apprehensively awaits fresh, more terrible blows?

As dawn breaks in Ramallah - the abrupt configuration of hills and ravines recalls Amman - the calm is idyllic. It takes me a while to see from my window the sandbags of an Israeli military outpost barely two hundred metres from the hotel. To reach the Palestinian university of Birzeit, students, teachers and inhabitants from nearby towns must leave their vehicles, cross five hundred metres of road blocked by the Israelis and pile into one of the taxis or minibuses waiting on the other side. This is not a defensive measure but a collective punishment meted on the whole population. In the interludes between two military incursions, Sharon’s aim is to to inflict all manner of humiliation on the Palestinians in a hope as vile as it is illusory of breaking their spirit of resistance and stifling their rebelliousness.

This spirit of resistance to injustice was noisily evident in the soirée of poetry and music at the Alcasaba Theatre, in the city centre. A packed audience unleashed emotions pent up during the penultimate siege and occupation. The traces of war are visible everywhere. In the Amira refugee camp, the brutal consequences of the attack on a school and destruction of some twenty dwellings via the procedure of dynamiting the dividing partitions gives us a small sample of what is awaiting us in Gaza.

An interview with Yassir Arafat did not figure in our programme and, when it was suggested, I expressed my disagreement. I have never been attracted by contact with Heads of State, for I know writers and politicians express themselves at different levels and nothing they may say is of interest to me. But I respected the wish of the majority and when it was my turn to speak during the audience I told him I visited him as yet one more captive Palestinian, deprived of his rights and freedom of movement. (As I write this report I am watching images of the attack on the residence where he received us. Paradoxically, Sharon’s personal rage restores to Arafat a moral authority that was in doubt.. As in Beirut in 1982 Arafat will emerge victorious from the test, alive or dead. What the general fails to understand is that Arafat thrives in defeat and rises like the Phoenix from the ashes).

On our journey from Ramallah to Gaza, the landscape of settlements, frequently constructed on the ruins of Palestinian villages, evokes yet again the chess-board of reciprocal exclusion between the settlements and the remains of the autonomous areas, to the point of confusing the inexpert visitor as to what they include and de-limit, to what is ‘inside’ and what is the ‘outside’.

The Erez checkpoint, where several United Nations vehicles are parked, is a vast desert space surrounded by barbed wire: Palestinians who work in Israel are no longer authorised to cross the frontier, so the economic situation on the Gaza Strip has deteriorated further. After a long wait we enter the hapless territory of the Palestine Authority. Because we are late, we head directly across Gaza, towards the refugee camps of Khan Yunes and Rafah. The main roadway has been blocked and we have to take the coastal road towards Dair el Balah. The nearby complex of settlements in Gush Khatif, with its vast military base surrounded by barbed wire and electrified fences, shelters hangars, barracks, stores, giant radar systems, communication towers, an enormous parking lot for bulldozers and jeeps as well as tourist complexes, hotels and beaches reserved for settlers. Over the last seven years this settlement has mushroomed: the occupier has dynamited several houses and uprooted hundreds of fruit-trees. The Israelis are currently building a bridge over the blocked road to link Gush Khatif with the settlement of Kfar Darom. The territory where over a million Palestinians stew together shrinks like shark’s skin. The number of settlers occupying forty per cent of the fertile part of the Strip number less than three thousand. The Netzarim settlement has only seventy-six residents.

On our arrival in Khan Yunes a desolate spectacle greets us: skeletons of houses, bullet-ridden façades, a refugee camp destroyed by missiles and belicose helicopters, ruins smashed by bulldozers, a cement wall higher than the old Berlin Wall. The settlements extend their perimeters and pitilessly reduce the population’s living space.

But the situation in Rafah is even worse: the refugee camp adjacent to the Egyptian frontier where the Israeli army has maintained a corridor to control and hermetically seal the Strip -, was devastated in less than two hours by a would-be anti-terrorist operation that brought dozens of victims.

I write these lines a few days after the bloody attack in Netanya in which twenty Israelis died in a hotel where they were celebrating the start to the Jewish Passover. Seven years ago when I was also writing reports on my trip to Israel and the occupied territories, another human bomb wrought similar carnage in the same city and, the then Israeli Prime Minister, Isaac Rabin declared that to put an end to these suicide attacks ‘the only solution [consisted] in the total separation of Israel and the [occupied] territories’. An Israeli extremist later murdered Rabin and today another fanatic, responsible, among his other ‘feats’, for the massacres of Sabra and Chatila, keeps a firm hold on the helm and leads Israel into a war without end, to the self-destruction of its moral values and its own physical existence.

As I wrote earlier, history is repeating itself and Sharon’s blind revenge-taking for the fresh carnage in Netanya augurs a sombre future. The eruption of the army into Ramallah and its attack on Arafat’s presidential palace will further extend the cycle of hatred and violence. Sharon wants not interlocutors but helots. But no peace, no truce will be possible without an agreement that guarantees the lives, work and dignity of Palestinians within a State that has internationally recognised frontiers. Otherwise, as Octavio Paz wrote, speaking of the destinies imposed on peoples throughout history, ‘in a closed world without exits, death is all, death alone has value’.