If lessons were learned …

According to official figures, the renewed escalation of the conflict in the Middle East has claimed the lives of 12 Israeli and 243 Palestinian deaths, including more than 60 children and young people. This is reason enough to talk again about the factual novel “Apeirogon”, published in 2020 and written by the Irish writer Colum McCann – as twice before in this newspaper (Current Concerns No 18 of 31 August 2020 and No. 22 of 16 October 2020). The novel has two “heroes” who actually exist: the Jewish Israeli Rami Elhanan and the Arab Palestinian Bassam Aramin. Both have lost a child to acts of violence by the “other side”. Both have joined the Jewish-Arab peace movement, in which both work together.

Apeirogon

In the middle of the novel, after the first 500 and before the last 500 chapters, both of them speak at length themselves.
“My name is Rami Elhanan. I am the father of Smadar. [Smadar was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing]. I am a sixty-seven-year-old graphic designer, an Israeli, a Jew, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite. [...] It may sound strange, but in Israel we don’t really know what the Occupation actually is. We sit in our coffee shops, and we have a good time and we don’t have to deal with it. We have no idea what it’s like to walk through a checkpoint every day. Or to have our family land taken away. Or to wake up with a gun in our faces. We have two sets of laws, two sets of roads, two sets of values. To most Israelis this seems impossible, some sort of weird distortion of reality, but it is not. Because we just don’t know. Our lives are good. The cappuccino is tasty. The beach is open. The airport is right there. We have no access to what it’s like for people in the West Bank or Gaza. Nobody talks about it. You’re not allowed into Bethlehem unless you’re a soldier. We drive on our Israeli-only roads. We bypass the Arab villages. We build roads above them and below them, but only to make them faceless. Maybe we saw the West Bank once, when we were on military service, or maybe we watch a TV show every now and then, our hearts bleed for thirty minutes, but we don’t really, truly, know what’s going on. Not until the worst happens. And then the world is turned inside out.

“Violence is weak. Hatred is weak”

Truth is, you can’t have a humane occupation. It just doesn’t exist. It can’t. It’s about control. Maybe we have to wait until the prize of peace is so high that people begin to understand this. Maybe it won’t end until the prize outweighs the benefits. Economic prize lack of jobs. No sleep at night. Shame. Maybe even death. The price I paid. This is not a call for violence. Violence is weak. Hatred is weak. But today we have one side, the Palestinians, who are completely thrown to the side of the road. They don’t have any power. What they do is out of incredible anger and frustration and humiliation. Their land is taken. They want it back.”

"The occupation is wearing us down"

“My name is Bassam Aramin, I am the father of Abir. [Abir was fatally wounded in the head by a rubber bullet fired by the Israel Police]. I’m a Palestinian, a Muslim, an Arab. I am forty-eight years old. I’ve lived in many places – a cave near Hebron, seven years in prison, then an apartment in Anata, and these days in a house with a garden in Jericho near the Dead Sea. [...] When I was a kid, I thought it was a punishment from God to be a Palestinian, a Muslim, an Arab. 
  I carried it around, a big heavy weight around my neck. When you’re a kid you always ask why, but adults forget to ask why anymore. You just accept it. They smashed up our homes. Accepted. They herded us through checkpoints. Accepted. [...] You see, the Occupation exists in every aspect of our lives, an exhaustion and a bitterness that nobody outside it really understands. It deprives you of tomorrow. It stops you from going to the market, to the hospital, to the beach, to the sea. You can’t walk, you can’t drive, you can’t pick an olive from your own tree which is on the other side of the barbed wire. You can’t even look up in the sky. They have their planes up there. They own the air above and the ground below. You need a permit to sow your land. Your door is kicked in, your house is taken over, they put their feet on your chairs. Your seven-year-old is picked up and interrogated. You can’t imagine it. Seven years old. Be a father for a minute and think of your seven-year-old being picked up in front of your eyes. Blindfolded. Zip ties put on his wrists. Taken to military court in Ofer. Most Israelis don’t even know this happens. It’s not that they’re blind. They just don’t know no idea what is being done in their name. They’re not allowed to see. Their newspapers, their televisions, they don’t tell them these things. They can’t travel in the West Bank. They have no idea how we are living. But it happens every day. Every single day. We will never accept it. Even after one thousand years we’ll never accept it. [...] The Occupation knocks us down and we get up. We are steadfast. We won’t give in. Even if they hang me with my own veins. You see, ending the Occupation is our only real hope for everyone’s security, Israeli, Palestinian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Bedouin, it doesn’t matter. The occupation corrupts us all from the inside out. But how do we go about ending it? I knew back then – and even more so now – that we have to do things differently. [...] We had to learn to use the force of our humanity. To be violently nonviolent. To bow our heads to the things that we need to tell one another. That is not soft, that’s not weak, on the contrary, it’s human.”

“Portaitissa to Donetsk”

A multi-award-winning documentary from 2018 about a monastery very close to the embattled and now completely destroyed Donetsk airport – “Portaitissa to Donetsk” – also comes to mind. The abbess of the monastery, which was largely destroyed during the fighting around the airport at the end of 2014/beginning of 2015, says in the film: “At that time, something could probably still be changed. We could have reconciled. Understood each other. Apparently, no one wanted that.”

Not enough, but worth the effort

And finally, another quote from the novel “Apeirogon”. Bassam Aramin, as the novel tells us in one of the last chapters, had the opportunity to speak at a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee AIPAC. He is always unsettled during his talk and has doubts about whether it makes any sense at all in speaking here, at the Israel Lobby. He perceives unrest and unwillingness in his audience. But in the midst of the portrayal, it reads: “To shift just one mind. It was never enough, but it was worth it anyway.”  •