Man not the tank shall prevail
Next, I pick up the map showing the country until 1948, but I snap it shut as horror rushes over me. Palestinian villages which on the Israeli map appear to have been swallowed by a Yellow Sea, appear on this one by the dozen, their names practically leaping off the page.
It’s been a long time since I’ve passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right.
Perhaps it has always been the way that the workings of the wider world, which have no obvious material impact upon our personal lives, nevertheless impact on other, more atavistic levels. When I was a child, the ghost idea of Boney, (Napoleon Bonaparte), still existed in the folk memory of the British isles, and one can imagine generations of British children being touched by the residual fear of a figure who died in the early nineteenth century. Wars have an effect which go far beyond the waging of them; the effects percolate through into the future. In my lifetime this has been true of Vietnam, Iraq, the Malvinas, Rwanda, Afghanistan, to name but a few.
The past months have added another war to that list. A war which feels like the apogee of the unjust twenty first century war. All war is perhaps a perverse blend of courage and cowardice, and the objective of those who wage war is to minimise the amount of courage required, as courage comes with a cost. Twenty first century warfare has evolved into an object lesson in cowardice. Dropping bombs from the sky to kill civilians requires no courage. Anymore than leaving cholera infested blankets on trees. When the armoury of the media is employed to reinforce this cowardice, the effect is doubly obscene. Children stagger across the eleven inches of your laptop screen, wailing in terror, blood-soaked, and this is pronounced as some kind of act of courageous military valour. When, in your bones, you know you are witnessing actions which are crimes against humanity.
All of this has a terrible relevance to Adania Shibli’s slender, compelling novel which uses fiction to investigate the theft of Palestinian land and the reality of Palestinian oppression within the apartheid state which Israel has since become. The novel opens with an account of the events leading up to the criminal rape and murder of a girl by soldiers who are participating in the establishment of Israel’s southern border. The prose is relentlessly material: language as an unvarnished testament. The skill in the writing is the way in which the authorial voice is reduced to the bare minimum. The story is presented from the point of view of an officer, commanding his troops, and there are moments where the reader almost (but never quite) comes to sympathise with the officer, who seems to be a force for the maintenance of civilised mores within war, until he isn’t anymore. The soldier is in great pain following an insect bite and this pain ultimately destroys his moral compass, and he becomes as much of a criminal as the soldiers he is trying to keep in line.
The second part of the novel is told from the point of view of a female writer, an avatar for the author, who is investigating the crime committed by the soldier all those years ago. History filters through and repeats itself. Once again, the story is told using pragmatic prose, which describes the fearful and absurd constructions placed upon an ordinary Palestinian citizen within their own country by the Israeli state. The narrator decides to research the crime, a process which involves entering the Israeli side of the country, with all the fearful paranoia that this engenders for a Palestinian. Simple things like hiring a car and driving that car down a road become fraught with risk. Terror stalks her heels, a terror that was initiated in the construction of the Israeli state and the theft of Palestinian land, and a terror that is all too understandable today, because it is underpinned by an apparent right to kill Palestinian citizens with impunity.
In her trip, the narrator notes how the geography of the land has been rewritten over the course of the last fifty years. Towns and villages which existed for centuries have been erased. The current events in Gaza appear to be an extension of this colonial practice. Reading Shibli’s novel reinforces a sense of impotence in the face of injustice. The only thing we can do is bear witness, as writers and as readers. The scales of history will have the ultimate word on whether the occupiers’ cowardly war will be one which succeeds in its aims or ultimately, as is the case with so many cowardly wars, leads only towards a Pyrrhic victory. What is undoubtable is that the end of the war will not come with the cessation of violence, because, as Shibli’s novel so eloquently shows, the violence committed by one generation lives on to haunt those that follow.
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