“We didn’t want to edit this book,” novelists Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman dramatically begin the introduction to this collection of essays timed for the 50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. In their effort to persuade the reader how remote they have been from the terrain of this collection, they offer their life story. Soon after they first met, they took a trip to Israel in 1992. (They married in 1993.)
Waldman, Jerusalem-born, had spent much of her life outside, and this was Chabon’s first time in the country. Their itinerary touched all the places Lonely Planet would recommend: Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, al-Aqsa, the Western Wall, the Dead Sea.
But thereafter they didn’t return, till Waldman went to a literary festival in Jerusalem in 2014. Here she befriended members of a non-profit organisation called Breaking the Silence, made up of former Israeli soldiers working to end the occupation. This time she visited Hebron and saw life under Israeli rule in the West Bank first hand. As she and Chabon write jointly, referring to each other in the third person: “For the first time she had a clear visceral understanding of just what occupation meant, of how it operated, and of the decades of Israeli strategic planning that had gone into creating the massive, often brutal, always dehumanising military bureaucracy that oversees and controls it.”
Together, they say, they decided to bring to the issue the powerful lens provided by storytelling (a storyteller being, they quote Henry James, “one on whom nothing is lost”). In batches, some of the best writers from around the world were taken to Israel-Palestine, including Maria Vargas Llosa, Anita Desai, Raja Shehadeh, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru and Colm Toibin. Their essays collected here record the dehumanising apparatus, procedures and relations the occupation has brought.
And perhaps it is Israeli writer Assaf Gavron’s recollection that underlines the importance of their efforts. Gavron recalls a 2009 commercial for a telecommunications company that focussed on the separation barrier: an object comes flying over this monstrosity towards an Israeli military jeep, the soldiers react, till one of them says, “It’s just a soccer wall.” A soldier kicks it over the wall, it comes back, and it’s “game on”. Some time later a group of Palestinians made a video to test this narrative. They kick a football over the wall, and “in return, the Israeli soldiers shoot tear gas”. And in a way that’s what this bunch of writers do: they train their novelist’s eye on the telling detail in order to bear witness to the varying and brutal degrees of dispossession.
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation ; Edited by Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman, 4th Estate, ₹482.
