Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

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 sent to prison. But had this happened, Tsemel believed, the Israeli outcry would have been such that the law would have been changed. “They would have found a way to detain him,” she asserts. In any case, Ahmed’s family would not allow a guilty plea. He had not touched either of the victims in the attacks. Forensics confirmed that his knife had not been used, and he maintained that he never had intent to kill. So Tsemel took the case to trial, knowing that on January 20, 2016, Ahmed’s fourteenth birthday, his protections as a minor would expire. He would be sentenced as an adult and face up to twenty years in prison. As Ahmed was brought, handcuffed, into the courthouse for the first day of his trial, two other Palestinian cousins, aged fourteen and twelve, from Beit Hanina and the nearby Shuafat refugee camp, stabbed and wounded an Israeli security guard. Media reports began to refer to the wave of violence as “the children’s intifada.”

“The children are doing it because the older ones don’t do it. That’s the feeling,” says Tsemel. “If the adults acted—if only there was some political movement—they would not feel this way.”

During the trial, Tsemel argued that no Jewish boy in the same circumstances would be charged with attempted murder for attacking Arabs on nationalistic grounds. “They will always face a lesser charge—manslaughter, grievous bodily harm,” she said. Settlers who injure Palestinians often are released from custody on payment of a small fine.

On April 18, 2016, the day Ahmed’s verdict was expected, his family gathered nervously at Jerusalem’s Central Court. His thirty-two-year-old mother, Maysoon, sat rigidly on a bench, meticulously dressed in a gray headscarf, a long navy skirt, and a turmeric-yellow jacket. As she waited for the guards to bring her son, she said she was still in a state of disbelief that Ahmed could have been involved in the stabbings. “I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t. I can’t. The first video, it shocked me. He’s a small, small kid. Shy. Always with me in the kitchen, or playing with his pet doves.” She gave a wan smile. “He always wanted to bring them inside, to fly around the house. I would complain to him, ‘They make a mess!’ but he would just smile and say, ‘Mama, you know I always clean it up.’” She inclined her head to a nearby bench where Ahmed’s cousins waited to catch a word with him on his way into the courtroom, since they were not allowed to visit him in detention. “They want to tell him that they are taking care of his birds,” his mother says. “They know how much he cares about them.”

Ahmed, small and delicately built, arrived flanked by two juvenile justice counselors. He looked overwhelmed and near tears when he saw his family. He tugged nervously at his green hoodie as his mother embraced him, and managed a brief grin for his cousins. Tsemel, her black attorney’s gown slipping casually off one shoulder, ruffled his hair. “How are you, kid?” she asked in Arabic, before his counselors ushered him away, into the courtroom.

Inside, the three judges who had heard the case confirmed a postponement in their verdict and ordered Ahmed returned to the juvenile facility while they deliberated further. Tsemel emerged from the closed hearing taking some small measure of optimism from the delay. “I hope they have debates. I hope they have doubts. I hope we had a strong enough argument to make them hesitate.” On the other hand, she said, Israeli public opinion remained overwhelmingly against any hint of leniency. Newspaper reports referred to Ahmed “the terrorist” and “the stabber” even though he had not used his knife. “At the trial, the cross-examination and the witnesses were very hostile.” The prosecution had asked for the maximum twenty-year sentence.

But Ahmed’s family was relieved that he would remain at the juvenile facility, where he could attend class and have regular visits with his parents, for at least a few more weeks. They said good-bye in the courthouse hallway as the counselors escorted him away.

At the Manasra compound, the family still struggles to understand how the two cousins became so radicalized. Because he is now a law student at al-Quds University, the boys’ uncle Ahmed has become the family’s spokesman during his nephew’s court proceedings. But very often, he admits, he is at a loss for words. “They did normal things kids do,” he says. “Of course, we don’t know what they see on the computer, what they read on the Internet.”

His brothers, he says, are no more or less radical than most Palestinians of their generation: “Every family has an activist.” As a young man, he took part in demonstrations and was jailed for seven years for throwing a Molotov cocktail at soldiers. Two others among the fourteen Manasra brothers also were jailed for throwing stones during the first intifada in 1987. “But we were men when we did these things,” he said. “It’s painful that we’ve reached this point—that children are involved. This is not the business of children. Not one Palestinian parent wants this. Not one. The only people who benefit are the greedy, rotten politicians who want to stay in their chairs. Calm isn’t in their interest.”

He gazes through the fluttering curtains at the view of his divided city and recalls a time when Jerusalem’s children did not encounter one another as enemies. “There was a park in West Jerusalem—the Bell Garden,” he says. “At Ahmed’s age, I would go there all the time, to play with my Israeli friends.”

Now that is impossible. Even as an adult, he feels insecure in Jewish neighborhoods. “Before, if an extremist tried to assault you, other Israelis would step in and break it up. Now, if something happens—a car accident, anything—it will be misunderstood. Everyone will attack you, because you are an Arab.”

He says every child in the family has been traumatized. Hassan’s seventeen-year-old brother Ibrahim was beaten and arrested the day of the stabbing, when heavily armed police swarmed the compound. A policeman claimed Ibrahim tried to grab his weapon. Since the police shattered the security camera that would have shown what occurred, Ibrahim had no way to prove his assertion that he had not. He was struck repeatedly with the butt of a rifle and suffered broken ribs and facial contusions and returned home only after almost five months in prison. Though he has returned to classes at his technical school, he can’t concentrate. His younger sister, who is ten, witnessed the beating and did not speak for weeks after. Another of the cousins, age five, didn’t leave the house for more than four months.

It was three weeks, Ahmed said, since Israeli authorities had finally offered to return Hassan’s body to his family. Both Jewish and Islamic custom demands the swift burial of the dead, but the Israeli police have recently made a practice of retaining the corpses of Palestinians killed while committing terror attacks. They had retained Hassan’s corpse for four months before offering the return of the body under stringent conditions: a night burial with only uncles and cemetery staff present; everyone to submit to a thorough security check beforehand. Hassan’s family accepted. But they asked that, since the Muslim custom is to carry the body from the home to the grave wrapped only in a shroud and often with the face visible, Hassan’s body not be brought home frozen.

On the appointed date, the Israeli authorities arrived with the body at midnight. “When he arrived, he was stiff as that table,” said his uncle, tapping the mahogany surface in front of him. “His face was blue. How do you say good-bye to an ice cube?” The family refused to accept Hassan in that condition. The police took his body back to the freezer.

“Hassan’s soul rests in peace, and may God forgive him,” Ahmed said. “A body is a body. At the end of the day, what’s left is the pain of those around him.”

ENDNOTE

On December 17, 2015, at Jerusalem’s Kotel, Na’or Ben Ezra was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah.

On May 10, 2016, Ahmed Manasra was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison and fined 180,000 shekels to be paid directly to the victim.

Hassan Manasra’s thawed body was finally returned to his family for burial seven months after his death.

ONE’S OWN PEOPLE

JACQUELINE WOODSON

IN AMERICA, BROWN BODIES WERE FALLING SO HARD AND SO FAST IT was hard to look away. The faces of young brown men popping up on social media platforms, beautiful brown women sending selfies into the universe long after they had been taken from it at the hands of those badged to protect them, little brown boys looking innocently at us from middle school photos. In the heat and energy of this, I boarded a plane. For Israel-Palestine.

For many weeks before I was to travel, I came to tears often. I was afraid not only because of the daily horrors moving across my computer screen, but because my partner, a physician, had visited Hebron four years before and I had been terrified that she wouldn’t return to us, that I would be left not only with two young children but having to live a life without her. That I would be left raising a beautiful brown boy in a country that hated its brown boys. A brown girl in a world that didn’t see her. I cried because years after my partner’s journey, we would be traveling to Palestine together, our children at a summer camp in New Hampshire, miles away from family, and, I would come to understand, a world away from anything they could even begin to comprehend at this point in their lives. Because even while we caution our brown boy about his behavior when addressing cops (eyes up, hands visible, never run), and our brown girl about how to walk into a room with her brown body (cover it, please!), I know now that there are mothers in Hebron who are waiting for their children to come home. I was in Hebron and watched soldiers close all checkpoints as two small boys sharing a bicycle stood outside, crying that their mothers didn’t know where they were. Please let us go home, they said again and again, their words falling into the dust. I was with a Palestinian activist named Issa Amro and my partner, Juliet. The soldiers, no more than young people themselves, their guns slung across their torsos, looked on or away, their young faces set into the work they were drafted to do for three years. The children, still holding tight to their bicycle, continued to beg. There was nothing we could do.

That evening, my partner and I went back to our hotel room, turned on our computer, and exhaled to dispatches from the New Hampshire camp. Our children were safe. Our children were happy. But we were different now. With us, we carried those crying boys.

IN THE WEEKS BEFORE LEAVING, OUR FAMILY SAT DOWN TO DINNER EACH evening, inside our brownstone built in 1878, around a table that we had owned for four years, passing dishes that we could easily replace at Ikea should they become chipped or broken. We moved inside our bubble of comfort easily, save me, with my head halfway in a place that was as foreign and frightening as ignorance. As palpable as the daily news.

What I “knew” about Israel-Palestine was that it was a dangerous place, a place where buses full of people exploded at midday and small boys ran through the streets aiming semiautomatic weapons at innocent passersby. The Israel-Palestine I thought I knew was not a place nice Jewish women (my partner) step into and out of unharmed. I knew the Palestine-Israel of newspaper articles and television journalism. This Palestine-Israel was as foreign to me as Yemen, a place somewhere out there where people who had no connection to me fought among themselves—and killed others. People who were not 100 percent people … how could they be? They were outside my very comfortable America. Outside anything I could—or needed to—imagine. Daily reports of the devastation of the occupation fell on ears attuned more to domestic tragedies—the overshadowing of police brutality, my own people dying. If I couldn’t change this, what could I change? The reports again and again of Jews and Palestinians dying arrived to me in murky shadow. Bloodless. Boneless. These were not schoolchildren who begged for an extra sweet, not mothers lifting a breast to a newborn’s mouth. Not that same newborn instinctively lifting her head to meet it. No boys outside a checkpoint, gates locked, soldiers walking away. When will it open again? I asked the people with me. It could be hours. The soldiers decide. No. If I couldn’t save my own people, why even begin to imagine the murky shadows as fully human?

My own people dying.

What I know now is that there is no longer such a thing as one’s own people.

IN UMM AL-KHAIR, A BEDOUIN VILLAGE IN THE SOUTH HEBRON HILLS, an artist named Eid Hthaleen served us sage tea in tiny, beautiful glasses. We sat on rugs underneath a large canopy, our shoes left just outside. In the hills beyond the tent, we could see his thin goats moving over the land. We could see the makeshift homes, built from tin and plastic and tarps. Beyond that, the piles of metal where soldiers had come in with orders to destroy the homes. Small children looked at me wide eyed. A dark man, nearly toothless, chain-smoked, his fingertips yellow. During a silence, he turned to me and asked through a translator, What is going on in your America? Why are they killing all the black people?

I couldn’t answer.

I do not know. Later, Eid took us to his studio, a tiny lean-to outside a small stone two-room home. He showed us the amazing trucks he had made—tiny renditions of the bulldozers and eighteen-wheelers that had come to destroy past homes, built from the materials and leftover metals of that destruction. This home, he said, was also under orders to be destroyed. All the structures were. He didn’t know where he’d go with his family from here. He didn’t know where the other families would go. They had been living on this land for over half a century. It’s land, Eid said. It will be here long after we’ve all stopped fighting over it.

SOME MORNINGS, WHEN I’M FEELING BRAVE, I PULL MY BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL T-shirt over my head—black shirt with white lettering; the people I pass either smile or glare or look surprised. My pro-Blackness is not antiwhite. This shirt isn’t my own middle finger thrown up into the air but rather an expression of my belief that love can exist for the self without annihilating others. Why is it I wear the shirt only when I’m feeling strong enough?

In Israel-Palestine, I meet both Israeli and Palestinian activists working hard toward creating a safer, freer, fairer nation. I take a bus to the Qalandiya checkpoint and watch the Palestinians moving slowly through it on their way to work. The checkpoint is a high structure of razor wire, iron bars, and metal detectors. IDs must be shown, and sometimes, for reasons no one can explain, people are not allowed to go through, losing days, sometimes weeks of work. A small white-haired Israeli woman, Hanna Barag, arrives early in the morning, to bear witness, to fight for the rights of the Palestinians, to help people move through their days, live their lives, feed their families. I watch her, see the hope in her actions, see the hope in the faces of the Palestinians who know who she is and why she’s there. The checkpoint reminds me of Comstock, Coxsackie, Elmira—the many prisons I saw as a child visiting my incarcerated uncle. In the heat of the early morning, I watch the people move slowly through, their heads bowed, their IDs held out hopefully—and I wonder what crime brought them to this moment. And I know, it is simply the crime of the accident of their birth. And the crime of a nation, of many nations, refusing to see people … as people.

In Hebron, a small red-haired Palestinian boy points to my hair and says It’s not real. Your hair isn’t real! I let him touch it and he yanks it hard. I do what any mother does. I yank his hair back. He is surprised. And then he laughs. I am as surprised by a red-haired Palestinian as he is by a brown-skinned Afroed woman. And then we aren’t surprised. We are just who we are.

I AM ONE OF THREE BLACK PEOPLE ON THE PLANE TO ISRAEL-PALESTINE. A dark man with a yarmulke waves to me. Do you know him, the flight attendant wants to know. I smile at her, silent as bone, my back and voice tense for the journey. I am a mother. A partner. A writer. In Brooklyn, I have a life filled with people whom we share Sunday dinners with and have done so, with only a few misses, for fourteen years. We are well versed in Bordeaux and politics. We laugh a lot and comment on our children’s pituitary glands—how did this come to pass so quickly, that this one is taller than I am now and that one is about to graduate from high school, college, a master’s program? A voice comes over the intercom in Hebrew. My partner takes my hand, tells me again that her own parents used to fly in separate planes lest something happened and their three children were left parentless. And beyond the plane, I want to ask. What then?

The camp in New Hampshire has every auntie’s phone number from New York to Vermont to California. I remember again that we still haven’t gotten to our will. My sister will know what to do. Or maybe she won’t.

MEMORY IS STRANGE. AS I WRITE THIS MONTHS LATER, WHAT I KNOW IS that my fear of Israel-Palestine, like so many fears, was one of ignorance, the unknown, the backstory of others brought into my own present. There is a quiet loveliness to the people of Palestine. Before you can remove your sandals and step into their homes, there is the offering of tea, the shy bowed heads of both the women and men, followed by the warm smiles often reflecting the tortured teeth of poverty. There is the deep heat of a moral core moving through the bodies of Israeli activists—a true belief in justice and equality for all people, a not-looking-away-ness from the pain that is this moment in Palestine-Israel. For many years, I stood outside these worlds. And then I stood inside my fear. Slowly, a bit reluctantly, I stepped inside, opened my eyes, touched, tasted, smelled, and pulled at the hair of a world I had tried to not see, to not know.