John Berger - Hold Everything Dear - Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

IWOULD LIKE — simply as a storyteller — to add a few short remarks to the current debate.

Being a unique Super-Power undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically one has to imagine oneself in the enemy's place. Then it is possible to foresee, to make feints, to take by surprise, to outflank, etc. Misinterpreting an enemy can lead, in the long run, to defeat — one's own. This is how sometimes empires fall.

A crucial question today is: what makes a world terrorist and, in extremity, what makes a suicide martyr? (I speak here of the anonymous volunteers: Terrorist Leaders are another story.) What makes a terrorist is, first, a form of despair. Or, to put it more accurately, it is a way of transcending and, by the gift of one's own life, making sense of a form of despair.

This is why the term suicide is somewhat inappropriate, for the transcendence gives to the martyr a sense of triumph. A triumph over those he is supposed to hate? I doubt it. The triumph is over the passivity, the bitterness, the sense of absurdity which emanate from a certain depth of despair.

It is hard for the First World to imagine such despair. Not so much because of its relative wealth (wealth produces its own despairs), but because the First World is being continually distracted and its attention diverted. The despair to which I refer comes to those suffering conditions which oblige them to be single-minded. Decades lived in a refugee camp, for example.

This despair consists of what? The sense that your life and the lives of those close to you count for nothing. And this is felt on several different levels so that it becomes total. That is to say, as in totalitarianism, without appeal.

To search each morning

to find the scraps

with which to survive another day.

The knowledge on waking

that in this legal wilderness

no rights exist.

The experience over the years

of nothing getting

better only worse.

The humiliation of being able

to change almost nothing,

and of seizing upon the almost

which then leads to another impasse.

The listening to a thousand promises

which pass inexorably

beside you and yours.

The example of those who resist

being bombarded to dust.

The weight of your own killed

a weight which closes

innocence for ever

because they are so many.

These are seven levels of despair — one for each day of the week — which lead, for some of the more courageous, to the revelation that to offer one's own life in contesting the forces which have pushed the world to where it is, is the only way of invoking an all , which is larger than that of the despair.

Any strategy planned by political leaders to whom such despair is unimaginable will fail, and will recruit more and more enemies.

HOW IS IT I am still alive? I'll tell you I'm alive because there's a temporary shortage of death. This is said with a grin, which is on the far side of a longing for normalcy, for an ordinary life.

Everywhere one goes in Palestine — even in rural areas — one finds oneself amongst rubble, picking a way through, round and over it. At a checkpoint, around some greenhouses which lorries can no longer reach, along any street, going to any rendezvous.

The rubble is of houses, roads and the debris of daily lives. There's scarcely a Palestinian family that has not been forced during the last half century to flee from somewhere, just as there's scarcely a town in which buildings are not regularly bulldozed by the occupying army.

There's also the rubble of words — the rubble of words that house nothing any more, whose sense has been destroyed. Notoriously, the IDF — the Israeli Defence Force, as the Israeli army is called — has become, de facto, an army of conquest. As Sergio Yahni, one of the inspiringly courageous Israeli Refusniks (they refuse to serve in the Army) writes: ‘This army does not exist to bring security to the citizens of Israel: it exists to guarantee the continuation of the theft of Palestinian land'.

There is the rubble too of sober and principled words which are being ignored. UN resolutions and the International Court of Justice in the Hague have condemned the building of Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory (there are now nearly half a million such ‘settlers') and the construction of the ‘separation fence', which is an 8-metre high concrete wall, as illegal. The Occupation and Wall nevertheless continue. Every month the IDF's stranglehold across the territories is tightened. The stranglehold is geographic, economic, civic and military.

All this is clear; it is not happening in some remote, war-locked corner of the globe; every Foreign Office of every rich nation is watching and not one takes measures to discourage the illegalities.‘For us,' a Palestinian mother says at a checkpoint after an IDF soldier has lobbed a tear gas bomb behind her, ‘for us the silence of the West is worse' — she nods towards the armoured car — ‘than their bullets.'

A gap between declared principles and realpolitik may be a constant throughout history. Often the declarations are grandiloquent. Here, however, it's the opposite. The words are far smaller than the events. What is happening is the careful destruction of a people and a promised nation. And around this destruction there are small words and evasive silence.

For the Palestinians one word remains undiminished: Nakbah , meaning ‘Catastrophe' and referring to the forced exodus of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948.‘Ours is a country of words. Talk. Talk. Let me rest my road against a stone,' wrote the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Nakbah has become a name that four generations share, and it endures so persistently because the operation of ‘ethnic cleansing' it names is still largely unacknowledged by Israel and the West. The brave work of the upstanding (and persecuted) new Israeli historians — like Ilan Pappá — is of the utmost importance in this context, for it may lead eventually to such an official acknowledgement, and this would change the fatal name back into a word, however tragic that word.

A familiarity here with every sort of rubble, including the rubble of words.

One tends to forget the geographical scale of the tragedy in question; its scale has become part of the tragedy. The whole of the West Bank plus the Gaza Strip is smaller than Crete (the island from which Palestinians may originally have come in prehistory). Three and a half million people, six times as many as in Crete, live here. And systematically each day the area is being rendered smaller. The towns becoming more and more overcrowded, the countryside more fenced in and inaccessible.

The Settlements extend or new ones begin. Special highways for settlers, forbidden to Palestinians, transform old roads into dead-ends. The checkpoints and tortuous ID controls have seriously reduced for most Palestinians the possibility of travelling or even planning to travel within what remains of their own territories. Many can go no further than twenty kilometres in any direction.

The Wall enclaves, cuts off corners (when finished it will have filched nearly 10 per cent of what remains of Palestinian land), fragments the countryside and separates Palestinians from Palestinians. Its aim is to break up Crete into a dozen little islands. The aim of a sledgehammer carried out by bulldozers.

‘There is nothing left of us in the wilderness save what the wilderness kept for itself.' (Mahmoud Darwish)

Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat, makes for a stance towards the world, here, such as I have never seen before. It may be expressed in one way by a young man joining the Islamic Jihad, in another by an old woman remembering and murmuring through the gaps between her few teeth, and in yet another by a smiling eleven-year-old girl who wraps up a promise to hide it in the despair …