Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

‘Witness: The Inward Testimony’ was the subject of the address I gave. It had, of course, particular reference and relevance to the place, Israel, and the Israeli writers among those present. In the depths of profound confusion, while peace talks as the foundation of justice for both peoples flounder and revive, I found there are two absolutes: for Israelis, the right of Israel to exist, denied by Hamas and jihad Palestinians; and the return of the occupied territories to Palestine.

Among Israeli writers, including the vociferous Amos Oz, renowned internationally for his brilliant novels and bold, critical publication of possible solutions for two-state justice, every Israeli writer I met was against the occupied territories and the harsh measures used against the Palestinian inhabitants. I was informed by people at conference sessions that the majority of Israelis are against their government’s policies of occupation. A minority spoke to me in defence of the occupied territories as acquisitions of the 1967 changes to partition lines in divine accord with biblical prophecy.

I had made arrangements before leaving South Africa to visit East Jerusalem, the Palestinian sector. A car from the Palestinian Authority picked me up at a curiously named no-man’s-land, the American Colony Hotel. I was received by Professor Sari Nusseibe, a fellow writer whose work I know. I talked with a gathering of students, many of them aspirant writers, answering their questions about the pressures of political conflict on the freedom of expression. But literature did not turn out to be the portent of this occasion for me. I was taken to the faculty which houses a unique documentation, for which ‘museum’ is not the right word. The smiling director was himself a prisoner of Israel for seventeen years of Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Not only had he assembled the minute scraps of testimony scribbled on shreds of paper or cloth that were smuggled out of prison, and photographs of men under merciless interrogation; he has a library of written accounts by ex-prisoners whom he seeks out to set down living memories of pain and humiliation under interrogation. No doubt there are the same kind of memories of suffering among Israeli prisoners interrogated by Palestinians.

The inhumanity of humans towards humans knows no boundaries.

Al Quds University is close to what is referred to as the Jerusalem suburb, Abu Dib, through which the wall that divides Palestine from Israel has part of its monumental path. The wall defies any conventional image. I stood beside one of its gigantic convolutions across streets and houses. It is as high as a wall from floor to ceiling in a one-storey house. I was with a doctor at the entrance to his home. The wall slices toweringly across his and a neighbour’s garden and their street. His clinic is a few blocks away, on the other side of the wall. He has to drive (I was with him) several kilometres to the nearest gate and checkpoint to cross and reach his clinic back near the very point he set out from. He told of critically ill patients on the east side of the wall whose life-saving treatment was available only at a specialised hospital on the west side, on occasion someone dying while guards delayed perusal of medical documents that authorised the crossing. In Israel, I was told by friends that nevertheless there are times when the ‘unconscious’ patient and the attending ‘doctor’ are let through. They are suicide bombers coming to explode murder among the Israeli men, women and children in public places.

Meanwhile, I watched children coming through the gate from their school on one side of the wall to reach their homes on the other side. The everyday disruption of Palestinian lives is inconceivable, even as you experience some small part of it.

Through my friendship with the late Edward Said, outstandingly brilliant intellect of our time, dedicated proponent of Palestine complete with just borders, and his wife Miriam Said, I was enabled to be received in what is known as the heart and mind of the occupied West Bank, Ramallah. Despite my participation in the International Festival of Writers, boycotted by Palestine, I was warmly welcomed by Dr Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary of Al Mubadara, ‘the Palestine national initiative for the realisation of Palestinian national rights and creation of a just, durable peace’ — a group whose members were assembled. They drove me about Ramallah, informing me of what I was seeing again as the results of occupation. Around a table for lunch at Al Mubadara, I learned first-hand about the political standpoint, tactics and work of the Palestine Initiative. They reject the Hamas denial of the right of Israel to exist, while pursuing a non-violent but inexorable struggle against the present and ongoing occupation of Palestine.

Dr Barghouti is a member of the Palestine parliament who achieved second place behind Mahmoud Abbas in the 2005 elections, focusing major attention on the demand to end further construction of Israel’s wall and the dismantling of its existence. He talked about customary rhetoric among political leaders, encouraging colleagues to speak. I heard how the Palestine Initiative, while ineluctably dedicated to a Palestinian state on acceptable, just frontiers, is also concerned with internal Palestinian divisions. ‘Just’ being under endless disagreement, where both Israel and Palestine each believe they have an ancient right to the entire territory, even while bitterly recognising, force majeure of the contemporary world, that would only be achieved by unspeakable bloodshed in a horrific war.

I left for the Other Side with a huge poster: ‘40 years under occupation’, reproducing coloured maps, green for Palestine splattered with red spots indicating Israeli ‘colonies’, incredible rearrangements, swaps of bitterly disputed territory, from 1948 to present — with a final blank map for the future, bearing only a question mark. There are some extraordinary responses to the blank map of the future. Returning from occupied territory to the conference in Jerusalem, the car in which I was transported plunged into a deep, long tunnel off the highway. My Palestinian escort told me this was one of those envisaged by Israel to connect, along 1967 lines, the far-flung pieces of Palestine that Israel recognises, without using the highways that lead through Israeli territory.

The question mark remains.

It hangs over peace negotiations — that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers. Israeli and Palestinian poets and fiction writers bear their particular responsibility of inward witness, not for the television and newsprint immediacy of the day, but in lasting works that bring up from beneath the news something of the contradictions of the human condition, enduring, living in hope, a time and place.

2008

I am black: hasn’t a black man eyes? Hasn’t a black man hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a white is: if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a black wrongs a white, what is his humility, his revenge? If a white wrongs a black, what should his sufferance be by white example, why revenge? The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’

You will have no difficulty in recalling a different version of this monologue. 141In fact, the two will be playing along in your mind, as in mine, as the same text in two voices; and it is the volume they create together that will be what I shall be venturing to put before you.