A Land without Borders by Nir Baram: all sides of a troubled story

Nir Baram spent 18 months in the Israeli-occupied territories speaking with Arabs and Jews. And all he did was listen.

Palestinian children in the Israeli-occupied West Bank look towards a Jewish settlement. Picture: AFP

Nir Baram is a powerful writer. In his last novel, Good People, which came out in English last year, he explored two emblematic characters during World War II: a bourgeois German who makes a career decision to join the National Socialists and a Jew who supports Russia’s NKVD in her resistance to the Nazi state. It was acclaimed across Europe.

Critics praised the author’s force, precision, boldness, ingenuity and more. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung when the book came out in German in 2012, one reviewer said, “Quite possibly, Dostoyevsky would write like this if he lived in Israel today.”

Author Nir Baram.

Baram’s latest book, A Land without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank, brings all the nuance of his fiction to the most intractable international problem of the past century: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Good People showed Baram’s talent for getting into the heads of people with whom he would necessarily disagree to consider their point of view, his latest book deploys that to dazzling journalistic effect.

He spent 18 months travelling through the occupied territories speaking with Arabs and Jews, Jewish settlers and Palestinian activists, the young and the old, extremists and pacifists, left and right. His Arabic is mediocre and English was often the lingua franca. What he did best in that time was listen. Really listen. He doesn’t rehearse cliches or offer solutions.

One of his most certain conclusions, however, is that the root of the troubles does not go back to 1967, when Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Old City of Jerusalem were occupied during the Six-Day War. People on the moderate left and right in Israel, the international community and Fatah emphasise this date.

For Baram, however, it goes back to the beginning: to the 1948 war that resulted in the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians and established Israel as a sovereign state.

This is the date Israel’s far right and far left, as well as most Palestinians, recognise. Palestinians call it the Nakba, the “catastrophe” in Arabic. Every year since 1998, when Yasser Arafat declared the date, it has been commemorated solemnly on May 15.

Early on, Baram speaks to a veteran Palestine Liberation Organisation activist, Fathi Darwish, who then would have been in his late 60s. Darwish speaks of the effect of the Nakba on his family, which left the village of Mi’ar, close to Acre.

“My father hoisted a blanket and mattress on his shoulders and carried my brother Mahmoud in his arms,” Darwish told him, “my mother perched a half full sack of flour on her head and held my sister Alia and a jug of oil …”

He spoke of the long-term effect on the family: “We’re a classic example of the dismantled post-1948 Palestinian family. Like a grenade that explodes and the shrapnel flies everywhere. My siblings are scattered around the world. I have brothers and sisters in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, in Serbia, in America, in Jordan. I haven’t seen some of them for more than 25 years.”

And, most poignantly perhaps, he told of the existential effect of the Nakba: “Darwish says that if Israelis were to read Palestinian writers and poets, such as Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habibi and Muhammad Ali Taa,” Baram writes, “they would gain an understanding of the Palestinian soul, of the moment when a person loses his home and instantly becomes dispossessed.”

Darwish is just one of a galaxy of people Baram met. His text is dense and intense with conversation, which he places in historical context. He sits with a half-dozen elderly Palestinian men, the remnants of a whole gang that transcended age and class, who served time in Israeli prisons in the 1960s and 70s. There’s good humour, even joshing. One claims to have been “Israel’s most wanted man” in the 70s; his friends say he’s exaggerating. They went on strike and rioted in prison; friends died. In the end they “beat” the prison system and the wardens let them manage their own affairs. Surprising as it may seem, they look back on the time with nostalgia. “They read everything: world literature classics, fiction, politics, sociology, philosophy — from Frantz Fanon to Theodor Herzl,” Baram writes, “ ‘It was a good time,’ [one of the men] al-Beiruti reiterates. ‘I can’t remember a period where we had as much autonomy to conduct our own lives as we did in prison. We slept, rested, read, spoke about the future.’ ”

After their release they had to rebuild lives from scratch. They shock Baram by telling him that 800,000 Palestinians have been through the Israeli prison system.

Also in Ramallah, a small boy who hears Baram talk in the street stops to ask him if he is Jewish and responds to his answer with disbelief. An older boy says, “He’s always hearing about Jews, but you’re the first Jew he’s ever seen in his life.”

In Jewish villages, Baram encounters a parallel world. In Kibbutz Nirim, he talks to two boys playing tennis. They are annoyed when tanks — part of Operation Protective Edge launched in 2014, for which local residents aren’t entirely grateful — kick up a cloud of yellow dust. “The army has caused hundreds of millions worth of damage,” one tells Baram, pointing to places tanks have trampled crops and crushed irrigation hoses. “They’ve killed the land. Just based on the damage they’ve done here, I can imagine the kind of things they are doing in Gaza.”

Baram’s book isn’t just filled with colourful human interest, though that is what brings to life the reality of people’s lives beyond the headlines. It is replete with political argument from myriad standpoints (sometimes confusingly so and some further explanations would have helped, at the risk of weighing down the text). What’s more, the author isn’t afraid to ask awkward, even enraging, questions before standing back to let his interlocutors have their say. He does, however, out himself as a member of Two States One Homeland, an Israeli-Palestinian organisation that advocates for two states with open borders, a step beyond his former formal two-state stance.

This is essential reading for those who wish to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and for those who already think they do.

Miriam Cosic is a journalist and author.

A Land without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank

By Nir Baram

Text, 284pp, $32.99