BOOK FEST: Ambrosio, Before We Say Goodbye

Gabriella Ambrosio
Before We Say Goodbye
2010

THE teenage book market is replete with books about monsters – particularly Stephenie Mayer’s hugely successful Twilight saga – and thanks to Amnesty International the shelves now have a new addition.

Gabriella Ambrosio’s Before We Say Goodbye, a semi-fictional account of a day in the life of a teenage female suicide bomber from Palestine and her Israeli victim, received a special endorsement by the human rights group at this month’s Edinburgh International Book Festival for its contribution to the understanding of the conflict. Like Twilight there are no shortage of monsters on both sides, and like the vampires of the saga these monsters are struggling to maintain their humanity against hateful, vengeful urges and an insatiable thirst for blood.

Before We Say Goodbye is based on the factual tale of Ayat al-Akhras, 19, who became Palestine’s youngest female suicide bomber when she killed herself and two Israelis including one Rachel Levy, 17, in a Jerusalem supermarket in 2002. The physical similarities between the two girls led the authorities to speculate initially that there had been two Palestinian suicide bombers, and that Levy was al-Akhras’s accomplice and perhaps even her sister.

The case starkly demonstrated the similarities between the communities on both sides, and in this book Ambrosio imagines the personal circumstances that brought these two girls together through the lives of two proxies, the Palestinian Dima and the Israeli Myriam, both 18.

Ayat al-Akhras and Rachel Levy on the cover of Newsweek

As the book is aimed at the teenage market, I have handed over my blog for this review to two Edinburgh teenagers, Andrew MacLean and Frances Singer, recent James Gillespie’s High School graduates who Amnesty pulled together for a chat with the author Gabriella Ambrosio at the book launch last week. I was struck by their different interpretations of the book, and conflicting sympathies, but as we shall see Ambrosio herself was not surprised.

“I seemed more sympathetic towards Myriam,” said Andrew, from Bruntsfield, who is going on to study biological sciences at Oxford next month. “Dima seemed a little naive, talking about how killing herself and others would make right all of the wrongs that that her family had suffered. There’s a line in the book about her actions taking all of the injustices away and making the Israelis pay, but I think this book showed that her actions were just part of a never ending process. By the end of it the Israelis were shouting, ‘death to the Arabs’, while the Palestinians celebrated.”

‘Dima had to blow herself up in the middle of a crowd. She had to blow up a crowd.
‘She wouldn’t be doing it if she weren’t sure she would kill lots of them. She would postpone it. Her life was not worth a few lives; it was worth a great many Jewish lives – at least a hundred. She would blow herself up and take a hundred people with her. A hundred Jewish families would have to suffer what they as Palestinians were suffering. And finally the camp would celebrate. The return of honour. Of a little justice.’ (Before We Say Goodbye, p.115)

Frances, from Newington, who is going travelling for a year before taking on a chemistry degree at York, had a slightly different take.

“I identified slightly more with Dima,” she said. “You can really feel her anger at the situation, whereas Myriam seemed quite empty. Myriam was upset about the death of her friend but it never seemed to sink in, whereas Dima’s response was more emotional. I don’t think I would do what Dima did [suicide bombing] but I can see why she did it. She felt there was nothing for her, and she was going to be stuck in the same situation unless she did something about it, but if she had just carried on she could have made much more of a difference. She wanted to be a journalist and she could have made much more of a difference doing that rather than blowing herself up.”

Two other characters stand out from the book who are worth noting. Myriam’s brother Nathan, 19, is doing his military service at the Erez checkpoint and is probably the closest thing to Mayer’s teenage vampires, a human child, a pacifist, unwillingly conscripted by older monsters who begins by being horrified by the brutality on both sides but ends up resigned to it.

' “You have to check everyone who crosses over [the checkpoint],” Nathan said flatly. “People are made to partly strip off, and their shoes and bags are passed through the metal detector. Often they have blades hidden in their soles...the first thing that came to mind was a scene from the Holocaust.
“I felt like I had got everything wrong...and then that awful thing happened...everyone saw Ariel’s head fly inside the blockhouse...
“They do this to us. Someone thinks it up and sends them to do this to us. The truth is, as far as their concerned we shouldn’t exist!"' (Before We Say Goodbye, pp72-73)

Then there is Ghassan, the Palestinian puppet-master, the man who “thinks it up” and sends “them” – ordinary Palestinians like Ayat al-Akhras and her fictional proxy Dima – to kill Israelis. Ghassan is the personification of every Hamas/Fatah/Hezbolla/Iranian/Al-Qaida hardliner who believes death and destruction is the only solution to the Israeli occupation but sends others to do their dirty work.

‘Peace. That is what Ghassan felt after every explosion. Peace at last. The blast, the trembling air, the pieces shooting away in all directions...
‘What must it be like, living as if you were always stuffed with explosives? What else could you want if not to get rid of them every so often? This is how it was for Ghassan, who sought every explosion the way another might seek an orgasm.’ (Before We Say Goodbye, pp76-77)

I had originally believed Ghassan to be not only the personification of Arab monsters but a dual personification of the monsters from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with his one brown eye representing the Arabs and his one blue eye a metaphor for the occupying European Jew stereotype, but according to Ambrosio his heterochromia is descriptive rather than metaphorical. Andrew’s and Frances’s insights, it seems, where more on the button than my own:

“His different coloured eyes are a result of the shrapnel in his head from one his grenades that exploded too close - nothing more,” said Ambrosio. “I am not surprised that Andrew and Frances came to different conclusions about the characters because when I read a book I identify with the people, not the politics. It’s the humans you identify with as they are your guides in this other world, and often the only way that you can understand how you would feel in this world is to understand how the characters feel."

READING: Cowley, The Last Game

Jason Cowley
The Last Game
2009

The Last Game, ostensibly an extended essay about the Liverpool v Arsenal title decider in 1989, is about much more than football. It is part biography, part social commentary, part fanzine and a wholly passionate read. It’s about Cowley’s relationship with football, with his father, with journalism and with the world around him, often all four at once. The prologue provides an interesting insight into his psychology:

“I accepted the false dichotomy between the so called highbrow and lowbrow and had concluded that you couldn’t be both a book man and sports man – that the two cultures were separate, with no connecting bridge between them.”

As a bookish journalist living in Edinburgh, 60 miles from my derelict hometown of Linwood where ignorance is practically a virtue, and 60 miles from my football team St Mirren which I still visit most weeks largely to catch up with my brother and boyhood friends, I know all about this dichotomy and can identify with the polar forces pulling him apart.

But Cowley and I both know that this dichotomy is, indeed, false (many people still recoil in shock when I inform them novelist Christopher Brookmyre is also a St Mirren fan). Cowley approaches his sport like the giants of American literature approached their sports. He marries his bookish head with his sporting heart and does for football what Norman Mailer did for boxing, Ernest Hemingway did for bullfighting, and Hunter S Thomson did for desert racing - he chronicles the attitudes, troubles and prejudices of the day through the prism of a single sporting event.

He even measures his own theories on that other momentous sporting event of 1989, the Hillsborough disaster, not against those of contemporary British writers such as the divisive Kelvin MacKenzie but against another giant of modern American literature Don Dellilo, who described the fans’ suffering like a great religious painting, “a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it”.

And he writes about Arsenal v Liverpool the way Mailer wrote about Ali v Foreman, as a titanic battle between gladiators rather than a lowbrow working class sport. He elevates Arsenal manager George Graham, a tough Scot born eight miles in the opposite direction of Glasgow as myself, to the status of an ageing warrior-poet:

“[As a player] Graham was a languid presence in midfield. He passed and moved so gracefully that he was known variously as the Stroller, the Ringmaster and The Peacock. ‘I had a quick brain but a slow body,’ he has said. ‘I needed time, which is not available in the English game today.’...

“[As a manager] Graham did not like strollers or peacocks: the footballer as the egoist or exhibitionist. He preferred grafters...Graham demanded toil and labour from his players and coaching staff.”

Even when he moves away from the football field to review the social change of the 80s he does so from the terraces, chronicling the changing attitudes to race through the eyes of John Barnes dodging bananas, likens a rave during 1988’s second summer of love to “an especially intense football match”, and conflates his Last Game thesis – that the ’89 title decider marked the transition between old and new football – with the other great social upheavals of the late 80s such as the decline of communism and Fukuyama’s theories on “the end of history”.

Running through it all is his own struggle to maintain his relationship with football and with his ailing father, his efforts to kindle his relationships with his wife and with journalism and the journey he took towards becoming the current editor of New Statesman and, as author of The Last Game, the thinking fans wordsmith.

BOOK FEST: Lock and Irving. Gaza: Beneath The Bombs

Sharyn Lock with Sarah Irving
Gaza: Beneath The Bombs
2010

“Israelis don’t oppress Palestinians,” activist turned author Sarah Irving told a packed crowd at the opening show in Amnesty International’s Imprisoned Writers Series on the first day of the Edinburgh International Book Festival this afternoon.

Irving and her co-author Sharyn Lock are here to promote their new book Gaza: Beneath The Bombs, and their statement – while apparently jarring coming from one half of a team of committed pro-Palestinian activists – sums up the humanitarian message of the book.

“Israelis don’t oppress Palestinians...the Israeli government oppresses Palestinians,” Lock elaborated. “While a lot of racism undoubtedly exists if you speak to Palestinian taxi drivers in the West Bank many of them will tell you that some of their best friends are Israelis.

“However, such relationships are becoming more difficult because it’s hard for an Israeli to travel to the West Bank. Ariel Sharon actually made it illegal for some Israelis to travel into the West Bank, and it was a deliberate effort to cut these ties and foster separation and resentment.

“The vast majority on both sides are just people trying to get on with their lives, but one side is systematically having everything they hold dear stripped away from them.”

Both Irving and Lock have been visiting Palestine for the best part of the last decade, and their eyewitness accounts confirm many of the horror stories that continually flow out of the embattled Gaza strip and West Bank.

“I actually worry more about the West Bank than I do about Gaza,” adds Irving. “Despite the bombing going on in Gaza the extent of the institutionalisation and acceptance of Israel’s ongoing programme of settlement building concerns me.

It’s like it’s become a part of life, but I’m continually shocked by how large these settlements have become even in the last nine years that I’ve been visiting.”
Irving’s persistent activism has taken an awful toll on her health. Hobbling in on crutches she explains that her legs are slowly deteriorating from an injury she sustained after being thrown to the ground by an Israeli soldier.

Irving and Lock told the crowd of their experiences crouching in parsley fields dodging bullets, and getting drenched by Israeli water cannons firing on Gazan fishing boats. The boats fire putrid water which, the authors claim, is laced with some form of poison which makes the fishermen sick and contaminates the fish destined for an area where food is scarce.

Lock emotively related her experience to the comforts of home. “I often forget that the planes flying overhead are actually death machines, and sometime catch myself imagining that they’re actually passenger planes full of eager holidaymakers like the planes back home.

“I sometimes mistake Israeli tanks for roadworks. The noise is very similar and I suppose in a sense they are road works – they’re unmaking the roads.”

While much was said about the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians, little was said about the counterpart governments in Gaza and the West Bank that arguably play their own part in oppressing the Palestinians by stoking Israeli anger – the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and corrupt secularists Fatah.

Speaking after the event, Sharyn Lock explained why Hamas has yet to show its true colours – for good or for ill – in Gaza because the area has been under constant blockade and frequent bombardment since Hamas took power in free Palestinian elections in 2007.

“No one can really decide how well Hamas are doing because they’ve got nothing to judge it against. Any progress Hamas makes is immediately bombed out of existence by Israeli planes.

“What many people forget is that there is no such thing as a welfare state in Palestine, no health care or child support, and for a long time Hamas was the welfare state. They organised help for the communities suffering under the occupation.

“And while there are stories about Hamas forcing women to wear the veil it’s not something I’ve seen myself. Some women do wear the veil but no more than in previous years, and nobody seems to make a big deal about feeling oppressed under Hamas because they’re all so focussed on the infinitely larger oppression their suffering at the hands of Israel.

“It’s got to be remembered that 50 per cent of Palestinians are under 18, so you’ve got a community full of children who don’t engage in politics and don’t have any idea about elections. Those that did vote for Hamas had watched as the Fatah controlled Palestinian Authority failed to secure any gains for the Palestinians.

“Faced with no other option they thought – like many British people in the last election – ‘These guys aren’t working for me; let’s see what the other guys have got to offer.”

READING: Milton-Edwards & Farrell. Hamas.

Beverley Milton-Edwards & Stephen Farrell
Hamas
2010

AS an RAF Spitfire screamed overhead at the annual air-show in my ancestral home of Sunderland last weekend, my mother remarked how frightening it must have been for my Nana growing up in this heavily-bombed shipbuilding town in World War II to hear that foreboding sound in the knowledge that death could shortly follow in its wake.

But as the Spitfire receded over the horizon it was followed by an even more bloodcurdling noise. Children covered their ears and adults looked to the skies as a Dutch F16 launched into a barrel-roll, the buzz of its engines growing to a deafening roar as it blasted the seafront with its fearsome afterburner. This sound must be a thousand times more frightening to the embattled people of Gaza, regularly bombed by Israeli F16s, largely, in latter years, as a result of their political support for Hamas.

"Hamas stunned the world when it won one of the only free elections in the Arab world,” writes James Hider, author of The Spiders of Allah and Middle East Bureau Chief of The Times, in his endorsement of Beverley Milton-Edwards’ and James Farrell’s eponymous study of the radical Islamist resistance group that has ruled Gaza with an iron-fist since its election in 2006. The stellar-list of endorsements that accompany this book is reason enough to make it compelling reading, from Hider, to former BBC Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin, to Guardian Middle East correspondent Rory McCarthy, plus a host of respected authors and academics, but the fact that Belfast Queen’s University politics professor Dr Milton-Edwards was able to recruit Farrell, the twice kidnapped former Times and now New York Times correspondent, as co-writer lifts it from what could have been a weighty and worthy academic tome to an indispensible and often gripping account of Hamas’s inception and rise to power.

Hamas’s origins can roughly be summarised as inspired by the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, infused with the spirit of 1930s anti-colonial fighter Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, stirred up by the foundation of Israel in 1948 and the six-day war of 1967, propelled by the foundation of Sheik Ahmed Yassin’s Mujamma following the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and finally ignited by the first intifada in 1987. The authors chronicle how Hamas’s brand of deadly resistance to Israel came into its own during the second intifada:

“The first intifada was the stone throwing intifada. Now who believes in stones.” (Hamas MP Jamila al-Shanti)

Hamas rise to power was essentially a reaction to years of ineffectual resistance to Israeli expansionism and oppression of the Palestinians, who watched as the secular politics of Nasser and Fatah failed to contain Israel within its 1948 borders and proved ineffectual in making their anti-Zionist protests heard.

“We tried the fiasco of liberalism in 1948 and we lost half of Palestine. We tried socialist communism in 1967 and we lost the rest of Palestine. We need to be more doctrinaire if Israel is to be overthrown. We need an Islamic state founded on the principles of the Koran.” (Unnamed Islamist student activist)

The authors piece together Hamas’s complex web of supporters and financiers. Following its election in 2006 the movement benefitted greatly from the resources it inherited (or commandeered) from its Western-approved predecessors Fatah and, after international sanctions and the Israeli blockade cut off Gaza’s lifeline, it took a leaf from Hezbolla’s book and looked East for its support, overcoming its sectarian opposition to Iran’s Shi’a theocracy to rely on its support and drawing further assistance from the Arab states.

The authors go to great lengths to distance Hamas from the mindless terrorists that many western leaders often portray them to be. Hamas’s founding fathers are here revealed to be articulate and often reasonable in their justification for their attacks on what they regard as invaders. Even the abhorrent act of suicide bombing, painstakingly deconstructed in this book by psychologists, politicians and families of “martyrs” interviewed by the authors, contains a touch of reason when deployed against an enemy that is vastly superior in weaponry, finance and international political backing:

“Believe me if we had F16s we would never use suicide attacks.” (Senior Hamas leader Dr Abdel Aziz Rantissi)

However, the inherent brutality of the movement frequently seeps through and can be seen writ-large in the days after it took control of Gaza and began to remodel it as an austere Islamic entity in the mould of Iran and, at times, approaching the brutality of the Afghan Taliban. Women were relegated to the status of incubators for future resistance fighters and forced to cover up under threat of an acid wash (in a region where short-skirts were not an uncommon sight during the swinging 60s). Men were encouraged to grow their beards and forced to subscribe to the Hamas doctrine wholesale or risk being shot. And yet the Palestinian people continue to support them because they appear to be the only effective resistance to the Israelis who have had them under the cosh for over 60 years, and certainly the only force that has been able to inflict any serious damage.

Parallels are occasionally drawn with the French resistance during WWII or the Provisional IRA, particularly in Hamas’s recent embrace of the ballot box, but these parallels quickly break down on closer analysis. Unlike Sinn Fein, the authors observe, Hamas went into politics to keep their arms not lay them down and its leaders admit that its policy is to continue to terrorise Israel, whose existence it steadfastly refuses to recognise. Hamas is also standing up to an enemy far more deadly and vindictive than the British. As one Irish observer in Palestine noted in the aftermath of the one tonne bomb that killed Salah Shehadeh, founder of Hamas’s military wing the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in 2002, wiping out 145 civilians in the process:

“If the British wanted to wipe out Gerry Adams would they use a bomb that size in a residential area?”

Ultimately, it is horrors such as this, and the countless other examples listed in this book’s 300 odd pages, that makes it hard to entirely condemn Hamas as nihilistic thugs. Gaza freely chose an Islamic resistance group with a history of violence in one of the fairest and most transparent elections in the region, so it is tempting to say that Gaza deserves everything that it has suffered in their hands. But the lesson of this book is that the people of Gaza felt they had no alternative. The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority failed to halt Israeli settlements, failed to create a Palestinian state, failed to stop the indiscriminate killing of innocent Palestinians and, by all accounts, lined their own pockets at the people’s expense. It failed to prove that secularism was the way to battle an aggressive theocracy so the only alternative was Hamas.

And the final lesson of this book is that, for the foreseeable future at least, Hamas is in Palestine to stay.