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."

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.”