A joke is doing the rounds.
It gets a quicker laugh in the Middle East. An Israeli arrives at Heathrow. "Your name?" "Shlomo." "Your age?" "Fifty-two." "Occupation?" "No, only tourism." You have to be Palestinian to appreciate this fully.
There has been no more consistent and passionate observer of Israeli occupation than Palestinian lawyer Raja Shehadeh. He began describing life in occupied Palestine in Strangers In The House and gave an unforgettable impression of life in his hometown Ramallah in When The Bulbul Stopped Singing.
In all his work, he conjures up a landscape of arbitrary boundaries, brutal segregations, the denaturing not just of people, but of places. The once-beautiful Jaffa was allowed to turn ugly and then confiscated on account of its ugliness. Asphalt and concrete are the brimstone and fire of Israel's manifest destiny. Taken together, Shehadeh's books are a kaleidoscopic history of the period since May 15 1948. That is the date known to Israelis as Yom Ha'atzmuat (or Independence Day) but to Arabs as Yawm an-Nakba, the "Day of the Catastrophe".
A liberal Westerner tends to think of freedom and repression in terms of grand abstractions and metaphors. Orwell is always useful for these. A Palestinian thinks about freedom and repression in terms of very specific dilemmas and fixes.
It is important when reading Shehadeh not to miss the moments of beauty and humour which break through the anger, but equally important to recognise that the intense particularity of the story he tells in this diary tends to a wider perception of his homeland and its history. As readers of his A Rift In Time will know, Shehadeh frequently and unexpectedly expresses admiration for the old Ottoman Empire which, although brutal and inefficient, also allowed a remarkable level of co-existence, even to the mutual sharing of religious and tribal festivals, something that persists in corners of the Middle East even today, but vanishingly.
That particularity is even more in evidence in Occupation Diaries, which unfolds from December 2009 as the scandal of the Gaza convoys develops. There are scenes of comic horror. Shehadeh tries to get to Edinburgh and has an airport experience that makes the usual tourist "nightmare" seem like VIP treatment. As a "suspect" person (read: Arab) he finds himself tagged with so many 6's he starts to look like the Beast of the Apocalypse. Meanwhile, a stout Israeli businessman (1.1) is whisked straight through.
Shehadeh never reaches for a metaphor. They find him. His wife is cleaning the bathroom and screams when she touches a snake in the drain. Shehadeh pokes with a stick and finds it is a tree root. How deep do they run in this place? He visits an abandoned old hotel once frequented by his mother, still an oasis in the occupation desert, like the Shehadehs' present garden.
He also quotes a diary his mother kept during 1944 and 1945, while living in still-beautiful Jaffa, studying in Jerusalem and visiting Tel Aviv. Her account of going to see a movie seems banal enough, until one remembers that Random Harvest is about lost memory and recovered memory, a lost birthright and a new, chosen birthright. Then one remembers that James Hilton, who wrote the original novel, was also the creator of Shangri-La, and suddenly the detail shimmers with meaning.
My oldest friend in the world is an Iraqi Jew, displaced from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, who came to London in 1963 and hasn't been back much since. He doesn't like contemporary Israel, says the place smells wrong. Smells are powerful signifiers for Shehadeh, too. Jews and Arabs routinely squabble over cooking odours, the way Londoners used to jibe at Pakistani families with their spices or Irish immigrants with their eternal cabbage.
But these are fleeting. There is another kind of smell for which there is a special word: petrichor. It is the essence of place, best experienced after a fall of rain. Shehadeh still catches it in his garden, but it's fading across the region. Gaby is right. Israel smells wrong because the occupation smells to high heaven.
Raha Shehadeh is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 15. Go to www.edbookfest.co.uk or call 0845 373 5888
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