Everything was ready for the arrival of the two guests: instructions for using the heaters, towels and linens, the phone number of a neighbor who is also a good friend, and who was supposed to meet them at the Qalandiyah checkpoint and escort them to my apartment in El-Bireh while I was away. Both landscape architects, the visitors had been invited to speak at an international academic conference at Bir Zeit University last November entitled "Conservation and Management of Landscape in Conflict Regions."
Last April the organizers of the conference had accepted the two women's jointly proposed topic for the lecture: "Nature, Nation, Native, Nakba: Landscape Narratives in Israel's National Parks." [Nakba, literally "catastrophe" in Arabic, is the Palestinians' term for the 1948 war and its consequences]. In July, the two submitted the final version of their talk, which was approved by the conference's scientific committee.
In mid-October, the two were told that Palestinian hotels were not allowed to receive Israeli guests. Thus one of them, Racheli Merhav, sent me what she termed a "bold request" by e-mail: She asked whether they might stay at my place. "You are most welcome to come," I wrote back, though I knew that Ramallah hotels do accommodate Israelis.
I knew Merhav from her activism in Yesh Din, the human rights organization established to counter the harassment of Palestinians by Jewish settlers, and to bring the perpetrators to justice. She is also active in Machsom Watch (a women's anti-occupation group). Merhav escorts Palestinians who have been attacked to Israeli police stations in the West Bank to file complaints, and frequently visits Palestinian homes. Going to Ramallah and giving a lecture at Bir Zeit seemed to her a natural extension of her activism during the last five years.
The lecture, she summarized, would concern the way in which landscape has been "conscripted" into nation-building; it examines how a landscape can be used to communicate a certain narrative that denies or pushes into oblivion the existence of its indigenous inhabitants. Chief landscape architect for the Israel Nature and Parks Authority between 1990 and 1999, Merhav herself played a part in that denial. Today she is amazed at herself, at her failure to ask questions, either as a child or as an adult, while confronting face to face the distinctive expressions of Palestinian existence in this country: houses, wells, rows of cacti, orchards.
"The job of landscape architects is to add information - they should not conceal information," she explains today. At the Mekorot Hayarkon National Park, for example, she says she helped, by virtue of her position and her ignorance, to conceal information about the small Palestinian village of al-Mirr, which once existed on the southern bank of the Yarkon River. This was in keeping with a general trend that emphasizes antiquity, while it skips over the last 300 years of local human habitation. In the park, the village is mentioned only in relation to the al-Mirr flour mill, which has survived; it was one of five that operated along the river.
The sign in the park says the village was established in the middle of the 19th century, and it describes the mill, which inhabitants used from the Roman period right up through Ottoman times. Today Merhav knows what the sign fails to mention: that the people of al-Mirr, most of whom were farmers, left in February 1948 out of a fear of military attacks.
On the one hand, Merhav recognizes that "it is natural and acceptable for each society to decide which story to tell in its environment, through its landscape." On the other hand, she believes that the story must be expanded beyond the national context. "It is no accident that Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai wants the architect of Hayarkon Park to integrate Gan Habanim, a site commemorating fallen soldiers, within it, but does not ask to build a Gan Habanot to commemorate women who were murdered by men."
In the lecture they prepared for the Bir Zeit conference, Merhav and her colleague alluded to the villages of al-Mirr and Safuriyya, whose lands are now part of the Zippori National Park. Safuriyya, whose population numbered more than 4,000 people, was testimony to the continuous habitation of the site since the Hellenic period. It was one of the first Palestinian villages to be bombed by the nascent Israel Air Force in July 1948. Following a ground attack, most of the villagers fled to Nazareth. In the park itself, the posted signs reveal only that a village named Safuriyya used to exist there, its name reminiscent of the ancient, original Hebrew name Zippori.
The conclusion of the speakers was: "Israeli landscape architects, as members of the dominating society, were born and socialized into paradigmatic oblivion." For Merhav, the motivation to give the talk was thus not purely academic: It was what she considered to be a political-existential act.
Merhav knew that in coming to Ramallah she would be violating the Israeli military order of October 2000 that forbids Israelis from entering Palestinian Authority territories (the edict does not, however, include the town of Bir Zeit, which is in Area B, over which Israel has security control). Undeterred, she assumed the organizers were hesitant about discussing her entry to Ramallah so as not to be "accomplices to the crime," and so left the travel arrangements to her colleague, who lives abroad and holds another passport in addition to her Israeli one. A Ph.D. and senior lecturer in the country where she lives, the friend wrote their speech in English, based on their joint work (and asked that her name and residence not be divulged, so as not to upset her elderly parents, who oppose her political views).
Merhav's colleague informed the organizers that the accommodation problem had been solved, and that she and Merhav would come to Ramallah on their own. "Then they told my friend that a cab would be waiting for her at the American Colony Hotel [in East Jerusalem]," Merhav explains. "She asked to reserve a seat for me, and was told that if I had a foreign passport, there would be room for me in the taxi." It then occured to Merhav that she was actually being asked not to come. She called Dr. Shadi Ghadban of Bir Zeit's architectural engineering department, one of the conference organizers. She was told that he was concerned for her safety - worried that the university would not be able to protect her if students attacked her for being Israeli. After coming to the conclusion that "fear conquers all," she stayed home.
Matter of principle
Was it fear or something else? Bir Zeit University has a reputation for avoiding ties with Jewish Israelis as a matter of principle: Even before its senior professors joined the call for an academic boycott of Israel a few years ago, the university refused even to hire Israeli lecturers known for opposing the occupation, including sworn anti-Zionists; it also turned away those few Jews, also from the Israeli left, who wished to be admitted as students.
"In Hebrew, too, there is a proverb: 'A fool throws a stone into the well, and not even 10 wise men can retrieve it,'" Dr. Ghadban told Merhav on the phone, repeating his words during our recent conversation at a Ramallah cafe. He did not deny, however, that the context for his reservations about Merhav's visit included the university's position on collaboration with Israeli academia.
Ghadban: "The Palestinian universities are committed to the decision to boycott collaboration with any Israeli academic institution, even if there are Palestinians employed there. Israeli academic institutions have never protested, as institutions, the violation of our academic freedom, let alone the occupation. They did not protest when the occupation authorities kidnapped students from Gaza studying in the West Bank and deported them back there when their permit to stay in the West Bank expired. They have not spoken out against the roadblocks preventing access to the universities, or the travel restrictions, or the arrest of students simply because of their activity on the student council."
But Merhav is an individual, after all. Her paper and its abstract were included in the conference's publications, where it is stated that Merhav is an Israeli, a graduate and teacher at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, with a graduate degree from Harvard, and that she is an activist in an anti-occupation group. No one concealed this.
The abstract of the talk was submitted from abroad, Ghadban says: "We were very happy to get it." The names suggested that the two authors were Jews. Bir Zeit does not prohibit the participation of Jews in its academic events. Later Merhav and her friend were asked to send their resumes - and Ghadban then discovered that Merhav lives in Israel. A few days earlier, a Bir Zeit man recovering from open-heart surgery had died of a heart attack following an assault by Israeli soldiers, who used stun grenades. The rage and grief were still fresh.
"I said to Racheli, 'Your life is more important than the conference,'" says Ghadban, who studied in Bulgaria in the 1970s. "We didn't know how the students would act. True, the boycott issue was still in the air, but first and foremost it was a question of life." He consulted with the Bir Zeit PR office and it was decided that she should not come: because of the boycott, the situation, the fear.
The director of the PR office is physics professor Ghassan Andoni. In his own political past, as a leader of the tax rebellion at Beit Sahur and founder of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People, he has frequently met with Israelis. "The main attitude at Bir Zeit is that under the present circumstances, and until there is a political solution, there is no value to maintaining ties with Israelis on an academic level and at the level of grass-roots activism," he says. "The official position is that no effort should be put into such connections. Israelis opposed to the occupation will understand that for us, what matters is building a state and its institutions, not being considered a fifth wheel tied to Israel. We want to be acknowledged as an independent entity, and for our window to the world not to be through Israel."
Asked whether Merhav would have been welcomed had she been a Palestinian Israeli citizen, he answers: "Yes, because Palestinian citizens of Israel are not part of the occupying state. Jewish Israelis are seen as part of the mechanism of occupation. Our top priority is to establish ourselves as a Palestinian academic institution, far from the occupier and its institutions. There is no personal affront to anyone here. We expect people to understand this. If they don't, then they don't understand the occupation and its essence."
Being opposed to the occupation, Andoni says, is a very vague concept, and it would be undignified to begin to set standards and to question every potential Israeli visitor about the essence of his or her anti-occupation stance: "There's an element of extortion in that: If you oppose this and that, you can come. If not, you're not welcome at Bir Zeit."
Both Andoni and Ghadban emphasize the difference between cooperation on the academic level and joint Palestinian-Israeli action such as that taking place, for example, in the protests against the separation fence at Bil'in. "There we are talking about distinct and focused political action against the occupation. Both groups have a clear shared interest, and all Palestinians welcome the cooperation," they say. This is exactly the distinction that Merhav and people like her have trouble making: To them, taking part in an academic conference at Bir Zeit is political activism.
Erasing the occupation
M., a popular professor at Bir Zeit, asks that his name not be mentioned. "Yes, that's from fear," he explains, somewhat self-mockingly, "the fear of what people will say, how they'll react, what their attitude will be toward my saying what I say here." During the 1980s, when he had just begun his studies, Israeli left-wing activists took part in various political events alongside students and professors from Bir Zeit. But the Oslo Accords, he says, gave Israeli-Palestinian cooperation a bad name: After Oslo, the basis for cooperation - as reflected in various projects launched by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Palestinian Ministry of Planning - helped erase the occupation from the common lexicon.
Furthermore, it turned out that many donors around the world relied on this cooperation, and even made their contributions conditional on collaborative academic projects involving Israelis and Palestinians. This is the essence of normalization that people at Bir Zeit find so distasteful, M. says - collaboration based on a phony symmetry between the occupier and the occupied - or, as in the case of the Peres Center for Peace, the patronizing attitude of a "developed" society helping a "backward" one, and the approval of travel permits as dependent on such collaboration.
"The fear at Bir Zeit is of losing control over the situation," M. explains. "Maybe we'll begin working closely with people who are clearly against the occupation, but gradually standards will slacken. Ties will be formed regardless of such distinctions." This, he believes, is what happened to Al-Quds University at Abu Dis, which has open academic ties that are too open - in his view and that of many Palestinians - with Israeli institutions and figures. M. is convinced, however, that in Merhav's case, the main motive was fear of how the students would act; fear, that is, of one hotheaded individual whom no one would be able to stop.
"In 2005, a delegation of anti- occupation American Jews came to the university," he continues. "They were accompanied by two young Israelis who shared their views. Their visit was approved by the university's PR office." The delegates sat down in the cafeteria and began to converse with the students. One student, an activist in the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), discovered that two of the guests were Israeli. She went out and began to protest their presence on campus.
"In a situation like that," M. explains, "students align themselves with the more radical position. Each organization competes with others to see who yells the loudest against the presence of the Israelis." Professors and PR officials made sure the visitors could finish their meal and leave safely. In a subsequent conversation between the students and the administration, it was agreed that Bir Zeit opposed normalization and ties with Israelis - especially out of concern that important distinctions would become blurred. "Some people at the university would like to have ties with Israelis, but then the university will have a problem: After all, it can't oversee and censor every meeting. That's why it was decided there would be no ties at all."
D., M.'s wife, used to teach at Bir Zeit. She recalls a case in which a literature professor agreed to write a letter endorsing the nomination of Israeli writer Amos Oz for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His letter appeared in the Israeli press. Within a day, she says, "he became the focus of such public hatred that he was forced to write a letter of apology."
Bir Zeit, M. says, allows its students more freedom of speech than other universities. But given the constant tension and frustration under which the students live, this freedom seems to serve those who hold more radical views - the kind who tend to silence all others, whether by violence or by merely an implicit threat of it. Adds D.: The fear breeds self-censorship.
In late November, Bir Zeit was still under the shadow of a violent struggle that had erupted between the PFLP and Fatah student movements on campus. M. says that Fatah liked the criticism voiced by PFLP members against Hamas, but was less pleased by the movement's criticism of the Palestinian Authority at a public rally marking the anniversary of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence on November 15. Shouts and accusations were exchanged, and the rally was cut short. Someone made an obscene gesture at the daughter of Ahmed Sa'adat, the PFLP secretary general, who is in prison in Israel. Two days later, masked assailants attacked the man, beating and stabbing him. Word of his grave condition spread. Students affiliated with Fatah began to seek out PFLP supporters in order to take revenge. The university shut down for two days. A number of students were suspended. Palestinian security forces discovered that the assailants were not students.
"On the first day of our conference [in November]," Ghadban recalls, "a group of Shabiba [Young Fatah Organization] members from the university came and stood at the entrance to the hall. They asked to meet with the university's president, Dr. Nabeel Kassis, and to protest the suspension of the students. My first thought was that they had come to object to the presence of the Israeli, and I feared something would happen to Racheli's friend." The concept of freedom of speech has become tainted by hooliganism, M. believes: There is no red line separating speech from violence.
Says Rita Giacaman, a professor at Bir Zeit's Institute of Community and Public Health: "We welcome any Israeli who opposes the occupation. After all, we have worked for years with the Israeli organization Physicians for Human Rights. It is easy for people like Merhav to be welcomed warmly at Palestinian homes and villages. But on all the campuses there is a concentration of angry young people who have lost their space to Israeli policy, and lost their ability to take part in political life due to the policies of the PA. They have no chance of finding employment, no place to go for fun, for social activity. They live daily under the shadow of death: When such a large group of people is dispossessed of its rights, experiencing injustice and inequality at every minute, the result is a reservoir of dormant violence.
"The question is not what happens in this or that case, to an exceptional Israeli who can or cannot come here. What matters is the primary goal, the context. And our primary goal is to encourage our students to experience political-democratic life, which is not available to them outside. Violent incidents are not healthy for Bir Zeit and for the democratic experience, and therefore we need to prevent them."
'Heated positions'
S., an economics student, is a PFLP activist at Bir Zeit. I've known his parents for a decade and have visited their home. S. agrees that campus activists have a tendency "to keep aligning themselves with the more heated positions," and that his own movement plays a central role in this trend. Maybe it's because the PFLP is less bound up by the political tension between Hamas and the PA: Hamas activists are more cautious because they are in the cross-hairs of the PA-run security forces. Fatah members are politically, financially and conceptually subordinate to the PA and its institutions. By contrast, PFLP activists feel independent and invulnerable.
S. was not able to convince his friend, an official PFLP representative on campus, to meet with "that Israeli journalist." "People are afraid of what others will say about them during the elections: 'Oh, that's the one who met with Israelis and went for normalization,'" S. concludes with frustration. Fear of rumors and slander and the inability to disprove them affect the actions of many people.
Racheli Merhav did feel a sting of personal insult, of "being unwanted," but she also understood the context: "This is my turn to be shut out. I'm paying for what I see at the roadblocks. I feel so guilty for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, that I would understand even if I was shut out over and over. The insult of being unwanted is dwarfed by my frustration and anger at the fact that fear wins the day. It's an emotion that drives the situation even deeper into its lack of a solution."
R., a Palestinian in his early 30s who lives in a refugee camp, began his studies at Bir Zeit this year, after spending five years in an Israeli prison. He is a Hamas activist, on and off campus, and has held various roles within the movement. Unlike the PFLP man, however, he had no problem meeting with "the Israeli journalist." He naturally accepts the university policy forbidding ties with Israeli academics. "We are aware that some Israeli groups are fighting against the occupation, and that if we, the Palestinians, fight them, we will lose their voice and influence," says R. "Then again, they may have different opinions from other people, but ultimately they share the same existence - that of our dispossessors. Maybe Racheli lives in my grandfather's house in Lod?"
Nevertheless, he adds: "I'm in favor of taking a close look at exceptional cases, of people who oppose the occupation and whose sincerity we are sure of." Had Merhav been invited as an exceptional case, would she have been in danger at Bir Zeit? R.'s answer is an unequivocal "no." In his opinion, the university "can actually use the visit of an Israeli guest like Merhav as an opportunity to organize its own educational activity. Not hide the fact that she comes or blur her identity, but on the contrary, explain why she specifically was invited."
At the end of the conversation, R. asks for Merhav's phone number. He called to say that he was sorry she did not come to the conference at Bir Zeit.
