When I was 8, I wound up in the hospital. A stone tossed during a raucous childhood game hit my nose, ripped flesh, blood spilling into my eye. The doctors bandaged both eyes, protecting the good eye by keeping it from compensating, from growing too strong. That’s when I learned the power of stones.
The child sees the stone, kicks it. Tosses it. At trees. At friends. I have a photo I took more than a decade ago of my nephews tossing stones into a lake, hoping to see them skip. Just flick your wrist, we told them, but the stones would splash through the surface, create concentric ripples that spread and faded.
The mason creates with stone, piles them atop each other, crafts a wall, a house. The engineer places stones at the bottom of detention ponds to catch the sediment, the refuse, as the water drains. We’ve laid river stones around our pool, a delineation. A way to catch the rain and the spill over.
Stones are tools. Used to pound and crack and crush. To build and settle and protect. Like words laid end to end to create a sentence. They create a reality. “Take what pictures you will,” writes Mahmoud Darwish in “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,” “so that you understand / That which you never will: / How a stone from our land builds the ceiling of our sky.”
Stones. They are tools and they are weapons. They build and they break. In Gaza, in the West Bank, the Palestinians use stones because the stones are all they have to fight back against an occupying force. To express their anger, their frustration. At occupation. At expulsion. The physical removal from their homes.
This is how Badr Abu Alia appears to see it, too. He lives in Al Mughrayyir in the West Bank, tells The New York Times that he is angry. That the army chased them from bed, herded them outside, collected IDs. They “ransacked the house,” and then “left two hours later, taking with them a teenager from next door, blindfolded.”
There was no explanation. This was normal. Almost expected. As the Times reports,
Mr. Abu Alia seethed as he described seeing his son outside in the dark, “afraid, crying because of the soldiers, and I can do nothing to protect him.”
“It makes you want to take revenge, to defend yourself,” he went on. “But we have nothing to defend ourselves with.”
Stone-throwing must suffice, he said. “We can’t take an M-16 and go kill every settler. All we have are those stones. A bullet can kill you instantly. A little stone won’t do much. But at least I’m sending a message.”
A message. In the act of defiance manifested in a stone thrown by a 50-year-old man. A man pushed to the edge of his tolerance. Pushed by the Israeli government. Dominated and brutalized — to use the words of Peter Beinart — and pressed into violence as a response “to the violence of state oppression.”
Hamas launches rockets. Operates as a guerrilla force. But mostly the Palestinians are under the boot heel of the Israeli army. A power imbalance. Israel is a military power, one of the largest in the region. It is backed by the United States, heavily funded. Professional.
My dad’s cousin lives in Haifa, a stone’s throw from the West Bank. A friend lives in Tel Aviv. I grew up being taught that Israel was a birthright. A Jewish homeland. Next year in Jerusalem, we’d say to close the Seder.
We were never taught that there were people, generations of families, living on the land. Only that the land was our land, our ancestral land. That we were the wanderers. We were oppressed, cast into the wilderness. Murdered. The Jewish state a version of the messiah — literally and figuratively, a land constructed in our imaginations, empty, demanding our return. We were the rightful owners. The people driven from their houses by the Zionists were the interlopers, and not people at all. One sees this in their portrayal as dogs by Leon Uris in Exodus, propaganda dressed up to look like a novel.
Uris presented the Palestinians and the Arabs as we in the west, as Americans, were being asked to see them. Strip from the Palestinians their inherent humanity and the west could ignore their plight, even as the Arab nations turned the Palestinians into pawns for their own ends.
We’re seeing the same thing today, with much of the media casting Hamas as an aggressor in a far more complicated puppet show being choreographed by the Israeli government, which has engaged in what the news media has called “evictions,” but that warrants far harsher language. These are expulsions. Forced removals. And they are religiously and ethnically based — making them into a kind of ethnic or religious cleansing. This, according to most observers, is the genesis of the most current violence. This and an Israeli attack on the Al Aksa Mosque, a holy place for Muslims in Jerusalem.
Framed this way, the rocket attacks by Hamas — rockets that, for the most part, have been easily repelled by Israel’s missile defense system — are not a provocation but a reaction to an existential threat.
That is how I see it, writing these words in my safe suburban home in New Jersey. Air raid sirens have not chased me to the shelters, nor is there an occupying army actively rousting me from my sleep and tossing me into the street so that a settler can take ownership. I have no need for stones beyond the decorative. The rubble of bombed buildings, of wrecked roads and bridges do not line my street. My neighborhood is not being cast into stones as I type this.
Palestine, says Darwish in his poem written amid the first Intifada, the first war of stones and rubble, Palestine is “a bleeding homeland of a bleeding people / A homeland fit for oblivion or memory.” He writes as a displaced person. Stateless. Homeless. Darwish was six when the Israeli Army, clearing the new Israeli nation of Palestinians, watched as his village in Galilee was destroyed. “The young Darwish was now an ‘internal refugee,’” write Manir Akash and Carolyn Forche in the introduction to Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, “legally classified as a ‘present-absent alien,’ a species of Orwellian doublethink that the poet would later interrogate” (xvi). the reality then, as Akash and Forche write, was Kafka-esque:
The newly “alienated” Palestinians fell under military rule and were sent into a complex legal maze of emergency rulings. They could not travel within their homeland without permission, nor, apparently, could the eight-year-old Darwish recite a poem of lamentation at the school celebration of the second anniversary of Israel without subsequently incurring the wrath of the Israeli military government. (xvi)
In “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,” Darwish addresses the Israeli powers. Commands they “take the past, if (they) wish, to the antiquities market,” the past being a relic and not justification for Israeli crimes, not currency on which a future can be built. “We,” he writes — a broad “we,” an encompassing “we” meant to take in all of Palestine, I think — “have that which does not please you: we have the future / And we have things to do in our land.” Get out, he says,
O those who pass between fleeting words
It is time for you to be gone
Live wherever you like, but do not live among us
It is time for you to be gone
His is the voice of a man chased from his home. The voice of the men in Gaza and the West Bank, of men and women who live in what are essentially open-air prisons. The voice of a people who, says Beinart, “will continue responding to the violence of state oppression with violence of their own.”
From you the sword — from us the blood
From you steel and fire — from us our flesh
From you yet another tank — from us stones
From you tear gas — from us rain
Above us, as above you, are sky and air
So take your share of our blood — and be gone
Go to a dancing party — and be gone
As for us, we have to water the martyrs’ flowers
As for us, we have to live as we see fit.
I am not endorsing violence. As Beinart says, “Nothing justifies Hamas’ rockets against Israeli civilians, which may constitute a war crime.” But denouncing Palestinian violence without condemning the much more brutal, much greater violence inflicted by the Israeli state assumes an equality of power that just does not exist. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in a different context, the appeals to calm, the calls for nonviolence by officialdom (in this case the City of Baltimore in the wake of the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray), they serve as little more than an endorsement of the status quo.
When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.
This is why Beinart’s use of language like “domination and brutalization” to describe the Israeli government’s actions is important. To understand what is happening in the region, he says, we must understand that Israel “denies Palestinians’ basic rights,” which in turn means the “Palestinians will keep fighting Israel.”
The narrative here is tragic in the Aristotelian sense, a fall built of hubris and political calculation. Palestinians throw literal stones. Israelis throw metaphorical ones. Stones of language and state power and American support.
“They throw stones,” writes the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, and what are Hamas’ rockets but high-tech stones, inaccurate, meant only to create random damage,
Throw this land, one at the other,
But the land always falls back to the land.
They throw the land, want to get rid of it.
Its stones, its soil, but you can't get rid of it.
The land. The stones. The conflict baked into the geography. The geology. This is the permanent made temporary, but still permanent. This is memory imposing its imperfect self on the here, the now.
“Please do not throw any more stones,” Amichai writes. Except maybe little stones or “snail fossils,” “gravel” or “Justice or injustice from the quarries of Migdal Tsedek,” ancient city mired in conflict, conquered and reconquered.
“The past throws stones at the future, / And all of them fall on the present.” And the land moves with the stones and the stones, the people, the land grow weary. Peace, he says, will be weary. If it can be found, I think. As if it is there, under the stones. Hemmed in by checkpoints and barbed wire. Buried under the rubble created by bombs dropped from the skies.
The stones are real. Physical. Deadly. Omnipresent. Moving but never leaving.
***
Sources:
Akash, Manir and Carolyn Forche. “Introduction.” Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, University of California Press, 2003, pp. xv-xix.
Amichai, Yehuda. “Temporary Poem Of My Time.” Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994, Harper Perennial, 1995, pp. 465-466.
Beinart, Peter. “If Israel Eliminated Hamas, Nothing Fundamental Would Change.” The Beinart Notebook, 20 May 2021, https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/if-israel-eliminated-hamas-nothing. Accessed 26 May 2021
—. “The Wars Will End When Palestinians Can Return.” The Beinart Notebook, 12 May 2021, https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/the-wars-will-end-when-palestinians. Accessed 26 May 2021
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Nonviolence as Compliance.” The Atlantic, 27 April 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviolence-as-compliance/391640/. Accessed 27 May 2021
Darwish, Mahmoud. "Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words," Middle East Report 154, September/October 1988, https://merip.org/1988/09/those-who-pass-between-fleeting-words/. Accessed 25 May 2021
Halbfinger, David M. and Adam Sagon. “Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict.” The New York Times, 22 May 2021