“Day after day, week after week, we see the limits of what is tolerable being transgressed and hardly anyone raises a voice of protest and says Basta!”
Excerpted from Christian Salmon’s The bulldozer war
No concerted effort is being made to create a Palestinian state, a binational entity or even two separate Israeli and Palestinian states. Instead the forces at work here seek geographic fragmentation and dissolution, the abolition of the land itself. It would not be the first time that places and streets were renamed or localities taken apart before being remade anew. In Bosnia this was known as “memoricide”, the murder of the past. Here mere name changes are not enough: forests, hillsides and roadways must be completely deconstructed. The territory has been mutilated. We know that geography’s primary purpose is to serve the needs of war. But in Palestine, war is designed mostly to conquer geography.
Official speeches and UN resolutions often fail to mention an important thing: this soil contains the interwoven strands of thousands of years of human history, the strata of numerous cultures and civilisations. The countryside and the roads, the fields and the olive groves are the endangered legacy of all humankind. Unesco was rightly alarmed when statues of the Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley. Will we stand by impassively while Palestine is reduced to fields of ruins and Jerusalem becomes another Beirut? Who will speak out against the obliteration of Palestine’s natural and archaeological sites?
Director Samir Abdallah‘s documentary Writers on the Borders is airing on the Sundance Channel tonight. The film is an intimate close-up of the International Parliament of Writers trip that Christian Salmon reflects upon in The bulldozer war. Russell Banks, Breyten Breytenbach, Bei Dao, Vincenzo Consolo, Juan Goytisolo, José Saramago and Wole Soyinka formed the rest of the delegation who, in Goytisolo’s words, would “visit a poet, confined, with three million of his fellow citizens, in that scattering of incomunicado rat-traps which is all that remains of the so-called Palestinian National Authority.” The poet he was referring to is Mahmoud Darwish.
Breyten Breytenbach’s Open Letter to Ariel Sharon