A monologue

Playwright David Hare recently published “Wall: A Monologue,” in the New York Review. It’s superb.

All right. Let’s be serious, let’s think about this.

Please, please: consider the state of affairs, consider the desperation, consider the depth of the despair. A country has reached a point at which 84 percent of its people are in favor of building a wall along its borders.

Have you ever known anything of which 84 percent of people were in favor? And yet there it is, over four fifths of a nation—can you imagine that figure?—saying something completely bizarre. The Berlin Wall was built to keep people in. This one, they say, is being built to keep people out.

You might call this an extraordinary state of affairs. Hardly a normal state of affairs. And that’s the word you hear all the time in the Middle East. “Normal.” The Palestinians ask, “When will we have a normal life?” And so do the Israelis. Indeed, the Israeli state was founded in 1948 with the principal ambition of being normal, of being a normal place like any other. The Palestinians call the foundation of the Israeli state the nakbeh: the disaster. And now sixty years later Israel believes itself, in the frequently expressed view of the majority, in need of a wall.

Except, of course, they don’t call it a wall. They call it a fence.

Listen to the reading of the monologue here. Read Hare’s play Stuff Happens.

Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Literature, Media , David Hare, Wall, Monolgue, New York Review of Books

Disaster Tourism at the Edge of the Golan Heights

A few weeks ago at a popular haunt for old men, writers and boozers in Damascus, I was talking with one well-traveled old man about the Golan Heights. Some weeks earlier I had visited Quneitra, the Golan’s capital, which fell to Israel in 1967.

The town was reportedly dynamited and dismantled by Israeli soldiers before their withdrawal following the October or Yom Kippur War. Removable fixtures down to light bulbs and any salvageable building materials were allegedly stripped from abandoned homes and sold to Israeli contractors. Bulldozers knocked down houses. The United Nations condemned in successive resolutions the “deliberate destruction and devastation” of Quneitra. Israel insisted the damage was caused by two wars and shelling from both sides; Syria downplayed any role of its own guns in the ruined shape of Quneitra.

“The whole thing was Henry Kissinger’s idea,” the old man said as he nibbled on a lettuce leaf between big glasses of whiskey. “Why else would the place be as it is today, 30 years later? He arranged for the Israelis to give it back to us, but they had to blow it up first, and the Syrians couldn’t ever rebuild it.”

Read the rest of my recent piece on visiting Quneitra on the Huffington Post.

Filed under: Syria, Writing , Golan Heights, huffington post, Quneitra