Rachel Kushner Wants to Radicalize the Novel – Jacobin magazine

I had an idea of where my sympathies lay in terms of that geopolitical situation which is more of a history of settler colonial theft and subjugation than it is a conflict, because the two sides are so asymmetrical but for a long time felt it wasnt really my battle. When I was invited to Palestine, I was focused on things much closer to home, here in California prison, poverty and I was writing a contemporary novel about California and its struggles.

But after going there, I could absolutely see how it becomes an obsession for people, because what you witness is so intolerable. The refugee camp I went to, Shuafat, has Gazans living in it, and it has Gaza-like attributes, in the sense that its both incredibly densely populated and also, if somebody ends up there with neither paperwork that allows them to travel in the West Bank nor paperwork that allows them to enter Israel, they are essentially stuck in a one-square-kilometer refugee camp for the foreseeable future.

The logic of the military occupation, shutting down freedom of movement, and the stated military objective of making every Palestinian feel they are being hunted and chased, was totally overwhelming. Its a lot to absorb, as a witness, which is nothing compared to living under it, or trying to.

I mean, watching Palestinian construction workers line up at 4:00 a.m. at a checkpoint to go through what are essentially cattle chutes to get to their jobs in Jerusalem, and to see that their very survival depends upon learning to consent to conditions of subhuman treatment it was just totally awful and unbelievable. Older people will be stuck in this line who are incontinent, or who have diabetes and cannot stand on their feet for six hours. If you have a health emergency in the line, theres chain overhead and chain walls on both sides, and there are hundreds of people lined up in front and behind you. Theres no way to get out. Thousands of Palestinian men endure this every day to get to work.

Thats just one example of the many outrageous things I saw there of the military occupation. Going there had a real effect on me. Our government not only supports this the United States more or less underwrites the whole thing. I am convinced that anyone who saw what I saw would not be able to continue to believe in Israel as the ethnostate that it is. Its tragic for everyone, including the Jews, that after a war in which literally two-thirds of European Jews were erased thats so staggering, I mean, Im stunned by that over and over that after a genocide of that engulfing scale, the reparation was to become a settler colony with nukes pointed at all their neighbors. Its agony.

Anyhow, as you mention, the essay in my new book, The Hard Crowd, is specifically about this refugee camp, called Shuafat, that is technically inside of Israel. I was interested in the idea of going to a refugee camp because a lot of them have become permanent homes for people, for better or worse. There is high-rise housing in Shuafat. The idea refugee camp suggests transience, but many of these refugee camps have now been there for fifty years. I wanted to know how that feels, what it looks like, how it works for those who live there.

Shuafat is a place where 85,000 people live in one square kilometer without any infrastructure or services. It is surrounded by twenty-five-foot concrete walls. Israeli authorities never enter except to storm the camp to make an arrest or arbitrarily bulldoze somebodys house then they fine the person whose house was bulldozed, for the cost of doing so.

Theres no garbage service in Shuafat. Theres no water system. Theres no electrical grid. Almost no schools. No fire trucks nor ambulances. Theres no land registration, no safety or building codes. There are roads, but they arent paved nor named, they arent zoned, they dont have addresses, and they dont have sidewalks. There are no parks. Theres no place for kids to play.

There are reasons to live in Shuafat. If you do, you can hold on to your Israeli residency, which is precious for people who need to get inside of Israel in order to work. But also, people dont want to leave Jerusalem, because thats where they are from, where their parents are from, even as they are stripped of citizenship, as Palestinians, and only have a provisional version of it, in the form of a Jerusalem residency status that can be revoked at any time.

My guide there and my host, I stayed with him and his family, was community organizer Baha Nababta an amazing person I write about in the book. He was assassinated in the street fourteen days after I left.

I didnt exactly sign up to be exposed to that kind of violence. When it happened, I was immersed in writing my novel The Mars Room, and in doing activism work with people serving life sentences. I was going to prisons all the time, and talking to people and thinking about different kinds of violence, and then Baha was killed, and I felt like I was sandwiched between worlds that were just really tough, really brutal, if in different ways.

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Rachel Kushner Wants to Radicalize the Novel - Jacobin magazine