Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The Palestinian refugee camp Dheisheh is buckling beneath poverty and inherited hopelessness. The despair is palpable even in the pictures that my friend and co-worker Ali sends me from inside the camp. I have never been there — even before October 7 it was not simple or prudent for a Jewish woman to visit Palestinian refugee camps, but now passage has become impossible. Since I began working with Ali to restart the after-school program for children which he used to run in his camp, my view into Dheisheh has been dependent on Ali’s glitchy WiFi. Ali grew up in Dheisheh, which has no parks, no playgrounds, no art museums, no movie theaters. The streets are marked by potholes and littered with the detritus of a population which lives on memories. There is nothing beautiful there. A life without beauty binds the mind as ropes bind hands and feet.    “Return” is the echo that haunts places like Dheisheh. There, tomorrow is an unfriendly specter, and the embers of a past worth remembering require much effort to keep from flickering to ash. The camp is located south of Bethlehem, the ancient town between Hebron and Jerusalem on the west bank of the Jordan River. It was built in 1949 as a temporary shelter for Palestinian refugees from both those cities. They had fled their homes during the war that would become known to Palestinians as the Nakba and to Israelis as the War of Independence. That war ended in an armistice on July 22, 1949. For the past seventy-six years, the Palestinians of Dheisheh have remained stalled in its aftermath.   Dheisheh was built to be provisional. The displaced Palestinians are bound together by the siren call of their former homes. Many of them carry keys to the buildings from which their grandparents or great-grandparents were evicted. Yet even if the people of Dheisheh could leave the camp and find somewhere else to live, starting a new life is considered a dereliction of duty, a treason toward their past. They are, in this sense (and more largely in their politics), complicit in their own misery — to leave Dheisheh, to eschew the refugee status in search of a fresh start, would be tantamount to conceding Israeli ownership of the homes from which their families were forced. They are bound to, and by, the past. To be Palestinian is in some essential way to live in longing for those lost homes. In this regard they are not unlike the Jews who for two thousand years prayed for a return to Zion. President Biden enjoys recounting the moment, just before the Yom Kippur war in 1973, when he and then-Israeli premier Golda Meir were standing shoulder to shoulder for a photo op. The two of them knew that Israel was about to be invaded by Egypt and Syria, and neither were confident the still-young, puny country could repel those forces. “Why do you look so worried, Senator Biden?” Meir whispered. “We Israelis have a secret weapon: we have nowhere else to go.”    It’s true. In all the centuries Jews wandered in the diaspora they were never permitted a sense of belonging or a sense of true safety. The vast majority of the Jewish tradition was written in exile. The entirety of it is tinctured with nationalist yearnings. Just as Palestinian identity been shaped by displacement, for most of the time that Jews have existed they have existed in exile. A marrow-deep sense of vulnerability is another trait that Jews and Palestinians have in common. Jews as good as kept their keys when the Romans forced us from Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. In prayers three times a day for the subsequent millennia, we vowed that we would come back, that we would be restored to the territory that was taken from us and that is rightfully ours. If Israel fell today, there would be nowhere for the seven million Jews who now live there to flee, nowhere that such a population could find rights and safety.    And nowhere is precisely where Palestinians are now. Today, to be Palestinian is to be suspended in the same inhospitable dimension between the past and the present that the Jews know so well. For Palestinians, any aspiration towards permanence is impossible, legally and culturally, when permanence – by which I mean stability and self-determination – is what they most need. The Israelis will not allow it, and neither will the Palestinian ghosts, who are just as present as the living. Perhaps even more so, since they seem to determine the unfortunate behavior of the Palestinian leadership. Nothing can be permanent until a will to live triumphs over the weight of all our dead. Palestinians must renounce their right to their grandparents’s olive trees if their children are to have parks and playgrounds. The price of progress is compromise, which fools confuse with treason.    Ali was born in Dheisheh in 1991. His father and mother were born there, too. His father’s father was raised in Hebron, and his father’s mother in Zakariyah, or Zechariah, an Israeli moshav west of Jerusalem where, according to legend, the body of the prophet Zechariah was found in 415 CE and buried there in what became a Christian shrine. (Zechariah was supposed to have been inside the Palestinian state that the United Nations established in its partition plan in 1947, which the Arabs rejected. In 1950 its last Arab residents were expelled by Israel.) Ali’s mother’s family was from Bethlehem originally. In 1949, after the armistice was signed, three thousand and two hundred refugees came to Dheisheh. They lived in caves or in tin-sheeted shacks, where they stayed for one year before moving into tents. In all the intervening time every step towards more habitable dwellings was made grudgingly, because these camps were not supposed to last. There is a terrible irony in this, because they have lasted. They have become permanent sites of impermanence.