The New York Review Abroad (73 page)

Still, he insists, he and his fellow Jews have “never said that for us to live here, no one else can live here,” whereas he believes that the Palestinians will permit no Jewish presence in Hebron in a future Palestinian state. It is the Jews who are the tolerant ones. As for the graffiti, he says, “We’re not particularly fond of it,” but he refuses to condemn it, calling it an “outlet” for settler youth “frustrated by terror attacks and the activities of the Israeli government against them.”

Wilder’s message—that if the Palestinians stopped threatening the settlers with violence, the restrictions could be eased—runs counter to experience. When, for example, the US-born Baruch Goldstein killed twenty-nine Palestinian Muslim worshipers in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, Israel imposed new restrictions—not on the settlers but on Hebron’s Arabs. The vegetable and meat markets were closed, and the ban on Palestinian cars on a-Shuhada Street introduced. (It’s striking that, far from being reviled as a terrorist and murderer in Hebron, Goldstein is buried in the Meir Kahane Memorial Park, which comes under the auspices of the Kiryat Arba municipal authority.)

Still, and despite the twenty-four-hour armed protection they are
given—Shaul testifies that as a soldier his orders were very clear: “We’re here to protect the settlers”—Hebron’s Jews appear to regard the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli state as their adversary. A poster in the Bab al-Khan neighborhood in H2, emptied of all but a handful of its former Arab residents with its gates to the Old City now sealed and bolted shut, declares in Hebrew: “Here’s where the ghetto begins. No entry for Jews.” Elsewhere, a spray-painted slogan denounces what it regards as the godless state of Israel: “We have no faith in the regime of the infidels, we follow the path of Torah.” Another seeks a regime governed by religious law: “We want a
halacha
state of Judea now.” Still another urges, “Death to the traitors of the King,” the King being God.

In this dispute, with the settlers hostile to an Israeli government that denies them the run of Hebron in its entirety, the Palestinians are caught in the middle. They dismiss the settlers’ suggestion that it is only a small fraction of the city from which Palestinians are barred, a relatively modest imposition on their lives. Issa Amro, thirty-one years old and active in organizing nonviolent protest in Hebron, says, “H2 is the center of the city.… All the markets were there: the vegetable market, the fruit market, the camel market, the meat market, the blacksmith market, all the markets were in H2. It is the heart of the city. And if your heart is sick, your whole body will be affected.”

He explains that the restrictions, even if applied to a superficially narrow area, have a far-reaching effect. Families are split between H1 and H2, making it hard for relatives to see each other, especially those who live on H2 streets barred to Palestinian cars or pedestrians. And it has a wider impact: if you want to drive north to south through Hebron, you have to take a long, convoluted route on congested roads. Shaul imagines the equivalent move in Jerusalem, shutting down Jaffa Street and the Old City. It might only account for less than 1 percent of the municipal territory, he says, but it would include
the main road and the historic monuments. “What’s the impact that has on a city?”

Some admit that what one sees in central Hebron is ugly, but console themselves that it is an extreme case typical only of itself. For others, though, Hebron is an intense, distilled version of the wider Israeli occupation. Yehuda Shaul places himself, reluctantly, in the latter camp. “This is a microcosm,” he tells me. “Walk here and you understand how the West Bank functions: the separation, the land grab, the sterile roads, the violence.” Nor does he reassure himself that Hebron is the handiwork of a few hard-core settlers. The presence of the IDF shatters that delusion, as does the plaque from the Housing Ministry on the settler building of Beit HaShisha, a seal of government approval that dates back to 2000, when the supposedly center-left leader Ehud Barak was prime minister. Twenty-one buses depart every weekday, more than one an hour, from the Jewish settlements inside H2 to Jerusalem, offering cheap, government-subsidized fares. Shaul’s grievance is not with the settlers alone, but with the state.

For people like Shaul, proud Israeli patriots and conscientious Jews, Hebron poses a more profound challenge than can be captured by the bland diplomatese of “obstacles to peace” and the like. For them it is about more than a fault line in a bitter, territorial dispute. “What’s being done here is in the name of God and in the name of my state,” he says, in a voice much older than his twenty-eight years.

Shaul has become well known in Hebron. On the steps of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a settler spots him and shouts, several times, that he is a traitor to his people. But there is a face better known than his and I see it within two minutes of arriving in Hebron. In a wheelchair, the consequence of a stroke in 2007, is a white-haired old man in a Panama hat, being pushed by a young, devout caregiver. He is Moshe Levinger, the man who started it all, out for his daily dose of
fresh air. I catch up and ask whether, when he holed himself up inside the Park Hotel all those years ago, he ever imagined it would lead to this, the center of Hebron cleared and emptied for the sake of his fellow settlers. “No,” the rabbi says, he foresaw no such thing. He points a finger toward the sky. “It is a blessing of God.”

—February 23, 2012

Mischa Berlinski

1.

I CAME TO
Haiti in the spring of 2007 when my wife found a job with the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission there. She was assigned to the southern seaside town of Jérémie, a place where donkeys outnumbered cars on the streets. Jérémie was just 125 miles or so from Port-au-Prince, but only a single dirt road linked the two, and the trip overland could take fourteen or fifteen hours. Otherwise, the only connection to the capital was by propeller plane, if one had the money; or, for the poor, the night ferry, the
Trois Rivières
.

About a week after we arrived in Jérémie, the
Trois Rivières
ran aground leaving the wharf. It had been loaded badly, its cargo heavy and high on the bow and its passengers perched precariously above the cargo. Another ship soon came to its assistance. Crew members ran lines between the two boats and the assisting ship reversed its engines. The
Trois Rivières
did not budge, listing instead under the tension of the ropes until its flank was at a sharp angle to the horizon. Then the lines snapped and the
Trois Rivières
, rolling fast back to the vertical, flung its passengers and goods into the shallow bay.

Eighteen travelers drowned. The bodies were gathered from the wharf and rushed to the Hôpital Saint-Antoine where in the middle courtyard they were tossed into a promiscuous heap—face down, face up, mouths streaked by weird smiles of sputum and sea foam. The next day or the day after that, the tides shifted and the
Trois Rivières
proceeded normally to Port-au-Prince. Several days later, the last of the drowned travelers was found on the wharf being eaten by a pig.

Here then was my introduction to Haiti, a classic Haitian tragedy: the careless, criminal incompetence; the gratuitous grief inflicted on the poorest of the poor; the absolute lack of accountability, on the part of both the boat’s owners and the bureaucrats responsible for overseeing maritime safety. In his new book,
Haiti: The Aftershocks
of History
, the historian Laurent Dubois laments that “when Haiti appears at all in the media, it registers largely as a place of disaster, poverty and suffering, populated by desperate people trying to escape.” This is, he says, a “negative stereotype.”
¹
But Haiti appears this way in media accounts because in my experience it is the truth. It is not the whole truth about Haiti but it is surely the most important truth about Haiti. The newsman, traveler, or historian who ignores Haiti’s suffering to focus instead on its lovely beaches, its remarkable folk culture, or its brilliant and ingenious art might well be accused of having an awfully cold heart.

The local explanation for the grounding of the
Trois Rivières
was this: the owner of the vessel had made an enemy—the details were obscure. The enemy had secured the services of a
boko
, or sorcerer, who had employed magical means to curse the ship. The accident was thus a punishment, the dead bystanders caught up in a private feud. In my time in Haiti, I would hear stories like this over and over again, from every level of society. The dean of the civil court in Jérémie refused to settle cases because he feared the losing party to his decisions would punish him with magic; manila folders settled on his desk in a dusty heap. The richest man in town was said to owe his fortune to human sacrifice. The failure of a merchant in the market was only the result of the supernatural intervention of her competitors.

The Haitian world was like the world famously described by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in his ethnology of the Azande: “Witchcraft participates in all misfortunes and is the idiom in which Azande speak about them and in which they explain them.” The details of Haitian life differed radically, of course, from Azande life. But Haitians, like the Azande, lived in a world where everything that went wrong went wrong for a reason: the door of fate in Haiti, not always but very
often, swung on a hinge of sorcery. Happenstance, coincidence, sheer bad luck—these were all bit players in the drama of Haitian life. The chain of causation inevitably led back past magic to one’s enemies, real or imagined; magic was something commissioned or desired, an overt act of hostility. Feud with your neighbor today, a child falls sick tomorrow: one has surely caused the other. There is to this principle a bitter converse: your child falls sick, surely your neighbor was at fault. Every death is, in a fashion, a murder.

A magical world is a world in which things make sense, where cause provokes effect. It is a rational world. It is a world without existential despair. It is a world in which one is never wholly responsible for one’s misfortunes. But it is also a world that supposes that one’s neighbors are vicious and predatory; that suffering is directly the result of somebody else—somebody in your community, somebody close to you—wishing you ill.

The January 12, 2010 earthquake was too large—too dramatic—to be considered the result of simple witchcraft. In its drama and horror and grotesque scale, it was outside common experience and the ordinary system of life. The consistent explanation offered to me for the earthquake was this: God had been angered by the inability of the Haitian people to live together harmoniously. In my experience, Haitians were no more fractious than any other people and quite possibly less. My Haitian friends, however, told me that I was naive. The earthquake, in their way of thinking, was the just response of a wrathful God to the mistrust, suspicion, and cruelty that, they argued, pervaded Haitian society.

2.

The Haitian worldview allowed multiple causes for the grounding of the
Trois Rivières
. Sorcery motivated by a personal grudge was a
necessary condition for the accident; in the absence of black magic, the ship might have sailed tranquilly. It had after all sailed without incident under similar conditions so many times before. But the effectiveness of the sorcery required bad governance. The ship was old and in poor shape and still on the seas; it sailed from port without inspection; the owners were assured of legal impunity should an accident happen; the wharf was too shallow for a ship the size of the
Trois Rivières
and required dredging; there was no decent road to Port-au-Prince—all of this was subsumed in the phrase
gouvman pa bon
, by now almost a Creole proverb: the government isn’t good.

The phrase as used by Haitians describes not only the chronic political instability of the capital and the weakness of the state but also the inability of Haitians to take collective action. Haiti is not only anarchic at the top, at the level of the presidency, where power has historically passed from hand to hand by revolution and coup d’état; it is anarchic at every level of society. From village to town to city to state, community resources are poorly managed; what worked once has fallen apart.

“Examples abound of the reticence, not to say incapacity, of rural communities to take charge of the global relationship to the environment, which can only be collective by nature,” writes the Haitian anthropologist Gérard Barthélemy. “Thus, water from the source is not captured …; thus, the only irrigation canal that survives is underground; thus, the road network that supposes a collective will of travel and maintenance is not cared for while it exists.”
²

I frequently visited the rural town of Carrefour Charles, about five kilometers from the nearest spring. The town was effectively divided into two castes: the upper caste consisted of those families who could
afford to hire the vastly larger lower caste to haul water for them, at five gourdes, or about 15 cents, per bucket. Lack of water dramatically aggravated poverty: children failed to attend school because they needed to fetch water; local gardens depending exclusively on rainwater failed to yield cash crops.

I spoke with a local engineer who estimated that it would cost about US$15,000, between pipes, pumps, cement, and labor, to build a rudimentary aqueduct to transport water to the town center. Even in a place as poor as Carrefour Charles, this was economically feasible, should the enterprise be undertaken collectively. I learned later that the project had been broached numerous times, but the community had been unable to reach consensus on how to proceed. The lack of clean water in Carrefour Charles was essentially a political problem, not a problem of poverty. The aqueduct in Carrefour Charles, like any action in Haiti that required an effective institutional structure, was doomed from the outset.