‘the tug of life’s sustaining banalities’ … these words were written by Susan Abulhawa in her novel The blue between sky and water, a beautiful piece of literature telling the story of a Palestinian family driven off their ancient land holdings into Gaza in the late 1940s early fifties. She describes the temporary camps where the people of Beit Daras waited, having fled their village in the face of Israeli bombardment.
Their husbands put up laundry lines for them, and built communal kitchens and underground ovens to make bread. In the congestion of national upheaval and collective sorrow that would deepen the roots of history and expand through multiple generations, the refugees of Beit Daras went back to their jokes and scandals. And while they waited to go home babies were born and weddings were planned. The tug of life’s sustaining banalities pulled them from their cots into communal spaces where they prayed together, drank the morning’s coffee and afternoon’s tea together. The war had been a great equaliser and put everyone, no matter their family name or fortune, into the same canvas tents lined in equally spaced rows in open shadeless fields. … The scoundrels, saints, gossips, mothers, whores, pious, communists, egoists, pleasurists and all the other ists went back to their former ways in this new, misshapen fate.
Like its precursor, Mornings in Jenin, it dragged my heart and mind back to the plight of the Palestinians, who for so many years have suffered the lot of all the dispossessed people all over the earth, the losers in the struggle for land, for power, for dominion, for place. It is nothing new. It has been the course of history for as long as it has been recorded by myth-makers/disciples of the powerful/ western historians/religious fanatics/dreamers. But this, like the Australian Aboriginal dispossession, the Rohingya, the Sahawis, …. so many peoples all over the globe … is part of our everyday lives right now. These are not Homeric tales, not the clinical unfolding of historical trends. They are here and now. In front of us.
And to my shame, the Palestinian dispossession was happening when I, as a young woman, was living in Israel in the mid 1960s, marvelling at what the people from the German concentration camps, who had suffered such terrible losses at the hands of their Nazi persecutors, who were struggling to find a home in their ‘promised land’, were managing to achieve in their kibbutzim in spite of the horrors they had experienced. Theirs was indeed an epic tale, but it was done at such a cost, a cost that I, then, didn’t recognise, did not want to see: a people whose land was taken from them, whose ancient ways and culture were uprooted, and over the years were deliberately squeezed in the increasingly small enclaves now known as the West Bank and Gaza. A solution manufactured by the West. Was it guilt, a quick way to rid Europe of a problem that seemed unsolvable at the time? How much of it was driven by a deep-seated residual anti-semitism? By giving the Zionists what they were asking for, at the expense of the Palestinians, was it designed to salve the European conscience, pass the problem over to somewhere else? Whatever it was – and there were many forces driving it – it certainly has come back to plague western democracies, along with all the other arbitrary borders that remain as remnants of the ‘Colonial Era’. Things fall apart as we shamble through what is now post-colonial times.
Ah, the human spirit. Today, many of the people I worked with in Chin State, which borders India in the north-west of Myanmar, have fled their homes as the Myanmar military, the Tatmadaw, continue their air strikes, burning and destroying villages in an attempt to quell the resistance of the people to the military government, which seized power in February 2021. The Chin Human Rights Organisation reports that there have been four airs strikes since Christmas. They report that around 200 refugees crossed the border into India in the past week. It is estimated that some 52,000 civilians have fled to India since the coup, 44,000 trying to survive in Mizoram State. The remainder are making their way to New Delhi, more than 2,000 kilometres to the east, where it is possible to register with UNHCR as refugees. The number of people hiding in the mountainous forests (internally displaced persons – IDPs) is unknown.
It is not only war that displaces people. I remember descending down the dirt steps cut into the steep hillside near the Indian-Myanmar border at the insistence of a young Chin woman so proud of the room she had struggled so long to find, a small dark space formed with scraps of corrugated iron around the narrow poles that supported the bamboo clad house perched on the mountain slope above. The dirt floor had been swept, the bedding was neatly folded in one corner, a pot sat on a small gas burner beside two metal plates. She had been forced out of her village because of fear of a misunderstood disease. She was one of the lucky ones. She had managed to secure antivirals to slow the progression from HIV to full blown AIDS.
The tug of life’s sustaining banalities. It is what human beings do, one way or the other, to survive. We revert back to the daily habits that we know, the little things that make up the flow of living in spite of what is happening outside us. The human spirit never ceases to amaze me and give me courage.
This Business of Living 
Hi Yvonne,
Great to hear from you again! And how interesting to read this post. The reality of everyday necessities – feeding ourselves, washing, our bodies and their various needs and urges, shelter, children and their needs and urges – providing a backdrop to wider issues, social change, broader conflict. It makes me think of the tension I always felt between individual change/individual experience and social/political change. Somehow they always weave together don’t they? How to ensure that for those of us with peaceful lives, the ‘daily banalities’ don’t just take over, leaving no room or interest in playing a part in making positive change… all very thought provoking!
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I wouldn’t beat yourself up too harshly, Yvonne, for not being sufficiently aware of the dispossession of Palestinians as a young traveller in 1960s Israel. As young Australians we travelled to experience the world, and the flood of those impressions often took time and maturity to digest and put into perspective. That’s not surprising when you think that most of us came from middle class homes where the dispossession of Indigenous Australians was never mentioned. It certainly wasn’t in my family.
Your entry brought back memories of my time working on a kibbutz near Tel Aviv in 1969. For me my four months in Israel were an endless round of confusing challenges. On my kibbutz, volunteers were ‘adopted’ by a family to whom you could discuss problems or, in my case, visit them after dinner to escape the juvenile antics of two New Yorkers sharing my dormitory. My kibbutz family had recently arrived from Brooklyn where the husband had been a civil rights lawyer working with Black organisations in New York. Sadly, he had become bitter and disillusioned with what he saw as the Black Power movement turning on whites like himself. One evening he didn’t want to talk about civil rights, but about my ‘being too close’ to a Palestinian family I worked alongside sorting and crating apples. They were a lovely Palestinian family who found work on the kibbutz during peak harvest times. While I couldn’t speak any Arabic and they no English, we would break the monotony of the work by joking about misshapen apples or pull faces after the stern foreman walked by to tell us to work faster. What amazed me was the generosity of this family with their insistence that I try the food they brought to the kibbutz each day. Someone must have mentioned these interchanges to the office as my ‘adopted’ family was asked to raise the matter with me. My kibbutz family patiently explained the mistake I was making in becoming too friendly with Arabs. Their overtures of friendship are nothing more than attempts to gain advantage, I was told. I remember leaving their home confused as to what to do with this warning, particularly as it came from a family who in the US had worked for Black civil rights.
On another occasion I hitchhiked to Jerusalem with a fellow kibbutz volunteer. On the afternoon before Sabbath, when by sunset most of Jerusalem shuts down, we decided to see a movie. I don’t know who or why we chose this film. It was a Hollywood WWII adventure in which the hero was a marine who had been a professional baseball pitcher before the war. I assume it was because we knew it would be in English. The cinema was full of young men and women mostly in uniform. When our hero threw a baseball that knocked out three or four Nazis with one pitch, the cinema erupted with whoops of delight; young men and women would leap to their feet, even stand on their seats, cheering with approval. A few days later the Israeli army drove 60kms into Lebanon in retaliation for skirmishes on the border. I wondered if some of those young soldiers in the cinema knew they’d be part of that incursion.
As a 22-year-old I had neither the time nor the maturity to come to terms with what I had experienced in Israel. I was on a ship from Haifa to Brindisi with another adventure ahead that likely would swamp any chance of thinking too deeply about these events. They mostly were stories to swap at the next youth hostel.
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