But Jerusalem is land.

And it is occupied land.

Land, and occupied by a powerful army whose only purpose is to keep my body, voice, steps, and memory far from it and stop me forever from reaching it. The world isn’t souls and clouds. The world is states, soldiers, borders and passports, visas and electronic searches, building laws and taxes, residence permits and cars that run on petrol, not prayers. Only the policeman now has the power to let us pray or stop us doing so. The Israeli policeman is now the master of the city, or desires to be. It is the armed policeman who organizes and decides, not the heavens or amulets, not the grief of those who have lost it or the prayers of those who love it.

Jerusalem is a city like any other city.

“Since when has Jerusalem been a city like any other city?” you ask me and I answer, “Since the soldiers in it came to outnumber its holy sites a thousand times over.”

From that ancient day on which it chose to be celestial, the soldiers have decided to love it by brandishing their weapons in the face of history.

Jerusalem has been a city like any other city from the day walls and checkpoints were built around it, from the day it became filled with government centers, police goons, surveillance cameras on electricity poles, nationality laws, police stations, army camps, torture sessions, and conquerors who dance to celebrate the day they conquered it instead of their own anniversaries.

Jerusalem has been a city since it was forbidden to us.

I told Tamim, “I’ll take you to Orient House.”

A beautiful, haughty villa. A very earthly mansion, built by builders using their worldly muscles who drank a lot of tea and complained of the cold, the heat, and the poor wages, as they would with any other block of apartments, house, and shop on man’s earth.

In Orient House, the late Faisal al-Husseini carried on his functions as manager of the city and representative of the PLO. Here Jerusalem’s guests — tsars, kings, ambassadors — were once received and moved through its elegant foyers. Here are offices for maps and statistics overseen by Khalil al-Tafakji, the most prominent Palestinian expert on settlement policies and the attempts to Judaize the city through the expulsion of its Arab inhabitants. (Israel had yet to issue its decree closing Orient House and all other PLO offices in Jerusalem.)

We went and talked to Khalil al-Tafakji, who appears to know the history of almost every building and house in Jerusalem by heart. Tamim asked him if he could look over some maps for academic research and al-Tafakji had what he wanted copied. Tamim started to explain what else he needed for the research.

Al-Tafakji, with the scholarly decisiveness that I admire in him, told him, “Ask me short, specific questions, to save time.”

Later, the Israeli army will raid Orient House and the government of Israel will decide to close it and all other buildings from which any Palestinian activity is managed, arguing that Jerusalem doesn’t belong to the Palestinians. Protests, sit-ins, and demonstrations demanding its reopening erupt but achieve nothing and it remains closed until further notice.

From Orient House, we go to an exhibition of hand-painted porcelain and ceramics run by a family that came originally from Turkey to restore the decorative work on the Haram al-Sharif and stayed on in Jerusalem. We buy beautiful dishes, an electric lamp with an oval base of porcelain hand-painted in shades of blue with designs of foliage and green roots, and a similarly painted flower vase as gifts for Radwa in Cairo. And yes, in Jerusalem, the people of God’s city buy and sell dinner plates, shirts, fruit, shoes, socks, flowers, pickles, new cars, kitchen appliances, bank shares, tins of sardines, lottery tickets, and sandawitshat (I don’t want to call them shata’ir; I don’t like the word, or most of the new words proposed by the Arabic Language Academy).

At the end of our stolen ‘tourist’ visit to Jerusalem, and again like one-day tourists, we have dinner in the garden of an old Palestinian restaurant and from there set off to return to Ramallah.

The Israeli army doesn’t stop us at the checkpoint.

Leaving Jerusalem is permitted — very permitted, in fact, and at any hour. If it weren’t, how could its Judaization and the cleansing of its Arab inhabitants take place?

Leave the road of departure forever open. Keep the road of return forever closed. Otherwise, what would be the meaning of the Occupation?

Before, Tamim had seen Jerusalem through my eyes and through stories. Today, for the first time, he has seen it with his own eyes.

Now it belongs to him.

I don’t know what of Jerusalem settled in his eyes forever and have no way to write of that. A few years later though, he will let all of Palestine know, when he writes his poem ‘In Jerusalem,’ which will become the most famous poem about the city in Arabic that I know of.

4. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

The Occupation stretched the distance between Tamim and Deir Ghassanah to more than twenty-one years, his whole life till then. Tamim took a large step when we obtained his permit, and the distance started to shrink. Now only twenty-seven kilometers separate Tamim from Deir Ghassanah. He knows that I was born ‘there.’ In half an hour I’ll be saying to him, “I was born here.”

I’m not a politician, but the Occupation distorts and destroys things that affect me personally and affect others whom I know and love. Occupation, like dictatorship, doesn’t just corrupt political and party life but the lives of individuals too, even individuals who have nothing to do with politics. One of the Occupation’s cruelest crimes is the distortion of distance in the individual’s life. This is a fact: the Occupation changes distances. It destroys them, upsets them, and plays with them as it likes. Whenever the soldiers kill someone, the customary distance between the moments of birth and death is distorted. The Occupation closes the road between two cities and makes the distance between them many times the number recorded on the maps. The Occupation throws my friend into prison and makes the distance between him and his living room one to be measured in years and in the lives of his sons and daughters, who will give him grandchildren he will never see. The Occupation pursues a fugitive in the hills and makes the distance between sleep and his pillow one to be measured in the howling of wolves and the darkness of caves, while the leaves of trees become his only dining table. It teaches him how to turn his shoes and the stones into a pillow beneath his head, above which dreams and nightmares interweave. The soldier at the checkpoint confiscates my papers because he doesn’t like the look of me for some reason and the distance between me and my identity becomes the distance between his pleasure and his displeasure. The soldier of the Occupation stands on a piece of land he has confiscated and calls it ‘here’ and I, its owner, exiled to a distant country, have to call it ‘there.’

Many of my friends around the world express surprise at this Palestinian attachment to place of origin and concern for family ties. Some even scoff at it and contrast it with their own open-armed acceptance of adventure, discovery, a nomadic lifestyle and residence in places that they choose and change according to their fancy, without the slightest regret at leaving family or even homeland behind. They remind me that the world is wider and more beautiful than ‘our villages’ and ‘our families.’ I understand this beautiful sense of the vastness of the world. Like them, I love movement, journeys, and living in new places. What these friends forget is that it is they who choose to distance themselves. They are the ones who take the decisions and make the plans and then present their passports (recognized everywhere) and get on planes and trains and cars and motorcycles and go to places where three conditions that the Palestinian cannot meet are fulfilled: first, that it is their preference and choice to go to specifically these places; second, that these places always welcome them; and third and most important, that it is in their power to return to their home country whenever they desire and decide. The Palestinian forced to become a refugee, to migrate, and to go into exile from his homeland in the sixty years since the Nakba of 1948, or the forty since the June 1967 War, suffers miseries trying to obtain a document by which he will be recognized at borders. He suffers miseries trying to obtain a passport from another state because he is stateless and has to go through Kafkaesque interrogations before being granted an entry visa to any place in the world, even the Arab states. The Palestinian is forbidden to enter his own country by land, sea, or air, even in a coffin. It is not a matter of romantic attachment to a place but of eternal exclusion from it. The Palestinian stripped of an original identity is a palm tree broken in the middle. My foreign friends have control over the details of their lives but a single Israeli soldier can control the details of the life of any Palestinian. This is the difference. This is the story.