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Friday May 27, 2005

‘Road to martyrs’ part memoir, part study into culture fueling intifada

by jennifer liss
staff writer

Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg recalled the bizarre day the walls of a main commercial thoroughfare in the Old City of Jerusalem were covered with spray-painted smiley faces.

Using a machine designed for the purpose, the Israeli Defense Forces had painted over Palestinian graffiti. Sometimes, Steinberg pointed out, the IDF would cover up the Arabic messages with larger-than life-menorahs, sometimes the word “Israel” and on that particular day — smiley faces.

The co-authors of “The Road to Martyrs’ Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber” did not go to Israel in the early days of the first intifada with the intention to study, quite simply, the writing on the walls.

And they did not intend, as the title of their book suggests, to explore the culture and daily life of the suicide bomber.

But over the course of their six-year stay in Israel and Gaza, Oliver and Steinberg amassed a sizeable personal library of media and political ephemera produced in Gaza and the West Bank — from photos of wall graffiti to martyr videos to audiocassettes to posters and leaflets.

They describe their book as partly a memoir of their time spent in the Middle East, partly a travelogue and partly a documentation of the role underground media played in fueling and defining the first intifada, which began in 1987.

Oliver and Steinberg, who was raised in the Bay Area and now lives near Portland, had each arrived in Israel independently in the late 1980s. Steinberg had recently finished studying at U.C. Berkeley and Oliver had come for a fellowship at Hebrew University. Neither expected to stay longer than one year.

They met at a conference in 1988 organized by Palestinian academics in East Jerusalem, and quickly realized that they shared a similar interest in the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

“I thought I’d go down [to Gaza] and look around and then perhaps head back home, but that’s not what happened,” said Oliver from her home in Oregon.

That same year she and Steinberg spent six months living with Palestinian friends in Gaza, and the rest of their time in the Old City of Jerusalem.

In what Oliver called a “cryptology exercise,” the pair began translating and recording the underground media that served multiple purposes in the Palestinian uprising.

Oliver said that when the intifada was in its infant stage Palestinians didn’t know what the movement was about or what they were supposed to be doing. Wall graffiti, leaflets and other media often served as instruction manuals, contained messages, delivered reports, called people to action or communicated meeting times.

“It is important to understand that [the graffiti] covered literally every surface,” Steinberg said. “Every wall was covered.”

Unlike gang graffiti that is often used to mark territory, graffiti in the West Bank and Gaza was historically layered, making reference to events and ideology more than 100 years old, Oliver explained.

“This was very different than ‘Mary loves John.’”

For example, Steinberg said, it was common to see the trial of a collaborator — from accusation, rebuttal and reports — carried out on the city walls. He jokingly called it “Court TV Gaza.”

“They were reporting something that people needed to know and something that provided excitement and entertainment, that stirred people up,” he said.

They watched the media become more sophisticated. This was, after all, a pre-Al Jazeera era. Around 1993, they noticed martyr videos (some even with coming attractions) being widely circulated.

“You lived in a supersaturated environment. There were leaflets everywhere,” Steinberg said of the atmosphere enveloping young Palestinians, and the lure of the culture of the suicide bomber. “Here was your chance to be one of the figures on the screen, and your friends would be watching you with their mouths open.”

Said Oliver: “A suicide bomber in Palestinian society at one point was like a movie star. You achieved almost instant fame. Posters at your death. Martyr cards made on your behalf.”

The authors are currently working on what they call the antithesis of their first book. This project will look at ordinary people involved in the conflict and working toward peace; people, they explained, who have chosen an alternative road to violence.

“These people have taken on a task much harder,” Steinberg said.

The project, added Oliver, will hopefully be a “recognition of what it takes to have a civilized life” in a time of war.

“People in America take that for granted.”

“The Road to Martyrs’ Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber” by Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg (214 pages, Oxford University Press, $26).

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