Steinbeck in Palestine

These are the hands of Abdullah Sharqawi, a Palestinian farmer in the West Bank village of Aboud.  Sharqawi is also Roman Catholic (almost half of Aboud’s 2200 people are Christian).  In late 2006 I spoke with both Sharqawi and his priest, Father Aridah, and learned that Sharqawi was losing much of his land to Israel’s controversial separation barrier, and how some of his olive trees had recently been uprooted and taken to Israel.  Sharqawi was struggling to cope.  With tears in his eyes, he told the priest, “My father said a family can afford to lose a son, but nobody can afford to lose his land.  Tell me, what am I to do?”

The words, Father Aridah explained, were not meant to devalue the life of a son; they were meant to emphasize the crucial role land plays in Palestinian life and culture.  “Some olive trees in Aboud are 1000 years old,” the priest said.  “Family identity is connected to the care and cultivation of these fields.”  In other words, the loss of a child may be tragic, but the loss of one’s land is worse, for it is the loss of a family’s heritage, sustenance, identity, and hope.

In visiting a village like Aboud, you speak with distraught farmers who watch powerlessly as bulldozers rip through their land, and you know these mammoth machines are driven by people and guarded by armed men who at the end of the day will return to homes unconnected to the land they maul and confiscate.  And then later, in reading The Grapes of Wrath and seeing how the Joads relate to the loss of their Oklahoma fields, you think the Joads and the people of Aboud would have something in common.  Here is an excerpt from Steinbeck’s excellent book, in which the displaced Joads reflect on the foreign machinery and people who have taken their land and made them homeless:

All this is easy and efficient.  So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation.  And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation.  For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land.  Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water no calcium.  He is all these, but he is much, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.  The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.  But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself.  When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.