Writing The Dope Priest

Nicholas Blincoe

Like Jesus Christ, my novel The Dope Priest was born one Christmas in Bethlehem. Unlike Jesus Christ, there is a great deal less mystery surrounding the actual conception. It all dates back to Christmas 1995, the date when the Israelis allowed the Palestinians to take over the day-to-day running of the town. I was in Bethlehem visiting my wife's family and saw Yasser Arafat arrive. He gave a speech from the roof of the Church of the Nativity in Manger Square, flanked on the one side by the Catholic Archbishop of Jerusalem and on the other by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Arafat had been in exile since the 1960's, first in Jordan, then Lebanon and finally Tunisia. He was now back as the Chairman (rather than President) of the Palestinian Authority (not Nation).

There was a lot of celebrating over Christmas and New Year . extended celebrating as the Orthodox Christmas is on January 6th. But there were also two major, unanswered questions. What kind of non-country was Palestine, now? Reading the small print of the Oslo Agreement provided no clues, they were vague and anything that specifically favoured the Palestinians was expressed as a wish rather than a hard contractual point. The Israelis could - and eventually did - ignore everything. The second question was: what kind of leader would Arafat be?

By 1997, when I actually began the novel, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, had been murdered by his political opponents. Incredibly, his political opponents had then gone on to win the election and the Oslo Agreement was dead. Yasser Arafat could do nothing to move the peace process forward, the hopeless leader of a non-existent country. One could argue that Benjamin Netanyahu was equally helpless. He had created an unstable and unlikely coalition in order to take power and now he could not move forwards or backwards. Except that Netanyahu viewed inertia as a positive political strategy. His only strategy was to play an indefinite waiting game, while more or less surreptitiously encouraging the settlers movement. This atmosphere, the period between 1997 and 1999, became the setting for The Dope Priest. A time of inertia and backroom deals, revolving appropriately (I thought) around a middle- aged dope smoker stumbling through an illicit land deal.

Anyone would be nervous of tackling a subject as explosive as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I just hoped the effort - and the risks - would be worthwhile. At bottom, I wanted to do the right thing. To make a contribution to a fraught, complex situation. As a writer, you have to believe you can make a difference. Maybe it's just a necessary illusions. But without it, you might look at your books one day and wonder why they exist.

The night before Arafat spoke from the roof of the church, I met his much younger wife, Suha, at a party. No one doubted that their marriage was an act of political necessity. But no one knew its true significance. Perhaps the fact that she was a Christian was intended to calm Christian fears about living in a predominantly Muslim society. But there were other, wilder theories about the relationship - including rumours about the shadowy influence of Suha's mother.

I didn't make much of an impression on Suha. A few minutes after shaking my hand, she seized upon my wife and began suggesting that she might like to meet one of her brothers. No doubt Suha thought a woman as beautiful and intelligent as my wife would be a great catch for her brother. But as my wife is from a prominent Bethlehem family, Suha would also have been aware of the political ramifications of her match-making. For me, it was an early indication of how the new Palestine would be run: through clans and alliances, everyone trying to make contacts with other powerful groups. Suha was busy strengthening the position of herself and her family within the new regime, while also attempting to bolster the position of Christians in general.

My father-in-law set up the University of Bethlehem in the 1970's. Initially funded by the Vatican, it soon began to take in Muslim students and receive the majority of its funding from the Arab oil states. My father-in-law went out and got the funding himself. He later became the Minister of Education for the occupied territories (or the equivalent of a Minister, as there was no actual government at the time). He secured funding for all kinds of education establishment, from degree colleges to primary schools. In early 1996, Yasser Arafat asked him if he would like to become a Minister again. My father-in-law refused, repeatedly. Maybe he had had a premonition of the level of nepotism and corruption that would characterise the new Palestine. Maybe he was just tired. He died six months later of a heart attack.

My father-in-law's funeral was an enormous affair. Hundreds of people followed the hearse, including a television crew. I must have shaken the hand of everyone from the greater Bethlehem area. A friend of the family from the Russian Embassy had to act as a kind of bodyguard, keeping the crowds back and making sure that me and my brother-in-law could get safely to the cemetery. Only men were allowed to visit the cemetery, my wife, her sister and mother remained in the church.

My father-in-law died intestate. He was owed money by many people and collecting proved difficult. Since Oslo, the Israelis had made it difficult to work in Israel or to sell goods outside the territories. This meant that his various debtors had no money and no hope of money. So they mostly tried to welsh on the debts. His death had other, even worse, effects. A neighbourhood family wanted a strip of land belonging to my wife's family but did not want to pay for it. They saw their opportunity to grab it, now my father-in-law's death had left a power vacuum. The neighbours had only recently arrived in Bethlehem from the near-by Muslim town of Hebron. Over the previous few years, Hebronites had been looking to move out of their over-crowded city and spread into the more peaceful and freer Bethlehem. Hebronites had a reputation as tenacious, hard-faced fighters. Thanks to the presence of murderous Israeli fundamentalists in the centre of the city, Hebron has become a much more front-line city than Bethlehem and it shows in the character of the population.

Over the next few years, with money worries and internal friction increasing, many Palestinians began to think about leaving. Families that had survived the wars of '48, '67 and '73 and lived through the Intifada began to lose all hope. The peace process was finished. The Israelis had closed their borders so tightly that there was no flow of money into the territories. Israeli settlements were continuing at a frightening pace. But no one could leave without money. And the only people with money were the Israelis.

Inevitably, Palestinians who had managed to retain property in Jerusalem began to think about selling up. Property in or near to the old city is so scarce, a house could be worth hundreds of thousands to a Palestinian. And it would be worth up to seven times more to an Israeli. If a Palestinian did sell out to an Israeli, they could become millionaires overnight, and go and live in Paris or California. The problem was, the Palestinian Authority had made land deals with Israelis into a capital offence.

Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have laws against trading with the enemy. But the Israelis are able to enforce their laws. The Palestinians have relied instead on death squads. Jerusalem is the only city in the world where you can be killed for selling a house. Which is, basically, what the plot of The Dope Priest is all about.

There will be no peace between the Israelis and Palestinians until the Israelis are certain they have secured the whole of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State. A story that takes illegal house-selling as its central plot, gets to the heart of the conflict. But I didn't want to just tell a story about the troubles and the impossibility of peace. I also wanted to give a vivid picture of the passions and interests of everyday life in Palestine - and also, to an extent, in Israel.

The Dope Priest is the story of David Ramsbottom aka David Preston, a retired drug smuggler lured out of retirement by his ex-partner, Tony Khouri. Tony is now a respectable Bethlehem used-car dealer who plans to sell a flat in Jerusalem to an Israeli. He persuades David to act as middleman, and hopefully take the heat for the deal. But it is also the story of Tony's niece, Sophia Khouri. Sophia is a normal twenty- something Palestinian. Intelligent and politicised, she is a testament to the work educators like my father-in-law put in, maintaining high standards of education in a difficult situation. Sophia is seen running errands for her family and worrying about the health of her father. But she is also a professional, seen working at the local Bethlehem radio station. The station is new and Sophia is trying to win fresh advertising and drum up support for her radio show: a phone-in show with a difference called The Songs No One Wants To Hear.

My portrayal of Israel and Israelis is more partisan. I wanted to show the fissures in Israeli society, the tensions underpinning the dream of a Jewish state. The Dope Priest is in the dying days of the Likud government. The various Israelis in my book are representative of the elements of the coalition that brought the party to power. So there are the new Russians, scared of terrorist bombs but uninterested in either Hebrew or Judaism. There are the settlers, fundamentalists living out the dream of god and gun in their own version of the Wild West: settling the West Bank. There are the Oriental or Sephardic Jews who feel they have been left out of the running of Israel by a self-promoting Ashkenazi elite whose parents or grandparent arrived from Europe. And finally there is the religious establishment, fiercely protective of their legal position as final arbiters of who gets to call themselves a Jew.

The settler movement is represented by two Hasidic gun men, described as paramilitaries in Victorian frock coats. These men exist in Jerusalem, although the settlers in Hebron are of the 'knitted kippa' variety: the ones with crocheted doilies on their head. The funds for the settlers come from an American-based charity whose only contributor is a widowed Florida-based woman named Mrs Grodman. This likeable old woman originally appeared in a story I wrote called 'Half-American'. She reminds David Ramsbottom of his own grandmother. Wealthy benefactors like Mrs Grodman allow the Israeli government to maintain the illusion that the settlers movement is entirely independent of state policy. This despite the fact that Government Ministers like Ariel Sharon often took part in their demonstrations. In any event, land in Israel is nationalised and any land that is incorporated into Israel becomes property of the State.

Mrs Grodman, the settlers and the Government are brought together by layers of middlemen. The main figure is Sammy Ben Naim, a man whose family migrated from Algiers. Sammy's father chose to become Israeli after Algerian Independence rather than move to France. Sammy is articulate and well-educated. His background is similar in crucial respects to that of Edward Said and Jacques Derrida, a Palestinian and a Jew and arguably the two most prominent contemporary philosophers. Sammy is a generation younger than either of these men and he occupies a modest position in the Israeli secret service, looking after land deals. Sammy is both proud of Israel but also somewhat embittered. It is clear that he feels that Israel failed his father in some way.

Elements of my portrayal of Israel are designed only to annoy Israelis or lampoon Israeli fears. There is an enormous moral panic in the country that their youths are a bit too keen on drugs. After all, the youth are their front-line soldiers. Mossad, the secret service, has responded by sending agents to Goa to gather evidence against dealers associated with Israeli sound-systems. In The Dope Priest all kids are drugged to the eye balls all the time. There is also a fear in Israel that all Russians are criminals - in The Dope Priest, most of them are. Maybe in future years I will regret these caricatures. I don't know. All I can say, I did not invent them. And in the way I have portrayed them, with enthusiasm and vitality, and the place I have shown them, in the city of Tel Aviv, I have at least shown a modern, pluralist society comparable to any of the world's great cities.

The Dope Priest was an ambitious project. I ended up changing both agents and publishers during the writing. Now it is out, hopefully it will contribute to a wider understanding of the situation. Who knows. But for what it is worth, there is only one solution: a one-state solution with no discriminatory laws or conventions. It will be a state that supports and encourages a genuinely pluralistic society. Israel was a response to the holocaust. It may even be a necessary response. But a state based upon a fantasy of racial or cultural or religious unity is a response that the Nazi's would have understood. We have to move beyond that.