The Sodomites

By Adi Callai

Terrorists for some and heroes for others, the Sodomites are set loose, and incremental change be damned ... 

 

Here is a story of a group that sees resistance to Israeli apartheid and to environmental degradation as one and the same. Each Sodomite has their own reasons for declaring a war for the wilderness. Zvika, an old timer expert saboteur, is compelled to support his Palestinian comrades. Yaniv seeks redemption after finishing his Israeli army service disillusioned and traumatized. Aya cannot sit by and let her land be destroyed. And Prof loves Aya, has the tech savvy to help, and seeks revenge against the transphobic professor who stole her scientific research. There will be sacrifice and betrayal, recklessness and bravery, and a glorious spectacle of revolt. 

 

The Sodomites is a nuanced literary thriller offering a window into the struggle against Israeli apartheid and the environmental problems of the region, and raising difficult questions about the tactics needed to effect change anywhere. 

 

"Coming from a rising voice in the Israeli left-wing diaspora, The Sodomites follows a gang of rogues in open rebellion against a settler state that crushes bodies, steals water, destroys communities, and cuts down ancient olive trees. With the cops hot on their tail, their rebellion unfolds across multiple dimensions-political, ecological, linguistic, technological, sexual, spiritual-as they explore and wage war from a terrain that is grim and enticing, beautiful and forlorn. A keen-eyed adventure that takes place at the exact intersection of revenge, social justice, and the urgent need to heal ourselves and the planet." 

 

- Peter Gelderloos, author of The Failure of Nonviolence and Worshiping Power

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xi Draconis Books
• Release date: Jul 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735388809

Book preview

THE SODOMITES

Al Badawi

Zvika is not as well accustomed to change as he used to be. He imagines life in a Parisian apartment, washing dishes while an old CD of the Trio Jubran puts a baby to sleep, and she enters the kitchen and pinches his butt, reminding him that she really is there, that it’s not a dream, that they will be together for many more fucks and unemployment lines, that as long as algae nibbles at the foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge, they will keep on emptying bottles of wine and falling in love, keep on melting into each other on a couch in front of televised opiates and staying in place long after the electricity blacks out. But it is a dream, and he is alone, alone, alone with her ghost.

The air is cool in the mornings and in the late afternoons. Sometimes there are heat waves and sometimes it rains. The woodpecker is long gone from the olive tree beneath the flat. The Jerusalem winter is not what it used to be, nor is the summer, for that matter. There is a great loneliness and a great despair, there are few friends and many enemies, but still there is a strong desire to flow. Like a powerful river, to flow, to flow. This will be another sleepless night, he sighs, and packs his equipment. The wine remains in his imaginary cellar, waiting for her. There’s only one thing he can do right now.

***

Al Badawi, the world’s oldest olive tree, is not as well accustomed to change as it used to be. Yet it registers Zvika’s presence, who has been coming to pour water at its roots recently, and whose head is covered with an elusively colored material, something between bark and mud and late-winter leaves. In the evening all light is sucked from the sky into a hole of red fire, like flood water washing off a rock, and in the morning the light spreads well before the wheel of fire rises, white-hot and fresh for another nourishing turn over the canopy. At least this phenomenon remains more or less unchanged.

The hills and valleys, however, have been altered beyond recognition. The two-legged animals would always come and go like the seasons, trimming Al Badawi’s leaves and collecting its fruit, laughing beneath its friendly shade, taking shelter from the water falling from the sky. Yet at some point they started removing boulders and shrubbery at an ever-increasing pace, flattening the grounds on the hills and in the valley below. Al Badawi meditated on this for several hundreds of years in its practice of contemplative effervescence, when it finally realized they were transforming the earth in order to plant specific species and then move round-like objects on top of the ground, enabling them, for some inexplicable reason, to take from plants ever larger quantities of fruit.

It was all escalating pretty quickly according to Al Badawi’s conception of time, and the tree sensed grim implications in the changing taste of water, in the increasing dust in the air, and in a growing feeling of loneliness, as its friends of diverse species, and not only trees, were being uprooted and dismembered. It issued a warning to its genetic information, hoping to get the message across to its future descendants. Perhaps with some more pondering through the collective ancestral memory, a way could be found to deal with this ever-expanding menace.

As it was issuing the notice, the agricultural terraces were becoming less relevant, the roads were turning from mere dirt to asphalt, buildings were sprouting, the air was changing, carrying with it ominous scents, the water was becoming ever more scarce, and from one moment to the next, a massive concrete serpentine structure, eight meters tall and so long it had no beginning nor end, was slithering in Al Badawi’s direction, swallowing everything in its path.

Al Badawi sensed a certain foreboding element in the air, of things that move despite being dead, but had no time to give it any attention, as it was still deeply concerned about the terraces and roads that had already transformed the hills and valleys so dramatically. Al Badawi didn’t really know that it stood directly in the path of the Wall, next to this village of humanoids which they call Al Walaje, where one of the final stretches of the Separation Barrier will be constructed, entirely surrounding the village, and uprooting a bunch of trees on the way.

"At the aunt’s and uncle’s... Zvika hums, his voice cracked from bygone years of chain-smoking in the desert. Yalla, boys, hand me that bucket of water."

The Palestinian kids follow the old Jew, who looks much like a shepherd with his traditional clothing, dark skin and thick gray eyebrows. He speaks colorful Arabic in a funny Iraqi accent and gives them balloons every time he comes over. Zvika pours the bucket at the old tree’s roots and pats the trunk. An older child on a donkey leads a herd of sheep down the valley below, to graze on the long barley billowing gently in the breeze, before the Wall separates it from the villagers forever. Ahsan haywanat. Zvika looks at the donkey’s calm eyes. The best animal.

Back in the previous decade, when they just started building the Wall, Zvika went at night to the construction route and used a one-handed sledge hammer to drive in large nails into each marked tree on the way, hammering nails almost all the way in at the base of the trees, and then cutting the ends off with a pair of bolt cutters so the workers would not be able to identify spiked trees. He imagined with satisfaction the saws cutting through the trees to hit metal and break the chain with a sharp thud. The next day they came with a big Caterpillar excavator, lifted the olive trees whole out of the ground, and loaded them onto a truck to sell and transplant in the gardens of rich Israelis. Zvika remembers the wail of the old Palestinian haj: Why the trees? Haram ‘al a-zaytun! What have the olive trees ever done to them?

I was there in Al Walaje once or twice as well. I joined a group of solidarity activists to repair a demolished house on the route of the forthcoming Wall. The owner, a man with a multicolored black-gray-white mustache, painted an image of the house before demolition. Here was the children’s bedroom, there was the kitchen. With a blank face and a shaking hand, he pointed at the other side of the valley. And there was Al Walajeh, on that mountain, before we were displaced in 1948. And so we went to work with an activist fervor, carrying dirt and manning shovels. Since I spend most of my time seated and staring at pixels on the screen, whenever I do manual labor I get this megalomaniac sensation. After an hour of work, when my muscles started aching with the satisfying feeling of accomplishment, I already visualized myself immortalized with a post-revolutionary statue—me with a bucket in each hand, on my face a stoic gaze to the future, and at the bottom, a steel plate on a marble base with my name. Adi carried a shit-ton of dirt, people would say. And then Zvika arrived with four young men from Beit Jalla in his pickup truck and told us we had been carrying the dirt to the wrong place, shattering my fantasy. The young men went to work, and in ten minutes the mound of dirt was moved elsewhere. They’re students at Bethlehem University but they still work pretty well, Zvika said, and looking at my sweaty forehead, added, Yalla, let’s get to work unless you want me to propose to you.

It is early in the morning. Zvika’s joints are not what they had been. His nighttime mission is done, and so is he. He walks away, leaning on a thick branch as he goes, barely visible with his attire of green brown and gray, and the camouflage kuffiyeh wrapped tightly around his head.

Beneath Al Badawi’s hill, while one small child clumsily tries to blow air into his deflated orange balloon, the construction crew assembles to start a day of work. Four reserve soldiers pour out of their loud jeep lethargically, looking like they have something better to do, barely glancing at the kids by the tree. A contractor, wearing a white buttoned shirt and hauling white papers, spits orders in several directions. The workers, Palestinians hired in a city, perhaps Yatta, from another part of the West Bank, avoid the kids’ eyes. Their reflective vests get swallowed in the big yellow machines on the site. The Cat excavator fills the morning air with the roar of its engine. The hydraulic arm is raised with the gigantic bucket pointing its fangs towards the inside, and the machine moves ahead, ninety tons crunching the ground, straight towards the marked olive trees.

But something’s wrong. The excavator stops and the worker steps out to examine the engine. The sound of the engine changes from a deep menacing grunge, to an increasingly higher pitch, and to a screeching scream, like a wall of noise. The contractor runs towards the excavator, yelling, Shut down the engine, shut down the engine! but the workers cover their ears as the screeching continues, increasing in volume until a loud climax—like a high-speed train going off track—mutes the machine. Black smoke emerges from the engine cover. In the silence that ensues, one can hear the jeep of the bewildered soldiers, and a hesitant toll of a bellwether from a flock of sheep in the valley below, and soon, a cheerful chant, Allahu akbar, Allahu ak-bar! Children wave their colorful balloons.

A couple of kilometers and several groans of pain down Wadi Ahmad, Zvika finds his old pickup truck. He throws a cut plastic jug, a crescent wrench and a funnel into the trunk, replaces the kuffiyeh with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and hauls his beaten old legs into the driver’s seat.

He drives up a dirt path evading the checkpoint to meet the road to Malha. Stops by the highway to buy a dozen red roses from a dark-skinned boy adorned with a thin mustache stubble. Another dollar, another day. The kid counts his coins.

Revenge

Perhaps it was Yaniv’s beard, snarling in all directions like rusty barbed wire, or the unknown objects protruding from his shabby old backpack. He tried to keep on walking but was stopped, and was asked for an ID, and when he responded that he didn’t have one, he heard, Well, you can have it the long way or the short way—you can either give me your details here and let me search you, or come to the station. And he said, You mean you wanna touch me? and he heard, Yes, and he said, Nah, and started to walk away, and the next thing he knew his arm was twisted behind his back, he was pushed against the wall, and when he resisted he saw a flash of pleased excited lurking eyes of a predator, and taken by the arm he was led to the station and he heard the radio, Two-two twenty-nine, and, Ten-four ten-four, and he heard the laughter of the crew, Look at this hippie, and he was pushed in a room and told to strip and he said, Fuck off, Wrong answer, and he was pushed down into a chair and another cop came in and pushed the chair with his foot checking Yaniv’s weight, and he leaned next to his ear and said menacingly, This is not a fucking summer camp, and another cop elbow-grabbed him around the neck from behind and he felt his lungs emptying, and the first cop stood up, and as Yaniv’s vision went all blurry he was punched straight clean in the diaphragm. Darkness. Next thing he knew he was on the floor, pants and underwear on his ankles.

This memory—so tactile, so real—fades out of focus to reveal the rat-ridden streets of the south of the city, rising up and down with his ragged breath as if viewed through the scope of a sniper rifle. He’s back in the present leaning on a wall. And he feels that sting at the base of his chest, a mosquito bite unscratched: revenge.

He heads towards the station by the park and sits on the grass, placing his big backpack on the ground and pulling out some dumpstered Chinese food to snack on. He’s invisible there, dirty and shabby next to his fellow scumbags—Russian heroin addicts, African immigrants, homeless vagabonds with shopping carts overloaded with plastic bottles. And he knows his cop, he knows he won’t recognize him, there are probably dozens of cases like his every month, and it’s been a while, but Yaniv remembers the name—Yehiel Rotem—and those languid eyes looking for prey. But now, Yaniv is the hunter and as he eats garbage-gathered food with the calm of a Zen monk, his wolf eyes wait for theirs as the police cars cruise in and out. Lurking on the grass, he waits. He remembers waiting in Gaza. A ball of white-hot fire cooking the dusty streets, abandoned sheep bleating in despair as their life-allowing liquids evaporate, the persistent thirst that could not be quenched by water, and that twitch in his fingers, fumbling for the cartridge. But no no no, he crosses murder off the list. The punishment must fit the crime.

And as he contemplates his next move he sees a police car with a lone handsome man inside, and the car parks arrogantly on a red and white striped sidewalk at the top of the road next to the shawarma place, and Yaniv sees the face and the eyes, as the man exits the vehicle and enters the shop. Yaniv holds his breath, then releases. Three or four minutes later the man exits, shawarma sandwich in hand, signals a friendly wave into the shop, enters the car, starts the engine, shifts out, and speeds down the road past the barrier and into the station parking lot.

Revenge is best served cold. Yaniv scratches his head. A good beating might be appropriate. His blood races as he thinks of that face—scarred from a youth full of zits but still handsome. Perhaps some bleach down the engine. Perhaps a used condom on his door handle and a nasty graffiti saying, Yehiel’s dead.

He stakes the station as day turns to night and his prey leaves and drives away. Then he goes gathering, passing through the alleyways where junkies fall asleep while standing up, hanging on their knees like unemployed marionettes. He goes diving in dumpsters and returns with enough bread for himself and all of the African refugees around the shelter in the park. At midnight a border police jeep passes and spits out bullies with clubs and rubber gloves to shut down all of the African businesses, so refugees from the clandestine bars slither quietly into the park. He chats with some of them about Sinai, slurs the Bedouins and praises the beaches, and they show him a safe spot where he unrolls his mat for the night. He takes out his big cotton sheet, cuddles with his backpack, and covers himself all the way up over the head. He thinks about strong hairy thighs and quickly falls asleep. He dreams about that scarred handsome face, those broad shoulders, and the cuffs, and those eyes, bloodshot with narrowed pupils. He wakes up with hatred pounding powerfully in his heart.

He cooks coffee for his new friends on a small portable stove. He’s heartened by the carnivalesque atmosphere as folks wake up and shout all around the park. Street vendors rise to work, marketing to each other and to the early passers-by old dysfunctional watches, plastic sunglasses, lighters. Three sex workers mill around the street corner and catcall an art school hipster speeding by on a bicycle. And then that cop car comes back, and Yaniv feels it rising in his intestines again, like dark wasps buzzing up through his veins and concentrating in his diaphragm. Anger laced with shame. Like that time his high school swimming coach reached for Yaniv’s crotch and grinned, feeling up the sock in his speedo. That was the first time Yaniv took on a bigger opponent. He knocked his coach down with an elbow to the nose.

Yaniv feeds on his pending vengeance. Yehiel goes out for his rounds and comes back to get his usual shawarma. When he gets around the corner Yaniv grabs the backpack and heads up the street. Yehiel parks and enters. Yaniv tries the handle of the car, it’s open, he sits in, fumbles for the key—it’s in—looks quickly into the shop, he wasn’t noticed, Yehiel is putting tehini on top of his shawarma, Yaniv ignites the engine, shifts to first, up with the clutch, down with the gas, and he speeds up the street. He looks back in the rearview mirror and sees Yehiel, confused with his sandwich, looking at his car disappearing, and after a moment of shock, running down towards the station, with his M16 rocking from side to side, reaching for his radio, and then Yaniv hears that satisfying panting, One-four thirty-six, one-four thirty-six, says Yehiel on the radio. Thirty-six one-four, speak up, a voice responds from the radio, and as Yaniv takes a left he hears Yehiel’s panicked voice again, Thirty-six all units, there was a forty-one on vehicle five. Repeat, forty-one on five on Levinsky, now turning south.

Several voices cacophonically crowd the radio. Yaniv laughs as he shifts to fifth, turns on the siren, crosses two red lights, and heads towards the highway. He remembers the standard procedure from his time as a soldier in Gaza. First comes the phone call, then the roar of the fighter plane, the warning missile, and finally the white phosphorus and heavy artillery drowning the whole goddamn block. Then Yaniv’s unit would go in to clear out anything still standing, or staggering. Or crawling. An image creeps up on him. A man gracefully sweeps the porch of his own demolished house and re-enters through a door that still stands between walls that are gone, and sweeps on, like a runner whose head is blasted off, and whose body, stubbornly, runs on. Yaniv almost goes off road. Shakes his head to regain control. He shoves the old skeleton back where it came from. Time to give them a taste of their own.

The first voice rises on top of the rest, One-four thirty-six. Thirty-six, Yehiel gasps. Thirty-six give me a nun tzadik. What nun tzadik?

Pause.

Where the hell are you, Yehiel? I’m here outside of the station.

So who’s in the vehicle?

I don’t know.

Silence. Yaniv speeds on to the highway, presses the radio button with his thumb and growls into the transmitter, I am, you blue menayek motherfuckers. I’m just taking one of your cars for a little joy ride.

Yaniv’s cackling laughter dissipates as he waits for the response, then realizes he’s been keeping his finger pressed on the button, shutting down all transmissions. As he speeds ahead he recalls that bridge that they’re building to shorten the distance from one garbage city to another and destroy a valley or two on the way. He races over there. One day, he thinks, he might have the strange satisfaction of hearing his own voice played back to him, perhaps in the Shalom Court in Jerusalem. He’s getting close to the building site. He takes a right off the highway, past a barrier into the construction site on a dirt road, past a bunch of dusty almond trees, waves to some Palestinian workers on lunch break, and up on an overpass that leads to the half-constructed bridge. He stops on the edge, throws his backpack out of the car, exits, and pushes the car forward until the two front wheels are out, hanging in thin air, and the undercarriage hits concrete with the crying of scratched tin. He walks to the back of the car and pushes forward, vengeance almost complete, he musters his rage, gives one last push and the car tumbles off the edge. He lies down on his stomach to watch as it falls down a hundred meters, crashes and explodes, sending pieces of metal flying all over the beaten valley.

He grabs his bag and hurries down off the bridge and into the dusty grove of oak, pine and almond trees. He walks, fueled by his happiness, until the fountain of Lifta. He spreads his mat under a big old olive tree. He will sleep well tonight. It was an itch well scratched.

The Mega Worm

Prof’s green eyes settle on that point down from

Reviews for The Sodomites

[Addie Leak · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book has vivid, empathetic characters, both Jewish and Arab, who live in a world of sabotage, activism, and hacktivism that is far removed from many of our realities but is a very real, very important world that we should know about, especially in the context of the Palestino-Israeli conflict. This book makes the reader feel the human toll of that conflict in a way that more official texts often fail to do. But activism is also about hope (which sometimes feels hard to grasp these days), and Callai's hope and love for Palestine is palpable. As dark as things may seem, I think it's impossible to finish this book without taking a little of that hope and that love with you.