Olives - A Violent Romance

Olives - A Violent Romance is about Paul Stokes, a young British journalist who travels to live and work in Jordan - his first overseas assignment for the magazine publishing company he works for. The company has picked up a contract to produce a magazine for Jordan’s Ministry of Natural Resources, which is currently deeply involved in the privatisation of Jordan’s archaic and stretched water system.

Paul wastes little time in getting himself into trouble thanks to a skinful of business class upgrade champagne and has to be bailed out by the family of Aisha Dajani, the young woman tasked with acting as his ‘fixer’ by the Ministry.

All too quickly, things go south for Paul, who comes to realise nothing is as simple as it seems - particularly when he is confronted by British intelligence agent Gerald Lynch, who blackmails Paul into spying on Aisha’s family. Aisha’s brother, Daoud, is bidding for the water privatisation against a British consortium and Lynch wants the ‘inside track’. Paul has little choice but to go along with Lynch, even as he finds himself falling for Aisha. Trying to reconcile himself with the new conflicts he is forced to confront, Paul is pitched into a new world of betrayal and terrible danger.

A new peace

Olives takes place in Jordan during ‘the new peace deal’, which could have been years ago or could be years in the future. There’s always a peace deal, you see. And in over sixty years, they’ve all come to nothing.

In 1948, the founding of the State of Israel marked the end of a long-held dream for a group of men who had laboured tirelessly since the late 19th century to found a home for the Jewish people. The Zionists strove not only to press the case for such a home, but also to conflate Jewishness with their campaign, which met with resistance from many Jews trying to get by in an increasingly anti-semitic Europe (Including Russia and Eastern Europe).

Using slogans like ‘A land without a people, for a people without a land’, they pressed their case that Palestine’s natural resources were being squandered, that the land was capable of bearing fruit if only it were managed by people who would be willing to work, to bring modern methods to bear and to settle the empty, open spaces of Palestine. The problem with this was, of course, that there was already a people on that land – the Arabic-speaking Palestinian Arabs, Christians and Jews who had been living there throughout the Ottoman Empire.

1948 saw some 700,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes and forced out of the country, over 500 villages were destroyed. Fleeing the violence, these families found homes in squalid, teeming refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands remained in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Palestinians call this event ‘Al Naqba’ or the catastrophe. It forms the background to Olives - A Violent Romance because it’s the background to the story of the Dajani’s, Aisha’s family.

Aisha’s story

Many Arab readers of Olives - A Violent Romance have told me how they felt Aisha’s story was their own, how their family had been through a similar experience.

In Aisha’s case, the family were lucky. With an entrepreneurial father (and yes, with links to the PLO in Kuwait), now the Dajanis live in the wealthy Abdoun area of Amman and collectively help to maintain the farm in Qaffin, in the West Bank, where Aisha’s grandmother still lives. The farm stayed in the family’s hands because one of Aisha’s grandparents stayed in the new state of Israel and so became an Arab Israeli. A smart lawyer, he managed to keep the farm in the family’s hands (many weren’t so lucky) but even so, the olive groves have been split by the ‘security wall’ built by Israel to isolate Palestine and, it has to be said, to sequester thousands of acres of land and enormous swathes of the region’s scant water resources.

The Water

Daoud’s preoccupation with the water shortage is also founded squarely in the story of the regional conflicts born out of 1948 – the Levant (Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Israel, although the term ‘the Levant usually refers to the Arab countries of the Western Mediterranean) is desperately short of water. Israel’s annexation of the Sea of Galilee (known as Lake Tiberius on the Arab side) in the 1967 war (the ‘six day war’) ensured a major source of precious water for Israel – fed by rivers and aquifers from surrounding Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Part of the background to Pauls’ dilemma in Olives - A Violent Romance is that Daoud Dajani is a wealthy Arab businessman with major business interests and connections across the region who is mounting a bid for the forthcoming privatisation of the Jordanian water network. Daoud’s consortium is being opposed by a British-led consortium which is focusing its bid on conservation and efficient distribution. Daoud’s bid is based on a brilliant and dangerous scheme – to tap the deep seasonal aquifers feeding Lake Tiberius, bringing more water to Jordan at Israel’s expense. Worse, by depleting the fresh water supply into Tiberius, he will ensure the remaining water is more saline – saltier and therefore less suitable for agriculture and drinking water.

Daoud’s bid obviously cannot be tolerated by the Israelis and unites both Israeli and British interests. The question Paul has to resolve is whether Daoud is a businessman acting within the law and meeting unlawful state-sponsored opposition to his brilliant scheme to benefit Jordan or whether he is a fanatic hell-bent on flinging the region into war.

“There can be no peace without resolving water problems and vice versa... it is water that will decide the future of the Occupied Territories and, what is more, whether there is peace or war. If the crisis is not resolved, the result will be a greater probability of conflict between Jordan and Israel, which would certainly involve other Arab countries.”
Jacques Sironneau, quoted in the NATO 2002 Report, ‘Water Resources in the Mediterranean.

The battle to secure supplies of ‘the universal solvent’ in the Eastern Mediterranean is insoluble. There are too many people living off the land, distribution networks are often creaky and wasteful and the struggle to gain control of resources is constant.

The research on the water crisis that forms the backdrop to Olives is solid – there is, indeed, a major humanitarian crisis brewing in the area and Israel has indeed annexed a large number of water sources by constructing its security wall to encompass them, carving strategic tracts of land from the ‘1967 border’. Each twist and turn of the wall is a bargaining chip at best, a fait accompli at worst. Carving farms in half (as, indeed, the Dajani’s farm in Qaffin has been carved), the wall makes the most of the scant water resources in the West Bank.

The source of Lake Tiberius’ wealth (or the Sea of Galilee) is, as outlined in Olives, a mixture of rivers flowing down from Syria and Lebanon and aquifers that rise up into the bed of the lake. According to NATO, 90% of the West Bank’s water is used by Israel and the distribution of water in the area is ‘unfair’ and ‘restrictive’.

How Olives - A Violent Romance happened

Olives is about a European sensibility being confronted with the realities behind the news reports from the Middle East, about trying to come to terms with being immersed in someone else’s conflict. It’s also about how our views and natural sympathies can be changed by being personally involved in things that we have become used to viewing dispassionately: how the people dying on our screens have just become another drama to us. Paul finds himself drawn into that conflict despite himself, literally and emotionally, and starts to understand that terrorism isn’t really a black and white simplicity – and that the good guys can be as bad, if not worse, than the bad guys. It’s a theme I returned to in A Decent Bomber, BTW…

We have long gone to sleep to a background of chillout music. One of our favourite things for a long time was a collection of piano music by the American musician and composer George Winston.

Going to sleep one night, lying in the dark, I listened to Winston’s February Sea and it made me think of stormy raindrops and a girl dancing in the deluge, soaked to the skin and beyond caring, laughing as she twirled.

The next day I woke with the book mapped out in my head, clear lines that stretched ahead of me like blacktop through the desert. I set about writing my story, driving in to work every morning at 5.30 so I had a clear three hours before everyone started traipsing into the office. I finished the whole thing in four weeks and then spent the next seven years editing and polishing it.

“…clear lines that stretched ahead of me like blacktop through the desert.”

In the process, I learned a lot more about writing than I had ever realised I’d need to (or want to!) know. Many of the lovingly constructed scenes from the first draft were consigned to the Recycle Bin, many more were created to strengthen the narrative, bring the characters to life and make sense of the plot as it unfolded.

Many of the additions reflected my own maturing understanding not so much of how to create characters, but of the characters that grew inside me. Aisha and Paul, in particular, started to become real people to me, so much so that when I finally took the decision to end the book as I have, it made me physically upset. I cried like a baby for the loss, particularly when Secret Garden’s Sleepsong plays: it’s a song of a mother’s love that repeatedly evokes the final moments of the book for me. It still makes me terribly sad when I hear the song.

At the time, I was travelling constantly to Jordan, a country of which I am inordinately fond. I first went there in 1988 and then again twelve years later, taken there by my company’s work with Jordan Telecom. We had worked with France Telecom to launch the privatised Egyptian mobile network and they called us to Jordan when they bought 40% of Jordan Telecom. I had staff seconded to their offices and we eventually opened up our own office there, expanding our work in the country to include the Ministry of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and various other bodies.

The Ministry of Natural Resources is therefore loosely based on my experience of the Ministry of ICT, although Harb Al Hashemi only reflects my real minister (His Excellency Dr Fawaz Al Zu’bi) in a couple of brush strokes – particularly in his frustration at the difficult task of driving reform in Jordan. And Lars (as in ‘arse’) is simply in telecoms because, well, so was I and it just felt right that he should be.

The airport pickup drivers inevitably ask you ‘is this your first time in Jordan, Seer?’ and I do enjoy their reactions when I reply, ‘No, my seventy fourth, actually’. Blame the Grand Hyatt, they were counting and I found a gift from the GM in my room when I arrived for my fortieth stay.

I never questioned that the book would be set anywhere else but Jordan, I had instinctively put my dancing girl there, on the road downhill from the Blue Fig in Abdoun, just as Paul’s house was always going to be the one across the road from the Wild Café. That dancing scene ended up being the pivotal point of the book, literally halfway through the whole work. And that was purely coincidence.