Show caption Ahdaf Soueif at the 2017 PalFest in Ramallah, Palestine. Photograph: Rob Stothard Point of view PalFest: ‘We go through checkpoints and soldiers; then we read’ The founder of the Palestinian Festival of Literature reflects on 10 years of bringing art and culture to the troubled region Ahdaf Soueif Sat 3 Jun 2017 12.00 BST Share on Facebook

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‘And were it not for my own children, back (home), I would stay. Stay in this city that brings out the cleanest and the clearest of me – and bear witness.”

I wrote this in Jerusalem, in December 2000. My second novel, The Map of Love, had just been shortlisted for the Booker prize, the second intifada had just broken out, and the Guardian had sent me to Palestine to write about it. In a sense I did stay, I stayed engaged, and the “children” came with me. Seventeen years later there’s been no third novel, but there’s been the Palestine Festival of Literature – PalFest to its friends – a communal idea that swept up family, friends and colleagues, making PalFestivalians of us all. Three weeks ago, we celebrated our 10th birthday.

It is 13 May 2017, PalFest X’s opening night in Ramallah. The small, exquisite amphitheatre of the Ottoman Court glows in the sunset. The audience circles the PalFest bookstall, settles onto the stone terraces. It feels like a reunion, into which we introduce new friends: writers, publishers, artists who have transferred themselves out of their lives and into our hands. For seven days they will be told when to wake up, when to eat, when to listen, when to perform. The festival bus will become their home, they will be on the move every single day.

Tonight three local authors and two visitors will read. Behind them hang 10 years of PalFest banners: Jeff Fisher’s initial tone-setting design, the letters of our name a bright burst of fireworks vaulting over a grey wall; then Muiz’s calligraphic puzzles, his emblematic indigenous birds and beasts, his classic luxuriant olive tenderly cradling “Gaza” for PalFest 2012 – the year we shamed the government of Egypt into letting us visit Gaza through Rafah. Tonight, one of the visitors’ poems will read: “Whereas today we celebrate things like his transfer to a detention centre closer to home.”

Festival participants go through a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Photograph: Rob Stothard

Five hours before, at the Allenby bridge, the crossing from Jordan into the Occupied Territories controlled by Israel, an Israeli officer said to the young Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif: “We have indications you may be carrying prohibited substances.” When pressed as to their nature, he waved a vague hand: “You know, the normal: guns, weapons, drugs. Do you have guns, weapons, drugs?” “No,” she said.

Ten festivals, almost 200 artists. From Palestine, the rising stars of a new generation of poets and dramatists as well as celebrated writers and critics. From abroad, some of the finest English-language novelists, essayists, dramatists and poets. Publishers, agents, editors and cultural producers. At first it was difficult. People were worried for their safety, or that they’d be labelled terrorist sympathisers, or that they might be incurring an obligation to take a political position. We had to win their trust, and we had to consider safety, logistics and perception. For the first few years we were constantly being asked: what about Israeli writers? But a central concept for PalFest was that Palestine would be liberated from being seen always in conjunction with Israel, from being seen as a problem to be solved, the Palestinians to be helped or persuaded towards “peace”. PalFest would be a festival for Palestine.

Palestinians under Israeli military occupation are issued with one of two types of ID: a Jerusalem ID or a West Bank ID. With a WBID you cannot go into Jerusalem – or leave the occupied West Bank at all – without a special pass. And even within the West Bank you will often find yourself stalled by a newly activated barrier or a couple of Israeli soldiers who have suddenly become a “flying checkpoint”. Our decision from the start, then, was for PalFest to travel to its audience – and it would try to travel in the same manner as a holder of a WBID. Every morning we pack our bags and get on the bus. We get off the bus to go through the steel grids and turnstiles of the checkpoints. We hold up our passports again and again to the dim windows behind which sit teenage Israeli soldiers and wait for their permission to pass from one town to its neighbour. When we arrive in Nablus/Jerusalem/Bethlehem/Haifa/Ramallah we race through the hotel check-in and straight to the lecture hall or the stage to read, listen, discuss, perform.

Molly Crabapple reads in the Ottoman Court in Ramallah, Palestine, during the 2015 PalFest. Photograph: Rob Stothard for The Palestine Festival of Literature

PalFest’s brief to its participants is simple: travel with us and do literary activities. In return they get a pass into a different life, a doorway through which they, whose business – as the novelist and poet Adam Foulds reminded me by the wall in Bethlehem – is the truth, can find their own truth.

We travel, but details that in another country would be pleasing – the noble houses donated to the community, the pop-up art spaces and cafes, the cultural centres working in deprived areas, the lively, ambitious students at the universities – all these, in Palestine, are poignant. A visitor, if they stay a few days, if they’re given the code, will see this. In the same gaze they will see gracious Palestinian Ottoman houses, the Palestinian refugee camp set up in 1948, now rooted and solid, and the young Israeli settlement bristling on top of the hill, waiting. They will see the stony terraces and the centuries that coaxed them into fruitfulness, the Israeli wall severing them from their farmers, and the settlement road cutting through the sky above them, digging deep into their soil.

In Palestine, civil society is vibrantly alive. But it has to fight for its life. It even has to argue that it has a right to be alive, that it has always been alive, here in this land. I think that’s the central truth I felt the need to bear witness to – and then act upon, all those years ago.

PalFest is proud to have earned a place in the cultural life of Palestine, and to be working to keep the oxygen of art and ideas flowing between the world and that life so gravely under threat.