The Parachute Paradox

When it was published in 2016, Steve Sabella’s memoir, The Parachute Paradox: On Love, Liberation and Imagination, won the 2016 Nautilus Book Award and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Award for best memoir, and it was a finalist for the 2017 International Book Award.

Reviewers hailed it as a “thought-provoking, compelling and beautifully crafted memoir” (Joanna Barakat) and described it as “part romance, part thriller, part political analysis” (Rabbi Yehuda Sarna).1 These are very different genres, yet Sabella brilliantly and compellingly weaves them together into a coherent account of his struggle as an artist to come to terms with his relationship to his birth city, Jerusalem, while choosing to live in exile. Sabella is a professional photographer who creates unusual collages that draw the viewer in and create a dynamic experience. In Jerusalem, London, and finally Berlin, the creative work that consumes him revolves around perceptions of and relations to Jerusalem, questions of identity, and exile. Throughout this period, he battles debilitating depression.

Sabella begins his account with his meeting of Francesca, the Swiss woman who became his muse and wife in 1996; he ends the memoir soon after the Arab Spring begins in 2011. (Every female reader of the memoir is going to be charmed by Sabella’s courtship of Francesca, first as his girlfriend and later his wife, involving a cast of characters, some of whom are complete strangers, in an extended declaration of his love and commitment to her.) In the opening chapter, Sabella describes a skydiving experience he had in tandem with an Israeli instructor, which he posits as a metaphor for his relationship to Israelis.

This is a recurring metaphor throughout the memoir. Part of the personal struggle he describes is the process of shaking off the Israeli on his back—what might be described as a personal Intifada, though he doesn’t describe it that way.

Even as a 12-year-old, Sabella writes:

Growing up in a house in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was freeing, in a way; since he didn’t really belong there, he didn’t have to meet anyone’s expectations. From the rooftop, he had a panoramic view of the city and could see all the major landmarks, including the Dome of the Rock, Mount of Olives, Mount Scopus, the Church of the Holy Ascension, and Augusta Victoria Hospital.

As an adult, and as a photographer/artist, using the imagination to transcend reality would become even more necessary for his sanity. As he puts it, “it’s nearly impossible to maintain sanity in Jerusalem, a place that drives everyone to the edge.”4 He uses a telling simile to express what it is like for Palestinians living in Jerusalem:

Sabella graduated from high school in 1992. By that time, he had lived through the First Intifada and the casual killing of young Palestinians, and he had also lived through the uncertainty of living in shelters, gas masks at the ready, during the First Gulf War.

Reading this account, one is struck by how much violence Palestinians are exposed to at a young age, whether directly or implicitly. Death is everywhere. Every Palestinian knows at least one family who has experienced the loss of a loved one to an Israeli bullet. During the First Intifada, he experienced depression; his family thought a change of scenery was in order, and so they sent him to the United States as an exchange student. (That experiment ended abruptly because his well-intentioned host family spoke to him as though he had come from another century, which offended him.) The Second Intifada, which erupted on September 28, 2000, introduced the unpredictable element of the suicide bomber. The events are terrifying, especially when they occur in places that one had frequented just minutes earlier. Sabella recounted a few instances where he had just missed a bombing site.

However, Israeli colonial violence and humiliation are persistent; there is no escaping it. Casual shootings are coupled with violence, sometimes overwhelming and sometimes thoughtless, designed to remind the natives who is the boss. In a stabbing incident targeting a Jewish settler, a soldier pushes Sabella to the ground, face down in a puddle, as part of the search for the suspect. The Palestinian is guilty simply for being a Palestinian.

And he continuously experiences that feeling most sharply when he moves around and reaches an Israeli checkpoint. In the airport, Israeli tactics are transparently bigoted, intended to place the Palestinian in a category: Muslim, Christian, or Druze. A security official begins to ask a string of questions: name, father’s name, mother’s name. To ask the traveler a direct question about his or her religion would not be consistent with the cosmopolitan image Israelis like to project. So, the interrogator goes through the family tree, hoping to come to a religiously identifiable name, like Mohammad and Fatima. More ambiguous names, as in Sabella’s case, warrant digging a little deeper into the names of the grandparents. And then the interrogator asks questions about the purpose of the trip. These questions get repeated to the security reinforcements who are invariably called in. And finally, the absurd question, which Sabella is asked again and again, and not only at airports by hostile Israeli officials but by new acquaintances as well: “Why is your name Steve?”

For several years, Sabella and his wife consciously choose to remain in Jerusalem, a city that “was in a constate state of alert, like an electric pulse with a disturbing rhythm; always charged, ready to explode at any second.”6 To escape, he used his imagination to travel to times past or future.

He describes his task in these terms:

To live in Jerusalem is to be preoccupied with questions of legal status (see Precarious Status). Sabella decides to seek Israeli citizenship at age 18 because he wanted to travel freely and not have his right to return to Jerusalem be questioned. He learns Hebrew and attains proficiency. He adopts Jewish Israeli mannerisms when he approaches checkpoints, barely slowing down and conducting himself with the ease of one who knows that the checkpoint was never meant to inconvenience people like him. (The act works, and he is invariably waved through, mistaken for an Israeli Jew.)

Legal status issues loom large in this memoir. His brothers lose their legal status (and with it, their permanent residency rights) when they leave the country and stay abroad for a length of time that Israel deems a cutting point; they are unable to return until they get a foreign passport, and then they can return only as tourists.

But even citizenship is not enough to attain equal status in the country. Sabella and his wife meet another couple, an Israeli Jew married to a Swiss woman, who also happens to be applying for residency at the same time as Francesca. Identical circumstances in some terms–Israeli citizen married to European woman–but not identical in the single way that matters–Jewish vs. non-Jewish Israeli man married to a foreign woman: one couple is demographically necessary to keep, the other is demographically necessary to exclude by complicating their lives sufficiently that they choose to exclude themselves (or a state reason is later found to exclude them). Within two months, the wife of the Jew receives residency and other benefits, including enrollment in the national health insurance system; Francesca’s application takes years, and ultimately, she loses her residency altogether when she leaves the country for a certain period of time. She is of course not advised of the risks that foreign travel poses. It is a safe bet that the other Swiss spouse faces no such restrictions.

Sabella does not belabor his interactions with Jewish Israelis; he clearly has other and bigger issues to deal with. But I was struck by the fact that almost without exception, the Israelis he mentions, whether in Jerusalem or in Europe, are oblivious to how threatening or obnoxious their behavior is to others. Examples are liberally sprinkled throughout the text. They include being instructed by a US immigrant, now an Israeli settler, who carries a rifle to class, and classmates who tell each other stories about pointing their guns at Arabs just to scare them. One classmate was angry at an Israeli colleague who identified by name the settlement overlooking a Palestinian classmate’s village; he considered it military information that should not be made available to Palestinians (the Others) in the vicinity. Sabella is thrown out of Israeli nightclubs when the bouncers suspect he is Arab; on television, an Israeli can openly propose raping the sisters of suicide bombers as a deterrent measure for future would-be suicide bombers, and in an interview, historian Benny Morris advocated caging Palestinians: “There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”8

All this passes as normal behavior in Israel. Being exposed to this day after day requires extensive acting and self-hypnosis on the part of Palestinians just to get through each day.

Not everyone is outright callous. Some are like the current residents of ‘Ayn Karim, who now live in an artists’ colony after the village was ethnically cleansed in 1948. When Sabella rents a house for a short stay, he asks residents what they know about the original owners of the homes they live in. They don’t know anything and have no curiosity about them, either. The people who lived in these homes prior to the establishment of Israel simply don’t exist.

Sabella worked as a photographer for the United Nations, and on several occasions, he was sent to Gaza on an assignment. The day before he went on a trip to Gaza in 2005 for a magazine assignment, he was asked by an acquaintance whether he felt safe in Gaza. He replied that if there is any place he feels safe, it is Gaza.9 The irony of that response became apparent two days later, when he and a foreign coworker were kidnapped by a political faction that needed bargaining chips to pressure the Palestinian Authority to release a man they held in custody. The incident ended amiably with a group photo and the release of all hostages. Five years later, he received an email from his captor who expressed genuine remorse but also consoled him that he had helped save a life.

Sabella returned to Gaza in 2006. The Israelis hadn’t yet evacuated the settlements or removed the 9,000 settlers who lived among 1.5 million Palestinians. His response to what he saw in Gaza is worth quoting at length—valuable for the snapshot it offers of Gaza during a historical moment and valuable for what it says about the architects and perpetrators of Gaza’s agony since the October 2023 genocide.

Sabella was appalled by what he saw when he visited al-Mawasi.

Sabella received Swiss citizenship while still in Jerusalem; he also sought and received an Israeli passport. Yet he was not a Swiss artist or an Israeli artist.

Would he consider himself a Palestinian artist? He suggests that saying he comes from any country, including Palestine, doesn’t truly define a person; he doesn’t see the sense of associating himself with a country that has policies he might not agree with. He found it less problematic to say that he is from Bab Hutta, a neighborhood in Jerusalem’s Old City, a more narrow but indisputable fact.

The creative projects described in the memoir all dealt with questions of identity and images. Jerusalem in Exile, a project conceived with Jerusalemite poet Najwan Darwish, “theorized the transformation of the city into an image. But since the origin of that image could not be traced, that could explain why we felt lost in our own space, leading us to live in a state of alienation, in exile.”14 To prepare for that project, he worked on Palestine 9 Meters, “a video of still images that appeared in motion. The main intentions were to question constructed notions of Palestine and Palestinians portrayed in the media.”15 In Till the End, he took stones from places in Jerusalem under threat of demolition, photographed the locations, and printed the images on the stone’s surfaces. Each stone exposed the image from where it came.16 His interest in controlling the Palestinian narrative (and who gets to control it) led to Kan Yama Kan, “an art project intended as an investigation into liberating the Palestinian narrative from its captivity, and aimed at breaking free from the collective consciousness in Palestine, which left little room for individual thought.”17

Sabella concluded that Palestinians and Israelis were fighting over the image of Palestine. In his view, Israelis wanted to convey the sense of the invincibility of their power; to serve that purpose, they promote images of defeated Palestinians. Palestinians, on the other hand, had trouble imagining freedom after the failure of the Second Intifada; he describes this as “the colonization of the imagination,” which was hidden from view.18 A change in perception would lead to a change in reality.19

Settlement—Six Israelis; One Palestinian (2008) consists of images of six Israeli men who had served in the Israeli army photographed in front of a wall; their images span one wall of a room. On the facing wall, a photograph of Sabella stares out, also standing in front of a wall. All the men are stripped down to their underwear: there is little to distinguish one from the other, or the Israelis from the Palestinian. He explains his purpose:

Stripping the figures down to their underwear was a way of saying that bodies needed “to communicate directly, without mediation.”21

The memoir ends with a description of a depressive episode and Sabella’s struggle through it. It seems to have been triggered by a loss of faith in his creative process, which left him with nothing to fall back on. After the interventions of worried friends (including fellow Jerusalem artist Kamal Boullata), he gradually came to a realization that helped him emerge from the darkness:

Freeing himself from the burdens of the past, he achieved a sense of independence in his life journey and could assert:

This fascinating memoir traces the author’s journey to free his mind and psyche from the burden of carrying a colonial history. In the process of liberating his imagination, he gained an awareness of himself as a global citizen.