Inevitably, politics began to cast a dark shadow over my relationship with Henry. Unlike Henry, I did not have the luxury of ignoring politics. Henry might express his objection to what was taking place, but he never had to follow this with any concrete political action. He could go on with his life as if nothing was happening. Meanwhile, we Palestinians were subjected to harsh treatment by the Israeli forces – long curfews, house demolitions, censorship, and restrictions on academic freedom and travel. Most aspects of our life were curtailed in some form or another and subject to permits from the military authorities. The occupation determined my present and my future. I waited in long lines for permits and endured constant harassment by the military on the way to and from my office. Even a task as simple as installing a telephone line was an ordeal requiring a military permit that was difficult to obtain.
The first time I sensed any friction in our relationship was in the late 1970s, when I visited Henry’s family home and met his father, who struck me as a very kind man, much like Henry. I went with Henry and his family to a synagogue. It was my first visit to a Jewish place of worship. Henry explained to me the setting and the rituals. I did not know much then about Judaism and was curious to learn.
Henry’s father was not religious and did not have a beard. This made me curious about what had made Henry decide to grow his. When I asked him, he said he thought I only asked because I wished he were not a Jew. This surprised me, since this was the last thing on my mind. What I really wished for was that he did not become Israeli. The Israelis were my enemies, not the Jews. Surely he understood this. We didn’t discuss the matter further, although I was left wondering whether he could ever forget that I’m Palestinian. I worried that, to him, I was not an individual but a representative of my people and that it gratified him to have an Arab friend – something he could boast about. That made me uncomfortable.
For a while in the early 1980s Henry lived in a flat lent to him by a friend in the Montefiore quarter opposite the Old City wall. It had been built at the end of the nineteenth century on land bought by the Jewish banker Moses Montefiore to house Jews from the Old City and ease overcrowding there. It had since become an upmarket neighbourhood, and with a panoramic view of the Old City walls and its historic windmill, it remains one of my favourite parts of Jerusalem. It was also near the newly built cinema, the Cinematheque, and film archive, the first of its kind in Jerusalem. I often met Henry there and we would walk together in that attractive area, even as terrible events were beginning to take place all around us.
Decades later – after he had become a Jungian analyst and university professor, had published a few books and many scholarly articles – every time I approach the building where Henry used to live I recall that magical time when I was still young and full of enthusiasm and confidence about the future. From this vantage point I used to be able to see where the border had been drawn between East and West Jerusalem before 1967. I could also see Silwan, one of the highly congested Palestinian suburbs in the valley just outside the walls of the Old City.
Now, standing there, I can see not only the beautiful walls of the Old City but another wall, ugly and concrete, that looms on the horizon, demarcating a new separation causing further hardship for non-Jewish residents. I can still see Silwan, which is now under vicious attack by the right-wing settler organisation Ateret Cohanim, which is trying to evict the Palestinians, take over their homes and revive what they claim was the City of David.
From our very first meeting at the hotel in Tel Aviv, Henry always maintained that it was tradition that had attracted him to Israel. ‘I came not intending to stay,’ he told me, ‘and then things happened.’ But can you live in Israel and not take responsibility for what its government is doing to non-Jews living there?
I have often asked myself what I should expect of a friend. I tried to disassociate Henry from what he was not directly responsible for. Yet with the ongoing theft of our land, restrictions on our daily lives and the establishment of Jewish settlements, this was difficult, at times impossible. In the early 1980s, through Al-Haq and its field workers in the Occupied Territories, I learned more of what was taking place around me. I became less involved in my own story and began to write about other people. The more I knew, the angrier I became. I did not feel Henry shared my concern about the large-scale violation of human rights and the dismal future that awaited us Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and we began to drift apart.
3
Visiting Jaffa
Jaffa, 1978
I don’t know why I was obsessed with spending a night in Jaffa, my father’s city, from which he was exiled. Daytime visits, like mine with Henry, were somehow not enough; I had to spend the night there. I had heard so much about it and thought that I needed at least one night to give me a true taste of what it was like to live in the city of my youthful imaginings. Perhaps I wanted to experience a return of sorts. Perhaps I wanted to understand what it was like for my father to live in a coastal city rather than in landlocked Ramallah. But, with the Israeli occupation, it was rare for me to spend a night away from home, and it was only in the autumn of 1978 that I was able to do this, when I visited a Jewish lawyer colleague, David, and his wife, Sarah.
When I was growing up in what was then the village of Ramallah, I would stand at the foot of the brown hills near our house and look at the sliver of blue sea that was visible on the horizon on a clear day. At the time the sea was inaccessible because of the border with Israel, but after the 1967 war, the lifting of the border between Israel and the West Bank allowed us to venture from the central hills of the West Bank all the way to the sea.
When we used to drive from Ramallah to Jaffa, we could see the transformation Israel had wrought on the land. Just before we got to Jaffa my father would point to the side of the road at where in the distance the Arab towns of Abasieh, Beit Dajan, Yazour and Salameh had once stood. I could never see any remains, but in one place there was still an old tree – I believe it was a carob – whose dusty branches had probably shaded the road to Jaffa when my father had lived there. My first impression of Jaffa as we entered was of a crumbling city with a fading charm but disgraced by neglect, as any city can be. My father said it was unchanged, as though time had stood still. Except for the Manshieh quarter, which had been completely destroyed, the city was more or less intact. Ever the optimist, he had thought that it would become part of the new Arab state under the UN partition scheme of 1947.
Usually the conqueror tries as quickly as possible to repair the damage caused by the war and have life return to normal. This is how it was with Jerusalem, Ramallah and other cities in the West Bank and Gaza after Israel conquered them in 1967. Not so with Jaffa after the 1948 war. The inhabitants were not allowed to return and those 2,500 or so Palestinians who managed to stay were forced out of their homes and placed in the Ajami quarter of the city. Surrounded by barbed wire, it was like a ghetto, and permission from the military governor was needed to enter and exit the zone. As for the rest of the city, the victorious Israelis were at a loss. Ideas ranged from total destruction to the renovation of the existing houses. Many of the small stone-built villages in the Galilee, which the Israeli army destroyed in 1948 and 1949, were relatively easy to demolish. In their place, they planted trees. Razing a historic 5,000-year-old city like Jaffa was not so easy.
May 1948 was not the first time that Jaffa had been evacuated. Although the city had prospered during the Second World War, it had been a war zone during the First World War. My grandmother Mary, my father’s stepmother, remembered how her family had been forced to leave Jaffa by the Ottomans. After the war was over, the inhabitants were allowed back, but it was unlikely that a similar return would be possible after 1948.
Some Israeli families were moved into the city but many houses stood empty. Sarah, an artist whose family came from Poland, was one of the few who took matters into their own hands, convincing her reluctant husband to move their family from Tel Aviv to
one of these empty Jaffa homes. She thought they were charming and had character. To me, Jaffa was a conquered city.
I entered the house with a heavy heart. It was an old Arab house with a porch and small garden. It was divided by an unattractive concrete wall into two dwellings and seemed shabby and in need of renovation. All sorts of complicated thoughts rushed through my head. Strangely I felt neither anger nor reproach. I just wanted to understand how it had all been possible: the Nakba, the expulsion of the city’s inhabitants, the new inhabitants in the homes of the conquered.
What would become of the city and of us?
My first visit to Jaffa had been right after the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank, when I was sixteen. I drove with my parents to visit the city they had been forced to leave nineteen years earlier.
We went first to my mother’s family house on Nuzha Street and met the Romanian family who had moved in. The encounter was more surreal than sad. The portly woman wearing a long dark dress who opened the door had no idea who we were. She looked confused and scared at the sight of us. Perhaps she had never been told that she had been given the house of a Palestinian family. We had no language in common and she could not understand a word we said. She was baffled when we made our way inside and my mother began to explain the function of every room in the house. My father seemed embarrassed by the whole experience. He could not wait to leave. My mother, on the other hand, moved through the house as though she owned it, pointing out the beautiful floor tiles, which she emphasised to us were Portland stone of the best quality. ‘Look how after all these years they still shine. My father always wanted to have the best material.’ They seemed to be the only remaining feature of the house that was familiar to her. It saddened her that she had to ask permission to enter her own house.
My parents began bickering. My father wanted us to leave immediately, while my mother insisted that he was always in a hurry and we must see every room in the house. For my part, I tried to imagine the house as they had described it – with the stylish furniture and the delicate carved room dividers, or paravans, and the wall hangings. I tried to recall the various family photographs I had seen which showed some of the expensive rugs and the beautiful porcelain figurines the family owned. My parents looked so happy in these photographs. Now they looked wretched, with clenched, grim faces, as they were confronted by denuded walls and alienating surroundings. After we left the house, my father’s driving, already bad, was worse than ever.
I had grown up hearing stories about Jaffa, and the more we saw of the city now the more I thought it had been insulted by sheer neglect. The faded beauty of its narrow streets and palatial homes along al-Ajami was marred by the scurrying rats and the broken doors and windows. I found the discrepancy between how the city appeared to my parents and how I saw it disconcerting. I wanted to show my appreciation but I couldn’t. I tried hard to see the grandeur of Nuzha Street, about which I had heard so much, but to me it looked shabby, its gardens filled with dying plants.
Jaffa was not just another city in Palestine; it had been the rich, thriving cultural capital of Palestine. It was where everything had happened. So many cities around the world had seen greater devastation during the Second World War than Jaffa had endured in 1948, but those cities were rebuilt soon after the war – Berlin, Nagasaki, Dresden. Not so Jaffa.
I had no doubt my father still saw in his mind’s eye the vital city Jaffa used to be. When we visited, he showed me where the cafés, cinemas and houses of his friends used to be – all now gone. Without difficulty, he drove to the outskirts of the city where, near the sea, he showed us some empty land he had bought just before the Nakba. He had been planning to build a new house for himself, his wife and daughter there. It was not to be. My father left us inside the car, saying he would not be long, and went to walk on the land. When he came back he was in a sombre mood. He said nothing. He wasn’t one to give easy expression to his emotions. Nor was it his habit to complain. I was left to wonder how my life would have been had I been raised in that house by the sea rather than in the hills of Ramallah.
I was not alone in my desire to return to the city. Many others were making their own way back to Jaffa, among them two men of my father’s generation, Mousa and Halim, who related to Jaffa in very different ways.
Mousa was one of a small minority in the West Bank who were not unhappy with the occupation. For them it provided new business opportunities and the chance to once again visit the city of their birth, the city they loved. Many like him made their peace with Israel, glad to be rid of Jordanian rule with its thinly veiled prejudice against Palestinians.
Originally from a humble background, Mousa was a labour contractor for some Israeli construction firms. He recruited Palestinian workers for them to work on projects in Israel and in the settlements. It was a lucrative business and he was quickly becoming a rich man. His friends began calling him Moshe.
For nineteen years after the Nakba, he had missed Jaffa. Under the occupation, he could now go back as an affluent man and eat like a lord at the seafront fish restaurants there. Mousa began to act as though nothing bad had happened – no Nakba and no occupation. He did not care that Israel was preventing refugees from returning to Jaffa. He had accomplished his own victorious return and his motto was now ‘Forget, forgive and live’. On weekends he drove his car along the Latrun road from the West Bank and was able to reach the sea he loved in forty-five minutes. Once in Jaffa, he would walk around the city, his belly protruding in front of him, his arms dangling by his side, palms turned backwards as he pressed forward, light on his feet despite his bulk – he was a good dancer.
He was on excellent terms with the officials working for the military government, in particular one Arabic-speaking Israeli who doubled as an intelligence agent. The agent enjoyed mingling with Arabs and had settled his family in one of the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem, where a lifelong friendship developed between the two men. Mousa met him frequently, providing him with information when needed and arranging for him to meet people he needed to investigate. He allowed the agent to use his house to hide the money he had illegally acquired from bribes. In return, Mousa obtained commissions and all sorts of permits to make his life as comfortable as possible. Both men agreed that life was good. It was only marred by those Palestinian rebels – Israel called mukharibeen – who planted bombs and complicated relations between the two sides. They should have realised there was no point fighting Israel.
People like Mousa began to contact friends and family who had stayed in Israel after 1948. Palestinian families from across the old divide began to intermarry. But Israel became concerned that these emerging alliances would bring this split society back together again. They wanted a greater Israel for the Jews, not a united Palestine for the Arabs, and from this concern grew ideas of once again separating the two areas. This was not accomplished until more than fifteen years later, by which time Mousa had gone into retirement as a rich man.
Halim’s case was different. His return from London to Jaffa, the city of his birth, had to wait until after the Oslo Accord in 1995, the result of secret negotiations in Oslo between Israel and the PLO. It had promised real peace and instead delivered a mere repackaging of the occupation. But one of the few concessions Israel made was that it allowed a number of Palestinian members of the PLO to return to the Occupied Territories. Halim was a businessman who had joined the PLO in 1973. Tall and well built, he was slightly stooped, with large piercing black eyes and bushy eyebrows. He was active as a public speaker for the Palestinian cause. After his return, he settled in Ramallah and became a frequent visitor to Jaffa.
When I first met Halim I disliked him. Why was he here? He had come too late, after the disastrous Oslo Accords, which had so compromised Palestinian rights. What Palestine did he think he was returning to? Where was he when we could still have ended the occupation, when there had still been a chance to build on what we had? He was too busy pursuing his own interests. Now he had ret
urned on a tourist visa, using his British passport, while the PLO, which he had served for so many years, had surrendered.
After each visit to Jaffa he would come back and with great enthusiasm describe to me how unchanged he found the city to be. He had that uncanny capacity to ignore everything that had happened to the residents of the city who stayed, as though their lives were of no importance, as though they were dispensable and all that was important was the bricks and mortar of the city itself. History was measured by his own experience. It ended when he left and resumed when he returned. Whatever happened in the interim was of no significance. ‘Just imagine,’ he told me with even greater excitement than usual, ‘the young Palestinian boys playing in the street knew all the Arabic names of the streets. They could give me directions as if nothing had changed. It’s the same Jaffa I knew as a young man.’ I wondered what the people in Jaffa thought of him – the Arab who left, now returned.
After Oslo, I was miserable. Could he understand what I felt? When I tried to tell him, he would stop me and begin describing loudly and emphatically his most recent visit to Jaffa and how he’d been for a swim in the sea just as he used to do as a young man. He made much of the few iconic businesses that still survived from his time in the city back then: the Fakhri Jday pharmacy, the Abulafia bakery and the now famous hummus place, Abu Hasan’s. From these, he reconstructed the entire city. There was a desperation about his selective memory.
I will never forget his description of his first visit to Jaffa after his return. It was like a fleeting realisation that others had stayed and suffered and that the city is not just the bricks and mortar. But he soon forgot all this. It was the stark contradiction between these two states of mind that could exist in him side by side that stood out and made me remember his description of this experience:
Where the Line is Drawn Page 3
