‘Why live in such a theatre of war now?’ I asked Sarah.
‘I’m an artist,’ she said. ‘I like beautiful homes.’
We continued our tour. She pointed out small details to me: the iron grille over a row of windows, some beautiful tiles, coloured glass that had survived unbroken. I tried to fill in more details from the photographs I had seen of the various Jaffa families who were friends of my parents – Albina and his parents’ wedding, the Dajanis and the life they had lived in the city. All gone now, all in the past. As we passed the empty houses I thought about how their inhabitants had left them fully furnished as they fled. They had no time to gather anything during the Nakba. There was large-scale looting after the city was evacuated.
As we left this house, we saw the rubble from another one across the street that had been recently demolished. We also saw a pile of rubbish that had been left uncollected for days. There were rats.
‘I met an old bearded Arab one day near a house that had been gutted and half demolished,’ Sarah said. ‘I asked him about his life in Jaffa and he offered me his understanding of existence. He saw himself as a single speck in a long historical process that proceeded like a huge wheel that was always moving but so infinitesimally slowly that it looked to each generation as if it were stationery. Only through the perspective of many years can its movement be discerned. My life, he told me, does not matter unless I see it from this broader perspective, in relation to what came before and what will come after. Jaffa, the coast, Acre, Palestine, Syria. One conqueror came, stayed and then was forced to move on. The next conqueror was followed by another, and so on. None have managed to stay for ever. The wheel is constantly moving, but slowly. It never stops turning. I envied the vision of that old man.’
Before I left for Ramallah, Sarah told me of a strange dream she had had, perhaps brought about by my visit:
At first there was a buzzing sound, probably an actual fly in my room. I tried to block it out, but there was another sound, a sort of continuous murmur, low and breathy, the sound of women close by. I strained my ears to listen. I was naked when I left the bed. I walked out on to the porch. There was a group of Palestinian women having their afternoon tea, but they weren’t like the Arabs I usually see. They were dressed like they were in the 1930s. They were seated on white wicker chairs around a table covered by a multicoloured embroidered cloth. On it lay neatly cut sandwiches, ginger biscuits, an apple pie and a chocolate cake. One woman was pouring tea out of a shining silver teapot into daintily designed cups. But as the tea struck it, each cup cracked and the pieces shattered over the woman’s lap. The others did not seem to notice. They continued with their quiet conversation. One of them had a satin collar. There was a cold breeze that caused the delicate fabric to ruffle and cover the woman’s left cheek. She seemed to notice me. She smiled in my direction and I was suddenly aware of my nakedness. I felt cold and exposed and I folded my arms over my breasts. Then I woke up.
It was already afternoon when I left Jaffa. The sun was still strong and the humidity high, though not as high as at night. I had not slept well because of the heat and I could not wait to get back to Ramallah with its cool, dry weather.
I drove slowly along an old British Mandate-period road, narrow and meandering and lined on both sides with eucalyptus trees brought to Palestine from Australia by the British. There were few cars and I enjoyed the scenery, the wide-open spaces so unlike the hilly terrain around Ramallah. Some fourteen kilometres south of Ramle, I saw a nursery and stopped to buy some seedlings to take back with me. I was looking at the wide variety of plants when the proprietor came over and we began talking. We both loved plants and bonded over this. I learned that she was from Canada, had a weak heart and had recently had a pacemaker installed. She had left Canada because she wanted a different sort of life, one where she could stop working so hard and take the time to enjoy things. She had found it here.
‘I never continue working while the sun is setting,’ she said. ‘I leave whatever I’m doing, rush out and just stand there enjoying the scenery. On the plain, we get an unobstructed view of the horizon and an amazing array of colours. Every day it’s different.’
As I continued my rounds of the nursery, I saw ruins on the opposite side of the road, evidence of a Palestinian village that had been destroyed. I hadn’t noticed them before. A young Palestinian man was working among the plants with a spade and I asked him in Arabic, ‘Which village was that?’
He looked up, hesitated, then answered, ‘Khirbat Beit Far.’
‘Did the inhabitants leave in 1948 or were they evicted afterwards?’ I asked. ‘And where are they now?’
‘Where are they now?’ he repeated. ‘Scattered all over the globe.’ He scrutinised my face, trying to understand where I came from and why I was interrogating him.
‘Are you from here?’ I asked.
He was from Ramallah but slept at the nursery during the week and returned home at the weekend. He had been working with this woman for five years now. He spoke fluent Hebrew with her and they seemed very friendly and comfortable with each other.
I felt a burst of anger, as though what I had suppressed during my visit to Jaffa was coming to the surface. I felt like asking this middle-aged woman how she could establish her nursery on land expropriated from villagers who were now forced to live in crowded refugee camps with no land to cultivate for themselves. I wanted to shake her out of her equanimity. How could she watch the sunset with an easy conscience when such a tragedy had taken place on the land she now exploits?
I went to find her, but I had a change of heart. Was it the plants that had a calming influence on me? Whatever it was I could not tell her what I had been determined to say. Instead I bought some plants. She smiled at me and gave me a seedling for free.
When I reached the Latrun Monastery, I saw some Palestinian labourers waving at me. They wanted a lift, so I stopped and took in two. On the way they told me that they worked at a nearby factory, starting at six in the morning and finishing at three in the afternoon. ‘We wake up at four and leave home at quarter to five,’ one of them said, ‘with the chicken.’ They got this work through the labour exchange office. I asked whether they had the same rights as Israeli workers. They said they thought so but were not sure. They did not know the details and never saw the contract. They knew that deductions were made from their salary but were not sure why. Their employer shouted at them and humiliated them whenever they tried to speak to him.
When we got to the turn-off that went to Khirbatha, they asked me to stop. ‘This is our village,’ they said.
I would have driven them to their doors but I had no time. I would have liked to see their reception when they arrived home and what they did in the evening. They were probably no more than seventeen but they looked older, worn out. It must be a hard existence.
After I dropped them off, I drove on through the hills back to Ramallah. I was looking with new eyes and noticed, perhaps for the first time, how attractive the landscape was. The lure of far-off Jaffa had blinded me from seeing the beauty of those central hills around Ramallah and beyond in the West Bank, where my father had proposed establishing a Palestinian state.
A whole new world was opening up to me, one that I had remained prejudiced against for so long. My gaze had always been fixed on the horizon, on Jaffa and the coast, and I had failed to see and appreciate what lay closer to home.
4
Naomi
Jerusalem, 1981
In 1981 I was preparing to publish a number of essays that I had written for a London-based magazine, The Middle East, under the pseudonym ‘Samed’. My Israeli publisher told me he knew a skilled editor and asked whether I would mind working with an Israeli. That was how I met Naomi.
We arranged to meet in East Jerusalem, in the courtyard of the American Colony Hotel, with its small fountain, goldfish pond and palm tree, the fronds forming a canopy over the open space. At that time the hotel was a meeting place for Palestinian
s and Israelis, and we continued to go there often over the years. The staff were mainly Arabs from Jerusalem and the West Bank. At night a small Israeli jazz band played in the cavernous bar in the basement. The atmosphere was romantic and dreamy.
Naomi was slim, intense and highly intelligent, with beautiful, frank eyes. She had short hair which she continuously swept off her face. Like most other Israelis, she smoked a lot and played with her cigarette between her fingers.
Her glittering eyes looked at me with affection and bemusement. She was quick to laugh and generous with her laughter. She emphasised her words, choosing them carefully, and had a way of using her hands to make a point – not unlike Arabs, although the gestures were different, especially the way she often used her little finger, which she held apart from her other fingers as if favouring it to make a finer distinction. Different fingers were used to emphasise different points, as if playing the piano in the air. Then she would audibly draw breath, screw up her eyes and gaze into the distance. I liked her.
The daughter of an Israeli diplomat, Naomi had grown up in a number of different countries. When she was drafted into the army she was initially enthusiastic but soon lost interest. She was highly moral. She was concerned about what was taking place around her and willing to speak out. In so many ways she was the opposite of Henry, who remained diffident and reluctant to commit himself, especially when it came to politics.
At the time we met, Naomi was working for the Jerusalem Post, where her brother was a night editor. We got along well. At that first meeting Naomi asked me what my book was about and I told her that it was about perseverance (sumoud) and explained what this meant, how it was a strategy of civil resistance. We Palestinians decided to stay put despite all the efforts of the occupiers to make life difficult for us in order to encourage us to leave. I made sure to emphasise that it was not about politics. She looked sceptical. When I explained that I had a hatred of politics, she laughed. I went on to say that I was writing about daily life and how to survive – how to develop a Palestinian community even under occupation.
‘And this is not politics?’ she gently enquired.
I insisted that it wasn’t. I gave her the manuscript and we parted, but not before planning to meet again at her home in the German Colony in West Jerusalem.
Next day I went to her house. It had an attractive front porch and was surrounded on all sides by a garden. The front garden had a few shrubs but was not cultivated. It was at the back of the house that Naomi’s mother applied her energy. Different annuals were planted there, each season producing a sea of joyful colour. Her mother, who took the Hebrew name Rosheen when she married Naomi’s father, was English and a superb gardener. They had a dog which they had found sick and lame in the gutter. They spoke to him in Hebrew.
I soon discovered that Naomi and I agreed about the danger of building settlements and the desperate need to speak out before it was too late. We were kindred spirits. At the time I was investigating the illegal ways in which the settlers had registered a local company to circumvent prevailing Jordanian law prohibiting the sale of land to foreigners without permission from a local authority. Meanwhile, messianic rabbis, such as Zvi Yehuda Kook, were claiming that the settlement of the land was by divine command. I remember wondering what could be so divine about a process that was proceeded by stealth and illegality. But I still had faith that secular law would eventually be enforced. Al-Haq’s publications documented what was taking place and its effect on Palestinian farmers. One of the publications was a collection of statements under oath from those whose human rights had been violated which we called In Their Own Words. Naomi’s mother, Rosheen, helped to edit it. It included testimonies from farmers whose land had been confiscated for the building of settlements or whose houses had been pulled down or sealed by the military, people who had been placed under town arrest and academics who had suffered censorship, harassment and the closure of their universities.
I was anxious. I could see disaster looming in the not too distant future if nothing was done immediately to stop the violations, especially those against the new generation of Palestinians. Evidently, while encouraging these settlements to prosper, the Israeli military authorities pursued a policy of stifling Palestinian development by refusing to grant permits vital for building the necessary infrastructure for investment and economic progress. I wasted no opportunity to speak out or write about these disastrous policies, which I believed would only hamper and complicate the resolution of the conflict. I was confident that Al-Haq’s work and the book I was working on would awaken others in Israel and abroad to what was happening.
As the deadline for the manuscript approached, I spent a lot of time with Naomi discussing the order of the pieces and making extensive changes. I completely trusted her opinion, had faith in her skills as an editor and thoroughly enjoyed working with her. A strong personal friendship grew between us that has never since been broken.
That year, 1981, was a time of change and not for the better. Israel reneged on the promise it had made to US president Jimmy Carter not to build more Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was religious, must have reasoned that it was more important to follow the will of God than a promise to a secular president – not to mention that it was politically more expedient for his party, Likud, to pursue the colonisation of Palestinian territory and make available free land for his electorate. As the Camp David negotiations proceeded over the fate of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it was becoming clear that in return for Sinai and the neutralisation of Egypt, Israel was giving itself the West Bank. Anwar Sadat, whose words had given me hope, did not follow through on what he had promised.
On 2 June a year earlier, the Jewish Underground, a terrorist group formed by militants in the settler movement, tried to assassinate the mayors of Bireh, Nablus and Ramallah in the West Bank by planting bombs in their cars. Bassam Shakaa, the mayor of Nablus, lost his legs, and it was reported that on hearing the news Rabbi Haim Drukman, co-founder of the extremist settler movement Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) and later a member of the Knesset and Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs, sang a line from the Song of Deborah: ‘Thus may all Israel’s enemies perish.’
I remember the first time I read about Gush Emunim. It was 1978, one year after Begin was elected prime minister of Israel. The victory of the hawkish, right-wing Likud party after thirty years in opposition was considered an upheaval in the political life of the state. It ended the hegemony of the Labour party, which was mainly led by Ashkenazi Jews. Likud was openly committed to establishing more settlements in the West Bank and holding on to Jerusalem, including the Arab eastern side of the city, as the ‘eternal capital’ of Israel. My first thought was that the Gush Emunim was a delusional fringe group. I was not alone. In 1976 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave an interview in which he compared the settlements to ‘a cancer in the social and democratic tissue of the State of Israel’. He criticised Gush Emunim as ‘a group that takes the law into its own hands’.
At that time I didn’t think the organisation posed a real threat. How could they force us out? Are we not persevering (samdeen)? Unlike in 1948, we didn’t leave our homes when the war erupted in 1967. ‘Sumoud,’ I wrote, ‘is our collective way of challenging the occupation. Whatever the Israeli military does to make us leave, we will not go.’ I was encouraged by Rabin, who said in that same interview that ‘because of the [Arab] population I don’t think it will be possible to [settle] over time unless we want to get to apartheid, with a million and a half Arabs inside the State of Israel’. But as the number of settlements grew, I realised that while they might be deranged they were serious and they had the support of the Likud government under Begin, which took over in 1977. Begin was no champion of peace or of reconciliation with the Palestinian people. He refused to recognise that the Palestinians were a people. In an article published in 1970 in the Israeli daily Maariv, Begin had made his position known:
If a Jew
, or a Zionist, a minister or spokesman, acknowledges the Palestinisation of the Jewish–Arab conflict, he still has no authority to determine that Israel ends here and Palestine begins there, or vice versa. He has accepted our enemies’ main argument. He has betrayed that of his own people. If this be the Land of Israel, we have returned to it. If it is Palestine, we have invaded it. If Eretz Israel it be, we have established legitimate rule throughout it; if it be Palestine, our rule is not legitimate in any area of it.
Month by month, the nightmare grew as more and more Jewish settlements were established. My father was right when he said that time was of the essence. If we waited too long the establishment of a Palestinian state would no longer be viable. As the settlements advanced and more land was taken using means that we were helpless to stop through legal action, I became more certain that the policy of the Israeli government was to throw us out altogether. All this was to make room for Jews from the West, like Henry.
The spring after Naomi and I finished editing the manuscript, there was turmoil in the occupied West Bank, mainly involving settler violence. But she and I continued to meet. That summer she was due to travel to England to continue her studies in philosophy, so we decided to go to my family’s house in Jericho to celebrate the book’s completion. There in that oasis we could escape, however briefly, from everything.
Time seemed to stop there. It was March and the citrus orchards were in blossom. As we entered Jericho we were embraced by their fragrance. In the garden of my family’s house we built a small fire and set up a table that we covered with a checked tablecloth. We drank champagne and ate grilled white goat’s cheese, roasted almonds and pistachios. We were alone – alone without any soldiers nearby – under a sky studded with stars.
Where the Line is Drawn Page 5
