From Birzeit we drove without incident to Ramallah.
It was a terrifying drive. We were lucky that nothing happened. But I was glad to have had the experience. To have seen the countryside with its new security arrangements at night, to have heard this soldier speak about fairness, which only signalled how shut off from reality he was, to have seen writ on the land the fanaticism of its settlers, who deluded themselves by creating a land of make-believe where the history of one people had been utterly erased from the landscape and replaced by a messianic fantasy, all this was most edifying. It made me realise that Israel’s settlement programme was a passing phenomenon and was not going to survive. Their presence was untenable, just as the Ottomans, after a 400-year presence here, also had to leave. But before they did, they destroyed our landscape, felling most of the trees to use for fuel during the First World War. How much damage would these settlers have done before they left?
Time is on the Palestinians’ side, I thought, after I finished this harrowing drive. The Israelis had been inflexible, allowed to get away with their crimes because of the sympathy felt towards them because of the Holocaust. But this emotional dispensation would eventually run its course.
When I got home I remembered an entry I’d read in the diaries of Khalil Sakakini, who worked as an educational inspector under the British Mandate. In it he describes a trip he took on 13 December 1934: ‘if the Jews have a few impoverished colonies the Arabs have thousands of villages. We travelled from Jerusalem to Hebron to Beir Sabaa to Gaza to Khan Yunus to Majdal to Ramle to Lydda to Kalkilia to Tul Karam and only passed through Arab lands. What is owned by the Jews compares as nothing to what is owned by the Arabs in Palestine.’
Meanwhile, to his surprise, the unseen people were organising, training and arming themselves, and when the time came they emerged from their ‘invisible’ locations, fought and won a war that ended up forcing out those who had only seen their own kind and failed to see the enemy in their midst. Sakakini too was forced out of his new home in Jerusalem, never to return.
Next morning as I was shaving, I looked at my face in the mirror. For the first time I felt ready to take responsibility for the way I looked. I realised that the contours of my face, the lines around my mouth, have mainly come from clenching my jaws from tension. This was no serene, relaxed face. There could no longer be any pretence or any concealment. I could see etched there the signs of my failures and successes.
The real suffering, the constant reminder and knowledge of the bloodshed inflicted on my people, weighed heavily on me and left its mark on my face. Mine was no longer a face with an elfish smile, as had been the case when my father was alive and I played the role of rebel son. Memory had wiped that smile from my face.
Footnote
* A version of this was published in Index on Censorship, Volume 3, 2004.
12
Shocking News
Ramallah, 2006
On the morning of 2 June 2006, I opened my email and found this message:
Raja,
I am sorry I have not been in touch since your uncle’s wife died. Unfortunately, I have been having some medical problems.
About three months ago, I discovered my left eyelid was drooping, but the many tests I did did not uncover the cause. At the same time, I began losing weight, eating less and feeling without my usual bounce. In the last couple of weeks, my spleen became painfully swollen and my liver somewhat enlarged and I became breathless after any physical exertion. Suddenly my white blood cell count became very high, along with other blood work anomalies. I have just consulted a wonderful hematologist, Professor Debbie Rund (who was a social worker before becoming an MD), and together we looked at my blood cells. She is fairly certain that I have a low-grade, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Thursday, I did a whole body CT, and on Sunday I will have a bone marrow and a pleural tap to remove fluid that has accumulated in my right lung and is the cause of the breathlessness. Along with other tests, specialized blood work, molecular genetics, immunoassay, etc., we should have a definitive diagnosis in the next week or two. I will then begin treatment. All my doctors were very optimistic about treatment and the prognosis; so that although my condition is serious, it appears highly treatable. There are 30 different subtypes of lymphoma, each with its own treatment (and a differential diagnosis with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which is also treatable).
Great credit is to Iva, who felt that something was wrong, pushed me to continue checking things out and even suspected a hematological problem long before the doctors did. Her support has been, as you would imagine it to be, outstanding …
My spirits are good. I have been working as usual and even feeling more creative and more alive than usual …
I promise to keep you posted.
Henry
I immediately wrote back:
I had wished the silence was due to other psychological, political reasons, anything but that. Still, I am so glad to hear that your spirits are up. How strange that with the death of a parent (as was the case with your father) so many of my friends begin to have medical problems, as though the parent had held them in abeyance.
Keep me posted. I will be thinking of you. Tell me when you feel you would like to meet and I will come to Jerusalem at any time that is good for you. Your optimistic spirit will help you get over this. With your positive attitude and Iva’s good care and love I have no doubt the treatment should work.
Much love and tender wishes,
Raja
Hearing about Henry’s illness via email was nightmarish. As I read the details of what was happening to him I could hardly believe it. His body was falling apart. It was a horror story. For a perverse moment I dared to hope: could it all be an elaborate game to see how different people would react? After all, these were just written words, emails, a virtual reality. I had not seen anything with my own eyes. I longed to see him.
It wasn’t a prank. It was even worse than I expected. Iva met me outside the door of their house and warned me not to be shocked.
Henry was on oxygen but he was cheerful. We did not speak about the disease. I had wanted to hear how he felt, what he was thinking. But he did not want to talk about it. I also wanted him to talk about what he wanted to talk about. As with politics, Henry was good at avoiding issues, but in this case I welcomed it. I did my best to tell him funny stories, to make him laugh, to entertain him and not to show how depressed I actually felt. I’m glad that I went to see him, but sad that my first visit to his house should have been under these circumstances.
During the visit Henry introduced me to his eldest daughter. I remembered him telling me that Ella was the most Israeli of his children. She had accepted the draft without hesitation. She greeted me coldly. ‘At last,’ she said, and left the room.
When I arrived home, Ramallah was in mourning. The latest Israeli airstrike on the Gaza Strip had killed fourteen people in twenty-four hours, six from one family who last year had lost four of its members. Among the dead were two infants.
I wrote to Henry:
From reading your last bulletin, I knew what you had been through before I came to see you. And to see your smiling face, to hear your happy melodious voice, was such a relief. I am so glad to have made the visit. When we shook hands, your grip was firm – I believe as firm as your spirits and will. And this is the most important of all. Please know you are constantly on my mind. Good vibrations can work miracles.
Henry responded:
It did me well to see you – body and soul. Yes, when things are back to normal, we can do something all together with Penny. Even come up to your place or a tea party that I ridiculously suggested or …
I have something else to tell you about the day we met at the film festival in the Jerusalem Theatre. Something else happened just before I met you. I will tell you when we meet. I was speaking with Iva today about what to do when I feel bad like I did Friday night and I thought speaking with good friends. So with your permission, I may turn to
you at short notice to see if we can meet and work the wonders of our friendship or just have you read to me or watch I Love Lucy together or the Mahabharata. Your vibrations are coming in loud and clear and embrace me. I overcome my deepest fear of abandonment.
I answered:
Any time, Henry. Nothing will please me more than to know I can be of help in any small way to you during your difficult time. You remain an inspiration in your fortitude. I’m glad and relieved you’re starting treatment. I only hope it will not be too painful and depressing. But you know to whom to turn when you need it.
A few days later, another message from Henry:
I remember well, that for years, my greatest joy
Was to bury the dead,
When I did field work (in every sense)
In a Jerusalem Burial Society (Chevra Kadisha)
In my time, I have buried many and
Myself many a time.
After each funeral,
I felt joyfully, painfully, alive,
Because I have lived
I will remember to die.
But not now Sweet Death, not now!
As I read this I thought of the grim but very real prospect of never again being able to go on walks with Henry. For many years the political situation made it difficult for us to walk together. It also made our communications limited and strained. Politics had narrowed me. It had reduced us. It had taken a terrible disease to remind me of how close I felt to Henry. It was our friendship that was important, not our political affiliations, not what we did, not what we failed to do.
Later I wrote to tell him that I was writing a book about walking in the Palestinian hills and this was bringing back the happy memories of the many walks we took together:
Do you remember when we stopped by one qasr [castle]? Do you remember that walk? You stood on the roof of that stone structure as the daylight turned to dusk. I stayed below looking up, saw you standing with your long beard, and I thought you looked like a prophet. The terraced hills were in the background. I waited to hear what you had to say. You remained standing with the light dimming behind you. As night began to fall, the silence was profound. Slowly you descended the circular inner stairs and emerged from the small door and came to join me. We both remained silent, taken by the beauty of the darkening hills all around us. Then you stooped down and began collecting old rusty utensils left over from the famers who had used that old structure.
And I thought, damn this political situation here that has prevented us from taking more of our most enjoyable walks. This is partly why I’m writing this book, to preserve the memory and hopefully make those who never took these walks experience something of the beauty and magic of this place.
May you get well soon,
Raja
That morning the body of a young man from the Jewish settlement of Itmar who was kidnapped and killed was found near to the spot which I had reminisced about to Henry in my note. Later, when the army came to recover the body, they were accompanied by a masked young man who had been arrested at a checkpoint near Ramallah. He had confessed everything to the police. At the time we were having a dinner party for Rema, a professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, who had just returned from Holland. We were enjoying the champagne she had brought. The army stormed into Ramallah and arrested Hamas legislators and ministers who had been renting flats not far from where we lived. Throughout we had no idea what was happening.
Even though the war against Gaza had begun, Penny and I still went to visit Henry at his house. Ilana, his sister, whom he loved dearly, was visiting. They were so close and such good friends. Henry and Iva had a tea party for us in their gorgeous garden – the tea party he had often spoken of, which we had never managed to have. Henry was dressed in a white suit, with white shoes and a white cowboy hat to protect himself from the sun. It made him look seraphic.
As he walked us out to our car he held my hand. How vulnerable he seemed. And yet the whole party was so well planned. He had spoken articulately and incessantly about the past, his parents, his relationship to his mother and his siblings. He was unstoppable. He spoke about very intimate things without reserve. At times he was abrupt with Iva, interrupting her when she tried to say something. But she didn’t mind. She was being motherly, as she must have been towards him for many years. Sometimes Ilana interjected; she also disagreed with some of his conclusions. Henry was like me, allowing himself to get slightly carried away and make sweeping and emotional final conclusions. Ilana was more measured, rational.
He looked different now without his beard. He had lost weight. His eyes were a bit glossy. Occasionally he leaned back, trying to be sociable, letting others speak. But I got the impression that he didn’t want us to make comparisons with our own experiences. This was his experience; he did not want interruption. So I listened without interrupting, reflecting on how long we had known each other and what we had been through together.
After the party I wrote:
Dear Henry,
It was a wonderful tea party, worth waiting for all these years. It felt very strongly out of time. Perhaps this is the only way to live in this place, times being so desolate.
It was as though we were continuing conversations started many years ago.
It was so good to see Ilana again and meet your daughters and of course see Iva, who was so kind and generous, as always.
Warm wishes, Raja
The medical bulletins Henry had been sending were long and elaborate and highly informative about the course of his treatment. But what surprised me was that in them he alluded to the security situation and compared his cancer treatment to a war. He had also been making more political references than he had ever done before. In one email he asked:
Why do we kill and kill and kill?
Is my physical state so interconnected to the battlefield?
This week I had no nausea from CHOP of MABTHERA (the
MABTHERA is a genetically modified monoclonal antibody that specifically attacks B-cell with CD20+ antigen markers) but an Israeli
Targeted assassination missile murdered a woman and her
seven children:
How can that be called war
But bloody, bloody, bloody bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody revenge
Each side caring only for its domestic audience
And all their bloods crying out to us
From the Book of Genesis for generations,
Because killing once done, cannot be undone.
I discover scars on the top of my shaven head
As though in my shamanistic trip I, too, was
In a knife slashing, head bashing.
I recall as a child
A swing smashing into my made bloody head.
But after coming to a heart-stopping coma at five years old,
What power can a swing or shaman knife slashing have over a ghost?
I live in my new look.
His new beardless look was receiving a favourable response in some quarters. The best, he wrote, was from Jon Feder, the chief editor of an Israeli digital news page, who, as Henry reported, told him:
I never knew you were such a handsome guy.
Your face (your real face …) is of the manly but sensitive kind.
You look determined–intent, but sensitive–exquisite, at the same time.
Too bad you had to be beaten by cancer in order to let us all know what a good-looking guy you are.
Henry went on to write:
I think of my profound ambivalence to my appearance especially since as a kid I relished and suffered from being chronically called ‘cute’. I yearned for an archetypal masculine that led me to the path of the beard and the Jewish wise old man tradition. What did I do to achieve this ascribed look? If I were ugly, would I be loved less? Yet I know so much of our attraction and sex life is based on appearances which are both trivial persona and profound Self all at once. Now, at last, I am a cute wise one.
In the past I didn’t see
many Israeli Jewish men with the yarmulke and tallit (fringed prayer shawl) in the streets of Jerusalem; only the orthodox wore these symbols of their religion. Now it was very common to see the young wearing them as a public display of association or affiliation unrelated to their moral or ethical behaviour but simply to declare: I’m a Jew.
However, Henry’s decision to wear a beard was nothing like that.
Not long ago I was having lunch at the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem with an Israeli friend who teaches law, whom I’ve known for a long time. He reminded me of a walk we had taken with his wife and three young children in the Ramallah hills. This was in the early 1980s, when the settlement of Dolev had just been established. I had said then something which stuck in his mind to the effect that children would be born to those settlers for whom these hills would be home and how this was bound to complicate matters and lead to inevitable future tragedies.
Unlike Henry, this friend came from a strict orthodox family and in his attire and food habits followed orthodox traditions. For the longest time, ever since I’ve known him, he had a beard and wore a yarmulke. Then one day I saw that he had shaved his beard and stopped wearing a yarmulke. When I asked him whether he had stopped being religious, he replied, ‘No, I’m still orthodox. It is not something one can give up. It’s a way of life that I’ve been raised on.’
‘Then why did you change?’
‘Because I don’t like to be associated any more with those who wear a yarmulke and a beard or with what they represent.’
Both these friends, for different reasons, have ended up losing their beards.
Where the Line is Drawn Page 14
