My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  My question is, why didn’t they flee?

  I’m on life’s last lap now, where the wisdom of death holds sway and the fatuous belief that we will live forever evaporates. I feel we should turn the questions upside down. Otherwise, we shall become an echo of the Zionist lie that transformed the expulsion of an entire people into a shameful smear on the history of those expelled, absolving the criminal of any moral responsibility and weaving the untruth that the Palestinians left their lands on the orders of their commanders, leaving the field empty for the entrance of the Arab armies that were going to occupy Palestine and wipe out the Jews.

  Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi has refuted that lie and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has demonstrated that what happened in Palestine was ethnic cleansing. That issue is behind us. What disconcerted me, though, in the course of my work collecting the scattered stories of Lydda and other Palestinian cities and villages during the War of the Nakba, was a different question, given that it is logical for civilians to flee during battles and that it is what has happened in all wars in all parts of the world.

  What I wish I could ask Manal is why they didn’t flee before the Israeli army entered Lydda! What made them wait for the massacre?

  Lydda was in the same situation as all the other cities and villages of Palestine. The people awaited death and only left their homes to the rhythm of Israeli orders.

  I do not say this boastfully, for blood, death, and mistreatment are not tokens of pride. I’m just recounting what I experienced and what I heard from the people who witnessed those days. I ask this now as a question. I’m not offering it as an answer but as a story that would make a fitting start to the as yet unwritten history of the crime.

  I should have asked Ma’moun the question but instead of speaking up that night at the Washington Square Hotel, I was struck dumb. Ma’moun rendered me speechless when he told me the story of the child whom he picked up off its mother’s body, and I behaved like a fool and surrendered to his mythic story. Throughout, I was as though drunk, seeing things double: Ma’moun turned into two men before my eyes, one of them sitting in the rocking chair in the lobby of the New York hotel, the other spying on us from a chair placed at the other end of the atrium. What an idiot I was! I, the one who turned his back on Manal and her stories and made up his life as he pleased, now finding myself tied down by a story that would make a fittingly melodramatic point of entry for the telling of the tragedy of the Palestinians, but it’s certainly not one that fits me.

  I’m not Waddah al-Yaman. I played the death game with the poet because I saw in his silence a metaphor for the victim who’s tied down by love and paralyzed by the possibility that that love has been lost. And when Ma’moun wrapped me in a shroud of silence and I saw the world as double, I decided to flee from the metaphor in order to write my own story.

  My story, though – and herein lies the paradox – needs those of others, if it is to take shape in words, and the others whom I seek have died, or disappeared and been transformed into parts of me. I sense them, and I sense that my body has become too cramped for us all and that I can no longer bear the sound of their voices. I haven’t answered my original question and I don’t think I’ll arrive at a true answer no matter how hard I look. My question does, however, reverse the terms of the question’s equation. Why, Manal, when you sensed that Lydda was about to fall and nothing could be done about it, didn’t you flee? Why did you stay in the hospital after your husband died? Why didn’t you go back to your family in Eilaboun or run off to Ramallah? I see Manal in my mind’s eye. I see my little mother hiding behind the mask of her face and I hear the whisper of her voice as she tells me to close my eyes so that I can go in my dreams to wherever I wish. That woman was the apple of my eye – that’s how I shall always remember her. Her voice embeds itself in my eyes as she tells me to close them so I can sleep. She didn’t tell me the stories other mothers do: she’d ask me what I wanted to dream and when I didn’t answer would start telling me my dream about the sea, taking me to the sand on the shore and describing the colored fish so that my night would be tinged with the smell of salt and the sound of waves that hide in seashells, and sleep.

  I see Manal and say that I want her to tell me why she didn’t flee just before the fall of the city and why she chose to remain afterward. Was it because she was unaware of what was going on around her? Did the Palestinians live their story as though it was a dream they didn’t believe?

  The latter isn’t my answer to the question, even though it seems plausible, since, when disaster strikes, no one ever believes it. Instead, people behave as though they weren’t at a crossroads. They close their eyes and go on with their lives until they discover that their long dream has swallowed them.

  Lydda fell on Sunday and Monday, July 11 and 12, 1948. On the third day began the comprehensive expulsion of the inhabitants of the city and those from the nearby villages who had taken refuge there. On the evening of the fourth day Ma’moun brought me back to the city, where I stayed with my mother in the Church of St. George before being taken the following day to the hospital.

  Ma’moun recounted the story of the expulsion and the march of death dozens of times, and the Palestinian painter Ismail Shammout has painted it, making of the images of the victims a symbol of the wandering Palestinian, as described by Raja-e Busaila in an astonishing text in English published in an issue of Arab Studies Quarterly (3:2, Spring 1981), edited by Ibrahim Abu Lughod. The stories of the fall and of the people who stayed in the city are recounted in only two books. The first is by Fawzi al-Asmar and entitled To Be an Arab in Israel (1975), the second by Isbir Munayyir and entitled Lydda During the Mandate and Occupation Periods (1997). I read both books more than once, and whenever the stories of grief emerged from between the cracks of the words, I would hear my mother’s voice. Both books are autobiographical and recount the story as a path toward desolation and grief, which is what I intend not to do. It is not my concern to uncover the crimes committed by the Israeli forces that invaded Lydda and destroyed it. My story isn’t an attempt to prove something. What I’m trying to do now is to take my own story back to its beginning.

  It opens with the fall of Lydda. My mother never said exactly when I was born. Was I born before or after the city fell? When she told stories of the first days of the ghetto, she would, however, picture herself as a mother holding her baby. Ma’moun confirmed this when he told the story of me under the olive tree: he said I was a baby but didn’t specify my age, and I didn’t ask him. I am going to suppose that I was born in the ghetto, even though I’m sure it must have taken place at least a month before the ghetto came into existence.

  Let me go back to the beginning.

  The beginning says that the Israeli forces that took part in Operation Dani, whose objective was to encircle Lydda and al-Ramla and bring them down, took the village of Yazour as their command base, said forces being composed of the following brigades:

  The 8th Armored Brigade under the command of Yitzhak Sadeh; the Yiftach Brigade, belonging to Palmach, under the command of Mula Cohen; the Kiryati Brigade under the command of Michael Ben-Gal; the Alexandroni Brigade under the command of Dan Epstein; plus the air force, which had been tasked with bombing the two cities. The operation was led by Yigal Allon, with Yitzhak Rabin as deputy, and six thousand Israeli soldiers participated.

  The question isn’t why or how Lydda and al-Ramla fell, since their fall was inevitable given the large discrepancy in size between the opposing forces. The Israeli army deployed elite forces whose numbers, organization, and weapons were vastly superior to those of the defenders, who consisted of about one thousand Palestinian irregulars, charged with the defense of Lydda and its villages, alongside a small unit of the Jordanian army whose command decided there was no point in fighting; that unit then withdrew to concentrate its defenses at Latroun so as to block the attackers’ route and prevent them from entering Ramallah.

&nb
sp; Between July 11 and 12, 1948, Lydda was throttled. All the villages surrounding it had collapsed, their inhabitants moving to the city, which came to resemble a large refugee camp. To the north of the city, the villages of Deir Tarif and Haditha had fallen, as had the airport, and to the south, the villages of Annaba, Jamzu, Danyal, and al-Dahiriya. Lydda was besieged from the north, the south, and the east.

  A city under siege. Those who’d fled to it from their destroyed villages wandered aimlessly in its streets, the fighters sensing the coming defeat and discovering that they possessed none of the elements needed to hang on except resolve, which was starting to crumble and collapse in the face of that sense of defeat.

  Lydda’s Day of Judgment did not begin with the invasion of the city by the 89th Battalion under Moshe Dayan, whose armored cars came from the direction of Ben Shemen, but with the droves of refugees who invaded the city bringing stories of the horror they had experienced and of how the Israeli army had forced them to leave their villages without burying their dead.

  The sound of the guns and the bullets blended with the roar of the planes bombing the city. The planes occupied the sky, pouring out their lava, and a sense of disaster enfolded them all. At around five in the afternoon of Sunday, July 11, an Israeli force advanced from the east, from the area of the Ben Shemen colony; it was composed of an armored-car column and went through the city from east to west, firing randomly at everything.

  Moshe Dayan could boast to his fellow commanders of Operation Dani that his column had concluded the battle in just one hour, which was the time it took the Israeli column to cross from Ben Shemen to the Great Mosque. And he was right: Dayan’s column decided the battle in favor of the Haganah, because it transformed the occupation of Lydda from a battle into a massacre.

  No exact count exists of the number of Palestinians killed by this column that randomly spewed bullets and flung hand grenades at everyone whom it happened to find in its way, but when we recall that the streets and squares of Lydda were crammed with thousands of refugees fleeing their villages, we can better understand why the fighters’ ability to resist its occupation crumbled. Some sources have spoken of Dayan’s column killing a hundred Palestinians, male and female. Let us assume that this figure is correct even though the young men of the ghetto who worked to collect and bury the corpses assert that the number was far higher. Nevertheless, while assuming, as I say, that the number is correct, it does not indicate the number of those injured. Statisticians of war usually calculate the number of the wounded by multiplying by five, meaning that we are faced with around five hundred wounded in addition to the hundred killed. This spread panic among the people who had taken refuge in Lydda, only to discover that they had fled from the fire of their villages to the fire of death.

  The 89th Battalion’s column was symbolic, as it was the Yiftach Brigade, under the command of Mula Cohen, that actually occupied the city and whose forces were able to spread through it, and the massacre carried out by the 89th Battalion was complemented by the massacre at the Dahmash Mosque and by the random killings carried out on the Tuesday, the day of the great expulsion, when the column of death which left Lydda for exile was formed.

  The Israeli decision was clear: all inhabitants of the city were to be expelled. The Israeli lie to United Nations mediator Count Bernadotte, to the effect that the exodus of the people from Lydda was the result of an agreement made at the Church of St. George on Tuesday, July 13, between the city’s notables and the Israeli military governor Shmarya Guttman, has no basis whatsoever in truth. Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref organized a meeting in Ramallah between Bernadotte and the notables of Lydda, who denied any knowledge of such an agreement and told the international mediator the story of the compulsory expulsion from the city. That meeting was one of the factors that led Bernadotte to put forward his proposal that the refugees must return, which led to his assassination at the hands of the Zionists.

  On Monday, July 12, the city’s inhabitants awoke to panic. The Israelis were everywhere and the wave of humanity was drowning in blood. The people of the city didn’t know what to do. Some sought protection in their houses while others, including the refugees, decided to gather at the Great Mosque, the Dahmash Mosque, and the church, believing that the invaders’ army would respect the inviolability of places of worship. They were, however, wrong.

  Was the Dahmash Mosque massacre a mistake? And what does it mean to seek shelter in the idea of a mistake, when the number of victims was more than one hundred and twenty-five, of all ages? Does the claim that it was a mistake absolve the one who made that mistake?

  Such questions appear to be irrelevant, because to sift through the details of specific massacres is pointless in the context of a comprehensive massacre to which an entire people has been subjected.

  I know that the word “massacre” falls unpleasantly on the ear in today’s world, which views Israel as the offspring of the Holocaust and as heir to the Jewish pain brought about by savage persecution and mass extermination. Despite this, I can use no other word, for not only is it appropriate to what happened in Palestine in 1948, it is also coextensive with the Nakba that has been ongoing for sixty years in the form of a continuing massacre that has not ceased, even now.

  I, the sacrificial son of the city, now admit that I discovered the truth of this never-ending Nakba only when I learned to speak. To arrive at that knowledge, I was obliged to read a lot, to meet with numerous people, and to cudgel my memory, and here I am now, writing it down, because, having finally reached that bend in life where the living, arrived at the foothills of nonexistence, may speak as if from the dead, I too have become capable of speech.

  I admit too that my mother never told me the stories of those three days of “the abyss.” Her stories began with the ghetto and she didn’t describe the whirlwind of death that invaded the city first. My mother was not alone in this. It was the same with everyone, as if the victims had decided unconsciously that the words could not be spoken and that their only means to survive in the abyss of death was silence.

  No one recounted these stories that I am trying to write down. They are word motes and memory shards. I approach them with my faltering language and instead of picking them up and washing the dust of sorrow off them, I blend into them and become a part of their dust.

  Lame Ahmad claimed to have been the sole survivor of the Dahmash Mosque massacre and said that he’d found protection from death among the dead who fell on top of him. Then, when everything had gone quiet, he’d snuck into the hospital, where he was treated for a bullet in the right foot, but because of the chaos that struck the hospital when the nurses and doctors were forced to leave for the Great Mosque, before being allowed to return on the second day, he didn’t receive the proper treatment.

  Lame Ahmad would be one of the third group of young men from the ghetto who were taken as prisoners, after which he never returned to Lydda; it seems the price of his release from the camp at Sarafand was that he go to Ramallah, where he joined his sister. Ahmad had remained in Lydda after the massacre because he’d died there, or so at least his sister, who was in her house with her husband and children when she learned that all the other members of her family had died at the Dahmash Mosque, where they’d taken refuge, had supposed.

  Lame Ahmad didn’t like the epithet that the inhabitants of the ghetto applied to him. He told Hajj Iliyya Batshoun, when the head of the ghetto committee asked him his and his family’s names, that all the members of his family had died, and that he too was dead. “Think of me as a dead man, friend. I died and I don’t know what happened to me and I found myself in the hospital and my name had become Lame Ahmad.”

  The man didn’t object to the name “Ahmad” that the doctor had given him as he pulled the splinter from the bottom of his foot without anesthetic. He bellowed like an ox being slaughtered and didn’t respond to questions.

  Everyone used to call him Ahmad, but Ma’m
oun, who returned from the camp at Sarafand three weeks after he was taken there as a prisoner, bringing terrible stories of his time in captivity, recounted that Lame Ahmad had woken out of his borrowed name when he’d witnessed an Israeli soldier order a prisoner to walk in the direction of an olive tree at the side of the road and stone it, at which time he fired on him, killing him.

  Ma’moun recounted that on the night of that crime, as the prisoners huddled together, Ahmad had approached and told him his story.

  “The young man,” Ma’moun said, “was Marwan Abu al-Loz, and the poor guy believed that he’d died in the mosque with the rest of his family, and when I asked him how he’d reached the hospital he said he didn’t remember. He’d thought that the days he spent at the hospital were a form of ‘the torment of the grave,’ of which he’d heard from his grandmother. That’s why he’d refused to speak and hadn’t tried to correct the name that Dr. Zahlan had given him there. I asked him what had happened at the mosque. He said that all he could remember was the sound of the explosions and the shooting. ‘Though I do remember the soldier with his blond beard who was holding a strange-looking rifle from which he fired a shot, and the people starting to fly in all directions.’ He said he’d flown, then fallen, and the body parts had started falling on top of him and he’d heard the sound of more than one rocket before he died.”

  “But you didn’t die, and here you are talking!” said Ma’moun.

  “No, I died,” said Lame Ahmad, before remembering that he was Marwan Abu al-Loz. “I swear I felt I’d died. What can I tell you? The dead don’t talk. It started raining death, that’s what I thought, and the sounds were loud. Everything was exploding and I exploded and then it all went quiet.”