“Yes.”
“But your father’s living in Toronto now?”
“He’s a lawyer and couldn’t leave his legal practice behind.” There was more to it than that, he thought, but that’s all Phil’s listeners needed to know.
“I see. Okay, here’s another easy question. What music do you listen to and what’s your favourite movie?”
“I listen to jazz and classical mainly. I like some modern groups but my tastes are old-fashioned; my friends think I’m a freak that way. And my favourite movie is Singing in the Rain.”
“Wow. Why Singing in the Rain?”
“It portrays a world that’s only joyful. Don Lockwood and the others have nothing to fear. And the music could kill you, it’s so perfect.”
“Yeah, I can see that. So, tell me what it’s like to live in West Jerusalem. It must be odd to have so much history around and to hear your city mentioned in the news so often?”
“Actually, it’s no big deal. I do what everyone does — I go to school, listen to music, watch TV, and hang out with my friends. Sometimes I’ll be walking around and the history jumps out, but that’s more tiresome than anything else.”
“Tiresome? Why? I would think it’d be interesting?”
“It would be if it came in small doses. As it is, it hits you wherever you go, good stuff sure, but bad stuff too. Take the old city. It has bullet-ridden walls from ’48 and ’67, and reminders of the Crusaders’ siege, and signs of what the Romans did. Here in West Jerusalem, which is the modern part of town, there’s the King David Hotel, which was blown up in the forties, and cafes and restaurants where attacks have taken place. So the city’s special for its history, sure, but too often it tells you just how terrible things have been. Maybe that’s why Canada’s quiet: it was born just yesterday, compared to stuff over here.”
“What about religion? It pervades the city. How does it affect you?”
“Well, when a siren goes off marking the start of Shabbat, everything slows and it’s very peaceful.”
“Do you go to synagogue?”
“No. This place is enough of a synagogue for me.”
He was only partly joking. In that part of the world, the talk of God was exhausting. Avi felt sure that if God existed, He wouldn’t think much of the hate He’d inspired, or of the bullying and violence committed in His name.
In March the family had gone for coffee at a local café. It was a Saturday, the one day all of them had off. No sooner had they installed themselves than three Haredim had wandered along and started shouting at them and hurling insults, saying they were breaking the Sabbath rules. When Dan had tried to calm them down, these “holy” guys practically spat at him. Much worse, of course, were the suicide bombers who, to express their devotion and commitment to God, maimed and killed in the name of Allah. It was possible that God had his place in the world — who was Avi Greenbaum to find fault with the Almighty — but people should be able to decide where God fit into their routines for themselves, instead of having holy rollers blast them with their narrow views. And if these guys were right and God approved of their actions? If God wanted them to bully people and force them on their knees and blow them to pieces? Then he wanted nothing to do with this God.
“Tell me this,” Phil Matthews went on, “you arrived here only recently. I mean, you’ve been here, what, just under five years. Do you feel like you belong?”
“Sure. Most people here are from somewhere else. As a Canadian Jew, I don’t stick out.” But he sure did, as a fearful Jew.
“And the Palestinians? Where do they fit in?”
“I’m not sure I understand your question.”
“Well, do you have any Palestinian friends?”
“No.”
“Do you have Arab classmates?”
“No. There isn’t a single Arab at my school.”
“And your neighbours?”
“Most are Jewish, with some Christians mixed in.”
“So where do you meet Palestinians?”
“I see them around, I guess, because we’re near the Old City. And lots of them have jobs in our part of town. And we see them in the Muslim Quarter, but even …” he broke off with a shrug.
“But you’re playing soccer against an Arab team?”
“Yeah. But once we’ve played, we go back home.”
“So they’re strangers?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t find this odd?”
“I don’t know. It’s normal here, for Jews and Muslims.”
In actual fact he did find it odd. When touring the Muslim shuk one time — when his family had just moved to the Musrara region — he’d been struck by how different the Arabs were, with their language, their dress, their houses, their religion. Even their choice of car was different: they drove Peugeots, not Subarus like most Israelis.
He had asked his mother about this divide. Her response had been matter-of-fact: “How often do ethnic groups in Canada mix? I grew up in Toronto and never brought a Tamil home. How often did I talk to Natives? How many Jamaicans or Sikhs did I know? I greeted the Koreans living on our street, sure, but they had their friends and we had ours.” While the gulf between Jew and Arab was extreme, she agreed, the fact was most ethnic groups stuck to themselves. In other words, Israelis were just like other populations. It seemed to make sense, but Avi still had his doubts.
“How do you feel,” Matthews continued, “when you hear Palestinians can’t live in Israel, the ones who were expelled in ’48 at least? Isn’t it strange when you consider they’ve been here for generations?”
“You mean the Palestinians in refugee camps?”
“Among others.”
“I feel bad for them.”
“But shouldn’t they be Israeli? You’re a citizen after all. You arrived here only recently, and yet you enjoy many rights these people can’t have. Isn’t that ironic?”
“I guess. But Israel’s a Jewish state. The right to settle here is mine by birth. This policy guarantees that the state stays Jewish, even though it does leave the refugees out in the cold.”
“It doesn’t trouble you that the state is Jewish?”
“Why should it? I’m happy there’s a state for Jews.”
Avi felt like yawning. It wasn’t that these questions bored him, or that he thought them unimportant. It was just the frequency with which these discussions took place and how, for all the talk, there was never a concrete conclusion. How many times had Rachel and his mom debated? Had either of them budged? Not even an inch. And the TV showed egg heads butting skulls together, one arguing for the Arabs, the other against. Was there ever any progress? Not on your life. And the same was true of the foreign press and university professors and politicians. No one was willing to abandon his opinion. So what was the point? Why expel this hot air? Why didn’t people simply throw up their hands and accept that Jews and Arabs would fight forever? It would make life easier for all parties involved and wouldn’t give rise to any false hopes.
“Tell me about Canada,” Phil Matthews said, sensing he had gone far enough with this subject. “What do you miss?”
“My family and I discussed this subject recently. I miss certain foods, snow, Saturday night hockey, and family road trips.”
“You don’t take road trips here?”
“We do sometimes. But when we travel north, we hit the Lebanese border. And if we drive to the Golan, we approach Syria and Jordan. The south is no better. Once you’ve reached Eilat, you’re faced with Jordan and Egypt.”
“You’re really boxed in, eh? What else do you miss?”
“I miss the freedom from politics. Here, politics is everything. Our soccer match? That’s politics. When you go into a store or bank, a guard will search you. Politics. The garbage bins on public streets? They’re
reinforced to take an explosion — politics again. On my birthday, what did we discuss at supper? Politics, politics, and more politics. I’m not just a kid who likes jazz and soccer; in the eyes of the world I’ll be a soldier in three years and come to oppress my share of Arabs. I hate it. I mean, Israel’s cool, but the constant show of politics can wear you down.”
“Why do you think people are so interested in Israel?”
“I’ve wondered that too. It’s politics again, I think. Most Westerners have boring lives, politically speaking — Canada for example. They like to watch our politics play out, the way they’ll cheer at a hockey fight on TV. But they can turn the TV off; we have to live in this political swamp.”
“You have a point,” Phil Matthews confessed. “Here’s one last question. Are there advantages to living in a place like Israel?”
“Advantages? How do you mean?”
“Do you get something here that you can’t find anywhere in Canada, say?”
Avi considered the question. It was exactly the one his father had asked when he’d started to doubt their aliyah: “Why are we here? What do we gain? And don’t mention all that Jewish stuff because we can be Jewish in Canada too.” And even if there was a gain, it came at a price. It required you to shelve your fears and to do what men are supposed to do. Still, he couldn’t say as much on public radio, and that’s why he went with his mother’s response.
“Maybe our lives are richer,” he said. “We have to fight for any peace we enjoy — I know that sounds crazy, to fight for peace. Still, because we have to fight for it, maybe we treasure it more. And my mom says she’s never met a boring Israeli: it’s the reward we get from being on edge all the time.”
After thanking him and saying he’d like to visit again, Phil Matthews put the recorder away, stood, and stretched his limbs. Shosh, who’d been sitting in the kitchen all this while, came into the room and said she thought it’d gone well. The journalist agreed and said he wasn’t just being polite: he would like to return in a couple of weeks. He mentioned several dates in June, then shook their hands, and left.
From the balcony Avi watched him walking away. For a moment he wanted to call him back and have him erase every word he’d recorded. But, just as suddenly he didn’t care: there were so many words in circulation already, a lot of them more stupid than anything he’d come out with, that his version of events couldn’t do any harm. And if he got people debating again, well, it was to be expected.
Chapter Ten
We were pulled from you half-grown
Our mother Palestine
And heard your anguished cries from afar
As foreign hands defiled you
And strange lands raised us to manhood
Indifferently, because we were not
The issue of their womb.
We see you shed tears of stone
And, in deference to your sorrow,
Rain these tears upon your aggressors.
Once the reader had finished reciting this poem, a song started playing over the school’s PA system. The lyrics came from Fadwa Tuqan’s poem “The Call of the Land.” It was the tale of a refugee’s return to Palestine, even though he knows he will die in the process.
As the song continued, and his fellow students listened raptly, Moussa couldn’t stop worrying about his jadda. She was always nervous and prone to sadness, but especially so on Nakba Day. Who could blame her? With all the talk about 1948 and the expulsion of the people from their ancestral lands, how couldn’t she brood on her personal pain?
He tried to imagine her as a twelve-year-old girl — he peeled away her wrinkles and fragile limbs and pictured her running through the family’s olive grove. And on that day, April 9, 1948? He’d read accounts of the attack on Deir Yassin, but these were nothing compared to her description, which she always recited in a thin, dry voice, as if she’d shed so many tears as a child that the source for fresh ones had run permanently dry.
It was early morning and she was awoken by the sound of shots and people clamouring wildly. For weeks the villagers had hoped to avoid the war that had broken out when Israel’s birth had been announced. But now the beast was at their doorstep. Jadda’s father and two brothers left to join the defenders. The battle waged on. The gunfire intensified, with the added sound of exploding grenades. Her mother couldn’t make up her mind: should she flee with her daughters or wait for the men to return? Finally, after an eternity of waiting, the firing stopped. But that was when the nightmare started.
In halting Arabic they were told to leave their houses. When people hesitated, a rough voice announced that their men were dead or had fled the village and left them to their fate. Surrender was their only option. Muttering a prayer, her um had led her daughters outside. As his jadda went to follow, her sleeve caught on a nail by the door and she stopped to work the material free. Suddenly, she heard her mother’s screams followed immediately by machine-gun fire so close to the house it would leave her deaf in one ear. She watched her oldest sister fall. When recounting the tale, she would pause at this point and ask her audience the very same question: if it takes so long to fashion a human, how can everything so terribly precious, all the love and dedication invested, vanish in less time it takes a child to swallow?
She hid beneath a bed for hours. When the enemy discovered her, they led her past her family’s bodies — her middle sister Eman had died while clutching her um. Some men loaded her onto a truck with other children. She remembers driving out of the village and seeing bodies strewn all over: her father and brothers were among the dead. She remembers the long drive into Jerusalem. She remembers the wails of the children beside her who had also witnessed the deaths of their loved ones — 110 people she would later learn. She remembers being forced from the truck at the entrance to the Jaffa Gate, which she’d visited before with her parents beside her. On that occasion her ab had treated her to ice cream. There was no ice cream that day in April.
“But there are good people too,” she would always conclude. A woman eventually stumbled on the children — Hind Husseini, of blessed memory — and cared for them and housed them in an orphanage. But the damage had been done of course: her family, her house, her land, her history, her future, her happiness, all had been taken. The thieves had robbed her of everything. Everything.
When he was little, Moussa had told his mother that he wanted to make his jadda smile. His mother had answered, “Good luck to you. I have tried all my life and never succeeded. She will smile when the past no longer insults her.”
Clearly that day was a long ways off.
He had the idea to buy his jadda chocolate on his way home from school, so she could pass the day with a sweet taste in her mouth.
“What do you see?” Their teacher was standing in front of a map of Israel. It was covered in Hebrew and showed no Arabic whatever.
“What do you see?” he asked again, this time with impatience.
“It is a map,” Mahmoud said, “of the land the Zionists stole.”
“That is correct,” Ali said with approval. “But let us investigate this statement in greater detail. For the sake of simplicity, let’s concentrate on al-Quds — Jerusalem as the Zionists call it. Over here, for example, we have an area called Malcha.”
“That’s over by the mall,” Sami said. “I was there last month.”
“It is a fine complex,” Ali agreed. “I too have visited it on many occasions. But while I wandered its stairs and halls and stores, I was treading on the ruins of the village al-Mahila.”
The students were shocked. They had explored the mall, too, but hadn’t guessed it lay on top of Arab ruins.
“I never liked the place,” Mahmoud said. “Now I know why.”
“On our map, or rather, their map,” Ali continued, “we see the name Mevasseret Zion, which is home to the world’s first kosher M
cDonald’s. But long before Jews ate their hamburgers here, Palestinians were living in the village of Qalunya.”
“I will never eat a hamburger again,” Anwar declared.
“Here is Moshav Naham — it was once the Arab town Artuf. Here is Nes Harim, which used to be Dayr al-Shaykh. Ramat Raziel was our village Kasla, Mevo Beitar was our village al-Qabu, and the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre has been built on remnants of Deir Yassin.”
Moussa started at this mention of his jadda’s former village.
“And al-Burayj, Bayth Mahisr, Allar, Satuf, Jashar, Islin, the list goes on, all of these are gone. What were villages or thriving towns have vanished altogether, existing only as memories for the families who lost them. And this is just the Jerusalem area. To do justice to our Nakba, we would have to discuss 400 villages and 700,000 people who were dispossessed of everything.”
Population is based on exponential growth, Moussa thought. If every family produced four children, these 700,000 souls (assuming they formed 350,000 couples) would have produced 1,400,000 descendants. And if their children had followed their example, they would have yielded 2,800,000 Palestinians. And they would have yielded millions in turn. But all of them were living abroad — in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Tunis, the United States, Canada, in every place imaginable except their native soil. His brother Douad could be counted among them.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Ali reflected, standing by the window and watching a crowd parade outside, “how it is our shebab can confront the Jewish army. I wonder how our mothers can stand to sacrifice their children. I ask myself, especially, how our people can strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves and some Zionists to pieces. The explanation lies on the map before you. Once you grasp its implications, you will understand the anger that pushes us to act. If you learn only one thing from the time we have spent together, let it be this map and the sorrow it embodies.”
The class was silent. His friends were frowning, and Moussa was staring hard at the map. It didn’t strike him as a piece of paper; it seemed more like the lid on an unbreakable coffin.
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