Exile: a novel

by Richard North Patterson

  David checked his watch. “How long will it take us to get to Ramallah?”

  “It should take, at most, a half hour. Today? An hour, two hours. One never really knows.” Elbow propped against the window, Ashawi gazed listlessly at the road. “What so many fail to understand is that the checkpoints do not separate Israel and the West Bank, but one part of the West Bank from another. Their purpose, the Israelis say, is to interdict terrorists and weapons. But these checkpoints do not discriminate—because we are all Palestinians, we are all suspects. And so all of us wait.”

  “How frequent are the checkpoints?”

  “Frequent, and unpredictable. There are permanent checkpoints, like this one, and temporary barriers—socalled flying checkpoints—set up to create the element of surprise for terrorists. For the rest of us, we often find it impossible to get home for dinner, or to visit a sick parent.” As Ashawi spoke, the line of traffic, at a standstill for minutes, began slowly creeping forward. “The Israelis divide us into zones. The cities are Zone A, in theory controlled by the Palestinian Authority—although at any time the IDF can come in to pursue terrorists, as they did in Jenin. Zone B, the areas immediately around the cities, is jointly administered by the IDF and the Palestinians. And Zone C, the countryside surrounding A and B, is controlled exclusively by the IDF. So our cities are separate enclaves; for Hana Arif to get from Ramallah to Birzeit University, she must pass through whatever checkpoints the Israeli army wishes to impose.” Ashawi gave a fatalistic shrug. “Some days she will make all her classes, some days not. And she will never know which days. Same thing for students such as your assassins, Jefar and Hassan.”

  “What would you have the Israelis do?” David asked. “From what I’ve learned, it strikes me as a chicken-egg problem: are there suicide bombings because the occupation continues, or does the occupation continue because there are suicide bombings?”

  “There will be suicide bombings,” Ashawi answered, “as long as there is hatred and despair. And there will be hatred and despair as long as there is occupation.”

  “Only until then?” David asked. “For someone like Saeb Khalid, there will be hatred and despair until the Palestinians return to Israel, and Israel does not exist.”

  His face closing, Ashawi shrugged again. Behind the wire, David saw a Palestinian woman in a scarf walking with her head down, as though on a treadmill to eternity, her slow, unchanging steps bespeaking a deep weariness in the bone and brain, days endlessly the same. At length, Ashawi said, “You wanted me to find out whether Jefar is Al Aqsa or Hamas. I don’t know yet. But I did learn something about him that is pertinent to your rumination about chickens and eggs.

  “Ibrahim Jefar’s oldest sister and her husband live in a village outside Jericho, closed off by a checkpoint and surrounded by a barricade. A year ago, eight months pregnant with her first child, Jefar’s sister began to hemorrhage. Her husband called emergency services and was told that an ambulance would be waiting on the other side of the checkpoint.” Ashawi’s tone remained factual, as though imparting a commonplace of daily life. “Jefar was visiting. Together the three of them set off in a car. But the checkpoint had stopped traffic altogether. Though it was obvious that she was in excruciating pain, for over an hour her husband and brother pleaded with Israeli soldiers to hurry her through. Finally, her husband told the soldiers that they could take responsibility for the death of a pregnant woman and her child. Only then did they allow her husband and Jefar to leave the car and try to walk her to the checkpoint.

  “Just before they reached the ambulance,” he continued, “she collapsed. When she awakened in the hospital, the baby had died, and she had undergone a hysterectomy. She has not spoken since.” He turned to David. “Her story explains more about Jefar than any label you can put on him. Perhaps the Israeli soldiers who stopped Jefar’s sister also impeded a suicide bomber in another car, and saved a Jewish life. But it is they, not Al Aqsa or Hamas, who made Ibrahim Jefar into Ben-Aron’s assassin. The cause and effect of occupation is not a mathematical equation.”

  A half hour later, they reached the checkpoint. With stone-faced indifference—perhaps a mask for fear—a female Israeli soldier armed with an assault weapon took Ashawi’s papers and David’s passport, and sauntered with ostentatious lassitude to a bulletproof guard post. Two more soldiers, as young as the woman, combed the car and the trunk, edgily glancing at Ashawi as they did so. No one spoke. To David, the moment crackled with tension and distrust.

  After ten minutes, the woman returned David’s passport and began snapping at Ashawi in Hebrew, jerking her thumb to summon him from his van. When Ashawi turned to David, his jaw was working, his voice taut. “She says that I cannot drive you—my papers are not in order.”

  David felt alarmed and helpless. “What’s the problem?”

  “Maybe an American coming to the West Bank. Maybe she’s impressing her friends. My papers were fine yesterday, and they’ll be fine tomorrow. It’s just that this child-bitch of a soldier can do whatever she wants with me.” As the soldier continued barking at him, Ashawi added in a lower voice, “When she’s not looking, drive the van on through, then stop beside the fruit market. I’ll try to catch up.”

  The woman led Ashawi away. Glancing over his shoulder, David eased the van past the guardhouse, eyes straight ahead. No one stopped him.

  On the other side of the checkpoint he spotted a fruit market where Arabs—the women covered, many of the men in kaffiyehs—gathered to shop. Adrift in the Arab world, David pulled to the side of the road.

  For over twenty minutes he waited, apprehensive. Then Ashawi climbed into the driver’s seat, having blended in with the pedestrians who passed behind the wire. “Welcome to the occupation,” he said tersely. “You’ve now broken Israeli law.”

  David checked his watch again. He had been on the West Bank for less than two hours, and already he felt tense and angry. Ashawi had gone silent.

  Ramallah was a city of opposites: young women in modern dress mingling with their covered Arab sisters; crowded streets whose shabbiness was relieved by bustling fruit stands and sandwich shops with colorful signs in Arabic; and, amid several mosques, a church. Of fifty thousand residents, Ashawi explained, perhaps a quarter were Christians. But whatever their religion, the character of the city was deeply Arab—any Jewish fanatic who imagined “a Greater Israel” that could somehow include or expel these people was, David knew at once, in full flight from reality.

  Ramallah was home to Hana and Saeb. It was also the site of Arafat’s tomb—formerly his compound and bombed to rubble by the air strikes that had traumatized Munira. It was there, Ashawi explained, that they would meet a friend, a man whose knowledge might be of use to David. Then they would proceed to Birzeit, where David had a meeting with the president of the university, Hana’s friend.

  Encased by a glass shell, Arafat’s black marble tomb was set in an open plaza surrounded by the half-ruined buildings. The tomb was covered in flowers and smiling photographs of Arafat; at its foot was a plaque sent by the children of Sabra and Shatila. Two Palestinian policemen stood stiffly at each side, an honor guard for the father of a would-be country he could not quite summon into being.

  David and Ashawi stood in front of the tomb. “He is a symbol,” Ashawi said. “He did not build a civil society, and he underrated the strength of the Jews. Some say that he allowed the Palestinian Authority to sink into corruption, indifferent to the needs of the people, and so gave us Hamas. But where would we be without him?”

  “Now? Some say you’d have a country, instead of an occupation.”

  “Then they say too much,” Ashawi answered curtly. “The Jews have already taken three-quarters of our homeland and refuse even to discuss our desire to return. Was Arafat supposed to accept all that, and the settlements as well? Did they expect him to buy peace at the cost of all our dignity?”

  David did not answer. “Do you remember when Arafat’s body was brought here?” Ashawi asked in a
quieter tone. “A proper ceremony was planned, but crowds of mourners seized his coffin and gave him a spontaneous burial.

  “The rest is little known. At three a.m. that morning some soldiers from the Palestinian Authority dug up his coffin, removed his body, and prepared him for a proper Islamic burial.” Ashawi’s voice became almost reverent. “The remarkable thing, the soldiers say, is that he looked the same as in life. Death had not touched his face.”

  Ashawi sounded as though he half-believed it. Quiet, David wondered if those who succeeded Arafat, like Marwan Faras, were doomed by the murder of Ben-Aron, and the violence that had followed, to find no peace with Israel. He doubted that the next Palestinian leader could, even in legend, defy the need for embalming by relinquishing the right of return.

  In her way, the woman at the King David had been right. David had entered a different world, the homeland of Hana Arif and Saeb Khalid.

  17

  Ashawi’s friend, Amjad Madji, turned out to be a wiry, soft-spoken peace activist in his late thirties who taught a course in human rights law at Birzeit. Among his former students, it transpired, were Iyad Hassan and Ibrahim Jefar.

  “Two different men,” Madji said, shortly after joining them. “When I first met him, Ibrahim was searching—still teachable, I thought, someone who could be turned away from violence. Not so Iyad. He was already closed, a missile waiting to be pointed.”

  As Ashawi drove them from Arafat’s tomb, David turned to face Madji. “By whom?”

  Though his manner was confident, Madji spoke with a judicious calm that suggested an observant nature tempered by experience. “Not the Al Aqsa Martyrs,” he answered. “At least if I’m any judge. Perhaps, to kill Ben-Aron, Iyad might cooperate with Al Aqsa. But his family was Hamas, I think—certainly his sister-in-law, the suicide bomber. And Hamas suited his temperament as I assessed it: puritanical, with a deep contempt for women, a fanatic for whom Islam means hating Jews and Israel. Al Aqsa might serve his ends, but it could never speak to his needs. As for me, I had no chance with him at all.” With a shrug of resignation, he said, “Souls like Hassan’s are harsh soil for nonviolence.”

  As was the West Bank, David suspected. Deferring his inquiry about Hassan and Jefar, he asked, “How did you come to believe in nonviolence?”

  “In the great tradition of Gandhi and Mandela,” Madji answered dryly, “I got myself arrested.

  “It’s easier than people think, and far less pleasant than the populace of Israel may allow itself to conceive. Justice in the territories is a Gilbert and Sullivan pantomime of law, a shell without substance. Have you had time to master the Israelis’ rules of detention?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Too bad,” Madji responded with an ironic smile. “From what I read of America’s own ‘war on terror,’ you might someday find this useful to know.

  “Here, there are two types of detention, both of which permit the IDF to jail you for up to six months, for no particular reason. Regular detention is based on an accusation by someone else, truthful or not. For the first eighteen days, you may be held without a lawyer if the prosecution asserts that you’re an exceptional case—which cases, in fact, are quite unexceptional. If you fail to confess, a prosecutor can apply for one extension, then another, on the basis of secret ‘evidence’ the prisoner never sees.” Now Madji’s smile was pained. “The purpose, naturally, is to extract a confession. Problems arise when one has nothing to confess.”

  At once, David thought of Hana. I have nothing to give up, she had told him. That’s the problem with being innocent...

  “By contrast,” Madji was saying, “administrative detention is reserved for those suspected of something even less specific, about which the suspect need not be told. That was me.”

  The traffic was slowing. Ahead, David watched soldiers erecting a barrier across the road. Turning back to Madji, David saw the man’s eyes narrow, an instinctive flash of worry that aroused his curiosity. “I’d like to hear about it,” David said.

  Madji had been back from Stanford Law School for less than thirty days when a soldier stopped him at a flying checkpoint between Ramallah and Birzeit.

  It was 1996, during the period when suicide bombings shattered the peace of Israel and altered the course of its election. There was a “mistake” on Madji’s identification, the soldier said—he must go with him to a compound run by the IDF. “With that,” Madji said softly, “I lost contact with the world as I knew it.”

  The room where they imprisoned him was dark, he supposed. But he could not be sure—the bag over his head prevented Madji from seeing; the rope that bound his wrists behind his back kept him from removing the bag. His ankles were chained to the chair he sat in.

  Twice a day, they brought food and allowed him to relieve himself. But mostly he knew his jailers by their voices, especially those who screamed at him when he fell asleep in his chair. He could call no one—not his parents or a lawyer. The burning pain of constricted muscles became excruciating; he vomited much of what he ate until his stomach felt raw. His cell stank of puke and urine.

  After a time—he could not tell how long—his grasp of reality began to slip. He would have confessed to anything, named anyone he might have suspected of some crime. But he had been too long in America; he knew too little to fabricate a confession.

  The one hint of his problem was a name they kept repeating—“the Palestinian-American Assistance League.” But only when they removed the bag, and showed him the scholarship application he had written, did the memory break free: the PAAL was a group of Arab-Americans who offered money to Palestinians studying in the United States. “They finance terrorism,” his interrogator insisted.

  “I know nothing,” Madji said miserably. “They rejected my application.”

  They put the bag back on his head, and the darkness resumed.

  Madji felt himself diminishing in flesh and spirit. When they questioned him, he wept more than spoke.

  One day, as every day, he heard the door to his cell open; as always, he flinched, atrophied muscles tightening with fear.

  Gently, someone removed the bag. An Israeli he had not seen before knelt in front of his chair, removed the shackles from his ankles, and then unbound his hands. He was a slight man with a scholar’s face, and he looked almost as miserable as Madji. “We are sorry,” he said simply. “The man we are seeking is not you.” Placing a hand on Madji’s rope-burned wrist, he offered a smile of encouragement. “We will clean you up, and then you are free to go.”

  “How long have I been here?” Madji asked.

  The man shook his head, as though commiserating. “Forty-two days.”

  When Madji emerged, he had lost thirty pounds. What the IDF had done to him, he learned, was arguably legal—even the circumstances of his incarceration, one could maintain, were not truly torture but the “moderate physical force” permitted in order to secure confessions. “Perhaps,” he told David now, “others held in the same compound gave up information that allowed their interrogators to thwart an act of violence. Perhaps, to the Israelis, I was just a sad mistake, an unfortunate by-product of their duty to save lives. But they changed my life forever.”

  Madji gazed at the checkpoint in the distance, his face haunted. “For days I sat in my apartment and relived what had become of me. Again and again, I thought of the Israeli who seemed to have felt almost as soiled as did I. The Israelis were prepared to respond to violence, I realized—they knew how to fight it, and it justified their excesses, even when those excesses spawned still more hatred and violence. But perhaps a broad-based peace movement, grounded in a nonviolent resistance that included women, might force them to confront themselves. Their own conscience was the one enemy Jews could not defeat.”

  David was both impressed and deeply skeptical. “How long will that take?”

  “A while, I’m afraid. My own group, Palestinians for Peace, is in its infancy. And nonviolence is still seen as weakness, not resistance. But more Pal
estinians are beginning to understand that violence has not brought about our return, or even given us our own country.” Madji fished a cigarette from his pocket with the deliberate movements of one suppressing a deep desire for tobacco. “The question is who, on each side, wins out. The Israelis are frightened; the Palestinians, humiliated. The psychology of extremists on both sides is much alike. If the murder of Ben-Aron continues this vicious cycle, they will be the winners.” Looking keenly at David, Madji said, “But that’s why you’re here. To learn who hoped to gain from this, and pray that they do not include your client.”

  “In a nutshell, yes.”

  Madji opened his car door. “We won’t be moving for a while. So step outside with me while I smoke. Since my time with the Israelis, I’ve found it helps me think.”

  Leaning against the car, Madji took a deep drag on his cigarette. “My assessment of Jefar is that he’s truthful. Or, put another way: that, like me, he would be broken by imprisonment and fear. But his confession leaves much obscure.”

  “In what way?”

  Madji drew on his cigarette. “It’s easy enough to find ‘resistance’ groups who wanted Ben-Aron dead—Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad. Perhaps some in Al Aqsa wished him dead as well. But actively plotting his assassination?

  “Look at the result. Al Aqsa is shattered. Its reason for being—to divert radical support from Hamas to Fatah, Faras’s party—has boomeranged. Now that Israel scorns Faras and he can’t deliver peace, Hamas will pick up the pieces, and Faras’s successor will be a member of Hamas.”

  David looked toward the flying checkpoint. Cars were inching forward now; walking beside Ashawi’s van toward the roadblock, Madji began puffing more quickly, his gaze moving between the harsh, rocky landscape and the barrier across the road, as though searching for some alternate route. “Perhaps,” David mused aloud, “Al Aqsa never thought it would be implicated. Would anyone expect Jefar to survive? There was nothing left of Hassan.”