This was when I started to regret that Louis was not my real father. I preferred him to Samuel, especially because he was there for me and had not abandoned me.
The worst part of those years was the distance that began to grow between us and the Ziad family. Louis had warned us to be careful.
“If you see them too much they could be accused of being traitors, and I don’t know what would happen to them then. If they come over here they will be welcome, but we shouldn’t compromise them with our presence. And you, Marinna, I know that you miss her, but you can’t carry on going to Deir Yassin to visit Aya. I know that she was insulted by a group of women a few days ago and that Yusuf has been warned for allowing his wife to receive Jews in her house.”
“I’m not going to stop seeing Aya! She’s like my sister. I refuse to let a couple of old gossips get in the way of our friendship,” Marinna protested.
“The important thing is for Aya not to suffer from your friendship. You’ll find a way to see each other, but you shouldn’t go over there.”
Igor didn’t usually contradict Marinna, but in this he was in agreement with Louis. He had the idea that they meet at Yossi and Judith’s house.
“No one will think it strange for Aya to go to the doctor. The Arabs respect Yossi. There are many important figures in their community who are his patients. He’s the best doctor in Jerusalem.”
Marinna accepted this solution, reluctantly. I almost entirely ignored Louis’s warnings, and went to Mohammed’s house to be with Wädi as often as I could. Of course, I tried to do so when night was falling, hoping that no one would see me. Even so, I would sometimes completely ignore Louis’s warnings and would go with Ben to the Ziads’ fence and wait for Wädi or Naima to invite us in. Sometimes it was Salma who saw us and waved for us to come in.
Salma reminded me of my mother. She was younger, but when her veil fell back you could see her dark reddish chestnut hair that was the same as my mother’s. She seemed very pretty, as much or more so than Miriam.
Some nights Louis, too, came over to the fence, hoping to find Mohammed smoking among the olive trees, sitting on the old wooden bench that Ahmed Ziad had made when Mohammed was still a child.
They would speak in low voices until late at night. Louis barely mentioned what he spoke about with Mohammed, although he would always say that whatever happened we should try to make sure that the ties connecting us to the Ziad family were never broken. Kassia often reminded him that Dina had been a good friend to her and that she felt as if Mohammed and Aya were her own children. My mother best understood Louis’s fears. The Peel Report had been a hard blow for the Arabs and a relief for the Jews, and that had made the breach between the two communities all the worse. Louis’s concern was how to mend this breach, at least as far as our two families were concerned.
Following Igor’s recommendation, Marinna met with Aya at Yossi and Judith’s house. My mother and I would often go with her, so we could see my Aunt Judith.
The passage of time had turned her into an inert being, who not only had lost her sight but also seemed barely to recognize us. Yasmin looked after her tenderly, and helped her father in the office. Mikhail, for his part, was now fully involved in politics. He helped the clandestine Jewish immigrants settle in the country. They would look for a patch of land to settle, and would mark it out with four stakes and a few tents.
It was not the case that the British had become more lenient about Jewish immigration to Palestine, but Nazism in Germany was forcing more and more Jews to flee their country. This was not an easy task, because as well as needing money to charter boats they had to deal with the rigid control of the British fleet along the Palestinian coast, trying to prevent more immigrants from arriving and thereby worsening their conflict with the Arabs.
One day I heard Mikhail explaining to my mother that my father was involved in chartering boats to try to overcome the perils of the sea and the English blockades.
“Samuel and Konstantin are spending their fortune buying old boats and bribing their captains to run the English blockade. I went to meet a group a few years ago up in the north, coming off a Maltese cargo ship. If you had seen the state of the boat . . . I don’t know how it kept afloat. We managed to disembark a hundred people. Lots of them were ill. They had traveled in heaps and the hygienic conditions were terrible. We took them to the Negev. It will be difficult for them to adapt, most of them are teachers and merchants who have never seen a hoe before.”
“You didn’t know how to plant a tree either,” Miriam said with a smile.
“I was young, but these people . . . Also, they only speak German, some of them know a little Hebrew, but they’re the minority.”
“At least no one will persecute them here,” my mother said.
“No one apart from the English, but they prefer that risk to the Nazis. If you could hear the stories they tell . . . Some of the women cry because of what they have left behind: their families, their houses, the tombs of their ancestors . . . In spite of all they are suffering, they feel themselves to be German, not anything else. Here they feel lost, they have turned into peasants overnight.”
“Is Samuel still working with the Jewish Agency?” my mother asked, keen to find out what had happened to her husband.
“Along with Konstantin he is one of the most active members. They do all that they can to help Jews escape from Germany and to defend our cause to the British. Apparently Winston Churchill is a great ally of theirs, one of the few British politicians who is not ashamed to proclaim his sympathies for the Jews.”
My mother was comforted to hear Mikhail speak well of Samuel. Their relationship had been filled with misunderstandings, especially their inability to recognize the immense affection that each held for the other. Miriam knew this well because for years she had heard Samuel talking of Mikhail’s lack of understanding.
It was no surprise for anyone when Mikhail decided to join the Jewish Settlement Police, whose mission was to protect the settlements. Mikhail could thereby combine his two activities, his official work with the English and his unofficial work with the Haganah, both of them sharing the same objective: protecting the Jews from the frequent attacks from Arab bands.
If the Peel Report had been a step forward for the Jews, with its recommendations that Palestine be split into two entities, a Jewish and an Arab state, it had been a step backwards for the British. On November 9, 1938, the British decided to shelve the report’s recommendations.
The British government gave way in the face of the evidence that although their superior military capacity had enabled them to control the Arab revolt, the Palestinian situation would eventually slip out of their hands.
This news came accompanied by another piece of news, tragic this time, that an even crueler persecution of Jews had taken place in Germany, known as Kristallnacht. It was one more step in the Nazi policy of threatening and liquidating the German Jews.
Louis came home worn out. For the first time we saw him look pessimistic. A few days after news of the massacres of Kristallnacht had been made public, the British refused visas to tens of thousands of children coming from Germany.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen. The British are playing their own game again. They don’t want to carry on their confrontation with the Arabs, so they have decided to ignore their promises to us. And those poor children . . . I don’t even want to think about what will happen to them.”
I don’t know why, but somehow I trusted that my father would do something. Didn’t they say that he was friends with some English ministers? Didn’t he have enough money to charter ships? Yes, Samuel must be able to do something, I was sure that he wouldn’t sit by with his arms crossed when he heard the news. I remembered a few conversations he had had with my mother when I was just a little boy and they thought I wasn’t listening. Conversations about what he considered to be a terrible threat—Nazi
sm, and its leader, Adolf Hitler, who so hated the Jews. I did not know why.
At about this time, my mother started to ask me what I wanted to study in the future at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I didn’t know whether to become a doctor like my Uncle Yossi or a chemist like my father, even though neither of those two careers really attracted me. I was fascinated by the comings and goings of Louis and Mikhail, and I thought that they must be having extraordinary adventures, laughing at the British forces and helping the immigrants who arrived secretly. But there was a part of that adventure that I rejected outright, and that was the idea that defending the colonies implied confrontations with the Arabs. I could not see the Arabs as enemies even though I had nearly died in the flames a few years before when that group of young men burned Hope Orchard. My world was to me no more than my mother, my Uncle Yossi and Aunt Judith, Yasmin and Mikhail, and everyone who lived at Hope Orchard. Especially Wädi. Dina had also been an important person for me, as were Aya and her children Rami and Noor. Even Mohammed’s Uncle Hassan and Aunt Layla, and their son Jaled, were an important part of my existence. I couldn’t see any differences between the Jews and the Arabs, and when I looked at the scars on Wädi’s face, I thought that I would always owe an eternal debt to him and his family.
I have said that death seemed to be hovering around us. In January 1939, shortly after the beginning of the Christian year, Judith was found dead in her bed. Yossi did not realize this until morning. She must have died during the night, as her body was stiff and cold.
I remember the knocking on my door. A friend of Yossi’s had come to tell us. My mother seemed to become incapable of moving, or speaking, or crying. I burst into tears immediately.
Kassia took control of us all. She told us to hurry up and get dressed and washed, and sent Ben to Mohammed and Salma’s house to tell them what had happened. Louis was not at home, and it was Igor who drove us to the Old City.
My Uncle Yossi was crying silently at Judith’s bedside. Yasmin had helped him wash and prepare the body for its final journey into the land that had given it birth.
There was no space for argument. Miriam and Judith had always said that they would like to be buried in Hebron. That was where their mother and father slept their eternal sleep, and it was where they wanted to take their final rest as well. Igor was worried about the journey to Hebron, and above all about the hostility that we might expect to encounter from Arab groups who were active in the vicinity. But my mother was inflexible. Her sister would be buried in Hebron and she would take the body there herself, even if it put her life in danger.
Yossi didn’t argue. He wanted to fulfill what would have been Judith’s wishes, so once all the documentation was filled out in Jerusalem, we left for Hebron, although he insisted that we tell Mikhail and Louis beforehand. We might need protection.
It was not easy to find them and they couldn’t get back until two days later. When they returned, all of Judith’s friends and acquaintances had already passed through the house to say their farewells to her. I was surprised that my mother still had not shed a single tear. After the death of her sister she had reacted with immense self-control. So great it was that Kassia was worried.
“It’s bad not to cry, it’s better if you do, you’ll suffer more if you hold it all in,” she said to my mother.
But Miriam was simply incapable of crying, and she spent three days attending those who came to pay their condolences.
In spite of all our fears, we experienced no problems on the road to Hebron. Perhaps this was because the people who could have attacked us decided to respect the cortège. We reached the small Jewish cemetery without incident.
It was a comfort for my mother to find her childhood friends here. They were Arab women the same age as my mother who sincerely mourned the loss of Judith. I asked myself how it was possible that here, years ago, there could have taken place the attack on the Jews in which my grandfather lost his life.
The night we returned home was when my mother started to cry. She shut herself in her room and we heard her uncontrollable sobbing. Kassia wouldn’t let me go in.
“Leave her. If she doesn’t cry, then she’ll explode.”
A few days later we went to see Yossi and Yasmin; I was shocked to see how much my uncle had aged.
“I can’t bear Judith not to be here. For all that I tell myself she’s been more dead than alive for years, it’s been a comfort to have her beside me.”
Yasmin was worried about her father, who barely ate and who apparently didn’t sleep either.
“He sits in his old chair and waits until morning. If he carries on like this he’ll fall ill.”
But however we felt, life continued. There was a conference in London about the future of Palestine in 1939, attended by Arab and Jewish delegations. His Majesty’s government could not keep sending troops to reinforce Palestine, as they saw a closer and more fearful danger on the horizon—the aggressive, expansionist policy of Hitler and the Nazis.
The Jews of Palestine were worried about what might result from this conference, but if one thing was clear, Louis explained, it was that we were not going to take a single step backwards.
The Arabs came to the London Conference divided. On the one hand, Jamal al-Husseini, the mufti’s cousin, was there; on the other hand, one of the most important members of the Nashashibi family, Raghib al-Nashashibi, the head of the more moderate Arab Palestinian faction, was also in attendance.
Al-Husseini stayed in the luxurious Dorchester Hotel, al-Nashashibi in the no less luxurious Carlton. Dr. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion were our representatives.
Mikhail had a few doubts about Dr. Weizmann. “He’s too British,” he said, but Louis reminded him that it was thanks to Weizmann that the Jews had received a precious gift, Lord Balfour’s declaration that Jews should have a homeland in the land of their ancestors, Palestine.
The news that came from London was not exactly optimistic. Samuel sent a long letter in which he said that the conference had needed to be inaugurated twice, once for the Palestinian Arabs and once for the Zionists because the two refused to be together, “something which irritated the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.”
Samuel said in his letter that the British seemed “more predisposed toward the Palestinian Arabs than us. A few days ago, at dinner in a banker’s house, Konstantin had heard from Chamberlain’s own lips that in the case of conflict with Germany the Jews would side with the British against the Germans, for what option did they have? So I’m afraid that they will make concessions to the Palestinians more readily than they will to us. We don’t have very many friends in the British government either; the new colonial secretary, Malcolm McDonald, seems to be not very engaged with our problems. The lack of agreement between Dr. Weizmann and your Ben-Gurion doesn’t help either. Ben-Gurion came to London committed to not moving an inch. I fear he is not a very flexible man. As far as I have been able to find out, Dr. Weizmann was willing to accept a reduction in the number of Jewish immigrants. Ben-Gurion has not allowed this at all. One of the diplomats who has been privy to their conversations, and who is a good friend of Konstantin, says that what Ben-Gurion proposes is a Jewish state within an Arab confederation. As you might imagine, the Palestinian Arab delegation has not accepted this proposal. I fear we have reached a dead end.”
Years later, history books would state that Ben-Gurion would not accept a limit placed on the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, an argument based on the persecution that they could expect in Germany. For his part, Jamal al-Husseini put his cards on the table from the outset: the British had to put a quota on Jewish immigration to Palestine, prohibit the Jews from buying more land, and, above all, accept the creation of a Palestinian state. The Nashashibi were in favor of allowing the Jews who were already in Palestine to be part of an Arab state, but al-Husseini added that they should not be given their own territory.
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nbsp; It was impossible to reach an agreement. In fact, it was worse than impossible, because before the conference had finished the British came up with a new plan to attempt to solve the Palestine problem. In this proposal, which became the basis of a new White Paper, the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, sought to solve the problem via the creation, within the next ten years, of a predominantly Arab state. He also considered an immediate halt to Jewish immigration. The document made the Jewish delegation walk out of the talks and abandon the conference. On May 17 the White Paper was made official and the Balfour Declaration was officially annulled.
We received news of all these developments with worry and a great deal of discussion. Kassia and Marinna, socialists above all else, argued with Louis about the Jewish leaders who wanted a homeland, a state. Mikhail, a fervent supporter of Ben-Gurion, vehemently supported the idea that the Jews should have their own state within an Arab confederation.
“I don’t want a state,” Marinna said. “Our aim is to live in peace with the Palestinian Arabs, we didn’t come here to find anything else.”
Marinna suffered from the confrontations between the two communities. Not because her love for Mohammed clouded her judgment, but because she had grown up and become a woman under the influence of her parents’ socialist ideals. They were internationalists above all and thought that Arabs and Jews had problems that went beyond the idea of nationalism.
My Uncle Yossi and my mother were upset by these discussions. They were as Palestinian as anyone, and defended what had been the status quo up until that point. Their hearts were divided. They knew that the Jews needed a homeland, a place where no one could persecute them, and at the same time they understood the worries of their Palestinian Arab friends in the face of the massive influx of immigrants. Neither could they imagine an exclusively Jewish state.
Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead Page 59
