Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  House by house, Jews and Arabs fought over every inch of ground. Wädi and his children were among those who defended East Jerusalem. But when the war ended, Israel had increased the size of its territory and had taken control of the Old City.

  Wädi Ziad, along with Anisa and his sons, went into exile again, this time to Amman.

  Naima, Wädi’s sister, asked them to stay in Jericho, but Anisa refused bluntly.

  “I don’t want to be an exile in my own country, and if we stay in Jerusalem then we will have to accept that the Israelis will tell us what we can and cannot do. I would prefer to live somewhere where everyone knows I’m a foreigner, and then at least I won’t feel humiliated.”

  These were not easy years. They lived in wretched circumstances for some years in a refugee camp, where Wädi devoted himself to his true vocation, teaching. He helped set up a school, and there, day after day, he tried to bring at least a taste of routine and normality into the children’s lives.

  They would never go back to Jerusalem. Israel did not allow them to travel. Also, what sense would there be in their returning as foreigners to their own country? For them, as for most Palestinians, it all came to an end in 1948. Like I said, the end of the story.

  Marian paused. She didn’t want to continue. The conversation had tired her out. She looked off into the distance.

  “Are you going to go back to Amman?” Ezekiel asked, bringing her back to reality.

  “Yes, I want to say goodbye to the Ziads.”

  “And you will go back home, go back to work, write your report. Someone will send it to the newspapers and everyone will talk about it for a few days and then things will go back to normal.”

  “Yes, things will go back to normal. Your son will still push for more settlements that take more land from the Palestinians, and thousands of men and women will sink into frustration and bitterness and call for justice to be done.”

  “Has Wädi Ziad told you how he has lived all these years?”

  She was confused by the question. What did this man mean?

  “Yes, of course he has.”

  “Please could you tell me what he told you?”

  “I don’t know why you insist so much . . . You know as well as I do that for the Palestinians their hell started in 1948. There’s no point talking about the same things again and again.”

  “Well, if we’ve spoken about what happened up until 1948, we should talk about what happened afterwards, which is why you are here. No one cares about everything we’ve been talking about, but what happened since the night of May 14, 1948, is the reason we are here.”

  “I cannot stay in Israel a single day longer. My boss wants to take me off the report already.”

  “And you don’t care if he does.”

  Marian shuffled uncomfortably in her chair. Ezekiel was making her nervous.

  “I’ll tell you what happened.” Ezekiel carried on speaking.

  “It would be hard for you to tell me what happened to the Ziads,” she protested.

  “You’re wrong, of course I can, just as Wädi Ziad can tell you everything about me.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “Ah, you don’t understand . . . Maybe you don’t know everything and maybe you know even less about the Ziads than you do about me.”

  “You are wrong, Wädi Ziad and his grandchildren haven’t hidden anything from me . . . There was no need, they trust me . . .” Marian was confused.

  “You are tired and you want to finish, I understand, so do I. But you will have to allow me to tell you the epilogue to this story. Wädi won’t mind. We have both suffered since 1948, suffered the worst kinds of loss, the most unbearable kind, the loss of children. His children and mine fell fighting for what they believed to be just.”

  “My report is nearly finished, I don’t want to add another comma. Also, I’m tired . . .”

  “Don’t worry, after hearing me out you’ll have a lot of time for yourself, time to think. After tonight, the rest of your life begins.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “Yes, you do understand me, but you are scared to. Listen to me carefully . . .”

  I heard nothing about Wädi until 1972. He would not have wanted to hear my news and I did not look for an excuse to see him. The war had separated us, we were in two irreconcilable groups, where what was at stake was more important than the lives of a few thousand people, what was truly important was the possession of a piece of land.

  The Israelis had no doubt that we were fighting to maintain possession of that piece of land, or else to find ourselves once more transformed into a wandering people, leaving our fate in the hands of others. And we did not want to do this. We had lived in a wretched state for centuries, in the ghettoes, we had paid excessive tribute to those who had accepted us within their borders, we had suffered appalling campaigns against us, and always, always we had been persecuted by the unjustifiable hatred of those who claimed that we killed Jesus. How many generations had been taught the same, that the Jews killed Jesus? This made us guilty and worthy of contempt, so that for years we tried not to provoke those who hated us for the simple fact of our existence. We suffered pogroms in Russia, Poland, Germany . . . so many places . . . We were expelled from Spain, Portugal . . . We had no homeland, no place that belonged to us; all we had was a feeling older than time itself—we knew where we came from, where our ancestors were, and that was no other place than these empty colonies in Judea, in Samaria . . . “Next year in Jerusalem,” repeated Jews for generations and generations. Until one day, men and women started to come home. My father, Samuel, was one of those men. Then Germany unleashed the largest massacre of Jews ever imagined, the Holocaust. Six million children, women, men, died in the concentration camps. We allowed it to happen. We let ourselves be led into the camps, just as we had put up with persecution for centuries, put up with pogroms, allowed them to burn our houses, kill our children.

  When the Jews in Palestine found out about the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War, they realized more clearly than ever that we needed a home, and that our home could be none other than the land of our forefathers. We asked to share it, and some Arabs, like the Hashemites, seemed at least willing to consider the question. Did you know that Arab leaders have blamed the Jordanian royal family for decades? Why? Because they were the only ones, out of the whole lot of them, who were realists, ready both in the past and in the present to converse with us. They have never been forgiven for this, even though when the time came for fighting they were the only ones to do so for real. The Jordanians are formidable warriors.

  I have said that since that day in 1949 when Wädi and Anisa left their home we knew no more about them. I did not know that Aya had died in Amman, and she did not know about the deaths of Marinna and Igor.

  Marinna did not survive Mohammed’s death very long. She started to die the night that Wädi went to Hope Orchard to tell her about it.

  Marinna suffered a heart attack a few days later. She recovered, but her period of renewed good health was brief, then her heart stopped and never again resumed beating. She had not been able to deal with so many losses; and Igor, for his part, was unable to deal with losing Marinna. He had a stroke and was forced to use a wheelchair.

  Suddenly I found myself living in a communal house with a sick man who could barely move and who had no desire to live. Don’t think that I didn’t believe that the best thing would be to take him to an institution where he would be looked after. But I didn’t, I thought that neither my father Samuel nor my mother Miriam would have approved. Igor and I were all that remained of the life that my father had built around that house, so I looked after him for a long year until one morning I went to wake him and found him sunk into eternal sleep.

  The day I buried Igor I realized that I was now definitively alone. Back then I was in th
e army. Perhaps because I spoke Arabic as fluently as I did Hebrew, my superiors decided to send me on a number of missions in enemy countries. The first of these was to help Israel bring home the Jews who lived in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Egypt and who, as you know or should know, were suffering indescribably. Ever since 1948 they had been expelled from their homes, had their houses taken from them, lost their lands, their possessions; lots of them lost their lives, and others, with our help, took the journey into exile. The tragedy is that most of them were not Zionists, but all the world they had was in Baghdad, or Cairo, or Damascus, or Tehran.

  But I won’t tell you any more of my own story except insofar as it has to do with Wädi Ziad, to whom fate had connected me in some irreversible way that night he saved my life when I was a child.

  I sold Hope Orchard and fought for the Ziads’ house and their little farm not to be confiscated, but without success.

  I thought of Wädi when some of the Jews we had brought to Israel from remote corners of Iraq told me with tears in their eyes what it meant for them to know that they would never again be able to return to the place that had been their home. They spoke to me of their houses, their farms, their belongings, their memories, and I thought that their loss must feel the same as Wädi’s did.

  I married again. After Sara died I thought I would never re-marry, but I met Paula again. The girl whom I had taught Hebrew to in the kibbutz had become a lawyer and was working as an analyst in the Ministry of Defense. I won’t say I wasn’t surprised, probably because when we first met I didn’t know how to assess her intelligence and worth.

  We met by accident in Jerusalem. I was wandering round the Old City, something I had always liked to do, and suddenly I saw her. She was alone, so I went up to her. I had not spoken to her since the day I called the kibbutz to tell her that I was going to marry Sara, and I was scared that she would rebuff me, but she didn’t. We went to a café and caught up on how our lives had developed. From that moment on we were inseparable. We married three months later and lived together until she died of cancer ten years ago. We had three children. Yuval, the oldest, died in the war of ’73. The second, Aaron, is the one you really wanted to talk to. He is the only son of mine who is still alive, because the youngest, Gideon, died in a terrorist attack. He was doing his military service when a bomb exploded and destroyed the jeep he was traveling in. He died with three other soldiers. He was only nineteen.

  I’m telling you this because Paula was the reason I met Wädi again.

  You will know, or you should know, that not all the Palestinians who had sought refuge in Jordan were loyal to King Hussein. Jordan became the base from which the Palestinian guerrillas attacked Israel, but they were not content with this, and at the beginning of the seventies they tried to overthrow the king. The confrontations between King Hussein and Yasser Arafat were bloody. They even tried to kill the king. In the seventies, the PLO and other organizations had a membership of more than one hundred thousand people, they were like a state within the state. Confrontation was inevitable, but the paradox was that some Palestinians fought alongside the Jordanians. Hussein won the battle and by the summer of 1971 he was back in charge of his country. Twenty thousand Palestinians died in the conflict, including Wädi’s oldest son. So, his oldest son died in 1971, and mine died two years later . . . But let’s go back to Jordan, and the confrontation between the troops of King Hussein and the Palestinians, out of which rose Black September.

  I was in the army, and in the summer of 1972 a soldier told me that a friar was insisting on seeing me. “He says that he’s named Brother Agustín and that he knows you.”

  I was stunned at the friar’s visit. It was a call from the past, from a past that I had corralled away in some corner of my brain.

  It was difficult for me to recognize him. He was older and thinner. We did not shake hands. We were not friends and I knew that he disliked the Jews.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a message from Wädi Ziad.”

  I felt a shiver run down my spine, but I tried to make sure that the friar did not notice my discomfort. I didn’t reply, and waited for him to tell me his reason for coming.

  “Latîf, Wädi’s youngest son, is a prisoner here in Israel. He is very young but very brave, he wanted to go to Jericho and then to Jerusalem. He was arrested.”

  I said nothing, not so much to make the friar nervous as to give myself time to think.

  “Wädi wants you to get him freed. His son is only sixteen years old. He is a boy, a brave and daring boy, who has not hurt anyone.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “You can check. He is not a member of the Fedayeen.”

  “So if you cross the border and want to get to Jerusalem, clearly with a message that could very easily be instructions for a terrorist attack, then you are not a member of the Fedayeen.” I tried to sound indifferent.

  “The Palestinians fight as they can. What you call terrorism is nothing more than war by other means.”

  “Right. Do you think that hijacking planes and planting bombs against civilian targets is merely war by other means? It’s terrorism, and the people who do such things are the worst of the worst,” I replied with irritation.

  “I didn’t come here to argue about the war, just to bring you a message. You owe your life to Wädi Ziad. He has never asked anything of you for having saved you, but now the moment has come for you to repay him for what he did for you. Save his son. He has already lost two sons: one in the struggles between the troops of King Hussein and Arafat’s guerrillas, and another on the border, in a skirmish with Israeli soldiers. He doesn’t want to lose another.”

  Brother Agustín turned away and in spite of his age walked away before I had time to answer.

  I told Paula what had happened and asked her to help me.

  “You have to know where the Palestinians who cross the border are held.”

  “The only thing I can do is find out exactly what this Latîf has done, but I will have to tell my superiors why I am interested in this kid.”

  “The truth is always the shortest path, all I want to know is what he is accused of. I have to pay my debt.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Ezekiel! Wädi saved your life when you were a child, it was something praiseworthy, you will always be grateful to him, but this doesn’t make you his hostage.”

  I didn’t know how to explain to Paula that her Cartesian ways of thinking had little to do with how things truly are in the Orient. I had been born in Jerusalem, I had grown up alongside Arab children, I knew and shared many of their values, and this was one of them, a life for a life, just as vengeance had to be paid with an eye for an eye. But Paula was German, she had been born and brought up in Berlin until she fled the Nazi menace with her parents, and she applied other codes to her life.

  “I have a debt to pay, Paula, and I’m asking you to help me pay it. If the boy is not a criminal, then he should be returned to his father.”

  “You’re crazy! In any case, you don’t get to decide that.”

  Paula confirmed what Brother Agustín had told me. He had been arrested a few meters beyond the Jordan River, having only just crossed the border. They found nothing compromising on him. He stuck to his version of the story, that he wanted to go to Jericho to visit his Aunt Naima, just that. Of course, they didn’t believe him. I knew the truth; Brother Agustín had told it to me without realizing it. Latîf wanted, more than to visit Jericho, to head to Jerusalem where he doubtless had to pass a message to some member of the PLO in Israel. Although he had not confessed, the people who interrogated him knew this for a fact, it was not the first time they had come across a case like this.

  I spoke to my superiors in the army and explained to them the case of Latîf, insisting that if the child had not committed any major crime then he should be set free. My superiors said that entering Israel il
legally was a crime in itself and that if he had not committed anything worse, then it was because he had been arrested in time.

  I was not a lawyer. I had finished my studies in agricultural engineering, although I had never dedicated myself to farming as my career was now in the army. I didn’t know what to do, but I was ready to do whatever it took to get Latîf back to Wädi. It was Paula who recommended that I get in touch with a young human rights lawyer.

  “He’s a lawyer who has become a living nightmare for the Ministry of Defense; he defends the Palestinians, no matter what they have done, and has been successful in cases when they have not committed any crime that involved bloodshed.”

  Isahi Bach’s office in Tel Aviv was a room with three desks in it, where two other young men worked as well. I explained the case to him and he agreed to take it on.

  “It will not be easy, but we should try. The important thing is that he is only accused of a single crime: illegal entry into the country.”

  “Yes, but he shouldn’t spend too much time in prison,” I said, almost begging these young men, none of whom was older than thirty.

  “Look, we’re not going to lie to you, you should know how these things work, the first thing is to obtain permission to see him. It would be helpful if the friar were to come with me, so that Latîf will know that he can trust me. Once we have found out how he is and he has told me his version of what happened, I will start to prepare his defense. It won’t be easy, but it shouldn’t be impossible.”

  “The boy hasn’t done anything,” I said.

  “I’ll make things clear for you. We believe in Israel’s right to exist, but we also believe that the Palestinians have a right to their own state, and above all we believe that no one should be able to trample the rights that are theirs as human beings, no matter what they may or may not have done. I am sure that Latîf came with a message for Palestinian activists within Israel, but if the prosecutor can’t prove anything, then he is innocent. No one is guilty until so proved.”