Outside the train, the window didn’t offer us much: some agricultural land, some uncultivated land, villages in the distance, and stations that all looked the same.
The time passed uneventfully. It was a routine journey in an air-conditioned train, though the weather outside was mild. Despite our chatter, which was also routine, my wife and I tried to listen carefully to the train’s loudspeaker whenever the name of a station was announced.
The train passed Tel Aviv University and Tel Aviv HaHaganah stations without our hearing the name Merkaz Savidor, or reading it on any sign—though my eyes were polluted by all the names I hated: Haganah, Stern, Lehi, and all the others, old and new, that represented the worst falsification of history and geography in the present age. At those moments, I felt the steel wheels of the train grinding the bones of the dead in the three Palestinian villages buried under Tel Aviv, and my own feelings were equally crushed.
“We’ve been traveling more than an hour, darling,” said my wife. “Are you sure we haven’t passed our station?”
The Israeli conscript snatched away my chance to reply to my wife’s question without asking permission, like Israel confiscating a piece of land in East Jerusalem. “Where are you going?” he asked in a Palestinian accent.
“To Merkaz Savidor,” replied Julie.
“You passed it some time ago, and now you’re on your way to Lydda,” he said, in a tone of gratuitous regret and slight censure. “You need to get off at the next station and head back the other way.”
“But we didn’t hear the name of the station or see any sign for it,” I replied.
“Well, it went past a little while ago. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He got up, and I followed him in the direction of a train route map hanging in the space between our carriage and the one before it. Of course, he would know more than me: he was a local, while I was a foreigner, a tourist lost in the country. The soldier showed me the last station we had passed, then put his finger on the name of the station we were supposed to have gotten off at. We went back together to our seats, though I could still not understand how we’d missed our stop.
“You speak Arabic better than I do. Are you Palestinian?” I asked him cautiously before we arrived back at our shared seat.
“No, I’m Israeli,” he replied, with a decisiveness free of any emotion. His confidence disturbed me. I swallowed as hard as I could, and sat down in silence. The conscript took his place and continued reading his newspaper.
At this point, Julie engaged him in conversation in the worst possible way. “Why are you carrying a weapon?” she enquired of the conscript, in her usual broken Arabic. My foot moved under the table, as I tried to signal her to stop talking. The young man hesitated to answer. Julie went on: “It’s a lovely day, the weather’s really nice, the train’s quiet, and wherever we go people are living normally. So why are you carrying a weapon?”
Once again my foot issued a warning beneath the table, this time more forcefully, as if to say, Why are you making problems with an Israeli soldier and creating a headache for us?
“Of course, the weapon’s necessary, essential. Otherwise . . . ,” the soldier replied.
All my attempts to stop Julie’s questions—to which she already knew the answers—failed. Despite my kicking her harder with my foot, Julie insisted on getting a clear and direct answer from the soldier himself. “Okay, why is the weapon essential? There’s no war here, there aren’t any problems!”
“But there might be trouble at any moment. We don’t know. We need to be ready.”
This answer silenced her questions like a blow. For my part, I tried to place his accent. Suddenly, I realized what I should have realized from the beginning: this Israeli army conscript was a Palestinian from the Galilee region, most likely a Druze, whose young men had been obliged to serve in the Israeli army (along with some of the Bedouin) ever since a number of traditionalist sheikhs of the sect had agreed on their behalf to the compulsory conscription decree.
As his rifle bumped my hip again, raising in me a shudder of disgust, I thought, Why didn’t you do as the writer Salman al-Natur’s hero did, and scream, “Why have you killed us, Sheikh?” like an eternal condemnation, as he did in the face of Sheikh Fahd al-Faris? Al-Natur gathered together the voices of those who had refused or resisted conscription, demanded that the sect be relieved of subjection to his laws, and threw them in the face of al-Faris: “You’re the killer, Sheikh!” Why didn’t you refuse to serve, go to prison, and come out of it freed from the Sheikh’s signature?
Meanwhile, Julie was busily examining the map of the land that the train window was flashing past. She seemed to have dismissed the conscript. I made a mental note to share the soldier’s paradoxical nature with her later.
Would this young man recall his colleague Samir Saad? Would he have even heard of him? Ought I to remind him? Samir had been a member of his sect, killed by Palestinians like himself. They had thought he was an Israeli—and they were right, since there was nothing Palestinian about him except his name and his origin. He was no different from a real Israeli—even though there’s no such thing as a ‘real’ Israeli. A resident of the village of Beit Jinn (which since 1983 had been under the control of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the groups making up the PLO), Samir had served in the Occupation’s Army of Defense. The sheikhs of the Druze religion had canceled his Palestinian birth certificate, and he had been silent and had accepted its cancellation. And in turn, he had been ‘canceled’ by true Palestinians on the Lebanese front.
On 13 September 1991, Israel received Samir’s body in exchange for Israel permitting the return of the trade unionist Ali Abdallah Abu Hilal, originally from Abu Dis. Abu Hilal was a member of the DFLP expelled by Israel in 1986. At that time, the deal was clear: one Palestinian in exchange for one Israeli, and the Arabic name or sectarian affiliation didn’t enter into the calculation of the deal. The family welcomed the return of the corpse, but they would have rejoiced over him as a martyr if he had respected his Palestinian identity. But he hadn’t. He’d stood on the other side of the front. He was exactly like the man sitting next to me now, an Israeli who either delighted in his Israeli identity or was forced to delight in it.
*
The train reached Lydda station and stopped. We were now running about half an hour late. After wasting another five minutes looking for the exit, we left the station and found ourselves beside a taxi rank, where a group of drivers were already waiting, smoking and arguing among themselves so noisily that all one could make out was a jumble of colorful expressions.
I asked the nearest of the disputants about the possibility of taking us to Jaffa. This reduced the sound level of the conversation, and he pointed to the right, to a kiosk with a rectangular window, from which a man in his fifties with a religious appearance was looking out; he shouted to his other colleagues to let my enquiry get through to him. When he had grasped what I was saying, he asked for eighty Israeli shekels and the address we wanted to go to, then pointed to a driver of medium height, with a light brown complexion and North African features, who took us to an old, worn-out car, which looked like it had spent most of the years of its life in a garage for special care. As a result, the ride cost us a delay of another ten minutes, for the car didn’t manage the road well, and we were unable to communicate with the driver, who only spoke Hebrew. Repair work to the drains in the area added a further five minutes, and we ourselves took another five minutes to get to the café by a roundabout route once we’d been dropped off, so by the time we arrived we owed Jinin an apology for a delay of around forty minutes.
When we reached her, on the agreed-upon street corner, we were met by the sound of a digger sinking its teeth into the body of the road.
7
Jerusalem
There were four of them, hovering in hopes of finding a passenger who’d finished his visit to the museum. They were chattering in Arabic. As I approached them, I became
their prey, their hoped-for passenger, despite the fact that I’d come from the opposite direction—the direction of people making their way to the museum. Two of them got up from their plastic chairs and greeted me with a single question, preceded by two smiles designed to ensnare me:
“Wanting a taxi, Hajj?”
I ignored the question, and asked them, “Excuse me, where’s Deir Yassin?”
My question disappointed them. One of them muttered in a disinterested tone, which I heard, “This guy looks like he’s just run away from Deir Yassin, and yet he’s come to ask about it!”
The same man then addressed me directly. “My friend, you can’t see anything of it from here. The fact is, there’s nothing left of it except for a few stones. If you like, I can take you to Giv’at Shaul B, just by the Hospital for Psychiatric Disorders—the loony bin, that is, if you’ll pardon the expression—which is very near to it.”
When he received no reply from me, he continued like someone retracting his offer. “Anyway, Deir Yassin is in that direction.” He pointed to the south wing of the museum. “Go past the building. Look to your right, though you won’t see anything. The village is more than three kilometers away.”
Okay, I said to myself, if it’s like that, I’ll postpone the sightseeing I dreamed about, and wander around for a bit inside the Yad Vashem Museum. That was part of my trip, anyway.
Once again, I wondered about the value of a visit like this. Had I been truthful when I’d told Salman that I wanted to explore how the victims I’d be honoring stood in relation to their own victims? Did bombing Gaza help to keep the memory of the Nazi destruction alive, for example? And what was the difference between being burned in gas ovens and being burned by Apache rockets? Then again, what would I gain by counting the names of Jews on whom the most hideous crimes had been committed?
At the entrance, my speculations fell away from me and I paid them no more attention. I passed a small glass office, where a young man in civilian clothes was sitting, reading a newspaper. He didn’t ask me anything and hardly registered my presence as I walked past him. I entered the museum through a long covered corridor and into halls designed in the most beautiful and artistic way. I passed through most of these rooms, both big and small, and stopped in front of several tables providing information, either in the form of pamphlets or else on computer screens. The Hall of Names made me pause and captured my feelings. I studied the names, and examined the features of the victims—who continued to scrutinize me as I looked at their faces—and tried to gauge their feelings at the moment the pictures had been taken. Moments that would no longer be there for people who had been reduced to skeletons or whose corpses had disappeared entirely. I lifted my head to follow the names upward until my gaze reached the hall’s circular extremity, open to the sky. At that moment, I felt like the faces of thousands of Palestinians—some of whom I knew, but most of whom I did not—gazed down on me. They were pushing and shoving, as if they wanted to come down into the halls of the museum, spread through them, and take their places as victims. I felt sorrow for those from both groups, and I cried for those who were crowded together in the sky, looking for a place to assemble their names.
I woke from my reverie and whispered to myself, as if someone was chiding or punishing me: “In the name of the people remembered here, the Israelis have lit in our country many fires, which may in the end themselves become a new holocaust.”
I fell silent.
I finally left the main building, preoccupied and dejected. I turned to the right and walked on in the direction the Palestinian driver had shown me. The semicircular path took me to the back of the building, where I found myself close to a tree-lined strip of ground, no more than a few meters wide, which ran parallel to the building and ended in woods, which stretched for a considerable distance—perhaps three kilometers, as the driver had surmised. The whole length of the tree-lined strip had been planted with small signboards. I went up to one of them, and saw that it contained the names of more Jews who had been among the victims of the Nazi slaughterers. Underneath each name had been written the date of death, though some were missing. There were boards that bore the names of Jewish families that had been exterminated in their entirety. The victims’ names were displayed in a different way further along: there was a small hut made of stones, with a twisted, roughly circular ceiling topped by a circular opening like a large hole. I stood for some minutes inside the hut, contemplating a work of art that aroused in me a mixture of emotions—admiration for the idea, and for the suffering that had inspired it. On the walls of the hut, which had no definite shape, identity cards and documents had been scattered. There were also scraps of paper of varying shapes and sizes, with phrases written on them like instructions, and the names of victims, some in handwriting, which grew closer to each other and more tightly packed the nearer they came to the ceiling. I found myself continuing to read them one by one with a strange curiosity, until finally I was gazing at a distant blue sky whose shape and size were defined by the opening in the ceiling. Artistically, the message had reached me. And as a human being, I understood it. I had to remember these victims, and their last, smuggled words. I asked God to have mercy on them twice: once as victims of the Nazis, and a second time as people used by those who traded on their tragedy.
I turned a little to the right. The scene revealed groups of people waiting in two small queues in front of two iron gates. I went up to a lady with an expression of worried anticipation on her face, and asked her in Hebrew, “Sliha, gvirti, excuse me, madam, why are these people gathering here?”
She looked at me, astonishment now written all over her face, making me feel that I had come from another age. Despite that, she answered me with cheerfulness: “They want to visit the other museum, on the other side over there.” And she pointed to an area in the distance, situated on some mountain slopes whose features were difficult to distinguish. I didn’t interrupt her as she explained to me what she meant. “Listen, sir, you’re a stranger—in fact, it looks as though you must be a complete stranger! These people are waiting their turn to visit the Zikhron ha-Filastinim museum, it’s a museum of Palestinian memories. It was built recently following the historic peace agreement that was signed just two years ago between the two peoples of the country, and which ended the bloody struggle that had lasted more than a hundred years. There are brand new electric cable cars like buses—you’ll see them when you get nearer, they call them the ‘tele-buses.’ They’re each large enough to hold twenty passengers, and take visitors to and fro along cables that stretch for three kilometers or more. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Before I could reply, her cellphone began to ring. She apologized to me and looked at the device, then started to mutter happily: “That’s my granddaughter Abigail, she’s apologizing, she was going to come with me on my visit to the other museum, but she’s changed her mind—she’s inside here, wandering around with some friends of hers. Perhaps she didn’t find the prospect of my company very attractive. She’s right, my company is never very amusing for young people like her, but it might appeal to you, mightn’t it?”
“Appeal to me?” I asked.
“Why not? Her electronic ticket’s already paid for, anyway . . .”
She interrupted herself to show me her cellphone, saying, “As you can see, there are two sets of numbers, each containing five digits. They open the entrance gate, and then you board the tele-bus. Then the numbers are wiped from the phone’s memory. Perhaps you’d like to accompany me, Mr.—?”
“Walid Dahman,” I said, quickly filling the gap, as I welcomed her invitation and thanked her for it.
“Tala. Tala Rabinovitch,” she responded.
We postponed any further conversation and headed for the assembly point, from where we arrived at one of the two doors. It was fitted with a small numerical screen. Tala looked at her phone, touched somewhere on the screen, and the entrance gate opened. I passed through the cross-shaped barrier, which closed behind me,
and waited for Tala to pass through.
We found ourselves beside some doors that opened electronically just by approaching them. We went through, and soon found the tele-bus. A large number of other visitors had already boarded before us. In less than two minutes, the vehicle, which was like a cable car, had moved off.
The view from above was stunning and took the breath away. As the area opposite slowly drew closer to us, allowing us to see it more clearly, Tala explained to me, pointing to what I assumed was our destination, “Some years ago, that was the Giv’at Shaul B settlement. Now we call it ‘Ir shel Slihanut,’ which means ‘City of Tolerance.’ No one uses the name of the settlement any more—it reminds us of the period of struggle, which no one wants to remember. Now there are Palestinian Arabs living in the city as well. By the way, Mr. Walid, any citizen of the new state can reside anywhere in the country. They’re classed as a resident of the city they live in, though they remain registered on the electoral roll of the region where they were born, or where their name was registered after the general census that was carried out a few months after the two peoples of the country had been unified.”
That was extremely interesting. I felt the value of my visit to Yad Vashem. The visitors to the Palestinian museum that we were heading for would doubtless also feel at peace after their visit to Yad Vashem—a peace that would prepare them for their visit to the other museum opposite. Truly, the rights of the dead become equal when the rights of the living are equal, I thought.
Then I turned to Tala and said, “At last, this has become a homeland for everyone, hasn’t it?”
“Exactly. Albeit with a certain amount of acceptable and welcome differentiation with regard to national rights and the expression of identity with all its subtleties, including language. Arabic has become an official language of the country, and everyone here speaks two languages. We have become like the Swiss, with two languages, only ours are Arabic and Hebrew.”
Fractured Destinies Page 20
