Miral

by Rula Jebreal

  Miral turned and saw Hani. He seemed shocked and bewildered. His eyes were sad now, but not with his usual melancholy. He went to Miral, grabbed her from behind, and tried to drag her out of danger. “We’re going away right now,” he said as he clung to her. “This isn’t for you. We’re not like this, Miral. This won’t get us anywhere.”

  Miral looked at him in amazement. “What are you saying? This isn’t what you wanted? The struggle grows in proportion to the people’s anger. This is the only path left for us to take, and we can’t turn back now.” At this point, Hani led her away by force, and when they had almost pushed through the crowd of demonstrators, swimming against its current this time, Hani pulled down his scarf and turned to her.

  “Miral, you have to listen to me. All this violence—it makes no sense anymore. They’re militarily superior to us, whatever we do, and this imbalance of forces will lead us to barbarism. I’m afraid of what we may become. If we reply to every one of their attacks with yet more violence, we’re going to activate the classic mechanism known as ‘the dog biting its tail,’ and we’ll all become prisoners of its doomed logic. We have to compel them to sit down at the negotiating table, and we have to come up with other ways of responding to them.”

  Dismayed and angry, Miral replied, “What do you suggest we do? Resign ourselves? Burrow down and live like rabbits? What’s up with you? You scare me when you talk like this. I don’t recognize you.”

  “After the arrests of the past several days, I’m convinced that a violent struggle will wind up playing into the hands of the Israelis who don’t want negotiations—the settlers, for example, the religious right, the Orthodox right. Don’t you understand? It’s a political strategy they’re using to discredit us, to make it appear to the eyes of the world that we’re the occupying force and they’re the ones who are defending themselves. Our hope lies in the portion of Israeli civil society that is becoming more and more convinced that peace must be reestablished between us. Think about it and you’ll see that we need to start going down paths that will yield rapid results, because our people can’t go on this way. We have to leave room for negotiations, and arriving at a political compromise is crucial. Violence is a trap we’re stupidly setting for ourselves. We must use our brains, not our guts. We are two people fighting over the same little stretch of land. We both have our reasons, and we’re both victims. They’ve suffered the Holocaust, and we suffer because the world felt guilty and used us as a bargaining chip.”

  Miral gazed at him and had no reply. She felt that there was something true in his words, but she hoped he was just blowing off a little steam. “The truth is always inconvenient,” she said, “especially when you say it out loud. You shouldn’t talk like that publicly, Hani, not in these times. It’s too dangerous. You could be misunderstood, and you know it doesn’t take much for someone to get branded a traitor.”

  Hani didn’t feel like talking anymore, either. He moved his face closer to Miral’s, so close he could feel her warmth. Their lips met in a passionate kiss. It wasn’t their first kiss, but it was their most desperate, abolishing time and space despite the acrid taste of tear gas and the confusion going on all around them. Clinging to each other, they walked off in the direction of the Old City.

  Month after month, as the conflict grew, so too did the divisions among the Palestinian factions, largely due to the secret peace negotiations, whose aims were widely shared by the civil society. But the radical leftist and religious groups believed such efforts to be a concession, a compromise, and—above all—a betrayal. Hani especially feared collaborationists; that is, spies who passed information to the Israelis because they needed money or work permits. Because of them, suspicion reigned everywhere. One had to be very careful; nobody could be trusted. You couldn’t talk on the telephone for fear of wire taps, and every document had to be burned after it was read. Hani said that everyone was a potential spy, and that the enemy took advantage of people’s weaknesses to lure them into the trap. Every week flyers appeared listing the names of collaborators; they and their families were repudiated by Palestinian society.

  Ever since 1948, the Israeli secret services had been constantly perfecting their strategies for countering the wave of protests. The current unrest was not at all weakened by traditional methods of repression, and the great echo set up by the international media, including television and daily newspapers, which described in detail everything that happened in the Occupied Territories, was causing the Israeli government more and more embarrassment. This pushed the authorities to seek new methods of crushing the revolt while making as little news as possible outside the country. Among these methods, the bloodiest was surely the widespread recourse to sharpshooters, who were employed in the most sensitive places and prevented any gathering of young people in the street. The appearance of tranquility and peaceful coexistence had to emanate from the capital, Jerusalem, at any cost, and so soldiers became a permanent presence at every corner of the city’s narrow streets, as well as along the roads leading to the city. The leaders of the Palestinian resistance likewise made adjustments in their methods, constantly varying the locations of their rallies and avoiding areas where there was no cover, such as public squares.

  The most underhanded system developed by the Israelis involved using Arab shopkeepers, particularly hairdressers and beauticians, to recruit informers and stool pigeons from among their young female customers. The owners of the shops were threatened with losing their licenses or told that fiscal pressure would soon force them to close. The proprietors therefore cooperated, and with their complicity, their young customers were drugged and then, while under the influence of narcotics or sleeping tablets, photographed in obscene poses. Some days later, such a girl would be contacted and summoned to the shop with the excuse that she had forgotten some personal item. A couple of Shin Bet agents would be waiting for her. The secret service men would show her the photographs and, by threatening to divulge them and thus dishonor her and her family, compel her to spy on members of the resistance and sometimes to mark their automobiles with a phosphorescent liquid that was invisible except to the X-ray equipment in military helicopters, making the cars and the people inside them potential targets for fatal missile strikes.

  During the First Intifada, this method was used to force dozens of girls to become informers. Some months later, one of them had the courage to relate her experience to one of the leaders of the resistance, whom she had been seeing for some time. This man, knowing that he would have to make the matter public, first of all asked for the girl’s hand in marriage, so as not to dishonor her, and then had flyers printed and distributed in all the Arab neighborhoods of the city, asking the girls who had been blackmailed not to collaborate with the Israelis and to get in touch with the resistance. During the following days, a great many young women, students who lived in Jerusalem and the surrounding villages, turned up. Those who confessed were guaranteed confidentiality and pardon. Young men in the resistance married them so they would not fall into dishonor when the photographs were published. In the most delicate cases, they went to live elsewhere in order to avoid retaliation. This network of solidarity involved all those who in one way or another participated in the disturbances and allowed the First Intifada to continue until 1992, despite harsh Israeli repression.

  Shops belonging to the barbers and hairdressers who had participated in the blackmail were burned down; their names were made public, and they were banished from the city. Those whose cooperation had resulted in the death of a leader of the resistance were condemned, sentenced, and executed; others were spared, in consideration of mitigating details, but were obliged to apologize publicly and visit schools, telling their stories and informing girls of the dangers that might beset them.

  There was a deep hostility toward the Israeli secret police and the Israeli army, but perhaps even more intense was the loathing reserved for any Palestinian who collaborated with them. Strictly speaking, what was going on was not so much a wa
r as an ancestral, visceral conflict between two peoples. On one side was a welltrained, well-armed national army; on the other was a mob of young people that followed its instincts rather than any strategy or military art. Reciprocal hatred made up for the lack of prospects in this struggle and provided the background for a mutual, tenacious obsession over the same land. Hani feared that a solution would be long in coming and that, meanwhile, his people’s response would become increasingly radical and perhaps fall under the control of bordering countries that had a score to settle with Israel.

  Miral suspected that some of the girls in her school were being blackmailed. In fact, she had noticed that two students no longer took part in the demonstrations. They had isolated themselves even in the classroom, were eating less, and seemed depressed. She decided to explain to her schoolmates the proper conduct in case of blackmail and held some impromptu meetings. The two girls—together with a third, who was evidently a more talented dissimulator—paled noticeably at her words. A few days later, the three confessed.

  However, there was another girl who particularly aroused Miral’s suspicions. Fadia was tiny, pretty, and ambitious, with delicate skin, light eyes, and straight hair. She never confessed to having collaborated with the Israelis, but Miral distrusted her nonetheless, even though they were in the same class and Fadia was always very nice to Miral. Although Fadia’s family was decidedly poor, she was one of the most elegant girls in the school, and when she left the campus in the afternoon, she always brought back a small gift for Miral, sweets or a notebook or some ice cream.

  One day, during a demonstration, a friend presented Miral with a list of girls who were collaborating with the Israelis. Because of the delicacy of the situation, and because of the particular attention given to not dishonoring the girls, such lists rarely contained errors. Next to the names of the three girls from Dar El-Tifel who had confessed, Miral read Fadia’s name and understood the motive behind the constant attentions, the gifts, the forced smiles. She suspected that this apparently ambitious girl had not even been blackmailed but had voluntarily offered herself as a collaborator in exchange for money. Miral felt endangered: Fadia could give her name to the Israelis at any moment, and if she hadn’t already done so, it was probably because she wanted something more from her. In all likelihood, she wanted to meet the resistance leaders with whom Miral had become friendly.

  Miral decided the only thing to do was to distance herself from her classmate, not abruptly, but slowly, trying to avoid arousing Fadia’s suspicions and to keep her from giving Miral’s name to the Shin Bet. Fadia asked several times to attend demonstrations with her, but Miral replied that she didn’t intend to take part in them anymore because the time had come for her to think about her future. After this it was Fadia who distanced herself, little by little, having realized that her “friend” had become wary and that she wouldn’t be able to get any more information out of her. Aware that the game was up, Fadia also knew that she would be the prime suspect if anything happened to Miral. She therefore dedicated her attentions to someone else and at the end of the scholastic year transferred to another school.

  9

  To all appearances, Miral’s life went on in a normal fashion, and she went home to her father’s house every weekend. But in fact, she was living two parallel lives: the regular school life she had led for years, in which the bulk of her time was given over to study and her only distraction was the nightly bedtime story she told the littlest girls; and the secret life bound up with Hani and the Intifada. She thought about him constantly, about their moments together and their growing love. Now, whenever they had a chance, they would meet at his house and spend hours embracing and chatting, and as their passions mounted, Miral discovered the secrets of love. Hani was very gentle; the veils of childhood and innocence fell away, and Miral’s physical awareness grew. At the same time, her voracious reading of political books and newspapers broadened her intellectual horizons. For the first time, she began to turn on television news programs, to the great annoyance of her sister, who wanted to see action movies. To make it up to Rania, Miral sometimes brought her along to Hani’s house, where they would all stretch out on the roof and watch the sunset.

  She felt that she had finally escaped being managed by others and was now the author of her own choices. If she slept at home more often during the week, she’d have even greater freedom of movement than she did at school, where it was becoming harder and harder to find new excuses for leaving the campus.

  In a certain sense, time had inverted Miral and Rania’s roles. In their first years at Dar El-Tifel, Miral had been protective of her sister, acting almost like a mother to Rania; after Miral became one of the most politically active girls in the school, it was Rania who took on the protective role, covering for Miral with the teachers while at the same time trying to dissuade her from exposing herself to such frequent danger. As the years passed, the temperamental differences between the sisters had grown more conspicuous. Rania became increasingly intolerant of school life and its attendant rules and was not at all fond of study. She wanted to go to Haifa to live with her aunt and, eventually, get married. Miral tried to convince her that she should continue her education, telling Rania that she had observed her while she was giving mathematics classes to the camp children and that she thought she had a great talent for teaching. “Knowledge is freedom,” Miral told her, trying to persuade her sister by repeating their father’s words. Miral loved both her school and her political activities, believing that her emancipation would result from her studies and her growing awareness. These days all her conversation revolved around history and politics. Rania loved pop music, the kind she could dance to, and found her sister boring and repetitious; Miral listened only to patriotic songs performed by Jordanian or Lebanese singers, and she became particularly emotional when such anthems were broadcast on television as the soundtrack to the intifada demonstrations.

  Rania preferred to wear skirts or dresses, and her great passion was brightly colored high-heeled shoes. Miral loved tight jeans, loose-fitting T-shirts, and gym shoes, substituting sandals for the latter during the summer months. Although the two sisters often quarreled, and found themselves in disagreement on practically every subject, they loved each other deeply.

  At their weekend family dinners, Jamal and Rania liked to talk about what they had done during the previous week. One evening Rania described the new brassieres she had seen her friends wearing (which she was sure would make her look less flat chested) and then addressed the topic of what she wanted to do that summer. Miral was distracted, her eyes vacant, her appetite nearly gone. Hani was moving farther and farther away from the party; everyone was complaining to her about him. He was deserting everything; he was making speeches advocating moderation, just at the moment when panic had spread through the entire group because of the hundred arrests that had been made all over the Old City in the past few days. It was only a matter or time for Hani and perhaps for her as well.

  “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” her father asked, stroking her head.

  Miral remained silent for a few seconds, searching her brain for the right words so as not to alarm her father; then she described what she had seen during her most recent visit to the refugee camp. Jamal gazed at her with mounting concern.

  “Do you understand, Papa? Our people can’t continue to rot in the camps. What future can there be for those kids? The world’s indifferent, and we’re faced with the injustice and arrogance of a military occupation. You know, Papa, for refugee-camp children, the Israelis are either soldiers or settlers. That’s the only face of Israel they know.”

  Jamal looked out the window at the clear blue sky over Jerusalem. “Miral, I know how you feel, but we have to find nonviolent ways of making our voice heard. We won’t obtain what is ours by right with stones or even with rifles, and we risk triggering a vicious circle of violence that will be very hard to break out of. Please, I do wish you would spend more time thinking about school a
nd your final exams.”

  But Miral had other things in mind than her diploma. Later that evening, as she walked through the streets of the Old City on her way to a PFLP section meeting and inhaled the intensely fragrant Middle Eastern spices in the souk, she sensed all the fascination of the city, all the mysterious force that enveloped it. Her thoughts turned to some of Khaldun’s comical gestures, which were still vivid in her memory, and she wondered when she would hear from him again. She had promised to write to him. She thought about the gratitude of the people in the villages around Ramallah. Simple, proud country folk subjected to continual humiliations, determined to hold on to their traditions and their culture. As soon as she saw Hani, she lit up like a candle. He came to her, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered in her ear that the section was being watched and that no more meetings would be held in that place. She must go back home, he said, and he would contact her.