Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  Salha didn’t want much. She didn’t expect me or her other international visitors to challenge Israel’s control over the wadi or free her father. All she wanted was a youth center where Bedouin children could play, and a better football field. The pitch next to the school, marked by a dented pair of drunkenly leaning goal posts, is too small and full of rocks. “If we had a place to practice and play we could get a Messi out of here,” she said.

  3

  To Breathe Life into a Name

  The prophet Mohammad began his night ascent to heaven from the stone that now lies beneath the shimmering golden dome of Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif. Believers say his footprint remains visible in the rock, along with the handprint of the angel Gabriel, who held the rock down as it tried to follow Mohammad into heaven. Nearby, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believers can put their own hand in the posthole of Christ’s cross; a splinter of the cross itself lies locked away in a Greek Orthodox treasury. A church in Lod houses ambiguous fragments of the body of Saint George along with the chains that bound him in prison. This disputed land is holy land, after all, and full of the holy debris of holy men for Palestinian believers—be they Christian or Muslim—to meditate upon.

  But not all revered objects in this place draw their sanctity from God. Not all relics are for the religious. The white coffee cup in Darwish’s museum is rendered sacred not for the coffee it once held but for the poet who held it. So, too, the scattered pens and notebooks in his office at Sakakini Cultural Center that I dared not defile by touching them. During my time in Palestine I sought out books hallowed for their very existence, where the words written within were less important than the ink and paper they were written upon. The stories of the books themselves proved as compelling as the stories they contain.

  I rode a service taxi from Ramallah to Jerusalem through the Qalandia checkpoint, where I watched a trio of boys in black leather jackets, like characters from an S. E. Hinton novel, sell car air fresheners to the waiting drivers. I walked from the bus station to the Old City, itself a walled reliquary of holy books, bones, and stones. When I entered through Damascus Gate, I was startled to see an old friend, Ali Jiddah, sitting at a café adjacent to the entrance. I first met and befriended Ali in Jerusalem in the waning days of 1999. Drinking coffee and listening to Ali pontificate about politics at his home in Jerusalem’s African Quarter sparked my interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His was the first Palestinian story I ever heard.

  Ali is an Afro-Palestinian, born in Jerusalem to a father from Chad and a Nigerian-Palestinian mother. Like Ghassan Kanafani, Ali joined the PFLP as a young man. In 1968, he planted a bomb in a trash bin near Bikur Cholim Hospital in a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem. “I was eating a banana,” Ali told me, “and I had the bomb in a paper bag. When I finished the banana, I placed the peel in the bag with the bomb, put it in the bin, then walked away.” I remember being struck by how matter-of-factly Ali told this story. How he seemed to savor the details without a smudge of regret. The bombing injured nine Israelis, and Ali served seventeen years in prison before Israel released him in a 1985 prisoner exchange.

  Ali could be blunt and vicious in his discourse, yet he always expressed an optimism for peace that seemed less naive in 1999 than it does today. He was healthier then, too. He was thin and frail now. Ali told me he’d been ill—“My blood is too sweet,” he said—and he walks with a cane. I don’t know if Ali remembered me, but he pretended to, and we spoke briefly over coffee as we used to do. Before I stood to leave, he said that if I ever needed him, I could find him at the café. “I am here every day,” he said.

  Ali was one of many constants for me in the Old City. The scene had changed little since my first visit in 1999. The streets were still populated with helmeted IDF soldiers and robed monks. Christian tour groups still clogged the narrow streets carrying wooden crucifixes. The smell of freshly ground coffee still wafted from the shop at the top of Khan El Zeit Street. I recognized some of the same cooks sweating above the same kebab grills in the same restaurants. Palestinian teens still blocked the heavy doors to the Austrian Hospice of the Holy Family, whose garden remained one of my favorite places in which to write.

  My affection for the city itself, though, has waned. I used to describe Jerusalem as my favorite city in the world: a place that always fascinated me and always seemed vital and exciting. But after many visits, I’d started to sense the darkness beneath the aesthetics of faith and history. Each sect and subsect lays claim to every stone and alleyway. Everything is disputed. Nothing is tolerated. Jerusalem is a city holy to everybody but welcoming to no one.

  Then again, Jerusalem could never mean as much to me as it means to the Palestinians. My heart lays no claims on this place. I defer to writers like Mourid Barghouti, who wrote of the city:

  All that the world knows of Jerusalem is the power of the symbol. The Dome of the Rock is what the eye sees, and so it sees Jerusalem and is satisfied. The Jerusalem of the religions, the Jerusalem of politics, the Jerusalem of conflict is the Jerusalem of the world. But the world does not care for our Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of the people. . . . The Jerusalem of white cheese, of oil and olives and thyme, of baskets of figs and necklaces and leather and Salah al-Din Street. . . . The palm fronds in all the streets on Palm Sunday, the Jerusalem of houseplants, cobbled alleys, and narrow covered lanes. The Jerusalem of clotheslines. This is the city of our senses, our bodies and our childhood. The Jerusalem that we walk in without much noticing its “sacredness,” because we are in it, because it is us.

  After leaving Ali, I walked until I found Chain Gate Street and asked around until someone pointed me to the green door of the Khalidi Library. Haifa and Asem Khalidi, cousins and current caretakers of the library, were waiting for me. They scolded me for my lateness and escorted me inside.

  The Khalidis are another constant presence in the city. “Our family knew Salah Eddin,” Haifa said, referring to the Muslim sultan and warrior who wrested Jerusalem from the Crusader king in 1187. “We followed him into Jerusalem.” Salah Eddin eventually departed for Damascus, but the Khalidis never left. They have long ranked among the city’s most enduring and accomplished families. For the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, Sheikh Musa al-Khalidi held the post of judge of Anatolia, the second-highest religious post in the Ottoman Empire. In the latter part of the century, Yusuf Diya-uddin Pasha al-Khalidi served as the mayor of Jerusalem, as a member of the Ottoman Turkish parliament, and as the governor of a Kurdish province of the Ottoman Empire. In his scant spare time, he wrote the first Kurdish-Arabic dictionary. His nephew, Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi, was appointed the consul general of the Ottoman Empire in Bordeaux, France. He lectured at the Sorbonne, translated Victor Hugo into Arabic, and wrote a book about Arabic literature and Victor Hugo that is considered the world’s first work of comparative literature. Dr. Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi served terms as the mayor of Jerusalem, as Jordan’s minister of foreign affairs, and, briefly, as Jordan’s prime minister. The current senior member of the family, Walid Khalidi, taught at Oxford and the American University of Beirut, and founded the Institute of Palestine Studies at Harvard.

  The Khalidi family amassed vast collections of books and manuscripts in their roles as scholars, jurists, writers, and intellectuals. At the end of the nineteenth century, Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, a Palestinian judge working in Jaffa, decided to organize the family’s books into a single collection. His idea was that any time a member of the family passed away, his books would be transferred to a core library. In 1900, Hajj Raghib established the al-Khalidiyah Library as a family trust, or waqf, with income generated from a public bathhouse the family owned elsewhere in Jerusalem.

  I followed Haifa and Asem past the courtyard into the library’s reading room. The chamber used to be a thirteenth-century mosque, and the polished stone mihrab, the niche that orients the congregation toward Mecca, was still visible. Haifa pointed me to a row of black-and-white portraits of her ance
stors sitting on a shelf along the wall. The men all shared the same dark eyes. “In those days, the Khalidis all intermarried,” Haifa said, explaining the remarkable resemblance. “You should look at me. My grandmothers are sisters and my grandfathers are first cousins. I am pure Khalidi.” The twisting and intertwining branches on the Khalidi family tree resemble the ancient olive trees of Palestine.

  After Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967, Haifa’s father, Heydar Khalidi, was put in charge of all Khalidi properties in the Old City, including the library. One day, an Israeli official posted a notice on the library door that declared the building “Absentee Property 65.” In 1950, the new government of Israel created the Custodian of Absentee Property to take possession of Arab property abandoned during the Nakba. The government administered the same policies following the Six-Day War. “Anything that was closed was considered absentee,” Asem said. The absentee-property notice rendered the library officially under Israeli control and out of bounds to the Khalidi family.

  Haifa remembers her father tearing the notice to shreds in front of an Israeli officer, who threatened to arrest him. Heydar pointed to the sign above the door that read AL-KHALIDI LIBRARY, then showed the officer his identity card. “As you can see,” he said, “my name is Heydar al-Khalidi. This library belongs to me, and I am clearly here and not absent.”

  Heydar’s boldness earned him a brief reprieve and the officer walked away, but the notice on the library door began a twenty-year legal struggle between the Khalidis and the Israeli establishment. “Uncle Heydar had so many confrontations,” Asem said. “So many harassments. Even Haifa faced harassment.” He turned to his cousin. “You got late-night visits from soldiers. They banged your door with the butt of their guns. Remember?”

  Haifa nodded, and her eyes reddened. “Yes,” she said. “I remember.”

  The Israelis confiscated the building next door to the library, which also belonged to the Khalidis, in 1968. A series of explosions rocked a nearby street and IDF soldiers decided to occupy the building in order to monitor the area. They stayed for over a decade. Afterward, the Israelis turned the building over to Shlomo Goren, an Orthodox rabbi, author, and Israeli war hero who was part of the military force that captured Jerusalem in 1967. Rabbi Goren would prove to be the Khalidis’ greatest adversary. He established a rabbinical seminary next to the library, then demolished a connecting wall between the two buildings and installed windows that overlooked the library courtyard. The Khalidis fought in court for five years against the renovations, and eventually a court order required Goren to replace the wall and fill in the windows.

  In November 1987, after waiting another five years for permits from the Jerusalem municipality to start their own renovations, the Khalidis began construction on a second floor. Rabbi Goren’s lawyer presented his own court order stopping the construction a month later. The rabbi also claimed that one of the rooms of the library belonged to his seminary. The case lasted an additional five years. In the end, two Israeli scholars—an archaeologist and a historian—testified on the Khalidis’ behalf, marking the end of more than two decades of legal struggle for the building.

  I followed Haifa up a tight spiral staircase into the sealed main library holding room, where the Khalidis store nearly thirteen hundred books in plain gray boxes to protect them against acidity. Haifa had removed a few special manuscripts to show me. She held out an Ottoman-era Koran, handwritten nearly four centuries earlier. Blue and gold designs swirled around the verses, and much of the calligraphy was written in gold ink. Haifa pointed out the ornate hezeb, circular markings like golden medallions that act as dividers between the chapters and sections. These, too, were drawn with gold. I asked Haifa if I could hold the Koran. “Are you a Muslim?” she joked before she handed it to me. The weight surprised me. The Koran was laid with so much gold leaf it must have weighed twenty pounds.

  Next, Haifa showed me a six-hundred-year-old medical book titled Chanakya’s Book on Poisons and Antidotes. The book was a gift for a twelfth-century Indian ruler as a guide to prevent assassination. Among the deadly recipes in the book is a cautionary tale about a beautiful young girl transformed into a weapon by a team of assassins. They fed her small but increasing doses of poison so that her body would accumulate the toxin while resisting its effects. Eventually, the maiden was saturated with so much poison she was fatal to the touch. The assassins then presented her as a “gift” to an unknowing king.

  The pages of Chanakya’s Book were peppered with tiny dots I first mistook for overzealous punctuation. They were, in fact, holes made by worms. Haifa told me that the library was closed between 1950 and 1967, and the only protection the family could afford for the books was mothballs, which failed to keep away the maggots. Now the library’s caretakers “smoke” the room twice a year to ward off silverfish and moth larvae.

  The last book Haifa showed me was an eyewitness account of the 1187 Battle of Hattin, Salah Eddin’s final battle with the Crusaders, a victory that marked the beginning of the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem. The book, full of hand-drawn diagrams of Salah Eddin’s military units and formations, is more than eight hundred years old and describes the city as the first Jerusalem Khalidis would have seen it. The entire collection bears witness to centuries of Khalidi scholarship, but this book in particular stands as a symbol of the family’s—and, by extension, the Palestinians’—enduring presence in the city.

  As we left the library, Haifa told me that someone suggested they move the collection to Birzeit University in the West Bank, safely out of reach of the Israeli authorities. The family refused. “If we remove the books from here, it means the building itself is going to be taken,” Haifa said. Without the books, the library will be just another vacant building in the Old City, and this will put it at risk of confiscation.

  The threat possesses its own sort of poetry. The Khalidis first established the library to protect the family’s books. Now, a century later, the books protect the library.

  Before 1948, the father of Palestinian philosopher Edward Said owned the Palestine Educational Bookshop on East Jerusalem’s Salah Eddin Street where he sold books, stationery, and typewriters. Said’s father sold the shop after the war, and the new owners divided the space into three tiny storefronts. In 1985, Ahmed Muna rented, and eventually purchased, the middle shop. He stocked the shelves with stationery, pens, pencils, and other school supplies and reopened the following year. He called the store the Educational Bookshop, dropping Palestine from the name. At the time, Israeli authorities associated the word Palestine with the PLO, which they considered a terrorist organization, and forbade the use of the word in areas under Israeli control.

  Ahmed taught at the United Nations schools that operated in Jerusalem and didn’t open the store until two in the afternoon, after he finished teaching. “It was not a serious business,” his son Mahmoud Muna told me as we drank espresso at a sidewalk table on Salah Eddin. “It was an extra thing. His friends would come and hang out there.”

  Not long after the shop opened, Mahmoud’s brother, Imad, returned from his studies in Jordan and took over the business. He was a more ambitious businessman than Ahmed. “He put new energy into the store,” Mahmoud said, explaining how Imad added Arabic novels and poetry collections to the store’s inventory. A greater opportunity arose when the First Intifada erupted at the end of 1987. Foreign journalists and NGO workers, most of them proficient in English, wanted to read about Palestine and the conflict, so the store started bringing in relevant English titles. “We started with books by Edward Said,” Mahmoud said. Demand quickly soared. By 1992, Imad was picking up packages of books from the post office every couple of days. The bookstore made only small orders, usually less than five copies at a time, to avoid paying extra Israeli import taxes.

  In 1995, Edward Said published Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, a book that railed against the recently signed Oslo
Accords. The new Palestinian Authority, headquartered in Ramallah, banned both the English and Arabic editions of the book. The PA had no authority in Jerusalem, though, so the Educational Bookshop was free to stock it. “The book became one of our first bestsellers,” Mahmoud said. Everyone wanted the book—in both languages. Even officials from the very PA ministry that banned Peace and Its Discontents ordered copies and sent their underlings from Ramallah to pick them up.

  Sales of English books about the conflict continued to rise. In 1996, Imad made his first visit to the London Book Fair, one of the largest book industry trade fairs in the world. The trip marked the Educational Bookshop’s entry into the proper book trade. But just as the store expanded its English-language selection, demand for Arabic books declined. In 1999 and 2000, Mahmoud watched the rows of Arabic books shrink month by month. Half a shelf of Arabic books would disappear at a time, replaced by English titles or more school supplies. Mahmoud made the painful decision to stock colored pencils in the place where Arabic books used to sit. “You are a businessman, yes, but you also love the books.”

  Mahmoud blamed the drop in interest in Arabic books on Oslo’s disappointing legacy. “During the First Intifada, there were a lot of books about the cause. About the struggle. About liberation,” he said. “Then Oslo came and didn’t really deliver anything. People were reading and waiting for something to happen. And something completely opposite happened.” Before Oslo, the store sold hundreds of copies of books by Palestinian negotiators and figures like Yasser Arafat. They sold books about Fatah and the philosophies of the struggle. “Suddenly no one wanted to read them,” Mahmoud said. Palestinian readers felt betrayed by their own writers. “They felt like they were reading bullshit. They were reading lies.” Mahmoud’s customers opted, instead, for Arabic poetry and fiction. These were genres they felt they could trust.