Ukeles told me that, aside from a couple of attempts by individual families, there has never been a collective request by Palestinians—not by the writers’ union nor by any Palestinian university—to return the books. “Now I assume that hasn’t happened because they assume it won’t work,” Ukeles said. “And it won’t.” But even if the Custodian of Absentee Property instructed the library to give the books back, the issue of original ownership remains. To whom would the library return the books?
Ukeles envisions ways this might work. Perhaps a team of graduate students from a Palestinian university could examine each of the nearly six thousand volumes, page by page, in search of dedications, ex libris labels, annotations, or other marginalia that might suggest the books’ original owners. This would be a massive and time-consuming project and would undoubtedly leave most books unidentified, but it would be a start. Or perhaps the entire collection could be donated to a Palestinian institution as part of a future diplomatic settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. This is magical thinking, and Ukeles knows it. “Still, I dream that there will be a Palestinian national library, and we will be able to give the books to them, and they would be the core of the collection,” Ukeles said. “Wouldn’t that be beautiful?”
Ukeles wants to see the issue of the Palestinian books solved one way or another. “Almost every conversation I have with any Palestinian cultural figure starts with the AP collection,” Ukeles said. “It colors everything I do.” Ukeles considers the library a public and nonpolitical space for all citizens: Jews and Arabs both. “Because I am American, I will cling to these naive ideas of a national institution that is supposed to serve as a stable place in civil society,” she said. Ukeles would like to see more Palestinians living in Israel participate in the programming she designs, but she struggles to convince Palestinians to support an Israeli institution that holds their books hostage.
Ukeles and I looked for Anahid’s Meyers Konversations-Lexikon in the AP collection. We couldn’t find it. According to Amit’s research, our failure shouldn’t have been a surprise. Unlike the Arabic books collected in 1948, most foreign-language books like the German encyclopedia ended up absorbed into the general library collection instead of branded with AP. No doubt Hagop’s encyclopedia once resided among the other collected volumes, but not anymore. Ukeles found a set of the encyclopedia on the library’s regular shelves, but the first volume bore an ex libris from the library of Gertrude Brann, a Jewish woman who died in 1951. This was not the book that Anahid thumbed through as a child. Perhaps those pages ended up wrapping onions at the grocer.
I sent Anahid Melikian Helewa an email from Jerusalem. I told her I’d failed to find her grandfather’s books and asked her to pass on my apologies to her aunt. She responded a few hours later:
Dear Marcello
We thank you wholeheartedly for all your efforts in trying to locate these books, which I believe ended with a fruitful result. This loss is nothing compared to the other losses Palestinians encountered because of the political situation in Palestine during both war and peaceful times. We never wanted these books back. None of the other heirs of Hagop Melikian read or write German and my aunt is almost ninety-two, but we wanted to know where they ended up. Now we know and we can put it to rest.
As for my aunt, she thanks you for your effort. She says that you are the last link and she hopes that these books found a good home with a book lover. She says that her father Hagop would say “forget about it.”
Back in Ramallah, at the Ziryab Café where Mahmoud Abu Hashhash and his friends used to gather to discuss poetry, I met with Wisam Rafeedi. Wisam was born “two days before Jesus” in 1959 and, according to his mother, used to spend all of his pennies on comic books. When he grew bored of comics, he started to collect coins—an obsession that, oddly, gave way to a fascination with socialism. Wisam joined the Communist Party when he was fifteen years old and took part in political demonstrations he didn’t tell his mother about. The sharp-eyed woman was no fool. “I knew something was wrong because his birth certificate was in the worst shape of all of my children,” she once said. She guessed, correctly, that the document had grown ragged from Wisam pulling it from his pocket over and over to prove to the soldiers he was too young to have a proper Palestinian ID.
The police arrested and beat Wisam a few times for minor offenses when he was a teenager. His short jail terms grieved his mother but were hardly unusual for politically minded young Palestinians in the 1970s. Wisam served his first major prison sentence when he was sixteen. He spent a full year in jail after being convicted—wrongly, he claims—of torching a car. The judge originally gave him two years, but Wisam’s sentence was reduced by half when he agreed to sign a “paper in Hebrew,” a confession he couldn’t read to a crime he insists he did not commit.
Wisam spent much of his yearlong sentence sitting in his cell transcribing from memory over one hundred poems and songs by Ahmed Fouad Negm, an Egyptian poet who rose to fame in the 1960s. Negm penned revolutionary verses that praised Egypt’s working class and infuriated the political establishment of the time. Marxists like Wisam adored him. After writing out the poems, Wisam shared them with his fellow inmates. “My voice is not very good, but I would usually sing the poems,” he said.
After his release, Wisam finished his high school education and started a degree program in Arabic literature at Birzeit University. He also became involved with the PFLP. Wisam didn’t tell me his role in the group or what actions he involved himself with, only that one night in 1982, a little after midnight, Israeli authorities pounded on the Rafeedi family’s door, looking to arrest him. Wisam was drinking tea with his mother and brother at the time. Wisam stood up, calmly told his mother to put his teacup in the sink so the soldiers wouldn’t know how many people were at the table, and slipped out the back door.
He was gone for nine years. Occasionally soldiers came to the house asking for Wisam. Sometimes they came to tell his mother that Wisam was dead. Neither she nor the Israelis knew that he had gone underground. The PFLP arranged a safe house for Wisam and gave him a printing press so he could produce the front’s communiqués. Wisam rarely left the apartment and never met with anyone outside the organization.
The Israelis intensified their actions against the PFLP in 1985. Wisam’s superiors feared his safe house had been compromised and moved him into a different Ramallah apartment. His neighbors thought the place was abandoned, so in order to maintain his cover Wisam could not receive visitors or even turn on the lights. He lived alone in the dark for five months. “It was not a good house,” Wisam said. “Every two weeks someone came and put food outside the room, knocked a secret signal, and went away.” The PFLP moved him again during the First Intifada, and Wisam spent twenty-two straight months indoors.
The most challenging aspect of living in hiding, Wisam said, was the uncertainty. A political prisoner in an Israeli jail always knows his release date. Even those serving life sentences have faith they will eventually be swapped for Israeli hostages. But a man in hiding doesn’t know his future. He could be arrested at any time. He could be shot. “Or maybe you will grow tired and decide you can’t continue, and you will be smuggled to Lebanon or Syria. You don’t know anything.”
Wisam’s superiors eventually moved him to a house in an upscale Ramallah neighborhood. “Bourgeois neighborhoods are best for safe houses. The neighbors don’t put their nose on you. They don’t care about anything,” Wisam said, his Marxist colors showing. But Wisam was unlucky. In 1991, IDF soldiers knocked again on Wisam’s door. They had been going house to house looking for local boys who had been throwing stones. They were not searching for Wisam at all, but when they realized who he was, they arrested him and took him away. The military interrogated Wisam over the course of five months, during which time he underwent surgery for intestinal problems brought on, he claims, by beatings he endured at the hands of his captors. Then the Israelis put him in prison.
In
his first letters from jail, Wisam describes four months of being transferred “from interrogation rooms in Ramallah to torture cells in Moscobiyya and to solitary confinement rooms in Petah Tikva.” And he assures his family that he is in relatively good health, despite a continuing intestinal illness and an injured foot that “is unpredictable and has a mind of its own.” Wisam thanks his family for their support, expresses sadness for being away from his mother for so many years, and admits his embarrassment for forgetting the names of his nieces and nephews. “Please understand that my memory has worsened during the months of interrogation. Not being able to remember everyone’s name bothers me.” His letters to his mother are remarkable for their florid sentimentality. “My gift to you today from behind these prison walls is tens of kisses on your rosy cheeks,” he writes to her on Mother’s Day. “After the kisses are some hugs and ruffling of your hair as I used to do when I was a youngster.” I didn’t expect such sappiness from a militant Marxist.
Wisam also writes: “Let me be very clear and up-front with you from the beginning that the road I have chosen is a road of deep conviction. The routines of life, such as having a wife, kids and getting a degree, do not mean much to me. If I am able to fulfill these, all the better, as long as it is not at the cost of my convictions. If I am not able to achieve these, I will never regret one day of my life or look behind into my past! Long live the life which has as its titles: change, adventure, and struggle.” Still, he admits he would like to marry. “If possible, I would like to meet a woman that has a strong, independent personality, and who is organized. I despise those women that only nod in agreement to everything their husbands say.”
As if in answer, Wisam soon received a smuggled message from Rula Abu Dhou, herself a PFLP inmate in Neve Tirza women’s prison. Wisam knew Rula from his childhood—their families were friends in Ramallah—but he hadn’t seen or heard from her since she was nine years old. “Abu Rafeedi, how are you?” she wrote in that first note. “Are you still tall and skinny? Is your mind still working?”
Wisam sent a message back. “Yes,” he wrote. “The only thing working well is my mind.”
The messages marked the beginning of a long, smuggled correspondence between Rula and Wisam. They wrote to each other about their families and of time spent in Ramallah. Rula reminded Wisam that she was part of a singing group that he had led, and he’d taught her the songs of Negm. “I can’t say they were love notes,” Wisam said, embarrassed when I asked him. “Sometimes we talked about politics, but mostly about personal memories.” Rula also sent Wisam her ration of cigarettes from the Neve Tirza commissary. “She didn’t smoke,” Wisam said.
Rula was serving a twenty-five-year sentence for her role in the killing of Yigal Shahaf in 1987. According to news reports, Shahaf was walking toward Jerusalem’s Old City with his wife when an agent with the PFLP shot him in the head at close range. The assailant passed the gun to an accomplice who, in turn, handed it off to nineteen-year-old Rula, who then disposed of it.
The different ways Shahaf’s story is told speaks to the frustrating ambiguity that blurs nearly every narrative of the conflict. Wisam told me that Shahaf was an Israeli soldier and therefore a justifiable target. But while Shahaf had worked as a technician for the Israeli Air Force, he was no longer active and was not wearing a uniform when he was killed. Israeli news reports, instead, more often referred to Shahaf as an Israeli “civilian,” a “student,” or an “amateur basketball player” without mentioning his military service at all.
Rula’s role also differs according to who tells the story. Israelis usually consider her a violent terrorist. Palestinians rarely do. One pro-Palestinian media source described her, simply, as “allegedly being a member of an armed cell and an illegal organization.” Journalist Leila Diab, writing in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, obscures Rula’s role in Shahaf’s killing even further when she writes that the Israelis accused Rula of “transporting arms”—an obscenely misleading way to describe the disposal of a still-smoking murder weapon. Diab goes on to claim that Rula denied all charges and, like sixteen-year-old Wisam years earlier, was forced to sign a confession in Hebrew that she could not understand. Even if this is true, Rula openly admitted her guilt on her release. “I am not sorry for it,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “On the contrary, I’m proud. And I wish I could do more for my country.”
Such competing narratives meant I never knew which story to trust, if any at all. Even individual words were burdened with bias. Ghassan Zaqtan once told an interviewer, “There is here a struggle over the language. There are two narratives in this land, and each one has its own terms, and it has its ground rules.” In much of Palestinian journalism, a Palestinian is “kidnapped” not “arrested” and “martyred” rather than “killed.” Supporters of Israel’s security barrier never call it a “wall,” while its opponents never call it anything else. Israeli settlers often black out the Arab names of villages on road signs in the West Bank, leaving only Hebrew and English behind. Right-leaning Israelis will only refer to the West Bank by the ancient Hebrew names of Judea and Samaria, while many Palestinian writers will not use the word Israel at all. There is no neutral lexicon. The conflict is fought word to word, phrase to phrase. Vocabulary is its own intifada.
In 1993, prison authorities transferred Wisam from Hebron Prison to the al-Naqab Prison near the Egyptian border. There he met a PFLP comrade who urged Wisam to write a memoir about his time living underground. Wisam hesitated at first. He didn’t want to reveal any secrets to his captors. “Under interrogation, I gave them nothing,” he said. Instead, Wisam decided to write a novel based on his experience, something that wasn’t purely fiction but would not betray any secrets. He called the book Al-Akanim Al Thalatha, roughly translated as The Trinity.
Because Wisam wrote The Trinity on notebooks his colleagues smuggled into prison, and which were therefore contraband, he needed to keep the pages out of sight of his guards. Wisam and his fellow inmates devised a system for hiding such illegal documents they cheekily called “a fax.” Prisoners would pull the soft white inside out of a loaf of bread, mix it with water, then form the wet dough into a ball. Once the ball dried and hardened, it became easy to throw. Prisoners tied messages to these faxes and hurled them back and forth between sections of the prison camp. “There were prisoners who specialize in faxes,” Wisam said. “They are from villages and have good muscles from throwing stones.” Some of the best fax throwers could launch the hardened bread balls more than two hundred meters.
During inspections, Wisam’s colleagues would fasten his manuscript to a fax and throw it to sections of the camp that weren’t being searched, thus saving it from being discovered. “But one time, they made a mistake,” Wisam said. The thrower aimed poorly, and the fax landed within sight of prison guards who then confiscated the manuscript. Wisam had spent five months working on the novel and did not have the heart to rewrite it. “When we have the feeling to write something and we do it, and then we lose it, we can’t have the same feeling to write the same something,” he said. “So, khalas, I lost it.”
The Israelis moved Wisam to another prison soon afterward. Years later, after several more transfers, Wisam ended up at the prison in Asqalan. He received a message from one of his comrades in Nafha Prison. The man wanted Wisam’s advice on setting up a “cultural program” for PFLP inmates there. The man sent along a copy of their proposed reading list for Wisam to critique. Wisam was shocked: the list of books included The Trinity. Wisam sent a message back to Nafha asking where they had found his lost novel. All the man knew was that a prisoner at Ktzi’ot Prison, where Wisam was never interned, had somehow read Wisam’s book and handwrote a copy for himself. When this prisoner was transferred to Nafha, he brought the copy with him and shared it with his PFLP colleagues. The discovery that his book had somehow survived felt like a miracle to Wisam. “Something like when Jesus was born,” he said.
The Nafha prisoners sent the n
ovel back to Wisam, who copied the whole thing out again. This time, Wisam didn’t risk writing in a notebook that might be easily found. Instead, he rewrote the novel on thin squares of paper peeled from the back of cigarette package foil. “I wrote it very, very small,” he said. Then he encased the tiny pages into fifty-four waterproof capsules he fashioned by melting cellophane from cigarette packages around the papers. This method was commonly used to pass messages from prison to prison. When an inmate was about to be transferred, he would either swallow the capsules or, as Wisam said, “put in from under.” He pointed to his backside to indicate that they pushed the capsules into their rectums. Suppositories of words.
The prisoners sometimes smuggled entire books this way—hand copied, encapsulated, and either swallowed or inserted—especially titles by Marxist thinkers and PFLP founder George Habash, whose books were banned. Wisam once spent fifteen hours copying a 270-page book by Karl Marx onto cigarette foil papers and forming them into individual capsules. The following day, twenty PFLP prisoners each smuggled about a dozen capsules in their rectums during a prison transfer. “We have a method,” Wisam said. “We tie each of the capsules together so we can pull them out one by one. It is very, very dirty.” Wisam said that the papers smell so horrible after “delivery” that they cannot be read right away. “You must put them in the window for two days. And you will put aftershave or something on them.”
Wisam eventually had to sneak his own book out of prison. A prison transfer order came without warning, and Wisam didn’t have the time to distribute the encapsulated novel to his fellow transferees. So Wisam stuffed the fifty-four little pods into his underwear. The prison guard assigned to search Wisam noticed the resulting bulge and put his hand on Wisam’s crotch. “I yelled, ‘You are a gay! You put your hand on me, and you are a gay!’” The other prisoners started hollering, and guards rushed in to quell the noise. Wisam threatened to file an official complaint of sexual assault, and the guard eventually apologized. Wisam’s novel was never discovered.
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