Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  Unlike Hamas and some of the other Islamist resistance groups, the PFLP had always valued critical thought over religious faith. For them, the establishment of a Palestinian state was an ideological and intellectual goal, not a spiritual imperative. Going to prison during the First Intifada was “like being enrolled in a master’s degree program,” Wisam said. PFLP members within the prison held classes where they discussed strategy and introduced socialist philosophy to novices. New prisoners were given reading lists by their comrades and attended lectures by their senior members. “You studied everything: history, economics, novels, poetry.” After two years in prison, any member of the PFLP becomes an intellectual, Wisam said. A member of Hamas leaves having only learned the Koran.

  After the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s, the Israelis closed the prisons at Nablus and Jnaid and transferred the inmates to detention centers inside Israel. Wisam was interned in Jnaid at the time, and his fellow inmates worried about what would happen to the library they’d amassed. Wisam suggested they donate all the books and handwritten manuscripts to the municipal library in Nablus. As he and his fellow inmates packed the books to be shipped out, Wisam found the original book of Negm’s poems he’d transcribed when he was a teenage prisoner in Nablus Prison. Sometime in the preceding seventeen years, the notebook had been transferred to Jnaid’s library. The discovery was another literary miracle for Wisam. “It was a very good morning,” he said. “The book was my history. Thousands of prisoners read those poems.” He flipped through the book for a while, seeing the poems written by his teenage hand, then placed it in a box with the rest of the books. Once all the books were packed, Wisam’s mother picked up the boxes and brought them to the Nablus Library.

  Wisam was released from prison in 1998. Rula Abu Dhou was waiting for him. They were engaged within three weeks and married the following summer. Soon afterward, Wisam traveled to Nablus to find his notebook again in the municipal library. “I held it in my hand,” he said. “When I see it, I feel happy.”

  After speaking to Wisam, I went to see the “Prisoner’s Library” in Nablus. Two Palestinian sisters, Beesan and Zeina Ramadan, took me to the third-floor room in the municipal library which houses about eight thousand printed books and eight hundred notebooks from Nablus and Jnaid prisons. Most of the inmates in these prisons would have been jailed for their role in the First Intifada, and a large number of titles discussed Marxism and socialist economics. These are the same books Wisam and his PFLP colleagues would have read, studied, and copied during their incarcerations.

  Other books described the struggles of subjugated people elsewhere in the world. “The Palestinian movement has always felt connected to other independence movements, especially during the 1960s and 1970s,” Beesan said. I found an account of America’s destruction of its native peoples, and a workbook dedicated to Namibian independence. I also found a tattered book of songs about Nelson Mandela, himself a prisoner at the time, with both English and Arabic translations. Someone had written diacritical marks in pencil over the Arabic lyrics to indicate proper pronunciation, evidence that prisoners did not simply read the words but sang them aloud. I imagined a group of Palestinians, standing in their prison clothes, singing songs for a fellow political prisoner in a distant African jail cell.

  Many inmates of the time were students who wanted to keep up with their studies while in prison, Beesan said, hence the large section of textbooks and dictionaries. Prisoners who had been educated abroad gave foreign language lessons to their fellow inmates. A shelf of English fiction held the sort of classics high school teachers assign to their students. Titles by Dickens, Hardy, and Hemingway stood alongside the occasional spy thriller or English translation of Dostoyevsky and Mahfouz. There were unexpected selections, too, such as a biography of Picasso and The Burl Ives Songbook. Elsewhere in the library I browsed a selection of English nonfiction, most dedicated to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, with titles like The West Bank and the Rule of Law and Israeli Nuclear Deterrence. Others, like Silent Spring and Crime in America, cast a dark light on the United States government.

  The fact that the prisoners were allowed a library at all is itself a triumph. In the 1960s, decades before Wisam’s long incarcerations, the Israelis did not allow prisoners to have books. Inmates staged hunger strikes to demand them. The authorities eventually relented and began to cooperate with the Red Cross to allow selected books into the prison. Many remained banned, especially political titles, and everything had to be approved by prison officials. Nonetheless, inmates’ families smuggled in forbidden books by adding false covers and changing the first few pages so that the volumes would pass a casual inspection by guards. “This library stands as an accomplishment of the prisoners’ movement,” Beesan said. “Each book means someone had to suffer inside the prison. This is real struggle.”

  The end of the Cold War in the years preceding Oslo also left an ideological hole in the Palestinian project, as the socialist independence movements suddenly found themselves aimless and without a core philosophy. In Palestine, as elsewhere, the Left left. Even Wisam, who maintains that socialism could be a solution to the Palestinian struggle, admits that the Soviet model is dead. Political Islam stepped up and filled the ideological space that socialism had left behind.

  Compared to what came next—the violent excesses of the Second Intifada, the rise of religious extremism, infighting among Palestinian factions—the First Intifada seems a golden age of Palestinian resistance. The fighters have been cast as heroes, as better men fighting a more dignified and honorable fight. This is why their books are so important. “The prisoners who had these books in the seventies and eighties represent for me the prime of our civil struggle,” Zeina said. “It was our revolution.” For visitors to the library, like Beesan and Zeina, the books provide a tactile link to the prisoners and the time in which they lived. Nobody visits the library to read these books. They come to connect with the men who once held them, to put their fingers in the same place on those same pages—and, perhaps, to mourn what has been lost.

  Beesan and Zeina’s father, Mahmoud, was himself imprisoned in Jnaid for his political beliefs. He read many of these books, and he told his daughters that if they searched the volumes carefully, they might find his handwriting in the margins. “This is what I am looking for,” Zeina told me. “This is part of who I am.” As she flipped through books she guessed her father might have read, Zeina showed me some of the writing other prisoners had added. She found a couple lines of a Darwish poem scribbled in one book. Simple drawings of flowers and trees in another. The Palestinian flag rendered in blue ink. Passages underlined in red or notes made in margins. Following Zeina’s lead, I did the same, searching the spaces between the printed text for the ink of men I can know no other way than by the hieroglyphs they left behind.

  The librarian on staff waved me over. She lifted a thick hardcover book out of her desk and opened it to reveal a secret compartment hollowed out of the center. The librarian told us prisoners had used the book to smuggle messages back and forth. Slots cut adjacent to the compartment allowed the pages to be tied together just enough so a guard could thumb through the pages without discovering the inner cavity. The hollow still contained a stash of messages written on paper peeled from the backs of cigarette foil, just as Wisam had described. The delicate paper retained a scent of tobacco. The handwriting was exceptionally precise, almost puritan in its neatness, and nearly too tiny to read. These were hardly the writings of ham-fisted and uneducated thugs.

  Holding the hollowed-out book in my hands and gently unfolding the messages gave me a sort of forbidden thrill. I imagined Wisam in his cell, peeling the diaphanous paper—slowly, slowly—from the cigarette foil. I imagined him with a cheap ballpoint in his hand, resting his cheek on the table to bring his eyes as close to the paper as he can. Only his cramping fingers can discern the movement of the ballpoint. He writes tiny words about his life underground. Reproduced id
eas about Marx and independence and revolution, entire manifestos on paper as thin as gossamer. I pictured him wiping his aching eyes when he is done. Then he folds the paper twice, glances up from the table, and places the message inside the secret book.

  The First Intifada prisoners, the men Beesan and Zeina so admired, starved themselves so they could read and then swallowed and smuggled the words they’d written. In a place where ideas are forbidden, words themselves become a valuable contraband.

  I met Sharif Kanaana again to talk about the book All That Remains. Instead of sitting inside the shuttered and smoke-filled Café Ramallah, which made Sharif uncomfortable, we met in the brighter environs of his house. Sharif’s home stood along the road to Qalandiya and near a park filled with pomegranate trees, cypresses, Italian pines, and pink blooming oleander. Sharif’s wife, a woman from South Dakota named Pat, served coffee in a salon decorated with Southwest Americana. Framed cross-stitches of wild birds hung on walls next to glass cases filled with porcelain figurines of American Indian dancers from Arizona and New Mexico. Sharif sat next to me and pointed his good ear in my direction.

  In the 1980s, Sharif worked as the head of the research center at Birzeit University. He launched a project to document the history and geography of each Palestinian village abandoned or destroyed in the wake of the Nakba. He and a staff of nine research assistants randomly selected villages from regions throughout what is now Israel. They administered a questionnaire to about a dozen former residents of each village who were old enough to remember what the village was like. “We collected information only from people who were at least fifteen years old when they lived there. People who were aware of things,” Sharif said. His team also gathered old photographs and made family trees for all the various clans and families. Then they accompanied the residents to the village sites to search for and photograph whatever original structures remained, and Sharif collated the information for each village into a small booklet.

  Sharif hoped to create a booklet for each of the nearly four hundred villages lost in the Nakba. “After I made fifteen of them, I realized I wasn’t going to get very far. It was going too slow.” The research also proved expensive, and Birzeit University lacked the resources to continue funding such an ambitious project. Sharif wrote a letter to Walid Khalidi of the Khalidi Library family, who was living in the United States. Sharif described the work his team had already accomplished. Then he suggested that instead of producing four hundred individual books, perhaps a better strategy would be to create a single volume with two or three pages devoted to each village. Sharif asked Khalidi if he’d be willing to support such a project.

  Khalidi never answered Sharif directly. Instead, he contacted the administration at Birzeit University and offered to provide between four hundred and five hundred dollars for each village included in the project. With Khalidi’s money in hand, Sharif devised an efficient system for working on the book. He reassembled his team into three groups, each with a geographer, a photographer, and a research assistant. He sent each team into a different area in Israel to seek out original residents from the villages who would accompany the team to each site. Back in Birzeit, Sharif tasked another group of researchers to collect statistics for each village from old British Mandate records that stretched back to the mid-1920s. Sharif also recruited a historian to write a short history of each village they investigated. “And when the material about a village was ready, we put it together in a package and sent it to Walid Khalidi,” Sharif said.

  Visiting the ruined villages with their former residents transformed the project from an academic pursuit into something heartbreaking. Finding one’s home reduced to a few stones or, in most cases, vanished entirely shattered the villagers Sharif worked with. “I would take people from the village. When they got there, they’d break down,” Sharif said. He started to recount for me the time a man found the sparse traces of the cemetery where his father was buried, but Sharif couldn’t finish the story. He, too, broke down. His voice cracked, and he started to cry. Afraid he might spill his coffee, I took his cup from his quaking hand. Pat sat quietly with her head bowed, and I figured she’d seen this happen before. “I am sorry,” Sharif said once he composed himself. “I cannot control this. I can still see the scenes when the people saw the remains of their homes. Or the graves of their relatives.”

  Sometimes anger usurped sadness on these journeys. Sharif once took an eighty-year-old man to visit the site of his former village, al-Shaykh Muwannis. The Israelis built Tel Aviv University on village land after 1948, and the man’s former home was incorporated into the Eretz Israel Museum. “We wanted to go through the museum gate to get to the house,” Sharif said, “but they tried to charge us admission.” The man caused a scene, refusing to pay for a ticket to see his own house. Eventually, the woman at the ticket booth called for her supervisor, who allowed the man and Sharif’s team to enter the museum for free. The man has since died, Sharif said, and the house itself was bulldozed in 2003.

  The Institute for Palestine Studies published the book in 1992, in English, under the title All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. An Arabic edition followed a few years later. Even though Sharif and his team compiled the entries for all but fifty of the 418 villages included in the book, the English edition names Walid Khalidi as the editor and Sharif as associate editor. In the Arabic edition, Walid is listed as “author” while Sharif and his team are only thanked six or seven pages into the introduction. The book also fails to credit Sharif el-Musa, the Palestinian-American writer who did the bulk of the editing. Both Sharifs felt Khalidi took undue credit for the work, and they met in Ramallah to discuss whether or not to confront him. “We sat and talked and in the end agreed that the book is good and that we shouldn’t ruin its reputation. And to hell with Walid Khalidi.”

  I felt grateful that Sharif and el-Musa did not allow bitterness to darken the book’s accomplishment. All That Remains succeeds in evoking both the pastoral splendor of a lost Palestine and the tragedy of that loss. As Khalidi writes in the preface:

  All That Remains is a manual, a dictionary of destroyed villages presented individually, yet in the context of their region and the events that swept them away. It is an attempt to breathe life into a name, to give body to a statistic, to render to these vanished villages a sense of their distinctiveness. It is, in sum, meant to be a kind of “in memoriam.”

  Amid the book’s enumeration of fields overgrown with weeds, cacti, and Christ’s thorn are entries that read like sad and accidentally beautiful poems. “There are two large, open graves on the northeast side,” begins a description of Bayt Nattif. “The bones in the grave are visible.” Of a village called Zayta, the book tells us, “there are no traces of houses; only a well, still in use, is left.” The description of Darwish’s al-Birwa mentions the schoolhouse I visited with Abu Ahmed and reads: “All of these landmarks stand deserted amid cactuses, weeds, and fig, olive and mulberry trees.” Other times, the descriptions are so stark and clinical they leave the reader to fill in the sadness. In al-Haram, the “dilapidated cemetery overlooks the sea and is used as a parking lot for Israeli tourists.” In Qastina, “there was also a thick undergrowth of khubbayza, or mallow, a wild plant cooked as a vegetable in Palestinian peasant cuisine. Later when a photographer returned to the site, he discovered that this undergrowth had recently been burned off.” The banality of the language contributes to the feeling of absence.

  But the book does more than this. When I first held All That Remains in my hands and felt the heft of its six hundred and fifty pages, something else struck me. The book renders the emotional heaviness of the Nakba into actual weight. Each time I lifted the book from my desk, I could feel in my hands a physical representation of all that was lost. In 2014, a left-wing Israeli nonprofit group called Zochrot designed a smartphone app called iNakba that used GPS technology to make an interactive map of all the villages lost in 1948. The app incorpor
ated much of the material from All That Remains, along with updated information and photographs. For all its technological wizardry, though, the app lacks the book’s striking physicality. Tapping a screen is not the same as turning page after page after page. Hundreds of pins on a virtual map cannot evoke the same sense of loss as two kilograms of paper and ink.

  4

  I Do Not Have an Account in the Bank of Wars

  Mourid Barghouti wrote about crossing through the Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem in his 2009 book I Was Born There, I Was Born Here. Or rather, he refused to. “There’s no need to describe the exceptional tragedies that take place here,” he wrote. “It’s enough to picture in one’s mind the density and solidity of the fortifications, their iron-ness and cement-ness, and then to picture the fragility of the human body, any human body.” Much as I admire Barghouti, I disagree with him on this point. It is not enough to simply imagine Qalandiya.

  I once crossed on a Thursday morning during Ramadan when hundreds of people were trying to get into Jerusalem in advance of prayers the following day. The service taxi from Ramallah dropped me off in front of a large shed built of corrugated steel and lit by anemic fluorescent tubes. From here, the crowd pressed forward into a series of caged chutes, flanked by vertical steel bars and topped with a metal grate, that divided the crowd into tight single-file lines. The cages were so narrow that anyone carrying heavy bags had to enter sideways. Barbed wire coiled above us while the floor collected discarded cellophane from cigarette packages and other trash. The light through the bars cast striped shadows on patient but unsmiling faces. The steel and concrete surrounding us imposed a chill on the scene as Barghouti’s “iron-ness and cement-ness” came in contact with the warmth of human flesh.