by Sandy Tolan
Since she was a girl, Dalia had carried the gift of empathy—for the children of Holocaust survivors, the Sephardic classmates at her school, and the Arabs, like Bashir, who once lived in Ramla. On each occasion, she had struggled to enter someone else's experience through the faculty of her own imagination. She thought of six-year-old Bashir, missing a hand in the Gaza of 1948.
Dalia realized that for nearly all his life, Bashir had blamed the Zionists for placing booby-trapped "toys" in the sands of Gaza in order to maim Palestinian children. "I was amassed at the intensity of his perception that Zionism was this incredibly evil manifestation and that this was his experience," she reflected. But she was a child of Zion, the "mountain of God." "There was no way I could accept this description of the Zionists, my people, me, as being the expression of darkness. To me Zion is an expression of my very ancient longing, for me it's a word that symbolizes a harbor for my people and our collective expression here. And for him, it's a regime of terror. Something that's an obligation to fight. And to resist in every way. Because for him if Zionism is a reign of terror, then terrorism is an appropriate answer!"
Dalia's voice was rising. She paused and gathered herself before speaking again: "And I say that I cannot afford to fight one wrong with another wrong. It doesn't lead anywhere!"
Bashir had neared the end of his letter. "I don't want to overburden you, Dalia," he wrote.
I know how sensitive you are. I know how you hurt. I don't wish you any pain. All that I wish is for you and me to struggle together with all of the peace and freedom loving people for the establishment of a democratic popular state. And to struggle together to bring the idea of the Dalia child care center to life. And to struggle with me for my return to my old mother, to my wife and my children, to my homeland, to struggle with me to reunite me with my palm, my palm that has blended with every grain of Palestinian soil.
Yours with respect, faithfully,
Bashir
Dalia sat quietly for a long time, "quite shaken," gazing at the letter. She tried to enter the psychological reality of the person who wrote it. Bashir was making an appeal for Dalia to help him unite with his homeland. By what means? she kept asking herself. Dalia had long heard Bashir's proposal that the land of Israel and Palestine be transformed into a single democratic secular state for all the people of historic Palestine. She believed, however, that a single state would mean the end of Israel, and for this reason she could not endorse Bashir's idea or his belief in the right of Palestinians to return to their old homes. It was true that Dalia had offered to return her house to Bashir, or at least to find some way to share its legacy, but she would go to great lengths to explain that this was a personal choice, not to be understood as an endorsement of a broader right of return for the Palestinians. It seemed inevitable that Bashir and Dalia would never reconcile their differences.
In September 1989, shortly after she received, read, and reread Bashir's letter from Tunis, Dalia drove out of Jerusalem, where she now lived, up the smooth, curving highway toward the crest of Kastel, the hilltop where the Haganah won a key battle to control the road in her country's War of Independence; past the stone minarets of the mosque of the Arab village of Abu Ghosh; down the hillside as the mountain walls closed in at Bab al-Wad, the Gate of the Valley; past the burned carcasses of Israeli army trucks and jeeps blown up in past battles and now adorned with wreaths; through the valley of Latrun; past the old familiar cement factory; and finally to the bump of the railroad crossing at the outskirts of Ramla. Dalia was back in her hometown.
It was time to move forward with the plan to honor the common history of the Khairi and Eshkenazi families. Dalia drove past Ramla City Hall—an Arab house that once belonged to Sheikh Mustafa Khairi—and parked outside the office of the city's cultural center on Weizmann Street, where she soon found herself shaking hands with a young Arab man named Michail Fanous.
The Fanous family history in Ramla went back centuries. Michail's father, Salem, a Christian minister, had been held as a prisoner of war by the Israeli army after the occupation of al-Ramla in 1948. Salem Fanous had accepted imprisonment in the POW camp as God's will, but he would not tell his children about it until decades later, a few days before his death. He told Michail, "Christianity is love. I didn't want you to hate the Jews. They are your neighbors."
"His lands were taken away," Michail recounted. "He woke up to a different life, a different culture, a different reality. He was in jail for nine months. And he felt a stranger in his own home. And all the time he was talking about Jesus. And he never had hatred for all the people who hurt him. It's amazing."
Michail had spent much of his thirty years trying to reconcile his identity as a Christian Palestinian citizen of Israel. He had grown up with the Zionist narrative, which for an Arab boy was inherently confusing. When his classmates insisted the other Arabs had fled Ramla like cowards, Mikhail would shout, "No, they didn't, just ask my father!"
During the early 1970s, Michail had attended junior high in the West Bank and understood what it meant to be a Palestinian living under occupation. Later he returned home to attend Ramla-Lod High School and tried anew to fit into his Zionist surroundings. He even tried to embrace the Zionist narrative for a time while rising to the presidency of the student body in Ramla's nearly all-Jewish high school. Of the 850 students, only 6 were Arabs. In his senior year, he was told he would be ineligible to attend military training camp with his Jewish schoolmates. Michail realized this was simply because he was an Arab. He began to understand why people would refer to him as a "demographic problem" in Israel.
. By 1989, Michail Fanous had been elected to the Ramla City Council— only the second Arab since 1948. His platform was based on antiracism and on advocating for the rights of the Arab minority in Israel, which made up nearly 20 percent of the population.
Minutes after Dalia arrived in the Ramla cultural center, she and Michail were deep in conversation. At first it seemed the other Israelis at the meeting had been uncomfortable with the subject, but soon neither Dalia nor Michail was paying them much attention. Dalia told Michail her story and the story of the house built in 1936 by Ahmad Khairi—the home that had been at the center of her life and of Bashir's.
Michail's wish was to serve the Arab population of Ramla as best he knew how; perhaps, it occurred to him, just as it occurred to Dalia, they could work together to share their two dreams. Each wanted do something for the Arab population and provide a place where Arab and Jew could meet.
Dalia proposed that Michail be the Christian Arab partner in an enterprise that would give witness to the history of Arab and Jew. It would include a kindergarten for the Arab children of Ramla and a center for Arab-Jewish coexistence.
"Here is someone telling me my story," Michail recalled thinking at the time. "It's a story of 1948, and of one people finding a home and another losing his home. It could not happen one without the other."
He looked at Dalia and said: "We can dream together."
In October 1991, the first four Arab kindergarten children walked through the doors Ahmed Khairi had framed and secured fifty-five years earlier. This was the beginning of Bashir's dream: to bring joy to the Arab children of al-Ramla. Soon the mission would expand, incorporating the vision of Dalia, Yehezkel, and Michail: to be a place of encounter between Arab and Jew.
They would call it Open House.
Twelve
HOPE
BASHIR SAT IN the shade near the eastern end of the Allenby Bridge, which connected the kingdom of Jordan to the land of his birth. It was April 1996, a warm spring morning in the Jordan Valley. Bashir and his sister, Khanon, were resting on a bench outside the Jordanian passport control building, waiting to cross,, Finally a bus arrived. Bashir, Khanon, and the other passengers climbed on and rode past military sentry posts and through a series of checkpoints and razor-wire fences. The bus crossed the bridge and over the narrow trickle of the once great Jordan River—diminished by upstream dams and diversion
s to a weed-lined ditch separating Hussein's kingdom from the West Bank. Anyone foolish enough to jump from the East Bank to the West would be more likely to get shot than wet.
The Allenby Bridge was named after the British general who led his troops into Palestine in 1917 at the beginning of the British Mandate. After eight decades of rule by British, Jordanian, and Israeli forces, the bridge was now under limited control of the newly formed Palestinian Authority. The partial autonomy was a result of the Oslo peace accords, symbolized by the handshake between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993.
The intifada had convinced Rabin to begin discussions with a "Palestinian entity," and after the 1991 Gulf War, the two sides began negotiations. Rabin, however, had still refused to recognize the PLO, and consequently the negotiations had stalled. The two sides then began the secret talks at Oslo, where the initial agreements called for limited Palestinian self-rule and a gradual Israeli pullout from the occupied territories. In exchange, Arafat, in a letter to Rabin, promised to "renounce the use of terrorism and other acts of violence" and "discipline violators."
"Mr. Chairman," Rabin wrote in response to his longtime nemesis, "the Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. . . ." For decades, Rabin had sworn Israel would never do this.
The mutual pledges were intended to mark the beginning of the end of the occupation and lead, the Palestinians hoped, to a sovereign state of Palestine. Israeli troops would "redeploy" from Gaza and Jericho, then other West Bank cities; Palestinians would hold free elections for a president (according to the Palestinians) or chairman (according to the Israelis) and a legislative council; and the Palestinian Authority, supported by funds from European governments, the United States, and private donors, would take responsibility for education and culture, health, social welfare, taxation, and tourism. These initial steps in a five-year "transitional period" were to lead to final status negotiations over the more difficult issues of Jerusalem, control of water, settlements, and, most important for Bashir and many others, the right of return.
In the first days after Oslo, plans for even limited self-government were immensely popular with Palestinians. When Arafat returned to Gaza in July 1994, delirious throngs welcomed him as a conquering liberator. Tangible symbols of sovereignty—the freedom to wave the Palestinian flag or Arafat's mailing, on January 1, 1995, of the first letter bearing a Palestinian stamp—seemed the beginning of something larger and more profound.
By early 1996, hundreds of PLO officials and former Palestinian fighters had begun to return from their exile in Tunis and cross back into the West Bank and Gaza. Each individual had been approved by the Israelis during lengthy amnesty discussions. On the bridge, unseen behind the Palestinian police in their olive green uniforms, Israeli military officers peered through one-way glass, carefully monitoring the crossings.
The bus carrying Bashir and Khanon pulled up at a terminal built by Israel to process Palestinians and Israelis in separate wings. The Palestinian wing was managed by a Palestinian deputy who reported to an Israeli director-general. Israel, according to the Oslo agreements, "remains responsible during the interim period for external security," including "throughout the passage" of the border terminals.
Bashir and Khanon got off the bus and entered the Palestinian wing, where a Palestinian policeman stood beside a Palestinian flag. Next to him stood an Israeli soldier. The terminal was packed with people awaiting family reunions: aged women in flowing white head scarves and dark, ankle-length dresses, their heavy purses slung over their shoulders; gray-haired men in keffiyehs and neckties; teenagers in jeans and sneakers; balding middle-aged men in business suits, toting briefcases and cell phones the size of shoes. They all waited in long lines to pass through the metal detectors. It was remarkably quiet, given the crowds and the impending reunions. People pointed to their luggage so it could be placed on a conveyor belt for inspection; beyond the metal detectors, Bashir could see opened suitcases atop the customs tables, where Israeli security officials were carefully examining clothing, books, newspapers, brushes, and toothpaste tubes.
Bashir and his sister waited their turn. By now the rest of the family would have gathered just a few feet away, on the other side of the exit doors. Bashir had been gone for eight years, but even in exile, he had dreamed of a different kind of return. For him, this return was marked by the deep flaws of the Oslo process. Oslo represented concessions by the Israelis to allow the exiled to come back to the West Bank and Gaza, but it also implied acceptance by the Palestinians that return to the rest of Palestine was no longer attainable. For many former fighters and activists in the Palestinian political factions, the journey back to Palestine was therefore marked by deep ambivalence. Nowhere during the Oslo negotiations or their resulting agreements, Bashir noted, was there any mention of Resolution 194, the 1948 UN mandate for return of the refugees. Rather, the basis of negotiations was the later resolution, 242, which called for withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories. This was what led to the "land for peace" equation: a Palestinian state on a part of Palestine, in exchange for Palestinian acceptance of Israel. For many Palestinians, including Arafat, it was time to make hard political sacrifices. Some Palestinians, including Bashir, felt the sacrifices they had already made were on behalf of a national liberation for all of old Palestine; this compromise, if it meant giving up the right of refugees to return, represented capitulation. Worse for some Palestinians was that Oslo had placed the refugee question, along with key issues of East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and control of water in the West Bank and Gaza, to final-status negotiations at some unknown future date, while Israel maintained control in the present.
As Bashir waited in line to pass through security there was an inherent tension between his dream and the Palestinian reality—a tension Bashir preferred not to talk about: As a result of Oslo, Bashir would soon be seeing his mother, his wife, and his two small children. He would be in Palestine for the first time since his deportation to Lebanon in 1988. But he would not be all the way home in al-Ramla.
A security guard pulled Bashir aside. They had some questions, Khanom recalled, and she watched her brother disappear into a room while she waited.
Several hours later, Bashir and Khanom walked through the clouded glass doors at the western end of the terminal and into the open air of the West Bank, where Zakia, Nuha, Scheherazade, and the children, and many of Bashir's friends were waiting.
They had traveled from Ramallah. It was like the time in 1984, when Bashir was released from prison—except that for at this reunion, twelve years later, Ahmad was gone. As before, Bashir didn't want a big celebration. "He was overwhelmed," Khanom remembered, but "he was very happy."
"It was like a second wedding," said Nuha. "My mom prepared food, many friends came. With Bashir there were many more sad days than good days. And this was for sure a significant day in the history of the family."
Bashir's first days back in Ramallah were bittersweet. Arafat's embrace of Oslo, together with his pledge to control "terrorism and other forms of violence," had begun to pit the champion of Palestinian liberation against the disparate Palestinian factions that had grown increasingly unsettled about Oslo. To them, accepting Oslo represented a surrender of 78 percent of historic Palestine; even the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, which represented the other 22 percent, Israel didn't seem prepared to hand over. Already the Israeli government had announced plans for thousands of new housing units in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians envisioned as their capital, and Israeli construction crews were building new "bypass" roads to better facilitate the travel of settlers from the West Bank to Israel. These plans were being undertaken within the Oslo framework, and many Palestinians worried that the new facts on the ground would permanently alter their chances for a viable, sovereign state. These fears were made more acute with the sudden surge in poli
tical violence and assassination, which had begun less than six months after the famous handshake on the White House lawn.
On February 25, 1994, a medical doctor and American settler named Baruch Goldstein walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs, part of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, where Bashir had received his aqiqa ceremony in 1943. The settler from Brooklyn pulled an M-16 from beneath his coat and opened fire, killing twenty-nine Palestinians praying in the mosque. Survivors pummeled him to death. Six weeks later, Hamas, the militant Islamic organization, abandoned its strategy of attacking only Israeli military targets. On April 6, a car bomb exploded in the Israeli town of Afula, killing six Israeli civilians. Hamas claimed responsibility. A communiqué declared the attack was revenge for those who died in the Hebron massacre.
The cycle of pain and retaliation had returned. Suicide bombers recruited by Hamas and Islamic Jihad blew themselves up in Netanya, Hadera, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and occupied portions of the Gaza Strip, killing dozens of Israelis; Hamas leaders claimed each attack on civilians was a direct response to Israeli attacks that killed Palestinian civilians.
Israel bulldozed the houses of suicide bombers' families and rounded up hundreds of suspected co-conspirators. Prisoners, according to Human Rights Watch, reported "sleep deprivation, hooding, prolonged standing or sitting in unnatural positions, threats, beatings and violent whiplashing of the head. . . . Applied in combination, these methods often amount to torture." Many of the suspects were later released without charge.
Arafat condemned each suicide attack and, under pressure from Israel and the United States, ordered the arrest of suspected members of militant groups. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were in Palestinian jails, many by order of a secret Palestinian military court for state security established under the Oslo framework,. In the first year of the court, several men died during interrogations; many Palestinians accused Arafat of doing the dirty work for Israel. The chairman responded to criticism by closing several newspapers and detaining prominent Palestinian human rights advocates. Edward Said, the Columbia University professor and leading Palestinian intellectual, wrote that "Arafat and his Palestinian Authority have become a sort of Vichy government for Palestinians."