Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  When I was a boy, my friends and I raised the Palestinian flag in our school playground. We did it because it was our flag, and it was illegal to fly it, and because we knew it would drive the Israeli soldiers crazy when they saw it up there. We watched them arrive and we threw stones at them. In return they fired tear gas, rubber bullets, live rounds. Then they tore the flag down and we threw more stones and then we put the flag back up again. Putting up a flag could mean a year in jail. We were always ducking and running and jumping walls. We were kids, we didn’t really understand what was going on. People come to your village, people you don’t recognize, people speaking a language you don’t know, who are they? Like aliens. They come in their jeeps and armored carriers and they patrol the streets and they say show me your I.D., get up against the wall, shut your mouth, turn around, get on the ground. They invade your home in the hills, block it off, smash it up. They hide eviction orders under rocks. They tuck them away so you won’t find them. They arrest your father, your brothers, your uncles. They stop you on the way to school. They arrest your teacher outside the school gates. Soon enough they arrest you too. They make you stand in the sun at the checkpoints during Ramadan, but they are experts at finding deck chairs for themselves, it’s a sandy beach for some of them, they have coolers of soda at their feet, they snap open the cans, they sleep with their hands behind their heads while your brain boils in the heat and you wait.

  I had polio, but I still ran to school, avoiding the jeeps. It was like an Olympic sport. Children I knew were beaten and killed. This is just the way it was, no exaggeration, everyone knew at least one child who was killed, and most of us knew several. You get so used to it, sometimes you think it’s normal. At the age of twelve I joined a demonstration and I saw it happen in front of my eyes. I was at the back of the crowd. A boy’s arms went up in the sky, he took his last breath, he’d been shot in the groin, he keeled over a few yards from me, they carried him through. From that moment on I developed a deep need for revenge except I didn’t think of it then as revenge, I thought of it as justice, for a long time they were the same thing to me, justice and revenge.

  At first we just threw stones and empty bottles, but one day my friends and I came across some discarded hand grenades in a cave and we decided to throw them at the Israeli jeeps. Two of them exploded, not even exploded, they just fizzled out. Luckily, no one was injured because we didn’t know how to use them properly. We were chased in the hills, caught, arrested, and in 1985, at the age of seventeen, the prison latch slid closed in front of my eyes, a long story, a long seven years.

  We had a mission in jail and the Israelis had a mission too. Our mission was to survive as humans. Theirs was to rob us of our humanity. Often, we would be waiting to go into the dining room when the alarms suddenly went off. Then the soldiers appeared and ordered us to strip naked. This was the IDF, the army, not the prison guards. They were on a training mission. Of course they deny it, but it happened. A very embarrassing thing—a group of teenagers to be stripped of everything, first our clothes, then our voices, and then everything else, our dignity. They were heavily armed with guns, batons, helmets. They beat us until we couldn’t stand. You realize eventually that you have to preserve your humanity—your right to laugh and cry—in order to save yourself. So I started screaming out at them: “Murderers! Nazis! Oppressors!” They kept beating us, but what struck me most was that these young soldiers, not much older than me, were doing it without hatred, without emotions even, because for them this was just a training exercise. Lesson A, hit the object. Lesson B, kick the object. Lesson C, drag the object by the hair. I don’t think they even realized what they were doing, they were so happy with their efficiency, doing such a good job. Let’s face it, they are very good at irony—they call it the Defense Forces, but I swear to you those who hold guns are captured by those guns. They would never have beaten their dogs in the same way. And as the leader—I eventually became commander—I was always beaten right until the end. I woke up under hospital lights and then another beating came.

  Luckily for me they say you have a hard head when you are born near al-Khalil, or Hebron. In prison, one evening, I saw a TV documentary about the Holocaust. At the time I was happy to think of the fate of six million Jews. Go ahead and die, go ahead, please, make it more, make it seven million, eight, oh nine million, please! For us, growing up, the Shoah was a pure lie, I wasn’t interested in made-up history. My enemy was that: my enemy. He could have no pain, he could have no feelings. Not after what he had done to me and my family. Let what happened once happen again. And again. And again. Make it ten million. But after a few minutes of this I began to feel something along my spine, a shiver. I tried to shake it off, to convince myself that it was just a feeling, nothing real, and this was just a movie, nothing real—there are no human beings that would do this to other humans. Impossible, who would do this to anyone? How is that even part of human? And the longer it went on the more barbaric it became. I couldn’t understand it. Here they were, herded into gas chambers without fighting back. If they knew they were going to die, why didn’t they scream out, push back, fight or try to run? I was turned inside out. I didn’t know what to think. I sat in my cell. Trust me, I was not soft, but that night I turned to the wall, pulled the blanket up and began shivering. I tried to hide it from my fellow prisoners but something in me changed—or maybe it hadn’t, but something was coming from a new direction, maybe I had just found something that was there all along.

  When I was a kid, I thought it was a punishment from God to be a Palestinian, a Muslim, an Arab. I carried it around, a big heavy weight around my neck. When you’re a kid you always ask why, but adults forget to ask why anymore. You just accept it. They smashed up our homes. Accepted. They herded us through checkpoints. Accepted. They told us to get permits for things they got for free. Accepted. But in prison I began to think about our lives, our identity, being Arab, and that led me to think about the Jews too. And I knew now this Holocaust was real—it had happened. And I began to think, reluctantly first, that so much of the Israeli mind must have stemmed from that, and then I decided to try to understand who these people really were, how they suffered, and why it was that in ’48 they had turned their oppression back on us again and again, stole our houses, took away our land, gave us our Nakba, our catastrophe. We, the Palestinians, became the victims of the victims. I wanted to understand more. Where was all this coming from? In prison I began to pick up a few more words of Hebrew and even Yiddish. And soon I had a conversation with a guard. He asked me, “How can someone like you become a terrorist?” And then he tried to tell me that I was a settler on his land, not him on mine. He really believed that we, the Palestinians, were the settlers, that we had taken their land. I said, “If you can convince me that we are the settlers, then I’ll declare this in front of all my fellow prisoners.” He said he never met anyone like me before. It was the start of a dialogue and a friendship. From then on he treated me with respect. He allowed me to drink tea from a glass, he brought me a prayer mat. It was illegal but he did it anyway.

  In prison we made belt buckles from coffee cans. One of the other guards, Meir, was very simple. He was told not to talk to anyone, especially me, who they called the Cripple. I was considered dangerous. The authorities were wary of me. The quiet one is forever dangerous. I was always being put in solitary. But Meir wanted a belt for his sweetheart that said Meir Loves Maya in Hebrew. I ordered my fellow prisoners to make a nice one—they were astounded to be making a belt for an Israeli, in Hebrew too, but they did it because they trusted me and I was commander. Meir loved it and he said, “What do you want me to bring you in return?” And I said, “Nothing, just a very small gun, please.” He laughed and said, “Seriously, what do you want?” “Just a small gun,” I said, “oh, and lots of bullets.” He laughed again. So I asked my fellow prisoners what they wanted. They were all young and they said they really wanted Coca-Cola, can you imagine? A bottle of
Coca-Cola. That was all. And so I told Meir and he brought two large bottles and hid them in a water tank. I made sure everyone got a taste. That day, one hundred and twenty prisoners got to sip a tiny little bit of Coca-Cola. They never forgot it, one of their best days in prison. We all used the same cup. It tastes better in glass—Hertzl, the other guard, had given me the glass. Every single one got a drink, so there could be no collaborators, no snitches.

  I also got some cassettes of Ibrahim Muhammad Saleh—Abu Arab—singing mawals about the return of the refugees, about the freedom of political prisoners. Listening to him was like a revolution going off in my head. I sang them out the cell door, it was hard to shut me up, I also sang some of the old fellahin work songs, the wedding ballads too. The best music forgets that it is being sung. It comes naturally. After a while Abu Arab became my nickname in prison.

  In jail there was a collaborator on our side, helping the Israelis. I was the leader, so they asked me to deal with him. It was too much for me not to kick him. And I did. I kicked him when he was down. Kicked and kicked and kicked him. But then, as I’m doing it, I said to myself, Why, why, why am I kicking this man? Am I a robot? Do I just want to repeat what the Israelis do to me?

  And in prison I was reading more and more. Listening too. I was taking classes, expanding my mind. Gandhi. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, I didn’t like him so much. Martin Luther King, I liked him. No wisdom in the gun. There will come a time. I have a dream. Mubarak Awad. So many people. And so I began to think that maybe they were right and the only way to achieve peace was through nonviolence and resistance.

  I got released in October 1992. I got married right away. Out of prison and into marriage, go figure. But seriously, it was the happiest time of my life. In 1994, we had our first child, we called him Araab. I was a father now, I had a duty to think about things differently. Not because I became a coward, but sometimes you sacrifice yourself in a different way. It was the time of the Oslo Accords and there was a great feeling of hope for a two-state solution. When I saw the Israeli jeeps leaving Jenin and the kids threw olive branches at them, I asked myself: “Why did I spend seven years in jail when it might have been achieved another way?” But then Oslo disintegrated. The politicians said we weren’t ready for it—they only seem to know what is best for lining their pockets, Arabs and Jews, we’re the same, it doesn’t matter, there are crooks on all sides, Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, they knew what they were doing. I was completely distraught. Another chance gone. And then the bombings started—these were the biggest political, strategic and moral mistake that we ever made during the Second Intifada. I started to get even more active, saying that we needed to change our ways. I read more and more about nonviolence and political engagement. I began to realize that violence is exactly what our opponents wanted us to use. They prefer violence because they can deal with it. They are vastly more sophisticated with violence. It’s nonviolence that is hard to deal with, whether coming from Israelis or Palestinians or both. It’s confusing to them.

  Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t turn my back on what I believed. It was the same goal I always had and will always have until the day it happens—to end the Israeli Occupation. You see, the Occupation exists in every aspect of your life, an exhaustion and a bitterness that nobody outside it really understands. It deprives you of tomorrow. It stops you from going to the market, to the hospital, to the beach, to the sea. You can’t walk, you can’t drive, you can’t pick an olive from your own tree which is on the other side of the barbed wire. You can’t even look up in the sky. They have their planes up there. They own the air above and the ground below. You need a permit to sow your land. Your door is kicked in, your house is taken over, they put their feet on your chairs. Your seven-year-old is picked up and interrogated. You can’t imagine it. Seven years old. Be a father for a minute and think of your seven-year-old being picked up in front of your eyes. Blindfolded. Zip ties put on his wrists. Taken to military court in Ofer. Most Israelis don’t even know this happens. It’s not that they’re blind. They just don’t know what is being done in their name. They’re not allowed to see. Their newspapers, their televisions, they don’t tell them these things. They can’t travel in the West Bank. They have no idea how we are living. But it happens every day. Every single day. We will never accept it. Even after one thousand years we’ll never accept it. The Qur’an says: Look at the signs around you, do you not see? The Occupation knocks us down and we get up. We are steadfast. We won’t give in. Even if they hang me with my own veins. You see, ending the Occupation is our only real hope for everyone’s security, Israeli, Palestinian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Bedouin, it doesn’t matter. The Occupation corrupts us all from the inside out. But how do we go about ending it? I knew back then—and even more so now—that we have to do things differently. I tried to make sure my son would never go to the Israeli jails, that he wouldn’t end up throwing stones. Look, I understand stones, stones are not bullets, but the Israelis took the stone out of our stone, and made the stones into something else. I wanted to say to them: Just don’t be here and then we don’t have to throw stones at you. But they’re here. Uninvited. What are we left with when they take the stone from the stone? We had to learn to use the force of our humanity. To be violently nonviolent. To bow our heads to the things that we need to tell one another. That is not soft, that’s not weak, on the contrary, it’s human.

  It’s a tragedy that we need to continually prove that we are human beings. Not only to the Israelis, but also for other Arabs, our brothers and sisters, to the Americans, to the Chinese, the Europeans. Why is that? Do I not look human? Do I not bleed human? We are not special. We are a people, just like any other.

  It wasn’t until 2005 that some of us started meeting in secret with former Israeli soldiers. I was among the first four Palestinians. You can’t imagine the first meeting. Up in the Everest Hotel. For us they were criminals, killers, enemies, assassins. And for them, we were the same. One of them was Rami’s son, Elik. This is how our two families met. We were meeting as enemies who now wanted to speak. These young Israelis were refusing to fight in the West Bank and Gaza, not for the sake of the Palestinian people, but for their own people. We were not acting to save Israeli lives either, but to prevent Palestinians from suffering. We were being selfish, both sides, and that is natural, why wouldn’t you be? At first I didn’t care about them. Okay, they were different, but so what? It was only later that we both came to feel a responsibility for each other’s people. It took more than a year. We started Combatants for Peace. There, in the Everest Hotel, up the road, near the settlement, by the Wall, two minutes away.

  Rumi, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there. We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it’s crazy. We sat in the Everest Hotel and talked about ending the Occupation. Even that word occupation makes most Israelis tremble. Of course, each one had a different point of view—they are the occupiers and we are the ones under occupation, so it looks different to them. But in the end we were all dying, we were killing each other, over and over and over. We needed to know each other instead. This is the center of gravity, this is where it all comes down. There will be security for everyone when we have justice for everyone. As I have always said, it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.

  Maybe the story could have ended there. I wish it could have. I wish I could walk out of here now, back to Jericho, to my garden, and not have to tell you any more, story finished, good night, I hope the morning comes with peace.

  But on January 16, 2007—two years after Combatants for Peace was founded—my ten-year-old daughter, Abir, walked out from her school early in the morning. It was a quiet day, my Black Tue
sday, not much was going on. She was just by the school gates when she was shot by a member of the Israeli border police. With a rubber bullet. An American-made rubber bullet. An American-made M-16. From an American-made jeep. There was no violence or Intifada going on. She was shot. In the back of the head. She had just gone to the store. She had just bought herself some candy.

  There were so many lies, everyone was scrambling to tell their version of the truth, the Commander said they weren’t in the area, he claimed there was no such operation, then they swore on oath she was hit with a Palestinian rock even though a rubber bullet was found right beside her body, then they tried to suggest she was throwing stones. But there was one simple truth: a ten-year-old girl was shot in the back of the head from a distance of a few meters by an eighteen-year-old border guard who stuck his gun out of the jeep and fired directly at her. She never regained consciousness. The ambulance was delayed for hours because they said there was rioting. Soon the rest of the world was appalled by the details of what happened, not least that Abir had just bought that candy at the store. Some details are heartbreaking because they are so simple, sometimes I think that she hadn’t had time to eat it. I often wake thinking about that, the most expensive candy on earth.

  So here I was, a man whose daughter is murdered by those he wants peace with. There is an Arabic saying, As-sallāmu ʿalaykum, peace be on you. We say it all the time. Well, it was not on us, nowhere near us. There was no criminal investigation. There never is when one of us is shot. They never say “killed” with a rubber bullet. They say “caused the death of.” That is their language, but it is not everyone’s. Most of the time nothing is ever said or done when a Palestinian child is killed, but many hundreds of my Israeli brothers and Jewish brothers around the world supported me in bringing the soldier to trial. Amazing. But the Supreme Court decided there was no evidence, so they closed the file for the fourth time. We had fourteen eyewitnesses but they still said there was no evidence, how is it that twenty-eight eyes can see nothing? My child was not a fighter. She was not a member of Fatah or Hamas. She was sunshine. She was good weather. She told me once that she wanted to be an engineer. Can you imagine what sort of bridges she could have built?