Where the Line is Drawn

by Raja Shehadeh

  I had tried to minimise my expenses during my studies in London so I would not be beholden to my father. Yet regardless of all my attempts to break free from my family, my life could never be completely independent of them. I yearned to have a life of my own, which for young Israeli men of my age seemed entirely possible. They also had democracy and freedom of expression. I could not read their Hebrew newspapers but was impressed by how freely the English-language Jerusalem Post published opinions critical of the government. I contributed poems and articles to the youth page. For that I was taken aside by the president of Birzeit College, where I was studying, and told in no uncertain terms that it was wrong to contribute to a Zionist newspaper.

  In Israel it appeared possible to criticise the highest officials. They could be tried in court if they committed an offence. The courts seemed to be independent and to provide a safeguard against corruption. They also had a law that every letter written to an official must be answered. If the sender did not like the answer, there was always an appeal process, so you never felt like you were at the mercy of lazy or corrupt officials who could simply disregard you. It was all so unlike the way officialdom and politics operated in Jordan. Unlike the staid, oppressed people around us, Israelis came across as active, adventurous and confident. Nothing seemed to stand in their way. They had a deep appreciation of Western classical music and an excellent music radio station, which I listened to, as well as superb live concerts and a music academy that produced world-class musicians. They were creative and organised. Why not learn from them? Why not put the nineteen years of backward Jordanian rule behind us – nineteen years of stagnation while Israel moved ahead and built a new society? And for a young man like me, nineteen years was a long time.

  I was also highly impressed by the socialist kibbutz experiment. Later on I wondered whether my interest in living in an ashram in Pondicherry, India, in the early 1970s might have been my way of experiencing what the early Zionists had tried to do – experimenting in new ways of living and getting away from the shackles of family and traditional society.

  Perhaps, I thought, the Israelis would be more likely to understand me and my search for an alternative society than traditional Palestinians, who seemed intolerant of change and difference, and could not begin to accept that I had chosen to leave London for India to try my hand at a spiritual life.

  This matter of national character was on my mind. It was what I discussed with Henry during that first encounter. When I spoke of my admiration for how I thought Israel was forging a national personality, Henry looked sceptical. He said he did not see it like that. Being a pacifist, he did not like the emphasis on the military. He was influenced by the views of people like Ahad Ha’am, the founder of cultural Zionism, who favoured a secular vision of Israel as a Jewish spiritual centre, not necessarily a state for Jews.

  Henry had just arrived in Israel from Cyprus after finishing his doctorate in psychology at Yale University. He had no idea whether he would be staying in Israel and, if he did, what he would do. Or at least he didn’t tell me. In Cyprus he had witnessed the terrible effects of the partition of the small island between the ethnic Turkish community and the ethnic Greek community, with the expulsion of the Greek Cypriots from the Turkish part of the island. He had made it a point to visit both Greek and Turkish sectors and felt for the refugees and the injustice they were suffering.

  Of the little he knew about Israel and Palestine, he suspected that a similar situation existed there. As he made his way to Israel, he felt certain that he would be unable to keep silent about what was happening. He would most likely get arrested once he became involved in political activities. What form that would take and what would be the nature of his involvement he did not know.

  I noticed that Henry was drinking his coffee black and asked why.

  ‘I’m lactose-intolerant,’ he said.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Seventy per cent of Semites are. We both belong to the same racial group and are among the majority of intolerants,’ he said, laughing heartily.

  In the hotel foyer, there was a lot of smoking, which bothered Henry. He was a non-smoker (his mother’s death was smoking-related, so he couldn’t stand it) and he did not drink. We went outside on to a balcony to get some fresh air.

  As we stood there, Henry told me that he was a vegetarian and that he observed the Sabbath. Explaining how this had come about, he told me that he had gone to Madagascar to study burial rituals after the death of his mother. She had died very suddenly. He and his siblings had tried their best but failed to resuscitate her. Ever since, he had been fascinated by death rituals. Whenever he found a dead animal on the road he stopped to give it a burial.

  ‘Even on the highway?’ I asked

  ‘Yes. I cannot tolerate seeing a creature left unburied.’

  Then he told me about his ‘death, decay and resurrection.’ It was a fascinating tale.

  ‘I don’t remember everything from my time in Madagascar,’ he said, ‘but I recall drinking salt water as an emetic. I have always suffered from constipation, which was severe at the time. Then vomiting, diarrhoea, passing out on a supply truck coming down from the north of the island. I came close to death and to madness.

  ‘At the time I thought I was Moses. I am coming back, bringing miracles. I am the Creator. I must say the Word to bring about the Light of Day. These are the things I do remember.

  ‘I was rescued by a relative of mine, Dave Allon, who called his Madagascan friend, who then called his relative, a Cabinet minister. The minister sent in an air force jet fighter that flew me from Ile Sainte-Marie, which is also known as the Island of Abraham. I then flew on Air Madagascar to London via Jedda. I was put on an antipsychotic drug by a French neuro-psychiatrist, who told my sister, Ilana, “If he is nervous, give him more.” The effect of the overdose was my jaw was dislocated, my arms were wheeling, my legs bicycling out of control. At the time, I was terrified I was crazy. The medicine was driving a wedge between me and my body. I thought, “So that is how it is: I will be like a mad traveller within my own body.”’

  I tried my best to relate to this, but it was not easy. I had once practised yoga at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry for a few weeks before being called home because my mother fell ill. This brief stay had helped me come to a better understanding of the split between the body and the mind. But it was surely nothing like what Henry had experienced.

  He continued, ‘In London, Ilana turned to me and said, in her most authoritative tone, “Look, you have to pull yourself together for five minutes. Then you can do what you like.” I go up to the British immigration officer and say, “My name is Henry Abramovitch and I just had a nervous breakdown.” Since I have a stamped medical visa, documents, certificates from a private doctor, he waves me through rather than create a scene.

  ‘My sister later told me that she never thought I would leave the island alive. She also said that I made a vow that if I ever left Madagascar alive, I’d become vegetarian and respect the Shabbat.’ Then, in a lower voice, he added, ‘In my own way.’

  I believed I could find more similarities between Henry’s experiences and my own. What was common to both of us was our transformative time in a distant land – in his case remaining in Madagascar, in my case Pondicherry – and delving deeper and deeper into ourselves. We both wanted to write about the experience and were both struggling to do so.

  Living in the stifling, traditional society of Ramallah, I have always worked by finding small orchards of time and space of my own. I would escape to the surrounding hills for solitary walks and on Saturdays I would stay away from my father’s law office to dedicate the day to writing. But my father would not leave me alone. He always made appointments for me and found things that he said urgently needed to be done that day. I was looking for solace in the midst of the chaos all around, and I found it with Henry.

  At that point in my life my primary concern was trying to figure out my life. I was looking for a
friend who would share my interests in literature, writing, self-analysis and walking, and who would help me understand the last eight years of my life since I left high school. Henry appeared to be the friend I was looking for. We continued talking on that hotel balcony in Tel Aviv, moving from one subject to another. It was as though I was testing his range of interests. A close rapport developed between us, the beginnings of a satisfying relationship.

  ‘Would you come to visit me in Ramallah?’ I asked, and he immediately agreed. I began to plan in my head where to walk with my new friend.

  The other Israelis in the foyer listened to the Egyptian leader selectively and felt euphoric, hearing what they liked and ignoring what they were unwilling to consider, like the necessity to create a Palestinian state and recognise the right of return if peace were ever to prevail. There was a sense of relief in the air: here was the leader of the largest Arab state cutting himself off from other Arab states and proposing peace with Israel. This was what they heard him say.

  Over the next months, Henry and I took many walks in the hills. We enjoyed our time together tremendously. We began planning other excursions in far-off places where I could not walk alone. We were a striking pair, Henry and I, he with his long, bushy beard and me scampering along beside him like a mountain goat, small, spritely and clean-shaven. Both short, one stocky, the other thin, we would stride down the hills in the Galilee or walk along the pebbly shore of the Dead Sea or through the Ramallah hills. And talking, always talking. We walked and talked endlessly, filling the hills with our chatter and laughter. I told him about my writing. I read to him what I was working on and his advice was helpful.

  One day we went to Jaffa looking for the grave of a friend of my family in what had been the Dajani Hospital. Dr Fuad Dajani, the founder of the hospital, had died suddenly and his wife had intended to build him the most beautiful tomb in Palestine, but her plans had been interrupted by the Nakba. The site was now a maternity hospital. In the grounds, as we tried to follow the hand-drawn map his widow had given us indicating the whereabouts of the grave, we were confronted by a security guard. He said there was no Arab grave there and ordered us to leave, erasing with one single sweep of his hand the entire history of the site. It was infuriating. Henry was as incensed as I was. He argued with the guard, insisting that the grave was there. He could not tolerate this denial of a Palestinian presence in Jaffa.

  After we had made our retreat, Henry turned to me and said, ‘We were looking on the wrong side, you know.’ I took out the old woman’s map. He was right.

  Another time we decided to go to the Dead Sea and sleep overnight on the shore. A car dropped us before the turn-off to Jericho and we set out on foot. I felt a new kind of excitement, striking off the road into unknown territory where you could get lost or arrested because of the area’s proximity to the Jordanian border. At that time no restrictions on movement had yet been imposed. For the first time in my life I was off the beaten track, going beyond the lunar hills towards the wall of boulders where the salty sea nestled and into the reeds, all the way down to the water and the lowest point on earth, to sleep in the open and listen to the waves whipping against the smooth rocks. Shortly before dawn, we heard an army jeep driving by and I held my breath until it passed. This was a military area and had the soldiers seen us we would surely have been arrested. Or worse, they could have driven over us as we slept. After the jeep passed, I could no longer sleep. The soldiers had destroyed the peace. I stayed up listening to the wind and the sound of the waves rushing in, then receding, sometimes softly hissing as they washed off the salt that had crystallised on the shore.

  In the morning we looked for the nearby kibbutz, where we had breakfast. I was breaking every rule that a Palestinian could break.

  On his own Henry did many more crazy things. I worried about him – how he would be viewed by the Palestinians he encountered on the way and whether someone would do him harm. But he welcomed adventure.

  Once he went to the Latrun salient north-west of Jerusalem, an area that Israel had annexed immediately after the 1967 war. He went to visit the Trappist monastery there and slept out in the open in a region where such things were not done. As a Palestinian I would be arrested if I were found there carrying my sleeping bag outdoors, but for Henry it was different. The army would just assume he was an eccentric Jew, not a terrorist.

  On another occasion he visited Hebron, one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the Occupied Territories. He went on his own and did not ask for contacts before venturing into this new area. When he returned I asked him how it was and he told me he had met some kind Palestinians who invited him to sleep the night at their house. He didn’t speak Arabic and they had only rudimentary English, and yet they seemed to have managed to get by. Henry was a great communicator and was able to bring out the best in people. He laughed like a young man, a fulsome rolling laugh that was infectious and never failed to endear him to everyone. He genuinely believed in the brotherhood of all men and was sure that ultimately good would prevail. He was a pacifist, always looking for kindness in people. This is why he was fearless on his hikes. He looked at the people he met with an open, friendly smile, never with fear or bad expectations, and he had a great capacity for empathy. He always found people to befriend and to stay with, whether they were Israelis or Palestinians.

  Henry was always trying to find the moral centre in his religion and make it relevant. He invited me to share the Seder meal with him and his friends where he tried to interpret the exodus from Egypt as representative of the passage into freedom of all nations, including the Palestinians. He wholeheartedly wished that the Palestinians would also find freedom.

  In 1979 I did something that was unusual for an unmarried Palestinian man living in the same town as his parents: I moved out of my father’s house and rented a small one-room flat, where I lived alone. It was an oasis of tranquillity. I could have my friends visit me there. I could listen to the music I liked and write undisturbed. Henry often came to visit. Once I showed him the first chapter of the autobiographical novel I had written. He immediately said he wanted to read it aloud to me.

  At the time, my writing was still heavily influenced by other writers and their concerns. I had not yet found my own voice. I had read my scribblings to friends, but they were more concerned with what I wrote rather than the style in which I wrote it, unlike Henry. This was why it was important to have Henry’s views. He took the manuscript, stood up, brushed his beard away from his mouth and began to read in his melodious voice. As he did, I could hear the voice that I was searching for.

  I was proud of my friendship with Henry. After one of our walks he told me, ‘Every time we walk together I understand more about the meaning of friendship.’ My friendship with Henry was a profound relationship, more so than any I had been able to forge with a Palestinian.

  It was the late 1970s and we were living in a dream. I was young and ambitious, and I believed it would all work out well between Palestinians and Israelis, and that Henry and I would always be friends. I had published my first book on human rights, The West Bank and the Rule of Law, which was getting considerable attention and I then believed it could help in curbing the abuses that were occurring, such as the acquisition of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements, the demolition of Palestinian houses, the closure of banks, the collective punishments and restrictions on free speech and assembly. The human rights organisation I helped to establish in 1979, Al-Haq, was making progress, creating a stir and highlighting the human rights violations perpetrated by the Israeli military. But even more significant to me was the work I thought we were doing to entrench the rule of law in our own Palestinian society. One aspect of Israel that I admired was that it had laws its society lived by. This also contributed to its national identity and I wanted the same for us. At the time I also thought Israel would be ultimately accountable to international law, especially if any violations were exposed and if fellow organisations around the world supported our ef
forts.

  We were encouraged to believe this by the replies we received to the interventions we sent to the military legal adviser. Al-Haq’s letters, pamphlets and books would invariably receive responses. This meant that we were in constant dialogue with Israeli officials over legal matters. As long as there was dialogue, there was hope. If we reached an impasse with a legal adviser, we could always resort to the Israeli High Court.

  I was hopeful that a political solution could be found and life would improve. I was hopeful that reason and kindness would prevail and the Left in Israel would succeed in bringing an end to the occupation. I was hopeful that, through an association with Israel, we could now modernise quickly.

  Henry shared my hopes.

  In January 1980 the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel negotiated at Camp David came into effect. Contrary to what Sadat had promised, Israel’s withdrawal from the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 was not a condition of his country’s recognition of Israel, which withdrew only from the Sinai Peninsula. Meanwhile, the Likud government under Israel’s sixth prime minister, Menachem Begin, was speeding up the establishment of Jewish settlements. Over a hundred were established in our midst.

  There was a time in the early days of the occupation when I had tried to relate to Israel and Israelis as if there was no occupation. That time was over. The occupation was turning into a colonial regime that deprived us of our land and gave our natural resources, our land and water, to their own people. In every way, large and small, it affected our lives and restricted our prospects. To fight this we Palestinians were left to fend for ourselves.