Where the Line is Drawn

by Raja Shehadeh

  We discovered that the ancient port city of Akka had a superb area for swimming. The city is surrounded by a formidable wall that was first constructed in the ninth century by Ahmad Ibn Tulun, who ordered that it be made as impregnable as Tyre. This did not prevent its conquest by the Crusaders in 1104, who left an impressive underground city with seven large halls and a tunnel that now leads to a Turkish hammam. The city had beautiful churches, mosques and khans, but we did not go there to visit the ruins or the places of worship. Our main interest was swimming. Most weekends in the summer we would drive some four hours to dip in the placid waters of Akka’s natural bay. We would take an elaborate picnic basket of delicious snacks, pastries of all sorts, nuts, fried courgettes and aubergines, salty white goat’s cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers and sliced watermelon, and have fried fish for lunch. We felt safe there.

  In the cold winter months we packed our overnight bags and went to stay in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee at the old Scots Hotel, which had served as a hospital under the British Mandate. My mother’s uncle had worked there as a pharmacist and my grandmother Julia had been born there. It still had the gong they used to strike to announce that breakfast was being served. At the time we used to visit, my eldest sister, Siham, was studying at Beirut College for Women. We were warned not to write to her about our trips to Tiberias in case the letter fell into the hands of the Lebanese authorities. Lebanon was still at war with Israel and they would have seen our visits as suspicious. Instead we would write that we had spent the night at our grandmother’s birthplace.

  Both Jaffa, my father’s city, and Akka, where his sister, Mary, lived with her family, were to be part of the Arab state under the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which divided Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. This was why, in the spring of 1948, my father was not against spending the beginning of the family’s usual summer holiday in Ramallah, away from humid Jaffa. By April it had become too dangerous to stay in Jaffa and the British police, who were still in control, would not protect the local Arab population. My father also believed that he would be able to return once the partition scheme had been implemented.

  On 18 May 1948 Akka fell to Israeli forces, a few days after they had taken Jaffa. By then only 3,000 out of the 13,560 Palestinian inhabitants of the city remained. The others had been forced to flee, some on foot to the eastern hills, some by boat to Tyre and Beirut. But Mary could not leave. Her youngest daughter, Amal, was only a few years old and she had typhoid. They feared for her life if they left.

  Mary and her family were forced out of their home and, along with the remaining Palestinians, were confined in a small section of the Old City that they could leave only with the permission of the occupying Israeli forces. There they heard about a massacre of some seventy Palestinians. Many now regretted their decision to stay, but there was a strong sense of solidarity and cooperation among them. Mary’s daughter survived.

  There was little opportunity for communication at first between my father and his sister but eventually they were able to exchange letters through the Red Cross. Often my father’s letters included the words ana jai, I’m coming, as he held on to his belief that he would somehow return home. He had tried. He knew the road to Jaffa from Ramallah was open and he tried to organise for the refugees to return to their city, but the Jordanian soldiers came for him and he was taken to prison, where he spent a few nights.

  After his release, he travelled independently of the Jordanian authorities to Lausanne with a small delegation representing the refugees to negotiate with the newly established Israeli government. His goal was for the return of the refugees to Palestine and compensation for those who did not. But Israel refused to have anything to do with them. We are now a state, they declared, and will negotiate only with other states.

  My father returned disappointed. He tried to go back to Jaffa with his family and a few friends. But these efforts came to nothing and he remained in that small house in Ramallah, where he and his growing family shared a few rooms with his difficult motherin-law. On clear evenings he could see the city on the horizon.

  Still he continued to write to his sister. Still with the hopeful words ana jai.

  Did these letters comfort Mary? She had always looked to her older brother for support and the two of them had endured a great deal together. Their mother died when they were still only a few years old in the typhus epidemic during the First World War. Their devastated father took care of them on his own until he married a young woman also called Mary. My aunt Mary was sent to a boarding school in Bethlehem, but my father lived at home.

  Perhaps my father’s letters gave my aunt some hope that her beloved brother would return and that she would not remain cut off from him, on her own, in the newly created State of Israel. But the promise of ana jai never came to anything and the two were unable to meet for many years, until in 1956 Israel agreed to allow some of the Christian Arabs to visit their holy places and their relatives for forty-eight hours on Christmas in what became the West Bank.

  Then one day in 1961 word came to my father that his sister had died of complications due to diabetes, from which my father also suffered. He had been unable to say farewell; he was not even able to attend her funeral.

  By the time it was possible to visit Akka again, after 1967, all my cousins except the youngest, Nuha, had found a future for themselves away from Israel, where opportunities for them were so restricted. Mary’s widower, Abu Naseef, lived with his youngest daughter, who was still in school. I grew up without knowing, without even meeting, any of my male cousins in Akka. When, several years later, we met in the United States, they were strangers to me.

  One of my earliest memories of Akka is a trip we took with a radiologist friend of my father, Khalil Jubran, a bon vivant with a dimpled chin and sparkling eyes, and his lively wife, Sumaya. The water was calm and we all floated on our backs under the strong August sun. I remember hearing Khalil mutter to himself, ‘Could there be a better place than this? This is heaven.’

  In a few years Khalil had left the area. He had asked my father how he would find husbands for his five daughters there. He emigrated to Jacksonville, Florida, joining scores of other middle-class Palestinian families from Ramallah. There he qualified as an anaesthetist, practising for a number of years before he died of a heart attack. I remember thinking that if this brain drain continued there would be no one left.

  The spirit of sumoud had not yet taken root. A number of families from Ramallah had left during the 1967 war, fearing that their young daughters would be raped. Now more were leaving in the hope that their daughters would have better marriage prospects. As for sons, fathers feared that they might join the Palestinian resistance and end up either killed or imprisoned by the Israeli authorities.

  Once they had left Ramallah, the Jubrans never returned, not even for a visit. To save their beautiful home, with its arched balcony in front and its glorious garden, my father had a relative of ours and his family live there so that the occupying army would not take it over as abandoned property. After Khalil’s death, his daughters sold the house in Ramallah through power of attorney. They never set foot in their country again and the house was subsequently demolished to make way for an ugly shopping mall.

  Under the Israeli occupation, more and more of Ramallah’s original inhabitants emigrated. The vast majority of them sold their homes and their land, severing all ties with their city. Most didn’t bother to teach their children Arabic. One after another, the old attractive houses were destroyed by their new owners, who had no feeling for the city. Consequently, little remains of the old Ramallah and the new city feels characterless. The inevitable development took place without any attempt at preserving Ramallah’s original charm. Instead, it was destroyed for ever.

  Today when I think of Khalil Jubran I remember him in the garden of the Grand Hotel in Ramallah, where he used to get together with my father and spend long afternoons relaxing, joking and telling stories. One of these s
tories was about how he once stopped his car – he was a notoriously slow driver – on the way to Jerusalem, where he worked at the Augusta Victoria Hospital, for a woman who needed a lift. She refused his offer, saying (and here he would smile his impish smile), ‘Thank you, doctor, but I’m in a hurry.’

  Those sorts of leisurely, genial gatherings are now rare. After five decades of occupation and the destruction of old Ramallah, most faces are sombre and burdened. Perhaps this is not unique to Palestine, but unlike places such as Italy and Greece ours is a bitter maturity. Instead of gaiety there is empty laughter masquerading as the real thing.

  For the first two decades under the occupation, the borders between Israel and the West Bank remained porous, but with the start of the first intifada in 1987 more blockades and checkpoints appeared on the roads. New roads were constructed to ensure speedy passage between the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Israel. It was not until the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993 that Israel began drawing a new border between Israel and the West Bank that prevented access from Palestinian cities and villages while allowing the unobstructed flow of traffic between the West Bank Jewish settlements and Israel. The general permit issued in 1967 for Palestinians to move to and from Israel was replaced by individual permits, allowing access only to those Palestinians whom Israel deemed favourable. Once again we were prevented from visiting the sea.

  6

  The Bougainvillea

  Ramallah, 1988

  About two months after the beginning of the first intifada, we were sitting together, the staff of Al-Haq and I, in a small meeting room, talking about the shootings, the beatings, the arrests, the curfews, the demolition of houses and the economic sanctions taking place in the West Bank. Since the minister of defence, Yitzhak Rabin, like a stern father reprimanding his unruly children, had announced his policy of ‘force, might and beatings’, our usual method of operation had been rendered obsolete.

  For many years, we had taken the Israeli government at its word – that it did not deliberately violate human rights as a policy, that abuses were an exception. Conscious of the international public’s scepticism of what a Palestinian organisation might say about Israel, we presented the violations to the Israeli authorities and they would respond by challenging our findings or by justifying their actions, claiming that they were consistent with the law. Often they said these actions were necessary for security. So how could we now approach a government that had declared in the clearest possible manner that its agents would use force, whose soldiers had fired in the first two weeks of the intifada some 1.2 million bullets – about 100,000 a day – that had killed several dozen Palestinians and injured many more?

  How could we have imagined that a time would come when thousands of soldiers would pass through towns, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, breaking all accepted human rights norms, stopping passers-by and humiliating them, beating them or detaining them, shooting at unarmed demonstrators and imposing long-term curfews on entire communities under the orders of their highest-ranking officers? What was the point of producing another report when this was well-known throughout the world? What was the role of a human rights organisation at a time like this?

  As the discussions continued without conclusion, we heard a loud cry from the street. We dropped everything and rushed to the balcony.

  Two soldiers stood opposite our building.

  ‘What happened?’ called Jonathan Kuttab, the codirector of Al-Haq, in Hebrew.

  The soldiers did not answer but gestured to three other soldiers who were standing right under our balcony. The five moved on. Then we saw a young man emerge from the door of our building carrying his shopping in a plastic bag. His face was bleeding.

  Riziq, one of our researchers, rushed down the three flights of stairs to catch up with him. The rest of us followed. On the way down, we saw a small puddle of blood on one of the landings.

  The young man had disappeared. Riziq walked into a gym across the street to ask if anyone had seen him. It was a stuffy little room smelling of sweat and filled with young men lifting weights and learning self-defence. They said they hadn’t seen him.

  It was dark now in the streets. There wasn’t a soul outside. Riziq tried other houses and eventually found the young man and brought him and his brother to Al-Haq. Our cameras were ready to document his injuries. While some of us tended to his wounds, the young man cursed vociferously, his brother too, but their anger was directed against us.

  ‘Human rights? If soldiers can beat a man in your own stairwell and you can do nothing about it, why are you here at all?’ they said.

  We were silent.

  The young man explained that he had been returning home with his groceries when he was met by the five soldiers near our door. They must have thought this was an empty building because they shoved him into the doorway, then dropped something on the floor and told him to pick it up. When he bent down, one of the soldiers kicked him in the face. That was when he cried out. They were not finished with him, but when they heard movement upstairs they stopped and let him go.

  Now we had the facts – an example of how the Rabin policy was being implemented. Jonathan and I left the others and decided to go after the soldiers. We caught up with them at the Manara roundabout in the centre of town, where they had stopped another young man. They recognised us.

  ‘We saw what you did,’ we said.

  ‘What did you see?’ asked one of the younger soldiers.

  A tall soldier with a drooping moustache intervened at that point, asking, ‘Who are you?’

  We introduced ourselves.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘Your names and the name of your unit.’

  He looked at us with the full authority of a soldier who knows he has the law on his side. He waved his baton before our eyes and said, ‘If you don’t leave immediately, I will arrest you. You are interfering with our work.’

  I breathed in, feeling as though I was about to explode.

  We then decided to try the police station and so started to drive. We drove down the dark, deserted streets under the orange street lights. This was the town where I had grown up. How had it changed so much? It felt so different now, haunted by criminals with orders to wound and even kill.

  We parked the car on a side street and walked to the Israeli police station in the centre of Ramallah. A tall pine tree loomed dark above us. This was the road to my old school. This was the bougainvillea I had walked by every day to and from school. Why did it now seem so menacing?

  We saw a soldier standing next to the police station relieving himself, his face, unashamedly, turned towards us. A bus full of soldiers was parked nearby. Alongside it was an army jeep. Altogether there were at least forty soldiers there. Jonathan and I were the only people not in uniform, but the soldiers did not pay us any attention. From the bus came voices. They were chanting, ‘Rotseem cola’ (‘We want cola’). Soldiers came in and out of the building. We could hear screams from inside. It was like a nightmare.

  ‘Who are you?’ an officer asked us.

  I wanted to leave this little Israel and go back to my Palestinian town, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want Jonathan to answer. I was afraid. This was not the time to say we were lawyers, not the time to test the system.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said to Jonathan.

  Jonathan stayed put. He told the soldier who we were and why we were here: to complain.

  Complain – fill out forms, provide a statement, leave our names and credentials, have policemen investigate the scene of the crime. What was the point? Would they even bother to write anything down?

  But Jonathan persisted. He repeated to the officer that we had witnessed a criminal offence. We had seen the guilty parties. We had come to report it. We wanted to submit a formal complaint for a police investigation.

  Meanwhile the soldiers from the bus continued to chant, ‘We want cola, we want cola,’ now accompanied by the thumping of
their heavy boots on the floor.

  ‘Just do me a favour and leave,’ the officer said. ‘Leave!’ he shouted, pushing us away.

  And so we left. We had no alternative.

  It was in the same building, the Ramallah police station, that twelve years later two Israeli soldiers would be lynched in the second, more violent intifada. The Israeli army, in retaliation, blew up the Ottoman building with a one-ton bomb dropped from the sky by an Israeli helicopter gunship. The building was reduced to rubble, the bougainvillea destroyed.

  For now, though, that visit to the Ramallah police station was followed by days marked out by their intensity, full of strong emotion and determination to do all we could.

  I went for lunch at my mother’s mainly to keep her company. Nearly four years earlier my father had been returning home from his office when he was murdered in the driveway of their house by a collaborator working for Israel. Much as we tried to get the Israeli authorities to investigate properly and bring the perpetrator to justice, our efforts failed and no one was ever charged with my father’s murder. Although the horrific event had taken place four years ago, my mother remained inconsolable. Not only had the Israeli police still not arrested the murderer, but I suspected the government was relieved by the death of a moderate peace-seeker like my father. His death marked for me the end of my expectation of a peaceful settlement.

  I had done all I could to pursue the investigation and keep it going. My mother was drowning in her own despair. I worried that if I was not careful she would pull me down with her. After one of our lunches I napped on the sofa in the sunshine on my mother’s glass balcony. Every so often my head would jerk from dreams and emotions of fear. I was so angry. I would ruminate over the wider implications of the conflict and my response to it.