Weeks earlier, Leah’s translator, Mariam, had written to me, reporting that the family had visited Mohammad in prison. They had asked pointedly about my request to meet with him. He had responded, and they had in turn relayed his response to Mariam, hoping it would be passed along to me:
at first Mohammad was hesitant and did not under stand why someone whom he has hurt would want to meet him but then as they discussed your visit and told him about your intention which is reconciliation, he agreed so Mohammad is more than willing to meet with you
The words felt true, they felt honest, that this man wouldn’t understand my request, that he would have been perplexed as his mother pleaded with him to meet with me, to meet with someone who should want him dead. I imagined his mother crying, begging, Mohammad having already caused too much pain for her, for the family, and him leaning into the glass and agreeing to do it, saying, “I’ll meet with him,” even if he didn’t mean it, even if they were just words to pacify a broken mother, to make her stop sobbing. It didn’t matter. Regardless of his intention or sincerity, I believed the words were spoken – “Mohammad is more than willing to meet.”
I decided to hold him to it. I decided to believe in the possibility of holding him to it by making two determinations:
1. Armed with new evidence to wave at the Ministry of Public Security, I would re-open my request for a meeting, asking for Israeli authorities to check with Mohammad again.
2. It was time to return to Israel.
My students gave me curious looks as I tried to focus on the task of teaching, unable to help but wonder what the complexion of this trip to Israel would look like, the complexion of which I wouldn’t know until the final verdict on my request came from the Ministry of Public Security. The verdict I had been expecting. The verdict my cell phone was anticipating. My students wanted it to vibrate. They wanted it to dance on the faux oak tabletop and interrupt class. They wanted it to sing.
“If they call, are you going to speak in Hebrew?”
“That would be so cool.”
“Say something in Hebrew right now.”
I told them to shut their mouths – stohm et ha’peh – which they found exceedingly entertaining, before beginning to workshop an essay written by Alice, a thirty-something single mom doing her best to juggle school and life among beach-clinging sorority girls and surfers. Ten minutes into a discussion on the structural integrity of her piece, the phone buzzed. I scanned the incoming number.
“Guys, I’m so sorry.” Everyone smiled.
“Hello?”
A woman on the other end spoke in Hebrew. “David, this is Hadar Cohen from the Ministry of Public Security.”
“Hello Hadar.”
“David, I’m calling about your request to meet with the prisoner.”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid it has been denied again. The prisoner has refused to meet.”
“He has.”
“Yes, David. I’m very sorry about this. If there is anything I can do, I will try to help.”
“But I’ve spoken with the family of the prisoner. They say he wants to meet. How am I supposed to view what you’ve told me?”
“I don’t know what to say about that. It has been passed on to me, to tell you, that the prisoner has refused, and that no meeting can take place without his approval.”
“Why not?”
“It is a law.”
“Is there anything I can do differently?”
“You could try sending him a letter, maybe?”
“To the prisoner?”
“Yes.”
“Through the Prison Service?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think so. Listen, this is what I’ve decided. I’m going to travel to Israel anyway, and I want to meet with people to learn firsthand what I might be able to do. Can you arrange a meeting for me with someone from the Prison Service?”
“Umm. I can try to do this, yes. When do you plan on traveling?”
“The first week of December. It would be much appreciated if you could do that. Oh, and I also want to meet with someone from the Ministry of Public Security. Maybe I can meet with you?”
“You want to meet with me? Why?”
“To talk about things I can do while I’m there.”
“David, I would be happy to meet with you. But I’m not the right person – I don’t know if there will be anything I can do.”
“That’s fine. I just want you to show me in person that my request has been rejected. I just want to see the written denial. Do you have a file?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been told by my superior.”
“Avi Dicter?” I asked, referring to the Minister of Public Security and one of the most prominent politicians in Israel. The line was silent.
“Never mind. Can I send you an email to review what we’ve discussed about my trip and everything?”
“Of course, David.”
“Great. I’ll also give you the details of my travel schedule once it is set.”
“Okay, David. Is there anything else I can do?”
“No. Thanks for calling and helping again. I appreciate your efforts.”
“I’m happy to help.”
“Okay. Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
I closed the phone and returned to the world of perplexed undergraduates watching me.
“That was Hebrew?”
“Yes.”
“Cool. What did they say?”
“That they were happy to help.”
Happy to help. No government official in Israel has ever, since its formation as a bureaucratic state, been happy to help. Even on the rare occasions when someone actually is happy to help, culturally it is a requirement to feign displeasure and boredom. This isn’t meant as derogatory – it’s simply the way things operate, generally. (There’s a reason Israelis collectively have referred to themselves for some time as Sabras – prickly cacti that have a sweet pulp hidden beneath a rough exterior.) It’s not really all that surprising once you get to know the country, which is, in essence, one large, dysfunctional family – for Jews, at least – the family that survived Nazi Germany, pogroms, and global anti-Semitism to arrive on a sliver of land where they now fight simultaneously for survival and the right to a good wireless plan. Combine Old World Jews, with their shtetls and collective traumas, with Middle Eastern disorganization and machismo, and you have the foundation for a maddening, twenty-first-century techno-village filled with God’s chosen clan, my clan, a clan I know fairly well. So when, after the hundreds of emails I’d brazenly sent to Hadar – functioning as continuous taps on the shoulder, waiting for her to turn around and respond – she said dryly, “I’m happy to help,” the words dripped with irony. And it was this irony that made me suspicious. Which words were true? Was she happy to help? Had Mohammad refused to meet? Had the Israel Prison Service refused to ask him? The answer alone wasn’t particularly important, except that it directly impacted my ability to attain a meeting with Mohammad, a chance to face him and ask, Why? To trade justice for truth.
After hanging up with Hadar and finishing my class, I headed to a computer lab on campus, resolved to begin choreographing my trip to Israel, hoping to find a path toward some elusive and blurry idea of reconciliation.
If I can’t face Mohammad, I want to meet the family, I thought, remembering Leah’s words, the family welcoming my efforts with open arms, inviting me to visit them, an invitation I was now eager to accept. I sat down and composed a letter to Mariam, asking if she could try to arrange a visit, and if so, whether she would be my interpreter in the event the Odehs actually meant it. A few days later, I had my response:
david i am glad you are coming and of course i will be with you …
i contacted the family again
mohammad has no objection what so ever to meet with you and talk
you are more than welcome to visit the family in december
i am planning to spend my xmas in egypt but do hope to be here when you come as i am personally looking forward to meet you
anyway i am now sure that the family and mohammad want to meet you and i dont know why the prison keeps giving a negative response
take care
Mariam
PART IV
Collective History
21
The history of Jewish suffering has been etched into my memory since birth. It began subconsciously with the first pin-prick of pain felt at my circumcision, at the moment my covenant with God was consummated. It was a warning: Don’t worry, there’s more where this came from. In Sunday school, as a wide-eyed kindergartener, I first learned about the stories of slavery in Egypt during Passover and the tales of near-genocide during Purim. Then there were the stories of the Holocaust that I gleaned when family members felt comfortable sharing them – stories spoken in hushed tones about relatives I’d never met, the ones who had been lost to the ovens. These came together to form a lineage of victimization stretching back centuries. It seemed as though I was told, again and again, that I was descended from the weak, the helpless, the few lucky enough to survive. As a result, the one thing I truly understood about my Jewish identity while I was growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta was this: as a people, we were always on the brink.
This history of suffering was concretized while Jamie and I were living in Israel. The daily images on television of carnage, of innocent Jews exploding while drinking coffee, validated my lifelong sense of vulnerability. And then Jamie was thrown to the floor. And we became the narrative. We became Jewish suffering. We became a part of this history.
But it was a history skewed by our collective traumas. The full range of our vision had been obscured over the years by bandages and blinders. In my mind’s eye, Jews were the eternal victims – the people everyone wanted dead – which made anyone associated with our suffering a mere implement of history’s anti-Semitic, machine-like march. Never had I considered the humanity of Palestinians. Never had I considered their history. They were animals, terrorists, the contemporary incarnation of Amalek. They were just the latest in a long line of people wanting us dead, lined up throughout history: Arabs, Germans, Russians, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians.
And here then was the definition of irony: becoming a victim, becoming a footnote to a footnote in the history of Jewish suffering, led me to consider for the first time the history of Palestinians, the history of those who were ostensibly responsible for our becoming footnotes. It was a history which had been invisible, irrelevant to me. A history I had ignored. But in order to move beyond the trauma wrought on us by Mohammad’s action, I chose to turn history on its head. I chose to move toward him in order to understand him. I chose to consider him and his people and the historical chain of events that led to the moment the bomb went off in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria, the moment Jamie was thrown to the ground.
And in understanding Palestinians as a people, I thought that, perhaps, a new history could be written. I thought that such an understanding might lead to a different life, a life devoid of hyperventilating and nightmares. A life like the one that existed before the bomb exploded.
I purchased a ticket to Israel knowing that the Odeh family was preparing for my visit. I need to prepare as well, I thought, visiting the university library and its musty, cavernous bowels where information was hiding within the intestinal walls of its closed books.
The eighties carpeting and beige, metal stacks called to me, said, This will be your training ground, said, These walls will guide you. Feeling obedient, I listened, spending weeks under the humming fluorescent lights combing through volumes of history and psychology. First, those on my own people. And then, those dealing with the other side, with the Palestinians, with the collective traumas we’ve shared for a century.
Over time I constructed a regional tragedy I had never fully understood, a tragic narrative that began with the story of my own people thinking, We’ve got to get out of here. It was a thought that arose out of European anti-Semitism and the mind-numbing horrors it visited upon Jews in the nineteenth century. At that time, most of the world’s Jewry lived in an area called the “Pale of Settlement” in Russia’s vast, frozen empire. And life there was hell. Jews were singled out and treated as sub-human – they were forbidden to own land, were restricted in their movements, and were: “subjected to a brutal system of twenty-five year military conscription, which occasionally entailed the virtual kidnapping of their children … and their attempted conversion to Christianity by the authorities in special preparatory military schools.”
Then came the pogroms, the mobs wielding scythes and torches, raping and murdering and decimating entire Jewish towns. And from this suffering came Zionism’s call – the desire for Jews to return to their biblical homeland. Out of these traumas came a secular, political movement, a movement to return to the land of Israel, to find a sanctuary. To live.1
But when the waves of Jewish immigrants fleeing Europe arrived in Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs didn’t see victims standing before them. Instead, they saw European Jews trying to gobble up their own homeland. Which, in truth, is what they were doing; as soon as the immigrants arrived, the mass-purchasing began. Jews – most of whom weren’t allowed the basic right of land-ownership in Europe – were now clutching the soil, kissing it, claiming it. They wanted to transform the land into a Jewish one, to redeem it.2
For Palestinians, this meant a wave of dispossession, as farms were bought up by these financially backed, white-skinned new comers. For Palestinians, Jewish “redemption” meant becoming invisible. They were asked to watch as colonizers carrying the slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” gained both momentum and acreage over a soil that was plenty populated already. They were asked to witness a Zionist movement that looked straight through them and saw nothing but open space. Property disputes were inevitable; so were violent clashes. Arab peasants, dispossessed and aggrieved, began to attack Jewish settlements, striking out, the seeds of conflict planted in this sandy soil.
Despite the Zionist slogan, Palestine was far from “a land without a people.” Just before World War I, Ottoman-controlled Palestine’s population was more than 700,000, with just 60,000 of those living in the region being Jews.3 Given that they were massively outnumbered, with Arab landowners rebelling around them, it’s not surprising that Zionist leaders sought outside help in their quest for a national homeland. It was a quest not only precipitated by necessity – by the pogroms and hatred from which the Jews had fled. It was a quest fed by spiritual visions of a redemptive history, fed by the promise that biblical Israel was not just a land, but a fertile woman beckoning the Jewish people back to where God wanted them. A land calling out to be reclaimed, to be rescued from captivity and released from the temporary grip of her captors, to have her soil tilled according to biblical commandments, by the hands of those fulfilling biblical commandments, by those who understood destiny.
The Zionist leaders, desperate for land and intoxicated by this spiritual vision, nudged destiny forward by seeking help from the British government, which, after the Allied powers’ victory over the Ottoman Empire in World War I, had taken administrative control of Palestine. In a letter now known as the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, a leader of Britain’s Jewish community, confirming that Britain would not, in 1917, stand in destiny’s path:
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which ma
y prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”4
What was remarkable about the Balfour Declaration wasn’t that the British government came to defend the nationalist rights of the Jewish community; it was that the letter negated the existence of any nationalist rights for the nearly 650,000 Arabs living in Palestine, calling them “non-Jewish” communities that would be granted civil and religious rights, but not nationalist ones. The British government, it seemed, didn’t consider the Arabs in Palestine as a people.5
This view would, in part, keep Palestinians from realizing their dreams of an independent country for themselves, a view perpetuated and sustained for decades with such staggering tenacity that more than forty years later, in 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meir could state with a straight face, looking into the mirror of history standing before her, that “There was no such thing as Palestinians … They did not exist.”6 And indeed they didn’t – at least according to the Western world after World War I. For when the League of Nations carved up the Ottoman Empire and drafted the Mandate for Palestine, which officially gave control of Palestine to Britain, the document included the text of the Balfour Declaration and recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and … the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”7 Yet not once in the twenty-eight articles of the mandate was there mention given to a Palestinian people. Instead, they were referred to as “the inhabitants” and “natives” and “non-Jewish.”
The sudden introduction of a European, nationalist paradigm into what was once Ottoman-controlled, Arab land compelled Palestinians to think of themselves as a people in newly realized political terms, to think of themselves as a nation.8 By denying Palestinian nationalism while championing the nationalist rights of the minority Jewish community, the British government unintentionally inspired Palestinians to stand up and demand their collective, political rights and identity as a Palestinian people. They weren’t just some native, faceless entity. They too were a people with a destiny. Zionism forced Palestinians to look down upon a land to which they were connected, both religiously and historically, and see it anew: not just as their home, but as their country. And so Palestinians began demanding political rights just as they were learning how such rights functioned among Western nation states.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 18