Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  In the spring of 1973, I got to know Kemal Nasser, then the spokesman of the PLO . Kemal was a square-shouldered man, husky, with a good face whose eyes gave him away. Though working for the PLO , his eyes and his smile were the eyes and smile of the poet, which is what he was. He was a good one. He never fought, never carried a gun. At night, by candlelight, he still wrote.

  One afternoon the Lebanese diplomat Clovis Maksuud and his wife-to-be, Hallah, and Abdul Karim Aboul Nasser, the columnist for the respected paper an-Nahar, and I had a memorable lunch. It went on for six hours at an exquisite blue and white fish restaurant that hung off the rocks over the sea.

  Kemal was in absolutely top form, telling stories about his old friend Yasser Arafat and about himself. Though they were the same age Kemal joked that, "I told him that I was a babe in arms when he was in Jerusalem." Kemal lived in the downtown Hamra district, and Arafat wanted him to move to the Sabra refugee camp for his own protection. "I told the Old Man [the nickname for Arafat], 'Better to die in Hamra than to live in Sabra.'"

  How telling.

  Later, as we walked down the street, the Mediterranean Sea spreading out before us toward Spain and Italy and then the New World, he said to me, a sudden sadness overtaking him, "We must protect this city, we must. It is all we have left."

  Looking at his face then, I saw a terrible vulnerability behind all the tough pronouncements he made so confidently. He had been talking a lot about dying recently; all his friends noticed it. Yet the next night, when he took me to visit his aunts who were visiting from the West Bank, he was again the happy, debonair man of the world.

  Through the next weeks in Beirut I was struck and at times overcome by a strange, haunting sense of things ending. I thought it must be the unusually early hot weather, because that early, cloying part of spring has always depressed me. It promises too much, and we are driven to dream of impossible heights and perfect emotions that we never can reach.

  I went from Beirut to Baghdad. One day I was walking into the archaeological museum with a young Italian diplomat when he suddenly spoke. "Oh, I meant to tell you," he said. "You did hear about the killings in Beirut, didn't you?"

  I stared at him. I had the consciousness of my heart stopping as the question hung there in the air.

  "The Israelis... " he stuttered. "They sent commandos right into the center of Beirut. They killed three Palestinian leaders. Abu Youssef and Kemal Nasser and..."

  So Kemal was dead -- one more statistic in the slaughterhouse.

  From then on, as I continued to travel about the Middle East, I felt somehow driven to know more about the Kemal Nasser whom I had known so little. So I talked with his friends and family, and a picture of him began to emerge. He was often playful, always romantic. He loved to sit up all night in coffeehouses, arguing poetry, love, revolution, in his dramatic, ultra-British accent. "He was such a presence," Abdul Karim said. Yet in his last months his hulking, graying, forty-seven-year-old body seemed to tire as though the growing brutality of the Middle East conflict was wearing it out. He talked of having a fifty-fifty chance, perhaps of retiring and "leaving things for the young people."

  After his death Kemal did not return to the stern and stony hills of the West Bank, where he had been born and nurtured. He was buried in Beirut in the commandos' cool, dark "martyrs' cemetery," under black cedar trees. But when I was on the West Bank later that spring and drove up to Bir Zeit College, which had been founded by his family, they were still mourning him.

  There in the exquisite stone Turkish-style buildings of the Nasser family's college, I found Hanna Nasser, the young director of the college in this rocky land with the golden glow. He spoke softly, a faraway look in his eyes. "I last saw Kemal two nights before he was killed," he began. "I had gone to Beirut to see him, and when he came up to my hotel room he was pleased that the concierge downstairs recognized him." Nasser, a tall, lanky, American-educated Palestinian, shook his head. "I always told him that a revolutionary is not supposed to be recognized. Then he told me, 'We'll meet next time in Bir Zeitf ... and that was it.

  "Everybody wanted to make a demonstration for Kemal here, a silent march to his house. But when it was written that there would be a service for Kemal at four p.m., the Israeli military governor came here -- there were jeeps all over our college. The military governor said, 'We hear you are having something on at four P . M .' 'We bury and respect our dead,' I said. He said, 'Oh, I didn't know it was a funeral service.'"

  Hanna Nasser smiled a bitter smile. "What really surprised them was that so many of the Arab 'notables' who cooperate with them came -- that was what they couldn't stand. There were more than five thousand persons here in the Bir Zeit alone to mourn for Kemal."

  The Israelis, of course, thought otherwise. "I was very surprised that the West Bank identified with these terrorist leaders," Israeli Chief of Staff David Elazar said in a press conference two weeks after the raid. "All we can learn from the fact is that there are still many Arabs who regard these terrorists as their leaders."

  Hanna Nasser's wife commented softly on this surprise: "The Israelis blind themselves. They think that only Israel is permissible. Therefore, anything they do is permissible. We wonder how long we can endure it. Yet, as much as we suffer, we think we are less nervous and upset than they are. When you know you are right, you can fight for it."

  As I traveled about the West Bank, I kept hearing more about Kemal -- there, in those barren hills, studded with jagged rocks and lit by that strange golden light. His relatives were going through a period of thinking and rethinking, evaluating the life of their fallen loved one. And they spoke of him always in the present tense.

  "Kemal is a humanist socialist revolutionary," said Mrs. Nasser, her large, sensitive eyes brooding. "That is why everybody always trusts him. He is far from being a bloodthirsty revolutionary." Then the tense shifted.

  "He was always terribly romantic," she went on, leaning forward eagerly. "He always felt something mysterious about himself. 'But I really feel it,' he would say. In his poetry, he was prophetic. He was about himself, too." She paused. "There must have been some thing in him that didn't want to fight anymore. He always had a sixth sense -- he always escaped before."

  The time they remembered best, since it was the last time he was really home in Bir Zeit, was the six months after the 1967 war. "It was a rare occasion when he could spend time with the family," she recalled. "We used to go walking and pick mulberries.... He

  went to Jerusalem, and I remember he came back and said that, despite the occupation, 'We must never be responsible for killing those Jewish children.'"

  Hanna Nasser interjected, "The Israelis at that time used to ask him to speak all over, and he would try to tell them that Jews and Arabs should live together. He would come home so frustrated and say, 'Those bastards have a golden opportunity to live with us -- they won't do it.'"

  After seven months Kemal, with about one hundred other West Bank leaders, was deported by the Israeli occupation authorities. He had been trying to organize passive resistance movements. It was then that he went to Jordan and joined the Palestinian resistance. However, he never joined any of the commando groups, he never fought, and he knew nothing about guns. He was called the "conscience" of the movement, and not even the Israelis accused him personally of being a member of Black September or an active terrorist. Some said in Israel that he was killed simply because he happened to live in the same building as the other two, who were the real leaders. But unquestionably, though he constantly publicly decried the Black September terrorism, he had come to a point himself, because of the growing Palestinian desperation, where he thought some forms of terrorism were necessary and even justified. And in those days fewer and fewer distinctions were being made on both sides.

  "He must have enjoyed his funeral," Mrs. Nasser was musing. "All those women throwing flowers on his grave. At the same time, he must have been asking, 'Why all this fuss about me?'" Three hundred thousand persons came
to his funeral in Beirut.

  But then in Bir Zeit reality introduced upon the growing legend of Kemal. As the Nassers were speaking, Kemal's aged mother, a bulky little woman all in black, walked down the street outside, helped by an aging sister. And the young Mrs. Nasser was saying in a soft voice inside the room, "Kemal never wanted to kill Jews. He wanted to live with them in a Palestinian state. All he thought was that we Palestinians have a right to live, too, and that nobody can take it from us.

  "Now, because of Kemal's death, my son says he wants to kill. I tell him that even Uncle Kemal did not want to kill. It's an awful thing to bring up a whole generation like this."

  ***

  Two months after Kemal's death, I found myself in Israel. The talk had died down on the "Raid into Beirut," but there was still excitement about it in people's minds. Then, one day, Clifton Forster, a particularly good American information officer, suddenly said to me: "A lady in the office knows the Chur family. What would you think of going down to their kibbutz in the Negev and interviewing them?"

  Avida Chur, twenty-two, was one of the three Israeli commandos killed in the raid on Beirut. Had he himself killed Kemal? What was he like? I had been looking at both sides for a long time, but this was a breathtaking opportunity.

  I said that, yes, I would definitely like to go to see the Churs, and Clifton arranged it. And so we drove south, across the "desert" now dotted with attractive kibbutzes and farms, with the Bedouins still close by.

  I have always hated stories like this -- how can one, if one is human at all, invade or impinge upon others' grief? -- and yet one had to do them. Often afterward, I reassured myself, the family was grateful. Years before in Chicago, for instance, I had been the first to tell Charles Evers that his famous civil rights leader brother, Medgar Evers, had been killed; we had sat on their big porch on the South Side as I imposed my dark knowledge, and I had mourned with him, but somehow this was worse.

  The Churs were a lovely family: sensitive, intelligent, dedicated people. Ironically they were people of the Mapam, the far leftist party which had always wanted to live with the Palestinians -- in deed, Mapam even wanted a bi-national state. But bullets do not stop to pose ideological questions.

  As soon as we sat down in their simple but comfortable modern apartment, I realized that there had been a grave misunderstanding. They had not understood, clearly, that I wanted to interview them about Avida, and I was smitten with guilt and with sorrow. We decided to forget the idea ... the grief for their son was so intense that both it -- and he -- seemed present in physical form. His loving and sorrowing kibbutznik parents had kept him alive with a deep and, as it transpired, sometimes strange search into the life, con science, and character of their dead son.

  At first they looked at me, from their dark, haunted eyes, as an intruder. But, please, they said, sit down and have something to eat. I did, intending to leave soon, and then something very strange occurred. As if the voices were coming out of nowhere or some chamber far away and long ago, they began to talk of Avida. Spontaneously, hauntingly. The words just seemed to push out, and I became the vehicle for their search.

  It soon became clear that they were obsessed with this dark contradiction, troublesome to so many conscionable Jews today, between the Jew as idealist and the Jew as warrior.

  As we sat there, they began to talk about his last days, how he had even seen the angel of death approaching shortly before he died. "My starting point for everything is from a humanistic basis," the doomed young man had told his lovely, dark-haired wife-to-be as they had driven late at night from Tel Aviv to this green kibbutz where he was born. They described his voice as tormented as he poured out his feelings in a kind of midnight confessional that became his ideological last will and testament. "I believe in solving the refugee problem. We should do everything for peace. But as far as the terrorists go, we should do everything against them."

  The Churs -- he from Poland, she from South Africa -- had come to this desert as Mapamists to build the now thriving farm and dairy. Believing that, as Chaim still insisted, Israel is the "common homeland of both Jews and Arabs," they made friends with the Bedouins across the road. When water was piped in by the kibbutzniks, it was brought for the Bedouins, too, and they sang a song that proclaimed: "Some say that generals make history, some say that presidents make history, but here we say that plumbers make history."

  And now -- in one of the great quirks of history -- it was the sons of these kibbutzniks, and in particular the tolerant, liberal Mapam kibbutzniks, who formed the majority of the elite Israeli commandos assigned to the most dangerous and lethal special raids against what had become the "enemy."

  "From my son's class, ten out of the twelve went into the special commando units," Chaim Chur, a graying, honest man who worked as a journalist for the Mapam newspaper, went on relating, "and the others were not accepted only because of physical disqualifications. All ten became officers. The way they were raised on the kibbutz, they didn't want to be professional soldiers. But the atmosphere created the idea that if a person goes to the army, he must go to the best unit or he is shirking his duty to prove himself."

  He paused, and a hesitant note entered his voice. "I think it is because of their humanistic motives that they are so good," he added, with a strange wistfulness. "They have an integrity of purpose.

  "I later heard from the other commandos on the raid in Beirut that they found families living in the one house they had planned to explode in connection with blowing up the Popular Front building. So as not to hurt these families, they used a different house, even though it wasn't as effective. I know my son, as the commander, was in favor of this, and that his point of view prevailed. He said, 'All right, maybe we won't blow it up this way, but they'll know we could have done it.'"

  Avida was killed when Popular Front commandos began shooting back as soon as the building exploded. "I know for a fact that my son did not like the army," said Chaim Chur. "But he knew he had to do it. He had completed his three-year service in February, but because they needed him as a commander, they asked him to sign for a half-year more. He signed because it was his duty. If he had not signed..." At this he looked like a man whom grief might overwhelm at any moment.

  Others told me, as we strolled quietly about the neatly manicured kibbutz, what had happened. Chaim Chur was in his newspaper office when he got the news. When he saw the two military officers coming in the door--heralds of death, just as Avida had seen some herald that dark night's ride across the Negev -- he gave out a blood curdling cry and fell to the floor. After that friends poured in to see and try to comfort them -- army commanders, friends of Avida, even the Bedouin sheikh's family across the road, whose son wrote a touching letter saying, "Among our tribe, Avida will be remembered as a hero of heroes." But what came through over and over in the flow of conversation that entire afternoon was the family's obsession with moral conflict.

  "It's not such a simple thing to take a youngster who couldn't kill a fly and turn him into someone who kills face to face," Chur continued. "Something has to work inside him."

  "They told us he was such a tough leader," Avida's pretty, dark-haired mother said thoughtfully. "That was not connected with our image of Avida at all. We interviewed a lot of his friends, and we learned much we didn't know. What we finally understood was that he always aimed for perfection -- the soldiers he trained had to do the best. He knew that if he taught them to do things properly, he would save lives in the time of war. If one thing was not done right, he made them do it over and over. Then he felt they were the best.... "

  After his death they found a sheaf of peace poems among his things. "Does the soldier see above the rifle sights the gray image of all the widows?" read one. And, "You mothers, teach your infants the word 'peace' before the word 'mother'!"

  His father recalled that Avida was moving away from his more dovelike beliefs. "Before, he was quite extreme in his political views," he said. "He was for giving everything back t
o the Arabs, even Jerusalem. When he was in the army, he retained his convictions, but he was more mature. He didn't criticize the government so much. He definitely changed his views on giving the occupied territories back. I don't see any real contradictions. He was for fighting the terrorists but for living with the Arab people."

  Some believed that the young kibbutzniks, having emerged from the womblike security of the kibbutz, found comparable security in the tightly structured commando units. This may help explain why, though the kibbutzim comprise only 4 percent of the population, they suffer 26 percent of the casualties. In the 1967 war they tended always to serve in the most dangerous units. And despite what the parents liked to believe, their sons were not always perfectly humane in such situations. Kemal Nasser, the Palestinian poet and spokes man -- a man whom the Churs would have recognized as a kindred soul had they met him under different circumstances--was first killed by shots across the shoulders; then he was shot around the mouth.

  But then, what I was seeing, day after day and week after week and month after month, was less and less room for the "humanists" and no room at all for distinctions.

  Finally it was time to leave. We had been there seven hours: seven hours of this wondrous and terrible outpouring of grief and memory. Before I left, I ask Chaim Chur, softly, whether he could think of the Kemal Nassers or the other Arabs who also died that fated day.

  This good -- this quintessential decent -- man could only whisper, "I just can't go that deep."

  When I wrote about these two men of the Middle East, I ended with what I really believed:

  It would be naive to suggest that peace would descend on the Middle East if such men as Avida Chur could come to know such men as Kemal Nasser. Good men both, as are many of those caught up in this new holocaust, they were, nonetheless, driven by memories and circumstances that surpassed their powers of rational and humane reflection. But the hard fact is that, sooner or later, such men as these must come to know each other.