“Satisfy my curiosity,” David said. “You’ve got a million people in these camps, and still more overseas. Some date back to the birth of Israel itself. The Israelis would say that the Palestinian Authority preserves them for the purpose you claim to deplore—breeding violence and resentment of Israel, while diverting attention from your own failures. In short, that Hassan and Jefar are your creation, not theirs.”
Farhat gave a wispy smile. “I acknowledge that if we were to dismantle the camps, in the eyes of the world there would be no refugee problem, no reminder of the injustice so many have suffered. We are invisible enough already. But the essential truth is that camps preserve a sense of identity, where refugees divide themselves into communities that commemorate the villages they came from—”
“And where they live in an idealized past,” David interrupted, “clinging to the symbols of their expulsion from paradise, while their grandchildren play in open sewers. It’s a recipe for the trouble you’re in. If there’s anything I’m clear on, it’s this: neither the Jews nor the Palestinians are going anywhere, and anyone on either side who thinks that could happen, at least without unspeakable displacement and brutality, is insane. So why can’t you folks say as much?”
Farhat studied his manicured fingernails. “A leader who told Palestinians they had no right of return would cease to be a leader. Fatah is ready to compromise. But how can we acknowledge Israel’s right to exclude all Palestinians from the land of their grandparents, solely on the basis of their religion?
“The very concept of Israel is racist. No other state on earth proposes to maintain a ‘democracy’ confined to those of a single ethnicity or religion, even while they keep us stateless. The Israelis live in a state of siege, believing anti-Semitism to be a permanent condition of mankind; erecting walls when walls are falling around the world; portraying us as terrorists rather than human beings; and importing Russian Jews by the millions in their desperation to win what they most fear losing—a demographic war.” Farhat jabbed the table. “An Israeli general once made the most racist, sexist remark I’ve ever heard: ‘the ultimate ticking bomb is the womb of a Palestinian woman.’ And yet they complain about this speech by the imam. Such hypocrisy.”
All at once, David had heard enough. “Truly,” he responded with sarcasm and anger. “I can’t imagine why a people who’ve suffered three thousand years of genocide and rejection, culminating in the Holocaust, could possibly want a refuge of their own. After all, it’s only Palestinians who’ve been expelled from country after country, only Jews who refuse to recognize someone else’s narrative of suffering.
“Aside from these assassins, do you know who I think murdered Ben-Aron? All of you. Because you’re living on different planets, and yours will soon be blissfully free of anti-Semites. Bullshit. Just like the Israeli notion that—whatever you call them—the Palestinians aren’t a people. History made them one.” David slowed his speech. “I’ve been here for just two weeks, and already all I can think is ‘God help this place.’ Assuming that anyone can even agree on who God is. All I can hope for is to get my client out of this fucking mess alive.”
Farhat stared at him, then emitted a short laugh. “There is truth in what you say, however rudely. And I acknowledge Israel’s legitimate fear of suicide bombers. But you can’t oppress and de-develop a whole society, and then build a wall between yourself and the problems that you’ve helped create. Only when the occupation ends can we build a civil society. And only then will those suicide bombings we all deplore come to an end.”
David shook his head. “How can you expect the occupation to end before the violence stops? How can Israel protect itself without checkpoints and a wall?”
“By leaving us, and quickly, before Hamas takes over completely. You want to know how terrorists are made? Think of Jefar’s pregnant sister. Or just be Palestinian for a day. Drive to a checkpoint until traffic stops, get out of the car, and walk a half mile to the barrier. You’ll find an Israeli soldier with a cigarette in his mouth and, quite possibly, his gun leveled at one of the two hundred or so people stuck in front of you.
“Perhaps you’re a student, unable to get to school. Perhaps you’re one of the hundreds of women who’ve delivered a baby, hopefully alive. Perhaps you’re the husband, shamed in front of his family by a soldier as young as his own son.” Farhat’s voice became almost elegiac. “Perhaps you’re just delayed returning home. And what awaits you? Poverty is widespread, unemployment is rampant. Your village is cut off from the next, your children cut off from a future that holds out more hope than does yours. And on the hill above you is a settlement populated by Jews who scorn you, or maybe just this wall.
“As for these ‘martyrs,’ forget the idea that they receive universal praise—most of us cringe at every dead Israeli. Don’t blame religion or ideology alone. To the incitement of the imam you mentioned, add despair, humiliation, and the desire for revenge. It is the occupation, not fanaticism, that spawned Ibrahim Jefar.”
“Not to mention,” David retorted, “terrorist networks that offer money to families of ‘martyrs.’ For that, the Israelis hold you accountable, and should. But let’s not quibble. It’s in your interest to help me before Hamas becomes entrenched.”
Farhat propped his elbow on the table, gazing at the multicolored garden that surrounded them. “Before Ben-Aron was murdered,” he finally said, “Hamas won control of the legislature. Our strategy had been to keep drawing them into the political process, even at the risk of losing power altogether. We had no choice—any attempt to disarm them would lead to an all-out war between us, which the Palestinian Authority lacks the security resources to win.
“But this was also delicate. To win back the legislature, we needed peace with Israel. In other words, we needed Ben-Aron.” His tone became mournful. “Now the Israelis blame us for failing to control his killers; our people blame us for delivering Israeli reprisals instead of peace. That Jefar was Al Aqsa may have sealed the fate of Fatah. Certainly, it ended our ability to bring Al Aqsa into our security forces, which would have strengthened our hand against Hamas.
“This leaves Hamas even more powerful than before. Soon they will launch their own reprisals against Israel. Only if Israel gives us nationhood can we regain power, disarm Hamas, and stop these suicide bombings. Otherwise, Hamas is the Palestinian future.”
“And if they are?”
“Then we will have a Muslim fundamentalist state, dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Bad for Israel, obviously. Also bad for our educated classes. Especially women like Arif and Nisreen Awad, who would be separated from men at public events and even forced to cover, and whose daughters’ educations might become extremely limited. Many secular Palestinians would leave, of course. Democracy here would end.”
“All because Ben-Aron is dead,” David responded, “and his assassins were supposedly Al Aqsa. Granted that Jefar was. But he was recruited by Hassan. And members of Hassan’s family were Hamas—including a suicide bomber in Haifa.”
Caution seemed to veil Farhat’s eyes. “We’ve considered all that. But we cannot prove his connection to Hamas. And such accusations sometimes get men killed.” Pausing, Farhat stared at the table. “Since Ben-Aron was murdered, we have lost what little control we had.”
“And how does that serve Al Aqsa?”
“It doesn’t. That is what I find so puzzling. But not all of its members are rational. Even its leaders.”
David waited until Farhat looked up again. “I want to meet with them,” he said.
Farhat shook his head. “They are dead now,” he answered softly. “Or so deep underground that not even Israel can find them.”
“Not even you? I’ll settle for whoever’s alive and brave enough to take the risk.”
Farhat raised his eyebrows. “Like Barak Lev? You don’t even know who killed him, do you?”
David felt his confidence falter. “True,” he acknowledged. “But we’re not in Israel now. The leaders of Al Aqs
a must be skilled in self-protection, or the Israelis would have killed all of them long ago.”
“Even so, why take the chance of meeting with you?”
“Because it might turn out to be a better means of self-defense than remaining underground. Al Aqsa leaders have denied any connection to Hassan, or the plot to kill Ben-Aron. Most people dismiss that as a survival tactic. But I happen to believe it. More specifically, I believe that nothing about this assassination is as it seems—that this was not an Al Aqsa operation, that Hana Arif was not the handler. And that whoever put this together carefully calculated the consequences, both in Israel and here.
“If I’m right, my defense of Hana may be your best hope of survival. I need Al Aqsa’s help, and yours, in tying Iyad Hassan to Hamas. From there, maybe I can find out who his handler really was, and who the handler worked for. As matters stand, you’ll soon have nothing more to lose.”
Farhat appraised him closely. “All right,” he said at length. “I’ll consider what you say.”
“Good. Because there’s something more I want: the medical records for Saeb Khalid.”
Though Farhat’s eyes widened, David sensed that his astonishment was feigned. “For what purpose?”
“In the past few years, Khalid traveled to Amman, supposedly to consult a specialist about a serious heart condition. Maybe he has one. But the last trip was just before Saeb went to America. Like his prior trips, this one took several days, leaving him time for other things. I’m curious about what they were, and who he might have seen.”
Farhat regarded him with bleak amusement. “So you wish to substitute the husband for the wife?”
“Only if it works. But if he has no heart condition, or saw a Jordanian doctor only briefly, that would pique my curiosity.”
Farhat opened his palms. “But why ask us for Khalid’s confidential records? Why not the Israelis? Perhaps they, too, have taken an interest in him.”
“You know they have,” David snapped. “But the Israelis won’t help me, so I’m asking you. Saeb Khalid may be a Palestinian, but he is no friend to Fatah. And I’d like to get his records without him, or anyone but us, knowing anything about it.” Pausing, David spoke more quietly. “No one knows what happened here. Unless we find out, the Middle East may blow up, and a Palestinian state along with it. Maybe I could live with that. But I don’t want Hana executed in the bargain.”
Farhat smiled faintly. “As before, Mr. Wolfe, I admire your candor. For today, let that be enough.”
21
A morning later, David traveled to Hebron in the company of a stranger. “You must see conditions in Hebron for yourself,” Nabil Ashawi had told him, “and this man may be able to help you in ways that I cannot. Go, and you will see.”
His guide, Abu Jamal, was a slight bespectacled man, a former mathematics teacher in his mid-forties, twice jailed in his youth for an alleged association with the PLO. In the back seat of his jeep was body armor as well as perfume, which, Jamal explained, could help ward off the effect of tear gas when combined with cotton balls held to the nose.
At the Qalandiya checkpoint, they stopped again, beginning the process with which David was now familiar—a half-hour delay while tense soldiers checked their papers and searched their trunk and bags for explosives. Once more David felt as though he had entered a dream state that, triggered by some random event, could easily become a nightmare. But he assumed that Jamal had been provided by Farhat, and he hoped that this trip would link him to a leader of Al Aqsa.
In the driver’s seat, Jamal gazed at the thirty-foot-high concrete wall that separated Qalandiya from Jerusalem. “The Jewish,” he said, “have stolen our homeland, and now are stealing more. If we ever get through this barrier, I will show you the village of Atwani.”
Though the landscape around Atwani was rocky and barren, its hills were softened by fig and olive trees and fields where sheep grazed. On the highest of the hills, covered in pine, was a settlement dominated by the Masada movement. “The settlers,” Jamal said, “harass these villagers with impunity, killing their sheep, stealing their crops, throwing rocks at their children on their way to school. They are the worst of the Jewish, making trouble so there will never be peace.”
Jamal’s repetition of “the Jewish,” tinged with anti-Semitism, began to chafe David’s nerves. “Barak Lev,” Jamal said, speaking the name as if it were a curse. “Whoever blew his head off is a hero.”
At the foot of a hill where three Palestinians were grazing their sheep, they came to a clinic run by the Christian Peacekeepers Team. Outside were two young people, a brown-haired Canadian man and a fresh-faced blond woman from Minnesota, and their supervisor, a schoolteacher from New York who wore her silver hair in a bun. The blonde had one arm in a sling, and David spotted a bruise along her collarbone.
“That doesn’t look much like a skiing accident,” he said.
The young woman, Shannon Heath, mustered a smile that went as quickly as it had come. “A few weeks ago,” she told him, “some settlers began cutting down the villagers’ wheat. Our whole deal is reducing violence and friction—if necessary, by asking the Israeli authorities to intervene. These guys” —she indicated the others with a nod of her head—“weren’t here. So I started videotaping the settlers myself—”
“They beat her with chains,” her supervisor said tersely. “What you can’t see is Shannon’s punctured lung.”
Arms folded, Jamal stood to the side, smiling grimly. “The Jewish,” he said again, as though this were comment enough.
David ignored him. “Is any one protecting you?” he asked the supervisor.
“In theory, the Israeli authorities. But the settlers stole Shannon’s video camera, and she doesn’t know the men who attacked her.” The woman bit her lip. “A few weeks before, the IDF told the villagers that our reports to the media were causing ‘trouble,’ and that they would protect the villagers themselves. The village leaders answered that the only reason the Israelis cared at all was because we’re here.”
“So we’re not leaving,” the Canadian said.
David watched Shannon’s troubled face. “We can’t,” she affirmed. “Last year the settlers poisoned sheep, this year they stole wheat. Just before he started beating me, I asked one of the settlers—this teenage kid, actually— what right he had to take wheat from the villagers’ land. ‘I have a deed,’ he told me. ‘It’s called the Bible.’ Without us here, I swear to you they wouldn’t stop at killing sheep.”
Their supervisor pointed up a nearby hill. “Would you like to see the village?” she asked. “One of the leaders speaks English. He can tell you more.”
At the top of the hill, David entered another place and time, where shepherds and subsistence farmers lived much as they had for centuries. Women in head scarves and long dresses walked alongside lean, sun-wizened men, carrying sacks of grain into a dark cave they used for storage. The cave dated to the Romans, David discovered; inside, the remnant of a column still remained.
The village leader, a teacher named Khader Mafouz, greeted David courteously. Leading David to his home, Mafouz pointed to the ruins of a mosque. “About twenty years ago, we built this. As soon as we were done, the IDF destroyed it.” He stopped, hands on hips, surveying the concrete buildings that formed the village. “The Israelis tend not to give us building permits. So the mosque was an ‘illegal’ building, as is our school. Whatever we build, they can destroy at any time. And now there is this wall.”
David saw a truck filled with IDF soldiers climb a road to the settlement, churning dust. “The wall,” Mafouz went on, “will encompass much of the land around us. We say it is ours; they say, ‘Prove it.’ But we have no deeds. So now we are going back to cemeteries, trying to show that we have lived in this place for centuries.”
A quiet despair in his voice hinted that this mission held scant hope. “Once our people lived in caves,” he told David. “Sometimes I’m afraid we’ll be living in caves again. But we don’t w
ant our children to be run off by these settlers, or cut off from their land. It is a great dilemma—to commit violence against them is too big a risk. Instead, with the help of our Christian friends, we persist.”
They entered his home, a concrete structure with timeworn carpets scattered across the floor of the main room. David sat on a carpet; beside him, Mafouz squatted, maintaining his balance without apparent effort. As they sipped tea, Mafouz swatted the flies that buzzed around them. “I am sorry,” he said. “They are from the settlers.” He pointed at the settlement, visible through the open space that was his door. “They bring their garbage down the hill, and make of our village their garbage pit.”
David turned to him, thinking to ask a question. But Mafouz kept gazing at the hill. “If I could,” he said softly, “I would drive them from this place. And if they refused to go, I would kill them all. When someone comes as they have, to take your land and way of life, to resist them is not terrorism. It’s survival.”
Driving to Hebron, Jamal and David passed a squalid refugee camp bounded by a twenty-foot wire fence, followed by an Arab village over which an IDF watchtower loomed, as Jamal related Hebron’s long and contentious history. Once home to the prophet Abraham and his family, followed by the site from which King David had ruled, Hebron was occupied, in succession, by Romans, Crusaders, and Arabs led by Emperor Saladin. The Ibrahimi Mosque, Saladin’s doing, was the fourth most holy site in Islam. That this place was sacred to both Jews and Muslims helped explain why its previous eighty years had been so bloody. In 1929, sixty-seven Jews were slaughtered by Palestinians—but only, Jamal hastened to add, because Jews had slaughtered Palestinians in Jerusalem the day before. “What the Jewish never speak of,” Jamal said, “is that other Palestinians saved several hundred more Jews from death.”
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