The first interview Lara translated for me was with the author Gharib Asqalani. He welcomed Lara and me into his home on the edge of the Shati refugee camp. Like every Palestinian whose home I visited, Gharib offered us coffee. But instead of making some himself, he directed Lara to the kitchen. “There is the pot on the sink and the coffee on the shelf,” he said to her. Lara shot me a look of bemused irritation but dutifully stood to make our coffee.
Gharib was still an infant in 1948 when Israeli soldiers swept through what was then known as the Gaza subdistrict. The occupation forces emptied forty-five out of fifty-six towns and villages in the area, including al-Majdal Asqalan, where Gharib had been born a few months earlier. He and his family escaped into the Gaza Strip along with the more than two hundred thousand terrified refugees who sought sanctuary among Gaza’s eighty thousand residents. Gaza swelled. The territory represented only one-hundredth of the area of Mandate Palestine but housed a quarter of the Palestinian population after the war. One historian wrote that Gaza had become “an involuntary Noah’s Ark.”
Gharib’s family settled in Gaza City, where his father found work as a tailor and cloth trader. They lived for a while in a rented house until Gharib’s father realized that the family might lose its refugee status unless they lived in a camp. They moved their home and business into Shati refugee camp, where his father operated a textile factory. “Other high-quality cloth was imported and expensive,” Gharib said. “My father sold his cloth to the other refugees for a good price.”
Like many Palestinian adolescents in the 1950s, Gharib grew up reading the works of Marx and Engels, but this leftist philosophy made little sense to Gharib as a young Gazan refugee. “In the camps, I didn’t see the rich living on the blood of the poor as Marx described,” Gharib said. “Here the rich and poor were both expelled from their land. And there was no work for anyone.”
Gharib’s father, though, knew how to create work. He purchased a small plot of land near the Bureij refugee camp and planted strawberries and orange trees. He urged Gharib to study agriculture. “I have land,” his father said. “So if you get an agriculture degree, you will have a job.” Gharib agreed and traveled to Egypt in 1965 to study agricultural engineering at Alexandria University. Gharib had completed only his second year when Israel occupied Gaza in 1967. His family could no longer export their oranges, and the Israelis restricted the amount of water allocated to the farm. Gharib suggested to his father that they should either sell the farm or build homes or warehouses on the land. His father refused. “This is a farm, and it will remain a farm,” he said. Gharib’s father uprooted the orange groves and planted olive trees in their place. He knew olives could survive the drought the Israelis imposed on them. “My father taught me another form of resistance. Not to resist by weapons, but by staying,” Gharib said. This was another example of sumud, the Palestinian concept of steadfastness.
The olive trees would take years to mature, so after graduation Gharib worked on agricultural projects in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. When political friction between the refugees and the Jordanian government hit its peak in 1970, Gharib left for Damascus. He worked in Syria’s al-Raqqah camp—“now full of ISIS,” he said—then as an agricultural engineer on the Euphrates Dam. During this time, he married a woman he’d met while a student in Egypt. “She was from Gaza, we married in Jordan, and we lived in Syria,” Gharib said. They returned to Gaza after the birth of their first son.
The sort of large-scale agricultural and irrigation projects Gharib had worked on in Jordan and Syria did not exist in Gaza. “The Israelis would not allow it,” he said. “They wanted the Gazan economy to be controlled by Israelis, not Palestinians.” His father’s olive orchards were not yet bearing fruit, and Gharib did not want to labor on someone else’s farm. He found a job teaching biology and physics. “I thought this would be a temporary job, but I ended up teaching for twenty years.”
Gharib had been writing songs and love poems since he was a teenager, but he never had ambitions to become a professional writer. After his return to Gaza, though, he started gathering with the other authors he knew. “We thought we were the most important people in Gaza,” he said. “We were the master intellectuals.” Gharib and his colleagues wrote political poems and stories and considered themselves “resistance writers.”
On Fridays, Gharib and his writing friends would find seats on the early morning buses that brought Ghazzawi day laborers to their jobs in Israel. The writers would alight in Tel Aviv and walk to Jaffa, where they’d buy Arabic-language newspapers from a communist shopkeeper they all knew. “We had to go early, otherwise the workers would buy them all,” Gharib said. From Jaffa, they’d travel north along the coast to Haifa to visit Emile Habibi, a writer and communist member of the Israeli Knesset. They would sit in the offices of Al-Ittihad—the communist magazine Habibi edited—to drink coffee and listen to Habibi pontificate. “We used to call him colleague, but he always called us boys,” Gharib said. Habibi published much of their early work in Al-Ittihad, and he encouraged them to enter writing contests. “He was like a prophet for us,” Gharib said.
After their time with Habibi, Gharib’s caravan traveled eastward to Nazareth to meet with “another prophet,” Tawfiq Ziad. Like Habibi, Ziad was both a writer and a left-wing politician. He served as the mayor of Nazareth and the head of Rakah, a Palestinian communist political party.
During these visits, Ziad would chat with his Gazan comrades and sell them cheap translations of Russian books Rakah used to get for free. Gharib and his weary friends would then head back to Gaza. The entire journey took about fourteen hours.
I envied Gharib’s Palestinian On the Road adventures. “I would love to do this trip,” I told him.
He laughed. “Bring me permission from the Israelis, and we can do it together.”
Gharib and his friends occasionally wrote romantic stories and poems, but they never published them. Their work was proudly political. Gharib’s 1978 novel The Collar described an Israeli siege on Gaza when Palestinian fighters ambushed IDF soldiers in Shati refugee camp’s narrow maze of streets. “The resistance used the alleyways as a trap,” Gharib said. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli defense minister at the time, ordered the army to bulldoze a row of houses to widen the roads. Then they surrounded the camp with a fence—the collar of the book’s title. Gharib wrote about the siege, the rubble left behind by Israeli bulldozers, and how women tossed oranges over the fence to feed the trapped fighters. Copies of The Collar were smuggled to political prisoners inside Israel. A sympathetic librarian in Gaza helped the wives of prisoners disguise the books by replacing The Collar covers with covers torn from benign-sounding romance novels. “We smuggled five hundred copies to political prisoners this way,” Gharib said.
While his stories have always been overtly political and fueled by a sense of resistance, Gharib was no propagandist. He claims to be one of the first Palestinian writers to abandon overt sloganeering and turn his gaze toward issues of daily life. “After all, you cannot send your lover a kiss with a Kalashnikov,” he said. Gharib wrote stories about the lives of regular people decades before the false promises of Oslo compelled Palestine’s next generation of writers to do the same.
My favorite story of Gharib’s is “A White Flower for David,” which Atef Abu Saif included in his Book of Gaza anthology. The story examines the complicated relationship between two Palestinians, Mahmud and Haifa, and an Israeli couple, David and Esther. The two couples share a warm and nearly familial friendship. Early in the story, David and Esther visit Gaza to celebrate the birth of Mahmud and Haifa’s son, Husam. “Esther was flying high that day as she cradled Husam in his cot. She was captivated by him, swooning over the blackness of his eyes. She caressed his neck and cried out: ‘If only we could have a daughter with Arab eyes!’”
David and Esther are written with sympathy. Gharib never casts them as villains even when, years later, inevitable violence strains the bond bet
ween the families. During a confrontation in Shati refugee camp between Palestinians and the IDF, Husam joins the boys slinging stones at the soldiers. David, now a soldier himself and on duty in Gaza, points his rifle at Husam. In a panic to save his son from being shot, Mahmud hurls a rock at David and cracks open his friend’s skull. In the story’s final scene, the two families meet again, this time in David’s home in Israel. Esther wears the Palestinian robe Mahmud’s mother gave her years earlier, and Mahmud kisses the wound he inflicted on David’s forehead. (The “scar was still moist.”) The old friends forgive each other. Still, when Husam looks out of David’s window and sees a group of soldiers waiting at a bus stop, he longs for his slingshot.
Gharib is hardly a humble man. He believes his life in Gaza was more complicated and nuanced than that of the new generation of Gazan writers. “I’ve experienced things they have only read about in books,” he said, adding that they concern themselves with winning prizes and writing for foreigners. Despite his boasting, it is true that only a Gazan writer from Gharib’s era could have written “A White Flower for David.” Gharib represents the last generation of Gazans to have known Israelis personally. He grew up in a time when Palestinians could leave Gaza to work for and alongside Israeli Jews. The power dynamic between the occupier and the occupied hung over every friendship, surely, but the walls were not as high and strong then. Palestinians and Israelis did business together, attended each other’s family celebrations, and exchanged gifts. Friendships like David and Mahmud’s were not uncommon. Two Intifadas and the blockade put an end to this. I was reminded of Mourid Barghouti’s claim that Palestinians have “seen the Jew only in khaki, with his finger on the rifle’s trigger.” Palestinians in Gaza rarely see Israelis at all, and all they exchange are rockets and stones for bullets and bombs.
Some of those bombs rained on the olive orchard Gharib’s father left for him. During Operation Cast Lead in 2008, Israeli warplanes destroyed a third of the olive trees his father had planted back in the 1960s. “The grove was close to the border,” Gharib said, “and the Israelis thought there were resistance fighters hiding among the trees.” Gharib planted new trees after the war. These trees bore fruit for the first time in 2015, and Gharib pressed them into oil. He stood from his chair to fetch a bottle of oil from his kitchen. He held it out for me to see, gold and gleaming, as proud as a grandfather showing photos of his grandchildren. I thought he might give me the bottle, but this oil was too precious to give to a casual visitor. “My sons and grandsons will go to the land and see the trees I planted after the war,” Gharib said. “I will pass away one day, but what will remain are my books and my olive trees.”
Nearly every Palestinian writer I met in the West Bank and Gaza had some relationship to the Tamer Institute for Community Education. Each one of them referred to the organization as Tamer, with the same inflection and affection they would reserve for a beloved uncle.
Tamer began in 1989 during the height of the First Intifada, when the Israeli military shuttered Birzeit University near Ramallah. Their classes canceled, a group of lecturers from the university decided to teach children at the Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem, who were confined to their neighborhoods by regular police roadblocks. The Birzeit teachers gathered the young students together wherever they could find space—in someone’s salon, in the shade of a neighborhood tree—and taught them the school lessons they were missing.
The children went back to their regular schools when the Intifada eased, but the teachers who organized the informal classes saw an enduring need for what they called community education, especially regarding child literacy. The volunteers opened an office in Jerusalem and implemented reading programs in both the West Bank and Gaza throughout the early 1990s. After Oslo, they moved their main office to Ramallah, where they organized themselves as the Tamer Institute of Community Education, registered as an official Palestinian NGO, and sought funding from foreign donors. Tamer now runs various literacy campaigns in Palestinian schools. It also organizes writing workshops for young writers, public art projects, and storytelling events with local authors. Tamer’s publishing arm prints and distributes children’s books by Palestinians like Maya Abu-Alhayyat as well as Arabic translations of books by international authors.
Tamer runs an annual reading campaign every April that it advertises with beautiful posters and billboards. The poster for the 2015 campaign featured a painting of a girl, her arms held aloft and her hair loose, bounding over rooftops beneath the slogan “Something awaits you in this world. Stand for it.” The campaign includes storytelling events in schools, libraries, and public spaces throughout Palestine and as far afield as the refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon.
Part of the programming always includes the Donate a Book campaign. Tamer invites youth to organize into groups and knock on doors in their communities to collect used books from their neighbors. The kids announce they are from Tamer and ask for any books the family may have already read. It is a sort of literary Halloween. Tamer sends the books to poor neighborhoods to supplement their library collections. If the children gather enough books, an entirely new library can be established.
The Donate a Book campaign added a new focus in 2010. Tamer organizers in Gaza realized that most of Gaza’s children were born in the 1990s and 2000s and, because of the closed borders, had had no opportunity to see Jerusalem. As they went door to door collecting books, the children also asked their adult neighbors if they’d ever traveled to Jerusalem. If they had, the volunteers would ask them to recount a story from their visit. The children wrote the stories down so they could have a record of the city they loved but might never reach.
Among all of Tamer’s activities, though, I found the My First Book program the most compelling. Every year the foundation invites children between eight and fifteen years old living around Palestine to write a story and send it to Tamer. They ask for illustrations, too, and encourage the young writers to team up with a friend who likes to draw. Hundreds of Palestinian children submit stories each year. Tamer assembles a reading committee that chooses the best fifteen or so stories to be published, along with the illustrations, in the annual edition of My First Book. Copies of the collection are distributed to libraries all over Palestine.
Each annual edition of My First Book stands as a time capsule of Palestinian life in a given year as seen through the eyes of children. Taken together, the books offer a sort of child’s history of Palestine. The My First Books reveal that the time between the two Intifadas, from 1994 to 2000, was an age of optimism for young Palestinians. Children in all regions of Palestine wrote about camping with their families or visiting the sea. They wrote the sort of stories children anywhere might write. Beginning in 2000, however, the traumas of the Second Intifada—soldiers, shelling, checkpoints—started to feature in the texts. Before the Israeli army evicted the settlers from Gaza in 2005, Gazan stories often featured the checkpoint boys of Abo Holi, the Israeli roadblock that divided Gaza in half. Drivers knew they had a better chance of getting past the soldiers if they had children in the car, so enterprising boys charged drivers a few shekels to sit in their backseats. West Bank kids started to write about the “separation” wall as soon as the wall began to rise. Gazan kids started writing stories about wars when bombs started to fall.
For the most part, though, conflict darkened only a few of the stories I read. In the 2013 edition of My First Book, a ten-year-old named Saddin from Tulkarem writes about a “scary dinosaur” that becomes a lifelong friend. Shorouq writes of the day the sky over his village rained red mulberries. The young olive tree in Nora’s story longs to travel but feels pride when her olives are pressed into oil and become part of the Palestinians who care for her. The girl in nine-year-old Umniya’s book wants to be a doctor, and wear glasses and a stethoscope, so she can heal the sick turtle in her garden. Only one story in the collection, about a girl whose painting of Palestinian suffering was censored by the Israelis, was overtly political. Th
e rest possessed an innocence I’d assumed the children of Palestine had long lost. These children wrote like children. I felt a strange relief reading about a world of friendly dinosaurs and magic mulberries rather than a world on fire.
Tamer endured an uneasy relationship with the Hamas government when it first took control of Gaza. Hamas disapproved of boys and girls mixing freely in Tamer’s various programs, and the Ministry of Education banned a few of Tamer’s published books from Gaza’s school libraries. The most bizarre of these was Election Day in the Savanna, an illustrated children’s book by French author Sandrine Dumas Roy that Tamer translated into Arabic in 2006. In Election Day, the animals of the savanna gather to elect a new king. Several animals announce their candidacy, including Jo the Lion, whose father was the previous king, and Jim the Crocodile, who bases his entire platform on security issues. “I will sink my teeth into anyone who should try to attack you,” Crocodile says, and his unsophisticated message earns jeers from the other animals, who consider him a “brainless crawler.”
But Jim the Crocodile wins the election anyway. He quickly appoints his brothers and cousins to all the important ministries and assigns young soldiers to secure the savanna’s borders. This suits everyone fine until the dry season, when the local water holes dry up and the animals must travel to the North Lake. The crocodile border patrol stops them, telling them that the border is closed in both directions. The king, who has access to the Royal Pond and no need of the North Lake, ignores the animals’ protests. When a gazelle tries to breach the border at night, the crocodile soldiers devour her whole.
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