Of course it’s a truism to say that naming the landscape is an act of storytelling, and an act of dominion and ownership, but it’s written into our consciousness – Adam, the first human and the first naturalist, naming and claiming dominion. But even if it’s a truism to say that the one in a position to name is the one with power, there’s a danger in naming, too. The common folk belief that an individual has a true name which must remain hidden in order to cheat death – or the Other, or the fairies, or the underworld – is still powerfully resonant: naming has magical properties. And when the hero or heroine learns that name, or if the antagonist divulges his true name, the balance of power shifts. Rumpelstiltskin, his name unguessed, cackles and rubs his bony hands together, the image of a stereotyped scheming, chaos-inducing Jew because he is outside, he is other, he is mutable and unknowable, his affiliations and his knowledge secret and inaccessible. But naming him by his true name renders him impotent. And the resonance of those folk beliefs is surely connected to an uneasy consciousness of how naming a child has something of this dangerous control about it, too. A baby is part of the generality of babies, unmarked by the first definitions of gender or weight, or the length and nature of the labour, or whether he or she cried at birth. These are impersonal details: none of these is a designation, and your own consciousness of him or her is incomplete, formless. But when you name a child, you stamp down your own classification, your own story; you exclude the possibility of other stories.
My older daughter is named Jericha, a feminised form of the world’s most ancient city, Jericho. She was conceived in Jerusalem, but Jerusalem carries within it the consciousness of Jericho, to which it is connected by an ancient trade route, the Jericho Road. The old names, the old routes are still there – Jericho and Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Jaffa, Jerusalem and Nablus. You can orientate yourself in the one city by an awareness of the other. My daughter is named after that ancient city, an imagined city of the moon, her name an evocation of cityscape and palimpsest, of ancient library mazes and mosaic floors, founded on ritual deposits – white-clay masks with haunting shell eyes.
I was thirteen when I first heard about those archaeological finds of masks at Jericho, which, my history teacher Mr Davidson said, was in Jordan. It was 1981, and I had been to Jericho the previous year, had seen the mosaic floor of its recently excavated ancient synagogue.
I put up my hand. ‘Excuse me, Mr Davidson,’ I said, ‘but Jericho’s in Israel.’
‘No,’ he replied, ‘it’s in Jordan.’
‘But I’ve been to Jericho,’ I protested, puzzled. ‘We went last year, when we were in Israel.’
This was my first encounter with a different version of the past – not the Leon Uris version, not the Israeli one, not the Zionist one. But in that unfamiliar version, the West Bank was still understood, at the time, to be occupied Jordan, and Gaza to be occupied Egypt: the territories had not yet become Occupied Palestine in the popular imagination.
When people puzzle over the source of my daughter’s name, I have to explain – because of what Jericho means, what it can mean – that the choice was not a claim of cultural or geographic or historical dominion over ancient Jericho and therefore a political claim on modern Jericho, but an invocation of that imagined city of the moon, emblem of all cities. Naming isn’t about identifying; it’s about trying to sear a brand into the flesh of a thing, about trying to make something permanent out of the telling of a story, an attempt to reduce chaos, to impose order.
Did my daughter’s particular love of cities result from her being named after the world’s oldest city? Did we, her parents, unconsciously but not accidentally, write Jericho and Jerusalem into her, seeking to shape her origins in our shared story as much as seeking to determine her future? How you are named determines who you are in fundamental ways, but it is not immutable. If only we could still believe that truth is pure and unchanging, rather than contingent, that chaos is reducible to perfect order, that there are absolute names for things. But everywhere I look I see naming as an act of storytelling that conceals, a process of reshaping and erasing the past in order to determine the future.
On the crest of the hill some three kilometres away, I make out the stand of trees that marks what remains of Al Murassas. I have one small bottle of water, and I am wearing thin sandals that are coming apart, but I set off towards the site of its ruins. Once again the landscape has split into a shimmering multiplicity – the present-day panorama of fertile agricultural land; the remnants in it of another relationship, another past, and the overt signage, with its laboured, over-flowery co-options and omissions, which I did not see from the car when my uncle brought me here the first time to look at cattle and sabra and barbed wire.
Parts of the trail have only recently been landscaped, and here the information boards and boulders with white-lettered inscriptions still look new. The bank has been replanted with pomegranate and oleander, the saplings sheathed in protective plastic that has already been bleached by the sun into a pale discoloured pink.
A flock of larks rises over the bare earth. Perhaps they are early migrating skylarks from Europe. There are no fences here to separate out the crop fields, no boundary markers, just the change from freshly turned soil to crop, to fallow land. The pale track blends on either side into the edges of the field.
My feet begin to hurt. Dusty, sore and thirsty, labouring a little in the heat, I recognise the resonance of a kind of pilgrimage. This isn’t a religious pilgrimage, as in Jerusalem, where knots of devout tourists walk, chanting, between the stopping points of the Via Dolorosa, and their guides stand to one side, waiting, while they pay homage or pray; nevertheless, in its own way this is becoming a kind of homage – though I am not sure to what, or to whom.
Ahead of me, in the distance, the site of the destroyed village is marked out from the fields by a dark line of sabra. As I draw near, I see that the barbed wire is down and the cattle are gone: it is empty, and I can go in.
According to Walid Khalidi, in 1931 Al Murassas was a roughly circular settlement of eighty-nine adobe houses. His figures come from the British ‘Census of Palestine’ that year. Three hundred and eighty-one people lived here then. By 1945 the population was four hundred and sixty, and in 1948, this had risen to an estimated five hundred and thirty-four. When I read Khalidi’s description of Al Murassas to my mother, she said: ‘Of course that’s not how I remember it. I remember ruins, ruined buildings, bits of walls. Buildings, but not with roofs... We called it khirbe. That’s what it was.’ Khirbe means ruins.
‘Stone?’ I asked. ‘Or adobe?’
‘Well, I remember stone, but I’m not sure. Maybe that was beit ha-sheikh. Or perhaps I’m remembering Kawkab…’
‘But you knew, right?’
‘Yes, it was the empty villages. We knew they were empty Arab villages.’
I walk down the cattle track from the road and step over the barbed wire lying on the ground. The cattle have eaten everything but the sabra and a low, dry thorny plant that scratches my ankles and penetrates through the worn soles of my sandals. As I come level, like a picture coming into focus, the wild tangle of sabra resolves into a border, a planted boundary hedge. It marks the edge of the village site, and three sides of a square, with a single tree in the centre. The ground is bare except for stubble and thorn and a few scattered rocks. Up on the road, the bank has been built up and landscaped with rock; perhaps it has been taken from ruined houses. Tomer, the kibbutz archivist, remembers the buildings as part stone, part adobe.
From the road I could only see a sabra thicket, but now I see the village itself begin to take shape. I walk a long way through those high sabra boundaries. The site stretches out into enclosure after enclosure, often around a single acacia tree. The cactus hedges are tall, gnarled, scarred and deformed, and impenetrable, like a fairytale thicket. Some of the sabra has broken, and great limbs lie on the ground, but there is new growth, too, and the old growth is still bearing fruit: ripening, and ripe, a
nd fallen.
I enter a corridor of sabra and it is absolutely still; the heat is caught there. On either side of the path, thick cactus grows to some seven or eight feet, shutting out sight of the curve of fields, the rounded hills, the purple and green of Gilboa. I am alone, enclosed in this silent, suffocating avenue of cactus, and it is all I can see – thorned, savage, massive and old. In the pressured hot stillness I can’t move: I am caught in this corridor, trapped. The cactus walls lean in, scarred and ancient; they have taken hold of me. Then I am walking again, fast, almost running, in a sudden near panic, until I break out of the corridor and into the open. I scramble away up the slope towards where the road lies, and at a safe distance look back. Behind me, the corridor has become once again only a tangle of cactus.
When Tristram identified Al Murassas among ‘several ruined villages’ in 1865, perhaps his ‘grass-grown sites ... marked afar by a deeper green’ were nothing of the sort; perhaps instead they were the darker green of these sabra boundaries, which he saw only from a distance, and about which he made dangerously mistaken assumptions.
Ahead of me a great rusty pipe rises out of the scratchy, dry land, and downhill from it there is a blur of slight green with low shrubs where it leaks a little. Perhaps this is the spring that once rose in Kafra and descended to Al Murassas. A covey of chukars rises at my approach – flight after flight of plump, chestnut-barred partridges taking off from the tiny damp oasis of the leaking pipe in the valley below.
I can see the far edge of the village now, the hedge of sabra marking the boundary, and I follow the pipe up towards the road, where it goes underground. My head is pounding. I have not drunk enough, and there is only an inch of water left in my bottle. Here by the pipe grows the stand of trees that Asaf pointed out the last time, when we stopped. They are in a rough circle – a cypress and a tall eucalyptus rising elegantly to a high canopy, and others I cannot identify. Perhaps this is the site of Sheikh Ibrahim Al Sa’ad’s grave, which is marked on Abu Sitta’s map, but there is nothing to identify it except the trees. The remains of the rusty pipe protrude here, too. Evidently it has been replaced by a newer high-tech pipe – its junction stands exposed on the far side of the road. Perhaps when this pipe was laid, the Sheikh’s bones had to be moved. All construction has to stop, in Israel, when bones are discovered, and the archaeological authorities have to be called in. Jewish religious law forbids the removal of the Jewish dead, so if bones are found, it has to be ascertained that the site isn’t one of Jewish burial. Deep history is the bane of Israeli construction companies: wherever you dig there are bones.
I clamber back onto the road. A few feet from the stand of trees, an upright boulder has been placed to mark the hiking trail. It is chiselled with white-lettered Hebrew lines from the poem Od Chozer ha-Nigun, ‘the melody still returns’, by nationalist poet Natan Alterman:
Still the melody returns which you left behind in vain
and once again the road opens up along its length
and a cloud in its sky, and a tree in its rain
still await you, passer-by.10
Knowing what that place once was, the meaning of the poem shifts from the one intended by its being sited there. The melody left behind in vain in that particular place is not the trace notes of a biblical past, referred to elsewhere in the signage, which re-inscribes it in the landscape. Instead it is the lingering melody of a much more recent past, and not trace notes of it, so much as a full lament – the lament of that other map which reads harus... harus... harus. Destroyed... destroyed... destroyed...
I walk back along the track, uncomfortably dehydrated. By the time I get within sight of the kibbutz, my head beats with pain, and I am beginning to stagger. My legs are not obeying me and my rings are tight: my hands have swollen. Once back in my cousin’s apartment, I kick off my broken sandals, sit down on the bed and gulp glass after glass of cold fruit juice – pear and sabra, with its odd, sweet flavour, and its poignant, sweet and difficult meanings and associations.
When I was ten, we drove along that road, heading for Belvoir up on the bluff that overlooks the Jezreel Valley. My mother was ill at the time, and so the rest of us – my father, brother, sister and I – were going birdwatching without her, in the rented Peugeot 504 that kept overheating. It was April, but in the early morning the interior of the car was already unbreatheable; the hamsin was blowing, a hot sandy wind from the desert that made people a little crazed. Before we realised it, we had driven into the midst of butterflies. My father slowed and then pulled over, and we sat a few moments in the car, watching butterflies in their hundreds. They were not behaving like butterflies as we knew them – fluttering, stopping, making sideways forays from flower to flower, in a random pattern determined by opportunity – but like birds: they were heading somewhere, determined and intent.
We got out of the car. There were butterflies flattened in the balding tyre treads, in the radiator grille, on the windscreen; there were butterflies dead on the road, caught among dry grass stems. They were all painted ladies. Around us and among us and beyond us, through the light and shade of a small stand of cypresses, and all along the slope, they kept coming. We went and looked down the hill and they were rising towards us through the grasses and sabra; we could see the movement a long way off. It is one of my most vivid, sensual childhood memories: the heat, the car’s metal smell, the dusty softening tarmac, the butterflies, and my mother somewhere else, ill.
I never knew where it was until, comparing bird memories with my father before travelling again to Israel, I asked where we’d seen the painted ladies. ‘At Belvoir,’ he said, over the phone. There was a pause. ‘Belvoir, the crusader castle. Kawkab al Hawa,’ he added. ‘I think it means Star of the East.’
The Arabic name means Star of the Winds, not Star of the East. The place is named after the high wind that often blows there – a hot wind, which brings no relief. Until 1948 this was the Arab village of Kawkab al Hawa. In 1948, at that elevation, with a wide view east and south, it offered a strategic military advantage and it was the site of fierce fighting. The village was occupied, depopulated and destroyed by Jewish forces, and nothing of it remains.
The crusader fortress site has long since been excavated and developed as a national park, but although there’s no trace of the destroyed village, the park’s name retains in its Hebrew version an echo of its older identity, as if in guilty half-acknowledgement – not Kawkab al Hawa, ‘Star of the Winds’, but Kochav HaYarden, ‘Star of the Jordan’.
Despite its official rebranding, despite the deliberate and systematic eradication of the evidence of its physical past, and the rewriting of the landscape under a new name, a fragment of the story of that place persists in memory, too. When I arrived this time at Beit Hashita, Chaya mentioned to me that she and my uncle Asaf had recently been on a little tiul, a trip, to Kawkab. Not Kochav, the Hebrew name; not Belvoir, the crusader fortress name, but Kawkab, the Arabic name. Her uninflected use of the older Arabic name – casual, unacknowledged, unconscious – is mirrored in the name of the Sakhne, too, the hot spring at the foot of Gilboa where I had swum as a child. Sakhne is its Arabic name, though the road-signs to it, and its presence on the map, use the official Hebrew name, Gan HaShlosha. When my mother was a child, the Sakhne was a green splash among rocks; kibbutz children went swimming there with an armed adult standing guard above them. When I was a child, it was an eroded, dusty, littered picnic area full of dangers, with strict segregation between Arabs on the far side and Jews and tourists on the near side.
A road used to lead from Al Sakhina to Al Murassas. Al Sakhina is gone, but the memory of it remains in the name of the spring, the Sakhne. The memory of Al Murassas lives on locally, too, whatever the government intended and attempted, and so does the memory of the other villages. My uncle knows where they were and what they were. So does his wife Chaya. So does my mother, and Tomer the kibbutz archivist, and the others of their generation. The Arabic names and meanings continue to cir
culate orally, continue to resonate, identifying features and settlements by the names that the Jewish newcomers learned in the 1920s and 1930s from the Arab residents who were already long settled in the valley. But the official elisions, the transition between ancient history and the present day, are seamless. Inscribed in the landscape in the boards and signposts of the hiking trail, they will become a new truth, and that elided past will be gone from the memory of the next generation. One of my cousins, Asaf’s daughter, tells me: ‘We learned nothing in school about kibbutz history, about Al Murassas.’ She adds, uncertain, ‘Is it Al Murassas – is that the name?’
Officially, the places do not exist – and, not existing, can be believed never to have existed – but memory disrupts the official version. They live on in names, in the older generation’s sense of place, in images of the landscape from their childhood now changed beyond recognition – my mother’s memory of beit ha-sheikh; her memory, her generation’s memory, of the still-visible ruins of the destroyed villages. They know and don’t know – about the destroyed villages and neighbourhoods, the missing three-quarters of a million people, transformed into a threatening, burgeoning five million. They know and don’t know because they remember but are required to forget. It is not denial, precisely, so much as silence and omission. And meanwhile, spread through the world in the Palestinian diaspora, the memory of those places is held and cherished in a story handed down through some three generations.
When I talk to him at last, Malik says that there is nothing special about his grandfather’s story. He apologises for not having been in touch: he has been very busy with work and preparations for his wedding, and for Ramadan. It is not convenient to meet me in Amman, but we can talk by phone. He says again, ‘If you are doing some justified research, I am happy to help your good self.’
It’s the day before I leave, and I wonder what I should say to this man, what I now want. Sorry? Sorry about your tsores, your troubles? Excuse me, but may I have your story for my own purposes, to feel better about myself? Can I harvest your past like some kind of fruit and make a bitter drink out of it? But I ask him anyway – about his grandfather, about what happened, about his own connection to that place now.
Losing Israel Page 16