Losing Israel

by Jasmine Donahaye

  Malik’s grandfather fled Al Murassas in 1948 and ended up in Irbid, in Jordan, where, except for ten years when he worked in Kuwait, he stayed for the rest of his life. Malik doesn’t know enough about it to make it stand out in any way: his grandfather’s experience was the same as that of everyone who left. He had been a farmer, and he had to leave his land. Farming was a second income, because mainly his work was as a carpenter, a skilled carpenter. He had worked in Haifa, which was a vibrant city, and he was doing well. When he had to leave, he lost everything. Nevertheless, because he had a skill, he managed well in his new life. He was able to support himself and his family, so he didn’t end up living in a refugee camp. He left Palestine with Malik’s father, who was about a year old at the time – Malik’s grandfather didn’t have a birth certificate, but he estimated that he was then about twenty-five – and he never went back, not even to visit. He realised he wouldn’t ever be able to return.

  I tell Malik I have seen the site of Al Murassas. What must it be like to hear, I wonder, that I can come and go to this place his family is from, that I could, if I wished, take up residence just a few kilometres away.

  ‘This is the place where our roots are; this is where we belong,’ Malik says. ‘We have rights – we have land and farms. It is our land.’ He pauses. ‘We know the situation,’ he goes on, more emphatically. ‘It’s harder, now – but we still have a feeling inside that we have rights; that it is our right, this land. It was a tragedy that happened thirty years before I was born; the land was my grandfather’s land. He left because of fear – he left everything. You can’t blame him.’

  It should not surprise me, this hint that there might be shame attached to having fled, but it does. How could members of a younger generation not have blamed the older one for losing them their birthright? And how could the question not be asked whether the Nakba, its tragedy, was something Palestinians might have been able to resist, which was the other side of the popular Zionist claim that they had in part brought it upon themselves?

  ‘If you are doing research,’ Malik says, ‘that aims to show the truth of the history, I am at your disposal: I am glad to help.’

  Truth? What truth, I wonder. That some people fled in fear, that others were driven out – that the creation of more than 720,000 Palestinian refugees was not the result of war but, as Ilan Pappe claims, a deliberate, orchestrated act of ethnic cleansing? The way Pappe presents it, the evidence of systematic ethnic cleansing is not always clear or convincing; stripped of the story he tells about it, that evidence can be subject to different interpretation, but I am no historian, and I don’t know any more now about the causes than I did at the beginning – except that there was no single cause, that there is no simple, single historical ‘truth’. The two versions are not binary opposites, mutually exclusive narratives, but a confusion of stories, an entangled mass of threads. But one of them is visible in the landscape I have just walked through, and the other has been removed.

  I think of that valley, with its newly signposted and landscaped hiking trail, which writes a state-sanctioned story onto a valley that no longer holds the people who once shaped it. Malik’s story, and that of others like him, doesn’t replace mine. It doesn’t stand in for mine. It doesn’t in any way moderate my feelings of attachment, though his sense of attachment, of rights, of ownership is just as real, just as strongly felt. But it’s my people who are in possession, my people who have dominion; it’s my people who inscribe their names and their stories onto the land that once held his people, so it is surely we who are accountable.

  When I was nine, my mother came to my school and taught my class the opening of Genesis in Hebrew: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void.’ I always afterwards loved the expression tohu v’vohu – without form, and void – and its King James translation, too. They seemed so different from one another, the Hebrew an almost childish rhyme, but barely there – just a breath and a dissipation – while the English line was so oddly curtailed and abrupt, emphatic. Without form: unidentified, undifferentiated, without name, and therefore void. Not naming – not naming the sites of destroyed villages and neighbourhoods, not telling the other story – is a different order of control: not naming renders a thing void.

  Before our first visit to Israel in 1978, when I used to leaf through my father’s precious edition of Tristram’s Fauna and Flora of Palestine, trying to understand phylum and class, order and family, genus and species, trying to memorise relationships and Latin names, it was the tiny iridescent sunbird that I lingered over, the one bird in the book that is found nowhere else in the world. Until Tristram ‘obtained’ specimens, by shooting them in northern Palestine in the spring of 1864, the sunbird was hardly known in Europe, or so Tristram claimed. His specimens, which he shot, to his ‘great surprise’, in a dell on the south side of Mount Carmel, were a significant addition, since, until his writing, the bird had only been known by ‘Antinori’s unique specimen’. In The Land of Israel, he described the sunbird in almost voluptuous detail, no doubt aided by the two he’d shot and skinned: ‘The male of Hosea’s sunbird is resplendent with all the colours of the humming-bird,’ he wrote, ‘and not much larger than most of that tribe, measuring 41⁄2 inches in length. It has a long, slender, and very curved bill, all the back a brilliant metallic green, the throat metallic blue, and the breast metallic purple, with a tuft of rich red, orange and yellow feathers at each shoulder (the axillary plume), which he puffs out as he hops in the trees, paying his addresses to his modestly-clad brown-green mate.’11

  Those who obtain the first specimen of a new species often aim for posterity in their naming of it, as Tristram managed with his grackle, onycognathus tristramii, that orange-winged starling of the Dead Sea and Masada. But though taxonomic conventions seek to contain chaos, seek to impose order and control in their naming, they are not always successful. In the years before he died, my uncle David, an eminent entomologist, had begun to compile the first attempt at a comprehensive photographic and descriptive record and taxonomy of the insects of Israel. He kept an aquarium of unclassified coppery cockroaches he’d found, which moved so fast they almost flashed. But there were so many insect species which had not been identified or named that the unfinished work kept growing beyond his reach and control; it was a project he could never have finished. He managed something rather different with the birds of the area, which were restricted to a more manageable number; all of these he provided, for his own purposes, with a Hebrew name.

  On my last day in Israel, in his house in Holon, I find his battered, dilapidated edition of the Collins bird-guide. It’s the same edition that my parents have, the same as mine. I turn to page 265, bright with the purple long-tailed tit, the chestnut-coloured bearded tit, and the sunbird. ‘The orange-tufted sunbird’, we used to call it, though the Collins guidebook names it the ‘Orange-tufted or Palestine sunbird’. It is perhaps the only bird in the entire book whose name is so politically ambivalent. The sunbird’s Hebrew name is tzofit, a diminutive, with the same three-letter root as the word for nectar: it means something like ‘little nectar bird’. In Arabic, it’s called the ta’er al nedim al Filistini. The translation is descriptively untidy, like the bird’s nest – nedim is a friend with whom you sit and drink wine. In Arabic, that tiny iridescent bird is therefore something like ‘the Palestinian wine companion bird’; it appears on numerous Palestinian Authority stamps. In his Collins guide, my uncle has annotated the entries with Hebrew names. But on this page he has gone further, and renamed the Palestine sunbird as tzofit ha-eretz Israel – the ‘Israeli nectar bird’, or the ‘nectar-bird of the Land of Israel’.

  Tristram did not impose his name on the sunbird, but nor was he ambiguous about its identity: in The Fauna and Flora of Palestine it is named the Palestine sunbird. At the time that he shot his specimens on Mount Carmel, the bird’s range was almost entirely restricted to the Jordan Valley – hence his surprise at findin
g them in the northwest of the country. Now the sunbird can be seen throughout Israel and the West Bank. Its growing range followed the spread of twentieth-century human settlement; it spread with the planting of urban parks and suburban and Jewish settlement gardens. But it is still unique to the area.

  When I was a child we never called it the Palestine sunbird, because we never used the word Palestine. We never used the word Palestinian, either, except in passing, about terrorists. Naming acknowledges and therefore begins to validate a story. Not naming erases. Not naming is tohu v’vohu – it renders a thing void.

  For me, for others like me, the name Palestine has been a bulbous, ugly nightmare creature bulging with unspoken meanings and claims, because no matter who is using the word, in what context, and no matter what particular geographical space is being designated, semantically the name Palestine erases Israel. The word makes a sort of mental noise that I cannot order or articulate, because its meaning is always ambiguous. What might it be referring to? To the West Bank, including or excluding East Jerusalem, and Gaza? To these areas and the state of Israel collectively – the latter referred to by some Palestinians, and non-Palestinians, as the ‘48 Lands’? Does it mean British Mandate Palestine, or Ottoman Palestine, including Transjordan, which became the Kingdom of Jordan, or a notional Palestinian state whose borders were proposed in the 1947 Partition Plan? Or does it mean a future state of Palestine along the 1949 ceasefire borders, or a future state of Palestine with borders yet to be determined? Might it be a geographical reference, or a reference to a political state? Many passionate and ahistorical supporters of the Palestinian cause believe Israel occupies a formerly independent Palestinian state – some notional amalgam of British Mandate Palestine, Ottoman Syria, and the post-Judea province renamed Palestine by the Romans. In the popular understanding, the Jordanian and Egyptian occupation of the West Bank and Gaza from 1948 till 1967, and the thirty-two years of Britain’s colonial rule preceding that, have somehow been erased.

  ‘Palestine’ presents these multiple possible meanings simultaneously, and to try to navigate them causes a kind of anxious cognitive overload – as, for a Palestinian, no doubt, do the multiple possible meanings and associations of the word ‘Israel’. ‘Israel’ semantically erases Palestine. Like the meaning of the name Palestine, the meaning of the name Israel also changes according to context, according to who is using it. Its boundaries and evocations are similarly ambiguous: biblical Israel, Mandate Palestine, Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist vision of an Israel on both sides of the River Jordan… And there is the gaping semantic, historical and emotional distance between the Hebrew names Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, and Medinat Israel, the State of Israel.

  The Zionist account of the past and the present is all-encompassing: it is a total story, a comprehensive account not only of a people, but of each individual, too. To have it, to feel part of it, is to sink into the warm embrace of belonging. But to use the word Palestine or Palestinian is to lose the safety of that account. It acknowledges all the simplistic oppositions in the popular versions of the two narratives: heroic return to homeland versus European colonisation; defence against attack versus aggressive imperial expansionism; national self-determination as against racist, exclusive ethnocentrism; a war displacing people and creating refugees, or a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing. The stories are irreconcilable. To accede to part of the other is to accede to the whole, and to use the word Palestine or Palestinian is to acknowledge and therefore implicitly give credence to another narrative, a different history – and, consequently, a different set of claims. At the same time, to accede to the whole is to deny oneself a sense of place, and a past. It is safer, therefore, not to use it. Not using the word Palestine, not saying Palestine, renders that other story tohu v’vohu – without form, and void.

  I take my uncle’s battered Collin’s bird-guide outside and sit in the tiny garden with a cup of coffee. I am leaving Israel again, and I don’t know if I’ll be coming back. The garden is full of bougainvillea, flowering pink, white and orange, and a creeper with long tube-shaped flowers that I can’t identify. As the early light begins to warm the tangle of creeper over the far fence, three sunbirds appear, two males and a female. They chase each other in and out of the greenery and flowers, and one hangs gleaming and green in the fronds of a palm tree. It is close enough for me to see its curved beak, the tiny orange and yellow tufts under its shoulders, and the glistening metallic sheen of its feathers.

  Orange-tufted or Palestine sunbird? I am still uneasy, but now it’s for different reasons. Palestine is beginning to mean something new in popular and practical terms, with forms of official recognition and status. But if the name Palestine might now or in the near future designate a territory determined more or less along the 1949 ceasefire lines, rather than all of British Mandate Palestine, this new official meaning of the name permits a kind of cleansing of the name Israel; it allows a new level of national forgetting. All that is not-Israel can be shifted over the future border; all that is within the border can be purified of its Palestinian past, and the claims of that past; the Palestinian population of Israel can become once again an ethnic Arab minority. The Palestine sunbird can without hesitation be called the Israeli sunbird. The other story, the Palestinian story within Israel, can be at most a minority story in a nation with many minority stories. It might become a loose thread that can now be pulled out for good from the bright, finished tapestry of national history.

  It is a bad sign, I think, if I can begin to use the word Palestine without discomfort and uncertainty. None of the approximations or conjoined names that attempt to repudiate that future deliberate amnesia are satisfactory – ‘Israel/Palestine’ or ‘Israel-Palestine’, or their reverse. Better that the name Palestine remain bulbous and burgeoning with ambiguity; better that the landscape remain complex and difficult; better that I hesitate between naming this tiny iridescent bird an orange-tufted sunbird, or a Palestine sunbird.

  Postscript – coming home

  At home, at night after rain I lie awake in the dark listening to the river. I assess the volume of its water by the volume of its sound. Sometimes I wake at night because the sound of the river has changed. Then I get up and go downstairs and slip on my gumboots that stand ready by the door and go out into the wet night to see and feel the level of risk – will the water rise and rise, and will the stream want to break its bonds and join it here? I squelch out in the dark, everything wringing wet. Between midnight and five the village street lights are turned off, and in the summer it does not get fully dark, but even at the winter solstice it’s never truly dark here, not even under heavy cloud. There is always a sense of shape in the darkness, a form to it that distinguishes object from space.

  I could not ascribe to the river the usual characteristics – sullen or angry, light-hearted and singing. It is just water, squeezed into a channel. When all the streams, gullies and culverts that take the run-off from the hills and from the slopes of Mynydd Bach are emptying into it, the river slows and swells, and its surface rolls; it is brown, foamed with nitrates washed off the field where cows have stood hock-deep in its sucking muddy edges, drinking and shitting.

  This is a wet place, saturated, and the water brings woe – mould, damp, creeping cold, clouds of midges, whining biteless mosquitoes and wildly accelerated growth of everything green that spreads out and clings and insinuates with roots or runners – but it also brings with it delights: the sound of the river at night, flycatchers, chittering flocks of house martins and sometimes the birds that prey on them; and, not long ago, for the first time, the evidence of an otter – its unmistakeable scale-and-fishbone scat.

  It is a wet place where I live and I have been fighting it, resisting it, saying it is not my place, that I cannot bear any longer its wringing rain. But the world lives in the flow of water; we live in the flow of blood and lymph, saliva and semen and silvery secretions. We are mostly water. The lanes near here are returning to local care:
the council no longer grits them in winter; the council no longer clears their ditches and culverts and drains. The civilisation we pay for is in retreat. The drains become clogged with leaves and mud from tractors churning into and out of sodden fields, ploughing or spreading muck in a near-hopeless attempt to grow something, anything, in this wet. I keep it at bay as best I can. The field above the house is turning to bog, is turning back to wild – a place that snipe come to feed; perhaps in the future curlews and lapwings will return. We are all going back to wild wet wasteland.

  Three years ago, something in my body stopped and I became ill. Of course the obvious clichés had some truth, as they usually do when your body alarms you with its warning signs – about stepping back and taking stock, changing priorities, reducing stress, living a more balanced healthy life. A blood clot is a serious business, particularly a blood clot that has no clear cause. Failing to uncover its physical origins, it became a metaphor: something in me was blocked; something in me would not move on.

  When I walked along the lanes here in the winter, I took a stick and redirected the blocked flow of every drain I passed, shifting the accumulated barrier of mud and grass and leaves, so that the slow water, relieved of its blockage, could flow freely again. It was not a socially responsible thing – I did it because of the fear of the blockage in me. With the blockage the flow is slowed, stopped; it spreads out and sinks; everything around it becomes waterlogged, sullen, thickly mud – and so I watched the water take up its old and proper path, beginning to flow freely, to clean the edges and surfaces, as I wished my blood to flow, cleaning the pathways of my body of its sediments, taking away loose particles, smoothing its channel as it went – towards a road-edge, a gulley, a drain; towards a stream, the river, the sea.