I come across a caper growing in the kerb, in the barely visible soil between the tarmac and the pavement, and I crouch to examine it. Its pods are just about to burst open. Walking, I am able to see and smell more. It makes me feel as though time has slowed down and I can linger on my way and examine things more closely. Gone are the anger and burning ambition that used to keep my mind so busy and distracted. It is as though I now have wings that make me feel lighter on my feet, able to float over the ground and look with unburdened eyes. No longer do I have to struggle for breath, as was the case in the past. Age might dull our senses but at least we’re spared the doubt about who we are, our place and role in the world. This allows us to linger, take in the view and appreciate the beauty.
A year ago I was walking behind the Mustakbal School, northwest of here, and found a line of fossilised corals that formed what looked like a coral reef following the contour of the hills. Apparently it is possible to determine the depth of the water from the kind of animal fossils present. The tiny sea creatures from which corals were made lived near the surface, so where I found them must have once marked the level of the sea which aeons ago submerged these hills, which are composed of different kinds of limestone. I knew that the encroaching new buildings would destroy this line of fossils, so a few weeks ago I decided to go with my backpack and take as many of them as I could carry home with me. I also visited the place with my photographer friend Bassam Almohor, who photographed the fossils in situ. Soon enough, the bulldozer arrived and began to dig the land in preparation for new housing. I have no doubt that those who come to live here will have no inkling of what was there before they arrived. As I walk southward, downhill to my office, I will be descending deeper and deeper below what was once the waterline. Then, at the dip almost halfway down Tireh Road, I will begin to climb another of Ramallah’s many hills.
In December 2001 the Israeli army made its first limited incursion into Ramallah since the signing of the Oslo Accords. A tank was parked at the corner of our street and Tireh Road, close to the empty house of Ziadeh Shamieh, who has lived for most of his adult life in the US. I remember bringing my seven-year-old nephew Aziz to look at the tank, so that when the Israeli invasion of Ramallah, which seemed imminent, started he would not be too shocked and realise that there were human beings inside these monsters. As we walked back towards my house, I asked Aziz whether he would like to look inside the little room: ‘Shall we ask permission from the soldier to go in?’ He looked at me with his large, intelligent eyes as though I was utterly mad. ‘No,’ he said, with a knowing grin to indicate that he realised I could not be serious, and tried to get me to walk away faster.
For many years since then I have tried to influence his thinking, but now I know that he, at twenty-two, will make his own choices and find his own way of relating to the political struggle. It is folly to believe that, just as when you get higher up a hill you can see more, adding years will bring clarity. And if that is true, why should he be interested in my clarity or my truth? Surely the future is his; my past is of no consequence to him, nor can I assume that it is an inspiration. There is little about it that’s heroic. It’s more a chronicle of repeated failures. Both we and the Israelis who were against the settlement project have failed to find a way of living together and that’s the biggest tragedy. Now time is running out.
Growing in the garden of the house on a side road there is a blooming jacaranda whose petals shining in the morning sun attracts my attention and distracts me from my angry thoughts about the tank. I turn and walk down to have a closer look. It stands in the garden of a four-storey building where a microfinance office with the nice acronym FATEN operated. It’s one of many lending agencies and banks giving small loans, a product of the last twenty years, during which most Palestinians have become debtors. Prior to 1995, when the Oslo Accord was signed, there were no banks offering mortgages and ownership of a single flat in a communally owned building was not possible. Since then we have had a large number of banks that dispense loans freely. It is said that 80 per cent of society are in debt. This might help explain why no commercial strike has been called, even on a day like this. I stood under the tree, admiring its floral bouquets. It was entirely full of blossoms, with no leaves. There are two kinds of jacaranda, one where the leaves and blossom come out at the same time and another where the blossoms come first, filling the tree with their splendour, and only later do the leaves follow. Ours was the former sort. Fortunately for this tree, it blossoms in June, when there are few competitors, so it gets all the attention. These trees are recent arrivals; there were none in Ramallah prior to the occupation.
I climbed back up to Al Rabia Street and walked a short distance. Just before I turned the corner where the French bakery opened a few years ago, on my right was St George’s School, a single-block drab building like a prison with high walls topped by wire mesh. It was built by the Greek Orthodox church on a small plot of land. The church is dominated by the Greek patriarchs. Over the years, many Palestinians bequeathed their land to the church, which became rich, owning large tracts. But rather than build the school on a more spacious plot, the church acted in a miserly fashion, behaving as though they were giving the Palestinians charity. Centuries-long efforts by the local congregation to win control of the church have never succeeded. And the Greeks, who are in the higher clerical ranks, have remained unaccountable, acting as sole owners, misusing church property and often selling assets while keeping the church archives under lock and key, never allowing any researcher access in order to reveal the secret deals made over the years. The school day had already begun and I could hear through the wide-open windows the teacher instructing his pupils in a loud commanding voice to repeat after him the lesson of the day.
The first school I ever visited as a child, the Friends Girls’ School, had a much more attractive campus full of trees. It was next to our house in the old city of Ramallah, where I grew up. I had gone there with Adeeba, my mother’s domestic helper. I remember well that first visit. It was a cold December late morning. I was rarely let out of the house on cold days in winter, so this was exceptional. I took Adeeba’s hand and together we walked in the fog. There was no one else on the street in this old part of town. I held tightly to her hand as she proceeded with stately steps in silence. She was always silent. She had a white mandeel (scarf) that covered her hair and went down to her shoulders which she fixed on her head with a pin. I was going to school to eat lunch with my sisters. They woke up early every morning and prepared for school. I woke with them, but refused to eat my egg. It was disgusting. I could not eat. I didn’t want to eat. My mother said I must if I was to grow up to be a man. My mother prepared food for my sisters and put it in the tiffin-tin lunch boxes for Adeeba to take to them. That day she made the decision to send me along, hoping that in the company of other kids I would agree to eat. She had tried all her usual tricks – playing games, telling me stories to distract me as she fed me one spoon at a time – but nothing worked.
Everything was transformed by the fog. Our neighbour Nur’s fig tree seemed to be breathing clouds out of its branches. On the other side of the street, Jaber’s pistachio shrubs looked more dense. The tops of the pine trees in our garden were invisible. We walked through the small door into the school campus. The wind howled and made the branches of the enormous pine trees sway from side to side. I was wearing several jumpers and a coat, a scarf and a woollen hat, which were dampened by the fog. The school grounds were deserted. We went straight to the kindergarten building with its big arching windows painted yellow, where there was the happy buzz of small children running around. It had different-coloured low tables and small chairs. We found my sisters sitting at one of the tables. I was glad to see them. Their teachers were milling around. We found two more chairs and Adeeba put the lunch boxes on the table. My sisters looked embarrassed by these visitors from home. Tall Adeeba seemed out of place, her large body perched on a small chair. I sat close to her among the other chi
ldren. She made me feel safe. I was happy to be here. The windows were misty and the room was warm. We began to eat. I was glad to eat now. I was still eating when an old woman with a tight bun on her head came over to us. She stooped and put her downy face close to mine. But I didn’t want an old person near me. I was now with my sisters and the young children around them, happy together. Why did she have to come and scare us?
I waited to see whether my sisters would do anything about this menace, but they didn’t. They sat quietly, politely tolerating her, so she went on disturbing our happy little world. I felt I had to do something about this. So I stood up, went around this monster and, reaching as high as I could, kicked it from behind as hard as I could, to make her go away. I didn’t want her there. She straightened her back and left us, laughing. I looked to see whether my sisters were relieved because I had saved them. But I could tell they were embarrassed. Why? Had I not done the right thing?
Before I left, Ahmad, the school carpenter, showed me the little house he had made. He was dark and had uneven yellow teeth and small, gloomy black eyes. The doll’s house was on a pedestal and had tiny windows and furniture inside. Fascinated, I took a peek through the windows. Ahmad’s serious face was next to mine and I could see his gold front tooth.
I wanted to go to school like my sisters and be in this big room, sitting on these small colourful chairs. But I didn’t want to have the old woman come around to scare me. I only wanted to be happy with other children.
On our way back we had to cross the street to avoid meeting the old man we called shawish (lieutenant), with his heavy green army coat that looked like something worn by Ottoman soldiers during the First World War. He lived in a broken-down Volkswagen Beetle, like a hedgehog. He never spoke, though there were rumours about his violent outbursts, which were like being attacked by quills. We also never knew where he came from (though rumours abounded that he had fought in the Second World War). Then one day he was no longer there and his home was removed from the pavement.
We passed St Joseph School and could see the nuns inside through the wire fence. Their garden had a row of strikingly white arum lilies with their egg-yolk-yellow stamens which we called Mar Yousef flowers. Along the wire fence was blue morning glory. We also passed the tile makers and the blacksmith and, closer to our house, Nur’s field, where she planted tomatoes in the summer. Nur had small brown eyes and her skin was wrinkled like the ripe figs that grew on her tree.
The first question my mother asked when we got home was whether I had finished my plate. Adeeba announced that I had. As always, I was glad to make my mother happy.
After he immigrated to the US and established a successful restaurant in Houston, a former classmate of mine, Albert Rukab, whose family owns the famous ice-cream parlour in Ramallah, told me that he found it strange how he, who as a child gave his mother such a hard time refusing to eat, ended up preparing all these meals for others. ‘How often do I stand in the busy kitchen and think to myself: what would my mother say if she saw me now?’ I too have passed through a huge transformation and have since acquired a passion for food and enjoy cooking. I sometimes think that my obsession with eating well is my way of warding off the ravaging years.
Three
I turned the corner and walked uphill along Tireh Road. Up the street was a petrol station owned by a man with many sons, judging by the large number of commercial ventures that keep popping up there: a drive-in café, a hardware shop, a grocery. I can imagine that the head of this large family feels he has to find employment for his children. Where there is no government to take care of its citizens, the father has to provide.
When I made the appointment at my office I was aware that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the occupation. Past anniversaries have been commemorated with demonstrations and a commercial strike. Today I wasn’t expecting much to happen, though it was possible that protests had been planned that I wasn’t aware of. That’s why I had decided to go early, to have time to cancel the appointment if it proved difficult for my client to reach the office.
In other years I had passed this anniversary hiking in the nearby hills. After a short walk I would leave the town behind me. That’s no longer possible. The hills have been invaded. My only alternative is an urban walk. I have a few hours before my one-thirty meeting. I will take the longer route to my office, which is normally only a forty-five-minute walk from my house; this will make it four hours.
As I walk, once again I can hear readings from the Quran from the nearby mosque. When the Quran is recited in a melodious voice it is enchanting. Now that it’s already eight days since the start of this year’s holy month of Ramadan, the readings seem to go on almost continuously throughout the day. It is no longer possible to enjoy those quiet mornings that Ramallah was famous for. If it’s not the call to prayer, then it’s the screeching of speeding cars on Tireh Road or the buzz of Israeli surveillance planes up in the sky. The verses being recited proclaim that God, the all-knowing, who neither begets nor is begotten, knows all about you and bids you to pray and will punish you for your neglect, but then God is also forgiving. It was He who created the earth and sky in six days. Out there is a community with a holistic view of society, of the beginning and the end, to which it must feel good to belong. What would it be like to have that unquestioning sense of belonging and a strong religious belief?
Last night we had dinner at the Snowbar garden restaurant with a Palestinian friend who holds a Jerusalem identity card and has applied for one for her husband, otherwise they cannot continue to live together in Jerusalem. The application, known as family reunion, was submitted a long time ago. Penny asked her about the progress of her application. ‘I found out that the head of the Israeli Interior Ministry office is a woman who grew up in East Jerusalem in a house confiscated from a Palestinian family,’ she responded. Penny winked at me but neither of us said anything and I did not mention that I knew her father when he worked in Ramallah at the military government. I remembered how, when I first met him, he was so hard up he wore different-coloured socks.
How extensive has been Israel’s success. This woman who now lives in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank is working in the department that exercises so much power over us and determines which Palestinian can or cannot live in the city of their birth with their spouse. Not only have we failed to end the occupation, but every year it seems to be ever more entrenched. Almost daily now we hear of killings of young men who attempt to stab Israelis. On the one hand there’s chaos and mayhem and on the other, the certainty and order that religious teachings offer. Is it any wonder that more are flocking in the direction of religion?
For many years I was too involved in politics to notice my surroundings. I felt my very survival was at stake and this was distracting enough. Now that I realise the limits of my abilities to make any effective change in the way the struggle is conducted, I no longer feel like this and have more leisure to think of myself in the world, of my body in time. Many men my age talk only about their physical afflictions. I avoid doing that and yet I’m all too aware of the passing of time.
I could feel a few drops of rain on my head. How strange that it should rain in June. No sooner had the rain fallen than the air was saturated with that peculiar odour that comes wafting up from the ground just after the rain. June is unquestionably the best month in Ramallah, when the weather is moderate and the greenery in the hills has not yet been burned dry. I can enjoy the morning to the fullest. The jacarandas are in bloom and the sky is bedecked with clouds that partially conceal the late spring sun. Soon, without our taking notice, spring will segue into summer.
A few weeks ago Penny and I visited a photography exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem called 1967. The first photograph showed a frontal view of one of Israel’s military leaders, the then defence minister, Moshe Dayan, instantly recognisable by the eyepatch over his left eye. It was taken during a visit he made at the beginning of the occupation to the Kalandia refugee camp near
Jerusalem. In it Dayan has a self-assured, piercing gaze like that of a hawk. To a large extent, Israeli history has been determined by daring leaders like Dayan. We wouldn’t be in our sad predicament if it were not for the decision by such leaders to pre-empt the war in June 1967 with Egypt and Syria by striking first and destroying their air force before they could make a single sortie. The war which was supposed to have lasted for six days but was in fact won by Israel in less time resulted in the Israeli occupation of Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank (including eastern Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.
What if this tactic had not worked? What if Israel had not achieved such a total victory, humiliating the neighbouring Arab countries and emerging so impregnable, a superstar. And to our misfortune, all this happened when the US, Israel’s ally, was losing in its war in Vietnam. No wonder that Israel became the darling idol of the Americans and won even more support than it had earlier enjoyed. Decades of air supremacy followed, allowing Israel to behave not only as the strongest power in the skies of the Middle East, but as the only one.
Following the generals who proudly surveyed the territory they had conquered came the sweaty, bearded, fat men wearing dark coats who looked at our hills with a covetous eye and decided that this was where their prophets had walked, where they would establish their settlements, taking the land free of charge and using money from the US to build them. They haven’t stopped doing that for the past half-century.
This morning I had read that there are negotiations with Israel to allow buses to leave Ramallah through the Beitunia checkpoint, now called Ofer, to take worshipers to pray at Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem during Ramadan. My first reaction was happiness. Then I realised I’ve become so used to the closure of the outlet from Beitunia to Palestinian traffic, begun a decade ago, and have so internalised the new geography Israel has succeeded in imposing, that this sounded extraordinary to me. How readily we accept the outrageous terms of our confinement: residents of East Jerusalem may not live in the West Bank and those of the West Bank and Gaza Strip may not change their place of residence even if they get married to a spouse from another area in Palestine.
Going Home Page 3