On leaving, I turn left on Main Street and begin walking down Post Office Street. There is a car park to my left which, during the reinvasion of Ramallah in the spring of 2002, contained five Israeli tanks shooting randomly in all directions. The house we moved to in 1967 was at the southern end of the car park. The back of the nearby Midan Building is still pockmarked by the shells that were fired at it. Seeing it brought back memories of that sad time during Ramallah’s most recent ordeal.
My first thought was that I would continue down this street, then turn left on to Jaffa Road and make a long detour home through Batn Al Hawa Road. But after reaching halfway down the street, one of my favourites as it is lined with huge plane trees, something – perhaps force of habit – draws me to the street of the last abode of my parents. I turn left towards the flat that the family rented after the 1967 war. When I get there, I pause and look up at the third floor, where we lived. In the garden the orange trumpet vine that the owner planted years ago is flourishing and has spread all over the outer wall.
When we moved there, Nabiha Salah, a widow, was living alone across the street in a house that she owned. She had a basement room which she rented. One day, soon after the beginning of the occupation in 1967, a single, clean-looking man knocked on her door and asked to rent the empty room. She did not recognise the man and didn’t think of asking. She was in need of money. It was Yasser Arafat, who was on the run. He didn’t stay long. The Israeli army, which was pursuing him, soon discovered where he was staying and came after him. They banged on Nabiha’s door, but she refused to open it.
Speaking with an American accent, which she had acquired during six years living there as a child and which she had managed to retain, she told them, ‘Go away. I’m an American citizen.’
They were not impressed and threatened, ‘If you don’t open up we’ll break down the door.’
Meanwhile Arafat had made his way out of the basement, crossed the road and hidden in our garage, where he waited for the army to leave before going in search of another hideout. This first visit at the start of Arafat’s life of struggle was not the last. Some twenty-five years later he returned to Ramallah after the signing of the Oslo Accords, when for a few years he acted like the president of a virtual state. Following the second Intifada, the Israeli army invaded his headquarters in March 2002 and kept him under siege for six months. His last abode, the small room in which he was holed up before he died, his ‘bunker’, is the only part of the old Mandate-built Muqata’a that is preserved. It forms part of the Yasser Arafat Museum dedicated to his life and his memory. How could I have known then that the short, wiry man who rented a room from our eccentric neighbour would come to dominate our lives and that our small city would become the de facto capital of a strange virtual state, with a museum devoted to him as its founder, where visiting heads of state would stop, his life memorialised and honoured in our city?
When I lived with my parents in this rented flat after the 1967 war, I was so full of words. At night words would bubble out of my mouth during sleep, as my brother Samer, with whom I shared a bedroom, would complain. At that time, words also came out in profuse lyrical writing that pushed back the world around me and kept me alive in my own alternative place. I mainly listened to the reel of words running in my head and was not so attentive to those around me. It was partly my way of rebelling, to shake away the world and live in one of my own making.
When my mother died, many years after she was widowed, Samer and I gave up this flat. Now I cannot go there and visit. The owner has raised the outer wall, which fortunately obstructs the view of the garage driveway where my father lay in a pool of blood. But I could still see the third-floor glass balcony on which I often sat with my father discussing office work, while mother rebuked us, saying, ‘No shop talk here, please.’
Not long before my father died, he reviewed his savings with me, assuring me that he could live off them to the end of his days and would not need my help. Whatever was left would be mine. And yet I was not relieved, appreciative or impressed. I wondered why he was telling me this: was it to win my sympathy for approaching the end of his life? I was not interested in his assets and had decided I would disinherit myself. Nor did I appreciate that he was organising all his papers so that there would be no confusion when he died. He told me, ‘I am seventy-three. How much longer have I got to live?’ And again I dismissed this as old man’s talk. Why was it so between us?
Now, many years later, I know that it was neither money nor material possessions that were important. These I could do without. What I needed, and have been seeking all these years since his death, was proof and acknowledgement of his love. And, as I have lately discovered, his friendship.
Why had I hardened my heart so? Because I was too proud, arrogant and ambitious, so much so that I didn’t want to settle for these material comforts and traditional relations? Wasn’t I going to do extraordinary things and go beyond these norms and conventions? I was not going to be merely an obedient son, anxious about the future, just like all the others. Didn’t he realise that I was special and had great ambitions? That I was going to forge a different and unique future?
In a culture that expected blind respect from son to father, where a son may not judge or disobey his father, I sought to be different. I defined respect as arguing back and finding my own way, and making this known rather than believing that concealing such rejection and rebellion was kinder. It cannot have been easy for my father living among others who saw my manner as disrespectful and utterly misguided. In his own way, my father had tried to tell me about the trials of old age, but I did not listen. Perhaps had I done so I would be better prepared for what I’m going through now, when I’m closer to his age then. To my regret and loss, I was blind to his ageing journey, which is perhaps the plight of everyone getting to that age.
I have achieved some of my ambitions. And yet more than anything, I yearn for him to have been a part of my success, to acknowledge it and celebrate it with me. Perhaps because in large part I had wanted success in order to win him over. As a boy I used to go to my father when he was standing by the sink shaving and announce that I came first in my class. He would not say anything, just smile approvingly. That smile meant the world to me. I never ever wanted to disappoint him.
Human rights activism was my alternative arena and from this he was absent, or rather I absented him. It enabled me to believe that I was more moral, more egalitarian, less elitist, serving all society and not just our clients, and a part of the political struggle on my own terms. Al Haq was my alternative workplace, where I made my own decisions. I didn’t want my father’s interference or censure. My work in human rights led me to be secretive. I didn’t want to alarm him by making him aware of our various campaigns against Israeli policies. I didn’t want him to worry. This made him suspicious of what I was doing and who I really was. Much as I wanted my father to love me I didn’t allow him to father me.
He and I had such different personalities and interests, but since I didn’t allow myself to be attentive to him or conscious of what he had to do to survive, I didn’t understand how his character was a reaction to the forces which, in time, I too would have to face. I never took into consideration his age. There were a number of passions that we shared, such as music. Why could we have not enjoyed these together? I know now that I have much to be grateful to him for and that I never thanked him or acknowledged his contribution to who I became or what I was able to accomplish.
When Niall McDermott, the Secretary General of the International Commission of Jurists, came from Geneva to visit us in Ramallah after we had established Al Haq, it was Nabeel, one of father’s trainees, whom we invited to have dinner with Niall. He had become one of the prominent young lawyers who smoked a pipe, wore a three-piece suit and looked like a caricature of a barrister. He sat there at the head of the table and ordered a nergila. He was utterly unconcerned about the state of human rights and saw no role for himself as a lawyer in the str
uggle we were so passionate about. Like many others, he was in the legal profession only for the money.
Now when I recall the list of guests at that dinner I realise that father was not among them. At the time I did not give any thought to how he must have felt to have been excluded. But then I was so concerned that this project had to be separate from the office, and from my father, that I did not even consider it. I feared that my father would be too cynical or dominant. It is only now that I’m able to face the truth that my project in human rights was conducted to distinguish myself from him. My success in my various projects won me praise from many quarters, yet one word of praise from him would have been worth the world.
I totally misread my parents’ midlife crisis. How could I have understood when I was so self-absorbed? For many years, every time I passed this building I thought of how my parents had died here. But then it was also here that they lived the happiest years of their lives. It is more a reflection on me that I insist on remembering only the sad events and not the happy ones. These were the years when they travelled and had friends. They knew how to live well. They both worked hard and yet were good at holidays and hosting parties. They had a good life. After mother died I could see only the sad parts of her life and this coloured everything, cancelling out what had gone before, the happier days.
But now is the time to remember their happy times. They moved into this house fifty years ago, at the start of the occupation. It made my mother so happy to move out of the old, cold house that never saw the sun and was difficult to heat. She would sit on the glass balcony which was flooded with sunlight and say, ‘It cannot be better than this.’ From that balcony we could see the outskirts of Jerusalem. My father was then hopeful of Palestinian statehood, despite everything, and was working hard for it. He had a growing number of supporters among both Israelis and Palestinians. But as Israel and the Palestinian leadership in exile fought against ‘a mere state’ in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, which they dubbed ‘a statelet’, that hope began to dwindle and later events proved the practical futility of this happening any time soon. And now it is what most Palestinians crave.
So much happened to me in this house, not all of it happy. I was ensnared in the tragic and unresolvable tug-of-war between my mother and her mother, who insisted on visiting just when my father came home for lunch. That exaggerated irritation he expressed when Tata visited must have been augmented by the distressed state he was in. Once when we were driving back from Jerusalem he questioned the point of all his efforts with the law. ‘Had I applied myself and worked as hard as I have in some scientific pursuit I would have got somewhere,’ he confided, clearly doubting the value of the work in law and politics to which he had dedicated his life. At the time this didn’t register with me: I was unable to empathise with him or appreciate his regrets.
My mother loathed her mother’s ways, though she tried not to show it. But then at the end of her own life she seemed to exhibit the same behaviour towards her own children that her mother had shown her. Health issues, particularly, and mother’s high blood pressure (which I too suffer from and properly managed presents no danger to life), were constantly used for emotional blackmail. I was kept on edge about the state of her health and resented being beckoned so often to be with her.
For many years, my mother seemed unable to reconcile her wish to please both her mother and her husband. I took my mother’s side against my grandmother, as I took her side against my father. I became harsh and insensitive and continued to be so even when my once-beloved Tata was dying. Thirtyfive years later, I still don’t know how it would have been best to act. I am sure, however, that it was wrong of me to harden my heart, a mistake for which I’ve paid a heavy price. Nothing in my life has been harder to accept than realising I should have acted differently in the various family tragedies. I kept on seeing father through my mother’s eyes. I was so attentive to my mother, who would not let go of me. There was a politics of alliance which I was unconscious of and I allowed myself to be recruited to her side.
Perhaps this was why I had so wanted him to ‘teach’ me how to shave, to openly show recognition that I was moving in status from mother’s boy to father’s man. But because he did not understand my need, he never did. No wonder he felt closer to my brother, Samer, who was in good health and had none of my psychological hang-ups, strange needs or vulnerability.
My parents took care of each other as family – they were practically each other’s only family – but they were of different characters and temperaments. My father was ambitious and politically engaged, while my mother was uninterested and wanted nothing to do with politics, nor would she lend her support to my father in his various public activities. She would often repeat what her father used to say: ‘I have enough troubles of my own.’ She also had her own mother to take care of, who had absolutely no one else around and was a difficult woman. When the regime made my father’s life difficult and it would have made more sense for them to leave Jordan and emigrate to the US in the 1950s, they didn’t. There, my father’s energy could have found an outlet and been better utilised, and this would have made him happier and more fulfilled. But my mother could not leave her mother behind, or take her along. She was always torn between her mother and her husband and often the strain was excessive and emotionally debilitating. It tore her apart. Three years after my grandmother died, my mother was widowed.
At her moment of great distress for the loss of her husband, my mother rejected me. After I returned from my travels to find my father killed, I rushed to comfort her. She did not want my embrace. I thought I could offer her some solace, but it was not to be. Only later could I understand and accept that her loss, as she experienced it in her solitude, was so complete that no one, not even I, could ease it. Much as I tried to get her out of her deep depression and mourning, which lasted for many years, perhaps to the end of her life, I could never succeed. Seeing her like this, so distant, so unapproachable, broke my heart.
I often came from the office down that same Post Office Street to have lunch with her and keep her company. She was depressed for so long. One kind of depression while my father was alive and her mother harassed her, and another much worse after he died. I was caught in the middle, never able to resolve anything yet tied and emotionally entangled. I struggled to be free, to be away from it all, but barely succeeded.
After all these years, I feel sympathy for my mother, who was sent away to boarding school and not given attention and love by her mother. I understand that she so wanted to do it differently with her own children that she ended up stifling us.
It was only years after his death that I came to understand my father’s mood swings and the depth of despair he felt before he died. He was dismayed by how the Palestinian leadership was acting and felt they were losing precious time, allowing Israel to proceed with its colonial project. He understood that as the years passed the Israelis were becoming only more right wing and less inclined to make peace with the Palestinians. He could see how quickly the settlements were being built and Israelis encouraged to move to them. I came to understand the effect his disillusionment had on his life because it was not unlike how I had felt after our leadership signed the Oslo Accords. But I had my writing to consume my energy. Father didn’t have this alternative.
I do not presume to understand the relationship between my parents. It was complicated, as with most married couples. They were at the same time family and adversaries, attracted and repelled, yet passionate about each other at different times.
A few months before my father was murdered I was having lunch with my parents. My father was in a bad mood and he was putting my mother down. I tried to intervene by supporting her when my father snapped at me, saying, ‘You don’t understand anything.’ I deeply regret never asking him what he meant. What was it that I did not understand? Could it be that he knew I viewed my mother uncritically, that I was under her spell and did not realise how difficult it was for him to live with
a person as anxious as her?
I can see my father walking energetically down the garden path to the staircase to climb up to our flat. He doesn’t look at the garden. Unlike me, he was never interested in plants or flowers. I inherited that interest from my grandmother. I felt a strong desire to call after him to stop and unburden my heart to him:
In my sixty-sixth year I’ve come back to visit where you last lived to tell you how much I miss knowing and befriending you. You used to be so tense at the law office when we worked together and you made life difficult for me. Only after experiencing the tribulations of getting older have I been able to understand the state of rage you exhibited in those last years of your life which distanced us even more.
When you most needed me to cheer you up, boost your morale and give you hope, I was judgemental and competitive. I could only think of myself. You had given me so much and were tolerant of my wayward behaviour when I was young, yet I could not reciprocate. I wanted you out of the way. I wanted you away from the office because it would be easier for me like that.
I thought the obvious answer would be for you to leave, to retire. I told you so, not aware how cruel I sounded. How brutal and unfeeling I was, asking you to retire at the time when you most needed to work and keep busy to manage your apprehensions. How could I have known that what you needed most was the assurance that you were still valued, rather than being shunned?
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