hungry. He did not know why everything had crumbled around him. He could not deal with his sudden transformation from a proud, self-sufficient Palestinian Arab to a helpless nonentity belonging to a people being pushed off the pages of history books. Armed only with his traditional images, with his traditional system of logic, which had served him well to define the peasant society he had been a product of, he was unable to explain why he had been robbed of the right to live in his country. That is why my father’s hair, which had been jet black in Palestine, was turning the color of snow. He was shriveling up and his hope, like his voice, was losing its edge. He had no answers, and he just wanted to die.
Yet I know I should not be concerned. My father lived his history and responded to it, in life and in death, the best way he knew how. And I had mine. When I reflect on it, I find that I have grown up with death like I have grown up with my skin. Violence and death flourished within close proximity of every moment, every encounter in my life. Even as a child I was learning of the violence that history is capable of inflicting on the soul.
Violence in both its psychological and physical forms had always dominated my life. Yet in this period along with my memory of pain and devastation, I had an equally strong feeling of compassion, an affirmation of the possibility of human justice and freedom—denying violence a monopoly of the soul. Even as an eight-year-old boy, I had memories of what I had left behind. Of walking, resting, and walking along the coast road to the Lebanese border to seek refuge. A peasant woman giving birth on the wayside, emitting ghastly sounds. My mother fingering her prayer beads, pleading with the deities to let us through safely. Stragglers from Haifa, and Acre, and other coastal cities joining us along the way, all heading in the same direction. My mother tying her shawl in knots around her back and shoulders and putting my two-year-old sister there. When we pass the Zionist settlements, everybody walks straight on, looking straight ahead, as if this will protect us from being seen or shot at. What are these settlements? Who are the people who live in them? Why did they choose our country to come to? Who are these people? Who are they? Who are they?
The year before, in the village we lived in, I keep remembering… the house was blown up and the family in it ran out, the woman, her body burning, clutching a pillow as she ran. I hear a scream. In the room that night everybody is getting up. My eldest brother carries a gun and leaves in a hurry. The sound of gunfire is getting louder, closer, and the animals in the village are running loose, down the dirt tracks, behind the houses. The Committee for the Defense of Balad el Sheikh is giving instructions while the sky rains fire on our village. Maybe God in His heaven has gone mad. They are here again. It is still night in the room and my mother is reciting verses from the Koran. The Stern Gang is here again. There is a kind of frenzy in the Koranic words my mother recites. Her voice is drowned out by the sound of shooting and then I hear it again, so loud, so frantic, when there is a gap, a short silence, as the firing stops. They are here … who are these people? … They are taking our homeland.
We left the village and went down to Haifa to live with my grandparents and uncle. My grandfather worked at the Haifa port with the British Port Authority… and the underground. Every night he came home with guns that he would smuggle through the gates at the port and bring to my uncle. Guns he would steal from the offices where he worked. Guns he would buy from drunk British soldiers. Guns brought on friendly ships arriving from Beirut, Latakia, and Alexandria.
My uncle and brother would go off for days together. They were called mojahedeen in those days. In my own generation, two decades later, their counterparts were known as fedayeen. But everything was dying. There were only remnants—disorganized and alone—of the 1936-39 revolt.
Outside my grandfather’s house, along the main road, a group of mojahedeen are standing beside cement blocks. They are armed with machine guns and hand grenades. They take up their positions on the road to Mount Carmel only minutes before the ambush begins. My uncle is running back and forth issuing instructions. The convoy of trucks arrives. Six brown trucks covered with canvas and thick rope. One driver and a passenger in each. I am crouching by the window with my father’s arm around my waist. Everybody in the room is watching. All at once, machine-gun fire rakes the trucks. Hand grenades explode. The shooting is incessant for over a minute. Two of the trucks are on fire. I do not know where to look. Something is happening in all directions. To all the men. To all the trucks. I keep watching the truck nearest to the cement blocks. I see the driver with one hand on the steering wheel, the other clutching a pistol that he places on the outside, against the windshield. His co-driver, next to him, is dead, his body half out of the open door. The man now jumps out of his vehicle and takes cover behind some of the cement blocks. He crouches there with the pistol still in his hand.
When the British soldiers arrive in their tanks and army trucks, my uncle and his men hurry back to their homes with their weapons. There are bodies in the street. The trucks are burning. The smell of gun smoke fills the air. The man behind the cement blocks waves to the soldiers. I see him as he walks away with them. I wave to him, tentatively, innocently. I begin to endow him with a private history that I create for him. A private life that is embellished with time. His memory has lived with me ever since I left Palestine in 1948. Ever since our land was flattened by bombs, and political edicts denuded our history of its metaphor and its idiom.
After the man is rescued the tanks and soldiers stay in the neighborhood. Soon more soldiers arrive. Hundreds of them. With their blond hair, freckled noses, and tattoos.
We hear them climbing up the stairs. My grandfather’s part of the house is on the second floor of a two-story building. We hear foreign voices. It is always foreign voices. Foreign people telling us what to do. They order us to open the door. They shout something about the authority invested in them by the King of England. That is how it was in those days—the King of England invested his people with authority to issue orders in Palestine. And in India. And Africa. And Kenya. And Hong Kong. Of course, no Englishman would ever have allowed us to send people over to England and invest in them the authority to push around English men, women, and children.
The soldiers rush into our house, six or seven of them. We are herded into one room. They ask my grandparents if they have guns around the house. We are standing, all of us, with our arms up. Only my mother looks funny, with her prayer beads over her head, muttering incantations to scare away the evil spirits. The soldiers open wardrobes, smash the dressing table, throw my grandmother’s sewing machine against the wall. They wreck the place. The two soldiers who are doing most of the ransacking are shouting abuse at the top of their voices. “Filthy wogs,” they keep repeating, “filthy wogs.” All this time I feel nonchalant. For I had seen that, and much more, done in the village. I had seen them grab people by the hair and drag them to the center of the square and kick them till they became unconscious. Often they took suspects with them who never returned. In the 1936-39 revolt, before I was born, the British hanged three men from our village. Three mojahedeen.
Though my father was never a mojahed, he transmitted their ethos to me. The mythology of the mojahedeen is an integral part of our oral history. Every Palestinian child who sits on his parents’ knees listens, entranced, to the tales of men who defied the hated British and later the Zionists. How bands of mojahedeen came to the village during the 1936-39 revolt, with guns and checkered headdress, and the women came out to the square and gave them flowers and bags of food and the children pointed at them. Suddenly a woman would stand close to them, put her hand over her mouth, clasping her lips with two fingers, and start ululating. The other women joined in and the square, the whole village, reverberated with the resonant sounds. The men in the village became reverential, their voices hushed, as they greeted the mojahedeen. “Ahlan Wa Sahlan, Ahlan Wa Sahlan fi el Abtal” (Welcome, Welcome to the brother heroes). And before leaving, the fighters were joined by some of the young men, who would leave the village fields to live in the hills with them.
My father never went away. He was a small shopkeeper. One day three British soldiers get off their jeep outside his shop and talk to him. They are drunk. One abuses my father because there are flies on the goods displayed in the open. How do you expect anyone to eat this shit with flies on it, he wants to know. Another takes his rifle and knocks over the bags of olives, cheese, oranges, whatever is nearest him, right on the ground and jumps on them, roaring with laughter.