A Map of Absence Page 14
He tried to go back to his newspaper, but Abu Wazir, eh? This boy an Abu Wazir? He wished it would stop affecting him. He wished he didn’t care. He wished that he were free of it all. It was now almost eight years since he left the Organisation and all political involvement with it, but it still got to him. When Jibril announced that he was leaving, their Leader had looked him hard in the eye, ‘You can leave the Organisation, Jibril,’ he had said, ‘Of course, Jibril, we do not want you to leave, for you to leave is your choice. But Jibril you must understand that you can leave the Organisation but the Organisation will never leave you.’ Jibril still did not know what that meant, but to be safe he had decided to treat it as a threat.
It was true though, people still acted as though he was part of it, ‘This is Jibril Mujahed of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’ his Western friends would say, as though they had a piranha in their fish tank, and he had no idea how they knew. The Arabs would just mouth ‘the Organisation,’ at each other; ‘Jibril was with the Organisation,’ they would say with a nod and that was enough.
Enough for some of them, particularly those who had been in Kuwait, to never stop banging on about the fraction of their salary that had been deducted every month to support the cause. ‘So your children went to school in Switzerland, did they? And us? Kicked us out of our homes in Kuwait because of your leadership and then what? Left to rot, the education of our children disrupted, and you? Educated your children in Switzerland, did you? So where’s our five percent? Lost it in the casinos of Monaco, did you? While our families rot in the refugee camps? Bravo my friend, bravo!’ He never encouraged any of this talk about the Organisation. No, he never encouraged such discussions. There was nothing he could do anyway. It was all in the past.
Not for the first time Jibril offered up a prayer of gratitude to this Gulf State that had taken him in despite his background and his papers, or lack thereof, and had allowed him to work. He thanked the glittering forest of Duty Free shops around him, complete with their electronic moose heads singing Christmas carols, the three-floor high columns of mirrors, the polished four-wheel drives displayed high on velvet platforms. He even thanked the posterior of the cleaner squeezing out her mop. I’m so glad to be here. I’m so glad to be out of it. He had done his bit. No one could hold him to account for the Organisation’s mistakes. No one. He had wiped his hands of it long ago.
‘I’m waiting for my daughter,’ Jibril announced when it quietened down, ‘She’s coming from Gaza.’
‘I didn’t know that was possible,’ the Abu Wazir boy said.
‘Not directly of course. She’s gone through the borders into Egypt and then been flown out. They held her up for days.’ In the middle distance an electronic tape of red dots was revolving around a screen informing Jibril and other potential customers about the discounts in the electronics store, particularly the substantial reductions on portable DVDs.
‘You’re sure that she got on the plane?’
‘Yes, yes. She got on, and she’s here. They’re just asking her a few questions. Nothing to worry about.’ Nothing that he knew he should be worried about, but of course it was possible that they had picked up on something. The message he had heard was that she, his mousy little daughter, his Iman, named after the belly-dancing star of all stars of the Cairo nights, was trying to get herself mixed up with some Islamic movement. Well, she would be backing the right horse there, if she wanted to side with the winning team. That lot were popping up everywhere: elections, coups, terrorist stunts. All action, that lot. Could not stand them himself, so dour and sanctimonious. He had never had any time for religion and saw no reason to change: God had hardly smiled on them this far; in fact he had verily shat upon them.
Silly girl. He would give her a good talking to. That was all it would need.
More red dots. This time the text stopped and flashed before him several times before rolling along. Even the main Japanese brands had come down in price. Sixty percent off the original price for DVDs. Flash. Flash. Sixty percent!
‘Terrible,’ said the boy, ‘How old is she?’
‘Twenty-five,’ Jibril replied although he had the feeling he had been saying that for a couple of years now.
‘Terrible,’ said the man again, ‘It appears that it is our destiny to get hassled in these places; airports, borders, checkpoints. That’s our unifying national destiny.’
‘Yes,’ Jibril agreed, ‘Yes, yes,’ His tongue was dried out from the coffee. ‘Yes,’ Jibril said, shaking hands. He considered buying Iman a present: a shawl, some jewellery, a peaked cap with a designer name on it, a diamante pin, a stuffed camel, a box of dates. She would need so many things that he was not really sure where to start. He squeezed, rubbed and stroked many potential gifts and found out their prices, colours and sizes and had reached the cash till with armfuls of goods when he decided it best to leave it for Suzi to get things for his daughter. She could take Iman to the malls. Lots of time for sorting her out.
Happy with the thought of Suzi’s adoption of Iman’s upbringing (and feminisation; the girl really should be thinking of settling down), Jibril sauntered into the electronics section, where he remained, haggling over several seven- to eight-inch screens, until the fixer called to say that they were both through.
RAMZY BAROUD
Excerpt from The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story
Under the Open Sky: How Beit Daras Was Lost
When the war was about to start, Ahmad al-Haaj was in his second year at his Gaza high school. Much of the fighting was taking place in other parts of Palestine, mostly near areas where Jewish settlements and towns held military sway over largely disorganised local fighters.
When Arab fighters attempted to cut off the few Jewish settlements in the south from the rest of the Zionist command, several fighters were killed and their actions instead resulted in the blockading of the main Arab roads. This meant that Ahmad, along with seven other students, could not return to their villages north of Gaza, a predicament that compelled the school’s headmaster to appeal to a responsive British officer who managed to sneak the frightened students in the back of a congested supplies truck back to Al-Majdal, but not further than that.
Dropped in Al-Majdal, they still had to walk five, eight, twelve, and in the case of one student, fifteen miles through dangerous terrain to reach their villages.
When Ahmad arrived in Al-Sawafir on 8 April 1948, he learned that Arab fighters under the command of Abdul Qader al-Husseini lost Qastal, west of Al-Quds, and that the Zionists attacked the village of Deir Yassin and slaughtered almost half of its inhabitants. All the roads that led to Al-Sawafir were subsequently closed; the one between Al-Sawafir and Masmiyeh, the one near Qastina, the one close to Be’er Toviya, the road between Masmiyeh and Al-Quds, near Khalda; even Al-Quds itself was nearly isolated now that Deir Yassin was conquered.
Word of mouth brought news of similar massacres in the following days. The neighbourhoods in Al-Quds were falling one after the other, starting with Sheikh Jarrah. Yafa itself fell later in April, followed by Haifa. Many of the terrified residents managed to flee as they were chased out with nothing but the clothes on their backs. But many were killed or fell prey to execution by gunfire or grenades. And not all of those who rushed to the open sea were lucky enough to jump into stable vessels or the fishing boats that remained afloat. Entire families watched each other drown, their screams swallowed up by an unforgiving mother nature.
To buy his German rifle and 125 bullets, Ahmad’s father, Khaleel al-Haaj sold a cow and four dunums. Laughter roared across his village as some found his action hasty and excessive. The Arab League had promised to send its armies to liberate Palestine, but it did not take a young communist like Ahmad long to realise that the rag-tag Arab armies, mostly operating under the command of the same colonial powers that handed Palestine to the Zionists in the first place, were not capable of fighting a liberation war. Only when the Arabs did not arrive did the fellahin understand the depth of t
heir crisis, prompting some to follow suit and obtain rifles in a crazed rush.
Just as the large Palestinian cities were about to fall to the militias, Arab paramilitaries were sent to aid Palestinian fighters, as a first step before the anticipated arrival of the official armies. But with time, it was becoming clearer that the Arabs were belatedly joining the war with the understanding that they were not to venture into areas designated for the proposed Jewish state.
Egyptian units arrived through Sinai, reached the Gaza district, and moved towards Iraq Suwaydan, hoping to reach Bir al-Sabi, and as far as al-Khalil, Beit Jibrin, and Bethlehem.
As for the Arab Salvation Army, led by a French-trained Lebanese officer, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, it entered Palestine through the Galilee, ostensibly to reach Yafa, Haifa, and Nazareth. The latter paramilitary units were quickly routed and regrouped back in the Galilee once the main cities fell and their inhabitants were killed, expelled, or fled.
Al-Sawafir itself had ten fighters, one of whom was Khaleel al-Haaj. While Arab militaries were losing the war, the fellahin were winning small battles in the south. Fighters with old Turkish rifles would gather from the nearby villages and move towards whichever village was likely to be attacked. In the second battle of Beit Daras, when the Jewish settlement of Be’er Tuvia mounted another failed attack, the villagers held their positions yet again, still hoping that the Egyptian army would arrive soon and defeat Be’er Tuvia once and for all.
Ahmad was shaken by the sight of the dead bodies collected by the Red Cross as Arab fighters were celebrating their victory. But he did not dare show any sign of weakness and held back the emotions engulfing his fledgling manhood. His father Khaleel also took part in that battle where he used twenty bullets, and, by the end of the fight, had nine to spare. Beit Daras, whose inhabitants were known for their oddly large heads, generosity and impatience, had twelve rifles and a total of 967 bullets, all equally distributed among the toughest men in the village.
When the triumphant Al-Sawafir fighters returned proudly to their village from Beit Daras, holding up their rifles and chanting their cheers, the immensity of the victory was overshadowed by the understanding that the Zionist militants were likely to return with bigger guns and more fighters.
The fellahin fighters had no time to lose to formulate a strategy, and met in Ahmad al-Haaj’s new house, the one built with bricks and a tiled roof. Their humble leadership was composed of three mukhtars and elderly men representing the most esteemed families. They were all men who had never imagined they would be drawing up war plans. Using nothing but their intuition as their guide, their decision was for the fighters to secure the main road, and others to join in using knives and clubs once a call for help was issued through the chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’ should the village be attacked. And it was attacked. Zionist militants moved in large numbers, all travelling in fortified military vehicles. Some of these were gifted or abandoned by the British and others purchased for the purpose of this war. Each military convoy consisted of anywhere between forty to fifty cars, with operations based on a set of military strategies that was aimed at isolating large areas before moving in to empty a besieged village of its inhabitants, exacting whatever price was required in blood and destruction.
In many cases, once the population of a village was banished, the remaining residents who did not leave due to pride, ill-health or an elderly body were pitilessly murdered and the village then looted and burned to the ground. Yet despite their defeat in Beit Daras, the militias seemed to direct their focus elsewhere, far away from Al-Sawafir and its ten fighters. That was the case until the Egyptian army officially entered the war on 15 April 1948, the same day the British formally left their positions, thus relinquishing Palestine and leaving the Zionist militias in control of most major cities.
But even then, Ahmad skilfully moved about between the villages, guardedly but with relative ease, using dirt side roads and avoiding the main road where the ten fighters and his father hid warily in the bushes, dreading the return of military convoys. Miraculously, Ahmad even went to Al-Majdal to sell harvested and milled wheat to purchase bullets for his father’s German rifle.
A feeling of hope and relative stability began to return when the Egyptians deployed some army units from Sinai, through Rafah, to Gaza City, which they designated as their headquarters and then moved north. Upon their arrival in Gaza, they were joined by many volunteers, including Ahmad Ismail, the physics teacher at Imam al-Shafi’i High School.
The first full-scale battle fought by the Egyptian army was a success. On 17 May they surrounded Yad Mordechai kibbutz, a few miles to the south of Asqalan, for four days and finally conquered the fortified settlement with the help of local Gaza fighters who were later assigned fixed salaries from the Egyptian army for their bravery. On 19 May they reached the town of Al-Majdal, where they met with various volunteer forces who also enlisted in the Egyptian army. These volunteers, under the command of Mostafa Hafez, were the core of what was later known as fedayeen, Palestine’s freedom fighters.
The Egyptians continued their drive further north to Iraq Suwaydan, then curved slightly to the east to Al-Faluja on their way to Bayt Jibrin in the direction of Al-Khalil. Their intention was to remain within the borders of the proposed Arab state, and not to go beyond the boundaries of the coastal area of that state somewhere between Rafah and Isdud.
The state set aside for the Palestinian Arabs per the United Nations partition plan of the previous year, was less than half of the original size of Palestine, even though the Arabs then constituted the vast majority of the country’s population.
The Zionist militia convoys eventually returned, with a vengeance. They made their expected move against Beit Daras on 5 June. Striking at dawn, they charged against the village until the early afternoon hours. By placating the stubborn Beit Daras, they knew the entire structure of local resistance was likely to fragment and collapse, so they proceeded to surround the village from all directions. All roads leading to it were cut off to ensure that fellahin fighters could not come to the rescue.
By then the fighters in Beit Daras had acquired up to ninety rifles, but the invading militias had amassed an arsenal of modern weapons including mortars, machine-guns mounted on top of fortified vehicles and hundreds of fully armed troops. The fellahin did not stand a chance.
Within the first hour of fighting, Beit Daras was on fire. Those who could not fight attempted to quell the flames of treason, but to no avail. Those who managed to escape ran to the Egyptian army, stationed only three miles north. But their frenzied calls for help and the destruction they described was not enough to implore these comrades to help them. The commander told the beseeching locals they could not intervene as they had not been given the orders to do so. Worse still, they even refused to supply the villagers with weapons or ammunition to defend themselves, for that also required a signature from the general command in Gaza.
It was too late anyway. By then the militias had moved in, and executed survivors of the initial onslaught, civilians and all, whoever they were – men, women, children – it made no difference. There were neither rules of war nor rules of engagement. Some escaped running through burning fields, tripping on one another while chased by sniper bullets. The few who remained alive arrived in Joura, Al-Majdal, Hamameh and the other nearby villages. The demise of Beit Daras had crushed the spirit of the smaller and less defendable villages.
The massacre instilled fear and horror, especially as the death toll reached three hundred in a village with a population that barely totalled two thousand.
The mukhtars of the much smaller Al-Sawafir met again and resolved that Be’er Toviya was likely to continue its attacks now that the heart of resistance went up in flames. They urged the people to sleep in open fields so that their homes were not burned in the middle of the night while they were still inside. Terrified and unsure of the plan that guaranteed nothing, hundreds of families walked late at night to nowhere in particular, hauling whate
ver food they could salvage, and pushing along their cattle and donkeys. They all slept under the open sky, with the intention of returning in the morning to salvage whatever else they could carry – their chickens, the remaining flour, bottles of olive oil, small stacks of corn and lentils.
FADY JOUDAH
Mimesis
My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking
She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?
Immune
My heart isn’t another’s
love is no transplant
it can be
or when I’m dead
I will give you my eyes & also my liver
you must suppress their memory of me
Sleeping Trees
Between what should and what should not be
Everything is liable to explode. Many times
I was told who has no land has no sea. My father
Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story
Of a sycamore tree he used to climb
When he was young to watch the rain.
Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being
Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red.
My brother believed bad dreams could kill
A man in his sleep, he insisted
We wake my father from his muffled screams
On the night of the day he took us to see his village.