A Map of Absence Read online

  While I sat there being my usual Pessoptimistic self, he was ecstatic: ‘Verdant fields! Green on your right and on your left: green everywhere! We have given life to what was dead. This is why we have named the borders of Israel the Green Belt. For beyond them lie barren mountains and desert reaches, a wilderness calling out to us, ‘Come ye hither, tractors of civilization!’

  * * *

  I looked before me and saw a huge building towering like an ugly demon of the desert; its walls were yellow, and around it there was a high, white outer wall. There were guards posted on each of the four sides of the roof, and they could be seen standing with their guns at the ready. We were awestruck by the spectacle of this yellow castle, so exposed and naked of any vegetation, protruding like a cancerous lump on the breast of a land itself sick with cancer. The big man was unable to control himself and exclaimed, ‘There! The terrible Shatta prison! How fantastic!’

  I stretched my neck forward in alarm and whispered, ‘God bless us all!’

  This led him to comment, ‘It is the prison warden who will bless you. Come on down. I’ll ask him to look after you.’

  Translated by Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick

  EDWARD SAID

  On Edward Said’s Experience of the Nakba

  Not to hold back my conclusion, which is roughly the same as Noam (Chomsky)’s, I want to say also that my feeling is that the two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is, I think, a hopeless one, and some form of bi-nationalism, which I’ll try to get to at the end of my comments, seems to me to be the only hope, and hence the reason for talking about it more in this country. I’ve just come back a couple of weeks ago from a trip where I spent some time in Israel, as well as, of course, in the Palestinian territories, and spoke about this to some degree of response from Israelis – I mean, Israeli Jews – and, of course, Israeli Palestinians.

  But what I want to do today is to talk a little bit about the importance, the continuing importance, of 1948 for the present moment. And in a sense, I want to talk about something quite different than what you’ve heard from Noam Chomsky. That is to say, I want to talk about the Palestinian experience as a human – evolving human thing, trajectory, and how it feeds into the current impasse and where it might, if looked at honestly within the Arab and international context, might give one some hope for the future, which I think is the most important thing.

  I might as well begin by speaking personally about 1948, particularly at a moment when the media is focusing so much on the faces and the bodies and general appalling plight of Kosovar refugees, and what it meant for many of the people around me. My own immediate family was spared the worst ravages of what we call the catastrophe, or Nakba, of 1948. We had a house and my father, a business in Cairo, so even though we were in Palestine during most of 1947, when we left in December of that year, the wrenching cataclysmic quality of the collective experience, when 780,000 Palestinians – two-thirds of the population – were literally driven out of the country by the Zionist forces of the time, this was not one we had to go through in as traumatic a form as most others did.

  I was twelve at the time, so I had only a somewhat attenuated and certainly no more than a semi-conscious awareness of what was happening. Only this narrow awareness was available to me, but I do distinctly recall some things with special lucidity. One was that every member of my family, on both sides, became a refugee during the period. No one remained in our Palestine, that is, that part of the mandatory territory controlled by the British Mandate. That didn’t include the West Bank, which was in 1948 annexed to Jordan. Therefore, those of my relatives who lived in cities like Jaffa, Safed, Haifa and West Jerusalem, which is where I was born, were suddenly made homeless, in many instances – penniless, disoriented and scarred forever.

  I saw most of them again after the fall of Palestine, but all were greatly reduced in circumstances – their faces stark with worry, ill health, despair. My extended family lost all its property and residence, and like so many Palestinians of the time, bore the travail not so much as a political, but as a natural tragedy. This etched itself on my memory with lasting results, mostly because of the faces which I had once remembered as content and at ease, but which now were lined with the cares of exile and homelessness, which is the condition of most Palestinians today. Many families and individuals had their lives broken, their spirits drained, their composure destroyed forever in the context of seemingly unending serial dislocation. This was, and still is, for me of the greatest poignancy. One of my uncles went from Palestine to Alexandria, to Cairo, to Baghdad, to Beirut, and now, in his eighties, lives a sad, silent man in Seattle. Neither he nor his immediate family ever truly recovered.

  This is emblematic of the larger story of loss and dispossession which continues today. And I think it ought to be mentioned that ever since 1948, the United Nations – just as NATO is saying today and the United States along with it – ever since 1948, the United States with the United Nations has voted a yearly resolution saying that the Palestinians can go back.

  The second thing I recall was that, for the one person in my family who somehow managed to pull herself together in the aftermath of the catastrophe, my aunt, Palestine meant service to the unfortunate refugees, many thousands of whom ended up penniless, jobless, destitute and disoriented in Egypt. She devoted her life to them in the face of government obduracy and sadistic indifference. From her, I learned that whereas everyone is willing to pay lip service to the cause, to the humanitarian cause, only a very few people were willing to do anything about it. As a Palestinian, therefore, she took it as her lifelong duty to set about helping the refugees. This was in the days before UNICEF and USAID and all of those other things, getting people and children into schools, getting them doctors, getting them treatment and medicine, finding the men jobs, and so on and so forth. She remains an exemplary figure for me, a person against whom any effort thereafter is always measured and always found wanting. The job for us in my lifetime was to be literally unending. It’s now fifty-one years. And because it derives from a human tragedy so profound, so extraordinary and saturating, both the formal as well as the informal life of its people, down to the smallest detail has been and will continue to be recalled, testified, remedied. For Palestinians, a vast collective feeling of injustice continues to hang over our lives with undiminished weight.

  If there’s been one thing, one particular delinquency committed by the present group of Palestinian leaders for me, it is their gifted power of forgetting. When one of them was asked recently – this appeared on the front page of the New York Times last October – what he felt about Ariel Sharon’s accession to Israel’s foreign ministry, given that Sharon was responsible for the shedding of so much Palestinian blood, this leader said blithely, ‘We are prepared to forget history.’ And this is a sentiment I neither can share nor, I hasten to add, easily forgive.

  It’s therefore important to recall what Israelis themselves have said about the country they conquered in 1948. Here’s Moshe Dayan, 1969, April, just about thirty years ago today: ‘We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country’ – the total area of the country that he’s talking about was only 6 percent – ‘we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know’ – he was talking to an Israeli audience. ‘You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either.’ In the events of 1948, 400 villages were destroyed and effaced from history. ‘Nahalal,’ which is Dayan’s own village, he says, ‘arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat – in the place of Jibta, [Kibbutz] Sarid – in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua – in the place of Tell Shaman. There is not’ – this is the last sentence of his intervention – ‘There is not one place built in this country
that did not have a former Arab population.’

  Looking back on the reactions in the aftermath of 1948, what strikes me now is how largely unpolitical they were, as it must be the case for people going through what some of the refugees are going through today. For twenty years after 1948, Palestinians were immersed in the problems of everyday life, with little time left over for organising, analysing and planning. Israel, to most Arabs, for at least twenty years after ’48, and to Palestinians, except for those who remained, was a cipher: its language unknown, its society unexplored, its people and the history and their movement largely confined to slogans, catch-all phrases, negation. We saw and experienced its cruelty towards us, but it took us a long while to understand what we saw and what we experienced. The overall tendency throughout the Arab world – and this is one of the most important consequences of 1948, as I’m sure it will be in regions of the world that are going through the same process today – is that a vast militarisation took over every society, almost without exception, as it did also take over Israel. Coup in the Arab world, military coups, succeeded each other more or less unceasingly. And worse yet, every advance in the military idea brought an equal and opposite diminution in social, political and economic democracy.

  Looking back on it now, the rise to hegemony of Arabic nationalism allowed for very little in the way of democratic civil institutions, mainly because the concepts and the language of that nationalism devoted little attention to the role of democracy in the evolution of these societies. Until now, the presence of a putative danger to the Arab world has engendered a permanent deferral of such things as an open press, unpoliticised universities, or freedoms to research, travel in and explore new realms of knowledge. No massive investment was ever made in the quality of education despite, on the whole, successful policies by some governments, including the Egyptian government, to lower the rate of illiteracy. It was thought that given the perpetual state of emergency caused by Israel, such matters, which could only be the result of long-range planning and reflection, were luxuries that were ill-afforded. Instead, arms procurement on a huge scale took the place of genuine human development, with negative results that we live until today. It’s worth mentioning that 60 percent of the world’s arms are now bought by Arab countries.

  Along with the militarisation went the wholesale persecution of communities – pre-eminently, but not exclusively, the Jewish ones in the Arab world and, of course, the Arab ones inside Israel. And this idea of homogenising societies to create, in the case of Israel, a Jewish state, in the case of the various Arab states, entirely Arab states, whether they’re called Syria, Jordan, Egypt, etc., has had the most wasteful and, in my opinion, terrible results, one of the tragedies of the politics of identity which ensued. The expulsion of whole communities as a result of 1948, which set in process a system of distortion within the societies, whether it was inside Israel or in the Arab world, most of it encouraged by US policy at the time, seems to me to have led to every conceivable disaster in the way of human formations and social institutions.

  Nor was this all. In the name of military security, in countries like Egypt, there was a bloody-minded, imponderably wasteful campaign against dissenters, mostly on the left, but independently minded people too, whose vocation as critics and skilled men and women was brutally terminated in prisons, fatal torture and summary executions. As one looks back at those things in the context of 1948, it’s the immense panorama of waste and cruelty that stands out as the immediate result of the war itself.

  Jerusalem Revisited

  Edward Said returns home forty-five years after the Nakba to find his family’s house in Jerusalem occupied by a right-wing Christian fundamentalist and militantly pro-Zionist group.

  There were four prosperous and new Arab quarters largely built during the Mandate period (1918–1948): Upper and Lower Baqaa, Talbiya, and Qatamon. I recall that during my last weeks in the fall of 1947 I had to traverse three of the security zones instituted by the British to get to St. George’s School from Talbiya; by December 1947 my parents, sisters, and I had left for Egypt. My aunt Nabiha and four of her five children stayed on but experienced grave difficulties. The area they lived in was made up of unprepared and unarmed Palestinian families; by February Talbiya had been taken over by the Hagganah. Now as we drove around, looking for my family’s house, I saw no Arabs, although the handsome old stone houses still bear their Arab identity.

  I remembered the house itself quite clearly: two storeys, a terraced entrance, a balcony at the front, a palm tree and a large conifer as you climbed toward the front door, a spacious (and at the time) empty square, designated as a park, that lay before the room in which I was born, facing toward the King David and the YMCA. I do not recall street names from that time (there are none, it turns out) although Cousin Yousef (now in Canada) drew me a map from memory that he sent along with a copy of the title deed. Years before, I had heard that Martin Buber lived in the house for a time after 1948, but had died elsewhere. No one seemed to know what became of the house after the middle 1960s.

  Our guide for the trip was George Khodr, an elderly gentleman who had been a friend of my father’s and an accountant for the family business, the Palestine Educational Company. I vividly recalled the main premises (comprising a wonderful bookshop at which Abba Eban had been a regular customer): these were built against the stretch of city wall running between the Jaffa and New gates. All gone now, as we drove past the wall, and up the Mamila Road, then a bustling commercial centre, now a gigantic construction site where a Moshe Safdie settlement was being built. Khodr’s family had also lived in Talbiya in a house he took us to so as to orient himself. Despite the Mediterranean foliage one might have been in an elegant Zurich suburb, so patently did Talbiya bespeak its new European personality. As we walked around, he called the names of the villas and their original Palestinian owners – Kitaneh, Sununu, Tannous, David, Haramy, Salameh – a sad roll call of the vanished past, for Mariam a reminder of the Palestinian refugees with the very same names who fetched up in Beirut during the fifties and sixties.

  It took almost two hours to find the house, and it is a tribute to my cousin’s memory that only by sticking very literally to his map did we finally locate it. Earlier I was detained for half an hour by the oddly familiar contours of Mr Shamir’s unmistakably Arab villa, but abandoned that line of inquiry for the greater certainty of a home on Nahum Sokolow Street, 150 yards away. For there the house was, I suddenly knew, with its still impressive bulk commanding the sandy little square, now an elegant, manicured park. My daughter later told me that, using her camera with manic excitement, I reeled off twenty-six photos of the place which, irony of ironies, bore the name plate ‘International Christian Embassy’ at the gate. To have found my family’s house now occupied not by an Israeli Jewish family, but by a right-wing Christian fundamentalist and militantly pro-Zionist group (run by a South African Boer, no less, and with a record of unsavoury involvement with the Contras to boot), this was an abrupt blow for a child of Palestinian Christian parents. Anger and melancholy took me over, so that when an American woman came out of the house holding an armful of laundry and asked if she could help, all I could blurt out was an instinctive, ‘No thanks.’

  The coincidence was too much for me at that point, suddenly vitalising my family’s history with this astonishing serene likeness of my young father as I really never knew him, and, as I thought back to the silent Talbiya house, with its lamentably foreclosed destiny now in ‘Christian’ hands, that world seemed condemned to intermittent scraps and shards of memory and melancholy. I think I knew at that instant why I should have left politics and resigned from the PNC, as I did, in late 1991, and why I felt I had to return to Palestine just then. Wasn’t it that the shocking medical diagnosis I received in September of a chronically insidious blood disease convinced me for the first time of a mortality I had ignored, and which I now needed to experience with my own family, at the source, so to speak, in Palestine? And then th
e reminder of other earlier histories starting and ending in Jerusalem seemed for me a fitting accompaniment to the ebbing of my life on the one hand, and, on the other, a concrete reminder that just as they had started and ended, I did and would too, but so too would my children, who could now see for the first time the linked narrative of our family’s generations, where that story belonged but from which it had been banished.

  MAHMOUD DARWISH

  To Our Land

  To our land,

  and it is the one near the word of god,

  a ceiling of clouds

  To our land,

  and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns,

  the map of absence

  To our land,

  and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed,

  a heavenly horizon … and a hidden chasm

  To our land,

  and it is the one poor as a grouse’s wings,

  holy books … and an identity wound

  To our land,

  and it is the one surrounded with torn hills,

  the ambush of a new past

  To our land, and it is a prize of war,

  the freedom to die from longing and burning

  and our land, in its bloodied night,

  is a jewel that glimmers for the far

  upon the far and illuminates what’s outside it …

  As for us, inside,

  we suffocate more!

  At a Train Station that Fell Off the Map

  Grass, dry air, thorns, and cactus

  on the iron wire. There’s the shape of a thing