Der Roman, der hier vorgestellt wird, ist von einer US-Bürgerin und Palästinenserin geschrieben worden, die als Flüchtlingskind von Palästinensern als Waise in unterschiedlichen Betreuungssituationen aufwuchs, bis ihr mit 13 Jahren eine Sozialisation als US-Bürgerin ermöglicht wurde, die ihr eine erfolgreiche Karriere als Journalistin und Schriftstellerin ermöglichte. Mit 30 Jahren hat sie in Palästina ihre Ursprünge kennen zu lernen versucht und ist darüber zur Aktivistin für eine Gleichberechtigung der Palästinenser geworden. Man erwarte also keine ausgewogene Darstellung des Nahostkonflikts.
Durch das, was gegenwärtig im Gazastreifen geschieht und das, was sich anbahnt, ist er von erschreckender Aktualität geworden.
Doch anders als viele gegenwärtige Publikationen verbreitet die Verfasserin keine Hassbotschaft, sondern versucht, beide Perspektiven: aus palästinensischer und aus israelischer Sicht zu zeigen. Da das gegenwärtig von beiden Seiten kaum noch versucht wird, stelle ich hier ihren Versuch vor. Nicht weil ich ihre Perspektive übernehmen wollte, sondern um auf die Ernsthaftigkeit des Versuchs aufmerksam zu machen. Der Nahostkonflikt, der sich anders als der Nord-Süd-Konflikt nicht in eine multipolare Konstellation wandeln wird, wurde wiederholt - immer wenn sich eine Lösung anbahnte - künstlich wieder belebt, zuletzt durch den Überfall mit Geiselnahme durch die Hamas im Oktober 2023. Am Schicksalhaftesten wohl durch den Mord an Rabin, der das Oslo-Abkommen vorangetrieben hatte, durch einen israelischen Nationalisten.
Angesichts der Vorgeschichte des Konflikts scheint er so gut wie unlösbar. Dass eine denkbare Lösung durch einen Israeli vereitelt wurde, hat Züge einer klassischen Tragödie.
Zu dem ursprünglich geplanten Titel der Buches The Scar of David
die Erläuterung einer KI mit Kommentar von mir.
Mehr zum Nahostkonflikt: in der Wikipedia, in diesem Blog, aus aktueller Perspektive und in Fontanefans Schnipsel
Prelude (2000)
AMAL WANTED A CLOSER look into the soldier’s eyes, but the muzzle
of his automatic rifle, pressed against her forehead, would not allow it. Still,
she was close enough to see that he wore contacts. She imagined the soldier
leaning into a mirror to insert the lenses in his eyes before getting dressed to
kill. Strange, she thought, the things you think about in the district between
life and death.
She wondered if officials might express regret for the “accidental”
killing of her, an American citizen. [...]
I. El Nakba (the catastrophe)
1 The Harvest (1941)
IN A DISTANT TIME, before history marched over the hills and shattered
present and future, before wind grabbed the land at one corner and shook it
of its name and character, before Amal was born, a small village east of
Haifa lived quietly on figs and olives, open frontiers and sunshine.
It was still dark, only the babies sleeping, when the villagers of Ein Hod
prepared to perform the morning salat, the first of five daily prayers. [...]
Kapitel 4 S. 28ff.
As They Left
1947–1948
[...] Less than a day passed before Israeli soldiers reentered the village. The
same men who had received the offering of food now marched through,
pointing guns at the people who had fed them. Hasan, Darweesh, and other
men were ordered to dig a mass grave for thirty fresh corpses. The village
men were able to identify all but two of them. Hasan somberly wrote the
names of his fallen friends and countrymen on the sleeve of his dishdashe
as he hollowed the earth in such shock that he was unable to grieve. Al
Fatiha. Dust to dust . . .
Stunned—is this a dream?—their nerves cracking, children crying, the
villagers were tractable.
“Gather the valuables. Assemble by the eastern water well. Move! This
is only temporary. Go to the well,” ordered a voice from a loudspeaker like
a hidden god, distributing destinies. The sky still infinite. The sun
unforgiving. Dalia put the gold in the chest pocket of her thobe and
gathered the valuables as told, Ismael on the left hip, Yousef in the right
hand.
“Mama, I want Baba to carry me,” Yousef pleaded.
“Go, habibi. Allah be with us all.” Dalia released his little hand and the
boy jumped on his father. Allah be with us all.
The area around the well teemed with faces, all creased and twisted with
alarm. But for the fright, Yehya thought they could have been gathered to
prepare for the harvest. The harvest, he thought.
“Now what?” Haj Salem wondered.
Darweesh and his pregnant wife were the last to arrive. He approached
stooped, one foot after the other, leading his heartbroken mare, Fatooma.
Ganoosh, Darweesh’s delight and Fatooma’s lifelong companion, the horse
that once had broken Dalia’s ankle, had been killed in the fighting and it
had taken much persuasion to pull Fatooma away from the massive carcass
of her mate.
Now what? [...]
II. El Naksa (the disaster)
Kapitel 8: As Big as the Ocean and All Its Fishes 1960–1963
I SPENT MUCH TIME IN my youth trying to imagine Mama as Dalia, the
Bedouin who once stole a horse, who bred roses and whose steps jingled.
The mother I knew was a stout woman, imposing and severe, who soldiered
all day at cleaning, cooking, baking, and embroidering thobes. Several
times each week, she was called to deliver a baby. As with everything else
she did, she performed midwifery with cool efficiency and detached nerve.
I was eight years old when Mama first let me help her deliver a baby. [...]
Kapitel 9: June in the Kitchen Hole1967
Die Erzählerin ist Amal, die Tochter Hanans, sie hat den Krieg in einem Loch in ihrer Küche im Lager überlebt.
Das Loch war mit einem Platte zugedeckt und hatte ursprünglich dazu gedient. Die Waffen, die ihr Vater dort versteckt hatte, unauffindbar zu machen. Jetzt hat sie zusammen mit Huda und einem Baby, was ihnen anvertraut worden war, dort gelegen und hat in der Dunkelheit nur die Geräusche gehört, die von dem Angriff der Israelis für sie zu hören waren. Gesehen hat sie mal die Beine von israelischen Soldaten. Als sie etwas aus dem Loch heraus kommen, werden sie von einer jordanischen Nonne entdeckt, und ihnen wird behelfsmäßig geholfen. Sie werden nach Bethlehem in die Geburtskirche Isas gebracht, wo sie in eine Badewanne steigen dürfen.
„The church where Master Esa was born had been shelled and still
smelled of fire. Inside, hundreds of children, most of them orphaned by the
war, sat on the floor. No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm
reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it all was
merely a nightmare. The silence reached up to the cathedral ceiling and
cluttered there, echoing sadness and unseen mayhem, as if too many souls
were rising at once. We were existing somewhere between life and death,
with neither accepting us fully.
Sister Marianne arrived, carrying an urn of water.
“Follow me, dears. You’ll need to bathe together to save water,” she
instructed us as Huda and I walked behind her to the washroom. The good
nun poured the water and left us. We were so bewildered that we got into
the metal tub with our filthy garments. The warm water traveled over my
body like a loving embrace, whispering a promise of safety.
Huda and I disrobed in the tub and sat across from one another.
Browned water separated us, but our legs rested together. Face to face, we
stared at one another’s thoughts, seeing each other’s terror and knowing that
we had crossed some unmarked boundary beyond which there could be no
return. The world we knew was gone. Somehow we knew that. We cried
silently and moved into each other’s small arms.
We lay that way, in the quiet of a foreboding for which we knew no
words. I looked at my toes protruding from the water. Chipped red polish. It
had been only one week since we had passed around the nail polish, giddy
over something that had made us feel older. Now, in that bathtub inside the
church where Master Esa was born, Huda’s nails and mine still bore the
chipped red remnants of that day. I calculated one week as the distance
between girlish vanity and hell.
Slowly, I let my body slide, pulling my head beneath the water. There, in
that silent world, like the stillness I had heard after the blast that had torn
the kitchen and killed Aisha, I had an odd desire to be a fish.
I could live inside water’s soothing world, where screams and gunfire
were not heard and death was not smelled.“ [...]
Kapitel 10 S.74 ff.
Forty Days Later 1967
LOOKING OUT THE BROKEN window in our devastated camp, the sun
was still hidden from view, but the sky was already ablaze with the purples
and oranges that announce its coming. Amazingly, the cocks had survived,
keeping to their regimen of crowing, unaware of the portentous shadow that
hung over us. As always, I was up before dawn. Sunrise belonged to Baba
and me, when he would read to me as the world around us slept. It had been
forty days since the war had ended and Sister Marianne had returned us to
Jenin and I had found Mama with a broken mind. Baba and my brother
Yousef were still missing.
Soon, the melody of the adan came through the air, into our makeshift
homes, to call the faithful to prayer. Decades later, after a life in exile, that
unmistakable cadence of the Arab soul would summon a calm certainty in
my heart that I had made the right decision to return to Jenin.
Although it was still dangerous to venture outside, little Samer, our fiveyear-
old neighbor, was running through the refugee camp yelling
incoherently, his high-pitched voice slashing the stillness of “curfew,”
which was now a fact of our lives.
I guessed that the poor child was reliving the terror of recent events. It
would not have been surprising, for lately most of the young ones wailed in
their sleep.
“They’re naked,” Samer panted, struggling to order his thoughts. “They
need clothes. They told me.”
Little Samer sounded hysterical and people began to stir. Exhausted and
bewildered eyes peered from windows. Old women cracked their
improvised doors for a look.
“What’s going on?” called a voice down the alleyway.
“Are we at war again?” asked another. In these moments of confusion,
despair, and anticipation, the rumor pulsed like a wave of hope through the
living dead.
People began to shout, “Allaho akbar!”
Faces appeared at the windows of every shack and more cries were
heard as excitement surged through the camp. From a window opening
blackened by fire came a euphoric note: “The Arab armies are coming to
liberate us!” But the people remained hesitant, for we could see Israeli
soldiers perched on their lookout posts. Arrogant conquerors, they.
Murderers and thieves. I hated them as much as I hated the sea of white
cloth fluttering over our homes—signs of our humiliating surrender.
But as quickly as the euphoria rose, so it fell when Samer began to make
sense.
“Enough! There is no more war. The boy says our sons are alive,” came
a man’s voice, quieting the war songs. It was Haj Salem. He survived! I
wondered where he had taken refuge.
Haj Salem had seen it all. That’s what he used to tell us youngsters. (S.75)
III. The Scar of David (S.86ff.)
Kapitel 11, S.87 ff.
A Secret, Like a Butterfly 1967
WATCHING DAVID, HIS BROAD shoulders bent over the dinner table,
Jolanta could scarcely comprehend how much time had passed since the
first day Moshe had brought him to her, a frightened, wounded little bundle.
She thought of that beautiful creature, now a man kissing her cheek and
saying, “I love you, too, Ma!” He was so small in her arms then; she would
hold him to suckle at her dry breasts when no one was around.
She had doted and fussed over him. Made him dress in too many clothes
in the winter, something he had tolerated until the age of seven, when he
had realized he could refuse to wear what she picked for him. She had
adored even his defiance and could barely conceal a smile when he would
assert his independence.
She always worried and he always said, “Don’t worry, Ma, I’ll be fine.”
When he had his first sleepover at the age of eight, she worried that he
would feel homesick and she made him promise to call no matter what time
of night. During his first weekend camping trip when he was ten, the list of
her worries had been so long that even she couldn’t remember it now. She
worried that he had not eaten enough breakfast before school, that he would
hurt himself playing football, that a girl would break his heart. She worried
when he went to his first party, where she knew there would be alcohol.
And when everything seemed fine she worried that there was something he
was keeping from her that she should be worrying about.
She worried that someday he would find out that he was not really her
son. Jolanta worried most of all the year David turned eighteen.
She did not want her boy to join the army. But she had no choice, nor
did her son. Israel was a tiny haven for Jews in a world that had built death
camps for them in other places. Every Jew had a national and moral duty to
serve. So in June 1967, when his country went to war, David already had
served in the Israeli army for one year.
The army sent him north to the Golan. He was strong, ready to serve his
country. Ready to fight.
He was part of the battalion that was supposed to provoke the Syrians
into retaliation so Israel could take the Golan Heights. General Moshe
Dayan instructed them to send tractors to plow in an area of little use, in a
demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If
they didn’t start shooting, David’s unit was told to advance the tractors until
the Syrians were provoked into shooting. They used artillery and later the
air force became involved. But on the last day, when Israel attacked the
USS Liberty, in the Mediterranean Sea, David was sent home because of an
injury to his hand.
He had been wounded by friendly fire that had burned his right palm.
Jolanta’s heart sank when she learned that her son had been injured, and she
could find no peace until David returned home.
She threw her arms around him. “My boy! Let me see your hand.”
“It’s okay, Ma. They fixed it all up.”
She inspected him to be sure, unable to thank God enough for her son’s
safety. “Are you hungry?” Jolanta was delighted to watch David eat the
kreplach she had made.
My heart won’t survive if anything happens to him. Somewhere in the corner
of her love, the secret lay in wait. She had not intended to keep the truth from David.
Since the day he arrived in July 1948, everything she was or had been had converged
to make her simply David’s mother. How he had come to be her son
remained unsaid, a harmless butterfly in a field of love.
Now, seeing his bandaged hand, she could not bear the possibility of
losing her son. Jolanta had no control over his serving in the army, but she
could keep the truth hidden. He’s my son, that’s the only truth he needs, she
decided, caging the butterfly. (S.87/88)
26. Kapitel, S.167 ff.
Amal ist von einer amerikanischen Familie aufgenommen worden, sie hat erstmals in ihrem Leben in einem warmen weichen Bett geschlafen. Es war schwierig, sich in dieser Welt zurechtzufinden, wo alle sie als fremd ansahen, sie für alle ein Außenseiter war.
Aber was war die Gefahr, von unbekannten Jungen verprügelt zu werden, gegen ein israelisches Gewehr, das man im Rücken spürte und wo eben vor ihren Augen vertraute Menschen erschossen worden waren und wo sie wusste, dass sie den Befehlen gehorchen musste, wenn sie überleben wollte.
13 Jahre gibt sie sich große Mühe, sich in dieser Welt zurecht zu finden. Sie will Amerikanerin werden und hält die Verbindung zu ihren Verwandten nicht mehr aufrecht.
Da erhält sie ein Lebenszeichen von ihrem Bruder Yousef , der in die PLO eingetreten ist und jetzt in Libanon lebt. Er hat Fatima, seine große Liebe geheiratet, und sie erwartet ein Kind von ihm. Sie leben in einem der drei großen Flüchtlingslager im Libanon. Da beschließt Amal hinzufliegen.
MAJID 1981
A GUST OF WARM, DRY wind greeted me as I stepped off the plane onto
Lebanon’s soil. Beirut International Airport was an ominous place, made so
by too many rifles strapped to too many uniformed soldiers. But the guttural
silk tones of Arabic rippled through me as I heard the melodic calls and
responses of my language. It’s a dance, really. A man at a desk was offered
tea as I walked through the metal detectors. He said, “Bless your hands” to
the one making the offer, who responded, “And your hands, and may Allah
keep you always in Grace.” Calls and responses that dance in the air.
Emerging from tense immigration lines, I found a tall, haggard man
standing impassively behind a sign that bore my name. His dark eyes were
set deep beneath straggled eyebrows. Sparse hairs sprang haphazardly at his
jawline in a vain struggle to become a beard, and a meticulously
symmetrical mustache could not conceal the fullness of his lips. When our
eyes met, recognition pulled his face into a smile.
“Al hamdulillah ala salama,” he said, extending a hand. “My name is
Majid. Your brother sent me to pick you up.”
“And God keep you in safety, too,” I replied. Calls and responses.
“I knew you right away. You look like Yousef.”
“We take after our mother.”
He smiled, taking my luggage.
Beirut’s traffic moved in jolts amid a bedlam of honking horns. Bicycles
darted between cars [...]
Dispersed in the pandemonium, peddlers sold newspapers, flowers, and
Chiclets while the aroma of freshly baked bread— the streetside displays of
sesame kaak with crushed thyme and cheese—crawled through my senses
into memories of Palestine.
“It’s good to be on Arab soil again,” I thought aloud.
“I hear you’ve been gone quite a while,” Majid said after a brief pause.
“Yes, quite a while.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No, it’s okay. I went on a scholarship and couldn’t go back to Jenin.
You know how it is when you’re gone for a while. The Israelis don’t let you
come back . . .” Furthermore, I had nothing, no one, to go back to. And to
be honest, I wanted to be an American. I wanted to pack away my baggage
of past and tragedy and try on Amy for size.
I turned my head to the open window to end the subject and inhale more
of the hot jibneh and zaatar on sesame kaak from the sidewalk carts.
Majid called out the window and a vendor, a slender, kindly old man,
approached with two large kaaks wrapped in newspaper.
“May God give you a long life, haj,” Majid said to thank the old man,
and paid him.
“And may he grant you and your family happiness, son,” the old man
replied.
“I’ll bet you haven’t had one of these in a while.” Majid turned to me
with a jibneh kaak. That smile again.
Thrilled, I thanked him: “Bless your hands. They’re made of kindness
and chivalry.”
“I knew something could make you smile.” [...]
The heavy, turtle-paced creep of gravity prodded Yousef to rise on his
legs. And the frail waft of honey apple tobacco, as he uncovered our
father’s smoking pipe, turned those legs to clay. Yousef ’s shoulders
drooped and I saw my brother cry for the first time in my life.
“How did you get this?” he asked, composing himself and wiping tears.
The constant, background-humming craving for just one more moment
with our father moved to the forefront of our yearnings, crowning the next
hours between brother and sister getting to know one another as adults. He
was sorry for having left me in Jenin. He’d have taken us with him, if he
could have. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when Mama died.” He hadn’t
heard about my being shot until a year after. Life hadn’t been easy. Nor for
me. But we were a family again and now there was a baby, a promise that we could live on.
“I didn’t know what else to do, Amal. But I want to make it up to you. I want to be here for you now.”
“You did the best you could, brother. I know that,” I said.
“There are some things I never told you,” Yousef began. He looked
down at his hands, as if placing the words in his palm first before uttering
them. “Our brother Ismael, the baby we lost in forty-eight, is alive,” Yousef
said, looking intently at my face.
He was surprised when I told him that I already knew, or at least I had
always suspected ever since Huda and I had overheard him talking so many
years earlier about the Yahoodi they call David.
“Does Huda also know?”
“I don’t think your conversation that day left the same impression on her
as it did on me. Anyway, we never spoke of it.”
My brother and I served Fatima in bed when she awoke [...]
27. Kapitel
The Letter 1981
MAJID PERSISTED IN AMAL’S thoughts. He filled her daydreams,
where she replayed their time together, searching for hidden meanings to
his words. She began to grow agitated when a full week had passed without
word from him. And for another two weeks, Amal tossed in the anxiety of
waiting for Majid’s next visit to her brother’s home. [...]
28. Kapitel
“Yes” 1981
WE MET IN SECRET two days later. Majid wanted my answer in private,
away from voices and expectations. So it was, at our favorite spot just
outside the quaint seaside village of Tabarja, that Majid and I held each
other for the first time. The blue Mediterranean lapped at our bare feet and
stretched at its far edges into a cloudless sky. You could not discern where
the ocean ended or the sky began, and somewhere in all that blue the
startling enchantment of love found me.
Majid turned to me, his penetrating eyes black in the blue light.
“I talked to your brother. You know I had to do that first . . . ,” he said,
breaking into the tension. “Will you marry me, Amal?” he asked in sincere,
committed blue, the ocean and the sky his comrades and conspirators in the
question.
I had been waiting to answer. I had practiced in the mirror saying “Yes.”
A surprised, happy “Yes.” A matter-of-fact “Yes, of course, I will.” So
much preparation just to utter that little word.
But all I could do was nod my head in assent, and my body took him in
its arms, absorbed the lovely blue crackling with love.
He brushed his lips against mine, pulled me closer, and I felt as if I had
lived all my life for that kiss.
“I love you,” he said.
The most perfect words.
Whatever you feel, keep it inside. Mama was wrong. “I love you, too,” I
whispered at his ear, willingly falling into my words. [...]
29. Kapitel
Love 1981
THEY MET DAILY DURING their monthlong engagement. Majid came in
the very early morning that had been so magical in Amal’s childhood. She
waited eagerly each time, her heart suspended in the mist of daybreak, until
she heard his steps approaching. He walked briskly, impatient to see passion
expand her bottomless black eyes when they set upon him. Though when
they beheld each other, their desire to hold and feel one another was
tempered by rectitude, by loyalty and respect for Yousef ’s and Fatima’s
good names, and by their approaching wedding.
They talked, less for meaning than to hear the other’s voice. Majid
learned the nuances of an earnest love, the lines it drew from the eyes of the
woman who loved him truly, the fullness of his own breath in her presence,
the way time passed too quickly when they were together and too slowly
when they were apart. [...]
Yousef bittet Amal, in die USA zurück zu fliegen und
sich dort um Asyl für Fatima und ihr Kind zu bemühen.
Er selbst und Amals große Liebe Doktor Majid bleiben
im Lager zurück. Majid fühlt sich für die Betreuung
seiner vielen Patienten im Lager verantwortlich.
Wikipedia:1982: Politik und Weltgeschehen: Europa: 31. Juli: Deutschland Bei einem Sprengstoffanschlag in einer Vorhalle zur Abfertigung von Reisenden nach Israel im Flughafen München-Riem werden sieben Menschen schwer verletzt.
„Der Libanonkrieg 1982 war eine militärische Auseinandersetzung im Libanon zwischen der israelischen Armee und verbündeten Milizen auf der einen sowie im Wesentlichen Kämpfern der PLO und syrischen Truppen auf der anderen Seite. Es war der erste größere Arabisch-Israelische Konflikt, den Israel begann, ohne dass seine Existenz unmittelbar bedroht war. Israel nannte die Operation „Frieden für Galiläa“.[1] Die israelische Offensive wurde jedoch, auch von vielen Israelis,[2] als Angriffskrieg gewertet.[3]
Der Libanonkrieg 1982 fand vor dem Hintergrund des Libanesischen Bürgerkriegs statt; dieser trug nicht unwesentlich zur Eskalation bei und wurde durch Israels Eingreifen maßgeblich beeinflusst. […]
11. und 12. Juni und brüchiger Waffenstillstand
Die USA, wohl auch unter dem Druck der Sowjetunion, drängten Israel nun endgültig zu einem Waffenstillstand. Israel bot den Syrern den Waffenstillstand an, so dass diese, trotz ihrer Niederlage, nicht als Bittsteller auftreten mussten und ihr Gesicht wahren konnten.[41] Die Waffenruhe trat am 11. Juni 1982 um 12 Uhr in Kraft, schloss jedoch die PLO ausdrücklich nicht mit ein.
Syrische Verstärkungen der 3. Panzerdivision waren aus Richtung Damaskus kommend zur Verstärkung ihrer 1. Panzerdivision in die Bekaa-Ebene vorgerückt und gerieten kurz vor Inkrafttreten der Waffenruhe an eine Riegelstellung israelischer Luftlandetruppen unter General Jossi Peled, die mehrere moderne T-72-Panzer der Syrer mit auf Geländewagen montierten TOW-Raketen zerstörten.[42]
Der Waffenstillstand wurde am 12. Juni auch auf die PLO ausgeweitet, hielt aber im Raum Beirut nicht. Schwere Kämpfe ereigneten sich in Beirut zwischen PLO-Einheiten, christlichen Milizen, israelischem und syrischem Militär.[42] Schließlich war Beirut von israelischen Truppen eingeschlossen, die die Stadt selbst jedoch nicht betraten.
Zunächst hatte sich der Kommandeur der 211. Brigade, Oberst Eli Geva, dem direkten Befehl widersetzt, seine Truppen in die Stadt zu führen, und stattdessen seinen Abschied genommen;[43] in einer politischen Intervention hatte US-Präsident Reagan dann schließlich dem israelischen Premierminister das Zugeständnis abgerungen, die Stadt nicht zu besetzen, nachdem er selbst von arabischen Staatschefs unter Druck gesetzt worden war, die die Besetzung einer arabischen Hauptstadt durch Israel für unzumutbar hielten.[44] Ein instabiler Waffenstillstand wurde schließlich am 25. Juni erreicht. Ständige Scharmützel zwischen Milizen und Angriffe israelischer Truppen aus der Luft führten jedoch zu zahlreichen Opfern unter der Zivilbevölkerung und starken Zerstörungen in der Stadt.
Am 25. Juni trat US-Außenminister Alexander Haig zurück. Damit nahm die Politik der USA im Libanon eine andere Richtung, bei der der zuletzt marginalisierte Sondergesandte Habib größeren Einfluss erhielt. Zentrales Ziel der US-Regierung war nun, zunächst die PLO friedlich aus dem Libanon zu entfernen und damit den Grund für die israelische Militärpräsenz im Nachbarland zu beenden. Danach sollten die syrischen und israelischen Truppen das Land verlassen. Zunächst fand sich jedoch kein arabisches Land, das PLO-Kämpfer aufnehmen wollte. Am 20. Juli erreichte der neue US-Außenminister George Shultz direkte Verhandlungen mit dem syrischen Außenminister Abd al-Halim Chaddam und beider saudischen Amtskollegen Saud ibn Faisal in Washington. Die Syrer wollten aber nur eine Aufnahme der politischen PLO-Führung um Jassir Arafat in ihrem Land akzeptieren. Sie befürchteten, dass die Anwesenheit palästinensischer Kämpfer Israel einen Kriegsgrund geben würde.[8] [...]
Abzug der PLO, Belagerung und Massaker der Phalange-Miliz
Ende August richtete die PLO in Tunis ihr neues Hauptquartier ein. Am 3. September war der Abzug aus Beirut weitgehend abgeschlossen. Daraufhin verließen die rund 3.600 syrischen Soldaten die Stadt in Richtung Bekaa-Ebene und anschließend zogen die multinationalen Truppen ab.[8] Die erhoffte Stabilisierung des Libanon trat jedoch nicht ein. Sowohl Syrer als auch Israelis verweigerten den von den USA verlangten Abzug aus dem Land. Am 14. September 1982 fiel der erst am 23. August gewählte Präsident Gemayel einem Bombenanschlag zum Opfer. Israelische Truppen rückten daraufhin in Beirut ein und schlossen die palästinensischen Flüchtlingslager in der Stadt ein, betraten sie jedoch nicht.[48]
Ab dem 16. September kam es dann zu einem zweitägigen Massaker in den Flüchtlingslagern Sabra und Schatila durch Anhänger der maronitischen Phalange-Miliz Gemayels unter dem Kommando von Elie Hobeika (damals Verbindungsoffizier zwischen Kata'eb und IDF). Schätzungen über die Zahl der Opfer sind umstritten und reichen von 300[48] bis 3000.[49] Nachdem die reguläre libanesische Armee es abgelehnt hatte, die Lager zu besetzen, wies Verteidigungsminister Scharon das israelische Militär an, die Säuberung der Lager von etwaigem Widerstand den Milizen zu überlassen.[48] Als Reaktion auf das Massaker beorderte US-Präsident Reagan die multinationale Truppe wieder nach Beirut zurück, um die Kampfhandlungen zu beenden. Dies war der Auftakt zu einer etwa anderthalbjährigen Präsenz im Land.[8]
Politische Folgen
Eine Untersuchungskommission, die in Israel auf Druck der Öffentlichkeit die Vorgänge um den Libanonkrieg beleuchten sollte, stellte im Februar 1983 fest, dass es Premierminister Begin versäumt hatte, die Handlungen seiner Untergebenen ausreichend zu überwachen, und verurteilte das Verhalten insbesondere von Verteidigungsminister Ariel Scharon und Stabschef Rafael Eitan schwer. Beide mussten ihre Posten danach aufgeben und Premier Begin im September des Jahres zurücktreten.[48]“
"I wasn’t paying attention to the small screen on the kitchen counter, but
Ammo was, and I noted the change in his face before hearing the news. We
had all been holding our breath for weeks and now what we had feared
moved languidly, like a cloud, across Ammo’s expression, pulling the color
from his face and causing it to droop.
I heard the shrill broadcast as I met his sad eyes.
“A massive invasion.” “Intense aerial bombardment.” “Ninetythousand-
strong invasion force moving up the coast of Lebanon.” The
television headlined “Operation Peace in the Galilee.” Such was history’s
name. [...]
“Israel is striking back against the PLO, a terrorist organization whose
aim is to slaughter Jews like they did the Munich athletes.” Israel’s stated
aim was self-defense. To dislodge the PLO, a six-thousand-member
resistance.
By August, the results were 17,500 civilians killed, 40,000 wounded,
400,000 homeless, and 100,000 without shelter. Prostrate, Lebanon lay
devastated and raped, with no infrastructure for food or water. Israel
claimed it had been forced to invade for peace. “We are here for peace. This
is a peacekeeping mission.” [...]
Ronald Reagan dispatched Philip Habib, who brokered a cease-fire deal
in which the PLO evacuated Lebanon. Yousef had to leave or die. He left
because it was the only way to keep Fatima and the babies safe. So they
said. The PLO withdrew from Lebanon only after an explicit guarantee from
U.S. envoy Philip Habib and Alexander Haig that the United States of
America, with the authority and promise of its president, Ronald Reagan,
would ensure the safety of the women and children left defenseless in the
refugee camps. Philip Habib personally signed the document.
Thus the PLO was exiled to Tunisia carrying the written promise of the
United States. The fate of those I loved lay in the folds of that Ronald
Reagan promise. [...]
Kapitel 32 (S.199 ff.)
A Story of Forever, Forever Untold 1982
ON SEPTEMBER 10, I awoke in a terrible fright, trying to discriminate
night from nightmare. The clock read 3:02 A.M. as the telephone rang in
the corner of my mind.
It was Yousef.
He had arrived at his place of exile with the PLO. Tunis was their
destination at the end of an agonizing departure from Lebanon, whereby
Yousef and his comrades had been forced to leave their wives, children, and
parents behind. These sacrifices were the small parts of Yasser Arafat’s
ragtag deals on behalf of his people.
Now Yousef suffered the surreal and oppressive responsibility of
delivering news he wished he did not have to utter to his only sister.
Majid had kept his promise to me, living in the shelter of his hospital,
which was clearly marked on every side and on its roof with the universal
symbol of medicine, a red cross. But at the urging of his co-workers, he had
returned to our apartment for a respite from the constant blare of sirens. He
had slept deeply and soundly in our bed, the place where we once had found
deliverance in love and where we had conceived our child; and when he had
returned to his duties, he had found an inferno where the hospital had been.
My brother was there, searching for Majid, and together they had helped
rescue as many people as they could.
“Only by the Grace of Allah were you spared, brother,” Yousef had said,
relieved to see Majid alive.[...]
Das Krankenhaus, in dem Majid gearbeitet hat, fällt wenig
später einem israelischen Bombenangriff zum Opfer.
Kapitel 33 (S.202 ff.)
Pity the Nation 1982
THAT WEEK IN SEPTEMBER, starting with Yousef ’s telephone call, is
the mantelpiece of my life. It is my center of gravity. It is the point on
which all of my life’s turning points hinge at once. It is the deafening
crescendo of a two-thousand-year-old lineage. It is the seat of a demonic
God. On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army
circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen
slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints,
barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into
the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their
binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the
path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps.
Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore
witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in Pity the Nation:
They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards
and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of
garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped
counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young
men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible
profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death.
Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients
at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the
doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass
graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such
savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the
tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through
field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses,
the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their
gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington
Post] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli
defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this
horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is
Deir Yassin all over again.”
What we found inside the Palestinian Shatila camp at ten o’clock
on the morning of 18 September 1982 did not quite beggar
description, although it would have been easier to retell in the cold
prose of a medical examination. There had been massacres before in
Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never overlooked by a regular,
supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens
of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people,
hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass
killing, an incident—how easily we used the word “incident” in
Lebanon—that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the
Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist atrocity.
It was a war crime.
Jenkins and I were so overwhelmed by what we found in Shatila
that at first we were unable to register our own shock. We might
have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of bodies,
killed in the heat of combat. But there were women lying in houses
with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart,
children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back
after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies—
blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24
hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of
decomposition—tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded U.S.
Army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, and empty bottles
of whisky.
Did I know those women, or those babies? How many of the children had
been my students? For forty-eight hours, Israeli soldiers, sodas and chips
handy, watched that malignant rush. How does an Israeli soldier, a Jewish
man, watch a refugee camp being transformed into an abattoir? Fatima.
Falasteen.
Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the
entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen
of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around
each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank
range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to
the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars
down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his
trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn
intestines. The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest
was only 12 or 13 years old.
In the next passage, I found the fate of Fatima and her friends— those
friends who had been at her side the day she gave birth to Falasteen. The
women who had kissed me because Fatima had told them so much about
me. The women who had gossiped about me when I fell in love with Majid,
and who had sung, danced, and cried at my wedding.
On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we
found the bodies of five women and several children. The women
were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble.
One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl
emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her
eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was
dead. Someone had slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways
and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes
were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.
An Associated Press photographer pressed his finger and sent the scarlet
darkness of that scene around the world. I saw the photo in the Arab press
and first recognized the woman’s pale blue dress. Fatima’s favorite
dishdashe, worn thin in nearly two decades of use. The curly-haired little
girl behind her was my niece. Falasteen.
Yousef called me, screaming. Screaming.
Even through the telephone wires, there was enough agony in his voice
to break the sky. I can still hear it shatter the wind when I walk.
“How much must we endure and how much must we give?” he wailed
like a child. “Fatima! My darling, Fatima! Did you see what they did?” he
asked, screamed, and he answered himself, “They ripped her belly, Amal!”
I had no words.
“They ripped my Fatima’s belly with a knife! . . . They killed my
babies!” He screamed more. “They killed my babies, Amal. Oh God! Oh
God . . .”
His sobs shook the ground beneath my feet and I thought the force of his
grief would tear the sun to pieces. He hurled objects within his reach and I
stood in Pennsylvania, mesmerized by the sound of breaking glass at the
other end of the world. He cried with no measure of control, gripped in a
seizure of pain. Tetanus. Thunder.
He cursed Israel, the Americans, Ronald Reagan, Arafat, and the world,
sparing no leader and no god or devil. “Damn them to hell. Damn them to
this hell they made for us.”
At the base of his voice I heard the silent howl of wrath burgeoning in
him, the raw substance of despair and rage concentrating into resolve. He
vowed vengeance, swore to cut their throats like pigs. He beat his head
against the wall with no mercy for himself, still holding the telephone to his
ear, still cursing. Still crying—the cries of a soul dying.
That frenzy of pain dismantled him. Yousef was irreparably undone.
They killed my sweet brother in absentia when they murdered Fatima. And
his heart now beat with the force of his rage.
“THEY SLAUGHTERED MY WIFE AND MY CHILDREN LIKE
LAMBS!”
The line went dead. [...] (S.205)
Kapitel 39, S.233 ff.
Amal
The Telephone Call from David 2001
[...] “Hello. Is this Amal?” replied a male voice in accented English.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“I am David Avaram,” said the voice.
She did not recognize the name, but by the surname, Amal suspected
this stranger was Israeli. “Do I know you?” she asked.
“No . . . I mean yes. Well, no, you don’t know me, but . . .”
She was about to hang up the phone, annoyed by the interruption since
Sara was due home any minute now.
“Wait, please don’t hang up,” he said, perhaps sensing Amal’s intention
to end the call. “I guess I wasn’t as prepared for this call as I thought.”
A memory rushed up in Amal’s mind from a buried past. “He’s a
Yahoodi they call David.”
Could it be? Her hands began to shake and she nearly dropped the
phone.
“I think you might know me as Ismael,” he said, but Amal could form
no words for the storm of a past rising in her mind. “I am sorry to call like
this. It’s just that . . . I have been looking for you for a long time. And I . . .
now, I mean, I will . . . ,” he stammered, trying to find the words he had
practiced for days before finally calling her.
Amal could not yet form words.
“This is unfair to you. Maybe it was a mistake to call like this. I’m sorry,
Amal. I will go now,” he said, and Amal panicked.
“No!” she said, louder than she meant to. “Don’t go.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I know this is a shock, but I will be in the United
States in two days and I was wondering . . .”
Amal heard the loud engine of Sara’s 1970 VW Beetle pull into the
driveway and found herself quickly making plans to meet her long-lost
brother, as if making plans to have lunch with a neighbor. They were both
struck by the awkward practicality of those last moments on the phone.
Flight information, date, time, her address, his cell phone number, her cell
phone number.
“Thank you, Amal. Bye for now,” he said.
“Bye,” she answered, unsure what to call him. [...]" (S.233f.)
Kapitel 40 (237 ff.)
David and Me 2001
"[...] When I got home, David was already there. He was early. [...]
We stared at one another before I approached him, both of us uneasy and
unsure. He looked older than I had imagined. He looked like Yousef.
“Hello, Amal.”
“Hello . . . David.” He had not been Ismael for fifty-three years.
In the house now, I moved the vacuum cleaner out of the way,
apologizing for the mess, as I always did with guests, even if I had spent
hours cleaning the house.
He smiled slightly. “It’s okay. I don’t have much time. A car will arrive
in a few hours to take me.”
“I didn’t realize you’d be leaving so early,” I answered, detesting my
casual tone of voice but not sure of how to be or act, or what to say. We
chatted in that awkwardness, empty conversation to patch up what felt like
holes and unraveling expectations. [...] He said he had been to New York
a few times for work but that this was his first trip to Philadelphia. He liked
what he had seen so far. I asked what he did for a living. “An engineer.
Boring stuff.” Where did I work? “Drug company. Boring stuff.” We both had kids.
How about that? “One daughter, Sara.” He had two boys, Uri and Jacob.
Divorced. “Sorry tohear that.” He asked, “What about you?” What about me? [...]
He looked on in silence at the proof of what Israelis already know, that
their history is contrived from the bones and traditions of Palestinians. The
Europeans who came knew neither hummus nor falafel but later proclaimed
them “authentic Jewish cuisine.” They claimed the villas of Qatamon as
“old Jewish homes.” They had no old photographs or ancient drawings of
their ancestry living on the land, loving it, and planting it. They arrived
from foreign nations and uncovered coins in Palestine’s earth from the
Canaanites, the Romans, the Ottomans, then sold them as their own
“ancient Jewish artifacts.” They came to Jaffa and found oranges the size of
watermelons and said, “Behold! The Jews are known for their oranges.” But
those oranges were the culmination of centuries of Palestinian farmers
perfecting the art of citrus growing. [...]
Was it you who tortured him when he was in prison?” Amal asked.
“No,” he answered quickly, as if surprised she would suspect such a
thing.
“Then, it was you who beat him at the Bartaa checkpoint, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Why?”
David lowered his eyes and tried to explain the urge of power to impose
itself for the sake of imposition. The elixir of unopposed force and the
daredevil thrill of impunity.
“There is no reason or logic. I was twenty years old and they gave me
total power over other human beings, Amal. I was angry. Somehow I knew
he was connected to the secret I knew my parents harbored. And
somewhere inside, I feared I might be an Arab. Rage and the impunity I
knew I had throbbed in my arms when I was holding the rifle.” (S.237-41)
Amal hat zwei hat in den USA schickalsschwere Anrufe von ihren Brüdern
Yousef und Ismael bekommen. Den ersten von Yousef aus dem Libanonkrieg
1982 , als er erfahren hat, dass seine Familie ermordet worden ist, eine Erfahrung,
die ihn später zum Terroristen werden lässt und 2001 den von David (das ist der
Name, den Ismael bekommen hat, als er als angeblicher Jude in Israel aufwuchs).
David/Ismael ruft sie an, um mit ihr, seiner Schwester darüber zu sprechen, wie
sie dazu gekommen sind, auf zwei verfeindeten Seiten zu stehen.
Im Gespräch vergleicht Amal in Gedanken das Schicksal der Holocaustüberlebenden
Jolande, die David/Ismael aufgezogen hat und das ihrer und David/Ismaels
wahrer Mutter Dalia:
"She [Jolande] had been a young girl of seventeen, frightened and weak, when Allied
soldiers had liberated her camp. Her entire family had been murdered
during the holocaust of World War Two. The irony, which sank its bitter
fangs into my mind, was that Mama, the mother who gave birth to David,
also survived a slaughter that claimed nearly her entire family. Only the
latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable
truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed
my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s.
“What about your mother? What was she like?” David asked.
[...]
David’s question was a call to arms. It was Dalia and me against Jolanta
and David. Dalia and me against the world. And I laid bare the fundamental
truth of Mama’s heart, which I had found in the endless early-morning
reflections of exile, peeling back the layers, the personal fortress that she
and destiny had conspired to construct.
“She loved beyond measure,” I said.
That declaration rolled from my lips of its own volition, as truth gushes
forth once it is acknowledged, as the air erupts from a drowning man’s
lungs once he is rescued.
“When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand
that she was too tender for the world she’d been born into,” I said. [...]
Dalia, Um Yousef, the untiring mother who gave far more than she ever
received, was the tranquil, quietly toiling well from which I have drawn
strength all my life. I had to travel to the other end of the earth, improvise
like a dog, and bathe in my own grief and inadequacy to understand how
her persevering spirit had bestowed on me determined will.
“What happened to her?” David asked.
“She sank into dementia not long after the war in sixty-seven.”
But I could not explain to David that her condition had been nothing
short of a merciful kiss from God." (S.247/48)
Kapitel 44, S. 263ff.
Hold Me, Jenin 2002
JENIN HAD BEEN IN THE NEWS LATELY: “DEN OF TERROR.”
“NESTING GROUND OF TERRORISTS.” “TERRORISM BREEDING
GROUND.”
It was a taller Jenin than the one I had left nearly thirty years earlier.
Shack built over shack. Stone instead of adobe. “Vertical growth” is the
technical term. One square mile of United Nations subsidies where fortyfive
thousand residents, four generations of refugees, lived, vertically
packed.
The air was busy when I arrived. Everything seemed to move and
scurry. Even children played nervously. There were no old men sitting on
upturned buckets in lazy games of backgammon, a constant scene from my
youth here. Young men, washed clean of dreams, ran in the alleyways with
rifles strapped to their bodies. They were preparing for the inevitable,
stocking up on food, setting up defenses, booby traps, and sandbags against
the coming storm. Anger and defiance had their arms linked, marching in a
military left, left-right-left step with no place to go but the boundaries of
that one-square-mile patch of a taller refugee camp. Suicide bombers
locking their belts, lovers locking their arms, little girls locking their knees,
and mothers packing their children into the innermost, lowermost rooms.
It was March 31, 2002.
On March 20, a suicide bomber had killed seven Israelis in the Galilee,
which was in retaliation for Israel’s killing of thirty-one Palestinians on
March 12, which was in retaliation for the killing of eleven Israelis on
March 11, which was in retaliation for Israel’s killing of forty Palestinians
on March 8, and on and on.
While we were revisiting the past in Ari’s office, Israeli tanks were
hammering at Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters in the present. And
while Yasser Arafat was holed up in a room inside the rubble of his former
headquarters, where the view outside his window was of the barrel of an
Israeli tank, Mr. President George W. Bush announced that Arafat ought to
“stop the terror.”
Later at David’s house, Sara asked her uncle to silence the television
broadcasting “that enormous ego with such a little brain to go with,” as she
put it.“ You would think the logistics of ‘stopping terror,’ i.e., an intact
building and a police force, might occur to the president of the United
States. But nooo. Not our Dubya. He says ‘terror’ so much I’m beginning to
think it’s a medical condition. Some kind of incurable verbal tic.
Terrorterrorterrorterrorterror!” she said in overwrought frustration.
My daughter.
The next day, we were entering the much-taller-than-before Jenin. The
much more crowded Jenin. The busy, resolute, angry Jenin. Not the passive,
waiting, putting-it-in-the-hands-of-Allah Jenin of my youth. My daughter
and I held hands as we walked up the snaking alleyways, the sun trembling
on sewage rivulets. Music, playing inside homes, spilled onto our path and I
heard Fayruz, her voice climbing like freedom toward and into the sky.
For your sake, oh city of prayer, I pray.
Ya bahiyat el masakin. Oh rose of all cities.
Our eyes travel to you each day . . . to ease the pain of your churches
and to wipe the sadness from your mosques . . .
I stopped, spread my arms to my sides to touch both walls of the alley,
and ran my palms along the stone of those taller, closer-together homes.
“This is how Huda and I always walked through these corridors,” I said to
my daughter.
“You have no idea how moving it is for me to be here, where you grew
up. I can’t wait to meet Huda and hear stories of you two.” Sara was visibly
excited. (S.263/64)
Das Lager besteht jetzt nicht mehr aus Hütten, sondern ist in die Höhe gewachsen Es besteht aus Steinen statt aus Lehmziegeln. Sie treffen Huda und ihren Sohn Mansour, der mit 6 Jahren von den Israelis mitgenommen wurde und seitdem nicht mehr spricht. Aber er zeichnet. Amal und Huda tauschen sich über ihre Kindheitserlebnisse aus. Amals Tochter Sara kann nicht genug davon hören.
Dann kommen die Israelis, das Lager wird bombardiert, alle flüchten in die untersten Geschosse. In dieser Gefahr kann Amal ihrer Tochter erzählen, wie sich immer vorgestellt hat, wie ihr Mann Majid damals in dem libanesischen Flüchtlingslager verschüttet wurde und wie sie beim Angriff auf das Welthandelszentrum am 11.9.2001 daran erinnert wurde und daran, dass da das ganze Land trauerte, während sie beim Tod ihres Mannes mit ihrer Trauer ganz allein war, weil das ja weit weg im Libanon geschah, was niemanden betraf. Libanon, da fielen ja immer wieder Bomben und das war weit weg.
In einer Kampfpause holen die israelischen Soldaten Mansour ab. Huda sagt 'He always comes back' und betet.
"Precious little water remained and we were nearly out of bread. What
had happened? We dared not remove the sandbags over the window to look
out and were too afraid to move near the mangled metal door, which offered
a lookout hole.
But it was calm now. It had been calm for a while. Soon, they will ride
with loudspeakers allowing us to leave our homes. But they did not and we
ran out of water and finished the bread. We thought surely someone would
come soon to clear the dead, whose unseen bodies forced us to breathe
through cloth soaked in rosewater.
The odor became unbearable. The markings we made on the wall
indicated that two days had passed since the bombing had stopped, but we
could see nothing through the hole in the metal door. An infinite cloud of
dust and debris of demolished homes hovered in the air.
We licked the last drops of rosewater, breaking the bottle to get at the
last bit, and we slept. “The world cannot possibly let this go on,” I said to
Huda.
“The world?” Huda asked sarcastically, rhetorically, and
uncharacteristically, deeply bitter. “Since when does ‘the world’ give a
goddamn about us? You have been away too long, Amal. Go to sleep. You
sound too much like an Amreekiyya.” With that, she and her wisdom pulled
up the cloth over her nose and closed her eyes. The next dawn, the sun rose
over the haze of a decimated refugee camp. I heard the sound of a large
vehicle. A Red Crescent ambulance. I left a note that I would return with
supplies from the aid truck, and I stepped out, covering my face from the
assault of light and dust. I walked on into an eerie stillness, like the quiet of
a graveyard where the imperceptible sounds of vanished souls and banished
little histories crawled up my feet from the earth like ants.
I thought it was over. I thought the Israelis were gone. It had been quiet.
I thought the car I heard was a rescue vehicle, an aid truck.
I was wrong.
It was an Israeli military truck. I saw it stopped ahead in a prairie of
rubble where hundreds of homes had stood only days before. The bed of the
truck was weighed down with lifeless bodies stacked on top of one another,
like lumber. The truck had stopped to remove the mangled body of a
Palestinian hanging dead on a protruding metal stake on the side of a
partially demolished building. Its head was hugged around by a black-andwhite
checkered headband, and around its arms by two communist red
armbands. Symbols made hollow by death in that truck of lumber.
The weight of my mistake fell on me. Cautiously, moving only my eyes,
I looked upward and saw the snipers. The Jews are still here.
Click. Click.
I turned in horror toward the shrill of metal switching on itself and felt
the muzzle of a rifle at my forehead before I saw the young face of the
soldier standing before me.
The moment made a space for us, pushing the dust away, and fixed us
together." (S.273/74)
Die Situation gleicht der Situation aus dem Prelude von 2000 am Anfang des Romans. Der Soldat schießt nicht. So wird menschlich wird ihr Bruder David seinen ihm unbekannten Zwillingsbruder gesehen haben, denkt Amal.
"Oh, David! Brother. I see you so clearly now. You have lived a stranger
in your own skin. You searched for years to find me, never giving up when
each lead to your family sent you to a grave or a morbid headline. Nowhere
but in the temporary release of alcohol could your heart find repose. You
searched for the one last hope that I, your sister, might traverse the abyss of
your loneliness with the peculiar will of those who can find no place to
belong. And when you found me, I did not come near enough. You
confessed your shame and your sins, but I only perched myself on my own
pain and sat in silence. Oh, brother! I feel a newness, the coming of rebirth.
It will begin with your forgiveness. I will come to you when this is over.
This will end soon. The world cannot possibly let this go on. The
devastation here is beyond comprehension. Israel cannot possibly cover this
up. It will not happen. The world will know at last. Things will change.
I will come to you soon and beg your forgiveness. You’re my flesh and
blood. You are the son of Hasan and Dalia. The grandchild of Yehya and
Basima. Father of two. I want to speak to this soldier whose gun still points
at me. But what is there to say? And would words shatter the immensity of
life and death so close to one another?
I close my eyes, the wholeness of my life flickering, flashing, and taking
form. I have made so many mistakes. I have not loved enough. I have not
loved enough.
A voice screams, “Laaa aaaahh,” and I know it is Huda as I feel my eyes
bulge in horror at the sight of my wandering daughter, exposed to snipers.
I forget about the soldier and rifle at my head.
I can fly. I swear it. I fly to her.
I throw myself on top of her, happy to be fat because my weight has
pushed her down.
I am unbelievably happy. Euphoric because the snipers did not see her
and we are safe on the ground. Low beneath the clouds of dust. [...]"
VIII. Nihaya o Bidaya (an end and a beginning)
Kapitel 45, S. 278 ff.
For the Love of Daughters 2002
"AMAL WAS SHOT.
Even as she spilled from her own body and her eyes were emptied of
her, Amal died without knowing death. She died with the joy of having
saved her daughter’s life. With contented thoughts and with love. [...]"
"Sara’s eyes had just opened from inside a dream when she stepped
through the door to reach her mother. She was dreaming of her violin
recital, just before her tenth birthday, when she looked into the audience and
saw her mother’s face soft in a mist of pride. Do you remember, Mom?
But in her dream she played for an audience of only two, Amal and
Majid, from whom came a resounding applause, swelling the theater of her
dream. Majid’s face was hers. Sara had tried throughout her life to
reconstruct her father’s features from her own reflection. “You look so
much like him,” Amal once told her daughter. Do you remember when you
told me that, Mommy? I do. I was five.
In her dream she bowed to them both. Suddenly, her grandparents Dalia
and Hasan, her uncle Yousef, Fatima, cousin Falasteen, Great-Grandfather
Yehya and Great-Grandmother Basima, Ein Hod and her great-uncle
Darweesh’s horses, and all the faces and stories that had saturated Sara’s
time with her mother in those days in Jenin. Her ancestors joined in the
applause for her, the fruit of their seed. The auditorium rumbled with their
laudation, dropping the lush landscape of Ein Hod into the background. The
applause stepped up into thunder— Was that the Red Crescent ambulance?
—cracking the center of her dream, wherein she saw her mother’s profile
standing outside, in the reality seeping closer. So, she kept walking off the
stage, toward Amal and Majid, whose face was no longer hers but that of an
Israeli beneath a soldier’s helmet. She walked to her mother between the
languid daintiness of her violin recital and the shocking devastation of
Jenin. She was coming to Amal in the unsteadiness of a waking dream.
Then came the scream, and she was awake beneath her mother’s weight.
You are the prettiest of mothers.
Sara can never forget those last minutes of her mother’s life. At least ten
minutes, maybe an hour, an eternity not long enough. It repeats in her mind
and she records it in the letters she writes to her departed mother on a Web
site for the world to see:
Your face is looking down at me. The words “I love you” are formed
inside your half-parted lips, cracked from thirst. But no sound leaves
you. I want to tell you then that I know you used to come into my
room at night, when you thought I was sleeping, to put your arms
around me. I know you loved me. I want to tell you this. Your breath
was always full of love and it was full of sorrow. I want to tell you
this, but I am terrified, because now I have the ultimate proof that
you love me more than you love life. I wonder what you are thinking.
I need your forgiveness. I need you, and I beg God not to take you.
Not now. Not like this.
The sniper’s bullet, intended for Sara, burrowed in Amal’s flesh and
drained her entrails of life in a pool of warm brown. It coated Sara’s dream,
and every dream she had thereafter. Until the siege ended a week later, Sara
was covered in her mother’s blood. The soldier who had held his gun to
Amal pulled Sara from her mother’s lifeless arms. She fought him to stay.
She asked him to shoot her. In her shock, she saw him surprised that she
spoke English. As the soldier dragged Sara back to Huda’s home, he said to
no one in shaking, broken English that he “cannot shoot anymore.”
The soldier gave Sara and Huda his thermos of water and two days later
brought another and instructed them where to find “the woman’s” body
when the camp “opens.” He had hidden Amal’s corpse beneath an uprooted
olive sapling. He gave them food and enough to drink while the siege
continued, but not enough to wash a mother’s blood from her daughter’s
skin. When the siege was lifted, reporters swarmed into the camp. Food and
water followed and survivors set about their searches for each other, for
their dead, their possessions, their will. Schoolbooks, unpaired shoes,
utensils, the things of living scattered amid destroyed homes. Haj Salem did
not survive. Fleeing neighbors had tried to get him out, but the advancing
bulldozer would not stop and its tonnage decimated the old man’s house
while he was still inside. When she heard this, Sara wept and wrote to her
departed mother:
Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home?
Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to
meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To
beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He
was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only
to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be
Palestinian?
April, the month of flowers, forever holds Sara in her mother’s arms. It
is the month when mother and daughter fell in love again and stayed up all
night talking while a fury swirled outside the walls protecting them. It is the
month when Amal at last found home in her daughter’s eyes. Her Web site,
www.aprilblossoms.com, is where Sara records her memories of that
month, the month from which all things come and to which all return. The
month from which Sara loves and hates.
Sara will go back to Pennsylvania. This is certain, for she has already
written too much and her name is on an Israeli list of “security threats.”
There is no place to hide in this land, where even shadows are uprooted. But
Sara’s heart will never leave Jenin.
Huda roamed the camp in a daze. That place where she was born, where
she had been abused and terrorized, loved and cherished, had once again
been destroyed. The remains of people’s lives protruded from the waves of
ruin. Huda wandered, looking for something to find. A woman’s bathrobe
still hanging on a bathroom wall, still standing amid the rubble. It was the
bathrobe of her friend and neighbor. That was a find. But she left it there. A
human hand, only fingers visible, jutted from the ground. Someone buried
alive. She gingerly walked around the hand, murmuring the Fatiha for that
person’s soul. A little girl’s shoe. Schoolbooks everywhere, torn and
imprinted with tank treads. A doll. She picked it up. It had but one arm.
Huda sat slowly on the ground, the one-armed doll in her hands. She looked
at it. Looked hard. She felt the circular motion of time breeze through her
heart and saw herself a girl again. It made her smile, ever so sadly. She ran
her hand over the doll’s head, smoothing its matted hair in a stroke that
replenished her tears. She cried with a small whimper, something like the
sound of a heart that keeps breaking. And with grace, Huda closed her eyes
in prayer: Oh, Allah, help us all get through this life.
Only at the burial did Huda scream. She wailed over the body of her
childhood friend. It was the only body she could bury. Jamil was never
found. She knew, as mothers know, that her son would be killed. But what
mother’s heart can truly prepare for that? She just screamed. A primitive
call into the ether. The love and death of children creasing and contorting
her face. Huda dug her fingers into the earth over the graves, kneading the
dirt as if she were fondling fate itself, grabbing fistfuls of her pain and
heaving it into the air and onto her face. She sat there sprinkled with dirt,
crying.
David was there too. He stood quietly next to Huda over the seven long
rows of graves. They knew one another well, for it was Huda who had
given David the names and rumors when he came looking for his family.
But now they did not talk. No one spoke.
The few remaining men in Jenin dug the graves. Children looked on in
curiosity as the shrouded bodies were lowered into the ground. Women
heaved dirt from the graveside and slapped it on their own faces. They
mourned with a primal trilling that the world did not witness.
David cried silently. He stood over his sister’s body, inside the torment
of sobriety, smelling of the want of liquor. Though he made no sound, the
force of his grief was strong, hovering over the graves like rain that cannot
fall. His tears welled inside a loneliness that could not be drowned, rocked,
or touched.
Ari did not stand. He crouched over Amal’s grave, sorrow on his back,
and spoke to her softly. “Take this,” he whispered to her body, “I owe your
father my life. Tell him I never had a better friend.” And Sara watched Ari
drop the eighteen-pearled brooch over her mother’s shrouded form.
Mrs. Perlstein’s brooch was buried with you, Mother.
When the hours had accumulated on them exhaustion and thirst, the
wailing gave way to the plaintive silence of tired grief. Ari limped into the
crowd of mourners and prayed the Muslim prayer for the dead. They recited
the Fatiha, dousing their faces in amen, cupped in their hands.
“Your grandfather is the one who taught me to pray,” Ari told Sara later.
“I wish I’d known him,” she said.
“I will tell you everything I remember. I knew your grandfather since he
was a boy and was by his side when he married your grandmother Dalia. I
can even tell you about your great-grandparents, Haj Yehya and Haje
Basima. If you like, I can take you to Ein Hod and give you a tour of your
origins. I have not been back there since I was a boy. It will be poetic to
return there now with Hasan’s granddaughter. Indeed it will. You will do me
a great favor to come. It will please your grandfather Hasan, wherever he is.
I am indebted to him.”
Stories from Jenin trickled out into neighboring towns. The sight of a boy
dangling from a metal post, headband and armbands marking him as a
fighter. The story of an old man, a centenarian haj, who was crushed to
death inside his bulldozed home. The one about the Palestinian-Amreekiyya
who was killed protecting her daughter. This woman had survived an Israeli
bullet in her youth and died by the one intended for her child. Her story
reached far and wide. Her tale sent Muna Jalayta calling the Colombian
Sisters, crying, “Amal was killed in Jenin.” That tale traveled abroad and
put an ache in the heart of Elizabeth, who cried on her husband’s shoulders
for the woman and her daughter whom they had helped and loved. It made
Angela Haddad and Bo Bo mourn the passing of an old friend. But that
story, too, quietly passed.
When Israel finally opened the camp, the UN never came. The
American congressmen who tour suicide-bombing sites and express eternal
allegiance to Israel never came. Jenin buried fifty-three bodies in a
communal grave, Amal among them, but hundreds remained missing.
The official report of the United Nations, prepared by men who never
visited Jenin and spoke to neither victim nor victimizer, concluded that no
massacre had taken place. The conclusion was echoed in U.S. headlines:
“NO MASSACRE IN JENIN.” “ONLY MILITANTS KILLED IN JENIN,
SAYS ISRAEL.”
They murdered you and buried you in their headlines, Mother.
How do I forgive, Mother? How does Jenin forget? How does
one carry this burden? How does one live in a world that turns away
from such injustice for so long? Is this what it means to be
Palestinian, Mother?
Just around Sara’s heart, a silent scream has formed like a fog. It bears
no words or definition. At times she thinks it is a political or humanitarian
urgency to set the record straight. Other times it feels like anger. But in the
shade of solitude, it is a wordless whisper from the depths of her, an
unmistakable longing for just one more moment with Amal to answer her
mother’s last words and say “I love you, too.”
Kapitel 46 S.284 ff.
Pieces of God 2002–2003
ARI MADE GOOD ON his offer a few weeks later, taking Sara to Ein Hod.
The two of them asked David to go along and all three walked through the
village. Modern sculptures dotted the terrain. A few artists, mostly French
Jews, worked outdoors on landscape paintings and residents walked about
in shorts and summer dresses. “This is your family’s home,” Ari said,
pointing to a splendid stone house with beautiful gardens and fruiting trees.
“Can we go inside?” Sara asked.
“Let us ask.” Ari knocked on the door.
A pretty Jewish woman in her early thirties appeared. Realizing that the
strangers at her door were there on an errand of Palestinian nostalgia, she
refused them entry.
“I know what this is about. You must understand this is our home now.”
She emphasized the word our. “Besides, my baby is sleeping.” With that
she closed the door and the would-be guests left.
Sara took photographs of the stables, where Ganoosh and Fatooma once
lived. She had promised her great-ammo Darweesh to visit that stone
building of his fondest memories. Three of his sons, Amal’s cousins, had
been part of the resistance and lost their lives in the fighting. The others
were imprisoned, and Darweesh had wished for death to come to him
during that time. But he survived in his wheelchair—in an innermost,
lowermost space.
David and Ari found Basima’s grave where the cemetery had been, just
above the village. Most of the headstones had been removed. But a group of
white-streaked red roses peeked over the tall grass.
“This is approximately the spot where we buried her,” Ari said. “Dalia
planted these roses.”
Sara caught up with Ari and David. In their last days together, Amal had
told her daughter about the grave and the roses. The story still fresh in her
mind, she knew right away what the men were looking at.
“Should we say the Fatiha for my great-teta Basima?”
“Of course,” Ari said.
“Will you teach it to me? The Fatiha?” David finally asked.
“Of course.”
Before the day was over, Sara drove a bit farther to Haifa’s shore. She had
promised her amto Huda to take pictures of the sea. In all her life, Huda had
not been able to fulfill her girlhood wish of going to the ocean “just to sit,
since I can’t swim.”
In Jenin, Sara at last found the extended family she longed for. Huda
became a maternal friend. Her great-ammo Darweesh had produced quite a
large contingency of cousins—first, second, and third. But most of all, she
loved Mansour.
A year after her mother died, Sara was still in Jenin, still helping in the
slow rebuilding effort with occasional funds from wealthy gulf states. She
took a job with a French nongovernmental organization and lived with
Huda. Her uncle David came around often and so did Jacob. All very
different people, they found one another in the memory of loss and the hope
of rest, becoming something of a family.
Following his sister’s death, David stopped drinking. This is what he
wrote on Sara’s www.aprilblossoms.com Web site:
I do not drink anymore, sister. Somehow you gave me this gift. I’ll
never be wholly Jew nor Muslim. Never wholly Palestinian nor
Israeli. Your acceptance made me content to be merely human. You
understood that though I was capable of great cruelty, so am I of
great love.
Sara was eventually deported back to the United States, where she took
a job with al-Jazeera news agency. Her cousin Jacob went with her to study
at Amal’s alma mater, Temple University. It seems he was predisposed to
mathematics, like his uncle Yousef.
During Sara’s stay in Jenin, she was able to sponsor a visa for Mansour,
whom she grew to love as the brother she had never had. Osama was
released from Israeli detention and both he and Huda encouraged their son
to go. Thus, shortly after Sara returned to her home in Pennsylvania, she
sent him a ticket to join her and Jacob, to live in the old Victorian house that
her mother had restored and where Sara had grown up.
David wrote of this on www.aprilblossoms.com:
Huda and Osama tell me that Mansour is studying art and working
part-time with Sara. “He’s doing well,” Huda said. “I get letters all
the time. Look.” She showed me a pile of them. “Look what he wrote
here,” she said, reading a passage that described his awe at a world
without military occupation. He had never imagined how thrilling to
the spirit it is to live by one’s own terms and move freely about.
I visit Huda and Osama often. She makes such sumptuous food
and they are very good about keeping me in line when I crave the
drink. “Have a hooka instead,” Osama insists, and we smoke
together muaasal. The honey apple tobacco is by far the tastiest.
Yesterday I was there, and Osama remarked how our children
live like siblings together in your Pennsylvania home. One
American, one Israeli, and one Palestinian. “How nice that is,”
Huda said, her tiger eyes the prettiest I have ever seen.
“Yes, indeed,” I said, inhaling the smoke of honey apple tobacco.
Love, David
. . . Love, Ismael
Kapitel 47, S.287 ff.
Yousef, the Cost of Palestine 2002
I PLAN IT. I LIVE IT. I see it. I’ll make it happen. I’ll kill. I will.
But I can’t. I know I can’t. Love came to me in a dream and placed her
lips upon my brow.
“Love is what we are about, my darling,” she says. “Not even in death
has our love faded, for I live in your veins.”
My darling wife. Beautiful Fatima.
And I struggle to fall back into my dream to find her once more.
I know I cannot desecrate Fatima’s love with vengeance. Much as I want
them to bleed, I’ll not besmirch my father’s name with the lies they will tell.
I can’t leave Amal alone in the world. I haven’t kept my promises. I tried.
To protect my wife and children. To set my sister’s life toward family and
love. I tried, Baba.
Now I’ve gone so far. Can I turn back? The wheels have been put in
motion.
“I’m not going to go through with it,” I say.
“He’ll not go through with it. The coward. But it will go through him,”
they say.
It will go through me.
I’ll live this pain but I’ll not cause it. I’ll eat my fury and let it burn my
entrails, but death shall not be my legacy.
“I understand, brother,” another tells me.
Someone else drives the bomb into the American building. It goes
through me.
And I see on television what I saw in my darkness. It lives in me with
the necrotic years that will not end. And my face is broadcast and printed
around the globe.
“The world knows your face, Yousef,” they say, and a bullet is handed
to me. “Do the honorable thing if you’re found.”
My gun and solitary bullet are in my pocket. I carry my death, the
honorable thing, in my clothes as I, their terrorist, search for work in the
dank realms of life. In Basra I am a laborer. In Kuwait, I haul stone. In
Jordan I am nearly a beggar. Then, I am a school janitor. How fate is
stubborn and holds to habit. I lay my head in a room beneath the library.
How fate is merciful. And everywhere, I am alone with my father’s books,
my bullet, Love and the memory of her, the past, and memories of a future.
I write so many letters to Amal. Stacks of them line my dirty walls. But
what new hell will come to her if we are in contact and I am discovered.
And oh, Ismael. I’ve carried your scar on my shoulders for so long that it
has sunk into my own skin. Here it is.
I read April’s news and weep tears. I weep darkness and love. Here it is,
at the library where I live: www.aprilblossoms.com.
Dearest Amal, with a long vowel of hope.
Sometimes the air is redolent with the sighs of memory. A waft of
olive wind or the jasmine of Love’s hair. Sometimes it bears the
silence of dead dreams. Sometimes time is immobile like a corpse
and I lie with it in my bed.
And there I sleep, waiting for the honorable thing to come of its
own accord.
For I’ll keep my humanity, though I did not keep my promises. . .
. and Love shall not be wrested from my veins.
AUTHOR’S NOTE, S.289/90
Although the characters in this book are fictitious, Palestine is not, nor are
the historical events and figures in this story. To accurately render the
settings and history, I relied on many written sources, which are cited as
references and, in some instances, quoted in the text. I am grateful to these
historians who have set and continue to set the record straight, often at high
personal and professional costs.
Writing this story and getting it published has been a long journey that
started in 2002. It was first published under the title The Scar of David by a
small press that went out of business shortly thereafter. Two years after this
original publication, Anna Soler-Pont, of Pontas Literary and Film Agency,
became my agent and began breathing new life into it. As a result of her
efforts, the story was translated into twenty languages and Bloomsbury
offered to release it again in English. I am immensely grateful to Anna and
to Bloomsbury for this second chance. In particular, I wish to thank
Alexandra Pringle, who believed in this story enough to take it on under
such unusual circumstances. And I wish to thank Anton Mueller, my editor,
for the literary insight and expertise (and patience with me) that made this
novel so much better. I wish to also thank Janet McDonald for her excellent
copyediting.
The seed for this book came from Ghassan Kanafani’s short story about
a Palestinian boy who was raised by the Jewish family that found him in the
home they took over in 1948. In 2001, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi sent an e-mail to
me after reading an essay that I had written about my childhood memories
in Jerusalem. The e-mail read: “A very moving article—personal,
Palestinian, and human. It sounds like you can write a first-rate biography.
We need such a narrative. Have you thought about it?” So, to Dr. Ashrawi, I
owe the initial confidence to write. A year later, I traveled to Jenin when I
heard reports that a massacre was taking place in that refugee camp, which
had been sealed off to the world, including reporters and aid workers, as a
closed military zone. The horrors I witnessed there gave me the urgency to
tell this story. The steadfastness, courage, and humanity of the people of
Jenin were my inspiration.
An award from the Leeway Foundation gave me a cushion to absorb the
financial difficulties that I encountered while writing. I’m thankful to this
wonderful organization and to all similar institutions that value and seek to
support artistic expression. The love and encouragement of friends assuaged
my many episodes of self-doubt, particularly when debt and publishing
rejection letters began to mount. I will always be indebted to Mark Miller
for his friendship and support that never wavered, not even in my grumpiest
hours. I am also grateful for the love and editorial help of many, especially
Mame Lambeth, who read this manuscript three times at different stages of
its development, and David Mowrey, for being the best friend I’ve ever had,
and for all the Saturdays when he graciously accepted my arrival at
obscenely early hours of the morning for breakfast.
A warm thank-you to the following individuals, whose generous spirits,
advice, and encouragement had an impact on the creation or direction of
this novel (whether they know it or not): Dr. Evalyn Segal, Gloria
Delvecchio, Karen Kovalcik, Peter Ciampa, Yasmin Adib, Beverly Palucis,
Martha Hughes, Nader Pakdaman, Anne Parrish, William Kowalski, Dr.
Craig Miller, and Anan Zahr.
Although I met him only once in person, and briefly so, the late Dr.
Edward Said influenced the making of this book in no small way. He
lamented once that the Palestinian narrative was lacking in literature, and I
incorporated his disappointment into my resolve. He championed the cause
of Palestine with great intellect, moral fortitude, and a contagious passion
that touched so many of us in many ways. To me, he was larger than life,
and though we all knew he was sick, I also thought him larger than death.
Alas, I was wrong. The sad loss of him, felt by many thousands of us, is
echoed in the pages of this story.
My most profound gratitude is to Natalie. Being her mother has been my
greatest joy, and the miracle of unconditional love that she gives and
accepts is my heart’s sustenance.
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