Sharon got exactly what he wanted. The Palestinians’ response would escalate until it culminated in what would later be called ‘the Second Intifada.’

The Israeli bull had been let loose in the china shop.

6. The Ambulance

So this is the Qalandya crossing.

It’s changed a lot. It now looks like a terrifying border post between two countries at war, though in fact it’s located between Ramallah and Jerusalem, that is, between two cities in Palestine connected by the natural urban growth that fills the sixteen kilometers separating them.

For three or four years after the Oslo Agreement, this Israeli checkpoint between the two cities was one of hundreds of routine checkpoints to be found at the entrances to cities and villages. Later, though, it gradually transformed itself into a permanent and closely guarded border post, intended to prevent any of us from reaching Jerusalem.

There’s no need to describe the exceptional tragedies that take place here. The mere likelihood of such things occurring is enough to make the scene appalling. It’s enough to picture in one’s mind the density and solidity of the fortifications, their iron-ness and cementness, and then to picture the fragility of the human body, any human body. It’s enough to imagine how a person feels when crammed here for hours waiting for soldiers behind fortified positions to shout through loudspeakers their instructions to stop or to move on through the revolving electronic gates with narrow bars that the Palestinians call ‘the milking stalls’—an apt name; in the Hungarian countryside I have seen better set-ups for managing herds of cows.

Here identity cards and permits are checked, at the slowest possible pace. Here bodies, clothes, shoes, bags, feelings, intentions, and expressions are inspected. Here police dogs grant permission to pass or bark in one’s face with the zeal on which promotions up the ladder of canine rank perhaps depend. Here are cement blocks, bars, soldiers of numerous facial types (Russians, Falasha from Ethiopia, Poles, Americans from Brooklyn, Arab and oriental Jews), tanks, armored cars, earth-movers, troop carriers, and, all day long, wary faces. A fortress has been improvised here. Hundreds of cars disgorge their passengers, who then stand in rows in the open in all weathers, after which they are permitted to pass, on foot and pulling their bags or carrying them on their heads or backs, among the tanks and machine guns, which are aimed and ready to fire if anything unexpected happens. That’s on normal days, so you can imagine how it is today. Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah has been three quarters destroyed and the tanks that surround it day and night are amusing themselves selecting angles at which to bombard the walls, windows, and entrances. They also prevent food and water from reaching the president and his companions and cadres who are trapped with him along with a large number of international supporters from almost all European countries and the U.S.; these include Jews who are critical of the savagery of the Israeli Occupation and who support Palestinian rights. The refugee camps are being invaded. The detainees are in the thousands. It isn’t just the Muqata‘a or just Arafat; the whole country is under siege. The roads between the cities and the villages are blocked.

The surprising suggestion came from my friend Faisal when he learned that I wanted to get into Ramallah.

“Will you make the journey with me in an ambulance?”

“How?”

“Leave the arrangements to me. I’ll phone you tonight to confirm.”

We travel together from Amman to the bridge. The travelers are few. We go through the Jordanian police post, then the Israeli police post, and continue to Jericho. There, instead of going to the bus park at the resthouse, we make our way to the hospital, where an ambulance is waiting to take us to Ramallah via the main highway and through the Qalandya checkpoint without our having to get out. It isn’t guaranteed since sometimes they search ambulances too but we’ve decided to risk it. We wait a while for the preparations for departure to be completed. Then it’s time. The first time I rode in an ambulance was when I accompanied my brother Mounif. The night rain was heavy over Amman Airport as we stood on the airport runway next to the baggage hold in the belly of the plane from Paris, waiting to receive the coffin. The workers brought it down in the rain, an ordinary wooden coffin bearing numerous seals. I was surprised that the coffin wasn’t wrapped in the Palestinian flag. I know that Mounif, though a good citizen, was without official status — neither a king nor a ruler nor a minister nor a top officer — but who ever said that the flag should be used only for those? Mounif had wronged no one in the country, had done no one any harm. He hadn’t arrested anyone. He hadn’t tortured anyone or been the cause of any of our continual defeats. He was good company, generous, and a man of honor, and flags were created for people like him: they are flown over palaces and in offices in his name, in the name of citizens like him, in the name of us all — ordinary people like you and me and him and her. Is the lot of the good citizen to be a naked wooden coffin such as this on a rainy night such as tonight? If I were ruler, I would give instructions that every citizen who departs this life be covered with the country’s flag; that’s the least his still living countrymen owe him. The flag is the flag of the people, of the citizens. The flag is the flag of the ruled, not the ruler.

Many years before, I received a major shock in connection with the flag when the prominent Palestinian historian Emile Touma died before my eyes in the Communist Party Hospital in Budapest. He was suffering from the last stages of cancer and had gone from Nazareth to be treated in Moscow, and from there they sent him Budapest, where he died. Radwa and I visited him daily. George Toubi came from home to accompany the body to Nazareth. Radwa and I bought meters of red, black, green, and white cloth from the market and made a Palestinian flag. We covered the coffin with it and accompanied it to Budapest Airport. At the airport, George stammered a few times before informing us that it would be better to remove the flag from the coffin. Seeing our surprise, he reminded us of something we’d completely forgotten: “They will never let that flag into Ben Gurion Airport. Emile Touma was an Israeli citizen with Israeli nationality. Have you forgotten?”

We had indeed forgotten, Comrade George.

Palestine’s great historian and political writer, who, starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, had raised generations in the struggle, was now an Israeli!

We had indeed forgotten, Comrade George.

We removed the Palestinian flag from the historian’s coffin.

Mounif comes back from exile with no flag. Emile returns to his homeland with no flag. No flag for the exile, no flag for the resident. We put Mounif in the ambulance and climb in next to him, to accompany him to the Takhassusi Hospital, where he will spend the night alone in the hospital refrigerator, awaiting his final farewell following the next day’s noon prayer. I sat next to the coffin, which held within it the secret of his passing, whether natural or by assassination, at the Gare du Nord in the French capital. His mother wasn’t with us and couldn’t have been. She was waiting for us at the house in al-Shmaysani. Only when she saw us returning from the airport would she believe the fact of his death. She had believed but not believed, still unable to accept that God could do all this to her. Sulafa, Ghassan, Ghada, Ghadeer, Majid, ‘Alaa, Talal, and our friend ‘Abida had accompanied his body on the way over from Paris. They had had no choice but to believe. They’d believed so much they’d found it in themselves to joke about the ironies of fate.