A poet sits in a coffee shop, writing:

the old lady

thinks he is writing a letter to his mother,

the young woman

thinks he is writing a letter to his girlfriend,

the child

thinks he is drawing,

the businessman

thinks he is considering a deal,

the tourist

thinks he is writing a postcard,

the employee

thinks he is calculating his debts,

the secret policeman

walks slowly, toward him.

However, instead of writing in the list of contents ‘Mourid Barghouti — Palestine,” the magazine wrote “Mourid Barghouti — Palestinian Authority”!

When I asked them to explain, they said there was no country called Palestine, to which my response was, “Is the Palestinian Authority a country?”

Israel, then, is not the only party responsible for rubbing out the name of Palestine; it is the world. The Arab dictatorships have played, and go on playing, a larger role in this linguistic assassination than any other countries, including those of Europe and Israel’s western allies. They are at least as much criminals in this as Israel.

I didn’t explain all this to the writers’ delegation as there wasn’t enough time. I just wanted to point out that for sixty years the State of Israel has continued to pursue the refugees in their places of refuge. As a result, the massacres of the refugee camps bearing the names Jenin, Sabra and Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, Tall al-Za‘tar, and others have become a part of the background of the victim’s double dispossession and murder. Yes! Double dispossession — otherwise, what is the meaning of the Occupation?

Here, in the al-Am‘ari refugee camp, our guests and we saw the tactics the Israeli army had used to take it.

They would enter a house, arrest all its occupants, tie them up with rubber straps, and then use special explosives developed by Israel for such raids to make a huge hole in the wall shared with the next house and charge into that one. Palestinian families would be surprised by soldiers bursting through the wall, as in nightmares. Then they’d demolish another wall so as to break into the next house, killing those they wanted to kill and arresting those they wanted to arrest, and continue in this way from house to house and from hole to hole, the walls splitting open to reveal soldiers of the ‘Defense Force’ like in some Rambo film or Hollywood war. We and our guests passed through one of these holes like the soldiers and heard the local people’s accounts of this repeatedly practiced form of attack. Some of them showed us the holes in the walls left by earlier attacks, which they had roughly repaired using basic materials.

When we toured the alleyways of the camp, one of the writers compared the Palestinian mothers standing in rows in front of their houses to the “chorus of women … of the Greek tragedies.”

I thought to myself, this is the camp of the driver, Mahmoud. The moment we entered the place, his words “I’m from al-Am‘ari camp” came to my ears. What had happened to him and his family? I thought I’d ask about him at his workplace the following morning, but in fact I didn’t want to ask, so that I wouldn’t hear an answer I didn’t want to hear.

Army raids on houses in the cities are carried out by abducting someone and using him as a human shield. They force him to get into the tank — this once happened to my friend Husam — and then under the threat of their weapons make him press the bell of the house of a neighbor they want to arrest and call out his name. When the neighbors trustingly open the door, the soldiers burst in. All Husam could do was to go with his wife the next day to visit his neighbors and explain what had happened. He discovered that he didn’t need to explain. The neighbors, like all the inhabitants of the city, had grown used to this method because it was used so often. On earlier occasions they had been used as he had.

We entered a school that functioned as al-Am‘ari’s computer training center and found the floor piled high with papers, plastic, wires, and cables. The computers were smashed and ripped open, the chairs smashed, and there were bullet holes in the walls. When we asked what had happened to the children, we were told that the army had taken them outside first and done them no harm. The objective had been to destroy the school and the computers, nothing else. Only someone who has experienced or heard of the experience of the Palestinians with education can understand what the destruction of a school in a camp means to the refugees. After the mass displacement in 1948 as a result of the Nakba, the refugees lived in tents set up for them in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon by UNRWA, the refugee relief agency belonging to the United Nations, which provided them with just enough flour, cracked wheat, and sugar to keep them alive, plus some clothes. All of this was distributed in jute sacks, from which the refugees in turn made tatty robes and underwear. You would see the children in front of their tents with the flags of America, Britain, Canada, and other countries on their bottoms, over ‘A Gift from Canada’ or ‘From the American People’ or ‘Point Four’ (with its famous symbol of two hands clasping). Anyway, UNRWA refused to build schools for these children in spite of the insistence of their parents, who, though driven into poverty, had no desire to be driven into ignorance and illiteracy too. One of the first school teachers in the camps told me that he’d only managed to establish the first school there two full years after the Nakba, in 1950, when he put sixty pupils in a single tent. All UNRWA gave him for them were the chalk and the backboard. He brought a wooden notice board, wrote ‘School’ on it in Arabic and then again beneath it in English, and fixed the board to the top of a wooden pole, which he hammered into the ground outside. The children were fascinated by and fell in love with the school, which was paradise for them compared to the monotonous life of the camp.

The people of al-Am‘ari camp were genuinely pained by the destruction of the computer center, though they quickly overcame that pain, as experience has taught them to do. In long conflicts, the weaker party experiences what might be called ‘historical pain.’ In such conflicts, the incident, the word, and the teardrop repeat themselves. Everything is repeated. Despair is repeated and hope is repeated. Heroism and treachery are repeated. Blood recurs and elegies recur. In long conflicts we don’t have to wait for the massacre to experience the pain that will follow or for reality to come into being for art to be created. What we wrote in the past will always provide material that fits the future perfectly.

The cruelest degree of exile is invisibility, being forbidden to tell one’s story for oneself. We, the Palestinian people, are narrated by our enemies, in keeping with their presence and our absence. They label us as it suits them. The weaker party in any conflict is allowed to scream, allowed to complain, allowed to weep, but never allowed to tell his own story. The conflict over the land becomes the conflict over the story and little by little the weak discovers that his enemy will not allow himself to be wronged. The enemy permits him only to be in the wrong, defective, and deserving of pain because he has brought that pain upon himself through his defects and his faults; it is not his enemy’s doing. This is the cruelest form of injustice, and injustice is a form of exile, just as stereotyping is exile and misunderstanding is exile. In this sense, the entire Palestinian people is exiled through the absence of its story. On this visit a few of the writers of the world saw a few of the features of the Palestinian narrative and our exile became a little less acute.