Why can’t I put up with what the fat grandmothers, the young ploughmen with their handsome bronze faces, and the children, who have got used to the Occupation, put up with — so much so that they have, to everyone’s surprise, forced it into a tight spot?
I hear a voice inside me proclaiming its revulsion at the lack of backbone of some poets and writers and their constant whining. I feel that in the end I’m a bad person when compared to these people who make so many sacrifices without complaining.
I tell myself no writer deserves glory so long as his people are in torment, even if he’s the person best able to give expression to that suffering. People may honor him because they value his talent or his role but he will be mistaken if he thinks that’s the end of the matter.
I think, I wish I were a train. A train doesn’t wait. Nor does a farmer. All a farmer waits for is the rainy season, which is easier than waiting for this bus to move before I go out of my mind.
I want to get to the house.
I want to sleep.
The Jordanian policeman allows us to get off the bus. We proceed to the passport barrier, then to our bags, and then to the street.
In a little while the sun will start to set. I’ll be in our house in al-Shmaysani before my mother goes to sleep.
Once I’ve crossed the bridge and entered Jordanian territory, peace enters my soul. I start to feel that things are at least normal again. I become a tranquil traveler. I can enjoy the sight of the trees running alongside the car and contemplate the banana plantations, the oleander flowers, and the roads that have no checkpoints, barriers, or watchtowers. To one leaving Occupied Palestine, Jordan seems like a truly blessed place. No being stopped, no settlements, and no tanks. Here distances always measure the same. You know how many minutes you need to get from one place to another. I take a car to Amman because I want to be on my own. I want to go over this whole journey in my mind from the beginning. I have half an hour to go before I arrive. I put my Jordanian SIM card in my cell phone and call Radwa in Cairo.
“I’m finally on my way to al-Shmaysani.”
Then I call my mother in Amman.
“What’s for dinner, Mother?”
Next morning, the dead and wounded lie scattered in their hundreds.
Television screens are colored red, almost shattered by the shells from the tanks, which hammer at life without let-up. The long embroidered dresses of the mothers bend over the faces of the dead and their arms shake the bodies in their shrouds in the hope of reviving life, if only to bid it farewell. Their hands call before their lips can to those who will never hear a mother’s or a sister’s or a grandmother’s voice again until the end of time.
All news bulletins start with the news of the Israeli army’s invasion of Ramallah.
2. Father and Son
The moment has come. Radwa says goodbye to us at Cairo Airport. She hugs Tamim. She hugs me.
The three of us hug one another, holding as still as the marble base of a clamorous fountain whose water tries to touch the sky before being reclaimed by the earth with the violence of gravity.
We pause for a moment.
As though none of us wants to leave the place.
“Let me know how things are going, blow by blow.”
“Don’t worry. Tamim will enter, get the ID very quickly, God willing, and return to you and his university safe and sound.”
“Bye. Lots of greetings from me to Mama Umm Mounif.”
“We’ll call you as soon as we get to Amman.”
Once again we start the journey from Cairo to Amman and from there to the bridge.
Since my first crossing in 1996, after thirty years of exile, I have crossed many times, sometimes with ease and sometimes with difficulty. I’ve seen Israeli soldiers whose seriousness, which can rise to the level of scowls of superiority, never leaves them and others who practice their job with professionalism, as though they were customs inspectors and nothing more. In the eyes of some, I’ve seen a certain confusion and, very occasionally, I’ve seen one who smiles or shows some desire to be of help. There is no homogeneity to their features — Ethiopian, Brooklynite, Slavic, Yemeni. The common factor is that they’re all armed. Some are newly conscripted adolescents, male and female, and some of these seem bewildered by their daily contact with hundreds of the Arab ‘enemy.’ In all cases, though, the rifles are ready for use at any moment. Taken together, they constitute a nightmare for every Palestinian who crosses the bridge. It’s difficult to trust the smile of a person carrying weapons here.
Our problem with the Jew, here in this ‘Jewish State’ as they insist on calling it, is that all three or four generations of Palestinians have seen of him is his helmet. They’ve seen the Jew only in khaki, with his finger on the rifle’s trigger. They’ve seen him only as a sniper at a window, an officer in a tank, a conscript at a checkpoint, a guard clacking his metal heels past the doors to prison cells or along the long corridors that separate them, or a heavy hand in the interrogation rooms, where Israeli law allows the use of what they call ‘moderate physical force’ (!) to extract confessions. Many western journalists who maintain a studied and malign blindness to the Occupation have asked me whether the Palestinian people are really ready to coexist with the Jews and I reply that we coexisted with them for hundreds of years in Palestine, the Arab countries, and Andalusia, and that it is Europe, which reproves us and holds us to account, that couldn’t coexist with them and sent millions of them mercilessly to the Holocaust. What is asked of us today, however, and has been ever since their military occupation of our land, is to coexist with their tanks in our bedrooms! Show me one person in this world, I say to them, who can live with a tank in his bedroom.
The cliché has it that bridges are symbols of communication, connection, and coexistence. This bridge is a symbol of discrimination, distance, disunion, and the historic distinction between the frightener and the frightened, though sometimes it is hard to be sure who fears the other more. Have the meanings of ‘bridge’ found in the dictionary been so completely distorted that they are no longer useful for describing this bridge? The Israeli obsession with security makes this bridge a great gap, a chasm with teeth. Everything in Israel is determined by its obsession with security. It is a nation that sees itself as forever victorious, forever frightened, and forever in the right. It has been victorious, and frightened, for sixty years. Always, whether fighting or negotiating, it enjoys the support of the only superpower in today’s world, as well as of all the European states. It also enjoys the secret collusion of twenty debased Arab regimes. It is a state that possesses more than two hundred nuclear warheads, has erected more than six hundred barriers and checkpoints, has built around us a wall 780 kilometers long, detains more than eleven thousand prisoners, controls all borders and crossing points leading to our country by land, sea, and air, and frames its laws with reference to a permanent philosophy that its victories do not change, a philosophy whose core is this mighty state’s fear … of us.
Here is a truly frightening state. The Israeli military pilot climbs the skies over any Palestinian city and flies his intimidating F-16 or Apache with as much peace of mind as if he were piloting a Swissair or an Air France plane, and releases his cluster, fragmentation, and phosphorus bombs and aims his ‘smart’ rockets at any target he wishes. The city is fair game, an easy target spread out beneath him. The Palestinians do not have anti-aircraft weapons. The pilot has become a deadly sky and we a murdered earth. The pilot returns safe to his wife or girl friend in Tel Aviv and talks to her of his ‘victory’ over the Palestinians! Despite this, Israel behaves like a state that is truly terrified and fills the world with cries that its existence is threatened. Could Orwell have imagined a more flagrant abuse of language than this?