Letters from Palestine (20 page)

I stopped and looked at the field he had
pointed to, trying to imagine my mom working here, trying to
imagine her carrying water on a big can on her head, crossing the
way in front of me. Immediately, memories jumped into my mind. I
used to hear my mom talking with others of her generation,
describing the village and how she used to carry water and sit
under the olive trees. I now could connect these images with this
place. I used to hear so many stories from the generation of the
catastrophe, their memories of the village and the mosque and the
school. Now I could connect all the stories I’d heard in the past
and maybe the stories I will hear in the future with this place. I
realized my visit to my father’s village was very short. But inside
myself I made a promise to learn more, to know everything about
this village, by being here.

We started to drive, my uncle continuing as
our tour guide, showing us the boundaries of the village and its
surrounding fields. Suddenly he said, “Here is the border between
Zakariah and Beit Ajmal.”

When he said this name, I realized he was
speaking of an area well known for its large Italian church. My
friend from Golan also realized this and asked if we could visit,
just to see the church. My uncle and I immediately said yes, of
course.

There was a sign pointing to Beinta Jama and
we started climbing the hill. On the right was an open field full
of wheat. My uncle said, “We used to work here,” pointing to the
field.

I asked him, “Working doing what?”

He answered, “During the harvest period, we
came to work with the church. The church owned the land and hired
the villagers from around the area to cultivate the land and
harvest the wheat. In exchange, the workers got to keep some of the
harvest.”

My uncle told me that he, my mom, and some
of his family used to live there and sleep there out in the fresh
air. During the day they worked, and during the night they
socialized. He remembered as a child they used to go every year, he
and his family. He said the work was very hard, because in summer
it was very hot. He used to wake up early morning and work the
whole day. But during the night, it was very beautiful because
people came from all the neighboring villages and sat down together
to eat and tell stories, sometimes dancing the Palestinian
traditional debka and playing games.

As he mentioned this, my friend and I
started talking about feudal life, about the period of history in
which the church and a few people owned all the land, and the rest
lived as poor landless farmers. During that period, the church
would take four-fifths of the harvest and only give one-fifth to
the people who spent their whole lives living on and working the
land.

We continued driving toward the church,
passing the convent. We came to the entrance, parked the car, and
got out. It was clear that the church was very old.

My uncle said, “Around here, the people
would come every Sunday. There was a market here where people could
sell their wares and buy and exchange goods. There was a doctor
here and a clinic.” He pointed to other buildings and turned to the
left and said, “Here is where we ground the wheat, and behind it is
where we pressed the olives to make oil. Most of the villagers
around this area depended on these two things for their
livelihood.”

My uncle walked toward the building that
used to be the clinic and told me, “Your father used to work here
as a barber, but not just cutting hair. He was not a doctor, but he
used traditional Arab medicine to treat common medical problems. In
those days, some barbers did both.” He told me that my father came
here every Sunday.

For me, it seemed wherever I went in this
area there was something connected to my personal narrative. I
asked him if my mom came with him on those Sundays. He said, yes,
sometimes she came with him to help.

My uncle asked me to look in front of me.
“Where you see that mountain, it’s Jarash village. And in the back
of the church, you can see the hills of Zakariah. So the distance
is very close.”

He turned and looked into my eyes, saying,
“Come, I want to show you something very important for you.”

We walked down a little bit where you could
see clearly the distance between my mother’s village and my
father’s village. He was smiling, one of the first smiles I saw
from him since we came. He pointed to the small paths that ran
between the hills, winding away from the main streets and
roads.

“Your mother, when she was married, she came
from here to your father’s village. I still remember that day. She
was riding a camel, and people came on horses, others were
walking.”

I don’t know how I felt in that moment. I
realized I would never have known about this history, I would have
never been so connected to this place, without coming here.

My two friends walked over to us, and
commented on how the settlements cut across the land. Settlements
stretched as far as we could see, from the left all the way down to
the distance to the right. They were small settlements and large
settlements, but they were all connected, blocking the footpaths
and old roads that used to connect the villages in this area. My
friends were shocked and commented that the people who built these
settlements were trying to change history, to make this place seem
like a European neighborhood.

My friend said, “They changed everything,
building houses and buildings.

Everywhere you look, you see beautiful
nature, but it is cut by all these settlements. They are destroying
nature to make it look like no Palestinians had ever lived
here.”

As we stood there, my uncle named more than
fifteen villages you could see from the top of that hill.

My two friends and I realized my uncle was
in a rush to get to his village. He was becoming impatient. We got
to the car, and we started driving.

My uncle said emphatically, “Now we are
going to Jarash. We will not stop anywhere.”

We got to the main street, and we drove,
with my uncle leading the way. At the traffic lights, we came to
the Beit Shamish settlement. He asked us to turn right, and we
started crossing the settlement, through its huge roads, past its
shops and flowers planted in the streets to divide the two lanes.
After a few hundred meters, we came to an industrial area with big
factories lining both sides of the road. We came to the end and
once more entered open space, with forest on the right and apple
trees on the left.

To the left, there were trees and brooks and
open fields. Through the field cut a dirt road. My uncle said to
turn to the left. He warned us that we would have to climb a hill.
It would be difficult to drive on that road. He said, “We can park
here. We will walk to the village.”

I realized he was changing emotionally. He
was not the same old man that left the camp. Now we were coming to
visit him long ago, when he was a child. I was coming to visit him
when he was a farmer, before he became a refugee. I was worried
about him now, wondering how he would be affected by this visit. To
take someone back fifty years, after fifty miserable years of his
life, would of course be very hard.

We left the car and stood looking around.
Suddenly we saw a sign, “Nature Reservation.” I thought we were in
the wrong place and told my uncle that this was just a park, that
there was no village here.

He looked at me and quietly replied, “No,
this is Jarash. This is the village where I was born.” He said, as
if to himself, “I spent eighteen years of my life here before the
catastrophe.”

I thought maybe my uncle had lost part of
his memory, that he didn’t know where the village was exactly,
because nothing I saw in front of me looked as though life had
existed there.

He turned to me as if I was naïve, as if I
didn’t realize what was going on. He shook his head. We started
walking, and we reached some old trees. My uncle stopped and
noticed that the afternoon was getting late. “We still have to go a
ways before reaching the house,” he said, “but it is already almost
1:30. I want to pray.”

I looked at my friends and nodded, saying,
“OK, pray.”

He explained that he first wanted to go
“ooadoo” to wash before praying. He wanted water to clean his body
before the prayer, and so I suggested he use the drinking water we
brought because we did not bring any other water besides this. He
told us not to worry, that he would find a way. I felt he wanted to
be alone, to be far from us for a bit. He walked away and climbed a
small hill and disappeared for a half hour before coming back.
During this time we sat down and started speaking.

My Jewish friend was upset, and started
talking, “How could the Israeli people come here, move around, and
enjoy this beautiful nature without realizing that there were
people living here, people that were removed and now live in a
refugee camp. I can’t believe it. How can a human know that and
then pretend that this never happened, that were no people living
here?” Her face was very sad.

The other friend, an intellectual, answered,
“This is colonialism. This is what happened throughout history.
Many countries faced this all over. This is the main problem
indigenous people face all over the world.”

They were speaking in front of me, but I
didn’t participate in the discussion. They were silent for a few
seconds and then looked at me. My Jewish friend asked me, “Hey,
what’s up? What do you feel? What’s going on?”

I replied angrily, “I don’t understand why
my people left this land. If I had all this nature, if I had this
land, I would die here for it.”

She tried to offer excuses, saying that the
Zionists forced them out.

I told her, “Of course, I know this. But if
you have this kind of land, what makes you leave it?”

Inside myself, I was comparing the nature
and land and life here to the life in the camp. Here, I started to
feel the meaning of freedom, something I had never felt before. I
started to realize another kind of connection that I hadn’t
experienced.

Life in the camp is miserable. There is no
green color. The air is different. The smell is different. The camp
is a jail, with a feeling of deep oppression in the alleyways, in
the U.N. rooms, in the public toilets. Everything in the camp is a
disaster.

Here it was so different. Why would our
parents, the 750,000 Palestinian people, accept this as human
beings, in their minds and their bodies? How could they have walked
out of their villages?

I felt very angry. My mind wanted to
explode.

My other friend was surprised to hear me say
this, and he answered, “Sometimes the people just do something to
survive. They didn’t leave because they wanted to leave. They left
because they wanted to survive.”

The word “survive” echoed in my head. I
thought, I am living in the camp because I want to survive. All my
life, I am trying to just survive. Not trying to have happiness or
a good life. We are always just trying to survive.

I told him, “What, to survive to get more
surviving?”

He replied, “It’s the nature of the human
being. When threatened with death or oppression, people need to do
something to survive, to protect their lives, the lives of their
children, their relatives, the ones they love.”

I heard my uncle’s footsteps, and as he
approached, I changed the subject and asked him why he didn’t take
the water with him to pray. “Did you use
Tayanammam
?”

In Islam, if you don’t have water to clean
yourself before you pray, you can touch the earth and use it like
water, touching your hands to your face and arms as if to wash. It
is allowed in Islam if you don’t have water.

He smiled and said no, that he had found the
water he needed.

I asked him where, because clearly here
there was nothing, no water source.

He nodded his head and told me, “It is my
village. I know where the water is.” The three of us were
surprised, and asked to be taken to the place where he found water.
“Come,” he said.

We walked behind him and came to a well. It
was old, and there was a bucket with a rope tied to it. The can was
new, but the well was old. He took the bucket and dipped it in the
water, saying, “This well was built before I was born.”

We washed our faces, but he warned us,
“Don’t drink from it.” We were not sure if people took care of the
well or if someone had thrown something in it. We could not be sure
it was still healthy.

As we finished washing we sat down under the
shadow of one of the trees near the well. Still, in my head I had
many questions about what had happened here so long ago. As my
uncle relaxed, I turned to him and quietly asked, “Uncle, why did
you leave the village?”

He looked at me and said gruffly, “You know
why we left the village.”

I paused for a moment and then said,
“Actually, no, I don’t.”

He was quiet and then answered briefly, “We
wanted to protect ourselves. We wanted to survive.”

I could not hold the ideas in any longer,
and so I said to him, trying to keep anger out of my voice, “You
were eighteen years old when you left. Many people like you could
have stayed and defended your land.”

He replied, “Look, we Palestinians, we left
our villages because there was a conspiracy. The Arabs didn’t do
enough to help. The international people were supporting the
Zionist movement. No one supported us. It wasn’t a balanced war
where we had an even chance to fight them.”

I had heard this before and could not
contain myself, replying, “This is crap. You were eighteen years
old. Look at this land and look at the life in the camp.”

I was upset and was speaking in anger. As
the words left my mouth, I saw that it was affecting him. I saw the
pain and deep sadness reflected in his face.