1948–1953
WHILE A FOREIGN MINORITY went about building a new state in 1948, expelling Palestinians and looting their homes and banks, the five major powers—the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, China, and the United States— appointed a UN mediator to recommend a solution to the conflict.
“He’s Swedish,” Yehya said to a group of men who gathered each morning near his tent for the latest news. “Who is Swedish?” asked a passerby. “Shut up. Hasan is reading the newspaper to us,” someone snapped. Yehya nodded to Hasan. “Continue, son.” Hasan read:
Serving his commission, the Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, stated, “It would be an offense against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who had been rooted in the land for centuries.”
There was a pause filled with the persistent hope of return before someone spoke again.
“It’s about time someone spoke up against this foulness.”
“I just hope the Jews didn’t mess up my house too bad.”
“I don’t care. I’ll fix my house. I just want to go home.”
“Let me go tell the family. Um Khaleel will be so happy. She’s been so worried about her lemon and almond trees.”
But just as the men began to disperse, a small, five-year-old voice stopped them. “Jiddo”—little Yousef looked at Yehya— “can we go home now?”
It was the assumption they all had made, but being confronted with the question, now they were unsure of the answer. So they turned to Yehya and Haj Salem sitting next to him. Yehya looked at Hasan, then turned to his grandson and said, “The truth is, Yousef, we just don’t know yet. We have to wait, ya habibi.”
My beloved
.
* * *
Gathering for the news became a morning ritual in the refugee camp. Women had their own groups, as did children. But to the men, it was the most important event of the day. It was a time and place where the hope of returning home could be renewed. Even when those hopes were perpetually dashed. Even when the old began to die off. And even when hopes grew fainter, they continued to gather in this routine of the Right of Return.
A few days after they heard of the Swedish mediator, they listened to another news item.
Hasan read:
The Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by Jewish terrorists.
Israel would not allow the return, and the family waited captive in that interminable year, with its surreal twist of fate and tentative conclusion, stretching on and on, renewed each morning with the news.
Yehya aged tremendously in those confused months that stretched into years, until one day in 1953, when he realized that his miserable tent in Jenin had turned into clay. The symbolic permanence of the shelter was too much to bear. He would rather have stayed in the cloth dwelling, its leaky top and muddy floor confirming only a temporary exile.
In the years of waiting in the tent city, Yehya would awake at the adan and idle through the day, playing the music of his nye between rationed meals and five daily prayers. He found some comfort in the love of his family and daily games of backgammon with Haj Salem and Jack O’Malley, the UN director of operations in Jenin. The three men were inseparable from midafternoon until eight or later in the evening, depending on how well the game was going, or how well-prepared the hookas were that day.
But in more than sixty years of life, Yehya had become accustomed to the daily activities of agrarian self-sufficiency. The aimlessness of captive dispossession warped his mood and bent his posture. The string of broken promises and UN resolutions, not worth the paper on which they set down demands of return, wore at his spirit and made him taciturn, and he shuffled about with the qualities of a man defeated by the wait. Defeated by the quiet nag of his hands wanting things to do.
Something in the clay of his new shelter, the way it solidified him, stirred him from his resignation. One early November morning in 1953, he handed some clothes to Dalia.
“Ya binti,” Yehya said, “will you make these as white as they can be?”
Dalia took the clothes and pushed them in the soapy water. Leaning into the wash bucket to scrub, she lifted her head, a few strands of hair escaping from her scarf, and watched her father-in-law walk away.
He’s in better spirits, thanks be to Allah
.
On a rock outside his clay shelter, Yehya sat in his long white underpants and a white undershirt, and leaned into the wind. He took in a premeditated breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled into the nye at his lips, playing a new tune. It was not the sad music of waiting. Nor was it a melody of his heritage. It was a call to the earth. To Allah. To the country within him. It caught the attention of passersby, touched their hearts and made them bow their heads inexplicably. He played his nye all morning, rarely opening his eyes, brow raised. When he was finished, he went inside his tent and returned with his grooming tools—a blade, a leather strap, and a piece of broken mirror. He sat upright, anchoring his callused old feet in the dirt, breathing deeply.
The olives are ready
.
He shaved. He twisted his mustache into two perfect upward-turning curls and fixed them in place with gum arabic sap.
The grapes and figs have surely fallen by now and are rotting on the land
.
One garment at a time, he dressed himself in vintage dignity, putting on his best dishdashe, a jacket that was too big for his frame, and a red-checkered kaffiyeh held on his head with a twisted black egal.
October’s rains have surely loosened the ground
.
And he walked out of his tent a proud man.
Realizing what Yehya was up to, Haj Salem begged him to find prudence. He pleaded, “Ya Abu Hasan, I know what you’re doing. It’s November and we’re all feeling it. But it’s too dangerous. Don’t be foolish, my friend. Wahhid Allah!”
“La ellaha ella Allah,” Yehya answered the call to proclaim Allah’s Oneness, but he would listen no more. Jack O’Malley knew better than to think Yehya could be stopped. He put his pudgy white hand on Yehya’s shoulder and in his Irish accent said, “Be careful, brother. Your chair and hooka will be waiting for you at Beit Jawad’s coffeehouse, so don’t be gone long.”
When Hasan tried to stop him—“Yaba, please. They’ll kill you”—Yehya gazed at his son with an Arab patriarch’s unquestionable final authority. Then he turned and walked as he once had, with purpose and pride—if with a cane—up the sloping alleyway to the edge of the camp, past its boundaries, outside the limit of that eternal 1948, beyond the border into what had become Israel—into a landscape he knew better than the lines on his hands—until he finally arrived at his destination.
Sixteen days later, Yehya returned ragged and dirty with a tangled beard and a radiant spirit. The kaffiyeh that he had worn on his head when he left now formed a bundle flung over his shoulder as he walked with a merry hunch under its weight. Yeyha had made his way back to Ein Hod, undetected by soldiers. “That terrain is in my blood!” he proclaimed. “I know every tree and every bird. The soldiers do not.”
For days he had roamed his fields, greeting his carob and fig trees with the excitement of a man reuniting with his family. He had slept contentedly in their shade, as he had done at afternoon siesta all his life. The old well where the soldier had shot Darweesh and Fatooma was still there, and Yehya had devised a makeshift bucket tied to vines of honeysuckle areej to fetch water. He had visited his wife’s grave, where the white-streaked red roses had come back despite the destruction. He had read the Fatiha for Basima’s soul and—he swore—had spoken to her apparition.
Almost thirty years later, and with the same curled mustache as his grandfather, Yousef would recall the yellow clay across Yehya’s teeth on the day he came back from his sixteen days in the paradise of realized nostalgia. Yehya had left the camp with stubborn solemnity, wearing his most dignified clothes, and he returned looking like a jolly beggar with as much fruit and as many olives as he could carry in his kaffiyeh, his pockets, and his hands. Despite his vagabond appearance, he came invested with euphoria and the people lifted him to heights of esteem befitting the only man among them who had outwitted a ruthless military and had done what five great nations could not effectuate. He had returned. However brief and uncertain his return may have been, he had done it.
Yehya’s audacity injected life into the refugees, who had become weary of the promises of the United Nations and lethargic with the humiliation of 1948, that year without end. For Yousef, not yet ten, his jiddo’s exploit was a seed that planted itself in his memories of the terrible eviction, and it would germinate at his core a character of defiance. In the happiest days of his life, some thirty years after Yehya made his daring journey, Yousef would tell his sister Amal about their grandfather, whom she had never known.
“It was a splendid sight,” Yousef would say. “He was so happy. He just unwrapped a bundle of figs, lemons, grapes, carobs, and olives in the middle of town as though he were bringing a million gold dinars. He couldn’t get rid of that smile. Our jiddo was a great man.”
“Like Baba,” Amal would add.
“Yes. Like our father.”
The patriarchs and matriarchs in the camp kept a festive vigil on the night Yehya came back from his Return. They divvied the goods and ate them with ceremonial savor, letting the olives roll in a dance with their tongues before taking the sacrament. Those fruits of forty generations of toil went down like the elixir of Palestine, like the nectar of her centuries.
“Taste my land, Jack! Taste it! This pile is special for you and the haj!” Yehya was effusive, his generosity animated by Return.
The villagers ate, laughed, wept, danced, and sang the sad and happy ballads of old, comparing their memories to Yehya’s description of the new state of affairs. The homes on the east and west wings of Ein Hod were still standing but abandoned, and the jars of pickles and jams, which had been there since the villagers left five years earlier, could still be found in pantries. Yehya had helped himself. “Better I eat them than leave them to the Jews.” Yes, yes. And he had seen clothes in the homes. Some toys here and there. The village mosque, in the very center of the town, had been turned into a brothel, he told them, at which point the women muttered curses and the men shook their heads in disgust. And, oh yes, Haje Magida, mercy on her soul, who had been known for her obsessive disgust for ants— her house had been overtaken by the critters. “If she could only see that!” They all laughed.
“Mercy on her soul.” Yes, mercy on her soul. No one was using the olive press, except to hang paintings. It had become an art gallery. And the big oak that had grown out of nowhere in the late 1800s was still there. “Well, of course it’s there.” All the olives were still there, too, but they were in need of care from people who knew how to care for them.
“Those people don’t know a damn thing about olives. They’re lily-skinned foreigners with no attachment to the land. If they had a sense of the land then the land would compel in them a love for the olives,” Yehya said, staring at the palms that had caressed those majestic, beloved trees only hours earlier. Age-dappled and rough, his farmer’s hands were infused with the melanin truths of those hills. The truth that an olive branch flowers only once and if it isn’t pruned back it will produce buds that become new slender sprigs by winter. The truth that an olive’s worst biological enemy is a small lacy-winged fly and that sheep are good to keep around because they supply the soil with needed nitrogen. Yehya’s hands knew those facts from a lifetime devoted to trees and their earth.
“Damn those people,” a woman shouted in the crowd, “they didn’t need to kick us out of our homes. We let so many of them settle on our land. And we gave them olives from our harvest.” Everyone sighed and the women muttered curses and the men shook their heads in disgust as they continued to eat figs with meticulous relish. Then Yehya pulled out his nye and began to play the sounds of time, and women swayed and sang sad ballads until someone shouted, “None of that! Play us ‘Dal’Ouna!’ ” He did, and the spirited tempo lifted their arthritic bodies onto their feet as they danced a clumsy dabke around the bonfire and someone improvised a tabla, adding percussion to the nye.
Yousef, the only child who had the privilege of their company until then and who struggled to remain awake, was suddenly energized by the unfolding festivities. In Beiruit decades later, with his sister Amal, Yousef would recall the evening’s toothless smiles, the laughter that shook tired old bodies, the giggles that sounded like those of mischievous children instead of grandparents, and the spiraling smoke of honey apple tobacco from the hookas and Hasan’s pipe.
The air filled with carousing sounds and people were drunk on the fruits of trees that had continued in time and penetrated the cloud of exile. Others joined as the gaiety wove into the night. Some women came out in their plebian finest and children, ecstatic at the prospect of a late-night vigil, gathered around Yousef and had their own celebration by the shadowy glow of the fire.
In the days that followed, the cheery spontaneity of that evening fizzled into the oppressive business of waiting and the offenses of temporary life. But for Yehya it was an intolerable anticlimax. So, two weeks later, once more he asked Dalia to make his whites sparkle.