My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (49 page)

Sheikh Salah wears a plain dark coat over his white gown and a knitted white skullcap over his gray head of hair. Now as then, he’s dignified and gracious. But from across his dusty desk he warns me that international Zionism is making a grave mistake by allying itself with the imperialist interests of the United States, and by thinking that in the twenty-first century it is possible to re-create the oppressive colonial rule imposed by the British and the French on the Middle East in the twentieth century. International Zionism, Salah says, doesn’t understand that although the Arabs were silent for a hundred years, they will be silent no more. A billion and a half Muslims will be silent no more. “I am not a prophet,” he says. “The future is in God’s hands. But if you turn the conflict from an Israeli-Palestinian one to a Jewish-Islamic one, the consequences will be dire. The Zionist Protestants in America want Armageddon. So there is great danger now to the world and to the Middle East, and definitely to this land. There is great danger to the Al-Aqsa mosque. I am deeply worried. I fear a catastrophe is coming, one that will imperil the future of the Jews.”

We leave the sheikh and are off to Mohammed’s homeland, the Galilee. When we pass Alonim junction (“Kafr Manda junction,” Dahla insists), Mohammed says that he doesn’t necessarily share all of Sheikh Salah’s views, but that he respects his convictions and modesty, and his record of action. He is referring to the March of the Flags, the weekly
pilgrimages Sheikh Salah leads, bringing buses full of believers from the Galilee to the Al-Aqsa mosque. It’s an impressive operation, meticulously run, that is constantly growing in size. So although Mohammed is not a religious man, and although he was exposed to the West and adopted many of its values, he says that for him Sheikh Salah is a very important identity anchor. “While your story of the temple built by King Solomon three thousand years ago in Jerusalem is pure fiction,” Dahla tells me, “Sheikh Salah represents fourteen hundred years of real Islamic existence in this land. It captures my heart. There is something very deep in this continuity. When I listen to the sheikh, I connect, as if through a time tunnel, to early Islam and to Caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab, for whom I named my son. I connect to the greatness of Islam. It gives me a deep sense of calm, a sense of self-assurance. I know that we are not destined to be defeated. I know we are not a minority. The idea of being a minority is alien to Islam—it suits Judaism, but it is alien to Islam. And when you look around you see that indeed we are not a minority. In this land there is a Jewish majority that is actually a minority, and an (Arab) minority that is actually a majority. So every time the authorities go after Sheikh Salah, I offer my help. As someone whose expertise is Israeli law, I do all that I can do for him.”

We turn toward the Jewish moshav of Tzipori. (“Saffuriyya,” Mohammed teaches me.) “By 1948 it was a huge village of thousands, so today there are tens of thousands of descendants—some in Syria, some in Lebanon, and some in Galilee villages. Even my sister’s husband is from Saffuriyya,” he says. “His children also see themselves as sons of Saffuriyya. And on your Independence Day, we all gather here for an enormous memorial rally. We shall not forget,” Mohammed promises. “We shall not forget and we shall not forgive.”

He wears a light suit, a golden tie. He is of average height and build, energetic, with a dark complexion. He is proud of the fact that his skin color is the color of this soil. For he is mixed with this soil, he says. As we park the car, Dahla points to some skeletal prickly pear bushes in the Tzipori National Park and at some remnants of stone terraces nearby. He tells me that the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 was not exactly like the Holocaust, but that he is not willing to accept the Jewish monopoly on the term “Holocaust.” “It’s true that here, there were no concentration
camps,” Dahla says. “But on the other hand, unlike the Holocaust, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 is still going on. And while the Holocaust was the holocaust of man, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 was a holocaust of man and land. The destruction of our people,” he says, “was also the destruction of our homeland.”

Tzipori’s houses are nice and neat, white-walled and red-roofed. In one of the front yards, a beautiful young mother opens her arms as her one-year-old takes his first steps toward her. But Mohammed says he doesn’t know how people can live here. “In theory, the countryside is pastoral and inviting, but in reality it is a graveyard. In theory, you are walking in your garden, but really you are walking on corpses. It’s not human,” Mohammed says. It’s like the movie he saw once about an American suburb built on a Native American cemetery whose ghosts haunted the families who chose to live on top of their graves. “I am not into mysticism,” Mohammed says, “but I feel the spirits here, and I know they will not stop haunting you.”

The religious kibbutz of Beit Rimon sits at the summit of the rocky ridge of Turan, overlooking the village where Mohammed was born and his father was born and his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather. “For hundreds of years we were here,” says Mohammed. “From time immemorial. Tens of thousands of dunams on this ridge were designated by the British high commissioner for the benefit of the villagers of Turan, until the government of Israel seized these ten thousand dunams in order to plant Beit Rimon Aleph and Beit Rimon Beth and Beit Rimon Gimmel at the top of the ridge. So here, like everywhere else, the Jews rule over the Palestinians from above. The Jewish masters live up above, while the Palestinian servants live down below.”

After we climb the mountain road to the kibbutz and find a way around its locked iron gate, Mohammed’s mobile phone rings: the family of a terrorist who tried to blow up butane gas cylinders outside the kitchen of a Jerusalem pub is asking Dahla to represent the freedom warrior. Mohammed agrees on the spot and calls the Russian compound police station in central Jerusalem to inquire about the whereabouts of the detainee. When he is done, I ask him if he considers Beit Rimon a settlement. Does he think what will ultimately happen to the settlements in the occupied territories should happen to Beit Rimon? “The
logic is the same logic,” answers Mohammed. “The mind-set is the same mind-set. There is even a physical resemblance—the same planning, the same architecture. It’s alien. It’s an alien force coming from above and imposing itself on the landscape.” It is early afternoon, and the air is clear, with good visibility. “Look at that Jewish community there, and that Jewish community there,” Mohammed says, pointing first to the right and then to the left. “They are so orderly, so regimented, so European. They are totally different from our villages, which grow from the bottom of the wadi up the hill like a climbing plant. It is so clear that they invaded my Galilee. That’s why they were established. To separate village from village. To prevent the Galilee from being an Arab land. So the Arab Galilee cannot demand territorial autonomy and cannot demand to secede from Israel and to join the State of Palestine.”

“Do you seriously consider demanding a Galilee autonomy?” I ask. Dahla answers, “For me, the preferred solution is a one-state democracy for both peoples. But if there is no movement toward a binational state, we cannot settle for a shrunken and fragmented Palestinian state that doesn’t even have its own airspace. That will not be a state, it will be a joke. So if you continue to insist on a two-state solution, the issue of the autonomy of the Galilee will have to be raised. And this autonomy cannot be only cultural, it must be territorial, with policing authority and effective control of the land and of natural resources. We will need three such autonomies: the Galilee autonomy in the north, the Arab Triangle autonomy in the center, and the Bedouin Negev autonomy in the south. And Palestinians living in Jaffa or Ramleh or Lydda must have personal autonomy linked to one of the three Palestinian cantons within Israel.”

We pass by Mohammed’s village of Turan, but for Mohammed it is more important to show me the ruins of the neighboring village of Lubia than to stop at home. He does tell me that his village is totally surrounded. Here is Beit Rimon, where he cannot live. Here is the Tzipori industrial park, where he cannot build a factory. Here is the base of an army that is not his army. Here is the monument for the Golani Brigade, which commemorates a memory he is not a part of. “So if I think I was saved,” Mohammed says, “if I think my family managed to escape the catastrophe of 1948 because we went into exile in Lebanon
for only a few months, here I am constantly reminded that I am not welcome. That I am on perpetual parole. That I have no rights here. For the monument that towers over the Golani junction, our Maskana junction, celebrates the victorious and omits the defeated. With its McDonald’s restaurant and its Israeli armored vehicles and its blue-and-white flags, what the Golani junction says to me is loud and clear: We vanquished you. And because we vanquished you, our power allows us to celebrate ourselves within your territory. In the heart of hearts of your Land of Galilee.”

Dahla’s blue Mercedes descends the road to the South Africa Forest of the Jewish National Fund, then climbs up the gravel path among the pines and conifers. “It’s not an innocent forest,” says my friend Mohammed. “It’s a forest of denial. By planting this forest you misled yourselves into thinking that you can deny your crime.” Then he tells me when it first hit him. In the late 1990s, he participated in back-channel talks between senior Palestinians and Israeli peaceniks in Scandinavia. In one of the conversations, the Palestinians demanded reparations for their suffering and asked that these reparations be paid by Israel to the future Palestinian state so it would be able to utilize them just as the reparations paid by Germany to Israel were utilized for national projects. That’s all they demanded. But the peaceniks went berserk. Because of this one request, the talks collapsed. Dahla and his colleagues returned home empty-handed, with no recognition of the historic justice they were seeking.

A short time later, he came to this forest with his mother’s relative Mahmoud, a son of the village of Lubia. He walked with Mahmoud up this forest path, and when they reached this spot, Mahmoud recognized the ruins of his home. And he wept. “Gone is our homeland,” he cried. “Gone is our life.” And the successful Israeli attorney Mohammed Dahla stood by his side and wept with him.

“So what are you saying?” I ask Mohammed. “That the injustice done to Palestinians is an injustice not to be forgiven,” he answers. “Because at this very moment, as Israelis lay out picnic lunches under the trees of the South Africa Forest, the refugees of the village of Lubia rot in the Yarmuch refugee camp in Syria. And the refugees of Saffuriyya rot in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon. So justice demands
that we have the right to return. At least those rotting in the refugee camps should be allowed to return.

“I don’t know how many there will be,” Mohammed says. “Not millions, but perhaps hundreds of thousands. But I see them returning. Just as my family returned from Lebanon, coming down the slopes of the rocky ridge of Turan with their donkeys and belongings after months of exile, so will the others return. In a long convoy they will all return.”

Azmi Bishara welcomes us to his private office in Nazareth. The Galilee-born philosopher had established a secular radical-nationalist Arab party in the mid-1990s and was a controversial but effective member of the Knesset ever since. There is no banner on the building that houses the headquarters of the leader of the Balad Party, no nameplate on the door, but his office is airy and comfortable. On the wall hangs a framed embroidered map of Palestine—all of Palestine: Jaffa but not Tel Aviv; Lydda but not Rehovot; Nazareth but not Migdal HaEmek. A photograph of Gamal Abdel Nasser is hanging there, too, of course. The Egyptian president and Pan Arab leader of the 1960s is Bishara’s hero, and as we sit on the sofa, he looks down on us from a large black-and-white photograph, in a gray suit and black tie, grinning mirthfully under his narrow mustache.

An outspoken Knesset member since 1996, Bishara is now very cautious. As he awaits a Supreme Court decision that will determine his political future, he looks more like a well-fed cat than a dangerous tiger. Friendly, warm, and obliging, he pours me strong black coffee and asks how I managed to lose so much weight and how my love life is. He tells me about an essay he has just written and a novel he has just completed. He looks wary, as if he is perhaps suffering from political fatigue. But he emphasizes how important it is for him not to be disqualified politically by the Court. If the Court doesn’t let him run in the coming elections—because he refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state—its decision will be perceived as a historic pronouncement. It will be viewed as an attempt to send Palestinian Israelis back to where they were in the 1960s. Even the appearance of formal democracy will dissolve.

“Will riots break out again as they did in October 2000? Will Israel
be torn to pieces by the conflict between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians?” I ask him. Bishara acknowledges that he is in no position to make any threats right now. But Dahla raises his head and says what Bishara is careful not to say: if the Palestinians’ rights are not respected and the Palestinians’ equality is not guaranteed, that will lead to the beginning of the countdown to the outbreak of Palestinian riots within Israel.

As we leave Nazareth, Mohammed tells me, “Bishara is my other identity anchor. He symbolizes our modern Palestinian pride. He is the icon of the modern generation, a generation that did not experience defeat and expulsion, a generation that does not fear Israel precisely because it knows Israel. This generation has learned from Israeli chutzpah, impudence, cheekiness, and therefore it does not beg but demands. It does not defend but attacks. It doesn’t think like a minority and doesn’t feel like a minority because it realizes it’s not really a minority. The future is ours,” Mohammed Dahla concludes. “No matter what tricks you try, you will not be able to maintain a Western state with a Jewish character here. All you will accomplish is to bring about a role reversal. We will be masters, and you will be our servants.”