She swept her hair from her eyes with a graceful hand and turned to Abby again. “We found writing on the back of one of the documents, a verse from Isaiah 11, probably written from memory. Now that I know that Leah could write, I’m wondering if perhaps she wrote it herself. It said, ‘In that day the Lord will reach out his hand a second time to reclaim the remnant that is left of his people. . . . He will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; he will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth. . . . and the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’
“Leah had claimed that verse in faith, even as the Romans were destroying her nation, killing or exiling all but a handful of her people. Two thousand years later, God fulfilled her hope through me when He brought my family here from Iraq. She and I were two pieces of God’s mosaic. She played her part, believing that out of the ashes of her life, Israel would rise again. Now I would play my part, believing in faith that Jake’s death was also part of His design, even if I couldn’t see it. I would lay claim to Gamla, to Golan. I would trust in His unfailing love.”
CHAPTER 17
TEL DEGANIA EXCAVATION, ISRAEL—1999
M
ay I join you, Abby?”
Abby looked up from her outdoor breakfast on the dig site to find Marwan Ash-rawi balancing his plate and a container of yogurt in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other.
“Sure, have a seat. This was the only patch of shade I could find besides the dining canopy. You’re more than welcome to share it.” Needing a break from the energetic college students, Abby had opened one of the vans’ sliding doors and was sitting on the door sill. She moved aside so Marwan could climb past her and sit inside the van. “It’s awfully hot in there,” she warned.
“I’m used to it,” Marwan said with a grin. “I’m not spoiled with air conditioning like you Americans are.”
Abby laughed, enjoying his gentle teasing. “How long have you been doing this gut-wrenching labor during the summer months, Marwan?”
“Oh, a long time. That’s how I earned money when I was in school. I met Dr. Rahov about three years ago, and she has given me work here during the summer ever since. She is a very nice woman.”
“Yes, I’ve grown to love her dearly in a very short time. I’ll miss her after—”
“Ah, there you are, Abby.” Ari suddenly rounded the corner of the van, interrupting them. “I was wondering . . .” He stopped when he saw Marwan, his expression changing from one of friendly ease to rigid discomfort, as if he had put on a mask. “Eh . . . excuse me. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“That’s okay.” Abby didn’t know what else to say. She knew that neither man would be comfortable if she invited Ari to join them. “Did you need me for something?” she finally asked.
“It can wait until later.” He disappeared as quickly as he had appeared. Abby looked at Marwan and shrugged.
“He does not like me,” Marwan said.
“So I noticed.”
Marwan fidgeted on the seat, toying nervously with his bread, as if he had something he wanted to say. “I have been wanting to ask you, Abby, if you would be pleased to join my wife and me for dinner one night. I would like you to meet Zafina and our children. My home is not far from here.”
“Yes, I would like that,” Abby said. “How many children do you have?”
“Six.”
She saw the pride in his eyes when he said it. “Six! Have mercy! I had my hands full with two!”
“Would you come tomorrow night? I could pick you up at the hotel. Let’s say five o’clock?”
“That sounds great.”
On the way back to the hotel, however, Abby decided to discuss it with Hannah, just to be sure she wasn’t doing something wrong.
“You should go,” Hannah said, “you’ll enjoy yourself. Marwan is a good man. I’ve found him very trustworthy. I’ve met his wife and family, too.”
“I’ve um . . . noticed that Ari and he don’t get along,” Abby said. “Is there a reason? Did something happen between them?”
Hannah shook her head. “As far as I know they never met until this summer. Sad to say, it’s probably nothing more than the fact that Marwan is a Palestinian Muslim and Ari is an Israeli Jew.”
THE WEST BANK, ISRAEL—1999
M
arwan Ashrawi’s house was a square flat-roofed building made from plastered cement blocks. It was clustered with a group of similar houses in a small Arab village not far from the dig site. Some of the rooms were hollow shells, without glass in the windows, as if the home was only partially built. Many of the other houses on his street looked incomplete as well.
“We finish one room at a time,” Marwan told Abby, “as we have money and materials.”
He parked his car in front and led Abby into a large all-purpose room with a polished stone floor covered with scatter rugs. It was bright and clean, the air fragrant with mysterious spices that made Abby’s mouth water. His five youngest children, who had been watching television, ran to hug their father and be introduced to Abby.
“This is my son Jamil, my son Salah, my daughter Leyla, my daughter Najia, and my youngest son, Kamal. And this,” he said as a handsome boy about fifteen years old came into the room, “is my oldest son, Basam.”
“How do you do?” Basam said, shaking Abby’s hand.
He was neatly dressed in a shirt and tie, and after greeting Abby, he headed toward the door, preparing to leave. Marwan frowned and began yelling at Basam in Arabic, but even though Abby didn’t understand a word of it, she could tell by Marwan’s tone and Basam’s wry grin that it was all in jest.
“He must leave for work,” Marwan explained. “He has a job clearing tables in a tourist restaurant.” He punched his son’s arm and tousled his hair before Basam left through the front door.
“He is a smart boy,” Marwan said proudly, “and he loves mathematics. I hope he will be much more than a waiter someday.”
“Will it be possible for him to go to college?” Abby asked.
“I would like for all of my children to go to university. My people will need educated leaders to build a strong Palestinian homeland. But the Israelis think that all Palestinian boys are terrorists, and whenever they see two or three together, they assume they want to make trouble.”
He motioned for Abby to take a seat on the sofa while he sat in a chair nearby. “Basam was arrested along with three of his Palestinian friends a few months ago,” he continued. Pain filled his eyes and his voice. “They took him to the jail and searched him, interrogating all the boys and humiliating them, for no other reason than that they were Palestinian. Of course they found no reason to arrest them, but the police didn’t care. They kept them locked up for five hours, frightened and shamed. I did not teach my son to hate. The Israelis are the ones who are teaching him. For this reason, many boys Basam’s age don’t want to wait so long and finish university. They want to fight for our freedom now.”
Abby didn’t know what to say. But Marwan’s mood changed a moment later when a woman walked into the room with a tray of glasses.
He smiled broadly and said, “This is my number one wife, Zafina.”
Abby’s jaw dropped. “Do you have more than one?”
Marwan laughed. “Alas, no—if I did, it would be over Zafina’s dead body!”
When Zafina smiled shyly, Abby could tell she didn’t understand a word they were saying. She looked older than Marwan, although Abby knew that she probably wasn’t—simply worn from a life of hard labor with six children and few modern conveniences. She was a bit plump, like many of the Muslim women Abby had seen, and wore a long skirt and a loose long-sleeved blouse, her head covered in a white scarf. Abby wondered why Marwan and the children could wear modern clothing, while the women were costumed like biblical characters.
“Thank you,” Abby said as she accepted a glass. She took a sip of the sweet mint-flavored tea.
Marwan’s youngest son, Kamal, plopped down on the sofa beside her. “Hello,” he said with a grin like his father’s. He was a beautiful child about four years old with large dark eyes like Marwan’s and curly black hair.
“Well, hello. How are you?”
“Hello,” he repeated.
“That is the only English word Kamal knows,” Marwan said, laughing.
“You have a beautiful family,” Abby told him.
“Thank you. Do you have any pictures of your family?” Abby pulled them out of her purse, proudly displaying prom photos and graduation pictures of Emily and Greg.
As Abby and Marwan talked about their children, his sons Jamil and Salah, who were about seven and eight years old, were engaged in a continual wrestling match—punching, hitting, pulling each other’s hair. On a school playground, their behavior would have quickly earned them a detention, but Marwan and Zafina ignored them completely. It wasn’t until Jamil formed his fingers into a gun and began making shooting sounds at the faces on the television news that Marwan hollered at him in Arabic and chased both him and Salah from the room.
Zafina sat on the floor before a low table, chopping vegetables for their dinner. She had a two-burner hot plate beside her and pans and dishes all around her, the rug beneath her protected by a plastic tablecloth. Leyla and Najia, who were about ten and twelve years old, helped her prepare dinner. As Abby watched them, she found it easy to imagine Leah preparing meals in much the same way in her first-century home.
When dinner was ready—spicy chicken and hot pita bread and several kinds of vegetable salads—Zafina and the children found seats wherever they could, and everyone ate with their plates on their laps. Then, just as Moshe Richman and Ari had shared the stories of their ancestors at the Sabbath dinner, Marwan shared his story.
“How would you feel if soldiers came to your home in America and told you that the land your fathers and grandfathers have owned for centuries is no longer yours?” he asked. “That is what the United Nations did to the Palestinian people in 1948. They said that Palestine would be divided in half, that people who had lived in Europe and Russia and other countries would own half of it from now on, and the Palestinians who had lived and farmed there for centuries would have the other half. Of course we rejected this partition and went to war—wouldn’t you?
“The Zionist soldiers ran my grandfather off his land when the war began in 1948. ‘You must leave, it is not safe,’ they told him. When he returned after the war, he found that his home and his village had been destroyed. The soldiers told him, ‘You can’t live here. You abandoned the land and fought for our enemies.’ The world doesn’t want to believe it, Abby, but the Zionists committed many atrocities against our people during that time.
“My father’s family was homeless, forced to live in squalor in a refugee camp. My father knew that this was no place to raise a family, so he eventually left the camps and settled in Jordanian-held territory on the West Bank. Life was very difficult. My father had no land of his own, so he was forced to work for other people. Then in 1967, Israel declared war by attacking Egypt’s airfields. You know the outcome. When the war ended, the West Bank was no longer part of Jordan but of Israel. Once again, my family lived in occupied territory. And we were not alone. More than one million Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip lived under Israeli military rule. I was only two years old in 1967, so I have never known freedom. I have lived in captivity all of my life. All I want, Abby, is a homeland and freedom for myself and for my children. Is that asking so much?”
“No . . . of course not. It’s what everyone wants.” But she couldn’t help thinking of Ari’s story, how he slept underground because of the Syrian shelling, just a few miles from where Marwan lived. As she gazed at Marwan’s family, she thought of Moshe Richman’s children, Dan, Gabriel, and Ivana. Must they all grow up as enemies? Without the peaceful solution that Benjamin Rosen vainly sought, would they go to war once again? Would Salah and Jamil, Dan and Gabriel kill one another someday?
“The Jews have tried to cut off my people,” Marwan said, “but we are like the olive trees—even if you cut them down, the roots continue to grow. The Jews would like to get rid of us, but we were also planted here by Allah. And our Father is also Abraham, through his firstborn son, Ishmael. Even the Jewish Scriptures say that this land was given to Abraham and his descendants. That means we also have a God-given right to it. I am sorry for what the Nazis did to the Jews. I know that they took away the Jews’ homes and millions of their lives. But is that a reason to do the same thing to my people?”
“No, of course not.” Abby’s answer seemed inadequate. Again, she didn’t know what else to say.
Leyla and Najia gathered the dishes when everyone finished eating and disappeared from the room with their mother. “Could I help them wash up?” Abby asked.
“No, please, you are our guest.” He leaned back in his chair, thoughtful for a moment, then asked, “Why is it that Americans don’t feel the same sorrow for the Palestinians that you feel for the Jews?”
Abby hesitated. “Well, I don’t mean to offend you . . . but too many Palestinians have used terror to fight back. When Americans read about things like hijackings, suicide bombers, innocent people losing their lives—it gives all Palestinians a bad name. In the past, some of your leaders, including Yasser Arafat, have condoned violence and terrorism. There has even been terrorism in my country that was linked to the Palestinian cause. Most Americans don’t realize that there are families like yours that simply want to live in their own homeland among their own people.”
“I do not condone the use of violence, Abby. I never will. But I know the frustration that many of my people feel. Not only was our land taken, but also our freedom. We now have self-government in some towns like Jericho and Bethlehem, but it is not enough. They offer us too little, too slowly. Didn’t your ancestors in America also fight a war for their freedom? And because your enemy had superior weapons, didn’t you also use . . . What do you call it? Guerilla warfare?”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Abby had to admit that Marwan had broken all the stereotypes she once held of the Palestinian people. He wasn’t a hate-filled, gun-wielding terrorist but a thoughtful, intelligent man who loved his home and his family. “I’m learning that the solution to a lasting peace in the Middle East is much more complicated than the nightly news portrays back home,” she said.