“How is that different from ‘Death to Arabs?’” he wanted to
know.
“But the young man is an employee of the Ministry of Religious
Affairs,” I argued. “He collects a monthly salary from the Zionists’ treasury,
for God’s sake!”
“So do members of the police force protecting fascist gangs
attacking Arab civilians for no reason except their race. It is Israel’s
version of democracy and balancing of the forces of evil.”
The cacophony of loudspeakers exploding one after the other from
seven different directions ended the dawn’s bucolic peace waking me from a
fitful sleep. For a moment I almost understood the attitude of a colleague, a
Polish immigrant physician as I recall, who informed me in my Ministry of
Health days that she had encouraged officials of the Jewish city of Upper
Nazareth where she lived to run their collected sewage refuse openly down the
valley to the Arab village of Reineh because of the latter’s disturbing of the
Jewish resident’s sleep with their dawn time calls for prayer. My two children
at markedly divergent time zones around the globe were text-messaging us
throughout the night. Israel’s deadly incursion into Gaza and the ensuing air
travel confusion in and out of Israel’s own airport had thrown a monkey wrench
in our family’s scheduled annual summer get-together in Arrabeh. But my outrage
quickly dissipated.
I decided to take advantage of the morning’s cool weather to
pick some dew-washed figs and cactus fruits from my orchard. But first I had to
check the Internet: The death toll had exceeded the magic figure of one
thousand. Somehow, that wasn’t as sad as my friend Ramzy Baroud’s pained status
on Facebook decrying his family’s fate. They were on the run again, refugees
from their shelter as refugees in Gaza. I wanted to advise patience,
forgiveness and magnanimity. Then I wondered how magnanimous I would have felt if
I and my family had been driven out of our home in Arrabeh to have a Polish or
a Brooklyn immigrant family live on my father’s land, collect its olive crop and
enjoy its figs and cactus fruit, and then to have them now send their son in an
American jet fighter bomber to chase me further away from ‘their homeland?’
As I picked my daily supply of summer fruit, the sudden
silence that descended on the empty village streets after the end of the morning
prayers in the mosques had a deadly quality. There were no children with toy
guns out celebrating on the streets, no flares and no firework. I went for a
stroll on the newly paved desolate street in our neighborhood risking the
likelihood of a village rumor about my sanity. The neighbors had lined the
entire sidewalk with a thousand candles in memory of Gaza’s martyred children.
The butcher sat on a chair and twirled his moustache. A lone skinned lamb hung
by the door. Usually on a day like this he would have two or three of his
children helping him out. He offered me the standard sip of black coffee:
“No family gatherings to celebrate the Eid today,” he said
more in apology than in anger or dismay. “Men coming back from the mosque look
like a snake had spewed its poison in their faces.”
I agreed. I realized that none of the neighborhood’s
children, including the dozens of grandnephews, had come dressed in their new
clothes to knock at our door for the usual Eid treats and monitory gifts.
The first and only holiday visit I made on this sad Eid
morning was to an octogenarian former patient of mine. He is terminally ill and
needed help with an injection. After the usual but subdued formalities of
exchanging Eid greetings I asked for his opinion regarding what was going on in
Gaza.
“I am dying anyway. I wish someone would take me back there
and give me my old English rifle,” he responded, tears rolling down his
leathery cheeks.
As a young man he had enlisted in the British Mandate border
police and served in Gaza training young recruits in marksmanship. Desperation,
at the personal and national level, fueled his wish for martyrdom, he explained.
As I returned I checked my email again. Someone had posted a
moving poem in English beautifully recited by its animated Palestinian author,
Rafeef Ziadeh, declaring her body “a TVed massacre.” I couldn’t hold my tears
of sadness and pride in her concluding line: “We Palestinians wake up every
morning to teach the rest of the world life, Sir!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM
I watched the video. Twice. The second time I cried more.
Then I saw it a third time, then a forth, a dozen times. And I cried more each
time than the last. At first, as I sat with a pair of tweezers to pick the few
tiny thorns from my hands I pondered the adaptive defense mechanism of the
cactus. Then I switched to more distressing thoughts: Even if they hadn’t taken
over my home and though they had left me some of my land, those foreigners had
stolen my culture, I realized. They had claimed my cactus fruit, the Sabra, as
the simile for their children who were born on my land.
Let us join hands Ramzy! We all are in this together.
No comments:
Post a Comment