"Bashir," Ahmad said when his son was finally sitting in front of him, "did you notice where this prison is? This is exactly where our olive trees used to be." Ahmad said the land had been bequeathed to Khair al-Din al-Ramlawi by the Ottoman sultan in the sixteenth century. The waqf land had remained in the family for at least twelve generations, until 1948. Bashir realized the symbolic was also the literal: He was being imprisoned on his own land.
