Minor Detail

by Adania Shibli

We must not hesitate to devote all the strength and vigor of spirit that we have to building this part of our infant state and protecting and preserving it for future generations. This requires that we go after the enemy, instead of waiting for him to appear, for ‘If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first.’

No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long, after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here and to expel them for good.

Then I ask him if, as a Palestinian, I can enter these museums and archives? And he responds, before putting down the receiver, that he doesn’t see what would prevent me. And I don’t see what would prevent me either, except for my identity card.

I saw along the road. It seems I simply have to drive on a straight course, albeit a short one, and I’ll soon reach my next destination, which appears on the map as a small black dot, practically the only one in a vast sea of yellow. Next, I pick up the map showing the country until 1948, but I snap it shut as horror rushes over me. Palestinian villages, which on the Israeli map appear to have been swallowed by a yellow sea, appear on this one by the dozen, their names practically leaping off the page.