Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

Attachment to God, land, and family was the core of their being and that is what they defended and sought to keep.

How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence? Somehow that raw question had not previously penetrated the consciousness of the refugees who had become confused in the rank eternity of waiting, pining at abstract international resolutions, resistance, and struggle.

Though Dalia’s spirit had long since been smothered, she could see its reincarnation in little Amal, like a whirlwind of life taking form in her daughter.

They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

I’m going to fight. It’s my only choice. They have scripted lives for us that are but extended death sentences, a living death. I won’t live their script.

The resistance is forming and eventually we will take back what is rightfully ours. You were born a refugee, but I promise I will die, if I must, so you do not die a refugee.

was January 20, 1968.

Fateh, the Palestinian revolutionary fighters whom Yousef had joined under the leadership of a young engineer named Yasser Arafat.

“Amal, I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell. I see your confusion. Consider fear. For us, fear comes where terror comes to others because we are anesthetized to the guns constantly pointed

at us. And the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our own emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

“The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness ca...

“It is the kind of love you can know only if you have felt the intense hunger that makes your body eat itself at night. The kind you know only after life shields you from falling bombs or bullets passing through your body. It is the love that di...

“If anything happens, I promise to live at the hospital. Even Israel will not bomb a hospital,” he reassured me, and pulled me close.

By August, the results were 17,500 civilians killed, 40,000 wounded, 400,000 homeless, and 100,000 without shelter.

I love you eternally. What we have is made of forever.

They killed my sweet brother in absentia when they murdered Fatima. And his heart now beat with the force of his rage.

By stolen futures and the unbearable sorrow of extinguished love.

How the memory and horrors of Sabra and Shatila were vanquished.

He was denied, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated, and exiled for the wish to possess himself and inherit the heritage bequeathed to him by history. His own heart he devoted to one woman only, for whom his grief shook the earth and spilled the blood of those who stood on it.

Fatima is the air I breathe. She is the reason for all promises. The embodiment of tenderness. She is love.

but I envied them the bliss of their small fears and the ease of their security.

Amal read these accounts, never knowing that the blindfolded six-year-old boy was Mansour, the youngest child of her friends Huda and Osama.

He was struck by death’s lack of drama. Its matter-of-factness. Its quiet authority. Jamal just closed his young eyes, expressionlessly, simply as if he were falling asleep, and never opened them again.

Only the latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust.

Love cannot reconcile with deception.

We licked the last drops of rosewater, breaking the bottle to get at the last bit, and we slept. “The world cannot possibly let this go on,” I said to Huda.

“Since when does ‘the world’ give a goddamn about us? You have been away too long, Amal. Go to sleep. You sound too much like an Amreekiyya.”

The power he holds over life is a staggering burden for so young a man.

For I’ll keep my humanity, though I did not keep my promises. . . . and Love shall not be wrested from my veins.

The seed for this book came from Ghassan Kanafani’s short story about a Palestinian boy who was raised by the Jewish family that found him in the home they took over in 1948.