More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
They’ve launched a campaign across the world calling Palestine ‘a land without a people.’
Some of the orthodox Jews in the city have organized an anti-Zionist campaign. They say creating a physical state of Israel is sacrilege. But powerful men in America have waged a relentless campaign to persuade Truman to recognize and support a Jewish state here.”
Yehya tried to calculate the number of generations who had lived and died in that village and he came up with forty. It was a task made simple by the way Arabs name their children to tell the story of their genealogy, conferring five or six names from the child’s direct lineage, in proper order. Thus Yehya tallied forty generations of living, now stolen. Forty generations of childbirth and funerals, weddings and dance, prayer and scraped knees. Forty generations of sin and charity, of cooking, toiling, and idling, of friendships and animosities and pacts, of rain and lovemaking. Forty
...more
The old folks of Ein Hod would die refugees in the camp, bequeathing to their heirs the large iron keys to their ancestral homes, the crumbling land registers issued by the Ottomans, the deeds from the British mandate, their memories and love of the land, and the dauntless will not to leave the spirit of forty generations trapped beneath the subversion of thieves.
The young life was Ismael, son of Dalia and Hasan, fellaheen from the Palestinian village of Ein Hod. Moshe did not know their names, nor would he or Jolanta, ever. The Arab woman’s face, and her scream of “Ibni, ibni,” would haunt Moshe’s years and the awful things he had done would give him no peace until the end. But for now, Moshe was propelled by love to steal a child.
A land without a people, for a people without a land. He said it until he could have believed it, but for that Arab woman. But for Dalia.
While Dalia lay heartbroken, delirious with the loss of Ismael, Jolanta rocked David to sleep. While Hasan tended to his family’s survival, Moshe sang in drunken revelry with his fellow soldiers. And while Yehya and the others moved in anguished steps away from their land, the usurpers sang “Hatikva” and shouted, “Long live Israel!
Dalia learned to be a stoic mother, communicating the demands and tenders of motherhood with the various tempers of silence. Against this quiet detachment, the girl offered fits and petulance, mixed with bursts of kisses and feverish need meant to provoke her mother. Dalia’s love found its expression during the child’s sleep. Then she stroked her daughter’s hair, loved her endlessly with the kisses she withheld during the child’s waking hours.
“I love you as big as the ocean and all its fishes. As big as the sky and all its birds. As big as the earth and all her trees.” “What about the universe and all its planets? You forgot that part.” “I was getting to it. Be patient,” he said, puffing on his pipe. He exhaled, “And I love you bigger than the universe and all its planets.”
“No one can own a tree,” he continued. “It can belong to you, as you can belong to it. We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her.”
“You cannot take the child there,” the soldier said in thick, broken Arabic. “Why not?” “Reporters.” “You’re afraid the world might see what you do to children?”
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. “Never let them know they hurt you” was their creed.
You were born a refugee, but I promise I will die, if I must, so you do not die a refugee.
foreign youth took to wearing the Palestinian checked kaffiyehs as a symbol of revolution and the power of the weak.
Huda wanted to sit by the ocean more than anything else in the world. “Just to sit,” she said, “since I can’t swim.” I have never forgotten that. The simplicity of her innermost desire is now enough to make me cry.
“We’re all born with the greatest treasures we’ll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart. And the indispensable tools of those treasures are time and health. How you use the gifts of Allah to help yourself and humanity is ultimately how you honor him. I have tried to use my mind and my heart to keep our people linked to history, so we do not become amnesiac creatures living arbitrarily at the whim of injustice.”
“We don’t like to see our own leave. This is hard on the hearts of your kin. But you have honored the gift of Allah with diligence and hard work, and all of us know that we should help you now to complete your journey, not to stifle Allah’s gift.”
“The future can’t breathe in a refugee camp, Amal. The air here is too dense for hope. You are being offered a chance to liberate the life that lies dormant in all of us. Take it.”
I had long since accepted that one day I would lose everything and everyone, even Huda.
I could not leave without seeing Huda and Osama and their baby girl, whom they had named Amal.
What I knew for sure was that people in West Philly thought I was beautiful, not different, and my accent was not a call for mistrust. The very things that made me suspect to the white world were backstage passes in the black neighborhoods.
In that refugee camp, which Israel would label a “breeding ground of terrorists” and a “festering den of terror,” I bore witness to a love that dwarfed immensity itself.
Our anger is a rage that Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones weep. And the way we love is no exception, Amal. “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 dives naked toward infinity’s reach. I think it is where God lives.”
“If anything happens, I promise to live at the hospital. Even Israel will not bomb a hospital,”
“Israel is striking back against the PLO, a terrorist organization whose aim is to slaughter Jews like they did the Munich athletes.” Israel’s stated aim was self-defense.
Fatima is the air I breathe. She is the reason for all promises. The embodiment of tenderness. She is love.
The irony, which sank its bitter fangs into my mind, was that Mama, the mother who gave birth to David, also survived a slaughter that claimed nearly her entire family. Only the latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s.
Alas, her heart was not of ice at all, but of a roiling lava contained by her own will, held back with her iron jaw and tireless fluttering hand, and the contents of that heart were seldom betrayed. Perhaps what made reality fade from her mind was not the unending string of tragedies that befell Palestinians, but rather, an immeasurable love that could not find repose.
But love cannot reconcile with deception.”
Love cannot reconcile with deception. And it cannot become inured to an existence paid for with the currency of another’s misery—my mother’s misery.
no other woman than Dalia could have been a finer mother to me.”
I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.
I have made so many mistakes. I have not loved enough. I have not loved enough.
I am delirious with love for my daughter. My precious little girl. Sara. My life’s loveliest song.
Even as she spilled from her own body and her eyes were emptied of her, Amal died without knowing death. She died with the joy of having saved her daughter’s life. With contented thoughts and with love. She died in a whisper, as if death itself was humbled by the unfolding of a wounded heart and did not want to spoil that tenderness by announcing its presence. As if death had sung for her a lullaby.
Jenin buried fifty-three bodies in a communal grave, Amal among them, but hundreds remained missing.
They murdered you and buried you in their headlines, Mother. How do I forgive, Mother? How does Jenin forget? How does one carry this burden? How does one live in a world that turns away from such injustice for so long? Is this what it means to be Palestinian, Mother?
