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Right. No one has immunity here.
Israel is committed to nothing to which Israel does not see fit to commit itself — another bitter fruit of the stupid negotiation with Israel in Oslo to which we sent negotiators whose sole talent lay in being talentless. Their ignorance wasn’t the problem, though. The problem was that what took place between them and the Israeli delegation wasn’t so much a negotiation as a series of approvals of proposals presented by a team of Israel’s shrewdest politicians and lawyers with highly specialized skills in everything needed to make us fall into their visible and invisible traps. On my first visit to Ramallah I said, speaking of our people’s attitude to the accords, that they were waiting for the fulfilment of their leaders’ promises. Nothing has been fulfilled. There is a huge explosion coming — I don’t know where and I don’t know when, but the explosion, or explosions, are coming for sure.
At the last Jordanian police post, the officer makes us get out of the car so that he can check our papers and oversee our boarding of the first bus. This bus is unavoidable because entry by car is forbidden to everyone except senior officials of the Palestinian Authority.
I notice someone trying to get an elderly lady out of her wheelchair and onto the bus. This is extremely difficult given her great weight and the high steps to the door of the bus, which is not equipped with a ramp for people with special needs. The paleness of her face makes it clear that she’s returning from medical treatment, accompanied by a young man, who welcomes our help in getting her onto the bus and pays no attention to a rude traveler behind us who’s a
The bus is full now and the engine is ru
We are on the threshold of Palestine.
We are at the lowest point below sea-level on the planet. Sweat oozes with sticky insistence. Clothes stick a
I tell myself, some homelands are like that: getting into them is hard, getting out of them is hard, and staying in them is hard. And this is the only homeland you have.
The traveler to Palestine does not cross its threshold in order to enter, he dwells at that threshold for a period that is not determined by him and waits for the instructions of the masters of the house, who determine everything.
I look at the passengers.
My gaze falls on Mr. Namiq al-Tijani and I feel an evil premonition.
I do not like to see this Namiq.
The sight of him reminds me of mollusks and mucosities, especially if he smiles or laughs, when his broad gums show and set my nerves on edge.
I say to Tamim in a low voice, “Do you see that person?”
“What about him?”
“He’s a very strange creature. Try to observe him. He’s the type I can’t stand. He’s the most representative ‘illustrative example’ of the generation that is being raised by the Palestinian Authority and I come across him wherever I go. He’s a person of symbolic dimensions!”
Tamim doesn’t appear interested in my talk of Namiq and is not curious to find out more. He just says, “Forget about him.”
I follow his advice and ignore “the Namiq,” looking at the other passengers. Palestinian mothers and grandmothers. Peasants with su
I ask myself what has happened to these exhausted, slowly moving grandmothers over the years since my youthful memories of them, when they would walk ten kilometers on foot to reach the springs outside their villages and return carrying their water jugs on their heads, their backs straight. At harvest season, they would pick the olives with their men-folk, quarreling to keep their places in front of the oil press, and receive the guests who came by for a chat in the evening in the courtyards of their houses, where the lemons, mandarins, and pots of basil reflected brilliantly off the windows. That’s how I remember my grandmother Umm ‘Ata and all the other grandmothers of Deir Ghassanah. I think about the women passengers on the bus, sketching pasts and futures for them as I fancy. Which of them, I wonder, is grandmother to a prisoner or a martyr or a fugitive in the mountains and caves? Which of them is a widow waiting in vain month after month for the National Authority to pay her the support money for her son who is imprisoned in the Ofer, Negev, Nafha, or Ashkelon prisons? Or for the pension for her husband, who sleeps beneath the earth while the radio stations dedicate patriotic songs to his memory and the bearers of the keys to the treasury forget him? What makes her face the misery and a
Am I using this trance to escape the anxiety I feel about Tamim’s entry? There would be nothing strange about that, given how cu
From time to time I look at Tamim.
Tamim doesn’t move his eyes from the window of the bus, through which he gazes at what he can see as though engraving the scenes on his memory.
“Baba, you were daydreaming,” Tamim says to me as the bus starts moving. It sets off to cross the river in the direction of Palestine. A few minutes pass. We’re close to the bridge now. “Now you’ll see the bridge,” I say to Tamim.
I’ve hardly finished this short sentence before we’ve crossed the bridge and put it behind us without Tamim noticing.
He turns to me in surprise—“Where’s the bridge?”—and laughs out loud when I say to him, “It’s a bridge shorter than a sentence.”