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“Have you seen Acre?”
“I saw it for the first time last year.”
I leave him standing, finishing al-Rusafi‘s poem, and stretch out on the couch.
The longing to relax after the tension of the journey makes me fall into a nap, or something like one. I find myself back in the only time I saw Acre, the summer before.
I was fifty-three years old that summer and had never been to Acre. The checkpoints weren’t many at the time. Hikmat, my friend and host, said, “Come with me to Jenin. We’ll spend a day and a night there, and then I’ll show you Acre, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Haifa.”
I stood on the walls of Acre. Immediately, a row of question marks lined up in front of me, all pointing the same way: “How was a city like this lost?”
A wall of dark presence, almost black in color. It curves with the beach, straightens out where the beach does, and curves again. Then you think it’s disappeared but it returns to view. Towering. A battleship from below, from above it looks like an unlucky fishing boat. Wide. With the exaggeration to which the scene lends itself, I think, “If you played football on it, you’d think the ball would never fall into the sea or the city, but remain always on top” (of course it would fall, but the illusion was close to being real). What made me think of football in this historic place? Who would play with whom? Who would lose? Who would win? And was it a game I was thinking of or the war that a whole nation lost? At this point, I put my finger on an idea that struck my body full on, like a wave: Palestine didn’t fall in a war that had a begi
Our enemy caught us at a moment of historic backwardness, as though we were incapable of realizing what would happen before it happened or at the moment it was happening, and perhaps we’re still incapable of realizing it even now that it has happened. Or could it be that we did and do realize but are too weak to right the scales now that they’ve tilted? Will our scales stay tilted forever? For part of forever? Till when, exactly? It’s unclear. As painfully unclear as a wolf’s bite.
I think to myself, we didn’t lose Palestine in war that we may now behave like the defeated and we didn’t lose Palestine in a debate that we can get it back with proofs.
Our enemy caught us at the low point of our weakness, at the low point of our drowsiness.
We have the power now to tell our grandchildren that drowsiness will not be their lot forever, or even for part of forever.
We have the power to remind them of that strange proverb coined by our ancestors, “Had Acre feared the sea’s roar, it would never have stood on the shore!”
All the same, we have to admit to them, and before them to ourselves, that we are responsible too. Our ignorance is responsible and our historical short-sightedness is responsible, along with our internal struggles, our tribal-familial logic, and the way we were let down by our Arab ‘strategic depth,’ which is made up of states enamored to the point of scandal with their colonizers. Nevertheless, we ca
From Acre we headed straight for Nazareth and Haifa, but before reaching these we went by the house of Ahmad al-Shuqayri, a native of Acre who lost his city in the Nakba of 1948. A refugee, he obtained an education and became a lawyer. The first chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization died, however, without seeing Acre again, as liberator, visitor, or tourist, and was laid to rest in Amman.
At the Church of the A