Losing Israel (21 page)

‘Yes, it was the empty villages. We knew they were empty Arab villages.’

I walk down the cattle track from the road and step over the barbed wire lying on the ground. The cattle have eaten everything but the sabra and a low, dry thorny plant that scratches my ankles and penetrates through the worn soles of my sandals. As I come level, like a picture coming into focus, the wild tangle of sabra resolves into a border, a planted boundary hedge. It marks the edge of the village site, and three sides of a square, with a single tree in the centre. The ground is bare except for stubble and thorn and a few scattered rocks. Up on the road, the bank has been built up and landscaped with rock; perhaps it has been taken from ruined houses. Tomer, the kibbutz archivist, remembers the buildings as part stone, part adobe.

From the road I could only see a sabra thicket, but now I see the village itself begin to take shape. I walk a long way through those high sabra boundaries. The site stretches out into enclosure after enclosure, often around a single acacia tree. The cactus hedges are tall, gnarled, scarred and deformed, and impenetrable, like a fairytale thicket. Some of the sabra has broken, and great limbs lie on the ground, but there is new growth, too, and the old growth is still bearing fruit: ripening, and ripe, and fallen.

I enter a corridor of sabra and it is absolutely still; the heat is caught there. On either side of the path, thick cactus grows to some seven or eight feet, shutting out sight of the curve of fields, the rounded hills, the purple and green of Gilboa. I am alone, enclosed in this silent, suffocating avenue of cactus, and it is all I can see – thorned, savage, massive and old. In the pressured hot stillness I can’t move: I am caught in this corridor, trapped. The cactus walls lean in, scarred and ancient; they have taken hold of me. Then I am walking again, fast, almost running, in a sudden near panic, until I break out of the corridor and into the open. I scramble away up the slope towards where the road lies, and at a safe distance look back. Behind me, the corridor has become once again only a tangle of cactus.

When Tristram identified Al Murassas among ‘several ruined villages’ in 1865, perhaps his ‘grass-grown sites ... marked afar by a deeper green’ were nothing of the sort; perhaps instead they were the darker green of these sabra boundaries, which he saw only from a distance, and about which he made dangerously mistaken assumptions.

Ahead of me a great rusty pipe rises out of the scratchy, dry land, and downhill from it there is a blur of slight green with low shrubs where it leaks a little. Perhaps this is the spring that once rose in Kafra and descended to Al Murassas. A covey of chukars rises at my approach – flight after flight of plump, chestnut-barred partridges taking off from the tiny damp oasis of the leaking pipe in the valley below.

I can see the far edge of the village now, the hedge of sabra marking the boundary, and I follow the pipe up towards the road, where it goes underground. My head is pounding. I have not drunk enough, and there is only an inch of water left in my bottle. Here by the pipe grows the stand of trees that Asaf pointed out the last time, when we stopped. They are in a rough circle – a cypress and a tall eucalyptus rising elegantly to a high canopy, and others I cannot identify. Perhaps this is the site of Sheikh Ibrahim Al Sa’ad’s grave, which is marked on Abu Sitta’s map, but there is nothing to identify it except the trees. The remains of the rusty pipe protrude here, too. Evidently it has been replaced by a newer high-tech pipe – its junction stands exposed on the far side of the road. Perhaps when this pipe was laid, the Sheikh’s bones had to be moved. All construction has to stop, in Israel, when bones are discovered, and the archaeological authorities have to be called in. Jewish religious law forbids the removal of the Jewish dead, so if bones are found, it has to be ascertained that the site isn’t one of Jewish burial. Deep history is the bane of Israeli construction companies: wherever you dig there are bones.

I clamber back onto the road. A few feet from the stand of trees, an upright boulder has been placed to mark the hiking trail. It is chiselled with white-lettered Hebrew lines from the poem
Od Chozer ha-Nigun
, ‘the melody still returns’, by nationalist poet Natan Alterman:

Still the melody returns which you left behind in vain

and once again the road opens up along its length

and a cloud in its sky, and a tree in its rain

still await you, passer-by.
10

Knowing what that place once was, the meaning of the poem shifts from the one intended by its being sited there. The melody left behind in vain in that particular place is not the trace notes of a biblical past, referred to elsewhere in the signage, which re-inscribes it in the landscape. Instead it is the lingering melody of a much more recent past, and not trace notes of it, so much as a full lament – the lament of that other map which reads
harus
...
harus
...
harus
. Destroyed... destroyed... destroyed...

I walk back along the track, uncomfortably dehydrated. By the time I get within sight of the kibbutz, my head beats with pain, and I am beginning to stagger. My legs are not obeying me and my rings are tight: my hands have swollen. Once back in my cousin’s apartment, I kick off my broken sandals, sit down on the bed and gulp glass after glass of cold fruit juice – pear and sabra, with its odd, sweet flavour, and its poignant, sweet and difficult meanings and associations.

When I was ten, we drove along that road, heading for Belvoir up on the bluff that overlooks the Jezreel Valley. My mother was ill at the time, and so the rest of us – my father, brother, sister and I – were going birdwatching without her, in the rented Peugeot 504 that kept overheating. It was April, but in the early morning the interior of the car was already unbreatheable; the
hamsin
was blowing, a hot sandy wind from the desert that made people a little crazed. Before we realised it, we had driven into the midst of butterflies. My father slowed and then pulled over, and we sat a few moments in the car, watching butterflies in their hundreds. They were not behaving like butterflies as we knew them – fluttering, stopping, making sideways forays from flower to flower, in a random pattern determined by opportunity – but like birds: they were heading somewhere, determined and intent.

We got out of the car. There were butterflies flattened in the balding tyre treads, in the radiator grille, on the windscreen; there were butterflies dead on the road, caught among dry grass stems. They were all painted ladies. Around us and among us and beyond us, through the light and shade of a small stand of cypresses, and all along the slope, they kept coming. We went and looked down the hill and they were rising towards us through the grasses and sabra; we could see the movement a long way off. It is one of my most vivid, sensual childhood memories: the heat, the car’s metal smell, the dusty softening tarmac, the butterflies, and my mother somewhere else, ill.

I never knew where it was until, comparing bird memories with my father before travelling again to Israel, I asked where we’d seen the painted ladies. ‘At Belvoir,’ he said, over the phone. There was a pause. ‘Belvoir, the crusader castle. Kawkab al Hawa,’ he added. ‘I think it means Star of the East.’

The Arabic name means Star of the Winds, not Star of the East. The place is named after the high wind that often blows there – a hot wind, which brings no relief. Until 1948 this was the Arab village of Kawkab al Hawa. In 1948, at that elevation, with a wide view east and south, it offered a strategic military advantage and it was the site of fierce fighting. The village was occupied, depopulated and destroyed by Jewish forces, and nothing of it remains.

The crusader fortress site has long since been excavated and developed as a national park, but although there’s no trace of the destroyed village, the park’s name retains in its Hebrew version an echo of its older identity, as if in guilty half-acknowledgement – not Kawkab al Hawa, ‘Star of the Winds’, but Kochav HaYarden, ‘Star of the Jordan’.

Despite its official rebranding, despite the deliberate and systematic eradication of the evidence of its physical past, and the rewriting of the landscape under a new name, a fragment of the story of that place persists in memory, too. When I arrived this time at Beit Hashita, Chaya mentioned to me that she and my uncle Asaf had recently been on a little
tiul
, a trip, to Kawkab. Not
Kochav
, the Hebrew name; not Belvoir, the crusader fortress name, but
Kawkab
, the Arabic name. Her uninflected use of the older Arabic name – casual, unacknowledged, unconscious – is mirrored in the name of the Sakhne, too, the hot spring at the foot of Gilboa where I had swum as a child. Sakhne is its Arabic name, though the road-signs to it, and its presence on the map, use the official Hebrew name, Gan HaShlosha. When my mother was a child, the Sakhne was a green splash among rocks; kibbutz children went swimming there with an armed adult standing guard above them. When I was a child, it was an eroded, dusty, littered picnic area full of dangers, with strict segregation between Arabs on the far side and Jews and tourists on the near side.

A road used to lead from Al Sakhina to Al Murassas. Al Sakhina is gone, but the memory of it remains in the name of the spring, the Sakhne. The memory of Al Murassas lives on locally, too, whatever the government intended and attempted, and so does the memory of the other villages. My uncle knows where they were and what they were. So does his wife Chaya. So does my mother, and Tomer the kibbutz archivist, and the others of their generation. The Arabic names and meanings continue to circulate orally, continue to resonate, identifying features and settlements by the names that the Jewish newcomers learned in the 1920s and 1930s from the Arab residents who were already long settled in the valley. But the official elisions, the transition between ancient history and the present day, are seamless. Inscribed in the landscape in the boards and signposts of the hiking trail, they will become a new truth, and that elided past will be gone from the memory of the next generation. One of my cousins, Asaf’s daughter, tells me: ‘We learned nothing in school about kibbutz history, about Al Murassas.’ She adds, uncertain, ‘Is it Al Murassas – is that the name?’

Officially, the places do not exist – and, not existing, can be believed never to have existed – but memory disrupts the official version. They live on in names, in the older generation’s sense of place, in images of the landscape from their childhood now changed beyond recognition – my mother’s memory of
beit ha-sheikh
; her memory, her generation’s memory, of the still-visible ruins of the destroyed villages. They know and don’t know – about the destroyed villages and neighbourhoods, the missing three-quarters of a million people, transformed into a threatening, burgeoning five million. They know and don’t know because they remember but are required to forget. It is not denial, precisely, so much as silence and omission. And meanwhile, spread through the world in the Palestinian diaspora, the memory of those places is held and cherished in a story handed down through some three generations.

When I talk to him at last, Malik says that there is nothing special about his grandfather’s story. He apologises for not having been in touch: he has been very busy with work and preparations for his wedding, and for Ramadan. It is not convenient to meet me in Amman, but we can talk by phone. He says again, ‘If you are doing some justified research, I am happy to help your good self.’

It’s the day before I leave, and I wonder what I should say to this man, what I now want.
Sorry
? Sorry about your
tsores
, your troubles? Excuse me, but may I have your story for my own purposes, to feel better about myself? Can I harvest your past like some kind of fruit and make a bitter drink out of it? But I ask him anyway – about his grandfather, about what happened, about his own connection to that place now.

Malik’s grandfather fled Al Murassas in 1948 and ended up in Irbid, in Jordan, where, except for ten years when he worked in Kuwait, he stayed for the rest of his life. Malik doesn’t know enough about it to make it stand out in any way: his grandfather’s experience was the same as that of everyone who left. He had been a farmer, and he had to leave his land. Farming was a second income, because mainly his work was as a carpenter, a skilled carpenter. He had worked in Haifa, which was a vibrant city, and he was doing well. When he had to leave, he lost everything. Nevertheless, because he had a skill, he managed well in his new life. He was able to support himself and his family, so he didn’t end up living in a refugee camp. He left Palestine with Malik’s father, who was about a year old at the time – Malik’s grandfather didn’t have a birth certificate, but he estimated that he was then about twenty-five – and he never went back, not even to visit. He realised he wouldn’t ever be able to return.

I tell Malik I have seen the site of Al Murassas. What must it be like to hear, I wonder, that I can come and go to this place his family is from, that I could, if I wished, take up residence just a few kilometres away.

‘This is the place where our roots are; this is where we belong,’ Malik says. ‘We have rights – we have land and farms. It is our land.’ He pauses. ‘We know the situation,’ he goes on, more emphatically. ‘It’s harder, now – but we still have a feeling inside that we have rights; that it is our right, this land. It was a tragedy that happened thirty years before I was born; the land was my grandfather’s land. He left because of fear – he left everything. You can’t blame him.’

It should not surprise me, this hint that there might be shame attached to having fled, but it does. How could members of a younger generation not have blamed the older one for losing them their birthright? And how could the question not be asked whether the Nakba, its tragedy, was something Palestinians might have been able to resist, which was the other side of the popular Zionist claim that they had in part brought it upon themselves?