And there are also refugees for whom a miracle happened and who were returned to their land.
Such an instance, of incomprehensible mercy, is that of those who reside in the village in Wadi Alfuqin: in 1948 they were uprooted from their village, and for twenty-four years they lived in a refugee camp, or with family members who took pity on them, or in rented houses, the houses of strangers, in Jericho and Deheisha and Husan and Amman, and suddenly, in 1972, some remote emperor lifted his little finger and gave the order: “Return them!” and they returned to the village from which they were exiled, and they, perhaps, are the only ones to have returned from refugee life to that of human beings, and they can testify to the differences, and can say something about the chances for reconciliation and forgiveness. I went there.
Wadi Alfuqin is a fertile, watered valley. Springs flow, the ground is productive and benevolent, and everyone has a storage pool for springwater, and kitchen gardens full of produce, and olive groves bordered by grapevines planted shoulder to shoulder. And at the top of the mountain which stands over the valley are the foundations of the ancient city of Beitar, and the new settlement Beitar Elit.
After the War of Independence, the valley was the focus of attacks on Israeli Army patrols passing nearby, along the border, and after the army took several retaliatory actions, the village was abandoned and its natives dispersed. Nearly all the houses in the village were demolished, and the ruins on the mountain slope are still bleached by the sun, and the remaining houses have become a training site for the army. On some of the ruins one can still make out the marks of the bullets fired by soldiers in the fifties.
Imtiyaz (the name means “excellence”) had not yet been born when her parents fled from the village. They moved from place to place in the West Bank over the course of several years. When she was a baby, they came to the Deheisha refugee camp. She lived her entire childhood and youth in the camp, and a year ago she returned to Wadi Alfuqin: she married a man there. Her parents, who could not afford to build a house in the village, remained in Deheisha. She remembers the day, fifteen years ago, when the people of Alfuqin left the refugee camp and returned to their village. “Of course we were mad at them,” she says. “We were angry that they were returning here to real life, and we remained there, in prison. They cried with happiness, and we cried out of jealousy and pain. There are still some there today who are angry with those who were able to return.”
“They are mad at the ones who returned? What are they guilty of?”
“Whom should they be angry at?”
Whom, indeed? “The Jews threw us out of here, and the Jews brought us back.” A wide-eyed old woman sighs as she listens to us from the roof of the house next door, between clumps of just-sheared sheep’s wool hung out for air: the Jew taketh away and the Jew giveth.
It is a cool day in early spring. We are sheltered in a shady, broad yard, and the little valley lies at our feet, and the storage pools sparkle in the sun, and despite the Ramadan fast, my hosts bring me a glass of tea, and little by little people from every corner of the village gather around us, listening, nodding their heads, and telling their stories—but not freely. These are things people do not like to recall.
“Life in the camp is bad,” one woman of about fifty says shyly. “You are always with your head down, waiting for the next blow. After a few years there you have nothing left but fear and poverty. You become like a dead person: you do not want anything and you do not hope. You wait for death. Even the children there are old. They are born with fear. Here, children are like children: they almost do not know what the army is. Only the mustawtanin, the settlers, are frightening.”
Everyone glances upward, to the bauble of a settlement stuck into the mountain.
“When the families left Deheisha on their way back to the village and we stayed there,” Imtiyaz relates, “I cried for nearly a week. They can return and we can’t, because we didn’t have the money to build a new house. I was small, and I didn’t understand that. After all, we all lived like one big family, we shared everything, we suffered together for years, so why them and not us? After a while, when they began to come visit us in the camp, we would pelt them with questions. We wanted to know everything about the village: how the land was and the spring and the vegetables…”
“They would bring us vegetables in bags,” remembers Hanan, a rounded young woman who knows a few words of Hebrew. “And we would kiss those vegetables. We would kiss each tomato a hundred times before we ate it there.”
“But I actually like Deheisha and miss it,” a woman says hotly. She has strong features and had come to sit across from me on a stool, her legs held apart, and had immediately begun vilifying our hosts for serving me a drink during Ramadan. “Even if your brother comes,” she says to the taken-aback woman of the house, “do not give him anything to drink! Ah, when the Jordanians were here, they would shoot anyone who desecrated the fast. Since you came here, everything has changed. There is no respect for religion anymore.”
You miss Deheisha?
Even the retarded woman, kneeling by the wall and hollowing out green squashes to be stuffed with rice and meat, stops to make a circular motion with her hand and looks at her in amazement.
“Yes. I miss it. I get goose bumps when I think of it,” she says, and bares an arm to illustrate her meaning. “But there it’s bad! Frightening!” Imtiyaz counters her, and she responds: “The fear is their doing”—indicating me with a movement of her head. “And I miss the people who were there. I miss my house. What, aren’t they people, the ones there? Weren’t we close to them? That’s what I miss.”
Apparently she is right, I think. A person can miss even a hard, bad place, if there were beautiful moments there, and if he has a memory of a single instance of grace, and maybe loved someone there or was loved. I thought of the army bases in the Sinai where I once served, jumbles of iron and cement thrown at random on a mountain, and how we made our lives there full, and how those neutral, dead places became dear to us.
Another woman joins the group, greeting us and sitting by us, and another young man, who brings us mandrake fruit to smell. Here it is called the “madman’s apple,” and it has a faint and wonderful aroma.
The name of the woman who just arrived is Wadha Isma’il, and she listens for a while to the stories of the others. Afterwards, she begins to speak, in a moderate tone, without any reproach in her voice, and tells me this: “After they expelled us from the village, we would come back to work our land. The Israeli Army pretended not to see us. They would have maneuvers up on the mountain, and we would work the land in the valley. We would come every day by donkey from Hebron in order to work our land. One day I came here with my father. I was young then, almost a girl. We worked a few hours, and we started on our way back home. Suddenly the Israeli soldiers surrounded us and separated me from my father. I saw that they blindfolded him with a rag and pushed him into some bushes. I remember that he still had a chance to turn to me once and call to me through the rag. Immediately afterwards I heard shots. Many shots. I began to cry. The soldiers who had stayed with me asked me: Who is that man to you? I said: He is my father. They said: Go to the garden down there, and you’ll see that he is harvesting lettuce and eggplant. When I was some distance from them, I glanced back and I saw one of the soldiers aiming his rifle at me. I was frightened and bent over. His bullet hit my neck and came out on the other side.”
I don’t know what to say to her, and she interprets my silence, apparently, as disbelief. “Look,” she says, and her work-hardened fingers undo her kerchief, and she smiles a sort of apology about having to bother me with her wound. I see an ugly scar in back, and another ugly scar in front. Young Hanan cries. It seems that Wadha is her mother. “Every time I hear that story, it is as if it were the first time,” Hanan says.
Wadha lay among the bushes and played dead. The soldiers distanced themselves from her and then left the area. She rose, oozing blood, and bound her wounds with a handkerchief. Afterwards, she found her father on the ground, his hands tied behind his back, a large rock on his neck. There were thirty bullets in his body, the village elder, Abu Harb, told us later. Wadha, who is for a moment a girl once more, describes with movements of her body how she walked and tripped through the valley, at night, scared that the Israelis would shoot her from behind, or the Jordanians from in front. She concluded her story as she began it, quietly, with no tone of accusation, and her daughter Hanan stood and cried for all of us.
I pondered then about how much one must be suspicious of people who testify about themselves morning and night that they are merciful. They always taught us that we do not know how to be cruel or to hate our enemies, really hate. We are cleanhanded types. And despite that, every so often another ugly incident takes place, carried out by the merciful hands of people like us, people who never hate, and maybe the fact that we do not allow ourselves to hate actually testifies to the disparagement we feel toward the Arabs, since you do not hate a person whom you see as lower than you. It is hard for us, for instance, to hate children, because we sense that they are not our equals. In this context I recalled a story told me by a reserve soldier I met during the course of these seven weeks. It has no connection with Wadi Alfuqin, but it is very much connected to the entire matter.
“Once, when I was on reserve duty, there was a terrorist attack in the Old City in Jerusalem, near the Rockefeller Museum, and we set up a detainment area for Arab suspects in the courtyard of police headquarters. We picked up all the Arabs we caught. We brought entire truckloads. How I beat them that night! There was another reservist, a young guy, with me, and I saw that every Arab he catches, he bites hard on the ear. Actually takes off a piece. I ask him why he did it, and he answered me: ‘So that I’ll know them next time we meet.’”
* * *
At the top of the village, in a small, dark house, next to the house of his extended family, the village elder lives. He is called Abu Harb, and he is eighty-five years old. He is, according to the residents, the village historian.
He sits on a colored reed mat, his shaking hand playing with a large, antiquated transistor radio. His eyes are much swollen, and his nose is oddly reddish. He remembers the Turks and the English and the Egyptians, who were here briefly, and the Jordanians he remembers, and now us. “In October 1948 we were exiled from here,” he says (the only one in the village, he says, who knows the precise date), and for twenty-four years we were not here. We wandered from place to place for twenty-four years, and everywhere we went we would bury our dead, and afterwards we would wander onward, and for twenty-four years I did not sleep at night, I would lie awake and think, and the first night I returned to my village and slept in it was the happiest night of my life, because I slept on my own land.”
In 1972 the people of the village received a notice from the military government that they could return to their village. They do not know who made the decision. They received a notice, and that same day the news spread to all the village’s exiles, who had been dispersed to the four winds. When Abu Harb describes how they gathered and came here, I recall the book of Ezekiel, the vision of the dry bones which join together, cover themselves with flesh and sinew, and return to life.
“The military government gave us one month to return to the village,” Abu Harb relates. “They told us that whoever did not build a house within that month would not be allowed to return. We came that same night, from every place, and we set up booths and tents in the place that was once the village. Afterwards, we collected money and paved an asphalt road to bring construction materials in trucks. It was a harsh summer and we worked day and night, and we would sleep under the floor of the house we were building. Each one of us built a single room with a roof, and that was our claim.”
He tells his story, and his wife, Ratiba, enters the room. She looks younger than he and her face is still smooth. Her face is dark, “but that is not my color from birth, it is only because of the damned sun of the camp, in Jericho,” she explains. They have been married for sixty years, “and he never took another wife, other than me!” she boasts.
I asked them if they know why the Israeli authorities so suddenly allowed them to return to their village.
“We heard that the Israelis needed our place in Deheisha. They intended to bring to the camp a large group of Gazans whom they wanted to remove from the Gaza Strip. So they evacuated us.”
“And did Gazans actually take your place there?”
“They came. But afterwards they stopped transferring people there from Gaza.”
I do not know if that is the correct interpretation of this singular act of mercy. The fact is that it was all done in secrecy, under wraps. Maybe so as not to arouse demands from other exiles in the territories, or from Israeli Arabs who had been expelled from their villages. I tend to think that the explanation given by the people of Wadi Alfuqin, concerning their exchange for Gazans, is correct. In the twisted climate of the occupation, when one act of mercy is performed, it must almost of necessity be crooked and bent, and be nothing but another of the many faces of arbitrariness.
I ask my conversants how the return to their land affected them.
“Everything changed,” Abu Harb says. “We now live here among real people. The people who stayed behind in Deheisha and in Jericho are miserable. They are going mad from sadness and longing for their land. They come and plead with us to give them a little garden plot. Just so they can regain a little self-respect. Something to live for. After all, it is not just land, it is everything. They are cut off from everything there. They have ceased to be people. We have been planted anew. Not only in the land. The land is the beginning: we are planted in life as a whole. In normal relations with other people. In tradition. In all the right things. We are no longer strangers in the world. We have the milk of our cows, the flour of our wheat. We are now complete people.”
I have one more question. Maybe the most important question: The Israelis brought you back to your village. Do you hate them less now?
They exchange glances. The very old man, his wife, his daughter-in-law, his many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom have gathered in the room. The daughter-in-law speaks. She relates that her husband has been arrested on suspicion of taking part in terrorist acts. Immediately after his arrest, Israeli soldiers came and destroyed their house. It was a new house, just completed. The family was not given enough time to remove all its belongings. When it was destroyed, it collapsed on ten sacks of sugar and ten sacks of flour that had been bought at great cost and had been stored in the house for the housewarming celebration. The husband was released right afterwards without any charges having been brought against him. As she tells the story, her lips go white with fury and look like a whip scar on her face. Two other sons of Abu Harb are now under arrest in Israel. One is in prison and the other is awaiting trial. Abu Harb says: Both of them are innocent. And if they did something, they apparently had no choice. The injustice and bad effects of the situation are what turns normal people into criminals.
The mother, Ratiba, says: “The settlers come down from the mountain at night with dogs. They frighten us. They stole our spring, and call it sharing.”
“The bus that takes their children to school,” ten-year-old grandson Hazem says, “blocks the way for our bus every day, and we have to walk about a kilometer to school.”
“They will expel us from here again,” says another young man, about eighteen, and everyone nods in agreement.
“And then we will really go mad,” says Grandmother Ratiba.
The old man, Abu Harb, sighs a long sigh, passes his hand over his face, and presses it against his eyes. The small children watch him. Returning home did not turn the heart of any one of them into one which loves us, the Israelis. Maybe it was foolish even to hope for that. Abu Harb rises to his feet with difficulty, and sees me to the door. We stand and look together over the beautiful and peaceful valley, and the smoke from the straw fires curls up into the air, and the thistles and wildflowers bloom as far as one can see. Now is the time of the yellow flowers. I tell Abu Harb that I called my book The Yellow Time in Hebrew, and he asks me if I have heard about the yellow wind. I say that I haven’t, so he begins telling me about it, and about the yellow wind that will soon come, maybe even in his lifetime: the wind will come from the gate of Hell (from the gates of Paradise comes only a pleasant, cool wind)—rih asfar, it is called by the local Arabs, a hot and terrible east wind which comes once in a few generations, sets the world afire, and people seek shelter from its heat in the caves and caverns, but even there it finds those it seeks, those who have performed cruel and unjust deeds, and there, in the cracks in the boulders, it exterminates them, one by one. After that day, Abu Harb says, the land will be covered with bodies. The rocks will be white from the heat, and the mountains will crumble into a powder which will cover the land like yellow cotton.