Alia Yunis was born in Chicago and grew up in the U.S., Greece and the Middle East, mostly in Beirut during the civil war. Alia writes about two conflicts in the Middle East: the civil war in Lebanon and Palestine’s ongoing conflict with Israel. As an adult, Alia confronts what the war in Palestine has done to a ten-year-old boy named Mutassem; understanding his painful experience sends her back in time to her own memories of being a child and then a teenager in besieged Beirut.
Lebanon endured fifteen years of civil war, which began in 1975 and ended in 1990. The country’s fragile religious coalition of power-sharing, created when Lebanon achieved independence from France in 1943, was unable to withstand the various religious and secular factions fighting for political control. But Lebanon didn’t suffer only from internally driven tension; it was also vulnerable to the conflict raging to its south between Israelis and Palestinians.
Starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing throughout the twentieth century, Palestinians were dispossessed of land and rights by arriving Jewish immigrants who had likewise been displaced by wars, genocide and ethnic violence in Europe and Russia. As the disputes between Palestinians and Israelis flared into war on several occasions, notably the 1948 Arab-Israeli Conflict and the Six Day War of 1967, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to Lebanon and settled there as refugees. After being expelled from Jordan in 1970, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) used Lebanon as a base both before and during the civil war to launch attacks on Israel. As a result, Israel invaded Lebanon twice, in 1978 and 1982, and remained in control of southern Lebanon until 2000.
In Palestine itself, violence has been a major fact of life for the last half century. Armies, paramilitary groups, terrorist cells and individuals have all contributed to the ongoing hostility. Children are sometimes the random victims of this violence. Ironically, Alia and the Palestinian child she writes about, Mutassem, did not meet in Lebanon, Palestine or Israel—they met in Los Angeles.
IN THE MIDDLE EAST, the advent of war is as unpredictable as the rain.
Each year the rain is needed desperately, but often it doesn’t come. However there is never a drought when it comes to war. Every generation has its war or—quite often—wars.
My first war was Lebanon in the 1980s. Bombings and gunfire, annoying pep talks from Ronald Reagan on the Voice of America, and that Swedish quartet Abba were the soundtrack of my grade-school days into high school. I was young enough that, like all good teen soundtracks, the war played on in the background without disturbing my angst over pimples, weight and boys, especially as the soundtrack became more a part of our lives.
War wasn’t yet embedded in us when my brother was eight and I was nine. We were hanging out on the hood of our car with some other kids in the neighborhood. One kid was bragging that he could climb the tree covering up the building across the way when a bullet coming from somewhere on the roof of that building pierced right through the engine of our car. To this day, my brother and I disagree about which one of us was sitting on the hood. He says it was him; I say it was me. While obviously there is some trauma in the memory, I still recall demanding that my mother let us go out and play the next day and being mainly upset because we no longer had a functioning car. I didn’t think about how there was almost nowhere left to drive to now that the city had been divided up by various militias.
See, a child can ignore the soundtrack of war—until it blows off his leg and most of his hand. This I learned from Mutassem Abu Karsh. He was ten when we met, the age I was when my first war began. By ten, Mutassem had already heard plenty of the music of war, although it didn’t become his main soundtrack until one day when he was playing soccer just outside the two-room house he lived in with his parents and five siblings: Mutassem lost his right leg and four of the fingers on his left hand during an Israeli bombing in Gaza in 2005. The blast injured his brother and cousin who were also playing outside. His brother continues to live with a piece of shrapnel in his head.
Mutassem, then eight years old, was taken immediately to Israel for the amputation of his leg. No one in his family was permitted to accompany him because his Palestinian relatives weren’t allowed to cross over. He never complained about going through the amputation without any familiar faces around him. But the amputation was so badly done that when he returned to Gaza, it did not heal properly, and he could not be fitted for a prosthetic leg by the doctors there, many of whom were volunteers. Mutassem had come to accept a life with one leg.
But two years later, the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) stepped in. PCRF is a non-profit organization founded twenty-two years ago by Steve Sosebee, then a recent American college graduate awed by the tragic health conditions and injuries of the children he met on a spiritual trip to explore the Holy Land. PCRF brought Mutassem to Shriners Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, where I lived.
Doctors at the Shriners agreed to do a second amputation that would allow him to get a prosthetic leg. One plastic surgeon even offered to cut into Mutassem’s hand to carve out a thumb that would make it possible for his remaining left finger—his pinky—to function, making the hand useable again. All these plans were made without Mutassem’s knowledge. He didn’t learn of these things until his father escorted him to the Egyptian border, where it took two days of negotiating to get Mutassem across to Cairo to catch the first plane ride of his life, something his father had never experienced.
As a volunteer for the PCRF, I was one of the people who looked after Mutassem while he was in Los Angeles, functioning somewhere between social worker and doting aunt. As we navigated the intimate moments of reconstructive surgery together—the discovery of a new hand, coming out of the anesthetic knowing even more of your leg was gone—the soundtrack of war was no longer on mute in my head.
It had been nearly twenty years since the war in Lebanon. I didn’t know it was still the background sound in my head, defining my personality in and out of war. I practically had it on mute, even back then. Once, four friends and I were sitting in the school courtyard under the big tree discussing the prom that would never be when a hail of gunfire landed our way. Instantly, like the experts we were, we each took shelter in a school locker. When Ronnie Hammad, the tallest, told us it was safe to come out, we started talking about the prom again, barely acknowledging the gunfire. We were warriors for normalcy, and, as long as no one was hurt, we kept on going.
Yes, I still get jumpy on the Fourth of July and don’t understand the need for firing guns into the air at weddings, as they do here in Abu Dhabi, where I live now. But for the most part I didn’t, now or then, consciously think about the war: the curfews; the days without electricity when the cockroaches would swarm into our hot apartment and crawl over us at night, when we would wish the water would come back so we could shower and boil some for drinking; the constant hum and dance of gun battles, bombs and shattering glass; the sudden disappearance of neighbors; the scores of scared people on the Corniche scurrying to our building to take shelter in our basement during a surprise Israeli air raid; the occasional dead man found on our street. Only Mutassem made me dwell on them, he who had been so much less lucky than I had been.
Mutassem and I hit it off instantly with a shared smile. We even looked alike, so much so that the nurses assumed he was my son. He didn’t speak English, but he could get the gist of the conversations when I would explain to the nurses who he actually was. “It’s okay,” he said to me one time. “You don’t have to tell them you’re not my mother. If you were my mother, I would still be happy.” It was a sincere desire not to call attention to his own story. But it was also intuitive, as if he knew my own sorrow over the absence of a child, although I never would have discussed such a thing with him.
Through him, I began to see a trait I’d carried with me since my years in Lebanon: reading into people’s hopes and trials is part of the instinctual survival of war for children. I discovered this was my fate when I started college in Minneapolis a few months after leaving Beirut. I was bundled up in my winter gear at the bus stop, shaking from cold, when a girl not much older than me, a total stranger, said, “You must be on your way to school. I’m on my way to getting an abortion. Do you think that’s what I should do?” She began to tell me the whole story of her boyfriend and their tortured relationship. She wasn’t the first person in Minneapolis who had used me as her soundboard. But with this girl, I realized that was who people saw when they saw me: the person who would listen to their story and say the right thing. She was shaking too, and I could barely tell what she looked like because her hat and scarf were covering most of her face, but I said something like, “You should do what you can live with for the rest of your life.” That seemed to put her at ease. We, the people of war, tell people things that will give them comfort and peace of mind because there is already plenty of fighting in the background music without allowing another frustrated track to be added. Today, for better or worse, I am the stranger to whom people at the party tell their deepest secrets.
Mutassem’s compassion was not an act either. He always engaged people, including doctors, with questions about themselves, asking me to translate. This is what we also learn as children during war—ask about others before you ask about yourself. We are not the center of the universe, which perhaps isn’t always the right thing for a child to believe but it is what children of war know. His questions were usually about how many kids each doctor had.
Before the hand surgery, in the pre-op room, the doctor asked me where I would like some skin from his “good” leg grafted in order to create the illusion of a thumb during the operation. “I’m asking you a cosmetic question,” he told me. “Explain to him it’s for people who will see him without his pants on.”
I examined Mutassem’s “good” leg, a mess of scars from the original injury and from the numerous grafts that had already been done there. Mutassem had had enough surgeries to understand what the doctor’s question was, and I suspect he also understood who would one day be seeing him without his pants on. He’d told me earlier that he planned on marrying a Palestinian girl, preferably one from Gaza. I pointed to one of the few small patches of pristine skin on the good leg and looked at him. He nodded and smiled that that would be just fine.
This was the conscious Mutassem, always trying to make things easy for others, not the post-surgery Mutassem.
After the second amputation, Mutassem was in excruciating screaming pain, a pain so severe that at times the strongest painkillers gave him little relief, a pain that made one cry along with him. The doctor had termed the amputation of his leg above the knee as “savage surgery,” because it was such a tortuous procedure that it was only performed as a last resort when there was no other choice.
WHEN THE PAINKILLERS finally kicked in, Mutassem would sit sullen, staring at nothing.
The hospital insisted on sending a staff psychologist to talk with Mutassem. I did not have much translation to do. He would not give her any responses, let alone the ones she was expecting, questions like, “Do you ever think what happened to you is unfair?” “Do you ever wonder ‘why me’?” He would just shrug, like it was an irrelevant question, and stare ahead. I guessed from her questions she had not been in a war as a child. Then she told him that it was okay to cry and feel bad. He turned to me and said, “Tell her we’re Palestinians. We don’t cry.”
In those words, Lebanon came back to me, as it would at night and during Mutassem’s physical therapy—the voices of parents and teachers telling us that we move forward, we do not fear, at least not visibly, which is why we went to school up until the principal could no longer convincingly define the current round of fighting as only “skirmishes.” The last time before the principal decided to close the school, my mom made us peanut butter sandwiches, a special treat as peanut butter was an alien concept there, and my brother and I walked through the little shantytown between us and the school. Not a soul was to be seen, not even the ladies who were usually sitting outside their one-room houses cleaning lentils. Although we didn’t look up, we knew the rooftops of the tall buildings were lined with men at the ready, machine guns pointing down at the street where we walked. Had we allowed the soundtrack to play louder, we would have understood how vulnerable we were at that moment. Instead, I started screaming because I saw a rat leap out of one of the massive piles of garbage that had changed the landscape and smell of Beirut. I openly—and from the very essence of my being–feared rats, not the war. Salim, an older teen in the shantytown who usually came out to say hello to us on school days, emerged from his hovel and told me to shut up before someone on the roofs thought something was wrong and started shooting. Salem was carrying a machine gun too, but we still qualified all this as no big deal, as our parents and teachers implied.
Mutassem would wake up many times in pain, hallucinating wildly about people coming into the room, people needing his help, people he needed to hide from, fears he would never admit in daylight. Finally there were times when he did get some peaceful sleep.
Looking over in the middle of the night during one of those quiet times, the only light I saw in the room was falling on his crutches, upon which he had hung his kefiyah—his Palestinian black and white scarf. It was the only thing he had insisted on bringing with him from Gaza. His kefiyah is his lucky piece, like the cedar of Lebanon on the bracelet I have worn since I left Beirut in the 1980s, scrunched down with my brother on the floor of a UN convoy car. I feel naked when my bracelet is not on, like some women do when they forget to spray themselves with perfume before leaving the house.
With our kefiyahs, cedar trees and other symbols, we have with us at all times a piece of that place that is hell but, more importantly, home. This trinket we carry with us is not mere pride and memory, but a reminder that even if our own soundtrack has been turned down, it could happen again, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in a hundred other places in the neighborhood.
When it was time for Mutassem’s physical therapy, he would scream in agony, twisting his good leg as if to squeeze away the torment. I would tell him, “Come on, be strong for God, for your parents”—anything I could say to help him get through the session. But it was only when I said, “Show them what a Palestinian boy can do” that he nodded and pushed through the pain.
I whispered this last sentence to him because it had been in my soundtrack and still lived there—family pride, national pride, not shaming either with weakness or laziness, as we perceived the world viewed us, the cobbled and conquered people of the Middle East. It’s why I’ve always worked harder than anyone else at the office, never cheated on an exam, never asked for a favor from a boss.
When his pain became more manageable, Mutassem would ask how the other young patients sharing our room at Shriners were doing. He always wanted to know how these other children, mostly from Central America, had come to be sick or injured. However, he wasn’t that forthcoming about his own wounds. He was more likely to talk about other injured kids back home. Self-pity is the least acceptable trait allowed by the parents on the war soundtrack. In American pop psychology, it was the equivalent of Not everything is about you. But it also meant, You are not an individual with individual wants and needs. You are part of a group, screwed up as that group might be.
There were other phrases in that soundtrack that continue to affect me as an adult, some for the good and a lot for the bad. I saw these commands ingrained in Mutassem. Don’t think about yourself. You are luckier than most, so don’t complain. Don’t be afraid. Why should your life be any better than someone else’s? Keep on going or they win.
I remember this from the first time I volunteered, when I was at the American University Hospital in Beirut. I was sixteen and was asked by one doctor to run an envelope down to the morgue. When I got there, the doctor had one of the body trays pulled open, with a dead young man on it. He saw the color drain out of my face and used morgue humor, joking that I was trying to look dead. “Don’t fear the dead or the living dead win,” he said. “You’re still alive, so be alive.”
As the months passed, Mutassem went through two additional surgeries on his hand. By that time, he had mastered walking with his new prosthetic leg. He had also learned some English and had accepted pizza, although he still preferred hummus. And by the end of his visit to California, six months later, he had learned to complain about the pizza and spend hours playing video games, just like his new friends did.
As a treat, we went to a Lebanese deli so he could get his hummus fix. The owner, a man in his mid-forties named Gaby, asked about Mutassem’s leg and Mutassem shrugged, not really interested in telling him his story as much as getting more hummus.
Then Gaby lifted up his shirt to show Mutassem the scars on his stomach from a bullet wound when he was the same age.
Mutassem discreetly rolled up his pants so that Gaby could see how the prosthetic was attached, and Gaby talked about watching his scars fade over the years. The conversation wasn’t of how they got injured but rather of how they healed.
And it was a different war—but they bonded on that—a war in which Gaby’s village’s faction in Lebanon would have probably been fighting Palestinians. But that was all in the past—wars between Arabs are ultimately forgivable, also part of what we all learn on the soundtrack. It is why Arabs abroad, so many of them escapees of wars, are excited when they run into another Arab, even if they have nothing in common beyond ethnicity.
I wondered if Mutassem felt the same way about the Israelis. “I don’t hate them because they’re Israeli but because they don’t let us live,” he said. “If they would just leave us alone, I wouldn’t care what they did. But they don’t want to leave us alone.”
It doesn’t seem likely Israel will leave the Palestinians alone anytime soon. A child can flee the war (mostly the prerogative of the wealthy or educated middle class, of which Mutassem was not a part, like I was) or the war can stop. But in most cases, children become the adult voices in the background soundtrack of a new generation’s war. I suspect that is Mutassem’s future.
On one of the last days I saw Mutassem, I asked him what he would like to do when he grew up. He shrugged and said, “What am I going to do?” Options weren’t an option.
I asked him if he would like to go to college and he gave one of his contagious smiles. Then the smile went away. Where would the peace and money for college come from, let alone having to fight off the drug pushers, gangsters and others who would try to win him over as he got older? (He wasn’t yet aware of that looming battle.)
We were driving in downtown LA and I was a little lost. Not liking to see me distraught over the failure of my Mapquest printout nor wanting to talk about the future, he changed the subject. “It never rains here,” he said. “Sometimes in Gaza it rains a lot.” Rain is a blessing in the Middle East, even in the fertile areas.
“Oh, it rains here,” I said. “But not at this time of the year.”
He seemed disappointed to know that Los Angeles got rain. Cars, houses, pizza and rain. Everything almost.
“But it usually doesn’t rain enough,” I quickly added. “It’s something people worry about, Los Angeles not having enough rain.”
“Too bad,” he said. He wasn’t wishing drought on Los Angeles, but he was happy to know that other places had annoying background music too, like needing rain.
“Would you like to stay here?” I asked him. “Here in Los Angeles.”
He shook his head without hesitation. For all that Gaza didn’t have, he missed his mom, his dad, his siblings, his scores of cousins, the hummus, everything that was home and hell, like I always miss the Lebanon of my childhood, with all its bullet holes and wounds.
On the day we took him to the airport, he walked—yes, walked, with his prosthetic leg, no crutches—to his gate. He turned and proudly waved at us with his new sort-of-hand (that surgery had gone okay, but not great). Despite the toys and other gifts he received from countless new friends, he was happy to be going home. If he wasn’t worried that we’d think him rude, he probably would have run to that plane, back to his soundtrack, his home—come war, come peace, come sun, come rain.