Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba

Introduction

When I was a child, my grandfather would tell us about his shop in Yaffa, a business he owned with his brother until 1948 before being expelled to Egypt. He told us that, on their departure, they only packed a few days’ worth of clothes for him, his wife and children, having been told they would be able to come back as soon as it was safe. They left their sheets on the clothes lines, chickpeas soaking in water, and toys in the yard. He locked the door, put his key in his pocket, and headed to safety as instructed. They never returned, and his key stayed in his pocket until he died in Cairo sixty years later.

On the fifteenth of May 1948, Israel declared itself a new-born state on the rubble of Palestinian lives. In the months before and after this date, Palestinians were forced from their homes across the country; those who weren’t driven out fled in fear of execution, having heard of the horrors which took place during massacres carried out by the Haganah (Israeli militia) in villages nearby.¹ This event would later, and begrudgingly, be known as the Nakba (or ‘catastrophe’), as Palestinians slowly came to terms with the fact that this was not a temporary displacement and that no one was going home any time soon. Eighty percent of Palestinians (over 700,000 people in total) were expelled, and their land taken over and occupied in what can only be described as an act of ethnic cleansing by the Zionist movement. They were all placed in refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, or in neighbouring Arab countries (Jordan, Syria and Lebanon), or displaced within the occupied lands of Palestine itself, now known as ‘Israel’.

Four generations on, any Palestinian child can tell you all about their great-grandfather’s back garden in Haifa, Yaffa or Majdal. They can tell you about their great-grandmother’s kitchen, the patterns on her plates, and the colours of the embroidery on her pillows. They can tell you about their great-grandparents’ neighbours, the musky smell of the local shop and all the handmade goods it sold. This child has never been to any of those places, of course, but so long as they keep the memory of them alive, then, should they ever get to go back, it would be as if they had never left; they could pick up exactly where their great-grandparents left off. Indeed, wherever Palestinian refugees are in the world, one thing unites them: their undoubted belief in their right to return.

Palestinian refugees are, in this sense, like nomads travelling across a landscape of memory. They carry their village in their hearts, like an internal compass where ‘north’ is always Palestine. They pass this compass down to their children, who sketch in the details on an ever-fading map – the hills and trees and wadis – from their own imagination. Every day spent away from Palestine, in the life of a Palestinian refugee, is one that they believe brings them a day closer to their return.

The Nakba didn’t end in 1948. It continued. With every brick built in this newly declared country; with every wall, watch-tower, gun-turret, or segregated road in the occupied West Bank; with every confiscation of land or demolition of Palestinian property (my own grandmother’s 800-year-old farmhouse in Khan Younis was bulldozed as part of a ‘security’ operation on 26 November, 2000); with every restriction on Palestinians’ ability to travel, and with every new attack on Gaza (what the Israeli Defence Force calls ‘mowing the lawn’); with each of these acts, the Nakba has continued. Israel’s seventy-year programme of systemic ethnic cleansing is one long, ongoing extension of the event that took place in 1948, the origin of which lay in the liberties that Israel took that year when Zionist militias, supported by the British, took more than 78 percent of the Palestinians’ land. Since then, countless Israeli government policies have furthered this gradual ethnic cleansing, building on the more comprehensive land-grab accomplished in 1948, and again in 1967. The ideology that continues to underpin the legalised destruction of houses in Jerusalem and settlement areas in the West Bank, and the slow strangulation of Gazans (through the now twelve-year-old blockade) is the same ideology that first destroyed 531 villages and eleven cities in 1948, an ideology that transforms each Palestinian into a potential target, myself and my two-year-old daughter included.

This ‘ongoing Nakba’ is also continually evolving. We are forever entering new stages of it, whether it’s the isolation of Negev Bedouins into smaller and smaller ghettos, the further separation of the Gaza and West Bank governments, the use of explosive bullets in the ‘shoot to cripple’ response to last year’s March of Return, or the subjection of Palestinians in Jerusalem to increasingly restrictive, discriminatory policies.² These systematic aggressions towards the Palestinian people continue on a daily basis in countless small, localised cases, making it difficult, or simply too unspectacular, to report on. Yet they are all part of a process that began in 1948.

You can see the repercussions of the Nakba throughout the diaspora in the neighbouring Arab countries, where refugees first fled, and beyond (as of 2003, there were 9.6 million descendants of Palestinians living outside Palestine). Its influence is not just geopolitical, but also profoundly cultural. When Palestinians write, they write about their past through their present, knowingly or unknowingly. Their writing is, in part, a search for their lost inheritance, as well as an attempt to keep the memory of that loss from fading. In this sense, the past is everything to a Palestinian writer; it is the only thing that makes their current existence and their identity meaningful. And the Nakba, of course, sits at the heart of this. Whether it is Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s novels, A Cry in a Long Night or In Search of Walid Masoud, or Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun or Returning to Haifa, Palestinian authors have all felt obligated to, as well as inspired by, the Nakba. They have a cultural duty to remember it.

It is perhaps for this reason that the genre of science fiction has never been particularly popular among Palestinian authors; it is a luxury, to which Palestinians haven’t felt they can afford to escape. The cruel present (and the traumatic past) have too firm a grip on Palestinian writers’ imaginations for fanciful ventures into possible futures.

Another reason why science fiction might not have been popular among Palestinian writers is it doesn’t offer an obvious fit to the Palestinian situation. In classic SF, the battle lines are drawn quickly and simply: the moral opposition between a typical SF protagonist and the dystopia or enemy he finds himself confronting is a diametric one. But in Palestinian fiction, the idea of an ‘enemy’ is largely absent. Israelis hardly ever feature, as individuals, and when they do, they are rarely portrayed as out-and-out villains. In Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, for example, we follow the unlikely visit by two Palestinians, Said and Safeyya, to the city they fled twenty years earlier, where they get to know the Israeli woman, Miriam, now occupying the house that was stolen from them. Instead of portraying her as a zealot, a woman self-convinced of her people’s holy right to the land, Kanafani presents us with a sensitive, compassionate individual, someone who, when confronted by it, is ashamed of what her people did to the Palestinians.

The absence of an ‘enemy’ isn’t the only absence in Palestinian fiction. You might even say absence generally is one of the defining features of Palestinian fiction – which is where science fiction might be able to contribute. Absence, and the feelings of isolation and detachment that come with it, are easy to magnify in a context of galloping future technology. In the twelve stories specially commissioned for this project, absence is everywhere. In Saleem Haddad’s ‘Song of the Birds’ and Rawan Yaghi’s ‘Commonplace’, young protagonists are haunted by the voices of their dead siblings. In Anwar Hamed’s ‘The Key’, Israelis are plagued by nightmares about Palestinian ghosts. In Abdalmuti Maqboul’s ‘Personal Hero’, the absence of a grandfather in her mother’s life inspires a scientist to make a game-changing invention. In all cases, the future’s technology, though designed to ease conflict or ameliorate trauma, manages only to exacerbate it.

Perhaps another defining feature of Palestinian fiction is the cultural disconnect felt between different sets of refugees and, within those, different generations of refugees. Once more, science fiction – in this case its love of alternate realities – offers surprising opportunities for exploring this. In Saleem Haddad’s story, the existential boundary between Aya’s world and Ziad’s provides a metaphor for the author’s own dilemma as a Palestinian in exile: do you accept your condition and make a home for yourself where you are? Or do you return, fight, and give up all the comforts of your life abroad? In the story, ‘N’, by Majd Kayyal – a writer whose grandparents were displaced inside what became Israel but never left it – we are presented with a cosmological solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: the creation of two parallel worlds – one for Palestinians, one for Israelis – both occupying the same geographic space. In this future, only Palestinians born after the establishment of the parallel worlds are allowed to travel between them; thus a deep cultural fissure opens up between the eponymous ‘N’ and his father when he leaves to study in the Israeli world. Once again, we see how even the most extraordinary future technology can do little more than mirror or reframe the current, real-world impasse.

But that’s what science fiction does; it uses the future as a blank canvas on which to project concerns that occupy society right now. The real future – the actual future – is unknowable. But for SF writers, the mere idea of ‘things to come’ is licence to re-imagine, re-configure, and re-interrogate the present.

In the wider Arab context, this act of reframing the present may become increasingly important. In Egypt, for example, where under President Sisi writers are regularly jailed for what they have to say about the present, the option of recasting that present – reframing it through fantasy or science fiction – is becoming more and more popular, especially among women writers (Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue uses SF, Eman Abdelrahim’s ‘Two Sisters’ uses supernatural horror). Likewise, for a Palestinian living in the West, writing about the present (or rather, the present back home) risks exposing them to automatic accusations of antisemitism. In these contexts, the act of reframing the present in the form of allegories (and not just future-set ones) may become more of a necessity than a luxury. Indeed, if infringements on free speech get worse, this re-framing may even need to become a conscious act of disguising.

Not that the disguise of science fiction would be that drastic a costume change for Palestinian writers, especially those based in Palestine. Everyday life, for them, is a kind of a dystopia. A West Bank Palestinian need only record their journey to work, or talk back to an IDF soldier at a checkpoint, or forget to carry their ID card,³ or simply look out their car window at the walls, weaponry and barbed wire plastering the landscape, to know what a modern, totalitarian occupation is – something people in the West can only begin to understand through the language of dystopia.

Hopefully, most readers in the West will never know what this kind of occupation feels like first-hand. But feel we must, all of us – even if that has to start with metaphors and allegories – if there is ever to be any hope of peace.

Basma Ghalayini, June 2019

Notes

1. Depending on the sources and the definition, between 10 and 70 massacres occurred during the 1948 War. These included the Deir Yassin massacre (9 April, around 112 killed), the Abu Shusha massacre (13-14 May, between 60 and 70 killed), the Lydda massacre (12 July, approximately 250 killed), the Al-Dawayima massacre (29 October, between 80 and 200 killed, leaving 455 people missing), and, between 30 October and 2 November, three massacres in the villages of Saliha (between 60 and 94 people killed, having taken refuge in a mosque), Safsaf (between 50 and 70 already-bound men killed, and four women publicly raped), and Jish (numbers unknown; a mass grave of two dozen bodies was reported to have been found by Archbishop Elias Chacour when he was 8 years old).

2. During 1967-2014, the Israeli occupation withdrew residence cards from more than 14,000 Palestinians living in Jerusalem. Research conducted by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel has revealed the number of Jerusalem Palestinians living in poverty had reached 79.5% in 2013. According to the same research, Palestinians are allowed to build on only 14% of East Jerusalem, equivalent to 7.8% of the total area of ​​Jerusalem. Since 1967, one third of Palestinian land has been expropriated in East Jerusalem, onto which thousands of new apartments have been built for Jewish settlers.

3. All Palestinians are issued ID cards with unique numbers by the Israeli government that keeps track of their movements, marital status, mothers and father’s names, religious practices, and number of children.

Song of the Birds

Saleem Haddad

In Memory of Mohanned Younis, 1994–2017¹

The unravelling began on the beach. Since Ziad hanged himself the year before, Aya had felt haunted, saddled by the weight of things. The violence of his death only reinforced how unreal everything seemed, like she was trapped in someone else’s memory. But as she stood on the shore under the late afternoon sun that day, the haunting had felt much closer, like it had suddenly crawled under her skin and decided to make a home for itself there.

Behind her on the sand, Aya’s father was dozing under a giant yellow umbrella. Like all grown-ups, her father slept a lot, although no one slept as much as her mother, who was barely awake these days. Whenever life got a bit complicated, it seemed that all these grown-ups could do was just drop off to sleep.

Taking one final look back, she walked into the water, leaving behind all the business of the beach: the loud, cheesy music blasting from the drone speakers in the sky, the smell of shisha and grilled meat, the screaming children and half-naked bodies running up and down the sand. Just another headache-inducing summer day in Gaza, she thought to herself as the waves softly lapped at her shins.

She made her way deeper into the calm blue waters, her feet navigating the occasional piece of coral on the otherwise sandy seabed. The sea was so blue, the sky so clear. When the water reached her stomach, she turned around in slow circles, her fingers gently grazing the surface.

Time passed more slowly by the sea. She learned that in physics class: the hands of a clock placed at sea level run a fraction slower than those of a clock placed on a mountaintop. Sometimes, she thought that she should go up and live in the mountains. That way, she would stop being fourteen more quickly. Time would pass faster and she’d be a real grown-up, do all the things she wanted to do. By the sea, she felt herself a prisoner of both history and time.

But the good thing about time moving slower by the sea was that, if she stayed there, she would remain closer to the last time she saw Ziad. Maybe, if she descended deep enough into the water, she could find a way to grind time to a halt and then push it back, back to the period before he left. Maybe then she would find a way to stop her big brother from dying.

She lay back and closed her eyes, allowing her body to float in the water. She could hear the song of the birds in the sky, the slow, familiar chattering: kereet-kereet … kereet. She dipped her ears below the surface, listening to the rumble of the sea. The sea, warm and inviting, seemed playful that day, licking the sides of her face. But underneath this playfulness she felt something more sinister. She imagined the blue waters swallowing her, dragging her deeper, until her body hit the seabed to join the thousands of bodies that had drowned in these waters throughout history.

She wasn’t sure if she fell asleep, but a sudden putrid smell overcame her. She sensed something cold and slimy wrap itself around her neck. She opened her eyes, took in a gasp of breath. The stench made its way down her throat, and her body shuddered in response. She reached for the thing around her neck and pulled it off: a soggy piece of yellowed toilet paper, disintegrating between her fingers.

She flung the paper behind her and stood up in the water. Her feet found the seabed, which now felt spongy and slick. The water around her was a brownish green sludge. Sewage and excrement bobbed on the surface. A rotting fish carcass floated by her right arm, casually bumping into an empty can of Pepsi. To her left, white foam gathered and bubbled on the surface of the water.

Her body contracted as a giant retch escaped her. A crackle of gunfire erupted on the horizon. She turned to the noise: four or five gunboats bobbed further out in the sea, as if warning her not to advance any further. She turned back to the beach. The beachfront was unrecognisable. The string of hotels and restaurants were replaced by decrepit buildings wedged alongside each other, aggressively jostling for space. Smoke blooms hung in place of the colourful beach umbrellas, the music and chatter drowned out by gunfire. Above her, the sky was a furious grey.

‘Baba,’ she shrieked, wading through the dirty water. She pushed aside bottles, soiled tissue paper, plastic bags and rotting animal carcasses. Her body jerked and convulsed continuously with what was something between a gag and a sob. A sharp stabbing pain tore through her body, like someone twisting a knife deep inside her stomach.

Stumbling onto the shore with seaweed in her hair, she looked like a deep-sea monster emerging from the depths of the waters. The sand was littered with plastic bottles, burning tyres and smouldering debris. The sunbathing bodies had disappeared. Above her jet planes roared, leaving in their wake trails of black smoke like gashes in the sky. A thundering explosion threw her to the ground. Her tongue tasted sand and blood.

‘Baba …’ she whimpered, barely hearing herself. The pain in her belly intensified. Up ahead, three people were lying on the sand. She crawled towards them. The bodies were small, too small to be adults. As she got closer, she realised the bodies were of three children. They looked asleep but there were pools of blood, limbs contorted into impossible positions. A punctured football lay beside the lifeless bodies. There was a loud screaming in her ear, and she realised the screaming was coming from her.

She stood up, looked down at her feet. A trickle of blood ran down her left leg.

‘It was likely the shock of the blood that caused her to faint,’ the doctor said. Aya was vaguely aware the doctor was placing a bandage on her forehead. ‘Sometimes, in young women, their first menstruation can be scary. Has her mother not prepared her for this?’

Aya’s father hesitated. ‘Her mother is … not well.’

The doctor did not press further. ‘These bio-therapeutic bandages should heal the wound by tomorrow.’

‘Habibti Aya,’ her father said, stroking her hair. ‘You’re a woman now.’

‘Do you remember what happened before you fainted?’ the doctor asked.

‘I was thinking of Ziad … I was in the water, thinking of Ziad …’

‘Ziad is my son,’ her father explained. ‘Aya’s brother … he … he passed away last year.’

‘There were these three boys …’ Aya said, suddenly, recalling the bodies on the beach. ‘Little children … their bodies …’

‘Habibti Aya,’ her father interrupted.

The doctor looked at Aya. ‘Three boys?’

Aya’s head moved in a vague resemblance of a nod. ‘There was dirty water … rubbish everywhere and burning tyres and … and the bodies of three boys … next to a football … their arms and legs were twisted and …’

‘That’s enough,’ her father interrupted. He turned to the doctor. ‘It was a hot day yesterday … it must have been the heat …’

The doctor nodded. ‘Trauma can lodge itself deep in the body, emerging when we least expect it …’

‘I understand,’ her father said. ‘It’s