3 A Circle of Tears

When I was in my early twenties, I travelled to Palestine to seek my own roots under the Nakba tree. As I sought to understand the trail of sorrow my grandparents walked, I found my journal filling up with stories about family ties. Together, the Palestinian territories cover an area only slightly larger than Prince Edward Island. Wherever you go, if you ask about a name, you’re likely to find someone who will lead you to the person or family you are looking for. In this way, I met many people who were related to either my father or my mother. I felt a sense of belonging that had always eluded me in Canada, a home in which I often felt like an unwelcome guest.

My time in Palestine coincided with the start of the Second Intifada in September 2000. I spent a week in Hebron, visiting my cousin Reham and her husband, Youssef. Situated about thirty kilometres south of Jerusalem, Hebron lies in the occupied West Bank and has long been a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several years before I arrived, the city had been divided into two zones, with the Israeli Army in control of about a fifth of the territory and the rest administered by the Palestinian Authority (PA). Virtually the entire population is Palestinian—more than 200,000 people, roughly 30,000 of whom live in the Israeli zone. The Jewish settlers, who number well under a thousand, live under military guard, surrounded by Palestinians.

While I was in Hebron, I ended up serving as a translator for a Canadian photographer and an Irish journalist. In the old quarter of the city, with its crumbling city walls, we talked to one of the many families who had been living under Israeli curfew since Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Haram esh-Sharif, or Temple Mount as it is known in English. They face food shortages, inadequate access to health services, and no garbage removal. Schools were closed, and some had been taken over by the Israeli Defense Forces for use as military bases. We asked a young man named Ashraf how he was coping under these conditions.

“I’m married and I have a little boy,” he said. “I can’t work, and I can’t buy medicine for my child. I feel helpless because I must support two families. But we are getting used to these conditions; this is not the first time that this has happened. It happened during the First Intifada, too, but this time the rules are much stricter—the soldiers and the settlers are even more violent.”

Ashraf was my age, twenty-two. “A year and a half ago,” he told us, “I was imprisoned for three months, and no one knew where I was. My family found out where I was when they were contacted to come and fetch me after my release. The soldiers and settlers beat, tortured, and humiliated me. Before they took me to prison, they blindfolded me, tied me up, and placed me in the middle of a crowd of Israeli settlers. I was tied down, and people who walked by me would curse at me and call me a ‘Dirty Arab,’ then either kick me, slap me, or spit at me. They would feed me food that was repulsive. Sometimes I would watch the settlers as they fed their dogs in pretty glass plates with good food. They played with the dog and nurtured it as I sat there watching. I would at times wish I were that dog. But what can we do? We have adapted to this way of life.”

Ashraf’s mother was less reconciled to their situation. “He is my only son,” she said. “In any other country, the only son is treated well because he is the sole provider for the family. But not here. Not here. We have no money; our food supplies are dwindling. There are some good people who sometimes put meat and vegetables in front of the house. But we can’t live like this forever!”

She and her extended family—fifteen people in all—were huddled together in a cramped living space. They lived in a neighbourhood that was often by Israeli forces, and curfews were frequently at all hours of the day. Anyone found on the street after one o’clock in the afternoon, she said, would be beaten or arrested, but she and other family members sometimes took the risk to get medicine or milk for the children.

“I never send my son out for errands,” Ashraf’s mother told us. “I go instead because I know that if the soldiers catch my son, they will do horrible things to him. My son, my only son, Ashraf, has been arrested many times, and he has been beaten, imprisoned, and humiliated by both the settlers and the soldiers. I am a widow; he’s my only son. If anything happens to him, the family will have no other means to survive.”

Her voice rose and cracked before she burst into tears. I under-stood the words, but I groped for some way to translate what she was saying. This could have been my family, I kept thinking. This woman could have been my mother, and I the son who has been abused and thrown into prison. Or she could be Grandma Nima, and the young man my father. Everyone was a captive here. Unable to speak evenly, I caught my breath and glanced at the journalist and photographer. “I have asthma,” I explained. I do have asthma, but that wasn’t the problem in this moment.

The stifling atmosphere broke slightly when Ashraf took us for a tour on the roof. “You see how we place cement brick barriers around the water tanks to protect them from bullets,” Ashraf pointed out. “Improvising, even with the basics.” I could see the bullet holes in the cement blocks. My mind flashed to my father’s childhood, when his family needed water, and I thought of him later in life, when he worked in a cement factory and then in sales. Standing there on that rooftop listening to Ashraf and his mother speak, the past, the present, and imagined futures all blurred together.

Only weeks before I visited Hebron in October 2000, Muhammad al-Durrah died in the Gaza Strip. He was twelve years old. Caught in the middle of heavy crossfire, he and his father, Jamal, were filmed by a Palestinian cameraman as they crouched behind a concrete barrel set against a concrete wall, both of them clad in jeans and scuffed-up sneakers. In the clip, Jamal reaches out an arm, trying to shield his son, who is sobbing, terror-stricken. Jamal waves frantically. There is a swirl of dust, and Muhammad lies dead across his father’s legs.

This brief clip became highly controversial. Was Muhammad really dead? skeptics asked. And, if he was, then how do we know it was Israeli soldiers who shot him? Was the entire sequence staged? Detailed investigations and ballistics reports followed, with Israelis claiming that it was all a plot to defame the country, and Palestinians reacting with outrage to such allegations. In an atmosphere of bitter polarization, finding the “truth” acquires an exaggerated meaning. It was as if the legitimacy of the entire Palestinian struggle depended on the authenticity of this one image.

There are countless other images, two-dimensional snaps of this reality that is three generations deep. Fathers and mothers cradling their children, victims of rocket attacks on Gaza, whether in 2000, or 2006, 2014, or 2021. Kids pierced and burned by shrapnel, rushed into overburdened hospitals. Family portraits of smiling faces covered in concrete dust in the rubble of living rooms. While I was in Palestine, I would often—too often—hear parents cry on the news, “What did my child do to die like this? What was his mistake? She was eleven months old … He was five years old … She was twelve years old … What did they do?”

Those voices have echoed in my head from the day I first heard them. In December 2013, when my family gathered in Calgary, I was about to become the father to my third child. After our dinner table conversation, my father had agreed to let me record his stories—for me, and for his children’s children. I held my mobile phone recording device close to preserve my father’s voice, hoping somehow to liberate him from the exhaustion weighing on his spirit. I did not know then that, only eight months later—right in the middle of the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People—Gaza would experience a summer of almost inconceivable destruction that would kill more than 2,250 members of my extended family, including 550 children. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict, some 11,230 people were wounded, 30 percent of them children; eighteen thousand homes were obliterated. Blood would be shed at checkpoints, and our people would die beneath concrete chunks of their broken homes. The violence would split our hearts across hemispheres.

Living in exile, we try to find some way to heal from the sorrows of displacement. We do our best to come to come to terms with our situation, to cross beyond the physical and mental checkpoints that prevent us from accessing our new home and a new identity fully, or from returning to our ancestral homes. But it is not easy to heal when the wounds are constantly reopened.