5 Planting Saplings

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, I met a guy named Mustafa. He spoke with a Lebanese accent, and I asked where he was from. “I am one hundred percent Lebanese,” he replied. He asked me the same question, and I told him I was Palestinian. He looked at me. “I don’t like Palestinians,” he said. “It was because of them that Lebanon was destroyed.”

I had heard this before, from Wesam, Aunt Khadija’s nephew on her side of the family. Their family had moved to Canada from Lebanon in 1993, when I was still in high school. “You’re Palestinian,” he said when we first met. “I hate Palestinians.” His aunt is Uncle Faisal’s wife, I thought. We are basically relatives! Years later, I asked his father, who was from the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, why his son would say that. “This is ignorance,” he replied. “The Lebanese people blame the Palestinians for their civil war.”

Mustafa was not what one would call a model Muslim: he liked to drink beer and flirt. He would tell me stories about late-night parties in Beirut, about his military service, and about his summer job as a tour guide in Lebanon. One day, I ran into him while I was walking to class. He looked at me critically and said, “Mowafa, you’re a little mlazliz.” I was taken aback, but not because he had accused me of being overweight, which is what mlazliz means. I was surprised that he knew the word at all.

I told him that I’d never heard anyone use that word except for a couple of my old-fashioned elderly aunts. “Are you sure you don’t have any Palestinian blood in you?” I joked.

He was not amused. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. Then he spun around and walked away.

A few months later, I found out from Uncle Yazan Haymour that Mustafa’s father was Palestinian. His mother was Lebanese, but he had grown up in Jordan—in Amman, in fact. During the summers, he visited his grandparents in Lebanon, where he faced hostility because his father was Palestinian, and that was probably when he had learned to mask his Palestinian roots by adopting a Lebanese accent.

It seemed sad that even in Canada he felt compelled to deny his own heritage. Again, the shame, the stigma attached to being Palestinian, coupled with the fear of backlash.

In Muslim culture, we are taught that even though another life awaits us after we die, we must never stop doing what is right in this one. In Hadith No. 12491, The Prophet Muḥammad, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “If the Resurrection were established upon one of you while he has in his hand a sapling, then let him plant it.” We plant one sapling, and then another, and another, regardless of where we are.

Uncle Faisal was the first of our family to leave the Middle East. He ended up in Edmonton in 1964—one of few Palestinians in the city at the time. He was lucky enough to find lodging with a pious Muslim from Lebanon, Mr. Tarrabain, and his family, who provided him with a home away from home. All the same, Uncle Faisal would get very emotional every time he spoke with his family over the crackling telephone wires. Back in Jordan, Grandma Nima would burst into tears whenever she heard “Ba’eed Anak” (“Far from You”) sung so powerfully by the famed Egyptian contralto, Umm Kulthum.

It was not long before Faisal began to wish for a family of his own, and one day he asked Mrs. Tarrabain if she knew of a good Muslim woman who might be interested in marrying him. Indeed she did. She had a cousin, Khadija, who lived in Saadnayel, a town in the fertile Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. Mrs. Tarrabain showed Uncle Faisal a picture of her cousin, and my uncle agreed to marry her. Introductions ensued by mail, and soon marriage followed. As Uncle Faisal was unable to leave Canada at that time, he sent a family member over to ask for her hand formally and to participate in the required rituals on his behalf. While the ceremonies unfolded in Lebanon, back in Edmonton, my now newly married Uncle Faisal continued working as a night janitor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital.

In 1967, the first Canadian-born Househ child came into the world—my oldest cousin, Hala. The year also saw the birth of the Canadian Arab Federation, formed to represent the interests of the country’s growing Arab Canadian communities. And, of course, this was the year of Canada’s centennial celebration, complete with Expo ’67, a world fair with pavilions for many countries and lands, including Kuwait and the United Arab Republic, as Egypt was known at the time. At the end of May, however, Kuwait closed its pavilion. The mood in the Middle East was not festive.

Palestinians also remember 1967, but not as a year of celebration. It is impossible to explain succinctly what transpired in 1967, but the end result was disastrous for Palestine. In 1950, Jordan had taken control of the area known as Transjordan, or the West Bank—land that the UN General Assembly had earmarked for an independent Arab State in Resolution 181 on 22 November 1947. Tension had been growing since the November 1966, when Israeli troops had marched into the West Bank and attacked the Palestinian village of As Samu’ in retaliation for the death of three Israeli police who had been killed when a border patrol vehicle drove over a land mine reportedly planted by Fatah. More than a hundred homes in the village were destroyed, along with a school and a medical clinic. Nearly twenty people died in the attack, including three civilians.

Historically, the Sinai Peninsula had been part of Egyptian territory since antiquity; Gaza requires a history of its own. Originally built as an Egyptian fortress in Canaanite territory during the time of the pharaohs, it had a history of being occupied by invading forces. After the First World War, the Gaza Strip—Gaza City and the surrounding land—became part of the British Mandated Territory. In 1948, Egypt took over de facto governance of the Gaza Strip until 1967. In May 1967, Egypt—reacting to what it believed was Israeli mobilization along the Syrian border, across from the Golan Heights—closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, thereby barring Israeli access to the Red Sea via the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel was swift to respond to Nasser’s action. On 5 June, Israeli planes bombed Egyptian airfields, essentially wiping out the Egyptian air force, while ground forces simultaneously launched attacks in the Sinai and the Gaza Strip. After Syria and Jordan entered the fray in support of Egypt, Israel invaded Syria’s Golan Heights, and seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The consequences for Palestine were devastating. When the war ended on 10 June 1967, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and large swathes of the West Bank were under Israeli control, and roughly a million Palestinians now lived in Occupied Territory.

In the aftermath of the war, entire Palestinian villages in the West Bank were razed, and two refugee camps in the vicinity of Jericho were “emptied” by forcing the refugees out of their places of refuge. By the end of the year, some three hundred thousand Palestinians had fled the territories taken by Israel—Palestinians were on the move yet again, their worldly possessions wrapped up in bundles and carried on their heads. Throats parched, they stumbled wearily through the desert, taking shelter in caves where they risked being bitten by snakes and scorpions. From there, they watched the night skies light up with falling bombs. Uprooted families—many for the second time—huddled together in tents as they faced an unknown future, their dreams broken by the rumbling of explosions.

The invasion occurred less than twenty years after Al-Nakba, but this new disaster was not a final defeat. This second exodus came to be called Al-Naksa—the Setback. By December 1967, and beyond, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were fleeing from the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan and Egypt, or from the Golan Heights further into Syria. While Palestinians in the now-occupied territories fled their homes, Uncle Faisal and his wife, Khadija, set up their home in Edmonton, Alberta. A world away, my father and his family continued their struggle to survive in an increasingly crowded refugee camp in Amman. Occasionally, news filtered through about Faisal in Canada, a place many of members of my family, including my father, would try to make their new home. So they learned that after working as a janitor, Uncle Faisal had started his own giftware business, and was working as a travelling salesman selling oil paintings and other gift items. He was in a better position financially, but it meant that he was away from Edmonton and his growing family for weeks at a time.

Uncle Faisal didn’t just take care of his family in Canada, but like a good son and observant Muslim, he continued to send money to his family who had been displaced by the Nakba and who needed help. Palestinian exiles, like members of many other diasporic communities, do not forget their relatives living in less fortunate circumstances.

Despite the pressures of his job, Uncle Faisal was active in Edmonton’s Muslim community in the 1970s and 1980s, by which time the faith community had grown to about sixteen thousand. Uncle Faisal was also a Muslim who said what he meant, often not troubling to soften his words. It had been rough in the refugee camps. “Nothing could be more precarious than that,” he told me. “Maybe one day you will know it, the kind of place I grew up in.”

My father had said similar things over the years, referring to the camp as a kind of cancer on the structure of life that had made him what he was. Often, it explained things he saw as flaws or shortcomings in himself.

While my uncle settled into his new life in Canada, my grandfather and his family in Amman watched as history repeated itself, not realizing what history was still to come. They thought about Uncle Faisal, now living far away, married and a father, and how he seemed to be finding some financial stability. The loss of the West Bank had dealt a crippling blow to the Jordanian economy, and the city of Amman was increasingly crowded, not only with yet more refugees, but with Palestinian freedom fighters who had shifted their operations from the West Bank into Jordan. They were soon joined by fedayeen from Syria and Lebanon, and Jordan became the PLO’s new home.

Groups within the PLO shared a purpose—the liberation of Palestine from Israeli control and the restoration of Palestinian self-rule. Little unity existed, however, as far as tactics went. While many fedayeen were affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, many belonged to other more radical groups—the largest and most influential of which was the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded in 1967 by George Habash, who came from my grandfather’s village of Lydda. During the late 1960s, the fedayeen became an increasingly bold presence in Jordan, weakening King Hussein’s control over the country. Violent clashes were occurring between PLO groups and the Jordanian Army, and yet Hussein was reluctant to deal too harshly with the fedayeen, since they enjoyed the support of much of the Arab world.

By the summer of 1970, the PFLP was openly calling for the overthrow of King Hussein, as were several other groups. In June, violence erupted at Zarqa, a town not far northeast of Amman, and shortly after that fedayeen attacked the Jordanian intelligence headquarters in Amman. As King Hussein was on his way to the scene, fedayeen opened fire on his motorcade in an assassination attempt that killed one of his guards. Almost immediately, several Army units responded by shelling both El-Hussein and Al-Wehdat, the other Palestinian refugee camp in Amman.

My father was working in Kuwait at the time, so he did not experience the chaos that engulfed the refugee camp first-hand, as my grandfather and the rest of the family did. The battle went on for three days and left some three hundred people dead. Despite negotiations between Arafat and Hussein, no resolution was in sight. At the start of September, fighting broke out in Amman after another attempt was made on Hussein’s life. But it was the PFLP’s airplane hijackings about a week later—ironically intended to draw fiery attention to the Palestinian cause—that sealed the fate of the PLO in Jordan. In mid-September, the Jordanian Army began shelling the two refugee camps again, and this time the battle lasted for ten days. Even after a ceasefire agreement was signed, the PFLP and another radical group, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, refused to give up the fight, and as a result the fedayeen were driven out of Jordan by the following summer—mostly into Lebanon, which now replaced Jordan as the PLO’s new home.

My uncles and aunts fled to Aunt Khadija’s hometown of Saadnayel in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley with their families and my grandmother. My father and one of my aunts stayed behind in Jordan to protect the new house he had recently built in Jabal al-Nuzha from possible looters. He and my aunt describe the civil war of 1970 and 1971 as probably the most terrifying period of their lives. Once again, my family was dispersed and had to struggle to make a new home in a foreign land.

After the Al-Naksa, our family dispersed even further than before. Uncle Faisal came to Canada, Uncle Muhammad found work in Iraq, and my father worked in Kuwait. Yet no matter how busy their lives got, or how far they spread across the globe, they kept in touch. As things settled, the family came to a joint decision about their future. For the sake of the whole family, they decided, Said should come to Canada, along with his brother Muhammad, and that Faisal should sponsor them. Having decided on a course of action, Said and Muhammad came to Canada. Once in Canada, my father soon discovered that his credentials as a pharmacy assistant were worthless. Despite his hard-earned diploma and his years of experience, he ended up working in a cement factory. He did not work there for long before he joined Uncle Faisal in his giftware business.

By the time Said was able to return to Jordan for a visit, his father had died. Said had been asked to deliver some gifts to members of his extended family, who lived in Syria. Since there were no flights between Amman and Syria, Said took a taxi to Damascus. When he arrived at their door, Hanan opened it. “It was,” he told me, “love at first sight.”

Hanan’s parents promised Said that they would speak to her about marriage, and he was told to return in a few days for an answer. My father came back bearing many gifts of his own, and he was elated when Hanan’s father said, “Ask your family to come and request our daughter’s hand.” This meant that she had agreed, even though there were more formalities to come.

My eldest uncle, Darwish, and several other members of the family then travelled to Syria to ask for my mother’s hand in marriage. As per custom, there was the initial meeting to confirm the agreement by sharing coffee and sweets and making arrangements for the marriage. That was followed a few months later by a small wedding ceremony at his Uncle Issa’s home in Jordan, followed by an Egyptian honeymoon. My parents had originally planned to have a big wedding, but shortly after my mother’s family arrived in Jordan, they heard that her brother Majid had been killed in an accident in Syria, which meant that her parents had to return home to make arrangements for the funeral. So instead, the close family gathered at Uncle Issa’s house to witness the ceremony. There was no music and no food. Afterwards, they took some pictures and went home.

Hanan stayed with her family in Syria while my father returned to Canada to deal with the required paperwork to get my mother to join him. Back in Edmonton, he was so excited and proud that he kept shoving a photograph of his new bride in people’s faces, kissing it every few minutes.

After Hanan arrived in Canada in 1975, my parents lived for a year with Uncle Faisal’s family. From the beginning, my family members attended Edmonton’s Al-Rashid Mosque—the first mosque in Canada, which opened its doors in December 1938. It seems strangely appropriate that these displaced souls would find their spiritual home in a mosque that also has its own history of displacement. The original mosque was built by a Ukrainian Canadian contractor and bore a curious resemblance to an Eastern Orthodox church. It was located right next to Victoria High School, but when the school needed to expand in 1946, the mosque was moved several blocks north to a site near the Royal Alexandra Hospital. By the start of the 1980s, the building had become too small for the city’s growing Muslim community, so a new Al-Rashid Mosque was constructed further to the northwest. The old building sat vacant for nearly a decade, until plans for the hospital’s expansion threatened it with demolition. Thanks to the efforts of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, it was saved from destruction, and funds were raised to move the historic building to Fort Edmonton Park.

When I first heard the story of how the mosque was moved, I imagined the mosque being lifted onto a flatbed truck and rolled away by the light of the moon to its new home in the Edmonton river valley. And there the two mosques are today: one in the north end of the city, and one in the river valley beside other historic structures. Displaced and residing in two places at once, much like Palestinians themselves.