6 In the Line of Fire

I was not yet five years old in June 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon with the intention of putting an end to the PLO’s presence in the country. Even at that young age, I could feel the effects of what was happening thousands of miles away. I heard my parents and older family members talking, sometimes anxiously, sometimes angrily. My emotional radar could sense how close this new violence was to my parents’ hearts.

Lebanon had been embroiled in a civil war since before I was born, a war that would drag on throughout the 1980s. The political situation in Lebanon had long been unstable—a Maronite Christian elite arrayed against a Muslim majority, some Shi’a, and some Sunni, with the Muslim population then augmented by an influx of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. When, at the start of the 1970s, the PLO shifted its base of operations into Lebanon, its presence further destabilized an already precarious balance of power among rival factions, both political and sectarian. In 1975, fighting erupted, with alliances forming and dissolving as the war unfolded.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in early June 1982 was accompanied by a new round of heavy bombardment. The attacks lasted for months, provoking international concern that culminated in US intervention. By late August, the PLO had withdrawn to northern Lebanon, and a new president had been installed—Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the Maronite Christian Kataeb Party, commonly called the Phalanges in English. Israel refused to withdraw its troops, however, and, at the start of September, the government of Menachem Begin rejected a peace plan laid out by US president Ronald Reagan. Instead, and in open defiance of the plan, Israel announced its intention to establish seven new settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

In Edmonton, the rabbi of Beth Sholom synagogue responded to these events by inviting the Arab Muslim community to join him in a discussion of the crisis in Lebanon. The rabbi and his wife were acquainted with Uncle Faisal from multicultural events in the city. As the story is told in our family, Uncle Faisal said little at first, but when the rabbi tried to justify Israel’s settlement policy as a form of self-defence, my uncle had had enough of the discussion. As he stood up, the scrape of his chair echoed through the hall. “What you say is wrong! Many innocent civilians are going to die because of Israeli aggression. This war should be stopped immediately, and the Israeli government should be persecuted for this massacre.”

Massacre! The rabbi’s wife tried to placate my uncle: “Faisal, why are you so angry? You and I share many things. Not eating pork, for instance.”

“You may not eat pork,” he snapped, “but for years you have eaten the flesh off our children’s backs.” Then he stormed out to the sound of furious clapping.

Faisal’s prediction proved brutally accurate. Lebanon’s new president lasted barely three weeks. In mid-September, he and some two dozen others were killed when a bomb exploded at the Kataeb Party headquarters. Although a member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party was swiftly arrested for planting the bomb, both the Phalangists and the Israelis assumed that Palestinian nationalists were responsible.

Retribution was massive and immediate. The Israeli Defense Forces entered West Beirut and surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, providing artillery support while Phalangist militia attacked. The four-hour assault on Sabra and Shatila was more than a massacre. Women were raped and their bodies mutilated; children were butchered and thrown onto garbage piles. It was an atrocity enabled by Israeli troops and committed by right-wing Christians, some of whom carved crosses in the flesh of their victims. The number of victims remains a matter of dispute, but the figure of seven to eight hundred used by Israel’s commission of inquiry likely represents about a quarter of the actual total.

About a year after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, E.T., the extra-terrestrial creature from the Stephen Spielberg film, paid a visit to the Abbottsfield Mall, which was not far from the Beverley neighbourhood where my family lived at the time. I remember going with my mother to the mall and excitedly reaching out to touch E.T.—his wrinkled body, with its skinny neck, huge, piercing blue eyes, and long, thin hand with the glowing fingertip. At the time, I was oblivious to the irony that one of my earliest memories would be of an alien being who struggled to stay alive long enough to return to his homeland.

I also remember a game of tag in our apartment building. I was playing with two brothers, Bashar and Khaldoon, who had come with us to see E.T., and several other children, all of us racing up and down the hallways in the building. Bashar was “it” and he was chasing me and Khaldoon. I was out in front, and at one point I ran through the entrance into another hallway and quickly slammed the door behind me so that Bashar could tag Khaldoon, which he did. I started to laugh, and Khaldoon, who was furious, came after me. He had a plastic straw in his hand, and the last thing I saw was his hand moving towards my face. Suddenly, the world exploded, and I could not see. My eye hurt like nothing had hurt me before. I was screaming and crying, and someone ran into the apartment building to fetch my parents. My father came to see what had happened. It took him only one look at my eye to assess the damage. He grabbed me, threw me in his truck, and headed for the hospital. He was going so fast that he was stopped by the police. My father pointed at me, and the cops then escorted us to the hospital, lights flashing and sirens whooping to clear the way. At any other time, I would have been thrilled.

At the emergency room, the doctor checked my eye, applied some liquid gel, and taped a piece of cotton over it. That night, back home, I snuggled against my mother, terrified that I would lose my eye. “You will be okay, you will be all right,” she kept saying, to comfort me. “There’s nothing to worry about. We are here. You have too much life ahead of you not to see it!” But as I lay there, I thought about Uncle Faisal, who had lost an eye when someone threw a stone at him in his youth back in the Middle East. He had lost his eye because of that incident and wore a glass eye for the rest of his life. I felt sad that no one had rushed him to a hospital to save his eye. Only when I was older did I realize that Uncle Faisal saw more with his one eye than most people see with both.

Later that year, my father took me to a demonstration against the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. I sat on my father’s shoulders as he marched in downtown Edmonton with hundreds of other community members—there I was, a five-year-old child, happily chanting along with everyone else: “Reagan, Begin, you should know, we support the PLO!”

Although I really had no idea what was going on, I was beginning to understand that I Palestinian as well as Canadian. I had a certain kind of blood, but I spoke English, and not with the heavy accent of my father. When a local political candidate who was in the crowd asked me where I was from, I said the first words that entered my mind: “I’m Palestinian!” He smiled, and so did my father. I felt proud of myself. Apparently, I’d said the right thing.

I was downtown with my father again in the spring of 1984, when the Edmonton Oilers won the Stanley Cup for the first time. We hollered and cheered, every bit as elated as the rest of the crowd. We were part of the whole thing—voices celebrating together, white voices, black voices, brown voices. I knew I was Palestinian, but I was too young to understand racism. I had this innocent idea that people’s skin came in different colours, depending on where they were from, that they went to different sorts of churches, and that this was perfectly normal.

That fall, I put on sunglasses and a new Edmonton Oilers cap as I left to catch the bus to Glengarry Elementary, which had an Arabic immersion program. My father sold accessories like these at his store, so we had some around the house, and I figured that wearing shades and an Oilers cap would make me look more like the white Canadian kid I desperately wanted to become. But I never got out the door.

“Mowafa, where do you think you’re going? Come back here, now!” My mother was always terrified that I would assimilate into Canadian culture and lose awareness of my Palestinian heritage—as if we could ever be allowed to forget that!—and she saw every attempt I made to fit in as a deliberate act of rebellion. Her tone when she spoke ripped through me, and I ran. She chased me down the hallway, spanked me, and ripped off the Oilers hat with a strength I’d never seen before. Then she broke the sunglasses into pieces. I walked to school crying, wishing I belonged to some other family.

This was the early 1980s, when the idea of an Islamic awakening, or sahwa, was flourishing throughout the Arab world. My mother became increasingly aware of traditional Muslim values and of building a sense of Islamic community. Among the things she did for the community was to initiate the idea for a pre-school at Al-Rashid Mosque. She was elected president of the pre-school, an achievement she is very proud of even if people do not recognize her accomplishment today. Along with many other women in Edmonton’s Muslim community, my mother began wearing the hijab to identify herself publicly with our religion. To me, it felt like she and others were hammering away to build a walled compound—trying to keep us safe at all costs.

As a kid, I resented this reaffirmation of our Islamic heritage. All it meant was that I would stand out, and not in a way I wanted. At least my father wasn’t as adamant about traditional Muslim values. At the time, he was pretty lax when it came to performing religious duties, and he didn’t see much reason to import Muslim values into everyday life.

Then, in 1985, everything changed. We were at the mosque one evening when my father’s close friend, Uncle Youssef, and several other people suddenly came running in. It was Uncle Youssef who broke the news to my father. Someone had broken into the warehouse and had stolen the container truck with his inventory in it. They had taken what they wanted, then set fire to the truck, destroying the remainder of the stock worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales revenue. At first, my father was speechless, and then he began to weep. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry. He had started out as a worker in a cement factory when he arrived, then worked as a travelling salesman. It had taken him years to build up his own business, and the whole family was proud of his success. When I visited his store filled with giftware and toys, I felt like it belonged to me too.

My father did not have any insurance coverage, so he lost a significant amount of money in the fire, and he had neither the money to pay back investors nor the will to begin again. For him, losing his business was like losing his sense of purpose—it was like being uprooted, yet again. I remember him bursting out in frustration one evening, saying “Screw this—I’m going home.” He handed over what remained of the business to Uncle Adnan and asked him to deal with his creditors while he prepared to move to Jordan. In retrospect, I think my dad needed to escape from what felt like a hostile country to him, a place where he was somehow condemned to failure. He needed the comfort of the familiar.

My mother was not enthusiastic about the idea of moving, but she felt it was her duty to follow her husband and support him in times of trouble. For her, moving to the Middle East meant she had to start over again, which caused my mother a great deal of stress about the quality of health care, education, and finances.

To compound her hesitation, she worried about being isolated. In Edmonton, she had made friends to whom she could talk to about her marital problems, but she did not have anyone like that in Jordan. Her brothers and sisters lived in Sweden, and she was not close to her Jordanian cousins. Living in Jordan would make her more dependent on my father and his family.

As for us children, we were all still too young to understand these complications. All I knew was that we were packing up and moving back to Jordan.

For my father, Jordan may have been “home,” but Amman was foreign to me—a rougher place, noisy and crowded. We had little money left after the loss of the business and the cost of relocation, and we lived in a modest two-bedroom apartment. My siblings and I—all five of us—slept on the floor in one bedroom, while my parents slept in the other room. Even so, my parents found the money to send us to private schools because they valued education. The schools were strict. I remember how, one day, I was hit with a wooden ruler in front of the class for not doing my homework. When my father found out, he was enraged. He came straight to the school and stormed up to the teacher, dragging me with him. “My son is Canadian,” he shouted. “Don’t ever do that to him again!” I felt embarrassed and confused. In Canada, I didn’t fit because I was Palestinian. Now, in Jordan, I didn’t fit because I was Canadian—although apparently this entitled me to privileged treatment. In our final year in Jordan, my father was unable to afford the private school fees, so instead we went to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency school.

Once we were back in Jordan, my father managed to start a new business, Mata’aam wa Halawiyat Househ, the Househ Restaurant and Bakery, in the Jabal al-Nuzha neighbourhood of Amman, not too far from the El-Hussein camp. I could sense that it gave him real satisfaction to be able to provide food for people, even if they were expected to pay for it. He did well for a time, and he insisted on having our apartment furnished in a Canadian way, which was quite unlike the furnishings in the apartments that many of our Middle Eastern neighbours had. The thick carpets and soft leather couches made me feel like I was back in Edmonton. He also installed a hamam Franji, a Western-style toilet, so that we could sit rather than squat. His confidence returned. He was back in Jordan and able to surround his family with comforts that, as a child, he couldn’t even imagine in the refugee camp.

One day, a young boy passed by my father’s restaurant. It was snowing, and he was walking barefoot, wearing only pants and a thin shirt. He made his way along the street, begging for help from those going into and out of the shops. My dad spotted him and shouted into the street, “Where are you who claim to be religious, letting this boy freeze to death?” My father brought him into the restaurant and fed him. He went out bought him two pairs of shoes, pants, shirts, a jacket, and socks. He also gave him some money before he let the boy go. I sometimes wonder what happened to that boy, who was about my age. For my father, faith was something one lived. He taught me to be suspicious of pious words that were not backed up by actions.

Despite its initial success, my father’s restaurant ultimately failed as a result of theft and my father’s poor financial management. Our deteriorating financial situation put a lot of stress on my parents’ relationship. They argued a lot. My father didn’t want to return to Canada for fear of being seen as a failure by his Canadian relatives, but my mother put her foot down. He could stay behind if he wanted, she said, but she was leaving, along with the children. She had no money of her own, so she asked her brother Adnan, who had immigrated to Canada shortly before my parents came over and owed my father some money, to buy the airline tickets for her, even though they were not particularly close. I was too young to understand all of what was going on between my parents, but I knew they were angry and unhappy and that returning to the Middle East had not been such a good thing for them financially, or for their marriage. In the end, they decided that my mother and my siblings would return to Canada, but that I would stay with my dad in Amman while he sold his restaurant and found a buyer for our apartment. Everyone else left, leaving me lonely and forlorn. I missed my mother, and I wanted to be with the rest of the family, not stuck in Amman, with only my father for company.

A few months later, I was sent back to Canada with my uncles, Saleh and Riyadh, while my father waited for the money from the sale of the apartment. Because Uncle Saleh couldn’t speak English, I was told to act as his interpreter. During my time in Jordan, I had forgotten a lot of my English and on the flight home I mistakenly told Uncle Saleh to put salt in his coffee because I couldn’t read the label on the container and guessed the word. An already stressful trip instantly became worse. According to my passport, we landed in New York on September 11, 1988. During our stopover, I struggled to remember how to order a cheeseburger. I was terrified that I would end up with the wrong thing.

When we finally arrived in Edmonton, my mother hugged me for a long time. She was as relieved as I was that we were together again. She and my brothers and sisters were renting a three-bedroom townhouse in northwest Edmonton, in an area called Castle Downs. I’d been back for two months before my father returned and rejoined Uncle Faisal at the giftware business. I don’t remember him talking much about Jordan after that. It was as if the whole thing had never happened, but the fault lines that had appeared in my parents’ relationship in Jordan remained. It did not help that they both avoided any conversation about their situation. Living on her own had also changed my mother, and that compounded the situation even more. We stayed in the Castle Downs house for about a year until my father and was able to purchase a house for us to live in. Even so, it was difficult for my father to re-establish himself financially in Canada.

I had completed Grades 3, 4, and 5 in Jordan, so in the fall of the year we returned to Canada, I entered Grade 6 at Lorelei Elementary School. It was a strange experience because although I quickly regained my understanding of English, I was afraid people would laugh at me if I spoke the language. As a result of my hesitancy to speak English, I was put in an ESL class, but it felt weird to be relearning a language I had spoken fluently before our sojourn to Jordan. However, I was very motivated to relearn English and picked it up again in no time at all.