Gate of the Sun (28 page)

Of course you remember the Black September operation and the kidnapping of Israel's Olympic athletes in Munich. I know what you think about that kind of operation, and I know you were one of the few who dared take a stand against the hijacking of airplanes, the operations abroad, and the killing of civilians. People said your position sprang from your fears for your wife and children in Galilee, but you said no, and you were right. I'm completely convinced of your position now, even though at the time I believed you only wanted to protect your family. As you used to say, “If you want to win a war, you don't go in for acrobatics, and if you don't respect the lives of others, you don't have the right to defend your own.”

Saleh al-Jashi claimed you didn't take part in the battle of Kherbet-Jeddin. We didn't believe him, though. That old hunchbacked man with a
large nose sat in his house receiving condolences and congratulations on his son's martyrdom, and seized the occasion to recount his own glories and those of the bands that came from al-Kweikat and Sha'ab and Ain al-Zaitoun to support the fighters of al-Kabri. And when someone asked about you, he raised his finger and said, no, he didn't remember you being with them. Puffing out his chest, he told the story of the ambush: “The people of al-Kabri won't forget the victory they tasted at Kherbet-Jeddin! If we'd fought throughout Palestine the way we did at al-Kabri, we wouldn't have lost the country!”

“But we're fighting now,” a voice said. A youth, one of Husam's comrades.

“We'll see, my son. We'll see what you can do.” Then Saleh al-Jashi started telling us about the Israeli convoy that fell into the ambush.

I want to ask you, was the fall of Ain al-Zaitoun, al-Kabri, and al-Birwa revenge for Kherbet-Jeddin?

Umm Hassan said she went past there on her way to al-Kweikat and amid the ruins saw a burned-out bus and the remains of an armored car; the Israelis had set up a monument to their dead.

“What about us – what will we put up there?” I asked her.

“What will we put up?” she asked in surprise.

“After the liberation, I mean,” I said.

She looked at me with half-closed eyes as though she didn't understand what I was getting at. Then she laughed.

Umm Hassan's right. We'll never put up anything – we can't even manage a decent burial ground, let alone a monument. For the fifteen hundred individuals who fell at Sabra and Shatila, we built nothing. The mass grave has turned into a field where children play soccer. Some even say that the whole of Shatila will be razed soon.

Monuments aren't important, only the living count. But why did Abu Husam claim you didn't take part in the battle, and why, instead of weeping for his son, did he sit like a puffed-up cockerel boasting of his heroic deeds?

Tell me what really happened.

I don't want to listen to that cripple boasting that a hand grenade went off in his pocket and didn't kill him. I didn't believe the story, but you confirmed it, laughing, “The poor man was frightened for his manhood. Blood was spurting out of him, and he put his hand between his thighs, and when he was sure the injury was elsewhere he started jumping for joy before fainting from the pain. We were a band of fighters on our way to al-Birwa. Saleh al-Jashi was hanging out of the window of the bus when the grenade went off in his pocket and he fell. We took him back to al-Kabri and continued on to al-Birwa. Then he met up with us again at the Sha'ab garrison after he'd become crippled.”

That was in May of '48.

Al-Kabri had been in turmoil for two months. At the beginning of February, a band of Israelis attacked the village and tried to blow up the house of Fares Sarhan, a member of the Arab Higher Committee. The attack failed, and the band that made it to Sarhan's house would've been wiped out if they hadn't withdrawn under a hail of bullets.

On the same day, the commander of al-Kabri's militia, Ibrahim Ya‘qub, saw a Jewish armored car leave Jeddin at the head of a convoy of vehicles in the direction of the main road that leads to Safad via Nahariyyeh. He rushed to Alloush, commander of the Arab Liberation Army in the area, to ask him for help, but Alloush refused because he hadn't received any orders.

Ibrahim gathered the fighters and divided them in two, the first group in the area of al-Rayyis, two kilometers southwest of al-Kabri, and a group at the cemetery.

The first group blocked the road with rocks and stones while the second set up an ambush in the cemetery under the command of Saleh al-Jashi.

The Israeli convoy stopped where the road was blocked but didn't retreat. The armored car pulled back and the bulldozer moved forward, followed by three armored cars, two trucks, and a bus.

Then all hell broke loose.

The battle began at noon. After the bulldozer succeeded in clearing a way, Saleh threw a hand grenade, but it didn't explode. He threw another,
and it made a terrible noise and produced a lot of dust, but the convoy continued to advance. Suddenly one of the armored cars turned and burst into flame. How did it catch fire? No one knows. Did a third grenade hit it or did it collide with the pile of rocks at the crossroads and catch fire?

Saleh didn't know.

But he does know that the convoy halted in its tracks and the firing started. It was a bloodbath. The firing went on until dawn.

Sitting in his house among the mourners, Saleh described what happened:

“They began getting out of the armored cars and tried to spread out among the olive trees while we fired at them with our rifles. We had English rifles, some hand grenades, and one Sten gun. Not one of them got away. They couldn't fight, and they didn't raise a white flag. We fired and received occasional fire from the windows of the bus or from the perimeter of the ambush. The firing didn't stop until we'd killed every last one of them.

“In the morning, the British came to remove the bodies. I stayed up the whole night in the cemetery with a few young men from al-Birwa and Sha'ab who'd come to lend their support. The rest gathered the arms of the Israelis and went home to sleep. General Ismail Safwat, chief of staff of the Arab Liberation Army, came, was photographed in front of the destroyed Israeli vehicles, before confiscating our stash of arms, from which he gave us back eleven rifles and seven boxes of ammunition.

“What kind of army was that? And what kind of liberation?”

Didn't anyone ask him what they did after the battle?

Didn't they expect a counterattack? Did they prepare for one?

But tell me, dear friend, what did Khalil Kallas do, commander of the group of thirty ALA men stationed near Fares Sarhan's house in al-Kabri?

“
Withdrew
,” you'll say.

“When?” I'll ask.

“Three days before the village fell.”

“Why?”

“Because he knew.”

“And you? You all didn't know?”

Abu Husam said they were taken by surprise by the attack on al-Kabri.

However, Fawziyyeh, the widow of Mohammed Ahmad Hassan and wife of Ali Kamel, knew, because she left the village the day that the ALA men left.

Fawziyyeh, whose husband died in the battle of Jeddin, didn't remarry for twenty years, and Ali Kamel, her second husband, discovered that she was a virgin.

Her first husband died in the battle of Jeddin without taking part in it. He was a cameleer, transporting goods among the villages. On that day in March 1948, he was returning from Kafar Yasif to al-Kabri when he passed by the Israeli ambush pinned under the gunfire of the village militia. He was hit and died. The man fell, but the camel continued on its way to the village, ambling along in its own blood, until it reached its owner's house, where it collapsed.

Fawziyyeh said the camel was hit in the hump and belly, and the militia men ate it to celebrate their victory. “No one paid any attention to my tragedy. I was seventeen years old and hadn't been married more than a month. My husband died, and they slaughtered the camel and ate it. They invited me to eat with them. I won't deny that I joined them, but I could taste death, and from that day I haven't eaten meat, not even on feast days or holidays. When I see meat, I see the body of Mohammed Ahmad Hassan and feel faint. I didn't touch meat again until I married Ali Kamel twenty years later. Poor thing, he couldn't believe his eyes when he saw that I was a virgin. He was a widower, like me. When he took me, and he saw the blood, he went crazy – he kissed me and laughed and danced. I was frightened, I swear I was frightened. I mean, how could it be? It was as if I'd never been married and blood had never spotted the sheets in al-Kabri. He wanted to say a few things about Mohammed Ahmad Hassan, but no, I assure you, Mohammed was a real man, it was just that I had turned back into a virgin. My virginity came back when I saw them eating the camel and wiping the grease from their hands.

“Ali Kamel, poor Ali, couldn't make sense of it. He went to the doctor and came back reassured. The doctor told him it meant I hadn't had sex since the death of my first husband. But how could I have? I was living in a hovel with my father in Shatila, and he watched me like a hawk. He even stopped me from working in the embroidery workshop – he said he'd rather die of hunger than see his daughter go out to work. Then this widower with no teeth comes along and tells everyone he's taken my maidenhood! But it's not true; Mohammed was the one. Ali was like glue – he'd stick to my body and lick me like a piece of chocolate. Umm Hassan laughed at him when he told her he wanted a child. She explained that I wasn't a virgin and that his seed was weak, but he didn't get it. A man over sixty and a woman in her forties, and he wants children!”

Fawziyyeh was sitting apart from the others at the wake, and al-Kabri rose up before everyone's eyes. Abu Husam spoke of his exploits while the village faded like an old photo.

“But we left the dead behind, and that was shameful,” said an elderly man as he got up to leave.

Umm Sa'ad Radi wasn't at the wake to tell her story.

Amina Mohammed Mousa – Umm Sa'ad Radi – died a month before Husam was martyred. If she'd been there, she'd have told you; she would have stopped the flood of nostalgia and memories.

If Umm Sa'ad Radi had been there she'd have said: “My husband and I left al-Kabri the day before it fell. We were on the Kabri-Tarshiha road and they slaughtered us. I wasn't able to dig a grave for my husband. I see him in my dreams, stretched out in the ground. He sits up and tries to speak, but he has no voice.

“We were on the road when darkness fell. My husband decided we should spend the night in the fields, and we slept under an olive tree. At dawn, as my husband was getting ready to say his prayers, our friend, Raja, passed and urged us to flee. He said the Jews were getting very close. My husband finished his prayers, and we kept going toward Tarshiha, where we ran into them. They were approaching al-Kabri from the north and the south. We were stopped, searched, and taken in an armored car to our village.

“They left us in the square; I could see the troops dancing and singing and eating. A Jewish officer came over to us, chewing on bread wrapped in brown paper and started asking us questions. He pointed his rifle at my husband's neck and asked in good Arabic, ‘You're from al-Kabri?'

“‘No,' I answered. ‘We're from al-Sheikh Dawoud.'

“‘I'm not asking you, I'm asking him,' he said.

“‘We're from al-Sheikh Dawoud,' my husband repeated, his voice shaking.

“At that instant, a man with a sackcloth bag over his head came over. I recognized him – it was Ali Abd al-Aziz. The bag had two holes for his eyes, and one for his lips. Ali nodded; he was breathing through his mouth, the bag was stuck to his nose, and he was puffing as though he were about to choke. I knew him from his nose, from the way the bag clung to his face.

“The bastard nodded his head, and I recognized him.

“‘You're from al-Kabri,' said the officer after the man with the bag over his head had confirmed it for him.

“They took my husband, along with Ibrahim Dabaja, Hussein al-Khubeizeh, Osman As'ad Abdallah, and Khalil al-Timlawi, and left the women in the square. We stood motionless while they danced and sang and ate around us. Then the officer came over and said he would have liked to bring my husband back to me except that he'd been killed. He also told me not to cry. Then he showed me a picture of Fares Sarhan and asked if I knew him.

“‘Tell Fares we'll occupy all of Palestine and catch up with him in Lebanon.'

“I burst into tears, but they weren't real tears. Real tears found me on the second day when I saw my husband's body and tried to carry it to the cemetery and couldn't. That's when I cried, the tears gushing even from my mouth.

“The officer raised his rifle and ordered us to leave the square. We slept in the fields, and in the morning Umm Hassan and I returned to al-Kabri and saw the chickens in the streets. I don't know who'd let them out. Their feathers were ruffled and they were making strange noises. Umm Hassan
tried to round them up. I don't know what we were thinking of, but we started rounding up the chickens. Then I got scared. Scared of the chickens. They seemed wild and were making such strange noises. I fled to the spring. I was thirsty, so I left Umm Hassan rounding up the chickens and fled. On the way I found Umm Mustafa. She hugged me and started sobbing: ‘Go gather up your husband, he's dead.' She took me by the hand and we ran to the square.