Authors: Elias Khoury
Karim left the training camp and those who died at Bhamdoun died, but the Palestinian girl’s shining eyes continued to keep him company, though he had no idea what to do with the mysterious emotion he felt.
At the Café Jandoul he told her he loved her. Jamal’s look, however, remained filled with white spaces. She sipped a little from her coffee cup and asked him if he was ready to die for the woman he loved.
“If I love her, I have to live for her sake.”
She smiled, lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke into the air before asking him again.
“That’s not what I meant. I was asking you if you’d be ready to die with her.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
The girl seemed to hesitate, as though she wanted to say something, but she didn’t say it.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“But I feel a strange attachment to you,” he said.
“You’ll forget soon enough,” she said.
“Why should I have to forget when we haven’t yet begun?” he said.
“You know, doctor, I think all intellectuals are cowards. A large intelligence turns one into a coward. I listened to your comments during the course on what you called the naïveté of the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung and especially his theory of paradox and you may be right, but without naïveté
we wouldn’t be able to fight. Without a simple, clear idea that can take over your heart like a religious idea, you can’t do battle.”
“But we’re secularists and Marxists and have to liberate ourselves from religion.”
“True, but there’s no other solution,” she said.
“If we turn into a religion, we’ll lose everything,” he said.
“You know you’re more intelligent than I am and are going to win the argument but that’s not the point. The point has something to do with cowardice and courage and not being afraid of death.”
“Is there anyone who isn’t afraid of death?”
“Me,” she said, and prepared to get up.
He asked her if he’d see her again and she said, “That would be nice.” He said they could make “that would be nice” into a reality now. “I could see you in two days. Let’s go out and have dinner together.”
“That would be nice,” she said, and left.
Karim only understood the meaning of her hints two days later, when pictures of Jamal filled the front pages of the Beirut newspapers. She was lying on the ground on the coast road between Haifa and Tel Aviv. An Israeli officer was crouched over her bullet-riddled body, as though searching the corpse.
Had she wanted him to go with her to their death? Had she meant by her hints at the Café Jandoul to invite him to join her group, which had made its way by stealth in rubber boats to the beach at Haifa and hijacked two Israeli buses before clashing with the Israeli army and dying?
Was suicide the other name of love? Or was it that Jamal, on the eve of her decision to lead a suicide operation inside Israel, was unable to love? What it came down to was that her heart had needed words, for at the moment of death, just as the lips feel a thirst for water, the heart thirsts for words.
Jamal Salim Jazayri was born on January 12, 1958, in Beirut. She was the eldest daughter of a Palestinian family from Jaffa. Her father, Salim Jamal Jazayri, had left Jaffa on foot the day the city fell, at which time he was twenty. His entire family had already left the city in boats but the young man, who had fought in the ranks of the Jihad Muqaddas Brigades, had refused to go with them and fought on in the city until the end. The city’s fall and the invasion of its quarters by men from the Haganah forced him to bury his rifle in the garden of the house and flee on foot to Lebanon. In Lebanon he never met up with the other members of his family, whom the winds of fate had tossed to Damascus, where they took up residence in Yarmouk Camp. He made it to Beirut, where he refused to live in one of the camps set up for Palestinian refugees. Instead, he rented a room in the Mazraa district and worked as a mechanic in the garage of Hajj Feisal Mughrabi before becoming the owner of his own garage and turning himself into the best car mechanic on the Mazraa Corniche. In 1957 he married Dalal el-Batal, a Palestinian from the village of Tiret Haifa, eighteen years of age, with whom he had four children, Jamal being the oldest; and though he had three boys – Salim, Amin, and Nasir – he continued to be known for the rest of his life as Abu Jamal.
At the Baissour Camp Jamal had told Karim her family’s story, and also how her father had encouraged her to take part in training courses organized specially for young girls. He hadn’t objected when she decided to join the Fedayeen after she got her secondary school certificate. She said she preferred the university of the revolution to a regular university. She couldn’t understand why all young Palestinian men and women didn’t join the Fedayeen: she wanted to be a model of the Palestinian woman in the resistance, just as Djamila Bouhired had become a symbol of the Algerian.
When Karim read the details of the operation led by a woman and saw Jamal’s corpse on the ground being messed around with by an Israeli officer, he was stupefied. She’d become a symbol, as she’d wanted. There she was, the girl from the Baissour Camp, at whose presence in a camp alongside the men some of the youths had grumbled, proving to them all that she was the bravest, the most beautiful, and the most capable of sacrifice.
A girl of twenty, she’d led ten Fedayeen, including two Lebanese and two Yemenis, and taken them by night in two rubber boats to the beach at Haifa. There they hijacked a bus carrying fifteen passengers and two hours later they hijacked another. Then they set off for Jaffa, firing into the air to clear the road.
The first bus was taken over at two thirty p.m. on Sunday, March 11, and at four forty p.m. the Fedayeen moved with their hostages, who at this point numbered more than sixty, to a new bus. At five thirty p.m. the bus found its way blocked by a barrier set up at the used car market in Herzliya, close to the County Club. Helicopters and tracked vehicles barred the way and the battle began. The bus was set on fire. The Fedayeen jumped down onto the road and engaged with the Israeli forces. Eight died, two were taken captive, and thirty Israelis were killed.
The moment he heard of her death, Karim felt he’d lost the woman he’d loved. It was as though Jamal had been hiding beneath Hend’s skin; as though the two young women were one, or had become so.
“Why did they send her to her death?”
When Danny came to him with the strange proposal, he’d felt panic.
“Why me?”
“Brother Abu Jihad wants to meet you. He read your article on the history of Shaqif Castle in the magazine
Occupied Palestine
and he wants you to write a pamphlet on Jamal.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” said Danny.
“But how did he know I wrote the article when I published it under a pseudonym? I don’t want anyone to know I wrote for
Occupied Palestine
. You know how my family’s placed, living in East Beirut. I don’t want them coming to any harm because of me.”
“Abu Jihad isn’t just anyone. He’s the real leader of the revolution and he knows everything, including that your brother, Nasim, works with the Phalanges.”
“What’s my brother got to do with anything? I beg you, don’t mention that to anyone!”
“The important thing, my friend, is that Abu Jihad was much taken with your storytelling skills and asked which of the boys who knew the Martyr Jamal wrote well, and he chose you. He said your article on the crusaders was excellent because it was made up of stories and he wants you to go and see him at ten o’clock tomorrow night at Center Thirty-Eight so he can talk to you about it.”
“Where’s this Center Thirty-Eight?”
“I’ll go with you,” said Danny. “Do you have any idea what it means that Brother Abu Jihad chose you to write about Jamal? Do you know what she meant to him? He’s the one who chose her nom de guerre ‘Jihad,’ because she was like one of his children to him.”
“If he loved her so much why did he send her off to commit suicide? Anyway, I’m not a writer. For me writing’s a hobby; I prefer to read. I wrote the article about the history of Shaqif Castle to say that while it’s true the Franks occupied our country for two hundred years, in the end they went away and all they left behind was castles and shankaleesh and that’s the way it’s going to be with the Zionists in Palestine.”
“That’s what Abu Jihad liked about it. He said your article was ‘an
expression of historical optimism: no matter how long the Jews stay and impose their rule, in the end they are destined to abandon the country to its inhabitants.’ ”
“I didn’t say the Jews, I said the Zionists, and that’s the heart of the matter. We’re for a secular democratic state in Palestine and we mustn’t use the word
Jews
to describe the Israeli occupiers. If Abu Jihad said Jews, I don’t want to work with him.”
Danny explained that all members of the generation that lived through the Palestinian Catastrophe in 1948 used the word
Jews
for the Israelis, for the simple reason that the Israelis, before and after the founding of their state, insisted on calling themselves by that name. Saying “the Jews’ army” in 1948 didn’t carry any intrinsically racist connotation. It was just a name that the peasants gave to the members of the Haganah forces.
“But we do distinguish between Jews and Zionists,” said Karim.
“Absolutely,” answered Danny, “and Brother Abu Jihad does so too, but when you’re dealing with people of that generation there’s no call to be stubborn over words. We’ll meet tomorrow at nine at Café Jandoul and I’ll go with you to Thirty-Eight.”
“I like being stubborn over words because I’ve been split in two. Here in Lebanon, where we’re fighting a civil war against the Fascists, all I hear you talking about is ‘the Christians.’ I’ve turned a deaf ear a hundred times but I’ve had enough. I don’t want to go on being a fool because that way the sects will swallow us up, the Left will die, the Palestinian cause will become a religious cause, and we’ll lose everything. Tomorrow, if Abu Jihad says ‘the Jews,’ I’m going to turn around and leave.”
They met at nine in the evening of the following day at Café Jandoul. Danny had chosen the café because it was close to Burj Abu Haydar, where Abu Jihad had one of his clandestine offices, known as “Center 38.” Karim took it differently, though. He believed the choice was a secret message addressed to him by Jamal. It was there that they’d met for the last time and
there that he’d discovered the beauty of her short black hair, a single small lock of which hung down over her right eye, and there that she’d admitted – by inviting him to die with her – that she loved him.
Danny came in all his elegance, an elegance over which this professional revolutionary – for whom it was a matter of pride that his wife was the most beautiful woman in Beirut – took as much care as a cockerel. He would wrap a long scarf around his neck and choose shirts ranging from sky blue to indigo, which had to be ironed to perfection. His shoes shone like his hair, which was fairish. The image would have been impeccable were it not for the smile, which revealed small teeth stained black by the French cigarettes he smoked. Danny ordered a chocolate
sablé
and a glass of Rémy Martin. The waiter turned to Karim, who ordered the same, but Danny told the waiter, “Two
sablés
, one cognac, and a tea.”
“You don’t like cognac anymore?” asked Karim.
Danny smiled and said in faux classical Arabic, “Nay, brother! The tea’s for thee, not me,” explaining that it would be inappropriate for him to go to a meeting with Abu Jihad with the smell of alcohol on his breath.
“Why? It’s forbidden to drink alcohol?”
Danny shook his head. “You’re totally unworldly, Brother Karim. It’s about what Chairman Mao taught us: respect the masses and their traditions.”
“I swear I don’t understand you people. What? Is Abu Jihad the masses?”
“Brother Abu Jihad doesn’t drink and doesn’t like those who do, end of story. If you want to be part of the struggle, you have to know where it is you’re living. Come on, drink up your tea and stop pestering me. We mustn’t be late.”
Karim swallowed the hot tea while he watched Danny sniff the cognac, take the glass in the palm of his hand to warm it, and then sip the cognac drop by drop as carefully as if he were distilling each one in his mouth.
Did Karim’s problem lie in the fact that, contrary to what he now
claimed, he hadn’t spoken his mind? Or was it that he was so dazzled by the Fedayeen that his criticisms evaporated when he found himself face to face with their heroism? He told Abu Jihad timidly that he didn’t support suicide operations – he didn’t say that exactly but he did say, “It’s a sin to send young people to their death that way! A sin, Brother Abu Jihad!”
“Where’s the sin?” asked the leader as he gazed at the map for the Martyr Kamal Adwan Operation that lay on his desk.
Instead of explaining his position or responding, Karim found himself gasping with admiration as he looked at the map and saw the points at which the Fedayeen had stopped before arriving at their death.
Danny had taken him to a building in Burj Abu Haydar. A guard carrying a revolver asked them what they wanted. “Deir Yassin,” responded Danny. It seems that was the password, for immediately on hearing it, the guard spoke into a walkie-talkie. A few minutes later a youth wearing khaki appeared, asked which of them was Karim, and gestured to him to follow.
“I’ll be at home if you need anything,” said Danny.
Karim entered the building with the youth, whose Tokarev pistol was visible at his waist, and they descended endless steps. Karim was silently counting the steps and when he got to sixty he saw in front of him a door, which opened, dazzling him with light.
The youth had left him in front of the door and begun to climb back up the stairs. Karim hesitated a little, then heard a voice calling to him to enter. This was the only time he met Abu Jihad. The leader was wearing a dark gray shirt and sitting behind his desk.
“Welcome, Brother Karim! What would you like to drink?”
Abu Jihad poured two glasses of sage tea from a thermos in front of him, offered a glass to Karim, drank from his own, and said he was pleased to meet him.