Exile: a novel (54 page)

Khalil smiled thinly. “The condition must be serious—one leaves the West Bank at one’s peril, never knowing if the IDF will allow you to return. That’s why I no longer take vacations.” Her smile vanished. “During the 1967 war, my brother fled to Amman. They never let him back; thirty-five years later, he was not allowed to attend our father’s funeral. Too radical, they said.”

“How did Saeb and Hana get back here after Harvard?”

“Good question. Perhaps the forces of international beneficence played a hand, as they did in educating them in America.” Khalil smoothed the pleats of her dress. “A better question is why they let Saeb return from Jordan, given how outspoken he’s been since coming here. I suppose they reviewed his medical records and did not wish to be accused of murdering a sick man by denying him the care he needs.”

“Have
you
seen his medical records?”

Khalil shook her head. “We took him at his word. Does he look well to you?”

“Neither well,” David said sardonically, “nor happy.”

Khalil laughed softly. “Happiness, I believe, is not in his nature. Nor is he a fount of self-revelation.

“You asked for specific information about his absences, so I went back and checked our records. He made six trips to Amman, each lasting up to a week, with the most recent being just over three months ago. Two weeks, in other words, before Saeb, Hana, and Munira all traveled to America.” Her expression became pensive. “Again, that the Israelis let either of them go is a bit of a surprise. I guess they have more violent people to worry about— or thought they did. Even paranoids have real enemies, and every day they spend here earns them more.”

David studied her, then decided to be blunt. “Was Saeb with Hamas?”

Khalil’s eyes narrowed. “I make it my business not to know these things, and so I don’t. As to Saeb or Hana, I know nothing.”

“What about Jefar and Hassan?”

“I know only their backgrounds. Both are from refugee camps: for Jefar, Jenin; for Hassan, Aida—another version of hell. As for whether they’re Al Aqsa, you’d have to ask whoever in Al Aqsa is still alive. Not that you’ll be able to find them: the Israelis are looking to kill the rest, and meeting with you is too big a risk for Al Aqsa to take.”

“What about classes? Did either Jefar or Hassan know Saeb or Hana?”

“I know Iyad Hassan had one class with Saeb. But that means little or nothing. Saeb is very popular; the classes are too large for him to meet or remember every student.”

And yet, David reflected, Amjad Madji had remembered Hassan, who was made singular by his anger and his disdain for women. Khalil picked up the photo of Munira. “Such a bright smile,” she remarked. “She seems to smile less now, like many of our children.

“One of our teachers tracked five children from elementary school to age eighteen. The young ones wanted to be artists, or writers, or musicians. By high school, one boy had seen his girlfriend die when the IDF blew up
her house, allegedly a terrorist haven; a girl’s brother was beaten at a checkpoint; another girl’s father was in jail. And their vision of the future had narrowed to hatred of Israelis.” Khalil replaced the photograph, still examining Munira’s face. “Hana and I spoke of this. Munira was her anchor, I often thought—Hana wanted a better life for her in Palestine, not perpetual war with Israel in the name of some Islamic dream.”

“So you don’t see her as a murderer?”

Khalil gave him a level gaze. “Hana, like me, is a mother. We would do anything to protect our children. That is why my daughter is in Turkey.

“We don’t abandon our daughters, or want them to be martyrs. If someone could prove that Hana involved herself in this assassination to protect Munira from harm—then, yes, I would believe it. Until then, I would tell you it’s impossible.”

Stones was not what David expected. A two-level café, all glass and steel beams, it was jammed with young people eating and smoking and drinking at the bar as multinational music pulsed from the sound system. Nor was Nisreen quite what he had imagined: tall, full-figured, and striking, she sat with David, smoking from a hookah and speaking with an insouciance more suggestive of a bohemian than the serious lawyer David knew her to be—Hana’s colleague in negotiations with Israel before Hana had quit in anger. “So I’m to be a character witness?” Nisreen said. “I’ll try to improve on my character between then and now. A bit like clearing out the Augean stables, some would say.” Puffing from the hookah, she looked at David with evident amusement. “You were expecting someone else?”

“Maybe someone a little more repressed.”

“I work very hard to avoid that. It probably helps that I’m a Christian, and not married to Saeb Khalid.” She waved a hand at the crowd; many people were wearing blue jeans, as was she. “Ramallah is shot full of contradictions. Many of these people are Christians, traditionally more affluent and better educated. But just outside the city is a refugee camp filled with people who don’t know that a place like this exists. They are Muslim, and grindingly poor. Needless to say, their women do not come here.”

“How do Palestinians handle the contradictions?”

“Not easily. We are a much more open society than many Arab countries—there’s more education, and women have a stronger voice. But many Christians have left for the U.S. or Europe, and many Muslims do not believe in a secular democratic government.” Nisreen took a deep hit
on the water pipe, exhaling smoke in a sinuous stream, which evanesced in the darkness. “Whether these problems heal or fester depends in great measure on whether the Israelis believe their own rhetoric about peace. Hana thinks they don’t, which is why she still despises them.”

This last remark troubled David—he could imagine Marnie Sharpe teasing out of Nisreen a portrait of Hana that made hatred of Israel central to her recent past. “Because of Munira,” Nisreen went on, “it’s hard to believe that Hana was involved in killing Ben-Aron. But too many people have heard her call the Israelis imperialists, and Ben-Aron a pious phony.” Her voice became emphatic. “A warning, then: if you try to pass her off as Mother Teresa, this prosecutor may jam it down your throat.”

David sat back, sipping the sauvignon blanc Nisreen had ordered for them both. “I guess you’d better tell me why Hana quit.”

Nisreen took another deep drag on the water pipe. “First, you have to understand the context of Hana’s anger—these settlements, and this cynical land grab the Israelis call a security fence.

“In 1993, as part of the Oslo agreements, Israel promised to freeze the settlements. Instead, they kept expanding them, adding territory and population and using more of our water.” Nisreen put down the water pipe. “Since 1993, the settlement population has almost doubled, cutting deeper into the West Bank. But almost as bad as the Israelis’ geographic expansion is their psychological detachment.

“The settlers live in a bubble. Their bypass roads connect the settlements to one another, dividing the West Bank and enabling Israelis to travel without seeing any Arabs. So they create their own delusion.” Nisreen flashed a quick, sardonic smile. “Once we met our Israeli counterparts in a Jewish settlement. Hana pointed out a painting on the wall—a landscape of the surrounding area, totally accurate except that the Arab villages had disappeared. ‘You have erased us,’ Hana told them, ‘just like you erased my parents from the history of the place you now call Israel.’

“That initiated an angry debate. When Hana accused the Israelis of breaking their word by expanding the settlements, one man responded that they had to do this to pacify right-wing Israelis. ‘Then truth is a convenience,’ Hana said. ‘And I should not believe anything you tell me.’ ” David could imagine Hana’s eyes flashing as she upbraided the Israelis.

“Anger is one thing,” David said. “Did you ever hear her call for violence against Israel or Ben-Aron?”

Nisreen considered the question. “To the Israelis, she said more than once that they were manufacturing suicide bombers by the score. But we all say these things.” Pausing, Nisreen added with obvious reluctance, “Once,
to me, Hana said that Ben-Aron would certainly die, and all that mattered was who killed him. I know what she meant: better their extremists than ours. By the time of the trial, I expect this conversation will have faded from my memory. But I hope she did not say as much to others.”

The tacit acknowledgment that she would protect her friend by lying, while not surprising, left David uneasy. “What prompted Hana’s resignation?” he asked.

“The security wall. Most Israelis and Palestinians know that there must be a two-state solution, with sensible borders. So how could they call it a security wall, Hana asked the Israelis, when it snakes this way and that to pick up settlements, water extraction points, and more Palestinian land? She’s right of course—if they complete it as planned, it will block our roads and surround our cities, cutting us off from one another. The whole idea is to create a de facto border that takes as much land from us as possible, while penning up our population in separate enclaves.” Nisreen looked at David intently. “Hana comes from people trapped in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, unable to go anywhere. To see us hemmed in by a wall made her heartsick and discouraged. So when Ben-Aron refused to renounce or redraw the wall, she quit. ‘It’s hopeless,’ she told me. ‘I cannot take part in this man’s charade.’ Again and again, the Zionists cannot resist reaching for one more piece of cake.

“After she resigned, she was more depressed than I had ever seen her. It was as though everything—her life, her hopes for Palestinians—was collapsing all around her. A slow death of the spirit.” Nisreen’s voice grew husky. “My God, I thought, this woman deserves so much more.”

“Than what exactly?”

“The life she’s facing. She came back from America in a time of hope, believing she could help build a country, and found herself surrounded by death and oppression, with hatred mounting on both sides.” Nisreen leaned forward, her voice and manner becoming even more impassioned. “Occupation gives young Israeli soldiers the power of life and death, at the same time exposing them to constant fear, all of which leaves them cynical yet traumatized and, in a certain way, dehumanized. And its constant pressure on the occupied breeds hatred in Palestinians and, in children, a lasting trauma. Seeing this in Munira pierces Hana’s heart.” Gazing at David, Nisreen continued in a tone of deeper resignation. “Most Israelis refuse to come here. Part of it is fear, but it’s also a form of denial. It’s ironic, really. The Israelis are a magnet for the guilt of others because of the Holocaust and centuries of persecution. But they cannot reconcile the suffering
they’ve endured with the reality that, under
their
occupation, it is we who are suffering.

“In law school, at NYU, one of my closest friends was a Jewish girl from Tel Aviv. But she won’t come to see me in Ramallah, and when we talk on the phone, it is all about suicide bombers, never about occupation—she cannot seem to hear me. And yet she, perhaps more than I, holds the key to our future.

“For Hana, the future has become Munira’s future. And what
is
that future, here, exactly?” Briefly, Nisreen scanned the crowd. “What you see is us spending what we have today instead of planning for a tomorrow we do not control. We are voiceless—however we cry out, the world does not hear us.”

Throughout this remarkable monologue, David watched the emotions flashing across Nisreen’s face: anger, sadness, resignation, the deep need to express herself to someone not a Palestinian. “I know something about Hana,” he said. “Tell me about you.”

Nisreen gave him a smile of self-deprecation. “Actually, I’ve been talking about myself all along. Occupation is all I know. But if you want to hear about me, I’ll tell you a few stories from my life. I’m to be a witness, after all.

“Unlike Hana, I am native to the West Bank. My mother was PLO. In 1967, she was arrested and my father, her apolitical fiancé, was detained. He would be released, the Israelis told her, if she revealed the names of her associates in the PLO. She refused.” Nisreen’s tone commingled pride and indignation. “Three years later they released her. She was deaf in her left ear from being slapped on the head. When she married my father, she had to stand to his left in order to hear their vows.

“That’s my parents. One of my cousins is serving nine years for being Hamas. My brother served a year for joining Al Aqsa. My sister’s fiancé went to Arafat’s compound to pick up a friend—also Al Aqsa, though her fiancé was not—and both were killed by Israeli soldiers who were hunting down the Al Aqsa guy.” Nisreen’s voice hardened. “You might think us an unusual family or, at least, unusually unfortunate. We are not.

“For reasons of traditions and economy, I still live in my parents’ home. The woman who cleaned it until recently has eight children, and a marriage that was in trouble—her husband could not find work where they lived and, because of checkpoints, spent most of the week in another village.

“One night he came to our home, looking for his wife. My parents and I could not tell him where she was. Then, while we were talking, we heard her name on television. When we turned to watch, we saw her standing
between two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. She’d been arrested for carrying explosives.” Nisreen shook her head. “We were all astonished—they were not even Muslims, let alone political. Just poor people with eight children to feed.

“It turned out someone from Hamas had paid her to carry explosives through the checkpoint—the raw ingredients for a suicide bombing that might well have killed Israeli children. What’s even more jarring is that, in the morning, she had gone to the market and bought clothes for her own children. Then she’d cleaned our house and gone off to the checkpoint. In her mind she was merely taking an opportunity to make money and, I think, express hostility toward her husband for his failure to provide.

“It’s absolutely nuts, of course—practically and morally. But it should introduce more complexity into your vision of who carries out acts of terror, and how the occupation distorts our lives.”