Losing Israel (8 page)

Asaf parks near his small house. Outside the cool of the air-conditioned car the dry heat catches at me. Fallen eucalyptus blades crackle under my feet, and their scent rises – and with the scent the place closes its fist over my heart. The memory of every return wakes, every childhood and adolescent and adult return – the memory of riding on the back of my grandfather’s small tractor, and he turning his head to smile at me that warm wordless expression of affection; my mother, vibrant and glowing; walking hand-in-hand with my older sister, and the revelation of the birds, one after another,
sunbird, hoopoe, roller, bee-eater, palm dove, bulbul
– smaller and brighter than in the field-guide, and though new, known instantly, sharp and exciting...

But my mother is distant and my grandfather is dead. My sister is dead, too, and many of the birds of our shared childhood have disappeared as well, gone long ago: the Egyptian vultures, gone from the edges of the roads, along with the rubbish and carrion, and gone, like the black kites, from the great dump near Tel Aviv, which is now covered over and landscaped, like the coal-tips in south Wales. My innocence is gone, too: that municipal dump, once a bird-haven, and for me a bird excitement, also seals in the invisible remnants of a depopulated and destroyed Arab village called Al-Khayriyya.

Over lunch, Asaf asks what exactly it is I’m after, and so, rather nervously, I tell him how I found out about the villages of Al Murassas and Yubla from my mother, and how I want to know what happened in this place before 1948. I’m not sure how he’ll respond. Perhaps he’ll see it as an unwelcome digging up of what is better left alone, but he doesn’t. ‘Wallah!’ he exclaims with enthusiasm. ‘This is so interesting.’ We can check in the kibbutz archive, he tells me, and he knows where the site of Al Murassas is: he can take me there, though there’s not much to see.

I feel a jiggle of excitement, the beginnings of a kind of hope crystallising in me – of revelation or epiphany, an anticipation of some kind of confrontation with the harsh fact of destruction. I wonder if it will
move
me, if it will shift me from my ambivalent uncertainties and confusions. My confusion has increased – I am in the grip of nostalgia, and during the night I cannot sleep: all my senses are in full assault, flooded by the sound, the smell, the familiar layout of this place that was my mother’s place, this place where, somehow, I became aware of myself as a separate creature for the first time.

But when my uncle takes me to Al Murassas the next day, it’s a disappointment. We drive along a pale dusty road that meanders through treeless slopes of unfenced crop-fields, and he slows and then stops the car near a small stand of trees, where a barbed-wire fence encloses a rough area of dry cow pasture and sabra. The fawn-coloured cows are slow with the heat, and turn sleepily to look at us.

‘Here you are,’ he says, gesturing at the cows.

‘Where are we?’ I ask.

‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is Al Murassas.’ He points out the wildly growing prickly pear, which shows the presence of a former settlement. Originally it was planted to define boundaries between households; now it is a thicket. He thinks that someone important is buried near the trees, that the trees mark the location of a grave. ‘Yubla has nothing left,’ he says. ‘Even less than Al Murassas. There’s nothing to see, nothing to mark the site, but we can go if you want.’

All I can see is the cattle and the wild thicket of old cactus. Al Murassas is just dust and stones and cows, a few trees, sabra. I know what I was expecting, what I was hoping for – something tragic; an epiphany. Instead I am merely hot, and tired. I look out over ruin with half my attention and feel only a pressure on my bladder, the awkwardness of intruding, suspect, on someone else’s past, and the rapid anticlimax of my unfulfilled desire to be changed utterly. The nagging readjustment turns into irritation. I shake my head, and say there is no need to go and see where Yubla used to be.

In the kibbutz archive, Tomer, the archivist, remembers Al Murassas and Yubla. She doesn’t know when precisely in 1948 they were destroyed, and doesn’t say who actually carried out the destruction. ‘This was political – it came from the government,’ she says. ‘It was not the decision of the kibbutz to destroy the villages.’ Like my mother, she remembers walking in Al Murassas when the buildings were still standing, some months after the inhabitants had left. She thinks the villagers of Al Murassas and Yubla were neither Bedouin nor Arab, but a different ethnic group. She remembers them as being very dark; she thinks perhaps they were African – perhaps descended from some of the African people who were brought to Palestine as slaves and servants in the earlier Ottoman period.

The houses of Al Murassas and Yubla were built of adobe. They only stayed empty and intact for a short while before they were destroyed. When Tomer was a child, nothing was safe. There was a high protective fence around the kibbutz, and people stood guard at night on the roofs of the school and the children’s house. By day things were amicable; at night there were attacks. They had lived daily in a state of threat from their neighbours in all the years leading up to the War of Independence in 1948. Afterwards, it was safer. Afterwards, the land left by the fleeing Arab villagers was shared out for use by the neighbouring kibbutzim.

Tomer, my mother, and others their age: all of them remember the ruins of Yubla, and Al Murassas. What happened to the villages is in the memory of the earlier generation, too – in their
yiskor
books, memorial pamphlets published for each member after his or her death, and kept there in the archive. Everyone of my mother’s generation remembers a version of Yubla and Al Murassas. They know, but don’t know; they know but they don’t talk about it, or they skate over it. Like my mother, most don’t want to be reminded, don’t want to dwell on the implications of that knowledge, or those memories. It is one thing to oppose the separation wall, to disclaim East Jerusalem, to argue for a full pull-out of the West Bank, but it is quite another to talk about the right of return of those refugees, now in their millions, who fled or were expelled between 1947 and 1949, some of whom were expelled a second time in 1967.

The older generation, and my mother’s generation, remember. They remember the field boundaries and know the location of the destroyed village sites. But members of the younger generation never knew and have not been told, and but for the efforts of individual historians and organisations like Zochrot dedicated to memorialising the Nakba, that knowledge would be gone from national memory too, as the names are gone from the maps.

Maps of this place used to be simple and sparse, like all early maps – but now they’re complex and crowded, dense and layered. Embedded in the Western imagination, the place has been redrawn by explorers and holy men, by missionaries and emissaries of Empire, and by Empire itself, its surface imagined and recreated, or observed and recorded, and its names and meanings mapped onto space sacred to other people, too – the Welsh, for example, and the white colonisers of America. The old Western maps combine the present and the past, juxtaposing what can be observed with what is imagined. On nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century maps, biblical Hebrew place-names in pretty Gothic font lie alongside Arabic names and the modern Hebrew names in Roman font, and there are the modern Hebrew names of the new Jewish towns of Gadera or Tel Aviv. Later, the new Jewish settlements are added: the kibbutzim, and communal farms, and villages. And then in 1955 the map reaches what is perhaps the peak of its complexity, with the triumphant purple overprint of the word
harus
– destroyed. After that, the Israeli maps revert to a simpler form, and the tourist maps for long years have not even shown what is known in Hebrew as ‘the seam’, the physically erased border with the West Bank. All of it became seamlessly Israel.

Israel’s enemies say it should be wiped off the map, meaning it should be utterly destroyed and its name obliterated. That is what Israel has done to the Palestinian villages. But in wiping the village sites and the record of their destruction off the map, it has obliterated its own past, too: the history of its birth, and the history of the years before its birth.

Beit Hashita is on every map of Israel, but the Arab villages are gone, as their physical features are gone from the landscape. And yet, though they’re gone, their memory is not obliterated in that place, not entirely, not yet. There’s nothing to see of Al Murassas but sabra and stones and sleepy cows, but there are unmarked graves there. Someone’s grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there, as they are in Yubla and Kafra, in Wadi El Bireh, Al Hamidiya, Jabbul and Kawkab al Hawa and all the other destroyed villages and neighbourhoods – as mine are buried, just a few kilometres away. But my ancestors’ graves are marked and maintained, and they have gathered a scatter of small stones, each of which records a visit, a paying of respects.

You consult a map to find out where you are, to see how to get from there to where you wish to be. This is how you
orientate
yourself, situating yourself, according to the meaning of the word, in relation to the rising sun, but also in relation to Jerusalem, as churches are aligned to point east to their origins. Jerusalem, and the whole land for which it is a synecdoche, forms the linguistic foundation of how, in English, you articulate knowing where you are.

But I don’t know where I am. No map I consult can tell me. I have no idea where I am in relation to my personal orient. The whole landscape, physical and imagined, shimmers with duality, with signs and stories that
dis
-orientate. Perhaps I will always be disorientated, because there is no longer any absolute east. It depends on where you are. Perhaps, like my mother, I may only carry my homeland in my heart, in a longing that will not be appeased, that cannot really be appeased, because others with grandparents buried in this place also carry their homeland in their hearts this way. But I am permitted to return, to leave a stone as a mark of my visit, to pay my respects and feel, here, my roots – and they are not.

I knew at ten who was an Arab and who was not an Arab. No one told me: I just knew. The division wasn’t one of Arab and Jew; it was Arabs and everyone else. Arabs were dangerous, and at the same time primitive and contemptible; ‘Arabs’, and all that ‘they’ constituted, were always understood in their generality, reduced and impersonal. I knew what Arabs were like from my grandfather’s wound, an emblem of their violent dangerousness. I knew who was an Arab when my father’s hand tightened around mine in the central bus station, or in the street; I knew it when a young man in discoloured Y-fronts had tried to touch me sexually at the Sakhne, a hot-water spring at the foot of Gilboa, because he slipped into the water from the far shore, the Arab side, where we didn’t go, where men stood too close together and dropped rubbish, and made noise. It was not articulated, but it was understood. As a child I could not have recognised this as an implacable biological reduction of others to something less than human. Now, as an adult, when I encounter it in others, when I am confronted by it in members of my family, I can only reluctantly acknowledge having thought it or felt it myself, because my whole story, my whole sense of self has been premised on reducing the humanity of Arabs in general and any Arab as an individual. A clear sense of ‘them’ – sly, unclean, mendacious and sexually intemperate – has helped to safeguard my understanding of ‘us’ collectively, each encircling ring of ‘us’: family, kibbutz, nation-state – and its necessity.

But when, after visiting the archive, my uncle Asaf takes me to see Abu Omar, I fall in love. Abu Omar is the grandfather of a woman who used to work at the kibbutz factory. According to Asaf he is old, and remembers everything. He lives in the village of Na’ura, which lies some ten kilometres from the kibbutz. Although most Arab villages in the valley were depopulated in 1948 and later destroyed, Na’ura is one of a group whose inhabitants remained. They left for a short while early in 1948, and then returned. Unlike many other Arab citizens of Israel, who became ‘internal refugees’ – the ‘present absent’, as they are known in Hebrew – villagers of Na’ura and a handful of other Arab settlements in the western end of the valley were allowed by Jewish militia to come back. But the story of what had happened in these villages is contested. One version is that rather than being driven out by Jewish soldiers, the villagers were instead ordered by Arab army irregulars to evacuate, apparently because of a fear that they would come to some ‘understanding’ with Jewish forces, which, it seemed, they did – in this version, they were, in short, ‘collaborators’.

On the phone to Abu Omar, Asaf explains briefly that I want to know about ‘how things had been before 1948’. I can hear a man talking loudly, asking questions, and then stating something, emphatic. Hanging up, Asaf says, ‘OK, we’ll go tomorrow afternoon. But,’ he adds, and he smiles slightly, ‘don’t eat too much beforehand, because they’ll feed us.’ He pauses. ‘It will be a
lot
of food… You should leave some room.’

The next day my uncle and I drive down to highway 71, and then turn off through the hills to Na’ura. Children and women watch us curiously as we creep up through the winding village, past the mosque with its green glass. At the top of the village, Asaf parks in the shade by an open shed where a sorrel mare tosses her head irritably at the flies. A barn full of hay holds chickens and a few penned sheep. I have only stopped in an Arab village once before to visit people, and the unfamiliarity makes me feel like a voyeur. Apart from neighbours of a childhood friend in the Galilee back in the late 1980s and again in 2007, I have never met and socialised with any Arab people in Israel. I don’t want to admit this; it contorts me with embarrassment that it’s true.

Abu Omar is sitting outside at a picnic table. Chickens are stepping and pecking in the dust and dry grass around the legs of the white plastic chairs, and a man with intense blue eyes is arguing with him, leaning forward, his elbow on the table. He’s a kibbutznik from Tel Yosef, and a teacher in the nearby secondary school. His manner is at the same time both deferential and emphatic.