The Words of My Father Read online

  THE WORDS OF MY FATHER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  YOUSEF BASHIR is a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, the son of a respected educator. After relocating to the United States, he earned a BA in International Affairs from Northeastern University and an MA in Co-existence and Conflict from Brandeis University. Now living in Washington, DC, Bashir is a public speaker, author, and peace advocate. He currently works for the Palestinian Diplomatic Delegation to the United States.

  THE WORDS OF

  MY FATHER

  Y O U S E F K H A L I L B A S H I R

  Published in 2018 by

  HAUS PUBLISHING LTD

  4 Cinnamon Row

  London SW11 3TW

  Copyright © 2018 Yousef Bashir

  Map on p. vi created by Martin Lubikowski

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-912208-17-3

  eISBN: 978-1-912208-18-0

  Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd

  Printed in the UK by TJ International

  All rights reserved.

  To my fellow Palestinians struggling for peace, justice, and freedom.

  “We must not let our wounded memory guide our future.”

  – Khalil Bashir

  Contents

  Before I Start

  Part One: Paradise

  1. Our Land, Our Neighbours

  2. My Family

  3. The School

  Part Two: Inferno

  4. Intifada

  5. The Soldiers

  6. House Guests

  7. Occupation

  8. Ramadan

  9. The Bullet

  Part Three: Angels

  10. Tel Aviv

  11. The Sheekum

  12. The Miracle

  Part Four: The Journey

  13. Escape

  14. Seeds of Peace

  15. Return

  16. Ramallah

  17. Desperation

  18. “Forward, Yousef!”

  Part Five: Legacy

  19. America

  20. My Father

  A Letter

  The Words of My Father

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Before I Start

  I have learned to read my audiences. If there is a hush as I am led onto the stage, then I know I have already hooked them. If, however, the buzz in the room continues while someone shows me my seat and adjusts the microphone, I know they are thinking about other things and I am going to have to work a little harder.

  If the room is small, like a meeting room or a classroom, I start working on eye contact right away. I suppose it is my way of announcing myself. In a large hotel function room like this one, I just scan the crowd. Some look back at me, as curious about me as I am about them. Most are checking their iPhones for important messages from friends about what they had for lunch. Others are networking. A typical Washington crowd. If I were not on the podium, I would be doing the same.

  They are well dressed. These three-piece-suit people will ask questions that are heavy with facts and are more statements than questions. Students in jeans and t-shirts usually ask broader, more general questions.

  An older woman comes over to me with a glass of water and makes sure I have everything I need. I do. She reviews the session’s format. Introduction. Speak for half an hour. She will give me a signal when my time is almost over. Twenty minutes of questions. I smile and thank her. I do not say that the questions will run long after the twenty minutes have ended, that when the session is over there will be a knot of people who come to the stage to ask even more and stay there long after everyone else has left the hall, or that a small group will trail me out to the lobby until they head off one by one. This happens all the time.

  I look out over the audience. There are a couple of hundred of them. I presume that many, if not most, are Jews; this event is hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which more than any other entity impacts US policy towards Palestine. These people have voices that get heard in Washington. It is important that they hear me.

  One of them will ask me about the Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. I have an answer for that, but perhaps they will hear me differently after I tell them my story.

  “Tell them your story, Yousef,” I can hear my father saying. “Tell them your story, then at least they will know something they did not know before.”

  My story is in so many ways my father’s story. My grandfather’s story. And the story of so many grandfathers before him. For centuries before Europe exploded and sent its Jewish people in search of safety, my family has farmed the land along the Mediterranean coast in Gaza. Our town, Deir el-Balah, is named “Monastery of the Date Palms” after a monastery established there by the Christians in the 4th century CE. Even before then, it was already an important stopping point along the route to Egypt. It once had a fortress. Alexander the Great passed through, as did the Romans, the Ottomans, and probably even Joseph and his brothers.

  My family, the Bashirs, watched them come and go, and maybe even sold them some of our dates. Two things had brought my ancestors to this place: fresh water springs that never ran dry, and the sweetest, reddest dates on the Mediterranean coast. We have been there forever. And for the past three hundred years since records were first kept, our name has been on them for this land.

  Though my father, Khalil Bashir, was known as an English teacher in the local schools and later as a high school headmaster, our land was so much a part of his identity that he thought of himself as a farmer.

  “This land has been in my family for hundreds of years,” I heard him say many times. “It is my childhood. It is my memories. It is my family. I cannot leave, because history is watching and I am not prepared to make the same mistake my people made in May 1948 when they evacuated their homeland. This is a lesson to everybody: you must never give up your land or your country, otherwise you will lose your dignity and your life.”

  A well-dressed young man steps up to the podium and quiets the room. The audience put away their iPhones, at least for the moment. I will know that I am losing their attention if the phones reappear.

  From the moment the young man says that I am a Palestinian, the room becomes extra quiet. It always does. I look out and smile. I can almost hear them thinking, “But he looks so Jewish.” Several, in fact, will say that to me afterwards. I just want to tell them now, “Of course I look Jewish. We all have the same genes. The scientists have proven it. We are cousins. So why all these problems?”

  The young man briefly recounts my bio and mentions that I hold an MA from Brandeis University. “What kind of Palestinian goes to Brandeis?” some of them are thinking. I know this because I get that question all the time. I welcome their curiosity. It will make them more interested in what I have to say.

  It is my time to speak. There is polite applause as I stand. For a split second, I am not sure where to begin. This always happens when I am facing a big group. I have brought some notes, which I will not actually use, but I look at them on the podium for a moment and let my father’s voice fill my mind.

  “Tell them your story, Yousef,” I hear him say. I will do that. But first I will tell his.

  “I want to start by telling you two things about my father,” I say. I speak quietly. “My father was as much in love with his land as he was with my mother. And he loved both of them deeply.”

  Part One

  PARADISE

  “Believers, eat the good things we provided you, and

  thank God, if you are truly worshipping Him.”

  — The Holy Quran, Surat Al-Bakarah (2:172)

  1

  Our Land, Our Neighbours

  My father was as much in love with his land as he was with my mother. And he loved both of them deeply.

  He loved the tall date palms along the edges of our farm that marked out an area larger than two football pitches. He loved his olive trees and the oil he produced from them. He loved his hives both for the bees and the amazing honey they produced pollinating his guavas, figs, and dates. He especially loved his greenhouses – long tunnels of plastic stretched over metal frames. They covered almost half the land. He raised tomatoes in them, along with hot peppers, and aubergines that he sold to markets in Israel and Jordan, and sometimes Egypt. He had spent his lifetime enriching the sandy soil with compost to make it immensely productive.

  He loved how on almost every piece of the land around his house there was a tree. Some, like his figs and guavas, gave fruit; others brought shade and colour to the open areas around our house. There had once been an orange grove, but my father’s brother had cut down most of the trees to make space for a new house he built for his family. My father never completely forgave him. He loved the memory of those orange trees, which he still saw in his mind, where they had stood for generations.

  He had more than two hundred date palm trees. Some grew around the corners of our house while others lined the long driveway from the house to the gate onto Mekka Street. There was a tower for pigeons, a cage for many rabbits, geese, ducks, and chickens, at least two roosters. We tied our gentle old white donkey by a small room which housed the motor that powered the irrigation system and our water well. Next to it was a very large olive tree, a couple of hundred years old. Olive trees can live for centuries. I liked to climb it to find a good hiding spot where I could relax and scrutinise my univer
se.

  We had dozens and dozens of olive trees, and during olive-picking season we all turned into a team. For breakfast, my mother fried eggs mixed with salted potatoes and cheese, and baked bread in her mud oven. My father spread plastic beneath each tree so that any olives that fell could be picked up without getting covered in the dry earth. I enjoyed climbing the trees. The higher I got, the more excited I felt. I came down only when my mother announced that lunch was ready: jasmine rice with beef and okra stew. She served it on a tray with a smashed tomato salad and a plate filled with freshly cut tomatoes, cucumbers, and hot peppers (mostly for my father), all straight from our farms, along with pickled olives from the previous season.

  Even though I found the whole process exciting, by the second day I was looking for ways to finish faster. One way was to use a stick to shake down the branches without having to pick them by hand. My grandmother got upset with me for this because she did not want the branches to be scratched. She lectured me about how an olive tree is like a human being: its skin is not to be harmed. I just waited for her to get distracted and went back to using my stick.

  At the end of the land some distance from the house, my two older brothers had helped my father build a hut from where we could keep watch on the far side of the property. It was a stockade of dry palm trunks with woven palm leaves for a roof. It had a place to make a fire and lay long, thin cushions called freash on the floor, where we sat.

  Our land is so big, I never ran out of space to be on my own. It was a paradise. Knowing that I grew up in Gaza, you may be surprised to hear me call it “paradise.” Today – and my heart breaks to say so – you might be more inclined to call it “hell.” Believe me, though, when I was a child it was not like that, and I still think of it the way it was then.

  When the harvest came and the date clusters were red and heavy, my father’s crews of pickers climbed the trees for weeks, filling trucks that left every day for the markets and packing houses. He saved the best ones for my mother to make her amazing date jam. That was the finest gift we could give anyone, and I always gave a jar to my teachers when I needed to make sure I was on a sports team.

  My mother grew up in the city. She had been born in Beirut, where her family owned land, but came back to Gaza at an early age. Her uncle had been the mayor of Deir el-Balah for many years. Her family is one of four original families there. They owned a lot of land. Some of her relatives were uneasy about her marrying my father. They saw themselves as cosmopolitan city people and were dismissive of him for being a farmer and less well off, though the Bashirs are the largest of the four original families. But my mother’s mother, Sitie, liked him. He was handsome, with movie-star good looks. He was immaculately dressed, even when he was working on the farm. When he spoke with somebody he looked directly at them; his dark eyes filled with such sincerity that his listeners were left deeply touched. He tilted his head just slightly as he spoke, chose his words carefully, and treated everyone kindly.

  “Leave it with me,” Sitie told my father. He did. Eventually, he and my mother did marry. Over the next dozen years, they had eight children. I was the fourth, with two older brothers and an older sister, plus one younger brother, then a twin sister and brother, and finally a youngest sister.

  He built a house for my mother and made it from the highest quality cement bricks, which looked like stones cut from a quarry. It was a sharp contrast to the humble house that still stood next to it, where he, his brother, and two sisters had been raised by their parents. He remodelled one of the rooms into a garage for his white Opel, and used it as a place to keep some of his farm tools. We stashed large bales of hay in another one of the rooms to feed the animals and birds we raised.

  For many years, the new house had had only one storey. In 1997, when I was eight, he started building two more floors using the money he had made from his greenhouses. He and my mother saved their money carefully. They did not believe in taking out a bank loan. They did something only when they had the money to pay for it, and were confident it would remain theirs until Judgement Day.

  The work on the new floors kept getting delayed, however, because our neighbours took my parents to court to stop the construction. The neighbours were Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers living illegally next to and on our land. The two new upper floors would make our house the tallest building in the area. Our neighbours did not want that. On many occasions, my parents left early in the morning for Tel Aviv, across the Israeli border, only to come back from the court late at night empty-handed. In the end, my parents won their case, but it took two years.

  A Jewish settlement had been built directly across the Salah al-Din Highway from our house. It was called K’far Darom. Two earlier settlements had been located there, one in the 1930s and another a decade later. In both cases, the settlers had left after only a few years. Following Israel’s occupation of Gaza in 1967, a third settlement was established in 1989 – the year I was born.

  When I looked over at the settlement from the upper floors of our house, it was so unlike everything else in Gaza. Their houses were laid out along two sides of a paved road that almost made a circle at the centre of their two hundred and fifty acres. Many of the houses had satellite dishes. Their roofs were sloping and covered with red clay tiles. My mother told me that was how houses were built in Europe.

  Though K’far Darom looked beautiful, the settlers themselves gave me an uncomfortable feeling every time I saw them. They just did not seem friendly. I had watched on TV how violent settlers had been towards Palestinians, how they showed no regard for children or women. Those images hung at the back of my mind when I saw the men always working with small machine guns strapped around their bodies. They scared me even though I had never seen them fire their weapons.

  I never saw children, only older people and women in long black dresses with their heads covered in black turban-like hats. We had heard that the residents of K’far Darom were among the most religiously conservative of the eight thousand illegal Israeli settlers in Gaza.

  They had greenhouses like ours, but hired Filipinos to work in them. They built a cement footbridge across the Salah al-Din Highway – not far from our house – to connect their homes on the far side to their synagogue, which was on our side. The footbridge was open only to the settlers.

  Between our land and the synagogue was an Israeli military base. It had two high watchtowers, where soldiers with machine guns were stationed twenty-four/seven. The towers were about forty feet tall, just slightly lower than our house. They were made of metal girders, and each had a small room at the top. We could see one of them from our formal living room and the kitchen, and the other from our bathroom and my parents’ bedroom.

  The soldiers stationed in the towers had binoculars. Whenever we looked at the towers we could see the soldiers watching us. Because they were always there, we presumed we were always being watched.

  Despite this, the soldiers on the base for some reason were less intimidating to me than the settlers – maybe because they always seemed to be enjoying life more. Every Saturday the soldiers turned their music all the way up; most of their music sounded very Arabic to me. We heard them as they clapped and cheered to the Egyptian pop singer Amr Diab’s Habibi ya Noor El Ein [Baby, You Are the Light of My Eyes].

  They often played football and sometimes kicked their militarylooking footballs across our fence. Sometimes, they came and asked for their ball back, though that was rare. Sometimes I kicked their ball back on my own. Sometimes I played with it a little before kicking it back. Sometimes I just kept it, because the palm trees had thorns that punctured my own balls. A new one was always welcome.

  One of the watchtowers had been built right above the shed where we kept our animals. I thought that was funny because the roosters crowed so loudly that any soldier posted in that tower would have had to hate his life. Sometimes a soldier would decide that he’d had enough early-morning crowing and start jeering in Hebrew at the roosters, before he shut all the windows in the tower and disappeared along with his agitation.