when suddenly the house was surrounded by military jeeps. Five or six soldiers jumped out and demanded that Raja and the rest of the family evacuate the house. Raja told them that his sister was bedridden and desperately needed medical attention. Her two young teenagers could testify to that. The soldiers could come in and see for themselves. She had a gallbladder attack and ought to be hospitalized, he repeated. He even led them to her bedroom to prove his point. Her face was pale and contorted, and her hands were clutching her right side.
“It will be most kind of you if you would help us move her to the hospital in one of your jeeps,” Raja appealed to the soldier, with his nephew and niece moving closer to their mother’s bed. Other soldiers, also with guns at the ready, were standing behind him and to the side of the room.
“You must be crazy,” replied the first soldier, his gun pointed at him and his finger on the trigger. “Hurry up and take her with you.”
“How am I going to take her?” Raja pleaded. “I don’t have a car. I can’t call a taxi. And look for yourself, she simply can’t walk,”
“Then I’ll help you out,” the soldier said
With mystifying nonchalance, the soldier pulled out his bayonet and walked toward the bed. With one master stroke, he slit her throat. It was like a flash, so electrifying, and so particularly wild, that the poor woman didn’t have a moment to blink her eye or make a peep.
A blast of horror filled the house. The children howled. Raja froze in place, his eyes glazed.
“Now you don’t have to worry about taking her to the hospital. Get out.”
Between looking at his dead sister with the blood oozing on the bed sheet, and with her hysterical children throwing themselves on her feet and chest, Raja felt utterly helpless. What could he do with the killer giving him a murderous look? Raja blamed himself for not having defended her. But he couldn’t have, he told himself. Defend her with what? With his bare hands? His impotence, anger, despair, and indescribable shame consumed him. The world was closing in on him. Suffocating him. Suddenly he pictured the room as Hades, with a huge monster at the gate licking its chops, ready to swallow them.
“Church . . . simple funeral,” Raja blurted, his well-known eloquence escaping him. “. . . cemetery . . . burial.”
“No problem,” the soldier assured him. “We’ll bury her for you here and now.”
“You’ll do what?” Raja screamed, his eyes bulging.
“Just take the kids with you and get out before I kill all of you. Out, I said. Out, out.”
Raja couldn’t fathom how a human being could be so cruel, so cold-blooded. Traumatized, he led his niece and nephew out of the house onto the main street, and the boy and girl never stopped sobbing and clinging to him. After walking less than fifty yards, they heard an explosion. Their hearts sank. With sheer terror gripping their heart and soul, they slowly turned around to look. What they saw engulfed them in a higher level of panic. Their house was tumbling down. The body of their slain mother/sister was literally buried beneath the rubble.
“The bastard kept his word,” Raja muttered, over and over again, enfolding the orphaned niece and nephew in his arms and leaning against a lemon tree. As the youngsters sobbed uncontrollably and kicked whatever was before them, Raja found himself too outraged to even cry. Dry-eyed and with all the solemnity he could muster, he made a silent vow to whomever or whatever or whichever was listening that the death of his slain sister would be avenged. So help him God, her death would be—most emphatically must be—avenged.
All of this Yousif had known already not only from stories that circulated about the famed journalist, but mainly from an article he himself had published under the title “Slain Mother / Slain Sister.” Yousif still recalled the power of his words and the chilling effect it had on him and the multitudes of readers. Now he was in the presence of that same man, that same chronicler of Palestinian pain and suffering. He felt fortunate, even proud, to be associated with any group that included Raja.
“We all know why we are here,” Basim began. “And I trust we are in agreement on what needs to be done. For the sake of clarity, let me repeat what I have told each of you in private, so that there will be no misunderstanding or secrets among us. What we’re planning to do is build a political and military organization for the sole purpose of liberating our homeland. The real war is on the horizon, and we must be ready to fight on many fronts. Our organization and many other organizations like it, that are being established as we speak, will be the new factor in the equation. The winning difference. There’s no other way left for us to redeem ourselves. I’m convinced, as all of you are, that our forced exile is meant to be permanent. Many of us thought we were going to be allowed to return home before last Christmas. We all know how naïve that expectation was. Many Christmases and many Easters and many Ramadans will come and go and our refugees will still be rotting in camps.”
Yousif looked around and found everyone rapt in silence.
“The Zionists,” Basim continued, lighting a cigarette, “did not work for the last fifty years to walk away from a victory that must’ve surpassed their wildest dreams. Not a chance. What they occupied they want to keep, make no mistake about it.”
Raja was the first to offer an opinion, “The first president of so-called Israel reportedly cried when the conflict ended before they could occupy the whole country.”
“For sure,” Hanna added. “The head of their underground wants Palestine and Trans-Jordan for a start. The boundaries of his Eretz Israel stretch from Iraq to Egypt. His record is clear on that.”
Basim returned to his interrupted introduction. “You are both correct. But how many of our so-called leaders have taken all these questions seriously? If the leaders are a lost cause, it is our job to awaken the masses to the enemy’s grand design. Ours is a monumental job—no question about it. But start we must.”
The discussion began and Yousif felt the urge to make his views known, if only to justify his youth among older men. But he considered it sensible to bide his time.
“The first thing we need to do,” Ali said, “is to forget once and for all that there are Arab regimes and Arab leaders. They are all a sorry bunch.”
Raja eyed Ali with a smile that seemed to attribute his sweeping generalization to immaturity. “I understand what you’re saying,” he said, “but governments and rulers have armies. They have tanks and planes and rockets and all kinds of armaments. And we don’t have a single hand grenade—not yet, anyway.”
Suddenly Ali was on the defensive. “But they hardly committed themselves or much of the equipment they did have. What’s the use of having it if you don’t use it?”
“Some did, maybe not as well as we had hoped, but they did. There’s no denying that there were some heroes in those battles.”
“And a lot of traitors in high places, if you ask me.”
“That’s the reason we are refugees,” Basim said, eager to stop the early and unsuspected wrangling. “That’s the reason we are meeting today. That’s the reason we need to form this organization. To address all these issues.”
“There are millions of good and patriotic people in those countries who are as angry and bewildered as we are over what happened,” Ustaz Sa’adeh volunteered. “One of the aims of this organization is to keep an eye on all of our leaders, and to sort out the trustworthy from the corrupt. To support
