talks as if his whole life depends on the success of the event, gesticulating wildly, pleading with everybody to stay in place and not disperse.
We ultimately get moving and pick up more people on the way, heading to the American University of Beirut (AUB) to combine with its own students demonstrating there. From the AUB we are all going to march down to the Borj, the main square in the center of downtown Beirut, to the Lebanese Foreign Ministry.
On the way, the shopkeepers throw flowers and rosewater at us. Some shout slogans such as “Down with colonialism” and “God is with those who seek to be free.” Others, more religiously oriented, shout Koranic phrases. By the time we reach the Borj, our numbers have swelled immensely. We stand all bunched up together, surrounded by a large number of gendarmes. The demonstration today, unlike many others before and after it, is legal. The Algerian Revolution in the late 1950s, like the Palestinian Revolution in the late 1960s, was too popular for the government to ban.
Outside the Foreign Ministry building the various groups from different schools or different parties or different ages mingle together. Ibrahim and I hold the wooden poles supporting a banner that says “Western imperialists, colonists, and occupiers in our homeland—the Arab world shall become your graveyard.” Salim Solh, the prime minister of Lebanon, steps onto his third floor balcony to address the crowd. Ibrahim and I are directly below, standing near the steps leading into the lobby of the building. For about ten minutes Solh dwells on the sympathy that the Lebanese and other Arab peoples have for the Algerian struggle for independence. But then he says the Lebanese people have always sought friendship and cooperation with the French and the Lebanese government does not want to endanger this special relationship. Ibrahim begins muttering loudly under his breath. Then suddenly, as if he has gone mad, he screams “La, la, ya Solh, la solh ma’a el istimar?”—No, no, O Solh, no peace with colonialism. Ibrahim is punning on the name “Solh,” which in our language means “peace.” He keeps screaming the line over and over again, at the top of his voice. Full of uncontrolled fury, he lets go of his side of the banner to wave his fists at Solh. Then he climbs up on the steps and proceeds to give a counter-speech.
For God’s sake. Ibrahim Adel. The sixteen-year-old boy with whom I grew up at the camps. Who has a lyrical name like Abraham the Just and a nickname like “the library.” Who shined shoes around the Corniche with me. Ibrahim, the boy with the shaved head who had tried to kiss a zaim’s foot not so long ago, is now giving a counter-speech to the one that the foreign minister of Lebanon is giving to a crowd of ten thousand demonstrators.
What is happening to us, the first generation of Palestinians growing up in exile? It is as if we are growing up challenged to talk about and deal with more than we knew. Each question we ask to which we find no answer becomes a blow, merciless and brutal.
Ibrahim is, of course, picked up by the police and taken into custody. In those days, when you were arrested the police did not bother to file charges, release you on bail, or enable you to inform your next of kin. Very simply, you were beaten senseless, made to sit in a cell for a day or two, a week or two, a month or two, or when necessary, a year or two. Till the emergence of the Palestinian Revolution in 1967, it was illegal for Palestinians to engage in any kind of political activity. In Lebanon, Palestinians were considered aliens.
When we went to visit Ibrahim at the police station the day after his arrest, laden with bread, black olives, and yogurt, he seemed in incredibly good humor, despite his swollen face and bruises. He even joked with us about what the police had threatened.
“To deport me,” he said mock-seriously, “if they caught me in a demonstration again.”
“Deport you,” we all asked in unison. “Where? Where could they deport you?”
“That’s the joke, don’t you see?”
Ibrahim was soon released because Abu Ibrahim (like everybody else) knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone in the Lebanese Parliament who, for a bribe, did favors for the families of prisoners. Under the then existing system, someone who could come up with the appropriate amount of money could literally get away with murder.
In Palestinian society, when someone is released from jail for a political offense, everybody in the neighborhood, and even outlying neighborhoods, visits to offer “congratulations.” The visitors may be total strangers, but they come, sit down, drink tea, talk Palestine, and offer their congratulations. If male, the ex-prisoner wears his headgear in a special way, tilting his hatta at an angle to indicate rakish defiance of the authorities and to declare to his friends that he had not been crushed. He is, in other words, proclaiming publicly his willingness to go back to jail if need be. If the victim died under torture, or has been killed in battle, then his family buries him attired as a bridegroom, arisse el watan, married to the nation. Again, congratulations, not condolences, are offered by the visitors.
These are old, traditional arrangements that Palestinians (in struggle for well over a century) had established sometime beyond anybody’s recall; arrangements that, for various reasons, still appeal to their internal psychic economy.
So Ibrahim basks in the “congratulations” that people from Bourj el Barajneh camp come to his home to offer.
Abu Ibrahim, however, is enraged at his son, not because of his political activism but because he is “endangering his education.” “How are you going to live without an education?” Abu Ibrahim is shouting at his son. “You keep forgetting that you’re a Palestinian. A Palestinian. You’re worth nothing without an education. No one will give you a job without an education. Do you want to grow up to be a shoeshiner? And tell me. How will you support us when your mother and I are old? You’re a Palestinian. Can’t you wait till we go back to our homeland? Do you want to struggle in the lands of others? May the Lord damn them and damn the lands of others? May the Lord damn them and damn their lands and their corrupt governments and police. May the rainbow never appear in their skies. May the Lord pour acid on their songs and fire on the tongues of their poets. Wait till we return to Palestine. Your education is more important than politics.”
In Palestinian society, you do not talk back to your father. Ibrahim listened, and said nothing. In exile, however, our fathers have become too debilitated, too drained, by the effort they have made, all these years, to transmute the ethos of Palestine to us. In their old age, they have become conservative, cautious, terrorized by the exigencies of life and the imminence of death in exile.
2
The objective conditions in our situation—which are themselves an externalization of our subjective condition—were changing us, transforming our picture of the world and ourselves at a dramatically accelerated pace.
At school, I am consumed by a paper I am writing about the Russian Revolution for my history class, trying to deal with why men and women struggle at such danger to themselves; why certain individuals readily offer their lives for a cause although this means they will not be around to enjoy the rewards of the ultimate victory. At home I am consumed trying to pacify my mother, who berates me and my sister for “endangering” our education. Our mission in life, she insists, is to become educated and liberate Palestine, not to change the Arab world. “Leave politics alone,” she shouts. “We are just Palestinians, for God’s sake.” She does not respond to our argument that Palestine and the Arab world cannot be seen in isolation from each other, and that our destiny as a people cannot be divorced from its relation to politics, and to political events in the rest of the world.
The argument that everything in politics is interconnected in an intricate web of relationships spanning the whole world had come to me from my friend Samir Salfiti, who worked as a peddler at the Corniche. I knew Salfiti from the camps and from Awlad Falasteeri.
