as an elite group who excelled not only in sports, but in combat. Karate was their major sport, according to Ben Bella. Though “violent,” he tells us, it teaches practitioners to be “calm.” The ashbal weapon was the RPG, known in the Soviet Union, where it is manufactured, as “the weapon of the brave.” The ashbal were expected to fight “like ten fedayeen.” “Every grenade in an RPG costs 34 liras, and you only have six, so don’t waste them,” they were told. “Don’t hit your target”—usually a tank—“until it gets close to you, and then immediately move away.”
Indeed, the Israelis dubbed them “the RPG kids” in the 1982 war for the devastating number of hits they scored with their grenades and the agility with which they moved. In every battle the Palestinians waged, all the way from the battle of Karameh in 1968 to the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in 1976, from the Israeli invasion of 1978 to the one that came four years later, the ashbal played a major role.
At Karameh, by literally throwing themselves at Israeli tanks with their explosives strapped to their waists, the ashbal may have turned the tide of battle. In June 1982, at the Rashidiyyeh refugee camp in the South of Lebanon, Ben Bella tells us, a group of thirteen ashbal kept firing at the attackers, “meanwhile running around like frogs,” till they ran out of ammunition. Then they marched out with military salutes, to surrender to the enemy.
Ben Bella also tells us about the last days in Sidon, around the end of June; how Salah Ta’amari decided to stay rather than leave the ashbal behind and join the battle in Beirut.
“They all fought until they had no more ammunition,” he says with finality.
Not more than twenty feet away, Salah’s wife, Dina, is busy hanging drawings done by Ansar prisoners, smuggled out recently, on the walls of a room set aside for their exhibition.
The conversation turns to internal politics. Abu Hatem, bitter because he was prevented from giving Fatah’s presentation on the Lebanon Zone because of his “radical” views, complains that the PNC’s major contribution in this session was to coin a new word for the Arabic lexicon—la’am, a contraction of the words la (no) and na’am (yes). All the resolutions that mattered, including the one on the Reagan Proposals, were couched in innocuous, ambiguous terms. In effect, this exposed the helpless, eviscerated spirit of our Movement.
Ben Bella takes exception, and submits that this is all part of the “tactics” of our postwar policy.
“Isn’t it interesting,” I say, “that most of the declarations dealing with our history have emanated from foreign capitals and were proposed by foreigners? Look at the Peel Commission, the Rogers Peace Plan, the Geneva Conference, the Camp David Accords, the Fez Plan, the Reagan Proposals, and so on.”
“The first session of the PNC, which gave birth to the PLO, was held in Jerusalem,” Ben Bella reminds me. “That is significant, isn’t it?”
I admit that it is; but I don’t add that it is equally significant that we are here in Algiers and not in Jerusalem. What is the point of getting into these arguments now? Isn’t it enough that I’ve discussed that issue a million times in the past, in the early hours of the morning, with diverse Palestinian friends, all the way from Sydney to Paris, from Washington to San Francisco?
1
In the panic, some children suddenly found no hands to hold. They ran up and down the coast road looking for their parents. Clusters of men and women, tired from the long trek, sat by the bushes to rest, staring into the horizon as if crazed by sorrow and incomprehension. A few miles before we reached the Lebanese border, a crowd of people gathered around a woman who lay by the wayside screaming with labor pains. No one knew that this was our last day in Palestine, that this chaos would leave a gap in our soul. And we, the children, did not know that the memory of it was later to haunt the inner history of our whole generation.
In our refugee camp in Beirut, my father complains that the Lord’s way has become wanton and absurd, but adds that every event in His creation has reason, meaning. If it had not meaning, then what has happened to us would not have happened. He could not explain the meaning of the events that led to our last day in Palestine. He just trusted that it was there, somewhere. The beginning of every act in His creation was simply the beginning of another.
Maybe he was right. No one can say. I just know that for my own generation of Palestinians our last day in Palestine was the first day that we began to define our Palestinian identity. Like the olive trees and the land and the stone houses and the sea and the dabki dances and the ululation at weddings. Everything was where it belonged. Everything coalesced into a coherent whole. It had never occurred to anyone to define it, or to endow it with any special attributes. Until we were severed from it.
I was just another eight-year-old child growing up in the refugee camps. All around me people talked about Palestine as if it were the center where all the impulses of their human identity intersected. And everybody was angry. Their anger tangled in the hair of the tents and the muddy lanes of the refugee camps. The men and women were angry because they had to count their years without the harvest. The children were angry because, as they began to acquire a past, moment by moment, touch by touch, encounter by encounter, they discovered that a sense of otherness governed their lives.
In exile, Palestinians lived in their little world and waited for a kind of deliverance. And soon our lives would intertwine with the lives of other people in the world. Then, in the overlapping of strange sorrows, it would be difficult to say whose mouth should turn angry.
In the early 1950s it was still unclear who was in exile, we or our homeland. The refugee camps we lived in were beginning to resemble the people who inhabited them.
In the winter it rained heavily. The dirt tracks of the Bourj el Barajneh camp turned to impassable mud. Families stayed in their tents or, the lucky ones, in their mud huts. After the torrents came the bitter frosts. The cold ate into our flesh. The whole camp was transformed into a swamp, with steam coming out of the belly of the earth and our mouths, and the walls of the mud houses.
The people were wrapped in rags given to them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA. Rags originally “donated by the American people.” The girls walked around wearing baseball hats. Out of the sacks our UNRWA flour rations came in mothers cut underpants for their sons. I often walked around with my behind covered with a handshake and the proclamation that the contents were a “gift from the American people.”
Everybody shivered. All over the camp, the emaciated dogs died. Every day had a thousand and one wrinkles and a thousand and one knots. The men looked for employment, for food. They avoided the police, who were then implicating Palestinians in everything from inflation and communist plots to cold spells. And once every month they lined up, as if in a funeral procession, to receive their UNRWA rations of flour, powdered milk, and dates. The rations lasted a week. Then people ate words. The words led to orange groves in Jaffa, to olive trees in Tershiha, to cloudless summers in Haifa. And back again to Bourj el Barajneh.
In the summer it was fiercely hot. Big bowflies buzzed in the air. A sense of ennui, of resignation, ruled the camp, our lives. It was going to take a new generation to bring down the camp’s flag of surrender and raise a flag of rebellion in its place.
In the 1950s I lived in the streets of Beirut. There was nowhere else to go. I worked in the streets, played in the streets, grew up in the streets, virtually all the streets of the city. In those days, Beirut was owned by street people. They poured over them, day and night, in an intricate communion with a city crazed by its colonial past and class dichotomies. Street peddlers, lottery-ticket sellers, shoeshine boys,
