They were in the courtyard of the mosque of Sha’ab, wrapped in their astonishment like ghosts in long black mantles.
It was there that you found out what had happened.
On the morning of May 2, the armed men withdrew from the village and people were penned up inside their houses, trapped by the gunfire. When the Palmach soldiers arrived, they ordered the people to gather in the courtyard of Mahmoud Hamed’s house.
Umm Suleiman had hid in the stable near her house, then finally decided to join the others in the courtyard, carrying a makeshift white flag.
“What can I say, Son? We were standing there, and they were firing over our heads. We started to crouch down, some of us kneeling, some squatting, some lying flat on the ground. Then Yusef Ibrahim al-Hajjar stood up. His wife was beside him, and she tried to pull him down, but he stood. He raised his hands as though surrendering, but the firing didn’t stop. Yusef Ibrahim al-Hajjar went toward the soldiers, bearing the seventy-five years of his life on the shoulders of his huge body.
“‘I want to say something. Listen to me.
“‘We surrender. Our village has fallen, and our men are defeated, and we surrender and expect to be treated humanely. Pay attention now. We are captives, and you must treat us the way captured civilians are treated in wartime. We’re not begging for your sympathy. We are requesting it and will repay it. If you treat us well, we’ll repay your good deed with many more. Tomorrow, as you know, Arab armies will enter Palestine and we’ll defeat you and then we’ll treat you as you treat us today. It would be better for you that we come to an understanding. I have said what I must, as God is my witness.’
“A young officer approached Yusef and slapped him across the face. Then he pulled out his revolver and fired at Yusef’s head, and the man’s brains scattered over the ground. None of us moved. Even his wife remained kneeling. Then the soldiers chose about forty young men and drove them ahead of them, and after they disappeared from sight, we heard firing. They killed the young men and then drove us like sheep toward the valley of al-Karrar, where we gathered before setting off toward Sha’ab.”
As they talked you looked for Hanna Kamil Mousa. Hanna was the leader of the village militia and closer to you than a brother. You’d met Abd al-Qadir Husseini with him in Saffouri, and you were inseparable.
“Where’s Hanna?” you yelled.
Ahmad Hamed told you he’d seen him.
“I was hiding in the house,” he said, “before I decided that it would be better to give myself up. So I went out and walked along the street where the Hamed clan lived, making my way to the square. Before I got to Abu Sultan Hamed’s house, they grabbed me and started dragging me along: I’d put up my hands in surrender, but they dragged me along as though they’d captured me. It was behind the square that I saw him. He was in the oak tree. I don’t know if he was alive because they wouldn’t let me get near him. One of them had a tight grip on my neck and was pulling me along as if he’d tied a rope around it. I couldn’t resist. I had no intention of resisting, I just wanted to stop in front of the oak, but they wouldn’t let me. Then they led me to the square where they had just killed Yusef Ibrahim al-Hajjar. They’d done the same with the sheikh, your father — didn’t your mother tell you? Where is the blind man? Have they taken him away?
“Hanna Kamil Mousa is still crucified on the tree. Go and get him down, Son. I wish I could come with you. I don’t know where his family is. They’ve probably come to Sha’ab. Perhaps they went to Amqa, lots of people went toward Amqa. Go to Amqa, maybe you’ll find his mother or father there. Tell them Ahmad Hamed saw him crucified, and we have to get him down from the oak.”
You left him midsentence and rushed to the Khatib house to confirm, for the umpteenth time, that your father was alive. You found the sheikh sitting in the courtyard drinking coffee and talking about the terrible events of the First World War!
You were gone for three weeks. Everyone believed you’d gone to Ain al-Zaitoun to get Hanna down from his cross, and when you came back you didn’t tell anyone about what you’d seen.
Tell me, is it true they crucified him? And what does it mean that they crucified him? Did they drive nails through his hands? Did they tie him to the tree with a rope and then kill him? Or did they tie him there and leave him to die, the way the Romans did with their slaves?
You don’t know, because when you slunk into the village and went to the oak tree, you found no one.
Was Ahmad hallucinating?
Or were you no longer able to see?
Perhaps, my friend, you weren’t capable of seeing your father walking beside your mother and wife in this exodus.
“It was as if I could see only darkness,” you told me.
Is it true that the area around the spring was strewn with the bodies of the forty young men who were killed there in cold blood?
Is it true that instead of burying the dead they used a bulldozer to push them into a communal pit, which didn’t get covered over properly so that people’s remains stuck out, mixed with earth?
Is it true that their demolition of the village was meant as revenge for Kherbet-Jeddin?
Saleh al-Jashi claimed you didn’t take part in the battle at Kherbet-Jeddin. I know he’s lying, and in any case, no one in the camp believes anything he says since the strange scene he made in ’72 following the Munich operation. People saw something they’d never seen before — a father jealous of his dead son!
Everyone raced to his house to offer their condolences after his son Husam was killed at the Munich airport, but instead of talking about Husam, he couldn’t stop talking about himself and his own acts of heroism, about how he’d killed seventy Israelis in the battle at Kherbet-Jeddin.
Of course you remember the Black September operation and the kidnapping of Israel’s Olympic athletes in Munich. I know what you think about that kind of operation, and I know you were one of the few who dared take a stand against the hijacking of airplanes, the operations abroad, and the killing of civilians. People said your position sprang from your fears for your wife and children in Galilee, but you said no, and you were right. I’m completely convinced of your position now, even though at the time I believed you only wanted to protect your family. As you used to say, “If you want to win a war, you don’t go in for acrobatics, and if you don’t respect the lives of others, you don’t have the right to defend your own.”
Saleh al-Jashi claimed you didn’t take part in the battle of Kherbet-Jeddin. We didn’t believe him, though. That old hunchbacked man with a large nose sat in his house receiving condolences and congratulations on his son’s martyrdom, and seized the occasion to recount his own glories and those of the bands that came from al-Kweikat and Sha’ab and Ain al-Zaitoun to support the fighters of al-Kabri. And when someone asked about you, he raised his finger and said, no, he didn’t remember you being with them. Puffing out his chest, he told the story of the ambush: “The people of al-Kabri won’t forget the victory they tasted at Kherbet-Jeddin! If we’d fought throughout Palestine the way we did at al-Kabri, we wouldn’t have lost the country!”
“But we’re fighting now,” a voice said. A youth, one of Husam’s comrades.
“We’ll see, my son. We’ll see what you can do.” Then Saleh al-Jashi started telling us about the Israeli convoy that fell into the ambush.
I want to ask you, was the fall of Ain al-Zaitoun, al-Kabri, and al-Birwa revenge for Kherbet-Jeddin?
Umm Hassan said she went past there on her way to al-Kweikat and amid the ruins saw a burned-out bus and the remains of an armored car; the Israelis had set up a monument to their dead.