“What about us — what will we put up there?” I asked her.
“What will we put up?” she asked in surprise.
“After the liberation, I mean,” I said.
She looked at me with half-closed eyes as though she didn’t understand what I was getting at. Then she laughed.
Umm Hassan’s right. We’ll never put up anything — we can’t even manage a decent burial ground, let alone a monument. For the fifteen hundred individuals who fell at Sabra and Shatila, we built nothing. The mass grave has turned into a field where children play soccer. Some even say that the whole of Shatila will be razed soon.
Monuments aren’t important, only the living count. But why did Abu Husam claim you didn’t take part in the battle, and why, instead of weeping for his son, did he sit like a puffed-up cockerel boasting of his heroic deeds?
Tell me what really happened.
I don’t want to listen to that cripple boasting that a hand grenade went off in his pocket and didn’t kill him. I didn’t believe the story, but you confirmed it, laughing, “The poor man was frightened for his manhood. Blood was spurting out of him, and he put his hand between his thighs, and when he was sure the injury was elsewhere he started jumping for joy before fainting from the pain. We were a band of fighters on our way to al-Birwa. Saleh al-Jashi was hanging out of the window of the bus when the grenade went off in his pocket and he fell. We took him back to al-Kabri and continued on to al-Birwa. Then he met up with us again at the Sha’ab garrison after he’d become crippled.”
That was in May of ’48.
Al-Kabri had been in turmoil for two months. At the beginning of February, a band of Israelis attacked the village and tried to blow up the house of Fares Sarhan, a member of the Arab Higher Committee. The attack failed, and the band that made it to Sarhan’s house would’ve been wiped out if they hadn’t withdrawn under a hail of bullets.
On the same day, the commander of al-Kabri’s militia, Ibrahim Ya‘qub, saw a Jewish armored car leave Jeddin at the head of a convoy of vehicles in the direction of the main road that leads to Safad via Nahariyyeh. He rushed to Alloush, commander of the Arab Liberation Army in the area, to ask him for help, but Alloush refused because he hadn’t received any orders.
Ibrahim gathered the fighters and divided them in two, the first group in the area of al-Rayyis, two kilometers southwest of al-Kabri, and a group at the cemetery.
The first group blocked the road with rocks and stones while the second set up an ambush in the cemetery under the command of Saleh al-Jashi.
The Israeli convoy stopped where the road was blocked but didn’t retreat. The armored car pulled back and the bulldozer moved forward, followed by three armored cars, two trucks, and a bus.
Then all hell broke loose.
The battle began at noon. After the bulldozer succeeded in clearing a way, Saleh threw a hand grenade, but it didn’t explode. He threw another, and it made a terrible noise and produced a lot of dust, but the convoy continued to advance. Suddenly one of the armored cars turned and burst into flame. How did it catch fire? No one knows. Did a third grenade hit it or did it collide with the pile of rocks at the crossroads and catch fire?
Saleh didn’t know.
But he does know that the convoy halted in its tracks and the firing started. It was a bloodbath. The firing went on until dawn.
Sitting in his house among the mourners, Saleh described what happened:
“They began getting out of the armored cars and tried to spread out among the olive trees while we fired at them with our rifles. We had English rifles, some hand grenades, and one Sten gun. Not one of them got away. They couldn’t fight, and they didn’t raise a white flag. We fired and received occasional fire from the windows of the bus or from the perimeter of the ambush. The firing didn’t stop until we’d killed every last one of them.
“In the morning, the British came to remove the bodies. I stayed up the whole night in the cemetery with a few young men from al-Birwa and Sha’ab who’d come to lend their support. The rest gathered the arms of the Israelis and went home to sleep. General Ismail Safwat, chief of staff of the Arab Liberation Army, came, was photographed in front of the destroyed Israeli vehicles, before confiscating our stash of arms, from which he gave us back eleven rifles and seven boxes of ammunition.
“What kind of army was that? And what kind of liberation?”
Didn’t anyone ask him what they did after the battle?
Didn’t they expect a counterattack? Did they prepare for one?
But tell me, dear friend, what did Khalil Kallas do, commander of the group of thirty ALA men stationed near Fares Sarhan’s house in al-Kabri?
“Withdrew,” you’ll say.
“When?” I’ll ask.
“Three days before the village fell.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew.”
“And you? You all didn’t know?”
Abu Husam said they were taken by surprise by the attack on al-Kabri.
However, Fawziyyeh, the widow of Mohammed Ahmad Hassan and wife of Ali Kamel, knew, because she left the village the day that the ALA men left.
Fawziyyeh, whose husband died in the battle of Jeddin, didn’t remarry for twenty years, and Ali Kamel, her second husband, discovered that she was a virgin.
Her first husband died in the battle of Jeddin without taking part in it. He was a cameleer, transporting goods among the villages. On that day in March 1948, he was returning from Kafar Yasif to al-Kabri when he passed by the Israeli ambush pinned under the gunfire of the village militia. He was hit and died. The man fell, but the camel continued on its way to the village, ambling along in its own blood, until it reached its owner’s house, where it collapsed.
Fawziyyeh said the camel was hit in the hump and belly, and the militia men ate it to celebrate their victory. “No one paid any attention to my tragedy. I was seventeen years old and hadn’t been married more than a month. My husband died, and they slaughtered the camel and ate it. They invited me to eat with them. I won’t deny that I joined them, but I could taste death, and from that day I haven’t eaten meat, not even on feast days or holidays. When I see meat, I see the body of Mohammed Ahmad Hassan and feel faint. I didn’t touch meat again until I married Ali Kamel twenty years later. Poor thing, he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw that I was a virgin. He was a widower, like me. When he took me, and he saw the blood, he went crazy — he kissed me and laughed and danced. I was frightened, I swear I was frightened. I mean, how could it be? It was as if I’d never been married and blood had never spotted the sheets in al-Kabri. He wanted to say a few things about Mohammed Ahmad Hassan, but no, I assure you, Mohammed was a real man, it was just that I had turned back into a virgin. My virginity came back when I saw them eating the camel and wiping the grease from their hands.
“Ali Kamel, poor Ali, couldn’t make sense of it. He went to the doctor and came back reassured. The doctor told him it meant I hadn’t had sex since the death of my first husband. But how could I have? I was living in a hovel with my father in Shatila, and he watched me like a hawk. He even stopped me from working in the embroidery workshop — he said he’d rather die of hunger than see his daughter go out to work. Then this widower with no teeth comes along and tells everyone he’s taken my maidenhood! But it’s not true; Mohammed was the one. Ali was like glue — he’d stick to my body and lick me like a piece of chocolate. Umm Hassan laughed at him when he told her he wanted a child. She explained that I wasn’t a virgin and that his seed was weak, but he didn’t get it. A man over sixty and a woman in her forties, and he wants children!”
Fawziyyeh was sitting apart from the others at the wake, and al-Kabri rose up before everyone’s eyes. Abu Husam spoke of his exploits while the village faded like an old photo.