“We thought we were fighting to defend our homes. But not them; they didn’t have any villages to defend. They were an army that advanced and retreated freely, as armies do.
“We didn’t put up a defense. At Sha’ab we discovered we were incapable of defending our homes. My house in Ain al-Zaitoun disappeared into thin air; all the houses in the village were blown up the moment they entered. I fought at Sha’ab, even though it wasn’t my village.
“We fought and fought. Don’t believe all that lying history. We have to go back there to fight, but I’m here. That’s enough for now.”
Do you remember how Abu Husam got up, all macho, and said that it made him angry to hear that kind of talk. “The Arab Liberation Army never fought. The Arab armies just entered Palestine to protect the borders that had been drawn and left us on our own.”
You tried to explain that we fought but we didn’t know. When you fight and don’t know, it’s as though you aren’t fighting. But no one wanted to listen. Only Nuha. Do you remember Nuha? She was there. She came and sat close to you and stared at the imaginary map you’d drawn on the dark red carpet. Then she took the stick from your hand, redrew the map of Galilee and asked you about al-Birwa.
That was the day I fell in love with Nuha and a one-sided love story began that only turned to real love six years later, when she came to the hospital to ask for my help in looking after her dying grandmother.
After Nuha finished drawing her map, she turned to you and asked, “Why?”
I think I saw a tear suspended in the corner of her eye, and that tear was the start of a love story, a love that began with a teardrop that didn’t fall and ended in the municipal stadium under a downpour of tears that soaked eyes and faces.
But Nuha, when she fell in love with me years later, denied the story of the tear. She said she hadn’t cried, but she’d felt pity for all of you because you were living on memories, and the past was your only pillar of support.
Looking at the map, she asked you — her voice halting and punctuated by white spaces, as though emotion were staining her words with silence:
“Why did you believe Mahdi?”
The room exploded in silence.
Is it true, Father, that al-Birwa fell because you believed Mahdi, Jasem, and the ALA division stationed at Tal al-Layyat?
Answer me. I don’t want anecdotes but a clear-cut answer.
I know you don’t know the answers. I can see you with the eyes of those days. You were an impulsive young man — that’s how everyone who knew you describes you. Despite that, or because of it, you succeeded — you and the division from Sha’ab — in breaking through to al-Birwa and taking it back.
But, to be accurate, before the breakthrough and the recovery, al-Birwa had fallen without a fight.
Sun-dust enveloped the fields, the wheat glittering in that golden light that precedes the harvest. And the village was afraid. After the fall of Acre, the villages of al-Mukur, al-Jdeideh, Julis, Kafar Yasif, and Abu Sinan surrendered, leaving al-Birwa floating in the wind.
And they attacked.
No one was ready. Our ambushes were laughable. Now we’ve figured out how to do things, and we have an impressive numbers of fedayeen. But then we were forty men and Father Jebran. The priest of al-Birwa didn’t negotiate with the Jews for a surrender, that’s a lie. He negotiated for our return — this issue has sparked great debate.
Nuha’s grandmother, who came to be known as Umm al-Hajar,* would tell the story and say, “If only!”
“If only we’d believed Father Jebran! We were nothing, my daughter — just forty men and up above, at Tal al-Layyat, more than a hundred soldiers of the ALA under their leader, Mahdi, who used to come down like a monkey asking for chickens. We named him Lieutenant Chicken Mahdi and would hand them over. What are a few chickens? Let them eat and good health to them! The important thing was for the village to survive — better a village without chickens than chickens without a village. But the chickens did no good, my dear, because when the Jews attacked, Chicken Mahdi didn’t fight.”
They were forty. They’d sent their wives and children into the surrounding fields and sat in their ambushes waiting. The Jews chose to attack from the west at sunset, so the sun would be in the peasants’ eyes. Three armored vehicles advanced under a heavy cannon bombardment but were brought to a halt. Then the Jews retreated and dug themselves in, renewing the attack at dawn.
“We ran,” said Nuha’s father. “Yes, we ran. We had no means of defense and the army up above us didn’t fire a single shot. I said to Mahdi, ‘Aren’t you even going to defend your chickens?’ He replied, ‘No orders.’ The village fell and we left everything behind. The ALA didn’t even try to save the chickens.”
Nuha said her father had always lived with sorrow in his heart: He said his greatest wish was not to kill the Jews but to kill Chicken Mahdi.
It would be lawful to kill Mahdi, isn’t that right, Father? It would be lawful to kill him not because he didn’t fight with you, but because after you took the village back he gave the order for you to withdraw and join your women and children because the ALA would protect the village. And you believed him.
Why did you believe Mahdi?
Yunes said he didn’t believe Mahdi, “but what could we do?”
“Listen, my daughter. They occupied the village, so the fedayeen withdrew and joined their families in the fields nearby. They slept and lived under the olive trees, waiting for an end to their sufferings. When they got hungry, they decided to take back their village. The Jews occupied the village on June 10, 1948, and we waited in the fields for two weeks. Then we came together — people from al-Birwa, Sha’ab, al-Ba’neh, and Deir al-Asad — and decided to liberate the village. The wheat and maize were waiting to be harvested, and people couldn’t find even a dry crust for sustenance.
“The fighters gathered at Tal al-Layyat, and there the Iraqi officer Jasem stood up and made a speech. He said the ALA didn’t have orders to help, but they were wholeheartedly with the villagers and would be praying for their success.
“Our attack began. We attacked the village from three directions — Jebel al-Tawil in the north, Sha’ab in the southeast, and Tal al-Layyat in the east — and we won.
“We won because they were taken by surprise and didn’t fight. They did just as we’d done: Instead of resisting, they ran away to Abu Laban. So we entered the village. Of course, they fired at us for a while, but it seems their numbers were very small so they withdrew.
“In al-Birwa we found everything in its place and Father Jebran there to greet us.
“He said, ‘You should have agreed with me and given me time to finish negotiating with them, but this is better. God has granted us victory.’
“The priest suggested we harvest the wheat before they came back, and we agreed. We were inspecting the village and the houses when we heard youyous coming from the house of Ahmad Isma’il Sa’ad. When we got there, we found everyone’s clothes stuffed into bags and placed in the center of the patio. People were attempting to pick out their own clothes from the jumble. I swear no one knows what he took and what he left behind. The clothes were all mixed up, and we couldn’t make heads nor tails of them. The priest kept telling us to leave the clothes and go out to the fields. Saniyyeh, the wife of Ahmad Isma’il Sa’ad, let out a celebratory trill and we all laughed; it was a rag wedding — we discovered our clothes were only rags. Why would the Jews take rags? And us, too — why were our clothes rags? We celebrated. I can hardly describe it, my dear — clothes were flying through the air, and everyone was trying things on and pulling them off. Everyone wore everyone else’s things, and we came together and were joyous. That was our victory celebration, but we couldn’t enjoy it because we heard gunfire from the direction of the threshing ground, so we thought the counterattack must have begun. Leaving our rags, we ran to get our rifles, and we found Darwish’s son, Mahmoud (not the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who was only six years old then and hardly knew how to talk — it was his cousin, I think) standing in the middle of the field, firing his gun in the air and pointing to the threshing floor. There we discovered the sacks: A large part of the wheat harvest had been placed in sacks in the middle of the threshing floor. We started gathering the sacks while Salim As’ad stood by in a British police officer’s uniform, which he’d never parted with, next to seven harvesters the Jews had left when they fled.