Raja Shehadeh is the author of When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, Strangers in the House, described by the Economist as “distinctive and truly impressive,” and Palestinian Walks, for which he won the 2008 Orwell Prize. Shehadeh trained as a barrister in London and is a founder of the human rights organization Al-Haq. He lives in Ramallah, on the West Bank.

April 26th
Washington DC: The Jerusalem Fund & The Palestine Center – 6:30pm (map)

April 28th
Washington DC: Foundation for Middle East Peace, at The Carnegie Endowment – 12pm (map)

April 28th
Washington DC: St. Columba’s Church – 7:30 pm (map)

WBAI Radio – Beyond the Pale, June 5th 2011

The Hill, April 27th 2011

Chapter 1: Escaping Arrest

by Raja Shehadeh

‘They’re coming to arrest you,’ Hanan, my sister-in-law,
called to warn me in her strong, matter-of-fact voice. ‘Samer
is on his way.’

My mother had just called Hanan in a panic to dispatch
my brother to my aid, convinced that the Palestinian security
police would be at my door any minute. She was frantic. An
anonymous official from the office of the Attorney General
had rung her to ask about me because they did not have my
phone number. Prudently, she refused to reveal it. ‘Don’t
worry. We’ll find him,’ he had menacingly said before hanging
up.

I wasted no time. I quickly put on thick underwear, tucked
my toothbrush in a pocket and pulled on an extra sweater,
prison survival tips learned from experienced security
detainees I had represented in the past in Israeli military
courts. Jericho, the site of the new Palestinian security prison
and the old Israeli military government headquarters, can get
very cold at night. On that evening of 18 September 1996 I
sat huddled in the courtyard of our new house and waited for
the knock on the door, trying to pretend I was neither worried
nor angry.

Those first years of the transitional rule of the Palestinian
Authority were strange times. It was the rude awakening at
the end of a fascinating and hopeful period for me, during
which I had devoted all my energies to bringing about change
and a conclusion to the Israeli occupation. I had spent years
challenging illegal Israeli land acquisitions in the occupied
West Bank. Ironically, the unfounded claim that was now
being made against my client was that he was selling land to
the enemy by going into partnership with an Israeli corporation
for the establishment of a gambling casino in Jericho, and
I was accused of helping him with this venture. It was a false
claim fabricated by some powerful members of the governing
Authority who were hoping to intimidate my client into
withdrawing from the project so that they could replace him
in this lucrative enterprise.

Prompted perhaps by disappointment over the false peace
heralded by the signing of the Oslo Accords, and despite all
the fanfare on the White House lawn, my thoughts had been
turning to the past, to the time when it all began. I had been
reading about my great-great-uncle Najib Nassar, who like
me was a writer, and like me a man whose hopes had been
crushed when the Ottoman authority of his day sent troops
to arrest him. But unlike me he did not wait for the knock on
the door.

It was from my maternal grandmother, Julia, that I first
heard of Najib. But he was always spoken of with ambivalence.
He was the odd man out in the Nassar family, the one who
was preoccupied with resistance politics during the British
Mandate period while his brothers were making a good living,
one as a hotelier, another as a medical doctor, a third as a pharmacist,
all well-to-do, established members of the professional
middle class, while he mingled with the fellaheen, the
peasants, and lived for a while among them. Even worse, he
associated with the Bedouins, spoke and dressed like them and
generally adopted their ways. My grandmother told me about
a visit he once made to the family home in the Mediterranean
city of Haifa.

‘We did not recognise him. We almost threw him out.
Then he said, “I’m Najib.” We could hardly believe it. He
looked emaciated, all skin and bones. His beard was long and
straggly, he wore a keffiyeh on his head and he smelt terribly,
as he had been living out in the open. I will never forget that
sight.’

Hearing this, I was intrigued. No one had mentioned the
order for his arrest by the Ottoman government. I was left
to wonder why he went to live out in the wild. What was he
running away from? And why was he so poor? How did he
lose his money? Did he gamble it away?

To locate the places where Najib found refuge during his
long escape from the Ottoman police, I first used a map made
by the Israeli Survey Department. But I soon discovered that,
in the course of creating a new country over the ruins of the
old, Israel had renamed almost every hill, spring and wadi in
Palestine, striking from the map names and often habitations
that had been there for centuries. It was the most frustrating
endeavour. If only I could visit this area with someone able
to read the landscape and point out where the old towns and
villages had stood. I knew just the person, but the Palestinian
geographer Kamal Abdulfattah was not allowed to cross into
Israel from the West Bank. How Israel manages to complicate
and frustrate every project!

After the failed attempt at mapping out Najib’s escape route
using a modern Israeli map, I managed to retrieve a 1933 map
from the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. What
a relief it was to look at this and envision the country Najib
would have recognised, with the villages, hills and wadis in
which he had taken refuge reassuringly marked and bearing
the names that he had used.

In planning the route of his escape, Najib had not been
hampered by the political borders that many Palestinians are
not allowed to cross today. Under the Ottomans on the eve of
the First World War there was no administrative unit called
Palestine. Haifa, Acre, Safad and Tiberias were part of the
Beirut sanjaq (an administrative subdivision of a vilayet or
province). South of that, including Jaffa, Gaza and Jerusalem,
was the independent sanjaq of Jerusalem. The south-eastern
parts of Palestine were included in the sanjaq of Maan and all
of these were part of the vilayet of Greater Syria. The River
Jordan did not delineate a political border. Without delays
Najib was able to ford it by horse and in no time found himself
on the eastern bank in what today is the Hashemite Kingdom
of Jordan. When he finally gave himself up he was transported
by train to Damascus, a trip that took no longer than
two hours. So distorted has the geography become that for us
West Bank Palestinians to travel north to Damascus we would
first have to travel east, then north, crossing four different
countries; and even that is possible only if we are fortunate
enough to secure the necessary visas and exit permits from
often uncooperative authorities, both Israeli and Arab.

The quest for Najib – the details of his life and the route
of his great escape – that consumed me for the next thirteen
years was not an easy one. Most of Palestine’s history, together
with that of its people, is buried deep in the ground. To reconstruct
the journey of my great-great-uncle I could not visit
any of the houses where he and his family had lived in Haifa,
his point of departure. This mixed community of Arabs and
Jews has become an Israeli city, with most of its former Palestinian
inhabitants scattered throughout the world. Najib
died on 30 March 1948, just months before the Nakba (catastrophe),
the mass expulsion and dispossession of the Arabs of
Palestine in 1948 upon the establishment of Israel. Perhaps
he was fortunate to be spared that most tragic period in the
history of his country. His son, wife, siblings and every one of
our common relatives were forced out of Haifa, losing all their
property. They did not realise that they would never be allowed
to return to their homes and so did not take their personal
belongings with them. Furniture, books, manuscripts, memorabilia,
family photographs, heirlooms and even personal
effects were left behind and never returned. Everything that
belonged to them, everything that told their individual stories,
was either stolen or seized and deposited in Israeli archives for
use by Israeli researchers seeking to understand the history
and character of the Arabs whom they were colonising.

A further difficulty was that many of the villages and
encampments in which Najib found refuge had also been
reduced to rubble, as I discovered when I went in search of
them in the hills of the Galilee. I had to scan the terrain with
an archaeologist’s eye to determine where they had once
stood. It was therefore a strange and yet a typically Palestinian
quest. Strange because I had to rely heavily on my
imagination and train myself to see what was not readily
visible. Typical because the process I had to follow to uncover
the history of a member of my family is similar to that
followed by many Palestinians who had family in the part
of Mandatory Palestine that became Israel. I have been able
to find only one official Israeli map where all the Palestinian
villages existing before 1948 are shown. Next to many of
those appears the sinister Hebrew word harous (destroyed).
Najib was born in 1865. For the first decade of his adult life
had tried his hand at a number of professions, as assistant
pharmacist, farmer and translator. Short and plump, he
always wore a tarboosh (fez) that leaned forward towards his
face in the manner of Beirut merchants. Unlike his brothers,
he was not good at making money. He was always involved
in pursuing unpopular causes and could hardly earn enough
to sustain his family. In 1913, when he was forty-eight, he
confessed in an article that he ‘despaired of living a free
life under the Ottoman Empire’. This made him decide to
emigrate to the United States, as many other members of our
family had done. Once he had made that decision, he could
‘hardly wait to organise [his] affairs and prepare [him]self for
the big move’. He was feeling ‘only regret for all the efforts
[he] applied to establish [him]self in the country’.

I was perfectly capable of recognising these sentiments.
I had trained as a barrister in London, but when I returned
to work as a lawyer in the West Bank under Israeli occupation
I found no professional satisfaction in a ruined legal
system. There is hardly a resident of Palestine today who
has not considered the option of emigrating. I know all too
many who, once they made that decision, regretted all the
time they had wasted living in Palestine. I too went through a
period when I felt the Israeli occupation would never end and
I would be doomed to a life of humiliation, oppression and
lack of civil rights. I seriously considered emigrating before
turning to human rights activism and writing alongside my
professional legal work. The outbreak of the First Intifada in
1987 gave me hope that things would finally change and I
dismissed all thoughts of leaving Palestine.