Read Online Letters from Palestine by Pamela Olson - Free Book Online Page B

work. Raneen has been active in
feminist and human rights organizations for a long time, and
currently works part-time for Zochrot, an organization concerned
with increasing awareness of the Nakba—the catastrophic and violent
expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people from their
towns and villages in 1948. She has been documenting Nakba
testimonies for several years, specializing in women’s
narratives.
     
    * * *
     
    I thought a lot. How can I tell the story of
Palestine in a few lines? How can I tell the story of the ports of
Haifa and Jaffa in a few words and the story of my grandfather who
died after his land in Galilee was confiscated? “It was called the
land of Tantour,” my grandmother would tell me. “Your grandfather
planted it with grapevine to convince the Israeli Army that
grapevines cannot become a military zone, but it did, and your
grandfather died.” She tells me the same story on every visit, the
same choking and the same anger, and my grandmother is growing
older.
    I am not going to tell you the story of my
grandfather and the grapevines or the story of my grandmother
moving out of Haifa in 1948. “We were the last to leave,” she would
repeat to make sure it penetrated my memory. “The city was
completely empty of people and noise and children and ghosts. We
went to Nazareth, and I came back a few days later to pick up what
was left of our house, and it was in ruins.”
    I will tell my own story, the story of one
and a half million Palestinians living in the same place at a
different time, and between place and time, sixty years of
waiting.
    My name is Raneen. I adore Haifa where I
live. In my eyes, it is life and challenge, and in the eyes of my
grandmother it is ruins and departure. Between my grandmother’s
eyes and mine, I live my daily life with its endless
contradictions.
    I wake up in the early hours of the morning
to catch the train to Tel Aviv. I make my coffee in a hurry and
open my window. I get a whiff of Haifa, and I look at it intently.
It’s there, soaring in blue and white, looking at me mockingly, and
I hear it say, “Don’t wear yourself out. There will no longer be a
Palestine. Don’t bother documenting the memories of the departed
about their Nakba, and don’t exhaust yourself teaching a child who
has not reached the age of three to read of Palestine, which you
wrote for him using all your skills and senses to interest
him.”
    I close my window quickly and go out to the
train station. The guard looks at my features, looking for fear in
my eyes, searching my bag and talking to his colleague about their
achievements in Gaza and in South Lebanon and the West Bank. “Why
don’t we do to them what the United States did in Hiroshima?” He
says it and looks around anew, perhaps to smell an Arab nearby.
    I enter the train quickly, angry, revolted,
and impotent. I close my eyes to hear Fayrouz singing for love. I
don’t want to see hundreds of soldiers on the train with their guns
on their way to Gaza, to death. It’s the train of death, full of
violence and rifles and soldiers competing for the number of their
victims, and Fayrouz sings.
    I look out of the window and count the
abandoned villages, searching another era and a dying memory. The
way from Haifa to Tel Aviv has become covered with sand and shrubs,
covering up the stones of their houses. An Israeli boy sitting next
to me and watching in silence asks his grandfather, “Where did all
this prickly pear (cactus) come from, Granddad?”
    “It’s the miracle of nature, my son.” [This
kind of cactus used to surround Palestinian villages—Ed.]
    Finally, I arrive at the village of Sheikh
Mouannes, which is Tel Aviv University today, the largest
university in the country. With every new building on its campus,
the village shrinks by one building. This is my university, which I
attended when I was nineteen as I came from a little village in the
Galilee to discover for the first time that I live with