Letter from the West Bank
Dear Friends,
I made it to my parent’s house in Birzeit. You cannot imagine how relieved I was that the immigration officer barely asked us any questions and let us through. Ben Gurion Airport was uncharacteristically empty, despite it being the summer holiday. Maybe the absence of tourists is what made it easier for me to make it home this time round.
A big smile spread along my daughter Frida’s face and mine as the taxi rolled onto the West Bank’s hills. I felt my anxiety evaporate as soon as I saw my parent’s house and the garden. Both looked in much better shape than I expected, despite having had no one to take care of them over the past 12 months. The trees my father planted were tall and standing, some even bearing fruit for us to enjoy. The loving aunts and cousins were there to greet us with open arms. I felt at home again.
But it did not take long for the reality of the war to impose itself. It was not so much in the new red gate that the Israeli Army built at the entrance of Birzeit, or the army vehicles on the road, or the new settlement outposts that we spotted on the way home. It was in the funeral we attended twenty-four hours after our arrival.
We went to give condolences for the passing of my cousin’s ex-mother-in-law, the paternal grandmother of the girls you already know, Alma, Laila and Sama. It should have been a formality, an expression of respect for the passing of an elderly woman, a refugee born in 1956 in a refugee camp and who raised 11 kids in another refugee camp.
Once we arrived at the house of the bereaved, though, I learned that Fairuz, the daughter of the deceased and Alma’s paternal aunt, was also mourning her twenty-year-old son, who was killed by an Israeli soldier on May 15th. Fairuz’s son wanted to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, like the kids of the camp do each year. He hadn’t yet started marching on the road separating the refugee camp from the settlement of Bet El when a soldier fired the bullet that burst through his neck.
How much loss can one take, how much grief can one bear. The condolences house was packed with women of all ages when I entered it with my cousin. Her girls came running to hug me. They led us to the main sitting room where I gave my respects to their aunts for the passing of their mother. I recognized Fairuz from the key chain hanging on her neck with the picture of her son smiling, a keffiyeh around his shoulders. She was not wearing black, as is usually the case in funerals. Instead, she wore green, an emerald blouse that reflected light onto her own green eyes. That color of hope stood in contrast to the big brown sofa that she was sitting on next to one of her eight sisters. She looked poised, her face stoic, her beautiful eyes empty, as if they were dried of tears, or couldn’t find any more water in her body.
I felt my heart crush once I reached Fairuz and told her may her mother rest in peace. One of the many nieces served us black coffee and dates once I was seated. Fairuz remained self-composed. She answered politely when people asked her how she was doing, Alhamdulellah. She showed us a video of an Israeli soldier outside her house stamping her son’s picture, and another clip in which the soldier tore a Palestinian flag under her window. She informed us that her husband, in prison since last year, learned about his son’s martyrdom, shahadah, through the local radio. She added that her oldest son, under Israeli administrative detention since December, is in a different prison and is holding up so far.
Seeing Fairuz made the war tangible, immediate, real. It became more unbearable the sense of helplessness, guilt, and ptsd I experienced over the past nine months, that many exiled Palestinians feel. I can’t fathom how one can live with this level of injustice, this level of pain. Thaklah is the Arabic word for a bereaved mother. It is the most cruel pain of grief. Yet, Fairuz refused to let despair crush her, or that’s what she tried to convey. “My son is not a number,” she told me calmly. “People in Barcelona called a street in his name, a mosque in Malaysia mentioned his name in their Friday prayers. Everyone knows about Ayssar. Look at the Facebook postings.” Her immediate concern, she explained, was her two remaining boys, 14 and 8 years old. “The 14-year-old boy wants to protect me, and I want him out of trouble,” she said as she leaned back into the brown sofa. “He keeps asking me if I am Ok, why I don’t cry,” she added her voice emitting pain melded with fear. “I need to protect him and his younger brother.” I couldn’t help but tell her that she had every right to cry and be angry, that she should show her sons her tears and anger to help them to grieve and mourn also. She nodded her head as if to console me or indulge me. How could I possibly know this level of loss or how to endure it. “I feel supported by all those who remember my son,” was all she said with a faint smile.
Seeing Fairuz made the war on Gaza, on Palestine, immediate, raw, and personal. Ayssar, Fairuz’s son, is the 496th Palestinian in the West Bank to be killed since October 7th. The number pales to the 38,000 we know have been killed in Gaza. But, as Fairuz reminded us, her son is not a number. He is the cousin of Sama, Laila and Alma. They played cards together, ran around in the refugee camp’s alleys when they were children, climbed trees in Jiffna, the village down the hill. Ayssar was finishing his second year at Birzeit University, where Sama hopes to go, once she finishes her Tawjihi, the national end of highschool exams she is now undertaking.
The girls had spent the past four days sleeping in the refugee camp to be with their cousins, to help their aunts. They are now at my parent’s house, catching up with Frida and dancing to a TikTok dance she had created. The 11-year-old Alma told me she could not sleep last night until 5 am. I can see glimpses of sadness in her eyes, but also a sense of defiance. She does not want to talk about her cousin. She asked me instead if she can sleep over and if I could take her and her sisters to Ramallah to get some Boba. I hugged her and said yes. I want love and hope to fill her eyes again.
Leila Farsakh is a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labor, Land and Occupation (2005) and editor of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (2021). She is presently working on a memoir entitled, Hon Casa? In Search of Palestine, in Search of Home.