Hatim's Response to William

My passion for Palestine is apparent--and inherent: I get much of it from my dad.

With his permission, I've posted one-fifth of an e-mail exchange between himself, and Prof. William Cook, an English professor at the University of LaVerne, who frequently writes about Palestine (a sample: http://kanan48.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/a-world-without-law-by-professor-william-a-cook/).

[By-the-by, the two have seemingly become e-mail buddies now, as is exemplified through Cook's opening and closing remarks in the response he sent to the note posted below: "Dear Hatim, I trust you are not discombobulated by my use of your given name; I feel we have a friend's dialogue going here, one that I hope will keep going for some time...Hatim, I must go, soup's on. Peace, Bill."]

While you do not have the full exchange between these two writers, in reading my dad's e-mail, you will feel the humanity and the life that thumps in the Palestinian heartbeat, and that is why we are sharing it with you. 3eesh!

From: Hatim Khatib
Sent: Saturday, December 26, 2009 12:28 PM
To: William Cook
Subject: RE: Palestinian Sentiments Not In Vogue

Dear Professor Cook,

I’ll let you in on a secret. In moments of reverie, Palestine recedes as a thing of intellect, of rationality, of strategy and power plays. In those moments, she rises as attachment, oneness, interiority, but mainly as pure passion. Intellectually, Palestine is easily explainable, especially for those with no delusions, prejudices, or allegiances. It’s no exaggeration that most Palestinians, just on merit, are willing and reasonably qualified interlocutors. At any café in any Palestinian street, the average habitué would be all too eager to engage in variegated discourse on Palestine with any other, without regard for the other’s academic credentials or station. The outcome of such engagements is never a sure thing. Palestinians’ articulation of Palestine is not prescribed only by or for academics, notables, clerics, or politicians; it emanates from the narrative that is within our chests and hearts. We are all laureates for Palestine.

The expression of Palestine, however, is not restricted to Palestinians. I have quite often encountered people from all over the world whose facility with Palestine was incredibly and pleasingly surprising. Regrettably, once those encounters were over, they’d go on and I’d be left with an unchanged, unpromised, undelivered Palestine.

Nonetheless, hope for more lingers. But even those encounters become worn with etiquette, monotony, and roll-play; with expectations and accommodations; with compromises and concessions. We Palestinians, in addition to sustaining the wound of dispossession and displacement and negation, have to bear, however willing and eager, the burdens and gravity of being interlocutors and articulators. We are, at others’ whims, on display as individuals and nation, being required to perform and explain—expectedly, conformably, and correctly.

Now I must speak from inside Palestine, as if it were the only place in the universe. For me, in my youth, and now in my memory, it was. Palestine was waking up on father’s command to early school mornings bursting with light and fresh air just arriving from surrounding hills and valleys to replace the exhalations of the previous night’s repose; predictably sunny blue skies and a few hops to school for reuniting with buddies; hurried wrestling matches to even scores after a breakfast of eggs and thyme and olive oil, with warm milk or tea, served by adoring mothers. Palestine lives matchless in its beauty and what it offered us, its sons and daughters. I remember well its long, sunny days, its tantalizingly overhead stars, its sensuous moonlit nights, and hypnotizingly silhouetted night stillness enveloping all its charges (families in stone houses, animals in bins, orchards of apricot, fig, and plum, and mountains of olive trees).

Palestine, within minutes, was the vaulted streets of Old Jerusalem, where I was born, and their smells of every Palestinian palate (desserts, artfully raised pyramids of spices, meats, fish), of linens and silks, of second-hand shoes, the warning shouts and furtive stares of Herculean street porters, shoulder-to-shoulder congestions of shoppers at once salivating for what’s on display and basking in the holiness that surrounds them. It is the most vivid hustle and bustle vociferated in myriad Palestinian idioms, from the delicately arrogant city dialect to the Falahi drawls (so distinct according to village) to the occasional Bedouin’s. Yes, and within minutes, Palestine displays its other side of beauty: bald hills, desolation, and ravines in one instant, and, in another, lush verdant plains and hillsides, marauding bleating sheep and goats, and fluting shepherds whose notes serenade the true story of the land and its people.

Palestine was annual school trips to Palestinian cities (Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarim, Jenin, Jaresh, once to Amman), always ending at the Dead Sea for a dip that would literally crystallize underwear—we never bothered with, or had, swim suits—in which we would make the trip back home, quite uncomfortably. Not only that, but we would go to bed in them that night. No mother, never mind how loving, would get up at 2:00 in the morning to relieve the suffering of children, who had the time of their lives that day, from the Dead Sea’s last laugh.

For me, Palestine, save for occasional growing pains, was all beauty and pure youthful pleasure. I’ll never forget Ramallah, where I went to school, or our walks to school from the bus stop and the sinuous detours we took to ensure at least distant sightings of girls going to theirs; or the long lines at Abdo’s falafel stand for a sandwich to wolf down while at the cinemas for a double-feature show, typically an Egyptian and an American western, and the utter chaos when a rare Technicolor Indian movie would be showing. Oh, Ramallah’s afternoons, after school in any season (slow paced spring’s serenity, fall’s tumult of windblown hair and skirts and discarded newspapers) and of old buses humming, exerting, brakes squeaking, readying to head to the steeper rural climbs of Palestine, loaded and noisy with people and fluttering fowl.

Palestine is the symbols we chanted and picked from elementary school readings: usurped Palestine; Yaffa (“The Bride of the Sea”); the battle of Qastal; the martyrship of Abd Al-Qader Al-Husseini; Deir Yassin; and Nasser’s speeches our parents listened to with abatjours shut, especially when relations between King Hussein and Nasser soured. It was the pain and longing and sheer curiosity we felt in our guts as children when we saw from Beitilu (our ancestral village to which we returned during school holidays) the bobbing, dancing lights, and glitter of what must have been Yaffa in what we methodically called Filistine al Muhtella (“Occupied Palestine”). This, very briefly, was the Palestine of youth.

Today the mere mention or sight or debate or discussion of it, whether on television or radio, or in a classroom or a lecture hall, or in a garage or barbershop, causes stirring, pulsating, collective yawning from difficult breathing, and writhing pain that is aggravated by our attempts at hiding it. I shout halfheartedly to my daughter from my bedroom if there is a program on Gaza or the Wall or a land grab for a new settlement, knowing the further frustrations and despair that’ll bring to us, especially to her. We know it’s just easier to avoid such things, but it’s nearly impossible. We are helplessly drawn to anything Palestine. The betrayal I feel as a father when I steel at her face (red hair, freckles and all) while watching those programs in which people from foreign places, with countries and homes and families untouched by what’s being shown, talk to Palestinians, and at them, in disparate tenors and for disparate aims, and know what she is going through. I am at once watching the pain on television and the one invading the insides of my goddess-daughter. I monitor her every move; her sighs and frequency of her yawns (indications of stress), scalping, look-aways, her hand movement, and, finally, her toes, her absolutely serene, civil, very human toes.

I’ve always watched my family’s toes and psychoanalyzed each member accordingly. My brother’s, even as a child, have always prostrated perfectly horizontally flush with his feet and, occasionally, rather peaceably, with live-and-let-live attitude, dipped downward. That, in my mind, always explained his even temper, emotional stamina, and patience. My daughter shares those attributes with my brother, but mainly with her mother, who, from her beginnings, has been a personification of virtue and the pride of our entire family. Conversely, mine, like my younger brother’s and sister’s, have always been restive and raised, sheer insight into my pugnacity and impatience. My family’s toes, hands, hair, eyes, torsos, teeth, smiles, yawns, winks, and twitches are what I see as representations of my family’s utter irreplaceability and the virtual impossibility of life without them. Horrifically, however, to a 22-year-old Israeli punk at any crossing or roadblock in Palestine, my family is so dispensable and irrelevant.

When I saw on television the destruction of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla, in Jenin and Tulkarim, and, most recently, in Gaza, I saw Palestine strewn in body parts (skulls and teeth and torsos and hair), in unfinished smiles and conversations, in halted tears, in aborted fears, unconsummated weddings and lives, courtesy of Israeli missiles signed by Israeli children. I see Palestine scattered in toes.

This is when Palestine ceases to be an intellectual exchange or a strategy, or just a rehearsed demonstration and speech, and becomes raw passion. When you write about Palestine, you are one of the very few who do so with conviction, truth, and passion—exceptional passion. When I wrote to you, it was in appreciation of your passion for Palestine.

Respectfully,
Hatim