The Last Earth Read online

  The Last Earth

  The Last Earth

  A Palestinian Story

  Ramzy Baroud

  Foreword by Ilan Pappe

  Edited by Daniela Loffreda

  First published 2018 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

  www.plutobooks.com

  Copyright © Ramzy Baroud 2018

  The right of Ramzy Baroud to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3800 2 Hardback

  ISBN 978 0 7453 3799 9 Paperback

  ISBN 978 1 7868 0287 3 PDF eBook

  ISBN 978 1 7868 0289 7 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0288 0 EPUB eBook This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

  Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

  Contents

  Acknowledgments ix

  Foreword: Ilan Pappe xi

  1 Shit River

  3

  2 Abu Sandal—The One with the Slippers 41

  3 Spirit of the Orchard

  79

  4 Death Notice

  115

  5 Jesus of Beit Jala

  153

  6 Letters to Heba

  185

  7 Alive in Gaza

  221

  8 The Last Sky

  249

  9 Dawn

  263

  Postscript: Echoes of History

  265

  Index 273

  To Zarefah, Iman and Sammy.

  Stay Strong.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is the labor and vision of many people; without them, The Last Earth would not have been published and these Palestinian stories would have remained untold, thus unknown to the world.

  I am tremendously grateful for the support I received from the Middle East Monitor and its director, Dr. Daud Abdullah.

  His insight has stood me in good stead.

  I am greatly honored and privileged to have been a student of Professor Ilan Pappe, who supervised my Ph.D. thesis in Palestinian Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. Professor Pappe has been both a teacher and a friend.

  Thank you to my Ph.D. committee examiners, Professors Nur Masalha, Ruba Saleh, and Sophie Richter-Devroe.

  To my agent and friend, Carina Brandt, thank you for your tireless efforts and support. Working with you on a project so close to my heart impacted my work greatly. Many thanks also to Elena Sarjols and the entire staff at Brandt New Agency.

  Daniela Loffreda and Yousef Aljamal joined me from the very beginning of this writing journey. Despite being the primary editor of this book, Daniela’s contribution extended into research and, at times, co-writing. Yousef was a leading researcher in this project. His constant and devoted efforts resulted in interviews being arranged and transcribed. He was also involved in the vetting process for hundreds of people, many of whom we interviewed jointly. I thank both Daniela and Yousef for their invaluable assistance and contributions.

  Salwa Amor helped me arrange interviews with Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon. Her guidance was a corner-ix

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  stone of my research on Yarmouk and Palestinian refugees in Europe. Thank you, Salwa.

  A special thank you to the Pluto Press team. David Shulman, I am indebted to everything you have done to make the publishing of this book a reality. I also thank Kieran O’Connor, Emily Orford, Robert Webb, Melanie Patrick and the rest of the Pluto colleagues for their outstanding profes-sionalism.

  I would also like to thank the following people, each of whom contributed in a unique and essential way: Dr. Deepak Tripathi, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Professor Noam Chomsky, Professor Richard Falk, Hawa Monier, Sylvia Fernandes-DeMelo, Dr. Vacy Vlazna, Ahmad Al-Haaj, Romana Rubeo, Dr. Blake Alcott, Suzanne Baroud, Dr. Roger van Zwanenberg, Claude Zurbach, Mohammed Mushtaha, John Harvey, Tamam al-Assar, Hana Shalabi, Sara Saba, Khaled Abdul Ghani, Ali Abu Mghasib, Joe Catron and Baroness Jenny Tonge.

  x

  Foreword

  Ilan Pappe

  Al-Nakba al-Mustamera, the on-going Nakba, is by now a common Palestinian reference to the age and time they have been living in during the last seventy years. This means that discrete chapters in the history of the Palestinians, such as the catastrophe of 1948, are not just events in the past, but rather are part of a contemporary historical chapter. We are still in this particular phase, and thus when we write the history of certain historical moments, such as the Nakba, we write on contemporary issues as much as on past events.

  This state of affairs has recently been recognized by scholars who adapted and applied the settler colonial paradigm to the case study of Palestine. The late Patrick Wolfe, who resurrected the paradigm, with a particular interest in Palestine, stated that settler colonialism is not an event but a structure.

  And indeed, examining the history of the Zionist movement in Palestine, it transpires clearly that the settler colonial project that commenced in the late nineteenth century is not over yet; as is the struggle against it.

  This concept of an on-going catastrophe and the struggle against is encapsulated in the trials and tribulations of the heroes and heroines of this book who are of different Palestinian generations and come from different locations.

  It is through minute, almost forensic personal stories over a generational spread that one can fully understand the full impact that such multifaceted experience has on the individual as well as the collective psyche of Palestinians in general and on Palestinian refugees in particular. The narration the xi

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  readers are about to enter conveys very strongly this sense of a wholesome, homogenous time zone in which Palestinians live and of the inconclusive and precarious existential realities.

  With this present phase in the life of Palestine and the Palestinians, oppression and victimization took different forms according to circumstances of time and place. In 1948, the Palestinians faced ethnic cleansing and massacres. Those who lived afterwards in Israel as a minority were under military rule that violated their human rights in almost every aspect of life. The refugees in the meantime were denied return and were joined by another wave of uprooted Palestinians in the wake of the 1967 war.

  The methods of dispossession became more complex, and in many ways more sinister and brutal in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the last fifty years, and still continue in this vein, as this book goes to print. Israel employed new meth-odology of oppression since the changing circumstances rendered policies of ethnic cleansing ineffective after 1948.

  The methods have changed, but the main vision propelling them is the same, and typical to all settler colonial movements in the past: to have the territory without the people.

  Ethnic cleansing as the principal means for implementing this vision was replaced by a matrix of dispossession, imprisonment, and spatial strangulation. This system was first imposed on the Palestinians who remained in Israel and were put under a harsh military rule between 1948 and 1967. The principle was quite simple, if you cannot remove people from a space, you have to enclave them so that they cannot move freely or expand their areas of habitation. This was executed brutally in the Palestinian areas inside Israel until 1967 and was then transferred as a system to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

  Whatever the Zionist method it was met by Palestinian resistance. The Palesti
nians are victims, but they are not xii

  Foreword

  passive victims. The tragedy was and still is that due to military imbalance (Israel became the strongest military force in the Middle East and the Palestinians the weakest), every Palestinian act of resistance (including nonviolent ones) was met with all the ferocity of Israeli power. The various chapters and verses of this punitive repertoire are told in this book through the narration of its heroes and heroines and will acquaint you with this Palestinian experience. Notable among them are the imprisonment of men, women, and children without trial, who are incarcerated not because they are criminals but only because they are Palestinian.

  Paradoxically, the biggest Zionist success of fragmenting the Palestinians into discrete groups that helped Israel to divide and rule was mitigated by the uniformity of this Palestinian experience throughout the years. This uniformity is very clear in the narratives unfolding in this book and it turns the Palestinian memory, oral history, and recollection into not just a register of atrocities but also tools of cultural resistance.

  Antonio Gramsci used to say that cultural resistance is either the rehearsal for political resistance or the means employed when political resistance is not possible. I think both possibilities apply to the Palestinian resistance. Resistance here unfolds as individual acts enhanced by a strong solidarity of the collective. The oppression is daily and time minuscule, and so is the resistance. Small gestures, daily heroism, and survival accumulate into a story of Sumud, steadfastness. The message of this book, like many Palestinian books before it, conveys very clearly that Zionism is not a settler colonial project that is going to end with the elimination of the natives. They are here to stay.

  One of the most impressive ways in which the Palestinians remained steadfast and will continue to do so is their ability, as so succinctly put by the late Edward Said, to narrate notwithstanding the ongoing Nakba. Their claims have been xiii

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  misrepresented over the years, even by some Palestinian politicians themselves, let alone foreign media and academia, and through the personal stories that insisted on their version of events that these fabrications and myths were successfully challenged and debunked.

  The unique technique employed here by Ramzy Baroud makes these narrations as powerful as ever. It also elucidates clearly that the narrations are a potent tool of resisting colonization and dispossession. They are part of the cultural resistance mentioned earlier, one which was far more unified and homogenous than the political resistance that suffered, and still does, from factionalism and disunity. Memory became the principal means by which Palestinians inside Israel identified with the demand of the Palestinian refugees for their right of return and which broadcast clearly to the world at large, and to Palestinians wherever they are, that they are victims of the same settler colonial system. Therefore, any political solution that would perpetuate fragmentation and separation would prolong dispossession and suffering.

  This unifying memory is accentuated by present-day experiences, but is not always recognized by the fragmented elite, which paralyzes the struggle. The act of symmetrically fusing the collective memory into an effective tool of cultural resistance comes from below, and it is through what Baroud calls “a history from below” that we reconstruct a very different narrative of the past and map the ambitions of the present.

  The reader can use this book as source for the history of Palestine and Palestinians in tandem with other excellent books produced in recent years. It complements the existing scholarly tradition by adding the authentic voice of the people as the principal narrators of the past and juxtaposing it with the scholarly narratives based on documents and more con-xiv

  Foreword

  ventional historical material, or media reports for the more contemporary period.

  It also differs from what you will find in scholarly works in its literary style. History is a story; that does not mean that is false, or fabricated, or even fictional. But telling the story of history cannot be divorced from emotive undertones, anger, a sense of injustice, and hope. Scholarly work does not often succeed in reconnecting to these ever-present and normal aspects of humanity even when they write about human beings. The style allows us to connect to these vulnerable and at the same time empowering sides of humanity, even if at times they come through a mediating narrator.

  It is probably only through such an approach that we can fully understand the connection between the destruction of the urban space in Palestine in 1948 and that of Syria since 2011. Among the many victims of the most recent of the two atrocities, the Palestinians again stand out (such as the dwellers of the Yarmuk camp in Syria), escaping this time from the Middle East and not just away from Palestine.

  The inhumanity that engulfed the Palestinians once more has also affected millions of others in the region. The barbarity raging in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen deserves our attention and condemnation. Nonetheless we should not forget that this kind of inhumanity prevailed in Palestine for more than a century and that global indifference towards, and indeed quite often support for, it is one of the major reasons that the West feels and remains helpless in the light of the present carnage. It is only through paying attention to the Western role in the dispossession of the Palestinians, which began one hundred years ago with the Balfour Declaration, that the West’s responsibility for the mayhem in the Middle East can be fully appreciated. One can absolve Arab societies and politicians for the dire state in which the Middle East finds itself today; this is recognized and has never been denied. The xv

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  fate of the indigenous people of Palestine, as that of so many other indigenous people around the world destroyed by the West, is closely associated with a better and hopeful future for the Middle East as a whole. To understand best how it began, and what is meant, one needs to hear the voices of the people who were at the receiving end of Western Imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism. This book is a good place to start this journey.

  The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.

  xvi

  Khaled Abdul Ghani al-Lubani, otherwise known as “Marco,”

  was born into a refugee family in Yarmouk, Syria and sought escape through an arduous path across continents. As a child, he was taught to believe he would never leave Yarmouk, unless the final destination was his adjoining village in northern Palestine.

  Only then would his family’s honor be redeemed, and true freedom attained.

  In our earliest exchange, Marco’s first words to me were a verse from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. Marco spoke of Palestine as if she were a woman; a beloved mother that was lost somewhere on the dusty trail of an unending journey.

  1

  Shit River

  Let me re-arrange the evening with what suits my failure and her absence.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Yarmouk was ever-present in Khaled’s soul, pulling him in and out of an abyss of persistent fears, urging him to never return. What was he without Yarmouk, his first haven, his last earth? How could any place in God’s unwelcoming universe be a home for him as a Palestinian first and foremost, and nothing else? When questioned, he answered without hesitation: “I am from the village of so and so in Palestine.” Yet for him Yarmouk was all that remained of Palestine because the Palestine he knew existed only in books, or as the tattered map in his family’s living room, and in old fables conveyed by long-dead grandparents.

  At least he had her by his side to share his grief, for without her he would not have embarked on his quest. Her name was Maysam Saeed and she was Syrian. Her allure came from her seductive Mediterranean beauty and from the playful confidence she exuded. The impression that she gave was not one of arrogance, but rather was part of an innate game she would play with anyone she encountered.

  They met as eager volunteers in Yarmouk’s Palestine hospital. Innoce
nt banter soon turned to flirtation that skimmed the boundaries of what was acceptable in the refugee camp. Their growing attraction drew them closer to a love 3

  The Last Earth

  that would become impossible to contain. Nor could they have foreseen that they would soon embark on an odyssey in search of their last earth, crossing a sea whose tumultuous waters had drowned many lovers and many innocents who barely had a start in life. Their love kept them afloat amongst the misery of war, but they knew there would be no true convergence of their two lives on the other side of the boundlessly dark sea.

  Even if their tiny boat could succeed in eventually evading the Turkish and Greek coast guard, love alone would still not be enough.

  They first made love on February 4, 2013. When he closes his eyes and thinks back to that sublime moment, Khaled gets goosebumps. Despite all the tragedies that befell him in war-ravaged Yarmouk, nothing would have stopped him from sneaking into Maysam’s family home during “the hunger siege”. Though starvation had left his face pale and gaunt, and his skin dry and creased, Khaled always managed to muster up the energy for a night of passion. His hunger for love eclipsed all else including the fact that she was a married woman. For Maysam, her suffering at the hands of a cruel husband was sufficient justification for the taboo affair. Her three children, who all had her same handsome face, glowing skin, dark silky hair and adoring eyes, were not an obstacle either. No one and nothing else mattered more than their love.

  Maysam’s parents were from Deraa in the south. They owned enough land to classify them as “landowners”, but not enough to buy them special status in Syria’s burgeoning aris-tocracy. Such status required more than wealth; it meant that one had to know how to use that wealth to win favor with the ruling class. They sold some of their land to build a relatively large house in the affluent Zahira neighborhood in Damascus, and the rest was saved for a “dark day”. That day did come, when what began as a restrained uprising in Deraa morphed 4

  Shit River

  into the era’s most devastating war, forcing millions to flee their homes to escape the relentless bloodshed.