Exile: a novel (56 page)

“Perhaps you’re a student, unable to get to school. Perhaps you’re one of the hundreds of women who’ve delivered a baby, hopefully alive. Perhaps you’re the husband, shamed in front of his family by a soldier as young as his own son.” Farhat’s voice became almost elegiac. “Perhaps you’re just delayed returning home. And what awaits you? Poverty is widespread, unemployment is rampant. Your village is cut off from the next, your children cut off from a future that holds out more hope than does yours. And on the hill above you is a settlement populated by Jews who scorn you, or maybe just this wall.

“As for these ‘martyrs,’ forget the idea that they receive universal praise—most of us cringe at every dead Israeli. Don’t blame religion or ideology alone. To the incitement of the imam you mentioned, add despair, humiliation, and the desire for revenge. It is the occupation, not fanaticism, that spawned Ibrahim Jefar.”

“Not to mention,” David retorted, “terrorist networks that offer money to families of ‘martyrs.’ For that, the Israelis hold you accountable, and should. But let’s not quibble. It’s in your interest to help me before Hamas becomes entrenched.”

Farhat propped his elbow on the table, gazing at the multicolored garden that surrounded them. “Before Ben-Aron was murdered,” he finally said, “Hamas won control of the legislature. Our strategy had been to keep drawing them into the political process, even at the risk of losing power altogether. We had no choice—any attempt to disarm them would lead to an all-out war between us, which the Palestinian Authority lacks the security resources to win.

“But this was also delicate. To win back the legislature, we needed peace with Israel. In other words, we needed Ben-Aron.” His tone became mournful. “Now the Israelis blame us for failing to control his killers; our people blame us for delivering Israeli reprisals instead of peace. That Jefar was Al Aqsa may have sealed the fate of Fatah. Certainly, it ended our ability to bring Al Aqsa into our security forces, which would have strengthened our hand against Hamas.

“This leaves Hamas even more powerful than before. Soon they will launch their own reprisals against Israel. Only if Israel gives us nationhood can we regain power, disarm Hamas, and stop these suicide bombings. Otherwise, Hamas is the Palestinian future.”

“And if they are?”

“Then we will have a Muslim fundamentalist state, dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Bad for Israel, obviously. Also bad for our educated classes. Especially women like Arif and Nisreen Awad, who would be separated from men at public events and even forced to cover, and whose daughters’ educations might become extremely limited. Many secular Palestinians would leave, of course. Democracy here would end.”

“All because Ben-Aron is dead,” David responded, “and his assassins were supposedly Al Aqsa. Granted that Jefar was. But he was recruited by Hassan. And members of Hassan’s family were Hamas—including a suicide bomber in Haifa.”

Caution seemed to veil Farhat’s eyes. “We’ve considered all that. But we cannot prove his connection to Hamas. And such accusations sometimes get men killed.” Pausing, Farhat stared at the table. “Since Ben-Aron was murdered, we have lost what little control we had.”

“And how does that serve Al Aqsa?”

“It doesn’t. That is what I find so puzzling. But not all of its members are rational. Even its leaders.”

David waited until Farhat looked up again. “I want to meet with them,” he said.

Farhat shook his head. “They are dead now,” he answered softly. “Or so deep underground that not even Israel can find them.”

“Not even you? I’ll settle for whoever’s alive and brave enough to take the risk.”

Farhat raised his eyebrows. “Like Barak Lev? You don’t even know who killed him, do you?”

David felt his confidence falter. “True,” he acknowledged. “But we’re not in Israel now. The leaders of Al Aqsa must be skilled in self-protection, or the Israelis would have killed all of them long ago.”

“Even so, why take the chance of meeting with you?”

“Because it might turn out to be a better means of self-defense than remaining underground. Al Aqsa leaders have denied any connection to Hassan, or the plot to kill Ben-Aron. Most people dismiss that as a survival tactic. But I happen to believe it. More specifically, I believe that nothing about this assassination is as it seems—that this was
not
an Al Aqsa operation,
that Hana Arif was
not
the handler. And that whoever put this together carefully calculated the consequences, both in Israel and here.

“If I’m right, my defense of Hana may be
your
best hope of survival. I need Al Aqsa’s help, and yours, in tying Iyad Hassan to Hamas. From there, maybe I can find out who his handler
really
was, and who the handler worked for. As matters stand, you’ll soon have nothing more to lose.”

Farhat appraised him closely. “All right,” he said at length. “I’ll consider what you say.”

“Good. Because there’s something more I want: the medical records for Saeb Khalid.”

Though Farhat’s eyes widened, David sensed that his astonishment was feigned. “For what purpose?”

“In the past few years, Khalid traveled to Amman, supposedly to consult a specialist about a serious heart condition. Maybe he has one. But the last trip was just before Saeb went to America. Like his prior trips, this one took several days, leaving him time for other things. I’m curious about what they were, and who he might have seen.”

Farhat regarded him with bleak amusement. “So you wish to substitute the husband for the wife?”

“Only if it works. But if he has no heart condition, or saw a Jordanian doctor only briefly, that would pique my curiosity.”

Farhat opened his palms. “But why ask
us
for Khalid’s confidential records? Why not the Israelis? Perhaps they, too, have taken an interest in him.”

“You know they have,” David snapped. “But the Israelis won’t help me, so I’m asking you. Saeb Khalid may be a Palestinian, but he is no friend to Fatah. And I’d like to get his records without him, or anyone but us, knowing anything about it.” Pausing, David spoke more quietly. “No one knows what happened here. Unless we find out, the Middle East may blow up, and a Palestinian state along with it. Maybe I could live with that. But I don’t want Hana executed in the bargain.”

Farhat smiled faintly. “As before, Mr. Wolfe, I admire your candor. For today, let that be enough.”

His guide, Abu Jamal, was a slight bespectacled man, a former mathematics teacher in his mid-forties, twice jailed in his youth for an alleged association with the PLO. In the back seat of his jeep was body armor as well as perfume, which, Jamal explained, could help ward off the effect of tear gas when combined with cotton balls held to the nose.

At the Qalandiya checkpoint, they stopped again, beginning the process with which David was now familiar—a half-hour delay while tense soldiers checked their papers and searched their trunk and bags for explosives. Once more David felt as though he had entered a dream state that, triggered by some random event, could easily become a nightmare. But he assumed that Jamal had been provided by Farhat, and he hoped that this trip would link him to a leader of Al Aqsa.

In the driver’s seat, Jamal gazed at the thirty-foot-high concrete wall that separated Qalandiya from Jerusalem. “The Jewish,” he said, “have stolen our homeland, and now are stealing more. If we ever get through this barrier, I will show you the village of Atwani.”

Though the landscape around Atwani was rocky and barren, its hills were softened by fig and olive trees and fields where sheep grazed. On the highest of the hills, covered in pine, was a settlement dominated by the Masada movement. “The settlers,” Jamal said, “harass these villagers with impunity,
killing their sheep, stealing their crops, throwing rocks at their children on their way to school. They are the worst of the Jewish, making trouble so there will never be peace.”

Jamal’s repetition of “the Jewish,” tinged with anti-Semitism, began to chafe David’s nerves. “Barak Lev,” Jamal said, speaking the name as if it were a curse. “Whoever blew his head off is a hero.”

At the foot of a hill where three Palestinians were grazing their sheep, they came to a clinic run by the Christian Peacekeepers Team. Outside were two young people, a brown-haired Canadian man and a fresh-faced blond woman from Minnesota, and their supervisor, a schoolteacher from New York who wore her silver hair in a bun. The blonde had one arm in a sling, and David spotted a bruise along her collarbone.

“That doesn’t look much like a skiing accident,” he said.

The young woman, Shannon Heath, mustered a smile that went as quickly as it had come. “A few weeks ago,” she told him, “some settlers began cutting down the villagers’ wheat. Our whole deal is reducing violence and friction—if necessary, by asking the Israeli authorities to intervene. These guys” —she indicated the others with a nod of her head—“weren’t here. So I started videotaping the settlers myself—”

“They beat her with chains,” her supervisor said tersely. “What you can’t see is Shannon’s punctured lung.”

Arms folded, Jamal stood to the side, smiling grimly. “The Jewish,” he said again, as though this were comment enough.

David ignored him. “Is any one protecting you?” he asked the supervisor.

“In theory, the Israeli authorities. But the settlers stole Shannon’s video camera, and she doesn’t know the men who attacked her.” The woman bit her lip. “A few weeks before, the IDF told the villagers that our reports to the media were causing ‘trouble,’ and that they would protect the villagers themselves. The village leaders answered that the only reason the Israelis cared at all was because we’re here.”

“So we’re not leaving,” the Canadian said.

David watched Shannon’s troubled face. “We can’t,” she affirmed. “Last year the settlers poisoned sheep, this year they stole wheat. Just before he started beating me, I asked one of the settlers—this teenage kid, actually— what right he had to take wheat from the villagers’ land. ‘I have a deed,’ he told me. ‘It’s called the Bible.’ Without us here, I swear to you they wouldn’t stop at killing sheep.”

Their supervisor pointed up a nearby hill. “Would you like to see the village?” she asked. “One of the leaders speaks English. He can tell you more.”

At the top of the hill, David entered another place and time, where shepherds and subsistence farmers lived much as they had for centuries. Women in head scarves and long dresses walked alongside lean, sun-wizened men, carrying sacks of grain into a dark cave they used for storage. The cave dated to the Romans, David discovered; inside, the remnant of a column still remained.

The village leader, a teacher named Khader Mafouz, greeted David courteously. Leading David to his home, Mafouz pointed to the ruins of a mosque. “About twenty years ago, we built this. As soon as we were done, the IDF destroyed it.” He stopped, hands on hips, surveying the concrete buildings that formed the village. “The Israelis tend not to give us building permits. So the mosque was an ‘illegal’ building, as is our school. Whatever we build, they can destroy at any time. And now there is this wall.”

David saw a truck filled with IDF soldiers climb a road to the settlement, churning dust. “The wall,” Mafouz went on, “will encompass much of the land around us. We say it is ours; they say, ‘Prove it.’ But we have no deeds. So now we are going back to cemeteries, trying to show that we have lived in this place for centuries.”

A quiet despair in his voice hinted that this mission held scant hope. “Once our people lived in caves,” he told David. “Sometimes I’m afraid we’ll be living in caves again. But we don’t want our children to be run off by these settlers, or cut off from their land. It is a great dilemma—to commit violence against them is too big a risk. Instead, with the help of our Christian friends, we persist.”

They entered his home, a concrete structure with timeworn carpets scattered across the floor of the main room. David sat on a carpet; beside him, Mafouz squatted, maintaining his balance without apparent effort. As they sipped tea, Mafouz swatted the flies that buzzed around them. “I am sorry,” he said. “They are from the settlers.” He pointed at the settlement, visible through the open space that was his door. “They bring their garbage down the hill, and make of our village their garbage pit.”

David turned to him, thinking to ask a question. But Mafouz kept gazing at the hill. “If I could,” he said softly, “I would drive them from this place. And if they refused to go, I would kill them all. When someone comes as they have, to take your land and way of life, to resist them is not terrorism. It’s survival.”

Driving to Hebron, Jamal and David passed a squalid refugee camp bounded by a twenty-foot wire fence, followed by an Arab village over
which an IDF watchtower loomed, as Jamal related Hebron’s long and contentious history. Once home to the prophet Abraham and his family, followed by the site from which King David had ruled, Hebron was occupied, in succession, by Romans, Crusaders, and Arabs led by Emperor Saladin. The Ibrahimi Mosque, Saladin’s doing, was the fourth most holy site in Islam. That this place was sacred to both Jews and Muslims helped explain why its previous eighty years had been so bloody. In 1929, sixty-seven Jews were slaughtered by Palestinians—but only, Jamal hastened to add, because Jews had slaughtered Palestinians in Jerusalem the day before. “What the Jewish never speak of,” Jamal said, “is that other Palestinians saved several hundred more Jews from death.”