A Lebanese shepherd looks at the land of Palestine

One of our cherished contributors here at Mondoweiss, Lillian Rosengarten, often generates an intense responses from our readers. The other day her poetry, No freedom in the land of false prophets, inspired Taxi to share a story with us from the hills of Galilee in Lebanon that started a conversation, moving from thread to thread linked again and again by readers over the last few days.

I’m reposting Taxi’s comment below as an effort to bring this conversation to a wider audience in the hopes it could inspire people to think outside the box on the future of Israel and Palestine.  It’s hot, it’s controversial,  and so it begins:

By Taxi

[Quoting an Israeli friend of Pabelmont] “He said the Jews were the chosen people, chosen to suffer.”

Yeah I had an israeli friend (leftist kibbutzim) who often would say exactly the same thing – but with a twist of black humor.

And speaking of the concept of ‘chosen’, today I happenstance met a Lebanese shepherd in the Galilee hills while I was hiking (I’ve been here visiting friends and site-seeing for two months and will be leaving in a few days). Anyway yeah this shepherd had this large flock of one hundred and fifty mixed goats and sheep and the greatest three shepherding dogs you ever met.

And so like I got talking to him ’bout this and that in my pidgin Arabic and I was asking him about his life wandering the huddled undulating hills and narrow ravines of northern Galilee. He said he’s been shepherding all his life, just like his dad, and just like his grandfather too, who for years and years before the ’48 Nakba, used to take his flock all the way to Lake Tiberias (now referred to as The Sea of Galilee). He pointed south-east and reminisced some more about his grandfather and sighed and said that he himself would love to be able to do the same before he died – he looked about 35 to me.

When I nodded my approval at his wish and said to him that israel had destroyed so many ancient ways of life since its existence, broken so many practical and spiritual bonds between the native people and their land, his ears pricked-up and he frowned at me and said: Not to disrespect you but I never call that spread of land (he pointed and panned across the southern vista) – I never call it israel. I always refer to it as occupied Palestine. I even make a point of teaching my children that down there is Occupied Palestine and it’s occupied by israelis. I call the land Occupied Palestine and I call the occupiers israelis – and do you know why I do this?

Well, me, unsure of where he was coming from, I shook my head with an awkward small smile.

He explained that if he called ‘that’ land israel and also called it’s people israelis, then the word ‘Palestine’ disappears from the conversation . He said he wanted his children to never forget the name ‘Palestine’ and to always think of the southern Galilee hills as Palestine. Falesteen, Falesteen – he repeated. He said his grandfather used to say that all Palestinians: jews, moslem and christian, were the real and only ‘chosen people’ – chosen by god and more fortunate than all other arabs to be born and to live on holy land – chosen to belong to the holy land.

I chewed on his point for a sec then I was awestruck by what this Lebanese shepherd next did: he soulfully broke into a folk song about Palestine, sung a verse and a chorus – then reaching inside his jacket pocket, he pulled out an old and worn reed pipe (naya), blew a sweet melody through it for a few seconds before his dogs joined in and howled in pretty good pitch and wagged their tails.

I laughed and applauded when he finished and he said to me: I’d like to give you this naya but I can’t because my grandfather gave it to me.