The most meaningful phrases in the Goldstone report are the statements that Israel conducted an assault on Palestinian dignity in Gaza, and that the dignity of Palestinians is being eroded throughout the occupied territories. Now that I have toured Palestine extensively, I know these words are true. The Israelis have assaulted Palestinian dignity for more than 60 years. The assault is racially-based, and it disfigures Jewish life for all the world to see. And still it goes on.
Of my encounters in Palestine, none was more compelling on this score than meeting Nahla Assali in East Jerusalem. Partly I had this response because we are of the same social class. Assali is related to my closest friend in Palestine, an intellectual and professional, and is herself highly educated, her English as good as mine. She is a privileged homeowner; she heads a foundation. There are good cars in the driveway, and pictures of the children and grandchildren all over the lovely house. I met her first at dinner, and Mrs. Assali served dish after dish of seasonal food, some traditional recipes.
But there the resemblance to my own family ends. After dinner, Assali got out photographs of the house in West Jerusalem from which her family was expelled when Assali was a little girl. Since then, the Israelis have been assaulting Nahla Assali’s dignity; and you see and hear the injury in every thing this woman relates. Oh, if only I can convey some measure of that injury…
The truth is that I was lucky to meet Assali.
“I’m receiving you as a friend of my relative,” she explained, sitting down in an armchair across from me in her living room a few days after our first meeting. For she is weary of dialogue. Three times in the last 15 years, she came to the United States on a tour of women organized by Partners for Peace, a twin organization of the Council for the National Interest. She went to many cities, on a stage with a Palestinian Christian and an Israeli Jew.
And then she said, No more. “I told Jerri Bird I’m not joining in any of these tours again. Because I see it as an exercise in futility. It’s the policy of the American administration that’s the problem. It is against any sense of justice and against anything that can lead to peace.”
What was the point in speaking to ordinary people if they were not going to have any effect on policy? Assali regarded it as hopeless, and stopped. And when she returned, she did not visit the Jewish woman on the tour.
“She was a Meretz liberal. She understands. She speaks about the Palestinian problems. But when we ended our tour, I would never have her in my place or go to her place. Until she starts being my equal, until she stops being my occupier– that is when I will accept social visits.
“Her understanding doesn’t arrest the bitterness of her being an Israeli occupying me and me being Palestinian and occupied. No matter what she says, the key secret of all our troubles is these words: End occupation. Those two words. It’s not easy for us to be nice to our occupier. How could I be nice to my occupier? Germany and France took years until they became good neighbors. Why not consider us like France being occupied by the Germans. It is the same story. It takes a long time for the bitterness to be diluted.”
Thrilling. And simple. Now where is this clear understanding in the American discourse?
You will be wondering what Assali is doing with the Hohner melodica in the picture above. She got it out from a cupboard in the original Hohner case so as to explain the occupation to me. In the late 70s she had visited Jordan with her daughter and son and she bought the Hohner for her son. When they came back over the Allenby bridge, an Israeli woman soldier tried to take the harmonica away. You cannot have this, what are you doing with this, she said to the boy.
“They cannot distinguish between a child carrying his musical instrument and a militant.”
And Assali’s 8 year old son held on to the harmonica till he was red and blue in the face, and the soldier and he struggled on the bridge, till he tore the thing back from her and played Frere Jacques, and then she let him keep it. “He played Frere Jacques on the Allenby Bridge,” Assali said to me with cold rage in her voice. Would you be enraged too if your children were subjected to such humiliation?
Ending the occupation is the core Palestinian concern. “Mrs. Clinton said she cares about Palestinian aspirations,” Assali said, quoting a recent statement by the Secretary of State. “She is talking in the abstract. Let her sit where you are sitting and I will tell her our aspirations. She is covering her eyes. She doesn’t respect our intelligence. Really, she doesn’t respect our intelligence. She is talking nonsense when she talks about our aspirations. Our aspiration is independence, freedom to determine our future, the end of occupation, getting our rights of 1948, the right of return. Our aspirations are dignity in life.
“Hillary Clinton cannot speak in my name. She knows our aspirations. Act upon it. The US must act.”
Assali was like so many other Palestinians who were deeply dismayed by Obama’s crumpling to Netanyahu in the last year.
“Obama went back on his word. This was really a blow to the Palestinians. To see that a powerful state could not enforce the freezing of settlements—it is so negative. It does not bode well for Palestinians.”
And like so many other Palestinians, Nahla Assali would accept the two-state solution, if it were just.
“The two state solution is possible and it’s maybe the most practical solution in the foreseeable future, provided there is an end to occupation, according to the 1967 border. This is the key element in any solution. This is the only occupation in modern history that has lasted 42 years. We should not talk about the details.”
And here Assali echoed a point you hear from international leaders: “Put Israel under pressure, to say, How much is it going to grab? What are the borders?
“They don’t even recognize themselves as occupiers. They do not acknowledge it. They say, they liberated Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, and they are not talking about occupied territories, they are talking about disputed territories. Let them acknowledge that they are occupiers and that the solution is based on the 67 borders, then we can negotiate.
“The demand is a recognition from Israel that they have done us an injustice. If they don’t say it, then it should come from the world community. Palestinians were done wrongs. But Israelis won’t say it.”
I asked Assali about a statement I’d heard from a couple of Israel-sympathizers. They know that they have their boot on the Palestinians’ neck but they are afraid to lift it off because they are afraid of how the Palestinians will respond when they can get back at Israelis. Assali shook her head.
“That’s denial. They live in denial. And meantime we live in false expectations. I call them false because they have never materialized for me. Political rights, liberation, independence, a decent life, with security, with no roadblocks, no divisions, no walls. Our aspirations are not realizable.
“Sometimes you feel that you are not treated as human beings, when they stop you and order to sit against the wall.”
And what of the right of return? At dinner with Mrs. Assali a few days before, she had gotten out old black and white photographs of herself as a 10-year-old, when her family had left their house Baka, in West Jerusalem. She wrote about it in this article for Sabeel.
She told me how the April 1948 massacre in the nearby village of Deir Yassin had scared the people of Jerusalem, just as it was intended to:
“Deir Yassin was really a big disaster for the Jerusalemites because of the horrible stories, and the families from Deir Yassin. Because we saw the survivors, the families and their children, they were decent families. They came to Jerusalem, they were brought in pickups, and they all talked about the horrible stories.”
After Deir Yassin, her father had sent her mother and her 4 siblings to Damascus for a week or two while he stayed in the house. The night before they left her father had argued with her mother, in the house, over whether the kids should bring sweaters. Of course they shouldn’t bring sweaters. It was April. They would only be away for a couple of weeks. Of course they never saw the house again.
And in time when the Israelis shut down the crossings between the Old City and West Jerusalem, her father had at last left his house, with his mother and her other son, and moved into a house in the Old City, for a little while. And here I would note that Rashid Khalidi has told me that the Israeli plan was to remove the urban Arabs. The educated upper stratum of the society, the intelligentsia and the stakeholders, in Jaffa and Haifa and Jerusalem—they were simply wiped away, to destroy the existing society.
I asked Assali how she looks on that old house in Baka that is her family’s.
“I know the layout of our house in Baka room by room, corridor by corridor. So I can draw you a map right now. And if I choose to go back to live in my house in Baka, I should be granted that right. Why should a psychiatrist from the Hebrew University live in my flat in Baka. My father built the house. We owned the building.”
Would she return? Does she really want to return to that old house?
“I was never given the choice. The UN resolution 194 grants me the right of return as a personal right. My family will not give up our right of ownership to our property in Baka.
“But if I was given the choice, maybe I would be more comfortable in East Jerusalem than in West. But also, what about my 62 years of lost rent on the apartments in my house?
“Faisal Husseini in his library surveys said that 70 percent of property in West Jerusalem was Arab in 1948. Justice comes before peace. This is axiomatic. You cannot have peace with people who still have grievances and hard feelings. You can’t have peace.”
Yes of course that house is theirs, just as those Klimt paintings belong to Bloch-Bauer family descendants in Los Angeles. (This is the spiritual Jewish problem: privileging our refugees over theirs, and failing to grasp this simple inequity.)
Assali had one regret about the house, something she had done to her father.
After the Israelis captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, and then annexed East Jerusalem a few years later, Nahla Assali and her father became “permanent residents” of East Jerusalem with Jordanian passports, and were able to travel into Israel. When her brother came through on a visit, he prevailed on their father to visit the house. Assali’s father didn’t want to visit the house. You wouldn’t want to, would you?
Still they had prevailed on him. And when he had driven up to the house he had refused to get out of the car, it had hurt him so much, which is when Assali had realized her mistake. He had only glanced out once and noticed that the house was in some disrepair.
“Why don’t they fix the shutter?” he had growled, and looked away.
Oh the fierce dignity of the Palestinian people, under assault for 60 years.
