Palestinian activist Nariman Tamimi (left) and Rana Hamadah sit for the verdict during their trial at Israel's Ofer military court near the West Bank city of Ramallah on July 9, 2013. An Israeli military court formally charged the two Palestinian women for their involvement in a peaceful demonstration in Nabi Saleh last month. (photo: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)
It is Friday morning. I leaf through the weekly Haaretz
Magazine and feel deeply discomforted. It is that unfocused panicky feeling
that is hard to pin down to any single source. I try to make sense of my state
of mind. I study Tal Niv’s one-page article entitled ‘Facing the Future.’ The young woman on the right side of
the photo on top of the page with her thick black hair ‘cascading across her shoulder’ catches my attention. I scan
the page for her story and think I’ve discovered the cause of my discomfort:
She is accused, among other things ‘of
interfering with a soldier … by moving her hands when the security forces tried
to handcuff her.’ The specific detail disturbs me. A human rights
worker recorded the event on video and it so happens that the same human rights
worker later gets shot at close range with a rubber coated metal bullet. Could
this ‘coincidence’ be the cause of my worry?
Totally out of the clear blue sky I want to run up the hill
and check on one of my many cousins. We were classmates in the village school
and, like all Palestinian kids, we competed in throwing stones at immobile
objects or quails and rabbits in the fields. He bettered me every time. He was
born with what I came later to know in my medical profession as a mild ‘varus
deformity’ of the wrist joint of the right arm, an inward turn of the palm of
the hand at such an angle and in such a manner that he had an advantage in
holding and in throwing stones. There must be a law in Israel, or perhaps an
amendment of the Anti-terror Ordinance from the British Mandate era that makes this advantageous anatomical variation illegal, I now think in my panicked
mind. But then, how serious can such an offense be. Judging by the frequency of
my being “randomly selected” for strip searches at airports, all Palestinians
must have a mysterious identifying physical variation of the normal that
renders them suspect. It sure is enough to instill doubt in one’s mind of the
normality of his or her physical mold if not in the competence of Him who
invented the faulty design.
I run away from the paper and take refuge in the morning
routine of shaving and showering. The image in the mirror glares back at me
ferociously: “Face up to your guilt,” the unshaven, red-eyed, dark face glowers
at me from behind the mirror.
“What guilt?” I object. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I
spent the whole night in bed. Ask my wife.”
“Identify the deep roots of your fears and you can shed away
this undetermined sense of anxiety,” the doctor in me says from behind the
glass. “Take courage. Go back to that page you looked at. Study the article
closely and you will figure out what is really bothering you.”
“But I didn’t even read the whole article,” I try to wiggle
out of responsibility for my sense of discomfort. “You can’t hold me
accountable for the hidden nuances of the whole thing.”
“But you are. Go back and look at the article word for word.
Let your mind roam while your eyes focus on each word. Let me know how you feel
when you are finished.”
“No way! And look now what you made me do! Two cuts!”
“It is your bum skin. The blade must have hit a pimple or
something.’
“You can’t blame it on pimples,” I object. “I haven’t had
one for half a century. I am long past the stage where my testosterone flow is sufficient
to raise a pimple or much of anything else for that matter.”
“Oh, just shut up and do what I say or else you will not be
able to sleep tonight.”
I hate insomnia. I go out with blood-soaked patches of
toilet paper hanging from my jowls and grab the magazine. The photo at the top
of the page I looked at earlier is enough to explain everything, I am sure: I
look at the two women in it and I know I am a partner in their crime, a
Palestinian like them. They both were caught ‘entering a closed military zone.’
What does that mean?
‘Every square millimeter of Area C (under full Israeli control) can be declared
a closed area at any moment, even on a person’s own land, even around his
house, even around the person himself if necessary.
I sit up straight in my chair and prepare to argue with the
older women, the more ‘battle-hardened’
of the two. When the battle rages around your identity, then the older
you are the more battle-hardened you are.
“Even if they declared your village, Nabi Saleh, a closed military
zone while you were already there, you must have heard the declaration,” I tell
the stoic more mature woman looking straight at me in total denial of her
crime. She is a tricky sort of fighter, using the worst type of deviance in the
war manual, disguise. ‘Her eyes are
flicked with amber,’ a desperate attempt to pass for European. But whom
is she fooling? No one with Tamimi for a last name can pass herself for
Ashkenazi. I am not fooled by the camouflage.
“The 49 killed in Kafr Qasim in 1956 were in their fields,”
I explain. “They were out of earshot from their village when the curfew was
declared. Shadmi and his soldiers executed them for the crime they had
committed of being in their fields and not waiting at home to hear the
announcement of the curfew. There is a difference, even if infinitely fine,
between the two cases.”
The stoic woman looks back at me from the page in total
tranquility. She mocks me.
“For that alone you deserve a month or two in jail,” I tell
her in the common telepathic mode of communication that all of us Palestinians
share. “Israel is at its wit’s end with all your lawlessness. There is hardly
enough cells in our prisons for all of you.”
I am going berserk with anxiety. My very identity is up for
grabs. Who am I?
“Not to worry,” Tamimi answers in total silence. “Build more
prisons and the USA will foot the bill.”
She goes on to remind me of what she told me the last time
we met in Ramallah, that the USA had covered the expenses of added checkpoints
erected between Jerusalem and Ramallah to relieve the massive pressure on the
Qalandia checkpoint. Since this was done to reduce the time the Palestinians
spent being entertained by Israaeli soldiers at the border, it was charged to
the PNA’s American aid bill.
But the woman is lying. I never met her before. Oh, yes, I
have met other Tamimi’s.
Here, in a sudden flash, like an epiphany, I think I finally
realize the source of my anxiety.
“Yes, I met a Tamimi or two the day before yesterday,” I admit to my
interrogator as I slump my head in the Murga position in which I have been held
for hours in my cell.
“A Tamimi, you admit?” the interrogator dressed in casual
genes, his handgun stuck casually under his belt.
“But he is the safe type,” I gasp with what little breath is
left in my collapsed lungs, the pain in my broken ribs nearly killing me. “He
is a retired professor in an American university. In fact, he still lives
there. He is safe!”
“But a Tamimi nevertheless! And we know he left some stuff
with you. Admit it. What did he give you? Spit it out. For your own safety. We
want to save you from a violent death.”
“My God!” I gasp realizing the trick my presumed friend had
played on me. He gave me a necktie, obviously booby-trapped. Once we shared an
apartment as students at the University of Hawaii. He knows I like to wear my
ties tight. As I pull at it for the last extra centimeter of length it will
blow up severing my head off of my body. I look at the two women in the picture
and they return my gaze absolutely unmoved by my suffering.
“The Tamimis are all cruel,” the interrogator reaffirms my
suspicion. “That is why we sympathize with Baruch Goldstein for trying to mow
down as many of them as he found in the Ibrahimi Mosque that morning.”
“Were all 29 of them Tamimi’s?” my severed head on the
ground asks.
“Not necessarily,” the Shin Bet man answers kicking the head
with his boot. “But the Tamimis are the worst bunch. They lay claim to the
whole city of Hebron, the burial ground of our forefathers.”
That brings it all to a luminous point of clarity, closes
the circle for my culpability with the Tamimis in their collective sin from
birth. In fact I am right in the middle of a book about the Tamimis that I have
read to sleep the last two nights. It is written by Dr. Nader Tamimi who has
collected historical documents about the known fact that the prophet Mohammad,
God’s blessings be upon him, had gifted Hebron and its environs to Tamim
Aldari, the father of all the Tamimis in the Middle East, upon the latter’s
conversion from Christianity to Islam in the 9th year of the Islamic
calendar.
“But the prophet didn’t rule Palestine,” I argue with the
Tamimi woman on the page. “Palestine fell under Moslem rule only years later, during the
rule of Caliph Omar.”
“True,” the woman answered with confidence unbecoming of a
woman, much less a Palestinian Moslem woman. My God! What happened to common
decency and the proper order of the universe! “The gift was made on the
expectation and full confidence that it will fall to the Moslems later on. The
prophet knew what was coming.”
She is right. I have read the account many times over in the
book I now keep next to my bed. The prophet also knew that a day would come
when non-Moslems would contest his gift. So he was sure to make it valid in
perpetuity to the Tamimi heirs. And he saw to it that the deed was recorded on
a piece of leather from the cover of his cousin Ali’s shoe and that a group of
reputable contemporaries of his attested to its validity with their signatures.
I have read the same account with minor variations related by various
historians from the era when Arabs were the victors and wrote their own
history. In fact I read so many versions in the Tamimi book with minimal
changes that I have decided to keep the book on my nightstand as the perfect
recipe for the induction of instantaneous sleep. Every time I wake up I open
the book to one of the dozens of accounts, read the first sentence then recite
the rest of the mantra mainly in the dream phase:
“In the name of God the merciful
the compassionate. This is what Mohammad the prophet gave to Tamim and his
brothers: Hebron, Martom, Beit Inon, Beit Ibrahim and all that is in it, a
final gift to share between them, implemented and handed over to them and to
their descendants. He who harms them God will harm; he who harms them will be
God-damned.”
Three caliphs are among the witnesses including Ali who
wrote it. That means all Moslems, Sunnis and Shias alike, are behind the
Tamimi’s claim to Hebron and its environs.
That must be sickening to Zionist Israelis. Turning this all in my head,
I am emboldened to take on my cruel interrogators: They have put a noose around
my neck to force me to recant. But I will not. I goad them, all three who have
been taking turns in torturing me, to come close to me pretending that I want
to confess to them. Then, as they move closer to me, with all my reserve of
strength, with all my inspired convictions, with all my love for my Tamimi
friends, with the imagined moral support of all 1.3 billion Moslems in the
world, I jerk my neck back violently exploding that booby-trapped tie around my
neck and blowing my tormenters to smithereens.
I open my eyes and the two women in the picture smile at me.
