I
Anyone who knew Abed in his youth would have told you that he was destined to end up with a certain someone. But that someone was not Haifa or Asmahan. It was a girl called Ghazl.
They met in the mid-1980s, when Anata was quiet and rural, more village than town. Ghazl was a fourteen-year-old freshman at the Anata girls’ school. Abed was a senior at the boys’ school across the street. Back then, everyone knew each other in Anata. More than half the village came from one of three large families all descended from the same ancestor, a man named Alawi. Abed’s family, the Salamas, was the largest. Ghazl’s, the Hamdans, was the second largest.
Alawi himself could trace his line back to the man who established Anata, Abdel Salaam Rifai, a descendant of the twelfth-century founder of Sufism. He had traveled from Iraq to come to al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and then settled in Anata, which was perhaps named for the Canaanite goddess Anat or the biblical city Anatot. As children, Abed and his siblings would walk down the road to the old stone shrine to Abdel Salaam Rifai, lighting candles inside the domed sanctum that would later become a resting spot for Israeli soldiers, who would leave it littered with cigarette butts and beer bottles.
Abed lived a few dozen feet downhill from the girls’ school, on the second floor of a two-story limestone house. The first floor served as a barn for goats, chickens, and sheep. Abed’s father loved the animals, and the goats in particular. He had named each one and would beckon them to eat seeds, nuts, or sweets. As a teenager, Abed used to take the goats to graze in the small valley between Anata and Pisgat Ze’ev, a new Jewish settlement.
In Abed’s youth the landscape of Anata was dotted with olive and fig trees and open fields of wheat and lentils. Large families slept together in a single room on a floor covered in thin mattresses. Homes had outhouses, and women carried water from a nearby spring in large jars balanced on their heads. Children bathed in giant buckets brought into their living rooms once a week, on Fridays, afterward lining up with wet hair and clean clothes to thank their fathers with a kiss on the hand, receiving in turn a kiss on the forehead and a blessing of comfort and bliss, na’eeman.
Anata began to change after Israel conquered it and the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 war. Until that point, the area had been governed by Jordan. Over the following decades, the demography and geography of the occupied territories were transformed by Israel, which used a range of policies to Judaize them. In Anata, the government seized the land piece by piece, issued hundreds of demolition orders, annexed part of the town to Jerusalem, erected a separation wall to encircle its urban center, and confiscated the rest to create four settlements, several settler outposts, a military base, and a segregated highway split down the middle by another wall, this one blocking the settlers’ sight of Palestinian traffic. The town’s natural pool and spring was turned into an Israeli nature reserve, which was free to the settlers of Anatot but charged admission to the people of Anata. The road to the spring went through the settlement, which Palestinians could not enter without a permit, so they had to use a different route, taking a long detour on a dangerous dirt road.
Year by year, Palestinians from Anata found themselves absorbed into the urban fabric of an expanding Jerusalem, which had swallowed up the Old City and the rest of East Jerusalem, as well as the lands of more than two dozen outlying villages, all annexed by Israel. They drove cars on Israel’s multilane highways, bought food at its supermarket chains, and used Hebrew at its office towers, malls, and cinemas. But Anata’s social mores remained unchanged. Prenuptial relations were forbidden, marriages were frequently arranged, and cousins coupled in order to retain wealth and land within the family. Enemies put on a show of great politeness toward one another, life outcomes were powerfully shaped by household reputation—a wayward daughter could ruin the marriage prospects of all her sisters—and the entire drama was shrouded in ritual and courteous speech.
If Anata was reminiscent of an eighteenth-century preindustrial village, Abed was born into its aristocracy. Both his grandfathers—who were brothers—had at separate points been the mukhtar, village leader, and together they had owned much of the land. But as their properties shrunk, confiscated under Israeli rule, so did the mukhtar’s significance. By the early 1980s, when it was time for Abed’s father to take his turn, he refused to accept the role, saying that it now consisted largely of pointing occupying soldiers to the homes of men they wanted to arrest.
Abed’s father was a proud man who rarely showed resentment about the losses he had suffered, neither those of matter nor of spirit. His first love had been a woman from the Hamdan family, but his father and uncle planned for him to marry a cousin so they could avoid dividing the family’s land. The parents of the girl he loved also schemed to keep the two apart because of the rivalry between the Salamas and the Hamdans. As soon as they learned of the young Salama’s yearning, they married the girl off to her cousin. Abed’s father was left with no choice but to respect his family’s wishes and agree to the marriage they had arranged.
When Abed himself fell for a Hamdan, he wondered if he was fulfilling his father’s thwarted destiny. In the evenings, he would write secret letters to Ghazl. In the mornings, he would hand them to one of her neighbors or classmates to pass to her at school. Often the notes included instructions for Ghazl to answer the phone at a certain time. Because the neighborhood she lived in, Dahiyat a-Salaam (called New Anata at the time), had been annexed by Israel and incorporated into Jerusalem, her house had a phone line. The homes in the rest of Anata did not. After school, Abed would take the bus to Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem, walk to the post office on Salahadin Street, the main commercial boulevard, and, at the arranged time, insert a token into the pay phone. The couple would speak for as long as they could, which often wasn’t very long at all. If Ghazl’s parents walked in, she would switch to addressing Abed in the feminine before abruptly ending the call. On many days, they barely finished saying hello before Abed found himself interrupted, midsentence, by the dull buzz of a dead phone line.
They were a handsome pair. Abed was tan and tall and svelte, with a strong jaw, a pensive gaze, and a gentle, relaxed demeanor. He had a thick head of hair, cut close at the sides, and, to his later embarrassment, a mustache. With his shirt unbuttoned low on his chest, he resembled a Palestinian James Dean. Ghazl had large, almond-shaped eyes and a dimple in her right cheek. She looked like her father. Her face, like his, radiated kindness.
Abed’s oldest and favorite sister, Naheel, lived in Dahiyat a-Salaam with her husband, Abu Wisaam, in a house close to Ghazl’s. From their home Abed liked to spy Ghazl on her roof or balcony, which were the only places where she would stand in the open with her hair uncovered.
Abed was secular and against the hijab. None of his sisters had worn it before they married, and Naheel didn’t put one on even after. Especially among the elites, the hijab was less commonly seen. When Abed graduated from high school, in 1986, fewer than half the girls in Anata covered their hair. He didn’t mind, though, that Ghazl wore the hijab. He knew she did it out of respect for her father, who was religious, and that in other ways she was far less deferential than her peers. She was also granted greater independence. Her father was amiable and trusting, and her mother—who came from Silwan, the central Jerusalem neighborhood directly beneath al-Aqsa mosque—adopted the modern ways of the city. It was their lenience that allowed Ghazl and Abed to see one another as often as they did. At least initially, before their secret courtship was able to truly flourish under the cover of joint political struggle.
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THE FIRST INTIFADA broke out in December 1987, a year and a half after Abed finished high school. It began as a series of spontaneous protests that erupted when an Israel Defense Forces semitrailer collided with a station wagon in Gaza, killing four Palestinian workers. The protests spread, fueled by years of anger at what Israel’s defense minister called an “iron fist policy.” They quickly transformed into the first organized mass uprising against the occupation, with thousands of street battles pitting stone-throwing Palestinian youth against Israeli troops equipped with armored vehicles and assault rifles. It was a time of painful sacrifice for all Palestinians, poor and bourgeois, secular and religious, Christian and Muslim, refugee and rooted, incarcerated and expelled. With everyone suffering from Israel’s determination to smash the uprising, signs of opulence and class distinction were avoided—strident secularists even adopted the hijab to show national solidarity.
Towns were besieged, curfews imposed, provisions depleted, jobs lost, schools closed, children jailed, husbands tortured, fathers killed, and sons maimed—so many bones were broken that the soldiers’ clubs would snap. “The types of batons were replaced several times,” according to Israel’s Kol Hazman, “because they were too weak and broke, to the point that they were exchanged for iron batons, and when these bent, then sticks made of flexible plastic were used.” More than 1,100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers or civilians during the six years of the uprising. Another 130,000 were wounded and some 120,000 were jailed. In those years, Israel had the largest per capita prison population in the world.
The Israeli military shut down all the Palestinian universities, making it impossible for Abed to get a degree. After he had finished high school, he’d hoped to study abroad. A close friend, Osama Rajabi, suggested that they apply to university in the USSR. The Palestine Liberation Organization offered scholarships in allied socialist states. Abed wanted to join Osama, but first he needed to obtain a passport, and for that he needed his father’s help. Israel didn’t give passports to its occupied subjects. Abed’s father had a Jordanian passport, granted to him when the Hashemite Kingdom controlled the West Bank, so Abed could try to get one in Jordan. But his father refused to help—he declared he would not allow his son to leave Palestine to become a communist. Osama left without Abed.
In Anata and elsewhere in the West Bank, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist faction of the PLO, was in the vanguard of the trade union and political organizing that had given birth to the intifada. The DFLP’s local leader was none other than Abu Wisaam, Abed’s brother-in-law. A diminutive, witty, and loquacious intellectual, he had joined the group in the 1970s, studied in Beirut, and been trained there in espionage, explosives, and party ideology, learning about world revolutions and the Zionist movement. On a visit to Anata to see his parents, he was arrested for membership in the DFLP—an illegal organization, like all PLO factions—and during his fifteen months in jail he read the important Marxist texts. He got engaged to Naheel shortly thereafter, when she was sixteen and Abed was twelve. From that moment, Abu Wisaam had his eyes on Abed for the revolution. Once the intifada started, he recruited him to the party.
It was not just a matter of enlarging his faction’s ranks. Bringing Abed into the DFLP was a way for Abu Wisaam to protect him. Rife with collaborators, Palestine had to be one of the most thoroughly penetrated societies in the history of foreign occupation and colonial rule. In the Democratic Front, at least, Abu Wisaam knew who could be trusted. On one occasion, a young member of the rival Fatah faction spread money around that he said had come from his uncle in the United States. The uncle wanted to help support the intifada, and the funds would go to buying sneakers for the shabaab, the youth. This was a way for the young man to begin building himself up as a leader.
He handed out five Jordanian dinars to each young activist, enough for a pair of fresh white Nikes, the better to run in when Israeli bullets started flying. Abed took the money, but when Abu Wisaam found out, he forced him to return it right away. He knew it was a ruse: the cash had come from the Israelis, who wanted to see which of the shabaab were involved in the protests and who was susceptible to being bought. Every one of the boys who accepted the money was later arrested, taken from his home by Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night. Thanks to Abu Wisaam, Abed was spared.
Although most of the men in Abed’s family belonged to Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s party, Abed learned to distrust it. Fatah always seemed to be full of empty talk, he thought, a conviction that strengthened over the years as he watched its leaders compromise on nearly every principle, then compromise on the compromises, to the point that, after the intifada, they found themselves working as Israel’s enforcers. What appealed to Abed about the Democratic Front was that on the ground, in Anata, Jerusalem, and the rest of the West Bank, the group seemed to be the most serious about building a local movement to liberate Palestine.
The DFLP supported Abed’s desire to join Osama in studying law in the Soviet Union. Ghazl did, too. Abed wanted to defend the swelling ranks of Palestinian political prisoners. Every year since Osama had left, Abed asked for permission to study with him, and every year Abed’s father said no.
Stuck in Anata, Abed worked in construction and rose up in the Democratic Front and its trade union, the Workers’ Unity Bloc. He organized protests, recruited new members, and distributed bayanaat, the regular communiqués of the intifada that coordinated the actions of pharmacists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, shop owners, landlords, and local committees, providing instructions on when to strike, what to boycott, which public employees should resign, which Israeli orders should be ignored, and where to march and block transportation to the settlements. Possession of the bayanaat, or of any PLO “propaganda material,” was a criminal offense, as was printing or publicizing “any publication of notice, poster, photo, pamphlet or other document containing material having a political significance.”
The bayanaat had to be produced and distributed clandestinely. The means of doing so were constantly shifting, as Israel confiscated leaflets and occasionally the presses on which they were printed. Abed once obtained bayanaat from a young European woman who had passed through a checkpoint with the flyers hidden beneath the lining of the trunk of her car. With the broadsheets tucked under his shirt, Abed would walk to the Anata supermarket, step into an empty aisle, and scatter them across the floor. At night, he and other shabaab would spray-paint the texts of the bayanaat onto Anata’s walls.
One afternoon, several weeks into the uprising, Naheel went to a DFLP demonstration at Damascus Gate. Beforehand, she had arranged an alibi. She and Abu Wisaam had been trying to have a child, and Naheel needed to take a pregnancy test. She called a clinic on Salahadin Street and scheduled an appointment for just before the protest. With the test result in hand, she joined her friends outside the Old City walls, where she began to wave the outlawed Palestinian flag. Israeli security forces pounced, but before they grabbed Naheel her friend snatched the flag out of her hand and escaped down the street. Naheel was taken to a West Jerusalem detention center in the Russian Compound area, known to Palestinians as Moscobiya. For displaying a Palestinian flag, Naheel could have been sentenced to several months or more in prison. But she hadn’t been caught with the flag and was able to point to the time and date on her pregnancy test, claiming she had just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. She spent only ten days in jail.
Naheel’s test was negative, but she got pregnant a little later, during the first Ramadan of the intifada. Her son was born in January 1989, a year into the uprising. When the baby was two weeks old, Abu Wisaam was arrested for his role in the DFLP. It was his third stint in an Israeli prison, and his second since marrying Naheel. This time he was jailed for almost a year. With Anata’s DFLP now leaderless, Abed took over.
He spent much of that period helping Naheel with her infant son, sleeping at her house, close to Ghazl, who was then finishing her final year of high school. Abed had recruited Ghazl to the Democratic Front and now put her in charge of enlisting and educating more young women. Ghazl was good at it. There were twenty-five women active in the group when Abu Wisaam went to prison. By the time he got out, Ghazl had doubled the number.
Naheel’s house near the top of the hill in Dahiyat a-Salaam offered Abed and his friends a good vantage point to spot Israeli soldiers coming up through Anata or from Shuafat refugee camp above. Shuafat Camp was a site of frequent demonstrations and one of the first Jerusalem neighborhoods put under curfew at the start of the uprising.
Abed and the people of Anata called Shuafat’s residents Thawaala, the people of Beit Thul, a village near Jerusalem, because some of the largest families in the camp had been expelled from there in 1948 when Zionist forces established Israel. It was taboo to say it, because refugees were the beating heart of the Palestinian national movement—its founders, its leaders in exile, its most potent symbol, and the embodiment of the Palestinian demand to return home—but Abed did not much care for some of the Thawaala. He resented them acting as if they were the sole defenders of Palestine, somehow better than the people who had stayed on their land. He thought the camp refugees presented a false image of Palestinians as beggars, living on United Nations handouts, and they made life difficult for everyone by blocking the roads whenever there was a dispute between families.
Shuafat Camp was also a haven for drug addicts and dealers, and Abed saw Israeli soldiers there buying hash and more. Somewhere else this might have been just a social problem, but in the Palestinian context it was a national liability. Israel often recruited collaborators by threatening to expose them to their conservative families and neighbors through real or doctored photos of their transgressions, particularly sexual ones. Dealers and addicts were a source of Israeli entrapment, so they were considered a threat to the uprising. At night, Abed and other shabaab put on masks and started fights with the dealers, clearing potential collaborators from the streets.
Copyright © 2023 by Nathan Thrall
