Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2009, pages 18, 31

Jerusalem Journal

The Taste of Grief

By Samah Jabr

	The author’s brother-in-law, Ihab, and his son Youssef (Courtesy S. Jabr).

FEB. 11, 2009: One hour ago, at two o’clock in the morning, we awoke with a sense of horror. Around two dozen masked Israeli soldiers surrounded our building, setting off the alarm of a car in our parking lot, cut the fence of the school adjacent to our home, closed the peephole on every apartment’s door. They marched up the stairs to my sister’s apartment, beat the door very hard with their guns, and shouted, “Ihab, come out, alone.”

Ihab, his wife and little Youssef awoke from their heavy sleep, scared and stunned at what was happening. Ihab was handcuffed and pulled away from us while our neighbors were forced to return to their homes and keep their doors and mouths shut. The family gathered afterward, and there is an acute taste of grief.

This terrifying event explains the strange summoning of my brother Basheer to the police station in Neve Yaqouv yesterday, where he was pressed to give details about each and every one of his sisters, provide their exact contact information, locate their homes on a GPS, and reveal what they and their husbands do for a living, as well as his personal opinion of them.

I recall an old Bedouin folk tale. A Bedouin father told his 5-year-old only son one day, “Son you are old enough to come with me on a hunting trip,” and takes his son and camel to an oasis. The animal eats and drinks, while the boy collects some herbs that his mother can use for cooking and some healing potions. Then the father notices a deer running by. He makes the camel sit down and orders the boy to sit near it and promise not to move until his father comes back. The Bedouin then chases after the deer. Hours and hours pass, and although the young boy was very bored he waited as he had promised. Before the father could return, however, the Ghoula, a creature which is a woman from her head to her waist atop the body of a horse, and which feeds on young flesh, notices the little boy and devours him.

After abandoning his hunt for the deer, the father returns at sunset and finds the camel, but not his son. He loses his mind and starts searching everywhere, but cannot find him. When he sees a bloodstain, he realizes that he has lost his child forever. He takes the camel and begins to walk home. On the way he sees a fire on a hilltop and the Ghoula dancing, intoxicated with the fresh blood she has just consumed. Figuring out what happened, he sneaks near her, shoots the Ghoula in the head, then opens her belly with his knife and finds the still undigested body of his son. He takes the tiny body, covers it with his abaya and goes home to his wife.

“My dear wife, I brought you a special deer,” he says, “a deer that can only be cooked in a pot that has never been used for a mourning meal. Go find us one and come back to me.” The wife goes to their nearest neighbors, but they had used their pot during the funeral of their deceased father; the next nearest neighbors had cooked in their pot for the death of their daughter, who had died during last year’s plague. The wife goes to all her neighbors, but cannot find the kind of pot her husband described, so she comes home and tells him so.

“Yes, my wife, every family has used their pot to cook for the funeral of a beloved one,” he says, “and today is our turn; here is the deer I hunted today.” And he shows his wife the dead body of their little son.

Several Days Later

Disheveled, unshaven and with tears in his eyes, Ihab at last returned home. His release is as perplexing as his arrest, and leaves many questions unanswered. Ihab is an apolitical, secular professional. A university teacher of information technology earning a modest salary, he has tried to supplement his income through a small computer repair shop providing servers and wireless connections. His shop also serves as an Internet café for poor neighborhood youth who don’t have computers at home. While Ihab was in detention we learned that his shop had been raided and his computers confiscated.

It wasn’t until today, however, that Ihab learned why he had been detained. He was taken to the police station in Jaffa Street after his arrest, put in an empty room and told he faced a long wait. “We are having [Israeli] elections and no one has time for you now” he was told. Four long days and four cold nights of complete silence and severe loneliness passed before he was called for a “chat” with interrogators, who told him that “messages against the security of the state of Israel were sent from computers in his shop during the Gaza war, and that if he does not monitor his business, he’d come back to detention, but next time for much longer than four days.”

His Israeli interrogators told Ihab nothing about the content, sender or recipient of the offending messages.

The real purpose of Ihab’s detention, however, was to terrorize Palestinians—in this case, Ihab’s family, friends, colleagues and everyone who happens to know him—especially those who are more politically opinionated than he is.

As a Palestinian Jerusalemite, I realize that we are living in an occupied police state that will allow us to survive, if at all, only if we abandon our opinions and beliefs and focus only on our most primitive needs. Should we not conform to the occupier’s laws, we’d better get used to restless nights of interrupted sleep. Indeed, it is precisely because my own family members have chosen for so long to hide behind academic achievements and professionalism, and to distance themselves from any activism or political involvement, that their pain threshold is very low in comparison to the majority of Palestinians. I believe this experience will teach them that the occupier will not be placated by our passivity and silence. There is no pot in Palestine where funeral food has not been cooked, and we’d better learn how to eat the food made for everyone in our occupied homeland.

Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist practicing in the West Bank and her native Jerusalem.

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