The Palestinian Patient | The Nation


The Palestinian Patient

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Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews have fundamentally different attitudes toward the origins of the conflict that at once divides and binds them. The number of Israeli books about the early settlements and the 1948 war--histories, memoirs, novels--exceeds by far the number of those written by Palestinians. In the face of a work like Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, which drew upon spurious demographic "data" to deny that Palestinians were ever the majority in their own land, a Palestinian is angered but not moved to action. Indeed, the rebuttal to Peters came not from a Palestinian but from Norman Finkelstein, an American Jew.

About the Author

Raja Shehadeh
Raja Shehadeh is the author of Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, and When the Birds Stop...

Also by the Author

"This road was as doomed as the Palestinian Authority itself."

I didn't have to wait long for Ziad, the plumber, to come to my house.
It had been a year since the current Palestinian intifada broke out in
September 2000, and unemployment was at record leve


Not so for Palestinian authors writing in English for a Western audience. This may explain why much of the historical work on the Nakba by Palestinians such as Walid Khalidi and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was written originally in English--and why the Israeli "new" historians who reached the same conclusions much, much later found it easier to persuade readers in the West that the 1948 refugees had not simply left of their own accord. As Edward Said frequently observed, part of being Palestinian is being denied the right to narrate one's own experience.


This political rather than literary reception is likely to be the fate of Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the Sun (Bab al-Shams), first published in Arabic in 1998 and just released in English by Archipelago Books in an excellent translation by Humphrey Davies. Khoury is a Lebanese writer who has listened very carefully to the testimony of people who have been living in refugee camps in Lebanon since they were driven out of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948. His novel is inspired by these accounts. When Gate of the Sun was published in Hebrew in 2002, the veracity of Khoury's chronicle of the Nakba stirred controversy (although the book was praised by some Israeli critics), and this could become an issue in the United States. That would be unfortunate, since Khoury's novel is a work of literature, not oral history.





On one of his first infiltrations, Yunes is reunited with his wife, Nahilah, who stayed behind. She tells him how the Israelis took the land and how their son's head was crushed by "a huge stone [that] had fallen on him" while he was playing with the children in the nearby settlement. She runs to the military governor's headquarters and asks for a permit to take her son to the hospital in Acre. There she is interrogated about her husband for three hours. Meanwhile, her son dies. After learning of Ibrahim's death, Yunes is eager for revenge, but he decides that individual reprisal is "worthless" and goes back to Lebanon to organize Palestinians into a guerrilla army. He chooses war over revenge and emerges as a legendary resistance leader. But Khoury is not uncritical of the Palestinian resistance, which he portrays as purely reactive. He takes us through the movement's different phases, from the days when its headquarters were in Jordan to the Lebanese Civil War, when Yunes serves in the Lebanon Regional Command of the Fatah Movement. Each phase leads "back to the beginning," as Yunes frequently laments, leaving him to pick up the pieces and start over again.

Yunes's story is recounted by Khalil Ayyoub, his caretaker at the Galilee Hospital in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, where Yunes has been rushed following "an explosion in the brain causing permanent damage." Khalil is called a doctor but really isn't one. He is, in fact, a former PLO political commissar who studied field medicine in China. He has been talking to Yunes for the past three months, trying to rouse him from his coma. "Is he dead or alive?" Khalil wonders. "I don't know--am I helping or tormenting him?"

Frustrated by Yunes's silence, Khalil seeks the advice of Umm Hassan, the only midwife in Shatila, who despite her own childlessness is described as the "mother of all our mothers" from the Galilee. In the opening pages of the novel, we are told that Umm Hassan is a woman who "always told the truth." She knew, for example, that the 1967 war would only bring disaster, and she predicted that "Palestine would not come back until all of us had died." When Khalil complains that Yunes can't speak, she insists that he can: "It's up to you to hear his voice." Although Khalil still can't hear Yunes, who according to his real doctors is "clinically dead," he refuses to give up hope, promising to "hold conversations with you and tell you stories. I'll tell you everything. What do you say--I'll make tea, and we'll sit on the low chairs in front of your house and tell tales!"

Thus begins the novel's Scheherazade voyage, which stretches out over 539 pages. But whereas the tales in Thousand and One Nights are funny and bawdy, here the tales are recounted to a dying, if not already dead, man with great solemnity, as if the narrator speaking on his behalf were taking part in a religious ceremony. There is none of the black humor and irony that have inflected the Palestinian response to many generations of interminable suffering. And Khalil's second-person narration of the dying man's life often results in awkward constructions that can test one's patience, making it even harder for the reader to find his way in this labyrinth of overlapping stories. The silence of the man to whom the stories are told can also be infuriating. But then, Khoury may have intended to provoke such a reaction, for the comatose man--a leader of a national liberation movement, still in exile and unable to speak--is laden with symbolism.

As this scenario suggests, Gate of the Sun is a novel of prodigious ambition, seeking to evoke the full sweep of Palestinian history. Most Palestinian novelists have preferred to illuminate specific aspects of the Palestinian experience, and for good reason. That experience has been so eventful, so turbulent, so fragmented and so complicated--intertwined with the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the cold war, inter-Arab politics, the events of Black September in Jordan, the Lebanese Civil War and the 1991 Gulf War--that it seems to defy dramatization, even while inviting it. The story unfolds on an almost mythic plane, a plane much vaster than that of the novel. Khoury seems aware of this problem; his narrator observes at one point that the novelist Ghassan Kanafani didn't write about Yunes's experience of the Nakba "because he was looking for mythic stories, and yours was just the story of a man in love." Yet Gate of the Sun is not so much the intimate story of a man in love as the allegorical tale of an entire people.


When Yunes is brought to the hospital at the opening of the novel, he is immediately pronounced dead, and hospital administrators don't want to assign a room to him. Khalil, however, rejects this judgment and, invoking a medical authority he does not actually possess, finds a room for him. By telling Yunes stories, the "doctor" hopes to resuscitate his patient. But can narrative and remembrance provide the sustenance of Palestinian survival and endurance? Khalil, exasperated, asks Yunes:


Khoury's answer seems to be that story-telling is a defeated nation's way of preserving its memories, keeping itself alive and reminding the world of its existence, its refusal to surrender. Despite the tragic history it recounts, Gate of the Sun is an affirmative book, insisting that despite the recent betrayals of its leaders, Palestine is not dead, that, in Khalil's words, Palestinians continue "seeking the aroma of life and are waiting." Yet Khoury seems to admit the limits of storytelling as an act of resistance, since it can draw one further away from the reality it is intended to recall. And for Yunes, reality seems to be slipping away. At one point, Khalil asks him whether he knows where he is now, and then answers:

Everything here isn't itself but a simulacrum of itself. We say house but we don't live in houses, we live in places that resemble houses. We say Beirut but we aren't really in Beirut, we're in a semblance of Beirut. I say doctor but I'm not a doctor, I'm just pretending to be one. Even the camp itself--we say we're in the Shatila camp, but after the War of the Camps and the destruction of eighty percent of Shatila's houses, it's no longer a camp, it's just a semblance of a camp.

It is hard to resist the temptation to read such passages allegorically. The hospital could represent Palestine (or the PLO) after Oslo II, a sick house run by a sham doctor, a semblance of a hospital where everything is breaking down and where the residents are nurtured by listening to stories that have no beginning or end--a "country of words," as the poet Mahmoud Darwish bitterly wrote.


The proliferation of stories also presents a problem for Gate of the Sun as a work of literature, and it is as a novel, not as a political commentary or oral history, that Khoury's book must be assessed. Just before the end of Part One, Khalil stands up and declares: "For three months I've been telling you stories, some of which I know and some of which I don't. And you're incapable of correcting my errors, so I make mistakes once in a while.... My throat's dry from so much talking. I'm dried up, I've become desiccated." Khalil says he feels as if he is "a prisoner of the story. I'm drowning. Water surrounds me. I swallow water and swallow words and tell the story." These words could express the state of the reader, who feels just as lost in a maze of stories without the firm command of an author in control of his material. The idea for the book is brilliant, but the execution is uneven at best.

In the second part of Gate of the Sun, Khalil expresses his fear of "a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death." Perhaps it was to avoid this that Khoury ventured into territory rarely visited by Arab novelists: the Holocaust. Khoury describes his narrator imagining Umm Hassan "wandering in the fields among the thousands of others without homes." This waking nightmare continues, but the scene suddenly shifts from Palestine to Nazi-occupied Europe: "I see her, and I hear the whistle of the train...when the refugees were rounded up and distributed around the various suburbs, which then turned into camps. The whistle rings in my ears. I see the people being led toward the final train. I see the trains, and I shudder. Then I see myself loaded into a basin and carried on a woman's head. I confess I'm scared." He declares: "You and I and every human being on the face of the planet should have known and not stood by in silence, should have prevented that beast from destroying its victims in that barbaric, unprecedented manner. Not because the victims were Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us...we--you--were outside history, so you became its second victim."

Since Israel depicted itself as the redemption after the European catastrophe, Khoury suggests, Palestinians were suddenly forced to see themselves through the prism of Jewish history. Here Khalil, until now a confused and broken man, suddenly overcomes his paralysis and improbably turns into a seer, a prophet, telling Yunes, "We mustn't see ourselves only in their [the Jews'] mirror, for they're prisoners of one story [the Holocaust], as though the story had abbreviated and ossified them. Please, Father--we mustn't become just one story. Even you, even Nahilah--please let me liberate you from your love story, for I see you as a man who betrays and repents and loves and fears and dies. Believe me, this is the only way if we're not to ossify and die. You haven't ossified into one story. You will die, but you'll be free. Free of everything, even free of your own story." Earlier, he says, "You saw your own image in their mirrors.... I do see a mirror broken into two halves, which can only be mended by joining the parts together. Dear God, this is the tragedy: to see two halves that come together only in war and ruination."

This image of Palestinians and Israelis as two halves of a broken mirror is striking, but the change in tone is jarring, the narrator's revelations unconvincing. Nor are the encounters with Jews who have left Lebanon to settle in Israel any more convincing. In one of Khalil's tales, Umm Hassan returns home to what has become the northern Israeli settlement of Beyt ha-Emek, where she meets Ella Dweik, a Lebanese Jew living in the house that once belonged to her. Dweik welcomes her, saying, "I've been waiting for you for a long time." When she discovers that Umm Hassan now lives in a camp in Beirut, her eyes fill with tears, and she says that she too is from Beirut. "They brought me from there when I was twelve," she recalls. "I left Beirut and came to this dreary, bleak land." When Umm Hassan asks her how this happened, she replies, "What do you mean, how did that happen? I've no idea. You're living in Beirut and you've come here to cry? I'm the one who should be crying. Get up, my friend, and go. Send me to Beirut and take this wretched land back." While Israeli Jews from Arab and Muslim countries are known to long for their ancestral homes, Ella Dweik's cry that she has "no idea" why she left Lebanon for Israel strikes a false note, as does her remark that she has been "waiting" for Umm Hassan, a woman who, after all, has the keys to the house Dweik now occupies. The point Khoury is making is an admirable one: that the destinies of these women, secret sharers of the intimate history of Palestine, are intertwined, and that the events of 1948 shattered the ties between Arabs and Jews native to the region. Yet the women are ciphers, embodiments of ideas rather than fully realized characters. As a result, the scene is contrived and sentimental rather than moving.



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