“That’s not what I meant. I was asking you if you’d be ready to die with her.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
The girl seemed to hesitate, as though she wanted to say something, but she didn’t say it.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“But I feel a strange attachment to you,” he said.
“You’ll forget soon enough,” she said.
“Why should I have to forget when we haven’t yet begun?” he said.
“You know, doctor, I think all intellectuals are cowards. A large intelligence turns one into a coward. I listened to your comments during the course on what you called the naïveté of the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung and especially his theory of paradox and you may be right, but without naïveté we wouldn’t be able to fight. Without a simple, clear idea that can take over your heart like a religious idea, you can’t do battle.”
“But we’re secularists and Marxists and have to liberate ourselves from religion.”
“True, but there’s no other solution,” she said.
“If we turn into a religion, we’ll lose everything,” he said.
“You know you’re more intelligent than I am and are going to win the argument but that’s not the point. The point has something to do with cowardice and courage and not being afraid of death.”
“Is there anyone who isn’t afraid of death?”
“Me,” she said, and prepared to get up.
He asked her if he’d see her again and she said, “That would be nice.” He said they could make “that would be nice” into a reality now. “I could see you in two days. Let’s go out and have dinner together.”
“That would be nice,” she said, and left.
Karim only understood the meaning of her hints two days later, when pictures of Jamal filled the front pages of the Beirut newspapers. She was lying on the ground on the coast road between Haifa and Tel Aviv. An Israeli officer was crouched over her bullet-riddled body, as though searching the corpse.
Had she wanted him to go with her to their death? Had she meant by her hints at the Café Jandoul to invite him to join her group, which had made its way by stealth in rubber boats to the beach at Haifa and hijacked two Israeli buses before clashing with the Israeli army and dying?
Was suicide the other name of love? Or was it that Jamal, on the eve of her decision to lead a suicide operation inside Israel, was unable to love? What it came down to was that her heart had needed words, for at the moment of death, just as the lips feel a thirst for water, the heart thirsts for words.
Jamal Salim Jazayri was born on January 12, 1958, in Beirut. She was the eldest daughter of a Palestinian family from Jaffa. Her father, Salim Jamal Jazayri, had left Jaffa on foot the day the city fell, at which time he was twenty. His entire family had already left the city in boats but the young man, who had fought in the ranks of the Jihad Muqaddas Brigades, had refused to go with them and fought on in the city until the end. The city’s fall and the invasion of its quarters by men from the Haganah forced him to bury his rifle in the garden of the house and flee on foot to Lebanon. In Lebanon he never met up with the other members of his family, whom the winds of fate had tossed to Damascus, where they took up residence in Yarmouk Camp. He made it to Beirut, where he refused to live in one of the camps set up for Palestinian refugees. Instead, he rented a room in the Mazraa district and worked as a mechanic in the garage of Hajj Feisal Mughrabi before becoming the owner of his own garage and turning himself into the best car mechanic on the Mazraa Corniche. In 1957 he married Dalal el-Batal, a Palestinian from the village of Tiret Haifa, eighteen years of age, with whom he had four children, Jamal being the oldest; and though he had three boys — Salim, Amin, and Nasir — he continued to be known for the rest of his life as Abu Jamal.
At the Baissour Camp Jamal had told Karim her family’s story, and also how her father had encouraged her to take part in training courses organized specially for young girls. He hadn’t objected when she decided to join the Fedayeen after she got her secondary school certificate. She said she preferred the university of the revolution to a regular university. She couldn’t understand why all young Palestinian men and women didn’t join the Fedayeen: she wanted to be a model of the Palestinian woman in the resistance, just as Djamila Bouhired had become a symbol of the Algerian.
When Karim read the details of the operation led by a woman and saw Jamal’s corpse on the ground being messed around with by an Israeli officer, he was stupefied. She’d become a symbol, as she’d wanted. There she was, the girl from the Baissour Camp, at whose presence in a camp alongside the men some of the youths had grumbled, proving to them all that she was the bravest, the most beautiful, and the most capable of sacrifice.
A girl of twenty, she’d led ten Fedayeen, including two Lebanese and two Yemenis, and taken them by night in two rubber boats to the beach at Haifa. There they hijacked a bus carrying fifteen passengers and two hours later they hijacked another. Then they set off for Jaffa, firing into the air to clear the road.
The first bus was taken over at two thirty p.m. on Sunday, March 11, and at four forty p.m. the Fedayeen moved with their hostages, who at this point numbered more than sixty, to a new bus. At five thirty p.m. the bus found its way blocked by a barrier set up at the used car market in Herzliya, close to the County Club. Helicopters and tracked vehicles barred the way and the battle began. The bus was set on fire. The Fedayeen jumped down onto the road and engaged with the Israeli forces. Eight died, two were taken captive, and thirty Israelis were killed.
The moment he heard of her death, Karim felt he’d lost the woman he’d loved. It was as though Jamal had been hiding beneath Hend’s skin; as though the two young women were one, or had become so.
“Why did they send her to her death?”
When Danny came to him with the strange proposal, he’d felt panic.
“Why me?”
“Brother Abu Jihad wants to meet you. He read your article on the history of Shaqif Castle in the magazine Occupied Palestine and he wants you to write a pamphlet on Jamal.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” said Danny.
“But how did he know I wrote the article when I published it under a pseudonym? I don’t want anyone to know I wrote for Occupied Palestine. You know how my family’s placed, living in East Beirut. I don’t want them coming to any harm because of me.”
“Abu Jihad isn’t just anyone. He’s the real leader of the revolution and he knows everything, including that your brother, Nasim, works with the Phalanges.”
“What’s my brother got to do with anything? I beg you, don’t mention that to anyone!”
“The important thing, my friend, is that Abu Jihad was much taken with your storytelling skills and asked which of the boys who knew the Martyr Jamal wrote well, and he chose you. He said your article on the crusaders was excellent because it was made up of stories and he wants you to go and see him at ten o’clock tomorrow night at Center Thirty-Eight so he can talk to you about it.”
“Where’s this Center Thirty-Eight?”
“I’ll go with you,” said Danny. “Do you have any idea what it means that Brother Abu Jihad chose you to write about Jamal? Do you know what she meant to him? He’s the one who chose her nom de guerre ‘Jihad,’ because she was like one of his children to him.”
“If he loved her so much why did he send her off to commit suicide? Anyway, I’m not a writer. For me writing’s a hobby; I prefer to read. I wrote the article about the history of Shaqif Castle to say that while it’s true the Franks occupied our country for two hundred years, in the end they went away and all they left behind was castles and shankaleesh and that’s the way it’s going to be with the Zionists in Palestine.”