Raba'i al-Madhoun - The Lady from Tel Aviv

Leah was anguished about the moment of her arrival, just as I am now. She wrote about the experience of arriving in Israel. ‘I was already nervous and on edge when I got there. But I was even more disturbed when people told me to bend down and kiss the ground beneath my feet. I couldn’t understand why I was supposed to do that. I’m not Israeli, and this land wasn’t promised to me. I wasn’t making aliya , nor would I ever. I was born British and I will always be British.’

She said she did not belong to this land. It was a foreign country to her. Dana, in contrast, is coming back to her own country. She belongs here — this is home. But Adel El-Bashity and me? We used to belong to this place before they did. We belonged to the place and its history, the past and the present, story and fact, light and shadow. Is it really still our home?

My emotions spin around as I stand in line with everyone else. Step by step we creep forward toward the booth, and suddenly a question pops into my mind. What land will you kiss when you walk out of the airport, Walid? Will you kiss the soil even if it isn’t as red as the henna on a peasant girl’s hands? Will you kiss it even if the oil of olives no longer courses through its veins? I’m not Dana and I’m not Leah Portman. And the land I’m standing on is no longer Palestine. And the big blue sign on the wall speaks to me exactly like it speaks to any other foreigner: ‘Welcome to Ben Gurion Airport.’

From the moment we land, I look around in astonishment. I see nothing but ordinary people. People are eating breakfast. People are sipping coffee in the beautiful little cafés carefully scattered throughout the terminal so as to entice the weary traveller to sit and stay a while. Are these ordinary people? The question belongs to Adel El-Bashity, but I re-ask it when I find myself in the same situation he was in. And then another question: why did three Japanese gunmen turn the terminal of the old Lod airport into a bloodbath in 1972? Did Palestinians really need Japanese kamikazes to launch a revolution for them? Did they want the Palestinian struggle to emulate their self-destructive example?

Adel El-Bashity laughs cynically. ‘Turns out that the roots of Palestinian resistance go back to the kamikazes!’ And I whisper back in my protagonist’s ear, ‘Yes, but look at the contemporary grandchildren of those kamikazes, Adel — not only do they not give a damn, but they can’t even do anything right.’

Someone starts shouting in Hebrew — one of the men wearing a broad black hat and sidelocks. A few metres away stands a woman wearing a headscarf, a dark blue blouse and a long grey skirt that goes down all the way to her black shoes. She is clutching a stroller where an infant sleeps. She tries to cut into the line, but someone else stops her. The man tries to persuade the other man to let her in, but he will not budge. They raise their voices as they argue and soon it turns into a shouting match. Eventually the woman retreats, but not before she has handed two passports to the man in the line.

Now it is the man’s turn. He goes up to the window and says a couple things to the security officer and points at the woman. The officer calls out the woman’s name, ‘Miriam Amar’, and she pushes the stroller forward and walks up to the window. As she passes the other man, I notice he looks beaten and tired.

Now it is my turn, the moment I give myself up to an officer who, at some level, works for Israel’s Internal Security Agency. Ever more nervous, I drag my feet toward the window not more than two metres in front of me. I put on a brave face and try to hide the noise of my thumping heart. I can barely stop it from flying out of my body and running down the corridor. My chest trembles with each slow step I take. The prospect of being refused entry terrifies me, as does the possibility of being shunted into a side room for interrogation. I picture the officer peeling away my life history layer by layer, wanting to know all there is to know about me.

What if this officer — and she is the real piece of the picture to focus on here — sends me back to London? What then? Everything falls apart. My mother, who dreams of my arrival and who is waiting for me to get there, in an hour or so. Waiting for the joy of her life, this child now fifty-seven years old who is going to walk up to her and hold her in his arms, where she would nurse him on stories she had kept hidden for decades. And my dreams — they too will fall apart. My dreams of retrieving a homeland, which has spread out through the hallways of my life and fed me the bitter taste of separation time and time again.

‘Good morning!’ I say in an official-sounding voice to the thirty-something woman sitting behind the glass at the booth. She looks at me through prescription glasses as I slip my passport into the slot beneath the glass.

She takes it and replies with the same formal politeness, ‘Good morning. How are you today, sir?’

‘Fine, just fine.’

She flips through my passport without saying a word. Some time goes by before she gives me a look, then studies my passport again with a puzzled expression. She types a bunch of words into the keyboard while the computer screen turns its back on me. I say nothing as I listen to the clacking of the keys recording my life. Tiktik. Taka-taka-tak. Tik-tak-tika-tika-tik. Tak.

The woman bites her lower lip and murmurs, ‘Hmm.’ A moment later she lets out a long ‘Ummm.’ Her eyebrows slide upwards across her forehead, forming high arcs over big eyes staring at something in disbelief. All of this makes me very nervous. ‘I notice that there’s a lot in your file.’

Maybe she only says it to explain all her hemming and hawing and the shock on her face. Maybe she is still forming her decision, a decision that might make my life much more difficult. She’s probably got no choice in the matter: either she’ll ask me politely to enter the interrogation room, or, with equal politeness, she’ll trick me into going there. Once they’re finished, I’ll walk out of the room and leave the airport, the same way Adel El-Bashity did. That is, only after her colleagues in Shin Bet pound into me the fact they wanted Adel to understand: You are not in Palestine — you are in Israel. Never forget it. I will not forget it — not even if I had been born on the very land where this airport now sits, not even if they discovered my forefathers’ bones buried under this terminal. They will wink and nod at my being British. They’ll even tell me how smart it is to be British. They did the same thing to Adel, telling him, ‘You should thank the Lord you’re German!’ And without thinking he replied, ‘Even if I held the citizenship of every country in the world, I will never stop being Palestinian.’ Even if my memory is made of a past that has no counterpart in the present, this past of mine has the taste of Truth. My country is a fact that has refused to die, even when it was assaulted by history itself. My country isn’t a shadow. My country is a split image — part of which can be found here, part of which is over there, with my mother.

I watch the woman holding my passport, all the while conscious of the fact that she is watching me through the file on her computer screen. Tik-tik. Taka-taka-tak. Tak-tika-tik .

The minutes pass slowly. Cold. Heavy. Excruciating. I find myself hoping that she will ask me a question. Just one question. Or that she might say something. Not just these ums and hmms, but an actual, audible word. But she does not — and her silence is torture. She bites on the knuckle of her index finger, then slides it across her teeth. She sighs out loud, and shakes her head in evident confusion. What shall I do with you? No doubt that’s what she’s saying to herself right now, as if she wants me to be even more bitter than I am . She goes back to the keyboard, bites her lips again and lets out another long ‘Hmmm’, followed by an ‘Ummm’ that never seems to end.