Najib Nassar. Only surviving photograph.
Several months ago, I reviewed Palestinian environmental and land-rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s book Palestinian Walks for Silk and Chai—a memoir containing accounts of six sarḥāt (or wanderings) into the disappearing Palestinian wilderness, amid its calculated destruction and fragmentation by the Israeli military and settlements. Shehadeh is a remarkable literary voice in defence and in lamentation of that wilderness. Despite his preferred (if critical) allusions to Thackeray, Melville and Twain, I might have likened him instead to Wallace Stegner. Yet given his status as an indigenous Christian inhabitant of Palestine, I think I may have to revise that assessment. Perhaps his writing in Palestinian Walks bears a more meaningful resemblance to Nicholas Black Elk or Leslie Marmon Silko.
Here, in A Rift in Time, Shehadeh embarks on a similar project—in fact, in many ways an extension of the same project: a biography of his great-uncle Najib Nassar (نجيب نصّار). The framing device for the biography is one in which Shehadeh himself is facing arrest by the Palestinian authorities, for choosing to offer defence in a land rights case which is politically inconvenient for their appeasement approach to Israel. Shehadeh likens his plight—his choice to flee from his house before his arrest and take shelter among his neighbours—to that which his journalist uncle Najib faced when a similarly politically-motivated arrest warrant was placed on his head. Najib’s journeys as a wanted and hunted man took him out of Palestine, across the river Jordan, and into hiding as a shepherd among the Bedouins of what would become under British rule the Transjordan.
Yet such artificial boundaries, Shehadeh stresses, were meaningless in the Ottoman Empire in which Najib Nassar lived his early life. After the threat of arrest passed Shehadeh over, he took a copy of his uncle Najib’s semiautobiographical novel Mufleh al-Ġassani, and together with his wife Penny attempted to trace Najib’s footsteps through what are today three separate countries: Israel/Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon. Yet even naming these territories by separate names occludes and obscures the reality that Najib’s travelogue describes. They belong to one land, borderless and undivided. The loss of this unity, and the environmental toll that these artificial borders have taken, form one of the chief laments within Shehadeh’s biography of his ‘Ottoman uncle’.
Raja Shehadeh’s keen sense of history and his interviews with the Palestinian, Lebanese and Jordanian people whose lives intersected with Najib’s—a stubborn 107-year-old Palestinian peasant in Kufr Cana; a good-humoured 70-year-old refugee taxi driver in Amman; Nassar’s hospitable direct descendants living in A’yn Ayoub, Lebanon; and Raja Shehadeh’s own family, including his mother, who told stories about their uncle Najib. The self-narrations of these witnesses across time overlap with interludes excerpted from Najib Nassar’s novel, and his narration of his flight from the Ottoman authorities. These in turn intersect with Raja Shehadeh’s account of the geological and ecological features of the Jordan Rift Valley landscape, both before and after its dismantlement and destruction at the malicious hands of the Israeli military and civilian developers.
One thing that complicates Shehadeh’s attempts to trace his uncle’s footsteps, is that many of the locations that his uncle describes are simply gone. Arabic place-names are quite literally obliterated from Israeli maps. Arabic villages have been bulldozed. The lucky ones are still recognisable ruins. The more lucky ones might be given a small plaque telling what their original name was. But what Raja Shehadeh finds is that in many cases, Arabic villages are only identifiable by the almond and other fruit-bearing trees that are still growing around them—almonds being entirely domesticated plants. No trace of any building remains.
One gets the same impression from Shehadeh’s description of Arabic farms in Palestine versus settler farms. Settler farms are mechanised and fed by thirsty drainage systems that suck all the fresh water out of the Jordan River. Arabic farms do not have any such mechanical advantages, but are underinvested and rely on the manual labour of human and beast. Raja Shehadeh says one can instantly tell an Arabic farm from a settler farm in the West Bank, by the noise of animals and the bustle of human activity. The Israeli settlements are attempts to turn what is naturally a desert wilderness into another Rhine Valley, and this is where Raja Shehadeh’s ecological conscience finds its full voice.
In his journey we also learn a bit more about Raja Shehadeh’s taste in literature, and how it differs from his uncle’s. Najib Nassar was very much so a Romantic. The naturalistic and ecological details that Raja Shehadeh finds significant, he finds to be frustratingly missing from Nassar’s novel.
Bedouin nomads of ‘Transjordan’, 1898
Najib’s flight from the Ottoman police took him into hiding in several different private homes in settled Palestine. This is when he learned, quite painfully, which of his friends he could trust, and which of his ‘friends’ (sometimes even fellow Arab Christians) would sell him out or even add further false charges to his name. (He was falsely accused, for example, of authoring an anonymous pamphlet that encouraged Arabs to support the British war effort.) Najib ended up crossing the Jordan River and taking refuge with a Bedouin clan, and asking (because Bedouins do not normally treat guests this way) to work for them as a shepherd. The Bedouin patriarch, of course, initially refused him… and was only convinced to allow him to work for them on the argument that such work would augment his disguise and prevent him from being caught.
Najib’s Romanticism led him to a certain idealisation of the Bedouin. He describes in glowing terms the hospitality of the Bedouins and the freedoms that they enjoy. Najib points particularly to their simple manners, their few possessions, their generosity to strangers with what little they have, their sense of personal honour, their willingness to move about with the herds. He describes his time among them as the happiest and most content of his life. But then, Najib places an interesting quote in the mouth of one of the Bedouins who shelters him:
‘You know… sheep follow the leader the way we tribal Arabs follow our shaykh. Goats are like you city people. Every one of you is his own man and does as he pleases.’This quote lends a rather interesting shade of meaning to the parable in Matthew 25, of the sheep and the goats, no? As for Shehadeh, although he clearly does not share Nassar’s idealisation of the righteous and austere Bedouin nomad, ultimately comes to agree with his uncle about the value and the virtues of the disappearing nomadic lifestyle.
In the end, Najib decided to turn himself in, and went back to the military governor in Nazareth. His rationale for doing so was that he didn’t want his friends and family to suffer reprisals from the government on his account. His Bedouin hosts tried their utmost to dissuade him, offering a wisdom drawn from Scripture. ‘Let those who build houses lament their destruction’—by which they meant, roughly: a man is responsible only for his own choices; that which God ordains, let God decide. However dearly Najib loved his Bedouin hosts, though, he went through with his plan, and placed himself under the mercy of the governor. Unfortunately, the General Commander of the Ottoman Army had a low opinion of Najib and would have condemned him to be hanged—except that he received a promotion to Istanbul and Najib’s life was spared at the last minute.
Intriguingly, the Ottoman Empire is not made out to be the primary villain of the piece, even though it was Ottoman authorities who pursued and persecuted Najib. True, the Arabs’ experience of the Turkish pashas was almost uniformly bad throughout the war years: with forced conscription (often a death sentence), appropriations, starvation, arrests and mass hangings being par for the course. Indeed, the interview with the centenarian Palestinian survivor of that age showcases both the extent of the authorities’ depravity at that time, and the degree to which that depravity soured permanently the Palestinian Arabs’ relationship with their Turkish governors. And Najib’s own experience both on the lam from those authorities and his mistreatment after his arrest serve to underscore that account. Yet Raja—just as Najib, a proud Ottoman citizen, did before him—suggests that the last four years of the Ottoman Empire’s life (infected by pernicious doctrines such as modern nationalism) are not to be the final word in assessing a four-hundred-year history that consisted primarily of a carefully-maintained pluralism and religious tolerance.
Christian Arabs in Bethlehem, 1919
The British Empire, in fact, comes off far worse. The British role in provoking the famed Arab Revolt of 1915 as part of their war effort in the First World War is well-known. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ is still a household name on account of his early silver-screen treatment in Hollywood. In the Arab world, though, the British are equally renowned for basely betraying and destroying their hopes for liberation after the First World War was over. Between them, the British and French and Americans treated the pieces of the shattered Ottoman Empire as colonies, the way they would treat countries anywhere else in the non-West. They set up client states under the sons of Sharif Husayn; began to extract valuable resources—oil most notably—from what they considered as their new possessions; and brutally crushed attempts by Arabs to take control of their own destiny. In Palestine, the plan—following the Balfour Declaration—was to use the British Mandate to establish a colonial Jewish homeland which would split the Arab world apart at the middle, neatly dividing North Africa from Arabic West Asia, and keep both sides open for Western exploitation.
Najib Nassar, although he had a somewhat optimistic view of British civilisation on account of his Anglophile education, nevertheless embarked on a campaign to prevent Arabic landowners from selling their land to Zionists. Because of the terms of the Mandate (that explicitly empowered Jews over their Arabic neighbours), Najib thought that the Arabs could outlast British rule and regain control of their country if they could simply retain title to their lands. His experiences met with little success, and by the time his life ended in 1948—mere months before the Nakba—his attitude toward his homeland was bleak and pessimistic.
There is an interesting thread about religious politics towards the latter half of the book. Shehadeh evinces the consistent belief that his uncle was a lifelong Protestant—an Anglican. The professional opportunities and possibilities for travel and advancement that came with converting to the religion of the missionaries who ran the schools in Beirut and Jerusalem were indeed enticing. However, that was only part of the picture. Many Arabs in the Holy Land, particularly educated ones, were disaffected from their traditional Orthodox Christian faith. The Patriarchate of Jerusalem had some regrettable Greek-supremacist politics: the Patriarchs and the high clergy could only be drawn from the then exclusively-Greek Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre. It also suffered from official corruption. The Orthodox Church was more than willing to sell their considerable land holdings to the Zionists, if they were short of funds.
Yet Najib Nassar’s relatives in A’yn Ayoub were all Orthodox Christians themselves. When he encounters them, Raja Shehadeh is puzzled by this—though he is clearly glad that the Lebanese Nassars still kept the keys to the hundred-plus-year-old Orthodox church in the village. Later, when he is trying to find Najib’s gravesite, he is informed that Najib is not buried with the Protestants, but instead has a gravesite at an Orthodox graveyard.
Raja Shehadeh points to two possible reasons for this. The first had to do with Najib’s politics. Najib had to be aware that the Anglican Church had an active hand in encouraging Zionist colonisation of his home country. It may have been the case that the hypocrisy of the Anglicans grew too much for an Arab nationalist like Najib to countenance. The other possible reason had to do with his second marriage. After he was forced to flee, his first wife abandoned him and their children, and ran off with an Ottoman officer. Raja notes that Najib did not talk much about this, but that it clearly hurt him. After his arrest, however, he met a young Arab nationalist activist named Sadhij and fell in love with her. Najib being a de facto divorcee, the Protestants of the Holy Land would not allow him to marry Sadhij. However, the Orthodox were a little more lenient, and upon hearing that Najib was the wronged party, allowed him to marry Sadhij in the Orthodox Church. Raja finds this to be the more plausible explanation for Najib’s return to the Orthodox fold.
This book is a deliciously-complex story, and it serves three overlapping and intersecting purposes. First, it highlights the modern-day plight of the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine, and the numerous levels of discrimination and hardship that they face on an everyday basis from the Israeli government, military and settlers. Second, it gives us another glimpse—through Najib Nassar’s eyes—out of a rare window into a Jordan Rift Valley landscape and ecosystem that had been unbroken by artificial political borders. And third, it serves as a captivating intellectual and personal profile of a unique and high-minded early 20th-century Palestinian intellectual through one of his life’s happiest—though most risky and dangerous—episodes.Raja Shehadeh’s prose remains sterling in quality: and this diary-travelogue-biography of his great-uncle ought to be read by anyone with even a passing interest in the region and its plight.
