Light an eternal flame for Palestine and its dead: to honor them, I remember them

An arbitrary day on a calendar, May 14, happy for one random group of people, a sad remembrance for another. Both groups destined to remain at odds, enemies to the last, each convinced the other is pure evil. Sounds simple enough, has the ring of familiar truth to it. If I was being objective I'd wax lyrical about how I wish we'd all just get along, live together in peace and harmony. Well, I'm not objective and I don't want to be, I belong to one of these groups, and I would be considered a terrorist sympathizer by the other group if they cared to even know of my existence, while I see them as the devil incarnate. Of course we are talking Palestinians and Israelis, and I take great pains to avoid the word Jew here.

Leonie, my late maternal grandmother, she fled Jerusalem to Ramallah with her kids before arriving safely in Lebanon

 

May, its a month for beautiful blooms, a month for rebirth and hope, that's why the memory of the Nakba is doubly cruel. So many never got to smell the sweet scent of home not even one more time before being forced to flee for their lives from marauding gangs of heavily armed Zionist killers, who, much like today, would terrorize the Palestinian countryside, set fire to farm land, destroy property, kill, in some cases massacre entire villages. These armed thugs formed the core of the nascent Israeli Defense Force of today, so called the most ethical army in the world. Those thugs were the founding generation of Israel, a state welcomed into the fold of western nations as an equal, so much an equal in fact that its the only Middle Eastern country with a nuclear bomb. Lucky Middle East!

My late uncle Habib, he left Palestine with his young family in 1948, in Lebanon he worked for UNRWA as so many Palestinians did

 

Every holiday, every family event or gathering, I saw faces through wisps of thick tobacco smoke that stung my eyes, faces tinged with an underlying sadness, well hidden most times, but still there under the surface. My entire family left something of themselves in Palestine, both sides, mom's and dad's. Don't let the name Keirouz fool you, mom's family were natives of Jerusalem for several generations. Dad's family, though 400 years prior to 1948 were mere newcomer settlers in Nazareth, were still as Palestinian as the hills, the valleys and the olive trees.

But my family were the lucky ones, they got out and lived to tell tales of hearth and home now lost but for a rusty old key. I choose to remember them at this time each year as my young eyes knew them, fuzzy images on aging color snapshots in period costume. The period is 1970s Lebanon, the clothes and hairstyles were Ghastly!

My late grandmother, her son my late uncle Roger, and to the far left my aunt Adia who was in boarding school in Jerusalem when the family fled and was nearly left behind

Time dims memory and faces tend to slowly go out of focus even in our dreams of loved ones long gone. But somehow being still around myself, a minor miracle in itself, and in an age of social media publishing, I feel compelled to tell and retell their stories. The story of struggle in unfamiliar surroundings, coping with loss, loss of land and property, loss of identity which is especially hard for a proud people. These are simple stories of ordinary people who faced extraordinary challenges and yet managed to come out the other end, to bequeath the next generation and the one after that a sense of purpose and dignity and deep connectedness to the land and the memory of a country that we all still carry with us.

My late father's late aunt Miladeh, protecting her infant children, she once fended off a wild hyena that entered her home, using a rifle taller than her diminutive self

We lived. Perhaps that's why the other group hates us so much, we are still around, our children are still around, we still remember the names of places that are mere ruins today. As long as we are alive, Palestine is alive in us and the impulse to recover what was taken from us by force with equal use of force is hard to resist. We are two peoples destined to fight to the death of both our peoples, I now recognize how inevitable and unavoidable that is, and our stories, both peoples' stories, is a tragedy in the making since at least 1948, a tragedy to rival Greek tales, and we are all its minor players.

If God is real, he's not ours or theirs, he would disavow us both. We who fight over the embers of the fig tree and olive branch, we who are stuck in a cycle of mutual hate, our destruction isn't divine retribution, our victory will neither be blessed nor cursed, we alone bear the sum total of the cost in lives and time, 75 years and we couldn't see one another, we were blind to each other's humanity and only saw an enemy to destroy.

My late uncle Habib and my late aunt Aniseh, my father's older sister

But, what is done is done, and war to end all wars is underway, there is no going back, no deescalation now, we are all destined to fight the final battle, whoever remains alive at the end will not feel like a winner, I assure you!

Once, my father told me stories of WWII Haifa, and his music teacher Herr Straus, a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany. He would tell me of the music shop owner from whom he would buy sheet music and the accoutrements for his cherished violin, he was also a German Jew. 

Each spring, Herr Strauss would hold a concert at his home for his best students. Once my father played with his cousin and his teacher and another Jewish student chamber music meant for Baroque European royal courts. Soft strains of Ein Klein Nacht Musik would echo and drift on the soft sea breeze of a Haifa evening into the dark blacked-out night of war. 

My father would tell me of how the owner of the music shop begged him not to go to Lebanon but to stay in Haifa, he told him he would add his name to the shop's signboard and they would be partners together. We don't hate Jews, how could we, it would be like hating the face we see in the mirror. They too were refugees once, they too only sought safety and peace. Whatever happened between then and now is the work of the evil one, unfortunately that evil doesn't have horns and a tail, but wears a suit...

Good night all, may we live to see the morn