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Dear Max,

At long last I’m writing to you, answering the three or four letters that I received from you years and years ago. The last one you sent registered, with a reception-slip that was signed by me and returned to you by the postal service. You must have known then that your letters were not lost but that I wasn’t answering you.

I can tell you that I didn’t feel good about it; it has always been hard for me not to answer a letter, regardless of my feelings about the sender, and in this case I was happy to have some news from you. But there was an unsurmountable reason for me not to write back to you -- you lived in Tel Aviv.

Do you remember that we must have met sometime between the second half of 1955 and the beginning of the following January. I was ill, operated on, sleeping on a hard board, with back pains. The young American woman who was my closest friend had met you at the cafeteria of the International House in Berkeley, and brought you home because she thought, in her bewildering innocence, "that we have a lot to tell each other!" Yes, we already had a war between us, and war, strangely enough, is a very intimate, very private thing, I learned since.

We didn’t speak much that day, but a few weeks later you visited us, bring along a very young woman who looked distressed and to whom you seemed very attached. Sylvia was her name, I can recall; she was under nineteen, and had just given newborn baby up for adoption with the stipulation that she could never see that baby again. A bit later, you came asking if we could shelter Sylvia for a while, as she was both heart-broken and broke. Sylvia stayed for a month or more, and you visited her a few times and I got to know you quite well, for we had long conversations, mostly literary.

Your parents had fled Germany before World War II, you said, and settled in Palestine. You were a young man in 1948 and you fought "the British," you insisted in telling me. You even said, once, that you were disappointed by the Army, that your superiors reaped great benefits for themselves and that here you were, studying mechanical engineering at an age when you should have been already integrated in a profession.

When Sylvia left, without telling why and for where, you were bitter, shattered. "She refused to marry me," you said. "If I could marry her I would stay in this country, for her. But now I will go back." You also told me that your parents had returned to Germany. I must have looked surprised and you said, calmly, "They were Germans, you see, and never liked Palestine. But I won’t follow them. I fought over there, and if I don’t stay here I’ll go back to Tel Aviv."

Your pain over Sylvia’s refusal to marry you, added to the image of her own desperation, troubled me and I was sorry, participating in the sense of confusion and defeat that you were both living, separately and intensely.

One evening we had a long conversation, each turning away from all problems and launching into literature, the domain where people can meet profoundly without mixing their personal lives. I was of course, then, (and unfortunately), of a strictly French education, having been born and raised in Beirut under the French Mandate. But French culture, ironically, is so linked to German literature and thought that you and I found a common ground. We both loved Thomas Mann, you, The Tragic Mountain, me, Death in Venice. You knew Heine and I knew Holderlin. I quoted Novalis, you preferred Spengler and The Decline of the West. I realize now how much we avoided mentioning the Arab East and found Europe to be our common intellectual territory.

In the meantime, it was in Berkeley that I was discovering, through my involvement with the Arab Students Association, the extent of the Arab World, its struggles, its projects for the future. Yes, in my childhood Palestine was myth, something "grown-ups" talked about, among themselves, with worried faces. It was also, in the downtown markets, the mountains of oranges that the Palestinians were growing. In Berkeley, I learned of Palestine directly, suddenly. I became friends with, among others, Mohammed Jaber (where would he be now and is he still alive, and you Max, are you still alive and at that old address of yours that I had erased from my memory?).

Mohammed, at age fifteen, had fought for Palestine. He lived in what became "West" Jerusalem, and he told me that in 1948 he smuggled himself under an enemy tank, planted a bomb, and later heard the explosion. He told me, over and over again, how his parents’ home was occupied by Jewish immigrants, how their underground armies sowed terror among the Arab population, killing some and forcing others to flee. There was determination and hope in his eyes and, also, a youthful will to live.

One day I was sitting and talking with you in the International House’s large living room and Mohammed saw me. That evening in the cafeteria he told me, severely, "I saw you talk to Max. He’s in one of my classes. I know him. He’s the enemy, you know." I tried to say something but I don’t think that I said much. Mohammed said something along these lines: "They could be nice, superficially, but they hate us and they will always do so because they took our land."

You must have sensed that I was avoiding, afterwards, and one day you knocked on my door, telling me that your birthday was the next day and asking me to go with you to a party that some friends of yours were giving as a celebration. I remember that I didn’t want to go but didn’t want to hurt your feelings. When we arrived at the party we created the equivalent of a little explosion. Your friends were stunned. They were all -- I soon understood -- expressing in Hebrew their indignation. Some of them went to the kitchen and stayed there, chatting. The music stopped. We ended up sitting on a couch all by ourselves in an atmosphere of trial. After a while you suddenly stood up, and we were leaving. Out in the street I saw tears in your eyes and I still hear you clearly, saying, "My people can be so awful!"

Not long afterwards you graduated and decided to go home. When you came to say goodbye, I promised to stay in touch and write to you.

Soon after, in that summer of 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and your country joined the British and the French in a war against Egypt. We, the Arab students from Berkeley, like the rest of the Arab world, understood once and for all that it wasn’t just Palestine alone that was in danger but the whole Arab East. I think that until then many if not most of us thought that we were dealing with a "localized" conflict which somehow was going to be solved. Now we were realizing that our enemy had powerful alliances and that History and Justice were not necessarily and automatically working for us.

Ever since, as a poet and a writer I plunged into the Palestinian tragedy. I read the Bible carefully and discovered among other things that Jerusalem was founded by the Jebusites, a Canaanite people, the direct ancestors of most Palestinians. I found out that some of my own friends in Palestine and in Lebanon carried family names which were used in pre-biblical times -- names such as Haddad, Kanaan, Hanania, and many many others. I read Frantz Fanon and followed the Algerian liberation war. I went back to the poetry of the French resistance, with which I was familiar until then only on literary terms, now with a different attention. Along the years, tragedies piled up on the Arabs. Floods of refugees were covering Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. I traveled to Beirut from California, regularly, on summers, witnessing the fever and the resolve of the Arabs to resist the crumbling away of their territories in front of an army infinitely better equipped and a government more efficient in its propaganda machine than any of the Arab States.

Palestinian land was occupied, confiscated, destroyed; its inhabitants either moved out or were reduced to make a living by building their oppressors’ houses and roads! While the world was realizing the scope and the horror of the Holocaust a new horror was taking place, bit by bit. Yes, a tragedy involving millions of people in the Arab East cannot be described in ordinary terms.

I thought, as did the whole Arab world, that we had to help the Palestinian Resistance, not only for the sake of Justice, but also in self-preservation. Haven’t we heard diverse Zionist slogans claiming the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, or, for the "moderate" ones, the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River? Haven’t we read the founder of Zionism claim that Palestine was a land without a people?! Or Golda Meir say quietly that Palestinians did not exist?! If the Palestinians did not exist while they existed, then the solution was obviously to make them disappear and thus justify the first assumption. Isn’t this the kind of logic that leads to genocide?

In spite of the contrast and dangerous rhetoric persistently utilized in the Western world against the Palestinian Resistance, it could be useful to remind the world that resistance has been the leitmotiv of the whole 20th century. My adolescent years coincided with the exaltation of the resistance of the French, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks ... a whole historical movement which merged the lyrical resources of the soul with the determination to resist forced submission and capitulation. Why is it that the Palestinians couldn’t be allowed to do what Europeans did? In fact, by terrible odds against it, by its sheer length, the number of its "martyrs," and the vilification endured, the Palestinian Resistance could be considered as being the most heroic of the century!

But now, where are we?

Dear Max, are you listening? There’s a flickering light at the end of all this. I say "the end" although I’m not quite sure; the tunnel may be longer than we think, but there’s a tenuous light that we have perceived and which tries not to die out.

The major event constituted by the Accords that Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin had signed was of a psychological nature; it represented a passage from the realm of mythology to that of history. Myths died that day, in numbers: the myth of the non-existence of the Palestinians, the myth that Arabs would never recognize Israel (although Egypt, the most numerous Arab country, had recognized it), the myth that a purely military solution to the conflict was possible, for either side, the myth of irreversible hatred between the two populations ... all this became irrelevant.

It was then clear that we had dealt all along with a classical case of conquest and resistance, of victories and defeats.

When the founders of Zionism decided to create a Jewish state they introduced themselves, and that future state, into History, that part of History which is territorial, with all the ensuing consequences. Israel is now a country with the institutions that characterize most other countries, I mean with a government and an army--a formidable army at that--military alliances, broad international support... It cannot indefinitely consider its critics as being anti-Semitic and should rather be judged according to the same criteria that apply to other nations. After all, it has atomic weapons and, ironically, all the destruction it brought about was against Semitic peoples! Dear Max, if the security of a nation depends upon the destruction of its neighbors then we should admit that there is something terribly wrong in the ways that security is envisioned and achieved.

The Oslo Accords did also achieve something tremendous although probably unnoticed -- they freed our language. Most everybody I ever knew in the West was always apologetic for Israel, unwilling -- after the Holocaust -- to criticize anything which had to do with Israel, either out of fear of being labeled a racist or by genuine embarrassment. You could discuss anything freely, speak of Communist brutality in Afghanistan, admire the liberation movement of Central America, exalt the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto, but never say loudly and clearly that the West Bank, for example, has been and is since 1967 something very close to a concentration camp and that a nation which still imprisons more than 10,000 Palestinian with no proof and no trial cannot claim to be, in spirit, a democracy!

In as much as a doctor cannot look for a cure without naming the disease we cannot come to an understanding if we do not free our words. We cannot throw dust in our eyes and then try to see or complain that there isn’t anything to see. I can assure you that the Arabs came a long way towards understanding you (in fact they never denied that you have religious and cultural roots in what has been the land of Canaan and then Palestine), and now they look forward to a comprehensive peace.

As for those who do not see much relevance to religious or past cultural references there is even more urgency for peace. There is the present, and the future; millions of people whose lives have been and still are hell deserve justice (a word that doesn’t enter the language of international politics), and need the possibility to give their dignity, their creative desires, their infinite potentialities, a chance for expression.

Dear Max, I am answering forty years later, forty dark years, and that’s a long time, but these years are gone and every day is a new day. We are now in a twilight zone, no war, no peace, and war itself is tired, is a dead end, and it’s time that we think of something else. A new millennium is about to start and with a real peace the Eastern Mediterranean can become a "new Spain." We the Arabs are the keepers of Paradise, historically, geographically. Let’s make that real, on this earth, in a region we should both love, not kill.

Yours,

Etel (Adnan)

Etel Adnan is a widely published Lebanese-born poet, currently living in Paris, France, who also makes her home in Sausalito, CA.

This article first appeared in Al Jadid, Vol. 3, No. 15 (February 1997); Copyright © 1997 by Al Jadid

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