Haifa 2015, Palestine 2020
By: Mariam Barghouti
Tags: Haifa, Refugee, Palestine, Occupation, Israel

I. Haifa: December 6, 2015

I listened to the stories as they fell from my grandfather’s tongue, one letter at a time. I had memorized the stories as they re-appear from the depths of the memory through labored voices of elderly women from different refugee camps. Their breath, burdened with nostalgia, reflecting the heaviness of lamentations. “The sea of Haifa” they told me, “heals the darkest of souls.”

Haifa, like a majority of historic Palestine resembles a memory passed on from one generation to the next by Palestinians about a home which we were displaced from. That memory remains frozen in the oral lamentations of former glory while the reality of Haifa today is vastly contradictory with its celebrated past.

II. October 2020

Palestine, fleeting. I’m trying to hold on to its palms. Please don’t go so quickly I whisper to the horizon. It cannot hear me, and I wonder if it does will it recognize my Arabic tongue? The annexation plans are not “still on the table” as Benjamin Netanyahu stated after normalization with the UAE, later Bahrain, now Sudan. This morning, 18 year old Amer Abedalrahim Snobar was beaten to death by Israeli forces. This morning 38,105,280 minutes have passed since the declaration of the state of Israel in May of 1948. Every minute means something for us, it is a minute delayed at a checkpoint, a minute between leaving the house and ending up imprisoned, a minute as another piece of land is destroyed with flames of settler arson attacks.

I keep asking family and friends if this is the beginning of the end, or if we are at the end. The pessimism is not some cynical iteration of the despair, but the recognition of all that is happening around us. I see the settlers, the weapons on their waist, and me sitting in a car with my muscles going stiff, I hold my breath, and I pray that I don’t make any abrupt movements that can trigger either soldier or settler to fire. I know if I am injured or killed, that’s it. Another name in the record, but the records will also wither away, and the memories will be too distant to allow for any accountability. I think of the millions of lives lost in historical conflicts and wars, too far away for any meaningful effort in bringing solace and accountability to their stolen lives, and the trauma that would be passed for generations to come.

II. Haifa: December 6, 2015

I dreamt of the day I get to visit Haifa, stand by its sea and wait for it to heal me. When I finally went, I didn’t have the courage to tell my grandfather or the elderly women waiting to return home, that it was Haifa that needs healing. The romanticism helped us defy the atrocities of the occupation by clinging on to what was and what could be once more. What it does not do is prepare you for is the betrayal.

The honeyed poetics of an ancient place, now more modern than ancient has left us imprisoned in an illusion.

I stood by Haifa, and its sea. I felt alien. My bones were feeling heavy, and my skin felt like an old leather bag too weak and too small to carry the hurt of this ocean. I catch myself poeticizing the pain of Haifa in the same way Sido and those women poeticized its glory. The truth is, poetics is of the few luxuries afforded to move around the ugly reality of constant dispossession.

The decades have been clocked in, and Haifa is still caught between being Israeli and latching on to the Palestine that is still falling deeper into its soil. Palestinian refugees continue to dream of a day they will return, all the while Palestinian residents in Haifa endure a harsh reality of discriminatory Israeli practices, and the subtleties of killing their identification with Palestine. Umm Othman, a Palestinian refugee in the West Bank reminisces about the time she was forced to leave her home “I don’t think we took anything with us. We just left under the assumption that we will return shortly after.”

Today in the neighborhood of Wadee Al-Saleeb in Haifa, Israeli hipsters join the Saturday flea market where many heirlooms from Palestinian homes are sold at a cheap price. Old tiles from Palestinian homes prior to the creation of the Israeli state are up for sale, baby spoons, old chest boxes and other products all lay sprawled for shoppers to buy and give a vintage look for their modern homes.

III. October, 2020

I did not see this pandemic coming, but I did see the horrors it will bring with it. I do not know what the generation of my grandparents were thinking as the sound of war plays, the stories of emptied villages comes closer and closer to their homes. They flee. I wonder why we must continue to pay the price of wanting to flee. It’s in its very essence an attempt at survival, their yearning to live was weaponized against them and today Palestinians are facing a similar fate. Every family, every community, every person that is being forced out of their lands and homes. I can hear my prayers in the voice of those long dead. I think they sang the same prayer. I know when we are praying, it’s because there isn’t much more left to do.

IV. Haifa: December 6, 2015

An old Palestinian man sits in the left corner of his small store near Ben Gurion St. in Haifa, speaking fluent Hebrew I mistook him for an Israeli. Somehow we were drawn to each other, an inevitable fate for Palestinians where it’s as though we’re in constant search of one another across the globe. Finding out I was Palestinian he invites me to share a sitting over coffee. We spoke, but I wasn’t used to sight of Israeli soldiers carrying out their normal daily routine. They seemed much more relaxed than the common image I have of them on checkpoints and at protests as they fire at Palestinian demonstrators. Here, outside a small coffee shop an Israeli soldier passes by after every few words I manage to express. Their green uniform clashing with the hues of the blue ocean and the skyline standing in perfect parallel, almost as one.

“I want to leave” the old man interrupts my anxious contemplation. “If I have the chance, I would leave.” In a youthful arrogance, I want to punish him for the thought. “How could you want to leave? This is your home,” I shrunk in my seat the moment those words came out of my mouth.

As though he was cautioning himself to not break my heart, he giggled and in a gentle voice confessed, “it doesn’t feel like home. Home is not this. This is not home. Life here is not what you’ve been told.”

I took home seashells from Haifa’s shore and once back to Ramallah I put them in a glass jar filled with glittering beads. I found myself back in the small alleyways of Ramallah’s refugee camps and at the doorstep of one of the elderly women who spoke to me of Haifa. Haifa was behind, she is still waiting, and I was too young to think of anything else to do except give her the jar. She took it, smiled and said “Ah Haifa, you beautiful bride.”