Democratic Palestine : 26 (ص 39)

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Democratic Palestine : 26 (ص 39)

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and mauve in the cheeks. Were these
bruises or the natural result of rotting
in the sun?
‘“‘Did they strike her with the butt of
the rifle?’’
‘‘Look, sir, look at her hands.”’
I hadn’t noticed. The fingers of the
two hands were spread out and the ten
fingers were cut as if with gardening
shears. Soldiers, laughing like kids and
gaily singing, had probably had fun
discovering and using these shears.
«Look, sir.»
. Y . .
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ee
laughing or smiling. No one was
throwing rice or flowers.
Since the roads had been cut off and
the telephone was silent, deprived of
contact with the rest of the world, for
the first time in my life, I felt myself
become Palestinian and hate Israel...
* * *
The statement that there is a beauty
peculiar to revolutionaries raises many
problems. Everyone knows, everyone
suspects, that young children or ad-
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. Ss 5
~ won i
LS
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oy
Naji Al Ali
The ends of the fingers, the top
joints, with the nail, lay in the dust. The
young man, who was simply and
naturally showing me how the dead had
been tortured, calmly put a cloth back
over the face and hands of the Palesti-
nian woman, and a piece of corrugated
cardboard over her legs. All I could
distinguish now was a heap of pink and
gray cloth, hovered over by flies...
The day after the entrance of the
Israeli army we were prisoners, but it
seemed to me that the invaders were less
feared than despised, they caused less
fear than disgust. No soldier was
olescents living in old and harsh sur-
roundings have a beauty of face, body,
movement and gaze similar to that of
the fedayeen. Perhaps this may be ex-
plained in the following way: breaking
with the ancient ways, a new freedom
pushes through the dead skin, and
fathers and grandfathers will have a
hard time extinguishing the gleam in the
eyes, the throbbing in the temples, the
joy of blood flowing through the veins.
In the spring of 1971, in the Palesti-
nian bases, that beauty subtly pervaded
a forest made alive by the freedom of
the fedayeen. In the camps a different,
more muted beauty prevailed because
of the presence of women and children.
The camps received a sort of light from
the combat bases, and as for the
women, it would take a long and com-
plex discussion to explain their ra-
diance. Even more than the men, more
than the fedayeen in combat, the
Palestinian women seemed strong
enough to sustain the resistance and
accept the changes that came along with
a revolution. They had already
disobeyed the customs: they looked the
men straight in the eye, they refused to
wear a veil, their hair was visible,
sometimes completely uncovered, their
voices steady. The briefest and most
prosaic of their tasks was but a small
step in the self-assured journey towards
a new, and therefore unknown, order,
but which gave them a hint of a cleans-
ing liberation for themselves, and a
glowing pride for the men. They were
ready to become both the wives and the
mothers of heroes, as they already were
for their men...
* ok OK
... Perhaps we should also recognize
that revolutions or liberations aim
-obscurely - at discovering er
rediscovering beauty, that is the in-
tangible, unnamable except by this
word. But no, on the other hand, let us
mean by beauty a laughing insolence
goaded by past unhappiness, systems
and men responsible for unhappiness
and shame, above all, a laughing in-
solence which realizes that, freed of
shame, growth is easy...
Many died in Shatila, and my
friendship, my affection for their rot-
ting corpses was also immense, because
I had known them. Blackened, swollen,
decayed by the sun and by death, they
were still fedayeen... I had spent four
hours in Shatila. About forty bodies
remained in my memory. All of them
-and I mean all - had been tortured,
probably against a backdrop of
drunkenness, song, laughter, the smell
of gunpowder and already decaying
flesh...
At the Damascus airport on my way
back from Beirut I met some young
fedayeen who had escaped from the
Israeli hell. They were sixteen or seven-
teen. They were laughing; they were
like the ones in Ajloun. They will die
like them. The struggle for a country
can fill a very rich life, but a short one.
That was the choice, as we recall, of
Achilles in the Iliad. ®
39

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Democratic Palestine : 26

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