Returning to Haifa

Man, in the final analysis, is a cause.

He started down the stairs, looking at everything carefully. It all seemed less important than it had a few hours earlier, incapable of arousing any deep feeling in him. He heard the sound of Safiyya’s footsteps behind him, more confident than before.

From that standpoint you are correct. But that doesn’t justify anything for you. Two wrongs do not make a right. If that were the case, then what happened to Iphrat and Miriam in Auschwitz was right. When are you going to stop considering that the weakness and the mistakes of others are endorsed over to the account of your own prerogatives?

In truth, he believed that when things calmed down he’d go to live in a quiet house in the country at the foot of some hill in Galilee. He’d read Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler while in Milan; a man who came from England to oversee the emigration operation had lent it to him. This man had lived for a while on the very hill in Galilee that Koestler used as the background for his novel. Actually, not much was known about Palestine at that time.

Thunder came abruptly from the east, from the heights of Mount Carmel. Mortar shells flew across the city’s center, pelting the Arab quarters. The streets of Haifa turned into chaos.

All at once the past was upon him, sharp as a knife. He was turning his car at the end of King Faisal Street (for him, the street names had never changed) toward the intersection that descends left to the port and right to the road leading to Wadi Nisnas when he saw a group of armed soldiers standing in front of an iron barricade at the intersection.

This is Haifa, then, twenty years later. Noon, June 30, 1967. The car, a gray Fiat bearing white
Jordanian license plates, was traveling north, across the plain which was called Ibn Amar twenty years ago.

All along the way he talked and talked and talked. He spoke to his wife about everything— about the war and about the defeat, about the Mandelbaum Gate, demolished by bulldozers. And about the enemy, who reached the river, then the canal, then the edge of Damascus in a matter of hours.