The Deathsong of Ahmed Al-Gara
There was a gap between the two stories, and it widened with every telling.
This first had impeccable sources: an Amnesty worker in the town, for one - the kind who ate falafel without getting a speck of harrissa on her chin, and whose conscience was equally spotless.
***
The kid hadn't a clue what he was singing about, but he had the song by heart. He chanted it on his way to school, strong-voiced for a six-year-old and in perfect pitch.
"Allah is great in heaven above,
He reigns with power and wisdom and love.
He blesses with sunshine the earth and the seed,
And looks in our hearts our transgressions to read.
May the day that I meet Him be purest of all,
Oh call upon me, I shall answer Your call."
Of the many child-versions of adult prayers, this was Ahmed's favourite. He pestered his teacher about it, who told him:
"Look at the sky - Allah's a billion times bigger! Yet you can find Him in the stone of an olive."
This rendered Ahmed's daily trek past the olive groves particularly vivid. He had his own ideas about 'transgressions' (for here his teacher spared the details) and thought of 'transit' vans and 'trans-atlantic' jets. Trangressions, he reasoned, meant journeys. He would picture Allah squinting at his heart's roadmap and tracing a Divine finger along the path to their house, where He would call on them one day for pastries and mint tea. For some reason, Ahmed's mother exploded with rare laughter whenever he asked if Allah was calling on them for tea.
That was before the security wall reached their area. As the Israelis blocked the olive groves and a hefty slice of sky from Ahmed's view, his mother and the adults around him grew sullen and tense. 'Transgressions' to school became complicated and heavily accompanied. Home was on one side of the division, school on the other. They were considered lucky: there was a checkpoint he could cross not a kilometre back, and the advancing end of the wall was only twice as far the other way. Yet he walked in the shadow of a concrete slab which cut the light but reflected an ugly heat. He sang his song louder, clutched a few olive stones in his pocket as a memento, and withdrew into a world of his own. It was this that propelled him to the next one - should you believe in such a place.
Ahmed's mother was late collecting him from school. She had been detained on the home side of the wall, arranging permanant passes for herself and her children. Ahmed arrived at the checkpoint with a group of older classmates and a teacher at precisely the moment a protest riot broke out. They sheltered in a ditch that ran between the road and the wall, whilst the exchange of stones, gunshot, rubber bullets and home-made explosives accelerated around them. At some point or other, the rubber bullets were exchanged for real ones.
Ahmed persisted in singing under his breath, despite his classmates' attempts to muffle him. He tipped his olive stones from palm to palm and shrugged as if to say, 'Well, the explosions are louder', stopping only when there was a lull in the firing. The silence lasted a minute. Ahmed whispered, "I know a place we can go," but the group stayed where it was, waiting for clearance.
All except Ahmed, who slipped from his teacher's grasp as if entirely disconnected from what was going on around him and scampered along the ditch towards the distant olive groves, where he would find Allah's protection. He was still flicking olive stones from one hand to the other as his song rang out, catching on the last couplet:
"May the day that I meet Him be purest of all,
Oh call upon me, I shall answer Your call."
The teacher was in a terrible dilemma - shield the remaining pupils or go for the crazy child? In the few seconds he took to scramble after his youngest charge, it was over. Ahmed was shot in the throat by an Israeli bullet.
The crossfire stopped. Fifteen minutes later Ahmed's mother found the trembling group and knew without being told.
There were photographs. A European journalist at the scene captured the horrifying sight of Ahmed's body, and within days this was circling the globe. A prim snapshot of Ahmed at school tailed it, and memorial poems about the remarkable little boy tailed that. There was a rush of sympathy for the Palestinian cause and a surge of anger against Israel. In France, several synagogues were vandalised.
The Israeli Defence Force insisted it was an unfortunate accident and issued an apology that appeased no-one. Its enquiry did not identify (or did not disclose) the exact culprit. Numerous shots had been fired simultaneously.
There was, however, one member of that IDF unit who thought he knew.
Arion Ben Ze'ev, nineteen years old, had been stationed on the wall some thirty metres from the gate. During the minute's pause in the riot, he alerted his comrades to a man approaching the far side of the road who seemed ready to spring. The children and their teacher in the ditch were barely in his peripheral vision. When Ahmed's voice triggered the renewed round of shots, several soldiers, including Arion, fired at the suspect. Arion aimed at the man's legs. Had he shot to kill, Arion thought, his bullet would have flown above Ahmed's head.
Arion saw the boy's eyes as he fell. He could not get rid of the idea that he might have been the one who killed him. He whispered this suspicion to a fellow in his unit, who urged him in no uncertain terms not be so stupid as to confess to something he hadn't done - and to aim well below the knee when forced to shoot at kids.
They waited for the retaliation that would follow the child's funeral, but it seemed to bide its time. Over the next fortnight, Ahmed's classmates went through the checkpoint with their fists clenched but their heads bent.
Singing.
Twice a day, resonating through twenty voices, Ahmed's song set the Security Area on edge; but there was nothing the soldiers could do.
Arion Ben Ze'ev was not there for the next uprising. He was transferred to another unit. His comrades complained he was behaving strangely and could be a liability in a crisis.
This was the first story. The second emerged slightly later, and its tellers were just as certain it was true.
***
The kid hadn't a clue what he was singing about, but he had the song by heart. He chanted it on the way to school, hitting each note with deadly accuracy.
"When to Jerusalem I go,
A martyr's triumph I shall know.
With stone and knife, with stone and knife,
Sweet Palestine will have my life.
In death's abyss, in death's abyss
I cast my soul to Holy bliss."
Ahmed asked many questions about this song and in time, through the instruction of one of the older children, he found answers.
Jerusalem, said his mentor, could be reached by walking along that Wall for three days. Once upon a time it had been their city, but the Jews had stolen it.
"Who are the Jews?"
"The soldiers at the Wall. Satan's wasps."
Jews came from the rich countries in the West and none could be trusted. It suited the powerful West to put them here, to spy on our nations of Islam and take Palestine by force. They won wars not by valour but because the Western imperialists helped them.
"Where is Palestine?" Ahmed asked (shelving 'imperialists' for later).
"Everywhere from here to the sea," the adolescent answered. "Once upon a time."
"And now?"
"Nowhere. But we'll get it back."
He told Ahmed how the Jews themselves had a story that proved the righteous and powerless could topple the oppressor! There was a warrior, Goliath, a giant armed to the teeth; but a mere boy, David, had felled him with a well-flung stone.
By the time the security wall had swallowed a line of their agricultural land, Ahmed had been spared no details of the Jews' transgressions and clutched five smooth stones in his pocket.
His delicate imagination hardened to thrill and terror. Only later, his teenage mentor told him (eyes bright as a sunstruck blade) would Ahmed have the privilege of carrying a more powerful weapon - a weapon that might not win back Palestine for him to see, but would surely make him greater than any King David in Paradise.
Ahmed's mother was late that day because she was trying to visit her husband, absent from Ahmed's life nearly all his six years. He was detained in an Israeli prison as a known terrorist.
The riot at the checkpoint broke out when it did because its perpetrators knew exactly when the school day ended. They'd even made sure that a journalist was on the scene, so that any child caught in the crossfire would also be caught on camera.
The camera lied - or rather, not everything it captured was shown. Ahmed, for instance, burst from the group with his fist raised. Just before he was struck, he was clearly about to throw a stone. Furthermore, it now looked likely that it was not Israeli but Palestinian fire that brought the child down. The bullet which could have proved things either way was lost (it had gone straight through the boy's neck) but the place and the angle of the shot indicated that it could have come from the other side of the road, where the terrorists lurked.
Ahmed's hands and pockets were empty.
Articles about Palestinian manipulation of their children circled the globe. There was a discrepancy, the investigators explained, between what was said in the Global tongue and what was said in the Mother tongue. The English-speaking world's general ignorance of Arabic was very handy.
A tale less told was the one of Arion Ben Ze'ev's expulsion from his unit.
It was bad enough, his comrades said, that they had to hear those kids intoning a Deathwish every day. Who needed Arion humming the tune at all hours, then acting the confused innocent when told to stop? Even more bizarre was his practice of walking an imaginary line like some tightrope artist. He said he was marking out the exact contour of the '67 border where, even from a military point of view, he remarked, it would have been wiser to build the Wall.
"How d'you work that out, prophet of wisdom?"
"The city of Ai."
"He's got it all mixed up! He means Jericho: like, the kids'll sing the wall down! Listen, those songs make it stay."
"No, I mean Ai - captured from two sides - "
(Here, Arion Ben Ze'ev swayed on his imaginary line.)
"From inside and out. Idiot Sharon puts a security fence in the middle of enemy territory!"
"Our territory."
"You know what I mean."
Yet Arion's reasoning became less and less apparent, and disappeared altogether when he was discovered - God knew how he got there - poised on an unfinished edge of the wall some three kilometres from where Ahmed was shot.
No one could say what was in his head. Perhaps he remembered Ahmed's look of childish terror; or wondered, if death creates stories, whether his would mean the same thing, or nothing, whichever side he fell.
Only one thing is certain. In parts of the world where the gap between stories is an abyss, truth loses its footing and drops out of sight. In such circumstances, we must insist on the intricacy of soul in all those whose tales we tell.
___________________________________________________________________________
There was a gap between the two stories, and it widened with every telling.
This first had impeccable sources: an Amnesty worker in the town, for one - the kind who ate falafel without getting a speck of harrissa on her chin, and whose conscience was equally spotless.
***
The kid hadn't a clue what he was singing about, but he had the song by heart. He chanted it on his way to school, strong-voiced for a six-year-old and in perfect pitch.
"Allah is great in heaven above,
He reigns with power and wisdom and love.
He blesses with sunshine the earth and the seed,
And looks in our hearts our transgressions to read.
May the day that I meet Him be purest of all,
Oh call upon me, I shall answer Your call."
Of the many child-versions of adult prayers, this was Ahmed's favourite. He pestered his teacher about it, who told him:
"Look at the sky - Allah's a billion times bigger! Yet you can find Him in the stone of an olive."
This rendered Ahmed's daily trek past the olive groves particularly vivid. He had his own ideas about 'transgressions' (for here his teacher spared the details) and thought of 'transit' vans and 'trans-atlantic' jets. Trangressions, he reasoned, meant journeys. He would picture Allah squinting at his heart's roadmap and tracing a Divine finger along the path to their house, where He would call on them one day for pastries and mint tea. For some reason, Ahmed's mother exploded with rare laughter whenever he asked if Allah was calling on them for tea.
That was before the security wall reached their area. As the Israelis blocked the olive groves and a hefty slice of sky from Ahmed's view, his mother and the adults around him grew sullen and tense. 'Transgressions' to school became complicated and heavily accompanied. Home was on one side of the division, school on the other. They were considered lucky: there was a checkpoint he could cross not a kilometre back, and the advancing end of the wall was only twice as far the other way. Yet he walked in the shadow of a concrete slab which cut the light but reflected an ugly heat. He sang his song louder, clutched a few olive stones in his pocket as a memento, and withdrew into a world of his own. It was this that propelled him to the next one - should you believe in such a place.
Ahmed's mother was late collecting him from school. She had been detained on the home side of the wall, arranging permanant passes for herself and her children. Ahmed arrived at the checkpoint with a group of older classmates and a teacher at precisely the moment a protest riot broke out. They sheltered in a ditch that ran between the road and the wall, whilst the exchange of stones, gunshot, rubber bullets and home-made explosives accelerated around them. At some point or other, the rubber bullets were exchanged for real ones.
Ahmed persisted in singing under his breath, despite his classmates' attempts to muffle him. He tipped his olive stones from palm to palm and shrugged as if to say, 'Well, the explosions are louder', stopping only when there was a lull in the firing. The silence lasted a minute. Ahmed whispered, "I know a place we can go," but the group stayed where it was, waiting for clearance.
All except Ahmed, who slipped from his teacher's grasp as if entirely disconnected from what was going on around him and scampered along the ditch towards the distant olive groves, where he would find Allah's protection. He was still flicking olive stones from one hand to the other as his song rang out, catching on the last couplet:
"May the day that I meet Him be purest of all,
Oh call upon me, I shall answer Your call."
The teacher was in a terrible dilemma - shield the remaining pupils or go for the crazy child? In the few seconds he took to scramble after his youngest charge, it was over. Ahmed was shot in the throat by an Israeli bullet.
The crossfire stopped. Fifteen minutes later Ahmed's mother found the trembling group and knew without being told.
There were photographs. A European journalist at the scene captured the horrifying sight of Ahmed's body, and within days this was circling the globe. A prim snapshot of Ahmed at school tailed it, and memorial poems about the remarkable little boy tailed that. There was a rush of sympathy for the Palestinian cause and a surge of anger against Israel. In France, several synagogues were vandalised.
The Israeli Defence Force insisted it was an unfortunate accident and issued an apology that appeased no-one. Its enquiry did not identify (or did not disclose) the exact culprit. Numerous shots had been fired simultaneously.
There was, however, one member of that IDF unit who thought he knew.
Arion Ben Ze'ev, nineteen years old, had been stationed on the wall some thirty metres from the gate. During the minute's pause in the riot, he alerted his comrades to a man approaching the far side of the road who seemed ready to spring. The children and their teacher in the ditch were barely in his peripheral vision. When Ahmed's voice triggered the renewed round of shots, several soldiers, including Arion, fired at the suspect. Arion aimed at the man's legs. Had he shot to kill, Arion thought, his bullet would have flown above Ahmed's head.
Arion saw the boy's eyes as he fell. He could not get rid of the idea that he might have been the one who killed him. He whispered this suspicion to a fellow in his unit, who urged him in no uncertain terms not be so stupid as to confess to something he hadn't done - and to aim well below the knee when forced to shoot at kids.
They waited for the retaliation that would follow the child's funeral, but it seemed to bide its time. Over the next fortnight, Ahmed's classmates went through the checkpoint with their fists clenched but their heads bent.
Singing.
Twice a day, resonating through twenty voices, Ahmed's song set the Security Area on edge; but there was nothing the soldiers could do.
Arion Ben Ze'ev was not there for the next uprising. He was transferred to another unit. His comrades complained he was behaving strangely and could be a liability in a crisis.
This was the first story. The second emerged slightly later, and its tellers were just as certain it was true.
***
The kid hadn't a clue what he was singing about, but he had the song by heart. He chanted it on the way to school, hitting each note with deadly accuracy.
"When to Jerusalem I go,
A martyr's triumph I shall know.
With stone and knife, with stone and knife,
Sweet Palestine will have my life.
In death's abyss, in death's abyss
I cast my soul to Holy bliss."
Ahmed asked many questions about this song and in time, through the instruction of one of the older children, he found answers.
Jerusalem, said his mentor, could be reached by walking along that Wall for three days. Once upon a time it had been their city, but the Jews had stolen it.
"Who are the Jews?"
"The soldiers at the Wall. Satan's wasps."
Jews came from the rich countries in the West and none could be trusted. It suited the powerful West to put them here, to spy on our nations of Islam and take Palestine by force. They won wars not by valour but because the Western imperialists helped them.
"Where is Palestine?" Ahmed asked (shelving 'imperialists' for later).
"Everywhere from here to the sea," the adolescent answered. "Once upon a time."
"And now?"
"Nowhere. But we'll get it back."
He told Ahmed how the Jews themselves had a story that proved the righteous and powerless could topple the oppressor! There was a warrior, Goliath, a giant armed to the teeth; but a mere boy, David, had felled him with a well-flung stone.
By the time the security wall had swallowed a line of their agricultural land, Ahmed had been spared no details of the Jews' transgressions and clutched five smooth stones in his pocket.
His delicate imagination hardened to thrill and terror. Only later, his teenage mentor told him (eyes bright as a sunstruck blade) would Ahmed have the privilege of carrying a more powerful weapon - a weapon that might not win back Palestine for him to see, but would surely make him greater than any King David in Paradise.
Ahmed's mother was late that day because she was trying to visit her husband, absent from Ahmed's life nearly all his six years. He was detained in an Israeli prison as a known terrorist.
The riot at the checkpoint broke out when it did because its perpetrators knew exactly when the school day ended. They'd even made sure that a journalist was on the scene, so that any child caught in the crossfire would also be caught on camera.
The camera lied - or rather, not everything it captured was shown. Ahmed, for instance, burst from the group with his fist raised. Just before he was struck, he was clearly about to throw a stone. Furthermore, it now looked likely that it was not Israeli but Palestinian fire that brought the child down. The bullet which could have proved things either way was lost (it had gone straight through the boy's neck) but the place and the angle of the shot indicated that it could have come from the other side of the road, where the terrorists lurked.
Ahmed's hands and pockets were empty.
Articles about Palestinian manipulation of their children circled the globe. There was a discrepancy, the investigators explained, between what was said in the Global tongue and what was said in the Mother tongue. The English-speaking world's general ignorance of Arabic was very handy.
A tale less told was the one of Arion Ben Ze'ev's expulsion from his unit.
It was bad enough, his comrades said, that they had to hear those kids intoning a Deathwish every day. Who needed Arion humming the tune at all hours, then acting the confused innocent when told to stop? Even more bizarre was his practice of walking an imaginary line like some tightrope artist. He said he was marking out the exact contour of the '67 border where, even from a military point of view, he remarked, it would have been wiser to build the Wall.
"How d'you work that out, prophet of wisdom?"
"The city of Ai."
"He's got it all mixed up! He means Jericho: like, the kids'll sing the wall down! Listen, those songs make it stay."
"No, I mean Ai - captured from two sides - "
(Here, Arion Ben Ze'ev swayed on his imaginary line.)
"From inside and out. Idiot Sharon puts a security fence in the middle of enemy territory!"
"Our territory."
"You know what I mean."
Yet Arion's reasoning became less and less apparent, and disappeared altogether when he was discovered - God knew how he got there - poised on an unfinished edge of the wall some three kilometres from where Ahmed was shot.
No one could say what was in his head. Perhaps he remembered Ahmed's look of childish terror; or wondered, if death creates stories, whether his would mean the same thing, or nothing, whichever side he fell.
Only one thing is certain. In parts of the world where the gap between stories is an abyss, truth loses its footing and drops out of sight. In such circumstances, we must insist on the intricacy of soul in all those whose tales we tell.
___________________________________________________________________________