A Map, the Sea, and Many Olive Trees

And some trains

1.

My grandfather was from Haifa, exiled to Lebanon alongside hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.

2.

My grandfather died in his 80s. He was older than Israel, the state that made Haifa Israeli.

3.

When I go to south Lebanon, I am closer to Haifa than I am to where I grew up near Beirut.

4.

Without the Israeli border, it would be a 40ish minutes drive.

With a fast train it could take, I'm guessing, 15ish minutes.

Without the Israeli border, my grandfather would have been able to just go home.

5.

There is a reason why the term ‘Gazan’ can be an uncomfortable one for Palestinians in Gaza.

It erases so much.

Most 'Gazans' are not from Gaza but actually Palestinian refugees from the lands that are now the state of Israel, from where they were ethnically cleansed in 1948.

6.

There are many 'Gazans' that have lived barely a few kilometers away from their actual homeland for decades and decades, prevented by Israeli law from returning home. Their homes given over to the Israeli state. The state just took them.

7.

Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, lived in Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat's villa. Zionist militias took the house in 1948 and then Israel turned it into several flats. Meir lived in the upper flat.

She apparently tried to remove the sign that reads Harun ar-Rashid, which is what Hanna named the villa.

Hanna's son, George, an American citizen, went to visit his grandfather's house in 1977. He could still read the sign, if only barely. Meir didn't do a good job at removing it entirely.

8.

George was met by an old woman, a Jewish woman from Eastern Europe. She told him that his family ‘never lived here.’ Just like that. She decided that George's grandfather never existed.

9.

Golda Meir declared that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Golda Meir also once said ‘I am a Palestinian.’

She lived in a house that was Palestinian and then not Palestinian. Just like her.

10.

Another man then came to the door. It was a retired “Justice Zvi Berenson of the Israeli Supreme Court, one of the drafters of Israel's Declaration of Independence.”

He let George in but only to the foyer, no further. He told George that “there was no need to see any more of the house as it had all been changed anyway.”

11.

Berenson was one of the judges who upheld “laws facilitating Israel's acquisition of Palestinian lands.”

In other words: an Israeli Supreme Court judge agreed to legalise the theft of Palestinian homes, and then moved in to a Palestinian home.

Or perhaps he moved in before reaching such a convenient conclusion? Someone probably knows.

12.

Berenson was born in Safed, Ottoman-era Palestine. He witnessed his Palestinian neighbours get forced out of their homes, and then legislated to make sure they stay out.

And then moved in.

13.

Stories like the Bisharat one, like my grandfather's story, are inconvenient. It's too messy to sit down with such stories.

There's hundreds of thousands of such stories, literally.

And that was just by 1948-1949.

14.

I've been to the border in southern Lebanon many times. A friend lived in one of the villages. Another one lived in another one. Another in another one.

Israel destroyed them all.

Not in 1948.

In 2024.

15.

In one of its most recent acts of self-defence, they self-defence-d their way through entire villages, denoting them with dynamite. They self-defence-d thousands of Olive trees from their inconvenient roots.

16.

Inconvenient roots are like the Bisharat story. Many Olive trees are older than 1948. The Israelis must believe that these Olive trees have seen too much.

Why else have they spent decades destroying them? Why do they still do it?

17.

The power of getting to decide who lives, who dies, who gets to come, and who gets to leave. Sometimes, things really are that simple.

Berenson and Meir get to live in that villa. Bisharat does not.

Some Olive trees get to live. Others get to die.

18.

The olive harvest is often stopped by the Israelis.

They set them on fire, let them rot, or just bulldoze them.

The Palestinian custodians of the land are made to watch as the land is torched by those who desperately want to be the land's natives.

19.

Why do they treat the land as such? It's just land. The Olive tree doesn't speak Arabic. It's not Christian or Muslim. It's not pan-Arabist or socialist or Islamist.

It doesn't know who the Nazis are, and what the Europeans did over there.

20.

The land must be punished for settler colonialism to work. Displacing or killing the people on that land - that's not enough. Their traces remain. You have to destroy the traces.

21.

Earlier this year, Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza carved a star of David using tanks.

I don't know if there were Olive trees over there. Someone probably knows.

22.

When I'd go to southern Lebanon, I would make it a point to stand as close to the border that was carved in 1948 as possible. I'd open Google map, use that little yellow man on the bottom right, and drop him on my head.

I made sure that he wasn't Israeli. They drop bigger things on people's heads, the Israelis.

23.

The land wasn't informed of the decision to carve it. People in the West made that decision. People with very short memories used force to enclose history itself. They then got rid of those with longer memories, people and Olive trees.

24.

I imagine trees communicating with trees on the other side through their roots. Before 48.

Maybe they got lucky. Maybe they were able to hold on to that connection for longer than my grandfather was able to.

Roots are inconvenient.

25.

What breaks my mind to this day is not that Israelis are capable of genocide.

What breaks my mind is not that they know how to bomb.

Or torture or exile or maim or humiliate or rape or bomb and bomb and bomb. I expect nothing less of them anymore. They treat us like they treat those Olive trees.

That's ‘easier’ to understand because, to us, the inconvenient Arabs from that part of the world, the Israelis weren't ever that much of a mystery.

We're all animals, remember. And the thing about being animals is that the humans around us don't bother with hiding their intentions. It gets easy to understand them. We understand them better than they understand us.

That's why it gets easy for them to kill so many children.

26.

What breaks my mind to this day is that there used to be a train from Haifa to Beirut, Beirut to Haifa.

I don't know if my grandfather ever boarded one of those. Maybe his parents did.

It breaks my mind because it meant being able to be in Haifa. That alone breaks my mind. I've never been. I can't go.

It meant boarding a train and then.. just.. sitting.

It meant being able to see the Mediterranean sea, to your left of course as you're going North.

Maybe lose yourself a bit? You got the correct papers, the ones that a state decided give you permission to go North. Or was that before papers?

27.

Trains, especially the nice ones, allow me to lose myself.

Maybe grandpa's train was one of those trains, like the one in that scene in Spirited Away (the spirits over there didn't bother too much with borders).

I like to imagine one of those What If-s of history that would have allowed my great-grandparents and the boy that became my grandfather to just do that.

28.

I never got used to trains. I've been taking them for a decade since moving to Europe. I did London-Edinburgh-London a dozen times. No one ever stopped me.

29.

Why would they stop the boy that became my grandfather? He was just a boy. He wasn't a pan-Arabist or socialist or Islamist. He didn't know who the Nazis were, and what the Europeans did over there.

30.

I was always terrible at positioning myself on the map.

But growing up in Lebanon was not a problem. It was always simple: If you got lost, just locate the sea. If you know you're North of Beirut, just locate the sea and make sure the sea is on your right. If you're South of Beirut, make sure the sea is on your left. Whenever I got lost, which was often, I'd locate the sea, make my way to Beirut, and then from Beirut make my way up to my village.

31.

The sea seemed reliable. The only border that ever was. The other two borders, the only other two borders that Lebanon has, are Syria and Israel. It won't shock you to know that they weren't reliable.

When I did London-Edinburgh, the sea, the Atlantic one, the channel, the same sea as my Mediterranean sea as all seas as part of the sea anyway, was on the right. When I did Edinburgh-London, it was on the left.

I would orientate myself like I would in Lebanon. I didn't have to. I could just sit and the train will do the rest. But I did. Old habits.

32.

I don't know how to explain always knowing, whatever happens in your life, whatever dreams or aspirations or insecurities or quirkiness you may or may not develop one day, that there is a hard limit to driving with the sea on your right, and, roughly between 2011 until Assad's downfall in 2024, a more or less hard limit to driving with the sea on your left.

The Edinburgh-London trips had no rigid land border, no wall of machine guns that you'd inevitably hit if you forgot to stop driving for too long with the sea on your right.

33.

Once, I was driving with a friend with the sea on our left. We drove for too long. We almost reached Syria. We turned back. We saw Assad's bombs in the distance.

34.

Lebanon is one of the smallest countries in the world. For my entire life on Earth, all 34 years/centuries of them, my neighbour was Assad's Syria (until 2024) and Israel (until who the fuck knows).

You zoom out on Google maps for like 2 seconds and you're already in not-Lebanon. There is nowhere else to go. Even the sea betrays you in the end, that false friend. The nearest country is Cyprus. It's in the EU. You need one of those nice passports to go there.

You order food and your slippery fingers zoom out for too long on that map and you're reminded that this spot on the planet, the one where you're hanging out with friends and you order 7 pizzas and you watch a movie or play some game or something, is just that, a spot. Don't venture too far from that spot.

Remember where the sea is. Remember to stop.

35.

You're somewhere here. You want to order pizza from an app.

You zoom out by accident.

That's already most of Lebanon, and a good chunk of not-Lebanon.

Now zoom out again.

That's where the bombs come from. Down there. The sea is on the left if you're going up, right if you're going down.

It doesn't matter though because the Israelis fly over that border anyway.

The border isn't for them. It's for the rest of us.

The sea is still to the left and then to the right, so we have that in common, us and our nice neighbours, the Israelis, the ones who have been self-defence-ing the fuck out of our lands and bodies for nearly eight decades.

Zoom out again.

The Schengen area starts on that land on the top right. That's where the civilized people are, the EU, the ones that are friends with the ones bombing you.

Do you see Gaza on that map? They don't even get full lines. It's a porous border, as long as you're an Israeli soldiers/tank/jet/drone. The map is from the state of Israel's perspective. That's the default map on Google.

36.

What the map cannot show you is what it feels like to be a ‘Gazan.’ Remember when I said, all the way up in the article - if you get lost, just make sure the sea is on your left - that Golda Meir and Zvi Berenson lived in a Palestinian house? It's somehow even worse if you're in Gaza because if you're in Gaza, and you grow old enough to know these things, that is if Israel lets you reach that age, you also know that the bombs are coming from the land that was your land. The bombs keep on falling. You go further and further south. Further and further from the land that was your land. It's never too far though. The whole territory is so small. All of it. Where the Israelis are, and where the Palestinians are. The entire thing is a bit bigger than two Lebanons. The Israelis could just let you go home. They just don't.

37.

They won't let you go home for the same reason they punish Olive trees. You know too much. You live with the cognitive dissonance required to know that you're from over there while also knowing that you can never go back, while also being told that it makes sense for any human being on Earth, so long as they're Jewish, to go to where you can never go back.

38.

You grow up a little bit. You're 34 years/centuries old now. You're already older than many Olive trees because Israel has been cutting those down, you see. That makes you an elder. An elder is someone who is older than the Olive trees.

39.

Anyway, I'm on the train now and I am watching Spirited Away. I don't want to be Palestinian or Lebanese or Arab or Brown or the he-kinda-looks-southern-European-he-probably-got-a-good-passport guy right now.

Leave me alone for those two or so hours.

Or at least that train scene.

40.

Did you notice how the sea is neither left nor right of the train?