But I also saw how Hamas and other groups hijacked the basic human emotions that I witnessed among Palestinians and used them for their own terrorist purposes. And Israel, in its justifiable rage against terrorism, might have lost sight of the fact that Hamas and Palestinian civilians aren’t the same.
I don’t want to sentimentalize my experience long ago, especially now when emotions are so raw, but here’s how it began: I was covering the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal in 1982 and wanted to understand life in the occupied West Bank. Through contacts in Amman, Jordan, I arranged to stay with a man named Hammadeh Kashkeesh, who worked as a stonecutter in a village called Halhul.
Resistance to Israel and yearning for Palestinian statehood were a way of life in Halhul, which lies south of Bethlehem, amid the white stone hills on the road to Hebron. But it was largely a quiet anger: One village elder had disguised a Palestinian flag as the knitted cover of a box of tissue paper; in another house, a biography of Yasser Arafat was secreted under a chair; in a third home, a hand-drawn map of pre-1948 Palestine was hidden behind a sheet of wallpaper.
My strongest memory of Halhul is falling asleep on the roof of Kashkeesh’s house. The men of the family slept there in the summer. As I lay under the blanket of stars, my host’s father, Abu Hammadeh, pointed to the town below and said, “This is beautiful.” Several minutes later, the old man repeated, “This is very beautiful.” And finally, as I was nearly asleep, he said loudly: “This is the best!”
Abu Hammadeh left the house each morning at dawn with his horse to tend the family’s plot of grapes. The vines that ringed the town were the center of Halhul’s economy. Farmers grew them; three sawmills made boxes to transport them; local merchants shipped them in trucks to Israel and Jordan. Residents proclaimed to me that Hulhul made “the best grapes in the world.”
In 2003, I visited the Kashkeesh family again. It was a darker time, during the second intifada. Abu Hammadeh was dead, but I asked to see the plot that the old man had tended so lovingly. It wasn’t possible, Kashkeesh told me. He pointed to barbed wire enclosing a new road that Israel had built for residents of a settlement beyond the town. On the other side of the road were the Kashkeesh family’s vines, growing wild and parched under a hot sun.
Hopes for peace had risen a decade earlier with the Oslo Accords, and the newly created Palestinian Authority, supposedly a prelude to statehood, had built a grand local headquarters in town. But Kashkeesh was dismissive. “They came with the attitude that they had liberated this land, but it seemed to me that every one of them was a money-lover,” he told me.
That corruption enfeebles the Palestinian Authority to this day, and it’s one reason Hamas began to gain strength. The day I visited in 2003, Kashkeesh’s two sons returned from Friday prayers at the mosque carrying a Hamas leaflet that proclaimed, “Death is only a race toward our God.” Kashkeesh was disgusted. “Killing innocents is not an Islamic thing,” he said.
I visited Halhul one more time, in 2014. The landscape had changed. More Israeli settlements and outposts had been built on the hills around the town. Kashkeesh was gloomy, except when speaking about his seven children, who had all graduated from high school or college. He remained dismissive of the Palestinian Authority (“liars”) and Hamas. Palestinian political leadership had “destroyed itself, by itself,” he said.
I left that last visit to Halhul thinking the opportunity for peace had truly vanished. The residue of bitterness on both sides was too deep. And that might be true, especially after the awful toll of these last weeks of Hamas terrorism and Israeli retaliation.
But Kashkeesh told me a story during one of my visits that suggests the human mystery that allows reconciliation, even after the worst tragedies. When he was a young man, Kashkeesh had joined a guerrilla group and was imprisoned by Israel for six years. When he was released at 29, he took a job at an Israeli resort.
One day, he told me, an Israeli infant fell into the swimming pool. Though he couldn’t swim, Kashkeesh jumped in and rescued the boy. When an Israeli asked him later why he had risked his life to save a Jew, Kashkeesh answered that the child was a human being. How could he do otherwise?
I hate Hamas for poisoning that spirit of shared humanity. I’m angry at Israel, too, when it forgets that there are Palestinians like Kashkeesh who share universal values — and would build something decent, if they had a chance.
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