It's not easy to draw a portrait of a refugee, because by definition, a refugee changes according to where he is. Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, who is about to become the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, is first of all a refugee and then a pragmatist. Abu Mazen - whose first-born son, Mazen, an engineer, died a year ago at the age of 42 in Qatar of a heart ailment - has gone through many places in the course of his 68 years. Like every refugee, Abu Mazen also carries his birthplace, Safed, in his memory. As a pragmatist, though, he knows where to draw the line that separates nostalgia, which attracts him to the city, and reality, which prevents him from even visiting it.
The status of refugee is an important biographical detail in the life history of a Palestinian politician, but pragmatism can define him as a Palestinian leader. Like every refugee, Abu Mazen has many stations in his life: Damascus, where he fled with his family, studied at the university (law) and taught in elementary school; Moscow, where he submitted his doctoral thesis, which dealt with the Holocaust, and more specifically with the connection between Nazism and Zionism; Tunis, where he resided as one of the leaders of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization; Qatar, where his family ran its business; and Abu Dhabi, where his daughter-in-law and his grandson live today.
Abu Mazen continues to travel between Gaza and Ramallah, in both of which he has homes, as befits the divided character of the state he is going to administer, and in addition, he has a house in Morocco, for the sake of the security that a refugee searches for all his life.
Kid from Safed
Mahmoud Abbas was born in 1935 in the Harath al-Joura neighborhood at the edge of the wholesale market in Safed. His family lived above the dusky shop run by his father, where one could get sunflower seeds in sacks, conserves in tins and vegetables by weight. However, his father's main source of income was the flock of sheep he kept in the village of Zangariya (where Moshav Elifelet is today). The sheep's milk from which the Abbas family made a living and from which they produced the renowned Safed cheese, was also the material that prevented the dissolution of the relations between Jews and Arabs - slightly more than 1,000 Jews who were crowded into the Jewish Quarter, and more than 20,000 Arabs in Safed and the surrounding villages.
The Arabs wanted to sell their dairy products and the Jews wanted to buy them, but the Jews, because of the kashrut (dietary) laws, could eat only cheese that was produced by other Jews. The result was the burgeoning in Safed of an industry of cheese-makers who purchased the milk in the villages and processed it into the cheese that they sold in Haifa and Jerusalem. Along with the cheese, another industry also flourished: protection money. The Jews bought the right to carry out commercial transactions in the Arab villages in return for payment to the city Arabs.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Aryeh Bandareli's father was a wholesaler of cheese who wandered among the villages. His son, like other veteran residents of Safed, begins by presenting his genealogy: He is the scion of a family that has been in Safed for six generations. He then recalls the blend of revulsion and pleasure in the damp, dank smell of the cellars in which the Safed cheese was stored until it matured. The cheese business, he says, created a "type of relationship - between the suppliers and the producers."
A "type of relationship"? Today, on the porch of his apartment on Mount Canaan, Bandareli looks out over the red roofs of Biriya, which was the rural suburb of Safed, and explains that those relations were based on "interests."
Mohammed Abbas, Abu Mazen's father, visited their home, but the Bandarelis were not invited to his home. He never met Mrs. Abbas and he did not play with the boy Mahmoud, who is three years his junior. It was only when he went to their places as his father's messenger that he would meet him. Still, along with the cool correctness of the business relations, there were also flickers of good-neighborliness: On the last day of Pesach, the merchant Abbas would place on his protege's table a tray holding thin pitas draped with a towel, cheeses and sweets, and he would be reciprocated with nuts, almonds and a little matzo that remained in the house.
Despite the mutual "vested interests," the friction between the suspicious majority and the hyperactive minority engendered tense relations. It was only the British and the cheese business that prevented a deterioration into a frontal clash. According to Bandareli, the tension was expressed in the form of harassment by Arab youngsters, who threw stones at the Jews, cursed them and started up with girls. Was Mahmoud Abbas also involved in this activity? No, Bandareli says, he was too small and he did not join the gang that was led by a certain Walid Kadoura, who was the son of the Arab mayor and a "big thug" in his own right.
The old house as a Safed legend (1)
In conversations with Safed old-timers, the phrase "Safed legend" comes up occasionally, but as an expression of disparagement. A Safed legend resembles the truth but is different. A Safed legend is born of the wind and is carried for years on its wings. In time it becomes covered with the dust that rises from the shabby alleys and becomes like them, elusive and secretive. The house of Abu Mazen is a widespread Safed legend.
Newspapers that are happy to turn every legend into reality treated it as the solid truth, and ever since, it has been recorded in the city's history as such. "You're looking for Abu Mazen's house?" someone in City Hall asks me, flashing an ironic smile at the piquant paradox. "Go to the local Likud branch on Jerusalem Street." Nine years ago, when he was chairman of the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu dedicated the branch and asked those present chivalrously "to play down the past of the building and emphasize its future as the center of Likud activity in Galilee."
The elderly gentleman wearing a large white skullcap who pauses for a moment to smoke a cigarette in the sun while leaning on the brick wall of the real Abbas house, also enjoys the humor of the legend and directs me to the building that houses the Likud party's local branch.
To know what the Abbas house looked like, you have to strip away in the imagination the ugly plaster and the solar heater that suddenly sprang up. You have to find the arches behind the rectangular frameworks of the windows and ignore the pile of junk in the corner of the inner courtyard. You also have to ignore the additions and the awnings and another room or two, and the rectangular sign that states, in pretty lettering, that this is not the local branch of the Likud but a kollel - a yeshiva for married men.
A young man with curly sidelocks, prayer vest fringes flapping and glasses on his forehead, comes out of the building to the inner courtyard in order to fill a pail with water from the sink. Not far from the sink, in the center of the tiled courtyard, is a magnificent cypress tree. "You can't miss it," Bandareli tells me in English as he directs me to the house. "The cypress is the best sign."
The cypress, unlike most of its kind, is not tall and thin; it is thick and splits into two trunks that carry their high, sharp tops straight into the sky. The split cypress is far taller than the turret of a nearby mosque, which shoots out of the asphalt hill in which it is planted, the vestige of the construction boom that seized the city for a very brief moment. Next to the cypress, between piles of junk and rags, there is also an old olive tree. The tree is scrawny and gray, but it will always be there, like the Hasid in glasses who examines me with hostility as he holds the full pail in his hand.
But is this the Abbas house? "It is not the house at all," insists a friend of the family dryly when I described the building to him. "The house is totally destroyed."
In September 1994, shortly after he returned to the country after about 50 years in exile, the refugee Mahmoud Abbas decided to visit his boyhood home. There is no knowing what he expected. It's possible that the adult Abu Mazen wanted to yield to the final, destructive discovery that the dream had in fact been shattered and the house was no more.
He will not forgo the symbolic meaning of the right of return, warns Ron Pundak, who knows Abu Mazen from the period in which they worked together on the Oslo document. But he has forgone its practical meaning. Speaking a few months ago at the Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria, he said, "You will not return to the house or the neighborhood or the village in which you were born. Those houses, the neighborhoods and villages no longer exist. New towns were built on your land, and Jewish babies were born in your houses. You will join a Palestinian minority, for whom the language of the state is not its language, nor its culture, nor its flag, nor its anthem. Places of work will not await you, nor will faces eager to welcome you."
He told his friends that organized visits should be arranged for the refugees so that they can see the new reality with their own eyes. This is what he himself apparently did. Abu Mazen, like the old refugee women who carry with them a rusty key to a door that was wrenched from a house that was long since demolished, wanted to see the place he lived until the age of 13.
The house as a Safed legend (2)
In September 1994, Abu Mazen wanted to prove to himself that the saying about the buried past and the rosy future is absolutely palpable. When he crossed the Jordan River via Allenby Bridge, he thought the pacific and highly publicized return would continue in the visit he would make to the house where he was born. Ze'ev Perl, though, had different ideas. Perl was the mayor of Safed for 10 years and is the sixth generation of his family in the city. At the time of Abu Mazen's planned visit, Perl was no longer the mayor, but he "organized," as he puts it, a unanimous resolution of the municipal council according to which "Abu Mazen is not wanted here."
"Those who grew up in Safed want Safed," Perl explained, and the mayor, Moshe Hani, from the National Religious Party, strengthened Perl's simple logic, noting, "There is a great deal of ferment in the public," and that for his own good, Abu Mazen should refrain from visiting the city in which so many victims of the 1974 terrorist attack at Ma'alot live. Abu Mazen, taking the advice of the national chief of police, turned his car around, though this did not prevent about 200 people, including the city's rabbis the victims of Ma'a lot, from gathering for a demonstration at the junction.
"We sang songs and it was all very nice," Perl recalls.
The majority in Safed is of Perl's opinion. "It's the mentality of old-time Safedians," Bandareli explains. "We are a very extreme town." The current mayor, Oded Hameiri, told a local paper about a month ago, "I hope Abu Mazen has absorbed the wisdom and the moderation of the old-timers in Safed," and invited him to visit the city.
One autumn afternoon, a few weeks after the demonstration organized by Ze'ev Perl, Abu Mazen was in the Mercedes of MK Ahmed Tibi, who was then the Israeli adviser of Yasser Arafat. (A Safed legend has it that the former mayor, Perl, and MK Aharon Nahmias were with them in the car.) They drove to what was once the village of Harath al-Joura, where there are now a few abandoned stone houses alongside makeshift dwellings that were built on their foundations. Across from the sports center built by the National Lottery is the turret of a mosque that thrusts out of the asphalt and two towering tops of cypress trees shooting out of the mass of stone.
Tibi parked the Mercedes in a kind of small asphalt parking space, and he and Abu Mazen then stood next to the kollel. Abu Mazen pointed to the towering two-trunked cypress and to the small mound of ruins. He showed Tibi where his house was. After a brief, mute stay they got in the car and went to an expensive restaurant called Bat Ya'ar, to eat away the memory.
Flashback: May 1948
Because it was not possible to interview Abu Mazen for this article, it is impossible to know whether the excellent food in Bat Ya'ar also erased the memory of the night between May 7 and May 8, 1948. Bandareli calls it "the night of miracles."
It was a night of pouring rain, and the Davidka, the mortar that was really no more than a hollow pipe that made a thundering noise when fired, had let loose two or three shells at the Arab neighborhoods before it blew up. Bandareli explains that the noise was so loud, and the flashes so threatening, and the memory of the rain that washed across Hiroshima after the A-bomb was dropped so fresh, that the Arabs were convinced that they were being attacked with "the Jewish A-bomb" and fled.
Generations of living as close neighbors did not melt the walls of suspicion, lack of knowledge, fear and hatred between Jews and Arabs in Safed. In 1948 the Arabs thought the end of the world was nigh, but the Jews, too, thought that defeat was at hand.
"In Safed there is once more sadness and gloom," Yehezkel Hameiri wrote in his book about the city, "a feeling of approaching defeat ... If reinforcements are not sent immediately, we would be better off surrendering, before we become as lambs to the slaughter in the hands of the Arabs." But the Arabs, unorganized, believing in the calls of the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and shocked by the horrific noise made by the Davidka, fled through Wadi Miron.
Bandareli, ill and tired but lucid and focused, moves heavily to the window of his porch at the edge of Mount Canaan. Looking at the splendid view, he shows me the channel in the wadi, there, between two plump hills, in which a lengthy column of Arab refugees made its way, "like arrow of ants." Their flight was undertaken in panic, "the food was still hot in the pots." Bandareli describes the looting perpetrated by the Jewish soldiers, "especially the Palmach [pre-state commandos]". He himself made do with books that he grabbed from the Scottish church and with "a few eggs and chickens" that he was asked to bring - explicitly! - by his mother. His father, Yosef Bandareli, who was the custodian of the abandoned property, asked his mother over the bowl of chicken soup where the chicken had come from. "Fregt nisht," she replied in Yiddish - don't ask.
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