Skip to main content

Oh, Jerusalem!


It was midnight.  27 Nov 1917.

Khalil al-Sakakini had put aside the book he was reading and was getting ready to go to bed when a knock on the door of his home in the Katamon area of Jerusalem jolted him, gentle though the knock was. 

“Alter Levin!” gasped Khalil on seeing his midnight visitor.  Levin was known to Khalil as an American citizen, an insurance agent, and also a poet of some repute. 

Worse, Levin was a Jew. 

“Give me refuge,” pleaded Levin.  As an American citizen, he had been ordered to surrender himself to the Ottoman authorities. 


The War was going on.  Khalil could hear the rumble of artillery around Jerusalem rolling like reverberating thunder.  The British troops were closing in.  Any foreigner who failed to surrender to the authorities would be considered a spy, as would anyone sheltering one.

Here was a Jew seeking refuge at the door of a Muslim.

Khalil was not a bigot. Rather, he was a scholar, an educator and a writer. 

“If I accept him, I’m a traitor to my government; and if I refuse him, I’m a traitor to my language,” Khalil wrote in his diary later.  By “language” he meant his Arab identity and loyalty to it.  “I told myself that he wasn’t appealing simply to me for refuge, but to my whole people as represented in me.  He was appealing to the literature expressed in my language, before the coming of Islam and after it.  He was appealing to that ancient Bedouin who sheltered a hyena fleeing from its pursuers and entering his tent.  And I should add that he had bestowed a great honour on me by coming to me for refuge.”

He opened his door to the virtual enemy.

A week passed.  Khalil was beginning to feel confident about the safety of his guest as well as himself when another midnight knock on his door jolted him.

The police had tracked Levin down.  They had arrested and beaten up a Jewish woman who had been asked by Levin to smuggle kosher food to him.  

“Man, why didn’t you eat our food, God forgive you?  If you thought our food was impure, then we must be impure too...  So how could you take refuge with us?  Oh, religions!  Oh, foolish minds, rather!  How many victims have you claimed?”  We read in Khalil’s diary.  [Highlight added]

Death was the penalty for treason.  Both Khalil and Levin counted the moments left to them. 

But the Ottoman Empire was in the throes of death.  Chaos prevailed over Jerusalem. 

"Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”  Jesus had cried two millennia ago.

Khalil and his Judas, both spent 40 days in prison before being released.  Khalil joined the Arab Revolt forces which were fighting with the British forces in the World War. 

When the War was over, in 1919, Khalil and Levin met each other in Jerusalem.  Levin bowed his head in gratitude. 

In 1933, Levin committed suicide apparently because his business was in trouble.

Khalil al-Sakakini died in Cairo in 1953 as an exile.  His diary, Such Am I, O World, describes the formative period of Palestinian resistance to Zionism.  It illustrates the shattering of Arab nationalist hopes, the sharpening of Palestinian identity, and the growing despair and militancy of Palestinians as they watched their land being bought up and settled by Jewish immigrants.


Note: I have adapted the post from Anton La Guardia’s book, Holy Land, Unholy War: Israelis and Palestinians, London: John Murray, 2002.  I bow my head in shame and grief over the killings going on in Gaza.  

Comments

  1. So much hatred, intolerance & unspoken pain around.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Until people understand the futility of some of their beliefs and notions, the situation won't improve.

      Delete
  2. Levin committed suicide. All the kosher food and the observance of his religious laws could not save him from despair. That is how religion fails. Your highlight is the central message of this incident from history. Religions kill rather than save people.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True religion is yet to be taught, though learned within by every individual.
      Till such time art of teaching religion is mastered, teaching it should be banned.

      Delete
    2. Banning will only make it more potent, I think. Such is the power of religion over the human psyche. Each one of us can and should keep trying to raise the consciousness level of people: that's the remedy I can see.

      Delete
  3. Replies
    1. Globalisation is all about commerce. Both America and UK mint billions by selling arms to Israel. That's globalisation.

      Delete
  4. I've read somewhere prior to 1946 - palestine consisted major part of now what is Jordan

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nandini, Please read the following link to understand the politics behind American statements about Palestine being Jordan:
      http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/177782#.U94jOOOSxe4

      Delete
  5. When I read about such times, I feel gratitude that I am living in a peaceful surroundings. But then I think what if I have reborn from such times.. What if I was in a camp like Annie frank or I was a sikh migrant during partition. And what if I die to be in such times.. And then again, I think thankfully, I am right now in a peaceful surroundings and pray for those who are not..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your peace could be ephemeral, Roohi, if somebody in India decides to do what Israel is doing in Gaza right now. Revanchism. Trying to reclaim land that their ancestors lived in centuries ago... What if somebody in India decides to do the same and starts dropping bombs or doing something similar with the intention of making India a single-religion country?

      Delete
    2. Yes you are absolutely right.. that's why I savor this peace as it is as you call, ephemeral :) I pray for peace in Gaza and everywhere..

      Delete
  6. very nice post Sir! I think this problem is a very sad one...in fact y'de I was reading some forums in wich comments were like...'as jews are cursed that they'll nvr get a homeland as per holy book & they know it, so they r using ghastly force 2 cling on to this land...till end of time they r bound 2 remain stateless'...

    Is there really this religious angle to it? Coz USA backing it steadfastly is due to powerful rich Zionist lobby in America...plus using Israel fr its own national interests & funding it heavily...

    But this is so completely unfair 2 Palestinians...Pan-Arabism also seems inactive nw...no Muslim states r raising their voices wich seems very unreal...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There definitely is a religious angle to the issue, Amrita. Israel is the land promised to the Jews by their God, according to the Old Testament of the Bible (which the Jews too accept as their holy scriptures). It's also a fact that the Jews were a "wandering people" for many centuries, so much so that many people believed they were an accursed lot. Christianity labelled them as the killers of Jesus and no lost opportunity to persecute them for that very reason.

      The Arab politics is controlled by America and its oil business. Many of the rulers and powerful Arabs are puppets of America. That's why Palestinians don't have supporters except the fundamentalists and terrorists.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af