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Travels with Mohammed - (Part 2 of 2) `Campaign of flags' Sheikh Salah is wearing a simple dark jacket over his white robe and has a glowing white head-covering on a head streaked with gray hair. Then, as now, he is the picture of elegant decorum and religious nobility. But from across the dusty desk, the sheikh cautions me that international Zionism is making a very serious mistake in linking the future of the Jewish people to the interests of the United States. In thinking that it's possible to return to colonialist oppression of the sort practiced by the British and the French. What the Zionist leadership doesn't understand is that even if the Arabs were silent for 100 years, this time they will not be silent. A billion-and-a half Muslims will not be silent. Zionism is making a mistake by expanding the sphere of the conflict and turning it from a Jewish-Palestinian into a Jewish-Muslim affair. I am not a prophet, says Sheikh Salah. The future is in the hands of God. But if you follow this path, the result will be very negative. Serious things will happen. After all, George Bush has already declared twice that he is launching a crusade. And the Zionist-Protestant current that influences him wants an Armageddon in this country. That is the reason they are going to attack Iraq. And after that, maybe Saudi Arabia. Maybe Syria. Therefore, Sheikh Salah cautions, a vast danger now faces the entire world and the entire Middle East and certainly this country. Al-Aqsa, too, faces a great danger. It is a mistake by Zionism to push the whole future of the Jewish people in the direction of that madman. You know, the people who believe in Armageddon also believe that two-thirds of the Jews will die in the war. So he is very worried. He fears a major disaster. A disaster that will endanger the Jewish people. We continue toward Mohammed's Galilee. His little homeland. As we go by Alonim Junction and approach Hamovil Junction ("Kafr Manda" Junction, he says; and Golani Junction is "Miskana" Junction, and Beit Rimon Junction is "Solam" Junction), Mohammed Dahla says that he does not necessarily share all of Sheikh Salah's opinions, but he respects his virtue and modesty and his ability to get things done. Sheikh Salah is now organizing busloads of people every week to go on pilgrimage to Al-Aqsa. The operation is called the "Campaign of Flags" and it is being conducted with exemplary order and on an ever-increasing scale. Even though Mohammed Dahla himself is not a devout Muslim, even though he has been exposed to the West and has adopted many of its values, he says that Sheikh Salah is a central pillar of his identity. Whereas what you claim about 3,000 years in Jerusalem is a fiction, Sheikh Salah represents 1,400 years of Islamic existence in this country. There is something captivating about that, Mohammed says; there is something deeply human about this continuity. When I look at the sheikh's eyes, he says, it's as though I am being connected through a time tunnel to the Caliphate of Omar al-Khatib, for whom my son is named. I connect with the greatness of Islam. That imbues me with a profound stillness that you don't have. A feeling of self-confidence. I know that it is not our fate to be beaten down and backward. And I know that, in fact, we are not a minority. The whole idea of a minority is foreign to Islam. It is appropriate to Judaism but foreign to Islam. When you look around you see that we are really not a minority: that in this country there is a majority that is actually a minority and a minority that is actually a majority. So whenever Sheikh Salah is harassed, I offer my help. I offer him what I can give him as an expert in Israeli law. Nakba vs. Holocaust We turn toward Moshav Zippori. "Saffuriya," Mohammed corrects me. In 1948, it was a very large village with a population of thousands. Today they are many tens of thousands: some in Syria, some in Lebanon, some in Galilee villages. Even my sister's husband is from Saffuriya. And his children consider themselves to be from Saffuriya. Every Independence Day, we gather here for a huge memorial ceremony. We will not forget, Mohammed promises. We will not forget and we will not forgive. He is wearing a light suit with a gold-colored tie. He's of average height, dark-skinned, energetic. He is proud of the fact that the color of his skin is like the color of this land. Because after all, he is mixed into this land. He points to a group of brightly colored sabra cactus bushes in Zippori National Park and to a few stone terraces and says that while it's true that the Nakba - the Palestinian "calamity" of 1948 - was not exactly like the Holocaust, he is not willing to accept the Jewish monopoly on the term Holocaust. True, there were no concentration camps here, but on the other hand the Nakba, unlike the Holocaust, is an ongoing event. And whereas the Holocaust was a calamity of people, the Nakba was a calamity of people and land. Our destruction, says Mohammed, using the word hurban, which Jews use to describe the laying waste of the two temples. The devastation of our homeland. The homes of Moshav Na'im are white with red roofs. On one of the lawns, a beautiful young mother opens her arms to receive a toddler who is taking his first steps. But Mohammed says he doesn't understand how people can live here. On the surface you enjoy some sort of pastoral setting, but in fact you are living on graves. You seem to be walking in your garden but in reality, you are stepping on bodies. It's not human, Mohammed says. It reminds him of a movie he saw about an American suburb that was built on an Indian cemetery, whose ghosts began to haunt the occupants. I am not mystically inclined, Mohammed says, but I feel the ghosts here. And I know that they will never stop their haunting. Beit Rimon, a religious kibbutz, sits atop the Turan ridge, its rounded outcropping overhanging the village below, where Mohammed Dahla was born and where his father and grandfather and great-grandfather were born, too. We have been here for hundreds of years, Mohammed says. From time immemorial. As we ascend the hill road to Kibbutz Beit Rimon, Mohammed explains to me that the British High Commissioner set aside 10,000 dunams (2,500 acres) of the ridge for the residents of Turan. But the government of Israel came and took that land in order to create Beit Rimon I and Beit Rimon II and Beit Rimon III. To ensure that here, too, as in every place in the country, the Jews will dominate from above and the Palestinians will be dominated below. The Jews will live high in the master's reserve, the Palestinians low in the natives' reservation. One state, two peoples When we find an opening and manage to bypass the kibbutz's iron gate, the mobile phone rings: The family of the terrorist who tried to blow up gas canisters in the area of the pubs in Jerusalem wants Mohammed to represent him. Mohammed accepts and immediately calls the police station at the Russian Compound in Jerusalem to find out where the prisoner is being held. Is Beit Rimon a settlement like the settlements in the territories, I ask. Is its fate to be the same? The logic is the same logic, Mohammed replies, the mind is the same mind. Even the planning is similar. It's an alien entity. An alien force that landed from above and imposed itself on the landscape. It's late afternoon. The air is clear and you can see a long way. Look at that mitzpeh, Mohammed says, referring to an "outlook settlement." And look at that one. They are all so orderly, so military, so European. So different from our villages, which grow from below like a tree. It is perfectly clear that they constitute a kind of Jewish invasion of my Land of Galilee. And that is exactly why they were built: to separate one village from the next. To prevent the Land of Galilee from becoming an Arab land. So that Arab Galilee will not be able to demand territorial autonomy and will not be able to separate from Israel and become part of the State of Palestine. Are you seriously contemplating autonomy, I ask. Mohammed Dahla replies: "The solution I prefer is one democratic state for the two peoples. But if the binational direction is not followed, then obviously a shrunken and punctured and fragmented Palestinian state that doesn't even have its own airspace will not be enough. It won't be a state, it will be a joke. Therefore, if the two-state solution continues to be insisted on, autonomy in Galilee will definitely be on the agenda. And that autonomy will have to be not only cultural but territorial as well. With policing powers and effective control of the land and of the natural resources. Three autonomous areas of this kind will have to be created: in Galilee, in the Triangle and in the Negev. Palestinians living in Lod or Ramla or Jaffa will have to be given personal autonomy that will have an associative relationship to the three Palestinian cantons in the State of Israel." We bypass Turan itself. It's more important for Mohammed to show me the ruins of the nearby village of Lubiya. Still, he does not forbear from explaining to me how his native village is surrounded on all sides. Here is Beit Rimon, where you are not allowed to live; here is the Zippori industrial zone, in which you don't have any factories; here is an army base and you don't have an army; and here is a memorial site (of the Golani Brigade) that evokes memories that are not yours. So, if you thought you were spared, Mohammed Dahla says, if you thought that your family succeeded in evading the calamity after going into exile in Lebanon for a few months in 1948, you are reminded here at every step that you are blocked. That you are conditional. That you have no right here. After all, the Golani memorial perpetuates the victor and consigns the defeated to oblivion. And with the McDonald's and the armored personnel carriers and the Israeli flags, what Golani Junction tells you relentlessly: We beat you. And because we won, we have the power to perpetuate ourselves among you. In the very heart of your Land of Galilee. Mohammed's Mercedes-of-success descends into the South Africa Forest of the Jewish National Fund and ascends on the forest road. This is not an innocent forest, my friend Mohammed tells me. This is a "laundering" forest. By means of this forest, you thought you would be able to launder the crime; you deluded yourselves into thinking that you were laundering the crime. Then he tells me about his breaking point. It was during one the talks with Beilin, in Oslo, when they requested that the compensation that Israel would give the Palestinian state serve it in the same way that the German reparations to Israel served it. That was all they asked. It was a kind of gentle hint, not quarrelsome. But, nevertheless, Yossi Beilin's Israelis went wild. Because of that sentence the talks broke down. They returned empty-handed. Without even the shadow of historical justice. He tells me that shortly after Oslo, he returned to this place with Mahmoud, a relative of his mother, from the village of Lubiya. He accompanied him up the road, and when they reached this spot, where he identified the ruins of his home, Mahmoud began to cry. The homeland has gone, he wept, our life has gone. And the Israeli lawyer Dahla stood there and cried with him. So what are you telling me, I ask Mohammed. That the wrong that was done here is one that cannot be forgiven? Because even now, when you are picnicking here, the refugees of Saffuriya and Lubiya are rotting in the Yarmuk camp and in the Ein al-Hilweh camp in Lebanon. So justice obliges that you be given the possibility of returning; that at least those in the refugee camps be given the possibility of returning. I don't know how many there will be, Mohammed says. Certainly not millions, maybe hundreds of thousands. But I see them returning. In the same way that my family slid back on the slopes of the Turan ridge with their mules and belongings after a few months of exile, the others will also return. It will be a long convoy of returning people.