The Palestinian Spring
The Merry and Bitter Month of May, 63 Springs and Counting
(Dedicated to my late father)
By Hani M Bathish
THIS year May 15 arrived as an unwanted but badly needed visitor, much like Nanny McPhee (from the film by the same name). An extraordinary flood of confused and mixed emotions welled up and churned inside me like a really bad shish tawook sandwich with mayonnaise that had gone bad. I was Lebanese on the 14th, fully focused on purely Lebanese issues, and then with the first images of the front lines of Maroun el Ras and Qunaitra, I realized I was Palestinian too. I put on Fairuz and replayed Sayfoun Fal Youch’har over and over and over again, that rare Rahbani foray into the battle-cry genre. I discovered I was in the wrong place, on a couch in front of the TV, when I should have been down there at Maroun el Ras with my people.
It’s a long story.
You see it all began in Lebanon in the early 1620s during the reign of Emir Fakhereddine in Mount Lebanon, who was the darling of the Ottoman’s at one time. The Ottoman’s usually rewarded their vassals in one way; they gave them more territory to rule over. Because Fakhereddine was well disposed towards his Christian subjects and because his territory now included much of Northern Palestine, including Nazareth, he allowed Christian Lebanese settlers to resettle Nazareth for the first time since the end of the Crusades. So, I am the son of settlers, not Jewish, but Christian.
It was at that time that Girgis Ibn Yammine El Ehdini, my ancestor (we only later adopted the last name Bathish, that’s an even longer story), and many of his family and other families from North Lebanon decided to settle in Nazareth. Ibn Yammine was a servant of the Church but he never became a man of the cloth, he was a church bureaucrat, a translator or dragoman (a corruption of the word Torgoman widely used in Arabic) and he worked at the Monastery in Nazareth. I imagine he mastered several languages; well he would have had to, at least Latin, French, Arabic, Turkish, maybe even Italian.
Our family and allied families in Nazareth formed a vibrant community but we were far from quiet and accepting. We actually beat the New World settlers to the punch: “No taxation without representation,” that was our idea believe it or not. In 1698, in a letter to the Pope, the clan Yammine of Nazareth and other families, asked to be relieved of their “duty of obedience” to the Maronite Patriarch and not pay their tithes to the Maronite Church any more, but pay them instead to the local Latin Church in Jerusalem. We were pure bread Lebanese, trouble makers to the core, we were stubborn, we held a grudge well and we drank Arak, home made and potent, and we got our wish. On May 1, 1698, we separated officially from the Maronite Church forming the first Latin community in Nazareth. We thus no longer paid tithes to the Patriarch’s envoy who at one time threatened to deny services and mass to the whole town of Nazareth, or so I am told, if they refused to submit to his authority.
This revolutionary pedigree of mine I think will make sense to any regular readers of my blog!
Male members of the Bathish Clan in Haifa 1940
Unlike many families who left with nothing in 1948 and again in 1967, my family were fortunate to have been living in an urban center at the time where communication was slightly better than in the rural areas and they knew early on it was time to leave. Sadly, most of the family albums and the all important ‘rusty old key’ were lost to squatters and looters in Lebanon’s civil war. It’s like there’s a conspiracy to deny us our memories and our past!
My father in 1948, was already working in Lebanon for the British owned Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC) when the state of Israel was declared. The rest of the family followed and took a house in Alley, to spend a pleasant summer in the Lebanon Mountains while the Arab armies liberated Palestine for them! How Naïve they were.
We know better now, in fact our youngest are as wise as the oldest and most learned scholars. Life’s unfair hand dealt to my people all those years past has taught us a lot, patience for one thing, a yearning for paradise, and a strong and unwavering desire to redress an injustice that has festered for too long.
I wanted us all to be down there by the fence, in our hundreds of thousands, and just lean on it until it lay flat on the ground, then we start walking, through a hail of bullets and shells, just keep walking, no weapons, not so much as a knife, just keep walking (sorry Johnny Walker). Many of my people left Palestine barefoot, and that is how we shall return. How can they stop such a human tide? Shoot us all, great they would give us our very own holocaust that we could wave in the face of the world in perpetuity!
Do it, shoot us all, or let us keep walking, back to the ruins of our villages and towns. Then, rather than be governed by the status quo, we would be the status quo that shall overwhelm the resources of the State of Israel and bring it to its knees. I wish we could retake our homes and our lands without killing a single Israeli, I truly have no ill feelings towards them, I let go of my anger a long time ago, I just want to go home, now that is a concept that even American movie producers can understand!
This Month continues to be a bitter sweet one for our family and our people; it marks our Nakba, our greatest defeat, but also our rallying point. May 1st marks Labor Day and the day my family broke off ties with the Maronite Church, also in May, the 21st of 2002 to be exact, was the day my father was killed in a road crash. He never got to go back or see his home again.
The first lesson in politics and in life: The secret to conquering your enemy is letting go of your anger, remember your loss but don’t let it overwhelm you and keep fighting, keep struggling.
(Dedicated to my late father)
By Hani M Bathish
THIS year May 15 arrived as an unwanted but badly needed visitor, much like Nanny McPhee (from the film by the same name). An extraordinary flood of confused and mixed emotions welled up and churned inside me like a really bad shish tawook sandwich with mayonnaise that had gone bad. I was Lebanese on the 14th, fully focused on purely Lebanese issues, and then with the first images of the front lines of Maroun el Ras and Qunaitra, I realized I was Palestinian too. I put on Fairuz and replayed Sayfoun Fal Youch’har over and over and over again, that rare Rahbani foray into the battle-cry genre. I discovered I was in the wrong place, on a couch in front of the TV, when I should have been down there at Maroun el Ras with my people.
It’s a long story.
You see it all began in Lebanon in the early 1620s during the reign of Emir Fakhereddine in Mount Lebanon, who was the darling of the Ottoman’s at one time. The Ottoman’s usually rewarded their vassals in one way; they gave them more territory to rule over. Because Fakhereddine was well disposed towards his Christian subjects and because his territory now included much of Northern Palestine, including Nazareth, he allowed Christian Lebanese settlers to resettle Nazareth for the first time since the end of the Crusades. So, I am the son of settlers, not Jewish, but Christian.
It was at that time that Girgis Ibn Yammine El Ehdini, my ancestor (we only later adopted the last name Bathish, that’s an even longer story), and many of his family and other families from North Lebanon decided to settle in Nazareth. Ibn Yammine was a servant of the Church but he never became a man of the cloth, he was a church bureaucrat, a translator or dragoman (a corruption of the word Torgoman widely used in Arabic) and he worked at the Monastery in Nazareth. I imagine he mastered several languages; well he would have had to, at least Latin, French, Arabic, Turkish, maybe even Italian.
Our family and allied families in Nazareth formed a vibrant community but we were far from quiet and accepting. We actually beat the New World settlers to the punch: “No taxation without representation,” that was our idea believe it or not. In 1698, in a letter to the Pope, the clan Yammine of Nazareth and other families, asked to be relieved of their “duty of obedience” to the Maronite Patriarch and not pay their tithes to the Maronite Church any more, but pay them instead to the local Latin Church in Jerusalem. We were pure bread Lebanese, trouble makers to the core, we were stubborn, we held a grudge well and we drank Arak, home made and potent, and we got our wish. On May 1, 1698, we separated officially from the Maronite Church forming the first Latin community in Nazareth. We thus no longer paid tithes to the Patriarch’s envoy who at one time threatened to deny services and mass to the whole town of Nazareth, or so I am told, if they refused to submit to his authority.
This revolutionary pedigree of mine I think will make sense to any regular readers of my blog!
Male members of the Bathish Clan in Haifa 1940
Unlike many families who left with nothing in 1948 and again in 1967, my family were fortunate to have been living in an urban center at the time where communication was slightly better than in the rural areas and they knew early on it was time to leave. Sadly, most of the family albums and the all important ‘rusty old key’ were lost to squatters and looters in Lebanon’s civil war. It’s like there’s a conspiracy to deny us our memories and our past!
My father in 1948, was already working in Lebanon for the British owned Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC) when the state of Israel was declared. The rest of the family followed and took a house in Alley, to spend a pleasant summer in the Lebanon Mountains while the Arab armies liberated Palestine for them! How Naïve they were.
We know better now, in fact our youngest are as wise as the oldest and most learned scholars. Life’s unfair hand dealt to my people all those years past has taught us a lot, patience for one thing, a yearning for paradise, and a strong and unwavering desire to redress an injustice that has festered for too long.
I wanted us all to be down there by the fence, in our hundreds of thousands, and just lean on it until it lay flat on the ground, then we start walking, through a hail of bullets and shells, just keep walking, no weapons, not so much as a knife, just keep walking (sorry Johnny Walker). Many of my people left Palestine barefoot, and that is how we shall return. How can they stop such a human tide? Shoot us all, great they would give us our very own holocaust that we could wave in the face of the world in perpetuity!
Do it, shoot us all, or let us keep walking, back to the ruins of our villages and towns. Then, rather than be governed by the status quo, we would be the status quo that shall overwhelm the resources of the State of Israel and bring it to its knees. I wish we could retake our homes and our lands without killing a single Israeli, I truly have no ill feelings towards them, I let go of my anger a long time ago, I just want to go home, now that is a concept that even American movie producers can understand!
This Month continues to be a bitter sweet one for our family and our people; it marks our Nakba, our greatest defeat, but also our rallying point. May 1st marks Labor Day and the day my family broke off ties with the Maronite Church, also in May, the 21st of 2002 to be exact, was the day my father was killed in a road crash. He never got to go back or see his home again.
The first lesson in politics and in life: The secret to conquering your enemy is letting go of your anger, remember your loss but don’t let it overwhelm you and keep fighting, keep struggling.
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