On a clear day, between the hills behind my teta and jiddo’s house in Amman, you can spot the fortified walls of Al Quds. Or so I’ve been told. In most corners east of the Jordan River, we look for scraps of Palestine in every recess of the rolling landscape. I’d like to say I’ve seen the Dome of the Rock glinting on the horizon but it’s probably just been the sun making its way down and out of our messy world.
Less than a two-hour drive, as the crow flies, lies my paternal grandparents’ home in Al-Khalil. But birds aren’t as beholden to things like gravity or obstacles of the ground. When we set out from my maternal grandparents’ house in Amman early one morning, the sun is a glimmering shadow, not fully formed, nor am I, age nine, fully awake.
As we snake towards the Jordan Valley, the terraced hills dotted with olive trees morph into rough cliffs of naked rock. Down we go, where the pressure is higher and atoms move faster, meaning more heat in the air. Almost in an instant, lush banana palm and blooming citrus trees explode all around us. We’re close to the riverbank now, and my parents shake my brother and I awake. Our car can’t take us any further so we join others like us, climbing a bus heading westward as the sun crawls up from the east.
*
What used to be one of many paths to Palestine is now the only means of entry and exit for its indigenous people, a narrow span connecting and separating. The bridge was named after First Viscount Edmund Allenby, who built a crossing atop the remains of another after he seized Jerusalem from the Ottomans in 1917. Over time, the river retreated like the Turks, reluctant to bear witness to the division of the land.
*
The trees have disappeared again, replaced by dust. As we approach a fence, our bus screeches to a stop. The driver’s assistant winds through the rows collecting documents and steps out with all of our identities. He inserts the thick, multicolored stack into a hole and seems to be negotiating with someone who must be on the other side of the concrete. Once the bus ahead of us crosses the fence, ours creaks closer. The assistant boards the bus again and hands each family their papers, records of the places we’d been displaced to, perspiration now lining his mustache. Time only flows when there’s friction, when you can see heat rising. You can count hours by the beads of sweat that accumulate on your upper lip. You can count centuries by the number of times Jerusalem has been an object of capture.
*
When Allenby was appointed as the head of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) in April 1917, he was given clear instructions from then Prime Minister Lloyd George to occupy Jerusalem before the coming Christmas. The Middle East had thus far played a minor role in the First World War but George had hoped that a victory there would boost public morale (and uncoincidentally, reinstall faith in his cabinet before elections). Jerusalem before Christmas was a big ask, especially since British troops stationed near Gaza had been defeated in two recent battles against Ottoman-German forces. Allenby set forth to the battlefield with Brits, Australasians, Indians as well as locals under his charge – the British had promised independence to Arabs uprising against the Ottoman Empire and many flocked to fight alongside the Allies.
*
The sun has grown since we left the house and I shield myself from its clingy embrace as we disembark the bus. My brother starts to dance to the rhythm of the rattling fence and squeak of turnstiles but I shush him, widening my eyes in the direction of the machine guns at eye level. Behind the concrete, a tanned man in camouflage parses through the pages of our passports before we’re searched.
“Farakh?”
My name sounds more guttural as it falls from his mouth, crashing into the dust. According to quantum mechanics, things can only be defined in relation to one another. Electrons don’t really exist unless they’re colliding with something else. As I approach the window, I search for his eyes but instead only find my reflection in his tinted sunglasses.
*
While deception had always been a feature of warfare, the emergence of radio communication, ciphers, and submarines created a new theater for subterfuge in the ‘Great War.’ Under Allenby’s command, false evidence of a grand strategy to lay siege to Gaza was planted, whereas in actuality the majority of British troops were stationed to sweep inland towards Beersheba, which was less protected, and whose road was a major artery through Palestine. Gaza, now intimately familiar with devastation, was first bombarded from land and air as a distraction. We don’t know how many women, children and men were killed but by Allied soldiers’ records, we know that the city was left a “mass of ruins, stark and silent;” “a place of desolation.”
*
My skin puckers against the hot, sticky seat after the security check. The bus hums as all the passengers trickle back in, makes melodies until the young man traveling by himself, who disappeared for a long time behind the concrete, finds his way back.
*
The ruse was successful and Allenby’s troops were able to plunge deeper into Palestine, overtaking the Al-Khalil-Jerusalem Road and leading the Ottomans to quickly scramble out of Al Quds. Its mayor was found alone outside the city’s gates, awaiting the arrival of the EEF, white flag in hand. After their surrender of Jerusalem, the Turks maintained that the loss of the holy city wasn’t significant to the fate of the Ottoman Empire, while its revolting subjects hailed the defeat as a step towards the creation of an independent, Arab state after centuries of Turkish rule. For the British, though, the conquest of Jerusalem brought closer the achievement of duplicitous dealings – the secret Sykes-Picot treaty between Britain and France, dividing the region amongst themselves.
*
The bus sputters deeper into the desertscape. My brother has fallen asleep with his head in my lap while I stare at the book in my hands but don’t actually make out the words on the page.
*
Before Allenby occupied Jerusalem, the British press was instructed not to refer to the “military operations … in any sense as a Holy War, a modern Crusade, or anything whatever to do with religious questions.” That instruction must have gotten lost in the dust on the way to Gaza from London. Upon the city’s surrender, then-General Allenby, an avid reader of the Bible, sent his troops a telegram, “Congratulations. Psalm 122, v. 2.”, and upon entering its holy gates, reportedly declared that “the wars of the crusades are now complete.” He wasn’t alone in that feeling: neither the British Empire’s media machine nor its churches could contain their enthusiasm about the Palestine Campaign, celebrations ringing all across London.
*
A mirage appears on the horizon. As we get closer, a biblical scene unfolds. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as one moves ‘forward’ in time, the entropy of a system can increase but not decrease. In other words, things tend toward chaos. By the time the bus clamors to a stop, the sun has reached its oppressive peak and people and flies as big as buttons buzz around the suitcases, rucksacks, televisions and boxes of provisions littering the floor of the hangar we now find ourselves in. Some bags have been split – fabric, rice and toys leaking out. Industrial-sized fans whir louder than helicopters and machine guns survey the scene as families identify and drag their belongings from one side of the hall to another to be tagged and searched.
*
Professor Hatem Bazian traces how the narrative of a crusade was incorporated into the support extended by the British government to the Zionist movement, starting with the 1917 Balfour Declaration – a plan to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Allenby tried to ban the circulation of the Declaration in Jerusalem, fearful of its impact on Britain’s alliance with the local population. It’s not clear how Allenby personally felt about the whole enterprise: he did approve a 1918 visit to Palestine by the Zionist Commission and became friendly with its leader, Chaim Weizmann, but was also sympathetic to the Arab fight for independence that led to the fall of the Ottomans. Allenby’s religiosity did, however, lend him to reflect on the history of the land he briefly ruled, marveling at the potentiality of prophets treading the same paths he was on in his diary. Professor Bazian has shown how “theological interpretations and attempts at recreating the biblical past” reflect a “right-wing Christian vision of the world” that sees the realization of the Zionist project as an essential step towards the Second Coming.
*
Families eventually gravitate to the other side of the hanger, to a terminal which is so vast it swallows our fellow passengers as we make our way through. My brother and I stick close to our parents as people line up all around us. The air conditioning numbs the senses and the multitudinous queues dampen our speed. Our passports are taken again and mama finds us seats to wait. Beyond the sound of shuffling people and papers, a baba’s name blares from behind a door in the corner of the terminal. My brother gets anxious when baba gets up to meet the mystery voice. I try to distract my brother by counting the number of pictures on the walls – Jerusalem, Haifa, Yaffa, Akka, the Dead Sea – places we hadn’t been to and would later find out we aren’t allowed to visit but he eventually became exacerbated. Einstein proved that time isn’t constant everywhere, that the greater the gravity, the slower the tick of the clock. It makes sense, then, that here, in the lowest valley on earth, the clock refuses to keep time.
*
First Viscount Allenby’s great great nephew attends a ceremony marking the centennial anniversary of his great great uncle’s conquest of Jerusalem, commemorating the commencement of Britain’s occupation of Palestine. In front of Bab Al-Khalil, a decorated actor atop a horse is surrounded by a throng of Arabs in orientalist dress, a trumpet sounding out jubilation as the great great nephew looks on. The local press describes the 2017 visit as “Allenby’s return.” When asked about the flow of time, of the changes to the city in the past century and of U.S. President Trump’s recent proclamation surrounding its status, Allenby – the great great nephew -punts. “It’s all about the 100th anniversary, and not what is happening now.”
*
Baba eventually exits the room alone, his crumpled clothes and the dismembered voice continuing to callout names the only evidence of time elapsing. We stand in line at a counter staffed by bored, middle aged women in regular clothes. I will one to look at me but she only flits her eyes away from her desk once, to compare the outline on the other side of the glass to a passport photo, a flat “Farakh?” croaking from pursed lips.
*
Upon his return to Britain and promotion to Viscount, Allenby became increasingly disillusioned with his role in the First World War. Instead of seeing his time in Palestine as his crowning achievement, he reflected on ‘those terrible years of ‘general insanity’’ that left society ‘mentally and morally ‘shaken.’’ Professor Justin Fantauzzo traces how the loss of Allenby’s only son on the Western Front just a few months before he crossed the threshold of Jaffa Gate, and the death of so many other friends and servicemen during the war, became more pronounced on his psyche after his retirement in England.
*
There’s a hole in the wall which seems to escape the stagnancy of the terminal. A scruffy old man sells beverages and snacks, his counter overflowing with abundance. There, the fragrance of Turkish coffee overpowers the smell of bleach and wisps of a drum beat emanate from a transistor radio. I don’t know whether he’s Arabi, or Jewish, or Arabi and Jewish. I don’t think it ever occurred to me to ask. He hands me and my brother bottles of rich chocolate milk that I will still dream of in adulthood. I don’t recognize the script on the packaging as being related to mine but Arabic and Hebrew share the same, Semitic root. When Hebrew was revived in the twentieth century, many words were ‘borrowed’ from Arabic.
*
Allenby’s brewed bitterness over war led him to favor more internationalist and pacifist policies over military conflict, and he advocated for the establishment of a “world police for world peace.” In 1936, concerned about the tension mounting again in Europe, so soon after the conclusion of the ‘war to end all wars,’ in whose trenches lay his son and so many others, he gave his last public address in which he warned about the gains of war as ‘Dead Sea fruit.’ He died two weeks later, a few years before war’s next, deadly harvest.
*
By the time we exit the terminal, the sky is rosy and the sun is nowhere to be found. We board another bus, and I recognize some faces from the morning, but they’re more animated, talking loudly and passing snacks to everyone onboard. My brother starts whining about how long it’s been and mama messes with his hair, laughs for the first time today. The bus lurches through the dust and baba asks the bus driver to drop us off at a corner, where my uncle suddenly appears. After we fish out our luggage and squeeze into his car, we finally creep out of the Jordan Valley. The only way is up. Aliyah means ascending in both Arabic and Hebrew. In biblical times it meant to go up a hill, often to Jerusalem, which our car now circles but cannot reach. To make aliyah in modern times is to migrate. To be granted rights in the land that birthed my forefathers which I am denied.
*
Not now, but ten years after Allenby – then-general – entered Jerusalem, the earth shuddered and cracked under the weight of its past, present and future. Over 400 people were killed in the Jericho Earthquake of 1927 and among other monuments, the bridge that he built, on top of the remains of a previous one, was destroyed. Allenby, who left Palestine after the first tremors of conflict between the indigenous population and immigrating Zionists, lived until after the bridge was erected again, only for it to be re-destroyed in 1946, this time by man. Not long after it was re-re-built, Allenby’s name was removed from the Jordanian side of the crossing. The bridge has been subject to several instances of wreckage and reconstruction since.
*
Carlo Rovelli explains how, in physics, time is not a fundamental concept, that the experience of its passage is merely a function of our superficial perception. How even seemingly solid things, like rocks or bridges or legacies, are merely happenings, a momentary coming together of dust.
