–Analysis–
Shahar Mendelson revealed that his “friend in arms,” fellow soldier Harel Itach, kidnapped (rescued?) a baby girl from Gaza after he found her crying in a house he raided. Mendelson indicated that the baby’s family was killed in an airstrike, adding that Itach transferred the baby to a hospital in Israel before he died in combat.
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The child may be in a hospital that does not receive calls from her family. She does not wear a bracelet bearing her real name. They may have called her “Jaffa,” but she has yet to know her name. She may be given a new name in a new language that competes with her mother tongue, which Jaffa has not yet had the opportunity to learn. Jaffa may grow up without the two languages fighting in her mind, but rather speaking in Hebrew, which has become her “new” language.
If the child is not taken to live with a family, she will be raised in a synagogue where she will receive a strict Orthodox Jewish education. If she is adopted by a family, she may gain a new life. Thus, Jaffa moves between many lives, none of which she chose.
Rather, it is a life that was chosen for her and imposed on her — from the cry for help in the cradle after her family were killed by the Israeli army’s bombing. Her family was wiped from civil registry records, like more than 50 families in Gaza who faced the same fate.
Jaffa moved between showers of bullets and debris to a hospital that we know nothing about. Today, the little Jaffa is seized by those who seized the city of Jaffa. Is baby Jaffa a survivor? Will she remember who killed her family when she grows up?
Jaffa & Khaldoun
I think that Jaffa will become the feminine version of Khaldoun S., the main character in Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novel Returning to Haifa. She is the victim of a new Nakba, or catastrophe, as she was removed from her home and her family.
Jaffa, Khaldoun and other Palestinians are proof that Israel steals everything — even children, even life, literally and figuratively.
The little girl, Jaffa, will grow up within a life that was imposed on her. She was stolen/kidnapped/rescued from her cradle, to live in a house built on land that does not belong to the residents of the house. Perhaps the people with whom Jaffa grows up are Europeans, white and blond, who do not look like her. Will Jaffa not ask herself when she grows up: “Why don’t I resemble those who sing to me before bed?”
He rescued her from the clutches of death and life together
It could be that Itach’s conscience rested in his eternal life under a soil laden with violence, myths and colonialism. He “saved the life” of a little girl from a house that might soon become rubble, if it had not already become rubble.
What Itach doesn’t know is that he stole a life. He rescued her from the clutches of death and life together, gripping a future he did not live to witness. But he certainly witnessed a similar example of Palestinians whose “Palestinian citizenships” was stolen by Israel and turned into “Israelis.”
History, people, stories, and homes are taken away every day in front of the eyes of those who are not dead, but are prevented from living their own life.
Wasn’t Jaffa exposed to a genocide? Such genocide that is represented by the disintegration of the Palestinian people and the dissolution of their existence on their land so they migrate to other countries, or are forced to integrate into Israeli society, which rejects them more day by day.
What is life?
Is Jaffa really alive just because she breathes? Is she still Jaffa or has she turned into someone else? Is life measured only by being alive or by surviving?
Jaffa is not the only one. She is one of many Palestinians kidnapped by the Israeli army from the West Bank, Gaza, or other occupied territories. Among them were children who were stolen by the army under the pretext that they were blond, so they were thought to be hostages! Some of them had their childhood stolen, like the children who remained under the rubble, or lost a hand, a mother, or a sibling.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health demands the return of Jaffa.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health demands the return of Jaffa. It’s her fate. The occupation, or Itach, gave her a life which might lead her — in 18 years — to stand in front of another bed in a demolished house, witnessing another child screaming in her soft bed for a family that no longer exists. Her memory may fail her, and she may decide to take the baby and save her life.
The child-soldier may thank Itach before she goes to sleep every night, even though he dictated to her a full life that allowed her to see Palestine and live in it, even under occupation, and from behind walls imposed on those living outside.
When Kanafani wrote Returning to Haifa, he hoped that the Mandelbaum Gate, a former checkpoint that marked the divisions of different sectors of Jerusalem until 1967, would open from the other side.
In 1973 Kanafani died, and neither age nor occupation allowed him to see the fence besieging Gaza “open” from the direction from which it should be opened.
I imagine that Jaffa will grow up to read the novel Returning to Haifa in Hebrew, and find out the truth about her false rescue. She may insist on learning Arabic in order to read the novel, and repeat the tragic question whose echoes are present now:
“Oh, Jaffa, Do you know what homeland is?” It is for all of this not to happen.
