On the Hills of God

By Ibrahim Fawal, Black Belt Press, 1998, 444 pp. List: $27.95 AET: $21.95.

Reviewed by Michael S. Lee

The depth of feeling emanating from Ibrahim Fawal in this powerful work leaves the reader with so much to consider and react to long after the last page is turned that one cannot escape the realization that it is a truly stunning creation.

As the reader enters his life, 17-year-old Yousif Safi is in love: with his family, with a girl and with his native Palestine. The reader is transported to a culture where friends and family are to be savored and a land where the labels Muslim, Christian, and Jew are all superseded by the one overriding designation of Palestinian.

Yousif’s two best friends are Amin, a fun-loving Muslim, and Isaac, an introspective Jew. Yousif, a Christian, has grown up with both and thinks of them as brothers, as he is the only child of Dr. and Mrs. Jamil Safi, one of the most respected families in Ardallah, Palestine. The summer of 1947 in Ardallah is deceptively peaceful and normal. The coming upheaval of death and displacement is mercifully still several months in the future.

The first hint of trouble comes when the three friends observe a group of Western-looking young couples disembarking from an inter-city bus one Sunday afternoon. Amin surmises they are up to amorous activity and urges his friends to follow them. Yousif agrees, more out of suspicion concerning the motives of the group, who the three come to realize are Jews, than out of boyish fantasies.

As Yousif and his friends follow the visitors out of Ardallah and into the countryside, he realizes that they appear to be surveying the land. This sends shivers down his spine, as he is aware of the jockeying for control of territory by the Zionists in anticipation of the British withdrawal from Palestine in 1948.

This is the beginning of the end for the deliciously normal town of Ardallah and its people. But as war approaches, Yousif has begun tutoring the two younger brothers of Salwa, a girl his age for whom he has pined for years. He so treasures his encounters with her that the result, in the author’s words, is that “Salwa and Palestine completed the trinity of his soul.”

The most powerful aspect of On the Hills of God is Fawal’s skill in weaving the reader into the tapestry of Yousif’s family and life in Ardallah. The reader begins to empathize with the town’s people, making the book’s subsequent account of what happened to them that much more wrenching.

As war approaches the idyllic town, evil manifests itself. After an Ardallah resident is killed in a Zionist bombing attack in Jerusalem, life becomes frightening for Yousif’s Jewish friend Isaac and his family. Threats against Isaac’s father at the slain man’s funeral escalate into a gun attack on Isaac’s home, at which point Yousif’s father insists that Isaac’s family stay in the Safi home until things calm down.

But instead things get worse. Isaac’s father decides it is time to leave and the family disappears. Later, Yousif receives a letter from his friend saying they are in Tel Aviv. Yousif responds, but doesn’t see his friend again until after a horrifying incident in which townspeople capture a group of Zionists attempting to ambush buses on the highway outside of town. When their disguises are removed, everyone is shocked to discover that Isaac is among them. He pleads for his life, insisting that he was forced to go on the mission.

Yousif jumps onto the truck carrying the prisoners and desperately begs the crowd to spare his friend’s life, but to no avail. Yousif is devastated by his failure. His orderly world is irrevocably slipping away.

An especially moving aspect of the book is Yousif’s stubborn clinging to the ideals of brotherhood and reconciliation as chaos engulfs his town and country. Although he refuses to pick up a gun, he devotes himself to other ways to defend Palestine, chief among them his daily shuttling of food and medicine to his countrymen fighting the Zionists.

As it depicts the doomed struggle of the Palestinian villagers to defend their homes in 1947 and 1948, the book grows increasingly heartwrenching. Nevertheless, Yousif scores some triumphs of the spirit as he rapidly matures in the face of all that is collapsing around him.

The book gets its title from the musings of Yousif’s friend Jamal, a blind oud player who all his life had wanted to “write a symphony of these hills—the hills of God. I wanted to write about their glory and everlasting meaning. I wanted to write about the people who lived and still live on them.”

For readers too far removed in time or space to have comprehended at first-hand the nakba, or “catastrophe” that deprived the Palestinians of their homes, their lands, their rights and even human compassion, this is the book that will provide that understanding.

Michael S. Lee is the director of the AET Book Club.