Hope that his own descendants will carry on the family and community tradition of nurturing the pointless, destructive fantasy of reversing the shameful defeat of Arab Liberation Army forces in 1948.
Beirut, April 4 – A third-generation resident of the Ein-al-Hilweh Camp in southern Lebanon wants his children, grandchildren, and, if at all possible, his children’s grandchildren, to inherit the old iron key that he treasures as representative of his own ancestors’ long-gone home in what is now Israel and the futile dream of returning in triumph to a place neither he nor his progeny will ever see.
Najj Alhaf, 50, voiced the hope that his own descendants will carry on the family and community tradition of nurturing the pointless, destructive fantasy of reversing the shameful defeat of Arab Liberation Army forces in 1948 at the hands of the ragtag, undersupplied Haganah-cum-Israel Defense Force and the associated flight of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, some of whom took up residence here just inland from Sidon on the Mediterranean.
“My grandparents used to talk about pomegranate trees and some goats,” recalled Alhaf, who has grandchildren of his own. “As my parents retold it, those trees became orchards and the goats became a prosperous, bucolic dairy enterprise. When I regale the younger generations with our family lore, I must likewise embellish to keep them interested. So I’ve added cattle and a wheat farm to the mix. I expect my own children, if they choose to maintain this noble tradition, to supplement with other details my grandparents must have been too modest to mention themselves, such as ownership of a soccer team, or something. The details aren’t what’s important so much as the emotional resonance and sense of loss.”
Alhaf admitted he does not actually know whether the key ever unlocked the family home. “A bunch of families here have identical keys,” he acknowledged. “That does seem kind of pointless. Also I seem to remember many fewer such keys on display in the camp in my youth. They definitely proliferated more when the PLO took over the camp. People must have suddenly found their long-lost keys that all look the same.”
The dream of expelling the Jews, maybe massacring a few hundred thousand of them along the way, has not exactly faded, Alhaf observed, but it has taken a back seat to issues that have taken on more immediacy in the passing decades. “The younger generation doesn’t prioritize things as we did,” he lamented. “Fortunately, they have not only preserved, but taken to new levels, our ancient cultural tradition of violently fighting fellow Arabs over some perceived slight or potential reputational gain, often to the detriment of our community’s and society’s fabric and health. So we’ve still got that going for us.”
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