Then Mahmoud asks, “And what’s the worst? I mean the joke they really can’t stand.”

“When the settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire on the worshipers in the Sanctuary of Ibrahim in al-Khalil and killed twenty-nine of them, someone said a few days after the massacre, ‘There would have been more casualties if Baruch hadn’t fired at their heads.’”

I haven’t heard the joke before, even though the massacre at the Sanctuary of Ibrahim took place in 1994. I don’t laugh. There have been so many massacres that they’ve become material for their victims’ jokes. In this uneven conflict with the Occupation, which bears the most modern weapons of the age, the unarmed Palestinian hates to be an object of pity. He arms himself with laughter and irony, even at his own expense, and by making fun of his repeated tragedies under this seemingly endless Occupation. People no longer complain to one another about the prisons, the curfews, the repeated closures and invasions. I don’t know whether getting used to these atrocities is a weakness or a strength. If getting used to oppression is a sign of the slave, one confident of the justice of his cause may find in it a way of tamping down his anger and stoking the elements of a hidden strength. One sign of strength in the oppressed is the ability to mock the powerful, and an unspoken readiness to respond in time, however distant that time may be. While waiting, the oppressed exercise their senses to the full in their lust for life.

It would be a big lie to claim that the oppressed do nothing with their lives and in their lives but resist oppression.

The oppressed cling to any of life’s joys that may be granted them, no matter how small. They let no opportunity for love, good cheer, or the pleasures of the body or soul escape them.

The oppressed strive to fulfil desires both obscure and obvious, no matter how rarely the chances come and no matter how difficult they are to realize.

I was delighted by a truly lovely story related to me by a young poet I’d met on an earlier visit, at the Shorouk Bookstore in Ramallah. He told me how happy he’d been when the loudspeakers unexpectedly announced the Israeli army’s complete closure of the town and how grateful he was in his heart to the army because the closure and the curfew would oblige the girl whom he loved, a relative of his who was visiting his family, to spend the whole night in their house, without fear of reproach from her parents. The next day, when the curfew was lifted and the checkpoints opened, the village, of course, was delighted, while my lovesick friend was miserable.

I hope the man from al-Khalil doesn’t go on telling jokes. A funny remark generated spontaneously in the course of a conversation, being a sign of wit and quick mindedness, makes me laugh more than jokes that have been learned by heart. Fortunately he stops and doesn’t say another word for the rest of the journey.

The car climbs a slight slope and then returns to the level as it regains the paved road.

I think about starting a conversation with the sad young man next to me but quickly drop the idea.

Mahmoud the driver appears relaxed now that we’re on the smooth highway. He searches among the buttons on the car’s radio, switches it off, and picks up his cell phone.

“Fine. Fine. Thanks.”

He reduces speed without explanation.

He looks right and left before turning off the highway, dropping down into a field next to the road, and turning back the way he came.

The comfort of the asphalt has lasted only a few minutes.

He goes another short distance and then explains things to us: “We’ve just avoided a flying checkpoint. Why the long face, Hajj? ‘The hopes of the optimist are rewarded.’ ‘Every knot finds someone to untie it.’”

“It’s all in God’s hands, my son,” says the Hajj.

“Are you taking us back to Ramallah? My plane leaves tonight and if I miss it I’ll lose my scholarship and my whole chance of university,” says the young man sitting next to me in a polite voice as though speaking to himself, hoping to hear something reassuring.

The driver replies in a voice that is fatherly, despite their closeness in age. “I’ve never taken a passenger back where he came from, no matter what. I just need you to help if necessary. That’s all I ask of all of you. Don’t worry. Smile, Hajj. Lighten up. They want us paralyzed and terrified. They don’t realize we’ve got used to it. And you, my friend — your plane won’t go without you. I’ve never taken a passenger back. Put your faith in God and in me, everyone. Hopefully, everything’ll be fine.”

A few minutes later he leaves the fields again for an unpaved road.

I’m not familiar with these roads that Mahmoud is taking, and not just because my geographical memory has faded during the years of exile; the sad and now certain truth is that I no longer know the geography of my own land. However, the car is now traveling over open country and there’s no sign of paved roads, traffic lights, or human beings as far as the eye can see. It’s going across fields and I don’t know how this is going to get us to Jericho.

Puddles of water, stones, and wild plants, scattered through a fog that is starting gradually to lift. Everywhere you look, huge olive trees, uprooted and thrown over under the open sky like dishonored corpses. I think: these trees have been murdered, and this plain is their open collective grave. With each olive tree uprooted by the Israeli bulldozers, a family tree of Palestinian peasants falls from the wall. The olive in Palestine is not just agricultural property. It is people’s dignity, their news bulletin, the talk of their village guesthouses during evening gatherings, their central bank when profit and loss are reckoned, the star of their dining tables, the companion to every bite they eat. It’s the identity card that doesn’t need stamps or photos and whose validity doesn’t expire with the death of the owner but points to him, preserves his name, and blesses him anew with every grandchild and each season. The olive is the fruit itself (berries that may be any shade of green, any shade of black, or a shiny purplish color; that may be almond-shaped or oblong, oval or spherical) and it is recipes, processes, and tastes (semi-crushed, salted, semi-dried, scored, or stuffed with almonds or carrots or sweet red pepper). Olives are people’s social status and what they’re good at. The season of their harvest, in the magical autumn, transforms the men, women, and children of the village into bards, singers, and lyric poets whose rhythms turn the tiring work into a picnic and a collective joy. The olive is the pressed oil flowing from the enormous palm-fiber pressing mats, its puzzling color somewhere between shining green and dark gold. Of the virgin oil produced from the first picking they make each other their most eloquent gifts and in the jars set in rows in the courtyards of their houses they store their peace of mind as well as the indispensable basis of their daily meals. If anyone falls ill, the oil is his medicine, and if they rub their aches with it, the pain goes away (or rather it doesn’t, but they believe it does). From its waste, they manufacture soap in the courtyards of their houses and distribute it to the groceries — Shak‘a Soap, Tuqan Soap, Nabulsi Hasan Shaheen Soap, and others. From the wood produced by the annual pruning, they carve curios, lovely wooden models of mosques and churches, and crosses. With great skill they whittle pictures of the Last Supper, the Manger, and Christ’s birth, and statuettes of the Virgin Mary. They fashion arabesque work boxes of various sizes inlaid with mother-of-pearl from the Dead Sea, along with necklaces and rosaries, horses and camel caravans, and carve them to the smoothness, luster, and amazing hardness of ivory. From the crushed olive stones they extract smooth grindings that they use as a fuel for their stoves along with or instead of charcoal, and over whose silent fire they roast chestnuts during the ‘forty days’ of the bitterest cold, leaving the coffee pot to simmer gently, quietly, over its slow heat while outside the thunder mountains collapse, gather, and then collapse again, preceded by lightning at times hesitant, at times peremptory. Next to these stoves they exchange their sly humor, make fun of their cruel situation, practice their masterful skill at friendly backbiting, and, when the visits of relatives or neighbors bring a boy and a girl together in one house, exchange flirtatious glances that combine daring with shyness. For those who don’t like coffee, they bring the blue tea pot, and sage leaves with their intoxicating perfume of the mountains.