Word: omar
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Forty years on, Omar is entering middle age, and so is Palestinian nationalism. Omar is a butcher, with sinewy forearms, a black mustache and sad, dark eyes. He buys his meat from Jews and counts several of them as his friends. "They live in Haifa, and I was worried about them during the war last summer when the Hizballah rockets were falling," he says. "I told them that they could stay with us!" Omar likes the novel idea of his Jewish buddies taking shelter inside a Palestinian refugee camp, and I ask him if Jews and Palestinians are so different...
Arabs enjoy rhyming puns, and the word for the 1948 creation of Israel--nakba, meaning disaster--is only a consonant away from their word for disappointment, naksa. That is how, with crushing understatement, Arabs describe the losses of the Six-Day War. For Omar and most other Palestinians, the two words are often interchangeable, and it was no surprise that when I visited Jalazon recently, they were commemorating the nakba and the naksa rolled into one. Indeed, when I press Omar to talk about the war he was born into, his thoughts leap to 1948, as though one event were...
...Omar's childhood coincided with the rise of the Palestinian resistance. After the Six-Day War, the Palestinians lost faith in the ability of other Arab states to seize back the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Instead, they pinned their hopes on an Egyptian-educated former civil engineer, Yasser Arafat, whose Fatah organization began carrying out raids inside the conquered territories and later committed atrocious acts of terrorism. Like other boys in the camp, Omar would listen to TV news from Jordan and Syria about their heroes--Arafat and his Palestinian fighters. They dreamed that one day Arafat would...
...Arafat and his colleagues, exiled in distant lands, were losing touch with the Palestinian reality. By 1987 Omar and thousands of youths like him had grown impatient waiting for their saviors and launched their own uprising against the Israelis. The spark for the intifadeh, as it became known, was a Gaza traffic accident in which an Israeli driver killed several Palestinian laborers. Revolt spread all over the Palestinian territories, including Jalazon. "We burned tires in the road and threw stones," recalls Omar's friend Ismaeen, who wears a muscle shirt and has the dark, heavy-lidded eyes of an Egyptian...
...Omar was one of 700 Palestinian youths from Jalazon rounded up during the first intifadeh. (At the worst of that struggle, which ran from 1987 to 1993, Israeli troops sealed off Jalazon for 45 days, cutting off electricity and shooting holes in water cisterns.) When he was released, Omar was swept right back into the violence. One day, he remembers, he was throwing rocks at Israeli solders: "I was shot in the hand. My friend next to me was hit in the chest. He died, and I survived. It could have been...