A Palestinian Memoir to Counter Trump’s Troubles in the Middle East
Yousef Bashir’s captivating “The Words of My Father” is full of youthful exuberance, unlikely adventures, and raw discovery.
Photograph by Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post / Getty
Yousef Bashir
is an unlikely peace-builder at one of the darkest times in the elusive
effort to end the conflict in the Middle East. He was eleven when the
second intifada erupted, in 2000, and the Israel Defense Forces took
over the family farm in Gaza. The property—rich with date and olive
trees, beehives for honey, and gardens of eggplants, hot peppers, and
tomatoes—had been in the family for at least three hundred years, and
Bashir’s father, Khalil, refused to move. “My father was as much in love
with his land as he was with my mother,” Bashir recalls in his
remarkable new memoir, “The Words of My Father.”
“And he loved both of them deeply.” During the next five years their
home was turned into a military post, with twenty to a hundred soldiers
occupying the second and third floors at any given time. “They smashed
holes through the upstairs walls to set up gun positions,” Bashir
writes. “They covered all the windows with camouflage netting and
installed automatic machine guns at each corner of the roof.”
The Bashirs, Yousef’s grandmother and the family’s eight children, slept in the living room. The I.D.F. soldiers allowed them to leave only during the day for work or school; they were locked in at night—and sometimes for days—as the cacophony of conflict played out around them. “We were now their prisoners,” Bashir recounts. “They acted as if they were in the most dangerous house on earth and were furious if we so much as sneezed or moved suddenly.” The family had to get permission to go to the bathroom, and an Israeli stood guard while they used the toilet; Bashir’s father, the headmaster of a local school, was not allowed to close the door. The family began keeping buckets in the living room, just in case.
Through it all, Khalil preached coexistence. “For how long will you be our guests?” he asked when the soldiers arrived. “Until this is over,” one soldier responded. Khalil took this as a good omen. “Until this is over means that it will be over someday, and they know it,” he told his son. Despite the humiliation, Khalil gracefully complied when the soldiers asked him to strip in front of his family after returning from work, to insure that he had no weapons. “I don’t attack, nor hate, nor plot,” Khalil told the soldiers, then added, “Nor do I lose my right to exist.” Journalists from around the world—the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, Newsweek, the Philadelphia Inquirer—descended on the farmhouse to chronicle Khalil’s peace advocacy. As a fearful child, however, the young Bashir was appalled.
Bashir’s epiphany came in an unexpected—and violent—way. In 2004, a week after he turned fifteen, Bashir returned from school to find three U.N. officials visiting his father. The Israelis, ensconced in a nearby tower, soon ordered the U.N. team to leave. As Bashir and his father walked the officials to their car, a single gunshot from an M-16 automatic rifle rang out. “I felt something knock me to the ground, like I was crumbling,” Bashir recounts. “I tried to get up but my legs would not move.” He was in searing pain—and paralyzed from the waist down. The bullet went so deep into his back that the doctors could see through to his spine. Bashir’s father urged Palestinians not to retaliate. “There is no time for anger,” Khalil said. Yousef was furious with his father, whom he blamed as much as the Israelis.
The boy’s life took an unexpected turn when, through his father’s connections, he was transferred to a medical facility in Israel. “All I knew about Israelis was that they had guns and had the power to tell me and my family when to use the bathroom and when to go to school, and that one of them had almost ended my life a few weeks earlier. Apparently, just because he could,” Bashir writes. When a group of Israeli military officers visited him at Tel HaShomer Hospital, in Tel Aviv, Khalil accepted their apology for his son’s condition. Yousef—in “merciless” pain from three bullet fragments still lodged in his spine—did not.
The cycle of surgeries and therapy went on for months. “Sometimes I would hold my legs and talk to them,” he writes. “I thought that if I did they might listen and get stronger. Sometimes my tears fell without my permission.” Israeli patients and their families offered encouragement. Jewish student volunteers came to play games. Hasidic groups even serenaded him with Passover songs. Time, in Yousef’s case, did heal. “In the midst of the pain,” he writes, “I became aware that a miracle was unfolding within me, not only in my body but also in my soul.” He particularly admired his nurse, Seema, an Iraqi Jew. He began to wonder “why everyone did not feel the love I was now feeling. I understood what my father meant when he said of the soldiers, ‘They are just children, forgive them.’ ”
That’s only half of Yousef Bashir’s book. The rest—full of youthful exuberance, unlikely adventures, and raw discovery—is just as captivating. Once he learned to walk again, he was determined to cross the social and political abyss. His journey has included a Seeds of Peace camp with Israeli kids in Maine, a Quaker school in the West Bank, a boarding school in heavily Mormon Utah, and a graduate degree in conflict and coexistence from Brandeis University. He won a Scoville Peace Fellowship and worked with Partnership for a Secure America on Capitol Hill. Last year, he was a congressional intern with the Virginia Democrat Gerald Connolly, who suggested that Bashir, who is now twenty-nine, may someday be President of the Palestinian people. While on the Hill, Bashir went with a group of Israeli students to meet Senator Bernie Sanders. “I told Bernie he was the most popular Jew in Gaza since Moses,” Yousef told me. Sanders laughed, and later hired him as an intern.
Along the way—and always in pain from the bullet fragments still in his back—Bashir has often been on the cusp of despair, and, since 2005, away from his family. His father died suddenly in 2009. Bashir never had a chance to say in person how the words of his father (thus the book’s title) redirected his life. He now works on congressional affairs for the Palestinian Authority’s mission in Washington.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump vowed to broker peace in the Middle East. “It’s something that, I think, is frankly maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years,” the President famously predicted. Instead, it appears ever more difficult.
U.S. diplomacy with the Palestinians, led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, ended after Trump recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and moved the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. This month, the Trump Administration cut humanitarian aid—totalling more than two hundred million dollars approved by Congress—to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. On Friday, the Trump Administration announced that it intends to cancel all U.S. funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which has overseen international aid to Palestinian refugees for decades, calling it an “irredeemably flawed operation.” The U.S. will also signal its rejection of the U.N. definition of a Palestinian refugee, a decision that would cap the number of recognized refugees at about half a million, which is about a tenth of the figure accepted and aided by the U.N. Like the U.S. decision on Jerusalem, the move could take another one of the most contested issues in the peace process off the table.
Polling over the past six months shows that support for a two-state solution—the premise of peace for a half century—has dropped to forty-three per cent among both Israelis and Palestinians. It is the lowest figure in two decades of joint surveys, according to an Israeli-Palestinian poll released in August by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, at Tel Aviv University, and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in Ramallah.
Bashir, who now spends his time lobbying for the Palestinians, speaking to Jewish groups, including AIPAC, and telling his story to anyone who will listen, hasn’t given up hope on peace, though he can occasionally sound forlorn. “I think I have finally understood Rumi when he wrote that there is no love greater than a love without a lover,” he writes, referring to the thirteenth-century Persian poet. “My commitment to peace has been such a love affair without a lover.” The book ends with its own peace offering: a letter to the anonymous shooter who disabled him. “Without your bullet, I might never have understood forgiveness,” Bashir writes. “You were created by the same God who created me. You have the same humanity as I have. You are part of the same family as I am. I forgive you, my cousin.”
The Bashirs, Yousef’s grandmother and the family’s eight children, slept in the living room. The I.D.F. soldiers allowed them to leave only during the day for work or school; they were locked in at night—and sometimes for days—as the cacophony of conflict played out around them. “We were now their prisoners,” Bashir recounts. “They acted as if they were in the most dangerous house on earth and were furious if we so much as sneezed or moved suddenly.” The family had to get permission to go to the bathroom, and an Israeli stood guard while they used the toilet; Bashir’s father, the headmaster of a local school, was not allowed to close the door. The family began keeping buckets in the living room, just in case.
Through it all, Khalil preached coexistence. “For how long will you be our guests?” he asked when the soldiers arrived. “Until this is over,” one soldier responded. Khalil took this as a good omen. “Until this is over means that it will be over someday, and they know it,” he told his son. Despite the humiliation, Khalil gracefully complied when the soldiers asked him to strip in front of his family after returning from work, to insure that he had no weapons. “I don’t attack, nor hate, nor plot,” Khalil told the soldiers, then added, “Nor do I lose my right to exist.” Journalists from around the world—the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, Newsweek, the Philadelphia Inquirer—descended on the farmhouse to chronicle Khalil’s peace advocacy. As a fearful child, however, the young Bashir was appalled.
Bashir’s epiphany came in an unexpected—and violent—way. In 2004, a week after he turned fifteen, Bashir returned from school to find three U.N. officials visiting his father. The Israelis, ensconced in a nearby tower, soon ordered the U.N. team to leave. As Bashir and his father walked the officials to their car, a single gunshot from an M-16 automatic rifle rang out. “I felt something knock me to the ground, like I was crumbling,” Bashir recounts. “I tried to get up but my legs would not move.” He was in searing pain—and paralyzed from the waist down. The bullet went so deep into his back that the doctors could see through to his spine. Bashir’s father urged Palestinians not to retaliate. “There is no time for anger,” Khalil said. Yousef was furious with his father, whom he blamed as much as the Israelis.
The boy’s life took an unexpected turn when, through his father’s connections, he was transferred to a medical facility in Israel. “All I knew about Israelis was that they had guns and had the power to tell me and my family when to use the bathroom and when to go to school, and that one of them had almost ended my life a few weeks earlier. Apparently, just because he could,” Bashir writes. When a group of Israeli military officers visited him at Tel HaShomer Hospital, in Tel Aviv, Khalil accepted their apology for his son’s condition. Yousef—in “merciless” pain from three bullet fragments still lodged in his spine—did not.
The cycle of surgeries and therapy went on for months. “Sometimes I would hold my legs and talk to them,” he writes. “I thought that if I did they might listen and get stronger. Sometimes my tears fell without my permission.” Israeli patients and their families offered encouragement. Jewish student volunteers came to play games. Hasidic groups even serenaded him with Passover songs. Time, in Yousef’s case, did heal. “In the midst of the pain,” he writes, “I became aware that a miracle was unfolding within me, not only in my body but also in my soul.” He particularly admired his nurse, Seema, an Iraqi Jew. He began to wonder “why everyone did not feel the love I was now feeling. I understood what my father meant when he said of the soldiers, ‘They are just children, forgive them.’ ”
That’s only half of Yousef Bashir’s book. The rest—full of youthful exuberance, unlikely adventures, and raw discovery—is just as captivating. Once he learned to walk again, he was determined to cross the social and political abyss. His journey has included a Seeds of Peace camp with Israeli kids in Maine, a Quaker school in the West Bank, a boarding school in heavily Mormon Utah, and a graduate degree in conflict and coexistence from Brandeis University. He won a Scoville Peace Fellowship and worked with Partnership for a Secure America on Capitol Hill. Last year, he was a congressional intern with the Virginia Democrat Gerald Connolly, who suggested that Bashir, who is now twenty-nine, may someday be President of the Palestinian people. While on the Hill, Bashir went with a group of Israeli students to meet Senator Bernie Sanders. “I told Bernie he was the most popular Jew in Gaza since Moses,” Yousef told me. Sanders laughed, and later hired him as an intern.
Along the way—and always in pain from the bullet fragments still in his back—Bashir has often been on the cusp of despair, and, since 2005, away from his family. His father died suddenly in 2009. Bashir never had a chance to say in person how the words of his father (thus the book’s title) redirected his life. He now works on congressional affairs for the Palestinian Authority’s mission in Washington.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump vowed to broker peace in the Middle East. “It’s something that, I think, is frankly maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years,” the President famously predicted. Instead, it appears ever more difficult.
U.S. diplomacy with the Palestinians, led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, ended after Trump recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and moved the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. This month, the Trump Administration cut humanitarian aid—totalling more than two hundred million dollars approved by Congress—to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. On Friday, the Trump Administration announced that it intends to cancel all U.S. funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which has overseen international aid to Palestinian refugees for decades, calling it an “irredeemably flawed operation.” The U.S. will also signal its rejection of the U.N. definition of a Palestinian refugee, a decision that would cap the number of recognized refugees at about half a million, which is about a tenth of the figure accepted and aided by the U.N. Like the U.S. decision on Jerusalem, the move could take another one of the most contested issues in the peace process off the table.
Polling over the past six months shows that support for a two-state solution—the premise of peace for a half century—has dropped to forty-three per cent among both Israelis and Palestinians. It is the lowest figure in two decades of joint surveys, according to an Israeli-Palestinian poll released in August by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, at Tel Aviv University, and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in Ramallah.
Bashir, who now spends his time lobbying for the Palestinians, speaking to Jewish groups, including AIPAC, and telling his story to anyone who will listen, hasn’t given up hope on peace, though he can occasionally sound forlorn. “I think I have finally understood Rumi when he wrote that there is no love greater than a love without a lover,” he writes, referring to the thirteenth-century Persian poet. “My commitment to peace has been such a love affair without a lover.” The book ends with its own peace offering: a letter to the anonymous shooter who disabled him. “Without your bullet, I might never have understood forgiveness,” Bashir writes. “You were created by the same God who created me. You have the same humanity as I have. You are part of the same family as I am. I forgive you, my cousin.”
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