The Parisian

lacuna

Haj Taher Kamal was a merchant because his father had been a merchant, and his father before him. Merchants were the glue that bound Nablus to the surrounding villages: for the village people they functioned as credit lines, patrons, employers, even friends; for the city dwellers they were both harbingers of novelty and pillars of tradition, and wh

Marcelin Albert

Bosphorus

crags

Then came victory in the Hejaz, and finally, the Ottoman Empire fell. Emir Faisal came to Paris for the Peace Conference, and what had been speculation, mere banter in high rooms off a boulevard, now these questions of nation or not were on the very threshold, and the blissful years of exile and indeterminacy were coming to an end.

We are never without death, in life. You could argue we exist in a constant state of dying, like a flame, unstable, decaying. And what is sickness, therefore? Sickness is a part of life. We talk of life as renewal, but really it is decay. The fight against decay, sometimes, but decay nonetheless.”

He had fallen so easily into the compromise available in Paris, this type, by an embrace of otherness that at first he had admired in Faruq but which now appeared in his mind a skewed, performed version of what it was really like to be in a place but not of it, not to know it truly.

The truth was that very few of the men sitting in Sheikh Qassem that day had ever met a European Jew. The Yishuv settlements were mostly quite far from Jabal Nablus, and as a result their only conception of European Jewish men and women was based on those devout incumbents of Jerusalem who were not even Zionists, and on the Samaritan Nabulsis, who