By Mona Anis How often have I borrowed the same, admittedly tired, title from the opening lines of T S Eliot's The Waste Land for a title? Yet once again, and as April draws to a close, I find myself resurrecting from memory those lines by Eliot, where he describes the present month as the cruellest, "breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain." Memory is after all a reconstruction of the past, most often for purposes of the present: a confrontation between past and present; but while such juxtaposition is the mechanism by which it operates, memory is itself a tool that allows history to animate current actions. This mixing of past and present, of the dead with the living, of dull roots and spring rain, and the many possibilities this process opens up, is perhaps why, of the entire year, April does seem the cruellest month. As I write this column on Easter Sunday (24 April), I am moved by the image of Jesus rising from the dead, having previously walked down the Via Doloroso on the way to his crucifixion, and carrying the cross. Christian history offers the solace of resurrection; of Easter Sunday coming after Good Friday. Modern Arab history does not boast as much: far too many good Fridays and very few Easters to balance them out. And in modern times Palestine, the land where Jesus was born, crucified and resurrected, remains the heartland of Arab tragedy. On 9 April 1948, few weeks before the proclamation of the state of Israel on occupied Palestinian land, thousands of Arab men assembled at Al-Aqsa Mosque to honour their charismatic leader, Abdel-Qadir Al-Husseini, who had been shot dead the day before while fighting Jewish gangs. As the men prayed over the body of their dead commander, large-scale carnage was unfolding barely three miles from the spot where he died -- the massacre of 254 Arab civilians at the village of Deir Yassin. At the beginning of April, the Haganah had launched Plan Dalet, seeking first to occupy and demolish villages along the Jerusalem road and, later, to occupy major towns that would become part of the state of Israel. Raji Sahioun, describing the atmosphere in Jerusalem during Al-Husseini's funeral, recounts that "sitting in my flat in Upper Baqa [West Jerusalem], surrounded by petrified friends, we could hear bullets, explosives, automatic rifles, machine guns. It was as if everyone had gone mad. The Arabs were firing in the air in honour of Al-Husseini, and the Jews were also firing in the air, some of them to terrorise the Arabs, others in jubilation and spiteful glee at the death of the hero who had instilled more terror in their hearts than all the Arab armies combined. The Irgun Zvai Leumi seized this opportunity -- the absence of most men from all the neighbouring villages of Jerusalem -- to commit their crime against the old, women and children of Deir Yassin." It was also in April that one of the most horrendous terrorist attacks on a sovereign state ever took place. On 10 April 1973, shortly after midnight, 16 Israeli soldiers slipped ashore in Beirut for an operation that was codenamed Spring of Youth. They were charged with assassinating three of the PLO's top leaders: Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser and Mohammed Yousef Al-Najjar (Abu Yousef), in their homes in downtown Beirut. Leading the attack were two women: a blonde and a brunette. The brunette was Ehud Barak, Israel's present defense minister, in female disguise. The soldiers divided themselves into three groups, and 30 minutes later the three PLO leaders had been murdered. The Israelis then returned to the beach and boarded a boat back. Two years later, a busload of Palestinian civilians returning to the Sabra refugee camp from a political rally commemorating the second anniversary of the deaths of the three leaders was attacked by Israel's allies in Lebanon, the Phalangists, who killed 27 and wounded 19. This massacre, called Ain el-Rammaneh, marks the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. It took Lebanon 15 long years, an estimated 250,000 people dead and over a million injured before the war eventually drew to an end. On 9 April 2003, US armoured vehicles rolled into central Baghdad, helping supposedly jubilant Iraqis to topple a huge statue of the country's president, Saddam Hussein. For months the scene remained the ultimate camera moment, capturing the fall of a criminal dictator, but also the start of an equally criminal military occupation. Eight years later, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died, three million or more have been displaced; Iraq's economy is ruined, and the country's social fabric has been torn apart. Contrasting these many past Aprils with the present one, I can find ample reason for hope in my country and elsewhere in the Arab world. As I write, I am listening to Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, giving his Easter Homily at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. "In the Arab world around us," he is saying, "an entire generation of young people has shaken the dust off their distressing condition... We join our voices with theirs in singing Alleluia for victory." Alleluia for victory? I wish I had the Patriarch's religious faith. Rather than victory, at this moment, my thoughts are with the vanquished, the flowing crowd of the dead and those undone by death; I wonder if there will be room for them at victory's final rendez-vous.
