“Not in my name” – Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
I wish for us the ability to stand in that magical place in Jerusalem where Jewish prayers, Muslim prayers, and Christian prayers can all be heard at the same time. Together, not apart.
Saturday night, I read Amir Tibon’s gripping story in The Atlantic, How My Family Survived the October 7 Massacre (gift article, no paywall). I could not sleep after reading that account. I knew I had to write something. But what? What could I say that hasn’t been said thousands of times over the past 365 days? And written more eloquently than I could ever write about that awful day when Hamas slaughtered Jews, Muslims, Israelis, Americans, in the name of perverted religion and terrorism?
Then Sunday on LinkedIn, I read equally gripping words by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. “Not in my name,” he said. A Gazan, an American citizen, he puts that day in perspective. I am copy-pasting his strong text at the end of this post.
Every once in a while, we all get those neighbors that drive us a little nuts. My first really nice apartment in Houston, my downstairs neighbor was a party animal. He’d turn his stereo up full blast – at 3 o’clock in the morning. While he lived downstairs, I had cockroaches in that Houston dwelling worse than in any other residence.
I complained to property managers. They checked out his apartment (pest control was part of our rent) and found he had been dumping his trash in his dining room, instead of taking it to the dumpster. Half-eaten cartons of ice cream, empty pizza boxes, a cockroach’s delight.
They evicted him pretty quickly.
Before long, I got a new neighbor. It was odd when he moved in. Just a few suitcases and boxes of pots and pans, still new. Good-looking guy. Modest demeanor. Things were looking up.
My very first Saturday with Mike as my neighbor, I was awakened at 7 a.m. by loud, loud, loud pounding. Start-stop, start-stop. Pound, pound, pound. I banged on the floor, and in about thirty seconds, there was a knock at my door. It was Mike, apologizing, me still in my pajamas, him with a hammer in his hand.
You see, he was building all the furniture for his apartment. Everything. Sofa, coffee table, dining room table, chairs, bed. Sleeping on the floor, in an empty apartment.
Mike agreed not to start building furniture until 10 a.m. I am not a morning person.
Occasionally there would be a knock at my door. “I just made tabouleh and chicken. You want to join me?” Sometimes he would come upstairs for supper, for my mom’s recipe for lasagna or chicken burritos. Slowly but surely, we exchanged life stories.
He was from Beirut, born and raised there. He was valedictorian at the American high school in that city. After graduation, he spent two years working with the Red Cross, “picking up limbs of bodies that had been blown apart by bombs.” Because these were the 1980s. Mike graduated high school just as Syria invaded Lebanon, what we mistakenly refer to as the Lebanese civil war.
First time I called it that, he gently corrected me. I’d thought I was up to date on current events. I think that was my aha moment, understanding just how slanted our own news coverage can be. I’d gotten a taste of that with all my years going back and forth to Germany. This was a whole other level of “slant.”
Mike’s dad had owned the main Lebanese radio-TV-film studio, with repping Agfa in the Middle East as his primary source of income. Syrians initiated the “civil war” by taking out his dad’s studio, forcing western reporters to send their news feed through Damascus. You can only imagine how fair and balanced Damascus was, in the reporting Syria allowed our three major networks to broadcast.
The family was Maronite – basically Catholics who do not recognize the pope – in a city that had been called the “Paris of the Middle East.” After Mike had served with the Red Cross for two years, his dad encouraged him to get out of Lebanon, to study in the USA. Hizbullah had recently organized, and Mike’s dad realized that things would get worse before they got better. Mike was accepted into the engineering program at Oklahoma State University.
Since he’d not had access to advance placement tests, he had to sit for those tests once he arrived in Stillwater. Most, including English language proficiency exams, were easy for him. Have I mentioned that Mike is smart? The engineering department required proof of ability to program (Basic, Cobol, or Fortran at that time). But they did not specify which programming language. Just presented a foundational engineering problem and asked incoming students to write a program that solved it.
Mike had a Hewlett Packard HP-16C programmable calculator. So: He solved the engineering problem using it.
OSU’s engineering chair thought Mike was making fun of him, not realizing that the programming languages he believed Mike should infer were as yet unknown in Lebanon. Because, well, war. That department chair held Mike to a high standard, making his life miserable, but ensuring he knew his stuff. He graduated with a BS in engineering, magna cum laude, earning his MS the following year.
When I met him, he had just relocated to Houston and accepted a job with Shell Oil Company. Making more money than he’d ever dreamed possible. But never forgetting that his family back in Beirut had less than nothing. Most of his paycheck went to their survival.
Shell paid for his work permit and eventually green card, so Mike used his savings to pay for work permit and green card applications for his two sisters. $15,000 each in 1980s money. About $50,000 each in today’s currency. Most of that went to lawyers. (We’ve needed immigration reform for a very long time.)
Our conversations centered on how worried he was about his family, what was happening in and to Lebanon, this terrorist organization called Hizbullah that had emerged from Palestinians to whom Lebanon had granted refuge. People like
can speak far more coherently than I to the religious divisions in Lebanon before, during, and after Hizbullah’s emergence. It had never been perfectly calm, but Muslims and Maronites lived together with a shaky and viable peace. Not after Hizbullah.Mike came home one day, visibly upset by a coworker at Shell. The fellow was Pentecostal. He would come into Mike’s office, Bible in hand, and tell Mike he had to convert to Pentecostalism or else he was going to hell. Mike had been keeping his cool, but one day, the guy went too far. Mike told Mr. Pentecostal that the first time he was stopped at a roadblock and asked “Christian or Muslim” by someone not wearing a uniform, and he answered “Christian” not knowing if that answer meant his head would be blown off, then and only then could Mr. Pentecostal talk to him about the definition of Christian.
Mike was not particularly religious. Live and let live, that was his creed. His sisters were fairly devout, and once they landed in Houston, they sought out a Maronite congregation.
One of them found her faith shaken beyond recovery, when she received news from home. Her family wrote her that sixty of her friends had been together in church in a small town north of Beirut. Hizbullah bombed the church. All sixty of her friends were murdered.
She never attended church again.
Mike’s dad, Abu Rim, visited him in Houston for three glorious weeks. I think I mentioned that Mike was good-looking. Well, let’s say that’s an understatement.
Abu Rim was ecstatic that Mike and I were friends. Yet, one day looking across the lovely park area (we had lucked into the best location in this complex, me upstairs, him downstairs), Abu Rim noticed a couple dozen people eating supper alone. “That is a crime! Why are you Americans like this? This is a town square! Micha, go invite everyone to dinner. Tell them, standing invitation!”
For three weeks, Abu Rim, Micha, and I cooked for the complex. The first night, maybe ten or fifteen young women were flirting with Mike in his living room while Abu Rim and I prepared tabouleh, hummus, and chicken. Abu Rim: “Denise, you are the slowest tomato chopper I have ever met! Can’t you chop tomatoes faster?” – Me: “Abu Rim, who do you see helping you? All the pretty young girls flirting with your son? Nope, you’re stuck with me!” Abu Rim loved that I talked back to him.
Abu Rim told us more about what had been going in in Lebanon, specifically in Beirut, in the years that Mike had been in the USA. They rarely had electricity or running water. Many houses had been destroyed. Theirs was still standing, “for how long?” Mike wanted his parents to join him and his siblings in Houston, but they could not. Especially “Mom” was tied to her roots.
We talked about Israel, about the escalation that seemed to worsen by the hour in 1988-1989. I was surprised to learn that Mike and Abu Rim supported Israel’s incursions. Abu Rim: “There’s not a Jew alive who supports Israel more than I do. They are defending their country. If Israel falls, there is no hope for the Middle East.”
The two of them often talked about the Hizbullah-Palestinian issue. Remember, this was still the 1980s. They had been fully supportive of allowing Palestinians to take refuge from Syrian oppression in Lebanon at the end of the 1970s, early 1980s. “We let the camel put his nose under the tent door,” they said. Because yes, Syria had been oppressing Palestinians, just as Syria oppressed and oppresses its own people in 2024. It had seemed to be the humanitarian thing to do, letting Palestinian refugees settle in Lebanon.
But along with legitimate refugees, militias and terrorists infiltrated Lebanon as well. It had become impossible to differentiate between the newly-formed Hizbullah militias and Palestinian civilians. The dividing line was invisible.
Syria had used Palestinian militias organized as Hizbullah to attack Lebanon, framing the conflict as Christian versus Muslim, when according to Abu Rim and Mike, it was one sovereign country attacking another sovereign country. Using as pretext the defense of Muslim militias, redefining the whole as civil war.
After Abu Rim returned to Beirut, Mike saved up to buy a professional grade movie camera. At great personal risk, he visited his family, traveling via Cypress and back roads known to natives. He filmed Syrian soldiers firing on civilians, Hizbullah attacking civilians, random murder of Lebanese civilians, scenes from the nightmare his family was living, scenes that proved Syria was the aggressor and Hizbullah their minions. (They also suspected Iranian involvement.)
When Mike was back in the USA, he contacted all three news networks and told them of his raw, unedited footage. He also contacted Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense for George H.W. Bush. None of the networks would view his footage. Cheney ignored him. I have to assume that Cheney, Bush, et al knew of Syrian involvement. They must have had another agenda.
Mike joined a Lebanese-American group in Houston that advocated on behalf of their homeland in DC. Houstonians reading this: The Jamail family, of the eponymous grocery stores, spearheaded and funded this association. They tried to get Mike’s footage seen, if nothing else by Houston news stations. No one would even agree to view it, much less air it.
At one of those meetings, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the association had scheduled a strategy session. Mike had the flu and asked me to attend in his stead. “Just take notes, you don’t have to say anything.” I gladly did so. I had sat with Mike and watched hours and hours and hours of that footage. Graphic, disturbing, and yes, it proved his point.
I’ll never forget one of the statements made by those Lebanese-Americans. “Two months ago, we never thought the Berlin Wall would come down. But it did. If that could happen, there is hope for Lebanon.”
In the late 1990s, Mike and his two sisters succumbed to the call of their homeland and returned. Lebanon at the time enjoyed a shaky peace. They had simply never been able to put down roots in Houston. Mike’s mom sewed me a traditional Lebanese gown, which I still have and treasure. And Mike wrote that he had married, and his sisters would be marrying soon. They wanted to start families, contribute to the future of Lebanon, be part of whatever that future looked like. Dangerous or not.
Shortly after they returned to Lebanon, I took a Chai (18-day) trip to Israel, November-December 1998. It was a solo tour. I spent ten days in Jerusalem, adopted by a lovely and loving family from Florida who shared every meal and adventure with me my entire time in that city. With them, we rated a special tour in Tel Aviv, where we sat in David Ben-Gurion’s chair, where he formally proclaimed Israeli Independence on May 14, 1948. I took a taxi up to Hebrew University and walked through East Jerusalem to Har Ha-Zeitim (Mount of Olives), then down from that place where both Christians and Jews await the Moshiach – Jews for the first time, Christians for the second – down to the Western Wall.
I stood in that magical place where one can hear Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prayers simultaneously, where if you close your eyes, you can imagine all three are praying together, not separately.
I rented a beat-up car with cell phone, and drove from Jerusalem to Masada near the Dead Sea. Explored that place where death, where suicide, was preferable to enslavement by Romans. As I was driving away, “my” family was driving up. I circled back to hug their necks one more time. They had an armed driver, who presumed I meant the family harm. The driver exited their vehicle with weapon drawn. Until the matriarch of the family said, “Oh, it’s our Denise!” And hugs ensued.
I slept on a narrow bed at Kibbutz Ein Gedi, the same narrow beds where refugees had slept in the early days, refugees from European genocide who brought food to a desert. I drove from Ein Gedi up through the West Bank, stopping at Kibbutz Gesher (bridge), so named because three bridges intersected there in days of peace: An old Byzantine stone bridge; an Ottoman railroad bridge that connected Haifa to Damascus (the Hejaz railway); and a British mandate bridge between Haifa and Baghdad.
This land had been purchased – deeds according to British, Ottoman, and local laws – in 1939 and had also been peopled by refugees fleeing Germany. There’s still a small contingent in that perilous place. The woman who gave me a tour hailed from San Francisco. Her husband is a sabra, born in Israel. She said she prays daily for the reopening of all three bridges. That will mean there is peace.
From there, I drove along the shores of Kinneret (also known as Lake of Tiberias or Sea of Galilee), to Kibbutz Kfar Blum. That kibbutz farms cotton. It too was settled by refugees from Germany and Austria. I met 80+-year-old Stefani, who was relieved she could talk German with me. She’s lost her English as she ages and has reverted to her childhood Austrian dialect.
Stefani told of the early years – this kibbutz also was purchased and held deeds according to British, Ottoman, and local laws – when the British had abandoned the rocky, unforgiving property. Young then, Stefani and her new husband, along with friends, cleared boulders and rocks, one at a time, sleeping on the ground, no tents or shelter for the longest time. “We ate treif (food that is not kosher),” she laughed. “We figured it was better to live than to keep kosher.”
In 1998, she and other residents of the kibbutz worried about its future. It’s uncomfortably close to Israel’s northern border. You quickly learn where the bomb shelters are, just in case. I learned that the Hizbullah bombings in 1998 had slowed to only a few barrages every few weeks, not daily, as had been the case. Sure enough, as soon as I was back in the USA, Kfar Blum and the nearby town of Kiryat Shmona were bombed. I had just driven down that road.
From Kfar Blum, I went to Z’fat – home of Jewish mysticism, art, and breathtaking views. I ate an Elvis burger (kosher!) and soaked in inexplicable vibes of a place unlike any other. The next day, I drove up the Golan Heights to the northern town of Mas’ade, pronounced like Masada, but not even remotely like its southern twin. Mas’ade is a Syrian-Druze community, Israelis one and all, neither Muslim nor Jewish. But Israeli citizens.
On the way back to Kfar Blum, I made a point of detouring to Metullah, the border between Israel and Lebanon. The people in that town deserve far more credit than they receive for their Herculean efforts at peace. That border is porous. Yes, it’s a flash-point. Yes, it’s probably the scariest place in Israel to live, well, at least it was until last year on October 7, when Nahal Oz and other points near the Gazan border replaced it as scariest.
As the residents of Nahal Oz had done, Metullah served as a place where Israeli doctors walk across the border into Lebanon to help those who are sick or injured. That’s all paused now, effective September 30, 2024, after the town became a closed military area. But as Metullah has done through the past five decades, once a shaky peace has been reinstated, doctors and aid workers will return to that little town that looks so much like Bavaria, it’s not even funny, with its white plastered, red roofed homes, geraniums in window boxes, and Zimmer Frei signs on random homes. The 1700 or so souls there won’t stop until there is peace.
During my Chai trip, I went to that border and looked northward. It was quiet, and would be for the next two weeks, until Hizbullah once again rained bombs in December 1998. I looked northward, towards Beirut, and wished peace for all of us. For Abu Rim. For Mike and his bride. For Grace, for Suzan, for Mom, for the families they have had in the meantime.
For Dan and Wendy. For R’Iser. For “my” Jerusalem family, the Cantors. For R’Grawesky, my Sephardic Moses who taught me so much. For Jennifer and Evan. For Ahmed. For Syrian-Druze, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, secular, atheist, and “still figuring it all out.”
Most of all, I wish the families and friends of those slaughtered on October 7, 2023 in the name of perverse religious fanaticism, in the name of terror, peace among tears, comfort knowing that there are people across the globe thinking about you, singing a vocal Mi-Sh’Berach for all of you, for healing, for r’fuah sh’leimah, renewal of body and spirit. You are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone.
I wish for us all the ability to stand in that magical place where Jewish prayers, Muslim prayers, Christian prayers can all be heard at the same time. Only the next time I stand in that place, I wish that we are together, not apart.
On the eve of the one-year mark since the October 7 massacre, I urge all who claim to care about Palestinians in Gaza and beyond to remember what this dark day represents for the Israeli and Jewish people. Please understand that 10/7 was an exceptionally painful day in which over 1,000 were criminally murdered and maimed; children, women, and bystanders were randomly killed, kidnapped, abused, and taken hostage; remember the trauma that this unjustified terror act has brought upon the Jewish people, making it the worst single-day attack since the Holocaust.
Do not celebrate Hamas, the despicable terror organization that has destroyed Gaza, held its people hostage, and delivered them on a silver platter to the most extremist government in Israel’s history. Do not taunt the Jewish people or boast about the supposed act of resistance, which October 7 was not. Do not harass people who are commemorating the tragedy and its victims. Please be mindful and respectful.
Be as outraged and horrified as you want to be about Gaza and the unbelievable death and destruction there. But give Israelis and Jews the space to remember their lost loved ones. The two traumas do not have to cancel each other out; they are, in fact, intertwined, and only this recognition can help us move forward.
Gaza is central to my being, identity, lived experience, and connection to the land. I care deeply about ending the war and being part of the Strip’s transformation. But that would never mean denying the horrors that Hamas and other terrorists committed on October 7.
Not in my name.
I stand with my Jewish brothers, sisters, and allies in remembering those who lost their lives on that fateful day, and pledge to always be a partner in pursuit of healing, reconciliation, justice, freedom, safety, security, and dignity for all.
– Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. © 2024 Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
© 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. Please message me for permission to quote.
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Every word, every image- what you have given us here is a blessing -bracha - for us and the world. Toda raba.
Thank you for every word in this post.