I appreciate your interest in me and my late father. It's very thoughtful of you to approach me on the pretext of publishing the most famous red lentil soup recipe on the internet in a book by a well-known journalist. The technique of flattering your subject is usually effective, and certainly worked on me for a time, although I had suspicions. However, in reviewing our interaction, I must share with you some points for your information, and for the amusement of my readers:
1) If you are going to send a researcher to interview me about food and cooking, she should know something about food and cooking.
2) If you want to know about me or my late father, you only have to read my blog, or google me, or google him. Everything your researcher asked me is available somewhere on the internet, for free. But she was not the brightest bulb in the hardware store so I guess she would not have been able to find much on her own. Review the transcript of our phone conversation to see if you can discover all the clues she dropped that she is not an American and was not raised in this country. I don't care to help you do your job so I won't tell you, although as a gossip, a cynic, and a show-off, I'm tempted.
3) Everything you asked me about, I answered freely and openly, suspecting that it was you. Do you think I care if you collect information about my father, his faculty positions, his history in this country? He is dead. I have advanced breast cancer. We have nothing to hide and nothing to fear.
4) Please go back and revise your old records from the 1970s. An informer told my father that you (or your American agents) listed him as a member of the PLO. Perhaps his answer got back to you: my father said he would have been proud to be invited to join the PLO back in the 70s, but as a Lebanese, he did not qualify for membership.
5) If you were being so obvious in your surveillance because you are trying to frighten me into silence, well, please write this down in your book:
Palestine will be free, from the Jordan to the sea. You will live in one state with your Arab neighbors, they will have the vote as you do, you will have to share our land. You are one of us, you are no better than we are and no worse. It may not happen in your lifetime but your children or your grandchildren will live in free Palestine, Semites among Semites. Or they will go back to wherever they came from.
I am a middle-aged woman with no job and a serious disease. You can't really do anything to me and I do not fear you. I am a nobody. I have no connections, I am not a secret organizer of anything. Everything I do is available here on the internet.
All I do is advocate for the simple rule of law. Obey the Geneva Conventions. Obey U.N. resolutions. Respect the rule of law. Negotiate. Eschew violence.
I know such ideas frighten you when applied to your military apparatus. As long as the internet exists in this form, you will not be able to clamp down on everyone like me, all of us nobodies speaking up, passing information around.
In conclusion, dear Mossad: Your day is done. You are dinosaurs. Your intelligence failed you in South Lebanon and it is failing you now. You are looking for facts about your opponents and you are avoiding the reality in front of you. Your methods and that of your military and politicians will lead to the destruction of your system. Don't worry, states have fallen before in your place, and new states always arise. The Jews will never be exterminated. Neither will the Palestinians.
I only pray that what replaces you will be better than you are.
Sincerely,
Leila Elias Abu-Saba
Daughter of Elias Georges and Mary Edith Bentley Abu-Saba
Granddaughter of Floyd Thomas Bentley and Georges Assaf Abu-Saba
Great-granddaughter of Samuel Earnest Bayne, William Jackson Bentley, Assaf Saba, and Nicola Saikaly
I heard the tears rolling down your face. Stay well, Leila.
Live in the only place available to live: here and now. Spend time each day, if possible, interacting with your children - in an activity of their liking. The conversation(s) rooted in activity will be remembered. Give your children emotional sustenance they can access for the rest of their lives. They will be searching for these clues someday. Please take your experiences as a mother, writer, activist, and lover of all things having to do with Elias', homeland to another level. You are everywoman, not every Arab-American woman.
MZ
p.s. I am not from Mossad.
Posted by: MollyZee | January 08, 2009 at 06:32 AM
Everything you write is so awesome.
Posted by: DRR | January 08, 2009 at 06:43 AM
Hey Molly, I am not crying. But the crocodile is...
Why are you so concerned about getting me to quit talking about Israel?
I'm sure you're not Mossad - I wasn't talking about you! In fact, I haven't been reading your comments when they come through my email, I just happened to look in on this one. Have a nice day!
Posted by: Leila Abu-Saba | January 08, 2009 at 06:49 AM
Bravo Leila.
I had tears in my eyes reading that...
Posted by: stevieb | January 08, 2009 at 08:09 AM
Keep up the good work. I really enjoyed this post.
Posted by: J. Otto Pohl | January 08, 2009 at 09:50 AM
Glad you cleared that up for me. Please do continue to think and write about whatever interests you. Your ramblings are a bit repetitive and warmed-over PoliSci 101, but well-intentioned no doubt. As for the crying: I suppose I mistook whining for crying. (My mistake.) Unfortunately you mistook concern for who knows what.
Posted by: MollyZee | January 08, 2009 at 04:03 PM
Leila - You have a pure heart. Unlike Molly, you have the ability to see both sides of the story. In every on of your posts that I've read since I've been coming here, you always try to find the good in people. Molly is feeling threatened because she knows everything here is what is right in the world and people such as herself have a need to introduce conflict into every situation they encounter. For the sake of your health and your spirit, ignore her.
Posted by: Maloof | January 08, 2009 at 06:40 PM
Molly, I took many political science classes--and, to be sure, Leila's wisdom transcends the vacuous half-facts that are so replete in this field.
The facts and sentiments on this blog are more poetic and ecstatic--and evolutionary.
You should take note Molly. Instead you seem intent on being condescending. Look at your own insecurities, then come to the discussion with humility and generosity. I have no doubt that you will be greeted as a sister in every meaning of the term.
Posted by: Slave Revolt | January 11, 2009 at 01:18 PM