To Palestine| From Bahrain to Gaza carrying a father’s legacy

The Bahraini leftist trade unionist Abdullah Hussein, one of the founders of the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions, passed away last March. Over the past weeks, friends and comrades mourned him, lamenting the loss of a discreet, stubborn, and humble fighter who did much without seeking credit for his actions or reminding others of what he had done. At the same time, he never compromised his principles.

From the photos and videos his son Mohamed showed me, as we sat together on the boat Al-Nasra (formerly Yulara), it seemed clear that the son had a similar temperament and character to his father. Mohamed, too, is quiet, humble, and calm, with tearful eyes.

The months of mourning did not stop Mohamed from his political activism.

After the Bahraini government dissolved the National Democratic Action Society (Waad), the political society he belonged to, in 2017, he became active in the Bahraini Society against Normalization with the Zionist enemy.

Mourning also did not prevent him from joining our flotilla during its Tunisian stopover.

Grief and his mother’s worry were not his only obstacles. He also had his job as a mechanical engineer at an oil and gas company, and his two young sons, Salman and Salam. Six-year-old Salman constantly asked when his father would return home, telling him he felt bored in his absence.

Mohamed showed me a video of his wife Maryam speaking eloquently and passionately just a few days earlier at Manama’s weekly sit-in for Palestine and to stop the genocide. She stressed the importance of supporting the Sumud Flotilla.

It was then, impressed by Maryam and by my companion on the boat, her husband Mohamed, that I understood the legacy that passed to Mohamed from his parents, and which Maryam is a partner in, and which they are passing on to their sons, Salman and Salam.

Sometimes, coincidences play their roles in a poetic and symbolic way.

Three years ago, I wrote an article on Al Manassa about my obsession with watches, how my watch broke in Tunis during a work trip, and about my father’s watch that my mother gave me after his death in 2007. I hung it on the wall above my desk until it stopped a few months later. I never replaced its battery.

What I didn’t mention in that article, because it happened afterwards, was that upon returning from Tunis to my home in Madrid, I took my father’s watch and replaced the battery. I have worn it on my wrist ever since.

We know we will not return from these boats with all our belongings such as clothes, personal items, electronic devices, phones, and so on. We will throw them into the sea before Israeli commandos raid the convoy or before we are arrested, or they will be confiscated.

Two days before leaving Madrid for Barcelona, I bought a new watch so that I would not board the boat with my father’s. Two hours before boarding Al-Nasra, I swapped them: I left my father’s watch in Barcelona and wore the new one, the one I knew I would lose. It was a Casio, like the ones my parents used to buy me 30 years ago at university, with a white face with hands and a black leather strap.

By coincidence, Mohamed told me the story of the Palestinian keffiyeh that his father, Abdullah Hussein, wore in the mid-1970s while he was studying in India. Before going back to work in Bahrain, he decided to volunteer defending Palestinian camps in Beirut. He reached Iraq, but circumstances prevented him from continuing. The keffiyeh was made of elegant, high-quality fabric. Years later, he gave it to his son Mohamed, now 37, to wear after him.

Mohamed made sure to wear the keffiyeh on every occasion and at every event. However, before boarding the boat, he left it with friends in Tunis and wore another one instead, so that the Israelis would not confiscate his father’s old, elegant Palestinian keffiyeh.

Mohamed inherited his father’s keffiyeh, but he inherited something deeper and more important: commitment to Palestine, to the weak, the poor, and freedom. It is not a biological inheritance but the imprint left in us by those we love and trust, which remains in us forever without our realizing it, without grand or eloquent words spoken to us.

Two days ago, little Salman had to complete his English homework at school. The task was to form a useful sentence that included one of a few selected words. One of those words was “boat.” Salman wrote: “My dad on the boat to Gaza.”

That is the legacy. The imprint passes silently, until one day Salman will carry his grandfather’s and father’s keffiyeh. In doing so, he will carry forward a symbol of Palestine and a symbol of belonging to it.