The novel “Asparagus” .. the story of the Israeli spy who lived as a sewage well cleaner in a refugee camp in Gaza

Gaza -

between the beginning of a friendly dialogue between a Palestinian resistance officer and an Israeli security officer, and an ambiguous open ending;

Many interesting and intertwined stories in the novel "Asparagus", in which the Palestinian novelist Talal Abu Shaweesh follows the story of an Israeli spy who resided in the Beach refugee camp in Gaza City in the sixties and seventies of the last century.

"Asparagus" is a nickname given by the camp's residents to that simple person, who took refuge in them and claimed that he was a Palestinian refugee coming from Shatila camp in Lebanon, after he lost his family after a boat carrying them sank during their flight from northern occupied Palestine by sea to Lebanon, during the catastrophe in 1948. .

Abu Shaweesh took long months to write his 300-page novel, and he tells Al Jazeera Net that he conducted interviews with residents of the Beach camp, and searched many Palestinian and Israeli sources to find out the exact details about the true “Asparagus” character.

Confrontation and mystery

The novel begins - according to a reading provided by Al-Jazeera Net, the novelist Muhammad Nassar, who recently won the Palestine Prize for Literature - with the officer of the Israeli Shin Bet security service, "Yushua Ben David", who served many years in this apparatus, and spent most of it in Gaza, which was the end of his father, "David Helen". Or "Asparagus" as the camp residents call it, the end of his sleepless nights for many years as he searches for the real cause of his father's death, did he die naturally or was he murdered?

A question that prompted him to search all their security departments, but without a satisfactory answer, but a glimmer of hope appeared to him when he learned from one of his friends in the apparatus that Israel had allowed one of the former resistance fighters in Gaza, "Mansour", to be treated in an Israeli hospital, after he had become ill.

Mansour is the "positive" protagonist - according to Abu Shaweesh's description - and symbolizes the resistance that was fervent and escalating after the defeat of June 1967 and in the seventies of the last century, and he spent about half his life in the occupation prisons (about 25 years), which struck him with diseases, and took him from him. He obtained an Israeli permit after human rights organizations pressured him to stop the repeated Israeli refusal to receive treatment in an Israeli hospital, due to the lack of necessary treatment for his condition in modest Gaza hospitals.

The novelist Talal Abu Shaweesh has literary works that tell aspects of the Palestinian cause (Al-Jazeera)

On the way to the Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing, which separates Gaza from the occupied interior, Yoshua recalls his memories there and his extreme cruelty to the Palestinian detainees during interrogation.

Remember Mansour and his extraordinary steadfastness, while a question accompanies him throughout the trip: Is it possible for Mansour to respond to my request or my plea?

Will he forget his stubbornness and stubbornness while he is in his weakness and sickness, and tell me about how my father died?

Joshua meets Mansour inside the ambulance, in which he was lying heavy with his illnesses, and Abu Shaweesh was keen in drafting it to reveal Israel's blackmailing of Gaza patients, and its bargaining methods by carrot and intimidation.

Mansour was surprised by Yoshua's question about "asparagus", and the biggest surprise was when he told him that he was his father, and he only wanted to know the truth of his death, as he was a senior official in Gaza at that period, and knew what no one else knew, even in the Israeli security circles, but Mansour, who did not His illness affects his memory, with the painful memories it stores of this "savage" officer, and causes him to kill one of the resistance fighters during his interrogation. He denies knowing the truth in a way that leaves doubt in Joshua's mind.

Moments passed after Yoshua left the ambulance, "disappointed" with many questions, when the decision came to cancel Mansour's treatment permit and return to Gaza. Yoshua threatened him that he would die in Gaza if he did not respond to him.

Mansour returned to Gaza, and while his wife - who accompanied him during an unfinished journey of treatment - was crying in grief, he felt very comfortable, as if the bouts of pain were gradually receding, and he confided in himself: “A novel must be written about that asparagus, we will write it as we know it, and not as they know it.” Hmm, Abu Shawish leaves the novel on an open and ambiguous ending.

from asparagus?

In the nineties of the last century, an Israeli channel broadcast a report about an Israeli officer named David Helen, a Jewish immigrant who came to Israel from France after the Nakba, joined the Israeli security services, and was chosen to plant it in Gaza, which was witnessing at the end of the fifties the first beginnings of work. Organized guerrilla.

Abu Shaweesh says that without this television report, no one would have linked this officer to the "asparagus" who lived for many years in the camp, disguised as a simple persona closer to the "attractors."

During his years in the camp, asparagus worked in a "miserable and lowly profession" that others alienated from. He was manually "flushing sewage wells", which refugees used to dig inside their homes due to the lack of sewage networks at that time, and for that he was paid a small amount and a piece of Soap, a profession - Abu Shaweesh says - that allowed him freedom of movement and entry to all the camp's homes.

The asparagus was strong in build, taciturn, and vehemently refused to eat the food served to him in the camp's homes and was satisfied with his wages, and his life was strange, unmarried and no one asked about him, but his behavior was not suspicious of the camp residents, who dealt with him as a "magic" man, perhaps He lost his mind after losing his family, as he claimed at the time.

At the end of the seventies of the last century, the residents of the camp missed asparagus for a few days, only to find him dead in his small room, and volunteered to bury him in the "Sheikh Radwan" cemetery. On the evening of the day of the burial, Israeli helicopters launched a landing operation inside the cemetery, led by Joshua without his knowledge of the "corpse" that was being buried. They took her from her grave and transported her for burial in Israel - according to Abu Shawish's account - and the camp residents believed at the time that the purpose of the operation was to steal the bodies of the martyrs.

Years passed, and the camp residents' memory almost forgot that strange man who was next to them for years, until they were surprised by the Israeli report on the "asparagus", the intelligence man who had planted Israel in the camp, after he "wrote" his story as a refugee from Jaffa to Lebanon and from there to Gaza.

In his account, Abu Shawish says through an Israeli officer, "The local agents provide good services, but they do not rise to the level that one of us living among them can do."

Nassar says that the novel Asparagus focused in more detail on the character of David Helen, and not like other literary and novel works that quickly passed through similar tales of Israeli officers who were planted in Arab capitals, which allowed its author, Abu Shawish, to present important aspects of this character's life, in a way Broader and deeper, giving space to talk about an entire time period, with all its details and events.

Also, "Asparagus" is a "distinctive and well-structured" novel, according to Nassar's description, and Abu Shaweesh was clever and smooth in dealing with its main character and the events surrounding it, and he says, "It is difficult to break from reading this novel, especially on people like me who lived through periods of that era and were witnesses on her".