Late last week I lost a friend and colleague, Jamil Hamad, who was an invaluable source of wisdom about all things Palestinian. Howard Chua-Eoan, our chief of correspondents, wrote this tribute to him:
Jamil Hamad, TIME’s invaluable correspondent on Palestinian life and politics, died in a hospital in the West Bank early Sunday morning, succumbing to a virulent blood infection that manifested after a recent surgery. For close to three decades, Jamil chronicled the often lugubrious turns in the Palestinian quest for unity and nationhood, helping six Jerusalem bureau chiefs navigate a conflict that defies resolution. Jamil’s life and his work were more deeply intertwined than those of almost any other journalist who worked for the magazine. More than once did he and his family collide with Israeli military authorities, including one last humiliating incident two weeks ago at a checkpoint as his sons tried to get him medical help.
But Jamil approached his journalism and his fate with an almost unnerving objectivity, able to see foolishness and mendacity as well as kindness and honor among the diverse peoples of that volatile, gerrymandered part of the world. That helped make his tireless work for TIME unassailable—no matter how many interests, both Palestinian and Israeli, tried to undermine it. Once his reporting led him to a conclusion, he was unrelenting in his conviction. But he was also stubbornly even-handed. During a demonstration in the early 1980s, an Israeli soldier fired a tear gas cannister that hit Jamil’s son Souheil in the forehead, shattering the front of his skull. As Souheil went through surgery after surgery, Jamil’s youngest son Sadir angrily demanded of his father, “How can you still have Jewish friends? Look at what they’ve done to my brother.” Jamil responded, “How many people does it take to fire a gun?” Sadir got his father’s point immediately: do not blame a group for the deeds of an individual. Later, the soldier who fired the cannister sought out Jamil to apologize for what he had done.
Jamil Hamad was buried yesterday in a cemetery near Rachel’s Tomb but on the Palestinian side, within view of an Israeli watchtower and the concrete slabs of the wall that separates one territory from the other. He was 72.
I should add one story. I would always try to see Jamil whenever I visited Israel. The last time we met was for dinner in a restaurant near his home in Bethlethem. I came across the green line with Time’s Jerusalem correspondent, Tim McGirk, just before sunset. We had a wonderful dinner, with Jamil pessimistic and realistic and insanely civil, as always. On the way back to Jerusalem, Tim and I were stopped at the border by a very attractive Israeli soldier–her looks did make a difference in this case, because they were so much at variance with what came out of her mouth. She said it was illegal for us to be in the West Bank after dark. Tim said no, we were journalists–and I was visiting from the United States. “Where are you from?” she asked me, with a fine smile and jingly black curls. New York, I said. “Wow. That’s cool,” she replied, then nodded back toward the border. “Why did you want to spend time with those people?”
Why? Because I always learned from Jamil…not just the latest news, but also how to be a man–a real man–under terribly unjust circumstances. I will miss him enormously. I would hope, but I don’t expect, that sometime soon Jamil’s children will not have to live as prisoners in their own land.
