Transcript from the Eulogy of General Farouk Al-Jabiri
Aaisha Al-Jabiri, Director-General, the Green Cisjordan Project
I’ll try to keep this brief. I hope you all understand. The outpouring of support and kindness I have seen in the past few days has been beautiful. My father would be in awe. I don’t think he ever expected this.
When I was a child, my father would claim that within a generation our accomplishments would be dust. Many of you may not know this, but he was not an idealistic man. [polite laughter] Those who knew him recalled his stalwart pessimism even in the face of unrelenting good news. He was always a skeptic, always a cynic. He never believed that we would achieve even a fraction of the peace we have. But then, he was a soldier, and a man in a different generation. There was always an enemy to fight, just around the corner. He was never impolitic, and he was often prescient, but most often, I remember him as a fighter. He was the warrior who protected me from scary things in the dark when I was a girl, he was the old lion who kept the bad men away from the door. I think he would have liked to imagine he was that for our Union as well.
The Prophet, peace be upon him, said: “When you wake up in the morning, do not desire that you should live until the evening and when the evening comes do not think that you will be alive until the morning. Make use of your health before you fall ill, and make use of your youth before you turn old, and make use of your life before you die.”
I don’t think anyone can argue my father didn’t make the fullest use of his life. These past few months he was constantly busy, constantly moving. I don’t think he ever stopped. There was always more work to be done, with the Foundation most of all, but he couldn’t ever say that was enough. He took tea with ministers and diplomats, with lawyers at my firm, with the professors at University College Beirut, and with his imam. Rest, I think, was unbearable to him. It meant, after all, an end to the struggle that he had devoted his life to.
And he knew that such struggles don’t really ever have an end.
He would want those of you who knew him well to remember him as a restless man, an impatient man. The world moved too slowly for his taste. Retirement was uncomfortable to a man such as he was.
My father was profoundly concerned with justice. Justice, good conduct, fairness. These were words he lived by. He understood the necessity of them, and how rare they were under Mandate Rule. Growing up as a young man, he had unprecedented opportunities but most were not so lucky. I would certainly have not been so lucky, as a young woman in those days. We’ve moved forwards so far, so fast. I think he always feared that progress was a mirage, something that could crumble at any moment. I think many times he was right. If he were alive now, he would warn you all about the green-jackets in Malaysia or whatever crisis caught his attention. He would remind you of America or Burma. At the risk of sounding too much like him, he would remind you that democracy is only ever a heartbeat from extinction.
The best thing you can do to honor my father is to give frequently and joyfully to charity. The next best thing you can do to honor him is to ensure that his vision is never forgotten. A united Syria, a united Near East, those were his dreams. That he lived to see them was to him a miracle, a gift.
He lived every day as if it was a gift. He lived every day as a traveler or a stranger on the road, knowing that it was transitory. He treasured the twenty-six years he shared with my mother, and I know how proud he was seeing me graduate from university and watching my life unfold. I know how much he wished that my mother had been there with him to share in more of that gift. I know how much he wished he could have seen what was to come, however much he might have been afraid for the future. However much he might have denied it, he was always something of a dreamer.
He never allowed pessimism to get in the way of doing what was right. He had firm principles and he never wavered in them. Nothing of my father was more typical than giving and giving graciously without a second thought to himself. He gave all that he could for our country, for our dream of a united Arab state. He gave because he believed in our nation, and he believed we could overcome the sectarian plagues that divided us. Christian, Muslim, nonbeliever, we share a common history, bound as much in our achievements as in our common plight. Ours was a land long ruled, first by the Ottomans, then by the West. When we emerged blinking into the light of a new dawn, it seemed impossible that we could stand tall. For a while we stumbled. By father as a young soldier saw this, in Mesopotamia and later in the Hedjaz.
My father never stopped believing, even when he felt certain that all we had built together would fall. He never stopped believing that history was on our side.
And now, looking back after fifty years of public service, both in uniform and out of it, I think I can say that it was. It still is. As we all move forwards, as I move forwards, I will have his example to guide me. I hope that I can match even a fraction of his achievements.