“I Remember The Bullets”

The life and times of Saleh Safi

“I remember running away from my village, Samu to Yatta, because the bombardments start[ed] early in the morning.” This was a year before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — Saleh Safi was eleven. “What they’ll do,” he said, “they’ll bombard the village, so people will run away, and then they’ll go into the village, and they blow [up] a hundred house[s] [...] then they’ll go back. They’ll kill anyone on their way.”  

When Safi was nineteen, he moved to Britain, first to a town near Manchester (where he conducted buses on the weekends) and then to Edinburgh. He now lives in Kirkcaldy, but last semester he came by St Andrews to cater a Palestinian photography exhibition in St Marks Church. That’s where I first saw him, a man with a white beard and a ladle. A week later I visited him in Kirkcaldy to talk about his life, from the West Bank to Fife, from a PhD to a Scottish falafel factory. 

When he came to Edinburgh, he got a Bachelors and Masters in Soil Mechanics, and started a doctorate. Some friends offered him a job as an engineer in Saudi Arabia. Had he taken it, he “could have been a millionaire.” He turned it down — he couldn’t bear moving to a country where he’d have to watch his words. In Britain, “you can say, ‘The King is a bastard.’ So what?” 

Before he’d finished his doctorate, Safi heard of a coffee shop up for sale, for a bargain. It was too good to overlook — he’d do the coffee shop for a year, then go back and finish his PhD, he thought. That year was a disaster — the shop barely turned a profit. “Buying a coffee shop or a takeaway when you have never worked in a coffee shop or a takeaway is like committing suicide,” Safi said. 

He decided to forge on, though, and dropped the doctorate. At that point he had married a Scottish woman and had three kids, including a newborn baby. But things got bleak. Once, as he and his family closed up shop, Safi’s van wouldn’t start. He reckoned a taxi home would have cost two pounds. He couldn’t afford it. “I slept with my wife and children in [the] Scottish cold, on the floor.” 

After the gruelling first year of shop ownership, Safi had a revelation. Coffee was too generic; everyone was doing that. He rebranded — the shop would focus on vegetarian health food. He worked without a salary, relying on his wife’s income as a midwife. His father-in-law even came down from Inverness to work in the shop, too. It didn’t make much difference — after two more years, even with the help of his in-laws, the shop was still in the doldrums.

Around then, Safi went back to Palestine. Before the 1990s, Palestinians living abroad had to regularly return to renew their residence permits. “If you don’t go back, then you will have no right to come to Palestine as a resident, but as a visitor only,” Safi said. For him, that was part of a wider story: it took him back to his childhood in Samu, where a lot of his neighbours had lost their lands after the creation of Israel, a decade before Safi’s birth. “Most Fridays, as villagers, we would take the sheep and cross the borders, on our land, which is ours, to graze there. And then the jeep will come in and start shooting,” Safi said. “I remember the bullets passing me.” 

When he came back again from the West Bank, Safi had an idea. Health food wasn’t enough: the coffee shop needed to expand. He found another place for a song, right next to the University of Edinburgh. But, at that point, at the worst possible time, his father-in-law quit. Safi now had two venues, but without his father-in-law, he could only open one of them. Safi could see why his coworker had quit: “there was no money for neither of us.” But still, it hurt. He didn’t speak to his father-in-law for three years after that.

Safi got it together. He rented out the shop next to the University to a Sudanese entrepreneur, who turned it into a wrap place that’s still there today — The Nile Valley. Business began to pick up — property values in student-dominated areas were skyrocketing, and Safi decided to expand again. He opened a small factory making Middle Eastern vegetarian food, with a room where he could sleep on-site. It eventually expanded to over 80 products. “[There is] not a single item I have produced that did not go through my hand,” Safi said. He boasted an impressive falafel selection: plain falafel, mushroom falafel, spinach falafel, super falafel, festival falafel, rocket and hemp seed falafel, jalapeño falafel, jalapeño and bean falafel, and even date and mango falafel (which, he said, is the “craziest one”). 

After twelve years of buyouts, flat-conversions, and venue-hops, Safi finally turned a profit. Those twelve years, he reckoned, were equivalent to 24 years of an average person’s work life. “There’s not a single week [where] I [worked] less than 100 hours.” He remembered one time he’d worked through the night in Edinburgh, then started to drive to Glasgow: he fell asleep at the wheel, hit the curb, and the van bounced so high that, when it hit the ground again, it bent the wheel frame. 

Following the pandemic, after half a lifetime in the trade, Safi retired: “enough is enough.” He shut down the falafel factory and decided to focus on his family. He’s remarried and now has seven kids (some of whom have gone to St Andrews) and nine grandchildren. “None of my children and my wife could be allowed to live in Palestine,” Safi said. “A few days ago, I was listening to a Jewish scholar, and he said, ‘It’s f***ing crazy that a Jewish person born in Brooklyn [has an] automatic right to Palestine, yet a Palestinian guy born in Palestine […] [has] no right in his own country.’” 

Even after retiring, Safi isn’t done yet. He wants to open another coffee shop, in Kirkcaldy this time, where people from whatever faith can hang out. He’s always tried to reach out.  “Right now a Zionist could come, and I will sit down there, and I will have a cup of tea with him, and we will argue the case.” 

Safi and I talked in Kirkcaldy for around three hours, over a tray of banana cake he’d baked. As night fell, the conversation turned to the news. “Gaza is the most horrific thing anywhere on the planet,” Safi said. “If you don’t react, you have no soul in your body.”

I asked if Safi had any hope. “Of course I hope,” Safi said. “Anything could be remedied, in my opinion. And the remedy is very, very simple in life. It’s for the aggressor to acknowledge the victim as being a victim.”

Illustration by Lucy Maitland-Lewis