10. Umm Khaled

Twelve kilometers west of Jerusalem, nestled in the Judaean hills, is the village of Abu Ghosh. It is an uncrowded, attractive place, with its five thousand inhabitants, almost all of whom are Muslims, living in spacious one- and two-story stone houses that sprawl along the valley and up the hillside. At the base of the village are freshwater springs and, in a distinctive architectural arrangement, both the village mosque and a nearby twelfth-century church are built over the springs. This church, and the monks who tend to it (and live in an adjacent monastery), have played a crucial role in the recent history of Abu Ghosh. In no small measure they have been responsible for another of the village’s distinctive features: it was the only Arab village to survive when Israel conquered the area in the 1948 war.

Umm Khaled (Amina), at seventy-two years old, is one who lived through this recent turbulent period in the history of Abu Ghosh. It is here, as a citizen of Israel, that she raised her family of sixteen children. Today all of these children are grown, and most continue to live in the village. Umm Khaled, now a widow, lives with the youngest of her daughters in a hilltop house. A thin woman in somewhat frail health, she spends most of her time at home these days, visited frequently by her children and “hundred or so” grandchildren.

Living not too far from Umm Khaled is one of the writers of this study, Rafiqa Othman. Though Rafiqa had never visited Umm Khaled before we began this book, each one knew of the other, and so it was relatively easy to arrange for an initial meeting in December 1994. As it turned out, Umm Khaled was most receptive to being interviewed for a book on Palestinian women—a receptivity that would have disappeared had Rafiqa not gone alone. (Indeed, when it was suggested that her coauthor pay a courtesy call at the completion of the interviews, Umm Khaled stated that she would not be comfortable with “a man from the outside” in her home, now that her husband was no longer there.)

With Rafiqa, Umm Khaled was both forthcoming and hospitable, plying her visitor with stories and food in equal measure. Seated in her flower-filled salon, with a photograph of Abu Khaled on the wall across from her, she carried on tirelessly despite her asthma and raspy throat. Occasionally her youngest daughter, Nafuz, would come by to listen to her mother’s reminiscences. But most often the interviews were conducted when Umm Khaled was alone.

As with the other older women in this study, Umm Khaled’s narrative style was at times discursive and repetitious. We keep some of this quality, but in the interest of readability we pare various digressions. In the section below, then, are some of Umm Khaled’s recollections of her childhood spent in Jerusalem in the 1920s, her return to Abu Ghosh to get married in the mid-1930s, and her family’s struggle to survive in the village during the 1948 war.

Look all around us, we’re the only Arab village that survived in 1948. All the other Arab villages in this area are gone. Al-Qastal, Suba, Qaluniya—gone, destroyed. We alone survived. Do you think this was an accident? It wasn’t. We survived because our village has always had a special fate. Abu Ghosh is a place that has had God’s blessing. It goes way back, from the time this village began, as far back as anyone can remember.

I can’t say I know all this history. Others know it better. What I know, I heard from my grandmother and mother and my aunts and mother-in-law. They told me how Abu Ghosh came to be. It started far back, they say, before the time of the Turks. One day a holy man was traveling through this area. He was tired, so he stopped. He tied up his donkey and he lay down. He had some bread and grapes with him, and he placed them at his side. Just before dozing off he prayed to God. He prayed that this wonderful place would some day be a wealthy village inhabited by many people. The holy man slept and slept—for forty years he slept. When he woke he found the same bread and grapes and donkey by his side, and all around him was a wealthy village with its vineyards. The name of this village was Qaryat al-Enab [village of the grapes].

This is what our village was called for many years, maybe hundreds of years. Some people here, you know, still prefer this name and call our village Qaryat al-Enab. But to most of us, it’s Abu Ghosh, the village of Abu Ghosh. That’s the name it got back in the time of the Turks. The way the name came about was this. A powerful sheikh from far away, a place called the Caucasus, came here and became the ruler. He had a loud voice, a booming voice, and when he talked in the religious courts there was this loud echo. That’s why they called him Abu Ghosh, because of his voice.^[*] He used to dress in elegant clothes—silk robes and a turban—and he walked with a fine, decorated cane. He was an important man. In his time he was the head of Abu Ghosh and he controlled all the villages from Jerusalem to the sea. He also had enemies, people from other villages who didn’t want him to be so powerful. One day, it happened that the men from another village came with their swords to make war on Abu Ghosh. There was a great battle, many men fell, but sheikh Abu Ghosh managed to survive. And so did his three sons. The way the sons survived is that Abu Ghosh’s wife sent two away, one to Egypt and one to Syria. And the third she hid here in the village with a holy man. This third son’s name was Issa and he went on living with the holy man.

When Issa came of age, they had to find him the right wife, a good woman. Fate brought him Wafa. Wafa was the daughter of a special woman, a woman blessed by God. Years before, when Wafa was a girl, her mother had been praying on leilat al-qadr.^[†] While she was reciting the Koran, suddenly the sky opened up to her. So, she requested that God grant her daughter the best of the best in life—honor and wealth and sons who would be good, strong, and generous men. And her request was granted. I tell you, ever since I heard this story, I’ve been praying that on leilat al-qadr the sky will open up to me too, so I can request that me and my family will all enter the Garden of Eden when our time comes. But so far, it hasn’t opened. Anyway, for Wafa’s mother it did open, and Wafa herself was blessed. She married Issa, the good, religious son of Abu Ghosh. They had four sons—one called Othman, another called Ibrahim, another Abd al-Rahman, and another Jaber. Each of these sons had their own offspring, and so on. And today the village of Abu Ghosh has four clans, each named for one of the four sons of Issa and Wafa. We are a good village with generous people, as you know. And we survived, while all other villages around us were destroyed. Only we survived the 1948 war. Why? Because of Wafa’s mother, who had the sky open to her on leilat al-qadr, and because God granted her wish. That’s what I believe.

The Arabic ghosh—from the letters ghein,waw,shin—is the root of a verb that means “to dispute, to argue loudly.”Leilat al-qadr, or Night of Power, falls on the twenty-seventh night of the holy month of Ramadan; on this night Muhammad is said to have received a divine revelation—the first in a chain of revelations that were later transcribed as the Koran.

I was born here in Abu Ghosh, the third one of ten children, and my father always told me that my birth was special. Right after I was born, he got the job with the English as a policeman, and he always believed I was the one who brought him this luck. That’s what he said. So, because he got this job I didn’t grow up here in Abu Ghosh. I only moved back when I got married at fourteen years old. Most of my childhood I spent in Jerusalem, where we moved after my father became a policeman. In my childhood, I wasn’t a fellaha. I was a daughter of the city, which is something much different.

In Jerusalem we had a very good style of living. I really enjoyed it there. My father got a big salary, five pounds a month. With that you could eat meat every day, wear nice clothes, go to the Turkish bath—really, we lived well. We lived inside the Old City walls, in Harat al-Sadiya [a neighborhood of the Old City]. We rented a house there, a fine place. My father would travel around with the police, and my mother and the children would be at home. My older brothers, Muhammad and Amir, went to school. The best of the best. My father spared no expense to educate them. Muhammad learned to read and write in Arabic and English, he was brilliant. And Amir too, he was clever in Arabic calligraphy. For my brothers, my father was willing to spend on education. For me and my sisters, no. I went a year to a school near al-Aqsa Mosque. I learned to read a little, but I don’t remember now. Today I can read two words, “head” and “heads,” that’s all. My father took me out of school after the first grade. He bought me a sewing machine. How did I feel about that? Well, it wasn’t my fate to learn. Back then they didn’t encourage girls to learn, not like today. My father said it was better for me to learn to sew, so that’s what I did. It was fine with me. I didn’t know any other girls at the school, so it was good to be home with my younger sisters and brothers.

Since I was the oldest daughter, I was given a lot of responsibilities. My father really trusted me. From the time I was about eight my father would give me part of his salary each month to use for shopping in the suq. A grocery owner told my father once, “This daughter of yours is worth ten sons!” I’d do the buying for our family. My mother would tell me what to get and I’d go from place to place to get it. Back then, with hardly any money you could fill up a couple of baskets with vegetables. And meat—for one agora you’d get four kilos! I’m telling you, we ate like kings. My mother would prepare wonderful dishes. If they needed to be baked in an oven—meat dishes or cakes—I’d bring the pan with the food to the baker’s, right near our house. He’d bake it in his wood-burning oven. Or sometimes, when my mother was too tired to cook, we’d bring in food from the restaurant near us. We’d bring in hummus, kabab, fried eggplants, salads. Also tisikya, that was my favorite. It’s small pieces of bread soaked in hummus, with spices and pine nuts. Oh, that was delicious! I’m telling you, we ate well back then.

But we worked too, sure we did. We didn’t have water in the houses. We’d have to go down to the stream outside the Old City walls and fetch it. That’s drinking water, I’m talking about. Water for washing clothes, we’d get from a well near the house. My mother used to have a woman come in to help her with the wash, and of course I and my sisters helped too. I was given the most responsibility, though, since I was the oldest. I remember this one time, my father came home with his uniform dirty and he said that the next day they were having an inspection. “Something has to be done quickly,” he said, and turned to me. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it, father,” I told him. I took the pants, cleaned them really well, but since I didn’t have an iron I folded them at the seams and put them under my mattress that night to press them. I cleaned his jacket, polished the buttons till they shone, and the boots too. The next day when he came home, he said that the commander had complimented him on how he looked. My father said to me, “My daughter, you have whitened my face!” I felt very good about this, I knew my father was proud of me. I think I was about ten years old at the time.

Once a month, when my father got his salary, we’d go to the Turkish bath. My father went by himself, and my older brothers went together. It was open to the men in the afternoons and evenings, and the women in the mornings. I’d go with my mother and all the children. It was an enormous place called Hamam al-Ein. It wasn’t far from our house. My mother would take soap and towels and a fresh change of clothes for each of us. She put us under the spout where heated water came out, and she’d scrub and scrub and scrub, till our skin was peeling. Our faces would be all red when she finished with us. We’d then go to this corner in the bathhouse where you could cool down by drinking cold sodas and eating oranges. Sometimes we’d stay for hours. You could stay as long as you wanted, nobody would bother you. Brides would sometimes be there with their families, just before the wedding. It was a fine thing to do, going to the Hamam. I looked forward to it. It was like a family outing.

Besides this, we’d also go out on weekends, on Sundays especially. That was my father’s day off. My mother would prepare a picnic basket and we’d go to the stream in Silwan, or over to the grounds near al-Aqsa Mosque. My sisters and I would jump rope or play five stones. We had a good time in those days, I remember them well. Also, sometimes, during the Little and Big Feasts,^[*] we’d go back to Abu Ghosh. We’d take a bus from Jerusalem and go there for a few days. We’d stay there at the house of my aunt, my father’s sister. Yes, my aunt Khadija, who became my mother-in-law when I married her son. Her husband was dead, she was raising the three children by herself, so we stayed with them. My father was close to her, he was helping to support them, and their house was big enough for all of us.

I liked visiting Abu Ghosh on these trips, it was a big change from the city. Clean air to breathe, not stuffy like in Jerusalem. And you could sit under a fig tree all day, resting and doing nothing. No, it wasn’t in my mind then that I would be coming back to live in the village. My cousin—oh no, I had no idea that someday he’d be my husband. I swear, no. I never even talked to him then, not one word. Eib! He was eight years older than me, I was only a girl and he was almost grown up. He went off early each morning to his job at the monastery, he worked on the land there. I had nothing to do with him. I stayed with my sisters and his sisters when we were there on those trips. Later, when my father decided that I would marry my cousin, I was surprised. I didn’t expect that at all.

Umm Khaled is referring here to id al-fitr [feast of the fast-breaking after Ramadan], and id al-adha [feast of the sacrifice that occurs annually during the hajj period].

The way it came about that I married him was this. My husband—I didn’t know this then, I found it out later—wanted to marry another girl, a stranger.^[*] His mother didn’t want her, she wanted a different stranger. He refused. There was a disagreement between them. My uncle, my father’s older brother, got into it. My uncle was a strong man in our family, everyone listened to his voice. He told my aunt and my husband that he should marry me. “Take Amina and forget about the strangers,” he said. “Take our brother’s daughter. She’s the one for you.” My uncle’s word carried great weight. He decided it.

One day I was told that my aunt and my cousin were coming to visit us in Jerusalem in order to request me. When I heard this, I ran outside the house. I ran over to an uncle’s house. I didn’t want anything to do with this request business. Marriage, what’s that? I didn’t want any part of it. I was only thirteen years old at the time. I had never sat before with guests when they visited. If people came to the house, it wasn’t permitted for girls to sit with grown-ups. A single girl wouldn’t sit with married women. She’d serve coffee and then leave. I didn’t want to be there when my cousin came, oh no! I didn’t want to live outside our house. I was used to my family, I wanted to stay with them. But my uncle’s wife convinced me that I should go back to the house. So I did, and that was it. I was told that I was going to be married to my cousin.

The wedding didn’t happen right away, though. This is because a terrible thing happened in our family. My two older brothers died around then, one right after the other. Nobody could even think of weddings anymore. Muhammad was eighteen and he had just started his job as a policeman, like my father. He caught typhoid fever, went to the hospital, and was dead eighteen days later. Then my father got Amir into the police and right after that he died too. Amir was handling his baruda and it misfired. He was shot straight through the chest. My family, my father and mother, all of us—we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, we were in shock. Not just us. The whole clan in Abu Ghosh, everyone. We were all in mourning. Nobody got married then, there was no taste for it. It went on like this for a year and a half, there were no marriages in Abu Ghosh, not in our clan and not in the others either. The other clans respected our family’s grief. It wasn’t like today, where after forty days, the mourning period is over, you’re free to do what you want. Back then death had a real meaning. People mourned for a long time. So a lot of girls in the village who were engaged during that time had to put off their weddings for a year or so. Me too, of course. Then finally my father said that we had to go through with my wedding. Even though there was still no taste in our family for a wedding, my father said, “We must start, so the others will be free to follow.” So that’s what we did. We let it be known that we were going to have a wedding, and then others felt free to have theirs too.

But my wedding wasn’t a real wedding. Other girls in the village had usual weddings then. They wore white bridal dresses, they went on a zaffa, there was music and dancing. I had none of this. There was no wedding party, and instead of a white wedding dress it was decided that I wear a black one. My husband was kind. He agreed that the mahr I got was twice the usual amount. He felt bad for me. But still, all the new clothes I bought as part of my wedding gifts were in dark shades—navy blue, brown, dark green. I didn’t buy anything light or bright—no reds or pinks or yellows. My husband also dressed for the wedding day in dark clothing, a jalabiya and a jacket in dark colors. When his family came to bring me from my parent’s house back to Abu Ghosh, my mother was so sad she couldn’t speak. And my father, all he could say was, “My daughter is leaving my home, it’s like losing my sons—they all go.” And that was it. I left my parents in East Jerusalem and went to Abu Ghosh to live with my husband and his family.

Going to live in the village was not easy. By then, I was a city girl, not a fellaha. To visit the village, fine. To come live here, that was something else. I’m not going to lie to you. It took me quite a while to get used to being in Abu Ghosh. I had to work much harder here than in Jerusalem. There was no primus stove to cook on here, and no bakery to buy bread. And do you think I liked fetching wood to make a fire? Or cleaning clothes without soap, but with ash? No, no. I didn’t like it. I was spoiled some from the city life. I was used to restaurant food once a week and meat almost every day. Meat in Abu Ghosh? Hardly ever. My mother-in-law used eggs instead of meat in her cooking. And we ate vegetables, just vegetables. My husband brought them from the monastery where he was working as a fellah on the monastery’s grounds. They were fresh and tasty, but I missed the city food, my mother’s food.

My father knew how hard it was for me coming back to Abu Ghosh. I was his favorite daughter, he loved me very much. So, once every few weeks he used to come back to the village with a present for me. Some sweets from Jerusalem, and pistachios and peanuts and other things he knew I liked. Then—it was about three years after I was married—he decided to move back to Abu Ghosh with the whole family. Slowly, slowly, he had been building a new house here. He made a good salary as a policeman, and with this money he paid some fellahin to build him the house. The English had a police station just outside the village—it’s still there today, the Jews took it in 1948—and he got assigned there. The English gave him this beautiful horse. He used to ride on patrol all over the area, from village to village. Oh, I remember that horse! You’ll never see one so beautiful, a reddish brown horse with white spots. My father used to fit her out so well and brush her like she was a bride. When there was a wedding in the village, they’d ask to borrow the horse for the zaffa. People in the village loved this horse. My father had her for a long time, until 1948. Then, when the war broke out and he went over to Jordan, he sold it. Oh, I’m telling you, such a horse I’ve never seen again. To this day, when I watch television and see horses, I look for one like her. But I’ve never seen one her equal, not even on television.

Umm Mahmud used the word ghariba [stranger], by which she means here that the girl was from outside their clan, which commonly includes all descendants of a great-great-grandfather.

So, I was telling you about what it was like to come live at my mother-in-law’s house. Well, I got used to it slowly, slowly. My mother-in-law was the only one in the house. She had her room, we had ours. My husband’s two sisters had both gotten married just two days before us, so they were gone. I got along well with my mother-in-law, it helped that she was my aunt. The ones who got into arguments, really, were my husband and my mother-in-law. But I stayed out of it. My uncle, the one who decided we should marry, had told me, “When the two of them have their fights, don’t get drawn into it. Let them settle it themselves.” I took his advice, it was good advice.

My husband and mother-in-law were close, though, very close. My husband’s father had died when he was seven, he was yatim al-ab.^[*] He was going to school then—not a real school, just a sheikh that boys went to to learn how to read. He stopped going so he could support his family. Someone had told him that his mother was going to remarry and he went half-crazy, screaming and crying and jumping up and down. He insisted on going out to work. He found a job in the monastery, they took him to work in the fields they owned. He was a good worker and all the monks liked him. When they prayed, he went and prayed too at the mosque next door. The monks were proud of him. He was serious and even-tempered like them, and religious. On his way back and forth from work he would read the Koran. He had learned to read the letters in school, and his mother had taught him to read the Koran. She, herself, couldn’t read, but she had learned the Koran by heart from her father. That way, when my husband first started to read the Koran, she corrected him and after a while he could read all of it. So, back and forth he’d go from work reading to himself. That’s the way he was. A religious man, calm and quiet. Not like me. I’m the one who gets excited and temperamental sometimes, and who likes to talk. My husband, he was a man of few words.

In the beginning of our marriage, I tell you, we hardly talked at all. Only a little when we were alone and nobody else was around. In public, even in front of my mother-in-law, we never exchanged words. My husband preferred it that way. Also, the custom of the time was that husbands and wives didn’t talk to each other in public. I mean, if they were outside the house, they didn’t say anything to each other. Today, wives not only talk to their husbands in public, they’ll argue with them openly. Take some of my daughters, take Leila—if she doesn’t agree with her husband she’ll speak right up. Her eyes are not ashamed in front of men. If you ask me, this is not a good thing. The women of today—most of my daughters, Leila too—go around with their heads uncovered. This is right? Maybe you don’t want to hear me say so, but I don’t think it’s right. I couldn’t do it. Back when I was married, and until maybe twenty-five years ago, I used to wear a mandil [delicate veil] over my face whenever I left the house and went to the suq, or clinic, or anywhere. One time I remember, it was shortly after I was married, I passed my husband in the street here in Abu Ghosh. I was going to take the bus to Jerusalem. My face was veiled and he didn’t even recognize me. But even if he had recognized me he wouldn’t have said a word. You didn’t talk in public in those days. Not if you were modest, you didn’t. Oh, no. Ya Rafiqa, things have changed here in our village since then, I swear, things have changed!

For a child whose parent has died, Arabic distinguishes yatim al-ab [orphan without a father] from yatim al-umm [orphan without a mother].

So that’s the way it was back then, my dear. Abu Ghosh before you were born, before your time. What else can I tell you? About my children, giving birth? Alright. I had twenty-one stomachs,^[*] you know that, no? Well, I did. But, it took me a while before I brought my first. I was only fourteen years old when I got married, and I didn’t bring Khawla until I was sixteen. My mother-in-law was worried those first two years. My husband was her only son, she wanted to have heirs. But what was I supposed to do—take one from my parents’ house? Finally, though, I pleased her. I got a stomach. All the women in the village who saw me said I was going to have a son. They looked at my stomach and said it was sitting nicely, easily, it had to be a boy. I wasn’t very old, I figured they knew what they were talking about. I was sure I was going to bring a son. When my time came I went to the hospital, an English hospital. After many hours finally I gave birth. The nurse told me, “Congratulations, you have a baby daughter!” I answered her, “No, mine’s a son!” She told me again that it was a daughter, and I repeated that it was a son. Back and forth it went. When my mother and family came to visit me, my mother asked, “What did you bring?” I answered, “I brought a son, but the nurse is telling me it’s a daughter.” My mother laughed and laughed.

Once I saw my baby, I was happy with her. She was healthy and well formed, that’s what mattered. My mother-in-law was happy too, really. And my husband seemed happy. He passed out sweets and was smiling at everybody. That’s how he was when the girls were born. With boys, he’d put on a serious face, no smiling. He wasn’t a man to show his true feelings, he hid them. Years later, after I’d brought all the children, one day we were sitting and talking, and then he admitted it. He admitted that each time I was pregnant he’d go to mosque and pray for a son. But when a son came he’d hide his happiness, and when a daughter came he’d pretend to be happier than he was. That’s how he was, Abu Khaled, he wasn’t one to let on to his true feelings.

Well, it took until the third time for me to make him truly happy. I brought Khaled. My husband named him after his own father, who’d died when he was a boy. Despite his serious face, I knew he was happy with Khaled. After that I brought three more sons in a row—Issa, Ibrahim, Muhsen. My mother-in-law was very satisfied with me. I’d brought her heirs. She helped me out with all of them, feeding and washing and wrapping them. We worked together side by side. I couldn’t have managed without her, God bless her memory.

In the beginning, though, the doctor told me I shouldn’t bring too many children. He said it wasn’t good for my health. I have asthma, since I was seven or eight I’ve had it. I’m always coughing and my throat is sore a lot of the time. When I was young, my parents once took me to this woman in Jerusalem who treated me by burning my throat on the outside with a hot fork. It didn’t help. Nothing helped. Herbs, medicines, nothing. So I’ve been sick with this throat and asthma all my life. When I started to bring children, the doctor warned me that I should wait four years between pregnancies. My mother-in-law was with me that day and she said to the doctor, “Ya doctor! Listen, my son is the only one I have. If she can’t bring enough children, my son will take another wife along with her.” She was serious, yes. Later she told me that according to our religion, he had a right to four wives. I didn’t want that, of course. Al-durra murra [the second wife is bitter]. Did you ever hear of a good second wife? So I kept on bringing children. What else could I do? There was no other way.

The hardest birth, no doubt about it, was the time I brought Muhsen. What made this one so hard is that after I got my stomach, the war came. This was 1948. Almost everyone had fled the village. My mother-in-law was gone, my mother was gone, my sisters—all gone over to the Arab side. Only a few of us stayed in the village, and most of us were hiding out in the monastery. The monks were very kind to our family, maybe because my husband had been working all those years with them. They gave us their reception room to live in. But when my time came, my husband said, “It won’t be good to bring the baby here, go back to our house.” It was a quiet time during the war, so I went back there alone. Our house then was near the monastery, in the center of the village. Nobody came with me. What I did is put a plastic cover over the bed so I wouldn’t bleed on the bedcovers, and I lay down. I twined a sheet like a rope, tied it to the iron poster of the bed, and held on. When the hard contractions came, as I lay on my back I pulled the sheet. That helped. I was scared, very scared. I prayed to God that I would bring this baby and return to my other children. And God answered my prayers. The baby came out healthy. I had no way of cutting the umbilical cord, though. Finally, my daughter came with this woman. She helped clean me up, but she refused to cut the umbilical cord. She believed that if she cut it—this was the way some women thought then—afterwards she wouldn’t be able to have any children. My husband, who arrived by then, said to her, “Cut it, do it! Go ahead!” But she refused. She left me there hanging between the heavens and the earth, with my poor son tied to me. A half-hour or so later, finally my husband found another woman who agreed to cut it. Everything was alright. I stayed there in the house with Muhsen, that’s what we called him. And the other children and my husband came back too. Thanks to God we were alright, even though the war was still going on. We stayed there in the house then, although the Jews started giving those of us who stayed a lot of troubles. But we survived. We didn’t flee and didn’t return, we just stayed in our house.

Umm Khaled and other village women occasionally refer to pregnancies as “stomachs.”

When I think back to the war in 1948, I think it was a miracle that we survived. God protected us. God protected Abu Ghosh. Even though almost everyone fled, we managed to keep our village. Ours is the only village in the whole area that wasn’t destroyed, thanks to God. We were very fortunate.

We knew a war was coming, but nobody knew when. People started getting very scared. The English were still here, but there was fighting going on in villages all around us. Many people in Abu Ghosh decided to leave, they went over to the Jordanian side. They took a few suitcases like they were going on vacation, hoping they’d come back in a few weeks or a month. My mother-in-law left with her two daughters and their families, and my two married sisters and their husbands left too. One of my sisters, Jalila, was married to the mukhtar of the village, Hammad R. The English gave him ten rifles to defend the whole village. Can you imagine, ten rifles for all of us? Hammad R. knew we didn’t stand a chance. And really what happened is that as soon as the English left, the Jews swooped right down on us easily. My parents had left with my two unmarried sisters just before that happened. My father had gone to Jerusalem to get his salary. The way back was closed off, so they had to stay over there on the Jordanian side. My husband had wanted me to go with my parents and take the children with me. He gave me 100 pounds. “I just sold our cow,” he said. “Take this money and go with your family.” I told him, “It’s not enough money, it won’t last. I’m staying here, no matter what happens. If you die, I’ll die with you. If you live, I’ll live.” My husband didn’t argue with me, he let me stay.

We hid out in the monastery. There weren’t so many of us left in the village, but those who were still here hid with the monks. We were all there on the day the English left the area, and the Jews came swooping down on us. There were a lot of shots for a while, like chickpeas popping in a pan, and then there was silence. The Jews came to the monastery and made all of us go to the center of the village. We thought they were going to shoot us all. We heard some of their soldiers say, “Let’s shoot them.” For hours we were out there in the sun, not knowing what they were going to do with us. Some of the soldiers stood guard and others went through the village, house to house. Then, they got some orders to leave us alone, and as quickly as they’d come, they then left. We knew they’d be back though, and we were scared.

After they’d gone my husband and I went up to our house. The whole place had been turned upside down. They’d opened the closets and thrown things out. I immediately went to the mirror on the closet door. Behind it, between the glass and the wood backing, I’d hidden the 100 pounds my husband gave me when he sold the cow. He knew the money was there too, we were the only ones who knew. But when I took apart the mirror the money was gone. My husband immediately began accusing me. He said, “What did you do with that money? You gave it to your parents, didn’t you?” I was shocked to hear him talk to me like this, and besides I knew it wasn’t true. It made me stop and think, and I said to him, “Your mother is over there, and you’re asking me what I did with the money?” He got real mad. We started arguing harder and harder. Both of us were convinced the other was lying. It left an awful feeling between us.

The whole thing didn’t really get solved until months later. This was after I gave birth to Muhsen, and we had moved back into our house. The Jews still came around on raids. They’d come at night or in the day, you never knew when. There’d be the sound of their boots marching up the steps. I swear, it used to make me tremble. To this day, if I see a Jewish soldier or policeman, even in the distance, the chills run through me. When they’d come on these raids, you never knew what would happen. Always, they were looking for someone or something. Well, this one time they came knocking on the door, demanding we open up. I was shaking, shaking, shaking. They came in and started turning things upside down. One soldier said to me, “Where’s the key to the closet?” Before I said anything, this other soldier—his name was Moshe, he was always in on the raids—he turned a table upside down and found the key. He opened the closet and went straight to the mirror and began taking it apart. There was nothing there this time, we had nothing left. But then my husband and I both knew what had happened to our 100 pounds. When the soldiers left, my husband said to me, “Now I know how the money disappeared.” His heart relaxed. Mine, too. The bad feeling that had been with us all the time finally was gone. We knew who had taken the money.

Because we were back in our house, we didn’t have anything else stolen from us. But all the others who had left the village had their homes emptied. The Jews came with trucks, they broke into the houses and took everything they could. Couches, armoires, chairs and tables, silver and copper platters, pitchers and glasses—everything. They came in broad daylight. They loaded up and left and then came back and loaded up and left again. We couldn’t do anything about it. Some Jews also came with their horses and donkeys and went out to the fields and carried off boxes and boxes of vegetables and fruits. Tomatoes, cucumbers, almonds, and grapes—they took it all. What could we do? We had no way of stopping them.

Later, after the war, they took the land too. The Israeli government confiscated land from this one, that one, from whoever they wanted. We had three dunams in the village in my husband’s name. That they didn’t take. But we also had ninety dunams in my husband’s name down by the village of Emwas.^[*] We still have the papers proving that it’s ours. That’s flat land down there, good for growing wheat and corn and sesame. Many people in Abu Ghosh had land down there. We would sharecrop it out. The people who worked it gave us part of the harvest and kept part of it themselves. In 1948 the Israeli army conquered that land, and we never got it back. I told my husband, “We didn’t flee, that land is ours. Go claim it!” Abu Khaled answered me, “Their army is sitting on it. The most they’ll do is offer me a few agorot for it, so forget it. It’s gone.” Today, I understand—I’ve never seen it, only my husband went back—the Jews are farming it. They’re growing guavas there, he once told me. But I still have the papers that show the land is ours, it belongs to us.

After the 1948 war, or sometime during it—the war kept going on for a long time after the Jews first entered the village—the Jews came one day and announced that they were giving us identity cards. Anyone who was living in the village and wanted a card could have one. The card meant you were an Israeli citizen. It meant you could stay in the village, they wouldn’t throw you out. We all went and got our cards. The Jews themselves appointed us a new mukhtar, Marwan S. He replaced my sister’s husband, Hammad R. But who was this new mukhtar? An illiterate man, that’s all. He wasn’t educated like Hammad R. The Jews wanted someone who they could control, so they appointed him. I don’t know how much he helped them or what. I know he sold vegetables to them and made good money that way. More than that I couldn’t say.

During this period there were a lot of people from Abu Ghosh who had gone over to Jordan and who now wanted to return. Some had already sneaked back before the identity cards were passed out, and they managed to get their cards. I have some cousins who succeeded in this way. Others tried after the cards were given out, and they had problems. My mother and father tried when it was too late. My aunts and uncles too. If you had connections with the Jews, or you were able to make connections, then you could get an identity card and stay. If not, the Jews would sooner or later catch you on one of their raids, and they’d dump you across the border again. They’d come in trucks, they’d load you up and dump you in Jordan. My parents got dumped this way twice. No, my father got caught twice and my mother once. The second time my mother managed to stay here a while, but then she heard that my father was thinking of taking another wife. So, she didn’t wait any longer in Abu Ghosh, she went back to the other side to join my father. They stayed there until 1965, until we managed to get the papers so they could return to the village.

In the beginning, right after the war, it wasn’t so hard to sneak back and forth across the border. I mean, you might get shot at while trying it—but mostly you could make it across. There were infiltrators^[†] who knew the good routes and you could pay them to help you across. The infiltrators were mostly young men from Abu Ghosh. I had some cousins who were doing this work. They’d go over the mountains at night, hiding out in caves when they had to. They not only brought people over, they also brought money and food and clothes. Some of the villagers who fled from here in 1948 took lots of money with them, and they sent back some to their relatives who stayed. The money was simple to hide, but if your relatives sent you food or clothes, you could easily get caught. When the Jews came around on raids they were looking for these things.

One time my sister Jalila, who married Hammad R., sent me and my husband some shoes and slippers, along with other things. The Jews came by here on a raid and my husband greeted them at the door. They looked at his shoes and said, “The infiltrators brought you these, they’re not from here. What else have you got?” They turned the house upside down, but all they found were my slippers. They were the most beautiful slippers I’d ever owned. They took them too, along with the shoes. I was furious. But nothing else happened to us. We weren’t hiding any infiltrators, we weren’t doing anything else against them, and we had our identity cards. So they left us alone.

After the war was over, two years or so after, it was very hard to sneak over. You had to come back with your papers in order, otherwise it was very risky. My two sisters managed to get back with their families this way. Actually, what happened was that my sister Hamda’s husband managed to get across through some connections he had. He then arranged for Jalila and the mukhtar, Hammad R., to get their papers too. So both families and all their children came back to Abu Ghosh. This was a little after I had brought Leila, it must have been 1953 or 1954.

For Jalila and her husband, coming back to Abu Ghosh was a hard thing. It was very hard on the mukhtar, he came back with nothing. Whatever money they had taken with them in 1948 was gone. They had spent those years living in the Bethlehem area. Hammad R. was treated there like a traitor. When he arrived in 1948 they cursed him and said to him, “How did you turn your village over to the Jews?” They humiliated him, and they even attacked him physically. For five years he lived there in disgrace, and then he managed to come back here with my sister and their children. Yet what happened to him here? The people in the village still respected him. We still thought of him as the real mukhtar even though the Jews had appointed someone else. But Hammad R. came back with nothing—nothing above him and nothing below him. The Jews had taken his land, and even his house had been emptied out by thieves. He didn’t have one agora to support his family. So he had to go to work as a common laborer, along with boys from the village. This same Hammad R. who once was mukhtar of mukhtars, the most respected man in the area, the one who made a sulha between families and was always hosting guests and slaughtering sheep for them—who was he now? Nobody. That’s the way he saw it, anyway. He felt so humiliated by all this that he prayed to God to hurry his end. That’s what my sister told me. Hammad R. didn’t want to live anymore. And one day God answered his prayers. He came home from work that day carrying his tools with him, his hammer in his hand. When he got off the bus in the village center, it was raining hard and there was thunder and lightning. A lightning bolt struck his hammer and Hammad R. was burned like a stick. God had ended his humiliation. My sister was still a young woman then and she had small children to raise herself. What a life she’s had! Poor thing. I suppose you know that one of her sons, Walid, is married to Leila. That’s right. Leila’s husband, Walid, is the son of Hammad R. And Walid, you know, is a respected man in the village now, his father’s good name still clings to him. My sister, she spends a lot of time over there with them, though she still lives in her own house, Hammad R.’s house. She’s an old lady like me now, both of us are widows now. Time sure goes by, doesn’t it?

Emwas, an Arab village about fifteen kilometers from Abu Ghosh, after 1948 wound up on the Jordanian side of the border. But many of the fields around the village—including those of Umm Khaled’s husband—remained on the Israeli side of the border. Before 1948 farmers in hill villages like Abu Ghosh often owned land on the plains and either worked it themselves or rented it out. In the 1967 war the village of Emwas was captured by Israel from Jordan and was later razed to the ground.Umm Khaled referred to these individuals as mutasallelin (sing., mutasallel), which is commonly translated as “infiltrators.” In this context the Arabic term does not carry a pejorative meaning, as does the English term “infiltrator.”