11. Leila

Leila is Umm Khaled’s eighth child and fourth daughter. She is a plumpish, pleasant-looking woman of forty-two who, like her mother, speaks in a rush of words and is open about her views and sentiments. Unlike her mother, however, she has a modern, fashionable look to her: she wears makeup, she does not cover her long brown hair with a head scarf, and she prefers blouses and dresses bought in the department stores of Tel Aviv.

Leila and her husband, Walid, were both raised in Abu Ghosh and chose to remain there to raise their seven children. Today, they live in the valley of the village, about a hundred meters from the mosque and monastery. Reflecting Walid’s success as a building contractor, they are converting their house from a modest five-room place to an expansive two-story building with ten rooms and a majestic veranda, a house fit—one is tempted to say—for a son of the former mukhtar.

All seven sessions with Leila took place at her house, either in the salon or the kitchen. At times it was possible to interview Leila alone, but just as often someone else was hovering nearby—her mother-in-law, her married daughter, or one of the younger children. Her husband, Walid, was seldom there, although Leila did apprise him of her participation in the project.

Before this study Leila and Rafiqa Othman had not visited each other, but Leila was receptive to being interviewed because like Umm Khaled she was familiar with Rafiqa’s family; in fact, she had gone to school with Rafiqa’s older sister. Leila was even willing to have Michael Gorkin participate in the interviews, but since we had interviewed her mother alone, we decided to interview the daughter this way also.^[*] Michael made a social visit only at the end of the interviews.

Born four years after the creation of Israel, Leila is the one woman in the book who has lived all her life in a Jewish state. Her experiences in school, at work, and as a mother raising children all reflect this fact. Indeed, when asked how she would describe herself, contrary to others in the book she did not refer to herself as a “Palestinian” but rather as an “Israeli Arab.” (Umm Khaled, by comparison, said, “I’m a Palestinian with an Israeli identity card—a Palestinian Israeli.”)

The material below, excerpted from the interviews with Leila, covers her entire life—her childhood, schooling, marriage, work experience—as it unfolded in the village of Abu Ghosh.

As we indicated in the introduction (see note 10), we were concerned about potential opposition to the study from Leila’s brothers.

Where do I start? I don’t know how to do this. What, just talk about myself? Alright, fine. Let’s see, the first thing I want to say is that, like you, I’m from here. All my life I’ve lived in Abu Ghosh, and I expect to be here the rest of my life. I love the village, it’s a fine place—good people, right? All my sisters and brothers are here still, except for Muna and Nadia who are over in East Jerusalem. And Walid’s family too, they’re all here. That’s the way it is with our village. People stay here usually, they marry someone from here. Abu Ghosh is a good place to live.

How do I remember my childhood? Well, I can’t say I remember much. Not before school, anyway. We didn’t do much as kids then. There was no nursery school or kindergarten in the village back then. You stayed at home, or went to your cousin’s house, or you went to the grocery store to get something for your mother. That was it, a different kind of day for kids than today.

Our house was in the center of the village near the monastery where my father worked. Today, my brother Muhsen lives in it—he was born there during the 1948 war—and part of it, the downstairs, is rented out now to the village as a nursery school. What I remember is that back when we were living there, we had three bedrooms. One for my parents, who had a real bed. And a bedroom for the boys, and a bedroom for the girls. We slept on floor mattresses in rows, one next to the other according to age. I slept next to Rana, my older sister. Oh God, how we used to fight! She’d pull my hair, I’d pull hers. Over the least thing, we’d be at each other. That’s how it is with rusiya,^[*] isn’t it? Each envies the other. Today, we’re friends, all that’s gone. She has ten children, and we get along fine. No problems.

Back then, if we got into fights we’d have to straighten it out with each other. Or maybe one of my older sisters, Khawla or Zahira, might get into it. They helped out my mother. My mother, herself, was too busy for things like that. She was always working—cleaning, washing, cooking. With fifteen or sixteen kids, she had no time to get involved with one or two of us. I mean, it wasn’t like today where you sit and talk with the child. They didn’t do it that way then.

I remember when my brother Khaled died. Nobody came and talked to me about it. Not my mother, not my father, nobody. I was five years old. I remember Khaled was pale, but I didn’t know how sick he was. He was my oldest brother, tall and handsome with blond hair and honey-colored eyes, and with this pale skin. Then one day there was a lot of crying and yelling, and someone said Khaled’s gone, dead. Death, what’s that? I didn’t understand what it meant. Nobody came to explain it to me, I had to understand it myself. The truth is, I didn’t understand it till much later, when I was a schoolgirl. At five years old, who knows what death is?

In Arabic, rusiya refers to two siblings close in age: one child is born on the “head” [ras] of the other.

The thing I really liked as a child was going to school. The school was only a few steps from our house, in the center of the village. I went there from first to eighth grade. That’s all we had in the village then, there was no high school. I would have liked to go to high school like your sister did. I wanted to study more, to be a nurse maybe. But my parents didn’t agree to my leaving the village and going to Jerusalem to high school, the way your sister did it. So when school stopped here, I had to stop too.

I was proud to go to school, I used to like going off each morning with my book bag. We’d wear these school dresses and blouses, light blue things with the school emblem, Abu Ghosh School, and a bunch of grapes embroidered on the blouse. That’s how you had to dress. You couldn’t wear pants if you were a girl, only if you were a boy. And if you were fourteen years or older, you were expected to cover your hair with a head scarf. That was the custom then, it changed later.

In the classrooms—there were eight, one for each grade—we were together with boys. They sat in their section and we sat in ours. But we’d talk together, joke around, and we were friends. They were like brothers to us. If you ask me, it’s good to have boys and girls in the same classroom, nothing wrong with it. Of course, after school we didn’t go play with boys—oh no! Our parents wouldn’t have allowed that. School was one thing, after school was another.

Me, I liked being there in school. I liked learning things, new things. Which subjects? I liked English, that was my favorite, I think. And Hebrew, we learned that too, starting in fifth grade. I used to speak it fairly well, but now I’ve forgotten most of it. Walid, he’s the one who can really speak, he’s fluent like the Jews even though he only went to eighth grade. And, let’s see, what else did we learn? Oh, math—that was the hardest for me, for sure. And then there was religion, geography, and history. And Arabic. We studied our own language too, from first grade on.

With Arabic, there were some problems. This was because our teachers were not from here, they weren’t Arabs. They were Jews from Arab countries, mostly from Iraq. You see, when I was going to school there were hardly any Arab teachers. Not until the seventh grade—then, we suddenly had a change. A new principal came, an Arab man, and also a lot of Arab teachers from up north who had finished college. Until then—this was 1965 or 1966—we were taught by Iraqi Jews. These Iraqi Jews spoke fluent Arabic, but it was different from ours, much harsher. They said the dh and the q from deep in the throat, not softly like we do. So what happened is that all of us were speaking like Iraqi Jews, at least in the school. When the new principal and teachers came they got very angry at us. They wanted us to speak right, like from here. I remember the principal came one time to our class to see if we were making progress with our accents, and every student who was still speaking the Iraqi way got hit on the hand. I got hit too, yes I did. I remember it to this day.

Other things also changed at the school shortly after this new principal came. He was a strong man, a good man, I think. He cared about the students. He brought about some changes. Like, for example, after he took over we didn’t celebrate some Jewish holidays the way we had before. Until then, we had always had a big celebration in May on Israel’s Independence Day. The teachers and the students would decorate the classrooms with balloons and blue-and-white Israeli flags. All eight classes would go out into the school yard and the principal, an Iraqi Jew, would give a long speech about the meaning of Independence Day. And then we’d sing these songs in Arabic, like this one—“It’s the Independence Day of my country/The bird who sings, sings gladly today/Happiness reigns all over/From the valley to the plain.” You see, I still remember it. Looking back now, I don’t feel we should have been told to sing these things, I’m glad the Arab principal changed it. Today’s kids don’t do this anymore, no more decorating the classroom, no more singing songs. They hang an Israeli flag from the school, and that’s all. But in my time we were ignorant. The teachers told us to decorate and we decorated, they told us to sing and we sang.

If you look back on it now, knowing what we know now, you can see that there were lots of things we didn’t learn. You asked me if we learned in school about the war in 1948. No, we didn’t, not that I remember. Not in history class, and not in any other class. What I remember is that we learned about some of the older history here. Napoleon, Herod, the Romans. And we learned about Hitler and someone else, Musso-somebody. But, about the 1948 war here, how the Arabs and Jews fought, and why there was a war at all—I tell you, I can’t remember learning about it at all. Did you learn in your time, Rafiqa? No, you see. It’s not something they taught. Now, yes, it’s changed. Today’s children learn about these things. Today, almost every teacher in the school in Abu Ghosh is an Arab. But in my time we didn’t talk about these subjects, about the wars between Arabs and Jews—not in school.

Of course, just living in Abu Ghosh, all of us knew something about the war in 1948. To this day, I can’t say I know a lot, but I know about what happened here, some of it, even though I was born after the war. All of us here had family over on the other side, in Jordan. I can remember when I was about ten years old, we went to Beit Safafa hoping to see our relatives who were in Jordan.^[*] I went with kids my age and some aunts. Not with my parents, they didn’t go that time. There were a lot of people there shouting across the fences, trying to talk to their relatives. Suddenly, my aunt Jalila said, “There’s Leila—over there!” I had never met my aunt Leila, I only knew my mother named me after her sister. She yelled over to me, “Whose daughter are you?” I answered, “Amina’s daughter—I’m Leila!” My aunt Leila began crying and crying, and I swear, I began crying too. Then Labiba—she’s a cousin of my mother’s—fainted. She had come with us hoping to see her brother who was a policeman on the Jordanian side. There were rumors in the village that he was dead, but she didn’t believe the rumors. She came to look for him. She wanted to cross over to the other side and find him. The Israelis didn’t let her, she got all upset, and she fainted. Finally, they sent someone to try to find him, and you know, he was alive! Labiba’s brother came to the Jordanian side of the fence and the Israelis let her cross over to meet him. I can still see that scene before my eyes. We stood there watching the two of them embrace, all of us weeping. I tell you, I’ll never forget that.

Naturally, we heard lots of stories about those over in Jordan. Nobody sat down and explained it all to us—how the war in 1948 started and why—but we learned things here and there. Jalila, my mother’s sister, and now my mother-in-law, talked a lot about the war. She likes to talk and she had many stories. She was married to the mukhtar, Hammad R. You know that, right? She was over in Jordan for about five years and then she and the mukhtar managed to get back with their children. Walid was born here just before they left. He was six years old when his father died, but he still remembers him. And Jalila, she’s always talking about the old days. Just yesterday, she was over here helping me make maqluba, and she was talking about the mukhtar.

I swear, my mother-in-law has had a hard life. Oh yes, she sure has. She was married to a man before the mukhtar, her cousin. He was no good, he was always looking for other women, so her father took her back home. But then fate brought her to the mukhtar. The mukhtar’s wife died and he was left a widower with two children. He came immediately and asked for Jalila. He was fifty years old and she was eighteen. She told her parents, “I want someone to look after me now. No more young men, only an older man.” So she married the mukhtar and she became a rich woman. She was no longer poor like my parents, no. She was busy all the time with the mukhtar’s guests, but she had servants to help her. They had a fine house and lots of land. Five hundred dunams. Then the war came in 1948, and they lost everything. When they were over in Jordan, people robbed everything in their house. Furniture, rugs, silver, everything. You see this copper fruit dish here? Simple but fine, no? It’s one of the few things they found in their house when they came back. All the rest was gone. The land, too. The Israelis took over everything except for a few dunams in the village. The mukhtar had to go to work as a laborer. That finished him. “God take me to you, I don’t want to live anymore”—that’s what Hammad R. prayed. Walid was in school that day when it happened. They came and told him, “Your father just died, he got hit by lightning.” God had answered Hammad R.’s prayers. Poor Jalila and the children, though. There were six children and Jalila had to raise them without a husband. Somehow she managed it. Her sons are all fine men, important men in the village now. They are still seen as the sons of the mukhtar, the best mukhtar the village ever had. Before 1948, and after—Walid’s father is known as the best.

After the 1948 war the border between Jordan and Israel ran through the village of Beit Safafa, in south Jerusalem; one part of the village was in Israel and the other in Jordan, with fences separating the two parts. On holidays, Arabs from Abu Ghosh and elsewhere in Israel would come to Beit Safafa with the hope of seeing and shouting greetings to family on the Jordanian side.

What I know about the 1948 war, I learned from the stories of others. To this day, I still hear things I never knew. My mother has probably told you things that I, myself, don’t know. I think we were very lucky that we survived, don’t you? I can’t imagine what our lives would have been like if my parents had left the village in 1948 along with my grandparents, and we had grown up in Jordan. Praise God, they stayed! Those who left had a hard time of it. When they came over here to visit after the 1967 war, we found that out. They hadn’t done so well in Jordan, not at all.

I remember all that very well. You see, the 1967 war happened when I was already pretty old, I think I was about fifteen. Yes, right, it was when I was in eighth grade. I remember it, sure. My father had a radio and he was listening all the time. So we knew a war was coming, a big war. We were living in our new house, the one my mother is in today. It’s a solidly built house. My father wanted to fortify it by putting sandbags around the windows and doors. He had us help him. He wanted the house to be well protected in case bombs were dropped. Some of the smaller children were put down in the storeroom to sleep. I can remember we were just finishing with the sandbags around the windows when a woman neighbor began shouting, “War! War! Head for the monastery!” Many people began running to the monastery, that’s where they hid in the 1948 war and were saved. My parents didn’t go this time. They thought our house was safe enough. Anyway, it didn’t matter. All of Abu Ghosh was a safe place to be in that war. Nothing happened here. There were a few shots fired nearby on the first day, and a few times when we looked outside we could see planes overhead chasing each other. But that was it. They call it the Six-Day War, right? It was over in six days.

For us, the Israeli Arabs, it was a shock. We were listening to the radio broadcasts from Jordan and Egypt, and we were sure the Arab armies were going to win. That’s what they said. They kept announcing Arab victories, one after the other. Lies, just lies, it turned out. It was disappointing, sure it was. I’m not going to lie to you and say we were hoping for Israel to win. Of course, we wanted the Arabs to win. Nasser was a hero in the village then. Everyone loved him, old and young. When Nasser and the Arab armies lost it made us all angry. We didn’t believe it would happen. And in six days—who would have believed it?

Anyway, that was the 1967 war. Started and finished in one week. The only good thing that came out of it—at least, we felt it was a good thing in the beginning—was that suddenly we could again see all our family, all the people from Abu Ghosh who had left in 1948. My grandmother, my father’s and mother’s sisters, our cousins. Half of Abu Ghosh was over in Jordan, and suddenly they all came back to the village. They couldn’t come to live, except for a few of them like my grandmother. The Israelis didn’t let them stay. But they were allowed to come for long visits, for weeks or months.

Well, at first, we enjoyed this. My parents especially enjoyed it. Me, I found it strange. To be honest, almost all these relatives who had been living over in Jordan seemed different from us. I can’t really explain it. They seemed like strangers in everything, how they talked and what they said. I had expected I was going to feel close to them, we were always hearing about them. But, they seemed like complete strangers to me. And they had this way about them that made you feel—I know my mother felt this—they expected things out of us. You know, one of them would say, “We don’t have this kind of cleanser, or this soap over there.” And another would say, “That orange juice concentrate, where do you get that?” Hinting, you see. And we were expected to go out and buy these things for them. We did, sure. We bought lots of presents, but they were always asking for more. I tell you, I didn’t like it. I wasn’t used to people talking in this way. And these were my relatives! They didn’t give me the feeling I wanted to know them more. I guess they had a hard life over in Jordan, maybe they envied us. I just know that when these visits ended, we were all relieved. We’d had enough for the time being.

For me, when the 1967 war was over and all the visits stopped, I was looking to do something. But what could I do? I didn’t want to get married, I was too young for that—only sixteen. What I really wanted was to continue in school. Well, a lucky thing happened. Just then, here in the village they opened up this one-year trade school for girls exactly my age. They gave courses in Hebrew, Arabic, math, and they also taught you how to sew. I was eager to go. I went to my parents and told them, but they refused. “Leila has gone to school long enough,” my father said. I didn’t know what to do, and then I figured I’d go to Margalit. She was a nurse in the health clinic in the village, a Jewish woman who spoke Arabic. Everyone in the village respected her, my mother too. I went to Margalit, and I could see she was on my side. The next thing I knew, she had gone to my father and he agreed.

Your sister went with me that same year. I used to rely on her to help me with the math homework. She was smarter than me in that. Oh, that was a good year! I really enjoyed it. After that, I wanted to go on to high school too, but my parents were against my going to East Jerusalem. Khalas, that was it. There was nothing I could do about it.

Actually, what happened is that during that year in the trade school, when I was sixteen and a half, Walid came to request me. In a way I was surprised, and in a way not. Walid is my cousin, so I had seen him over the years. No, we never sat and talked, of course not. He’s five years older than me, that’s a lot of years when you’re young. But we would visit his house, and they’d visit us. And sometimes we’d all go on outings, like picking olives together. Walid and I never said more than “hello” to each other. Still, there was something I could feel. This one time when we went olive picking—I was already fifteen or sixteen—I could sense he had his eye on me. Even from a distance I could feel it. I didn’t say anything and neither did he. Then, one day, his sister came to visit me. She told me, “Leila, my brother wants to marry you. We all love you in our family. We hope you’ll accept.” I said to her, “Why has Walid chosen me? Why not my older sister Rana?” She answered, “No, Walid wants you. He loves you.” I wasn’t against the idea, it was just that Rana and Zahira weren’t married yet, and they were older than me. I didn’t want to cause problems. And, naturally, it did cause problems. My mother was against my going first, she opposed the idea. If she had her way, she would have stopped it. Walid didn’t give up though, and in the end that’s how it worked out. My father and mother agreed. Nobody came and asked me what I wanted, but I wasn’t against it. So it was agreed I’d marry Walid.

He and his family came over one day and made a formal request. It had already been agreed, but the custom was to make a formal request. Walid came with a maska,^[*] this bracelet to put on my wrist. I knew it was going to happen, yet when they got to our house I suddenly ran into the other room. The whole thing embarrassed me. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Then my uncle Khalil came and took me by the arm and led me back to the salon. I was brought to sit next to Walid, a formal request was made, and he put the maska on my wrist. I was sixteen and a half years old, too young to get married according to the law. You had to be seventeen. When we had the ceremony to sign the kitab a few weeks later, the sheikh told us he personally was going to hold onto the marriage contract until I was legal age. He didn’t want to run into any problems. That’s what he did, and then when I was seventeen we had our wedding party.

I had several months between the kitab and the wedding to get myself ready. I went to Tel Aviv and got everything there. Things were cheaper in the West Bank, but you got much better quality in Tel Aviv. In my time, the custom was that the bride wore seven dresses of different colors—white, black, red, pink, green, blue, and yellow. And there were matching shoes for the black, red and white dresses. These days the custom is different, right? The bride only wears one dress, a white one. Maybe it’s more elegant this new way. I know the way I did it was fine with me. Today, they also don’t ride a horse in the zaffa anymore. That’s really a shame. That was a good custom. Although, the truth is, I didn’t get to ride the horse. Oh, how I regret that! To sit up there looking at all the people, it’s a special thing for a bride. I wanted to do it, but my father was a religious man, very modest in his ways. I didn’t dare ask him to let me do it, and my parents didn’t suggest it either. To this day, it’s the one thing I regret about my wedding. Everything else was fine, perfect.

After the party at my parents’ house, a party for the women, I was brought over by the men in Walid’s family to his house. That’s where they had the men’s party. Today, they no longer do it this way, no separate parties. They have one party for everyone. But back then, it was separate. Anyway, the party at Walid’s house was enormous. Almost the whole village came because it was right before the elections in the village, and so all the men wanted to make an appearance. Walid and his brothers are important in the village, they were back then too. So, it was a big party. You know, music and dancing—the men doing the debka. I was there with some of the women in my family, we sat separately. Well, it went on and on—all afternoon. I could see that Walid was really enjoying it. I enjoyed it too, watching from the side. Really, I did. The only thing I was sorry about was the horse. I had wanted to ride over to Walid’s house on the horse, sitting up there looking out at the people in my white dress. But except for that, everything was the way I wanted. Really, it was a fine wedding.

A maska [literally, something with which to catch] is given and received as an informal agreement that the two parties are planning to write the kitab. Like an engagement ring, its social purpose is to show others that the girl is already “caught.”

After the wedding we went to live in my mother-in-law’s house. No, there weren’t honeymoons in those days. Not like today. Look, my daughter Lilian went to Greece with her husband. But that’s a new custom. Honeymoons are for today’s couples, we didn’t have them. You had a few days of privacy at your mother-in-law’s house and that was it.

For me, moving in with my mother-in-law was not what I expected. I knew her, sure, she’s my aunt. Still, a mother-in-law is a mother-in-law even if she’s your aunt. That’s what I found out. My aunt, she’s a different type than my mother, as different as the earth and the sky. She’s more outgoing, she likes to go here and there. After her husband died she started smoking. How many women in Abu Ghosh do that? And when we were kids, she used to listen to these romantic dramas on the radio. My mother would tell her it was an eib, that she was going to influence us to listen too—and, of course, we did listen in secret. Oh yes, Jalila was a different type, more open you could say. But, you see, once I moved into her house with Walid, I saw another side of her. My aunt started to take over, she became like a boss. I hadn’t expected it. Everything Walid and I did, she had to be in on it. Where we were going, why we were going there, and when we were coming back—she had something to say about it. And money! Walid wasn’t making much money in those days, so she was always critical about what we did with our money. She wanted to be the boss of the house, simple as that. I was really offended at first, but I didn’t fight back. I decided the best thing was to leave it to Walid. Let him work it out with her, I figured. Yet in the beginning it was hard for me. I swear, with Lilian and the rest of my children, I wouldn’t do that. I’m keeping out of things, not like my mother-in-law did.

Walid and I had been married about six months when I got pregnant. I was eighteen when I had Lilian, she’s my first. How did I feel about having a girl first? Look, anyone who tells you it makes no difference is not telling the truth. A woman always wants her first to be a boy, even the second. A woman is given more credit if she has sons, that’s the way it is in Arab society. Now that Lilian has grown up, I’m glad I had a girl. Daughters stay close to you, sons go off. But you’re influenced by those around you. So, naturally, when Lilian was born I was disappointed. I had wanted a boy.

We called her Lilian instead of some Arab name because of Walid’s brother, Qasem. Around the time that Lilian was born, Qasem had to break off his relationship with a girl named Lilian. He loved this girl very much, but she was Jewish. Actually, her father was Arab and her mother was Jewish. My mother-in-law opposed this relationship, and when Qasem said he was going to marry the girl, she became enraged. There was a big struggle, and in the end my mother-in-law got her way. Qasem was broken-hearted. So Walid wanted to ease his brother’s heart, to do something that would at least keep the name in the family. That’s what we did. We called our first Lilian, even though it’s not an Arab name. We did it for Qasem.

After Lilian was born, I got pregnant right away. And again it was a girl. This poor child died, though. She got some kind of fever in her brain, and she died when she was one month old. That was her fate, what could we do? Immediately after that I again got pregnant, and this time it was a son—Samir. He’s our oldest son, I’m Umm Samir. I’m the one who chose the name. I chose almost all the names after our first. I’d hear a name I liked on one of the television dramas, and I’d pick that. Walid didn’t mind, not at all. He’s easy about these things. So I picked the names for our sons. That’s what I brought after the second girl, just sons. Six sons altogether. I had them all one right after the other, all of them in the hospital. Usually, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. It’s a fine place, a very good hospital. By the time I was about thirty years old, I had brought them all. Lilian is our only daughter, and now that she’s married there’s only boys here. Six boys, Walid, and me.

I brought the first five children when we were living at my mother-in-law’s house. The last two I brought when we moved here, where we’re living today. My mother-in-law was a big help to me with the children, I’ll say that. I didn’t know much about caring for babies. She told me what to do and I did it. With the first four, we massaged them with olive oil and wrapped them from top to bottom with a cloth. It’s the traditional way. I wasn’t so sure about this wrapping business, but my mother-in-law talked me into it. She said it was good for their bones and skin. I went along with it. With the last three I didn’t do it, even though she was telling me I should. I did it my own way. Diapers alone, that’s all. We didn’t have Pampers, the diapers you throw away, like the Jews use. We couldn’t afford them. So it was a lot of work. I was busy every minute in those years. It wasn’t easy, not at all.

But, praise God, they all turned out well, at least so far. They’re all good children, every one of them. These days Walid’s been doing very well in his construction business, so we’re adding onto the house. We’ve been here twelve years or so, and it’s really a bit small for us. Now, each of the boys will have his own room. It’s better that way, right? It’s different than when I was growing up, that’s for sure.

Really, they’re good boys, they deserve the best. They’re not spoiled. Even though they’re boys, they sometimes help me out in the house. If a guest comes, like when you’re here, one of them will sometimes bring the coffee. They’re alright in this way. The only thing I wish is that one or two of them, or all of them, would go off to college. Walid and I encourage them to do it, but so far nobody has gone. With Lilian too, we wanted her to go to college. But she couldn’t get high enough grades on her matriculation exam—she couldn’t pass the English part—so she didn’t go to college. She wound up working in the clothing factory in Jerusalem, where Qasem is a supervisor. Some of my younger sisters worked there too. Lilian hated it, and I don’t blame her. A year or so later she got married, and now she’s got two children of her own. She married her cousin, Hamzi.

Cousin marriage—what do I think of it? Look, if you ask me, I’ll tell you the truth. It’s not a good thing. I mean, my mother did it, I did it, and so did Lilian, but it’s best not to marry a cousin. Usually, I mean. That’s what the doctors say, and they’re right. If you marry someone in your family it can cause problems with the children’s health, or their personalities, or how clever they are. It’s better not to marry so close, even though until recently that’s the way it was done. Parents married their children to first cousins. These days, things are changing. In my view, it’s best to marry someone from outside the clan, even outside the village. Walid says he doesn’t care if it’s outside the clan, but it should be someone from the village. That way, you know better who the person is. But look, these days the parents don’t control it so much. Children are much freer to choose who they want. Even girls are freer. If a girl doesn’t agree to the groom, she tells her parents “No,” and that’s it. Lilian refused the first one who came, and if she hadn’t wanted the second—even though he’s my brother’s son—she would have refused too. A girl is much freer now, it’s better that way.

And these days, the children know much more. They’re not ignorant about life like I was when I got married. They learn in school. Today, they teach them about pregnancy and things like that. All my sons know about this. And Lilian knew too, before she got married. No, I didn’t talk to her, I didn’t tell her anything. She learned in school. And she learned at the clothing factory where she went to work. The women there were always gossiping, so she heard about sex and all that from them. I never discussed it with her, but I could tell before she got married that she knew about these things. I’m close to her—I was before she got married and I still am—so I could tell she wasn’t ignorant. Not like I was. It’s a different generation now, they’re much more aware.

Lilian, she even teaches me things. She knows things I don’t know. She supports me. Look, she’s my only daughter, there’s things she understands because she’s a woman. Like recently, she was the one who supported me with something, with this problem. I’ll tell you what it was. It happened a few months ago. You see, I got pregnant again. For a while I’d been taking pills to avoid getting pregnant, and then the doctor said I should take a break for a few months. I took a break, and I wound up getting pregnant again. It made me very upset. I don’t want another. It’s not a good thing to bring children after the age of forty. What, I’m going to go with my daughter and her friends to the baby clinic? No, no, not for me. I told my daughter and some of my sisters about it, and my mother found out too. Everyone knew, including my sons. They all told me to go on with it. “Yes, yes, bring another child,” my sons said. My sisters said the same, and my mother told me, “Leila, it’s haram to get rid of it. It’s against our religion.” The only one who supported me was Lilian. She told me I should go see her doctor, check it out on that ultra-machine, the one that looks like a television. Her doctor said maybe I’m not really pregnant, at my age it might be a “false pregnancy.” I don’t know about these things, but I knew I was pregnant. I could tell. “So, if you’re pregnant, you can abort it at the hospital,” Lilian said. “You’ve had enough children. Do what you want!” She was the one who sympathized the most with me.

I decided not to go for the abortion, but to do other things instead. I began to work extra hard around the house. I ran up and down the stairs, and I was jumping, jumping, jumping all the time. I also pressed my stomach hard with my hands. Walid knew what I was doing, but all he said to me is, “Leila, you’re going to hurt yourself.” Well, what happened is that the baby fell out. I miscarried. I wrapped it in a cloth and buried it in our yard, under a tree. Then, I went to the hospital and got cleaned up. And that was it. Nobody says anything about it now. Not my children, not Walid. My mother thinks I miscarried because I was upset about things, that’s the way she sees it. Alright, I was upset. True. But now it’s over and khalas, no more. I’m going to a doctor and get a contraceptive that I can use, one that will work. I don’t want any more accidents like this one. No, no. No more pregnancies for me!

Don’t misunderstand me, I like small children. I just don’t want more of my own. But taking care of other people’s children, doing it as a job—that’s fine with me. I like it. You know that’s what I do, right? I’ve been doing it for five or six years. The children I take care of now are all from Abu Ghosh. Three of them are my brother Khalil’s children. Their mother is sick, she can’t be with them now. Frankly, I don’t like this arrangement, it was sort of pushed on me. I wish she could take care of them herself. But what can I do? The thing I like, really, is taking care of children not in the family, children of mothers who work and need a child caretaker during the day. This is the work I like to do. And it pays well too!

The way I started doing this was a little unusual. I started working with Jewish children. It is unusual, right? I tell you, I wasn’t looking to do this work, it happened by accident. What happened is that Walid was involved in some project over in the Jewish settlement, Nataf. Walid gets along real well with everyone, Jews or Arabs, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, this family he was doing some building for, the woman—her name is Haya—came to Walid and said, “We have no child caretakers in the settlement that I like. You don’t happen to know a good one in Abu Ghosh, do you?” Walid said he would check into it and let her know.

So that evening he comes home and tells me. Actually, he told our neighbor who was sitting with me then. She immediately said she was interested. After she left I got mad at Walid. “Why not ask me?” I said. You see, the idea really struck me as something I wanted to do. All my children were in school by then and I had the time for it. I really wanted to do it. Walid said that since he was a building contractor there, he was embarrassed to suggest me. But I didn’t let him get away with that. I pressed him, and finally he agreed. And that’s how it started. Haya began bringing her daughter, Miriam, to me.

Haya is an unusual person, one of the Peace Now people, I think. She teaches at Hebrew University, and she used to bring Miriam to me three times a week. I took care of her for about a year. Oh, what a beautiful girl Miriam was! Like the moon. She was about a year and a half old then. I used to wash her, feed her, and take good care of her. I’d feed her our food, Arab food, and she’d eat everything. I’d put her in a little pool we have for children, she loved that. And my children would sometimes play with her too. We spoke Arabic to her. Haya wanted that, she wanted her daughter to learn Arabic. And she did. Haya and I became friendly too. She’d sometimes sit here and talk and eat with us, and sometimes I’d do her hair with henna for her. I really liked her.

During that year Haya began to tell her friends in Nataf about me. She made a real advertising campaign for me. The next thing I knew, others were coming. One, two…it got to where I had seven or eight kids from Nataf. They were all good kids, truly they were. There’s been so many by now, I forget some of their names. Some would come only for a few hours a week, some came every day. I charged by the hour, four shekels an hour—or by the month, 550 shekels a month. It was good money, sure it was. Walid didn’t mind that at all! Although, he’s never asked me for an agora. “It’s yours, do what you want with it,” he tells me. He’s very good about it. He even likes having the kids around, that’s the way he is.

The one time he got angry, though, was when I made a bad mistake. It was the kind of thing that happens now and then, but I guess because it was with a kid from Nataf it bothered him more. It bothered me, too. What it was is that one of the kids, Smadar, got burned in the face. I was baking something in the oven, and Smadar came running over to me just as I opened it. She caught the oven door in her face, and she got a huge burn mark. I felt horrible. I went running with Smadar to the clinic here, but they were shut because of a strike. I took her to the office of a private doctor, but he wasn’t there. I felt shaken up. Walid came in just then and started yelling at me, “Why don’t you pay more attention? Why did you let this happen?” When the mother called and told me to send her daughter home that day with a neighbor from Nataf, I said to her, “I’m coming that way, I’ll bring her myself.” I wanted to talk to her in person. I went with my oldest son, and while we were driving there I had the thought, “They’ll say I did it on purpose because the girl’s Jewish and I’m Arab.” But when we got there, the mother was not like that at all. She was very understanding. She could see the burn wasn’t so serious and she said, “Relax, these things happen. It’s happened to me too.” She was very kind about it, but I felt awful.

These days I’m not working with any kids from Nataf. I think they now have some child caretakers there to bring their children to. I’m still in touch with some of the mothers and their children. Once in a while they drop by and say hello. Haya came here a few months ago with Miriam, I hadn’t seen her in years. “This is Leila, she’s the one who raised you,” Haya told her. Miriam was a little shy with me at first, but she warmed up after a while. It was good to see her again. She’s still a beautiful child, still like the moon.

I no longer have Jewish kids here who I take care of. Only Arab children from the village. That’s too bad, really. I’d like to work with Jewish and Arab children together. That would be good. Maybe it’ll happen. Like I said, I still have a good relationship with some people in Nataf. Though, you know, a while back one of my sons said something that shocked me. Maybe he was upset about something that day, I don’t know. He said, “Those kids you’ve taken care of—the Jewish boys—one day they’re going to be soldiers.” I answered, “Yes, so?” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. And he went on, “Someday you’re going to pass a checkpoint and one of them is going to stop you and say, ‘Give me your identity card!’ ” I told him, “Listen, by the time they grow up, we’re going to have peace here. And besides, they’d recognize me. Nothing like that will happen.” That’s what I told him, but I admit that when I thought about it more, it upset me. I mean, if such a thing ever was to happen it would hurt me, of course it would. I’m not saying that thinking about this has changed my mind about taking care of Jewish children. I loved those kids, and some of their parents were wonderful. I can’t change the politics here, can I? Yet, sometimes you realize that it’s all pretty awful, an awful situation to raise children in—ours and theirs.

For me, politics isn’t something I think about very much. Even though it’s something that affects us all, I’m not very interested in it. I vote, yes. I supported Meretz^[*] in the last election. Walid and I both did. They’re the best, I think. They’re the ones who are helping to bring the Arabs and Jews together, and the ones who are helping bring about peace. I supported them. So far, I think they’re doing a good job.

It looks to me like there’s going to be peace. If there is, it’ll be good for the Arabs here in Israel. We Israeli Arabs used to get along much better with the Jews before 1967. Since then—and especially since the Intifada—things have gotten bad between us and the Jews. We used to have relations with them, we’d visit each other on holidays. Now, hardly at all. We used to go wherever we wanted, with nobody stopping us for our identity cards. Now, they stop us. They’re suspicious of us. This is no good. No good for us or them.

I’m not saying I’m against the Intifada. It did bring some results. Now, it begins to look like there’s going to be a settlement. They’ve already given back Gaza and Jericho, and soon they’ll give back more. At least, that’s what they say. Look, I’m not a politician. I don’t know exactly how the land here should be divided. But it has to be divided fairly. The Jews say it all belongs to them and their grandfathers. The Arabs say it’s all theirs, it belonged to their grandfathers. So we have to make a division, a compromise. Let there be a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza, and a Jewish state here. That’s fair, no? We in Abu Ghosh will stay here in the Jewish state. What, we’re going to move over there? No, this is our village, our home. Our lives are good here, we’ll all stay.

But let’s finish this thing. Let’s make a sulha and stop all the killing. A mother is a mother whether she’s Jewish or Palestinian, all mothers hurt the same. So, khalas, let’s make peace. That’s what I want. And the way it looks now, it’s going to happen. God willing, it will. That’s what I think.

In the 1992 elections to the 120-member Knesset, Meretz won 12 seats (one of which an Arab occupies). It is the major coalition partner with the Labor party and, unlike the Labor party, supports the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.