2. Umm Abdullah and Samira

(Camp Aida)

6. Samira

On the outskirts of Bethlehem, just off the main Jerusalem-Hebron road, sits Camp Aida—a Palestinian refugee camp built by UNRWA^[*] in 1967. It’s a small camp, about 2,300 people in all, and from the main road it appears less impoverished than the large camps in Gaza or elsewhere in the West Bank. Within Camp Aida, however, there are the usual telltale signs of a refugee camp: narrow dirt lanes, sewage flowing in open gutters, and small children darting to and fro.

It is here that Samira grew up along with her eight brothers and two sisters, and it is here that she got married and is raising her two children. Today, her house is a far more substantial place than the one-room (later, two-room) house where she was raised. It is a two-story concrete dwelling with a huge visitor’s salon downstairs, and two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen upstairs. A television and videocassette recorder sit in one corner of the living room, and bookshelves (with many political books) sit in another corner. Hanging on the walls are some Palestinian-style embroidery and a large wedding photograph of her brother and his wife who, like Samira and her husband, paid a heavy price for their involvement in the Palestinian national struggle.

Today, at the age of thirty-one, Samira has little about her person to suggest that she has been a political activist for most of her life and spent three years in jail for throwing a Molotov cocktail at Israeli soldiers. Deferential in manner, she has a soft, even girlish voice; and when she speaks, there is an openness about her. Indeed, of all the women in this study, she was perhaps the most candid and self-critical.

Michael Gorkin had met Samira briefly at a workshop for Jewish and Arab mental health workers. A mutual friend who knew about the book suggested that Samira might be an appropriate subject for the study. As it turned out, Samira was our most enthusiastic participant. More than the others, she seemed to have a quick understanding of the nature of our project; in fact, she herself had read a number of books on Arab women and immediately agreed to talk to us.

We met with Samira eight times over a period of ten months. Every meeting was in the living room of her house, usually in the afternoons when she returned from her job as a social worker in a rehabilitation center. Typically her six-year-old son and infant daughter were with her, while her husband—who fully supported her participation—was away. Two or three times Samira’s mother came to sit with us for a short while. Yet she seldom joined in or engaged in dialogue with Samira. A mutual respect, and perhaps an element of distance, seemed to exist between them. And Samira made it quite clear that she preferred talking to us without her mother nearby.

In these excerpts from our first interviews with Samira, she recalls in her matter-of-fact style some of her early experiences as the daughter of refugee parents. She also reflects on how these experiences led to her early initiation as a political activist.

Even today the United Nations Relief Work Agency (UNRWA) assists Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and provides various services in Camp Aida.

I was born when my family was still living in Beit Jala, about a kilometer from where we are today. I’m the fourth child and the oldest daughter. I remember hardly anything from those years in Beit Jala. Only the house. It was a tiny house with one room and a kitchen. It was built below the level of the street that passed by, so from the street you couldn’t see anyone was living there. I remember we had this German Christian woman as a neighbor, a very nice lady, and she would always bring me presents. I remember also that my mother used to stay up late at night sewing embroidery on dresses, beautiful peasant dresses, and for this she’d get paid. Much more than that I don’t remember.

When I was five we moved to Camp Aida. By then I had another brother, Hatem, the one whose picture is on the wall here. And then my mother gave birth to my sister, Sarah, and then five more—Ismail, Fawaz, Mahmud, Maysun, and Jamil.

I remember those first years we moved to the camp but really I wish I could forget them. It was a hard time then and when I look back it seems even harder. Until I was eleven or twelve years old, our house was only one room and a kitchen—much too small for all of us. At night we’d sleep in the same room on the floor, except for some of my brothers who went to sleep at my grandmother’s house in the camp. Each of us had our own place. Mine was in the corner beside Sarah. When my mother gave birth we’d all move into the kitchen. That happened a few times, and I can remember being very upset each time. We saw nothing, but we’d hear my mother moaning and crying out. Nobody ever said anything to us—it’s a mistake, don’t you think? I was frightened, I didn’t say anything either.

Those years, and even later when we built another room onto the house, were very tough. My father hardly earned any money. He’s a plasterer, that’s his trade, but he didn’t like to work. Even when he was a boy in his village he didn’t work hard in the fields. That’s what I was told. His oldest brother was the one who did the work. My father was lazy then and he didn’t change even when he had children. This caused problems between him and my mother. She had to bring in money by sewing. Also my brothers worked. My oldest brother, Abdullah, dropped out of school when he was fourteen in order to help support the family. And my other brothers, when they were on vacation from school, they worked too.

We were barely able to manage. I mean, we actually didn’t have enough to eat. What did we have? Well, in the mornings my mother would give us bread and tea. Sometimes there was some olive oil too. Next to our house there were some olive trees, and we’d get some of the harvest for watching over the trees. In the afternoons we’d always eat fried potatoes, and once in a while something else. In the evenings, if there was no food my mother would give us tea again. That was the usual fare. Maybe once a month or on holidays we’d have something special. My favorite was the chicken my mother made in our tabun. That was delicious! And I can remember having ice cream or candies every now and then. But most days we ate the usual—tea, bread, potatoes. Actually, I didn’t know back then just how poor we were. Almost everyone I knew was living in the camp. All of us had pretty much the same harsh conditions. All my friends were like me. So I didn’t really see the harshness of our situation the way I see it today.

The really hard thing back then for me was all the fighting between my mother and father. And a lot of this was brought on by my father’s mother, my grandmother. She hated my mother. She was against their marriage, she never accepted my mother as her daughter-in-law. She used to whisper all kinds of things into my father’s ear and then he’d go after my mother. The truth is, my grandmother was a difficult person. She used to live near the entrance of the camp and everyone knew her. She had run-ins with lots of people. She was tough, hard. Maybe because she was left a widow at a young age, thirty or so, and she had eight children to raise by herself. I don’t know. I do know that my father admired her strength, and she had a lot of influence with him. I can remember in the later years of her life—she died fifteen years ago at the age of eighty—she was partially paralyzed and couldn’t take care of herself. My brother Yusef and I used to go take care of her and sleep at her house. I had to clean and feed her, often in the middle of the night. This was when I was about fifteen years old. I did that for her and not once did she ever say thank you. I’d bring her food that my mother had cooked and she’d send me back with it—once, twice, three times. She wanted her son, my father, to bring it instead. Or my oldest brother, Abdullah, he was her favorite. She preferred boys to girls. She never loved me and I didn’t love her either. The truth is, she was a bad person. She made our lives miserable, particularly my mother’s life. As if we didn’t have problems enough without all that!

Since I was the oldest daughter, I was given lots of responsibilities around the house. That’s the way it goes, doesn’t it? Whenever my mother left the house, went to the market or something like that, I was in charge of the younger children. I have a retarded brother, he didn’t walk until he was five years old. I’d take care of him, clean him, dress him. Doing all this used to bother me. I was only ten at the time, it was too much for me. And doing housework—I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. Back then, I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and play, to be free.

My father didn’t stop me from going out and playing. A friend of mine, Samira—we had the same name—and another friend, Imtiyaz, used to go with me and we’d play five stones [a game like jacks], or we’d play with dolls that we’d make out of sticks. We’d dress these dolls up, make a house, and then play mother and children. Samira’s father used to beat her for leaving her house to come play with us, but she was brave. She’d escape with us and just take her beatings. Besides playing with Samira and Imtiyaz, sometimes I’d play with boys. I’d play soccer with them. My father and mother didn’t say anything about it. Not until I got a little older, anyway—like about ten years old. Although, really, I don’t remember either of them ever saying, “No, it’s an eib!” Nothing like that happened. It happened in a natural way. At about that age I just stopped playing with boys.

What I enjoyed also was going to school. It was another way of being outside the house and being with friends. I was a diligent student, smart. I wasn’t the best, but one of the good ones. When I look back on it, though, I can’t say that these schools were good ones, or that the teachers were good either. From first to ninth grade I went to UNRWA girls’ schools. They were overcrowded, sometimes forty or fifty of us in classrooms that had no air in them and no heating. The teachers were tough on us, they’d hit us a lot on the hands and face. I can remember getting slapped in second grade, in math class, because I had left a blank page in my notebook. Can you imagine it? And we used to wear these uniforms to school, blue and white striped dresses. You can still see girls today going to school in these uniforms. Me, I was embarrassed by it because I had the same dress for years. It got so old that it had patches in the elbows, patches of a different color than the dress. I didn’t have winter shoes. I used to yell at my mother, “Why don’t you buy me a new dress, new shoes?” My mother used to sit there listening, not saying a word, just crying quietly to herself. Back then, I really couldn’t understand what she was going through. Only later I realized.

My mother, she’s illiterate. She always wanted to learn to read, but she never did. It’s terribly embarrassing for her when she has to sign her name. All she is able to do is give a thumb print. When we were children some of us tried to teach her to read, but we didn’t show her enough patience, so she never learned. My father can read. He went to school up through sixth grade, so he’s able to read the newspaper, the Koran. He didn’t think to teach her to read. Look, when I was in school and had problems with my homework, I didn’t go to him for help either. It wouldn’t have been comfortable asking for his help. And my brothers were all too busy. I learned early that if I was going to do well in school, it was up to me alone. I had to rely on myself.

From seventh grade on, I began to have some friends who came from outside the camp. We were going to the UNRWA junior high school here together, and it was through them that I began to get interested in politics. I started to write about my feelings—about poverty and suffering. My friends gave me political books to read, things about the Palestinian struggle, books on Marxism and class struggle. I was about thirteen then. I’d hide these books in with my school books so my father wouldn’t see them. It was from these things that I began to understand about the Israeli Occupation, and about the national struggle against the Occupation—why we had to go on strike, demonstrate, and fight. Always though, when I was reading these books I was afraid of my father catching me. The truth is, I was more scared of him than of the Israelis! And he did catch me a few times. Then, he’d fly into a rage. He’d grab the books from me, tear them up and burn them. “Haram! Haram!” he’d scream. He’s a religious man, and he thought my books were antireligious. He was also worried that I or my brothers might get politically involved, and he was afraid of what the Israelis might do to us. He tried to put a stop to it, but I wasn’t about to let him.

In school, too, I had trouble with some of my teachers. In ninth grade I had this teacher who was very religious. He caught me reading some Marxist literature. He slapped me and accused me in front of the class of being a kafer [heretic]. He then told our class and several other classes too that we had to stay after school for a lecture on the danger of these kinds of books. I didn’t stay, I knew what was coming. I was a stubborn kid, I was not about to listen to his criticizing me more. My girlfriends who did go to the lecture told me what he said and how he spoke about me in a humiliating way. I was very angry, furious. Though, I admit it, I wanted to get him annoyed. And after this humiliation, I was even more determined to rebel. It was the same with my father. The more he tried to stop me from reading books on Marxism or that kind of thing, the more I was determined to read them. I don’t like to give in or be weak. It’s a mistake, but that’s the way I am.

I also was having trouble with the principal of that junior high school. My friends and I were going out on strike days then. This was before the Intifada, in the late 1970s. If there was a memorial day for some occasion—like Black September^[*] —we’d go out on strike. Or sometimes, frankly, we’d go out on strike just for the fun of it because we didn’t feel like going to school that day. The principal would then pounce on me and insist I bring my father to school. But I never brought him, since he might have yanked me out of school altogether. Instead, I’d bring in my older brother, Yusef. He may not have believed in what I was doing, but he loved me and so he never told my father.

By the time I got to high school, tenth through twelfth grades, I already had developed strong political opinions. More than that, I had begun to see that I wanted to fight for my views. I was reading all kinds of things—books by Victor Hugo, Maxim Gorky. And more political books. I remember one book that really excited me. It was called Al-Fedaiyin [The guerrillas]. It’s a book that talked about the fedaiyin camps in Jordan, the training the fighters went through, and some of the actions they went on. I began to feel I wanted to be like them.

By that time I knew that our plight as refugees, our poverty, was the result of a great injustice that had been done to Palestinians. The Israelis had come as colonists, they forced us out of our villages, and they took our land. This same Israeli army that I saw every day in front of our camp had committed the injustices of 1948. My parents deserved to still be in their village, Al-Qabu. About this, my father and mother were in agreement with me, of course. What we should do about our situation—that was another story. But that our place was Al-Qabu—well, I’d heard stories about that all my life.

In September 1970 the forces of King Hussein of Jordan attacked Palestinian fedaiyin [guerrillas] in their bases and refugee camps within Jordan. Several thousand Palestinians were killed during these attacks, and Palestinian resistance groups moved their main bases to Lebanon.

From the time I was old enough to sit and listen, both my parents used to tell us about Al-Qabu. They told us how in 1948 their families had been forced to leave. But more than that, they used to talk about their lives there in the village. You only had to ask one question or say one word about the village, and my mother or father would talk for an hour about it. I used to enjoy hearing about Al-Qabu. If I wasn’t angry at them on that particular day, I’d stay and listen. Especially I enjoyed listening to my father’s memories of the village. He was older when they left—let’s see, he must have been fifteen years old or so, and my mother was about nine. He remembered more. Besides, his memories were happier, more joyful. His family had eight children, my mother’s had the same. But his family was a lot wealthier than my mother’s family. His father was the mukhtar [village headman]. My mother’s family was poor. Her father used to work far away in a stone quarry and he’d sleep there most of the time. So her mother and the children had to work the land they had. She would tell me how hard this was, and altogether I had the picture of how she suffered. It wasn’t easy for me to listen to this.

But listening to my father I had the picture of a wonderful place. When I was little I used to like thinking about it. In my mind, I had this picture of a village up on a hill, and below were the fields and trees and a stream. Beautiful, no? My father remembered the village in clear detail, and I used to ask him all about their lives there. He never told me exactly how many dunams [about one-fourth of an acre] they had, he just said “a lot.” They used to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, string beans, lentils, grains, and all kinds of fruit. They also raised animals—sheep, chickens, and rabbits. Some was for their own use and some was for the market. His father was known as a generous man, and since he was the mukhtar they were always having guests and slaughtering sheep to feed them. Not just on holidays, but regularly. It seemed like they had a good life there, they were rich and happy. I know that my father was never more fun to listen to than when he was talking about these things.

My father also told me about his oldest brother who fought along with al-Husseini in the 1936 revolt against the British Mandate government. He was a hero with the fedaiyin. And his mother used to help out this son in his fighting against the British. She’d bring him the ammunition. She was able to sneak by the British soldiers because she was a woman. They never thought to stop her. My father wasn’t a fedai himself, he was only a small boy while this was going on. But he admired his brother, and he admired his mother too. I used to ask all kinds of questions about these things, it was very fascinating to me. And also I wanted to know all about what happened in 1948—how we came to leave the village, where we went. I wanted to know exactly.

Later, when I was a teenager, we finally went back to visit the village. Al-Qabu is just across the green line,^[*] not very far from here. Maybe it’s five or ten kilometers. I’ve been there three times. When we were there my father talked and talked. My mother was mostly silent. I’m not sure what she was thinking then. Sometimes she’d just wander off by herself. I went around with my father. It was amazing to me how exact his memory was. The village is destroyed now, razed to the ground. The Israelis have made a picnic area out of much of it. My father, though, still knew where everything had been—his family’s house, the mosque, their fields. I went walking out to these fields with him. Even though there were no walls to divide the fields, he remembered exactly where they were. They were terraced plots on the side of the hill. Each plot had its own name. He’d tell me the name and then he’d say, “It ended right here, and then so-and-so’s plot began there.” He showed me where their house was that the English destroyed, and he told me how they built it again. He showed me the place of their old mosque, and where his grandfather’s grave was. And he showed me where they used to go swimming in the stream, and where they took their water. I would always take a drink of this water when we were there. It was good.

On all our visits to Al-Qabu, we’d bring back something from the village. My mother liked doing this. Each time she’d come back with a jerrican [about 5 gallons] of water. For her, it’s a special water, different from any other water in the world. She’d also bring soil from the village. Once my uncle who lives in Jordan, my mother’s brother, asked her to send him some and she did. Everyone in the family who used to live there is still very tied to the soil. They long for the village. They’ve always had the feeling that someday they will return. My mother told me that after they left Al-Qabu, when she was a child she would ask her parents for new clothes for the holidays, and her father would answer her that “the holidays” are back in the village. For them everything good and worthwhile is still back in Al-Qabu.

I can’t say that I feel the same way. I understand my mother’s and father’s feelings, but I never lived there like they did. If you ask my mother she’ll tell you, “One day we’re going to live there again.” I don’t believe it. The Israelis committed a great injustice in forcing my parents to leave Al-Qabu, that’s for sure. But realistically, there is no way they’ll ever give it back—even though nobody is living there now.

Our struggle right now, the way I see it, is to get rid of the Israeli army that’s occupying us here in the West Bank. I’ve lived all my life under this Occupation, and my struggle now, and from the time I got involved in politics, was against this Occupation. These were the injustices that were always before my eyes, and more than anything, this is why I got involved in the national struggle back when I was still a teenager.

On international maps from 1949 to 1967 the borderline between Israel and Jordan was colored green. Al-Qabu was just over the green line in Israel (see map), while Camp Aida was in Jordan. In 1967, when Israel defeated Jordan and conquered the West Bank, Samira’s family—and of course others in the West Bank—could return for visits to their former villages.

In high school I got even more involved politically than I had been in junior high school. In tenth grade I was going to a high school in Bethlehem. It was a girl’s school too, and I had five girlfriends who were very political like me. We went out on strikes whenever we could, and we encouraged other girls to join us on demonstrations. The principal was against this, she accused us of incitement and we got expelled. You see, back before the Intifada—this was in 1978—not so many students did things like this. It wasn’t acceptable at all to go on strike or demonstrate. They came down hard on you. Only with the Intifada was overt political action more acceptable.

But that year, I not only got expelled from school for a while, I also got involved in something that caused me to go to jail. That was stupid. I mean, the thing I did was stupid. It was something here in the camp. We had this person in the camp who was collaborating with the Israelis. I was convinced of this. Several young people had been arrested here and I was sure he was the one doing the informing. So I decided to burn his car. I took a tire, went to his car, and was about to set it alight when he stepped out and caught me. He turned me over to the Israelis and they put me in jail for nine days. It was a silly mistake, an empty gesture, the kind of thing that kids do. I was only fifteen.

I was in Maskubiya jail for nine days. It was my first time in jail, I was very frightened. I didn’t know what they would do to me or how I would react. When they called me to the room where they investigated you, I was scared stiff. There was an investigator there with the name of Abu Nehad. He wasn’t an Arab, he was a Jew. All the investigators use Arab names. While he was asking me questions he moved very close to me, his chair touching mine. He put his hand on me. I tried to pull away or curl up. He kept putting his hand on me because he knew how insulting this is for women, especially Arab women, and he figured this was the way to get to me. I was scared as hell. He used filthy language and threatened to put me in a cell with women who were common criminals. If I didn’t talk, he said, he’d put me in with these tough women, and he gave me to understand that they would hurt me or do God knows what to me. I wasn’t beaten—not this first time I was in jail. In the end, they put me in a cell where there was an older woman, a huge woman from one of the villages near Hebron. She was half-mad. Her husband had been killed and she was wailing and tearing at her clothes. She scared me terribly, even more than the investigator or anyone else in the jail. I didn’t dare say one word to her the whole time I was there.

At the end of nine days the Israelis let me go home. My parents were extremely angry. I hadn’t seen them when I was in jail. My mother was angry more at what had happened to me. My father was angry at me. My brothers reacted as if it were just one of those things, part of life and nothing to make a fuss about. I was the first in our family to go to jail, and at that point, I was only the second girl in the camp who’d gone to jail. My father felt it was a shame and humiliation for the family, especially because I was a girl. He was furious at me. As a punishment, he yanked me out of school. He told me I was never going back, I was staying in the house. My mother was more sympathetic to me—not politically, but as a person. There was nothing she could do about this punishment, though. She stayed silent, I stayed silent, and then one day, finally, my father changed his mind and told me, “Alright, go back to school!”

I finished up high school in East Jerusalem. I went there to this top girl’s school for eleventh and twelfth grades. I went on a scholarship. You see, I was actually a very good student, I had outstanding grades even with my political involvement. It was a good high school to attend if you wanted to go on to college. And I did. There were students in this school from Jerusalem’s elite families and they had good teachers. But there was also a problem for me there. Not just for me, for others like me too. For the first time in my life, I was subjected to class discrimination on a regular basis. The girls from the elite families got to take special activities or courses in the school. A course in music, say—it was only for them. Besides this, the principal and many of the teachers related to the girls from the elite families in a special way. With them, they were sympathetic, kind, always polite. With those of us who were from poor families, they were nasty and insulting. The principal of the school made me feel that in her eyes I was someone inferior. She let me know that she considered me a troublemaker, the one who caused problems, the one whose hair was disheveled and whose clothes were of inferior quality. She told me once in her nasty way that she did not expect me to pass the tawjihi, and that I would never make it to college. I didn’t answer her back or anything like that, but I was determined to prove her wrong. And I did. Out of the girls in my graduation class, I had the second highest score on the tawjihi. This was high enough for me to go to college and good enough for me to get a scholarship too.

That was fortunate. Without a scholarship I never could have afforded to go to college. My parents support the idea of education, but they didn’t have money for that kind of thing. Five of us have gone to college in the West Bank—Yusef, me, Sarah, Ismail, Mahmud. Maysun is planning to go next year. In our family, education is respected as a way of advancing yourself, for girls too. But back when I wanted to go, in 1982, my parents had no money to pay for tuition. They gave me a little help in buying books, but that was all.

I had no idea what I wanted to study at college. I just knew I wanted someday to do something special, to make some special contribution to my people. Dreams, dreams, that’s what I brought with me to college. I wound up studying English—don’t ask me why. And the truth is, I wasn’t very interested in my courses. I didn’t even attend classes regularly. I was more interested in my friends and political involvement. Also, I met my husband that year, my freshman year. He was already a sophomore there at the University of Bethlehem and he was from Camp Aida too. And like me, he was very involved in politics. I met him in a straightforward, natural way. Before going to the university, I had hardly ever seen him in the camp. Then one day, Asam came over and introduced himself. We began to be friendly, nothing more than that at first. Then, after a few months, Asam said to me that he wanted a “serious” relationship with me. I was happy about this because I really liked him. He was a quiet type with a kind of personal courage, a person who had warm relationships with others on campus. Asam was from a different political group than mine, he was with the Communists. I was with Arafat’s group, Fatah. Many boys who were with Fatah tried to make me break off my relationship with Asam. They said it was a mistake to get involved with someone from another political group. I paid no attention to them. I liked Asam, I was not about to break it off.

Outside the university it was difficult for us to see each other, especially here in the camp. But sometimes I would go visit Asam in his house anyway, without my family knowing. My parents would never have allowed it. If my father had known he would have gone crazy. Asam’s mother was shocked that I visited him just like that. “How can this go on, a girl visiting a boy?” she’d say. I was scared she might tell my parents. But, because Asam is the oldest son, he was listened to and respected by his parents, and he made them keep the secret. Sometimes I would sit with Asam’s family and sometimes I would sit just with him. He had his own room, his male friends used to visit him there, and so did I. We’d talk a lot about politics. Asam didn’t always agree with me, nor I with him. But there was a mutual respect. He didn’t pressure me to switch to his group and I didn’t try to get him to switch to mine. We talked, we argued, but it never got unpleasant. And of course there were many things we agreed on completely. About the need for national struggle—for sure, we agreed. We also agreed on the need to take personal action. That’s how we got into trouble, you know. Asam and I got arrested together. Did my mother tell you about that? Well, that’s what happened. We went on this action, we and two others, and we got caught and put in jail. He was in for two and a half years, and I was in for three.

You have to understand that the period when we took this action was during the Lebanon War. The summer of 1982, it was. The Israelis had invaded Lebanon and were killing Palestinians—men, women, children. We were seeing this every night on our television screens, and it drove us crazy. My friends and I were burning with rage, and we felt we had to do something. Anything. We got together one day and decided to attack some Israeli soldiers. It was a kind of spontaneous thing, not planned out at all. We went up to the army checkpoint just outside the camp, Molotov cocktails in our hands, and we hurled them at a bus of soldiers and settlers. And we took off.

As I look back on it now, it was not a good thing to do. I mean, it was a foolish way to go about it. It was not wrong in the moral sense. Look, I know the Jews see me as a “terrorist.” If I were in their shoes, I’m sure I’d view me in the same way. But if someone could feel what it’s like to be in our shoes, suffering from this Occupation on a daily basis, real suffering I mean, maybe then it would be understandable why we do what we do. There are some actions that are wrong to take. To kill women and children is, in my view and feeling, something I reject. If I were asked to do such things, I’d refuse. I love my children so much, how can I do this to someone else’s child? Still, one has to understand what brings a person to do such things. For us, the Palestinians, it is a question of to be or not to be. And we want to exist as a people. We have this right, nobody can take it away from us. The Israelis try to deny us this right. They have no respect for us, they don’t even treat us as fellow human beings. A person who struggles against the Occupation isn’t a “terrorist” who has lost his humanity. He is fighting so his people can live their lives as human beings.

That’s the way I see it. I don’t reject the moral basis of what I did. I only feel, looking back at it now, that it was foolish to go about it the way we did. We were bound to get caught and we could easily have gotten ourselves killed. Which is what nearly happened. You see, once we had thrown the Molotov cocktails, the soldiers started running after us. Each of us had taken off in another direction. The soldiers were shooting all over, bullets flying all around, and I was running as fast as I could. I was just lucky I didn’t get hit. None of us did—I found that out later. But they easily caught up with me, and when they did, they started beating the hell out of me with their rifles. They kept beating me until they got me back to their post. From there, they whisked me away to some other place, a place where they began investigating me.

The officer who did the investigating is someone who called himself Karim. He was very tough. A real nasty guy, filthy and evil. He started beating me with his hands and cursing me. He knew all about my family. He’s the one who arrested my brother, Hatem, a couple of months earlier. Hatem was in jail then for throwing a Molotov cocktail, he was just starting to serve a three-year sentence. This guy Karim knew all about him, and about us, and was trying to pry me for information. But really, I had nothing to tell him. What I had done was a spontaneous act, that’s all.

That same evening I was taken from this guy Karim to the Maskubiya jail. It’s the same place where I had been three and a half years earlier. There, they tried to squeeze more information from me, but like I say, there was nothing to squeeze. They didn’t torture me this time—only later did that happen, the third time I was in jail. They just held me there and then put me on trial. They had no problem making a case against me, they had caught me in the act. At the trial they said the Molotov cocktails we threw had damaged the bus, and one person had been seriously wounded. I have no idea if the Molotov cocktail I threw caused the damage. I had just thrown it and run. Anyway, they sentenced me to three years in jail. After a month, I was taken from Maskubiya and brought to Ramle jail. I spent the next three years there.

While I was there, my family came to visit. They were very loyal, they came whenever they were allowed, which was one visit every two weeks for a half-hour. In the beginning when they came, it was hard for me to see the pain in their eyes. They tried to be cheerful, but still I could see how troubled they were. Hatem and I were both in jail at the same time. It was hard for them to take. Also, what I didn’t know during those first few visits—my parents hadn’t said a word about it—was that ten days after I was arrested, the Israeli army destroyed our house. They bulldozed it into the ground. I only found this out later from the newspapers. When I read that, it hit me like a brick. From that moment on, I began to feel terribly guilty about how I had harmed my family, really harmed them. They had just added two new rooms onto that house before I was jailed, and now the whole place was destroyed. My father refused offers from others to live in their houses. He said he was staying right where his house was, no place else. They wound up having to live in a tent next to the destroyed house, and that winter was a terrible one. It was bitter cold, with lots of rain and snow. I knew how badly they must be suffering, even though they never said so and they just told me to take care of myself. It was the hardest thing for me about being in jail. I didn’t really feel better until I heard they were rebuilding their house. Then I finally felt relieved, I knew they’d be alright. This was about ten months after I’d been in jail.

As for being in jail, it was nothing so unusual—at least it got to be that way. I was in a section with political prisoners, all Palestinian women. In the section next to ours were Jewish women, not political prisoners. These Jewish women were in for stealing, murder, drugs, or other crimes. We had contact with them, sure. We’d drink coffee and tea together and joke around. We just didn’t talk politics, it would have caused problems. But we got along. In a way, we shared a common enemy—the guards and the police. And for them, like for us, the government was also their enemy. It didn’t treat them right. Most of these girls were from the lower classes. They weren’t our enemies, it was possible to sympathize with them. Most of them had good hearts, really. We managed fine together.

Of course, my real friends were among the Palestinian women. Some of these women I still see today. We visit each other or speak on the phone. Some of these women are great people. Nobody knows much about them, but some of them have the moral stature of a Nelson Mandela—at least I see it this way. They’re special, no doubt about it. My contact with them helped me a great deal—to get through prison and to become a more mature person. When I entered prison I was only eighteen, still a kid. Some of these women took me under their wings, they guided me and helped me develop. In our section, there was a real camaraderie. There wasn’t selfishness, but more a communal sense among us. What belonged to one, belonged to all. Even the guards had a certain respect for us. They could see how we were with each other.

The women in my section developed a study program that you could join if you wanted to. Some of these women were highly educated, they knew all sorts of subjects. I was glad to join and study. I made up my mind that I wouldn’t waste time in prison, I’d do what I could to develop. I learned English there, mostly how to read. And I learned a lot about, I guess you could call it, international relations. We studied Japan, China, Algeria, Yemen—the political changes and revolutions there. And naturally we studied the Palestinian problem. The educated women who knew these subjects gave lectures from what they knew. We also had some books from the prison library. Other materials, which we needed but the prison authorities would not permit, we managed to smuggle in. We did this smuggling during family visits. The materials were printed in tiny handwriting on small pieces of paper and rolled up inside some plastic. We’d swallow it during the visits, and it would come out later in the toilet. We’d unwrap the plastic, quickly copy the materials in notebooks, and destroy the original. The guards caught on and we were discovered a number of times, but that didn’t stop us. We went on doing it.

Anyway, besides attending study groups, I kept busy in prison by working. I who hate housework wound up working in the jail kitchen! I was there for a year until I was transferred to working outside in the fields, weeding, pulling out rocks, that kind of thing. This wasn’t pleasant work, but it was worth doing. The rule in the prison was that if you didn’t work, you’d only be let out of your cell for one hour a day. Those of us who worked were let out more. Some women were assigned to work in a sewing shop, and also a small factory that belonged to a major Israeli company. I didn’t want to do these jobs. I was willing to cook for prisoners, pull weeds, but I didn’t want to contribute anything to the Israeli economy. There were many of us who felt that way, and eventually it led to a big strike in the jail. We, the Palestinian prisoners, told the guards that we wouldn’t work there, and what is more, we told them that from then on we would cook only for the prisoners and not for the guards. Up to then we’d been cooking for the guards too. The prison authorities responded harshly to all this. They retaliated by taking away our family visits and they closed down the library. That really got us angry. We started yelling and banging on the cell doors, and then they further retaliated by bringing in male guards who sprayed us with tear gas. After this, we went on a hunger strike. It lasted eight days and it got a lot of publicity. Some Jewish groups like Peace Now, and some women’s groups, came to demonstrate for us. And finally the Israeli minister in charge of prisons, Haim Bar-Lev, showed up and we negotiated an agreement. We agreed that nobody had to work in factories or shops producing for the Israeli economy, and we no longer had to cook for the guards. They gave us back the library and family visits, too. And that was that. Life returned to normal.

From then on, until I got out, life was pretty much the same—work and study, like that. The fact is, I actually got a lot out of my time there. I mean, I learned a lot. More than I was to learn later at the university. The courses in prison were more interesting, for sure. But more than that, I would say that I learned about life there, about the important things. How to relate to people, how to stay loyal to your ideas, how to plan for the future. When I came out of prison, I was no longer the same kid who went in three years earlier.

The day I came out was strange. It was Asam who came to fetch me. We had stayed in contact throughout the time we both were in prison. We managed to get letters smuggled back and forth. And then when he got out, six months before me, he came to visit me twice. But the actual day I got out of prison, I didn’t know he was coming. You see, I was supposed to be released on August 5, 1985. The prison authorities refused to let me go, they said I had to wait until August 28. Asam went and checked it out without telling my family or me, and he discovered that a mistake had been made. My release date actually should have been on August 5. The authorities claimed that my file had been misplaced, something like that. A few days later, it was August 13, I remember the guard coming to me and saying I was going to be released that day. I was caught by surprise and went a little crazy. I said I didn’t want to get out that day. I wasn’t emotionally ready for it right then. But they released me anyway. And when I stepped out of the prison, who was there? Asam. He and his friend. I tell you, I wasn’t expecting to see him. It was a real shock for me.

7. Umm Abdullah

Just down the hard dirt lane from Samira’s house, about fifty meters away, Umm Abdullah (Halima) has her house—the one that was rebuilt in 1982 after the original was bulldozed into the ground. The present structure is a simple, unimposing, single-story concrete building of four rooms, with a small patch for chickens out back and a garbage-strewn olive grove off to one side (where the family lived in a tent for ten months in 1982). Living in the house today along with Umm Abdullah and her husband are the remaining unmarried children, four sons and a daughter, all in their teens or early twenties.

Our initial interviews with Umm Abdullah did not take place in her house. There was some concern on everyone’s part that her husband would not agree to her participation or, in any case, that it would annoy him; so we decided to meet her at Samira’s house while she was away at work. Eventually, though, Umm Abdullah invited us to visit her at her home (while her husband was out). There in her salon—with photos of her husband and his stern-looking mother gazing down from the beige walls, and an old fan or kerosene heater humming or hissing off to the side depending on the season—we held the last three interviews.

At fifty-four years old, Umm Abdullah is still an attractive woman, with high cheekbones and light brown eyes and an electric, if infrequent, smile. Her hands, even with the three rings she wears, are the weather-beaten calloused hands of a fellaha. And in her embroidered black thawb, and white head scarf, she does look as if she is still a villager.

Loquacious by nature, Umm Abdullah seemed to look forward to the interviews. Like so many Palestinian women of her age or older, she has a deep feeling of anger—and pride—in having lived through, and endured, a hard history. “Dhuqna, dhuqna [we’ve drunk it all],” she often told us. She seemed to relish the opportunity to set down this story in a book for someone, somewhere, to read.

At times Umm Abdullah’s story has the quality of a cri de coeur, most especially when she is relating political events. She keenly feels, and holds onto, her status as one of more than seven hundred thousand Palestinian refugees in the 1948 war. Also, the fact that five of her eleven children have served time in jail as political prisoners has clearly left its mark on her. When talking of these events she sometimes seemed not to be talking to us, but rather to the reader, somewhere out there.

In light of this, it is perhaps not surprising that Umm Abdullah is the only woman in the book who wanted us to use her real name. Her husband and family counseled otherwise, and in the end she reluctantly went along, although she insisted we call her by her eldest sister’s name, Halima. And so we have.

In the excerpts that follow, taken from our initial interviews with her, Umm Abdullah recalls her life as a girl in the village of Al-Qabu, her family’s uprooting in the 1948 war, and some of her ordinary-extraordinary experiences as a young Palestinian woman and refugee.

I am from the village of Al-Qabu, just ten minutes from here by car. Me, my husband, many others here in Camp Aida are from there. We even have some sheep here from Al-Qabu. That’s right, these sheep are the offspring of those that came from Al-Qabu in 1948. We still keep them. But that’s all we have. The rest is gone. Al-Qabu is in ruins now, the Jews razed it to the ground in 1948 after they took it. You can hardly recognize it now. Only we who lived there can recognize it and know how it once was.

I remember. I was nine years old when we left but I remember. I remember the war in 1948 too, sure I do. Oh God, tell me why did we leave? Why? To this day, we still ask ourselves this. If only we had stayed! We should have stayed—no matter what. But, people were afraid. I remember the adults talking. “War is coming here soon,” they said. “What shall we do?” We could see the fires off in the distance. Al-Qabu is a village built on a hill. From there we could see all around. We could see the smoke coming from Ein Karem, Lifta, Al-Malha, Dir Yasin. We could hear the guns firing and the shelling. There were two villages not far from us. People from these villages came through here when they left [hjiru],^[*] and some stayed for a while in Al-Qabu. And they sat around talking.

We were all afraid, very afraid. We heard about what the Jews had done in Dir Yasin, how they had massacred all the people there. We thought that might be our fate too. So it was better to leave than face that. That’s what the men decided. Suddenly, one day they brought in some trucks. It was a cold rainy day. In October, it was. All of us were packed into these trucks. Me, my parents, all of the children. The whole village got into the trucks and we drove off to Beit Sahur, not far from where we are now. There in the fields, with no place to go, we got out. “What is going to happen to us?” we asked. Nobody knew then. Now we know.

Oh God, what a mistake! I swear, we should have stayed. Since that day all of us are blaming ourselves for leaving. If we stayed, the Jews might have slaughtered us. Or maybe not. There are Arab villages in Israel where the people stayed—like Abu Ghosh. They kept their villages. If we had stayed, even if they slaughtered some of us, or most of us, the village could have survived. Some of us might have lived, and so Al-Qabu would still live. Instead, look what happened! We are left with nothing, living our lives in the camp. And Al-Qabu razed to the ground. Half of it the Jews turned into a forest, so they can go on picnics there! The rest is just rubble, the remains of what was. If you go there you’d never know what a beautiful place it was. Only those of us who lived there remember Al-Qabu as it really was, how it really looked. Who can forget? Not me.

A more precise translation of the verb Umm Abdullah uses here (from the infinitive an uhajir) is “migrated”; Palestinians often use it when referring to the manner in which they left/fled/were forced to flee their homes and become refugees in the 1948 war. Its noun form, hijra, traditionally describes the Prophet Muhammad’s migration/flight from Mecca to Medina.

It was a beautiful village. Really. Everyone said so. People used to come from all over to see the views from Al-Qabu. And the air, it used to blow from the west, clean and sweet—not like the air here in the camp, stinking with the smell of sewage. I swear, Al-Qabu was a Garden of Eden. A stream flowed in the valley below, and leading down to the stream on the side of the hills were terraced plots where we grew crops. In the spring, wild flowers would bloom on the hills and the fruit trees would blossom. Ah, the quince blossoms! They gave off a scent you could smell all over the village. Al-Qabu, it was a Garden of Eden, I swear it was.

My family were fellahin, like everybody else. We weren’t rich and we weren’t poor. My father and mother worked in the fields together. My mother was the one who worked the most. A lot of the time my father was away working at a rock quarry, and he’d sleep there. He’d leave my mother with the baruda [rifle] and she’d take care of us. She also took care of the crops. My mother could do the work of a man, and then some. She could plow behind the cow just like a man. And when it came to sowing the fields, she could do twice the work of my father. He would do twenty rows and she’d do forty. Oh yes, my mother was some worker! On market days she’d take a basket of vegetables in each hand, fifteen kilograms each, and she’d carry a small child on her back. Down the hill she’d go when it was still pitch dark. She’d catch the “Train”—that’s what we called it, in English—it went by near the streambed, and in ten minutes or so she’d be in Jerusalem. She’d spend the day there selling and then return at night with good money. She was a clever merchant, very clever.

Usually we had good harvests, so there was enough for our family and also for the market. We grew lots of things. Wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, olives, cucumbers, onions, and all kinds of fruits—grapes, cactus fruit, quince, plums, apricots, and apples. I used to have my favorite apple tree. It was spread out on the bottom like an umbrella, and I’d just lie under it and the fruit would dangle down to me. And I had my own fig tree, a qarawi it was called. It bore light green figs that were reddish on the inside. We raised bees and they used to come to the flowers of my fig tree. The honey they gave had a special taste, a natural taste, not artificial. Besides this, we raised animals, of course. Chickens, goats, sheep. Every family had about a hundred head of sheep and goats. On holidays, or when guests came, we’d slaughter a sheep or two and have a real feast. There were no refrigerators. You ate the meat after you slaughtered, all in a few days. It was fresh and good-tasting, not like the stuff we get today. My father was a generous man. If guests came, he was always slaughtering a sheep and hosting them in a big way. My mother was a fine cook—her chicken in the tabun was known as the best in the village. I remember, yes I do. Those were the days in Al-Qabu!

We used to have fun back then. At the age of five, six, seven, I’d go out to the vineyards with my sisters and girl cousins. We’d watch over the grapes to make sure other kids didn’t steal them. When we were out there we’d play. Sometimes we’d build houses of small rocks and make dolls out of rags. Or we’d play hide-and-seek, or five stones. Or we’d play backgammon just like the boys played. We’d play it on the ground with pebbles and holes. There was no girl who could beat me. Same with five stones. I was the best at that too.

I would have liked to go to school—like my daughters have. But back in those days there was no school for girls in our village. There wasn’t a school for boys either, not when I was born. What there was, was a kuttab, where the boys would go and sit on straw mats on the floor and learn the Koran and maybe some other things. One of my brothers went to this kuttab. Later, they built a schoolroom and the smaller boys in our family went to that. Me and my sisters, though, we had nothing. A pity, really.

When I wasn’t playing, I was working. A job I liked was taking care of the lambs. My father entrusted me with that. I’d take them off to the grassy areas and graze them. The lambs would get used to me and talk to me—baaah! baaah!—and they’d only go off with me. Afterwards, when they were fattened up, they’d be sold off or my father would slaughter them. That was hard on me. I’d miss the ones that were gone. I’d go over to the place where one was slaughtered and I’d think about the lamb, remembering how I took my jacket off in the winter and put it over the lamb to keep it warm. I’d say this to myself, not to anyone else. I loved those lambs.

Let’s see, besides the work with the lambs, I’d also help my mother. Housework or in the fields—whatever she wanted. I was a good child, an obedient child. My mother would say to me, “Halima, go to the stream and fetch some water,” and I’d go fetch some. And she’d say, “Halima, go find the goats,” and I’d go find them. Or she’d say, “Go to the fields and bring back some onions,” and I’d go and bring them. “Go pick the grapes,” she’d say, and I’d go pick them. “Go pick some figs—the best ones high up on the tree,” she’d say, and I’d go pick them. Yes, I worked, I worked.

But really, the one who worked harder than me was my oldest sister, the one whose name I want you to use for me in the book. She was eight years older and she had the hard work, in the house and the fields too. Poor thing! My father married her off at thirteen years old. In that time, they used to marry the girls off at twelve, thirteen or fourteen. She’d be used in the fields of her father-in-law as a worker. That’s what happened to my sister. Her husband’s family worked her hard and they beat her too. Four years after she was married my father went and took her back, he divorced her. There were no children, so her husband’s family agreed. She came home and didn’t get married again until she was thirty years old. She got a good husband this second time, and now she has three children. But she’s had a hard life, my sister has.

My mother, too, had the same thing happen to her. She was married at eleven. Haram! The reason it happened to her was that her mother had died when she was two years old. Her father didn’t have anyone to help raise her. He had a sister who was married in the village, and this sister had a son. So when my mother became eleven years old, her father arranged for her to be married to this cousin of hers—my father. The sheikh who agreed to write the kitab told them, “Don’t let the wedding take place immediately. Wait another couple of years.” My mother didn’t want to get married, but back then you married when your father told you to marry. You didn’t dare say anything. “I was still playing with the girls when they took me off,” she once told me. After the kitab was written she went to live in her aunt’s house. They all lived together in one room. Then, at fourteen years old, she had her wedding. At fifteen, she brought her first child, a daughter.

I swear, a woman had a hard life in those days. She worked in the house and the fields and she had to take care of her children. And do you think there was any mercy for her when she was pregnant? She’d have to go to the market carrying baskets on her head and in her hands, all while she was pregnant. She’d work in the fields too, right until she gave birth. One minute she’d be working with a hoe, the next minute she’d stop and give birth. Yes, right there in the fields. The other women would help her. Someone would go back to the village and get a scissors to cut the umbilical cord and bring a sheet or blanket to wrap the baby. Once I heard about a man who was alone with his wife in the fields and there were no women around to help her. He helped her by himself, but since he had no scissors he took two stones and cut the umbilical cord. He then went back to the village with her and the baby, she walking barefoot with the baby in her arms. Can you imagine? That’s the way women had to do it. Two days later—yes, two days after she brought the child—she’d be back in the fields with a hoe, work as usual. It’s not right but that’s the way it was.

I tell you, sometimes I think God has brought the Palestinians to their fate now because of all the bad ways they’ve treated their women. Making women work all day in the fields, making them carry heavy loads on their heads, giving them only a few hours rest each night—I swear, it was cruel! I think my God has punished the Palestinians for that, taken away our villages. Really, that’s what I think.

You know who treated our women well? The English. They did. I was only a child back then, during the period of the English, but I remember these things. If English soldiers saw a man beating his wife, they’d stop him and beat him instead. Also, in that time, if they saw a woman walking with a heavy load on her head and her husband walking behind her empty-handed, they’d take the load from the woman and give it to the man. Or even if they saw a donkey loaded up too heavy, they’d make the man take on part of it himself. And once when I was with my grandmother, who was blind, she was walking barefoot and an English officer helped lead her home, removing thorns and stones from her path. I remember these things, yes I do.

But look, there was another side to the English. I was told some of that. They destroyed my grandfather’s house because there was a family member who fought against them as a fedai. I’m speaking about the period of the Arab revolt in the 1930s. My husband’s family also had problems, lots of problems, with the English. His father was mukhtar, and my husband’s older brother was a fedai. He got shot one time in both arms. His sister took him away to another village and hid him in a huge tabun. For forty days she put butterfat on his wounds until he healed. As soon as he was better, he went back with the fedaiyin to fight the English. My husband’s mother used to help out her son. She’d bring ammunition to the fedaiyin by hiding bullets inside the bread as if it was a sandwich. Once the English came to her home searching for ammunition but she managed to hide it in time somewhere in the garbage. She invited the English for lunch instead, and they never found the ammunition.

These are things I heard about the English. So I know they weren’t just our friends. They fought against us, they caused us lots of problems. That’s the other side of the English. Who can forget? Not me. I remember these things too.

What happened to us after we fled our village in ’48? Everything, everything you can imagine. Dhuqna, dhuqna. In Beit Sahur we managed to find a corner inside a house to rent. In a second corner of that house was another family, and in a third corner was someone else. We had no water and were forced to go all over looking for some, and when we found any, clean or dirty, we’d take it. It was a hard time, believe me. Beit Sahur is a Christian community and…well, look, my husband told me to hold my tongue about these things. Today, these people are living like we are, they’re occupied by the Israelis like all of us. In the 1967 war, when the Israelis took Beit Sahur and all the land around here, we reminded these people, “Now you’re just like us. The same!” So look, what took place back in 1948, the way we refugees were treated in Beit Sahur—let’s forget it. We managed to find water there, we found something to eat, we managed.

After about three years we moved to the town next door, Beit Jala. It’s another Christian town. At least it was then, now it’s half Muslim. We managed there too. I mean, it wasn’t easy, but I don’t want to go into that either. My husband told me, “Leave the past in Beit Jala alone, speak nicely.” The mayor there was good to us. He helped get us a mosque in Beit Jala, he contributed to it himself. Those who were against us refugees, who were they? Not the good people of Beit Jala. Just drunks and Communists and other bad people. Maybe they were worried we’d take their land. I don’t know. Let’s just say that we managed with the help of some good people there. We managed as best we could.

We lived in Beit Jala most of the time from, let’s see, about 1951 until we came over here to Camp Aida in 1967. But I was still young when we first moved to Beit Jala. I was about twelve years old. A young girl, really. About that time there was a family that came to my family to request me as a bride for one of their sons. I didn’t want any part of getting married. I didn’t want to be like my mother or sister. I wasn’t ready to take care of a house, and I said so. Fortunately my parents listened. Besides, my father knew this family wanted to use me in the fields. They had a lot of land, and he didn’t want them using me in this way. So my father refused.

But it didn’t stop there. You see, I was a pretty girl then, very pretty you could say. I had rosy cheeks and was already, well, like someone a few years older. Not like now. Sadness has ruined my face. Take a look at Samira. She has my face, the way it was then. I used to look like her, real pretty.

What happened is that more men came to request me. When I was fourteen years old a Jordanian soldier came. The Jordanian soldiers liked Palestinian girls because of their good looks, their character, and the way they dress. Many Jordanian soldiers married Palestinian girls and then divorced them. This one who came for me was stationed up near the Iraq border, far from here. He was about thirty or thirty-five years old, and he already had a wife and some children. My parents met his wife and told me she was pretty, with blue eyes. He wanted me as a second wife. He told my father frankly that he would take me away and that I wouldn’t be able to come back much for visits. My father didn’t like that idea, so he refused. I was relieved.

Then when I was fifteen years old another man about thirty-five years old came. This one was from Syria. He had four children but no wife. He was widowed. He smoked twenty cigarettes each time he came. I think he really must have wanted me, but thanks to God, my father refused him. The man got very angry when he was turned down. He beseeched God to never let me marry another. He cursed me twice like this, he did. And right after that I began to get terrible pains in my arms and legs. The pains wouldn’t go away, so my parents took me to a sheikha to remove the curse. First to one sheikha, then to another. Still the pains wouldn’t go away. Finally, they took me to a doctor who said I had a case of “nerves.” That’s what he called it. And you know, to this day I still get these pains on and off, worse in the summer than in the winter. I’m sure I’ll have them till my dying day.

While I was having these pains back then, still more suitors came to request me. Another Jordanian soldier who was stationed up on the hill in Beit Jala came by and requested me. My father turned him down. Then there were some Palestinian men who wanted me, refugee people like us. Again my father said “No.” Finally, there came a family from our village, from Al-Qabu—the mukhtar’s family. I was sixteen years old. My father said “Yes.” I told him I didn’t want to marry yet, but my father didn’t listen to me. He had listened to me up to then, but now he said, “Khalas, you’re marrying this one!” My father was a good man—blessed be his memory—he died just two and a half years ago. He was good, but he had a bad temper. He could go wild in rage sometimes. I didn’t dare argue with him when he finally said, “This is it, no more saying ‘No.’ ” So, khalas, it was over. I had to get married.

I was too young—of course, I was. I knew that back then, and I’m sure of it today. A girl shouldn’t get married early. The older she is the more she understands life and the more she can understand her husband. At sixteen years old she’s not ready. To take care of the house, and serve her husband, feed a baby, all this at the same time—I swear, by the time she’s twenty years old she’s wasted. She starts thinking, “Better I never got married at all!” A girl needs to wait until she’s more than a teenager. And these days she needs even more time so she can finish her studies. At twenty-two or twenty-four years old she’s ready. That’s the way my daughters did it. Samira at twenty-four, Sarah at twenty-two. And Maysun, at eighteen, has refused many offers already—and I support her! Boys, too, should wait. At twenty years old they think they’re ready, but they’re not. They marry then and at twenty-six they already want a divorce. Better for the boy to wait until he’s older too—say, twenty-six years old. That’s my view. I’m sure I’m right.

But back then I had no choice. My father decided and I had to go along. I had never seen my husband. Only in the distance, walking here or there. I had never set eyes on his face. Oh no, no. Eib! Girls didn’t have any contact with boys back then, they wouldn’t dare look at them. If they did dare look at boys and got caught, they would be punished harshly. We all knew that. And if a girl dared to go off alone with a boy, God help her! They’d finish her off just like that. Poison her or cut her throat, khalas. Look, these things still happen sometimes now. Less maybe, but they happen. Fifteen years ago here in the camp, a man cut the throat of his married daughter when he heard she was having sex with some man besides her husband. He heard the rumor, didn’t check it out, and killed her. He threw her dead body into the street. The police came and put him in jail, and then his family got a lawyer and got him out. Later he discovered that it had all been a false rumor, that’s all. He repented but it was too late. Can you imagine?

Back when I was a girl it was even worse. If you were a girl, you didn’t dare do anything that might cause someone to spread rumors about you. You didn’t dare cast your eyes in the direction of a boy. God knows what might happen to you! So, of course, I never had a look at my husband. But he had seen me. He had been watching me going down to the stream and fetching water. He had had his eye on me and he had decided he wanted me. This I found out later. He went to his family—a boy could do that—and he told them I was the one he wanted. “Her?” they asked. “Why her?” They tried to talk him out of it. His mother was aware of my “nerves,” I guess, and she said to him, “She’s sick. She’s like your sister, she’ll never be able to bring you children.” He answered, “No matter what, I want her anyway.” And he began to weep. This I found out later. His sisters told me, and one time I asked him myself and he answered, “Yes, it’s true. I wept.”

So his family went along with him, even though they were against it. They came one day and requested me. I didn’t even know what was going on. They came, they left, and that evening my father agreed. My fate was decided. Soon after that they signed the kitab, and they agreed to have the wedding party four months later. Khalas, that was it. I was sixteen years old and my fate had been decided.

Between the signing of the kitab and the wedding, you know, the boy is allowed to come and visit the girl. It’s not like today, of course. Today the boy and girl are allowed to sit and talk to each other. In my day, it was forbidden. My husband—this was in the four months before the wedding—came to visit and he’d sit and talk with my parents. He was six years older than me. I’d sit in the corner. I didn’t dare look at him because of my father, I was scared of my father. But he was always stealing glances at me. I could feel it and it embarrassed me. When my parents were looking the other way I could feel him looking in my direction. It made me very uncomfortable. And one time, before the wedding this was, he came by looking for my father. I didn’t know it was him and I opened the door. I quickly told him that my father was at the neighbor’s. My brother’s wife saw me speaking with him and immediately went and told my mother. My mother came shouting at me, “Girl, have you no shame! What’s the matter with you?” She threatened me that if I spoke with him again she’d tell my father. Believe me, I didn’t dare do it again. I was scared. The next time I spoke to him was the night of the wedding itself. Then it was alright.

The wedding was the usual kind they had back in those days. It went on two days, a leilat al-henna and the wedding itself. It wasn’t like in the time of the village, like my mother’s wedding, when the wedding went on for ten days. No, mine was two days, that’s all. Before the wedding, I had bought a lot of things with the mahr. Some of these things I still have today. For me, the bride price was 110 dinars pre-mahr, and 20 dinars post-mahr. An educated girl used to get 180 dinars then, but I wasn’t educated. Today an educated girl gets thousands. Samira could have gotten thousands but she didn’t want a mahr. Her husband bought her some gold and things for the house, and that was it. Really, the mahr today has become much too much. The Prophet said the groom should give some kind of small present, a symbol. Today the groom goes broke paying the mahr.

Anyway, what I did with the mahr is buy gold. I got two bracelets for 22 dinars, today they’re worth 300 dinars. I have these bracelets still. I keep them in my closet, I don’t use them. I just wear rings today. And I also bought some thawbs, some nice ones. And I bought a few other things too.

The wedding was usual. It was in Beit Jala. There was a zaffa, with me and my mother and my sisters in a car. The men were singing and dancing the debka [a traditional Palestinian dance] in front of the car, and the women walked behind, singing and trilling. I wore a simple dress and scarf, and they covered me with a man’s jacket. That was the custom. I hadn’t gone to a hairdresser, and I didn’t have all that make-up put on like they do nowadays. No, that wasn’t our way. We did have a big dinner at my husband’s house—they slaughtered some sheep. There was music and dancing, with the women inside the house, and the men outside. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Even my mother-in-law looked happy. But she was only pretending. I didn’t feel her hatred then, I was too young to recognize these things. Only later, I realized how unhappy she had been that night. She never accepted his choice to marry me.

After the wedding party, I moved into my husband’s house along with his family. We were all living in one room. My husband and I had a corner of that room. We had no lamps, all we had was a tin can with a cloth soaked in kerosene, and when the family went to sleep they put that out and we were in the pitch dark. But the first night or two, the family didn’t stay with us. They went over to the neighbor’s. That was the custom. After a couple of days they came back and we all slept together in that one room.

What happened to me, though, is that the first night I was alright. Then, on the second night, I got the shivers and terrible pains in my bladder. These are some of the pains I’d been having since I was fourteen years old. I got them again on that night, the second night. It was terrible. It got so bad that they had to take me to a doctor in Jerusalem. And do you know what he said? He said, “If you waited just two more days you would have died.” He gave me medicine, but for the next nine days the pains continued. It was so bad that I kept beating myself, and I stopped peeing completely. Finally a woman from Beit Jala brought me this herb, it’s called rejl al-hamama [the dove’s leg]. She boiled it in water and I drank it, and immediately I was able to pee. I began to feel better. The pains went away for the time being. I mean, I still get some of these pains on and off—even today. I go to the doctor and get medicine for it, but when the medicine runs out the pains come back again. What can you do? I don’t think it will ever stop.

It was not an easy life living together with my mother-in-law. She was a strong woman, strong-willed. Yes, that’s her picture up on the wall. Not an easy person, believe me. Her husband died when she was still a young woman, and she had to raise the children by herself. She died fifteen years ago. God bless her memory. It’s not good to talk about the bad things. She was my husband’s mother and I say, God bless her memory.

My mother-in-law got her own place after we moved to the camp in 1967. But those years when we were in Beit Jala she lived with us. She helped me with the children once I started to bring them. Abdullah, Yusef, Ahmad, Samira, Hatem—they were all born in Beit Jala. And then when we moved to the camp, I brought six more—Sarah, Ismail, Fawaz, Mahmud, Maysun, Jamil.

I was seventeen years old when I brought the first. A son, Abdullah. I’m Umm Abdullah. It was a hard pregnancy, all my pregnancies were hard. I was sick, vomiting, the first four months with Abdullah, and with all the others too. I swear, if I hadn’t gotten sick like that I would have brought more. Maybe fifteen or sixteen.

Abdullah—I brought him at the hospital. Most of my children were born in the hospital. I brought four at home with the help of a midwife, and I brought one in the clinic here in the camp. They’re all fine, healthy, except for Fawaz who I brought at the clinic in the camp. He’s retarded and lives with us still. He’s a fine boy, all the same.

Actually, I liked giving birth at home. I liked having the midwife come and help me out. I had different midwives. One was from Beit Sahur, she had a license. Another came from Camp Deheisha and another was from here. Usually, the midwife would stay with me for a couple of days after the birth, or even a week if I needed her. I’d pay her for this, sure. I’d give her things from the grocery store, a little money. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

With all my babies, I took care of them the village way, the way the women from the village used to do it. What’s that way? Look, one thing I’d do is kuhl the baby’s eyes. I’d make the kuhl by putting olive oil in a rag and then burn the rag. The leftover ash was kuhl, and I’d put it on the baby’s eyelids for forty days. It helps the eyes grow strong and not get irritated or infected. I did this with all my children. I’d also massage and wrap the baby. What you do is each night you take some olive oil and mix a little salty water with it. You make a salve. You smear this all over the baby’s body, massage it in good. It makes the skin so it won’t peel, and when the baby grows up it doesn’t smell. Then you wrap the baby in a tight cloth, roll him up in it. The baby sleeps like this and in the morning you take off the cloth and you wash the baby. Then you wrap him up again for the day. You keep doing this for four or five months, and that way the baby’s bones grow strong and healthy.

I’ve told Samira about this, but she doesn’t do it. These days I’m taking care of her baby daughter, Leila, but Samira won’t let me do these things with Leila. She’s wrong. She thinks that if you wrap the baby like I say, the arms and legs will be damaged, broken. She thinks that the salt will irritate the skin of the baby. But I tell you, it’s a mistake not to do these things. Samira, and the women today, are making a mistake. Sure they are. The women of my generation, village women, know how to do it. What, our children didn’t come out strong? Look at my children, look at Samira herself. She’s not strong? And look at those of us who were born in the village—we had it the best! The air, the food, was healthiest back in the village. A mother breastfeeds her baby, but if she’s not eating good food her milk isn’t as good. Back in the village the mother’s milk was good. Since we left the village there’s not been the same good food for mothers to eat.

Me, I breastfed all my babies. But what happened with me is that none of my babies were ever filled by my milk. God alone knows why. So, I always would add some cow’s milk. I always gave this cow’s milk in a teaspoon, never a bottle, because if I gave it in a bottle they might stop breastfeeding. There’s a lot of milk in a bottle and not much in a teaspoon, right? That’s what I did with all eleven of them. I didn’t want to stop breastfeeding—oh no! As soon as I stopped breastfeeding I’d always get pregnant. If I continued to breastfeed for two or three years, then I wouldn’t get pregnant. The women around here told me about this, and it worked. Except once, with Sarah—I got pregnant with her while I was still breastfeeding Hatem. But usually it worked.

How was it when I gave birth to Samira? Well, I’ll tell you the truth, it wasn’t easy. It was like when I gave birth to my first, Abdullah. Maybe because Samira was a first too—the first daughter. I remember I wanted to give birth to her at home, but there was some problem, she wasn’t coming out. They rushed me to the French Hospital. I remember I was yelling a lot, they gave me a shot, and then she came out. From the time she came out, I loved her. We all loved her, she was our first girl. It was me who gave her the name Samira. My husband had chosen the names of my first three sons. I named her Samira. I named her after a heroine who fought for Islam—a real brave fighter, she was. I had heard my husband and his friends talking about this Samira one time, when they were telling stories from the Koran and about the Prophet. I decided that’s the name I want for my daughter. So that’s what I called her, Samira.^[*]

She is a heroine too, don’t you think? Samira has lived up to her name. As a small child, maybe you couldn’t see that one day she would be so brave. She was always so sensitive, and a little nervous. More nervous than me. When I used to give birth at home, I could see in Samira’s eyes how scared she was. She never said a word, though. I’d put the children in the kitchen, I wouldn’t tell them what was happening. I didn’t want them to get scared. But Samira knew. I remember one time, she looked very frightened afterwards. I tried to reassure her. I told her that really there was only a little pain for a while and then it stopped. I told her that I was ready to do it again, the next day. I don’t know if she stopped being frightened so much. I couldn’t tell. She never asked me a question about it, never said a thing. That’s the way she is, Samira.

We abbreviate Umm Abdullah’s long anecdote about the heroine, “Samira,” for the sake of her daughter’s anonymity.

I brought the first five children outside the camp, the last six here. A little before we moved here my mother-in-law tried to get my husband to marry another woman. She wanted him to take a second wife. This happened when I was pregnant with my sixth, Sarah. She had never wanted him to marry me at all, she had told him I’d never bring children. Now I had brought four sons and a daughter, and still she hated me. She hated me so much that she prayed I would die. What can I say? God bless her memory, that’s all. She’s my husband’s mother. My husband, he wouldn’t listen to her. She kept talking to him and he told her, “No.” He wanted just one wife—me. So my mother-in-law finally had to stop pushing this thing with him.

She got her own place when we moved to the camp. We moved to this spot. For a while our house had only one room and a kitchen. Then UNRWA helped us add another bedroom and a veranda. What can I tell you? We’ve managed, yes, we’ve managed. I’m a village woman, and we village women know how to manage. My husband worked some, he’s a plasterer. Then my oldest son took up the trade and his brothers helped out too. Nowadays, my number two and three sons, Yusef and Ahmad, live in Saudi Arabia. They’ve done well there, they send us money. They tell us, “You’ve worked hard enough, rest.” So we are fine now, we manage fine.

There were hard times too, of course there were. I think the hardest was back when they destroyed our house. The Jews destroyed it. It was back in 1982 when Samira went to jail. She must have told you about that, didn’t she? Well, that was a hard time. We had been living in our UNRWA house, and we had just added two more rooms. We had water and electricity. We got that in 1978. Then Samira got arrested and they destroyed the house. It was the first time one of my children went to jail. Wait.…there was another time. Four years before that, Samira was in jail too—for a week. She was only fifteen years old then. Already she was involved in politics. There was someone here in the camp who was a collaborator with the Jews, and she decided to burn his truck. She got caught in the act. She was sent to Maskubiya jail and we weren’t allowed to visit her. They investigated her, but she was clever. She never let on who was behind her action, who her friends were. She told them she did it on her own, she stood up to them. And so they let her go.

But four years later she was back in jail again. This time for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a bus full of soldiers. Ten days after she went into jail the Jews came here and demolished our house. They bulldozed it into the ground. Then, they offered us a tent to live in. We told them, “Keep it! After you destroy our house, you want to give us a tent to live in? Keep it!” We bought our own tent, a big one from Hebron, and we set it up in the olive grove next to us. We all moved in. It was a cold winter, lots of rain and snow, but we managed. We took an electrical cable and ran it from the mukhtar’s house to our tent. We had a refrigerator, an iron, even a television. We had lots of visitors too, they kept coming to visit us and support us.

We didn’t tell Samira, though—not at first. When we visited her in jail we’d joke around and be lighthearted. We didn’t want to worry her. Then she found out about it herself, she read it in the newspapers. She was all upset. But we told her, “Just take care of yourself. Don’t worry about us.” We told her, “We’ll build a new house, a better one than the UNRWA house. When you get back you’ll see!” And that’s what we did. By the time she got out three years later we’d already rebuilt, and we were managing fine—just like I told her.

8. Samira

When Samira returned home from prison in 1985 she was twenty-two years old. Her political goals, and her life in general, had a clearer focus at this point. As she puts it, “Jail had crystallized my plans and hopes, I knew more what I wanted and how to go about it.” Then in 1987 began the Intifada—the Palestinian uprising that swept more of her family into its fast flow and profoundly affected her own life, too.

In the section below, Samira recalls some of the events of these past ten years: her marriage, her giving birth to two children, her work as a social worker, and her continuing political involvement. She also recalls her return to jail for a month in 1991, during which time she was tortured. This experience was understandably the most difficult for her to relate (she had not done so before), and its impact on her life is, also understandably, still with her.

Iremember that day I got out of jail, August 13, 1985, very well. How could I forget it? It was a shock to me. It was a shock to my parents too. They hadn’t been expecting to see me home that day either. They thought it was going to be at the end of August. Then, suddenly, there was Asam bringing me home. They knew Asam of course, and they knew he was a friend of mine. My mother was aware that I liked him. My father wasn’t aware of that, at least I don’t think so. When Asam showed up with me they were angry. Instead of it being a joyful occasion for them, it was a big embarrassment. They felt it was an eib. How dare I, an unmarried girl, come in a car with a man? They felt I’d shamed them in front of the community, and they let me know it. I was hurt by their reaction, very hurt, but I should have expected it. Three years away in jail made no difference as far as that was concerned. Sad, but that’s the way it is.

I, at any rate, had changed. I had grown up a lot. I knew more who I was. Jail had crystallized my plans and hopes, I knew more what I wanted and how to go about it. Asam—I knew I wanted him and I intended to go on with him, for sure. And I was sure he wanted me too. We both wanted to finish our studies at the university. He had already gone back, and I was determined now to continue my studies, not in English but as a social worker. In jail I decided that I wanted to work with people’s problems in a direct way, and social work was a way of doing it. I intended to stay involved politically, but in a more organizational capacity. No more Molotov cocktails for me!

Asam and I soon decided that we wanted to get married. To do this, we needed to tell our parents and get their approval. His parents were no problem. The real problem was my father. He didn’t want me to marry Asam. It wasn’t a personal thing, it was just that he didn’t want me marrying someone who was involved in politics. When Asam came to my father to request his permission, my father refused him. Asam waited a little and came again. My father refused again. This happened a few times. So Asam brought some respectable elders in the camp to plead on his behalf, but my father told them, “How can I give in now after having refused several times?” He’s a stubborn man, my father is. He thinks he’s the one who knows what’s right and best for everyone. In the end, though, what happened is that I went to my brothers and convinced them that Asam was the man I wanted to marry. They agreed to go to my father, and finally they managed to convince him.

While all this was going on, I was seeing Asam of course. I wasn’t about to stop. But I was scared like hell that my father would catch me. At least part of the time my mother was aware that we were seeing each other, but she kept it to herself. It was not easy for us to see each other, though. We were both still required to stay in the immediate area, and every day we had to go to the local police station and sign in as proof we hadn’t left. So there weren’t many places we could go alone. Sometimes, though, our friends would help us escape, they’d invite us on short trips—to Jerusalem or Jericho—and Asam and I would take the chance and go.

Even after we got engaged and the kitab was signed, my father still opposed Asam’s and my being together in public—or at all. He wouldn’t let me visit Asam’s family, and when Asam came to visit me my father wouldn’t let us sit together alone. I tell you, it was ridiculous. We had to deal with two Occupation authorities—the Israelis and my father! During that period, I was always scared of being caught by one or the other.

Not all fathers in our society are as strict as mine, things have loosened some, but still I have to say that our society is terribly repressed in this way. I managed, I did what I wanted. But still, a woman and man who love each other shouldn’t be obliged to sneak around like we did. I believe a woman should be free to do what she wants with the man she loves. If she wants, she should be free to have sex with him. I don’t mean in the way they do it in Israel and the West. I believe in freedom, but not in the extreme way. But look, I loved Asam, so why shouldn’t I have been free to do what I wanted with him? It’s my business, nobody else’s. In our society, there’s no support for the idea of having sex before marriage. A few do, they take the chance, but only a few. Me? I’ll tell you the truth, with us it was Asam who’s conservative in these things, not me. He didn’t want to have full sex before marriage, he wanted to wait. I wouldn’t be ashamed to tell you if we did, but we didn’t. To me, whatever we did was perfectly alright. I have no guilt, no shame about anything. I tell you, in my view a lot of the problems that young people have in our society have to do with the fact that they are frustrated and repressed in this area. Our society is sick in this way, very sick. That’s the way I see it.

We had a very nice wedding. It was done the usual way weddings are done here in the camp, but in a way it was special. I mean, naturally it was special for me, but it was also special for a lot of people here in the camp. Asam and I are both children of the camp, our families are well known here. And the fact that both of us had been so politically active, and in jail, gave people an extra reason to celebrate. Our zaffa through the camp—that’s what you usually do, the bride and groom tour the camp with all the guests—was enormous. Guests came from all over the West Bank, and there were hundreds upon hundreds from the camp too. Many of our friends, like us, had been in jail, so it was a big procession of political activists. This gave it a special feeling. I was riding in a car and Asam was carried through the camp on his friends’ shoulders. A friend of ours had a video camera that he just got from America, but he didn’t know how to use it and nothing came out. All I have are some photos. Here…[Samira goes to the bookcase and brings a small framed photograph of herself and Asam standing together; she, elaborately made up and in a floor-length white bridal dress, and he in a black suit and tie.] We looked pretty good then, didn’t we. A pity the video didn’t come out!

Anyway, after we had toured the camp for a while, we then went to Asam’s house for the wedding meal. In the camp these things are done very modestly. The guests don’t take part in this meal, not even the bride’s family does. Only the parents of the groom, and his brothers and sisters sometimes. The guests are given some sweets and soft drinks, but that’s about it. The custom in the camp is that a neighbor of the groom’s family makes a festive meal for the bride and groom. The way this happens is that a number of neighbors offer themselves as the one to make this meal. The neighbor who is most enthusiastic, or really the one who seems she’s going to be most offended if she’s turned down, is the one who’s usually chosen. The groom’s mother does the choosing. For us, a lot of neighbors wanted to do it, and Asam’s mother chose a perfect one.

The meal this neighbor brought us was beautifully done, and the way she brought it was also beautiful. She put all the food—the salads, the meat and rice—on an enormous platter that she decorated with candles and red roses. She put this platter on her head, and she came dancing this way to Asam’s house, dancing and singing and trilling. It was something special and the food was wonderful. She had really done a good job of it. It was a true gift from the heart.

It would have been nice to go away on a honeymoon, but for us that was out of the question. We had no money for this. Besides, we were not allowed by the Israeli military authorities to leave the camp. Every morning, I still had to go report to the police in Bethlehem. This made for a situation that was sort of funny. You see, the custom is that after the wedding the bride doesn’t appear in public for several days. She’s supposed to stay in the house. But, I had to go to the police each morning. So what I did is try to disguise myself. I wore jeans, a plain blouse, and I tied my long hair up, hoping people wouldn’t recognize me. I left the house at seven-thirty in the morning. Still, some of the neighbors noticed me. I heard them saying to each other, “That’s the new bride? What’s going on here?” It was sort of funny for me to hear them. The whole situation was a bit ridiculous. Not the usual honeymoon, no?

Asam and I had our own apartment, just at the back of the camp. It was a place we rented, and we moved into it after the wedding. We had a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. This was very nice, a luxury for us. I was still going to Bethlehem University, studying social work. And Asam had just graduated with a major in Arabic literature and language. He hadn’t found a job yet, but that was alright. We were feeling very good, glad to at last be in a place of our own.

But then Asam got arrested again. It was the beginning of the Intifada, and the Israelis rounded up a lot of people here. They put them in Atlit, a military prison. Asam was in for nine days and then they released him. Then, about a week later, they came back and arrested him again, what they call maatsar minhali [administrative detention]. He wasn’t formally charged with anything, but they were holding him in jail for six months. During this period, they arrested some others from the Bethlehem area, a military group, and someone in this group said that Asam was the one giving them orders. So they put Asam on trial and sentenced him to five years in jail. He didn’t get out until 1993.

For me this was awful. I was pregnant already when Asam was taken to jail. Two and a half months pregnant, something like that. I didn’t want to stay alone in that rented apartment. The only other place I could go to was my parent’s house. That was a bad feeling, but I figured I had no choice. So I went back. At the end of the year I gave birth to my son, Ali. I gave birth at Muqassed Hospital in East Jerusalem. My mother came with me. It was a difficult birth, lots of pain, but what was hardest was that Asam wasn’t there. I didn’t know when I’d see him again, or when we’d all be together.

As it happened, ten days after I gave birth I went to prison to see him. I went without Ali, I wasn’t ready to bring him yet. I wanted to be there by myself. About two months later I brought Ali. Asam took a look at him and began crying. I was crying too, and so was Ali. All three of us. Asam looked terrible. His eyes were all red, his face was unshaven, he was thin, and his clothes were filthy. You could see they had been torturing him. Later I found out just how bad it was. They nearly killed him with all the torture. Asam had stayed silent, protecting his friends. You could see in his eyes the ordeal he’d been through. It was awful.

But, it was good for Asam, and me too, that I brought Ali. We were Asam’s tie to life. I knew this. When you are in prison, these visits are what you have. You count the days between visits, they keep you going. So, I kept bringing Ali. As he got older, he looked forward to going, and unless he was sick I’d always bring him. The visits were only for forty-five minutes, and we had to talk to each other through an iron-mesh screen. You couldn’t even hug, all you could do is shake fingers through the screen. But we went every two weeks. Ali used to ask me why his father was in prison, and I explained it to him. He knows now that the Israelis put us—his father, me, his uncles—in jail because we are fighting for our country. He understands this. He’s scared of the Israeli soldiers. When he sees them with their rifles and tear-gas canisters, he comes running home scared. He’s also scared of our people, the shabab [fellows] who cover their faces with head scarves. He’s had a hard time of it, Ali has. He’s only six years old. I worry about him a lot. But what can you do? That is our life.

While Asam was in jail, I continued going to Bethlehem University to get my degree. It took me until 1991 to finally graduate because the university was closed down for two years with the Intifada. We had to take classes at people’s homes. Mostly, we weren’t able to study at all. But I was very busy during these years with political work. There was a lot to do. I was active in the Fatah student group, I was one of the organizers in it. We planned demonstrations and strikes, and we kept things stirred up. No, I didn’t throw any more Molotov cocktails during this time. Only a few stones here and there, that’s all. Really, though, my main work was more as an organizer, that’s where I felt I could be most effective.

I also became involved during this period with the Women’s Committee for Social Work, working as an organizer of women in the villages and refugee camps in the Bethlehem area.^[*] This was a new kind of political work for me. Up to then I’d been involved in political work as a student, together with men. I had never worked just with women. But with the Intifada the Palestinian struggle had become a true mass movement, and there was a need to involve women in a constructive way. I’m talking about women from the villages and refugee camps, women who’d never been involved in political or social activism in their lives—women like my mother.

The way we did it is that we’d go to the villages and camps, and with a small group of women we’d get a committee going. At this point, almost every village and every camp has these women’s committees. The kind of work we do is largely social and economic, but it also has a political impact. I’ll give you an example. In almost all these places there have been no nursery schools or kindergartens for the children. These children have been neglected, they just stay at home with their mothers until they are six years old. So we bring in a lecturer to talk about the need for such facilities, and then we start to organize people to run the nursery or kindergarten. Sometimes we’ve been very successful, sometimes less so. Or I’ll give you another example. We try to get the women active in something that will earn them some money, money they don’t have to ask their husbands for. We help them produce things to sell—sewing, embroidery, or prepared foods like jams and pickles. We provide help in marketing these products, and this way the women make some cash. Even though the cash they earn in this way isn’t much, it gets the women together and gives them a sense of accomplishment. All this has political results too. These women from the villages and camps who never before would have dared do anything political have wound up joining in demonstrations and strikes, and thus they’ve become part of the national struggle.

For me, this whole experience of working with women has been very meaningful. I’m now on the national steering committee of our Women’s Committee for Social Work, but I still go to the villages sometimes. It’s easy for me. Unlike some of my co-workers who are from the city, I’m very familiar with village women. Their families are like mine, the mothers are like my mother. When I go there now, I can see what a big change has taken place these last few years. It’s amazing. I’m not saying that our committees are responsible for these changes—no, I don’t mean that. I mean, there’s been a social process that has taken place here, a lot of it due to the Intifada, and our work is part of all that.

These women in the villages and camps, just like my mother, have begun to free themselves from the domination of their husbands. If you want to know what’s happened, you just look at my mother. She’s still under my father’s control a good deal. But now she goes out on demonstrations, on marches, and she doesn’t ask his permission. Look, she’s talking to you for the book. Most of the times you come, she doesn’t even tell him you’re coming. She does it because she wants to do it. She would never have been so free before. Before, she wouldn’t speak up to him at all, now she does. She begins to understand that her views are worth something, that she herself has something to say and contribute to the society, not just to her family.

This is the big change that has come about since the Intifada. In a way the Intifada has contributed more to women than women have contributed to it. Under the cover of a national struggle, you could say, women have been able to leave their traditional places, their incarceration, in their homes. In many cases, when the husbands were jailed, the women have had to go out and work to support the family. When the Israelis closed down the schools in the villages and camps and cities, women organized classes in their houses. When their husbands and sons were put in jail, they went on demonstrations and hunger strikes for prisoners. And they’ve gotten involved directly in confrontations with soldiers—throwing stones or whatever. When all this first began to happen, the men opposed it. But gradually it became clear to the men that the Intifada is a people’s war, and so women’s participation has become acceptable. Before, the men looked upon women as weak. Now they’ve seen that women can stand up to soldiers, can face being wounded or martyred. Women have proved their ability to endure suffering, even more than men can if you ask me. All this has had its effect. Women have become freer now than they’ve ever been before.

The question we’re asking ourselves now—me and other women involved in the national struggle—is where it’s all going. We take a look at Algeria and we see what happened there. The Algerian women took a big part in the national struggle to rid the country of the French, and then they slipped back into traditional roles. Now the Muslim fundamentalists there are trying to take over the country. Is this our future? That’s what we ask ourselves. And I’ll tell you the truth, it worries me. Right now, the PLO has the support of most Palestinians. But if Arafat cannot succeed more in changing the real conditions of people’s lives, if the Occupation continues despite all the negotiations, people will swing over to the Muslim fundamentalists, to Hamas. It’s already been going on for a while. When people are desperate, they seek refuge in religion. Personally, I can’t stand the religious extremists—not Jewish nor Christian nor Muslim. Religion for me is a private matter, and I respect that. I have friends who wear religious dress. Their way of dressing is their business, my way is mine. I fast during Ramadan. That’s my business too. But, what would be intolerable to me is living in a state where I’m told I have to dress in a particular way or pray in a particular way. As a woman I couldn’t tolerate living in a state run by Muslim fundamentalists. If it comes about, I’ll leave, khalas. I don’t know where I’d go, but I would leave. I haven’t fought all these years, I haven’t gone to jail, to wind up in a Muslim fundamentalist state. I swear, I’d leave.

The Women’s Committee for Social Work is affiliated with Fatah, and is one of four women’s organizations operating in the territories under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and representing different factions within the PLO.

Even though I was doing a lot of political organizing among women and students after the Intifada broke out, somehow I managed to stay out of jail. Some of my brothers got arrested during this period, and Asam was in serving five years, but the Israelis left me alone. Until 1991, I was alright. Then I got put back in jail for a month—this time for something that I wasn’t involved in at all.

The reason it happened was this. My sister-in-law, Fatma—she’s Hatem’s wife—was martyred. That’s her wedding picture on the wall. I really liked her. She was very active as a fighter. What she did this time was take a bomb to the Jewish market, Mahane Yehuda, with the intention of planting it, I think, in the toilet there. But the timing device must have misfired and it blew up on her instead. She was killed on the spot. Immediately after that my brother went into hiding, he knew they’d be coming after him. None of us knew where he was. The Israelis put a curfew on the entire camp, and they delivered Fatma’s smashed-up body to the graveyard in a plastic bag. We weren’t allowed to have a proper funeral for her. The Israelis only let eight family members attend. I wanted very much to be there, so I went. When I saw Fatma’s face inside the plastic bag, her face all full of shrapnel holes, I about collapsed. It was awful. And then, as I was standing there looking at her, an Israeli Shabak^[*] guy came up to me and grabbed me and put me under arrest.

This Israeli guy’s name was Jad, that’s what he called himself—an Arab name. I don’t know why they all use Arab names, but they do. He took me to Maskubiya jail. They also took my sister, Sarah, there. Poor thing, she’s a nurse, she’s not political at all, but they arrested her too. Anyway, this Jad took me back to the same jail I’d been in twice before. As soon as we got there, he brought me to this yard—it’s a very well known place—and in the yard there were several Palestinian fellows. They were all handcuffed or chained up, with their hands behind their backs or to a chair, and some of them were moaning and wailing. This Jad grabbed my arm and said, pointing, “Look, this one’s been here twenty-five days, and that one ten days, and that one a month. If you don’t cooperate, you’re going out there too.” It was January then, very cold. That night they put me out in the yard too. I was out there four days and nights, my hands chained behind my back, one reaching down behind my neck and the other up to it. After a while it hurts terribly. They didn’t let me sleep at all, not a wink. And for three days they gave me nothing to eat. The only time they took off the chain was when they brought me in for interrogation. They questioned me about things which I knew nothing about. They knew I was in jail before and that I was still involved politically, so they thought I might know something. But, I swear, I knew nothing about what they were asking me, not a thing.

After four days they took me out of the yard and put me in a room. Not really a room, a shaft. This shaft was pitch black day and night, and not wide enough to sit in, and it was bitter cold. There’s a cooling machine on top that blows cold air down on you. The prisoners call this shaft “the Refrigerator.” The police call it “the Closet.” In this shaft there’s a half-chair made of stone, but the shaft is too narrow for a person to sit down on it. So you are standing almost all the time, or you put one or both your feet up on the stone chair. It’s impossible to feel comfortable. They let you out only to interrogate you. The idea is to break you down so you’ll talk easily. With me, during these interrogations, they cursed and threatened me constantly. They told me, “You’re not going to get out of here alive.” They kept threatening to strip me down naked in front of them. They never did strip me, though when I was in prison I heard stories about women who’d been tortured sexually. And I saw men there who’d gone crazy, and I knew of those who were trying to commit suicide.

But when I was in jail this time, in 1991, the torture methods they used were no longer so much physical as psychological. In the beginning of the Occupation—I know this for a fact—they’d take women and beat them like they were wild animals. They’d burn them with cigarettes, pull out their hair, and torture them sexually. I won’t tell you they raped these women—though I’ve heard stories about that—but since I don’t know this for sure I’m not saying they did this. They beat women on their sexual parts, this I know for sure. But the Shabak has since switched mostly to more psychological forms of torture. The brutal physical methods gave them a bad name outside. Everyone knew the Israelis were killing people in jail, beating them to death. But besides this, the Shabak realized that the psychological methods are often more effective. Depriving people of sleep, putting them outside in the cold or in “the Refrigerator,” playing recordings of people screaming and crying—all this plays on a person’s nerves and it destroys a person even more than the brutal physical methods. The body can get used to blows, sometimes. But the psychological methods break a person’s mind eventually, and then the Shabak can get out of them what they want.

I want to tell you something. I understand that we are in a national struggle with the Israelis. But what I want to tell you is that the people that do this torturing, these Israeli interrogators, are not doing what they do out of nationalistic reasons. I don’t believe it. These Shabak interrogators are doing it because they like it. I don’t believe that most Israelis, most people anywhere, could imagine torturing others in these ways. But these interrogators are sadists. They like their work. I’ve come to know them up close, unfortunately, and I’m convinced of this.

Me, I survived it. I managed to be strong because I knew I had no information to give, nothing to hide. And I survived because of my son, Ali. I kept thinking all the time that I’ve got to stay strong and get back to him. He’s my only child—he was then—and I love him so much, and I was determined not to break emotionally. What made things especially hard for me was that this period when I was in jail was during the Gulf War. January and February 1991. I kept saying to myself, “What will happen if Saddam bombs Israel with chemical weapons?” My poor son was without me or his father either. Asam was in jail then too. My mother was taking care of Ali. That whole month, twenty-five days, I kept thinking about Ali. When I did get sleep, I had nightmares. Like, I would dream that Ali was running on a roof and then suddenly he’d fall off and disappear. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, shaking. But, thinking of him is what kept me going and not breaking.

Another thing that helped me was that I had a wonderful lawyer. I love this woman. Leah Tsemel is her name, she’s a Jewish woman. She’s the only one who was allowed to visit me. Nobody from my family was allowed to come. Usually, Leah Tsemel doesn’t have time to visit prisoners, but because of the Gulf War she had more time. In the beginning, they didn’t let her visit either, but she appealed to the Supreme Court and won. She came several times, she passed messages from my mother, and she kept telling me to stay strong and she would get me out. And she kept her word. At the end of twenty-five days I was freed. They let out my sister, Sarah, with me. She had been tortured too. When we got out, you couldn’t have recognized us. We were filthy, we hadn’t been allowed to bathe the whole time we were in jail. We were frightening to look at. We took a bus to the camp, and when we got there the Israeli soldiers at first refused to let us enter. There was a curfew on the camp that day. But they let us go home, and when we got there it was a surprise because nobody had been told we were getting out that day.

Shabak is an acronym for Sherut Bitahon Klali, the Israeli internal security services.

I had told myself when I was in jail being tortured, that if I survive this, I’m going to quit political work and devote myself to my son and my family. Khalas, no more politics. Believe me, that’s what I wanted to do. Just before I was jailed, I had bought this house. I had some money from the new job I’d taken, Asam’s political group was giving some money while he was in jail, and I borrowed 2,000 dinars from a money lender I know in Bethlehem. I wanted my family to have a place of our own.

When I got out of jail, I continued to fix this place up. Slowly, slowly, I put it in order—I fixed up the two bedrooms, I put in a new kitchen and bath, and I bought some furniture. We moved in a year before Asam got out of jail. Ali and me. Also, Sarah stayed with us before she got married, and one of my brothers too. I’m proud of this place, really I am. But the pact I made with myself to stay away from politics, to just devote myself to my family, well, I wasn’t able to keep it. I couldn’t. The political situation hasn’t changed, the struggle continues, and even though Asam has gotten out of jail, my brother, Hatem, is in now serving a life sentence. And we have friends still in jail too. So, I’ve continued with politics, the Women’s Committee for Social Work especially. What can you do?

But now that Asam’s out—it’s been a year and a half—we are living a normal family life. We have a new baby, as you can see. Leila’s her name. I always wanted a daughter. I want to raise her different than I was raised, to be free, free in every way. I’m trying, it’s a hard job. Raising children is not easy. Right now, I’m not having another. I use contraception, of course. I couldn’t handle another right now. In the future who knows, maybe I’ll want one more. But not more than three. For sure, not eleven like my mother! Oh God, no! No way I’d do that. I couldn’t manage with more than three, not at all. Even though, I will say, Asam’s been a big help to me. He helps with the children and does a lot of the housework too. He’s very liberal in this way. Even if his friends drop over while he’s busy, say, washing the dishes, he goes right on in front of them. A lot of people around here consider this kind of helping one’s wife as unusual, as if the husband is henpecked. Asam doesn’t pay attention to it. Although once I gave him a load of wash to hang on the roof—that’s where we have the clothesline—and he came running back down immediately with the wash in his hands. He said there were several old women watching him from their verandas, and he just couldn’t go on. In front of his friends he’s not embarrassed, but in front of these old ladies he was! I tell you, it made me laugh, really it did.

Anyway, these days the one who I’m really dependent on for help, especially with the baby, is my mother. I recently went back to my job after a maternity leave, and my mother takes care of Leila all day. I would have preferred to hire someone, but we couldn’t afford it, and my mother insisted that she’d do it. So she takes care of my daughter all day, and my son too after school, if Asam or I aren’t back from work. I can’t say I agree with everything she does with my daughter. She has some old ways from the village. Like, after Leila was born my mother wanted me to massage her with salty water and wrap her up like a stick for a few months. I refused, and I didn’t let her do it either. My mother tends to overprotect Leila and she overfeeds her too. The poor kid is fat as a football from this. But Leila is crazy about her, and my mother is crazy about Leila. And even though I feel guilty about the whole arrangement, it does let me go to work, and that I like—or at least I used to like my job. Lately, I’m beginning to think I’ve got to get a new job.

This job I have now, it’s something I’ve been doing for about four years. Make that five years, as of this year. I’m a social worker at a rehabilitation center.^[*] I started there when I was in my last year at Bethlehem University, in 1990. The director of the center is someone I knew at the university. I had pull with him. That’s how things work in our society. You need pull. He hired people he knew, his friends, and I was one of them.

When I first started working there I really enjoyed it. I used to look forward to going to work each morning and being with my clients. The fact that I could talk to them and help them meant a lot to me. It still does, but in a way I think I’ve become burned-out. I feel overwhelmed a lot, and I can’t stop thinking about the clients even after I come home. I tell you, I need a break from it.

You see, the majority of the clients we have at the center are Intifada victims. We have some people with handicaps due to birth defects, or illnesses like polio, but most of the clients are Intifada-related cases. We have an inpatient program and an outreach program. I’m working in the inpatient program, and I have about ten cases who I see once or twice a week. They’re all young men who’ve been seriously wounded or tortured in jail or traumatized in some other way. The ones who come to us are the ones who can’t cope with the trauma, they’ve broken down. Often their families have rejected them, their friends too, and they feel isolated and hopeless. Our job is to try to get them back on their feet. Job counseling, psychotherapy—that’s what we offer them. And, if I look at it objectively, I’d say we do a pretty good job. We’re able to help many of them.

For me the problem is—at least my supervisor thinks so and I agree with her—I overidentify with some of my clients. When I sit there listening to their stories, I find myself crying sometimes. It just gets to me, I can’t help it. For example, I have this client from Gaza, a guy who received a head wound. The wound affected his speech and his memory, and his arm and leg are paralyzed. When he talks to me about his family’s rejecting him, I find myself getting very upset. The tears start rolling down my cheeks, and I find it difficult to go on listening to him. I wanted to stop seeing him, but my supervisor encouraged me to stay in there, so I have.

Sometimes, also, I’ll have a client who went through what I did. Torture, I mean. With one young man, he went through almost exactly the same—at the same jail and at the same time. Yes, he was there when I was. Usually, I don’t tell my clients that I was in jail. I might say that someone in my family was in jail, but I don’t talk about myself. I think it wouldn’t be professional on my part, it would personalize my relationship to the client too much. But with this fellow, he knew I was there then, and he asked me about it. I acknowledged it, but I didn’t go into details. Just acknowledging it was hard enough for me, I don’t like remembering these things. Still, the fact that I was there built a special bond between us and enabled me to help him. Even now that he’s no longer in the center, he still drops by to say hello and chat with me. I feel good about my work with him, sure I do.

But my work doesn’t always go so well, there’s lots of tough cases that I don’t feel I helped much. One guy particularly is getting to me these days. In fact, this case has brought me to the point where I’m thinking I’ve got to get a new job, like I shouldn’t go on there. What happened with this client is that just a couple of weeks ago he tried to kill me. Others stopped him and took the knife out of his hand, but if they hadn’t, God knows what he would have done. He’s not a client at the center now. He was, but the administration decided to send him home. He was causing too many problems, he almost burned down the center. I thought we dismissed him too quickly, too traumatically. He’s a person who already was suffering from too much trauma and rejection. He’d been abused as a child, and in jail he was tortured by his fellow prisoners. They accused him of being a collaborator—which I don’t think he was—and they tortured him. Now his family rejects him completely. He came to us, and what happened? We rejected him too. So he’s gone crazy. For months after we sent him home he’d call me regularly, threatening me. He came twice and threatened me in person. I was scared, but what could I do? We have no guards or police protection. What are we going to do, call in the Israeli army? They wouldn’t care anyway. So the situation just went on until a couple of weeks ago he came to the center with the knife and tried to get me. The janitor stopped him and very nearly got stabbed himself. I tell you, it was a horrible situation. I’m still shaken up from it. I don’t feel safe going to work any more. I’m thinking seriously of quitting. I might.

You know, after this incident I stayed at home for a few days. My supervisor told me not to come in, to relax. I stayed at home with the children, I enjoyed it. I was able to relax some. During this time that I was at home, my mother told me I shouldn’t go back to this job. I should get another job if I wanted to work, she said. She told me she had had a dream about my going back to the center, a bad dream. I gathered that in this dream, this nightmare, something had happened to me, maybe I got killed. I asked her, but she wouldn’t tell me. She has this belief that if you reveal a dream, then it comes true. To this moment, she has refused to tell me. She just keeps saying that I’ve got to leave the center and find something else. Believe me, I’d like to. Maybe working with teenage girls, I think I’d like that. When I was a teenager I could have benefited from having someone to talk to. I think I could be good in this work. But right now, I’m stuck where I am. I can’t afford to stop working. So, each morning I go off to the center scared. And my mother, she keeps telling me that I’ve got to stop soon. The sooner the better, she says.

Samira requested that the name of the center not be used, and accordingly we omit it.

9. Umm Abdullah

Her experience in the 1948 war and subsequent status as a refugee left their indelible mark on Umm Abdullah’s political consciousness. Yet her shift into political actor is more recent. Women who had never acted on their political beliefs, among them many uneducated housewives like Umm Abdullah, were pulled into the wake of the Intifada. As the mothers watched their children enter the battle and suffer the consequences, they felt compelled to join them in some way. But for Umm Abdullah, Samira’s imprisonment—which came in 1982, five years before the Intifada—was the spark that ignited her willingness, her determination, to confront Israeli soldiers.

And Samira was only the first of her children to be imprisoned. Four others have since been jailed, most during the Intifada. Her son Hatem is currently serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison. Hatem’s house, located opposite Umm Abdullah’s house, has been boarded up with the door welded shut by the Israeli army. Each morning as she steps outside her own house, she faces this reminder of her political fate, and as she puts it, “Each day my blood boils anew and my heart cries out for him.”

In this section of Umm Abdullah’s story, she recollects and reflects on some of her experiences, especially political experiences, in the last few years. She also recalls her “return” to Al-Qabu for several visits in the 1980s, and the impact this had on her.

After Samira went to jail and they destroyed our house, we lived in the tent for ten months. It was a big tent, I made it as comfortable as possible, but it was not an easy time for us. The winter was cold. At night all of us slept together in a row on the ground. We tried to keep warm. But there were some hard nights, rain coming through, everyone getting wet. What could we do? That was our fate. We endured it.

The Israeli soldiers kept coming by to check on us. They couldn’t believe we were managing. Sometimes they started talking to us, nasty and rude. I remember once this Jewish officer started up. Haim was his name, I think. He asked my husband how many children he had. “Eleven,” my husband answered. “All these are from one woman?” he asked. My husband nodded, and I jumped in, “I want to bring more!” This Haim gave me a nasty look. I repeated, “I swear, I’m going to bring more!” This time the Jew answered, “Oh yes? Go ahead, bring more.” I looked him square in the eyes and started shouting, “I will! Sure I will!” And I began to curse him. My husband told me to shut up, but I went on cursing them and their fathers too. I swear, I did. It made me feel good to curse them. Sure it did.

Anyway, that’s the way it was for ten months. Then we got permission to rebuild. Not from the Israelis, they didn’t give us permission. We got our permission from the deputy mayor of Bethlehem. He told us to go ahead. He didn’t write anything down but he said he’d take responsibility for it. Later, the Israelis caused us lots of problems because we didn’t get permission from them. Many times they threatened to tear down the house again. But lately they’re not bothering us, thanks to God. The money to rebuild came from my sons in Saudi Arabia. They could afford it. People came from all over to help us rebuild. You should have seen them working here. I cooked for all of them. In four days, four walls went up—room after room. In less than a month we were in our house. By the time Samira got out of jail in 1985, we had already been living in this new place two years.

Do I remember her coming home in 1985? Yes. Sure I do. We didn’t know exactly when she was getting out, it wasn’t clear. Then suddenly one day there she was! Her husband, Asam—he wasn’t her husband then—brought her back along with a friend of his. We were happy, very happy. We began singing at the top of our voices and soon people came from here in the camp, from Beit Jala, from Camp Deheisha. It was a great joy for us. To have her back again, oh yes, a joy!

After she came home she returned to the university. She began her studies again to be a social worker. Asam was studying at Bethlehem University too. Soon after, they decided to get married. Did I approve? Yes, I was very glad. I knew they loved each other. Samira hadn’t told me but I knew. People had told me that they went around together. And once when I was in Bethlehem, from a distance I saw them together. I pretended not to notice them though, and I never told my husband. To this day he doesn’t know they were going around together before the wedding. But yes, I’m glad they got married. Asam is a good husband to her. Their relationship is wonderful, the very best. They’re both educated, they’re both nationalist and very involved in politics. She’s a heroine and he’s a hero. Asam’s been back in jail since they got married. He was in for five more years. And Samira’s been back in too, after Hatem’s wife was martyred. What can I tell you? They have a good marriage, they support each other to the end. And you know Samira yourselves. Really, there’s nobody like her. Look, a mother loves her daughter and the daughter loves her mother. When I’m sick, Samira’s the one who takes me to the doctor, she forces me to go. When my husband and I went on the hajj a year and a half ago, she was the one who worried about us, and how we’d manage in the heat. Samira—she’s got a warm heart. I’m proud of her and what she’s done. I haven’t been able to do what she’s done, but if I could have I would. That’s right. I would have lived my life like she has. Oh yes, I’m very proud of her.

I’m proud of all my children. The one’s who’ve gone to jail for their beliefs, for their nationalism—I’m very proud of them. You see, just about everyone here in the camp has been involved since the Intifada began. If my children weren’t involved, they’d be different from the others. That’s the way it is. Because our children—Samira, Hatem, Ismail, Mahmud, and Sarah—have been in jail, our family is known as very active and nationalist. My husband is proud of them too. “What they’ve done is honorable,” he says. You know, my husband is respected here in the camp because of our children. People treat him like a qadi [judge], they come to him for help in solving their problems. He’s now like his father was back in Al-Qabu, a mukhtar.

Since the Intifada began we’ve had one or another of our children in jail all the time. Mahmud was in for nine months. Ismail was in for four years. Hatem is serving a life term now. Sarah was in about a month with Samira. And Samira’s been in three times, more than three years altogether.

The Israeli soldiers know our family by now, they like to arrest us. They know we’re nationalist so they come after us. Sarah got arrested for nothing. She and Samira were taken in for interrogation during the time the Israelis were looking for Hatem. They both got tortured for doing nothing. And the time Mahmud got arrested and put in jail for nine months, he hadn’t been doing anything at all.

That time with Mahmud, I tried to stop the Israeli soldiers from taking him. This happened about four years ago. Some boys from the camp were stoning settlers’ cars up by the main road. The soldiers came into the camp chasing after them. They grabbed Mahmud. He hadn’t been part of it, but no matter, they grabbed him anyway. I ran after them. I didn’t have my shoes on, I was barefoot. People from here started shouting at me, “Go back, they’ll shoot you!” But I tell you, I wasn’t afraid. I just kept chasing them up to the main road where they had their outpost. They were cursing me and I was cursing them. There was a Jewish officer there who called himself Karim, and he said to me, “Get out of here!” I answered him, “You get out of here!” He didn’t hit me, but I hit him. I pushed him. My blood was boiling, I didn’t care what happened to me. I just didn’t want them taking Mahmud. But I couldn’t stop them, there were too many of them. They took him, they put him in jail, and he didn’t get out for nine months.

That happened just a little before Hatem got arrested again—and got sentenced for life imprisonment. Ninety-nine years they gave him, it’s the same thing. This is what has broken my heart. Mine and Abu Abdullah’s too. We’re both broken from this. I see Hatem’s picture on the wall at Samira’s house, his picture with his wife. It destroys me. I cry and cry and cry. Oh God, why? Tell me, why?

Hatem—he’s broken now. They finally broke him. This last time he’s been in jail the Israelis finished him. Hatem’s twenty-eight now and he’s been in and out of jail since he was sixteen. Six times. Let’s see, the first time—three years. The second time—fourteen days. The third time—thirteen days. The fourth time—six months. The fifth time—two years. Now—life imprisonment. And this last time he didn’t really do anything. He wanted to do something, yes. He was planning to attack a bus of settlers, but they caught him before he did it. What they put him in jail for is what Fatma, his wife, did. They wanted to finish them both off.

Fatma—she was martyred. Samira must have told you about that, no? She and Hatem had been married for only seventy days, that’s all. They didn’t even have time to enjoy their marriage. That picture on Samira’s wall is of them on their wedding day. She was beautiful, a beautiful girl. And a fighter! Fatma was a real fighter. Earlier that year she had been involved in an action where she killed one and wounded nine. This was before they were married. Then she got involved in this thing that killed her. She was going to place a bomb in the Jewish suq [outdoor market] and it blew up on her. She was martyred.

As soon as that happened the Israelis came looking for Hatem. The Shabak came here and turned our house upside down and broke all sorts of things. They came several times, each time with fifteen or twenty men. They threatened to destroy our house. My husband said to them, turning his back on them, “Go ahead, do what you want!” I tell you, we weren’t afraid. We were only afraid they’d catch Hatem and kill him. He had gone into hiding, we didn’t know where he was. None of us did.

But what they did, the Shabak, is they hauled off Samira and Sarah for interrogation. They put them into separate cells and they tortured them, trying to get information. I kept thinking, “This time they’ll kill Samira, and Sarah too.” It was during the Gulf War. I was scared the whole time, scared also of the Scuds and the chemical gas that Saddam said he was going to use. I was taking care of Samira’s son. Her husband was in jail then too. I was scared that we were all going to get killed this time. By Saddam, by the Israelis, by somebody.

After a month they let Samira and Sarah go. They knew nothing, so they let them out. And after forty days they caught up with Hatem. Collaborators must have tipped them off. How else could they have found him? They put him in jail and they broke him. They showed him pictures of Fatma’s blown-up body and he fell apart. He began to say all kinds of things about himself. They got him to say whatever they wanted. And with that, they sentenced him to ninety-nine years. We visit him now in prison, Abu Abdullah and me. We’re allowed to go there every fifteen days for a short visit, and we go every time. We never miss. Someone from the family always goes. As long as I’m alive, I’ll go to him. Oh yes, I will. Our only chance that Hatem will get out is if there’s peace and the new Palestinian government releases him. But who knows? Only God knows.

The Israeli army wanted to destroy our house again after they put Hatem in jail. But this time we got a good lawyer. A Jewish woman named Leah Tsemel. She’s a very good person. She helped Samira and Sarah get out of jail. I wasn’t able to visit them—the Israelis didn’t let us—but Leah Tsemel did visit them, and she passed messages back and forth between us. Then she helped us save our house, this Leah Tsemel. She convinced the judge that Hatem was living in his own place, not ours, and that the army shouldn’t be allowed to destroy our house again. So instead the army boarded up his house and sealed the door shut. Hatem’s house stands right across from our house. As I go out of my door each day I see it. Each day my blood boils anew and my heart cries out for him.

The Intifada has made big changes for women. It’s gotten us moving. It’s changed our lives. When we see soldiers beating our sons, we go wild inside. We have to do something to defend our sons. We do what we have to do without thinking, without fear. A woman who acts like this is respected by other women and they say she’s a heroine. Not only the women say this. The men say it too. They say, “You women are stronger than we are. Courageous, real heroines, you are.” That’s right, the men sometimes talk about us this way now.

I remember one time these Israeli soldiers came into the camp chasing after some boys. These soldiers were cursing, cursing our religion. I came out and started yelling at them, “What are you doing to these children? Do they have stones and knives? They’re just playing.” The soldiers took these boys who they had caught and started beating them. They were beating them with batons, beating them so hard that they broke some of the batons on them. I swear, I jumped in to defend the boys. Even though my own sons weren’t part of it, I couldn’t watch them beating the boys. Some other women came to join me. A soldier grabbed me and pushed me against a wall. Another soldier said, “Shoot her!” One of them put his rifle in my face, but he didn’t shoot. “I’m not afraid of you!” I shouted at him. “The day’s coming when you people are going to get yours!” He cursed me and I cursed him right back. And you know, we stopped them from taking the boys. They left them there. But these boys were beaten so badly an ambulance had to come for some of them. Later, when I went into the house, my husband said to me, “Tell me, weren’t you afraid?” He had stayed inside because he’s a man, and if he had gone out they would have beaten him and arrested him. But, I swear, I wasn’t afraid.

The Israeli soldiers—who are they? They’re cowards, that’s all. They’ve got frightening weapons, nothing more. Without their weapons they’re nothing. I’ve stood up to them many times. When the shabab throw stones at settlers’ cars up at the main road and then come running into the camp, I sometimes have gotten in the middle and directed them where to run. “Don’t go that way, they’re coming from that direction!” I tell them. “Here, go this way!” Sometimes the shabab have hidden in my house. I go out and see when it’s safe for them to leave. I take their clothes and give them new ones so they won’t be recognized. I tell them, “Calm down, relax, so it won’t look like you’ve been running.” These are things I can do. It’s my way of helping, my way of joining the national struggle. It’s all I can do. I don’t have the time to join women’s committees here in the camp. Samira does that kind of work, political work. I admire her. But I have to take care of my husband and my children, and sometimes Samira’s children too. Sometimes I go on demonstrations or sit-ins at the Red Cross office or at the prison where Hatem is. I’ve gone, I’ve waved banners with Arafat’s picture on it. But getting involved every week or month with a group of women, that’s for Samira—not for me.

Together though, women of Samira’s generation and women of my generation—we’ve done something. Sure we have! We’re samdin [steadfast people]. We’ve learned to be steadfast, no matter what the Jews do to us. That’s a new word, you know. Sumud [steadfastness]. We got that word from the PLO. There’s even songs now about samdin, but don’t ask me to sing them. Some people have named their children Samed. What it means is that the way we will win is by staying strong. Lazem nusmud [we have to be steadfast]. No matter how many martyrs we have, no matter how many are jailed, we have to stay strong. Lazem nusmud!

And we are strong! We Palestinians are a strong people. The strongest! There’s nobody like us in the whole world. Wherever you go in the world there’s Palestinians. In the Arab world, in Europe, in America—we are all over. And wherever a Palestinian is, he stays Palestinian. They can’t manage without us in Jordan and Kuwait. Jordan was a desert before Palestinians came there. I’ve been in Amman. Who built all those houses and factories there? We did. In Kuwait, after the Gulf War, they threw Palestinians out. Now they’re asking us to come back. They can’t manage without us. And do you think Israel can manage without Palestinian workers? They can’t. Our workers are stronger, more steady, and work for less. The Israeli government may not want us, but the Jewish bosses need us.

Oh yes, we Palestinians are a strong people. Sure we are. We are going to win in our struggle with the Jews. Lazem nusmud, that’s all. There were many foreigners who came here and they all left. The Turks were here for hundreds of years before they left. The English came, and soon they left. And now the Jews are ruling Palestine, but they’ll leave too. In the end, Palestine will be for the Palestinians. How long it’ll take, I don’t know. I’m not an expert on politics. But sooner or later, God willing, it will happen.

If you ask me who I’m for in politics, I’ll tell you, it’s like this. I’m for the PLO and Arafat. I want them to be in charge of the Palestinian state. That’s what I prefer. But do you know who the Jews are most afraid of? Hamas, that’s who. The Jews are more afraid of the religious Muslims than anyone else. Hamas says they want the Palestinian refugees from 1948 to be able to return to their homes. They don’t want a compromise. That scares the Jews. Me, I want the refugees to be able to go back to their homes too. Of course, I do. And I’m religious, a believing Muslim. I pray, I fast on Ramadan, I’ve been on the hajj. That’s the way I’ve educated my children. But I don’t support the Muslim political party. I prefer the PLO, like Samira does. I think they have the best chance of getting a Palestinian state for us. They have the best chance of removing the Jews from around here. That’s what I want. The sooner the better. We’re fed up with the Jews, and I know they’re fed up with us too. I’ve heard the Jews talking, here and on television. They don’t want to be around us either. So let them go their way and we’ll go ours. That’s best. And then we’ll see where it goes from there.

I don’t know if in my lifetime I’ll ever return to live in Al-Qabu. If you talk to Samira, she thinks there’s no way we’ll ever return. She says it’s all over, khalas. But my sons, some of them, think differently. They think it’ll take a hard fight, a real war, and then we’ll all go back. Someday we’ll live in Al-Qabu again. In twenty years or so, they say. Me, I don’t know when it’ll happen, but I believe it will. Maybe I won’t live there, but God willing, my grandchildren will. That’s what I think.

When they were small I used to talk a lot to my children about Al-Qabu. I’d tell them how our life was there—healthier, cleaner, better. I wanted them to know where they come from, where their village is. My sons, especially the younger boys, were very interested. Samira? Not so much. I don’t know why, she was always too busy or had other things on her mind. She didn’t seem so interested.

You know, here in the camp we still have sheep from Al-Qabu. When we left in 1948 a man brought some sheep with him. And today, more than forty years later, he has the offspring of these sheep. He holds onto them, he won’t get rid of them. Some old men here in the camp say that if we lose those sheep we’re all going to become ill. The man has to hold onto them, they say. And he does. He doesn’t trade them away no matter what.

I’ve been back to visit Al-Qabu four times. After the 1967 war, when the Israelis conquered the West Bank, there was no longer a border separating us from Al-Qabu. You could go back and look around if you wanted to. Some people immediately went, but it wasn’t safe. You could get shot by Israeli soldiers, by settlers. Really, some people who went back to see the village then were shot while they were there. Some were killed. It was dangerous, I tell you. It’s the same today. Since the Intifada started, it’s not safe to go there. The Israeli soldiers aren’t the problem now, it’s the settlers. The Jews have built settlements in that area, and those settlers are dangerous people. You could get shot easily these days. So we no longer take trips there.

But, back before the Intifada, our family went. The first time was twelve years ago. That was the hardest time. It had been more than thirty years since I had been in Al-Qabu. When I got there, I could see that the place was destroyed. The houses were bombed. I went up to where our house had been. I looked inside. I could see the spot where I used to sleep, and the spot where my mother gave birth to one of my brothers. I could see the spot where my grandmother used to sit, and the spot where the tabun was. The tabun was still there. I remembered my mother baking and cooking in it. I called my brother over, and I said to him, “Take a look over here, the zatar you planted is still here!” And then we saw at the side of the house the carob tree he had planted. We started crying, crying hard. “Oh God,” I said, “Why did you force us to flee our village? We and all the others too from all the other villages—why?”

I went over to the old well we had in Al-Qabu. Some of my sons came with me. An underground spring flows into this well, and you can walk down steps into it. Before we came back to Al-Qabu I had made a vow that if I ever got back there, I would bathe myself in this well. And I did. I had my sons sit around as guards. You see, Israeli soldiers were nearby and you could see they’d been bathing in the well too. So my sons guarded me and I went down and washed myself again in Al-Qabu’s waters. I swear, there’re no waters like them in the world—sweet, sweet like ice cream.

The rest of my family, my husband, were resting under some trees down by the stream. Some of the children were playing. We had brought some food for a picnic—chicken, stuffed squash. But what kind of picnic could you have then? Right opposite us were Jewish soldiers and Jewish tourists having a picnic too. They were cooking out on fires by our old stream. The area by the stream had been turned into a picnic ground by the Jews. They’ve planted trees all over the place. I couldn’t sit still, I had to walk around. My husband said to the children, “Your mother is lost in memories.”

I wandered off by myself. I went out to where our land was. I went to the “floor plot.” That’s what we used to call it. Each of our plots had its own special name. I could see that some of our trees are still standing. The almond trees, the grapevines, the fig trees were still there. My fig tree, my qarawi, was still there too, it was still bearing fruit. I swear it was. But other trees, the apricot and plum trees, were finished. Nobody had cared for them and they had died. The olive trees were gone too. Uprooted. The Jews had uprooted them, and other trees were planted in their place.

I kept walking and looking and talking to myself. I had a headache, my head was killing me from all this. I swear, anyone who goes back to his village is going to get a headache—for sure. I’ve heard of people who died when they went back to their villages. They died of sadness, they got heart attacks and died on the spot. Me, I just kept thinking and asking myself, “Why? Why?” If we had nothing to eat but the soil, we still should have stayed in Al-Qabu. I tell you, we who left our villages can never forgive ourselves for leaving.

After that first time in Al-Qabu, we went back three more times. Not all of us went each time. Sometimes we’d go with the neighbors and we’d visit their villages too. Ras Abu Ammar, Dir al-Hawa, nearby villages that had been lost too. Once or twice we brought along food to cook on the fire. We’d go out to our old vineyard, and we’d have our picnic there alone, away from the others.

Each time we went to Al-Qabu I’d come back with things from there. I’d bring back water from our well so that those who didn’t go with us could drink. I’d bring back soil. Once my brother who lives in Jordan asked me to get him some, and I did. I’d also bring back whatever was growing. Cactus fruit, almonds, figs. One time I brought back a couple of branches from my fig tree. I planted these branches next to our house in the camp and they took real well. But a neighbor’s goat got to them and finished them off.

Each time I went back to Al-Qabu I got a headache. But still it was good to go. I wanted my children to see it. I wanted them to know it’s still there, even if it’s in ruins now. God willing, the day will come when we can leave this camp and return there. We have land there. My husband’s father was the mukhtar, half the land in Al-Qabu belongs to his family. Yes, God willing, we’ll sell our house here and build a new one there. That’s what I would like. God willing, one day it will happen.