3. Umm Khaled and Leila

(Village of Abu Ghosh)

10. Umm Khaled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Leila

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Umm Khaled

While most of the population of Abu Ghosh fled the village in 1948 to become refugees in Jordan, Umm Khaled and her family wound up where they had been before—in their four-room house in the center of the village, next to the monastery. All the other Arab villages lying within the Jerusalem corridor had been destroyed: Abu Ghosh was now surrounded by Jewish settlements. Umm Khaled and her husband went on raising their family within the cocoon of their village, adjusting, as best they could, to their new and uncertain status as Arabs in the state of Israel.

In this section Umm Khaled takes up her account of life in Abu Ghosh—from the period just after the 1948 war until the present. During this time her family increased from six to fifteen children (her oldest son died); almost all of them married and are now raising their own children in Abu Ghosh. With a clear eye she regards her family and reflects on some of the struggles, political and otherwise, they have endured over the last forty-five years.

When the war ended in 1948 we were back in our house and my husband was still working in the monastery’s fields. Because my husband had this job, we didn’t lack for food. Cabbages, cauliflower, lettuce, plums, apricots, grapes—we had it all. Others in the village looked at us with an envious eye. Some of them had little to eat, and they had to go looking for work with the Jews. This was a hard time, believe me.

For us the hard part was not that we were hungry. We had enough to eat. But we were suffering from the loss of our families, our relatives. Most had fled and weren’t able to sneak back, this way or that. We felt like part of our body had been taken away from us. Now and then, someone would work out their papers and get back. Like my two sisters and their families. My parents, though, didn’t come back until just before the 1967 war. And my mother-in-law didn’t get back here until after that war. By then so much time had passed, so many things had happened—but look, we had to go on without them. That was our fate, what else could we do?

Me, I kept bringing children. That was my fate, I kept getting a stomach. Twenty-one stomachs I had. I brought Muhsen, my sixth, during the 1948 war, and after that I brought the rest. My mother-in-law was no longer around to help me with the little ones. My two oldest daughters, Khawla and Zahira, helped me until they got married. And after that the younger girls helped out. That’s the way I managed it. But I swear, it was easier raising children when I did than it is today. Sure, I had no washing machine with all the buttons, I had to wash clothes by hand in a bucket. No fancy stove either, for years I cooked over a fire. Still, I say it was easier then. Children didn’t wear you out like they do today. When I cooked a meal the children ate—no complaints. Today, a mother cooks a meal and the children say, “No, I want a pizza. No, I want a hot dog.” We didn’t have any meat back then, we were poorer, much poorer, but we felt better. And if you ask me, the children grew up better. They weren’t so hard to raise like today’s children.

After I brought my tenth child—I don’t know if you’ve heard this—I got some kind of paper that you hang on the wall from the Israeli government. The head of the government, Ben-Gurion, sent me this paper congratulating me for having ten children. Umm Issa and I were the only ones to get it in Abu Ghosh. And there was a check too, for 100 pounds, which was good money in those days. No, I never hung the paper on the wall. It’s still in the closet. But the 100 pounds was good to have, really a fine surprise.

I’ll tell you the truth, though. To have so many children, ten or more, is too much. It’s hard on the woman. After she’s had four, it starts to weaken her. Look at me today, I’m too weak sometimes to even get up and fix myself something to eat. I tell you, too many children is not good for the woman. Abu Khaled, blessed be his memory, wanted a big family. He was the only son, he wanted more and more children. So we kept having more. Some women told me that as long as I was breastfeeding I wouldn’t get pregnant. I used to breastfeed for a long time, day and night. Maybe a year for the girls, and two years for the boys. I got pregnant anyway, so I don’t believe that breastfeeding stops you from getting pregnant. For me it didn’t work that way. I kept getting one stomach after another.

I brought most of the children at home, not in the hospital. After Khawla, my first, I brought them here in the village. There was a midwife here, a woman who didn’t have any children of her own. She wasn’t trained, but she knew her work. She did it because she was generous and she wanted to help out in this way. I never had to pay her for it. Later, after Leila—no, after Maysa—I started going to the hospital. This was about in 1960, and it was easier to get to the hospital quickly. So the last five or six I brought in the hospital in Jerusalem, one hospital or another.

I never lost one at birth, I was lucky in that. One of my daughters, Maysa—the first Maysa—died a few months after I brought her. We gave her name to the one who came after her. I wanted to keep the name even though we lost the baby. My husband went along with it. Usually, he and I decided together on the name, sometimes it was his idea and sometimes it was mine. Most of the time we named the children after someone in his family—his father or mother—or someone in my family. Khaled, our oldest son, is named after his father. My poor son, God bless his memory, died when he was eighteen years old. He had a bad heart, some kind of infection in the pipes of his heart. We took him to a German woman doctor in a Jewish settlement near here, and she gave us medicine. But we couldn’t save him. He left us. My husband decided to call our son who was born after Khaled died by the same name. This time he didn’t consult with me. He went and gave the officials the name Khaled. I was very upset by this. I couldn’t call my new son by Khaled’s name. It saddened me too much. I called him Khalil instead, and that’s how we call him in the family, though in his identity card he’s called Khaled, the way Abu Khaled registered him.

Besides Khaled and Maysa—the first Maysa—I lost four others before they were born. I miscarried four times, all girls I was told. Do I remember? Oh yes, each one. They all went between the third and fifth month. Always there was something that happened just before I miscarried. One time was when I went to bake imtabbaq [a type of blintze]. I walked to the oven with the dough on my head like a fellaha. I wasn’t used to it and it tired me out and my back gave way. I began bleeding and that was it, I miscarried. Another time, I miscarried shortly after my mother had this accident. We were in the yard, I was doing the wash and suddenly I saw her fall and crack her head on the ground. Seeing her lie there in all this blood shocked me, and soon after that I miscarried. A third time, it was right after my father died. I had stopped eating for a couple of days, and I took two aspirin, and with all the hunger and sadness, I miscarried. The fourth miscarriage came after my daughter Khawla got engaged. I didn’t agree to this groom. My husband didn’t consult with me, he left me on the side. The rage I felt caused me to miscarry, I’m sure of it.

So that was it, four miscarriages. Together with Khaled and Maysa, I lost six. Fifteen are left, praise God. They’re all grown up now and they have their own children. I don’t really know how many grandchildren I have, maybe one hundred or so. And maybe thirty great-great-grandchildren. Fate has been kind to our family. Abu Khaled was one son—and now look! God be praised.

Sometime after I had brought Leila, and after her, Hasan, my husband got arrested. This was about 1955. The thing he got arrested for was not something he did, but they took him anyway. What happened was this. Somebody placed a bomb just outside a Jewish school not far from here. The ones who did it must have been people from the village who were collaborating with the Jewish police. They wanted to have a reason to get rid of some of the important men in the village. My husband wasn’t a political man, but he came from an important clan and he had a fine reputation. So, what happened was that as soon as the bomb exploded, police came rushing to the village. They surrounded our house, broke in, and started looking here and there for evidence. They took little things and made big accusations out of them. But what could they prove? My husband was a religious man, he prayed and fasted. There is no way in the world he would have done a thing like that. Well, there was a trial for my husband and three others who were important political men in the village. No real proof was brought against them, so they didn’t keep them in jail. Instead, they banned them from the village for six months.^[*] All were sent out of the area to live in other Arab villages, each one to a different village. My husband was sent north to Baqa al-Gharbiya.

He was there only four months, not six. But for me, it was like four years. Right after it happened I went to the wife of the president of Israel to request that she do something. Khawla’s husband advised me to do this. He went to a lawyer, and the lawyer wrote up a letter that I brought along with me. I also brought all my children. The president’s wife didn’t speak any Arabic, so I couldn’t talk to her. I gave her the letter. She said she couldn’t get my husband back, but she said something about trying to help us with money. That wasn’t what I really wanted, and anyway, she didn’t help us that way either. I heard that she did send some kind of inspector to the village to find out about us. He went to the grocery store to see if we were in debt. Only two days before I had paid our bill, so they told the inspector, “The family of Abu Khaled owes us nothing.” I never got one agora from the president’s wife. Nothing.

I did get to see my husband when he was in Baqa al-Gharbiya. I went twice. You had to get special permission from the police to go there. Back then, Arabs were not able to travel around Israel whenever they wanted. To go out of your area you had to have a permit.^[†] I went both times with one of the men in the family and stayed a few days. My husband was managing fine there. The people in the village realized he wasn’t guilty at all and that he was a good, religious man. Every day he was invited to someone else’s house as a guest. He was living in a room of the house of a widow who had a son. This poor woman had just lost her daughter. The girl was killed in an accident right before she was supposed to be married. Having my husband there to look after helped her take her mind off things. She cooked for him, washed his clothes, fetched water so he could bathe and wash for prayers. She was good to him. My husband could have just sat around doing nothing—I think that’s what the others did who were expelled—but he chose to work. He fixed an olive press they had in the village, and he ran it for them. He was good at those things. They stuffed money in his pockets for this work. He didn’t want to take it, but they stuffed it in anyway. They really liked him. Later, a few months after my husband returned to Abu Ghosh, we went back to Baqa al-Gharbiya to express our gratitude to all the people. Especially to the poor woman who lost her daughter and took such good care of my husband. Poor thing. She was still in a bad way. She had no husband. My heart went out to her.

Banishment—temporary or permanent—was a punishment meted out to Arabs who committed political offenses, or were otherwise politically problematic for the Israeli government.After the 1948 war until 1966, all the major areas of Arab population were placed under the authority of the Israeli military government; travel between various districts in Israel required special permits. This regulation was strenuously applied against the Arab population in the first years after the war.

My husband returned to his work at the monastery, and things went on just like before. We continued to manage. Working in the monastery’s fields gave us enough to eat, but still we had to have cash money for other things—clothes, shoes, medicine, lots of things. Zalmati^[*] wasn’t getting paid enough for all of this. So my sons also had to go to work. Abu Khaled pulled Issa out of school after sixth grade to work in a cement factory, and Ibrahim and Hasan, too, left after eighth grade to work. That’s how we were able to afford things. My youngest son, Khalil, could have gone to school, but he didn’t want to. A teacher hit him in first grade, and he never went back. I tried to convince him to return, but he always refused. He works now as a waiter.

My older daughters never went out to work, they stayed at home helping me until they got married. They went to school a few years, third grade or sixth grade. Only my younger daughters went until high school, and then a few of them—Majda, Nadia, Butheina—went to work in a clothing factory in Jerusalem. We didn’t need their money then, so they kept it for themselves to buy clothes or whatever. That was fine with me. Did I want them to go to college? No, I didn’t. High school was good enough. I didn’t want them leaving the village to study. Going to work at the clothing factory was alright, one of my sister Jalila’s sons is a boss there. But if they went to the university, maybe they could get in trouble, maybe rumors would be spread about them. You know how it is. A girl raises her arm to scratch herself, and someone who sees her thinks she’s waving to the man across the street. I didn’t want this to happen to my daughters. So I say, better to get married after high school. I know you probably don’t agree with me, you’re college-educated yourself, and I know and respect your family. Yet we had ten daughters, and I say, better for them that they got married without going to college. If a woman has a good husband and she brings a few children, boys and girls, that’s the best thing for her. She doesn’t need to go to college for this, right?

The problem is, you don’t always find a good husband. It depends on what your fate is. People think they can arrange it to go the way they want, but everyone has her own fate. God alone decides, not us. We try to choose good husbands for our daughters, but it’s God who decides how it’s going to be. In our family, some of my daughters had a good fate, and some not. Most did alright, but I’ll admit it, some of my daughters didn’t do so well with their husbands.

Majda, she’s the one who really had a bad fate. And that happened even though we married her to someone we knew, a cousin. This cousin turned out to be a drinker and someone who roams around at night. Majda is always alone with her children. She looks terrible, she’s so thin she looks like she’s at death’s edge. Her husband wastes their money. I had given her two gold bracelets as a wedding present, special bracelets that my father once gave me. Well, Majda never wore them. I wondered why, and then my husband and I figured it out. Her husband must have taken them and sold them. I tell you, I’d prefer it if she never got married at all rather than wind up with one like him.

With Leila, she married a cousin too, and she’s had a good fate. I admit that I was against this marriage. Not because of Walid, her husband. But I didn’t want Leila getting married right then. Her two older sisters, Zahira and Rana, hadn’t married yet. That’s not the way to do things. The older ones should go first. Others were pushing for this marriage. Walid was very insistent, and he got my mother to do his bidding for him. Even my sister Jalila wasn’t for it. But my mother took over, and that was it. The decision was taken out of our hands. They signed the kitab before Leila was of legal age. It wasn’t the right thing to do, but they did it anyway. Now, if you ask me, I have to admit that it worked out fine. Leila has had a good fate. Walid has been an excellent husband and their children are all good. No problems. Leila knows how to raise children, she’s very warm with them. She’s even taken to raising other people’s children, she’s made a job out of it. I told her not to do it. Better to give her time to Walid and her own children. Yet she’s done it her own way. From what I can see, she’s doing fine. She and Walid are a good couple. I wish all my daughters had a good marriage like hers.

With my sons, I didn’t get into it much. Abu Khaled took care of things. Mostly my sons have done alright, praise God. The one time I got into it was the time with Issa. He was the first of my sons to get married. This was shortly after the war in 1967. Issa told us that he wanted to marry outside the village. He told me to find him someone from East Jerusalem. The reason he wanted this was because he was ikhweh fi al-ridaah with too many girls in the village. You know what that is, don’t you? You see when Issa was a baby, I wasn’t able to breastfeed him. I was too upset at the time. One of my brothers, Marwan, had just drowned. I was so upset, no milk was coming out. So I had some other women in the village breastfeed him for a while. My husband was enraged at me afterwards because if you suck at the breast of someone who isn’t your mother, then—this is according to our religion—that mother’s children become ikhweh fi al-ridaah. They’re like your own brothers and sisters, you can’t marry together.^[†] So, you see, Issa had too many “sisters” in the village, and for that reason he wanted me to find someone outside. I tried to help him. I went back to East Jerusalem and looked up families I had known when I was a girl. They sent me to houses where there were candidates, and I’d go there and drink coffee and talk with the girl and look her over. With the ones I liked, the parents refused for one reason or another. One family told me frankly, “We won’t let our daughters marry anyone in Israel.” This was only a little after the Six-Day War, you could understand it. In the end, I wasn’t able to arrange anything for Issa. He had to marry a girl from here in the village, someone from our clan who was a few years younger than him and with whom he wasn’t ikhweh fi al-ridaah. It worked out fine, they have nine children. That was his fate, you see. Even though I tried to work out something else, it didn’t happen. Issa’s fate was to marry in the village, and that’s what happened.

Zalmati [my fellow] is an affectionate expression by which Umm Khaled occasionally refers to her husband.According to the Koran (Sura 4:22), children who have suckled from the same breast are forbidden to marry.

The war in 1967—you want to know about that? Alright, I’ll tell you. You probably don’t remember. You were too young when it happened, right? Besides, nothing much happened here in the village. It wasn’t like what happened over in Jerusalem or in the West Bank. There is where the war was. The people over there were the ones who suffered.

My mother, praise God, was no longer over there when the war started. We had brought her and my father back to Abu Ghosh in 1965. My father died after that, about a year later. It had taken us until 1965 to finally work out their papers, and then we brought them back through the Red Cross. No, it wasn’t possible to visit with them between 1948 and 1965. They were over in the West Bank—you couldn’t get there and they couldn’t come her. My father was living off the pension he got from the English, and also there was some money coming from the English because my brothers had died when they were with the police. That was all they had, my father didn’t work. They told us about this when they returned. While they were over there we didn’t know about them. We did manage to see them once—from the distance, in Beit Safafa. This was in 1963 or 1964, during the Big Feast. Do you know how Beit Safafa was then? It was divided in two, one side in Jordan and one side in Israel, and with a fence on each side and a barrier in the middle. We heard that some Abu Ghosh people were coming to the Jordanian side of Beit Safafa on that holiday, and my husband and I went there hoping to see some of our relatives. His mother didn’t come, but my parents were there with one of my sisters. My other sister had married, she didn’t come. We shouted back and forth for about a half-hour. You could hardly hear each other. The place was full of people shouting, and police were all around. I felt terrible not being able to get closer. What could you do? I took off two gold bracelets I was wearing, they were thick and braided and worth a lot. I wrapped them in a scarf and heaved them. I shouted, “One is for you, mother, and one is for my mother-in-law.” Praise God, they cleared both fences and landed at her feet. She took them, and that was it. The next time we saw them was when they returned to Abu Ghosh to live. I’m glad my father got to come back to Abu Ghosh before he died. He’s buried here in the old cemetery. If they hadn’t made it back then, my father, blessed be his memory, would never have seen the village again. After the Six-Day War would have been too late for him.

Anyway, you want to know how the Six-Day War was in Abu Ghosh, right? Well, it turned out to be nothing, but before it started we were all very scared. We remembered the 1948 war, and this had us worried. This time we knew what was happening. Everyone had a radio and some of us had televisions. We listened to all the talk, and we knew a big war was coming. We took all our money and bought supplies—flour, rice, sugar, fruit juices to drink, and chocolates and candies for the children if they started crying. We loaded up. We protected ourselves by covering the windows with sacks of flour and placing sacks of cement in front of the doors. And we even took two or three of our youngest children and put them in the storage room downstairs, where they slept on mattresses. We said to ourselves, “If the rest of us are killed by bombs, maybe these small ones will stay alive down there.” I’m telling you, we were scared. We buried ourselves alive in our houses, waiting and waiting for the war to come. Then one morning it came. People outside began shouting, “War, war, war—it’s coming now!” But, as soon as it came, it was over. What was it—five days, right? There was no shooting, no bombing, nothing here. In five days the Jews had beaten all the Arab countries, and that was it. Later, we found out how bad the war had been on the other side. Here in Abu Ghosh it was quiet, quiet. Nobody suffered a scratch in the village.

As soon as the war ended, fathat al-dunya [the world opened]. All of a sudden, we were able to go over to the Arab side, and our relatives were able to come here. We were living in our new house then, this one we’re sitting in today. It’s bigger than the old one we had in the center of the village. We had finished building it a few months before the war started. There’s an upstairs and downstairs, more than four bedrooms. It’s a good thing we had all this space, too. All our relatives from over there came, all the ones living on the West Bank. Those in Jordan couldn’t come. We went ourselves to Nablus to get my mother-in-law who was ill. We brought her back here to live with us. Our other relatives came for visits—my husband’s sisters, our aunts and uncles, our cousins. They came for weeks, months. I swear, after the 1967 War our house was filled with guests all the time. No matter how much food we cooked, it went immediately. Potful after potful of soup, rice. Half a sheep one day, a box of fish another day. It kept going on and on like that. They were our guests and we treated them right. But to tell you the truth, there was something about it that I didn’t like. We began to get the feeling that our guests, our relatives, wanted to squeeze out of us what they could. We felt they were looking at us not in the right way, that they were thinking what belonged to us was partly theirs. They had left in 1948 and lost everything. Where they went, they didn’t do so well. Not as well as we did. We still had our houses, our property and our land—some of our land. They envied us. No matter how much we fed them or bought them presents, it never seemed to satisfy them. Really, that’s the truth.

When the visits stopped, finally, it didn’t leave us with the feeling of wanting to go visit them immediately. Eventually we went, but not as much as you might think. More often, we’d go over to the West Bank by ourselves, to do things over there by ourselves. Fathat al-dunya, we wanted to see what was over there. Me, I went shopping over there. Cheap! I tell you, the prices were nothing compared to what we were paying here. It’s the same today. Everything on the West Bank costs much less. I went over there right after the war and bought huge quantities. Sacks of meat, rolls of cloth, and boxes full of shoes for all the children. I continued going, at least once a month. For Butheina’s wedding, I bought all the clothing, and even the white bridal dress over there. It was only 500 shekels, in Tel Aviv it would have been maybe 4,000. The quality was a little better in Tel Aviv, but that’s some difference in price, isn’t it? I swear, for us it was a good thing, it helped us out a lot being able to buy over there.

Oh yes, there were other reasons it was good for us that we could go to the West Bank and to East Jerusalem. You know, two of my daughters married men from over there, Nadia and Muna. Nadia lives over in the Old City, not far from where I grew up. She did very well, her husband is a fine man. But Muna’s marriage isn’t so good. They live with her mother-in-law and her husband’s brother’s family over in Al-Ram, just outside Jerusalem. They all live in the same house. Her mother-in-law controls all of them, and Muna’s life is hard. What can you do? That was her fate. I tell her for the sake of the children she should stay strong, she shouldn’t leave. Where’s she going to go, back here? No, she has to stay. Maybe things will get better.

Maysa, she also married someone from over there, but he came to live in Abu Ghosh. His family is from here originally, but he grew up over in the West Bank. He’s a good one, I don’t know how he puts up with the situation—you know, Maysa is not well. I don’t want to go into all of it, but after she brought her children she had some problems. Her thinking wasn’t right, she wasn’t able to manage at home. We went to some doctors here, but when that didn’t work we decided to get some help for her over there. What kind of help? Well, we took her to a sheikha over in Artas, near Bethlehem. There’re a lot of these healers over in the West Bank, and some are very good. I don’t know if you believe in these things, but I do. I’ve seen things, oh yes, I have. I believe these healers can help. Especially sometimes when the doctors can’t do anything. Like with Maysa, and like with my granddaughter Nabila. We took her too when we went. Nabila had this shaking in her arm and shoulder, she got it after a dog barked at her. She’d shake and shake, she couldn’t stop sometimes. So we took both of them, Maysa and Nabila.

When we got to the sheikha she was busy, but she agreed to work with us. She was a young sheikha, only fifteen years old maybe. She was plump and white with a pretty face. I asked her, “Where did you learn what you do?” She answered, “I don’t know how to read or write, but they do the writing for me.” I asked her, “Who’s they?” She said, “I have some helpers, some men, who speak to me in my head and give me instructions.” The sheikha’s mother-in-law was in the room with her, and she said, “Really, we didn’t want her to do this, but she’s got a gift for it.” The mother-in-law—we heard this later—was a greedy one, she liked all the gifts and money the sheikha received. Anyway, the sheikha said to us, “Someone has performed some black magic on your daughter, they’ve put a curse on an apple tree. That’s why she’s been sick. She needs to come here four times.” After that, she turned to my granddaughter and took care of her. She gave her mother a piece of paper with some writing on it and told her to dissolve it in water and then wash Nabila’s arm with the water. If there was any leftover water, she said, that had to be spilled out in a clean place like in the garden, not down the drain. She also gave her mother a second bottle of water for the girl to drink. Well, they did all this, and you know, my granddaughter got better. Nabila doesn’t shake anymore. The sheikha really helped her. It’s amazing, isn’t it? But, what happened with Maysa is that when we went back the second time to see the sheikha, she wasn’t there. She was dead. They had killed her. Because of all the money her mother-in-law was taking in, people got envious. Some people from the village, or who knows where, killed this poor girl sheikha.

After that, we took Maysa to another sheikha in Nablus. She, too, said that a curse had been put on Maysa. “Who’s the one who wanted to marry your daughter before her present husband?” When she asked this I had to stop and think. Then I remembered and told her, “Her cousin wanted to marry her but it wasn’t fated to be.” The sheikha said to us, “Some woman has put a curse on your daughter.” The sheikha gave us a hejab^[*] for Maysa and told us to come back once again. But when we got home, Maysa threw away the hejab, she refused to wear it. And to this day she’s still suffering. We don’t take her back to the sheikhas any more, even though there are some good ones over there. Khalas. Only God knows what my poor daughter’s fate is going to be now.

A hejab [literally, a veil or protective covering] consists of a piece of paper with Koranic phrases or symbolic markings. Typically, a traditional healer will give an hejab to a client with instructions to wear or carry it in an amulet, or to immerse it in drinking or bathing water, or to burn it and smear the blessed ashes on the skin.

These days we don’t go over to the West Bank very much anymore. I still do a little shopping in Ramallah once in a while, but that’s it. We don’t go around visiting, or anything else. Not since the Intifada. At the beginning of the Intifada we got attacked once. In Nablus. We were on our way to buy kenafeh [a sweet cheese pastry] in Nablus, it’s very good there. I was with my daughter Zahira and my son Ibrahim and his wife. Because we were driving an Israeli car, a car with yellow license plates, we got stoned. It scared us. We turned around quickly and came right back to Abu Ghosh. Since then, we go over to the West Bank much less. Who wants to get stoned, right?

If you ask me, I’ll tell you frankly—I’m against this Intifada. We’ve had none of this stone throwing or Intifada here in Abu Ghosh, I’m glad for that. Haram! I don’t agree with killing people, not these and not those. When I see on television or hear on the radio that someone got killed, it bothers me. It doesn’t matter to me who it is, I’m against it. It’s not God’s way for innocent people to be killed. Haram, I swear. What we need here is peace, not killing. Right now, they are trying to make a sulha, Israel and the Arabs. That’s good. Anyone who’s against that is wrong. On television I see some people who are against peace, Jews and Arabs. They’re wrong. The Muslims who are against it, the Hamas people, they’re wrong. To make a sulha is good. Why shouldn’t we?

How long this is going to take, I don’t know. Who knows? Only God. Maybe one year, maybe five, maybe fifteen. In the future there’ll be peace. It can’t keep going on like this, I don’t think so. God willing, it will change. In our family, everyone is hoping for peace. We believe in making a sulha. Abu Khaled, he thought the same. He was a man of religion, against war. He had no involvement in politics. That wasn’t his way, it isn’t mine.

Abu Khaled left us six years ago. It doesn’t seem that long, but it is. The days go by fast. Yes, that’s his picture up on the wall. It was taken after we went on the hajj. That’s him, that’s how he looked—always with his white cap on. I swear, he was a good man, a special man. He loved his children and was never bored by them. He was someone with patience. He had worked with the monks, he was calm like them. Sometimes I’d ask my daughters and their children to go home already, or I’d discourage them from visiting. Zalmati, he was the opposite. He always wanted them to come, and when they were here he wanted them to stay longer. What a good man he was! God bless his memory.

He left us suddenly. He wasn’t in the hospital or sick for a long while. He just went. He had strong stomach pains and he was urinating blood. This had happened before when he was tired or angry. I gave him some tea with miramiya [wild sage] to drink, and we thought it would pass by. When it didn’t, we called the ambulance. On the way to the hospital he threw up, his tongue came out of his mouth, and he went.

We came back home. We washed him here. A man came and read the Koran. He was buried in the new graveyard up on the hill. My parents and brothers are in the old graveyard in the center of the village. I swear, I’ve never been to my husband’s grave. Not my parents’ either. It’s permissible to go, but I’ve just never gone. Do I still keep things of his? A few things, very few. I gave away his clothes to the poor, and my children took his Korans—he had a few of them—and his prayer beads. I just have his picture that’s up there on the wall, and also some old papers and a diary he kept when he was younger. I can’t read these things. But I know that some of these papers—they’re half-eaten by mice now—say that the ninety dunams down by Emwas belongs to him. And the diary, I really don’t know what’s in it. A little while back I asked my youngest son, Khalil, to read some of it to me. What was written there was something about this cow we used to have—when she got pregnant, when she brought a calf, what she ate, things like that. There was also something there from when he was twenty-one or twenty-two years old, but Khalil didn’t read it to me. But look, who needs to read these things to remember him? I don’t. He was a special man, I remember him every day. We were together more than fifty years, we had a good life together, and we had a good family. Fate was kind to me. God bless his memory.

Since he went, I’ve stayed here in the house with our youngest daughter, Suhad. Suhad’s not married yet, and she probably won’t get married either. She’s twenty-seven now, I think it’s too late. What do you think, Rafiqa? You’re educated, maybe you’ll meet someone educated who’s older. Suhad, she only finished high school. She has this store on the first floor of the house, you know. She sells these household things that she brings from Tel Aviv. It’s a way of making some money, she doesn’t have to ask her brothers for anything. Besides working in the store, Suhad helps me in the house. Really, I couldn’t manage without her. When my throat hurts, she makes me a drink of milk, egg, and honey. If I have some problem at night, she’s got a telephone right in her room. She watches over me. Without her, I might have been dead already. Suhad’s the one who is keeping me alive. I swear, God gave her to me as a present in order to help me now. That’s what I think. And you know, it was Abu Khaled who insisted I have still another. What was I when Suhad was born—forty-five years old? I got a stomach and I had another child, even though I didn’t want another.

It’s haram to get rid of a baby once you have a stomach. What Leila wanted to do, it’s forbidden. She got a stomach, and she started talking about how she didn’t want it, and maybe she was going to do something to get rid of it. I told her, “Leila, it’s forbidden, you must go on with it.” Walid told her the same. Then, what happened is that she had a miscarriage. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but it must have been because she was upset. She’s busy taking care of Khalil’s children these days. Khalil’s wife is sick, so the three girls are staying with Leila. Leila doesn’t really want that, and then she got a stomach too. It was too much for her. She miscarried. Yet, at least, she didn’t go have something done. Haram, I tell you. Who knows who the baby would be? Maybe the baby would have been a present to Leila in her old age, like Suhad is for me. God alone knows. God alone decides.

For me, I’m glad I have Suhad. She will care for me until the end. I’ve also got two of my grandchildren who are coming to live here. They’re going to live on the floor downstairs, next to Suhad’s store, as soon as they’re married. Jamal is Issa’s son, and Amal is Rana’s daughter. They’re cousins. They’ll be a good couple, I’m sure. I arranged this marriage. Jamal was always very close to me and Abu Khaled. He used to help us out a lot as a boy, and my husband put money away for him in the bank. I suggested to Jamal that he marry Amal, and he went along with it. They’re getting married in September, and then they’ll move in.

So, there’s going to be a few more people around. That’s good. I don’t know how many more years I have left, but it will be good to have my grandchildren here, along with Suhad. I want to stay here in this house until the end of my time, in Abu Khaled’s house. I feel good here. It’s nice up here on the top of Abu Ghosh, isn’t it, Rafiqa? You’ve been here all your life, right? It’s a good place to live, good air. And you can see the whole village from up here. Abu Ghosh is a place blessed by God, don’t you think?

13. Epilogue

To begin these closing remarks and introduce myself to the reader, I would like to describe an event that happened when I was two years old. I do not remember this event, but over the years my grandmother and parents retold it enough times that it became well established—branded, you could say—in my brain.

What happened was this. I was hospitalized in Jerusalem with a high fever, and I stayed there for several weeks. My parents were unable to visit every day since my father was busy as a construction worker, and my mother was also busy at home with my two brothers and two sisters. One day the mailman arrived with a letter written in Hebrew. The mailman could not read Hebrew much more than my parents, and so he read, “Your daughter has died, please come and get the corpse.” My parents fell into shock and grief, and my father’s mother went to calm them by saying, “Praise God that He chose to take a daughter, and not one of the sons!” My parents came to fetch my body. I greeted them with the joy of a two-year old who was not aware of her supposed fate. We returned to Abu Ghosh with me dressed in a new red dress and red shoes that my parents bought me along the way. And my grandmother, who had been preparing things at home for my burial, was amazed to see her granddaughter reborn.

Over the years I heard this story many times, and it came to have a special meaning for me. As regards my grandmother, I was often unkind to her. For years every request she made of me—for example, to bring her a glass of water—I’d remind her, “And who would be doing this for you now, if I, the girl, had died?” This was unfair. After all, my poor grandmother was not entirely to blame for her attitudes. The society she lived in led her to believe that girls are not as valuable as boys. It was Arab society, my society, that made my grandmother think it better that one like her should die rather than one of the other, fairer, sex. My poor grandmother went to her grave believing this, and while I have not acknowledged her in the book’s dedication, I am sure today that she is as responsible for my wanting to do this book as anyone else I knew.

Most women born in our society have similar stories, or ones much worse. The six women in this book all had to deal with the problem of being regarded as inferior because they are women. As their stories make clear, each responds to this problem in her own way, each with her own mixture of acceptance and rebellion. As we compare the stories of the mothers and daughters, the point that stands out for me is the huge, almost revolutionary, change that has taken place in our society since the time of my grandmother and, alongside it, just how far we have to go until inequality between the sexes disappears in all its forms.

In the introduction we outlined some of the main shifts that have occurred for women in the areas of education, work, and personal freedom. What I would like to add here are some personal thoughts on these matters. Let me start with the area of education. It is true that today’s women are far more educated than their mothers, and there can be no doubt that this development has caused, and will continue to cause, much stress in our society. Someone not born and raised in Arab society may find it hard to understand how deep the belief was—and in many places, still is—that men are the ones who know, and women are the ones who are ignorant. It is painful to see in our small sample how pervasive this thought is among the mothers (though Umm Abdullah, the youngest of the mothers, has started to fight against it). And it is encouraging to see that within the two college-educated women (Marianne and Samira) a new awareness has taken place. These women assume that they know about the world, about life, as much as men know—in some instances, even more.

It was a rewarding experience for me to feel how grateful the older women in this book seemed to be that somebody saw fit to ask about their lives. They knew that they had led interesting lives, but the idea that their stories might be worthy of putting in a book was not something they could imagine. I feel honored to have the possibility of bearing these stories, and I only wish that in translation we could catch the full richness of their colloquial storytelling styles. As for the daughters—particularly Marianne and Samira—they were not surprised that someone would want to put their ideas in a book. Both have a familiarity with books, and furthermore each felt she had something worth saying to a larger, anonymous, audience.

Education, and especially college education, has given Palestinian women a greater sense of authority, no doubt about it. The experience of leaving the family and going to college is one that opens women’s eyes. Each girl who leaves her home to go to college offers a model for others who follow. In my village I was one of the first to go, and now most of my nieces are either going to college or thinking of going. The gap between us and those who do not go to college—for example, Leila—is profound. But I have seen that the increase in self-confidence in those of us who have gone to college has also benefited our sisters who have stayed at home. In a general way, they have benefited from our increased status. Leila is a person with strong opinions, and—to her mother’s discomfort—she does not hold back from stating them to her husband. In the era of the mothers, such expressions were considered an eib. In this respect, we have come a long way.

The problem I see now is that women’s growing educational status has not yet brought about sufficient gains in their status within the family. In short, women are still expected to be housewives and mothers in all the traditional ways, even if they are working full-time jobs outside the house. I know that in the West women struggle with this problem too, but they have already won battles that we have yet to fight. In Palestinian society, men rarely share with their wives in taking care of small children and in housework—as Samira and her husband do. Leila is far more typical of village women, and Marianne (a city woman who is not yet married) still takes it for granted that she will be the “homemaker.” I think we are a generation or two away from real change in this area, though it does seem to me that we are moving slowly in the right direction.

Another area in which progress has been slow is that of courting and marriage. True, there have been some gains. The three mothers (and Leila) all had husbands chosen for them, while Samira and Marianne assume the right to choose their own partner—with their parents’ approval. The main problem now, as I see it, is that our society does not accept the possibility of men and women meeting publicly, dating each other in an open way and getting to know about each other before marriage. For women who live in the cities, or for Christian Arab women (whose families traditionally are more Western-oriented), there is somewhat more freedom. Yet for village women the restrictions are great, and women who break them are risking a great deal, sometimes even their lives. Even for college-educated women, like Samira and Marianne, one can see how repressive the family and society are when it comes to dating and courting. Each has felt it necessary to be highly secretive, and one can see how humiliating this is. The usual result of all this repression is that Palestinian men and women wind up marrying someone they hardly know. And, of course, this often leads to marital unhappiness. Speaking personally, as an unmarried woman, I can only say that sometimes I despair about the possibility of women in our society ever attaining the level of personal freedom in this area that seems to me a basic right and necessity.

This brings me to another point I want to discuss: the decision to participate in a book with my friend and colleague, Mike Gorkin. Mike talks about it in the preface, and we mention it in some of the chapter notes: for me to go about openly with him and interview Palestinian women was to expose myself—and my family—to social disapproval. Obviously, I knew this when I started. The kind of comments that Umm Mahmud made to me (see the dialogue) were predictable; she was even more tactful than others. I am grateful to my parents: they were willing to expose themselves to potential criticism of this type and, even more, did not put upon me the burden of doing this project in secret.

Now that we have done the book together, I sense that criticism may be coming my way from another source. Some of my Palestinian women friends may blame me for doing this project with a male outsider, and one who had (as he admits in the preface) some underlying difficulties in working with me as a Palestinian woman. Why did I not choose to do this book with a Palestinian woman? For me, the answer is simple. The idea for the book came from Mike. When he turned to me, acknowledging his need for a female insider to work with—someone to help with the interviews, and also to give another perspective on the material—I had no hesitation. I had always wanted to speak out about the situation of women in our society and to recount the kinds of stories that I have heard all my life—stories that convey the vitality and richness, often unrecognized, of all generations of Palestinian women. A book on mothers and daughters seemed like an excellent place to do so. And I had no hesitation about working specifically with Mike. We had already worked together on an article about traditional healers in Palestinian society, and I admired his book, Days of Honey, Days of Onion: The Story of a Palestinian Family in Israel. I trusted that whatever difficulties we ran into—and there were some, as he stated in the preface—Mike would deal with them frankly and fairly. I feel my trust was well placed. Mike’s “blemishes” (and mine too, of course) are more clear now, but my friendship with him remains. If I have offended anyone by my “collaboration” with Mike, I can only say that I, at least, feel no regrets.

In working on this book, I faced specific difficulties with each of the pairs, and other general difficulties that are part of doing fieldwork in Arab society. Let me start with the last point. As an Arab doing fieldwork in Arab society, I had to deal with the fact that in our culture it is extremely difficult to maintain a line between one’s role as an interviewer and one’s personal relationship to the interviewee (some of the essays in Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society, edited by Soriya Atorki and Camillia Solh [Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 1988], discuss the problem). Once I began to ask personal and intimate questions—and receive answers to them—I found myself put into the role of friend. Rather than “friendly interviewer,” I was becoming “a friend who was interviewing.” Mike and I discussed this problem, and I understand that for Westerners this difficulty also exists, yet not to the same degree, I think. For instance, with Marianne I found myself immediately in the role of friend. She was going through a difficult period in her life, and she chose to confide in me. I could not say no and I did not want to do so. And I believe that if I had refused the demands of friendship, Marianne would have been offended and less willing to participate in the study. Mike and I decided on a working rule that helped me draw a line between interviewer and friend: that is, to use only what was said on tape. Yet trying to remain an interviewer and also a friend often made me feel torn between the work and the friendship. I do not think there is a clear solution to this conflict, and it is all the more difficult if you happen to be an Arab doing fieldwork in Arab society.

With Leila and her mother, the problem was even more complicated because we are from the same village. Their willingness to participate in the study was already a signal that they considered me “a friend,” even though I had never before visited either of them. The advantage of my immediate acceptance was obvious. Leila and Umm Khaled talked about intimate matters more quickly than the other pairs. Also, because I am from their village, I had heard stories about members of their family and I was able to ask about some of these events. For example, I knew about Abu Khaled’s arrest and “banishment” in the 1950s, and was able to ask about it and receive Umm Khaled’s interesting recollections. However, the restrictions placed on me as a “daughter of the village” also meant that there were a number of topics that I had to avoid. I could not ask about sexual matters, for instance. It was difficult enough to ask women not from my village; with Umm Khaled and Leila it was absolutely unacceptable for me to do this. Even inquiring about Abu Khaled’s death was on the edge of what I felt I could ask, because “a friend” does not ask things that make another uncomfortable. As a person who has lived all my life in Abu Ghosh, and who expects to be there after the book is published, I could not do anything that would make these people too uncomfortable. Maybe Mike and I made an error in choosing to work with a couple from my village, but I hope the interesting material that came out of my interviews with them makes up for the restrictions I felt obliged to follow as a native daughter.

With Umm Abdullah and Samira I came up against another problem—one I did not have with the other pairs. It is the complex problem of being a Palestinian who lives in Israel. In brief, we who live within Israel and our fellow Palestinians in the Occupied Territories share our culture, but our political fate has been different. We are a discriminated minority within Israel, and that fact makes us feel our Palestinian identity more. Yet we are not under occupation, and as citizens of a materially developed society we enjoy some of its benefits. And above all, we have the benefit of not having lost our villages and homes. Visiting Samira and Umm Abdullah was, therefore, difficult for me. They personally made me feel comfortable and welcomed. But driving through their refugee camp with my yellow Israeli license plates—not blue plates, showing residence in the territories—I sensed the suspicious eyes of those around us. And yes, I worried for the safety of my Jewish colleague. The time I spent visiting with Umm Abdullah and Samira was the most extended and intensive contact I ever had with those living in refugee camps. I found myself wondering at times what my life would have been like if my parents, who fled in 1948, had not been able to return to Abu Ghosh. Listening to Umm Abdullah’s and Samira’s stories filled me with admiration for their personal courage and strength. But mixed in was a certain sadness, both because they are like me and also because they are not.

In the most basic way, though, Umm Abdullah and Samira—and Umm Khaled and Leila, and Umm Mahmud and Marianne—are unquestionably like me. We are all women. Despite my particular differences with each of them, I felt throughout the adventure of coming to know them that our existence as women held us together. This, after all, is a book of women’s stories—Palestinian life as viewed through the eyes of women. It is being published in English, and I am glad that English-speaking people, women especially, will be reading these stories. I want others to know about us. But I also hope that someday these stories will be available in Arabic. I want my mother and sisters and friends to read these “lives.” My father and brothers, too. And of course, if she were still alive I would want someone to read these stories to my grandmother, who was illiterate. I am sure she would enjoy hearing them. Indeed, it would give me great pleasure to read them to her myself. And if she asked, I would bring her a glass of water—this time without saying a word.

—Rafiqa Othman
October 1995