PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 119

The living stones of Haifa
Suad Qaraman, 91 years old
He always took people by surprise, where no one was
expecting him. Though illiterate at the age of 15, Hajj
Taher Qaraman became an inventor, a politician and
also a visionary, because he dreamed of a better world.
He had managed to transform his dreams into convic-
tions, and his convictions into actions. He was certainly
an adventurer too, because, in the 1930s, he had trans-
formed some arid land in Ibtin, near Haifa, into a model
farm the size of a village by setting up a tobacco factory,
an olive press, a flour mill, a confectionery for halawa, a
dairy and some orchards.
Hajj Taher was Suad Qaraman’s uncle, and she lives
in Ibtin, about ten kilometres from Haifa, in a part of the
farm that she has never left. 1 In the shade of big trees, the
house smiles despite the wrinkles of an ageing wall hidden
by brambles. The wooden door opens onto a refined inte-
rior in which each of the furnishings holds a secret. The
little silk tablecloth, the table inlaid with mother-of-pearl,
the faïence tea cup, the charcoal drawing of Uncle Taher,
the photo of the factory, everything here tells of the time
when Haifa was the capital of northern Palestine under
the British mandate. 2 Haifa, the urbane, the port city,
with a rail network, an oil pipeline linking Iraq to the
Mediterranean, and a refinery. 3 After May 15, 1948, of
the 74,000 Arab inhabitants of the town – as many as the
number of Jews – only 2–3000 would remain. 4
 Two boys, Taher and his brother Abdel Ra’uf,
aged nine and seven, lost their father in 1899. They
left Nablus with their mother and their three sisters to
try their luck in Haifa. Palestine was still part of the
Ottoman empire and Haifa was a buzzing town. Its
nickname Um Al Gharib “mother of foreigners”, was
because of the diversity of origin of its inhabitants. Not
only Palestinians like us lived there, but also German
Templers who arrived in 1869, 5 European Jews who
started coming in 1880, 6 and even adherents of the
Baha’i faith. 7 Haifa lies in a strategic location in north-
ern Palestine, thanks to its port and its rail network,
begun in 1892, which linked the Hejaz in the south
with Damascus in the north. Industry was developing
in Haifa and trade prospered, so the people living in
the countryside flocked there to look for work. 8
My father was the younger of the two brothers. At
that time, Taher and Abdel Ra’uf, two little shrimps,
went to work in their much older half-brother’s gro-
cery shop, even though they were both illiterate. Then,
one of their sisters sold one of the family jewels, a gold
brooch, which allowed them to take out a loan from the
bank and invest in a small grocery shop. Taher, now a
businessman, sent his younger brother to school. One
of his customers, who used to buy a sandwich from
him every day, was a teacher; my uncle suggested an
exchange: he would give him the sandwich in exchange
Suad
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