PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 124

not ready for marriage, but I did not have the choice. To
convince me, they had taken me on a trip to Damas-
cus and Beirut, where my mother took me to the shops
and showed me the trousseaux to make me understand
that it was exciting to get married. After that trip, she
ordered some lovely hand-embroidered underclothes
and I bought my trousseau in a famous shop in Cairo.
I married my cousin in 1944 and during our honey-
moon in Egypt, I announced to my husband that I was
too young to have children! Darwish loved me, so he
accepted my conditions. I made an appointment with
the doctor who told me about a method of contracep-
tion, and for six years, until I was 22, I did not become
pregnant. I wanted to study, to become cultivated, to
dive into Arabic then English literature. That is when I
started to create my library and to write my first poems. 19
My uncle’s political and economic influence was
spreading. He often stayed in town, whereas the family
lived in Ibtin. Thanks to that we were able to avoid
the bombing by German and Italian planes in 1942,
which were aiming at Haifa’s industrial zone and refin-
eries. From 1943 until 1951, Uncle Taher was on the
municipal council, under mayors Hassan Shukri and
then Shabtai Levy, the first Jewish mayor of Haifa. 20
That was where he met David Hacohen, a municipal
councillor, 21 who later became a family friend. Inter-
faith friendships were not uncommon, which did not
please Zionist groups like the Haganah or Irgun, 22
which, for their part, were making every effort to force
the Palestinians to flee, 23 especially from towns that
they considered to be strategic. 24
In 1948, when Israel was created, the Haganah
erupted onto our farm to chase us away, under the
pretext that there might be spies among the employ-
ees who may have given important information to
the Arab armies in Galilee. Uncle Taher immediately
appealed to his friend David Hacohen, who intervened
with the founder of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gu-
rion himself, in favour of the Qaraman farm. He gave
us a letter that protected us temporarily from the inten-
tions of the Haganah.
The road between Haifa and Ibtin had become dan-
gerous, to the extent that doctors no longer dared to
travel. The local people had to flee in despair. 25 In a
short time, the town was emptied of its Palestinian
Arab residents. In the chaos and panic, families were
separated and some children were lost. Parents clung to
the idea that an uncle, cousin or neighbour would look
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after them and that they would find them again later. 26
But reality was much darker. We experienced this first-
hand, because we rescued a 14-year-old Bedouin girl,
who found herself without a family from one day to
the next. They could not go back to Haifa and did not
know where to look for her; we welcomed her in our
home until she married a young man, also a Bedouin.
The situation deteriorated to the point where my
uncle decided to send the children and my aunt and
sister-in-law, both pregnant, to Lebanon. My mother
stayed with the men. My uncle took me aside:
‘You must get ready to leave. Get some food and
clothes! It will not last!’
We filled a truck and a car and set off for Lebanon,
where we stayed until early 1949. It was Uncle Taher
who told us when the moment was right to come back
home: the Israelis were preparing a census and were
going to give an identity card to those people present in
Israel. So, we had to cross the Israeli–Lebanese border,
controlled by Israelis, without getting caught.
The bus took us as far as Rmeish, in southern Leb-
anon, and then we crossed the mountain on donkeys
until we came to Hurfeich, a Druze village where
Uncle Taher was waiting for us with a vehicle to take
us home. Once there, we understood that Israel in fact
had two sorts of identity cards for us Arabs: one written
in red ink for those who had fled in 1948 and who had
returned and whose rights were limited, and the other
in blue ink for those who had stayed there and who were
given permanent Israeli citizenship. Since all the men
in our family had stayed, we were given the blue card
and became Israelis. It was the only way to stay in our
home. We did not have the choice, otherwise we would
lose our Arab identity, our history, our land. But this
earned us much criticism from other Palestinians living
outside Israel. They accused us of being collaborators.
They understood, later, that if we had left, everything
would have been lost, that by staying we were resisting
every day, defending the language, the land.
In Ibtin, the factories were shut down; the Israelis
wanted to take everything from us, they passed abusive
laws which allowed them to block everything. There
was pressure from every side; Uncle Taher exhausted
himself; he had a stroke and died in 1952. He was our
pillar, and the family never picked up again. After his
death, we hired an Israeli lawyer, Ahron Hoter Yishai, 27
who advised us to divide the land between the members
of the family.