PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 141

was a seamstress and she made dresses or adjusted them
when they no longer fitted the ladies of Safad; be they
Jews, Muslims or Christian, they would all call for her
skill with scissors, her knowledge of European fashion
and her advice. She had a real talent, my mother, and she
earned a good living.
She would often work by the glow of an oil lamp
late into the night. No one ever frightened her. Not
even the burglar whom she chased, stick in hand, the
night when he slipped into the house, his face barely
camouflaged by a sheep skin. She was tall, beautiful
and clever, my mother, and she had ideas: with an old
diesel barrel, a few holes and some wood, she made a
bread oven from which delicious smells emanated into
the alleys. The whole village would visit us when she
was preparing fatayer 3 or mana’ ish. 4
My parents had met in Lebanon, in the village of Ar
Rafid in the Bekaa valley, where my mother was from.
The two of them did not see themselves as different sim-
ply because they were born on either side of the border:
sheep, cows, donkeys and birds crossed in both direc-
tions, shepherds, villagers and shopkeepers too, so why
give it any importance? On top of which, that line had
been drawn by foreigners, and my father was a fervent
opponent of the colonial presence in the region. At the
time of the Great Revolt of 1936–1939 against the Brit-
ish, he and his two brothers, nick-named “the wolves”
for their bravery, had joined ‘Abd Al Qadir Al Husseini. 5
Apart from the hajal, I have only fleeting memories
of Fir’im. But I can still hear my big sister Wardah’s
sharp and mischievous voice very clearly. 6 At all of ten
years old, she dared to shout messages in verse at Zion-
ist groups 7 as she passed them in Safad: Yallah ya ibn
al kalb, min allak tinzel al harb! So, son of a dog, who
asked you to make war with us!
I was small and I only vaguely remember the night
we had to run away from Fir’im. 8 But subsequently I
have heard the testimony of friends and parents over
all the years that have followed this catastrophe: they
told of the bombings, of Zionists emptying the villages
and towns in northern Galilee one by one, shooting
everyone they caught, the terror, the lost children, the
parents who searched for them, the silence that had
overwhelmed our village after we had gone. We all left
together. My older sisters carried the younger ones on
their backs. The eldest, Hasnah, took our mother’s sew-
ing machine. The was no question of leaving it for those
thieves! She had made a sort of turban from a piece of
cloth which she had twisted into a ball on top of her
head to carry the machine. Her small voice, as we were
leaving the village, expressed our anger and impotence:
‘Dar, dar abuna wa jayin al ghuraba yetarduna. (This
is our father’s house but strangers come to evict us.)
Dar, dar abuna…
That night, we went around the barricades on the
roads by cutting across the hills, and we stopped in a
cave; my father blocked off the entrance with big stones
so that not even the idea of our presence would occur
to the Zionist soldiers. Early the next day he piled us
into the first vehicle we saw that was going to Lebanon.
The border was open, as always: Lebanon allowed
everyone in. My mother’s family welcomed us in their
house. The Ar Rafid villagers brought us mattresses,
blankets, crockery, shoes; they all helped us in their
own way. There were no refugees in Ar Rafid, the
camps were set up mostly along the coast close to the
big towns of Beirut, Saida, Tripoli and Tyre. 9 Because
so many Palestinians came to the land of the cedars,
there were some bad reactions from some Lebanese
who feared that we wanted to take their land in the
same way that the Zionists had stolen ours. They called
us the ghuraba, the foreigners.
The idea of returning to Palestine was so fixed in his
head that our father prepared us for it both morally and
physically. 10 He spoke to us in detail about the village,
of our customs, of the defence of our rights and about
resistance. He liked to put on plays about our history,
the battles, the fear, the disaster that we lived through
in 1948. In fact, our family was a veritable theatre com-
pany: we each learned our part and found the where-
withal to dress ourselves using bits of cloth that were
lying about around the maternal sewing machine. My
father had also organized some physical exercises for his
daughters as well as his son. He would hang a rope from
the ceiling fan, place a plank on the floor, and would
make us climb, jump, run, crawl on our elbows….
Until the end of his life, he thought about returning:
‘There is nothing dearer than your homeland,’ he
would say. ‘You do not exchange your homeland for
another one.’
Pride prevented him from ever letting anyone guess
at his profound sadness. But his incomprehension was
total: how could they deny his existence and prevent him
from living in his own house? Who could understand
that? He wanted us to be like him, invincible, so that we
would never give up our right to return, al ‘awda. 11
Halima
139