PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 160

as he grabbed me by the hand to take me there imme-
diately. From that moment on he was my hero, because
I wanted to learn, I wanted to, whatever the cost!
Although I was of the age to go into primary school,
I could barely read, and did not know how to write. A
dictation in which I got a resounding zero could have
stopped my dreams right there. But Mahmoud insisted
that I had to be given a chance, and the next day I was
allowed back in. As there were not enough chairs, he
bought one for me. By the end of the year I was one of
the top three in my class.
In 1948, I was ten years old and spent my time
between Jericho and Jerusalem. The British had not
been part of my childhood, I did not see them in Sil-
wan, and rarely crossed paths with them in Jerusalem.
I have to say that our young eyes did not linger on any-
thing that was not part of our world, and the British
had never entered mine. I suppose I must have glimpsed
them occasionally, like at the end of the Second World
War when they celebrated in public, dressed in kilts,
dancing and waving flags. However, what had really
struck me at the time was that the colour of sugar had
changed in Palestine: during the war it was brown and
suddenly it became white.
It was only after they left that I really understood
the position the British had held in Palestine, when all
my brothers lost their jobs and had to emigrate. The
oldest went to Iraq, the others to Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Kuwait, Lebanon and Jordan. My parents, my married
sister and I stayed in Silwan; Arab Jerusalem had not
fallen under the control of the State of Israel in 1948,
so we were lucky enough to be able to stay in our home.
We became part of Jordan and my parents, along with
the children who were on their documents, were there-
fore given Jordanian nationality. 11 On the other hand,
the Palestinian inhabitants of the posh neighbourhoods
of Baqa’a and Qatamun, on the west side of town, had
been forced to flee and thus became refugees.
In the early 1950s, we settled permanently in Jericho
and my mother allowed me to continue my second-
ary schooling in Jerusalem, where I went by bus every
day, leaving at five o’clock in the morning. Then I was
sent to stay with my brother Musa in Amman, where I
finished secondary school. In my final year, my school
friends at the Queen Zein Al Sharaf school 12 were a
fairly cheeky. One of them had put a Jack-in-the-box in
front of the Religious Studies and Arabic teacher, and
when he opened it, a puppet popped up in his face. The
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Memories of 1948
joke almost turned sour, because he reacted badly and
pointed a menacing finger at my friend: it was lucky
she was a girl, because a boy would have been caned!
The year we received our school leaving certificates,
my mother had a dress made for me by Salma, known
as Salma Al Almaniya, a German Jewish seamstress.
She could have stayed in her house in 1948 because
being Jewish was enough to qualify for nationality and
aid from the new State of Israel, but she was married
to a Palestinian and she had followed him when all the
Palestinians from Jaffa had fled. 13 She had in fact lived
a long time in one of the many Unrwa camps, first in
Lebanon and then in Jordan. 14
Sadness struck us with full force with the death of
my father in Jericho. My mother refused to let me go
to university – she wanted me at home, close to her.
My dream of going to Ramallah to train to become a
teacher evaporated. Nevertheless, even without train-
ing, I still managed to teach maths and physical edu-
cation in state schools in Jericho and in a school in
the Jabal Hussein neighbourhood of Amman for four
years, until 1961.
That year, the eldest of my five brothers, Faez,
had been named as cultural attaché to the Jordanian
Embassy in Iraq, 15 and had succeeded in convincing
our mother to let him take me to study at the Univer-
sity of Baghdad, where I had been accepted. But just
as I was packing my bags, Mahmoud, who was teach-
ing at the University of St Andrews in Scotland at the
time, showed up. Mahmoud had become a renowned
archaeologist and epigrapher; 16 he was worried about
the current situation in Iraq and insisted that I should
go with him instead. Once again, Mahmoud showed
up at the right moment. He fought for me while my
other brothers and my mother maintained that if I
studied in Great Britain, I would scare men away and
no one would want to marry me! It was no use my
telling them that I did not want a man who would be
afraid to marry me because I had studied: they insisted
anyway. It was, they said, for my own good! Luckily,
Mahmoud stood his ground and I set off with him for
Scotland to go to the oldest university in the country. 17
My Jordanian school-leaving certificate was not
enough to get into St Andrews. I needed to pass an
entrance exam for which I had to prepare during one
long year before being admitted to study political sci-
ence, economics and statistics. A year during which
I lived with Mahmoud and his family. The second year I