PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 123

would give him nine children. My mother was not a
woman willing to share her husband! She was from the
Badran, a family of artists and people well versed in
religious matters. My maternal grandfather, Hassan
Badran, was a well-known court clerk in the civil and
religious court of Haifa, who had learned calligraphy
at the University of Al Azhar in Cairo. One of his sons,
Jamal, was a recognized award-winning artist, who, in
the 1970s, would be chosen by King Hussein of Jor-
dan, guardian of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, 11
to restore Saladin’s minbar in Al Aqsa mosque. 12 It had
been damaged in a fire in August 1969 started by a
Zionist fanatic who was absolved as a mad man (the
claim of madness would be the excuse used to exoner-
ate all those who attacked Palestinian property).
I grew up in this lovely house, and I played in the
garden opposite. For a child, it was an amazing place:
I spent hours among fruit trees and bougainvillea,
watching the vast aviary filled with multicoloured
birds. From time to time, my uncle would organize
lunches for social or religious gatherings, served in the
shade of the vine-covered pergola. My father and uncle
had a second house built close to the first one, designed
by an artist popular in the 1930s, Moshe Gerstel. He
was an inspired architect who designed the Talpiot
market in Haifa, one of the architectural masterpieces
of the time. Gerstel came from Europe. He left when
Nazism was beginning to rise, 13 and moved to Manda-
tory Palestine without, however, adhering to the Zion-
ist movement, nor in fact, to any other political party.
He and my uncle were friends, to the extent that when
Gerstel found himself in serious financial difficulties
at the beginning of the Second World War, my uncle
hosted him and his two sons in the Qaraman house for
two or three years.
My uncle’s flair for business of any sort led him to go
into politics and to become involved in social and edu-
cational activities. He founded an Arab party, became
a pre-eminent member of the Haifa Chamber of Com-
merce and of the municipality, joined a Muslim welfare
association…. It was at that time that he and my father
invested all their money in Ibtin, a huge property of
3000 dunums 14 which would literally change the course
of their lives.
The land belonged to an acquaintance who had gone
bankrupt. Mortgaged, the land was on the point of
being repossessed by the bank when the two brothers
paid off the owner’s debts and bought Ibtin. It needed
an immense amount of work, but Uncle Taher and my
father had a very clear idea of what they wanted to do.
Electricity had just reached Kfar Hassidim, 15 adja-
cent to Ibtin. It should be said that the British had
given Pinhas Rutenberg, 16 a Russian Jew, the electricity
market in Palestine in the early 1920s. At the time that
Rutenberg was bringing electricity to the settlements
close to Haifa, Uncle Taher jumped on the occasion to
explain to him that the 3000 dunums at Ibtin should
also benefit from it. They needed electricity for wells
to water the land and to build factories on the farm.
Rutenberg agreed to connect the electricity.
My father and Uncle Taher had had wells dug, small
houses built, as well as a school, a grocery shop and a
mosque for the agricultural workers and their families.
They had then planted olive groves and brought in olive
presses and a grain mill and built factories to produce
milk products. They had bought Dutch cows, reputed
to be the best milkers in the world, had hired Bedouin
and local villagers to look after the animals, to raise the
sheep and goats, and even the horses that I was happy
to ride. They grew the best variety of Jaffa and Jeri-
cho oranges… In a very short time, a real model farm
emerged from the ground, as big as a village! The Jewish
immigrants looked on with admiration, as they might
view a spectacularly successful competitor. They were
our neighbours, and we had good relations with them.
In 1936, when a general strike was declared against
the Balfour Declaration and the pro-Zionist policy
adopted by the British, which favoured the immigra-
tion of Jews and the purchase of land belonging to
Arabs, my uncle and father sent us, women and chil-
dren, to Lebanon. For six months they slept with the
workers in the shops for fear of seeing all their work
destroyed. When our family returned from Lebanon,
my parents enrolled me at the Carmelite Sisters’ school
in the neighbourhood of the German colony in Haifa.
Then I went to live for a year with my mother’s fam-
ily in Gaza, to complete my secondary education in
an excellent state school where I perfected my classi-
cal Arabic. It was there that for the first time, together
with hundreds of teenagers, I sang Ibrahim Touqan’s
poem, “Mawtini” (“My Homeland”), 17 which glori-
fied the Palestinian resistance against the British. 18 I
also spent two years at the Nazareth Convent in Haifa,
where I started learning French.
I was 16 when my parents wanted to me to marry
my cousin Darwish, my Uncle Taher’s eldest son. I was
Suad
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