PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 144

Strong women, around 1910
a small Koran into his pocket one day, to protect him:
he kept it with him always. I feared the worse, but at
the same time, it is part of daily life for us Palestini-
ans. In any case, destiny is in the hands of God, and if
death comes, it is because it must come. I always took
good care of Yussef, doing everything that was in my
power to help him in his daily life. He liked the dishes
I cooked for him, he would say that he had never eaten
anything so good. He ate love. And even if he was very
busy, he would always come back to his beloved… But
I have never belonged to the political movement that
he belonged to. Nevertheless, in my eyes, being the
wife of a fighter is to be a fighter too!
By 1974, Palestinian organizations began to distance
themselves from the Syrian authorities and we moved
to Jordan in 1976 with our three children. Registered
as refugees with Unrwa in Amman, we lived first in
the Wihdat Camp, 16 and then in the Baqa’a Camp. 17
In 1979, my husband’s brother died in Qatar in
suspicious circumstances. To go to the funeral Yussef,
together with five other members of his family, had
to take a plane which had the misfortune to crash on
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Memories of 1948
arrival in Doha. There were 45 dead, including Yussef
and all his family. I thought I would die! I found
myself alone, pregnant, with three small children to
bring up. 18
From that moment, my battle was to bring up my
young children. To be their mother, their father, and
their friend all at the same time, to give them an educa-
tion and to teach them to love their land, that was my
priority, as it was for thousands of Palestinian women
who were widows like me. I was still young and beau-
tiful, I could have remarried, but I preferred to devote
myself only to them and to be like my father, to reject
the tawtin, the idea of settling permanently. I have
always rejected forgetting and I taught them where we
came from. I told them what Palestine looked like, the
village I always heard about as if it were a legend, I told
them again and again that they had a house in Fir’im,
that their grandparents had resisted the British colo-
nizers…. My son was born two months after Yussef’s
death, and I gave him my father’s first name. And in
the Beqa’a camp where he has lived all his life, everyone
calls him Al ‘Awda, the return.