PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 91

surrounded by an orchard of 26 dunums 4 planted by
my grandfather with fig trees, orange, pomegranate
and olive trees. 5 Visitors would often sit in the leafy
shade and feast their eyes on the beauty of the sur-
rounding countryside. It was a small paradise.
During the school year, being the eldest girl, I lived
at my maternal grandmother’s, my teta, on Aqabat al
Saraya Street, which climbs up towards the esplanade
of Al Haram Al Sharif, in the old city of Jerusalem. We
often wandered around the narrow shopping streets
around Bab Al Amoud, Damascus Gate, as far as Salah
Eddin street. There was a quarter in the old city where
Jewish Palestinians lived; they were our neighbours, and
we visited each other frequently. As for Jewish immi-
grants from Europe, they had been coming to Palestine
for several decades, 6 but in Jerusalem, we did not see
them much. Most of them went to live on kibbutzim 7
outside the city, where they immediately found work in
agriculture and where they were taught Hebrew; a few
settled in Tel Aviv. In any case, they did not live in our
neighbourhood; they only settled there later, in 1967. 8
The government girls’ school, Al Mamuniah, was
not far away. Every morning I would fetch Lubna
Mohtadi, the daughter of Teta’s neighbours, and we
set off together, hand in hand, proudly wearing our
uniforms: a blue dress with matching socks and black
shoes with no heels. No long sleeves, and nothing on
our heads, it was not part of our culture. My mother
did not cover her hair either. At the weekends, my par-
ents would come to Jerusalem, and my father, who was
very religious, spent his Fridays in Al Aqsa mosque.
My family belonged to the traditional ones at the
head of Jerusalem municipality and owned a lot of
land in the old city and its surroundings. My paternal
great-grandfather, ‘Abd Al Razek Al Alami, had three
sons. When it came time to think about the legacy he
would leave after his death, he made a decision that
proved to be very wise in the long run. First, he left 2.5
dunums to each son: a simple legacy, known as mulk.
The rest of his properties – lands, hotels, houses, res-
taurants, shops – about 13 dunums, he registered in
the Jerusalem law courts as waqf, 9 in other words a
“religious foundation”. This meant that he could avoid
dividing his property and contribute to the intellectual
and human development of the city, while ensuring
some income for his descendants. The income from
renting these properties could, for example, be used to
subsidize hospitals, religious institutions, schools or to
provide food for the poor. Of course, by changing his
properties into waqf, my great-grandfather accepted
that they were no longer “his properties”, because waqf
property can be neither sold nor given away, nor mort-
gaged, inherited, shared or transformed into private
property. But by all accounts, this was not important
to him nor to many of his fellow citizens, since waqf
properties represented about two-thirds of the area of
the old city of Jerusalem.
He went before the judge to establish that the income
from the waqf would always be managed by someone
chosen from within the family, who was called the
mutawalli, the administrator. He had himself selected
the first administrator, my grandfather, the wisest of
his three sons, and one who knew the law well. Later
on the role passed to my father. The girls could not take
on the role, but like the men they received their share
of the revenues from the waqf.
Today, most of the properties that my father had
inherited from his father and which were registered as
mulk have been confiscated. Considering our family to
be “absentees”, since none of us has the right to go to Jeru-
salem, the Israeli law passed in 1950 simply dispossessed
us. 10 Even though our property is still in my father’s and
grandfather’s names, Israel acts as if we do not exist.
Only the waqf properties have not been seized, 11 but our
family no longer receives any income from them. This
has not prevented me from describing all these family
places, both Nabi Samwil and Jerusalem, to my children
since they were small… so that they never forget.
I was twelve years old in 1948. At the very beginning
of the war, Nabi Samwil was taken by a division of
the Palmach, the elite of the Zionist Haganah group. 12
Subsequently, the Jordanian army captured it, seeing
it as a strategic position for the defence of Jerusalem.
When my father saw that moving around from one
place to another was becoming more and more diffi-
cult, he chose to send us all away to the safety of Gaza,
where he owned a hundred dunums of orange groves.
Those juicy Gaza oranges are just as delicious as the
ones from Jaffa.
‘The journey won’t take long,’ he said, appointing
his replacement from among his cousins to manage the
family waqf properties. He reassured us completely as
he calmly explained that it was simply a matter of giv-
ing the Arab armies from the neighbouring countries
time to get things under control again. Nonetheless, I
think that deep down inside he foresaw that the worst
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