Summary
An Arab village twelve kilometres west of Jerusalem in the Judaean hills, of five thousand inhabitants, almost all Muslims, which in Three Mothers, Three Daughters was the only Arab village in its area to survive the 1948 war — a survival Umm Khaled attributes to God’s blessing on the village from its legendary founding, and the authors in part to the monks of its twelfth-century church (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 1232, 1242).
Details
- At the base of the village are freshwater springs over which both the village mosque and a nearby twelfth-century church are built; the church and the monks in the adjacent monastery have played a crucial role in the village’s recent history (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1232).
- Its older name was Qaryat al-Enab [village of the grapes]; the name Abu Ghosh came, in the legends Umm Khaled heard, from a Caucasus sheikh in the Turks’ time whose voice boomed with a loud echo in the religious courts, and the village’s four clans descend from the four sons of his hidden son Issa and Issa’s wife Wafa (lines 1244-1250).
- In 1948 most of the population fled to Jordan; those who remained hid in the monastery, were held for hours in the village centre while soldiers searched the houses, and were then ordered to be left alone; the fled families’ houses were emptied by trucks in broad daylight (lines 1296-1304).
- The Israeli government later confiscated village families’ land, including ninety dunams at Emwas in Umm Khaled’s husband’s name; identity cards were offered to those living in the village, and a new mukhtar, Marwan S., was appointed in place of Hammad R. (lines 1306-1308).
- Villagers who had fled tried to return: some sneaked back before the identity cards and got them, others were caught on raids and dumped across the border in Jordan; by two years after the war, return required papers in order (lines 1310-1316).
- Umm Abdullah, whose village Al-Qabu was destroyed, names Abu Ghosh among the villages that stayed and kept their villages (line 964).
- Leila, born there four years after the creation of Israel, expects to live there all her life, and holds that in any fair division Abu Ghosh will stay in the Jewish state: “this is our village, our home” (lines 1334, 1430).
- About 1955 the village’s important men were targeted, in Umm Khaled’s account, by a bomb planted outside a Jewish school by village collaborators with the Jewish police; her husband and three others were banned from the village for six months after a trial brought no real proof, a punishment the book’s end note describes as meted out to Arabs who committed political offenses or were otherwise politically problematic (lines 1458, 1802).
- In the June 1967 War the village, fearing a repeat of 1948, sheltered behind flour and cement sacks and suffered no shooting, bombing or scratch; the opening that followed, fathat al-dunya, brought West Bank relatives as guests for weeks and months, West Bank marriages for village daughters, and cheap shopping over there — until the Intifada, when Abu Ghosh cars on yellow Israeli plates were stoned and visits largely stopped (lines 1481-1496).
- Umm Khaled is against the Intifada, which Abu Ghosh has not joined — “We’ve had none of this stone throwing or Intifada here in Abu Ghosh, I’m glad for that.” (line 1498)
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Umm Khaled, Leila, Al-Qabu, Emwas