Summary
A Palestinian village on a hill across the green line, five or ten kilometres from Aida Camp, whose people left in October 1948 and which, in the accounts of Umm Abdullah and her daughter Samira in Three Mothers, Three Daughters, was razed, half of it turned into forest and picnic area, its fields and houses still exactly remembered by those who left (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 887-898, 958-966).
Details
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Both of Samira’s parents told their children of Al-Qabu all their lives: how in 1948 their families were forced to leave, and how they lived there; one question would set them talking for an hour (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 887).
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Samira’s father’s family was wealthy by village measure — his father was the mukhtar [village headman] — with “a lot” of dunams [about one-fourth of an acre] growing tomatoes, cucumbers, string beans, lentils, grains and fruit, and sheep, chickens and rabbits; her mother’s family was poor, its father working away in a stone quarry (lines 889-891).
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Her father’s oldest brother fought along with al-Husseini in the 1936 revolt against the British Mandate government, and his mother carried him ammunition, sneaking past British soldiers because she was a woman (line 891).
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Umm Abdullah, nine in 1948, remembers seeing smoke from Ein Karem, Lifta, Al-Malha and Dir Yasin from the hill, hearing of the Dir Yasin killings, and the men’s decision to leave; the whole village went by truck on a cold rainy October day to Beit Sahur (lines 960-962).
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She calls the leaving a mistake: “Oh God, what a mistake! I swear, we should have stayed.” (line 964) Villages whose people stayed, like Abu Ghosh, kept their villages; Al-Qabu was razed, half made forest for picnics, the rest rubble.
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She remembers it as a Garden of Eden: a stream in the valley below, terraced plots, spring wild flowers, and quince blossoms whose scent filled the village; crops of wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, olives, cucumbers, onions, grapes, cactus fruit, quince, plums, apricots and apples, and about a hundred head of sheep and goats to a family (lines 966-970).
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There was no school for girls in the village, and no boys’ school when Umm Abdullah was born, only a kuttab where boys learned the Koran on straw mats (line 974).
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Samira visited the destroyed village three times as a teenager with her parents; her father still knew where house, mosque and each named terraced plot had been, where the English had destroyed their house, where his grandfather’s grave was, and where they swam and drew water; the family carried back a jerrican [about 5 gallons] of its water and soil from it each time (lines 893-896).
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Umm Abdullah’s husband’s family were also of the village — its mukhtar’s family — and she married into it at sixteen (lines 1006-1010).
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Umm Abdullah visited the destroyed village four times before the Intifada; on the first visit, twelve years before the telling and more than thirty years after leaving, she saw where she had slept, where her mother had given birth, where her grandmother had sat, and the tabun still standing, bathed in the village well under her sons’ guard as she had vowed, and walked the named “floor plot”, where her qarawi fig still bore fruit and the olive trees had been uprooted; she brought back well water, soil and produce from every visit (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 1208-1224).
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Sheep descended from sheep a man brought from Al-Qabu in 1948 are still kept in Aida Camp, their keeper refusing to trade them away, some old men saying that if the camp loses those sheep all will become ill (line 1206).
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Samira thinks there is no way the family will return; Umm Abdullah believes it will happen, if not in her lifetime then for her grandchildren, her husband’s mukhtar family holding half the village’s land (lines 1202, 1224).
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Samira, Umm Abdullah, Aida Camp, Deir Yassin, Lifta