Summary
The June 1967 War as Umm Mahmud recounts it in Three Mothers, Three Daughters: a war that began suddenly, just before noon, a year after her daughter Marianne was born, in which her East Jerusalem family sheltered five days in a nearby church, returned to a bombed house, and stayed, while others fled on foot to Jordan (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 704-718).
Details
- Umm Mahmud dates the war a year after Marianne’s birth: “I brought her in 1966, yes, and the war came in 1967.” It was a short war, only a few days, “very cruel,” with a lot of fighting all around them (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 704).
- It began just before noon, announced by a siren on the radio: “There’s a war, the Jews have attacked and are coming our way.” She had not expected a war then, or so suddenly; it was not like 1948, when you could feel it coming slowly (line 706).
- People fled their homes despite a call not to do as in 1948; some walked all the way on foot to Amman, among them some of her brothers and their wives, her sisters and their husbands, and one sister and her mother-in-law, and some who went were killed on the way, though not her family (line 710).
- A neighbour was killed outside her house; on a Christian neighbour’s urging, the family ran to a nearby church, where about eighty others sheltered for five days — she thinks the war itself went on for three days — hearing airplanes and gunfire and the priest’s radio (lines 712-716).
- On returning, the family found the house hit by several large bombs, with holes all over, the refrigerator crushed, the stairs destroyed and an enormous hole in the bedroom; all of them were still alive, and because they had not fled they still had their house, where those who fled sat in Jordan not knowing their fate (line 718).
- Land near her house that had belonged to a family that left the area during the 1967 war was, in her account, later taken by Jewish building after Bedouin with sheep were pushed off it (line 722).
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Umm Mahmud, Marianne, First Intifada