Leila

Summary

Daughter of Umm Khaled in Three Mothers, Three Daughters (the name is altered, as are all names in the book), the eighth child and fourth daughter, born four years after the creation of Israel and the one woman in the book who has lived all her life in a Jewish state; a paid child caretaker in Abu Ghosh who calls herself an “Israeli Arab”, votes Meretz, and wants a fair division of the land and a Sulha to stop the killing (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 1322-1332, 1426-1432).

Details

• Leila is forty-two in the authors’ framing, plumpish and pleasant-looking, wears makeup and does not cover her long brown hair, and lives with her husband Walid, son of the former mukhtar Hammad R. and a building contractor, and their seven children in the valley of Abu Ghosh, about a hundred metres from the mosque and monastery; seven sessions were held at her house, rarely with her alone (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 1322-1328).
• She attended Abu Ghosh school from first to eighth grade, all the village had; she would have liked to be a nurse and go to high school in Jerusalem, which her parents refused; Arabic was taught by Iraqi Jewish teachers until an Arab principal came in 1965 or 1966, and the 1948 war was not taught in school (lines 1344, 1352-1356).
• At about ten, at the Beit Safafa fences, she met her mother’s sister Leila, for whom she was named, across the wire, both of them crying (line 1358).
• She remembers the 1967 war at about fifteen: sandbags on the new house, Arab radio victory announcements that were “Lies, just lies”, Nasser a hero in the village, and reunion visits by relatives from Jordan whom she found strangers who hinted for presents (lines 1366-1372).
• A one-year village trade school was won for her by Margalit, a Jewish nurse in the village health clinic who spoke Arabic, after her father refused; high school in East Jerusalem was refused again (lines 1374-1376).
• At sixteen and a half her cousin Walid requested her, over her older sisters Rana and Zahira and her mother’s opposition; nobody asked her what she wanted, but she was not against it; the sheikh held the kitab until she reached the legal age of seventeen; she wore seven dresses of different colours at the wedding and regrets only that she did not ride the horse in the zaffa (lines 1378-1384).
• Her first child, Lilian, born when she was eighteen, was named for her brother-in-law Qasem’s lost Lilian, a girl whose father was Arab and whose mother was Jewish, whom his mother forbade him to marry; a second daughter died at one month; she then brought six sons, all in hospital, usually Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, the first four wrapped in the traditional way and the last three not (lines 1390-1396).
• She holds cousin marriage not a good thing, although her mother, she and her daughter Lilian all married cousins, and holds that girls are now much freer to refuse a groom (line 1402).
• Pregnant again after forty, she decided against a hospital abortion — her mother told her “it’s haram to get rid of it”, her sons and sisters told her to go on, and only her daughter Lilian supported her — and instead ran up and down stairs, jumped and pressed her stomach until she miscarried, buried the foetus in a cloth under a tree in the yard, and went to the hospital to be cleaned up (lines 1406-1408).
• Her paid childcare, five or six years at the time of the interviews, began by accident with Jewish children from Nataf: Haya, “one of the Peace Now people, I think”, a Hebrew University teacher, brought Miriam to her three times a week wanting her to learn Arabic, and word of mouth brought seven or eight Nataf children, at four shekels an hour or 550 shekels a month, the money hers to keep (lines 1410-1418).
• After Miriam’s contemporary Smadar was burned on Leila’s oven door, Leila drove her home herself fearing “They’ll say I did it on purpose because the girl’s Jewish and I’m Arab”; the mother was understanding (line 1420).
• One of her sons warned her that the Jewish boys she had cared for would one day be soldiers and stop her at a checkpoint for her identity card; she answered that there would be peace by then and they would recognise her, though the thought upset her afterwards (line 1424).
• She votes Meretz, with Walid, holds that Israeli Arabs got along much better with the Jews before 1967, and wants the land divided fairly — a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza and a Jewish state here, Abu Ghosh staying in it — ending: “A mother is a mother whether she’s Jewish or Palestinian, all mothers hurt the same.” (lines 1426-1432)

Where sources disagree

• Leila gives eight births (Lilian, a daughter who died at one month, and six sons) and also gives the first five children as born at her mother-in-law’s house and the last two at her present house, a split summing to seven (lines 1390-1396). Both counts stand as given in Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories.
• Her mother Umm Khaled tells Leila’s post-forty miscarriage differently: that she and Walid told Leila it was haram to get rid of the baby, that Leila miscarried because she was upset, and that at least she did not go have something done (line 1510); Leila’s own account is that she induced it herself (lines 1406-1408). In the Epilogue Rafiqa Othman also holds Leila up as the village woman who, to her mother’s discomfort, states strong opinions to her husband — a change from the mothers’ era (line 1530).

Related pages

Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Umm Khaled, Abu Ghosh, Sulha, Peace Now