Samira

Summary

Daughter of Umm Abdullah in Three Mothers, Three Daughters (the name is altered, as are all names in the book), raised in Aida Camp by refugee parents from Al-Qabu, a social worker and former Fatah activist who spent nine days in jail at fifteen and three years in Ramle prison after throwing Molotov cocktails at an Israeli army bus in 1982 (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 216, 843-854, 904-926).

Details

• Samira is the fourth child and oldest daughter of eleven; she was born in Beit Jala and moved to Camp Aida at five, growing up, until she was eleven or twelve, in a one-room house where the family often had only bread, tea and fried potatoes; her oldest brother Abdullah left school at fourteen to support the family (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 856-864).

• Her father, a plasterer who “didn’t like to work”, and her illiterate mother, who sewed embroidery for pay, fought much, she says, because her father’s mother opposed their marriage and poisoned him against his wife; Samira cared for that grandmother in her paralysis at about fifteen and was never thanked (lines 862-868).

• In UNRWA girls’ schools she was a diligent student in classes of forty or fifty, hit by teachers, wearing one patched uniform for years; her mother can only give a thumb print for a signature, and her father, schooled to sixth grade, never taught her to read (lines 872-874).

• From about thirteen, friends from outside the camp gave her books on the Palestinian struggle, Marxism and class struggle; her father tore up and burned them when he caught her, and a ninth-grade teacher slapped her and called her a kafer [heretic] before the class (lines 876-878).

• She does not share her parents’ belief that they will return to Al-Qabu: “The Israelis committed a great injustice in forcing my parents to leave Al-Qabu, that’s for sure. But realistically, there is no way they’ll ever give it back—even though nobody is living there now.” (line 898) Her struggle, she says, is against the Israeli army occupying the West Bank.

• At fifteen, in tenth grade in Bethlehem in 1978, she was expelled for a while over strikes and demonstrations, tried to burn the car of a man she believed was a camp collaborator, and spent nine days in Maskubiya jail, where an investigator who called himself Abu Nehad put his hand on her and threatened her with criminal women prisoners; her father removed her from school in shame and then relented (lines 902-908). Her mother gives this episode differently — a truck, and a week in jail (line 1052); see Where sources disagree.

• She won scholarships to a top East Jerusalem girls’ school, where she met class discrimination and a principal who said she would never pass the tawjihi, and then to Bethlehem University; she had the second highest tawjihi score in her class, and five of her siblings have gone to college in the West Bank (lines 910-914).

• At Bethlehem University she, a Fatah member, took up with Asam, a Communist from Camp Aida, against Fatah boys’ pressure, visiting his house in secret (lines 914-916).

• In summer 1982, during the Lebanon War, she, Asam and two others threw Molotov cocktails at a bus of soldiers and settlers at the checkpoint outside the camp; at her trial the cocktails were said to have damaged the bus and seriously wounded one person; she was sentenced to three years, served in Ramle after a month in Maskubiya (lines 918-926).

• Of the action she says: “I don’t reject the moral basis of what I did. I only feel, looking back at it now, that it was foolish to go about it the way we did.” (line 922) She rejects killing women and children outright.

• Ten days after her arrest the Israeli army demolished her family’s house; her parents hid it from her at prison visits until she read of it in newspapers (lines 928-930).

• In Ramle the Palestinian women prisoners ran a study programme, smuggling forbidden material in swallowed plastic during family visits, and won an eight-day hunger strike, after tear gas, against factory work for the Israeli economy and cooking for guards, negotiated with the prisons minister Haim Bar-Lev (lines 934-938).

• She was released on 13 August 1985, after the authorities first gave a mistaken later date; Asam, released six months before her, fetched her, and her parents were angry that an unmarried girl arrived home in a car with a man (lines 940, 1064).

• She switched her university studies from English to social work, decided in jail, and meant to stay political organisationally: “No more Molotov cocktails for me!” (line 1066)

• Her father refused Asam’s request to marry her several times because Asam was involved in politics, and relented only when her brothers intervened; even after the kitab her father would not let the couple sit alone together (lines 1068-1072).

• She holds that a woman should be free with the man she loves, and that it was Asam who wanted to wait for full sex until marriage (line 1074).

• Her wedding zaffa toured Camp Aida with hundreds of guests, many fellow former prisoners; there was no honeymoon, and she had to report to the Bethlehem police each morning in disguise (lines 1076-1084).

• At the Intifada’s beginning Asam was arrested again and sentenced to five years, out in 1993; she bore their son Ali at Muqassed Hospital in East Jerusalem while he was in prison, and visited him every two weeks with the baby, talking through an iron-mesh screen (lines 1086-1092).

• She graduated in 1991, two years late for the university’s Intifada closure, as an organiser in the Fatah student group, and worked as an organiser for the Women’s Committee for Social Work in the Bethlehem area’s villages and camps, later on its national steering committee, starting committees, kindergartens and women’s income work; the Intifada, she holds, “has contributed more to women than women have contributed to it”, and she would leave rather than live in a Muslim fundamentalist state (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 1094-1107).

• In January 1991, after her sister-in-law Fatma was killed by the bomb she took to the Mahane Yehuda market, Samira was arrested at the burial by a Shabak man calling himself Jad and held twenty-five days in Maskubiya — four days and nights chained in the cold yard, then in the black shaft prisoners call “the Refrigerator” — interrogated about things she knew nothing about; her lawyer Leah Tsemel won Supreme Court permission to visit and got her and her sister Sarah out (lines 1111-1123).

• She bought a house just before that arrest, with money from her new job, help from Asam’s political group and 2,000 dinars borrowed from a Bethlehem money lender, and moved in with Ali a year before Asam’s release; her daughter Leila was born after his release, she uses contraception and will have no more than three children, and her mother cares for Leila against the village baby ways Samira refuses (lines 1125-1131).

• Her rehabilitation-centre social work, begun in 1990 in her last university year, covers about ten inpatient cases, mostly young men seriously wounded or tortured in the Intifada; she says she overidentifies with them and cries in sessions, and a dismissed client who had been tortured by fellow prisoners as a suspected collaborator tried to kill her with a knife a couple of weeks before the telling, after which her mother urged her, on the strength of an undisclosed bad dream, to leave the job she cannot afford to stop (lines 1133-1146).

Where sources disagree

• Samira says she tried to burn a collaborator’s car and was jailed nine days at fifteen (lines 904-908); her mother Umm Abdullah says the vehicle was a truck and the jail a week (line 1052). Both accounts stand as given in Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories.

• Samira remembers her parents angry at her 1985 homecoming (lines 1064-1066); her mother remembers singing and joy (line 1162). Both accounts stand as given.

Related pages

Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Umm Abdullah, Asam, Aida Camp, Al-Qabu, UNRWA, Administrative Detention, Leah Tsemel, Fateh, Hamas