Summary
Mother of Samira in Three Mothers, Three Daughters, a refugee from Al-Qabu living in Aida Camp, who fled the village at nine in October 1948, was married at sixteen, bore eleven children, five of whom have served time in Israeli jails as political prisoners, and is the only woman in the book who wanted her real name used — the name Halima, her eldest sister’s, was used instead at her insistence after her family counselled otherwise (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 944-956).
Details
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Umm Abdullah is fifty-four in the authors’ framing, living with her husband and five unmarried children in the Camp Aida house rebuilt in 1982 after the original was bulldozed, fifty metres from Samira’s house; she often told the authors “Dhuqna, dhuqna [we’ve drunk it all]” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 944-950).
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Of leaving Al-Qabu in 1948, aged nine, after the men decided to leave on hearing of Dir Yasin, the whole village going by truck to Beit Sahur in October, she says: “Oh God, what a mistake! I swear, we should have stayed. Since that day all of us are blaming ourselves for leaving.” (line 964) Villages that stayed, like Abu Ghosh, kept their villages, she notes; Al-Qabu was razed and half turned into forest for picnics (lines 960-966).
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Her family were fellahin; her mother, left with the baruda [rifle] while her father slept at a rock quarry, sowed forty rows to his twenty and carried fifteen-kilogram baskets in each hand and a child on her back to market in Jerusalem (lines 968-970).
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There was no school for girls in Al-Qabu, only a kuttab for boys; she grazed her father’s lambs and did house and field work as ordered (lines 974-978).
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Her eldest sister Halima was married at thirteen, worked and beaten in her father-in-law’s fields, taken back and divorced after four years, and remarried at thirty; her mother was married at eleven, wed at fourteen and a mother at fifteen (lines 980-982).
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She holds that God has punished the Palestinians for their treatment of women — field labour all day, heavy loads, a few hours’ rest — and remembers the English both protecting women from beating and overloaded carrying, and destroying her grandfather’s house over a fedai relative in the 1930s revolt; her husband’s fedai brother was hidden forty days in a tabun and his mother smuggled bullets inside bread to the fedaiyin (lines 986-992).
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After 1948 the family rented a corner of a house in Beit Sahur for about three years, then lived in Beit Jala from about 1951 until moving to Camp Aida in 1967; her husband told her to hold her tongue about Beit Sahur’s treatment of refugees and to “speak nicely” about Beit Jala, whose mayor helped the refugees get a mosque (lines 994-998).
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Suitors refused for her included a married Jordanian soldier and a widowed Syrian whose curse she blames for pains in her arms and legs that two sheikhas could not lift, a doctor called “nerves”, and she still suffers (lines 1002-1006).
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At sixteen her father accepted the mukhtar’s family of Al-Qabu; she had never seen her husband’s face, though he had watched her fetching water and wept to have her against his mother’s warning that she was sick and would never bring children; she spoke to him once before the wedding, opening a door unknowing, and was shamed by her mother for it (lines 1006-1016).
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Her mahr was 110 dinars pre-mahr and 20 dinars post-mahr, against an educated girl’s 180 dinars then; she bought two gold bracelets for 22 dinars, worth 300 dinars at the time of the interviews and still kept (line 1020).
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Five of her children were born in Beit Jala and six in Camp Aida, eleven in all, most in hospital, four at home with a midwife and one in the camp clinic; she named her first daughter Samira herself, after a heroine who fought for Islam, her husband having named the first three sons (lines 1030-1046).
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Her village baby care — kuhl of burned olive-oil ash on the eyelids for forty days, a nightly olive-oil-and-salt massage and tight wrapping for four or five months, cow’s milk by teaspoon never by bottle, and breastfeeding two or three years partly to delay pregnancy — her daughter Samira will not allow for Samira’s baby Leila, which she calls a mistake (lines 1038-1044).
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Her mother-in-law pressed her husband, while she was pregnant with her sixth child Sarah, to take a second wife, and prayed she would die; he refused (line 1048).
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Of the 1982 demolition of the family house, ten days after Samira’s second arrest, she says the family refused the tent offered — “Keep it! After you destroy our house, you want to give us a tent to live in? Keep it!” (line 1054) — bought a big tent from Hebron, lived ten months in the olive grove with a cable run from the mukhtar’s house, hid the demolition from Samira at visits, and rebuilt before she came out (lines 1052-1056).
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After the 1982 demolition the family lived ten months in their big tent, cursing the officer Haim who asked about their eleven children; they rebuilt in under a month on money from her sons in Saudi Arabia, with verbal permission from Bethlehem’s deputy mayor, not the Israelis, and had been in the new house two years by Samira’s 1985 release (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 1156-1160).
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She approved Samira’s marriage gladly, knowing from others and from seeing them together in Bethlehem that Samira and Asam went around together before the wedding, and never told her husband — “To this day he doesn’t know” (line 1164).
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Five of her children have been jailed as she lists them: Mahmud nine months, Ismail four years, Sarah about a month, Samira three times and more than three years in all, and Hatem ninety-nine years, in jail on and off since he was sixteen; her husband is treated in the camp like a qadi, as his mukhtar father was in Al-Qabu (lines 1166-1176).
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She herself chased barefoot after Mahmud’s arrest and hit the officer calling himself Karim, defended beaten boys against soldiers, and hides and re-clothes the shabab; she names this steadfastness Sumoud — “Lazem nusmud [we have to be steadfast]” (lines 1172-1194).
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Politically she is for the PLO and Arafat, like Samira, and does not support the Muslim political party, though she says the Jews fear Hamas most because it demands the 1948 refugees’ return, which she also wants (line 1200).
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Her four visits to Al-Qabu before the Intifada are at Al-Qabu.
Where sources disagree
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Umm Abdullah gives Samira’s first jail as a week, for deciding to burn a collaborator’s truck (line 1052); Samira gives nine days, for trying to burn a collaborator’s car (lines 904-908). Both accounts stand as given.
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In her narration her mother addresses her as “Halima” (line 978), though Halima is stated by the authors to be her eldest sister’s name, adopted for her in the book (lines 954-956).
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Umm Abdullah remembers Samira’s 1985 homecoming as happy singing (line 1162); Samira remembers her parents angry (lines 1064-1066). Both accounts stand as given.
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Samira, Asam, Aida Camp, Al-Qabu, Leah Tsemel, Sumoud, Hamas, Palestine Liberation Organization