Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women's Stories

Summary

Michael Gorkin and Rafiqa Othman, Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories (University of California Press, 1996): tape-recorded oral histories, in Arabic, of six Palestinian Muslim women — three illiterate mothers and three of their daughters — living within twenty kilometres of one another in East Jerusalem, Aida refugee camp and Abu Ghosh, gathered in six to eight sessions of about ninety minutes with each woman between April 1994 and May 1995, with all names altered, presented mainly as monologues so that individual voices, lost in the post-intifada literature that put Palestinian Women on the map while leaving the individual Palestinian woman voiceless, can be heard against the half-century’s changes in education, marriage choice, women’s work and political involvement, and against the disputed rise of Muslim fundamentalism (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 126-176). Part 1 (lines 1-364) gives the front matter, Gorkin’s Preface, the whole Introduction with its notes, and the opening of chapter 1: section 1, Umm Mahmud’s account of her East Jerusalem childhood, denied schooling, marriage at fourteen, wedding customs, home births, and her family’s staying through the 1948 war, and section 2 begun, Marianne’s account of her unwanted conception, her sister Nuzha as mother-figure, and her schooling, ending mid-story as she begins to relay an incident her mother told her from before 1948. Part 2 (lines 365-728) completes section 2 with that incident — a young woman helper killed by the men of her family, as Marianne relays her mother’s telling and rejects it — and Marianne’s Abu Dis College years, her account of science and religion and of her own observance against her mother’s received religion, the Intifada closure that stretched her degree to seven years, and her teacher’s-certificate year at Bethlehem University; gives section 3, the Dialogue (in fact a trialogue) between Umm Mahmud and Marianne over living alone, reputation and what others say, Arab women in Israel, Western culture and Hanan Ashrawi as a model, recorded after Umm Mahmud entered a session meant for Marianne alone and a planned café meeting in West Jerusalem was moved back to the house; and begins section 4, Umm Mahmud’s further reflections, with her choosing Marianne’s name and her account of the June 1967 War — five days sheltering in a church, the bombed house, and staying — her refusal of politics, and her views of the nearby Jewish buildings, of fate and of the Intifada, ending as she begins her trips to America. Part 3 (lines 729-1092) completes section 4 with those trips, her 1984 hajj and the resumed prayer and fasting that followed it, and her one worry, Marianne’s marriage; gives section 5, Marianne’s further reflections — her stated preference for a Hamas state run on true Islamic principles, her East Jerusalem teaching, and her boyfriend Usama, met and telephoned under her parents’ rules; and opens chapter 2 with section 6, Samira’s Camp Aida childhood, schooling, secret political reading, first jail at fifteen and three years in Ramle after the 1982 Molotov action, section 7, Umm Abdullah’s Al-Qabu girlhood, the October 1948 flight, refugee years in Beit Sahur and Beit Jala, marriage at sixteen and village baby care, and section 8 begun, Samira’s marriage to Asam, his five-year sentence at the Intifada’s start, and her son Ali’s birth and prison visits. Part 4 (lines 1093-1456) completes section 8 with Samira’s 1991 graduation, her Women’s Committee for Social Work organising, her twenty-five days in Maskubiya in January–February 1991 after her sister-in-law Fatma was killed by her own bomb, her rehabilitation-centre work and the knife attack by a dismissed client; gives section 9, Umm Abdullah’s political reflections — five jailed children, Hatem’s ninety-nine years, her own confrontations with soldiers, sumud, her PLO preference and four return visits to Al-Qabu; and opens chapter 3 with section 10, Umm Khaled’s Abu Ghosh origin legends, Jerusalem childhood, mourning-delayed marriage and 1948 survival in the monastery and the house, section 11, her daughter Leila’s schooling, marriage to Walid, seven living children, induced miscarriage after forty and paid childcare of Nataf children, and section 12 begun, Umm Khaled’s post-1948 childbearing — twenty-one pregnancies, fifteen children left — and Ben-Gurion’s certificate for ten children. Part 5 (lines 1457-1819) completes section 12 with her husband’s banishment to Baqa al-Gharbiya about 1955, her refusal of college for her daughters, fate in her daughters’ marriages, the quiet 1967 war in Abu Ghosh and the opening to the West Bank that followed it, Maysa’s illness and the sheikhas, her opposition to the Intifada, Abu Khaled’s sudden death and her life with Suhad; gives section 13, the Epilogue, Rafiqa Othman’s own closing account — her childhood story, her reflections on education, family status and courting, her defence of working with Gorkin, and the difficulties of fieldwork with each pair; and gives the Chronology, the Glossary and the end notes, which in this edition stand together at lines 1740-1810 and supply every asterisk and dagger note of the book.

What the file is

The UC Press E-Books Collection Archive HTML edition of the book (preferred citation as printed: Gorkin, Michael, and Rafiqa Othman. Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4489n8s2), made freely available by the publisher. The original as saved is the HTML file; the paired text copy is a plain-text rendering of the same edition, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers in the text copy (1,819 lines in the part division used for this ingest; 1,818 newline-terminated lines by wc; about 88,134 words). The text copy is clean, with a missing space in the imprint (“PRESSBerkeley”, line 22, as printed in the copy). Asterisk and dagger notes attached in the printed book to the name Adila, the mahr amount, the legal age for the kitab and Dir Yasin do not appear in lines 1-364 of this text copy; the Introduction’s numbered notes 1-12 do appear, at lines 178-226. Asterisk notes attached to “Umm Mahmud” (line 443) and to Hanan Ashrawi (line 648) likewise do not appear in lines 365-728. The text copy in this range prints “caé” for café (line 419) and the garbled “sura apter]” in Umm Mahmud’s Koran reference (line 722). Asterisk notes attached to Bab al-Amud (line 730), to “better” in Marianne’s Koran discussion (line 788), to UNRWA (line 843), to Black September (line 880), to the green line (line 893), to “[hjiru]” (line 960) and to Samira’s name (line 1045) likewise do not appear in lines 729-1092; the text copy in this range prints “Iremember” for “I remember” (line 1064, as printed). Asterisk and dagger notes attached to the Women’s Committee for Social Work (line 1096), to Shabak (line 1111), to the rehabilitation center (line 1133), to Abu Ghosh’s voice (line 1246), to leilat al-qadr (line 1249, a dagger), to the Little and Big Feasts (line 1262), to the stranger Umm Khaled’s husband wanted to marry (line 1266), to yatim al-ab (line 1280), to “twenty-one stomachs” (line 1284), to Emwas (line 1306), to infiltrators (line 1312, a dagger), to rusiya (line 1338), to Beit Safafa (line 1358), to the decision to interview Leila alone (line 1328), to the maska (line 1380) and to Meretz (line 1426) likewise do not appear in lines 1093-1456. The asterisk attached to the banishment (line 1458) and to Zalmati (line 1464) and the daggers attached to the travel permit (line 1462) and to ikhweh fi al-ridaah (line 1475) likewise do not appear in lines 1457-1819 itself; all of the book’s asterisk and dagger notes appear together at lines 1740-1810, in the order of their marks in the text, each ending “Back” in the copy, and one of them (line 1766) states that Umm Abdullah’s long anecdote about the heroine “Samira” is abbreviated in the book for her daughter’s anonymity. Lines 1812-1818 are the UC Press E-Books site footer (Help, Privacy Policy, Accessibility Statement, the archive’s project line and ”© 2026 The Regents of the University of California”, as printed in the copy), which is not part of the book; line 1819 is blank.

Section by section

Front matter and Acknowledgments (lines 1-92)

Title, authors, imprint and preferred citation; dedications (Gorkin to his daughters Maya and Talya; Othman to her parents Qasem and Fatma); table of contents listing Acknowledgments, Preface, Introduction, chapter 1 Umm Mahmud and Marianne (sections 1-5, including a Dialogue), chapter 2 Umm Abdullah and Samira (sections 6-9), chapter 3 Umm Khaled and Leila (sections 10-12 and section 13, Epilogue), Chronology and Glossary. Acknowledgments thank above all the six women, whose names cannot be cited publicly under the authors’ promise; Mufida Abd al-Rahman and Leila Atshan, who helped make contact; seven named manuscript readers; and UC Press staff Suzanne Samuel, Nola Burger, Edith Gladstone and especially Lynne Withey (lines 1-92).

Preface, by Michael Gorkin (lines 93-123)

Gorkin, in first person, signed October 1995. He met Rafiqa Othman in spring 1989 as his Arabic tutor while doing fieldwork for Days of Honey, Days of Onion (1991) on a Palestinian family; their friendship — “friendship between a Jew and an Arab is still rather uncommon, especially if the two happen to be a man and a woman” (lines 93-123) — led after a year and a half of lessons (conducted largely in Hebrew, in which both are fluent) first to a joint study of traditional psychotherapeutic healers in Israel and the West Bank, published as “Traditional Psychotherapeutic Healing and Healers in the Palestinian Community”, Israel Journal of Psychiatry 31 (1994): 221–31, stated to be the first journal article in Israel written by a Jewish man and an Arab woman, and then to this book on Palestinian women, which Gorkin as a man could not have written alone and which for Othman was a way of telling stories not adequately told. The book also produced their first quarrels: over excluding a mother-daughter pair Othman judged “too problematic” and not representative, over how far to pursue sexual topics (Othman, as an “insider”, guarding the women’s privacy and dignity; Gorkin, as an “outsider”, holding the material essential), and most seriously over the pace of interviewing. Gorkin records that he was imposing his views because part of him felt it his prerogative “because I was older, more experienced, and yes, because I was a Western male” (lines 93-123), that Othman had until then played a secondary role and now asserted herself, and that they were playing out a struggle at the heart of the women’s stories.

Introduction (lines 124-177)

The authors’ joint framing. Palestinian women, neglected in historic and even “herstory” accounts, received attention after the First Intifada began in December 1987, but “Palestinian Women have been given a voice, but the individual Palestinian woman is still, in the main, voiceless” (lines 126-130); the book answers with oral histories of six women, no six of whom could portray the gamut. History is outlined only in the book’s Chronology, with Gorkin’s account in Days of Honey, Days of Onion and Kitty Warnock’s in Land Before Honour offered instead. The social changes are then sketched. Education: before 1948 the vast majority of Palestinian women were illiterate and girls’ schooling was held undesirable; today most girls receive seven years or more, and women are approximately 41 percent of the Arab university population in Israel and approximately 35 percent in the West Bank and Gaza; the study’s mothers are all illiterate, two daughters went to college and the third completed ninth grade, and uneducated mothers usually encouraged daughters at the cost of widening the gap (lines 136-138). Marriage: daughters now usually may veto a parental choice and often choose, subject to parental approval, but society remains profoundly conservative on “courting” (lines 140-141). Work: the mothers never entered the public workplace; two daughters work outside the home (teacher, social worker) and the third as a paid child caretaker at home (lines 142-144). Politics: women’s organisations in the territories (several thousand members, predominantly nationalist agenda) and within Israel (separate structure, feminist objectives foremost); of the three pairs, one is profoundly involved in the national struggle, one absolutely opposed to political involvement, and one politically uninvolved, yet “not one of the six women in this study questions the right of women to be involved” (lines 146-148). Muslim fundamentalism: phenomenal growth in the past decade, a minority in Israel and a substantial portion (not a majority) in the West Bank and Gaza; proponents claim support for women’s education, work and social involvement with strict limits on interaction between the sexes, detractors call it a reaction against women’s gains; all six women are “believers” in Islam and the mothers each made the hajj, and their views range from open support to outright antagonism (lines 150-152). Selection: only Muslim Palestinian Arabs (Druse and Christian excluded), for diversity of education, work and location; three pairs within twenty kilometres — a West Bank pair in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, refugees of 1948; an East Jerusalem pair; an Abu Ghosh pair — found fortuitously after months in which men in families refused permission, it being improper, if not shame [eib], for women to “reveal” themselves, a sensitivity heightened by one author being a Jewish male; Rafiqa Othman alone interviewed the Abu Ghosh pair (lines 154-158). Method: tape-recorded, in Arabic, mothers and daughters separately, six to eight ninety-minute sessions each (Umm Mahmud and Marianne April 1994–January 1995; Umm Abdullah and Samira May 1994–March 1995; Umm Khaled and Leila December 1994–May 1995) (lines 160-161). On representation the authors agree with postmodern ethnography that informant and investigator create the text — only Othman took part in discussions of potentially embarrassing material, and a Western audience shaped the inclusion of sexual material — and aim at “a valid—not the valid—set of self-representations” (lines 166-168), but present the stories mainly as monologues for readability, juxtaposing mothers and daughters, and keep each woman’s “voice” in translation, the mothers’ rambling and free-associative where the college-educated daughters’ is linear (lines 170-176).

Introduction notes 1-12 (lines 178-226)

Note 1 credits Rosemary Sayigh’s introductory essay to Orayb Najjar, Portraits of Palestinian Women (University of Utah Press, 1992); note 2 names Najjar and Kitty Warnock, Land Before Honour (Monthly Review Press, 1990), as the two best recent accounts. Note 4 gives the education figures’ basis: in 1944–45 primary schools for girls in only 46 of Palestine’s approximately 800 villages (Sayigh, “Palestinian Women”, 15); in 1992, among females aged fifteen or older, 37 percent in Gaza and 50 percent in Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank) had seven years of education or more, and in Israel in 1992–93, 71 percent of girls aged fourteen to seventeen were in school (Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel 45 [1994], 830–31, 650). Notes 5-6 cite the Supplement to the Monthly Bulletin 4 (1995): 71 and the Statistical Abstract, 830–31, for university attendance 1992–93. Note 7 attributes the breakup of the traditional agricultural economy in large measure to “the vast confiscations of Palestinian land carried out by Israel”, while holding that pre-1948 forces would likely have eroded it anyway, citing Henry Rosenfeld, American Anthropologist 70 (1968): 732–52. Note 8 credits Sayigh, “Palestinian Women: A Case of Neglect”, on women’s organisations from the 1920s. Note 9 gives Christians as about 15 percent and Druse about 9 percent of the Arab community in Israel including East Jerusalem (1993 estimates, Statistical Abstract [1994], 43). Note 10: “We altered the names of all individuals to protect the privacy of the participants and their families.” (line 216) Note 11 explains Othman alone interviewing the widowed Umm Khaled, whose sons might have opposed participation if a male outsider’s regular visits drew attention, and records that Umm Khaled herself opposed visits by Michael Gorkin. Note 12 cites Clifford and Marcus, eds., Writing Culture (1986), and Stephen Tyler’s essay in it, 122–40, quoted from 131.

Chapter 1, section 1: Umm Mahmud (lines 228-326)

Authors’ framing: Umm Mahmud (Adila; name altered) is seventy-two, mother of thirteen adult children and grandmother of thirty-seven, married fifty-eight years and fifty-four years in a hillside East Jerusalem house with a view of the Old City and Qubat al-Sakhra and, behind it, a recently built Jewish housing complex; seven children have emigrated (four to the United States, two to Kuwait, one to Jordan). She was interviewed six times from April 1994 on the veranda, a somewhat reluctant subject; Othman alone interviewed her about her wedding (lines 234-244). Her monologue: her father’s people have been in the neighbourhood seven generations, before that from a village near Jaffa; her father was a British mounted policeman, a fellahin family’s son who hired workers while her mother worked the grain harvest; as oldest of ten children she kept house, fetched water from a hill well or, in drought, from Silwan, and was refused schooling by her educated father — “What does she need school for? It will only make her strong-willed.” (line 254) — though her sisters later went; neither she nor her husband can read a newspaper or the Koran. A fall from a neighbour’s mule, a broken mirror from her mother’s wedding gifts that her mother shielded her for, and a fever cured, after a doctor failed, by an old woman’s herbs and “sabbath eggs” — a cure she later used on her son Tawfiq — mark her childhood; she distinguishes herbal healers from faith healers and fortune-tellers, who are haram. Her father chose her husband, a clan cousin of about twenty who had asked for her, after confirming no closer cousin claimed his right; the mahr was forty Palestinian pounds pre-mahr and twenty post-mahr, spent by her mother on gold, furniture and bedding; at the kitab the sheikh refused to marry a fourteen-year-old until the family’s men insisted “She’s nineteen!” (line 273). She describes leilat al-henna, the wedding-night feast (ten or twelve sheep), her dresses and al-Mashta [the comber], the open announcement of money gifts, dancing with battery lights on her fingernails under a jasmine crown, and the customs she has not kept for her daughters: the next-morning washing and showing the bloodied sheet. Married life began in her mother-in-law’s house; her first baby was born dead in the hospital next to Maskubiya jail, after which her mother-in-law forbade hospitals, and most children were born at home with a midwife, though the last four, including Marianne, were born in hospital. Shortly after the twins, the 1948 war broke out with six children in the house: “Over in Dir Yasin* the Jews killed the people, destroyed their homes.” (line 305) Her husband lost his cook’s job when the British left; she stored food, West Jerusalem Arabs fled from Ein Karem, Talbiya and Baqa while East Jerusalem people mostly returned, and the family stayed, surviving three near-misses by bullets, day stone-work and rent from the upstairs. After the war seven more children came; she tried and failed to end the twelfth pregnancy, and for the thirteenth a doctor required her husband’s or oldest son’s signed permission, the ten dinars were instead spent on a sheep and a party, and she named the girl herself: Marianne (lines 246-326).

Chapter 1, section 2: Marianne (lines 327-414)

Authors’ framing: Marianne, twenty-seven, the youngest of thirteen and the only child still at home, wears Western clothes against her mother’s traditional dress; interviewed over nine months to January 1995, she found the interviews cathartic, especially about her mother (lines 329-335). Her monologue: “I was never supposed to be born. My mother told you about that, didn’t she? She tried to abort me.” (line 337) Brothers teased her at three that her mother wanted to throw her away; her mother reassured her she had meant before birth, not after. Her older sister Nuzha was her “Mommy” and mother-figure; at about six she travelled with her mother to Kuwait for two months for Nuzha’s and Fatma’s marriages there, knocking at night on Nuzha’s bedroom door, and after returning carried Nuzha’s photograph to school until her mother took Nuzha’s place at bedtime. At school she was a good, liked pupil; with her sister Ibtisam’s son Muhsen — like her a child of the same breast, ikhweh fi al-ridaah — she fought daily after their coed school in first and second grade, her mother refusing to intervene (“He who plays with cats must suffer the scratches”, line 349) while her father, unlike a “typical Arab father”, never stopped her and made Sulha with candies after a slap. From third grade she attended a girls’ school in Beit Hanina through high school, excelling in mathematics, physics, religion and Arabic, cheating in biology, and taught religion by a man she later recognised among those Israel expelled to Lebanon. As a teenager she socialised only with girls, watched romantic films her mother called “tasteless, eib”, hid her first period for months and burned the pads, and has never talked with her sisters about sex; her mother called a friend’s father “crazy” for wanting to see the wedding-night sheet. Marianne then relays the incident her mother told her, about a young woman who helped with the children and the house before 1948: the woman married, was pregnant right after, and was killed by the men of her family, who reckoned the child could not have been her husband’s; her mother adds “Besides, she wasn’t really a modest woman” and “So? To this day it goes on, no?”, where Marianne answers “Then they’re criminals” (lines 365-385). Of the thirteen children, about half have a college education, against parents who between them never completed one year of school; Marianne’s tawjihi score of 81 was not enough for the Jordanian colleges she applied to, and she went instead to Abu Dis College for science, commuting from home, preferring friendship with the mostly religious male students there and holding that science and religion are not opposed — “Science is subservient to religion, science is about probabilities and religion is about certainties” (line 395). She describes herself as a believer who tries to pray and fasts on Ramadan but does not dress observantly, who reads the religious texts her illiterate mother knows only from the mouths of others, and who will not take a sheikh’s praise of King Hussein or Arafat’s religious phrases as proof of religion. The First Intifada closed Abu Dis for three years; she worked as a secretary for her brother Mahmud while some classes met in offices and houses, graduated in 1991 instead of 1988, and spent a year at Bethlehem University on a scholarship for a teacher’s certificate, in a mixed group of six boys and four girls, Christian and Muslim, whose outings were never one girl and one boy, or even two and two, for fear of rumours. Now, she says, it is work and come home, her mother wants her home before dark, and to her mother’s “Marianne, if you love me, then listen to my voice” she answers “Mother, I can’t—not always. I just can’t.” (lines 387-414).

Chapter 1, section 3: Umm Mahmud and Marianne: A Dialogue (lines 415-695)

Authors’ framing: the authors interviewed each mother and daughter separately so each would be freer, but Umm Mahmud and Marianne, who live together, could not be kept apart; in the previous session Marianne had said she would reveal a secret only where she could not be overheard — evidently, the authors write, a secret boyfriend her mother knew nothing about — and had agreed to meet next in a café in West Jerusalem, which Umm Mahmud, entering as the arrangements were made, at once ruled not a respectable place; Marianne telephoned a few days later to move the meeting back to her home, and Umm Mahmud stayed through most of it (lines 417-419). In the excerpts, Marianne says she knows no woman who lives alone — “Not as far as I know. No woman I know, did. It’s not acceptable.” (line 427); “No, I’d never live alone. I don’t know anyone who’s done it really.” (line 452) — and that she would never do it herself, for the suspicion it would draw, though she says she feels her family is “squeezing the life out of me” yet does not want to leave; Umm Mahmud holds that a girl with a parents’ home cannot live alone, that religion guides them, and that she herself has watched over women students from Nablus and Gaza to whom she rented the downstairs apartment (lines 421-452). Asked whether Marianne could work on a book as Rafiqa Othman does, travelling with Michael Gorkin, Umm Mahmud answers first through what others would say — a girl who goes wrong is talked about through her mother — and, pressed twice by Marianne for a yes or no, answers “No.” (lines 454-484); college is different, she holds, because there is a framework and professors to watch over students, and she sent Marianne to college to learn to choose good over bad. Marianne holds there is nothing wrong in the authors’ working together but would not do it herself while living under her parents’ roof and rules; to Umm Mahmud’s warning that a husband’s rules will seem harder — “Maybe the one you marry won’t even let you go out alone to the grocery store down the street” (line 516) — she answers “You mean I’m going to pass from one jailer to another?” (line 520). With her mother in the kitchen, Marianne contrasts East Jerusalem with Arab women living among the Jews in Israel: teachers from the north, in the Galilee, answer a principal back and meet men openly and in public, where in East Jerusalem meeting a man is secret and roundabout; Rafiqa Othman qualifies that what Marianne describes is more true of Christian than Muslim Arabs, and of city than village Arabs, and Marianne accepts that the northern women she knows are Christian Arabs (lines 540-588). On Western culture Marianne would take the good — punctuality, queuing, public sanitation, modesty against boasting — and leave the bad, above all what she calls freedom without limits and Western women’s fashions; Umm Mahmud holds that most girls here have kept the traditional ways, and Marianne answers that tradition has its own bad customs, among them families who refuse to let daughters study, where Umm Mahmud answers that her own daughters studied and Marianne may go to America for a doctorate with her blessing (lines 590-636). Both take Hanan Ashrawi as a model — Marianne: “She is a good model and representative for us. She’s educated, skilled.” (line 652); Umm Mahmud: “She’s fine. A good model, why not?” (line 660). Asked whether she would agree to Marianne giving Arafat a kiss on the cheek, as Ashrawi is seen doing on television, Marianne answers “I wouldn’t agree!” (line 668); Umm Mahmud does not answer for Marianne — she says of a Gaza woman who rushed up to Arafat on television and tried to kiss him, “She’s crazy, I think”, and tells how in America she refused an American friend of her son who came up to kiss her, “No, no, keep back!” (line 672). Marianne holds that Ashrawi’s kissing Arafat is Ashrawi’s own business. The section closes over stuffed squash and tabbouleh brought from the kitchen (lines 638-694).

Chapter 1, section 4: Umm Mahmud (lines 696-765)

Authors’ framing: the dialogue unsettled Umm Mahmud, and for a while it appeared she would stop taking part; without Marianne’s promptings, the authors think, she likely would have. After a couple of months she agreed to two further interviews, in which the authors steered away from subjects that might offend her, most especially male-female relations (lines 698-700). Her reflections open with the name Marianne, which she chose herself — until then her mother-in-law, then sick and near death, had chosen the children’s names — though she had never heard it before and people called it a Christian name (lines 702-704). She dates Marianne’s birth to 1966 and the June 1967 War to a year after. The war began just before noon, by a siren on the radio, unlike 1948, which could be felt coming slowly; she was making maqluba and in fright put the eggplants in unfried. People fled on foot to Amman, some of her brothers, sisters and their spouses among them, and some were killed on the way, though not her family. A neighbour was killed outside her house; on a Christian neighbour’s urging the family ran, with the children and the maqluba, to a nearby church, where about eighty others sheltered for five days — she thinks the war itself went on for three — hearing only airplanes and gunfire and the priest’s radio, the baby Marianne stepped on as she slept on the floor, nobody eating the first day or two, and her spoiled maqluba eaten by others on later days. Back home, the house had been hit by several large bombs, the refrigerator crushed, the stairs destroyed and a large hole in the bedroom, but all of them were alive and, unlike those who fled to Jordan, they still had their house: “We didn’t flee, we still had it.” (line 718) Asked about “the Jewish presence”, she refuses politics — it gives her a headache, and her husband does not talk about it either — but of the Jewish buildings built five to seven years earlier on nearby land she says the Jews took land belonging to a family that left in 1967, pushed Bedouin with sheep off it in their turn, and claim the owners in America leased it to them, where people there say the dead rich owner’s wife leased it; of those who give property to the Jews, locals say “May God destroy their property!” (line 722). She holds it all to fate and God’s decree, telling of a neighbour run over by a car after refusing coffee and of her brother-in-law’s rich son in Kuwait left without a dinar in Jordan after the war in Kuwait. Of the First Intifada she says she does not know if it is good — “We got back Jericho and Gaza and we’re getting back more. So they say.” (line 726) — against people out of work with nothing to feed their children and many jailed; she wants only that “we live the same as the Jews are living, not one of us better than the other”. She begins her trips to America: twice to the Washington area, once thirteen years ago for forty days and once five years ago for three months, where she has three sons and a daughter (lines 706-728). Her husband would not go — “If America was no further than the Bab al-Amud* I still wouldn’t go.” (line 730) — and let her go alone; she flew with no Arabic speaker to help her, fought a taxi driver down to the agreed three dollars, stayed at her sons’ houses, never got used to America, could not eat its food and refused her son’s suggestion of a hairdresser and pants, keeping her thawb; the one good food was at her cousin Mama Aisha’s Washington restaurant. Her other travels were Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, for the hajj in 1984 with her husband, the trip that meant most to her: circling the Kaba seven times, Arafat, stoning the devil at Mina — where she pulled her husband off the narrow “Street of Death” — and four sheep sacrificed, two each; the return over the Allenby Bridge, with shoe confiscation and twice being screamed out of an inspection room, she calls humiliating, against which she sets the smooth crossing since the Israel-Palestinian agreement. After the hajj she resumed the five daily prayers given up in the child-raising years and full Ramadan fasting, adding Mondays and Thursdays; all her children pray, she says, except Marianne, who fasts but does not say her prayers. She closes on death and judgment, her mother’s grave, and her one worry: to see Marianne married — by suitors she has refused, perhaps by a videocassette of her dancing sent to America as another woman was matched, to an educated man, unforced: “Fi idein Allah, it’s in God’s hands.” (lines 729-765)

Chapter 1, section 5: Marianne (lines 766-836)

Authors’ framing: after the Dialogue, Umm Mahmud stopped interrupting, the last three sessions were held on the veranda out of her hearing, and Marianne and Rafiqa Othman became friendly, Marianne telephoning about problems with her mother, her boyfriend or at work — a dilemma over exploitation the authors name openly; their rule was to print only remarks Marianne agreed to tape-record (lines 768-772). Her reflections: politics. She does not vote in Israeli elections, which as a Jerusalem resident she may, and stays out of the Intifada, but a relative’s house, built without a permit on inherited land beside the road to a Jewish neighbourhood and worth about 80,000 Jordanian dinars [about $115,000], was demolished the previous week with nothing allowed out; his wife screamed at the demolishers and collapsed; Marianne, furious with all her family, still says she would not have built without a permit. She could never kill — “I’m not capable of killing a chicken in order to eat it” (line 779) — and counts one cousin jailed three and a half years on a Molotov accusation he denies. The Intifada, she holds, produced an uneducated generation who will be Israel’s cheap labour, yet also brought Palestinians closer and nearer a state. Between a state run by Arafat and Fatah and one run by Hamas she prefers the religious state, “but on one condition: the state they bring us is one that truly follows the principles of Islam” (line 786); in true Islam, she argues, women keep rights to education, work and choosing a husband, the Arabic qawamun means men’s greater capability rather than greater value, and she would wear the hejab and long dresses, while faulting fundamentalists who are too strict with women; she fears for her teaching contract for saying so, and says print it. Her work: math and science to third-grade girls in an East Jerusalem school, classes of thirty-five to forty, children who confide divorce and fighting at home and who once gave her Mother’s Day present of a mother’s size-42 shoes. Her boyfriend: she will marry only a Muslim, and has met Usama, a professional a little older, arranged through a married teacher friend; they meet at his sister’s house, once, fearfully, in public, and mostly talk late at night by telephone, under her parents’ rules as long as she lives under their roof. After the kitab, she holds, kissing and hugging are permissible but not “all the way” until the wedding itself. Her parents’ almost sixty-year marriage is her model in public reserve; her mother pleases her father perfectly in company, while her father, kind alone, walks in front saying “Follow me!” and contradicts her mother before guests, worst before sisters’ husbands — men are like that, educated or not, and Usama is the same with guests. She wants two or three children, each with a room, in a small house not too close to her parents; if she does not marry she would adopt a boy and a girl, which she says the Koran supports (lines 774-836).

Chapter 2, section 6: Samira (lines 837-941)

Authors’ framing: chapter 2 pairs Umm Abdullah and Samira in Aida Camp, “a Palestinian refugee camp built by UNRWA* in 1967” (line 843, asterisk as printed) on the outskirts of Bethlehem, about 2,300 people. Samira, thirty-one, a social worker in a rehabilitation centre, grew up there with eight brothers and two sisters and raises her two children there; the authors state she “spent three years in jail for throwing a Molotov cocktail at Israeli soldiers” (line 848) and call her perhaps the most candid and self-critical of the six women; eight meetings over ten months, in her living room, her husband supporting her participation and her mother sitting in only briefly (lines 843-854). Her account: born in Beit Jala, fourth child and oldest daughter; the family moved to the camp when she was five; until she was eleven or twelve eleven people lived in one room and a kitchen, sleeping on the floor, the children moved into the kitchen to hear their mother give birth behind no explanation. Her plasterer father did not like to work; her mother sewed embroidery for money; her oldest brother Abdullah left school at fourteen to support the family; they often had only bread, tea and fried potatoes. Her father’s mother, who had opposed her parents’ marriage, made the parents fight and never thanked the fifteen-year-old Samira who cleaned and fed her in her paralysis. As oldest daughter Samira was in charge of the younger children, including a brother who did not walk until five; she played five stones, stick dolls and soccer with boys until about ten, unrebuked. In UNRWA girls’ schools, forty or fifty to a class, teachers hitting hands and faces, she wore one patched striped uniform for years. From seventh grade, friends from outside the camp gave her books on the Palestinian struggle, Marxism and class struggle, which she hid and her religious father, when he caught her, tore up and burned screaming “Haram! Haram!” (line 876); a ninth-grade teacher slapped her and named her a kafer [heretic] before the class; she went on strike days in the late 1970s and took her brother Yusef to the principal in place of her father. Her parents’ Al-Qabu was a lost plenty: her father, fifteen when they left, son of the mukhtar, remembered every terraced plot’s name on their three visits to the destroyed village across the green line, whose water her mother carried back by the jerrican and whose soil was sent to an uncle in Jordan; Samira does not believe they will return: “realistically, there is no way they’ll ever give it back” (line 898). Her father’s oldest brother fought with al-Husseini in the 1936 revolt, his mother carrying him ammunition past British soldiers. In tenth grade in Bethlehem in 1978 she and five friends were expelled for strikes and demonstrations; at fifteen she tried to burn the car of a man she believed was a collaborator and spent nine days in Maskubiya jail, where an investigator called Abu Nehad put his hand on her and threatened her with criminal women prisoners, and where her cellmate was a half-mad widow from near Hebron; her father took her out of school in shame, then relented. She won a scholarship to a top East Jerusalem girls’ school, where poor girls met class discrimination and her principal said she would never pass the tawjihi; she had the second highest score in her class, and a scholarship to Bethlehem University, where five of her siblings have also gone. There she met Asam, a Communist sophomore from the camp, against Fatah boys’ pressure on her as a Fatah member, visiting his house in secret. In summer 1982, during the Lebanon War, they and two others threw Molotov cocktails at a bus of soldiers and settlers at the checkpoint outside the camp; she defends the act’s moral basis — rejecting the killing of women and children — while calling its way foolish: “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) Caught, beaten with rifles, investigated by an officer calling himself Karim, tried — 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. Ten days after her arrest the army demolished her family’s house; her parents hid it at visits until she read it in newspapers; the family lived in a tent through a bitter winter and rebuilt about ten months in. In prison the Palestinian women ran a study programme, smuggling forbidden material swallowed in plastic during visits, and struck — eight days’ hunger strike, after tear gas — against factory work for the Israeli economy and cooking for guards, winning both points from the prisons minister Haim Bar-Lev, with Peace Now and women’s groups demonstrating outside. Released, after an administrative date error, on 13 August 1985, she was fetched by Asam, out six months before her (lines 856-941).

Chapter 2, section 7: Umm Abdullah (lines 942-1057)

Authors’ framing: Umm Abdullah (Halima — the eldest sister’s name, used at her insistence after husband and family counselled against the real name she wanted used; she is the only woman in the book who wanted her real name) is fifty-four, living fifty metres from Samira in the house rebuilt in 1982 after the original was bulldozed, the family having lived ten months in a tent in the olive grove beside it; five of her eleven children have served time in jail as political prisoners; interviews began at Samira’s house, from concern about her husband’s agreement, and ended at her own (lines 944-956). Her account: Al-Qabu, ten minutes by car, from which Camp Aida’s families and even its sheep came in 1948 and which “the Jews razed it to the ground in 1948 after they took it” (line 958). She was nine; from the hill they saw smoke from Ein Karem, Lifta, Al-Malha and Dir Yasin; hearing what was done in Dir Yasin, the men decided to leave; one cold rainy day in October the whole village went by truck to Beit Sahur and got out in the fields. “Oh God, what a mistake! I swear, we should have stayed.” (line 964) — villages that stayed, like Abu Ghosh, kept their villages. The village she remembers is a Garden of Eden: terraced plots, a stream, quince blossom scent; her mother, left with the baruda [rifle] while her father slept at the quarry, sowed forty rows to his twenty and carried fifteen-kilogram baskets in each hand and a child on her back to catch the “Train” to Jerusalem market. There was no school for girls, only a kuttab for boys; she grazed lambs she loved and fetched and picked as ordered. Her oldest sister Halima was married at thirteen, worked and beaten in her father-in-law’s fields, taken back and divorced after four years, remarried at thirty; her mother was married at eleven to her cousin, wed at fourteen, a mother at fifteen. Women gave birth in the fields and were back with a hoe in two days; Umm Abdullah holds God has punished the Palestinians for such treatment of women. The English, she remembers, beat men who beat wives and shifted loads from women’s heads to husbands, and an officer cleared thorns for her blind grandmother — yet the English also destroyed her grandfather’s house over a fedai in the 1930s revolt, and her husband’s brother, a fedai shot in both arms, was hidden forty days in a tabun while his mother smuggled bullets in bread. After 1948: three families in corners of one Beit Sahur house, hunting for any water, clean or dirty — about Beit Sahur’s treatment of refugees her husband told her to hold her tongue; about Beit Jala, where they lived from about 1951 to 1967 and whose mayor helped them get a mosque, he told her to “speak nicely”. Suitors she refused or her father refused for her include a family wanting her field labour, a married Jordanian soldier of thirty or thirty-five who would have taken her near the Iraq border, and a widowed Syrian with four children whose curse, she holds, brought the pains in her arms and legs that two sheikhas could not lift and a doctor called “nerves” and that she still has. At sixteen her father accepted the mukhtar’s family of Al-Qabu; she had never seen her husband’s face — a girl who went alone with a boy would be finished off, “Poison her or cut her throat, khalas.” (line 1012), and she cites a camp father who cut his married daughter’s throat on a false rumour fifteen years ago, was jailed, freed by a lawyer, and repented too late — against her suitor’s having watched her at the stream and wept, “No matter what, I want her anyway”, against his mother’s “She’s sick. She’s like your sister, she’ll never be able to bring you children.” Between kitab and wedding in four months she spoke to him once, opening a door unknowing, and was shamed by her mother for it. The wedding was two days, leilat al-henna and the zaffa, in Beit Jala; her mahr was 110 dinars pre-mahr and 20 post-mahr, against an educated girl’s 180 then and thousands today, and bought two bracelets for 22 dinars now worth 300. The second wedding night brought back her pains, nine days unable to pee until a woman’s herb, rejl al-hamama [the dove’s leg], cured her. Five children were born in Beit Jala and six in the camp; she named the first daughter Samira, after a heroine who fought for Islam, against her husband’s naming of the first three sons. Her village baby care — kuhl of burned olive-oil ash on the eyelids for forty days, olive-oil-and-salt massage and tight wrapping for four or five months, cow’s milk by teaspoon never bottle, breastfeeding two or three years against new pregnancy — Samira will not allow for her own baby Leila, which Umm Abdullah calls a mistake. Her mother-in-law, who had opposed the marriage, pressed her husband while she was pregnant with Sarah to take a second wife and prayed she would die; he refused. Of Samira’s jailings she corrects herself: the 1982 demolition was not the first — “Wait.…there was another time. Four years before that, Samira was in jail too—for a week.” (line 1052) — giving the collaborator’s vehicle as a truck where Samira says a car and nine days. Offered a tent after the demolition they refused it — “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, ran a cable from the mukhtar’s house, and rebuilt before Samira came out (lines 958-1057).

Chapter 2, section 8: Samira, begun (lines 1058-1092)

Authors’ framing: Samira came home from prison in 1985 at twenty-two with clearer goals; the Intifada began in 1987; below she recalls her marriage, two children’s births, her social work, continuing political involvement, and a month’s return to jail in 1991 in which she was tortured, the hardest thing for her to relate (lines 1060-1062). Her account opens: on 13 August 1985 Asam brought her home unannounced and her parents were angry, not joyful — an unmarried girl arriving in a car with a man was an eib that shamed them before the community. She had changed in jail and switched her studies from English to social work, meaning to stay political in an organisational capacity: “No more Molotov cocktails for me!” (line 1066) Her father refused Asam repeatedly, not personally but because he was involved in politics, refusing even camp elders — “How can I give in now after having refused several times?” (line 1068) — until her brothers convinced him; all the while she saw Asam in secret, both of them signing in daily at the local police station, escaping with friends to Jerusalem or Jericho. Even engaged, her father would not let them sit alone together: “We had to deal with two Occupation authorities—the Israelis and my father!” (line 1072) She holds the society terribly repressed in this, that a woman should be free with the man she loves, and that it was Asam, not she, who wanted to wait for full sex until marriage. The wedding zaffa toured the camp with hundreds of guests, many fellow ex-prisoners; the neighbour chosen by Asam’s mother carried the meal on an enormous platter with candles and red roses on her head, dancing and trilling; a friend’s American video camera produced nothing. There was no honeymoon — no money, and no permission to leave the camp; she reported to the Bethlehem police each morning in disguise, jeans and tied-up hair, and neighbours recognised the new bride anyway. At the Intifada’s beginning Asam was held nine days in Atlit, released, then held six months in maatsar minhali [administrative detention], then tried on another prisoner’s word that he gave a Bethlehem-area military group its orders and sentenced to five years, out in 1993. She was two and a half months pregnant when he was taken, moved back to her parents, and bore Ali at Muqassed Hospital in East Jerusalem at the year’s end; ten days later she visited Asam without the baby, and at two months brought him — Asam cried at the sight, his eyes red, thin and filthy from torture she later learned nearly killed him while he stayed silent protecting friends. Visits ran forty-five minutes every two weeks through an iron-mesh screen, fingers shaken through it; Ali at six knows his father, mother and uncles were jailed for fighting for their country and is scared both of soldiers and of the masked shabab. Visits ran forty-five minutes every two weeks through an iron-mesh screen, fingers shaken through it; Ali at six knows his father, mother and uncles were jailed for fighting for their country and is scared both of soldiers and of the masked shabab (lines 1064-1092).

Chapter 2, section 8: Samira, completed (lines 1093-1146)

While Asam served his five years Samira finished her degree — delayed to 1991 by the university’s two-year Intifada closure — as a Fatah student organiser, and did a new kind of work as an organiser for the Women’s Committee for Social Work in the Bethlehem area’s villages and camps, now on its national steering committee: starting committees, kindergartens and women’s income work (sewing, embroidery, jams and pickles), which she credits, as part of a wider Intifada process, with freeing village and camp women — as it freed her mother — from husbands’ domination. She fears an Algerian outcome and a swing to Hamas if the PLO and Arafat cannot change real conditions, and states she would leave rather than live in a Muslim fundamentalist state. In January 1991 her sister-in-law Fatma, Hatem’s wife, was killed when the bomb she took to the Mahane Yehuda market blew up on her; at the burial, where only eight family members were allowed, a Shabak man calling himself Jad arrested Samira, and her sister Sarah with her. She gives twenty-five days in Maskubiya: four days and nights chained in the cold yard, then “the Refrigerator”, a black shaft with cold air blown down, interrogations about things she knew nothing of, threats to strip her, and, as her general account, a Shabak shift from physical to psychological torture, which she holds the interrogators practise because they like it. Her lawyer Leah Tsemel, a Jewish woman, won Supreme Court permission to visit, passed her mother’s messages, and got her and Sarah out at twenty-five days. She broke the pact she had made in jail to quit politics, fixed up the house she had just bought (2,000 dinars borrowed from a Bethlehem money lender) and moved in with Ali a year before Asam’s release; she has a new daughter, Leila, uses contraception and will have no more than three children, where Asam does housework unembarrassed before friends but fled the roof clothesline before old women’s eyes; her mother cares for Leila against the village baby ways Samira refuses. Her rehabilitation-centre social work — five years, about ten inpatient cases, mostly young men wounded or tortured in the Intifada — has burned her out: she overidentifies and cries with clients, one a man tortured at the same jail at the same time, and a dismissed client, an abused man her centre rejected as it had been rejected by his family, tried to kill her with a knife a couple of weeks before the telling. Her mother, who will not reveal a bad dream about the centre for fear revealing makes it come true, urges her to leave; she cannot afford to stop (lines 1093-1146).

Chapter 2, section 9: Umm Abdullah (lines 1148-1224)

Authors’ framing: Umm Abdullah’s 1948 experience marked her political consciousness, but her shift into political actor is recent — Samira’s 1982 imprisonment, five years before the Intifada, was the spark; four more children have since been jailed, and her son Hatem is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison, his house opposite hers boarded up with its door welded shut (lines 1150-1154). Her telling: the ten tent months after the 1982 demolition, cursing officer Haim (“I want to bring more!”); rebuilding in under a month on her Saudi sons’ money, with verbal permission from Bethlehem’s deputy mayor, not the Israelis; Samira’s 1985 homecoming remembered as joyful singing — against Samira’s own account of angry parents (lines 1064-1066) — and her approval, kept secret from her husband to this day, of Samira’s premarital meetings with Asam. The children’s jail terms as she gives them: Mahmud nine months, Ismail four years, Sarah about a month, Samira three times and more than three years in all, Hatem ninety-nine years — Hatem, twenty-eight, six times in jail since sixteen, this time, she says, for planning a settlers’-bus attack he never carried out and in substance for what Fatma did, broken after being shown pictures of Fatma’s blown-up body; Fatma and Hatem had been married seventy days, and Fatma had earlier that year, before the marriage, killed one and wounded nine in an action, as Umm Abdullah tells it. Her own part: chasing barefoot after Mahmud’s arrest and hitting the officer who called himself Karim, defending beaten boys against soldiers who put a rifle in her face, hiding and re-clothing the shabab — women’s work she distinguishes from Samira’s committee work. She names the change Sumoud: “Lazem nusmud [we have to be steadfast]”. Politically she is for the PLO and Arafat, like Samira, though the Jews, she says, fear Hamas most, because Hamas demands the 1948 refugees’ return. Return to Al-Qabu she believes will come, if not for her then for her grandchildren; the camp still keeps sheep descended from Al-Qabu sheep of 1948. Of her four visits before the Intifada: the ruined house and its named places, bathing in the well under her sons’ guard as she had vowed, Jewish soldiers and tourists picnicking by the stream, the “floor plot” and her surviving qarawi fig, the uprooted olives, the headache every visit brings, and bringing back well water, soil and produce — “we who left our villages can never forgive ourselves for leaving” (lines 1156-1224).

Chapter 3, section 10: Umm Khaled (lines 1226-1318)

Chapter 3 pairs Umm Khaled and Leila in Abu Ghosh. Authors’ framing: the village, twelve kilometres west of Jerusalem, five thousand inhabitants, almost all Muslims, its mosque and twelfth-century church both built over the base springs, was the only Arab village to survive when Israel conquered the area in 1948, in no small measure through the church’s monks; Umm Khaled (Amina), seventy-two, a widow and Israeli citizen, raised sixteen children there (as the framing states, line 1234), and was interviewed by Rafiqa Othman alone from December 1994, refusing a courtesy visit by “a man from the outside” (lines 1232-1240). Her telling, as heard from grandmother, mother, aunts and mother-in-law: the origin legends — the holy man who slept forty years and woke to Qaryat al-Enab; the Caucasus sheikh Abu Ghosh, named for his booming voice, who controlled the villages from Jerusalem to the sea; his hidden son Issa and Wafa, whose mother’s prayer on leilat al-qadr, when the sky opened, won honour, wealth and good sons, from whom the village’s four clans descend — as her explanation of 1948 survival. Born in Abu Ghosh, third of ten, she grew up in Jerusalem’s Harat al-Sadiya, a British policeman’s daughter on five pounds a month, schooled one year only, taken out for a sewing machine, trusted from about eight with the salary shopping (“This daughter of yours is worth ten sons!”), pressing her father’s uniform under her mattress, monthly at Hamam al-Ein. Her uncle decided her marriage to her cousin, her aunt Khadija’s son, over the strangers mother and son each wanted; she was thirteen at the request; her brothers Muhammad (typhoid, eighteen) and Amir (his baruda misfiring) died one after the other, and a year and a half of clan mourning postponed the wedding, which was then held without party or zaffa, in a black dress, with double mahr, to open the way for others. In the village, a city girl unused to wood fires and ash washing, she lived with her aunt-mother-in-law; her husband, an orphan at seven who had worked the monastery’s fields since boyhood and read the Koran walking to and from work, never spoke to her in public, nor she to him, as custom was; her father returned with his police horse. Her first child, Khawla, came at sixteen after two years, a daughter insisted on as a son to the English hospital’s nurse; Khaled third, then Issa, Ibrahim and Muhsen; against the doctor’s four-year spacing and her asthma, her mother-in-law threatened a second wife — “Al-durra murra [the second wife is bitter]” — and she kept bringing children. Muhsen was born in 1948 alone in the house, a sheet twined as a rope to the bedpost, the cord uncut for a half-hour until a willing woman was found, while the family sheltered in the monastery, whose monks gave them the reception room. She had refused her husband’s 100 pounds from the sold cow — “If you die, I’ll die with you” — and stayed; the village’s few remaining people were held for hours in the centre while soldiers said “Let’s shoot them”, then ordered to be left alone; the 100 pounds, hidden behind the closet mirror, was gone, and she and her husband each thought the other lying until a later raid, when the soldier Moshe went straight to the mirror. The fled families’ houses were emptied by trucks in broad daylight and their field produce carried off; ninety dunams at Emwas* in her husband’s name were taken and never returned, their papers still kept, against three village dunams not taken. Identity cards were offered to those in the village; the Jews appointed Marwan S. mukhtar in place of her sister Jalila’s husband Hammad R.; her parents, dumped across the border twice (her father twice, her mother once, as she corrects herself), returned only in 1965; infiltrators brought people, money, food and clothes until papers in order became necessary; her two sisters’ families returned in 1953 or 1954, after she had brought Leila; Hammad R., treated as a traitor for five years in the Bethlehem area, came back with nothing, worked as a common labourer, prayed for his end, and was killed by a lightning bolt striking the hammer in his hand (lines 1242-1318).

Chapter 3, section 11: Leila (lines 1320-1432)

Authors’ framing: Leila, Umm Khaled’s eighth child and fourth daughter, forty-two, makeup-wearing and uncovered, lives with her husband Walid — Hammad R.’s son, a building contractor — and their seven children about a hundred metres from the mosque and monastery, converting their five-room house into a two-story ten-room one; seven sessions at her house, rarely alone; she had gone to school with Othman’s older sister; born four years after the creation of Israel, she is the one woman in the book who has lived all her life in a Jewish state, and calls herself an “Israeli Arab” where her mother says “I’m a Palestinian with an Israeli identity card—a Palestinian Israeli” (lines 1320-1332). Her telling: childhood in the centre house, floor mattresses in rows, rusiya with Rana, fights settled without her busy mother; Khaled’s death unexplained to her at five; Abu Ghosh school first to eighth grade in light blue uniform — coeducational, Arabic taught by Iraqi Jewish teachers until the Arab principal of 1965 or 1966 hit hands for Iraqi accents and ended the Independence Day celebrations and songs; no 1948 war taught in school. At about ten, at the Beit Safafa fences, she met her namesake aunt Leila across the wire, and saw Labiba faint and then be let across to her brother found alive. Of 1967, at about fifteen: sandbags, false Jordanian and Egyptian victory broadcasts, Nasser a hero, and reunion visits by the Jordan relatives, whom she found strangers who hinted for presents. The trade school was won for her by the Jewish nurse Margalit against her father’s refusal, and high school in East Jerusalem was refused again. In that year, 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, but she was not against it; the maska, and the sheikh holding the kitab until she turned the legal seventeen; seven coloured wedding dresses, the horse ride she regrets never having, the enormous men’s party before village elections. In Jalila’s house her aunt-mother-in-law became a boss over their movements and money. Lilian, born when she was eighteen, was named for Qasem’s Lilian — a girl whose father was Arab and mother Jewish, whom his mother forbade him to marry; a second daughter died at one month; then six sons, hospital-born, the first four wrapped traditionally, the last three not; by about thirty she had brought them all; her names for the children came from television dramas. She holds cousin marriage not a good thing, though her mother, she and Lilian all married cousins, and holds the new generation, taught about pregnancy in school, far less ignorant than she was. Pregnant again after forty, on a break from the pills, she was told by mother, sisters and sons to go on; Lilian alone backed her; the hospital abortion she decided against, she instead ran stairs, jumped and pressed her stomach, miscarried, buried the foetus wrapped in a cloth under a yard tree, and went to hospital to be cleaned up. Her paid childcare began by accident through Walid’s building work in Nataf: Haya, “one of the Peace Now people, I think”, a Hebrew University teacher, brought Miriam three times a week, wanting her to learn Arabic; Haya’s advertising brought seven or eight Nataf children at four shekels an hour or 550 shekels a month, the money hers to keep. Smadar’s oven-door burn, and her dread — “They’ll say I did it on purpose because the girl’s Jewish and I’m Arab” — against the mother’s understanding, close the Nataf years; one son’s warning, that the Jewish boys she raised will one day stop her at a checkpoint for her identity card, upset her on reflection without changing her mind. Politically she thinks little of it, votes Meretz, expects peace, holds Israeli Arabs got along much better with Jews before 1967, accepts the Intifada’s results, and wants a fair division — a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza, a Jewish state here, Abu Ghosh staying — ending: “But let’s finish this thing. Let’s make a sulha and stop all the killing. A mother is a mother whether she’s Jewish or Palestinian, all mothers hurt the same.” (lines 1334-1432)

Chapter 3, section 12: Umm Khaled (lines 1434-1514)

Authors’ framing: while most of Abu Ghosh fled in 1948, Umm Khaled and her family wound up where they had been, in their four-room house next to the monastery, now surrounded by Jewish settlements; in this section, from just after the 1948 war to the present, her family “increased from six to fifteen children (her oldest son died)” and almost all have married and stayed in Abu Ghosh (lines 1436-1438). Her account opens: food was not their hardship — her husband’s monastery work gave cabbages, cauliflower, lettuce, plums, apricots and grapes, while others looked for work with the Jews — the loss of relatives was: her parents did not come back until just before the 1967 war and her mother-in-law not until after it (against her 1965 date at line 1310). She kept bringing children: “Twenty-one stomachs I had”, Muhsen her sixth, in the war; child-raising was easier then, she holds, than today’s pizza and hot dog complaints. After her tenth child Ben-Gurion sent her a congratulatory paper — Umm Issa and she the only ones in Abu Ghosh to get it — and a check for 100 pounds, never hung, still in the closet. Ten or more children is too much, she says now: after four it weakens a woman; breastfeeding, a year for girls and two for boys, never stopped her pregnancies. Most children were born at home with an untrained, unpaid midwife; from about 1960, after Maysa, the last five or six in Jerusalem hospitals. She never lost one at birth; the first Maysa died a few months after birth and the next daughter took her name; Khaled died at eighteen of a heart infection, and the son born after was registered by her husband, unconsulted, as Khaled, though the family calls him Khalil. Four miscarriages, all girls as she was told, between the third and fifth month, each narrated: carrying imtabbaq dough on her head to the oven, her mother’s fall and cracked head in the yard, her father’s death with two days’ hunger and two aspirin, and her rage over Khawla’s unconsulted engagement. “Together with Khaled and Maysa, I lost six. Fifteen are left, praise God”, with maybe a hundred grandchildren and thirty great-great-grandchildren (as printed) (lines 1440-1456). Her account completed: about 1955, after Leila and Hasan, her husband was arrested over a bomb placed outside a Jewish school — by village collaborators with the Jewish police, she believes, to frame important men — and at the trial of him and three others no real proof was brought, so the four were banned from the village for six months, her husband to Baqa al-Gharbiya, where he served four; her appeal with a lawyer’s letter and all her children to the wife of the president of Israel got no help and not one agora, and her two permitted visits found him running the village olive press for hosts who stuffed his pockets. Back at the monastery his pay did not suffice, so Issa left school after sixth grade for a cement factory and Ibrahim and Hasan after eighth; her older daughters stayed home until marriage, her younger went to high school and some to a Jerusalem clothing factory, and college for daughters she refused outright — high school was enough, and rumours were the risk. Fate decides husbands: Majda’s cousin-husband drinks, roams and sold her bracelets; Leila’s cousin marriage, which Umm Khaled opposed for jumping older sisters Rana and Zahira and whose kitab was signed before Leila was of legal age, worked out well; and her one intervention for a son, searching East Jerusalem brides for Issa because too many village girls were his ikhweh fi al-ridaah from other women’s breasts, failed when parents there refused a groom “in Israel”, so Issa married in the village and has nine children. Of 1967 she retells her parents’ return through the Red Cross in 1965 — her father dying about a year later — and the Beit Safafa fence meeting of 1963 or 1964, where she threw two gold bracelets to her mother; in Abu Ghosh the war was five days of fear behind flour and cement sacks and no scratch to anyone, and then fathat al-dunya [the world opened]: months of West Bank guests she felt were squeezing and envying them, cheap shopping over there (a bridal dress 500 shekels against maybe 4,000 in Tel Aviv), Nadia married in the Old City, Muna unhappily in Al-Ram, and Maysa, whose thinking went wrong after her children, taken to a fifteen-year-old sheikha in Artas — later killed, Umm Khaled says, over her mother-in-law’s takings — who cured her granddaughter Nabila’s shaking, and to a Nablus sheikha whose hejab Maysa threw away, still suffering. Since the Intifada began — her car stoned in Nablus for its yellow plates — they go over little; she is frankly against the Intifada and against killing on any side, holds Hamas wrong to oppose the sulha being attempted, and expects peace in one, five or fifteen years, God knows. Abu Khaled died suddenly six years before, on the way to hospital; his papers, half-eaten by mice, include the deed to the ninety dunams at Emwas, and his diary the record of a cow. She lives with Suhad, twenty-seven, unmarried, whose ground-floor store keeps her independent, and whom Abu Khaled insisted she bear at about forty-five; Leila’s miscarriage she tells as forbidden to induce and caused by being upset; and she has arranged a September marriage between her grandchildren Jamal and Amal, who will live downstairs (lines 1457-1514).

Chapter 3, section 13: Epilogue, by Rafiqa Othman (lines 1516-1550)

Rafiqa Othman’s own closing remarks, signed October 1995. She opens with the story retold to her of her own second year: hospitalised in Jerusalem, a letter in Hebrew misread by the mailman as “Your daughter has died, please come and get the corpse”, her grandmother calming her parents — “Praise God that He chose to take a daughter, and not one of the sons!” (line 1520) — and the child brought home alive in a new red dress; her grandmother, who went to her grave believing a girl worth less, is, Othman says, as responsible as anyone for her wanting to do this book. All six women, she writes, dealt with being regarded as inferior because they are women, each with her own mixture of acceptance and rebellion, and the change since her grandmother’s time is “huge, almost revolutionary”, with far still to go. On education: the belief that men know and women are ignorant persists among the mothers — Umm Abdullah, the youngest, has started to fight it — while college gave Marianne and Samira the assumption that they know as much as men; the older women were grateful to be asked about lives they could not imagine in a book, the daughters unsurprised; “The gap between us and those who do not go to college—for example, Leila—is profound” (line 1530), though the college women’s confidence has also benefited sisters at home, Leila among them. On family status, gains lag: women remain expected to be housewives and mothers in the traditional ways even in full-time work, men rarely sharing housework as Samira’s husband does, and real change is a generation or two away. On courting: the mothers and Leila had husbands chosen, Samira and Marianne assume choice with parental approval, but public meeting and dating remain unaccepted — village women who break the restrictions risk a great deal, sometimes their lives, and even the college-educated pair had to be secretive — so people marry someone they hardly know; speaking as an unmarried woman, she sometimes despairs of this freedom, which seems to her a basic right, ever being attained. On working with “my friend and colleague, Mike Gorkin”: the collaboration exposed her and her family to social disapproval, which her parents bore without making her work in secret; to the Palestinian women friends who may blame her for choosing a male outsider over a Palestinian woman she answers that the idea was Mike’s, that they had already published together on traditional healers, and that she feels no regrets. On method: an Arab doing fieldwork in Arab society cannot hold the line between interviewer and friend — with Marianne she was “a friend who was interviewing”, and the tape-only rule was the working line they drew; with Umm Khaled and Leila, fellow villagers, acceptance was immediate and stories came quickly — she could ask about Abu Khaled’s banishment, which she already knew of — but sexual matters were absolutely unacceptable to raise and even his death was on the edge; and with Umm Abdullah and Samira she felt her different political fate as a Palestinian citizen of Israel — a discriminated minority, not under occupation, her village not lost — driving through the camp on yellow Israeli plates under suspicious eyes, worrying for her Jewish colleague, wondering what her life would have been had her own parents, who fled in 1948, not returned to Abu Ghosh. She closes hoping the stories will one day be available in Arabic, and that, were her illiterate grandmother alive, she would read them to her — and bring her a glass of water “this time without saying a word” (lines 1516-1550).

Chronology (lines 1552-1603)

The book’s own timeline, “Significant Events in the Recent History of Israel/Palestine”: Ottoman rule 1517–1917; the British capture of 1917–18 and the 1922 League of Nations mandate; the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, quoted as viewing with favour “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” with the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities not to be prejudiced; the Arab rebellion of 1936–39; the November 1947 Partition Agreement, accepted by the Jews and opposed by the Arabs; the war of 1947–49, in which “approximately 370 Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed and some 600,000 to 760,000 Palestinians became refugees” (line 1572) and only 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remained within the new Jewish state’s expanded borders; the PLO’s formation in 1964; the June 1967 War; the October War of 1973; the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of March 1979; the Lebanon War of June–September 1982; the Intifada’s eruption in December 1987, considered ended with the September 1993 Declaration of Principles; the Gulf War of January–February 1991; the Declaration’s signing by Abu Mazen and Shimon Peres in Washington; the May 1994 first stage of self-rule (“Gaza and Jericho First”); and the September 1995 second stage, extending autonomy to West Bank areas where the majority of the Palestinian population live (lines 1552-1603).

Glossary (lines 1604-1739)

The book’s definitions of its terms, on a transliteration scheme from the International Journal of Middle East Studies with diacritics omitted: among them dinar at approximately $1.45andshekelat3to$1.00, each “as of this writing”; dunam about one-fourth of an acre; Fatah as Arafat’s PLO faction, an acronym for Palestine National Liberation Movement; Hamas as “the leading Muslim fundamentalist organization in the Occupied Territories” (line 1650); intifada as literally “shaking off”, the uprising that began in December 1987; Shabak as Sherut Bitahon Klali, the Israeli internal security services; and Sulha as a peace agreement between individuals, families or countries, typically arranged by a mediator (lines 1604-1739).

End notes (lines 1740-1810)

The book’s asterisk and dagger notes, gathered in this edition after the Glossary in the order of their marks: sheikh as colloquial for a traditional healer; the umm naming custom; the mahr’s division into pre-mahr and post-mahr; the Mandate legal age of sixteen for a kitab; Dir Yasin, where “Jewish irregular forces massacred some 250 villagers on April 9, 1948” (line 1748); Marianne’s respectful “Umm Mahmud” as the first such use in the interviews; Ashrawi as Palestinian spokeswoman at Madrid and Washington; Bab al-Amud as the Damascus Gate; the Dawood Koran translation Gorkin showed Marianne for Sura 4:34; UNRWA’s continuing services in Camp Aida; Black September 1970, in which several thousand Palestinians were killed in Jordan; the green line and Al-Qabu’s place just over it in Israel; hijra and Umm Abdullah’s verb; the abbreviation of her heroine-Samira anecdote for her daughter’s anonymity; the Women’s Committee for Social Work as Fatah-affiliated, one of four PLO-umbrella women’s organizations; Shabak; the rehabilitation centre’s name omitted at Samira’s request; ghosh as the root of “to dispute, to argue loudly”; leilat al-qadr; the two Feasts; ghariba as a girl from outside the clan — the note, as printed, names Umm Mahmud, though its asterisk stands in Umm Khaled’s narration (line 1782; see Open questions); yatim al-ab against yatim al-umm; “stomachs” for pregnancies; Emwas, razed after its 1967 capture, its fields on the Israeli side of the 1948 border; mutasallelin without the English “infiltrator“‘s pejorative sense; the concern over Leila’s brothers’ opposition; rusiya; divided Beit Safafa and its holiday fence meetings; the maska as showing the girl already “caught”; Meretz’s 12 seats in the 1992 Knesset elections and its support, unlike Labor, for a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank; banishment as a punishment for politically problematic Arabs; military government over the Arab population areas until 1966 and its permit regime; Zalmati; Sura 4:22’s bar on marriage between children of the same breast; and the hejab as a paper of Koranic phrases a healer gives to wear, immerse or burn (lines 1740-1810).

Key passages

• “Palestinian Women have been given a voice, but the individual Palestinian woman is still, in the main, voiceless.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 128)
• “These events, choreographed on the whole by men, have impacted no less on the lives of the women.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 132)
• “not one of the six women in this study questions the right of women to be involved” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 148)
• “We altered the names of all individuals to protect the privacy of the participants and their families.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 216)
• “No, she’s not going! What does she need school for? It will only make her strong-willed.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 254) — Umm Mahmud quoting her father, as she reports him.
• “She’s nineteen!” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 273) — the men of Umm Mahmud’s father’s family to the sheikh at her kitab, as she reports learning later.
• “Then they’re criminals,” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 383) — Marianne to her mother, on the men who killed the young woman helper.
• “Science is subservient to religion, science is about probabilities and religion is about certainties.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 395) — Marianne.
• “Mother, I can’t—not always. I just can’t.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 413) — Marianne, to her mother’s “if you love me, then listen to my voice”.
• “You mean I’m going to pass from one jailer to another?” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 520) — Marianne in the Dialogue, on a future husband’s rules.
• “We didn’t flee, we still had it.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 718) — Umm Mahmud, on returning to the bombed house after the June 1967 War.
• “If America was no further than the Bab al-Amud* I still wouldn’t go.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 730) — Umm Mahmud quoting her husband, asterisk as printed.
• “I prefer the religious state. I would support Hamas, but on one condition: the state they bring us is one that truly follows the principles of Islam.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 786) — Marianne.
• “Look, it’s alright, I’ll wear the hejab and the long dresses. So? Our problem is not what we wear, this or that dress.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 793) — Marianne, answering Rafiqa Othman.
• “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.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 922) — Samira, on the 1982 Molotov action.
• “Oh God, what a mistake! I swear, we should have stayed.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 964) — Umm Abdullah, on leaving Al-Qabu in 1948.
• “Keep it! After you destroy our house, you want to give us a tent to live in? Keep it!” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1054) — Umm Abdullah, on the tent offered after the 1982 demolition.
• “We had to deal with two Occupation authorities—the Israelis and my father!” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1072) — Samira, on her engagement to Asam.
• “In a way the Intifada has contributed more to women than women have contributed to it.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1105) — Samira.
• “I haven’t fought all these years, I haven’t gone to jail, to wind up in a Muslim fundamentalist state. I swear, I’d leave.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1107) — Samira.
• “Each day my blood boils anew and my heart cries out for him.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1186) — Umm Abdullah, on Hatem’s sealed house, also quoted by the authors at line 1152.
• “Lazem nusmud [we have to be steadfast]” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1194) — Umm Abdullah, on sumud.
• “If you die, I’ll die with you. If you live, I’ll live.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1296) — Umm Khaled, refusing to leave Abu Ghosh in 1948.
• “A mother is a mother whether she’s Jewish or Palestinian, all mothers hurt the same.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1432) — Leila.
• “If you ask me, I’ll tell you frankly—I’m against this Intifada.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1498) — Umm Khaled.
• “Praise God that He chose to take a daughter, and not one of the sons!” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1520) — Rafiqa Othman’s grandmother, as the story was retold to her, in the Epilogue.
• “The gap between us and those who do not go to college—for example, Leila—is profound.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1530) — Rafiqa Othman, Epilogue.
• “approximately 370 Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed and some 600,000 to 760,000 Palestinians became refugees” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1572) — the Chronology, on 1947–49.
• “Jewish irregular forces massacred some 250 villagers on April 9, 1948” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 1748) — the end note on Dir Yasin.

Evidence the work relies on

• The tape-recorded oral histories themselves: six to eight sessions of about ninety minutes with each of six women, in Arabic, April 1994–May 1995, mothers and daughters interviewed separately (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 160).
• The Introduction’s statistics, as the work presents them, credited to the Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel 45 (1994) and Supplement to the Monthly Bulletin 4 (1995), and to Rosemary Sayigh, “Palestinian Women” and “Palestinian Women: A Case of Neglect” (lines 192-212).
• The scholarly framing credited to Clifford and Marcus, eds., Writing Culture (1986), and Stephen Tyler’s essay in it (line 224).
• The book’s Chronology (lines 1552-1603), which gives its own figures for 1947–49 — approximately 370 villages and towns destroyed, 600,000 to 760,000 refugees, 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remaining (line 1572) — without citing a source within the Chronology itself.
• The end notes (lines 1740-1810), including the Dawood translation of the Koran cited for the Sura 4:34 phrase shown to Marianne (line 1756), and the Epilogue’s citation of Soriya Atorki and Camillia Solh, eds., Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 1988), as printed at line 1540, on the interviewer–friend problem in Arab fieldwork.

Analysis

The work’s method is collaborative oral history: an outsider clinical psychologist and an insider special-education teacher, whose own disagreements — over subject selection, sexual material and pace — the Preface presents as the same struggle for assertion the women’s stories record. The Introduction explicitly limits its claims: six Muslim women, names altered, accounts presented as a valid, not the valid, set of self-representations. The limits show in practice. The one joint session happened because the separate-interview arrangement broke down in a shared house; the subject of a secret boyfriend is raised by the authors in chapter 1 only as their inference (“evidently”, line 419); after the Dialogue the authors steered away from male-female relations with Umm Mahmud to keep her in the study (lines 698-700); and the friendship that grew between Othman and Marianne raised the question, in the authors’ framing, of exploiting a friendship to advance the work, met by the rule of printing only what Marianne agreed to tape-record (lines 768-772). The Epilogue, Othman’s own account, confirms and extends each of these limits from her side: the tape-only rule was the line drawn against the interviewer–friend collapse she describes as near-unavoidable for an Arab interviewing in Arab society; with the Abu Ghosh pair, her own village, sexual matters could not be raised at all and even a husband’s death was on the edge of the askable, so that pair’s record is shaped by what a “daughter of the village” may not ask; and her visits to the camp pair were shadowed by the difference between a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose family returned to its village and refugees who did not (lines 1540-1544). The book also withholds by design, and says so in its end notes: Umm Abdullah’s heroine-Samira anecdote is abbreviated for her daughter’s anonymity (line 1766), and the rehabilitation centre’s name is omitted at Samira’s request (line 1772). Two of the book’s central episodes — Samira’s first arrest and the 1982 house demolition — are told twice, by daughter and mother, with details that differ, as are Samira’s 1985 homecoming, Umm Khaled’s parents’ return and Leila’s miscarriage (see Open questions); the book prints both tellings without adjudicating between them, which is its stated method applied to fact as well as voice. Its historical frame is the authors’ own: the Introduction’s statistics are credited to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and to Sayigh, but the Chronology’s figures for 1947–49 — approximately 370 villages and towns destroyed, 600,000 to 760,000 refugees, 160,000 remaining — are given without a cited source (lines 1552-1603), and the end note’s Dir Yasin figure of some 250 villagers massacred (line 1748) likewise stands as the authors’ statement. Othman herself marks the translation limit: she wishes the full richness of the mothers’ colloquial storytelling could be caught in English (line 1528).

People, organizations, places and events (links)

• People: Michael Gorkin, Rafiqa Othman, Umm Mahmud, Marianne, Hanan Ashrawi, Samira, Umm Abdullah, Asam, Leah Tsemel, Umm Khaled, Leila, David Ben-Gurion
• Places: Silwan, Lifta, Bethlehem, Al-Aqsa Mosque, Deir Yassin, Aida Camp, Al-Qabu, Abu Ghosh, Emwas
• Events: First Intifada, June 1967 War
• Organizations: Hamas, UNRWA, Peace Now, Fateh, Palestine Liberation Organization

Concepts (links)

• Sulha, Hamula, Sumoud

How it relates to other sources

The Introduction cites Sayigh and Najjar on Palestinian women, a field also represented in this wiki by Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, whose folktales are likewise women’s narration collected and translated with ethnographic framing; where Muhawi and Kanaana’s tellers are mostly older women of the generation before 1948, Gorkin and Othman’s six women speak in their own persons about their own lives, and the daughter generation — college, work, chosen husbands — is inside the frame. The book’s three locations give three of the situations other sources in this wiki treat separately: Umm Mahmud’s 1948 account, of a family that stayed in East Jerusalem while West Jerusalem neighbourhoods fled, stands beside the displacement accounts in other ingested sources, with attribution to her; Umm Abdullah and Samira’s Camp Aida is the refugee outcome told from inside a camp, against Al-Qabu destroyed; and Umm Khaled and Leila’s Abu Ghosh is the Remainers’ outcome in Manna’s term — a family that stayed, took identity cards and lived under the military government’s permit regime the end notes describe (line 1804) — which Settler Colonialism and Conflict: The Israeli State and its Palestinian Subjects analyses as the state’s categorisation of the Palestinians who remained. The Chronology’s 1947–49 figures (approximately 370 villages destroyed, 600,000 to 760,000 refugees, 160,000 remaining, line 1572) are the authors’ own summary numbers and stand beside, without being reconciled with, the registers and counts of other ingested sources; the end note’s Dir Yasin figure (some 250 massacred, line 1748) is likewise the authors’.

Open questions

• The asterisk and dagger notes attached in the printed book to “Adila” (line 234), the mahr amount (line 270), the legal age at the kitab (line 273) and “Dir Yasin” (line 305) do not appear in lines 1-364 of the text copy; they appear in the end notes at lines 1740-1810 (the naming note at line 1742, the mahr at line 1744, the legal age — sixteen under Mandate law — at line 1746, and Dir Yasin at line 1748).

• Umm Mahmud gives her age at her thirteenth pregnancy as forty-four (“what was I, forty-four years old?”, line 323) and is framed by the authors as seventy-two and married fifty-eight years (lines 234-236), with birth in 1921 (line 244); the figures are recorded as given.

• Marianne’s religion teacher is described only as one of those Israel expelled to Lebanon “a few years back” (line 355); no name or date is given in this range.

• The young woman who helped Umm Mahmud before 1948, whose story Marianne begins at line 363, is not identified in part 1; in part 2 Marianne relays her killing by the men of her family (lines 365-385) but the woman is still not named, and the account is Marianne’s relaying of her mother’s telling, with no date or place given.

• The asterisk notes attached to “Umm Mahmud” (line 443, in Marianne’s speech opening “Umm Mahmud* is right”) and to Hanan Ashrawi (line 648) do not appear in lines 365-728 of the text copy; they appear in the end notes at lines 1750 and 1752.

• The text copy prints “caé” for café (line 419) and the garbled “sura apter]” in Umm Mahmud’s Koran reference (line 722); both are recorded as printed, and the second’s reading is uncertain.

• Umm Mahmud says she sheltered in the church for five days in June 1967 while the war itself, she thinks, went on for three days (line 716); the figures are recorded as she gives them.

• Umm Mahmud dates Marianne’s birth to 1966 (“I brought her in 1966, yes, and the war came in 1967”, line 704) and Marianne is framed by the authors as twenty-seven in interviews running to January 1995 (lines 329-335); the figures are recorded as given.

• The authors state, as their inference, that Marianne evidently had a secret boyfriend her mother knew nothing about (line 419); in part 3 Marianne herself names and describes the boyfriend, Usama (lines 809-817), while Umm Mahmud says Marianne does not tell her about such things (line 760).

• The asterisk notes attached to Bab al-Amud (line 730), “better” (line 788), UNRWA (line 843), Black September (line 880), the green line (line 893), “[hjiru]” (line 960) and Samira’s name (line 1045) do not appear in lines 729-1092 of the text copy; they appear in the end notes at lines 1754-1766. The text copy prints “Iremember” at line 1064, as printed.

• Samira gives her first jail, at fifteen, as nine days in Maskubiya for trying to burn a collaborator’s car (lines 904-908); Umm Abdullah gives the same episode as a week in Maskubiya for deciding to burn a collaborator’s truck (line 1052). Both accounts are recorded as given.

• Umm Abdullah dates the family’s move to Camp Aida to 1967 (line 998), and the authors give the camp itself as built by UNRWA in 1967 (line 843); Samira says the family moved when she was five (line 858) and is framed as thirty-one in interviews of 1994-95 (line 848). The figures are recorded as given.

• In Umm Abdullah’s narration her mother addresses her as “Halima” (line 978), though the authors state Halima is her eldest sister’s name, which she insisted be used for her in place of her real name (lines 954-956); the sister is also addressed in the narration as the hardest worker (line 980). The usage is recorded as printed.

• Umm Abdullah says Samira’s 1982 arrest was “the first time one of my children went to jail” and in the same passage corrects herself — “Wait.…there was another time. Four years before that” (line 1052); Samira states she was the first in the family to go to jail at fifteen (line 908). The two tellings are recorded side by side.

• Samira remembers her parents angry, not joyful, when Asam brought her home from jail on 13 August 1985 (lines 1064-1066); Umm Abdullah remembers the same homecoming as happy singing, with people coming from the camp, Beit Jala and Camp Deheisha (line 1162). Both accounts are recorded as given.

• Samira gives her 1991 jail as twenty-five days (lines 1121-1123) and also as a month (line 1109); Umm Abdullah says Samira and Sarah were let go after a month (line 1184). The figures are recorded as given.

• Fatma’s death: Samira gives the market as Mahane Yehuda and the intended place, she thinks, as its toilet (line 1111); Umm Abdullah gives the Jewish suq [outdoor market] and adds that Fatma had earlier that year, before her marriage, killed one and wounded nine (line 1178). Hatem’s sentence Umm Abdullah attributes in substance to what Fatma did and to a bus attack he was planning but had not carried out (line 1176).

• An officer or investigator calling himself Karim appears in Samira’s 1982 arrest account (lines 918-922) and in Umm Abdullah’s account of Mahmud’s arrest about four years before the telling, where she hit and pushed him (line 1172); whether the same man is meant is not stated.

• Umm Khaled is framed by the authors as having raised a family of sixteen children (line 1234); section 12’s framing says her family “increased from six to fifteen children (her oldest son died)” (line 1438), and her own account gives twenty-one pregnancies, four miscarriages, Khaled and the first Maysa dead, and “Fifteen are left” (lines 1444-1456) — seventeen births by that count. The figures are recorded as given.

• Umm Khaled dates her parents’ return from Jordan to 1965, when the family got their papers (line 1310), and also says they “didn’t come back until just before the 1967 war” (line 1442); in section 12’s completion she again gives 1965, adding that they were brought back through the Red Cross and that her father died about a year later, before the Six-Day War (line 1479). All are recorded as given.

• Umm Khaled says Khaled was named after his own father’s father (line 1288, “his own father, who’d died when he was a boy”) and later that “Khaled, our oldest son, is named after his father” (line 1452). Both are recorded as printed.

• Leila’s children: she gives Lilian, a second daughter who died at one month, and six sons — eight births, seven living, matching Walid’s and her seven children in the authors’ framing (lines 1322-1324) — and also gives the first five children born at her mother-in-law’s house and the last two at the present house (line 1396), a split summing to seven. The counts are recorded as given.

• The text copy prints “East Jerusalem” for the parents’ home Umm Khaled left at her marriage in the mid-1930s (line 1272) and “great-great-grandchildren” for Umm Khaled’s maybe thirty descendants of that generation (line 1456); both are recorded as printed.

• The asterisk and dagger notes listed in What the file is for lines 1093-1456 do not appear in that range of the text copy; they appear in the end notes at lines 1768-1800, and the notes for lines 1457-1819 at lines 1802-1810.

• The end note for “a stranger” (line 1266) reads, as printed, “Umm Mahmud used the word ghariba [stranger], by which she means here that the girl was from outside their clan” (line 1782); the asterisk stands in Umm Khaled’s narration, of the girl her husband wanted to marry and the different stranger his mother wanted. The note’s naming is recorded as printed.

• Leila’s miscarriage after forty: Leila says she decided against a hospital abortion and herself ran stairs, jumped and pressed her stomach until the baby fell out, then buried it in the yard (lines 1406-1408); Umm Khaled says she and Walid told Leila it was haram and she must go on with it, that Leila then miscarried because she was upset, and that “at least, she didn’t go have something done” (line 1510). Both accounts are recorded as given.

• The Chronology gives its 1947–49 figures — approximately 370 villages and towns destroyed, 600,000 to 760,000 refugees, 160,000 remaining (line 1572) — and the end note gives Dir Yasin’s dead as some 250 villagers (line 1748), in each case without a source cited at that place; the figures are the authors’, recorded as given.

Coverage

lines 1-1819 of 1819, read in full in parts 1-5 of 5. The book is complete: front matter and Acknowledgments, Preface, Introduction with its notes, chapter 1 (sections 1-5), chapter 2 (sections 6-9), chapter 3 (sections 10-12), section 13, the Epilogue by Rafiqa Othman, the Chronology, the Glossary and the end notes at lines 1740-1810; lines 1812-1818 are the UC Press E-Books site footer, not part of the book, and line 1819 is blank.