Tears for Tarshiha Page 2
Then he would push himself back and sit tall, chest swollen with pride, meeting each of our eyes as he described the Palestinian resistance to the British occupation and Jewish migration in the early 1920s and 1930s. ‘We were determined not to live under the yoke of the British and we fought hard for our independence and freedom,’ he would declare, the unspoken message that we had to fight again. I remember my excitement on hearing how our village of Tarshiha was actively involved in this resistance, including the 1936 national uprising as well as the general revolt that lasted until 1939. But my grandfather would point out that the price of this resistance was high. Many people from Tarshiha were among the dead or imprisoned.
These nights by the small coal fire were replicated around the refugee camp as our history was orally passed on to a new generation. Other relatives would visit our gathering and add their memories to these history lessons. My grandmother’s sister-in-law, Umm Samir, had lived through the British raids on the village and would bring the memory to life as she re-enacted the warning call, ‘It is cloudy, it is cloudy’. This alluded to the dust storms created by the soldiers on horseback, letting everyone know the British were coming. The soldiers would order the women into the mosque and the men to a large garage. They would search their homes and interrogate them. During these raids, the British took the women’s scarves and put them on their heads, making fun of their dress. And we all laughed when Umm Samir told us the only two words in English she could remember were, ‘come out, come out’ as the British soldiers rounded them up.
On these nights Mahmoud would always remind us that Palestine was a multi-faith society of Muslims, Christians and Jews. In Tarshiha the Friday call to prayers at the mosque gave way to the peel of church bells on Sunday. Palestinian Jewish Arabs had been part of our society since ancient times and shared our language and culture. Their family doctor was a Palestinian Jew, while the Christians worked mostly as goldsmiths, carpenters and blacksmiths or merchants. We had lived in peace with each other for centuries, he would say, quietly adding as if in a plea, that our war was against the colonisers, not each other.
In Mahmoud’s version of history the ultimate act of betrayal was actually quite recent. He would point to 1937 and the British Peel Commission that recommended the partition of Palestine. With a vote by a Parliament in London our village, Tarshiha, was arbitrarily determined by the British occupiers to go to the Jewish migrants4. When he spoke these words Mahmoud’s voice would shake with anger. ‘Of course, we resisted this outrageous idea and we fought the British again; but thousands of us were killed or arrested’.
His anger with the British was soon directed at another ‘enemy’—the United Nations. In the aftermath of World War II, the newly formed UN decided that Palestine should be divided in two, giving the Arabs and Jews each a state5. ‘Our rights as the owners of Palestinian land were not considered,’ he would say, his voice loud with anger as he held his large hands against his chest as if to quell the pain. The Zionist Jews liked this decision even less than our people and responded with violence: assassinating the UN’s Swedish peace negotiator and attacking Palestinian organisations, banks, railways and industrial installations. Many Palestinian civilians lost their lives.
‘We fought again, against the British and the Jewish settlers, but we were poorly armed and poorly organised as many of our best leaders had been killed or imprisoned by the British,’ my grandfather would add with great despondency.
It would be nice to say our fireside stories had a happy ending—but no matter which new detail my grandfather added, we all knew what the last page of his ‘history’ would reveal. On May 14, 1948, Jewish forces declared the state of Israel and their campaign to eradicate our presence from our homeland began.
At times my grandparents would set politics aside and our fireside conversations would give us an insight into Palestinian customs and their early married life. My grandparents were cousins and grew up together, often meeting at family celebrations. It was quite common at the time for cousins to wed, so with their parents’ permission they were married in the early 1930s. Their first home in Tarshiha was a large house with many rooms, bought from a Palestinian journalist who had left the country after being persecuted by the British. The house was two storeys and too big for my grandmother’s family alone, so she rented out one floor. Tarshiha was one of the larger villages in the district and was proud of the fact it had two schools, including a secondary school. Palestinians strongly believed that education was important for girls, so when Alia’s daughters, my mother Hind among them, were old enough, they went to school as did all the other girls in the village. However, because of the war my mother was never able to complete her education—a sadness both she and my grandmother carried through their lives.
My grandmother often talked about relatives and people she had known in Palestine, including Umm Salim. When she died in 1947, the year before their flight, the whole community, Christian and Muslim, supported one another. People in Tarshiha came and sat with the family, visitors being offered bitter coffee as was the custom. The women of the family bathed Umm Salim and buried her within 24 hours which is required for Muslims. Some of the village women performed a special dance on the first three days of mourning—called nadib—in which they carried scarves in their hands and waved them about, shouting, crying out and speaking to Umm Salim: remembering her wonderful sense of humour, her work in the village, her role as a mother and wife, and her friendship. They would alternate this ritual with religious songs.
Relatives and friends brought food to the family, and those who could afford it slaughtered sheep and distributed the meat among the villagers. On the third day of this mourning period, they distributed a small pastry filled with crushed mixed nuts or dates, known as ma’moul. This practice was repeated on the 40th day after the funeral, when the sweets were offered with bitter coffee. During the period of mourning, all foods eaten at times of celebration such as kibbeh, were forbidden, as was celebratory music.
Stories of our homeland were often accompanied by the food of our land. On these cold nights by the fire, my mother would make us a special Palestinian sweet where she would mix flour, water and sugar, and bring it to the boil while stirring all the time. Then, when this mixture had thickened she would pour it onto a tray and make a hole in the middle into which she would place a piece of butter and some sugar. The sugar and butter would melt, and we would eat the dripping hot ‘custard’ with great relish. This sweet dish, called a’ccedi, is famous in our culture and also has special religious significance: Omar, one of the Prophet Muhammad’s key followers, is said to have made this dish for a poor family. As children we loved these sweets and, even though my parents were not overly religious, we were comforted by the place this dish played in our religious history. To this day, it remains one of my favourite foods.
3
A FAMILY DISPERSED
In their flight from Tarshiha in 1948, members of my extended family scattered to either Lebanon or Syria. My grandparents planned to join Alia’s brothers and uncles in Aleppo, Syria, but by then the Syrian government had taken its quota of refugees and closed its border. So the family was split, with my grandparents marooned in Lebanon. It was just the first of many separations to come.
The family’s first ‘home’ in Lebanon was a canvas tent that, when erected, was the size of a small room. For the four freezing, wet winter months of 1948-49 a dozen of my grandparents’ family lived in this basic dwelling in northern Lebanon. The only bedding they’d brought from home was one small mattress and a pillow for the babies. But with their sheep, cows, cash and gold jewellery, they were more fortunate than many others. Some refugees with money in the banks in Palestine could not withdraw it. Many had left in panic with just the clothes they were wearing. When word began to spread through the camps that Jewish settlers were moving into their homes, my grandparents and their peers were devastated by the news. They had not just lo
st their homeland, they had lost their home, their belongings, everything.
By February 1949, my grandparents had moved south to Burj Barajneh, a UN-run refugee camp in bushland on the edge of cosmopolitan Beirut. Here they at last found themselves among friends, people from Tarshiha and nearby villages. The camps quickly established themselves into little villages, so even in exile we lived alongside our old neighbours. These tent cities spread as far as the eye could see, with little in the way of amenities or distractions for those it housed.
I can’t imagine how confronting this new life was for my mother, who at that time was just entering her teenage years. The security and tranquility of her village life was gone; in its stead she faced a life of uncertainty and deprivation.
My mother has spoken about the long, winter nights when the wind blew furiously around the camp tents. She would wake and, with her brothers and sisters, struggle desperately to stop their meagre shelter from being blown into the sea. The small earth channel around the tent inevitably failed to keep the water out and they often had to work furiously to keep their bedding, mattresses and precious few clothes dry. Amid all the shouting as people held the tent down, the children would be crying with cold and despair. The sleet and icy winds from the snow-clad mountains to the east of Beirut drove the chill deep into their bones. My mother believed her later severe arthritis was a legacy of those early days in the tent.
‘It was so cold in the winter. I was never warm enough sleeping on a mattress on that hard, cold, damp floor. And the heat and humidity of the summer was equally unbearable,’ she would recall.
While their hearts were always yearning for home, my grandparents were determined to keep on with life. At first the floor of their tent was only sand, but after a short while my grandparents made a hard mud floor. They cooked over a small fire, a babboor, fuelled with petrol, but for years many people cooked on open fires outside, using wood gathered from the bush nearby. Soon after they arrived, my grandfather also built a mudbrick bakery in which the family and neighbours would bake food in the traditional Palestinian village way.
Subsistence was an everyday chore for those in the camp. Collecting water was a tedious daily task for the young ones, including my mother. The public toilet and washing facilities were a seven-minute walk from the family tent and everyone had to make this trek on freezing winter nights, and in the summer heat and humidity when the sand would burn their feet. For seven years they lived like this—and always at the front of their mind was the conviction that any day, they would return home. It was not an unrealistic belief and one in which the international community was complicit: just two months after my family left Tarshiha, on December 11, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 194:
The UN General Assembly resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for the loss of, or damage to property which under the principles of international law and in equity should be made good by the government or authorities responsible.6
When my family and all the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees heard this news, they were joyous as they understood it meant they would soon be going home. But even as the UN voted, Israel was working against the order. In Palestine all traces of our people’s existence were being erased. Parks were built on former Palestinian land, cemeteries became playgrounds7 and Palestinian homes were occupied by Zionist settlers. On December 8, 1949, just short of a year after its bold declaration that Palestinians had the right of return, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was founded—a clear indication the international community had little interest in enforcing Resolution 194.
Until its establishment, Palestinian refugees were supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross and similar bodies.8 UNRWA’s mandate was to provide for the almost one million Palestinian refugees who had fled Israel. Many felt, however, that by building hospitals, schools and improving conditions in the camp, UNRWA was actually further entrenching our exile.
My family’s flight from Palestine had a major impact on my mother’s education. She became one of the many thousands of children who, due to the war and their exile, missed years of schooling. In spite of her parents’ commitment to her education, my mother never went back to school, instead, working to help the family survive. My grandfather, like many men in the camp, worked as a farm labourer for a Christian who owned land not far from the camp. He earned a small income and was able to grow food, but there was little money left for other essential things. When I was little I remember each day around 4 o’clock, my siblings and I would race to the camp’s edge to meet him on his return from work as he always had a ‘gift’ of corn or other food for his grandchildren.
When my mother was just 13 a fellow refugee offered to teach her how to use a pedal sewing machine. After learning this skill, my teenage mother rented a machine for her own use and in the cramped confines of the family tent began to make embroidered sheets and pillowcases. Once completed, she would walk for more than an hour to the shops in Beirut to sell this beautiful and much-sought-after handiwork.
There was little social life in the camp except for the numerous weddings to which all our extended family and friends from villages around Tarshiha were invited. It was at one such wedding that my mother met her future husband, Khalil. As both their families were from Tarshiha, Hind and Khalil had met several times before but barely knew each other. However, at the wedding an interest was sparked. I am not surprised by the instant attraction. My mother was stunningly beautiful despite the hardship under which she was raised. Her thick, shoulder-length black hair framed a striking, dignified face with dark, warm eyes. Likewise, my father was the personification of tall, dark and handsome. Dressed in their western clothes, they could have been any cosmopolitan couple strolling the boulevards of Paris or Londson. As our customs decree, Khalil’s parents asked my grandparents if their son could marry Hind. My grandparents were happy to support their courtship. Khalil worked as an accountant with a firm that sold cars in the mostly Christian sector of East Beirut, earning 95 lira a week, which was considered a good wage, and certainly enough to support a wife and family. But most importantly my grandparents could see Hind and Khalil cared for one another. With her parents’ approval, in 1955, after spending six years, or a third of her life, living in a tent, my mother, aged 19, married and finally moved into a home.
It was a momentous occasion for them and the family as they were among the first in Burj camp to move out of their tented homes into a constructed shelter. It was very basic but by camp standards they were comfortably off. My mother had a family right away; my eldest brother, Nader, was born in 1956; Ihab came two years later and I followed in 1960. We were all delivered in the house with a minimum of fuss—attended by women from the camp with a local daya or midwife to help during the birth. Becoming a parent did not slow my mother down. She was fiercely independent and determined to contribute, so even though she had babies on the hip and in the womb, she continued to sell her Palestinian embroidery, setting up her own small business with girls from the camp to do the sewing.
The ‘house’ where I was born consisted of one small room and was made of mud walls with a corrugated iron roof. A tiny kitchen was attached, and in the tradition of our houses in Palestine, there was an outside area that we called the dar, a walled, open-air courtyard. With a government ban on refugees bringing materials into the camp our homes were made from mud, concrete blocks and scraps of iron that we could find nearby. As a result nothing fitted neatly together. Despite our best efforts the wind and rain would seek out the gaps and make their way into our home as a constant companion. During the day our mattresses would be piled in the corner and at night spread out for sleeping. But sleep was often hard to come by. O
n rainy, winter nights the cold would go to my bones and as new leaks would emerge in the roof, my parents would wake us to move the mattresses so we would not get wet.
Summer brought no relief as the stifling heat also made sleep near impossible, and the wild cats fighting on the tin roof at night made certain any shut-eye was temporary. Our house had no electricity. My mother cooked over a gas stove. All the washing was, of course, done by hand. There was no bathroom and no shower. We used to have our bath in the kitchen, which, with only a curtain as the door, opened out into the dar. My mother would boil water on a gasoline stove and the children would be washed in a wide bowl. The minute we were told we had to bath, we would cry, especially in winter. What should have been a pleasurable experience was for us a misery to be dispensed with as quickly as possible.
During this time all camp residents had to use public toilets as private toilets were banned. This ban was symbolic of the Lebanese Government’s attitude toward the Palestinian refugees reinforcing the view that we were not welcome. From our arrival in 1948 we were denied basic services, and access to employment was severely restricted. Unlike those who fled to Jordan where many were given citizenship, and to Syria where they were given civil rights such as access to education, health care and jobs, Palestinians in Lebanon were, and remain, stateless second-class citizens. But as in all bad situations, there are ways and there are ways. My father had good relations with the owner of the company where he worked, and with his help, he was able to get special permission from the government for a private toilet for our small house. It was no luxurious affair, just a small hole in the ground in a tiny space off the main room. This hole led to a common pit outside which had to be emptied manually because there was no sewer system. It was a great improvement for the family and meant we no longer had to walk for seven minutes through the camp to the public toilet.