Huda met her husband, Ismail, shortly after the attack on Hammam Chott. He had come to her clinic with tonsillitis while on a visit from Moscow, where he was completing his doctorate in international relations. He was also the head of the Palestinian student union there, a fast track to national political leadership, and was in Tunis for a meeting of student union activists from around the world. Five years older than Huda, Ismail looked a bit like the hero in an action movie, with a mane of shaggy, sandy brown hair and a thick mustache. Huda had three conditions for any potential mate: he had to be educated, a member of Fatah—which to her meant a person of moderation, like her father—and, unlike most of the men she knew, not intimidated by a successful, intelligent woman. In concrete terms, that involved supporting her plan to resume medical school to become a specialist. Ismail met all three.
They were engaged five days after they met and then Ismail returned to Moscow. Huda joined him the following year, living in the university dorms. She loved Moscow and Russian culture, impressed with how literate and well educated the people were. After learning Russian, she began studying pediatrics but soon got pregnant, and it changed her in ways she hadn’t expected. She could no longer bear the sight and sound of children in pain. Huda was ready to switch fields when Ismail learned that Arafat had appointed him to a diplomatic posting in Bucharest. She talked to one of her teachers about staying alone in Moscow to complete her training. The teacher advised against it: husband and wife are like a needle and thread—where the needle goes, the thread must follow.
In Bucharest, Huda had to start again, learning Romanian and applying to a new medical school. She took it as an opportunity to change her specialty to endocrinology. She enjoyed the logic and critical reasoning that the profession entailed and, more practically, thought there would be no emergency work, so that after her child was born she would not have to be away at night.
They named their baby daughter Hiba, “gift.” The birth put a strain on the marriage. Hiba was difficult, crying without end, and Huda received little support or sympathy from Ismail. She was single-handedly nursing and taking care of Hiba, studying endocrinology, serving food to poor Palestinian students in Romania, and hosting dinner parties for diplomats, visiting Palestinians, and Romanian officials. A few months after Hiba’s birth, she became pregnant again. By the end of her third trimester, she was worn out from a year of soothing Hiba’s relentless crying, so she chose an aspirational name for the second baby, a boy—Hadi, meaning “calm.” She traveled to give birth to Hadi in Homs, where she had the support of family. Back at home, Ismail maintained that the stress was of her own making: she was the one who chose to stay in medical school while raising two young children who were just a year apart. If she wanted to pursue her specialty, he had no objection. But he would not be helping with cooking, childcare, or hosting; she was free to study when all of that was done.
Somehow she managed, learning Romanian, finishing her training, raising her children, hosting dinners, and even having a third child, Ahmad, in 1991. Though exhausted and unhappy in her marriage, she appeared to be fortunate and content: a successful doctor with a distinguished husband and three young children.
After the Oslo Accords, thousands of PLO cadres were able to return to the newly formed pockets of Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank. Though Huda wasn’t eligible to go on her own, not having worked for the PLO, she could do so with Ismail. But he didn’t want to leave Bucharest, a riverside capital dubbed the Paris of the East. He enjoyed the life of a diplomat. Huda insisted on leaving, however. She knew Israel, she said: if they didn’t go now, they would not be allowed to enter Palestine later. Privately, she had another reason for wanting to go. Despite the state of her marriage and her husband’s refusal to help, she dreamed of having a child born on Palestinian soil. This was her chance to replant a seed in the land from which her family had been uprooted.
They arrived in September 1995, a year before Israel halted entry of PLO personnel. Huda gave birth to their fourth child the following year, naming the girl Lujain, which meant “silver” and came from the opening line of one of her favorite Fairuz songs. It was the peak of what was called the peace process. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had just concluded the second Oslo Accord, known as Oslo II, which delineated all the islands of limited Palestinian autonomy in the occupied territories. Huda felt it was meaningless.
Rabin was emphatic that there would be no Palestinian state, no capital in Jerusalem, more settlements annexed to Jerusalem, more settlement blocs in the West Bank, and that Israel would never return to the boundaries it had prior to the 1967 war, even though they comprised a full 78 percent of historic Palestine. Somewhere within the West Bank and Gaza, the remaining 22 percent—or the part of it that Israel hadn’t settled, annexed, or set aside for permanent military control—the Palestinians would be granted “less than a state,” as Rabin called it. But even these crumbs were too much for some Israelis: Rabin was assassinated by an Orthodox Jewish nationalist a little over a month after Huda and Ismail and their children crossed into the West Bank. Hearing the news at his home in Gaza, Yasser Arafat wept.
The Palestinians who came to the occupied territories under Oslo were known as returnees. Huda thought the term was silly. She was a refugee in Syria, an expatriate when briefly living with her parents in the Gulf, an immigrant in Romania, and now a returnee. She was on Palestinian land, but to what had she returned? Not to anyplace she or her father or uncle or grandmother knew. Huda’s husband was not allowed to return to his family’s home in Jabal Mukaber, because it was within annexed Jerusalem. He and Huda moved instead to part of neighboring Sawahre, just outside the municipal boundary. Sawahre and Jabal Mukaber had once been a single village but, after Oslo, Palestinians from eastern Sawahre needed permits to visit their relatives in Jabal Mukaber and even to bury their dead in the cemetery. Later the separation wall ran through the middle of Sawahre.
Huda felt out of place there. The villagers seemed rough-mannered to her, as though out of another time. Their dialect was hard for her to understand, and she was embarrassed not to comprehend the basic speech of fellow Palestinians. Her neighbors struck her as hardened, too. They were mountain people, nothing like the cosmopolitan, seaside Haifa natives of her grandmother’s stories. Even Haifa itself, when she was finally able to visit, bore no resemblance to her grandmother’s descriptions.
As a returnee, Huda felt a growing distance from the society around her. The returnees who had come with Arafat filled the senior positions in the new sulta at the expense of the local Palestinians who had led the intifada. It was only due to the sacrifice of the local population, the “insiders,” that the outsiders were able to return. But the lives of the insiders only got worse after Oslo. On top of greater restrictions on movement, employment plummeted as Israel replaced Palestinian laborers with foreign workers, recruited mostly from Asia. The year after Huda arrived, almost one in three Palestinians was out of work. Nearly every returnee, by contrast, had a job in Arafat’s expanding patronage network.
Ordinary people came to resent the returnees, holding them responsible for Oslo, corruption, and the impossible bind of the Palestinian security forces, which were key to maintaining Israel’s occupation. The figures close to Arafat pocketed tens of millions of dollars of public money, much of it funneled through a Tel Aviv bank account, and some even profited from the building of settlements. Arafat tried to make light of the matter. He once told his cabinet he had just received a call from his wife reporting a thief in the house; he assured her it was impossible because all the thieves were sitting right there with him.
Joking aside, Arafat knew he was threatened by the widespread unhappiness with Oslo—and with the authoritarian regime it had created. When twenty prominent figures signed a petition against the sulta’s “corruption, deceit and despotism,” more than half of them were detained, interrogated, or placed under house arrest. Others were beaten or shot in the legs.
Huda was most troubled by the sulta’s security cooperation with Israel. Ismail worked in the Interior Ministry, which, relying on a wide network of informants, oversaw the surveillance and arrest of Palestinians who continued to resist Israel’s occupation. Huda was horrified by how many Palestinians were betraying one another. Even among her own staff at the UNRWA clinic, there were informants who brought on visits and interrogation by Israeli intelligence. Huda refused to change her behavior or censor herself, however, remaining defiantly political at work. For her, the job was never only humanitarian. It was always national, too. Treating refugees meant she was doing something for her people.