1 / Childhood Days

You are lucky birds, flying from tree to tree, rose to rose.

You are happy birds, singing and dancing.

I can’t understand your songs and I can’t understand your laugh because I am imprisoned here.

Please come and see my tears, my situation, my life.

It’s an awful life. I wish to be like you, but I can’t.

A WHITE LIE changed my life. If I hadn’t told that lie, I am sure I would have been another example of most Palestinian women of that time who had children, cooked, and took care of the home. But my ambition went further than wanting to be just a housewife, and maybe God helped me to lie. I convinced my father—who was very strict in a way that nobody could change his mind—with my lie, and through it I was able to achieve my dream. I thank God for this.1

The Palestinian problems began with Herzl at the Basel conference on August 28, 1897 in Switzerland,2 when the Zionists made up their minds to occupy Palestine. In November 1917, the British foreign secretary Lord Balfour issued his infamous Declaration promising Palestine would be a national home for the Jewish people. After that Declaration, Jewish immigration to Palestine accelerated, both openly and secretly, helped by the English. Then the British Mandate started in Palestine in 1922.3 The English sympathized with the Zionists and their project to colonize Palestine, and opened the doors, legally and illegally, for them to come by sea, in order not to alert Palestinians about what was going on.4 At that time, Jewish people were a minority in Palestine and lived peacefully with Arabs of Muslim and Christian faiths. There was no enmity between us, but when their numbers increased as a result of the influx of Jewish immigration from Europe, Palestinians began to realize the danger of what was happening. They also realized that the English were conspiring against the Arabs. After the end of the Second World War, the horror of the holocaust was used by the Zionist movement to gain the West’s sympathy for their cause.

During the First World War, my father, Sheikh Hafez Albatta, studied at Al Azhar Al Sharif University in Cairo, which taught religion, Arabic, and Islamic Law, and was one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the Arab world at that time.5 After he graduated as a teacher, he couldn’t return to Khan Younis because of the war, so he worked in Cairo and married the only daughter of a widow. In 1921, his father died and his mother remarried, and all his sisters were sent to different members of the Albatta family to be looked after, so he decided to return to unite the family and take care of them. He told his wife that he was returning and asked if she would come with him; but, her mother would not allow her to go and told her that if she went, she would have to forget her and she would not receive an inheritance. She also told her daughter that the people of Sham (the Levant region) were very strong and that she would not be able to live with them. My father’s wife hesitated in choosing between her husband and her mother, but my father had already decided to go, and she chose to stay. When the sheikh divorced them, they both cried.

My father returned to Palestine in 1922, the year it came under the British Mandate. He found work as a teacher of the Arabic language and Islamic religion in the Beersheba school,6 and brought all his sisters there. At that time, my uncle, Fayez Beik Al Idrisi, was in charge of the police and general security under the administration of the British Mandate, and he sometimes organized horse races for the British. One day, he took his mother, whose origins were in Syria and Turkey, so she didn’t cover her face like the Palestinian women living in the southern districts of Palestine.7 She had recently returned from a trip to Syria, where she had bought clothes for her four daughters and many other things. She brought her daughters to the races, and they happened to sit in the front row across from where my father sat, and he kept looking at one of the daughters and fell in love with her. When the races finished, he wanted to meet this girl and marry her, so he went to his cousin, the mayor of Beersheba, and asked him about her. His cousin asked my father which of the girls he had fallen in love with, but he didn’t know her name; he only knew that she had worn a violet skirt and jacket.

The mayor’s wife then visited the family to welcome the mother home from her trip. She told her she had heard that her daughters had worn very beautiful clothes at the races and asked to see them. As in most places, the south was underdeveloped, and because Beersheba was small, news spread very quickly, so these clothes had caused much gossip because they were not normally worn by the local people. My grandmother asked her daughters to bring the dresses they had worn, and when the mayor’s wife saw my mother with the violet skirt and jacket, she asked if she had worn them at the races. She said yes, and that her sisters had worn dresses of green, dark blue, and brown. So, my father discovered the name of my mother, the girl he had fallen in love with. Her name was Rabia, and she was the second youngest of the four girls. He sent his cousin to my uncle to ask for her hand in marriage.

My uncle said that Rabia couldn’t marry before her two older sisters, but that my father could marry either of those two. My father refused, so again my father’s cousin returned and told my uncle that my father wanted Rabia. My uncle told him that Mufida, the oldest, was very skilful at sewing and her hands would bring gold, and because Khayria, the second oldest, had taken care of her father when he was sick, she had inherited a lot of land, more than her sisters, when he died. He returned and told my father what my uncle had said, but my father said he didn’t care about gold or land, he wanted to marry the one he had fallen in love with. So, my uncle told his wife and mother that Sheikh Hafez Albatta wanted to marry Rabia, and after a long discussion they agreed.8 My father was so happy that my mother’s family had finally accepted him, and they were married in 1923. In fact, my parents weren’t just husband and wife like ordinary married couples; they were very much in love and my father worshipped her. My mother was very beautiful, with white skin and very dark, straight hair. She was also very clever and had very good manners. She was from Nablus and her mother was from Syria, and her great-grandmother was from Turkey. Her father’s family was Al Idrisi, from the family of the Libyan King Al Senussi.

My father was employed by the administration of the British Mandate and moved from town to town according to their instructions. My parents moved to the town Al Majdal, the name of which was changed by Israel to Ashkelon, and I was born there on July 8, 1924. My first memory of Al Majdal was on June 1, 1927, when I was almost three years old and my mother gave birth to her second child, my sister Ni’mat. That day, a lady wearing Al Majdal tawb9 came and quickly put her shash10 over the clothesline and our blue towel on her head. Then she entered my mother’s room and closed the door. I was surprised at what she did, and more astonished when I heard my mother screaming and screaming, and I didn’t know what was happening. I thought this lady was beating my mother, so I beat on the door to try to help her, but it remained closed. After almost an hour, it opened and the lady came out. Before she opened her mouth, I took our towel from her head and put it under my arm and said, “This is our towel.”

She said, “You speak about your towel! Come and see the baby! You have a beautiful sister. Come and see, leave the towel.” I looked and was astonished because the baby was wearing my blue hat. Before I looked at her, I took the hat and put it under my arm with the towel and said, “This is my hat.”

The lady said, “Come and look at your sister, she is beautiful, isn’t she?” But I only looked at my mother.

After forty days, my mother went to another room to take her fortieth-day bath as per Muslim tradition, but was afraid that I might hurt my sister, so she took me with her. She put me in the corner on top of the wooden stand that held the mattresses we used for sleeping, and under me were a big towel, my mother’s clothes, and a yellow comb. I was excited and sat singing to the sound of the water boiling on the kerosene burner. Our rooms were built of clay and there were no bathrooms or bathtubs, taps or water heaters, only big basins for washing and copper pots to boil water on the kerosene burner. Suddenly my mother stood up, pulled the towels from under me and covered her head and body. She took me in her arms, opened the door and ran. The water was dripping off her and the comb fell and broke, and I told her, but she said to forget about it, and we ran outside into the main street of Al Majdal. This was the only big street, with clay houses on both sides and some gypsies’ tents spread in the area. She had forgotten my baby sister Ni’mat, and on the way she said, “It’s enough if one of my daughters is saved. It is better to save one daughter than lose both.”

The street was a flood of people, with everybody running south and crying, “God is great! There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah!” But I didn’t understand what was happening and why they were running. After five or ten minutes, they became calm and returned to their houses, and my mother ran back to our home, still carrying me. When we came close to our house, our neighbour quickly opened the door when he saw my mother covered only in a towel. When I was older, I heard my mother telling the story of the earthquake that happened when Ni’mat was forty days old. She said, “While I was having a bath, I felt the earthquake. The kerosene burner began to shake, and the pot of boiling water above it shook as well. I was afraid the boiling water would fall on me, so I quickly stood up, covered myself with the towel, took Madeeha and escaped into the street.”

Two months ago, I was listening to a radio programme called Good Morning Egypt when the earthquake that happened in Palestine on July 11, 1927 was mentioned. They said it was a strong earthquake that hit the whole of Palestine, and I counted back forty days from this date and found it was the June 1st, the date of Ni’mat’s birth.

We moved back to Beersheba at the beginning of 1928, when my sister was still very young. Beersheba then was almost empty, with very narrow streets. The main street was long and on both sides were shops, most of them owned by merchants from Gaza. There was a police station and a combined school for boys and girls: boys on the ground floor and girls on the upper floor. It was built by the English during the British Mandate and there was a cemetery beside it. There was a big palace that belonged to Hajj Fraih Abu Middain, and some of it still remains. In front of the municipality was a square with a statue of the British leader Allenby, who had occupied Beersheba. Tuesday was the main market day, so merchants came the day before and stayed the night so they could go to the market early the next morning. They stayed in a khan where they slept in rooms of clay, in front of which was a big empty square surrounded by a wall and a big gate. Behind this khan was the main marketplace. The people who owned the khan made coffee and wheat bread for the merchants. Bedouin who came to town to sell their animals and produce also spent the night there, and I saw them in their traditional clothes of ’abaya, hatta, and ’eqal, and at night I could see the smoke of their fires and smell the brewed coffee. My childhood started here.

I used to play with the children of the owner of that place, and I remember his daughter Maryam had a drum that her mother bought from Al Muntar in Gaza. My brother Al Shahid Hassan, the martyr,11 was born in Beersheba in August 1929, and my aunt and cousin came from Nablus soon after he was born. Before they left, my aunt took me to the market and bought me a doll, but told me to hide it and not play with it until after they had left in two days’ time, and not to tell her daughter who was one year older than me, because she would cry. That afternoon, while my aunt slept, I showed my doll to my cousin and told her that her mother had bought it for me and hadn’t bought anything for her, and that she had asked me not to tell her. She started to cry, and her mother woke up and became very angry. She gave me some money and told me to take her daughter and buy a toy from the shop beside us. It was safe then to go out. The next day, when I took my doll outside, I saw Maryam and asked her to give me her drum to play with. She said she would if I gave her my doll, but I refused and quickly took the drum from her and broke it and ran home. The girl went crying to her mother and a short time later brought her to our home, complaining about what I had done. I was beaten that day.

I used to play in the streets of Beersheba and once I saw a big group of people running in the streets. It was a very big demonstration, but I thought it was a wedding party, so I ran with them. My mother called me, but I didn’t hear and then a neighbour pulled me from the middle of the demonstration and took me home. My mother shouted, “What were you doing there?”

“I was watching the wedding party.”

“Stupid! That was a demonstration, not a wedding!”

That year, some Jewish people were killed in Hebron and the English searched for Fedayeen. There were dozens of Jewish families in Hebron then and they lived peacefully with Palestinians. If Palestinians had good fruits, they gave to them, and if the Jewish people baked good bread, they gave to Palestinians. There was no animosity between them, but this relationship was poisoned when Jewish immigrants, with the help of the British Mandate, began to colonize Palestine. Palestinians realized then that the Zionists were preparing to take over the country and would eventually outnumber them, especially in Hebron, so the problems started.

I started school in Beersheba in 1929 or 1930, and I used to go with my father. When I registered in the first class, I went with my neighbour and stood in a line in front of her. The teacher asked me my name, my father’s name, and my address, and then it was my neighbour’s turn. The teacher asked for her name, and before she came to her father’s name, I quickly said that she didn’t have a father, and asked how she could give her father’s name because he was dead? The teacher was very angry and told me to be quiet.

Once I was playing with my friends outside our home when we saw a very big black cloud covering the sky and thought rain was coming. It wasn’t a rain cloud but locusts, which attacked Palestine in 1930. When we saw the locusts, we ran to our homes. When I was home, my mother quickly closed the door because they were everywhere. The locusts ate the plants, trees, and everything green and turned Palestine into a desert, so the British organized campaigns with planes that spread chemicals over the land and killed them. Then they arranged a very big party to celebrate their success and invited the notable people of Beersheba, such as employees of the administration of the British Mandate, the mayor, makhateer, as well as the English officers and soldiers.12 The soldiers played music and organized a horse race with the Arabs at the party, while some Bedouin cooked a big meal of sheep and bread for the guests. It was a very beautiful party held in a place called Wadi Sabha, and it went from afternoon to midnight. I think it was in April, in the middle of spring, and it became very cold that night because it was in the desert.

The meal was served by the British Mandate administration’s employees, and among them were teachers from my school. As they offered food to my mother, they congratulated her on the recent birth of her baby. My mother was holding Hassan, who was then seven months old, and she was surprised and asked why they were congratulating her and who had told them. They answered, “Madeeha.” One teacher told her that I had cried at school because I had lost a bag of sweets that I had brought instead of my sandwich, and when the teacher had asked why I hadn’t brought a sandwich, I said I had brought the sweets that my grandmother had brought from Syria to celebrate the first week of Hassan’s birth. In fact, I had forgotten to bring my sandwich and had lied in order to get one. My mother was very angry when she heard this.

After lunch, there was an acrobatic display by the planes that had sprayed the chemicals on the locusts. When it became dark and we were about to leave, we were told that the program wasn’t finished, and a big screen was erected to show a film of how the planes had destroyed the locust plague, followed by a Charlie Chaplin film. I still remember it, and if I close my eyes, I can see what he was doing. Then we took a taxi home. There were a few taxis then, owned by Gazan people working in Beersheba. When we arrived home, I was punished for lying, and also by my teacher the next day.

My father, who was originally from Khan Younis, insisted on being transferred to his hometown, so, in 1931, the British agreed to transfer him as an Arabic teacher to the Khan Younis Boys’ School, the only school there. Boys studied until the seventh class (grade) and then went to Jerusalem if they wanted to continue on to high school. My father was very happy about returning to his hometown and bought a dunum of land situated in the most beautiful area of Khan Younis. At that time, it was almost empty, with only a few small clay houses. My sister Nadida was born in 1932, a short time before we moved to our new home. She was my youngest sister, and I raised her as my daughter when our mother died. Later, she became a headmistress. She just died a few years ago.

In 1932, my father built our beautiful sandstone house with the coloured glass windows he had dreamed of. Sandstone is not durable like mountain stone so our home only lasted fifty years, but my grandfather’s house in Nablus is over one hundred years old and is still standing. In Ramallah and Jerusalem, the houses were the same for a long time because the stone is so strong.

While the house was being built, the baker was busy baking bread, which he brought three times a day for the workers. I remember the donkeys, carrying one big sandstone block on each side, coming from Abasan and Bani Suheila, villages to the east of Khan Younis. It was the first house to be built of sandstone and was like a palace, a landmark of Khan Younis, and people passing by would always stop and look. It had red tiles on part of the roof, and balconies, and a big open area of white tiles in front of the house, with a separate entrance for men leading to the first floor and another area for women upstairs. When my mother entered, she covered her face and sometimes greeted the male relatives, which made my father angry. He used to tell her not to speak to them because when a woman is covered, she should not speak to men. My father was very strict, but later I succeeded in tempering his strictness, thank God. My mother liked gardening very much and planted the garden with many roses, jasmine, basil, orange trees, and many other fruit trees. I still have a photo of the house, taken from the balcony of my home across the street.

The weekend was on Thursday and Friday, but only in Khan Younis because there were only two Christian families, while the schools in the rest of Palestine had Friday and Sunday as their weekend. Also, Thursday was the main market day and it was important for people to buy and sell on this day. We gained a lot from those weekends of two consecutive days, especially if we wanted to visit my mother’s family or my uncles in Jerusalem or the West Bank. We would travel on Wednesday afternoons and return on Friday afternoons. I had been to Jerusalem, Nablus, and Jenin during the school holidays and on weekends with my mother because my uncle Fayez Beik Al Idrisi lived there. I had also visited another uncle in Ramallah, as well as a third uncle, who was a magistrate and lived in Tulkarm. But the first time I travelled outside Palestine was in 1934, when I went to Egypt with my parents.

Every year, the British gave their employees four free train tickets with which they could travel anywhere. After we moved into our new home, my father wanted to use these tickets to travel to Egypt, although my mother was then six months pregnant and hesitant about travelling. But he insisted, so my parents, Hassan, and I travelled to Egypt. I still remember that first trip to Egypt when I was nine years old. I couldn’t believe I was going on the train and tried to imagine how the trip would be. My parents laughed and spoke and smiled at me. We took the train that came from Haifa and went to Al Qantara, where we crossed the Suez Canal and then picked up the train again on the other side and continued to Cairo. We rented a suite in a hotel called The Modern Club in Al Hussein, one of the best areas in Cairo. There were no radios in the Gaza Strip, so I listened to the radio for the first time at that hotel, because in that year Egypt established the country’s first radio station. The hotel had a very big hall and the radio, which was the size of a sofa, hung on the wall. When I entered, I heard someone singing and asked my father who was singing. He said, “Look there, that box.”

I asked, “How can a box sing?”

My father explained about the radio, and said, “You are lucky that you saw it because this is the first time that Egypt has a radio station you can listen to.”

Not far from the hotel a shop sold boiled milk because there were no refrigerators, and I went every day to buy it. One day, I became lost because all the roads were similar, and I didn’t know which one led back to the hotel. So, I cried as I carried the hot milk and an old man asked why I was crying. I told him I was lost, and he asked me the name of the hotel and then pointed the way. When I returned late, my father was very worried and angry that I had lost my way because it wasn’t the first time I had gone to buy milk.

Two years ago, I visited Egypt, and after praying in Al Hussein Mosque with my niece and cousin, I searched for this hotel and asked a very old man what had been built in its place. I had assumed the hotel was gone because it was very old in 1934, but he told me it still existed, but that its name had been changed, and gave me directions. I didn’t believe him, but I went in the direction he told me. I then asked another old man, who was sitting and smoking an arqila, about the hotel. He told me it was two hundred years old and had a new name and was at the end of the road. Nothing had changed except the big hall near the reception area, which had fallen down and hadn’t been rebuilt, but instead had been made into a parking lot for hotel customers.

I liked Cairo very much. I saw The White Rose, the first film at the cinema starring Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, the famous Egyptian composer, singer, and actor. We also attended a concert of Umm Kulthūm, and I was amazed at the jewellery she wore over her black dress, and her posture when she stood in front of the microphone to sing. I thought she was singing from memory because she wasn’t holding any paper in her hand, and as I listened to her voice, I told my father, “She’s really very clever in composition.” My father laughed and whispered something to my mother that I didn’t hear. Many times, I couldn’t understand what they said to each other. Then he asked me, “Why do you consider her good in composition?” I answered, “Because she sings in sequence. She sings that the whole universe shares her happiness: first the air, then the birds and trees, then the rivers and land.” He said I was very clever and was surprised that at my age I could understand the meaning of her song.

When we attended Umm Kulthūm’s concert, we had left Hassan with relatives who lived close to the hotel, because small children were not allowed. He had been asleep when we left him, but later woke up and cried because we weren’t there, so after my relatives tried in vain to calm him, they brought him to the concert. Sometime before the end, we heard noises and crying from the entrance of the hall, and my father saw the guards trying to prevent our relative, holding Hassan who was crying loudly, from entering. He quickly went and asked the guards to allow him to take Hassan to his mother, and promised that Hassan would not cry, and that if he opened his mouth, we would leave. Thank God, after my mother took Hassan in her arms under her veil, he immediately became quiet and slept. It was early morning, about 2:00 AM, and very cold when the concert finished, and people rushed quickly outside the theatre to find horses and carriages to take them home because there were no taxis. My father waited until the crowd diminished and then he found a carriage to take us to the hotel. The next night we went to the cinema, and the third day we went to the Egyptian museum and the pyramids.

We spent two weeks in Cairo and then travelled to Isma’ilia, where we spent three days at my uncle’s home. He was a road contractor for the English and had married an Egyptian. Then we travelled to Abu Hammad Al Sharqia to visit two of my father’s colleagues who had studied with him at Al Azhar University, and they killed a goat every day for lunch for us as a sign of their hospitality.

We returned to Khan Younis, and three months later my mother delivered twins: a boy named Abd Al Azeez and a girl called Radiyya. My mother contracted a fever after the delivery and died one week later because there were no antibiotics, ampicillin, or sulpha. The twins were sent to wet nurses; Radiyya went to one family and died at four months, and Abd Al Azeez went to another family and died nine months later from a fever. He was a very beautiful boy, and I remembered him and cried for him again when my brothers Hassan and Nadid were killed by the Israelis in 1956. That day, I cried for them and wished that Abd Al Azeez had lived so that at least one brother from my mother would be with us.

Everybody in Khan Younis cried when my mother died because she was good to everyone. She was the only one who owned a sewing machine, and she taught the women of Khan Younis many skills: knitting, crochet, sewing, and cooking. This made people even more sympathetic, and when we passed in the streets, they would say, “That is Madeeha, daughter of Rabia, that good lady. God be merciful.”

From that day, I stopped being a child and became responsible for the family. You could say I went instantly from childhood to adulthood and became a mother to my brother and sisters. With my pocket money, I bought chocolate and sweets and was very happy when I gave them to my brother and sisters. My father remarried one year later in 1936, the year of the Arab Revolt and the six-month strike against the British and their support for the Zionist movement, and in protest of the Jewish immigration to Palestine that undermined our rights to our country; the strike lasted from March to September.13 After the end of that revolt there were many negotiations between the English and the Arabs, which resulted in many agreements, but at the same time treachery started. Anyone suspected of being involved in actions against them, or even attending meetings to discuss the political situation at the time or how to mobilize and protest against their policies, had their house blown up by the British as a punitive demolition. Village houses were built of clay, so it was not such a big thing to blow them up. The British also sent thousands of those involved in activities against them to a place called Al Sammakh, close to Tiberias. Their brutal suppression of the revolt left many killed, wounded, and deported. They also hunted and arrested many Fedayeen, among them Mohammad Jamjoum, Ata Al Zier, and Fouad Hijazi, who participated in the 1929 uprising that started in Jerusalem and then spread to the rest of Palestine. These three young men were among the Fedayeen who led the protests against British Mandate rule and the colonization of Palestine in 1929. They were imprisoned in Acre Prison and hanged in front of thousands of people in a big square.14 The executions, which took place in June, were intended to silence the resistance. The English wanted Palestinians to understand the message that anyone who resisted would be killed. A famous poem, titled “Min Sijjin Akka” (“From Acre Prison”), that later become a popular song, was written to commemorate these heroes. It continues to be recited and sung by Palestinians throughout Gaza and by those in exile, especially on June 17th of each year, the anniversary of the execution of these three martyrs. This song was the beginning of my awareness of the Palestinian cause, the Zionist project, and British colonization.

The Fedayeen attacked the police station, post office, and railway station in Khan Younis and regularly attacked trains carrying English soldiers, so the British began the practice of putting a large number of Palestinians on a small motorized cart in front of the train. If the line was mined or they were attacked, the Palestinians were killed, leaving enough time to warn the following train. I know of many Palestinians who were killed because the cart was blown up, and of course the train stopped before it reached its destination.15

The second time I travelled outside Palestine was in 1937. As I said earlier, my mother died in 1934, three months after we returned from Egypt, and my father remarried one year later. That year, we spent our holidays at the Khan Younis beach because we couldn’t go anywhere due to the strike. My father loved the beach, and we spent the whole summer in the area now known as Al Mawasi.16 We had canvas shelters with roofs of palm fronds, and the people of Al Mawasi were our friends and helped us a lot. We gave them a sack of flour when we arrived, and every day, they brought us freshly baked bread. We brought a kerosene burner and pots to make tea and coffee, and kitchen equipment for cooking, and every week we sent someone to the town market to buy meat, vegetables, and fruit. So, we spent almost three months at the beach, from the day school finished until one or two days before school started. I consider that holiday one of the best times of my life. I have travelled a lot outside of Palestine, and I can say that this beach, with its clean white sand, was the most beautiful I have ever seen in my life. A lot has been written about the beautiful beaches of Tunis, and I have been there, but they didn’t look like the Khan Younis beach at that time. Al Mawasi changed after 1967. Now most of the beach area is occupied by Israeli settlements and the rest has become neglected and dirty.17

In 1937, my father took his wife on a late honeymoon to Lebanon and Syria, together with Hassan and my half-brother Nadid, the martyr, who was born in September 1936, and me. We took the train from Khan Younis to Haifa, with the free tickets my father received as an employee of the administration of the British Mandate. I had my notebook in my hand and wrote down everything that happened on the journey, such as the time we left Khan Younis and the names of the stations along the way. In Haifa, we had lunch in beautiful restaurants, and I remember a restaurant called Khairazan, which was situated over the sea and still exists today. We spent three nights in Haifa and visited Mount Carmel, and then went to Acre where we prayed in the Al Jazzar Mosque and spent a very nice time.

After we left Haifa, we rented a taxi, and I wrote down the names of places and information about the area that I got from the driver. We were travelling with two of my father’s friends from Khan Younis: one was a merchant and the other knew the area very well. At that time, the borders between Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria were open, so we didn’t need a visa or special permission. We were included on my father’s Palestinian passport along with his wife, because a wife and children under sixteen were registered on the man’s passport, and my father only needed to show the passport to the border guards as we moved from area to area. Before crossing from Palestine to Lebanon, we saw a girl selling watermelons by the roadside. My father’s friend offered her five qersh for one, but she asked for eight; after some bargaining, she went to ask her mother. She returned a short time later and accepted the money, but when my father’s friend took the watermelon, he shouted angrily at her and said she had exchanged it for one that was smaller and not as sweet. He knew because he had scratched a mark with his fingernail on the original watermelon.

In Lebanon, we stayed in a big hotel in the mountains. There were only two hotels, and a long asphalt road with big tall trees on both sides led to them. The place was very, very beautiful and the scenery was amazing. My father and his wife slept in the afternoons, and my father sent Hassan and me to play in the park of the other hotel, because it had swings for children and he didn’t want us to become bored. We played there until late afternoon when they came and met us.

From Beirut, we travelled to Damascus and stayed in a big hotel close to Al Hamidiyah Souq, a very big, beautiful market that can only be entered on foot and where one can buy every imaginable thing.18 We also visited Al Umayyad Mosque and prayed there. Once, after lunch, we bought ice cream at a shop where women and men were segregated. The women were very religious and strict, and when they saw me uncovered with my father, they said, “Look at that girl. She doesn’t cover her head and her father looks religious, like a sheikh. How can he allow his daughter to do this? It’s not good.” My father heard them, and before we returned to the hotel, he bought me a white scarf to cover my head while we were in Damascus. I was twelve years old at the time. While I was there, I also visited my grandmother, who was visiting her sisters and relatives. I spent a very nice time with her, and she gave me some gifts. Then we returned by train to Khan Younis.

In that year, I finished the fifth class and started to think about my future. I felt that I didn’t want to be another copy of the women in Khan Younis, sitting at home with my father’s wife cooking and cleaning, then marrying one of my relatives or a family acquaintance and having a family. I didn’t want to be imprisoned at home. I wanted to see other places, and because I had travelled and seen life outside of it, I always thought it would be a disaster if I lived the rest of my life in Khan Younis.