A White Lie

by Madeeha Hafez Albatta

  Madeeha’s narrative was selected to be first in this series because her life experience and personality overlaps with, corresponds to, and unites all of the women represented (whether a native resident of Gaza, a refugee, a mother of prisoners, a villager, or an exiled returnee). To a large extent, her life journey corresponds to and communicates the collective Palestinian story. As a citizen from Gaza, Madeeha opened her arms and heart to arriving refugees who entered the Strip. In aiding and also, notably, listening to them, Madeeha could grasp the concrete meaning of losing one’s home and being forced to become a refugee in one’s own land. A year after the Nakba, she was married to one of these recent refugees, a lawyer from Al Ma’in who went on to become a magistrate, a national figure, and ultimately the first mayor of the city of Khan Younis under the Egyptian administration of the Gaza Strip. Together with Ibrahim, on a journey of over six decades, Madeeha managed to raise a family of nine despite formidable challenges and very complicated circumstances. Her chief concern was sheltering her children against the dangers and harm of military occupation and a settler colonial regime that practices apartheid. All this while Palestine—the cause and the people—remained the discernible, steadfast centre of their lives.

  The battles that Madeeha waged continue. The children and grandchildren of her generation are now taking the lead and following the trail that she, like so many other Palestinians, blazed seventy-two years ago. It is this generation of refugees and non-refugees, men and women, and boys and girls who have marched for rights and dignity along the razor-wire fences that confine Gaza’s residents. Gazan civil society is presenting another model of its people’s strategies of mobilization and struggle for justice, which are at once traditional and innovative. Palestinians from all parts of society are participating in the Great March of Return, as a call to the world to recognize their inalienable right to return to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly removed seven decades ago. Gazans are also demanding an end to the notably immoral blockade that denies them freedom of movement, the right to education, the right to life, the right to livelihood, and the right to feed their children, as well as the rights to fish their waters, cultivate their land, export their products, and to drink clean water and receive medical treatment. These are the same very basic rights that Madeeha struggled to attain.

  Madeeha paid heavy personal prices in order for her and her family to struggle for freedom. Today’s younger generations protesting at Gaza’s borders are also paying heavily for exercising the right to take part in determining their future, and for practicing an advanced form of participatory democracy to call world attention to their slow strangulation by blockade. In peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins, held in the buffer zone imposed by Israel hundreds of yards from the outer perimeter of the fence encaging Gaza, they have narrated and staged a legendary epic of resistance, celebrating the Palestinian survival, traditions, culture, and history that Madeeha worked so hard to preserve. As of the beginning of 2020, protesters have continued to gather every day for well over a year, since March 30, 2018, to sing, dance traditional dabkeh, share stories, fly kites, cook traditional meals, and recount memories of what once was their homeland, all while praying for and dreaming of return.72

  Ignoring their message and disregarding their right to life, Israeli army snipers, stationed in jeeps and military towers behind multiple stretches of barbed wire, with no imminent threat to their lives, are systematically targeting demonstrators with live ammunition. In February 2019, after a year of demonstrations, an independent Commission of Inquiry, set up by the UN Human Rights Council, confirmed “reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot at journalists, health workers, children and persons with disabilities, knowing they were clearly recognisable as such.”73 Accordingly, the report found that the Israeli army might be responsible for war crimes in Gaza against protestors involved in the Great March of Return.

  Madeeha died a natural death in her home in Gaza on December 22, 2011, at the age of 87, leaving a legacy that has already become a beacon for the ongoing march of the Palestinian people toward freedom and dignity. A poem written by Maheeda seventy years ago still accurately portrays the current situation in occupied Palestine and in besieged Gaza. It summarizes the agony of Palestinians, their yearning for freedom, and their daily suffering under occupation, siege, and apartheid. It presents a Gaza that is not just a piece of land, but a place in which a history of resistance, resilience, and Sumud (steadfastness) has formed. The poem sends an open invitation to the world, urging it to engage with her struggle to save lives and achieve justice.

  A BIRD AND OTHER BIRDS

  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.

  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 Mun
tar 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.