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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971

1970-10-30 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 6

leilah khaled's Story

  Soon after this, things became serious as we began our descent to Lydda. Of course, we had no intention of landing there--that possibility was the one thing that worried us. But we wanted to fly over our enemy's city just to show him we could do it. 
   "Descend to one-two-zero," I told the pilot and the co-pilot chipped in, "You mean twelve thousand feet?" "You know what I mean." So we began the long descent and out of the haze the coast of Palestine gradually grew clearer. "What shall we do when we get to 12,000?" the pilot asked. "Let's have a round twice," I replied and made a swinging gesture with my left hand and the pilot's eyes, as always, followed the grenade; "we want to have a picnic over our land," I said.
   Needless to say, my exchanges with Lydda airport were not friendly. The controller was very excited and shouted at me angrily the whole time. Having switched to Lydda wavelength, I first read a message in Arabic for our people in Occupied Palestine. I tried to speak to the airport tower in Arabic but they wouldn't reply. "TWA 840?" they kept calling, so I responded, "Shut up! This is Popular Front Free Arab Palestine. We will not respond unless you use this call sign. We are coming down. We are landing. Give us space." 
   I said this just to frighten them, because I don't think the Israelis wanted us to land any more than we wanted to land there. My words seemed to have had the desired effect because Lydda tower shouted back, "Don't come down, don't come down, or else we'll send Mirages to shoot you down."
   And I told them:  "Here is Free Arab Palestine. What can you do about it? I don't care for my life. This is our land. We want to die over our land. But you'll be responsible for the lives of the crew and passengers." (While all this was going on at about 20,000 feet, my friend held the intercom microphone near my mouth so that the passengers could hear the exchange, which couldn't have been very comforting for them.)
   There were more threats of Mirages from the ground and when I glanced ahead there they were, two of them, just in front of us. We were still descending, but the captain said to me, "We can't descend any more. It's too dangerous with these Mirages in front." This, evidently, was how the Israelis were trying to prevent us from landing. The co-pilot then asked to speak to Lydda. He explained to them:
   "We have to follow their orders and descend or else the aircraft will be blown up. Clear the air. And, don't keep calling TWA 840. This is Popular Front." Perhaps because of his words, the Mirages moved out a little, though they still stayed with us and we descended to 12,000. We then did three big turns over Lydda and Tel Aviv. We were seven minutes in all over Tel Aviv: enough to make our point. My final message to Lydda, just to keep them worrying was, "Bye bye for now, but we are coming back."
   17.12 HOURS. Compass bearing 350 degrees
   I gave the pilot a compass reading for a course due north and he suggested that we climb because we were using up too much fuel at 12,000 feet. I told him to go up to 25,000.
   In a very few minutes Haifa was before us--the hump of Mount Carmel, the harbour below it and over to the right the oil tanks and the cement factory with its long plume of white smoke. "This is my city," I told the crew. "Take a good look at it. This is where I was born." 
   From maps I had a rough idea of the area in which our house stood and I think I identified this area but the city slipped away beneath us much too quickly. I felt like asking the pilot to make a turn over my home town so that I could have a better look at it but we were really running low on fuel and every minute counted now.
   Just that fleeting glimpse, and a few dim childhood memories are all that link me directly, personally, with my home in Palestine. I was born in April 1944, so I was just under four when my mother, with us eight children, left Haifa some time in March 1948. I remember a staircase: one day there was a man with blood all over his face lying under the stairs. My mother says he died there, one of the victims of the battle for Haifa between the Arabs and the Zionists that was going on all around our house.
   My father was away from home, with the Arab fighters, but when he came home, a week before we left, and found that my mother had packed up things to leave he ordered her to unpack everything because we were not going to leave, then or ever.
   But the street fighting increased, most of the other women and children left, the Zionists were advancing and they were ordering us to leave over their loudspeakers. Many, many times in the following years we asked our mother why she had left and she would tell us that she was forced to.
   Certainly there was a lot of fighting in the nearby streets and she was alone with eight children: the first taxi we sent for was hit and set on fire and I remember there was shooting very close to us as we got into the second taxi. We left in a confused hurry with little more than what we stood up in.

   At the last minute, counting her brood of children in the car, my mother found that one was missing, myself. I was hiding under the stairs. I remember not wanting to leave home but my mother teased me by saying that what I didn't want to leave was a box of sugared dates my father had brought us. My mother left with a big bunch of keys because she had carefully locked up everything in the house. 
   That was how my family became "refugees." But no Palestinian is really a "refugee." We are displaced persons or evictees. For if we were refugees and had found refuge, we would not want to go back to what we had left. Because we didn't leave of our own free will, but were pushed out according to a deliberate Zionist plan, we do want to go back, but haven't been allowed to. This determination to return makes us Palestinians unique among the "refugees" of the world.
   
   As the plane crossed the frontier between Israel and Lebanon, the co-pilot, looking rather worried, asked, "Are we going to Beirut?" "That is none of your business," I told him. "We don't have much fuel left, you know," he replied. "I know that, and I also know how to swim, should anything happen."
   I, too, was worried about our fuel situation but I also was tremendously excited as we flew over the beautiful blue bay that lies beyond Ras Nakura. On the point opposite the Ras is Tyre which is where we have lived since leaving Palestine. Our apartment is almost on the beach and I thought I could just pick it out. Little did my mother know that one of her daughters was flying high above her head. I visited her on my last evening in Lebanon and even told her I would be home for dinner. I knew she would be anxious but I had to keep things secret. I had also left the usual farewell letter in case something happened.
   I could see the waves breaking on the beach where I had learned to swim.This is how we passed our time. Tyre had no cinemas then and we had no money to go to them even if there had been any. Away to the right, at the head of this splendid bay is what looks like a town but is really a camp for Palestinian refugees, 9,000 in all. For twenty years such camps have been the new homeland of our people. 
  When we arrived at Tyre we were a family of destitutes and destitutes we remained for 10 years. In Haifa my father was not a rich man but we were reasonably comfortable: he was a textile merchant and he also owned a small cafe and rented out a couple of shops. He lost all this, of course; but what was really bad was that like many others, he got nothing of the money he had in the bank, even though it was a British bank.
   There was so much confusion when the Zionists captured Palestine that for several months we had no word of my father and we gave him up for dead: he ended up in Egypt. This was not an unusual occurrence; I know of many families who were scattered like this into the neighboring Arab countries.
   My father was a sick man when we saw him again, with blood pressure and a bad heart. But what he was really suffering from was the loss of his home and is work. Again, this was not unusual, I know of several other men of my father's age whose health was broken because their careers were broken. Perhaps he should have struggled on. Many Palestinians have made a success of their new lives and when we do so that too is held against us: "refugees" just can't win.
   My father was bedridden or the last five  years of his life: he died in 1966. Fortunately my mother is originally from Tyre so for the first year we lived with one of her uncles. Then we moved into a two roomed house in which we lived for the next 16 years, and by that time there were 14 in the family.
   Crowded wasn't the word for it. But still, we were luckier that the others living in the tents. During the winter storms my friends wouldn't come to school because their tents had been blown down. The small brother of one of my friends was washed away by a flood which tore through the camp.
   The only regular cash coming in was a monthly payment to us of 100 Lebanese pounds ($31.20 dollars) by my mother's uncle which doesn't go far with 14 people. 
   Also we had to register as refugees with the UN. We received rations from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). But UNRWA itself says that it can't afford anything more than a bare subsistence diet of 1,500 calories a day. 
   But hunger one can learn to bear; what was unbearable was the humiliation of having to stand in line with our cans and sacks to collect our rations as "bakhshish." We had become beggars, just beggars, with our begging bowls in our hands, except that the alms came from UN and not from individuals. In the photos UNRWA has of ration distribution you will see few adults in the queues. They can't bear to go, so they send the children, as was the case with us. When my sisters began working as school teachers in 1957, UNRWA cut our rations, which was a blow, but we felt happier for being less dependent.
   The best thing UNRWA has done for the Palestinians is to provide them with education. I liked school very much, I think we all did, because it was the only place where we could show that we were still human beings and not just a number on a ration roll. I first went to an Anglican school in Tyre and then to an American missionary school in the neighboring town of Sidon on an UNRWA scholarship.
   I won another scholarship to the American University of Beirut where I planned to become a pharmacist, which is good progression for a girl in this part of the world. The scholarship was not sufficient to cover all the costs of living in Beirut and my family couldn't help. So I could only stay a year at the University, and having to leave was the biggest disappointment I've faced so far. 
   I took a job as a teacher of English in Kuwait and did this for six years. I don't particularly like teaching but I had to start earning in order to help the family. One of my brothers got his degree in engineering and is working in Abu Dhabi in the Arabian Gulf, and another brother, who graduated in business administration, is working in a bank, also in Abu Dhabi.
   With all our contributions the family is comfortable once again. We can now afford to send one of my younger sisters to the University but, how ironical this is!--she is more interested in becoming a fedai (a Palestinian resistance fighter). One of my brothers and I are full-time fedayeen.
   Many of our Lebanese friends ask my mother, "Do you really want to go back to Haifa after all these years?" And  my mother answers, "Yes, I'd go tomorrow. It's true we have had a hard time and now things have become easy: we have a pleasant apartment, enough to eat, funds for the children's education and extras like TV. What is more, I'm a Lebanese from Tyre. So I'm not a stranger, but I'm at home. Lebanon is my country but it is not my place, my place is Haifa."
   And my friends ask me whether I want to return to a country I barely knew since I left Palestine as a small child. And my answer is, "Yes," because I too have learned that while I am never a stranger in any Arab country, I can never feel at home.

Continued next issue - LNS

6   Vol. 1 no. 8   Ain't I

Saving...

leilah khaled's Story Soon after this, things became serious as we began our descent to Lydda. Of course, we had no intention of landing there--that possibility was the one thing that worried us. But we wanted to fly over our enemy's city just to show him we could do it. "Descend to one-two-zero," I told the pilot and the co-pilot chipped in, "You mean twelve thousand feet?" "You know what I mean." So we began the long descent and out of the haze the coast of Palestine gradually grew clearer. "What shall we do when we get to 12,000?" the pilot asked. "Let's have a round twice," I replied and made a swinging gesture with my left hand and the pilot's eyes, as always, followed the grenade; "we want to have a picnic over our land," I said. Needless to say, my exchanges with Lydda airport were not friendly. The controller was very excited and shouted at me angrily the whole time. Having switched to Lydda wavelength, I first read a message in Arabic for our people in Occupied Palestine. I tried to speak to the airport tower in Arabic but they wouldn't reply. "TWA 840?" they kept calling, so I responded, "Shut up! This is Popular Front Free Arab Palestine. We will not respond unless you use this call sign. We are coming down. We are landing. Give us space." I said this just to frighten them, because I don't think the Israelis wanted us to land any more than we wanted to land there. My words seemed to have had the desired effect because Lydda tower shouted back, "Don't come down, don't come down, or else we'll send Mirages to shoot you down." And I told them: "Here is Free Arab Palestine. What can you do about it? I don't care for my life. This is our land. We want to die over our land. But you'll be responsible for the lives of the crew and passengers." (While all this was going on at about 20,000 feet, my friend held the intercom microphone near my mouth so that the passengers could hear the exchange, which couldn't have been very comforting for them.) There were more threats of Mirages from the ground and when I glanced ahead there they were, two of them, just in front of us. We were still descending, but the captain said to me, "We can't descend any more. It's too dangerous with these Mirages in front." This, evidently, was how the Israelis were trying to prevent us from landing. The co-pilot then asked to speak to Lydda. He explained to them: "We have to follow their orders and descend or else the aircraft will be blown up. Clear the air. And, don't keep calling TWA 840. This is Popular Front." Perhaps because of his words, the Mirages moved out a little, though they still stayed with us and we descended to 12,000. We then did three big turns over Lydda and Tel Aviv. We were seven minutes in all over Tel Aviv: enough to make our point. My final message to Lydda, just to keep them worrying was, "Bye bye for now, but we are coming back." 17.12 HOURS. Compass bearing 350 degrees I gave the pilot a compass reading for a course due north and he suggested that we climb because we were using up too much fuel at 12,000 feet. I told him to go up to 25,000. In a very few minutes Haifa was before us--the hump of Mount Carmel, the harbour below it and over to the right the oil tanks and the cement factory with its long plume of white smoke. "This is my city," I told the crew. "Take a good look at it. This is where I was born." From maps I had a rough idea of the area in which our house stood and I think I identified this area but the city slipped away beneath us much too quickly. I felt like asking the pilot to make a turn over my home town so that I could have a better look at it but we were really running low on fuel and every minute counted now. Just that fleeting glimpse, and a few dim childhood memories are all that link me directly, personally, with my home in Palestine. I was born in April 1944, so I was just under four when my mother, with us eight children, left Haifa some time in March 1948. I remember a staircase: one day there was a man with blood all over his face lying under the stairs. My mother says he died there, one of the victims of the battle for Haifa between the Arabs and the Zionists that was going on all around our house. My father was away from home, with the Arab fighters, but when he came home, a week before we left, and found that my mother had packed up things to leave he ordered her to unpack everything because we were not going to leave, then or ever. But the street fighting increased, most of the other women and children left, the Zionists were advancing and they were ordering us to leave over their loudspeakers. Many, many times in the following years we asked our mother why she had left and she would tell us that she was forced to. Certainly there was a lot of fighting in the nearby streets and she was alone with eight children: the first taxi we sent for was hit and set on fire and I remember there was shooting very close to us as we got into the second taxi. We left in a confused hurry with little more than what we stood up in. At the last minute, counting her brood of children in the car, my mother found that one was missing, myself. I was hiding under the stairs. I remember not wanting to leave home but my mother teased me by saying that what I didn't want to leave was a box of sugared dates my father had brought us. My mother left with a big bunch of keys because she had carefully locked up everything in the house. That was how my family became "refugees." But no Palestinian is really a "refugee." We are displaced persons or evictees. For if we were refugees and had found refuge, we would not want to go back to what we had left. Because we didn't leave of our own free will, but were pushed out according to a deliberate Zionist plan, we do want to go back, but haven't been allowed to. This determination to return makes us Palestinians unique among the "refugees" of the world. As the plane crossed the frontier between Israel and Lebanon, the co-pilot, looking rather worried, asked, "Are we going to Beirut?" "That is none of your business," I told him. "We don't have much fuel left, you know," he replied. "I know that, and I also know how to swim, should anything happen." I, too, was worried about our fuel situation but I also was tremendously excited as we flew over the beautiful blue bay that lies beyond Ras Nakura. On the point opposite the Ras is Tyre which is where we have lived since leaving Palestine. Our apartment is almost on the beach and I thought I could just pick it out. Little did my mother know that one of her daughters was flying high above her head. I visited her on my last evening in Lebanon and even told her I would be home for dinner. I knew she would be anxious but I had to keep things secret. I had also left the usual farewell letter in case something happened. I could see the waves breaking on the beach where I had learned to swim.This is how we passed our time. Tyre had no cinemas then and we had no money to go to them even if there had been any. Away to the right, at the head of this splendid bay is what looks like a town but is really a camp for Palestinian refugees, 9,000 in all. For twenty years such camps have been the new homeland of our people. When we arrived at Tyre we were a family of destitutes and destitutes we remained for 10 years. In Haifa my father was not a rich man but we were reasonably comfortable: he was a textile merchant and he also owned a small cafe and rented out a couple of shops. He lost all this, of course; but what was really bad was that like many others, he got nothing of the money he had in the bank, even though it was a British bank. There was so much confusion when the Zionists captured Palestine that for several months we had no word of my father and we gave him up for dead: he ended up in Egypt. This was not an unusual occurrence; I know of many families who were scattered like this into the neighboring Arab countries. My father was a sick man when we saw him again, with blood pressure and a bad heart. But what he was really suffering from was the loss of his home and is work. Again, this was not unusual, I know of several other men of my father's age whose health was broken because their careers were broken. Perhaps he should have struggled on. Many Palestinians have made a success of their new lives and when we do so that too is held against us: "refugees" just can't win. My father was bedridden or the last five years of his life: he died in 1966. Fortunately my mother is originally from Tyre so for the first year we lived with one of her uncles. Then we moved into a two roomed house in which we lived for the next 16 years, and by that time there were 14 in the family. Crowded wasn't the word for it. But still, we were luckier that the others living in the tents. During the winter storms my friends wouldn't come to school because their tents had been blown down. The small brother of one of my friends was washed away by a flood which tore through the camp. The only regular cash coming in was a monthly payment to us of 100 Lebanese pounds ($31.20 dollars) by my mother's uncle which doesn't go far with 14 people. Also we had to register as refugees with the UN. We received rations from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). But UNRWA itself says that it can't afford anything more than a bare subsistence diet of 1,500 calories a day. But hunger one can learn to bear; what was unbearable was the humiliation of having to stand in line with our cans and sacks to collect our rations as "bakhshish." We had become beggars, just beggars, with our begging bowls in our hands, except that the alms came from UN and not from individuals. In the photos UNRWA has of ration distribution you will see few adults in the queues. They can't bear to go, so they send the children, as was the case with us. When my sisters began working as school teachers in 1957, UNRWA cut our rations, which was a blow, but we felt happier for being less dependent. The best thing UNRWA has done for the Palestinians is to provide them with education. I liked school very much, I think we all did, because it was the only place where we could show that we were still human beings and not just a number on a ration roll. I first went to an Anglican school in Tyre and then to an American missionary school in the neighboring town of Sidon on an UNRWA scholarship. I won another scholarship to the American University of Beirut where I planned to become a pharmacist, which is good progression for a girl in this part of the world. The scholarship was not sufficient to cover all the costs of living in Beirut and my family couldn't help. So I could only stay a year at the University, and having to leave was the biggest disappointment I've faced so far. I took a job as a teacher of English in Kuwait and did this for six years. I don't particularly like teaching but I had to start earning in order to help the family. One of my brothers got his degree in engineering and is working in Abu Dhabi in the Arabian Gulf, and another brother, who graduated in business administration, is working in a bank, also in Abu Dhabi. With all our contributions the family is comfortable once again. We can now afford to send one of my younger sisters to the University but, how ironical this is!--she is more interested in becoming a fedai (a Palestinian resistance fighter). One of my brothers and I are full-time fedayeen. Many of our Lebanese friends ask my mother, "Do you really want to go back to Haifa after all these years?" And my mother answers, "Yes, I'd go tomorrow. It's true we have had a hard time and now things have become easy: we have a pleasant apartment, enough to eat, funds for the children's education and extras like TV. What is more, I'm a Lebanese from Tyre. So I'm not a stranger, but I'm at home. Lebanon is my country but it is not my place, my place is Haifa." And my friends ask me whether I want to return to a country I barely knew since I left Palestine as a small child. And my answer is, "Yes," because I too have learned that while I am never a stranger in any Arab country, I can never feel at home. Continued next issue - LNS 6 Vol. 1 no. 8 Ain't I