Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

the morning salat, the first of five daily prayers.

Difference between secular and religious societies

thobe

Numerous words dropped in without explanation

put a hot iron to the hand she was forced to admit had been the one that had stolen the horse. “This one? Put it out where I can burn it good,” the father said, seething, as Dalia offered her right palm. “And if you scream, I’ll burn the other hand,” he added, turning to the crowd of onlookers for approval. Dalia made no sound as the burning metal seared the skin of her right palm. The crowd gasped. “How cruel the Bedouins are,”

Child abuse

nye

?

daily BBC reports of terrorism by the increasingly militarized Zionist gangs.

#IsraelTerrorState

Aeeda

aroosa,

fourteen-year-old Dalia married Hasan Yehya Abulheja

14!

dabke

“Hasan, they’re going to take land. They’ve launched a campaign across the world calling Palestine ‘a land without a people.’ They’re going to make it a Jewish homeland.”

Fuck the Jewish terrorists

the people of Ein Hod, individually and collectively, prayed for the rest of the day, putting their fate in the hands of Allah before laying down to sleeplessness.

Waste of time

dishdashe

jiddo

Moshe snatched the child, tucked it in his army sack, and kept moving without looking back. He heard the woman yell, “Ibni! Ibni!” and that made him believe that she had seen him take her baby. But she had not.

Bastard

The Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by Jewish terrorists. Israel would not allow the return, and the family waited captive in that interminable year, with its surreal twist of fate and tentative conclusion, stretching on and on, renewed each morning with the news.

adan

dabke

the refugees rose from their agitation to the realization that they were slowly being erased from the world, from its history and from its future.

“Wudu and salat.

babboor’s

You are no different from Nazis who stood in my way when I cared for Jews in the Second World War.”

muaasal

fadeeha.

fellaha’s

dishdashe

learned later that Jamal’s life had ended as an “example.” Soldiers executed him in front of my brother and fifty others. Jamal was blindfolded, hands bound and kneeling, when an Israeli soldier put one bullet into the head of the boy who frequented our house daily, who played soccer in the dirt fields, and who used to call me ammoora—adorable—and ride with us on trips to Jerusalem, the Jordan River, Bethlehem, or Jericho. He was sixteen years old when he became an example.

The fucking cruelty of the Jews

kahwe

“It was him!” Yousef said. “I saw the scar! He’s alive and he’s a Yahoodi they call David!” My brother had seen a Jewish soldier with a scar identical to the one that had marked the face of our brother Ismael, who had vanished seven years before I was born.

The theft of the infant is metaphorical for the Jewish theft of Palestine. Giving him a false name is a synonym for the lie that calls the country 'Israel'

Yahoodi, a Sahyouni

Jomaa

The crowd fell silent and we heard the voice of Yasser Arafat. “What we have done,” the voice declared, “is to make the world realize that the Palestinian is no longer refugee number so and so, but the member of a people who hold the reins of their own destiny and are in a position to determine their own future.”

anywhere I went, I was bound to run into Israeli soldiers and settlers, for Israel had already begun massive land confiscations and construction of Jewish-only settlements around the centers of Palestinian life.

Bastards

kahwe

After Israel conquered Palestine in 1967, we never went to Jerusalem again. It was too difficult at first and eventually we weren’t allowed. On its first day of occupation, Israel bulldozed the entire Moroccan neighborhood of some two hundred ancient houses and several hundred residents, who were given less than two hours’ notice to evacuate. Muslims and Christians alike, Greeks and Armenians saw most of their property confiscated, while they themselves were evicted to ghettos or exiled.

Thieving bastards

Our bond was Palestine. It was a language we dismantled to construct a home.

America 1973

50% through. She's left Palestine

We were naïvely full of dreams and hope then, blessedly unaware that we were the world’s rubbish, left to tread in its own misery and excrement.

Victims of Jewish occupiers

Within three months, they were united and married in Beirut. To make that journey, Fatima said a final farewell to her family and country, because once she left, Israel would not allow her to return to the land it occupied. She gave up everything she knew to marry my brother and never regretted it.

“Al hamdulillah ala salama,”

kaak

I went on a scholarship and couldn’t go back to Jenin. You know how it is when you’re gone for a while. The Israelis don’t let you come back … ” Furthermore, I had nothing, no one, to go back to.

hot jibneh and zaatar

They had named her Falasteen, the Arabic word for Palestine.

In that refugee camp, which Israel would label a “breeding ground of terrorists” and a “festering den of terror,” I bore witness to a love that dwarfed immensity itself.

the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our own emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

I can see them now as if I were an outsider looking through someone’s window. The five of us, Fatima, Yousef, Majid, baby Falasteen, and I, sit around the plates of fried tomatoes, hummus, fuul, olives, zaatar, eggs, yogurt, and cucumber.

First person. Amal narrating

zaghareet

zaghareet,

aroosa,

el ghurba.