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the fate of Ein Hod’s people was joined with that of some twenty thousand other Palestinians who still clung to their homes. They repulsed attacks and called for a truce, wanting only to live on their land as they always had. For they had endured many masters—Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Ottomans, British—and nationalism was inconsequential. Attachment to God, land, and family was the core of their being and that is what they defended and sought to keep.
Thus Yehya tallied forty generations of living, now stolen. Forty generations of childbirth and funerals, weddings and dance, prayer and scraped knees. Forty generations of sin and charity, of cooking, toiling, and idling, of friendships and animosities and pacts, of rain and lovemaking. Forty generations with their imprinted memories, secrets, and scandals. All carried away by the notion of entitlement of another people, who would settle in the vacancy and proclaim it all—all that was left in the way of architecture, orchards, wells, flowers, and charm—as the heritage of Jewish foreigners
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To chase people from their homes, he had been commissioned by an omnipotent edict. A land without a people, for a people without a land. He said it until he could have believed it, but for that Arab woman. But for Dalia.
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.
“We’re all born with the greatest treasures we’ll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart. And the indispensable tools of those treasures are time and health. How you use the gifts of Allah to help yourself and humanity is ultimately how you honor him.
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
He had the sad dignity of a man resigned to eating alone at a table set for five.
Her entire family had been murdered during the holocaust of World War Two. The irony, which sank its bitter fangs into my mind, was that Mama, the mother who gave birth to David, also survived a slaughter that claimed nearly her entire family. Only the latter occurred because of the former, underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s.
Allaho Akbar: God is bigger. Western press explains this phrase as meaning “God is great,” which is an erroneous translation that strips it of spirit and context. “Allaho akbar” is used in nearly every conceivable context among Arabs, and always as a humbling reminder that God is bigger than any event or circumstance and therefore faith in Him is the answer.
La hawla wala quwatta ella billah: There is neither might nor power but with Allah. It is a saying to express one’s powerlessness to reverse tragedy.
