The West Bank
(After the Nakba)

(Extract from Quicksand Oil and Dreams)

By Michael S. Ladah

I spent all of my years on the West Bank in the town of Ramallah. Al Taibeh, which was strictly a farming community, proved to be too small for most of the refugees who went there, with few amenities and no jobs. After only a few months in al Taibeh we moved to Ramallah. Life in Ramallah provided my father more opportunities for work and was close to one of the large refugee camps on the West Bank, al Am'ari, with its makeshift tent homes, mud brick houses, tin roofs and burlap for doors and shutters. Even though life was miserable in exile for most of the refugees, they had some comfort in that they all shared the same misery.

Most of the refugees had been farmers and produce growers on their own family farms and orange groves before they became refugees, and they did not fare well without the land that sustained them. Others had been fishermen, had worked in the ports, or had worked for the British in their army compounds. Some even had been civil servants or traders. Now, many of them had no place to work or eke a meager living out of their new surrounding. All of a sudden they were shut out of their family farms and groves, there was no sea in which to fish and they were shut out of their cities and their ports. Many families felt compelled to hustle a living or have their children work to supplement the families' incomes. With everybody hustling, it was often the hustler hustling the hustler. Some sent their children to sell simple things such as chewing gum or work as shoe-shines or, during the summer months, sell ice-cream bars from portable coolers held by little children on their shoulders. Everyone thought, and was hopeful, that this was a temporary situation and, soon enough, their Arab brethren and the world community would come to their rescue. On every news broadcast, they heard news of debates in the United Nations and speeches and declarations by different Arab and foreign representatives, ambassadors, envoys, and other people with such dignified titles, giving them hope that something was being done to return them to their homes. The news broadcasts on the radio became the most important event in the life of Palestinian refugees. Every news broadcast brought hope with it, and brought closer that day when they would be able to return to their cities, homes and farms. Little did they know or suspect that they were condemned to be refugees longer than any other people in modern history. Little did they know that their Arab brethren were manipulating the situation for their own internal political gain. Little did they know that the world community was largely indifferent to their cause.

Their exile lasted longer than anyone expected. When the weeks grew into months, many families gave up on the so-called “decent” way of making a meager living and, as soon as they ran out of money or valuables to sell, they opted to beg. There were more and more beggars every day and every week. Droves of children went to the streets every morning dressed in torn rags and worn clothes to exaggerate their poverty, gain sympathy and extract more alms from other refugees who were living in the same area and under the same conditions of poverty. Many parents chose to go begging with their children for they could not do anything else; most of these parents were women dressed in long and dirty black dresses. The women had their hair covered and faces veiled with thick black veils. I could not see their faces and I wondered whether they could see through the veils. I have always thought that it was this, the seeming absence of their faces, which gave them the boldness to beg. They begged from strangers on the streets, in shops and in public gatherings. These strangers often rejected their request for alms, even if it was for a sick and perhaps dying child. The strangers rejected their request even if it was “for the sake of God and may He smile upon you and send you His blessings,” or “may God keep any evil away from your children,” or “may God keep your children,” or. . . or. . . or. . . .

I am fortunate that my family never lived in a refugee camp, although somehow I now believe I missed a great educational opportunity by escaping life in the camps. My father had just enough money to start us living in Ramallah in one room, which he rented from a local doctor, where my parents and their six children (later to grow to eight) lived. The room was our bedroom, our kitchen, our living room and, when it rained or the weather was severe, our playground. That room was so versatile that we could do anything there, except for one thing; we had to go out to use the outhouse. I remember how in the evenings my mother would stretch the blankets and homemade comforters, which we conveniently called mattresses, on the floor, organizing them such that my father’s place was by the door and the place of the youngest was all the way in by the inner most wall. In the mornings as everybody rose, my mother would reverse the routine and fold everything on the floor into a sofa-like structure, which became our sitting couch. When it was time to eat, we all sat on the floor around a round wooden table, tablieh, which stood about 12 inches from the ground.

For breakfast, my mother always managed to place a few dishes on the tablieh, a few loaves of Arabic bread, toasted over a kerosene burner, and a pot of tea. Breakfast included a ration of white Nabulsi (in reference to the town of Nablus) goat cheese, olives, olive oil and za’tar, a mixture of an herb of the thyme family dried and then ground with various spices and roasted chic peas. Lunch was always some kind of vegetable stewed in olive oil with tomato sauce, or some kind of soup; my favorite was lentil soup, with Arabic bread cut into small pieces and soaked in the soup. Sunday’s lunch stew occasionally had meat in it, and boiled rice on the side. Dinner was the same setup as breakfast, with the same dishes but smaller rationed portions. It wasn’t good to eat a full meal before we went to bed, we were convincingly told.

Then came UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Works Agency, which started schools in the camps and distributed relief supplies and food once a month to all refugees. When the Agency started distributing food, things became easier and refugees could get sugar, flour, shortening, rice, crushed wheat, dates, cheeses and everyone’s favorite, dried fish (bakalaw). UNRWA also made sure that every member of a refugee family got their daily supplement of fish oil, with a smell and taste that I have not been able to forget to this very day. The Agency even distributed milk every morning, one cup for each family member, to those who were willing to stand hours in line waiting for the powder milk to melt and for the reconstituted milk to boil, then for the distribution to begin. The smell of burnt milk was everywhere in the mornings as young boys and girls received their families' rations in various types of containers, including large tin cans, and walked with them back to their homes before breakfast. Although the number of children begging on the streets declined considerably when the UNRWA started to distribute food, and began opening schools in the refugee camps, street begging continued. To some, begging became a way of life.

My father always managed to keep the room for us and was terrified of the idea of living in a refugee camp. He worked, and he worked hard. He used his skills, which he learned while he was at the Syrian Orphanage working with diesel engines and other machinery, and he used the skills he learned working for the old man Smerling in Tel Aviv.

 Now, at the end of their fist summer in exile, Palestinian school children were ready to go back to school. Schools run by the government, by Churches or by the UNRWA were about to open their doors for a new school year. School records and family records, such as birth certificates, that had been left behind by most families suddenly became very important. Those who did not have family records had to get new ones from the closest government agency. I was one of those whose birth certificate was left behind. A replacement certificate would have been easy to obtain, provided an adult member of my family knew and was willing to swear to the accuracy of my birth information. My parents and my grandparents all agreed on my birthday but disagreed on the year of my birth. It took them many days of arguing before they agreed on a year, and 1940 was picked although my mother always insisted that I was born in 1941. My grandfather took all of the children in the family who needed birth certificates to a health office in Ramallah and arranged for new birth certificates. It took me a long time to learn the significance of the argument regarding my birth year. Because of the absence of school records, all schools on the West Bank decided, during that first school year in exile, that students from refugee families would be placed in a specific grade based on the year of their birth.

A year after we left Jafa, my father, in cooperation with a native blacksmith who owned a shop in Ramallah, and a rich refugee who had money to lend, formed a partnership to start a machine shop business. The blacksmith would provide the shop space, the refugee his money to buy the machinery, and my father his expertise to design, build and install machines that were needed locally. My father built flourmills, olive presses, water-pumping systems and a host of other machinery. He built and repaired small flourmills used by the villagers around Ramallah to grind their own hand grown wheat. He built and repaired olive presses, which were used by the people of Ramallah and the surrounding villages to compress their olives into oil. He built and repaired machinery for quarry plants and stone crushers that produced gravel to be used in concrete mix. My father did not always get paid, nor was he always paid money. Many a night, late at night, he would walk into the house (the room) with a couple of live chickens in his hand, or a four-gallon can of olive oil or a sac of flour. He did not mind the pay, but when one of those presses went down and the villagers needed him urgently or else the olives would spoil, my father insisted on getting paid in convertible currency.

In Ramallah, I worked with my father in his workshop, during my summer break and for about a year after high school. I learned a lot about what he did at work and how he did it. I used to like to travel with my father to the villages when he went to repair old machinery or install new equipment. I enjoyed learning about the different Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Many of those villages do not exist today; they were razed by the military as the Israeli military occupation forces made sure that Palestinians claiming the right of return would find nothing to return to, even in the West Bank. I enjoyed roaming the Palestinian countryside in the summers, watching the farmers harvest their olives, figs and grapes, and listening to the sounds of the crickets, or the zeez as we called them when I was a little kid. I saw how the villagers lived. They were very simple people, full of goodness, living a simple life. Their lives centered on making a living for their families, from olives, from figs and grapes, and from wheat. This was their essential staple diet, and they also kept livestock: chickens, goats and a cow or two. They ground their own flour, pickled their own olives and pressed their own olive oil. They made their own jam from their bountiful plums and apricots, dried their own figs and raisins, and made their own labaneh, which was nothing but natural yogurt dehydrated into a paste by draining the water out of it. Most families in those days always had a pillowcase, with yogurt in it, hanging over whatever they considered their wash basin, continuously dripping water drop by drop. The end result was labaneh, a paste which sat in a flat dish or in a jar of olive oil and, when it was ready to eat, was topped with olive oil. Arabs used it as a dip or spread with toasted Arabic bread. It is still my favorite dish for breakfast because of its nice lemony taste. The Palestinian farmers baked their own bread in their family taboun, which was made of a small mound constructed of mud mixed with wheat straw. It was essentially half a sphere, the shape of an Eskimo igloo, two to three meters in diameter, built on the ground in the back of the house. The center of the taboun had a place for wood fire which, once it got started, was covered with hard rock pebbles on which the dough was baked. The bread was flat, approximately 12 inches in diameter with its sides indented by the hot pebbles of the taboun.

The villagers always greeted my father with smiles and optimism whenever he arrived at their village to repair an engine, a mill or a press. I could tell that when he arrived to help them with their mechanical problems, he was their hero. They all knew my father and he had the reputation among the villages of Palestine that he knew what he was doing, and was frequently the subject of their discussions at the flour mill or the olive press. He was the one who was the expert; he was the student of Schneller, the German School/Orphanage, and the student of the Jew in Tel Aviv. The villagers were optimistic about his skill and always knew that he would find them a solution that would not cost much. They were always anxious to show their generosity as soon as my father arrived, but my father would not have any of that for he had a job to do and he wanted to do it first and quickly. He always told them he would not eat anything or drink coffee or tea when he arrived, as was the custom, until after he finished his work. In the meantime, the villagers would send word to the wives to prepare a meal for the guests (my father and his helpers). The women’s work would start. They would start the fire in the taboun, start baking bread and preparing musakhan, a meal fit for a king, of taboun bread, chicken, onions, sumac and, of course, natural virgin olive oil pressed from olives that grew in the Palestinian hills.

Those were the olive trees that Palestinians considered sacred, for the trees had fed them for thousands of years. They considered them sacred because they were always the symbol of peace, in the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. Palestinians have a famous anecdote about olive trees and tell it frequently: Once upon a time a young man passed a very old sage who was working the fields, planting an olive tree. The young man mocked the old man and yelled, “Old man, what are you doing? That tree takes so long before it bears any fruits, and you look very old to me. You will not likely live long enough to eat from its fruits.” The old man stopped working for a moment, wiped the sweat from his forehead, looked at the young man and replied, “They planted so that we may eat; we plant so that they may eat.” Those were the same olive trees, which were older than my father was and older than his father was, which the shameful Israeli military uprooted and continue to uproot from the Palestinian hills.

When my father finished his work, the whole village would know. He would start the diesel engine to test it and make sure it was working properly. The engine start up would shatter the silence in the village with the sound of that old groaning and moaning diesel engine and its whistle piercing the roof of the engine room. And, if one were close enough to the engine room, one would hear the sound of the flat belts slapping against the rotating pulleys. The whole village would come to greet my father, congratulate him for fixing the problem and thank him for bringing life to the village again. I could tell. I definitely could tell; he was their hero. Then the men would take us to their guesthouse, usually a high place on a second floor where one could see the whole village. Before entering the guesthouse, my father and his crew, accompanied by the village elders, would be invited to wash their hands and faces with water not running from a faucet, but poured from a pitcher by the hand of the village elder as a sign of respect and thanks. Then the guests would be invited into the guesthouse to sit on the floor, on pillows neatly placed around the perimeter of the large reception room. The women would then come in carrying large wooden plates of musakhan on their heads, and the celebration would begin. Sometimes, some young and outspoken person might ask my father what was wrong with the engine or what he had to do to get it working, but that person would immediately be reprimanded in public by an elder for such “interrogation” which might convey lack of faith in the work of the master. But my father didn’t mind talking about his work. He would explain what had to be done and why, or what parts he had to make.

Many of the engines that the villagers used in their cooperatives were old. Some were as old as the years of the First World War. Many of them were single cylinder 100 to 400 horsepower ‘Crosley’ or ‘Deutz’ horizontal engines. Whenever anything went wrong with any part, my father would make the part, for spare parts were often not available, and if they were available from Germany or England, they would be too expensive. He had the knowledge that he gained from Schneller School and the old man Smerling, the tools that he bought with that loan from the rich refugee, and the patience and humility that he acquired from being forced to leave his home and his possessions. I saw much of his work in the shop during the summers when I worked there or when I worked or visited the shop after school during the school year. One summer I saw him cast a whole 24-inch piston from scrap cast iron, machine it, machine the grooves and manufacture the rings, all in a couple of days. His measuring tool was the micrometer, nothing less. His knowledge was awesome. His patience was immeasurable. His accomplishment in the face of economic, social and emotional adversity was great. He had the knowledge, patience and courage to do work that my generation would not dare do ….

For many years after we moved to Ramallah food was scarce as it would be anywhere in the world where there has been conflict or civil disturbance. Meat, particularly, was very expensive because it was so difficult to find. Most families at that time, at least this was true of our family, would go to the butcher shop only once a week, on Sundays, to buy one or two pounds of lamb for the Sunday lunch. The lunch would consist of any one of many lamb dishes, which ranged from vegetable stew with rice on the side to a pan meal (siniyyeh). Most meals would be prepared and cooked at home over a kerosene fire from a hand-pumped air pressure kerosene burner. The siniyyeh meals consisted of prepared meat and other ingredients in a large round pan that was sent to a public bakery, the same one where the families' bread was normally taken to be baked. Most families in Ramallah at that time did not have ovens at home so they sent their dough to the public bakery for a small fee. The siniyyeh was also sent to the same public bakery. Because it takes hours to bake a siniyyeh, one would take it to the bakery around mid-morning and come back to get it around noon, in time for the Sunday lunch. One Sunday afternoon, my sisters and I had just finished our Sunday lunch and were sitting at the balcony of our newest home, overlooking the street. Further down the street lived a friend and companion of mine, Isa. Apparently Isa's family sent their Sunday siniyyeh to the bakery late because it was around two in the afternoon when we saw Isa bringing their siniyyeh home. I was sitting closer to the inside wall of the balcony and my two sisters were sitting to the outside and could see Isa coming down the street toward us.

My sisters joked that Isa must have starved the rest of his family by bringing back their siniyyeh late. We all looked and saw Isa coming toward us from far away, carrying a very large siniyyeh on his head and holding it with one hand. That in itself was normally risky when carrying a large 36-inch aluminum siniyyeh that had just come out of the oven and walking with it, but Isa was not walking; he was carrying the siniyyeh on his head while he was riding a bicycle! As Isa got my sisters’ attention, they remarked how brave it was to ride that way, and what a good biker he was. But as Isa got a glimpse of his attentive audience, he knew that this was his opportunity to impress them even more. As he rode closer to us, Isa let go of the handle bar and was holding the siniyyeh with one hand and had his free hand resting on his knee as he pedaled, and the bike was still going straight with not a hand on the handle bar. My sisters smiled at this courage and rushed to the edge of the balcony to watch Isa, who by then was glowing as he could see the smiles. He must have felt so gratified that he impressed his female audience. That was not enough for Isa, however, who by then was gaining more and more confidence. As he approached us and was under the balcony and his eyes could no longer meet my sisters’ eyes, Isa liberated his other hand from the siniyyeh and stretched out both hands, extending them horizontally toward the sides of his body. I have to admit that Isa did not only impress my sisters, but also impressed me and anyone else who would have seen him demonstrate his acrobatic and cycling skills. Still, Isa was not satisfied and must have felt that he might as well go for the gold. He started rocking the bike from side to side with the bike going forward and sideways, first to the left and then to the right and so on. The glory which Isa was in for a few seconds did not last, as he wiped out just before he arrived to his home, with the siniyyeh rolling down the street and Isa's family’s lunch, which his mother must have spent most of Sunday morning preparing, all over our street. Fortunately the only part of Isa that was hurt was his pride. Later, my sisters asked Isa's sisters about that incident and what they had for lunch that day; Isa's sisters were furious at their brother for showing off. Although this happened over 45 years ago, I’m not sure that Isa ever recovered from the incident.

Isa and I continued to be friends for a long time. One thing that later made us go our separate ways was his political affiliation, which turned out to be much different from mine. When I was in high school, everyone I knew either belonged to a political faction, political party or a group of supporters of one political party or another. There were the communists and their supporters, who were primarily workers and some farmers with a moderate support base amongst the students. In Syria, Jordan and the West Bank, the local communists advocated rebellion against business proprietors, shop owners and the government. They favored the state control of all resources, and advocated the Marxist-Leninist style of socialism. Then there were the Ba’thists, those who belonged to the Ba’th Arab Socialist Party, and their supporters. They were primarily teachers, professionals, farmers, laborers and politicians, with strong support amongst students. The Ba’thists advocated union among all Arab states, freedom from all foreign influence, and social justice, another code word for Arab Socialism. Also there were, to the surprise of most people I talk to today, the Islamic parties, the most predominant of which was the Tahrir Party, an early predecessor to the present day Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Moslem Brotherhood. People generally know little about the existence of the Islamic political movement at that time because Islamists were a very small group and were considered fanatics by the other political groups. They had very little popularity in Palestine and Jordan and were not taken seriously. They did, however, have strong presence in Egypt, and the Moslem Brotherhood is accused of having plotted several assassination attempts on Gamal Abdul Nasser, and later was successful in assassinating Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat. Another political party, which was very popular in parts of Syria and Lebanon, and had little popularity in Jordan and the West Bank, was the Syrian Nationalist Party commonly known as al Hizb al Kawmi al Suri. This was a party which advocated the unity of the countries forming the “Greater Syria,” which included modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and a small part of western Iraq. Since its political agenda excluded any country outside the so-called Greater Syria, it had no popularity and no support in the Arab countries that were geographically excluded from their version of a Greater Syria.

In those days Arab nationalism was a very strong movement throughout the Arab world, especially in the West Bank where I lived. A friend of mine, who was a very loyal Ba’thist and heavily involved in the Arab nationalism movement throughout the 1950s and 1960s, recently attributed the growth in Arab nationalism to a group of Christian Arab intellectuals. During the late 19^th and early 20^th century, a group of Arab intellectuals, which included a large percentage of Christian Arabs, championed the cause of Arab nationalism. According to my friend, the members of this group of thinkers were truly Arab nationalists, but also had the objective of diverting the Arab political stream from potential Islamic fundamentalism, to the more secular objective of uniting the Arab countries, streamlining Arab institutions and efficiently utilizing the natural resources of the region. Many of the Arab nationalists in the Arab world were Christians. Michel Aflaq, a Christian Syrian Arab, was the main thinker and philosopher of the Ba’th Arab Socialist Party, the largest single entity espousing Arab nationalism after WWI. Many of the leaders of the Ba’th Party in Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank were also Christian. Arab nationalism was a means for these intellectuals to escape potential religious persecution at the hands of the few “devout believers,” extremists, among the Moslem Arab population. While not usually an issue deliberately discussed or debated among Arabs, the underlying religious differences within the Arab societies, especially in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, were always lurking beneath the surface, waiting for someone to exploit them. It was the Islamic fundamentalists who were always in hiding, waiting for the right moment to pounce on those differences and exploit them to the fullest, to advance their own agendas. For almost half a century after WWI, a period during which many of the Arab countries gained their independence from western foreign domination, Arab nationalism was a successful alternative to, and diversion from, Islamic extremism. Other alternatives, which also served the purpose of reigning in Islamic fundamentalism, were Arab communism which flourished in Syria and Jordan under the leadership of Christian Arab intellectuals, and Syrian nationalism which was also espoused by Christian Arab intellectuals through the Syrian Nationalist Party. Moslem Arab activists who worked side by side with their Christian compatriots for the cause of those movements never focused on religious differences. One could definitely classify this period, the half century after WWI, as the golden age of religious harmony between the Christian minorities living in the Arab world and the Moslem Arab majority. That is not because the Moslem Arab majority has since changed its attitude or behavior toward the Christian minorities. It is because the Islamic extremists, who are still a minority, have been allowed to become more vocal in their religious campaign against western Christian “enemies” who, in the minds of Moslem extremists, are associated with local Arab Christians.

Political activism in the West Bank at that time was very important, just like dignity, honor and the love of one's country. All activities of high school students seemed to center on politics, not only local but also world politics and their impact on their lives. Students in the West Bank at that time were very politically oriented and in many cases were the cause of many problems for the Government of Jordan and even the cause of the collapse of many a government under King Hussein. One has to keep in mind that the Palestinians, after the 1948 exodus from the part of their homeland which became Israel, were in utter political disarray and were distrustful of the entire world community and with the British and the west in particular….

The Palestinians were drowning in a sea of despair after loosing their homes and their homeland. The disappointment was overwhelming. It was the Palestinians, among all Arabs, who were really affected the most by the outcome of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. They lost their homes, they lost their property and they lost their homeland. They also lost their dignity as a people. As a result of their losses and disappointment, the Palestinian masses were the most fertile grounds, among all Arabs, for any “revolutionary” radical beliefs. Most of those were beliefs that appeared to give them hope that one day their country would be returned, that the glory of Palestine would return and that the state of Israel would succumb to the wishes of the Arab masses.

One of the direct results of the Arab-Israeli War was the Egyptian “Revolution” of 1951 led by Mohammad Nagib, and later by Gamal Abdul Nasser. This was not a revolution of the people like the Communist Revolution or the American Revolution. Rather, it was a coup staged by a group of young, nationalistic Egyptian military officers responding to the dissatisfaction of their people, and their own dissatisfaction, both with Egypt's performance during the Arab-Israeli conflict and, also the incompetence of their military leadership. It was a revolution that was supported by the Egyptian people. They had suffered the consequences of foreign occupation and the injustices of the feudal system that was still being controlled by the feudal landlords, the Pashas of the Egyptian agricultural system. The Egyptian Revolution was wholeheartedly supported by the Arab masses in general and the Palestinians in particular. At that time, Gamal Abdul Nasser was no doubt as popular among the Palestinians and across the Arab world as he was among his own people in Egypt.

Another direct result of the Arab-Israeli War was the tremendous surge in the popularity throughout the Arab world of the Syrian based Ba’th Arab Socialist Party which resulted from a merger of the two most influential political parties in Syria: the Ba’th Arab Party and the Arab Socialist Union. The Ba’thists preached “Unity, Freedom and Socialism” for all Arabs, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf, obviously including the lost land of Palestine in the unity aspect of their “trinity.” It is unlikely that the founders of the party, the most prominent among them the Christian Arab thinker Michel Aflaq and his colleague Akram Hourani, envisioned the speed with which the Ba’th teachings would spread and catch on throughout the Arab world like wildfire. This surge in popularity began in the 1940s, accelerated in the 1950's, and culminated in the mid-1950s, the years I was in high school.

During those years and leading up to them, the Arab masses went into rebellion against any foreign presence, which they labeled “colonialism” particularly directed at the British and the French, and “imperialism” especially directed at the United States. They went into rebellion against their governments. The harder they rebelled, the tougher were the controls and military repression imposed by their governments. Controls were in the form of prison sentences, house arrests, dusk to dawn curfews, selective all-day curfews, random investigations and searches of individuals or groups suspected of political activity, random house searches and arrests, denials of permission to travel outside the country and denial of any governmental routine, but essential, services or formalities. There were uprisings in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Algeria. Some of the rebellions lead to various forms of strikes and civil unrest that did little to force a change in the grip on power exercised by the affected governments such as Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco. Some of the rebellions lead to and were manifested by bloodless military coups such as in Syria. Some lead to military revolts and the deposition of the monarchy such as in Egypt. Yet, others lead to more bloody revolts and massacres of entire royal families as was the case in Iraq.

The people of the Arabian Peninsula were isolated from the rest of the world and from the events, political or otherwise, in the rest of the Arab world. The lack of communication and the absence of any free press or other news media in the Arabian Peninsula only perpetuated their isolation. The Arabian Peninsula had very few urban centers in the 1950s and its inhabitants lived their traditional nomadic lives, uninterested in, and unhampered by, governments until much later in their industrialization cycle. Later, the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula had to deal with the other Arabs and the rest of the world because of trade, the increased demand for oil coming from the outside world and their desire to share in the governance of their newly found states. That was a dream to which they still aspire today and which has been very elusive to them. The Palestinians and the rest of the Mediterranean Arabs have always blamed the Arabs of the Peninsula for their lack of political interest and considered them politically inept, incapable of joining the “Arab Revolution” because of their “default” allegiance to their oil-rich, power-hungry monarchs. Most other Arabs still believe that the Arabs of the Peninsula never experienced the political awakening of the 1950s and continue to live as political slaves under the yoke of their absolute monarchies. Yemen became the proving grounds for the conflict between Gamal Abdul Nasser and the Saudi kings. The Algerians revolted against the French who were still in Algeria in full force, thinking that they would always exercise some presence in that part of the world just as the Israelis nowadays think about their presence in the West Bank and Gaza. Libya was a late bloomer, and even their resistance against western powers was a disappointment in more ways than one and more disappointing than in most other Arab countries.

This, briefly, was the backdrop for the intense political orientation of the Arabs and the Palestinians when I was growing up in Ramallah, and the exposure to politics that I got while I was in school. I sympathized with certain political parties, wrote and distributed leaflets surreptitiously, painted graffiti on the walls under the cover of night, and participated in strikes, political rallies and demonstrations. My friends and I carried leaflets in our pockets knowing well that possession of only one of these was sufficient to ensure a stiff jail sentence. We neatly folded the leaflets and carried them in our pockets, strategically positioned to eject them at the right moment, in front of the right market or in the right shop. I still remember my sisters asking me why most of my pockets had holes in them; they didn’t know that the art of ejecting leaflets in a crowded market demanded a holed-pocket so the leaflet would leave through the pant’s leg without creating suspicion. We painted graffiti in areas that attracted a lot of attention by passersby. During daylight we staked walls that were strategically located, and at night we broke the street light first to dim the area, then prepared for the art of writing. We held meetings when it was unlawful to meet. We met in the open, on the sidewalks, under the watchful eyes of the mukhabarat, the secret police, in places where they least suspected. I still remember an incident when one of my contacts, Ismail, was bringing me a set of leaflets to distribute one afternoon. As he approached the barbershop in el-Bireh where I was waiting for him, I could see that a detective was stopping him. I waited in the barbershop until Ismail arrived. Visibly shaken up, he told me what had happened. The detective stopped him and searched him. While the detective was doing that, Ismail offered the detective a banana from a paper bag he was carrying. The detective took a banana from the bag and let Ismail go. Little did the detective know that the leaflets were in the same bag under the bananas. I can still remember how shaken up Ismail was, for he would have been arrested on the spot and sentenced to a number of years in jail. Although Ismail escaped jail that time, he would not escape arrest and jail in subsequent political activities.

All of our political discourse, the meetings, the leaflets and the graffiti demanded action by the people from their government. They demanded the expulsion of any foreign officials remaining entrenched in the government or military hierarchy, such as John Glub (Glub Pasha) in the Arab legion of the Jordanian Army. They demanded that Arab governments break all ties with the colonialists and imperialists. In response to such actions, the authorities in most of the Arab countries first flirted with the political parties and patronized them. But as these parties became more popular and started to demand a share in governance, the authorities cracked down, and they cracked down very hard. Governments felt that the power of governance was theirs and theirs alone, and no one was going to take that power away from them or dilute it, let alone a bunch of citizens who knew nothing about politics or governance. Arab governments felt that governance was their business and not the business of the people. To start with, due process in most of the Arab countries practically did not exist. After the authorities declared war on the political parties, due process needed a miracle to function, and miracles were hard to come by. Young people, especially students, were arrested in their homes, in their schools and even in the streets, and were quickly whisked away to interrogation centers in secret locations. Families could not find out any information about those arrested for days, and sometimes weeks and months. By the time the families found any information, the arrested would have been moved from Ramallah jails to al Qishleh in Jerusalem, an old building used as a jail and which had been used for the same purpose by the British during their mandate over Palestine and by the Ottoman Turks before them. This same building today continues to be used for that same purpose by the Israeli military occupation forces. Those political prisoners taken to al Qishleh were the lucky ones. Others were shipped to the remote jail in al Jafr, in the desert of East Jordan where no one would dare escape for fear of being lost in the desert. Many Palestinians of my generation and older are graduates of these jails and they still, even today, are proud to have been there for the cause which they still feel justified in having defended.

I was never arrested, not even for an hour. I was probably lucky, or perhaps more cautious than many of my colleagues who ended up in jail. The authorities always collected evidence from the suspects’ homes through unannounced police raids. They looked for subversive literature, literature that advocated political principles in variance with those of the prevailing authority. They looked for leaflets or leaflet making materials such as typewriters and printers. They looked for banned books such as those written by Arabs who advocated republican rule, Arab socialism or principles of the local communist party. They looked for publications written by the political parties, perhaps a party constitution or a party’s political declaration. They looked for any of these items which constituted evidence that the person in whose house they were found was himself or herself a subversive. My house was never searched for any of this material while I lived at home, at least not in the open. But they, the authorities, didn’t always operate in the open.

I can still remember an incident one summer afternoon in Ramallah. My family had a custom that on Sunday afternoons, every member of the family would leave the house in search of his or her interests. It was a general custom in Ramallah in those days for young adults to end up in a movie theater for the afternoon show which normally started around 3:30. After the movie, each would go with their friends for a stroll along Main Street and the more popular Radio Street, then end up in the most popular ice cream parlor, Rukab, on Main Street. My brothers, sisters and I followed this routine for years. My father spent Sunday afternoons with his two best friends from work, and they would go on car rides through town and occasionally walk the same streets we walked. The streets were full, as the town’s population would double on Sundays with an influx of visitors from Jerusalem, Amman, Jericho and Nablus. Ramallah was a summer resort which attracted a lot of visitors. By the time we finished our walks and visit to the ice cream parlor and returned home, it would be almost dark. In those days, our home was a flat on the second floor of a three-story building. When we returned home one Sunday, we were all in absolute shock to find the main door of the flat wide open with the floor littered with clothes, books and papers, as if someone had broken into the house looking for something specific. Neither the bedrooms, nor the kitchen, nor the bathroom were saved from the wrath of those who broke in. In the living room, we had a custom made couch which was essentially an empty box with an upholstered top. It opened up for storage and was usually filled with stored winter clothes. The couch was opened and all of its contents were on the living room floor. The shelves of closets and cupboards were emptied with their contents on the floor and all drawers were emptied and left open. Even the furniture and flower pots left on the balcony were tampered with. At first we assumed that this was the work of robbers, but in those days there were no robberies reported in Ramallah, at least not in broad daylight. Then we talked to the neighbors. Although we were close, they initially refused to talk because they were afraid. They told us that they saw what happened, but that they could not tell us. We knew right away that it was the work of the authorities searching for “subversive” material. We knew that the neighbors could chase a robber away, but they could not lift a finger against the authorities, the mukhabarat.

The mukhabarat did not find any political literature or I certainly would have been arrested. I was careful not to bring anything home, not even a single political leaflet. If I wanted to read anything, books, leaflets or pamphlets, I was careful to read them away from home. A favorite reading place was the Ramallah cemetery where we also held our political meetings on occasion. Little did the mukhabarat know, however, that the leaflets I distributed with my friends were always kept outside my home but not far away. When we first moved to that building, we lived on the first floor. In the back of our living area, there was a small garden that was accessible to all occupants of the building, but was generally used by those living on first floor. I always hid the leaflets and other “subversive” literature in a large tin can, which I buried in the garden between the azaleas and the roses. I continued to use the garden as a hiding place even after we moved to the second floor. I believed that even if the leaflets were ever found by the mabaheth, the detectives and informers, they could never attribute the leaflets to me. The mabaheth never found anything that implicated me and I was careful not to give them a reason to arrest me. Many of my friends, relatives and fellow students were not so fortunate; for this reason, many of us who were not arrested felt guilty, perhaps because we were not convinced that we did our best to serve the cause for which others were arrested and tortured.

I was very active in politics at a young age in Ramallah, although not all of my experience in Ramallah was political, in spite of the political environment during the years when I was in high school. I was also involved in activities that were related to my school or to other interests. One such activity was the Boy Scouts. Some of my older friends were members of the Boy Scouts in Ramallah First Troop, Sariyyat Ramallah al’Ula. Because my closest friend, Nimer, was a member of the Troop, I developed an interest in joining after he recruited me by explaining all of the activities that they were involved in. The Troop consisted of three groups: the Cub Scouts, the Boy Scouts and the Rangers. The age group minimum to join the Boy Scouts was 12 years old and the Rangers 18 years old. I was not quite 12 years old when I applied to join and there was a debate regarding which of the groups I should be accepted in. After many discussions, arguments and my friends’ testimonials, I was judged mature enough to be admitted in the Boy Scouts.

Sariyyat Ramallah al’Ula was headed by a prominent Ramallah personality, Labib Hishmeh, whose sons were friends of mine and one of them, Basem, was also my classmate. Labib was very well connected in Ramallah. He had the respect of his peers and the city council. He was very interested in the activities of the Troop and always made sure we had enough suitable activities to keep us busy. Labib always arranged for the Troop to lead public parades and religious (Christian) processions. The most memorable of these was the Sabt-el-Noor procession. Sabt-el-Noor, Saturday of the Light, celebrated the burst of light (flame) from the gravesite of Jesus Christ, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, on the afternoon before He rose on Easter Sunday. It was a tradition in which all Palestinian Christians participated. Every Saturday before Easter, the elders from every Christian village and town went to Jerusalem to bring the flame in bundles of candles. Upon the return of the Ramallah elders from Jerusalem around mid-afternoon, all members of Sariyyat Ramallah al’Ula would be waiting at al Manarah, the city square, and would lead the elders carrying the flame to the Greek Orthodox Church in a procession through the city’s main street leading to the Church. The procession was lead by the Troop and the Church officials, and all citizens who were interested would participate by walking in the parade and going to church at the end of the procession. The Troop had a band, with only trumpets and drums, which played intermittently in between the church choir singing “Christ is risen.” The band members were looked upon as the elite of the Troop members. I was delighted that within a short period of time, I was admitted to the band and was trained to be a drummer.

Another memorable experience with the Troop was camping. During the summer, the Boy Scouts would set up camp in the mountains surrounding Ramallah. The camp was maintained by the Boy Scouts, all of school-age and on summer break. Every night we had a campfire gathering called Nadwa Adabiyyah, a cultural evening, during which we recited poetry, told stories, acted in plays or skits, or simply had discussions which usually centered on politics of the country, the Arab world and the two superpowers. Similar camps were set up during the Christmas break. Because of the cold weather in Ramallah at that time of year, the winter camp was usually set up around Jericho in the Jordan valley. I remember that one of the memorable sites to visit while camping around Jericho was Mount Crontol, the mountain top site where Jesus was tempted after fasting for forty days and nights in the Jericho Desert. The activities of Sariyyat Ramallah al’Ula also included day trips or overnight trips designed for weekends when school was in session. One of the day trips was to Hebron and Bethlehem to visit some of the very old biblical sites, such as Ballouta and Burak Suleiman. Ballouta was the site of the Oak Tree under which Abraham was to sacrifice his son as a demonstration of his loyalty to God, but then was stopped by an angel who brought him a lamb to sacrifice instead. I visited the Oak Tree again recently with my wife at the Moscowbiyyeh, the grounds of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Hebron. I felt extremely sad that the tree had no green branches as I remembered it 45 years ago. It is probably dead although it is still standing and supported by a steel structure. Burak Suleiman is the site of King Solomon’s pools, which he built for his wife’s recreation. The pools were still surrounded by pine trees up high in the mountains south of Jerusalem. Some of the trips with the Boy Scouts took us to the Crusader Castles in the Eastern Highlands guarding the entry into the Jordan Valley. Some took us to remnants of Roman cities such as Jerash and to many Islamic era sites from the days of the Omayyads and the Abbasids. They also took us to the magnificent Qal’at al Rabad, in Ajloun, the one stubborn castle which was not build by the Crusaders, but by the defenders against them. Some of the trips were more recreational than educational, such as trips to the valleys with flowing water, including Wadi al Beidan outside Nablus and al Wad outside Ramallah. Other recreational trips took us to Nahr al Azraq and the orange groves around Jericho.

Regardless how much my friends and I enjoyed these activities, we were not happy with the status quo and we knew that some day soon we had to make a basic change in the way we lived our lives. We knew we could not, should not, accept what we were dealt and if collective action would not result in improving our circumstances, then we had to make changes in our individual lives through individual action. In the meantime, my friends and I continued to debate the question, should one leave this society and look for something better or should one work to change the society in the hope of making it a better place for everyone. The latter seemed hopeless most of the time, with odds stacked against our ability to exercise any influence because of the strength of the opposition. Those who were in power had a monopoly on access to all of the productive elements of society as it existed. They controlled access to all institutions and manipulated them for their own benefit. Changing the society we lived in continued to be an elusive goal, a dream we could not fulfill. We now had to turn our attention to changing our own lives, in spite of the opposition and their adversarial benevolence.

While we were growing up as teenagers, my friends and I had many escapes from the nightmare in which we lived. One of them was a routine that, I am convinced, led to our salvation. My Christian friends and I followed the same routine every Sunday morning. First, my friend Nimer would pass by my home around mid-morning and call for me. I would be waiting and ready to leave on our venture. Then, both of us would walk to Bahij’s home and yell for him. Bahij would be ready and waiting, and as soon as he heard our yell, he would come out to join us. The three of us would then walk on Main Street toward the Jerusalem bus stop at al Manarah. On the way, we often found one or more friends, perhaps Jalal, or others who would join our party. We would take a service shuttle to Jerusalem, to the Damascus Gate, and walk to Jafar, the sweets café located at Suq Khan Ez-Zeit, a few minutes walk inside the Gate. After we had kunafah, the Arabic sweet made of local cheese, cream of wheat and sugar syrup with rose water, we would continue our walk to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The Church would be crowded with tourists on Sundays, so we would only stay for a few minutes. If the line to Jesus’ grave was short, we would go into the grave, say a short prayer and ask the Lord to deliver us from the society in which we lived. We made our wish, always the same, and each of us must have had the same wish, to give us the wisdom and the strength to leave for a better place. If the line was too long, we would pray in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary at the Golgotha, or in front of one of the other icons. We would then leave the Church, walk back to Damascus Gate and pick up the shuttle outside the Gate to return to Ramallah, and then walk home in time to join our respective families for Sunday lunch. That was a routine that we followed week after week, month after month and year after year, until our prayers were answered. We were delivered from the society in which we lived and, with the help of the Lord, we did leave on a long journey to follow our dreams.

Courtesy of and ©2001 by Michael S. Ladah.  The writer is an Arab American who was born in Jaffa, Palestine. He lived and worked in various parts of the Middle East.  He is the author of “Quicksand, Oil and Dreams: The story of one of five million dispossessed Palestinians.”  This article is an extract from the author's book Quicksand Oil and Dreams, from the chapter with the same name.

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