Excerpted with permission from In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Verso Press, London, 2002.

On the night of January 4, 1948, three days before Christmas, we went to sleep as usual. It was raining heavily with occasional bursts of thunder and lightning. Fatima was staying with us that night and was sleeping on her mattress on the floor of our bedroom. Suddenly, at some time in the night, I awoke from a deep sleep and found myself in the middle of a nightmare crashing with thunder and lightning. For a few seconds, I could not distinguish dream from reality. The bedroom seemed to be full of strangers until I realised that they were my parents. There was a tremendous noise of shattering glass, shootings and explosions which seemed to be coming from our back garden. Rex was barking wildly. My mother dragged me off the bed and sat me up with Ziyad against the bedroom wall. The floor was cold against my warm body. She sat in front of us, her back pushing against our knees. The room was strangely lit up and as I twisted round towards the window I saw that the sky was orange, glowing and dancing. “Is it dawn?” I asked. “Is that the sun?” No one answered and I could feel my mother’s body shaking in her nightdress. My father was on the other side of Ziyad, sitting against the wall with Siham and Fatima squeezed in next to him. They all stared ahead and Fatima was intoning in a whisper the words of the Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Quran, over and over again:

I thought that my mother was whispering something too, but I did not know what it was. A shattering bang shook the windows as a great clap of thunder exploded overhead. And then I knew that I was afraid, more afraid than I had ever been in my life before. As Ziyad turned his face towards the window, I saw that his eyes were enormous but he never made a sound. After who knows how long, the noise outside began to abate. And with that, my mother started to move forward. “Stop!” my father hissed. “There may be another explosion.” He made us wait a little longer until the sky stopped being so red. It now had a far-away glow, like the embers in our charcoal stove. My leg was numb and the palm of my hand hurt where I had pressed it against the floor. We got up and groped our way out into the liwan. It was about two o’clock in the morning. Torrential rain lashed against the shutters. Fatima made coffee, but neither I nor Ziyad wanted anything, and our mother made us go back to bed. Siham followed soon after, but I don’t think our parents slept at all the rest of that night.

By morning, when we got up, jaded and tired, we found no one in the house and the street looked deserted too. Everybody had gone to the scene of last night’s explosion, the Semiramis Hotel in the road directly behind ours. This hotel was owned by a Palestinian Greek and had been fully occupied on the night when it was blown up. We decided to go and see for ourselves, walking through the wet, slippery streets in a howling icy wind with Rex close on our heels. The windows of several houses in the vicinity gaped, their glass shattered by the explosion of the night before. There was a great crowd around the devastated building which was still smoking and there was a strong smell of kerosene. Their faces were cold and pinched and many people were crying.

Municipal workers and British soldiers were trying to clear the rubble and still dragging bodies out. Some of these were very dark- skinned, Sudanese kitchen workers. As the crowed surged forward to see the bodies, in case there was a relative or friend amongst them, the soldiers pushed them back. Because Ziyad and I were small, we had got right to the front and they shouted at us to go back home. All the dead and wounded who were accessible had been taken away in the small hours, but the search was now on for others still buried beneath the slabs of concrete and stone and unlikely to be alive. An elderly couple next to where we were standing pressed forward repeatedly to get close to the digging. “They must find him,” the man kept saying. But she said, “No. It’s no use, he’s gone. He could have been alive, standing and watching just like these people, but he’s not.”

We pulled away to go back and noticed for the first time that amongst the debris on the ground was a large quantity of headed hotel stationery, some of it grubby, and stacks of wet envelopes. Ziyad bent down and started to pick it up and I followed suit. “Stop that!” cried Siham but we kept hold of what we had picked up. Neither of us could take in the enormity of what we had just seen; to us this was an opportunity for play and mischief. But the images would remain to haunt us one day. Later that morning, it emerged that it was the Haganah which had planted the bombs in the hotel, thinking that it was being used as a base for an AHC unit, “a hotbed of armed Arabs,” as they called it.

In fact, this was not the case, although Arab journalists were in the habit of staying at the Semiramis and it was a well-known meeting place for activists of all political persuasions. Some thirty people perished in the bombing, amongst them the hotel owner and the Spanish consul. The rest included several families all of whose members were killed, except in one case where the parents died and their three children lived. We saw them wandering about in the rubble looking dazed.

The Haganah command expressed condemnation of the incident and regret and said that it had been carried out without its knowledge by a splinter group. But everyone around us said, “Liars and sons of dogs!” People demanded that greater protection be provided by the AHC or from the Jaysh al- Inqath (the army of salvation), which consisted of volunteer soldiers from Arab states recruited by the Arab League. The AHC had national committees in the towns all over the country, but the defence of Jerusalem was part of a special force. A unit of this force arrived in Qatamon at the beginning of the year and took up residence in Abu Ahmad’s house in the road above ours, which had stood empty ever since he and his family had left for Egypt.

It was headed by a man called Ibrahim Abu Dayyeh who had a reputation for bravery, but the men he commanded were few in number and poorly armed. Jewish soldiers, who were better armed and better trained, frequently chased them around and, though they assured everyone that they would defend us against all odds, it was obvious to everyone that they did not have the capacity. One evening, we even found one of them hiding in our garden shed, having been chased by an armed Jewish unit. He was very young, not much older than Siham, and trembling with fright. “It’s no good. We can’t compete with the Jews. They’ve got more men, more arms and more money,” everyone said.

We heard that the men of the area met at the house of Khalil Sakakini to discuss what security measures ought to be taken. After the devastating attack on the Semiramis, it was clear to everyone that we were vulnerable and alone. The men decided to put up barricades at both ends of the roads and to have them manned. But only five people had guns and the rest did not know how to use weapons. There was consternation and in the end they drew up a rota of the people with weapons whose job it would be to guard the defence posts every night. Our father did not share in this rota, but he and others who did not take part paid a monthly fee towards the costs. This effort did not last long, however, for one night, Jewish gunmen shot and killed the man on duty.

There was terrific shock and mourning and then recriminations. “For God’s sake, who is there left to guard anyway?” asked Daud Jouzeh sadly. He said this because in the days which followed the bombing of the Semiramis, there was a panic exodus from Qatamon. The months of instability and fear, culminating in this incident, had finally broken people’s resistance. Those of the Arabs who were still holding out murmured, “They ought to be ashamed of themselves. They’re doing just what the Jews want them to.” The National Committee tried to persuade them not to go. They had received orders from the AHC on no account to allow anyone to leave. “If you go, the Mufti will only order you to return,” they warned. “Or he will bring in Arab fighters to take your place. So, better for you to stay.”

Whether because people heeded this or not, they first tried moving only from one part of Qatamon to another, hoping it would be safer, but others like my mother’s friend Emily went to the Old City for the same reason. Yet others went out of Jerusalem or Palestine altogether, and often in such cases the women and children were evacuated first and the men stayed behind. But as the danger grew without any visible support from anyone, least of all the AHC and its local committees, many of the men followed their families and the majority left Palestine. “Fine for them to talk, but who will care when our children get killed?” they said as they came to say goodbye to us. “Still, it won’t be for long. Just until the troubles die down.”

But far from dying down, the troubles continued to get worse. It was as if the Jewish forces no longer felt restrained from unleashing all-out attacks against our neighbourhood after the small number of Jews who had lived amongst us departed. The Kramers went to Tel Aviv at the end of 1947 in the wake of the turbulence which followed the partition resolution, but the Jewish doctor hung on into the new year. When Arab snipers shot at him as he walked along the road soon after the Semiramis bombing, he left for Tel Aviv too.

At the end of January, the Haganah blew up another building in our vicinity, this time the big Shahin house on the edge of Qatamon. The Shahins were a wealthy family and had a beautiful villa standing in open ground at the top of Qatamon; no one could think why they had been targeted, except perhaps that the house might have been used at one point as a base by Arab snipers. Ever since one such sniper had shot dead a Jewish cyclist in Rehavia, the Haganah had instituted a policy of blowing up any Arab house which they suspected of harbouring gunmen. As February came, the sound of gunfire in the air was a frequent occurrence. From time to time, it was punctuated by explosions which vividly brought back the memory of the Semiramis. We had found this difficult to forget and whenever anyone even banged a door shut in the house, Siham would jump and start trembling.

Word came to my father at his office from a family friend of ours in Tulkarm, Hamdan Samara, urging him to move his books out of Jerusalem. “I will store them for you in Jenin where they can be safe,” he wrote. Jenin was a town to the north of Tulkarm. “You may be forced to leave your house, and you never know, the Jews might pillage your library.” My father had an extensive and unusual collection of books in Arabic and English, lovingly bought over the years, which he treasured. “Will you take up his offer?” my mother asked. “No,” he laughed. “We’re not going to be leaving and no one is going to harm my books.”

By now, Ziyad and I were told not to go out onto the road because it was too dangerous. He and his friends took no notice of this, however; they found the whole thing rather exciting, especially when they went out on patrol with Abu Dayyeh’s men like real soldiers looking for Jewish snipers. They never found any, but usually came back with a collection of the spent cartridges and used bullets which had been fired by the snipers. These had foreign markings, Belgian, French, Czech and others, and Ziyad would line them up excitedly according to shape and place of origin. “What do you want with those horrible things?” our mother said. “Get rid of them!”
At other times, he went out on his own with Rex in tow, apparently unafraid. On one such jaunt, he ventured as far as Talbiyya which was a mixed Arab-Jewish neighbourhood. As he walked down a street which, unknown to him, was mostly inhabited by Jews, he saw a foreign-looking man on a balcony above him suddenly spring up and aim a rifle directly towards him. Rex started to jump up, barking and growling, and the man shouted out in broken Arabic, “Go away! Get out!” He was so threatening, and the street so empty, that Ziyad turned and ran off as fast as he could. He arrived home, panting with fear. After that, he never tried going to Talbiyya again.

The assault on our part of town was especially concentrated because, in company with other West Jerusalem neighbourhoods like Talbiyya, Sheikh Jarrah, Romema and Lifta, we formed the “seam” with the Jewish areas to the west of us and thus came under repeated attack by the Jewish forces. All these districts were either mixed or predominantly Arab, and the news which reached us from there was all grim. Because of the attacks, people were frightened and were starting to leave their homes. All through January and February, long queues of cars packed with people and luggage filed out of the streets on their way to safer places. The AHC were worried; they issued threats through the local committees and imposed punishments against anyone leaving. But as had happened in Qatamon, no one took any

*Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian doctor of medicine, author and academic. She writes frequently on Palestinian issues in newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Nation andJournal of Palestine Studies. She is a fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Arab & Islamic studies at Exeter University.