June 5, 1967 Home
On June 7, 1967, Luba Sihwail rode with the windows down and the radio on in her blue Buick sedan. Spring always reminded her of home. Even though these outskirts of Baltimore City were nothing like her faraway village, she thought Maryland was nevertheless quite pretty.
Luba had left her husband George's rug installation shop and had given herself fifteen minutes, just enough time, to reach her daughters' elementary school. Each day she would vary her route, taking a different tributary that connected the two major roads, Hartford and Belair, between which her life was contained. With its nicer houses -- fully detached single-family structures -- Hamilton Avenue was her favorite. Luba liked to pick a house -- always one with a wraparound porch -- and fantasize she lived there instead of in the tiny apartment they rented, just a few streets away, that overlooked the vast cemetery on Moravia Road.
Outside her window, the trim and manicured lawns, full of verdant green grass, were so different from home, where the terrain was rugged and allowed to remain wild. The land there was interspersed instead with dirt, rocks, and plants that thrived in a climate where it did not rain for half the year. Americans seemed intent on bringing the earth in line, smoothing Maryland's modest crags into even rivers of asphalt, along which Luba now drove. The houses that stood at perfect attention along the roads were made of uniform bricks cast in a die or siding completely level. Each house was so like its neighbors but for some variation such as the color of the shutters, the location of the driveway, or the hue of the roof 's shingles. Back home, the houses reflected the needs and means of the individual families that built them and were constructed with hand-chiseled stone, each one an echo of the flicks of the wrist that had formed them.
But it was spring now and spring anywhere always reminded Luba of Ramallah, her village in Palestine. There, when the winter rains finally gave way to the unadulterated blue skies that lasted all spring and summer long, Luba, her sisters, and the neighbors' boys -- the three sons of a Palestinian father and a German mother -- would race the two miles to the top of one of Ramallah's hills and shout across the valley. The boomerang of their voices' echo would delight them. They would then run down into the low field separating the hills, turning over the rocks on their path to watch what scorpions, little snakes, and centipedes they could find. They picked wild anemones, tulips, narcissus, and cyclamens before returning home. Upon seeing the frenzied bouquets, Luba's mother would admonish her children for bringing more flowers than she had vases before filling pots usually used for cooking with water and standing the blooms upright.
How was her mother now? Luba wondered.
Since Monday, Luba had kept the radio on constantly -- at the house, at the store, in the car. A new war close to home had erupted in the Middle East, and each evening she and George watched it unfold on American nightly news.
In a strike meant to preempt what the Israelis claimed was an imminent Egyptian offensive, Israel had on Monday, June 5, 1967, launched an air attack against Egyptian airfields, destroying dozens of planes parked on the runways and killing dozens of Egyptian pilots. In retaliation, Syrian, Jordanian, and Iraqi planes had attacked Israel. Israel responded by bombing Syrian, Iraqi, and Jordanian bases, quickly winning air supremacy. Its ground forces had also crossed into the Sinai, defeating Egyptian troops along the way. Then on Tuesday, Israel had wrested control of Gaza from Egypt. And much closer to Ramallah, fighting between the Jordanians and Israelis had yielded control of Palestinian cities Hebron and Bethlehem to the Israelis.
Luba had convinced George to put off buying a house here in Baltimore so they could one day -- when the time was right -- return home. But they always seemed to be waiting for the time to be right, and nearly ten years had passed since they had first arrived in Baltimore. With this new war, Luba was starting to panic that things would never be good enough, stable enough, prosperous enough for them to return home.
In Ramallah, they had gotten used to conflict bringing change to their lives. The creation of the state of Israel had seen Palestinian refugees, like George and his family, pour into Luba's village. Many, like George's family, had walked for days and arrived on foot with what little of their belongings they could carry. The amputation of the Palestinian cities, towns, and villages that became part of Israel, the destruction of many others that were cleared to make way for the new state, and the subsequent Jordanian domination of the West Bank meant economic hardships for them all.
But to Luba, it seemed that life-threatening violence came only accidentally to Ramallah. In 1948, an errant bomb intended for the nearby headquarters of the Arab Legion had instead crashed down on her family's house, forcing them out into the midnight darkness in their nightgowns and robes. The explosion had shattered all the glass panes in the house and annihilated two large peach trees and one fig tree. Where the trees had been, they found only craters. When Luba's mother went to retrieve her baby Isa from his crib, she found a puddle of shards and a big piece of sharpened glass balancing on the blanket that covered his body -- mercifully his exposed face and head were unscathed. Throughout the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, they had kept their suitcases packed and waiting by the door, should a truce never happen. When it finally did in April 1949, a kind of normalcy had descended, with both sides menacingly entrenched.
Yet despite the fact that the conflict might not be resolved anytime soon and that Ramallah might always be ringed by trouble, Luba believed it was bound to forever remain free from Israeli control. Maybe that should be good enough reason to just return home.
For now, though, she would be traveling only in Baltimore, and mostly between house, store, and school. With school soon to be out, that routine would at least change, and Luba would shuttle their children to dance, baton, and piano lessons instead. Even if she and George did not have enough money to take a proper vacation, the girls would have a full summer indeed.
Luba pulled into the parking lot of Gardenville Elementary and saw her daughters Sana and Mona waiting -- as they did every day -- at the school's entrance. Sana had her great-grandfather's blond hair, cropped short, and Mona's auburn hair sported the two braids that Luba wove each morning.
Sana jumped up front; it was her turn to sit next to Luba. Luba quizzed them about how their day had been and what homework they would be working on once they got back to the shop.
"Mom," Mona interrupted from the back, before switching to Arabic. "I went to the teacher today, and I told her 'Mrs. Dishler, I don't like how you're doing your hair.' "
Luba looked at her in the rearview mirror. Mona's teacher was an older woman who always wore her long blonde hair neatly pinned in a bun.
"I told her," Mona continued, " 'You should do it differently. You should let your hair down.' "
"You did not tell your teacher this!" Luba exclaimed, trying not to laugh.
"Yes I did!" Mona retorted, quite serious.
"Mona, you don't talk like this to a teacher," Luba admonished.
"Well, she would look prettier," Mona responded. "What's wrong with that?"
On the radio, the music was interrupted with a special news report. Luba hushed the girls.
Violence had escalated in the Middle East. Israeli forces had captured the Old City in East Jerusalem, Sharm el-Sheikh in the Sinai, and several Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were fleeing into Jordan.
Luba needed to hear precisely which villages in the West Bank had been taken.
Jericho had fallen.
And Ramallah -- Ramallah was now under Israeli control.
Luba let out a heaving scream before moaning "Not Ramallah, not Ramallah!" She wanted to take her head in both hands, but she caught herself and instead banged the steering wheel repeatedly.
Sana and Mona immediately fell silent and stared, startled, at their mother.
Luba's mind quickly traveled to her parents, at home in their house in Ramallah, and she fought the terror of the Deir Yassin massacre creeping into her head. The mere thought of it still sent a chill down her spine.*
What would happen to her parents? Would the Israelis steal anything? Would they bomb anywhere? Kill anyone? Luba panicked that she would never see her parents again. Would she ever go home now? Would there ever be peace? She began to sob. " What's wrong, Mom?" Sana asked.
Everything was wrong, and Luba could barely see the road in front of her. She wiped at her tears with her sleeves and the backs of her hands.
Sana looked up at her and asked, "Is it your headache again?"
Luba strolled side by side with George in the British Protectorate of Aden in the early months of 1958. The whispering of the calm waters of the Gulf, fed by the Red and Arabian Seas, kept them company as they chatted and waited for the Abayan Development Board car to return. The British cotton company for which George worked in the remote village of Ja'ar had arranged for them to travel to Aden so that they could fetch the groceries not available in the village. They had finished quickly, but the driver would not be back for them for another two hours.
Abayan Board had hired George just months before as an accountant. Founded with a substantial loan from the British government, the company had put in place a series of major irrigation works to convert the land in Abayan for cotton cultivation. With earnings from cotton exportation, the Abayan district had grown into quite a community, with roads, running water, and electricity.
Great Britain had been in Aden since 1839, when it invad...
