According to this classification, the actual age of the youth groups that form the active elements of the intifada cuts across two of these stages. This situation has actually created a language problem for Palestinians when talking about this group. In Arabic newspapers, political classes, social science articles, and other formal settings using classical Arabic, the term atfal is used as the officially recognized translation English "children." It is defined to cover both males and females -birth to sixteen years of age, and it therefore covers the young males we are discussing. Thus, in formal Palestinian culture, especially and other literary forms, such terms as atfal el-hijareh (literally, children of the stones," meaning stone-throwing children) are in vogue. These poetic forms have great appeal for Palestinians and Arabs in general because, even here, the term "children" has connotations of a group of adolescents than it denotes in actuality. As a result, the Israeli enemy is portrayed with all its armies and military power as failing to subdue the mighty little Palestinian children after several years of intifada. On the other hand, Palestinians, using colloquial language and discussing their daily affairs under the unstable conditions of the intifada, are usually confused about how to refer to these youths and often vacillate between the three terms atfal, awlad, and shabab; but they do not feel comfortable with any of them. Atfal and awlad would be insulting particularly to older youths, because of their age, and to all youths because it detracts from the seriousness of the role they are playing in the intifada. Shabab, which is the term preferred by the youths themselves and which causes many of the adults within earshot to snicker, is suitable for the role but too dignified for the ages of most of them.

A compromise solution has been reached by some people in an attempt to resolve the contradiction between the ages and roles of these youths; they refer to them as shabab izghar, or "little shabab." This, I expect, will become the permanent colloquial linguistic designator for the new perceptual category created by changes in the reality of Palestinian society.

A body of narratives, like ours, can be analyzed in many ways and can produce a variety of answers depending on the angle from which we approach it, the dimensions along which we classify it, and the questions we pose about it. In this discussion I am interested in the types of characters that appear in these legends and the types of roles these characters perform in the legends. In particular, I am interested here in the Palestinian female characters appearing in my collection of intifada legends.

In folk legends, as with all traditional genres of folk narratives, there is always "the tendency for only two characters to be on stage at one time or even for a complete tale to have no more than one or two characters" (Williams 1984:217). The legend, as one of the shortest narrative forms and usually having only one episode, tends to be of the latter kind. The major reason for this tendency in folk narratives general, and in the legend in particular, is that folk narratives typically convey a struggle or conflict between two parties or forces, each represented on the stage by one person at a time. When more than two characters appear simultaneously, two of them are usually the main characters of the narrative, while the others are supporting character on either side.(8)When a complete tale has no more than one character is usually because the other party to the struggle is an intangible supernatural force.

The legend normally consists of one single episode that takes place one location or within a small area. The episode typically ends with resolution of the struggle in favor of one of the contestants, usually the party by whom or among whom the legend was created. In such cases the resolution is of the nature of wish fulfillment. When a legend created by a group shows the enemy emerging victorious, it usually serves as a warning to the group members of what may happen if the enemy wins, and it also helps them to come to terms with a bitter reality. The tragic endings of such legends are sometimes replaced by humorous ones - often of the black humor type - at the hands of some individuals. Such individuals use humor in order to relieve their anxiety by distancing themselves from the course of events and by making the terrifying events look outlandish and ridiculous and thus more acceptable (Ballard 1984:12).

In Palestinian intifada legends the contestants are clearly the Palestinians and the Israelis. The Israeli side is invariably represented by one or more male military personnel - a soldier, an officer, the military governor, or a group of soldiers or border policemen - but never by civilians, not even the settlers who in reality play a significant role in the Israeli effort to put down the intifada. However, in this discussion we are interested in the representatives of the Palestinian side of the conflict as portrayed in the legends.

The Legends

Of the 237 narratives in my collection, the Palestinian representatives contestants are exclusively male in 148 of them and exclusively female in only 15. In 23 cases the Palestinian side is represented by an entire community, and in 8 cases by an animal belonging to a Palestinian.The remaining 43 cases have each a cast of both Palestinian males and females.

In the 148 narratives with exclusively male actors on the Palestinian side, the actors consist mainly of members of the group we have described above - the young shabab -although some older men and infant males also appear in a small number of incidents. I will leave the discussion of these particular narratives for a future essay and will limit my discussion here to the female characters of the 58 items involving a Palestinian cast that is partly or exclusively female. I will be investigating the questions of who these females are and what kinds of roles they play in these narratives.

From a purely quantitative viewpoint, we may note that male characters appear in about 93 percent of all the narratives in which Palestinians are not represented by a community, a crowd, or an animal, while females appear in only about 28 percent of these cases. In other words, there are approximately 3.3 male characters for each female character.

The comparison, however, is more meaningful when we turn to qualitative analysis. The male characters consist primarily of one age group, namely the young shabab, while the females are mainly adult or elderly women. The male characters are restricted essentially to one kind of role: that of direct confrontation with Israeli soldiers, while the females are given a much wider range of roles to play in these narratives. Female characters often come to the aid, support, or protection of the males, but the males never reciprocate. Most of the credit given to female characters comes from their association with male heroes, while males are glorified for their own acts of heroism.

After this very short comparison of the male and female characters this collection of narratives, we can now turn to the analysis of internal variations within the female sample. The female characters that appear in 58 narratives can be divided into two main categories: adult women (marah, plural nisswan), who appear in 45 cases, and young girls of marriageable age (bint, plural banat), who appear in 15 cases. Two cases have both a woman and a girl. The adult women are portrayed as having a much more significant role to play than that of the young girls Adult women, in the 45 narratives where they appear, represent the only or the major character on the Palestinian side in 26 cases, and a supporting character to a male hero in the other 19 instances. As the, major or the central Palestinian figure in these 26 narratives, the adult: woman plays one of two roles: the heroine or a naive peasant woman,

As a heroine, the adult Palestinian woman may confront the Israeli soldier, involve him in a physical fight, and defeat him. Following are two such cases. The first was collected from the town of Jenin in the northern part of the West Bank in April 1989 and the other from the city of Gaza in May 1989.(9)

A woman was participating in a demonstration in Jenin when she got into a shouting argument with an Israeli soldier. The woman shouted to the soldier that if he was to put his gun aside, she would show him who was the more courageous of the two. The soldier accepted the challenge and put his gun aside. The woman attacked him and with one blow knocked him down on the ground, sat on him, and continued to beat him until the other soldiers came and saved him.

One time, a woman went out during a curfew. Some soldiers met her and asked where she was going. She answered that she was going to get food for her children. They told her to go home. The woman told the officer, "I'll hit you if you don't let me go!" The officer said, "Let me see you do it!" The woman rushed at the officer and started hitting. One of the soldiers hit her with the butt of his rifle. She fell to the ground. The soldiers left; only one of them stayed behind. He took off his uniform and helmet (wanting to rape her). When he came close to her, she grabbed him by the neck and tried to strangle him. He started to scream. Other women came and released him from her grip and sent him, naked, back to his officer.

The adult woman can also become a heroine by showing great courage and by setting an example for other Palestinians of how to behave at the time of great stress when weaker people may feel defeated and crushed. Such is the message of one narrative that was collected in the town of Ramallah in June 1990:

One time there was a woman from the village near Jenin. This woman's son threw a firebomb at the [Israeli] soldiers. The soldiers came and blew up her house [as a punishment]. When the woman saw what had happened, she started to sing joyfully. The officer asked why she was so happy. She answered, "The streets of our village had almost run out of stones [to throw at the soldiers]. Now that you have blown up my house, [I am happy because] we have lots of them "

Most often, however, the heroic feats carried out by courageous adult women consist of protecting the young shabab and saving them from being harmed by the Israeli soldiers. In order to achieve their goal, women have to be creative, courageous, and willing to make heavy sacrifices. Hence, a woman may have to put on a big act in order to save a young man from being arrested, as was the case in this narrative, which was collected in Ramallah in July 1989:

A group of soldiers stopped a young shab in the marketplace and were about to take him away. A woman who was shopping in the vicinity saw what was happening. Immediately, she threw herself at the soldiers and started shouting and screaming, telling the soldiers to let her son go because he had not done anything but was simply walking with her while shopping. She kept pulling and tugging at the boy until she got him loose. As she walked away with him hand in hand, one of the passers-by heard the woman ask the boy, "Which family are you from, dear?"

A woman may also have to go through some awkward and embarrassing moments in order to prevent the arrest of a young shab. The following narrative was collected from a forty-year-old woman from Gaza in July 1989:

One time, a young shab threw a Molotov cocktail at the soldiers and ran into Shifa Hospital, and the soldiers followed him into the hospital. He ran into the reception room. He was so scared that he became confused and did not know where to hide. There was a woman there from Khan Yunis with a dayer [a long, flowing, black skirt]. She called to him and hid him between her legs under the dayer. And she said to him, "Stay there, you are like a son of mine." The soldiers came after him to the reception room but couldn't find him. When they left, he came out.

This scenario is a very popular theme, and variations on this narrative were collected in several parts of the occupied territories. In several cases, the story, mercifully, specifies that the young shab was only eight or nine years old. A test that is harder to go through in trying to rescue a young man involves a woman's coming close to compromising the family honor. The following story was collected from a twenty-year-old woman from Nablus in April 1989:

One time, there were troubles in the streets of the Old City [of Nablus]. One young man ran into a nearby house, which had only a woman and her young daughter living in it. The girl was, at the time, sleeping in her own room. The woman closed the door behind the young man, but the soldiers were chasing him and started pounding at the door. She said to the young man, "Go into that room, change your clothes, put on this pair of pajamas and get in bed next to my daughter. Please hurry up and don't hesitate." The young man did what the woman told him to do, while she went and opened the door for the soldiers. They said, "We believe that a young man just ran into the house, where is he?" She answered, "There is no one in the house except me and my daughter and her husband. You can go in and see for yourselves." They went in and there was no one except a man sleeping with his wife, so they left. The young man got up, put on his clothes, thanked the woman, and left. Two days later the young man came back and told the woman, "You trusted me with your daughter, and I lived up to your trust, and now I have come to ask for your daughter's hand to be my wife."

We are left to assume that the mother and daughter agreed to his proposal and the couple lived happily ever after.

However, try as they may, women cannot rescue all the young shabab, and some of them inevitably get killed and become martyrs (shahid, plural shuhada). But even in the case of a shahid, the woman can still try to prevent the body from being taken to the Abu Kbir Medicid Center, where it would be dissected by army doctors, or worse yet, have some parts of the body stolen for organ transplants. The following is a story in which a woman's efforts paid off and the body was rescued. The story was collected from a twenty-five-year-old housewife from Gaza in July 1989:

One time, one of the shabab were killed. One of his friends carried the body on his shoulders and Started running and shouting, "Shahid! Shahid!" He did not know where to take the body [to hide it], and bullets were falling all around him like a hailstorm. A woman saw him and called to him. He went to her and said, "Hide him! Hide him! We don't want the soldiers to take him to Abu Kbir." The woman had a tabun [an outdoor clay oven] for baking bread, and next to it there was a large pile of dried branches [used for fuel for the oven]. She made an opening in the branches, placed the body in it and piled more branches on top of it. In a little while, the soldiers came into the house and searched for the body but could not find anything, so they left.

According to the narratives in our collection, besides the heroic role portrayed in the narratives thus far, a woman occupying the center stage as a representative of the Palestinian party in the struggle may play only one other role: the role of a simple, naive peasant woman. This role is similar to that of the "wise fool," which is usually portrayed by the lovable character of "Hodja" in Turkey, "Khuja" in Persia, and Joha" in the Arab world. The "wise fool" character usually makes naive or foolish statements that turn out to reveal, unintentionally and unknowingly, some wise and profound truth. In the following narrative, a village woman from the Ramallah district naive and inarticulate, gives and answer that on the surface appears to be ignorant and meaningless. At a deeper level, however, it seems to portray the essence of the new order of things in the occupied territories after the outbreak of the intifada.

In the early eighties the Israeli authorities sealed off a house in one of the villages near Ramallah because one of the family members was involved in anti-Israeli military activity. In the early days of the inti- fada, the young shabab reopened the house, fixed it up, and returned it to the family. One day, the soldiers realized what had happened. They came to the house and asked the housewife living in it, "Who gave you permission to reopen this house?" The woman answered "Our village military governor [meaning the shabab] gave me per- mission."

In another narrative, this time from the Jenin area, a woman ignorantly directs insults at an Israeli officer by giving him a name that to most Palestinians conveys a great deal of truth.

In Jenin, when children want to tease the soldiers, they shout at them Ya Homo! Ya Homo! [from English through Hebrew]. One time, a boy was caught by the soldiers and taken to prison. The boy's mother went to the Israeli officer and begged him, "Please Mr. Homo, release my son."

In other versions of this story, the term used is memzare ["bastard], zonah ["whore"].

Finally, an old woman from 'Asker refugee camp, again unintentionally, brings out the basic contradiction between being a collaborator with the Israeli authorities and a decent person. In the occupied territories, those who collaborate take bribes from local Palestinian residents in return for such favors as getting them a driver's license, a car license, a travel permit, and so on. Understandably, the collaborators often take the bribe but do not deliver the goods. Here is a narrative collected in Nablus in January 1990:

An elderly woman from 'Asker refugee camp went to get a travel permit. She stood in the middle of the crowd waiting in front of the military governor's office and shouted at the top of her voice, "Ya naas! Oh people! Who knows of any decent collaborator to get this travel permit signed for me?"

We come now to the nineteen cases in which an adult woman appears in a supporting, rather than leading, role within a team that represents the Palestinian side of the conflict, or opposition, in our narratives. In all these cases the Palestinian team consists mainly of a mother and son. It is the son rather than the mother who is the central figure of the narrative, but the mother gets some of the credit or glory by association by being the mother of the hero.

The son-mother team appears in two basic situations: when the son is born and when he dies as a shahid. To start with, it is no mean feat to give birth to a male Palestinian infant who, it is assumed, is destined to become a mulathem (one of the shabab who wears a headdress mask, plural mulathemin), as can be seen from a humor narrative collected in East Jerusalem in June 1990:

Two women, a Palestinian and an Egyptian, were in the maternity ward of a hospital. The Palestinian woman was shouting and screaming while the Egyptian woman stayed very calm. Then, the doctor came and said to the Palestinian woman, "What is all this screaming about? Here is another woman right next to you, and she is in the same situation but is not screaming!" The Palestinian woman replied, "Well, giving birth to a mulathem is not as easy as giving birth to a belly dancer."(10)

A Palestinian woman can be proud of simply giving birth to Palestinian male children because, even when they are little children or infants, they are equal to adult men:

A woman from Gaza had seven sons, two of whom became shuhada, and she had five left. One time the soldiers pounded at the door and shouted, "Where are the men? Are there any men in the house?" The woman raised her hand with her fingers spread out making the sign of the number five and said, "Yes, I have five men in the house!" The soldiers barged in to arrest the five men only to find out that the five men she referred to were her five sons, whose ages ranged from one to four years.

A Palestinian woman naturally has the right to be proud of her male infants because they are known to start the struggle against the Israeli soldiers even before leaving their mothers' wombs. From Gaza comes the following story, which was collected in June 1989:

One time when the town [Gaza] was under curfew, a pregnant woman started to have labor pains. The soldiers took her to a military hospital to give birth there. It turned out that she was pregnant with twin boys. The head of one of the babies came out, he looked around and saw all these [Israeli] military uniforms, turned back to his brother and shouted ``Ahmed! Ahmed! We are surrounded, get some rocks!"

Anyone who, after hearing all these stories, still doubts the courage of these Palestinian male infants may check with the enemy's own soldiers. They acknowledge this fearlessness, as happens in the following story from Gaza:

A woman was going home after having given birth at the hospital. There was a curfew, and she wanted to get home. A doctor who had a permit [to drive during the curfew] took her with him. On the way home a group of soldiers met them and stopped them. They asked the doctor, "Where are you going?" The doctor said, "A woman has given birth and is going home. The officer turned to the woman and asked her, "What did you give birth to?" "A boy," she replied. He said, "Oh, a boy! Where are his hands? Let me see them." She asked, "What for!" He replied, "I want to find out if there are any rocks in them!"

The second standard situation in which the mother-son team appears in the narratives is one in which the son, who is the major character, is a shahid. The mother comes into the picture through several types of relations or associations with the shahid, all of which spring from the implicit assumption that the strongest ties a young shab can have are with his mother. In our narratives, the shahid is often portrayed as having previous knowledge of his death, sometimes down to the exact time and location. He faces his death intentionally, knowingly and heroically. The shahid usually does not reveal this secret to others, and it becomes known only after his death through retrospective analysis of the shahid's behavior or comments during the last days or hours of his life. But if any shahid is ever to give away his secret before his death, it is to his mother, as did this shahid from Gaza:

There was a young man whose sister had just returned from outside the country and had brought him some new clothes. He put on the new clothes and in the evening did not take them off. He came to his mother and told her, Mother, I have a feeling that I am going to die tomorrow, and therefore I would like to sleep next to you tonight." The mother exclaimed, "May the name of Allah protect you! What is going on with you?" He answered, "As I told you, tomorrow I must become a shahid." He slept next to her that night. In the morning he had his breakfast, washed up and stayed in his new clothes. He said to one of his friends, "Today we will show them [the Israeli soldiers]." The confrontation started, but despite the heavy shooting none of the shabab was injured except for the young man. He was hit and became a shahid. During the funeral procession, the coffin started to move on its own [showing that he was a real shahid], and people started running after it.

However, even if the shahid fails to inform his mother about what he knows is "written" for him, the whole community, including the shabab, know that the one person the shahid would want to see and be seen by before his death is his mother. The following anecdote was heard in Ramallah in July 1989:

Shahid Muhammad Sammi from Qaddurah refugee camp [near Ram- allah] died on the tenth of May 1989. The shabab confirmed that he was dead. The shabab took the body to [the shahid's] home so that his mother, the family members, and close relatives could see him. His mother, his relatives, and some of the shabab who were then in the room confirmed that [the shahid] opened his eyes and looked at his mother for a few moments, then closed them again.

Clearly, the closest and dearest person to a shahid is his mother. The shahid, however, seems sometimes to be torn between wanting to live for the sake of the real mother or to die for the sake of the figurative mother - his country. The mother in the following narrative, collected from East Jerusalem in January 1990, resolves the problem for her son by devising a symbol that incorporates both mothers almost equally, a symbol the shahid-son can take with him into the second world:

One time, a shahid brought his mother a large [Palestinian] flag and said to her, "There is a demonstration in town [in which I am going to participate], and if I die do not forget to wrap my body in this flag. As soon as he left, his mother tore up the flag and burnt it because she was afraid the [Israeli] soldiers might come into the house [and find the flag there]. About half an hour later she heard of the death of her son. She wondered what to do [about replacing the flag]. She gathered some of her own personal clothes, tore them up into pieces and sewed a [Palestinian] flag out of the pieces, and she used the flag as a shroud for her shahid-son.

The communication and communion between a mother and her son does not end even after the shahid is buried; death is not a strong enough barrier. The soul of the shahid-son keeps in touch with the mother in her dreams, as is the case in this short narrative collected in Nablus in April 1988:

A shahid's mother [from Nablus] relates that the morning her son died he got up, bathed, put on his wedding suit, splashed on some perfume, chatted with his wife and other family members, then left home [for the downtown area]. It was not long before he was hit by the occupation [forces'] bullets and killed. The mother says that a few nights later he appeared to her in her sleep and told her that he was happy and doing fine and that if she wanted to see him he would be available every day at four o'clock, but he did not mention where he would be available.

The shahid can be seen by his mother even in her waking hours, as happened to another woman from Nablus:

A shahid's mother went to the cemetery to visit the grave of her son. When she got there she saw him together with a group of his shuhada friends walking toward the mosque to perform their prayers. She called to them, "Come [back] with me!" They answered her, "No! Here, we are in the house of ultimate truth and we are much happier here!"

Testimonies to the effect that a shahid is happier in his second life in heaven than on earth are reported by hundreds of shahid stories circulating in the country, and it is almost invariably mothers who bring back such reports. It is true, of course, that only the soul goes to heaven, but in the case of the shahid, the body reflects the new happiness by staying fresh and smiling even after several months:

The mother of a shahid felt that she was not given enough time [by the Israeli authorities] to say good-bye properly to her shahid-son. She kept asking the village sheikh [religious leader] to give her permission to have the grave reopened in order to see her son. Finally, the sheikh agreed, and the grave was opened. It was already several months since her son's death. She found her son looking exactly as he did when he was alive. A sweet smell came from his body, and a smile was on his face. At the time of death, a friend of the shahid had placed a rose under his arm, and when the grave was reopened, the flower had grown into a rose bush in full bloom.

Lastly, we come to the fifteen narratives that include a young female character. In four of these cases, a girl or a group of girls appears at center of the narrative, and it is possible to say that these are stories about one or more girls. In the other eleven narratives a girl appears among the cast, but she is not in the leading role. Altogether, however the young girl, as she appears in all these narratives (including the four and in all other version and variations with which I am familiar), a weak, passive, and ineffectual figure.

Young girls appear as the central figures in the first four narratives not because of any courageous or heroic actions, but because society assumes that young girls are weak and vulnerable and thus can be use' to symbolize the feebleness and susceptibility of a group that one may wish to tease or insult. Thus, when village or refugee camp residents the West Bank want to make fun of the residents of East Jerusalem for supposedly not participating as strongly as they should in the intifada effort, they may tell humorous stories like the following:

One time, there was an army roadblock at the entrance to Jerusalem. One of the soldiers made the passengers get out of a cab and wait by the roadblock for a couple of hours, then frisked them and checked their identity cards. After the soldier turned his back and walked away from them, one of the spoiled [nawaim, literally, "soft"] Jerusale- mite girls was so "courageous" that she looked at the soldier's back and said, "Oh, you are such a cruel person!"

The remaining eleven narratives are those in which a young girl appears in a role secondary to that of a shab, who is occasionally supported by an adult or elderly woman. In all of these cases, there is a transparent message related to how or how not to behave under intifada conditions. The message is delivered through the portrayal of the behavior of a shab who is the central figure of the narrative. A young girl appears in the narrative not because she is significant on her own, but because the setting needed to deliver the message requires the simple presence of a young girl.

Two types of message seem to be intended from these eleven narratives. One of the two messages concerns weddings under intifada circumstances. Traditionally, weddings in Palestinian society are occasions for a great deal of celebration and feasting; it may last up to a week or more and may involve several thousand people, including family, relatives, clan members, local community leaders, and friends and acquaintances from all parts of the country. At the beginning of the intifada, instructions were given several times by the intifada Joint Leadership that weddings should be carried out without any celebrations. It was explained that since so many people had been killed, the mood of the nation was one of national mourning, and it would be improper to celebrate and be merry in the midst of suffering and death. People were also urged to save their resources for the intifada effort, and consequently, the splurging that usually accompanied wedding celebrations was highly discouraged.

Several of our stories simply deliver this same message, but in narrative form. A young girl appears in each of these narratives because a wedding requires the presence of a bride. The message is quite clear in the following narrative, collected in Ramallah in April 1989:

In Hebron, a young man was to get married. The bridegroom's family decided to sing while taking the bride from her family to the groom's family. The young shabab had come to see the groom's family several days before and warned them against singing, out of respect for the prevailing [intifada] conditions. The groom's family refused to listen, so the shabab decided to teach the groom a lesson he would never forget as long as he lived. After the bride had been brought to the groom's family, some of the shabab pretended to be coming to congratulate the groom. They asked him to step out of the house with them and took him to a faraway place, beat him, tore up his wedding clothes, and kept him all night long, while the bride stayed at his parents' home. The next moming, they brought him back, and he went in to his bride with his clothes all torn up.

In this case it was the groom who paid because his family refused to respect "the prevailing conditions." In another narrative it is the bride's mother who is inconsiderate and the bride who suffers. This time, the punishment comes at the hands of the Israeli soldiers, but the message remains the same(11):

A bride in Jalazoun [a refugee camp near Ramallah] did not want to wear a white [bridal] dress, but her mother insisted that she had to wear a white dress. Finally, the bride agreed, bought a white dress and wore it. They gave a small party and invited [only] the neighbors. While the bride was on her way to the bridegroom's house [on foot], three army jeeps came by. They told the bride, "The strike forces of the intifada forbid people to have [fancy] processions with [decorated] cars, but we are going to give you a big one, to spite them. They sat her [by force] on the hood of one of the jeeps and drove around the streets of Jalazoun until they got all the way to the UNRWA school [outside the camp].

These two cases tell us what should not be done in a wedding during the intifada. What, then, should an intifada wedding be like? Well, we do have a couple of examples in our collection. Here is one:

A young man from ed-Duheisheh [a refugee camp near Beit al-Lahm], was instructed to come to the military governor's office for questioning. It was his Henna Day [the day before the wedding]. They kept him there until one o'clock. Immediately afterwards, a big demonstration broke out. He went out to look for his little brother [among the demonstrators]. The soldiers caught him and put him in jail. By that time it was two o'clock. The people of ed-Duheisheh found out that the groom had been arrested. They also knew that on three previous occasions he had been arrested on the day before the date set for his wedding [causing it to be postponed]. So they decided to go to the military governor and ask him to release the young man because it was the eve of his wedding. After a lot of arguing and haggling, the jail authorities agreed to release him for that night only. It was already seven in the evening. Ed-Duheisheh's people intervened and got the bride's family to agree to have all the formalities taken care of at the same time. They brought a large metal tray with some sweets, coffee, cakes, and cigarettes [to treat those present] and carried out all the necessary official ceremonies. After one hour, everything was completed. The bride and the groom went to Jerusalem to spend the night so the groom wouldn't be arrested during the night. The next morning, they returned to the refugee camp, and the groom was soon arrested.

The other message contained in the stories in which young girls appear concerns the behavior of the young shabab toward young women who may participate with them in intifada activities. Palestinian society is predominantly conservative and Muslim, and there is normally a distinct division of labor and almost complete separation of the sexes. With the beginning of the intifada, many young girls, particularly those from high schools and colleges, started to participate in demonstrations and other intifada-related activities. Muslim fundamentalist groups were against this aberration, and Israeli authorities used it in anti-intifada propaganda.

The dominant message in the few available and relevant narratives seems to be: any relationship should lead to marriage. This was the message in the previously quoted story about the woman who hid the shab in her daughter's bed; the young man returned a few day later and asked for the girl's hand in marriage. The same message comes across in the following narrative:

A girl from a refugee camp, eighteen years of age, lost one of her eyes when she suffered a direct hit to her eye by a rubber bullet during a confrontation with the soldiers. This caused her to lose her beauty, which in turn led to her fiance leaving her. The shabab in the refugee camp came to ask for her hand, thus causing her fiance a great deal of embarrassment. So he went back and apologized to her, and they married shortly thereafter. Now they are always seen together during confrontations with the Israeli soldiers.

Conclusion

The intifada-related, contemporary narratives that were circulating by word of mouth among Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank portray sons as both the major characters of the narratives and as heroes in the conflict. Mothers in the leading role appear as either heroines or wise fools." As supporting figures to their sons, the mother's role is to bring sons into this world; to train, socialize, and protect them; and to offer them as sacrifices for the common cause of Palestinian society. Daughters are weak and vulnerable. Fathers are almost completely absent from the whole picture. In the few cases where they appear (no such cases appear in this discussion), they are pitiful, cringing figures, defended by their wives or young sons against verbal or physical abuse by Israeli soldiers.

Despite the fact that sons and young males appear in the largest number of these narratives and play the role of the heroes who challenge the enemy and engage him in deadly battles, it is the adult women or mothers who, upon surveying the whole collection of intifada narratives, appear to be the strongest figures, the pillars of the Palestinian Arab family. Thus, young men often need the moral and physical support of their mothers or mother figures. The mothers gladly and capably offer such support to their sons and to all the other members of the family but never seem to need help or protection from the others. It is a Middle Eastern/Arab - if not universal - rule of social interaction that one who gives is stronger than one who receives. In this sense it is the Palestinian mother who seems to be the strongest and most solid member of the family.

However, there is yet another aspect to these narratives. It is true that young men are the army of the intifada; they pay with their very lives to keep the struggle going. But in another sense they are tools used by society to guarantee the survival of the group in a manner reminiscent of the juvenile males who make up the outer circle of a feeding primate group. In other words, they are the most disposable.

It is the adult mothers who give birth to mulathemin, raise them, and train them to be men from an early age, offer them as martyrs when society needs them, and even makes sure they are happy in the "house of ultimate truth." Thus, ultimately, it is the mother who guarantees the continuity of the group.

NOTES

1. Nasser and Heacock, eds., 1990, is a very good source for references to the literature of the intifada.

2. See, for example, Kanaana 1989b, 1990, 1991.

3. This is a compound definition derived from definitions by Georges (1971:5), Degh and Vazsonyi (1989:31), Nicolaisen (1984:170), and Oring (1986:125).

4. This notion incorporates ideas from discussions by Oring (1986:121-26),Georges (1971:10), Degh (1971:60~2), and Hand (1965:441).

5. For some of the victimization strategies, see Kanaana 1989.

6.The most reliable figures on Palestinian victims can be found in the occasional reports issued between 1987 and 1990 by the human rights organizations al-Haq in Ramallah and B'tselem in Jerusalem.

7.For further discussion of these and other problems related to defining classifying, and indexing legends, see Georges 1971, Friedman 1971, Degh 1971, Hand 1971, Halpert 1971, Williams 1984, and Ben-Amos 1976.

8.For more on structural opposition in folklore, see Kongas and Maranda 1962, Maranda and Kongas-Maranda 1971, and Dundes (1978, chap. 6).

9. All the narratives included in this article were collected in Arabic and translated by the author.

10. Egypt is believed to have the best belly dancers in the Arab world.

11. In order to appreciate this story, we need to know that the Israeli soldiers often forced Palestinians to do things in ways contradictory to the instructions of the shabab.