AS FIRST RANKED IN HER CLASS, A DISTINCTION THAT still exists at the Quaker Friends School in Ramallah, Alia Abu Sa’ab’s firstborn daughter, Minister of Finance Khaled Abu Sa’ab’s first granddaughter, the owner of two highly pronounced cheekbones and the first girl in 1960s Nablus to wear a London-imported miniskirt, Laila Abu Sa’ab was certain to have a great life. She was born in between two catastrophic Israeli-Palestinian wars: ’48 and ’67. The second one broke out when she was eight years old. In less than a week, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria lost control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. Another wave of Palestinian displacement ensued. The possibility of a state called Palestine receded even further into the distance, becoming nearly unattainable.

The extent to which violence affected her childhood is unclear; she rarely speaks of her youth, and never relates much information when asked. She recalls that on weekends, she and her four siblings would travel through three checkpoints from Nablus to Ramallah, for two scoops each of pistachio ice cream at Rookab. She remembers that her youngest brother went to an Israeli prison eight times when they were teenagers, the stays ranging from nineteen to forty-five days, for throwing rocks at armed soldiers and trying to muster up his own resistance movement. After throwing stones at a Humvee convoy that blocked a mother from taking her seizing child to a hospital in Jerusalem, he was placed in a solitary cell so small that he couldn’t stand upright and had to remain hunched for an entire three weeks.

After college, Laila turned down a slew of suitors: rich ones, handsome ones, good-familied ones. Though everyone expected her to, she knew she wouldn’t marry for a while. What was the rush? Things were changing. Women no longer had to go straight from their parents’ home to their husband’s anymore. In the late 1970s, the waves made by the sexual revolution in the States were just washing up on Middle Eastern shores. Against the return of the ayatollah in Iran and the rise of the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the U.S. seemed like a bastion of freedom and liberalism. In America, she would be able to date whomever she wanted and not worry about her reputation. “Play the field,” her Harvard Med School–educated father told her. “Go places. And never settle.”