A Week In The Life Aida Suleiman: A refuge for Arab sisters

WHAT AIDA Suleiman would really like to do is write novels. The mother of two studied psychology and Arabic literature at Haifa University. She has a manuscript in a drawer, but she knows it is not good enough for publication - and for now she has no time to rewrite it.

Ms Suleiman, 34, a restless former journalist with deep-set eyes and sunglasses perched on her dark, wayward hair, is busy 12 hours a day combating the routine abuse suffered by hundreds of her sisters in Israel's Arab minority community. She worries that she is neglecting her own daughters, Maram, 10, and Meyar, 7, but hopes they will understand. She tries to get home by 7pm to her flat in a modern block, shared by Jews and Arabs, outside the walls of the old Crusader port of Acre.

Work in her office high above the biblical Mary's Well in Nazareth, Israel's biggest Arab city, is constantly interrupted by calls on her desk and mobile phones. She deals with them briskly, switching seamlessly from Arabic to Hebrew to English, often in the same sentence.

For the past four years she has been director of Women Against Violence, a self-help coalition she founded with six other Arab feminists. "Women kept complaining about violence," she says, "husbands beating wives, parents beating daughters."

Increasingly, Ms Suleiman is focusing on "family-honour" crimes. Last year, nine Israeli Arab women were recorded killed by fathers or brothers for "disgracing" their families - refusing to marry the man chosen by their parents, having sexual intercourse outside wedlock, taking drugs, provoking scandal.

So far this year, five family-honour victims are confirmed to have died. One of them, a woman aged 22, was killed by her brother because she complained to the police that her father was beating his younger children. The father was sent to prison. The brother cut her throat for bringing shame on them all.

Now the women are fighting back. An offshoot of Women Against Violence, Al Badil (Arabic for "alternative"), has set up two safe houses, one for battered women and children, another for young single women in distress. Since 1993, the first has sheltered 400 mothers and 550 children; the second, 485 women aged 15 to 25. A women's hotline, offering legal and psychological counselling 24 hours a day, has answered 333 calls in the past year alone.

On Wednesday, Ms Suleiman visits one of the shelters, an anonymous, two-storey village house, with four flats, a yard and a high wall. She and her colleagues mobilise local authority social workers. The shelters take care of the women, the social workers talk to the families. As well as a haven, the shelters help the women to come to terms with their traumas and to chart a future.

"We don't decide for her," Ms Suleiman insists. "We make her aware of the options, the negative and positive sides of each solution."

Ms Suleiman is haunted by the case last year of a woman aged 35, who stayed in a shelter for 12 months and divorced her husband. All the reportssuggested she was no longer in danger, and the woman, who had three children, was eager to restart her life.

"We advised her to go back gradually," Ms Suleiman recalls. "She visited her family first for a couple of hours, then a bit longer each time. Eventually, she came back and said she was sure she could go back without danger. She rented a house near her family. Two weeks later she was killed." Her ex-husband was questioned, but has not been charged.

"She was a mature woman," Ms Suleiman broods. "All the same, you start to blame yourself ... Did I do everything I could? Could we have saved her? Then you realise you have done your best. You give them the maximum, but you can't guarantee."

On Thursday, Ms Suleiman drives to a Druze village to coach peasant women to assert themselves. "These are the meetings that keep me in contact with my own society," she explains. "If we don't have this connection, we'll start to represent just ourselves."

As confidence grows, the village women pour out their souls. One complains that her husband beats her. She tries to justify him. She must have done something to deserve it. She confesses she feels numb. She no longer has any affection for her children.

Ms Suleiman tries to comfort her. She gives her the phone number of the women's crisis centre, as well as her own number. "The battered women concentrate so much on surviving violence," she reflects, "that they sometimes lose their feeling for anything else going on around them."

The next day, Ms Suleiman leads a delegation to lobby the women's rights committee of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem. The MPs listen courteously, make sympathetic noises and condemn the family-honour killings.

But Ms Suleiman leaves disappointed. "We wanted more specific decisions," she says. "Still, it's important to raise our demands, even if we don't expect a lot."

Back in Nazareth, Ms Suleiman is teased in a supermarket by Arab men, who accuse her of wearing the trousers in her middle-class household. Her husband, Jerys, is a building engineer. "Even if I do wear trousers," she smiles, "he doesn't wear skirts."

Male chauvinist hostility has never gone further than verbal sparring. "I haven't been attacked," she says. "I haven't been threatened, or even abused for what I am doing. We are all women who are involved in our society, in politics, in minority rights, in the peace struggle. We are respected for what we have done in other fields."

Attitudes change slowly, none the less. When Ms Suleiman lectures Arab high school pupils, the girls are angry at the continuing discrimination between them and their brothers. The boys retort: "You can't expect the same things as us. It's dishonouring, it's not acceptable." She encourages them to argue - and to listen to each other.

Some do, some don't. Either way, Aida Suleiman won't be short of copy if she ever does get round to finishing her novel.