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- Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Seventy-one years ago, in 1948, the Nakba – the 'catastrophe' – overturned life in Palestine, forcing three-quarters of Palestinians into exile, depriving them of their land, their homes, their belongings. Today, those who can bear witness to that period are becoming rare. From different social backgrounds, nineteen men and women remember the coexistence that prevailed in Palestine, the war, the exile, as well as the strength and resilience which they had to muster to adapt to new realities. Life stories expressed in the first person are accompanied by black and white portraits where each look questions the coming generations.For every Palestinian, Jerusalem is charged with symbolic meaning, of identity and of remembrance, the more so because it has become inaccessible to most. The city is made the focus of a compilation of colour photographs presented for a contemporary look, between shadow and light.
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PALESTINE
MEMORIES OF 1948 PHOTOGRAPHS OF JERUSALEM
Chris Conti Altair Alcântara
Translation from French Isabelle Lavigne
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This English translation was made possible by a donation in the memory of Mey and Omar Akashah, may their dream of a free, democratic, secular, and open Palestine become a reality.
The team would like to give special thanks to:
Majdoline Al Ghazawi, godmother of this project. Helen, Randa, Roula and Sally for their total involvement. Mona, Hala and Tarek, who supported the printing of the French and English editions.
Abu Samy and Samir A. for their backing.
Father Jean-Michel de Tarragon, assisted by Mr Serge Nègre, who kindly gave digitized images from the archive of old glass-plate negatives of the Dominican Fathers of the École biblique et archéologique française of Jerusalem.
The families of the people interviewed, for their trust and warm welcome, as well as: Muhammad Abdulhadi, Hussam Abed, Nazih Abu Nidal, Mohammed Abu Saleh, Dalia Abu Sharar, Salam Abu Sharar, Samaa Abu Sharar, Joumana Al Jabri, Abdel Aziz Al Sayed, Firas Banna, Francisco Javier Bernales, Ghada Bisharat, Nawar Bulbul, María Paz and Carlos Chawan, Paula Costabal, Sara Dajani, Reka Deak, ‘Abd Al Fatah Al Kalkili, Akram Al Sharif, Suha Eid, Samah Eriqat, Eduardo Escobar, Vanessa Guéno, Rabbieh Hamzah, Wael Hamzah, Haifa Irshaid, Imad Jada, Nina Jada, Fadi Kattan, Ghada Khoury, Johnny Mansour, Samih Masoud, Macarena Meruane, Ayed Nabah, Elena and Ali Qleibo, Rana Safadi, Housep Seferian, Jeanine, Jean-Yves, Rachel, Kamal, Zahira and her family for having pointed us in the right direction.
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Contents
Foreword
Salim Tamari
Professor of Sociology, Birzeit University; Research Associate, Institute for Palestine Studies; Editor, The Jerusalem Quarterly
Chris Conti has managed to skilfully bring together some riveting narratives of exile and survival from the war of 1948. A few relate to prominent figures like Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, writer Feissal Darraj, and advocate Fuad Shehadeh – but the majority are ordinary Palestinians who originally came from Jerusalem or made the city the centre of their lives. Those survival stories are not narratives of heroic resistance, common to the hagiographic literature, but they present us with the subjects’ defiance and steadfastness against all odds. The stories include satirical, mundane, and tenacious reactions to oppression and exile – with the city of Jerusalem as the backdrop to their predicament. The intimate and austere photography of Altair Alcântara provides a poignant reminder that the consequences of 1948 are still with us today.10
Living Memories
By Falestin Naili
Historian, Researcher at the French Institute for the Near East (Ifpo)
There are dead who sleep in rooms you will build there are dead who visit their past in places you demolish there are dead who pass over bridges you will construct there are dead who illuminate the night of butterflies, dead who come by dawn to drink their tea with you, as peaceful as your rises left them, so leave, you guests of the place, some vacant seats for your hosts … they will read you the terms of peace … with the dead!
From The “Red Indian’s” Penultimate Speech to the White Man, by Mahmoud Darwish, translation by Fady Joudah
Living Memories
On May 15, 2018, thousands of Palestinian demonstrators gathered on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel to demand their right to return and to oppose the relocation of the United States Embassy to Jerusalem. Seventy-one years after Al Nakba (1948), these demonstrators, most of whom were under 30 years old, surprised the world by the longevity of their memory. They shouted loudly and strongly about their right to return to nearby villages and neighbouring towns in Gaza, like Ramle, Lydda, Majdal and Jaffa. These young people, who have known no reality other than military occupation, wars and blockades, form part of a collective destiny with 1948 as its tragic point of departure. For them, the border constitutes the line drawn between their lives in the refugee camps of Gaza and the bygone days in the villages and towns of their forefathers, some of which are visible from the border. It is the demarcation between their present reality and a past from which they were forcibly cut off and on which they cannot turn their backs.
In May 2000, similar scenes played out following the retreat of the Israeli army from southern Lebanon. The border, once again accessible after 28 years of military occupation, was the backdrop for visits and family reunions for Palestinian refugees who had settled in Lebanon and their relatives living in the north of Israel.1 Many Palestinian refugees today live very close to the places they came from but to which they cannot return, even for a visit. Sohaila Shishtawi testifies to this; living in Amman, she is only 80 kilometres away from her 12native Jerusalem: ‘I recently applied for a visa at the Israeli embassy in Jordan to go and visit my nephew in Jerusalem, but it was turned down. I do not understand; how could an 89-year-old Palestinian woman, 1.4 metres tall and weighing 38 kilos, possibly pose a threat to Israel?’
Nevertheless, since 1948, the “absentees” have been making their presence felt, even if it is physically impossible. The 19 stories offered here illustrate different ways of being present, of counting, of making oneself heard and of having some weight. In the face of erasure – imposed through terror, through the destruction of their villages,2 by being uncounted during population censuses, by being deprived of their right of residence – in the face of the confiscation of their property and their marginalization in the dominant historiography on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 11 men and eight women tell their stories of 1948. They retrace the effects of this historic cataclysm and the different strategies for survival, perseverance, creativity and resistance that they deployed.
These 19 stories obviously cannot cover all of the experiences Palestinians lived through in 1948, but they give a fairly representative idea. From Gaza to Nazareth, the narrators come from towns and villages in different parts of historical Palestine. Today, some live in refugee camps, others in towns and cities in the region or much further afield. They come from different social classes, different professions and represent various degrees of social and political engagement. Some of the stories emanate from public figures such as the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah and the intellectuals Ilham Abughazaleh and Feissal Darraj, but the majority of the testimonies are those of people who have left no written traces of their experiences. It is thanks to the passionate work of the team of editors that their voices can be heard. This book can thus be seen as a response to the call made some ten years ago by Ahmad Sa’id and Lila Abu Lughod to make it possible for ‘Palestinian stories to slip through the wall of the dominating history of 1948 and open it up to factual and moral questioning.’3
These very personal stories deal with themes that are often combined: the land and rootedness, creativity and resistance, and finally, the space of the possible.
The collapse of a world
Over and above these themes, these texts evoke the terror, the wrenching and the intense sense of loss experienced by these men and women, the majority of whom were still children during the war of 1948. Depicted by Israel as the war of independence; it has been the subject of many books and special editions of journals; yet until recently, the Palestinian perspective remained marginal. It is in the details of the tragedy afflicting the Palestinians that we find the reasons for its name: Al Nakba – the catastrophe. Fear of death, violence, the loss of loved ones, separation, exile, of being deprived of one’s home and all means of subsistence, all of those fears are part of the moment when the world of the Palestinians falls apart.13
In these testimonies we hear the suffering of wandering and the extreme vulnerability of the families: during their flight, many families were broken apart and children were lost in the general panic. Nakhle Shahwan of Beit Jala remembers that in the aftermath of the war of 1948 Radio Jerusalem devoted two hours each afternoon to messages from refugees who had lost a family member during the flight, often children. We also hear the simple words used by the children to express their fear and revolt, like those of Halima Mustafa, fleeing the invasion of Fir‘im, near Safad, her mother’s sewing machine on her sister’s head: ‘Dar, dar abuna wa jayin el ghuraba yetarduna.’ (This is our father’s house but strangers are coming to evict us.)
Between the lines of these stories of flight lies the fear of massacre. Rushdieh Al Hudeib is a survivor from the village of Dawayima, to the west of Hebron, in which a battalion of the Israeli army committed a massacre in late October 1948 (after the foundation of the State of Israel). Around 500 civilians were killed. It happened more than six months after the massacre in Deir Yasin, carried out by paramilitary Zionist groups which the Zionist propaganda had exploited to frighten the Palestinians and push them into abandoning their villages. Deir Yasin had a traumatic effect on the Palestinian population,4 as Sohaila Shishtawi tells us.
In spite of the collective trauma caused by these massacres, around 150,000 Palestinians stayed in their towns and villages and found themselves integrated into the new territory of the State of Israel. Both Samira Khoury from Nazareth and Suad Qaraman from Haifa bear witness to life under martial law, to the censuses and to the administrative apartheid against the Palestinians.
After the rupture of 1948, the Palestinians were faced with a multitude of legal situations, in particular concerning the rules that govern their residence in different parts of historical Palestine and in host countries.5 In a world regulated by nation states, they have been deprived of a Palestinian nationality which could have united and defined them. The stories of Umaima Al ‘Alami and Tamam Al Ghul, who cannot go to their native Jerusalem without special authorization from Israel, are enlightening on this subject. This has lead to the very particular relationship that Palestinians have with their identity papers and especially with their passports. Feissal Darraj highlights this through his story, which is that of a refugee who has ‘for seven decades been a man whose existence was confiscated’.
‘The land, a perfect metaphor for permanence’
The land has a special place in many of the stories,6 because it represents a central stake in the conflict between the indigenous Palestinian population and the ambitions of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Colonialist ideologies of settlement share the leitmotiv of an empty territory, and so the Zionist ideology has described Palestine as ‘a land without people for a people without land’.714
Suleyman Hassan’s story of life in the little West Bank village of Kafr Laqif reflects the steadfastness of a farmer, strongly attached to his land and his olive trees. He grasps every legal means available to assert his property rights in face of the settlers who arrived after the occupation in 1967. During the 1967 war, Suleyman – harking back to the experience of refugees arriving in his village in 1948 – managed to convince nearly all the villagers of Kafr Laqif, who had been chased away by the Israeli army, to return home as quickly as possible. We find that same attachment to the land in the story of the agronomic teacher, ‘Abd Al Rahman Al Najjab, who has insisted on the importance of being agriculturally autonomous throughout his life.
Another story shines a light on the close link between cultivating the soil and the determination to be present and to maintain one’s rights. The residents of the village of Battir near Jerusalem, located close to the railway line between Jerusalem and Jaffa, took fright after the Deir Yasin massacre and did not dare sleep in their village. Nevertheless, they continued to cultivate their land in the daytime in order to give the Israeli army the impression that the village was still inhabited. When Battir was about to find itself in the no-man’s-land between the Israeli border and the Jordanian border, one of the villagers, Hassan Mustafa, decided together with some 20 men from the village, including Hassan Harbuk who tells the story, to resort to a ruse in order to prevent the evacuation of the village. Moreover, the inhabitants of Battir managed to save their land once again in 2014 with the inscription of the village on the Unesco list of endangered world heritage sites. The village thus escaped having a new stretch of the so-called separation wall built on it.
Against all odds – al sumud
Battir’s destiny takes us to the theme of creativity and resistance which, in Palestine, is characterized particularly by perseverance, or the capacity to hold on – al sumud. A revolutionary trait exalted by Palestinian nationalists, this type of resistance is manifested essentially in day-to-day behaviour. The notion of sumud developed in the 1970s in response to the profound transformations experienced by rural Palestinian society. The land confiscations and the attraction of the Israeli job market had an impact on rural Palestinians. Al sumud, in that context, meant living in one’s village and preserving one’s land.8
In the stories gathered in this book, perseverance takes on different forms depending on the context. From the individual will to succeed in order to ensure the survival of the family in spite of dispossession, to military participation in Palestinian resistance, al sumud is primarily based on the determination not to be a victim that suffers its fate.
Some, such as Muhyeddin Al Jamal, write that determination into their autobiographic story, like the beginning of an epic. A poor child from a village near Ramle, he managed gradually to become a prosperous entrepreneur in Brazil. For others, that perseverance is linked to the conviction that rights must be re-established and injustice refused. Fuad Shehadeh, a lawyer, born in Jerusalem in 1925, decided to open a case, in 1950, against the two international banks that had frozen Palestinian assets at the request of the Israeli authorities. This allowed families to get their money back even if it was only through small monthly reimbursements.15
In the same spirit of fighting injustice, others decided to devote their lives to the resistance by joining the ranks of the PLO. Some paid with their lives, like Majed Abu Sharar, whose journey is told here by his family and friends. There are also some women, such as Samira Khoury from Nazareth, one of the founders of an organization called Nahda (awakening), who, since the founding of the State of Israel, has advocated against the martial law imposed on residents of Palestinian towns and villages. Other women organized civil and political responses to the repeated devastation suffered by Palestinian society, like the university professor Ilham Abughazaleh in Nablus.
The space of possibilities
The history of Palestine has been written by the winners of the 1948 war and has been considered retrospectively as the chronicle of inevitable events. To counter this fatalistic vision of history, one has to look at the untrodden paths, the unexploited potentials and the ungrasped possibilities of various moments in history. The space of possibilities is a red thread in the stories, telling of the coexistence of all of the country’s inhabitants, whatever their religion, which was the norm in Palestine before 1948. That coexistence, which had already been disrupted before Al Nakba by British mandate policies and the growing influence of the Zionist movement, stands out in many of the stories like a thread woven into the memories of better days.
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, born in Nazareth in 1933, remembers what some forget: ‘The British had withdrawn in 1947 and had left the country in a state of war, between Arab Palestinians and Jewish Palestinians. At the time, everybody was still Palestinian.’ Mohammad Tijani of the destroyed Mughrabi Quarter (Harat Al Maghariba) of the Old City of Jerusalem recalls the links between Arab Palestinians and Jewish Palestinians which resisted several wars. The generation which still remembers living together is slowly disappearing, and with it, the memory of coexistence. Salaheddin Aissa also evokes, with a degree of nostalgia, the ‘living together’ that prevailed in his region between Palestinian villagers and the inhabitants of the kibboutzim, even the marriages between Arabs and Jews from Europe. Suad Qaraman tells of friendships that defied the limits of identity categories defined by the mandate, which divided the Palestinian population between “Jews” on one side and “Arabs” (or “non-Jews”) on the other. However, the policy of division practised by the mandatory power and wanted by the Zionist movement had made itself felt long before 1948: for example, the Kadoorie Agricultural School where ‘Abd Al Rahman Al Najjab was educated, was divided into two establishments by the British, one for Arab students and the other for Jewish ones.
Beyond collegial links or friendships, there is the question of advocating for a political project common to all the inhabitants of Palestine, and in ways that are evidently even more constrained since 1948 than during the Mandate period. In this regard, the compartmentalization of historical narratives about Palestine not only fails to do justice to historical realities that are far more complex than those that dominate the country’s historiography, but it also makes it impossible for a common horizon of a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to emerge. Edward Said insisted, in 1984, on the necessity of elaborating narratives to ‘absorb, support and circulate’ the facts,9 to incorporate them into history and to use them in a historical narrative, with the aim of re-establishing justice.10 Palestinian memories constitute an important pillar of that narrative, which must necessarily open onto a history of possibilities.
1.M. A. Khalidi (ed.), Manifestations of Identity: The Lived Reality of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon, Beirut, Institute for Palestine Studies/Ifpo, 2010.
2. Nur Masalha,The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, Zed Books, 2012 and Ilan Pappé,The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld Publications, 2006. See also the monographs on destroyed villages published in the 1980s and 1990s by the Birzeit Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society (CRDPS) directed by Sharif Kanaana and Salah Abd Al Jawad, and the book by Walid Khalidi,All that Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Washington DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
3. A. H. Sa’di and L. Abu Lughod (eds), Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 23. We should point out here several recent initiatives in the field of Palestinian oral history, including the “Palestinian Oral History Project” of the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the “Testimonies on the Displacement of the Palestinians in 1948” project which led to the publication of Living Memories, edited by Faiha Abdulhadi, Ramallah 2017.
4. Deir Yasin was attacked by the Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Palmach, under the umbrella of and supported by the Haganah, on April 9, 1948. The massacre there has been called by the Zionist information services a ‘decisive accelerating factor’ in the exodus of Palestinians. (B. Morris,Victimes, Histoire revisitée du conflit arabo-sioniste, Éditions Complexe 2003, pp. 229–232).
5. See Jalal Al Husseini and A. Signoles (eds), Les Palestiniens entre État et diaspora, Paris, Karthala, 2012.
6. Nadine Picaudou (ed.), Territoires palestiniens de mémoire, Paris, Karthala/Ifpo, 2006, p. 27.
7. This slogan was formulated for the Zionist movement by Israël Zangwill towards the end of the nineteenth century (E. Said,The Question of Palestine, New York, Vintage Books, 1979, p. 9), but Lord Shaftesbury is probably the first to have used it in reference to Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century.
8. S. Tamari and R. Hammami, “Populist Paradigms: A Review of Trends and Research Problems in Palestinian Sociology”, in R. Bocco et al. (eds), Palestine, Palestiniens: Territoire national, espaces communautaires, Beirut, CER-MOC, 1997, p. 29.
9. Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate”, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 13, spring 1984, p. 34.
10. Said, op. cit., p. 46
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Why this book?
By Chris Conti
The official version of history, the one that we are taught, the one that is handed down, is the one written by the victors; those who take territory for themselves by force and who gag their victims into silence.
Most of us are fascinated by those who proclaim themselves heroes, and we forget the other side of memory. We do not take the time to look into the shadowy corners where the vanquished crowd together: those who, partly though our indifference and our choices, become “the forgotten people of history”.
However, memory has a surprising ability: even if it is stifled, it always reappears where it is least expected. It is like a green shoot poking up though the concrete, a cactus growing on the ruins of a village that has been wiped off the map, an insolent word or a naive question from the mouth of a child. That is probably why it haunts those who deny it. Forgetting even forgetfulness itself, braving the forbidden, the memory of victims always comes back to the surface.
And so it is that, in Israel, the history written by the victors has been questioned by their own children: known as the new Israeli historians, they are researchers who have sifted through the archives, found documents, re-examined the litany that had been imposed on them, revealed massacres, brought evidence to light, collected confessions… and eventually they have challenged the widespread cliché of an empty country, when in fact the country was emptied.
The testimonies collected by our team (journalists, photographers, interpreters, science editors, translators – each of whom gave their time unstintingly) are those of Palestinians who lived through Al Nakba, the catastrophe. That word, despised in Israel, accurately describes the reality that they have been forced to live with for 70 years, because they have lost close family and friends and have been dispossessed of all their property, houses and lands, and above all, their identity, their very existence as a people. Being between 75 and 95 years old, they are the generation born before 1948. They were Palestinians – as stated in their passports during the British mandate – and they have remained Palestinians, even though they have adapted to what life has thrown at them. For some, that means existence under occupation, controlled by Israeli martial law, for others it is Israeli nationality but as second-class citizens, and for yet others it is life in a refugee camp, sometimes with a foreign passport that has allowed them to reinvent themselves, to adapt, to get an education, to learn and especially to become what they are.
We talked to them in the course of every day life in the Middle East. Their energy and resilience, the dignity with which they face their destiny moved us, and their desire to pass on their memories impressed us. During the long hours spent listening to them and then re-reading the written versions of their stories with them, trust was created between us, and often friendship. The result is a series of testimonies that depict some of the diversity of Palestinian society just before 1948, bubbling with life. These stories, told in the first person, sensitively evoke the damage and wounds inflicted by massacres, “ethnic cleansing” and exodus. They recount revolt and survival, and particularly how each person subsequently found their own way of resisting.
In this book we have tried to be as unobtrusive as possible and give center stage to the victims, the Palestinians.
For all the people interviewed, Jerusalem has an important symbolic, spiritual and political value. Their memories of it are all the more important because it remains inaccessible to most Palestinians and because it represents the identity and continuity of Palestinian presence on the ground. Jerusalem, capital of the Palestinians, is illustrated at the end of the volume in a series of colour photographs for an up-to-date view, between shadow and light.18
Memories of 1948
20
The girl on the Jerusalem rooftops
Sohaila Soubhy Shishtawi, 90 years old
As a kid in the 1940s she used to roam with her friends along the ramparts of the old city of Jerusalem.1 That’s where she was born, in a big beautiful house of white stone that flushed pink with the sunrise and turned golden with the setting sun.
Sohaila Soubhy Shishtawi was a mischievous little girl and by the time she was a young teenager she was already responsible for her numerous siblings. She could do everything: she washed, sewed, cooked, went to fetch the oil and gas, the water from the well and looked after her brothers and sisters. She followed traditions and beliefs, listening to the advice of her elders. But that is not what makes her tick. What Sohaila likes, what brings her to life, is to go out, to go off on an adventure, to escape across the terraces and rooftops of her town from where she can see the world from above. Using shortcuts known only to the cats of Jerusalem, she can see everything, hear everything, learn everything. The town gives up its secrets to her, its songs and its prayers, its shadows and its light, its costumes and its spices, its traders and its travellers; everything that is missed by “normal” people, who walk in the alleyways without seeing all these things.
For Sohaila, Jerusalem will always be her town, even though she had to leave in it 1950. Since 1967 she has been able to visit only by applying for a visa at the Israeli consulate. Her town, which today smells a little like desolation.
“I recently applied for a visa at the Israeli embassy in Jordan to go and visit my nephew in Jerusalem, but it was turned down. I do not understand; how could an 89-year-old Palestinian woman, 1.4 metres tall and weighing 38 kilos possibly pose a threat to Israel?! Last year, when I had made the same application, they called me in for an interview, and a well-dressed young man who did not introduce himself began talking loudly, suspecting me of lying. According to him, I was not going only to Jerusalem, he had seen my photo on the Facebook page of one of my great-nieces in Ramallah. When I left his office I was thoughtful, wondering whether his questioning masked some sort of fear. Perhaps this young man was scared that I might die in Jerusalem,2 in which case I would then be counted as yet another Palestinian in my occupied town.
They know very well that I am from Jerusalem. It is written on my birth certificate: I was born there in 1929, just like my father and grandfather. Try as they might to prevent me from returning, I will always be from Jerusalem. We were all born in our house in Harat Al Sa’diyya, in the very heart of the old town, in an alley that connects two of the main gates, Bab Al ‘Amoud and Bab Al Zahra.3 It was – and still is – a big, multi-storey house with seven big bedrooms.
My mother, Amina, was a woman of great beauty; she was gentleness personified, with her long, straight 22chestnut hair, her dark, silky eyes and her air of determination despite her small size. No one contradicted her. She did not like jewellery but she wore a necklace of transparent crystal that shone like diamonds. She was a talented seamstress who could work taffeta, satin and cotton with ease, bringing them to life as she embroidered them with brightly coloured silk threads in reds, purples, blues and gold: a whole tradition, of which Palestinian women were the keepers. Each dress carried a motif specific to a particular town.
Amina was a mother first and foremost: pregnant every two years, she had had 11 children, all alive and well, four boys and seven girls, all seven of whom she sent to the Mamuniah school. One more baby and she would have got the prize awarded by the British to women who brought 12 babies into the world.
Raising so many children was a lot of work and she needed help. So, at the age of 13, I took on the role of “little mother” to my siblings, my eldest sister being married, and I left school in 1942, at the end of primary school. At the time, I raised no objection to this, I had neither the time nor the choice to oppose the parental decision, but today, I deeply regret not having been able to continue my education.
I became responsible for daily tasks, washing clothes, bathing the children, knitting jumpers in winter, sewing shirts in summer. I was the one who prepared the bread every day and took it to the baker in the next street to be baked. I loved to prepare makloubah, a rice and aubergine dish mixed with cauliflower and seasoned with cardamom, nutmeg and cinnamon. I also loved waraq ‘ainab, vine leaves stuffed with spiced meat and rice, which had to be no larger than ones little finger, cooked in fat called mendil. Everyone’s favourite dish, though, was arnab mahshi, rabbit filled with stuffed vine leaves, the meat for which was sautéed in sesame oil, sirej.
I lavished affection on my brothers and sisters, would break up their fights and understood their worries, which led me to use the various remedies, amulets and talismans that we kept carefully in our house. Both my grandmother and my mother were convinced of their efficacy, and so I used them too, especially since tradition had it that they should be passed down from mother to daughter.
I became familiar with one of these traditional tools, a copper bowl known as tasset al rou’bah, the bowl of fear, because we often used it when my brothers and sisters showed signs of anxiety. In the evening, I would fill it with water, then would let it stand all night next to a window. All the liquid had to be drunk before sunrise for the fears to go away. To protect the children, I learned that one had to soak a necklace of stone beads in hot water for several hours, then wash the children with this water, which was supposed to turn away the evil eye. For common illnesses, there was always a remedy. Wrapping heated salt in a cloth and applying it to the stomach would relieve pain and nausea. Stomach ache could be alleviated by simply applying warm bread dough brushed with olive oil. For women who were having difficulty conceiving there was the plant murr batarikh (Commiphora myrrha) which, mixed with a half-cooked egg, had to be swallowed in one go.
Our daily lives were influenced by many beliefs that today would be considered superstition. Back then, no one made fun of them, quite the opposite. I would never allow crows or owls to land on our balcony, they had to be scared off to prevent bad luck. And an upright broomstick meant a poor household: it had to be laid down in the hopes of a life of abundance.
My paternal grandmother, my sitti, passed on all these ancestral “recipes” to us, which she had learned when she was a young girl. She also told us about the traditions of the diverse communities in Jerusalem so that we should learn to respect them. For example, when we Muslims passed the funeral procession of a Jew – the body was placed on a bier and carried to the cemetery at shoulder height by four men – we had to be careful not to pass under the body, because the family of the deceased was convinced that that would bring it bad luck. Equally, when an “Arab” inadvertently passed under the stretcher, he had to be asked if he would kindly pass back underneath in the other direction, in return for a token payment. A few rascals realized that if they passed under the body as it was being lifted, they could earn a little money, which was probably why bodies started being carried at knee height instead!
One evening, by the light of an old oil lamp, my sitti told me about the Moroccan women in the Jewish quarter of Mea Shearim, outside the old town, whom she visited from time to time even though they frightened her. Many of the townspeople had called on their services at one time or another, because they were said to know the secrets of Black Magic. Restoring peace in a household or casting a spell on a neighbour were some of their specialities. They would also go to people’s houses to prepare maftoul, working the grains of burghul in the palms of their hands.423
The old city of Jerusalem24
Esplanade of the mosques, Jerusalem
25Our house was comfortable, because my father, Abu Saleh, was a handyman. He had made a wooden sink by coating it with a waterproof material. But we had no water tap, we had to bring it from the well, which was in the house. If that precious liquid ran out, we went to fetch it from the sabils, the public water fountains,5 and we would heat it on the babour, the kerosene heater. In winter, the neighbourhood mothers preferred to take all the children to the baths, to Hammam Al ‘Ayn (the spring), or Hammam Al Shifa (the healing),6 or a bit further away to the Hammam sitti Maryam (Lady Mary) where we would all gather to chat while scrubbing the little ones with horsehair mitts. On the way, as we went through the souk, we passed the cheese and yoghurt vendors with their little donkeys.
From the terraces of Jerusalem I could watch the pilgrims who came from all over the world to discover my town. I loved going to the Cinema Rex, at Bab Al Khalil (also called Jaffa Gate)7 to watch all the films they showed, particularly those about the lives of singers like the Syrian Asmahan and the Egyptian Umm Kalthoum.
The babour was used primarily to heat the contents of the large copper saucepan. It was our “cooker”. Our house did not have electricity yet (only the wealthier homes in Jerusalem had power): it was lit, like all the houses in the neighbourhood, by paraffin lamps, like those that lit the alleyways at night, giving the old town its golden and mysterious atmosphere. An atmosphere that provided the perfect framework for the creation of Jerusalem’s legendary “Al Ammoura”, which would, variously, take the shape of a cat, a sheep, an old woman or man… perfect for scaring children.
Towards 1940, my father found a job as a carpenter in the British barracks in the Baqa’a quarter, half an hour away from home by bus. He made doors, tables, chairs, cupboards and so on, and he heard some talk of the mobilizations that were being prepared, no doubt more than our neighbours who did not know very much. When the Partition Plan for Palestine, between Jewish and Arab communities, was approved, on November 29, 1947, and fighting started, he asked us to stay at home and later to go and hide in the basement. All contact with our Jewish acquaintances stopped, and a sense of mistrust settled between them and us. The neighbourhood men piled sand bags up in the alleyways to protect us. The British virtually never intervened when a quarter was attacked by the Zionists. Daily life became hell.
In early April 1948, raids hit the Arab village of Qastal, among others, which was on the road to Jerusalem, and an army of villagers was formed to defend it. At its head was ‘Abd Al Qadir Al Husseini, one of the figures from the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 against the Balfour Declaration.8 He was killed during a battle against armed Zionist groups in Qastal, leaving his men in utter disarray. On April 9, 1948, at his funeral, all the men from the surrounding villages came to Jerusalem to pay their final respects.
The old town was black with people. I was small and as agile as a monkey so I was able to follow the procession without being noticed by climbing on the ramparts all the way to Haram Al Sharif, where he was buried. After the rites were finished, on the way home, I passed a very agitated group of women. They were screaming:
‘Deir Yasin!9 Dear God, the women, they’re all naked! Murdered! The women of Deir Yasin…’
Then I saw them. They were not walking, they stumbled, like a group of wounded birds flocking together for support. A sea of children barely ten or 12 years old. Survivors. They were bleeding, screaming their pain in silence. And for all of us who watched them pass by, that deafening silence was unbearable. Near Souk Al Hussor, they stopped, and one of them tried to tell their story, but his words were muffled by his sobs. I then understood the seriousness of what had just happened. Knowing that the men of Deir Yasin had gone to the funeral of their leader, Zionist groups had launched an attack on the village, where there were only the old people, women and children. They began by spraying each house with machine gun fire, then they gathered all the survivors to execute some of them in front of the others. They took the women and did what they did to them… It is said that they threw babies down the wells.10
The boy who was speaking looked like my little brother: he had the same face, the same brown curls. He had been lined up against a wall with all his family; he had fallen. Fallen without dying. The survivors, some old people and a few boys, were then taken into one of the Jewish quarters in Jerusalem, just beside the village, to be exhibited, then they were released.1126
Jerusalem, 1907
A total of 55 children from Deir Yasin became orphans that day. Luckily for them, a woman of the Jerusalem bourgeoisie, Hind Al Husseini, a cousin of ‘Abd Al Qadir Al Husseini, found a place for them in an institution. Then, after the ceasefire, she brought them to her grandfather’s house, which she renamed Dar Al Tifl Al Arabi (Home of the Arab Child).12
After the departure of the British on May 14, 1948, Jerusalem managed to resist in spite of the battles and bombardments. Rockets fell everywhere. Dumdum bullets which, as they exploded, sent out smaller bullets, would arrive unexpectedly, embedding themselves deep in our flesh, our souls and our walls of stone. My father’s parents and brothers and sisters, who lived in Baqa’a, in West Jerusalem, came to us in a panic to stay. Baqa’a had been attacked, and its inhabitants, scarred by what had happened a few weeks earlier in Deir Yasin, took flight. The Zionists’ message was clear: those who dare to resist them, those who refuse to go, will suffer the same fate.
In this wounded Jerusalem, my father found himself unemployed, without a salary. He made bits and pieces here and there, but it was not enough. The problem was the same for everyone: they needed to work, but in Jerusalem, that was no longer possible. My father stayed as long as he could because he did not want to run away. Nevertheless, in 1950, we had to leave for Amman where there were, so it was said, some prospects for the future. East Jerusalem was part of Jordan at the time, so we did not need passports to go to Amman. I found it very hard to leave my ramparts, my terraces, my world.
Once settled in the Jordanian capital, Abu Saleh easily found work thanks not only to his expert carpenter’s hands, but also to his reputation. But the life seemed to have gone out of him. A year after we arrived in Jordan, he died, having made us promise to take him back to Jerusalem. We accompanied him as far as Bab Al Asbat,13 to the main Muslim cemetery of the same name, just outside the old town. A grave among the graves, at home. It was what he wanted.
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan. Just after that, I sneaked back to Jerusalem with one of my sisters. It was extremely dangerous. An entire 27 family had been shot on the same path as us the day before: they had all been killed.
During the 40 days that I stayed with my sister, the Israelis organized a census which allowed the Palestinians who were there to get an Israeli identity card, a measure that prevented others from returning.
Afraid of the possible reactions of the Israelis were they to discover that I was in Jerusalem instead of Amman, where I was supposed to be, I hid and was thus not counted. From that moment on, all the Palestinians who had gone over to Jordan no longer had permission to return. When, a few weeks later, I crossed the border again back to Jordan to re-join my family, the Israeli customs officer asked me for my census paper, which of course I did not have. He looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘You won’t be able to come back, you understand?’
No, I did not really understand, I said to myself that they would not stay long. But he was right: since that day, I have never been able to return to Jerusalem without applying for a temporary visa.
Our house in Harat Al Sa’diyya did not stay empty. When the Arab families fled Jerusalem, the people of Hebron moved into the houses to save them. They protected our property, thankfully. Our house was rented to one of these Hebron families, four dinars a month at the time. That price has stayed the same ever since, which means that today the monthly rent for our house is between US$5 and US$6. It is impossible to take our house back: because most of the members of the family are considered as “absentees”,14 we can no longer live in Jerusalem. And to obtain a visa from Israel is becoming more and more difficult. We are Palestinians from Jerusalem, who are no longer allowed to go home.
I have heard that on several occasions some Israelis went to see the tenants in our house and offered to buy it. It has to be said that a few of our neighbours, four or five, have sold their property. The prices offered are so high that they can make you lose your head, preventing any reflection on the disastrous consequences that such a sale will have on the whole Palestinian community. It is very sad, even shameful, I think. Regardless of the state of the houses, what the Israelis want is to be able to take possession of them. What is important, in their eyes, is to plant their flag in the heart of our Jerusalem.”
1. For those interested in life in Jerusalem from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, see the collected articles of Angelos Dalachanis, Vincent Lemire and 35 researchers, Ordinary Jerusalem 1840–1940, Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, Brill Open E-Books Online, 2018.
2. On the theme of the memory and identity of the Palestinians in Jordan and of their future in Jordan, see Géraldine Chatelard, “Palestiniens de Jordanie”, in Jordanie, le Royaume frontière, Paris, Autrement, 2001.
3. Damascus Gate and Herod’s Gate.
4. What is known as maftoul in Palestine is the couscous of North Africa. The finished dish is called al moughrabiyya, in other words “the Moroccan”.
5. Vincent Lemire, La Soif de Jérusalem, essai d’ hydrohistoire (1840–1948), Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2011.
6. To the south of the covered alley of the Souk Al Qattaneen (cotton-workers’ market) stand the two hammams, built by the Mamluks in 1336. During a building campaign, the governor, Saif Al Din Tankiz redeveloped the quarter and built a big covered alley for shops, a khan or caravanserai, and the two baths.
7. In Jerusalem, each of the gates leading into the old town has different names in different languages and these names do not have the same meaning. The Arabic name Bab Al Amud, for example, means Column Gate, but it is called Damascus Gate in English. Bab Al Khalil translates as Hebron Gate (Khalil in Arabic is the town known as Hebron by Christians and Jews), but it is called Jaffa Gate in English.
8. Henry Laurens, La Question de la Palestine, vol. III, 1947‒1967. L’Accomplissement des prophéties, Paris, Fayard, 2007, p.73, explains why ‘Abd Al Qadir Al Husseini decided to recapture the village, which he equates to the fate of Jerusalem. He was then in Damascus to try to get help from the Arab League, which, preoccupied with the situation in Galilee, refused him.
9. See the article by Nadine Picaudou, “The Historiography of the 1948 Wars”, in Mass Violence and Resistance – Research Network (MV&R), November 1, 2008, Sciences Po.
10. Ilan Pappé,The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld Publications, 2006, p.91, confirms it: ‘However, as the Jewish forces regarded any Palestinian village as an enemy military base, the distinction between massacring people and killing them “in battle” was slight. One only has to be told that thirty babies were among the slaughtered in Deir Yasin to understand why the whole “quantitative” exercise is insignificant.’
11. Nathan Yalin-Mor,Israël, Israël, Histoire du groupe Stern, 1940–1948, Paris-Presses de la Renaissance, 1978, cited by Henry Laurens, ibid., p. 75, gives details of these exactions.
12. The orphanage is in the Sheikh Jarrah quarter, outside the old town of Jerusalem.
13. Lions Gate.
14. In 1950, Israel voted in the Absentees’ Property Law, which allowed it to take the possessions and lands of Palestinians whom Israel has forbidden to return home. This law allowed Israel to hand over the land of these forced “absentees” to third parties.
28
The legal battle to unfreeze Palestinian assets
Fuad Shehadeh, deceased in 2019 at the age of 94
His office is on the first floor of an old building in the centre of Ramallah. No need for adornments or frills. The A, F & R law firm (Aziz, Fuad & Raja), founded by Fuad and his brother Aziz, gained its reputation through legal successes in the early 1950s. That was when the two brothers filed a law suit against the banks that had implemented the Israeli order to freeze the accounts of all their Palestinian Arab customers.1 The two lawyers wanted to fight the unilateral measure that had taken by surprise the people who had deposited their funds in all confidence in these establishments. The unbelievable response of the bankers was: ‘We are sorry, your money is indeed here, but we cannot give it to you, it is frozen, mujammid.’Among the most important of these banks was Barclays, the official bank of the British mandate authorities, and the Ottoman Bank, which at the time was mainly in the hands of the British and the French.
What did this money represent? And who were these people who were stripped of their assets?2In February 1949, a few months after the implementation of the Israeli diktat, both banks, Barclays and the Ottoman, were forced to transfer the liquid assets and securities of their Palestinian clients to the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property.3 This was the administrative body responsible for managing the real estate, moveable and capital assets of Palestinian Arabs in its possession. The 1950 law on absentees’ assets endorsed this system.
Faced with this financial dispossession in addition to the loss of their homes, their land and all their belongings, the bank’s customers fought back through the legal system. Fuad Shehadeh was one of their lawyers.
“I come from a renowned family of journalists. My father was from Ramallah. He was a widower when he met my mother in Jaffa in 1923, and he published a newspaper called The Eastern Mirror (in Arabic Mir’at Al Sharq, founded in 1919). He had lost his wife and children during the cholera epidemic of 1916. My mother was from Jaffa, from a family of reporters well known in Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine.
