PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 107

1.  Dura is 11 kilometres south-west of Hebron
(Al Khalil in Arabic).
2.  Saleh Abdel Jawad, “Une politique d’assas-
sinats”, Revue d’Études Palestiniennes, 85, 2002.
The author shows why these targeted assassina-
tions, which often claimed innocent victims,
were all based on political will: “Many political
assassinations perpetrated by Israel violated the
sovereignty of other countries, whether they be
allied countries or signatories to a peace treaty
with Israel. France, for example, has been the
scene of the assassination of eight Palestinian
nationals.”
3.  The list of intellectual and political Palestin-
ians assassinated in long: Mahmoud Hamshari
(director of the PLO in Paris, killed by a bomb
in 1972), Wa’el Zuaytar (shot dead in Rome
in 1972), Ghassan Kanafani (writer, member
PFLP, killed by a car bomb in 1972 in Beirut),
Kamal Adwan (he and two other PLO mili-
tants, Kamal Nasser and Abu Youssef Al Najjar
were assassinated by Ehud Barak disguised as a
woman in 1973 in Beirut), Ali Hassan Salameh
(killed in 1979 in Beirut)… the list goes on.
4.  Close to unaligned and Marxist ideas, the
Arab revolutionaries wanted to get rid of the
regimes that the colonial powers had set up be-
fore giving Arab countries their independence.
5.  Azza is the daughter of Majed’s second wife,
Inam Abdel Hadi.
6.  This portrait, on a wall in the town, is by
Yousef Amairi. He has also made three other
mural portraits, symbolic of the Palestinian re-
sistance, of Bajes Abu Atwan, Ghassan Kana-
fani and Mahmoud Darwish.
7.  In May 1948, Egypt took control of Hebron,
but subsequently the town and its surroundings
were at the centre of a conflict between Egypt
and Jordan, that lasted until October 1948.
The two countries assigned military gover-
nors in order to gain the support of the local
dignitaries. The Egyptian forces confronted
the Arab Legion, a Jordanian force led by the
British officer Glubb Pasha, until the armistice
was signed and the town finally fell under Jor-
danian military control. In December 1948,
the Jericho conference, attended by dignitaries
from Hebron, including Muhammad ‘Ali Al
Ja’bari, backed Jordan’s project to annex the
West Bank under King Abdullah I (who was
finally confirmed by the Jordanian parliament
in April 1950) as well as the granting of Jorda-
nian nationality to West Bank Palestinians. In
1948, many people from Hebron went to settle
in Jerusalem at the time when its inhabitants
were fleeing for fear of massacres. See Kimberly
Katz, “Hebron between Jordan and Egypt:
An Uncertain Transition Resulting from the
1948 Palestine War”, Urban History, n°46 (1)
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018,
pp. 132–148.
8.  The Gaza Strip was created during armistice
negotiations in Rhodes, after the first Arab-Is-
raeli war in 1949. This fringe of land, covering
362 km 2 , would be administered by Egypt be-
tween 1948 and 1967. By 1950, the population
reached 254,000, two-thirds of whom were
refugees from other parts of Palestine which
were now part of Israel. Egypt managed Gaza
like a protectorate, and its inhabitants became
stateless. In 1954, encouraged by Jamal Abdel
Nasser, the Egyptian president, the first fedayin
commandos were operating in southern Israel,
which responded with military force.
9.  A Palestinian poet living in Egypt, educat-
ed in Gaza. His first poems were published in
the newspaper Al Hurriya (Liberty) in Jaffa. His
first book, Al Ma’raka (The Battle) was pub-
lished in 1952, then Palestine in the Heart in
1964 and Trees Die Standing in 1966. He was
in prison in Gaza from 1955 to 1957 and 1959
to 1963. He went into exile in 1967 when the
Gaza Strip fell under Israeli control.
10.  Dhahiriya near Dura was then part of the
West Bank annexed to Jordan until 1967. Al
Tafila and Al Karak are on the east bank of the
Jordan.
11.  According to the Partition Plan for Pales-
tine decreed in November 1947 at the United
Nations General Assembly, Jaffa should not
have been part of the State of Israel. But the
UN vote was not respected, the town was tar-
geted by attacks by Zionist militias from early
1948 and fell on May 13, 1948, on the eve of
the end of the British Mandate. Today, Jaffa is
a district of Tel-Aviv.
12.  At Dammam, on the Persian Gulf, is one
of the first petrol reserves found in 1930 by the
American company California Arab Standard
Oil Company (CASOC). Petrol production in
concentrated in these eastern provinces.
13.  Al Ayam would be issued twice a week in
March 1966, three times a week with 12 pages
in September 1971 and in June 1978 it became
a 40-page daily, plus special issues.
14. Fatah (means “conquest” as well as be-
ing an inverted acronym of harakat al tahrîr
al Falastîni), signifies “Palestinian Liberation
Movement”. Fatah was founded in 1959 by Yas-
ser Arafat. It brought together a large variety of
Palestinian resistance groups, as well as young
people from Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, Tunisia,
A man of integrity
Morocco, Syria, Egypt and Europe… to whom
Fatah gave political and military training in
training camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
15. Helga Baumgarten, Palästina: Befreiung
in den Staat, Die Palästinensische Nationalbe-
wegung seit 1948, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 1991.
16. Bassma Kodmani-Darwish, ‘L’OLP, de
l’Incarnation du peuple au gouvernement de
l’État’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la
Méditerranée, pp. 68–69, 1993.
17.  Towards the end of the 1970s Majed be-
came more sceptical about the ten-point plan.
He no longer believed that it served the nation-
al interest of the Palestinians.
18.  To continue the tradition of free and mil-
itant journalism, in 2014, his children creat-
ed the Majed Abu Sharar Media Foundation
(MASMF), directed by his daughter, Samaa,
and based in Beirut, Lebanon. Young Palestin-
ians who have grown up in refugee camps re-
ceive professional training in the use of different
media. Among other things, they learn about
the defence of freedom of speech and how to
avoid being victims of stereotypes that are all
too often trotted out about the Palestinians.
19. “Good Morning Majed”, a poem by
Mahmoud Darwish, dedicated to Majed Abu
Sharar. Mahmoud Darwish Foundation, in
Ramallah.
Majed
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