PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 137

1. In July 1946, a bomb destroyed the King
David Hotel, which was the British headquar-
ters in Jerusalem. See Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld Pub-
lications, 2006, p. 25; after the Second World
War, the British ‘were looking for a solution
that would be based on the wishes and inter-
ests of the people actually living in Palestine,
and not those of Zionist leaders claimed might
want to move there – in other words, a demo-
cratic solution. Armed, but especially terrorist,
attacks by the Jewish underground militias
failed to change that Policy. Against the bomb-
ing of bridges, military bases and the British
headquarters in Jerusalem (the King David
Hotel), the British reacted mildly – especial-
ly in comparison with the brutal treatment
they had meted out to Palestinian rebels in
the 1930s. Retaliation took the form of a dis-
armament campaign of Jewish troops, a large
number of whom they themselves had armed
and recruited, first in the war against the Pal-
estinian rebellion in 1937, and then against the
Axis powers in 1939.’
2.  The Royal Flying Corps, which subsequent-
ly became the Royal Air Force, was established
in 1917, at the request of General Allenby, who
had planned an offensive against the Ottoman
Empire in Palestine.
3. Yibna, on the road between Ramleh and
Ashdod, had around 5000 inhabitants in the
late 1940s. See Walid Khalidi, All That Re-
mains, The Palestinian Villages Occupied
and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Institute
for Palestine Studies, 1992, 636 pages, pp.
110–113.
4.  In 1949, there were 190,000 refugees in the
Gaza Strip.
5.  Muhyeddin Al Jamal has never had a birth
certificate; he thinks he was born between 1930
and 1932.
6. Refugee camps were first established in
Gaza in 1948, the earliest ones being Al Shatti
(the beach camp), Bureij and Maghazi.
7.  Gaza was under Egyptian rule in 1948. It
remained so until 1967.
8.  When the German army invaded Poland in
1939, many Poles sought refuge in Palestine,
which had been under British mandate since
1922.
9.  One Egyptian pound would buy about one
kilogram of meat.
10.  Israel, France and Great Britain attacked
Egypt in October–November 1956 after Nass-
er nationalized the Suez Canal. Israel then oc-
cupied Gaza (which had been under Egyptian
administration since 1948) and Sinai until May
1957. For a detailed history, see Jean-Pierre Fil-
iu, Gaza, A History, New York, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2017. See also Joe Sacco, Foot-
notes in Gaza, Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2019; Orna
Almog, Britain, Israel and the United States,
1955–1958, Beyond Suez, Frank Cass Publish-
ers, 2003 and Taylor & Francis, 2005.
11. According to the UN Partition Plan
(1947), Beersheba was to be part of the terri-
tory attributed to the State of Palestine, given
that the majority of its inhabitants were Arabs.
But the town was occupied and conquered by a
unit of the Palmach in October 1948 to prevent
any possible blockading of Israeli convoys to
the Negev. For more details, see Benny Mor-
ris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Revisited, Cambridge (UK), Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003. In 1956, there were 22,000
Israeli inhabitants in the town.
12.  The UN deployed two peacekeeping mis-
sions in Egypt and Gaza under the name of
the United Nations Emergency Force (Unef):
the first was Unef I, during the Suez crisis in
1956, which lasted until 1967, the second was
Unef II, after the Yom Kippur War, from 1973
to 1979.
13.  Voltaire Londeiro Schilling was a Brazilian
soldier of German origin who worked for the
Unef mission.
14.  Unrwa (United Nations Relief and Works
Agency) for Palestine Refugees in the Near
East, established on December 8, 1949.
15. Henrique Teixeira Lott, Minister of War
(in Brazil one spoke of the Ministry of War
at the time) in Juscelino Kubitschek’s govern-
ment, which initiated the construction of Bra-
silia, the new capital of Brazil, in 1956.
16. The governor of Gaza was an Egyptian,
since Gaza was under Egyptian rule.
17.  Today, it is even harder for the two million
inhabitants of the Gaza strip, who are living
in an “open-air prison”, as the historian Ilan
Pappé calls it in his book The Biggest Prison
on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories,
Oneworld Publications, 2017. See also Sara
Roy, The Gaza Stip: The Political Economy of
De-development, 3rd edn, Washington, DC,
Institute for Palestine Studies, 2016.
18.  As Ofer Aderet explains in his article “Is-
raeli Prime Minister After Six-Day War: ‘We’ll
Deprive Gaza of Water, and the Arabs Will
Leave’”, Haaretz, November 17, 2017: the Is-
raeli objective was to incite the Arabs to leave
the Gaza Strip.
19. Willys–Overland Motors is an American
make of vehicles, known for its military jeeps.
20.  While tradition had allowed everyone to
pick the nuts anywhere, even on private land,
the arrival of large agro-industrial groups, be-
ginning in the 1960s, turned everything upside
down. Landowners began to prevent pickers
from getting to the palm trees, which provoked
violent conflicts.
21.  São Luis do Maranhão is the capital of the
State of Maranhão, between the bays of São
Marcos and São José de Ribamar, about 800
kilometres east of Belém.
22.  Palestinians of Gazan origin living in Jor-
dan are only very rarely granted Jordanian na-
tionality, usually in cases of services rendered
to Jordan. Nationality can be granted by the
king, or, as in this case, thanks to the interven-
tion of the prince.
23.  See the article by Jalal Al Husseini, “Le
statut des réfugiés palestiniens au Proche-Ori-
ent, Facteur de maintien ou de dissolution de
l’identité nationale palestinienne ?” in Jalal Al
Husseini and Aude Signoles, Les Palestiniens
entre État et Diaspora – Le temps des incerti-
tudes, Karthala, 2011. This article looks at all
the political aspects of the particular status of
Palestinian refugees which, according one of
the informal representatives of the refugees in
an article in a Jordanian newspaper ‘are not the
normal victims of war to whom we give assis-
tance (…) but a nation from which the United
Nations Organization has stolen everything.’
Muhyeddin
135