PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 15

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 massa-
cre 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 histori-
cal 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’. 7
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.
Falestin Naili
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