PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 188

the British, who had been managing economic and
political life in Palestine since 1922: they were allow-
ing the Zionists movements to arm themselves while
a Palestinian only had to be stopped carrying a pen-
knife for him to be thrown in jail. And those who
opposed the British mandate often ended up being
hanged, as Fu’ad Hijazi, Mohammad Jamjoom and
’Atta Al Zir, had been on June 17, 1930 in Acre. 9 Then,
in 1947, came the United Nations decision to partition
Palestine, 10 which gave birth to the war. An unjust war
in which we Palestinians had everything to lose, and
the Zionists everything to win. 11 In the midst of the
fighting, my mother preferred to move to our house in
Jerusalem, where she felt safe. But in April 1948, when
groups of armed Zionists attacked the Arab neigh-
bourhoods in West Jerusalem, including Qatamun,
we had to flee and hide in the surrounding hills. 12 In
her haste, my mother had left the radio on, and I can
still hear her saying: 13
‘I should have turned off the radio! Electricity is
expensive!’
But the radio carried on crackling that day and we
were never able to go back to the house. That image
still hurts me deeply today when I think of my mother,
conscientiously closing the door behind her, stuffing
the key in her pocket: she could never have imagined
that they would one day stop her from going home!
According to the partition plan, Beit Jala found
itself by chance on the Palestinian side, 14 and we were
able to go back to our house there. But our life stopped
at that moment although we did not know it yet. The
roads were packed. Hundreds, then thousands of Pal-
estinians were flooding in from villages to the west of
Bethlehem. The flow became even heavier when the
British finally left on May 15, 1948, and the State of
Israel came into being.
It was awful: people were rigid with fear because
armed Zionist groups were attacking and massacring
like invaders, indiscriminately. Beit Jala represented
security to all these refugees: the war had more or less
stayed outside it, two kilometres away, but outside
nonetheless.
Seventy years after 1948, I still feel a painful anger
gripping my chest, and also a feeling of powerless-
ness in the face of what we have called Al Nakba,
the Catastrophe. Our Catastrophe. A terrifying story
which for a long time was snuffed out, effaced, even
ignored 15 because the conquerors, those who built Israel
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Memories of 1948
– alleging that it was the will of God – had decided
that only a single version of the facts would be allowed:
their version.
To go away in order to escape the conquerors, leav-
ing absolutely everything behind, was no trivial mat-
ter for the Palestinians of the villages around Beit Jala:
the violence that they had suffered could be seen in
their faces. Though only 13 years old, I knew what it
was all about since we had been forced to leave Jeru-
salem in a hurry, and I could now see all these people
coming together in groups by family, by neighbour-
hood, by village and the refugee camps gradually tak-
ing shape. They were educated people, townsfolk and
farmers, Christians and Muslims, who from one day
to the next, were compelled to abandon their lives and
everything they had built up for generations. Some-
times, people who had left in a hurry tried to go back
to their houses at night, to get a mattress, or blankets
or precious items, but many did not come back: they
were executed on the way. And the mines stealthily
placed in their houses or on the paths claimed many
victims. David Ben-Gurion had spoken very clearly in
July 1948: “We must do everything to ensure that they
(the Palestinians) will never come back to their hous-
es.” 16 It would have been enough just to listen to him
to understand; but how could we imagine such cruelty?
I could not understand that in the name of the crea-
tion of the State of Israel – which the whole world saw
as “grandiose” – we, the inhabitants of these towns and
these hills, had become obstacles. I could not conceive
that our elimination had become a “foregone conclu-
sion” in everyone’s eyes, and that our suffering was
“secondary”. My heart was in pieces seeing children
and teenagers like myself searching for their parents
whom they had lost in the haste. Every day between
3 and 5 pm messages were broadcast on Radio Jerusa-
lem to find lost relatives. The youth of Beit Jala felt that
we were implicated – perhaps we knew unconsciously
that our turn would come later – and so we decided
that it was our duty to help them find each other.
The spring of 1948 went by, and the summer. And
the hope of return remained complete. But people’s
money was drying up and, when the rain, the mud and
the cold came, the awakening was brutal: the fantasy of
a return was one thing, the reality was another. Shelter
needed to be found urgently as well as water, which was
cruelly lacking. Sickness touched everybody, the most
vulnerable in particular. All aid was welcome and the