PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem

1. According to Cecilia Baeza, “Les Pales- tiniens du Chile, de la conscience diaspori- que à la mobilisation transnationale”, Revue d’ études palestiniennes n°95, Spring 2005, the nick-name Turkos caused a negative reaction among the first Palestinians of Chile: on top of being designated by a nationality which was not theirs, they were being identified with their oppressors. 2. Lorenzo Agar and Antonia Rebolledo, “La inmigración arabe en Chile: Los caminos de la integración”, El Mundo Arabe y América latina, Ed. Libertarias/Prodhufi, Madrid, 1997. 3. The Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahaim Jabra, born in Bethlehem in 1920, writes about emigration from Palestine to the United States, Central America, Brazil, Chile and Ar- gentina at the turn of the century in The First Well, University of Arkansas Press, 1995. 4. Ziyad Clot, “Il n’y aura pas d’État pales- tinien”, Journal d’un négociateur en Palestine, Max Milo Éditions, 2010. In footnote 62, the author mentions 300,000 people. 5. Figures quoted by national and internation- al media and in various reports, such as the note by Cecilia Baeza, op. cit., these figures were confirmed by Jorge Sahd, director of the Centro de Estudios Internacionales de la Uni- versidad Católica de Chile, during the confer- ence on “The economic contribution of Arab immigration in Latin America: past, present and future”, held at Al Hussein Cultural Cen- tre in Amman, Jordan on October 2, 2018. Ac- cording to him there are over 20 million Arabs (some say 25 to 28 million) in Latin America. 6. Adrien Pécout, “L’effet papillon du conflit israélo-palestinien sur un maillot chilien”, Le Monde, January 10, 2014. 7. Cecilia Baeza, “Multiculturalisme et con- struction identitaire au Chile (1990–2011)”, Critique Internationale n°54, Presses de Scienc- es Po, January-March 2014. The migrants who came in the early twentieth century did indeed identify themselves as “Palestinian”. 8. See the book in two volumes, Al anatiqoo- na bil dad fi America el jenoubieh published in Arabic (Jerusalem, Al Mathba’ah Al Tijariiyah 1946 and 1956) by the Jordanian writer Yacoub Awdat, better known by his pen-name Al Bad- awi Al Mulaththam (The Veiled Bedouin). In English the book title means “Arab-speakers in America North and South”. It deals with em- igration from Beit Jala, Beit Sahur and Bethle- hem to South America and from Ramallah to North America in the early twentieth century. 9. A British commission of inquiry, directed by Walter Shaw, submitted its report in March 1930 on the disturbances in Palestine in Au- gust 1929. That document resulted in the Hope Simpson Enquiry of May 1930 which conclud- ed that the riots had essentially been caused by the fear of massive immigration of European 192 Memories of 1948 Jews and their purchase of land. These points are reviewed in the Passfield White Paper which called for Jewish immigration to Pales- tine to be limited. 10. An important detail: Chile abstained from the vote on the resolution in 1947 on the parti- tioning of Palestine. 11. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Pales- tine, Oxford, Oneworld Publications, 2006, p. 46. ‘Immediately upon the adoption of UN Resolution 181 the Arab leaders officially de- clared they would dispatch troops to defend Palestine. And yet, not once between the end of November 1947 and May 1948 did Ben-Gu- rion and, one should add, the small group of leading Zionist figures around him sense that their future state was in any danger, or that the list of military operations was so overwhelming that they would impinge on the proper expul- sion of the Palestinians.’ 12. Ilan Pappé, op. cit., p. 126. The author ex- plains that the UN at least sensed things were going from bad to worse ‘but they took no ac- tion beyond watching and reporting the begin- ning of the ethnic cleansing. The UN had only limited access to Palestine, since the British authorities forbade an organized UN outfit to be present on the ground, thereby ignoring that part of the Partition Resolution that demanded the presence of a United Nations committee. Britain allowed the cleansing to take place, in front of the eyes of its soldiers and officials, during the Mandate period, (…) and hampered the UN efforts to intervene in a way that might have saved a number of Palestinians.’ 13. “The urbanicide of Palestine” would also af- fect Jerusalem, as Salim Tamari explains in his book Jérusalem 1948. The Arab Neighbourhoods and Their Fate in the War, The Institute of Jeru- salem Studies and Badil Resource Center, 2002. 14. Even though it is in Palestinian territory, Beit Jala has lost two-thirds of its area due to the construction of the illegal Israeli settle- ments of Gilo, Har Gilo and Givat Hamatos on its lands. 15. Avi Shlaim, “The Debate about 1948”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 27, n°3, August 1995. The author cites the tra- gi-comic novel by Émile Habibi, Les Aventures extraordinaires de Sa’ îd le Peptimiste, Gallimard, 1987: ‘Conquerors, my boy, consider as true only the history that they themselves have fabricated.’ 16. David Ben-Gurion, in his Memoirs, on July 18, 1948, cited by Michael Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157. 17. Stéphanie Latte Abdallah, “Regards, visibilité historique et politique des images sur les réfugiés palestiniens depuis 1948”, in Le Mouvement social, n° 219–220, pp. 65–91, éditions de l’Atelier, 2007. Between 1948 and 1950, it is the Red Cross (the International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of Red Cross Societies) and the Quakers who intervened on the humanitarian mandate of the United Nations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as in the neighbouring countries where the majority of the refugees were. Since then, it is Unrwa which supplies that assis- tance. The article highlights the negation of the social identity of refugees and the new life cre- ated by them in the camps, which are meant to replace their villages and towns and gradually become their new homes. 18. See the article by Jean-Pierre Filiu, “L’as- sassinat par Israël du médiateur de l’ONU en Palestine”, in his blog Le Monde, October 14, 2018. The author describes the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, UN mediator for Palestine, by a Lehi commando on September 17, 1948, thus putting an end to the prospect of peace itself. Yitzhak Shamir, one of the high-rank- ing leaders of Lehi at that time, would become prime minister of Israel from 1983–1984 and 1986–1992. 19. The admission of Israel into the United Nations was, in principle, linked to its imple- mentation of Resolution 19 (III), paragraph 11 of which promulgates the return of refugees or their compensation. 20. Justin McCarthy, Population of Pales- tine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate, Colum- bia University Press, 1990. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Palestinians consisted of 403,795 Muslims, 43,659 Christians and 15,011 Ottoman Jews. By 1914, they were, re- spectively 601,377; 81,012 and 38,754. 21. According to the article by Olivier de Tro- goff, “La diaspora chrétienne de Palestine dans le monde”, Les clés du Moyen Orient, September 29, 2014, the Palestinians who migrated in the late nineteenth century were nearly all Chris- tians. The first to leave followed the strength- ening, in the mid-nineteenth century, of the French and British presence in the Ottoman Empire, notably in Lebanon and Palestine. By giving their support to opponents of the Otto- mans, they encouraged the emancipation of the Christians. But this strategy did not foresee the mass emigration of young Christian men from the Ottoman Empire, to escape conscription. 22. Denys Cuche, “Un siècle d’immigration palestinienne au Pérou. La construction d’une ethnicité spécifique”, Revue Européenne des Mi- grations Internationales, vol. 17, p. 88, 2001. The author explains that the first wave of emi- gration of Arabic speakers from the Near East (mostly from Palestine and Lebanon) to South America occurred between 1860 and 1914. Several tens of thousands of people – almost exclusively Orthodox Christians who repre- sented only 10% of the total population – left Palestine.

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