PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 96

1. Al Azhar, “the Splendid”, is the foremost
university for the study of Islam. It is in Cairo.
2.  Al Aqsa mosque was the original qibla (the
direction towards which Muslims turn when
praying), before Mecca came to give that di-
rection. Along with the Dome of the Rock,
the mosque forms part of a group of religious
buildings on the esplanade known as Al Har-
am Al Sharif. This is the third most holy site
of Islam. According to Muslim tradition, this
is the place from which the Prophet went up to
heaven after his “night journey”.
3.  Nabi Samwil (Prophet Samuel) is a Pales-
tinian village in the West Bank, north of Jeru-
salem. In the sixth century, a Christian author
identified the site as that of the tomb of the
Jewish prophet Samuel. In the twelfth century,
the Spanish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela noted
that the Crusaders found Samuel’s bones in a
Jewish cemetery in Ramah. It was from the top
of Nabi Samwil hill that the Crusaders would
have seen Jerusalem for the first time, which is
why they named it the “Mountain of Joy”. A
church and a monastery were built there first,
then in 1187, under Salah Eddin, a mosque was
erected. In the fifteenth century, a synagogue
was built close by. The house Umaima Mohta-
di Al Alami grew up in was part of both the
mosque and the church. The village was con-
structed in the 1730s under Ottoman rule, but
in 1967, most of the villagers living around the
mosque of Nabi Samwil were driven out. Even
though this place had long been important
to both Jews and Muslims, the Israelis built
a synagogue there, and in 1993, a yeshiva (a
centre for study of the Torah and Talmud). In
1995, Israel decided to turn Nabi Samwil into
a national park under Israeli administrative
control. In 2007, the village (of about 250 in-
habitants) was cut off from the rest of the West
Bank by the construction of the separation
wall. Nowadays, its residents live in an enclave,
surrounded by settlements.
4. A dunum is a unit of measurement dating
from Ottoman times, equal to 919.3 m 2 , but
during the British Mandate in Palestine (1917–
1948), the metric dunum, measuring 1000 m 2 ,
was adopted.
5.  There are archaeological excavations on this
land today. See the book by Elias Sanbar, Dic-
tionnaire amoureux de la Palestine, Plon, 2010,
pp. 31–39, in which the author explains the
role of archaeological excavations undertaken
by the Israelis who are trying to demonstrate
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Memories of 1948
their precedence in this place and thereby jus-
tify their “exclusive possession of the place”.
However, discoveries often destroy myths.
6.  In 1922, the Jewish population amounted
to 11  % of the total population of Palestine
(Justin McCarthy, Population of Palestine:
Population History and Statistics of the Late Ot-
toman Period and the Mandate, Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1990) and they owned 2.5 % of
the land (Lehn, 1988).
7.  A kibbutz (plural kibbutzim) is a group of
agriculturalists whose members are organized
as a collective on the basis of communal prop-
erty. This organization (the first was created in
1910 in Palestine) was much used in the 1940s
for the creation of Jewish settlements.
8. The State of Israel made West Jerusalem
its capital in 1949. Then, in 1967, having con-
quered the east part of the town, it considered
that a “reunified” Jerusalem was “its” capital.
This despite the fact that the United Nations
and most of its members consider Jerusalem to
be “occupied” and demand that UN Resolu-
tion 181 be implemented. This resolution states
that the city must be placed under an interna-
tional regime, conferring on it a special status
due to its importance to the three monotheistic
religions.
9. In Jerusalem, every religious community
had some waqf properties; they were not re-
served only for Muslims. See Musa Sroor,
Fondations pieuses en mouvement. De la trans-
formation du statut de propriété des biens waqf à
Jérusalem, 1858–1917. Presses de l’Ifpo, 2010.
10.  In 1950, Israel passed the Absentees’ Prop-
erty Law, which granted the government the
right to take possession of the property and
lands of Palestinians whom Israel has forbidden
to return to their land. This law allows Israel to
sell the enforced “absentee’s” property to third
parties.
11. The Israeli State has found ways to seize
some waqf properties, as is the case, for exam-
ple, for the Nabi Samwil Mosque.
12.  Haganah is a Zionist paramilitary organi-
zation created in 1920 and integrated into the
Israeli army in 1948. Initially, it was under
the leadership of the Zionist union Histadrut,
subsequently coming under the control of the
Jewish Agency, which was the executive arm
of the Zionists in Palestine under the British
mandate. The Haganah became the unofficial
armed wing of the Jewish Agency, considered
to be illegal by the British authorities.
13. Today, two-thirds of Gaza’s inhabitants
are descendants of refugees who arrived at the
time of the 1948 conflict, particularly from
southern Palestine.
14. Before 1948, Ramallah was known as
being a Christian village. It was next to the
Muslim village of Al Bira. After 1948, the two
towns merged together, the majority of Ramal-
lah’s residents having emigrated to the United
States.
15. After the ceasefire with Israel, the Gaza
Strip fell under Egyptian administration. But
the Gazans were not given Egyptian national-
ity, and they needed a permit to travel, unlike
the West Bank Palestinians, who were given
Jordanian nationality.
16. In 1967, Egypt was engaged in a war in
Yemen on the side of the republicans, who were
also supported by the USSR, against the roy-
alists, supported by Saudi Arabia and Britain.
That year, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to
Israeli shipping again and demanded that the
UN Blue Berets should leave that area. Israel
then started a war by bombing the Egyptian
air force.
17. In 1948, Jerusalem should, according to
the UN partition plan, have been an interna-
tional city, given its central importance to the
three monotheistic religions. The corpus sepa-
ratum was one of the most important dossiers
discussed during the Lausanne conference in
1949, along with the definition of the borders
and the right of return of refugees. After the
Six-Day War, on June 29, 1967, the Knesset
(the Israeli parliament) instituted Jerusalem as
its eternal capital and indivisible from Israel,
and declared it “unified”: it then fell under its
sovereignty alone. The whole world was against
this decision and immediately withdrew their
embassies.
18. According to Abbas Shiblak, “Passport
for what price? Statelessness among Palestin-
ian refugees”, in Palestinian Refugees: Identity,
Space and Place in the Levant, edited by Are
Knudsen and Sari Hanafi, Routledge, Lon-
don-New York, 2011, p. 116, Israel has used a
regulation from 1974 as a “legal” instrument
to deprive many Arabs from Jerusalem of their
identity papers and of their right of residence
if they stay away from the city for more than
seven years, if they acquire another nationality
or if they have been given a permanent right of
residence elsewhere.