PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 111

the kibbutzim. 13 So of course, when people in the Pales-
tinian villages learned of this, the women began selling
their gold jewellery, the men their cows and sheep, so
that they too could buy some weapons. The traffickers
sold old English and Belgian rifles dating back to the
First World War. Our family, not having the means,
bought only one, but the British supplied the villagers
with a dozen more. In Kawkaba, people dug trenches
round their houses and organized a rota for guard duty.
By the time the British left, in May 1948, clashes
had already been going on for a while. In the neigh-
bouring village of Beit Daras, they had in fact started
two months earlier, in March. 14 A convoy of Zionists
had terrorized the inhabitants in the village, and the
young people of Kawkaba had gone there to support
them. I was too young to fight, but I learned that a
man, a Zionist, had been killed during the battle, one
Shlomo, and that the young people of Beit Daras had
buried him. A few days later, the British came with
the Red Cross, disinterred the body and gave it to the
Jewish fighters.
When the mathbaha, the massacre of Deir Yasin hap-
pened in April 1948, 15 the news spread rapidly through
the countryside and many villagers, fearing that this
type of action might become widespread, fled to Gaza.
Kawkaba was attacked on May 13, as were Burayr and
Hleiqat. The opposition were well equipped in arms,
tanks and men. They burned everything, our wooden
houses, our schools, they demolished the water reser-
voir… By chance, our family had left ten days earlier to
seek shelter in a neighbouring village. A month later, in
June, the Egyptian army arrived, followed by a group
of Saudi volunteers: they set up their military bases
near Kawkaba and fought the Israelis, who were forced
to retreat. My elder brother had joined the Egyptian
soldiers at Kfar Darom. 16 At 19, he wanted to defend
his village and the whole of Palestine; he died for that.
We villagers could not do much with our ancient rifles,
we were not soldiers. However, the fighters defended
us, which meant we could return to our villages.
But in Kawkaba, the nightmare reoccurred in Octo-
ber-November 1948: the Israeli forces took to the skies,
and Iraq Suweidan, 17 where the police were, fell. The
Egyptians left without giving us any warning and we
fled to the town of Al Majdal, 20 kilometres to the west
of Kawkaba, where my parents had friends able to take
us in. We just had enough time to take a few blankets
and our donkey. But very soon Al Majdal also fell. The
Israelis held the roads with their Sherman tanks and
forced the Egyptian army to head for the sea along a
dirt road. 18
I was barely adolescent. Our parents did not have
the time to explain things to us, we ran like everyone
else, feeling betrayed by the Arab armies, betrayed
because they were abandoning us. 19 We fled all the
way to Gaza where, after weeks of wandering, sleep-
ing out on wastelands, in the market place, in schools,
churches and mosques, we finally found some tents
that had been put at our disposal. Later, they were
replaced by huts with corrugated iron roofs, which had
eight rooms, each one of which sheltered one family. As
of May 1, 1950, Unrwa 20 took over the management of
the refugee camps, 21 and we became lajiyin, refugees 22
in the Rafah camp, 23 close to the Egyptian border.
In our camp, we had eight schools: classes were held
in big tents, and the teachers, who were refugees like
us, sat on a bale of straw so that they could see all their
pupils, who were sat on the ground. It was only later, in
the mid-1950s, that cement replaced the tents, and that
we were given tables and chairs. Our school books fol-
lowed the Egyptian syllabus, since Egypt was adminis-
tering the Gaza Strip.
We were not sheltered from trouble in the camps:
the Zionists continued to attack us. Whenever they
could, they would undertake commando operations,
they even bombed the town of Gaza, its post office and
the railway station.
In 1955, 24 Egypt sent soldiers to put an end to these
Israeli assaults. But it was not enough. We Palestinians
had the feeling that we urgently needed to create our
own system of defence, an army for the liberation of
Palestine, and we held massive demonstrations, which
displeased the Egyptian authorities. 25 They arrested
about 60 people and locked them up in their sinister
prisons where they were tortured; the poet and com-
munist Mu’in Bsieso and the Muslim Brothers Fathi
Bal’awi and Mohammad Al Najjar, 26 founding mem-
bers of Fatah, were among them.
By chance, Jamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt finally
decided to train some Palestinian fedayin as comman-
dos. 27 But to my mind, this army included people who
were too opposed to one another, and so I did not join
it. Moreover, the Egyptian action was not enough,
because the following year, in 1956, the Suez Crisis
allowed the Israeli army, backed by the French and
British armies, to invade and occupy the whole of the
Salaheddin
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