PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 16
Suleyman Hassan’s story of life in the little West Bank village of Kafr Laqif reflects the
steadfastness of a farmer, strongly attached to his land and his olive trees. He grasps every
legal means available to assert his property rights in face of the settlers who arrived after
the occupation in 1967. During the 1967 war, Suleyman – harking back to the experience
of refugees arriving in his village in 1948 – managed to convince nearly all the villagers of
Kafr Laqif, who had been chased away by the Israeli army, to return home as quickly as
possible. We find that same attachment to the land in the story of the agronomic teacher,
‘Abd Al Rahman Al Najjab, who has insisted on the importance of being agriculturally
autonomous throughout his life.
Another story shines a light on the close link between cultivating the soil and the determi-
nation to be present and to maintain one’s rights. The residents of the village of Battir near
Jerusalem, located close to the railway line between Jerusalem and Jaffa, took fright after the
Deir Yasin massacre and did not dare sleep in their village. Nevertheless, they continued to
cultivate their land in the daytime in order to give the Israeli army the impression that the
village was still inhabited. When Battir was about to find itself in the no-man’s-land between
the Israeli border and the Jordanian border, one of the villagers, Hassan Mustafa, decided
together with some 20 men from the village, including Hassan Harbuk who tells the story,
to resort to a ruse in order to prevent the evacuation of the village. Moreover, the inhabitants
of Battir managed to save their land once again in 2014 with the inscription of the village on
the Unesco list of endangered world heritage sites. The village thus escaped having a new
stretch of the so-called separation wall built on it.
Against all odds – al sumud
Battir’s destiny takes us to the theme of creativity and resistance which, in Palestine, is char-
acterized particularly by perseverance, or the capacity to hold on – al sumud. A revolutionary
trait exalted by Palestinian nationalists, this type of resistance is manifested essentially in
day-to-day behaviour. The notion of sumud developed in the 1970s in response to the pro-
found transformations experienced by rural Palestinian society. The land confiscations and
the attraction of the Israeli job market had an impact on rural Palestinians. Al sumud, in that
context, meant living in one’s village and preserving one’s land. 8
In the stories gathered in this book, perseverance takes on different forms depending
on the context. From the individual will to succeed in order to ensure the survival of the
family in spite of dispossession, to military participation in Palestinian resistance, al sumud
is primarily based on the determination not to be a victim that suffers its fate.
Some, such as Muhyeddin Al Jamal, write that determination into their autobiographic
story, like the beginning of an epic. A poor child from a village near Ramle, he managed
gradually to become a prosperous entrepreneur in Brazil. For others, that perseverance
is linked to the conviction that rights must be re-established and injustice refused. Fuad
Shehadeh, a lawyer, born in Jerusalem in 1925, decided to open a case, in 1950, against
the two international banks that had frozen Palestinian assets at the request of the Israeli
authorities. This allowed families to get their money back even if it was only through small
monthly reimbursements.
8. S. Tamari and R. Hammami, “Populist Paradigms: A Review of Trends and Research Problems in Palestinian
Sociology”, in R. Bocco et al. (eds), Palestine, Palestiniens: Territoire national, espaces communautaires, Beirut, CER-
MOC, 1997, p. 29.
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Memories of 1948