PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 17

In the same spirit of fighting injustice, others decided to devote their lives to the resist-
ance by joining the ranks of the PLO. Some paid with their lives, like Majed Abu Sharar,
whose journey is told here by his family and friends. There are also some women, such as
Samira Khoury from Nazareth, one of the founders of an organization called Nahda (awak-
ening), who, since the founding of the State of Israel, has advocated against the martial
law imposed on residents of Palestinian towns and villages. Other women organized civil
and political responses to the repeated devastation suffered by Palestinian society, like the
university professor Ilham Abughazaleh in Nablus.
The space of possibilities
The history of Palestine has been written by the winners of the 1948 war and has been con-
sidered retrospectively as the chronicle of inevitable events. To counter this fatalistic vision of
history, one has to look at the untrodden paths, the unexploited potentials and the ungrasped
possibilities of various moments in history. The space of possibilities is a red thread in the sto-
ries, telling of the coexistence of all of the country’s inhabitants, whatever their religion, which
was the norm in Palestine before 1948. That coexistence, which had already been disrupted
before Al Nakba by British mandate policies and the growing influence of the Zionist move-
ment, stands out in many of the stories like a thread woven into the memories of better days.
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, born in Nazareth in 1933, remembers
what some forget: ‘The British had withdrawn in 1947 and had left the country in a state
of war, between Arab Palestinians and Jewish Palestinians. At the time, everybody was still
Palestinian.’ Mohammad Tijani of the destroyed Mughrabi Quarter (Harat Al Maghariba) of
the Old City of Jerusalem recalls the links between Arab Palestinians and Jewish Palestinians
which resisted several wars. The generation which still remembers living together is slowly dis-
appearing, and with it, the memory of coexistence. Salaheddin Aissa also evokes, with a degree
of nostalgia, the ‘living together’ that prevailed in his region between Palestinian villagers and
the inhabitants of the kibboutzim, even the marriages between Arabs and Jews from Europe.
Suad Qaraman tells of friendships that defied the limits of identity categories defined by the
mandate, which divided the Palestinian population between “Jews” on one side and “Arabs” (or
“non-Jews”) on the other. However, the policy of division practised by the mandatory power
and wanted by the Zionist movement had made itself felt long before 1948: for example, the
Kadoorie Agricultural School where ‘Abd Al Rahman Al Najjab was educated, was divided
into two establishments by the British, one for Arab students and the other for Jewish ones.
Beyond collegial links or friendships, there is the question of advocating for a political pro-
ject common to all the inhabitants of Palestine, and in ways that are evidently even more con-
strained since 1948 than during the Mandate period. In this regard, the compartmentalization
of historical narratives about Palestine not only fails to do justice to historical realities that are
far more complex than those that dominate the country’s historiography, but it also makes it
impossible for a common horizon of a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to emerge.
Edward Said insisted, in 1984, on the necessity of elaborating narratives to ‘absorb, support
and circulate’ the facts, 9 to incorporate them into history and to use them in a historical nar-
rative, with the aim of re-establishing justice. 10 Palestinian memories constitute an important
pillar of that narrative, which must necessarily open onto a history of possibilities.
9. Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate”, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 13, spring 1984, p. 34.
10.  Said, op. cit., p. 46
Falestin Naili
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