PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 32

We would take the same collective taxi from Jerusa-
lem to Beirut. It was there that I met the man who was
to become my best friend, Mahmud Abu Zalaf, who
worked for the newspaper Al Difa’a (The Defence) in
Jaffa. We were in the same class as Meir Shamgar, who
went on to become the president of the Supreme Court
of Israel from 1983 to 1995.
I left Beirut and returned to Jerusalem to go to law
school. It was then that everything began to change:
after the Second World War had ended, the Partition
Plan for Palestine was announced, as was the depar-
ture of the British, and the State of Israeli was created.
Events quickly followed one another. My former Jewish
classmates were unrecognizable: they became vindic-
tive. The unity of our class was shattered.
Our family often spent the weekends together in
Ramallah, where we rented a house. We had got into
the habit of moving around in convoys to protect our-
selves against attack by the armed paramilitary and
Zionist groups that ruled the roads. But one day in
early April 1948, we happened not to be in a convoy;
we were simply coming back from the country in the
car, with my mother and a friend of the family, when
repeated gunshots stopped us dead in our tracks. Our
friend, a young and successful businessman, was killed
instantly; my mother’s body was riddled with 17 bul-
lets, and I was hit three times. The armoured car that
came to pick up the dead took us to the government
hospital in Jerusalem where we spent the rest of the
month fighting for our lives. The city was in chaos,
the hospital had almost no medication left. As soon
as we could be moved, on April 27, we left by road for
Amman, where we could get the necessary care. My
mother never fully recovered from her wounds, and I
still have one bullet in my arm.
Since we were unable to go home to Jerusalem, loot-
ers eventually noticed that our house was empty. The
thieves, who apparently loved books, stole our family’s
entire library, more than a thousand books and manu-
scripts, three-quarters of which were very old. 5 They left
only my father’s newspaper archives, probably because
they were too heavy to carry.
At the age of 23, with my law degree in my pocket,
I longed to start working in my profession but we were
now in Amman which, with no industry at all was more
like a small provincial town than a city, even though it
was developing rapidly. Its lawyers were not yet organ-
ized into practices: they would gather in the centre of
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Memories of 1948
Amman, in the Cafe Brazil, where each one used a
table as his desk to offer his services. Since Jordan was
still following the laws of the Ottoman Empire, and I
had just finished my training under the British man-
date legal system, I would have needed to “upgrade”.
Somewhat discouraged, I preferred to accept a job as
secretary to a Jordanian Member of Parliament whilst
hoping one day to have the opportunity to practise the
profession which really interested me. 6
It was in late 1949 that my eldest brother Aziz, 7 a
prominent lawyer in Palestine, called me from Lausanne,
where he was taking part in peace negotiations with Israel,
to ask me to open a law practice with him in Ramallah. I
did not hesitate for a second and we opened our office on
January 1, 1950. The West Bank became part of Jordan
in 1950, 8 so we were able to practise equally in Ramallah,
East Jerusalem and Amman; Ramallah was ten minutes
away from Jerusalem, and Amman an hour and a half
by road. 9
After the ceasefire of June 1948, 10 Israel decided to
freeze Palestinian assets, mostly held by Barclays and
the Ottoman Bank; but both banks had been slow to
apply the official orders. Faced with such an unusual
situation they had asked for instructions from their
head offices in London, which recommended that they
should not change anything. This situation lasted for
four months, until October 1948, at which point the
Israeli authorities, having caught wind of the prevari-
cations of the Ottoman Bank in applying their direc-
tive to the letter, threatened to take away their trading
licence. The message was received loud and clear: for
fear of losing their right to trade in Israel, both the
Ottoman Bank and Barclays complied with the direc-
tive to freeze assets.
Our family did not suffer any losses because our
money was in the Arab Bank, which was owned by a
Palestinian, Abdul Hameed Shoman, who had moved
to Amman before May 14, 1948, the day on which all
the British withdrew from Palestine. All around us, our
Palestinian friends who had opened accounts in the two
British banks were devastated. No one understood how
such a measure could be applied from one day to the
next. When they claimed what was theirs, they were
simply told that it was frozen. Not only had they been
dispossessed of their homes and land, but now this freeze
was added on, in order to prevent them from surviving!
And yet, these men and women did not give up –
they fought for their rights. Initially, they wrote to the