PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 39

The Stranger
Feissal Darraj, 76 years old
To be a Palestinian is to be worthless, in revolt, the
stranger, the one who must raise his hand at school when
the refugees are counted, the one who is taken aside at the
airport, the one who does not exist since Palestine does not
figure on any map of the world.
Feissal Darraj is a Palestinian refugee. A stateless refugee
since 1948, dispossessed of everything, continually persecuted.
Darraj, a man of letters, does not describe his emotions,
but we see them naked and raw in his stories: a succession
of symbolic images that take us into the heart of his interior
life. He is a philosopher and a writer, a journalist specialized
in Zionism amongst other things, and a literary critic whose
name is known throughout the Arab world by all those who
love to read, write and think about the world self-critically.
 Each time I look into the past towards Palestine
where I was born, or to Lebanon or Syria or Jordan,
where I have lived since 1948, I feel as though my life
was confiscated and I must rebuild it. These fragments,
these symbolic images frame my life.
F irst image : a yellow van
We are fleeing from the bombing one morning in April
1948, as are thousands of other people living in north-
ern Palestine. Leaving behind our house in Al Ja’una,
near Safad. I am five years old and I am shaking. Luck-
ily we are all together, my brothers, my parents and me,
squashed up together in a yellow van. We have been
going a quarter of an hour when suddenly my mother
becomes agitated and urges us to turn back. She has
a premonition. What if the idea, planted by Egyptian
radio, that this is going to be a short, quick war and
that we would be going home in two or three weeks
is wrong, and leading us astray? My mother believes
in intuition, and she wants to go home, where she has
left her money and a few items of family jewellery. And
from that moment on she never stops doubting.
S econd image : a photo
My father has taken it down from the wall and slid it
into his pocket before climbing into the yellow van. It
is a black and white photo of a young man with fine
features and an open expression, who wears an ammu-
nition belt across his chest. I do not know him but
my father says he was a great man, ‘Abd Al Qadir Al
Husseini, whom everyone calls “the Magnificent”. He
studied chemistry at the American University in Beirut
(AUB) and then at the American University in Cairo
(AUC) and the day he got his degree he tore it up in
front of the Dean, showing how little importance he
attached to such documents. Then he went home to
Palestine where he became one of the leaders of the
Arab Revolution 1 of 1936–1939. 2 He was killed fight-
ing against a group of Zionist attackers at Qastal, a
village near Jerusalem, in April 1948. My father would
Feissal
37