PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 72
When our children are killed
hearing. One of my mother’s friends was looking for
her daughter, her son and her mother. She asked every
passer-by whether they had seen them. She did not yet
know that all three had been shot.
It was not until several months later, in June 1949,
after he had led us to safety, that my uncle gave his tes-
timony to a member of the Unccp (United Nations
Conciliation Commission for Palestine) about what
had happened. 16 At the time, bizarrely, no one seemed
to notice that the massacre at Al Dawayima had been
even more brutal than that of Deir Yasin. 17 And what
we experienced had been forgotten… as have many of
the bloody events that have touched the Palestinians. 18
It is astonishing that some of the authors of the massacre
wanted to testify, in particular an Israeli soldier who sent
a letter to an Israeli newspaper on November 8, 1948,
ten days after the massacre. The letter “got lost”, and was
not “found” again until 68 years later, in 2016. 19
Why was the terror of which we were victims in
Al Dawayima hidden, unlike the events of Deir Yasin
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Memories of 1948
that had terrified the Palestinian population in April
1948 and sent them fleeing to neighbouring countries,
even before the State of Israel had been created? I don’t
know. Some of my uncle’s friends thought that it was
to forestall a new panic and to prevent the Palestinian
territories from being completely abandoned by their
inhabitants. 20 Others asserted that it was the Israeli
authorities that had hushed up the affair, fearful that
it might tarnish their image. It should be noted that
the massacre at Deir Yasin took place before the crea-
tion of Israel and that those who were responsible for
the butchery there were the Zionist gangs that David
Ben-Gurion said he was fighting against. 21 However,
by the time of Al Dawayima, five months later, the
State of Israel did exist, and those same gangs were an
integral part of the Israeli armed forces, directly under
his command. He could no longer point the finger at
groups alleged to be “external” or “uncontrollable”. 22
In Jericho the climate is temperate. Each family built
their tent with whatever they had managed to bring