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 70 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